Gerstner’s Capital grid
Photo by Watz
One of the coolest grids of all time is Karl Gerstner’s grid for Captial magazine. Based on subdividing a square into 58 equal units, Gerstner found he was able to make a grid of 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 columns. It’s truly a thing of beauty. Designer Pedro Monteiro of the blog What Type recently retraced Gerstner’s steps, and, while he is not totally faithful to the original grid, his is certainly in the spirit of Gerstner’s, and he was nice enough to offer a PDF of his efforts here.
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Two great photosets of books on Flickr, both via Coudal: Spies Lies & Alibis and Pulp Sci-Fi. Related to each are these selections from McSweeney’s: Jean-Paul Sartre’s script for “Without a Trace,” and Selections from H.P. Lovecraft’s Brief Tenure as a Whitman’s Sampler Copywriter. The latter had me laughing out loud at random intervals throughout the day. Beware!
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Milton Glaser drew the poster announcing Ettore Sottsass’s new Olivetti typewriter, the Valentine. The poster uses Glaser Stencil (of course). BiblioOdyssey (a site you’ll remember from before) has a great batch of Sottsass drawings up now, and the Flickr set in particular is worth checking out. Start here.
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While I’m on the subject of innovative uses of Flickr, another one is the use of tagging to created pools of shared photos. This is nothing new, but seeing the Wim Crouwel photo pool or the Dieter Rams photo pool, I can begin to imagine how a collectively-authored design monograph might begin to take shape.
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One of the many interesting ways to use Flickr that’s sprung up lately has been people sharing certain rarish books from their design libraries with the wider world. I find this enormously valuable, not to mention fun. Four of the best and most dedicated to posting their books are AisleOne, Alphanumeric, Insect54, and Outofprint. Recently, AisleOne put up a book I’d been looking to add to my library since my days at Winterhouse, the seemingly hard-to-find 1967 edition of Hans Neuberg’s “Publicity and Graphic Design in the Chemical Industry.” The work it depicts, especially packaging and publicity for Geigy (now part of Novartis), is a classic example of Swiss Modernism in practice.
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Erik Kastner’s Spelling with Flickr mines Flickr for letters and generates randsom-note style pages with them.
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A huge cache of scans from the history of graphic design (the Philip B. Meggs version). Very helpful for teachers, I think. More from jmbdcool on Flickr.
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Schiff nach Europa, the collaborative novel created by writer Markus Kutter and designer Karl Gerstner, is now viewable online at Flickr thanks to the prolific and design-savvy Insect54. I spent a long time looking at this book while I was in school, and it’s stayed with me.
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A clever idea, desktops that actually look like desktops or bulletin boards, free for download, which you can then use to keep your digital knick-knacks organized.
