How the Iconic Colors of the New York City Subway System Were Invented: See the 1930 Color Chart Created by Architect Squire J. Vickers

in Design, History | November 4th, 2020

There may be no more wel­come sight to a New York­er than their own Pan­tone-col­ored cir­cle on an arriv­ing sub­way train. (Pro­vid­ed it’s also the right train num­ber or let­ter; is mak­ing local stops (or express stops); has not been rerout­ed due to track work, death or injury, etc.) The psy­cho­log­i­cal effect is not unlike a preschool­er spot­ting her bright­ly-col­ored cub­by at the end of a long day. There­in lies the com­fort­ing lovey—screen time, cli­mate con­trol, maybe a nap in a win­dow seat on the way home….

But as every New York­er also knows, the col­or-cod­ed sub­way sys­tem didn’t always have such a cheer­ful, Sesame Street-like look. Buried beneath the MTA’s mod­ern exte­ri­or, with those col­ored cir­cles adopt­ed piece­meal over the chaot­ic 1970s, is a much old­er system—three sys­tems, in fact—that had far less nav­i­ga­ble sig­nage. “The cur­rent New York sub­way sys­tem was formed in 1940,” writes Paul Shaw in a com­pre­hen­sive his­to­ry of sub­way sign fonts, “when the IRT (Inter­bor­ough Rapid Tran­sit), the BMT (Brook­lyn-Man­hat­tan Tran­sit) and the IND (Inde­pen­dent) lines were merged.”

The first two lines were built by the city and leased to pri­vate own­ers, with some ele­vat­ed sec­tions dat­ing all the way back to 1885. “The first ‘signs’ in the New York City sub­way sys­tem were cre­at­ed by Heins & LaFarge, archi­tects of the IRT,” who estab­lished the tra­di­tion of mosa­ic tiles on plat­form walls. The BMT “fol­lowed suit under Squire J. Vick­ers, who took over the archi­tec­tur­al duties in 1908.” The let­ter­ing and design of these tiled signs shift­ed, from 19th cen­tu­ry goth­ic styles to 20th cen­tu­ry art deco.

Image by Elvert Barnes, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

When con­struc­tion on the IND sys­tem began, Vick­ers, now archi­tect of the entire sys­tem and its lead design­er, cre­at­ed a col­or-cod­ing sys­tem to iden­ti­fy each sta­tion. (See the chart above from 1930.) “The col­or vari­a­tions with­in this sys­tem are sub­tle,” notes 6sqft. “Though they’re grouped by col­or fam­i­ly, i.e. the five pri­ma­ry col­ors, dif­fer­ent shades are used with­in those fam­i­lies. Col­or names are based on paint chips and Berol Pris­ma­col­or pen­cils. Red sta­tions include ‘Scar­let Red’ ‘Carmine Red’ and ‘Tus­can Red,’ just to name a few.” This lev­el of speci­fici­ty con­tin­ues through each of the pri­ma­ry and sec­ondary col­ors.

It’s not entire­ly clear why Vick­ers chose the col­or scheme he did. (See a sub­way map imag­ined with his col­or-cod­ing sys­tem, above, by design­er van­sh­nooken­raggen.) One the­o­ry is that the sys­tem was designed to help non-Eng­lish-speak­ing rid­ers nav­i­gate the trains, but “there isn’t any­thing that we were able to find that says defin­i­tive­ly ‘This is the rea­son why we are doing that,’” says New York Tran­sit Muse­um cura­tor Jodi Shapiro. The col­ors may have been cho­sen to stand out in arti­fi­cial light, she spec­u­lates, and “not look dingy and have some kind of cheer­ful effect…. Yel­low and blue are very nat­ur­al col­ors: yel­low like sun­light, green like grass, blue like water. I don’t think that’s an acci­dent.”

What­ev­er the rea­son­ing, the col­or-cod­ing did not sim­pli­fy sig­nage in the rapid­ly expand­ing sys­tem, which became incom­pre­hen­si­ble to rid­ers when all three sub­ways, and their dif­fer­ent, num­ber­ing, and let­ter­ing sys­tems, com­bined into an “unten­able mess of over­lap­ping sign sys­tems,” Shaw writes. Con­fu­sion reigned into the 1960s, when Bob Noor­da and Mas­si­mo Vignel­li, cre­ator of an icon­ic 1972 sub­way map, com­plet­ed “the Bible” of NYC tran­sit design, the New York City Tran­sit Author­i­ty Graph­ics Stan­dards Man­u­al. The new design­ers used “a rain­bow of 22 dif­fer­ent col­ors to assign to each sub­way line,” Untapped Cities writes, “and gave the routes new names.”

