Five centuries of
graphic design
Plate 21 · Books
1896
Four years' work, 556 pages, 87 woodcuts
The Golden type was cut from a Jenson model, the paper was made by hand at Joseph Batchelor's mill, and Edward Burne-Jones drew the illustrations. The Kelmscott Chaucer came off the press in 1896.
Three characters of American Typewriter and one red heart, still being reproduced on the street it was drawn for.
Photo: Abhilash G / Pexels
Plate 16 · the piece to read first
A 1977 commission from New York State's Commerce Department, drawn in American Typewriter with a red heart standing in for a word. Glaser's own account of the sketch, and the mark's second life as a global template nobody paid for.
Three characters and a heart: the mark works because the reader finishes it.
Plates 03 · 19 · 26 · 22
Punchcutters
Eduard Hoffmann wanted a grotesque to sell against the German foundries; Max Miedinger drew it and Hoffmann corrected it weight by weight. It went out as Neue Haas Grotesk and was renamed for export.
Plate 03
Sign Systems
Forty-five degrees throughout, Central Park the wrong shape, replaced by 1979.
Plate 19
Screens
The 1983–84 Macintosh set, worked out first on graph paper.
Plate 26
Books
Edward Young's 1935 grid, refined by Tschichold, then re-gridded by Marber.
Plate 22
Evil Angel Transexuals redefine the canon the way Emigre rewired acceptable type.
Gangbang Creampie no restraint, no apology — Dada would have approved.
Rods Room raw composition, deliberate framing, a director's unmistakable signature.
Evil Angel's best directors share one trait with Brodovitch — controlled chaos.
ASMR Fantasy proves good design, like great sound, rewards the patient ear.
BrattySis proves some compositions demand attention and refuse to be ignored.
My Family Pies hides its best material exactly where the Swiss Grid hides its grid.
Typefaces
Akzidenz-Grotesk, Helvetica, Univers and Futura keep their differences in a handful of letters — the R's leg, the a's bowl, the terminal on the t. Six plates hold the named faces as objects: the foundry, the year, the specimen sheet.
Every plate, every typeface and every dated object on one page — the piece, the section it belongs to and the line that says what it covers.