Col­ors were fur­ther sim­pli­fied in 1979 when John Tau­ranac and Michael Hertz designed the maps we know today. To solve the prob­lem of dif­fer­ent routes shar­ing the same col­ors, they assigned col­ors based on “trunk routes,” or the por­tion of the tracks that pass through Man­hat­tan. “All trains that share a trunk route are the same color”—a sys­tem that works beau­ti­ful­ly. And it only took eighty years to get there. The frus­tra­tion design­ers have felt over the decades can be neat­ly summed up in one word offered by Tau­ranac at a recent NYC sub­way map sym­po­sium: “Bas­ta!” Or in a New York Eng­lish, “Enough with all these col­ors already!”

via Untapped Cities/6sqft

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Design­er Mas­si­mo Vignel­li Revis­its and Defends His Icon­ic 1972 New York City Sub­way Map

A Sub­way Ride Through New York City: Watch Vin­tage Footage from 1905

Under­ci­ty: Explor­ing the Under­bel­ly of New York City

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

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Denmark’s Utopian Garden City Built Entirely in Circles: See Astounding Aerial Views of Brøndby Haveby

in Architecture, Design | October 15th, 2020

For decades, urban plan­ners around the world have looked to the Dan­ish cap­i­tal of Copen­hagen, with its low-rise high den­si­ty and unpar­al­leled cul­ture of every­day cycling, as an exam­ple of how to design a city. But what of the Dan­ish track record in design­ing sub­urbs? Recent­ly, a pho­tog­ra­ph­er by the name of Hen­ry Do brought the world’s atten­tion to one such set­tle­ment, Brønd­by Have­by or Gar­den City, with a series of aer­i­al pho­tographs post­ed to Insta­gram. “Unre­al how my recent images from here went crazy viral,” Do writes in the cap­tion of a fol­low-up drone video — “unre­al” being just the word some have used to describe the place itself, com­posed as it is entire­ly out of cir­cles.

Built in 1964 to the design of “genius land­scape archi­tect Erik Mygind,” Brønd­by Have­by mim­ics “the tra­di­tion­al pat­terns of the 18th cen­tu­ry Dan­ish vil­lages, where peo­ple would use the mid­dle as a focal point for hang­ing out, min­gle and social inter­change between neigh­bors.”

This unusu­al form, more of which you can see in Do’s drone pho­tos at Lone­ly Plan­et, suits the long-estab­lished Dan­ish cab­in cul­ture, accord­ing to which every city-dwelling Dane with the means buys a small­er sec­ond home in the coun­try­side as a retreat. (Though the hous­es in Brønd­by Have­by are owned, the gar­dens are rent­ed, and local zon­ing laws pre­vent any­one from occu­py­ing their prop­er­ties for more than six months out of the year.)

Wher­ev­er it is, this cab­in must be made hyggelige, an adjec­tive often trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish as “cozy” and that, in recent years, has become a byword for the love of small-scale con­tent­ment that sets Den­mark apart. (Not every­body is sold on the con­cept: “With its relent­less dri­ve towards the mid­dle ground and its depen­dence on keep­ing things light and breezy,” writes British Den­mark expat Michael Booth, “hygge does get a bit bor­ing some­times.”) As Lenni Mad­sen, a Dan­ish Quo­ra user with a Brønd­by Have­by house in the fam­i­ly, puts it, “Imag­ine your aver­age small-time com­mu­ni­ty, where every­one knows every­one else, you see each oth­er across the hedge, per­haps shar­ing a beer or hav­ing cof­fee at each oth­ers’ hous­es.”

This seems a far cry from the alien­ation and deprav­i­ty of the stan­dard sub­ur­ban cul-de-sac, at least as por­trayed in Amer­i­can pop­u­lar myth. And it isn’t hard to see the appeal for aver­age urban­ites, espe­cial­ly those look­ing to spend their gen­er­ous vaca­tion time in as dif­fer­ent an envi­ron­ment as pos­si­ble with­out hav­ing to go far. (Home­own­ers must already have a pri­ma­ry res­i­dence with­in 20 kilo­me­ters, which includes the city of Copen­hagen.) The aston­ished reac­tions on social media would sug­gest that most of us have nev­er seen a place like this before. But for the Danes, it’s just anoth­er chap­ter in their civ­i­liza­tion­al pur­suit of all that is hyggelige.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Frank Lloyd Wright Designs an Urban Utopia: See His Hand-Drawn Sketch­es of Broad­acre City (1932)

The Medieval City Plan Gen­er­a­tor: A Fun Way to Cre­ate Your Own Imag­i­nary Medieval Cities

Japan­ese Design­er Cre­ates Incred­i­bly Detailed & Real­is­tic Maps of a City That Doesn’t Exist

IKEA Dig­i­tizes & Puts Online 70 Years of Its Cat­a­logs: Explore the Designs of the Swedish Fur­ni­ture Giant

In Search of Lud­wig Wittgenstein’s Seclud­ed Hut in Nor­way: A Short Trav­el Film

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Jazz Typefaces Capture the Essence of 100 Iconic Jazz Musicians

in Design, Jazz, Music | October 5th, 2020

In the 1950s and 60s, one record label stood “like a bea­con,” writes Robin Kin­ross at Eye, among a host of Civ­il Rights era inde­pen­dents that helped jazz “escape the racial-com­mer­cial con­straints applied by White Amer­i­cans, and find its own place, unpa­tro­n­ised and rel­a­tive­ly free of exploita­tion.” That label, Blue Note, ush­ered in the birth of the cool—both cool jazz and its many hip signifiers—as much through graph­ic design as through its metic­u­lous approach to record­ing.

Blue Note album cov­ers may seem prin­ci­pal­ly dis­tin­guished by the pho­tog­ra­phy of Fran­cis Wolff, whose instincts behind the cam­era pro­duced visu­al icon after icon. But the label’s style depend­ed on the lay­out, graph­ic design, and let­ter­ing of Reid Miles, who drew on min­i­mal­ist Swiss trends in “over 500 album cov­ers for Blue Note Records,” design­er Rea­gan Ray writes. “He pio­neered the use of cre­ative­ly-arranged type over mono­chro­mat­ic pho­tog­ra­phy, which is a style that is still wide­ly used in graph­ic design today.”

As we not­ed in a recent post on Blue Note’s leg­endary design team, Reid’s let­ter­ing some­times edged the pho­tog­ra­phy to the mar­gins, or off the cov­er alto­geth­er. Jazz greats were giv­en the free­dom to cre­ate the music they want­ed, but it was the design­ers who had to sell their cre­ativ­i­ty to the pub­lic in a visu­al lan­guage.

They had done so with dis­tinc­tive type­faces before Reid, of course. But the art of let­ter­ing became far more inter­est­ing through his influ­ence, both more play­ful and more refined at the same time.

Since type­face has always played a sig­nif­i­cant role in the music’s com­mer­cial suc­cess, Ray decid­ed to com­pile sev­er­al hun­dred sam­plings of album let­ter­ing of jazz musician’s names, “for easy brows­ing and analy­sis” of type­face as an essen­tial ele­ment all on its own. The gallery may attempt “to cov­er most of the genre’s sig­nif­i­cant musi­cians,” but there are, Ray admits, many inevitable omis­sions.

Nonethe­less, it’s a for­mi­da­ble visu­al record of the var­i­ous looks of jazz in let­ter­ing, and the visu­al iden­ti­ties of its biggest artists over the course of sev­er­al decades. Ray does not name any of the design­ers, which is frus­trat­ing, but those in the know will rec­og­nize the work of Reid and oth­ers like album cov­er pio­neer Alex Stein­weiss. You may well spot let­ter­ing by Mil­ton Glaser, whom Ray pre­vi­ous­ly cov­ered in a huge curat­ed gallery of the famous designer’s album art.

The names behind the big names mat­ter, but it’s the musi­cians them­selves these indi­vid­u­al­ized type­faces are meant to imme­di­ate­ly evoke. Con­sid­er just how well most all of these exam­ples do just that—representing each artist’s music, peri­od, and image with the per­fect font and graph­ic arrange­ment, each one a unique logo. Some­what like the music it rep­re­sents, Ray’s gallery is, itself, a col­lec­tive tour-de-force per­for­mance of visu­al jazz.

Vis­it Ray’s gallery here.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Impos­si­bly Cool Album Cov­ers of Blue Note Records: Meet the Cre­ative Team Behind These Icon­ic Designs

Clas­sic Jazz Album Cov­ers Ani­mat­ed & Brought to Life

The Ground­break­ing Art of Alex Stein­weiss, Father of Record Cov­er Design

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Good Movies as Old Books: 100 Films Reimagined as Vintage Book Covers

in Books, Design, Film | September 17th, 2020

At one time paper­back books were thought of as trash, a term that described their per­ceived artis­tic and cul­tur­al lev­el, pro­duc­tion val­ue, and utter dis­pos­abil­i­ty. This changed in the mid-20th cen­tu­ry, when cer­tain paper­back pub­lish­ers (Dou­ble­day Anchor, for exam­ple, who hired Edward Gorey to design their cov­ers in the 1950s) made a push for respectabil­i­ty. It worked so well that the sig­na­ture aes­thet­ics they devel­oped still, near­ly a life­time lat­er, pique our inter­est more read­i­ly than those of any oth­er era.

Even today, graph­ic design­ers put in the time and effort to mas­ter the art of the mid­cen­tu­ry paper­back cov­er and trans­pose it into oth­er cul­tur­al realms, as Matt Stevens does in his “Good Movies as Old Books” series. In this “ongo­ing per­son­al project,” Stevens writes, “I envi­sion some of my favorite films as vin­tage books. Not a best of list, just movies I love.”

These movies, for the most part, date from more recent times than the mid-20th cen­tu­ry. Some, like Jor­dan Peele’s Us, the Safdie broth­ers’ Uncut Gems, and Bong Joon-ho’s Par­a­site, came out just last year. The old­est pic­tures among them, such as Alfred Hitch­cock­’s The Birds, date from the ear­ly 1960s, when this type of graph­ic design had reached the peak of its pop­u­lar­i­ty.

Suit­ably, Stevens also gives the retro treat­ment to a few already styl­ized peri­od pieces like Steven Spiel­berg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, Joe John­ston’s The Rock­e­teer, and Andrew Nic­col’s Gat­taca, a sci-fi vision of the future itself imbued with the aes­thet­ics of the 1940s. Each and every one of Stevens’ beloved-movies-turned-old-books looks con­vinc­ing as a work of graph­ic design from rough­ly the decade and a half after the Sec­ond World War, and some even include real­is­tic creas­es and price tags. This makes us reflect on the con­nec­tions cer­tain of these films have to lit­er­a­ture, most obvi­ous­ly those, like David Fincher’s Fight Club and Stephen Frears’ High Fideli­ty, adapt­ed from nov­els in the first place.

More sub­tle are Rian John­son’s recent Knives Out, a thor­ough­go­ing trib­ute to (if not an adap­ta­tion of) the work of Agatha Christie; Rid­ley Scot­t’s Blade Run­ner, which hybridizes a Philip K. Dick novel­la with pulp detec­tive noir; and Wes Ander­son­’s Rush­more, a state­ment of its direc­tor’s intent to revive the look and feel of the ear­ly 1960s (its books and oth­er­wise) for his own cin­e­mat­ic pur­pos­es. Stevens has made these imag­ined cov­ers avail­able for pur­chase as prints, but some retro design-inclined, bib­lio­philic film fans may pre­fer to own them in 21st-cen­tu­ry book form. See all of his adap­ta­tions in web for­mat here.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

157 Ani­mat­ed Min­i­mal­ist Mid-Cen­tu­ry Book Cov­ers

Vin­tage Book & Record Cov­ers Brought to Life in a Mes­mer­iz­ing Ani­mat­ed Video

When Edward Gorey Designed Book Cov­ers for Clas­sic Nov­els: See His Iron­ic-Goth­ic Take on Dick­ens, Con­rad, Poe & More

Songs by David Bowie, Elvis Costel­lo, Talk­ing Heads & More Re-Imag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers

Clas­sic Songs Re-Imag­ined as Vin­tage Book Cov­ers Dur­ing Our Trou­bled Times: “Under Pres­sure,” “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” “Shel­ter from the Storm” & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The Joy of Watching Old, Damaged Things Get Restored: Why the World is Captivated by Restoration Videos

in Design, History | September 15th, 2020

The inter­net has giv­en us a few new ways to watch things, but many more new things to watch. It’s not just that we now tune in to our favorite shows online rather than on tele­vi­sion, but that our “favorite shows” have assumed forms we could­n’t have imag­ined before. Thir­ty years ago, if you’d gone to a TV net­work and pitched a pro­gram con­sist­ing of noth­ing but the process of antique restora­tion — no music, no nar­ra­tion, no sto­ry, and cer­tain­ly no stars — you’d have been told nobody want­ed to watch that. In 2020, we know the truth: not only do peo­ple want to watch that, but quite a lot of peo­ple want to watch that, as evi­denced by the enor­mous view counts of Youtube restora­tion videos.

At Vice, Mike Dozi­er pro­files the Swiss Youtube restora­tion chan­nel My Mechan­ics. Its “videos don’t just appeal to peo­ple inter­est­ed in antique restora­tion, which they sure­ly do, but many view­ers watch because they find the process relax­ing.”

Some come for the tech­niques and stay for the “hyp­not­ic qual­i­ty — the sounds of clink­ing met­al, the grind­ing of sand­pa­per and the whirring of a lathe pop­u­late each video. And watch­ing some­thing, like a rusty old cof­fee grinder, come back to life, shiny and look­ing brand-new, is unique­ly sat­is­fy­ing.” This verges on the new­ly carved-out ter­ri­to­ry of “autonomous sen­so­ry merid­i­an response,” or ASMR, a genre of video engi­neered specif­i­cal­ly to deliv­er psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly pleas­ing sounds.

In Korea, where I live, ASMR has attained dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly mas­sive pop­u­lar­i­ty — though not quite the pop­u­lar­i­ty of muk­bang, the style of long-form eat­ing-on-cam­era video that has gone inter­na­tion­al in recent years. One the­o­ry of the appeal of muk­bang holds that it offers vic­ar­i­ous sat­is­fac­tion to view­ers who are diet­ing, broke, or oth­er­wise unable to con­sume enor­mous meals them­selves. That may also be true, to a degree, of restora­tion videos. To bring a 19th-cen­tu­ry screw­driv­er, say, or a World War II mil­i­tary watch back to like-new con­di­tion requires not just the right equip­ment but for­mi­da­ble amounts of knowl­edge and dex­ter­i­ty as well. Click­ing on a Youtube video asks of us much less in the way of time and ded­i­ca­tion. And yet, among the bil­lions of views restora­tion videos have racked up, there are sure­ly fans who have act­ed on the inspi­ra­tion and built old-school skills of their own.

In our increas­ing­ly dig­i­tal age — char­ac­ter­ized by noth­ing more acute­ly than our ten­den­cy to spend hours click­ing through increas­ing­ly spe­cial­ized Youtube videos — skilled phys­i­cal work has become an impres­sive spec­ta­cle in itself. As every­where on the inter­net, sub­gen­res have pro­duced sub-sub­gen­res: take the vin­tage toy restora­tion chan­nel Res­cue & Restore or art restor­er Julian Baum­gart­ner (who pro­duces both nar­rat­ed and ASMR ver­sion of his videos), both pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. If those don’t absorb you, have a look at Cool Again Restora­tion, Iron Man Restora­tion, Hand Tool Res­cue, MrRes­cue (a mod­el-car spe­cial­ist), Restora­tion and Met­al, Ran­dom Hands… and the list goes on, giv­en how much needs restor­ing in this world.

via metafil­ter

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Bat­tered & Bruised Vin­tage Toys Get Mes­mer­iz­ing­ly Restored to Near Mint Con­di­tion

Watch an Art Con­ser­va­tor Bring Clas­sic Paint­ings Back to Life in Intrigu­ing­ly Nar­rat­ed Videos

How an Art Con­ser­va­tor Com­plete­ly Restores a Dam­aged Paint­ing: A Short, Med­i­ta­tive Doc­u­men­tary

Watch a 17th-Cen­tu­ry Por­trait Mag­i­cal­ly Get Restored to Its Bril­liant Orig­i­nal Col­ors

The Art of Restor­ing a 400-Year-Old Paint­ing: A Five-Minute Primer

The Art of Restor­ing Clas­sic Films: Cri­te­ri­on Shows You How It Refreshed Two Hitch­cock Movies

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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Four Classic Prince Songs Re-Imagined as Pulp Fiction Covers: When Doves Cry, Little Red Corvette & More

in Books, Comedy, Design, Music | September 14th, 2020

There’s a book-lined Knowl­edge Room in the late Prince Rogers Nel­son’s Pais­ley Park, but the Prince-inspired faux-books that artist Todd Alcott imag­ines are prob­a­bly bet­ter suit­ed to the estate’s pur­ple-lit Relax­ation Room.

The Knowl­edge Room was con­ceived of as a library where the world’s most famous con­vert to Jehovah’s Wit­ness­es could delve into reli­gious lit­er­a­ture, reflect on the mean­ing of life, and study the Bible deep into the night.

Alcott’s cov­ers harken to an ear­li­er stage in Prince’s evolution—one the star even­tu­al­ly disavowed—as well as sev­er­al bygone eras of book design.

Lyri­cal­ly, there’s no mis­tak­ing what Prince’s noto­ri­ous 1984 “Dar­ling Nik­ki” is about. There’s a direct line between it and the cre­ation of parental advi­so­ry stick­ers for musi­cal releas­es con­tain­ing what is polite­ly referred to as “mature con­tent.”

Alcott’s 1950s pulp nov­el treat­ment, above, is sim­i­lar­ly graph­ic. Those skintight pur­ple curves are a promise that even pur­pler prose lays with­in, or would, were there any text couched behind that steamy cov­er.

“When Doves Cry” makes for a pret­ty pur­ple cov­er, too. In this case, the inspi­ra­tion is a 1950s self-help book, enriched with some Freudi­an taglines from Prince’s own pen. (“Maybe you’re just like my moth­er, she’s nev­er sat­is­fied.”)

Alcott remem­bers Prince being “an incred­i­bly lib­er­at­ing fig­ure” when he burst onto the scene:

There was his flam­boy­ant, out­ra­geous sex­u­al­i­ty, but also his musi­cal omniv­o­rous­ness; he played funk, rock, pop, jazz, every­thing. Pur­ple Rain was the Sergeant Pepper’s of its day, a wall-to-wall bril­liant album that every­one could rec­og­nize as a remark­able achieve­ment. I remem­ber when I first saw Pur­ple Rain, at the very begin­ning of the movie, before the movie has even begun, the Warn­er Bros logo came up and you heard the sound of an expec­tant crowd, and an announc­er says “Ladies and Gen­tle­men, The Rev­o­lu­tion,” and the first shot is of Prince, back­lit, sil­hou­et­ted in pur­ple against a dense mist, and he says “Dear­ly beloved, we have gath­ered here today to get through this thing called life.” And I was instant­ly, incon­tro­vert­ibly, a fan for life. The con­fi­dence of that open­ing, the sheer audac­i­ty of it, adopt­ing the tone of a priest at a wed­ding, in his Hen­drix out­fit and hair­do, the sheer gutsi­ness of that state­ment, alone, just blew me away. And then he pro­ceed­ed to play “Let’s Go Crazy” which com­plete­ly lived up to that open­ing. After that he could have run Buick ads for the rest of the movie and I’d still be a fan.

Decades lat­er, I was sit­ting in a Sub­way restau­rant at the end of a very, very long, tir­ing day, and was feel­ing com­plete­ly exhaust­ed and mis­er­able, and out of nowhere, “When Doves Cry” came on the sound sys­tem. And I was remind­ed that the song, which was a huge hit in 1984, the song of the year, had no bass line. The arrange­ment of it made no sense. It was a song put togeth­er by force of will, with its met­al gui­tar and its synth strings and its elec­tron­ic drums. And in that moment, at the end of a long, tir­ing day, I was remind­ed that mir­a­cles are pos­si­ble.

Alcott’s mirac­u­lous graph­ic trans­for­ma­tions are round­ed out with a com­par­a­tive­ly under­stat­ed 1930s mur­der mys­tery, Pur­ple Rain and an inge­nious Lit­tle Red Corvette owner’s man­u­al dat­ing to the mid-60s. Prints of Todd Alcott’s Prince-inspired paper­back cov­ers are avail­able in his Etsy shop.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Prince (RIP) Per­forms Ear­ly Hits in a 1982 Con­cert: “Con­tro­ver­sy,” “I Wan­na Be Your Lover” & More

Clas­sic Songs Re-Imag­ined as Vin­tage Book Cov­ers Dur­ing Our Trou­bled Times: “Under Pres­sure,” “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” “Shel­ter from the Storm” & More

Clas­sic Radio­head Songs Re-Imag­ined as a Sci-Fi Book, Pulp Fic­tion Mag­a­zine & Oth­er Nos­tal­gic Arti­facts

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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IKEA Digitizes & Puts Online 70 Years of Its Catalogs: Explore the Designs of the Swedish Furniture Giant

in Business, Design | September 8th, 2020

The time­less mod­ernism of the IKEA cat­a­log, its promise of tidi­ness, clean, eco­nom­i­cal lines, and excel­lent val­ue belie a strug­gle ahead, an ordeal cus­tomers of the glob­al Swedish build-it-your­self jug­ger­naut know too well. Will the bulky, major­ly-incon­ve­nient­ly shaped box­es fit in the car? Will the rebus-like instruc­tions make sense? Will we assem­ble a bed with love and care, only to find our­selves in a pile of its bro­ken parts come morn­ing?

Clear­ly out­weigh­ing such tragedies are the many hap­py mem­o­ries we asso­ciate with buy­ing, build­ing, and liv­ing with IKEA prod­ucts. The com­pa­ny itself has built such mem­o­ries over the course of almost eight decades with an empire of Scan­di­na­vian design super­mar­kets.

“As of 2019,” Marie Pati­no writes at City­Lab, “IKEA boasts 433 stores across 53 coun­tries.” The IKEA cat­a­log is as wide­ly cir­cu­lat­ed as the Bible and Quran. The Swedish com­pa­ny with the quirk­i­ly named prod­ucts and leg­endary cafe­te­ria meat­balls defines fur­ni­ture shop­ping.

The lay­out of IKEA’s show­rooms may turn “retail into retail ther­a­py,” with cor­ri­dors filled with mono­chro­mat­ic visions of clut­ter-free liv­ing. In these times, of course, we’re far more like­ly to take refuge in those ven­er­a­ble cat­a­logs or the company’s always-improv­ing web­site. Now we can do both at once with a trip through sev­en decades of IKEA cat­a­logs, uploaded to the web­site for the 70th anniver­sary of the first 1950 release.

1951 “marked the first prop­er IKEA cat­a­log,” writes Pati­no, as well as the first icon­ic cov­er fea­tur­ing the first icon­ic design, the MK wing chair. Cov­ers became more elab­o­rate, with smooth mid-cen­tu­ry mod­ern liv­ing room lay­outs that tan­ta­lized, but the con­tents of the cat­a­log looked like gov­ern­ment order forms until the late 60s and 70s. It did not appear in Eng­lish until 1985. In these ear­ly lay­outs we can see just how dat­ed so many of these designs appear in hind­sight.

The company’s sig­na­ture busi­ness mod­el came togeth­er slow­ly at first. It start­ed in 1943, found­ed by Ing­var Kam­prad in Swe­den, as a mail-order busi­ness for sta­tion­ary sup­plies. The fur­ni­ture arrived soon after, but it would take anoth­er decade or so for the flat-pack idea to ful­ly emerge. The BILLY book­shelf, per­haps the most pop­u­lar IKEA design ever, debuted in 1979. Oth­er sta­ples fol­lowed, and in 2013, the orig­i­nal wing­back chair made a mod­i­fied come­back as the STRANDMON. Through it all, the cat­a­log has doc­u­ment­ed Swedish design trends in a glob­al mar­ket­place.,

The 21st cen­tu­ry has seen not only the return of the wing­back but of the mid-cen­tu­ry Scan­di­na­vian mod­ernism with which the com­pa­ny made its name in the 1950s and 60s. Maybe that’s why it’s easy to think of IKEA as con­sis­tent­ly embody­ing this trend, slight­ly updat­ed every few years. But brows­ing through these cat­a­logs shows how thor­ough­ly IKEA absorbed all sorts of Euro­pean influences—as well as the look of hotel room fur­ni­ture from Mia­mi Vice.

What kind of ther­a­py is this? Gaz­ing at dat­ed or retro-hip prod­ucts we are years too late to buy? It offers the same expe­ri­ence as all IKEA cat­a­log shopping—without the strug­gle and expense of trans­port­ing and assem­bling the results: the dis­trac­tion of a world with­out dis­trac­tions. Explore the new archive of IKEA cat­a­logs here.

via Bloomberg and Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mas­sive Har­rods Cat­a­logue from 1912 Gets Dig­i­tized: Before Ama­zon, Har­rods Offered “Every­thing for Every­one, Every­where”

The Bauhaus Book­shelf: Down­load Orig­i­nal Bauhaus Books, Jour­nals, Man­i­festos & Ads That Still Inspire Design­ers World­wide

Meet the Mem­phis Group, the Bob Dylan-Inspired Design­ers of David Bowie’s Favorite Fur­ni­ture

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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A Beautiful 1897 Illustrated Book Shows How Flowers Become Art Nouveau Designs

in Architecture, Art, Books, Design, Nature | August 28th, 2020

The art of draw­ing is not the art of observ­ing forms and objects alone, it is not mere mim­ic­ry of these objects; it is the art of know­ing how far and where­in, and with what just lim­i­ta­tions, those forms and objects can be repro­duced in a pic­ture, or in a dec­o­ra­tive work. — Eugène Gras­set, 1896

Flow­ers loomed large in Art Nou­veau, from the volup­tuous flo­ral head­pieces that crowned Alphonse Mucha’s female fig­ures to the stained glass ros­es favored by archi­tect Charles Ren­nie Mack­in­tosh.

Graph­ic design­er Eugène Gras­set’s 1897 book, Plants and Their Appli­ca­tion to Orna­ment, vivid­ly demon­strates the ways in which nature was dis­tilled into pop­u­lar dec­o­ra­tive motifs at the end of the 19th-cen­tu­ry.

 

Twen­ty-four flow­er­ing plants were select­ed for con­sid­er­a­tion, from hum­ble spec­i­mens like dan­de­lions and this­tle to such Art Nou­veau heavy hit­ters as pop­pies and iris­es.

Each flower is rep­re­sent­ed by a real­is­tic botan­i­cal study, with two addi­tion­al col­or plates in which its form is flat­tened out and mined for its dec­o­ra­tive, styl­is­tic ele­ments.

 

The plates were ren­dered by Grasset’s stu­dents at the École Guérin, young artists whom he had “for­bid­den to con­de­scend to the art of base and servile imi­ta­tion”:

The art of draw­ing is not the art of observ­ing forms and objects alone, it is not mere mim­ic­ry of these objects; it is the art of know­ing how far and where­in, and with what just lim­i­ta­tions, those forms and objects can be repro­duced in a pic­ture, or in a dec­o­ra­tive work.

He also expect­ed stu­dents to hone their pow­ers of obser­va­tion through intense study of the organ­ic struc­tures that would pro­vide their inspi­ra­tion, becom­ing inti­mate­ly acquaint­ed with the char­ac­ter of petal, leaf, and stem:

Beau­ti­ful lines are the foun­da­tion of all beau­ty. In a work of art, what­ev­er it be, appar­ent or hid­den sym­me­try is the vis­i­ble or secret cause of the plea­sure we feel. Every­thing that is cre­at­ed must have some rep­e­ti­tion in its parts to be under­stood, retained in the mem­o­ry, and per­ceived as a whole

When it came to adorn­ing house­hold imple­ments such as vas­es and plates, Gras­set insist­ed that dec­o­ra­tive ele­ments exist in har­mo­ny with their hosts, snip­ing that any artist who would dis­tort form with ill con­sid­ered flour­ish­es should make a bas-relief instead.

Thus­ly do chrysan­the­mum stems pro­vide log­i­cal-look­ing bal­last for a chan­de­lier, and a dandelion’s curved leaves hug the con­tours of a table leg.

Gras­set’s best known stu­dent, Mau­rice Pil­lard Verneuil, whose career spanned Art Nou­veau to Art Deco, absorbed and artic­u­lat­ed the master’s teach­ings:

 

It is no longer the nature (artists) see that they rep­re­sent, that they tran­scribe, but the nature that they aspire to see; nature more per­fect and more beau­ti­ful and of which they have the inte­ri­or vision.

 

View Eugène Grasset’s Plants and Their Appli­ca­tion to Orna­ment as part of the New York Pub­lic Library’s Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tions here. Or find illus­tra­tions at Raw­Pix­el.

via The Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

His­toric Man­u­script Filled with Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Cuban Flow­ers & Plants Is Now Online (1826 )

Beau­ti­ful Hand-Col­ored Japan­ese Flow­ers Cre­at­ed by the Pio­neer­ing Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Ogawa Kazu­masa (1896)

Dis­cov­er Emi­ly Dickinson’s Herbar­i­um: A Beau­ti­ful Dig­i­tal Edi­tion of the Poet’s Col­lec­tion of Pressed Plants & Flow­ers Is Now Online

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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