The Metropolis office was saddened this week to hear of the sudden loss of a visionary leader in the design community. Sylvia Harris, the founder and principal of Citizen Research & Design and a designer at the Public Policy Lab, passed away on Sunday. Harris is remembered for her pioneering approach to improving the usability of public spaces and programs through design.

Sylvia (center) and her team, image courtesy Citizen Research & Design.

Harris’s company—originally called Sylvia Harris LLC but recently renamed Citizen Research & Design—specialized in wayfinding graphics and improved communication in the public realm. Harris once wrote, “As citizens, we deserve public services that are efficient, effective and respectful. We need straightforward forms and publications, easy-to-use websites and call centres and clear signage and communications in public buildings.” The company’s projects prove that good design can make virtually anything easy to understand.

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German Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, March 22, 1944
Pavel Petrovich Sokolov-Skalya
Multicolor brush stencil on newsprint (pieced), laid down on tan Korean lining paper,
1872 x 845 mm (click on images to enlarge).

While here in the United States, the Bureau of Graphics at the Office of War Information was cranking out World War II posters by the hundreds of thousands, its Soviet counterpart took a far more artisanal approach. The exhibition Windows on the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941-1945, on view at the Art Institute of Chicago from July 31, will present 157 posters created by the Telegraph Agency of the Soviet Union (TASS) during World War II. All of these posters are between five and ten feet tall, and each of them was painstakingly painted by hand!

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Last week I got down to the serious business of discussing how graphic design can help build a powerful and effective sustainability movement.The discussion was moderated by Susan Szenasy, editor of Metropolis Magazine and, in addition to me, the panelists, were  Michael Bierut (Pentagram), Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky), Jeremy Osborn (350.org), Dmitri Siegel (Urban Outfitters) and James Slezak (Purpose.com). (The event was sponsored by AIGANY and Distributed Artist Publishers.)

In organizing this panel, we wanted to come to real, concrete conclusions and to open up some real pathways for artists to contribute meaningful work towards a movement that has the capacity to radically affect our political thinking. Let’s cut right to the chase. Here are the highlights: Read more…

The back cover of the book Green Patriot Posters, published by Metropolis Books.

Seems like we have been predicting the end of the printed matter for a while now.  But whatever happens to newspapers and magazines, books are here to stay – for the simple reason that people love them.  Books, to some, are objects of worship.  

Now, I am willing to bet that there is significant overlap in the population of book lovers and the population of people that self-identify as “green” or are concerned about things like climate change. That makes sense, given that reading books is about acquiring knowledge and concern about our ecological crisis is founded on a trust of knowledge, as opposed to ideology or wishful thinking. Yet, how many book lovers, or more importantly how many book publishers, pay attention to how a given book is printed? I would say very, very few and that needs to change. Here is how it could work: Read more…

In our January 2011 issue, we featured just a few of the works included in Postcards of the Wiener Werkstätte, a recent exhibition at the Neue Galerie of about 500 postcards from the Leonard A. Lauder collection. If you missed the show, which closed a few days ago, take heart: the curator Christian Witt-Dörring has edited the museum’s visual feast down to a digestible bite of six postcards. Here he presents his personal favorites and explains what makes them special.

Postcard n° 540
Meat Market: Old Roofs (1911) by Adalberta Kiesewetter

The topic of this postcard is the unspectacular or, to put it another way, the familiar. It tries to capture the atmosphere of the fast disappearing old city of Vienna around 1910. Nostalgia embraces contemporary artistic expression—the ambiguous play between the flat plane and a perspective rendering. The image breathes tradition in the Secessionists’ interpretation of the term as a revival of a lost quality.

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In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.

The ripple effect of the stalled housing market has impacted countless industries—including the purveyors of those storage pods that pop up on the curb when someone needs to move. A few months back, Charley MacKenzie, the owner of the Maryland-based SmartBox USA, told his friend Gregory Pitts about his company’s overstock of plywood storage boxes, each about the size of a walk-in closet. Pitts, a designer with the furniture company David Edward, had an idea. What if the pods could themselves become home? Read more…

“Trumbull” (left) and “Gilman,” two of the canned magazine templates now sold by Ready Media

How should publication designers greet the news yesterday that Roger Black—the magazine design (and redesign) guru who’s had his hands on Rolling Stone, Newsweek, New York, Popular Mechanics, Esquire, and about a zillion other titles over the years—has launched a new venture called Ready-Media to provide “outstanding media templates for both print and web-based formats” to publishers “at a fraction of the cost”? Several commenters on the Society of Publication Designers’ Grids blog were understandably displeased by what they saw as yet another nail in the pub-design coffin:

What a huge setback for designers and magazine makers.

You’ve got to be kidding. Paint by numbers for magazine design?

Working at a city/regional magazine and seeing the ever reducing budget & staff, this sends a shiver down my spine.

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In her monthly “Letter from Baltimore,” Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson writes about architecture, culture, and urbanism in a city more often associated with violent crime than with good design. Click here to read her previous posts. For more by Dickinson, visit her blog, Urban Palimpsest.

Baltimore, like most urban environments, is lousy with graffiti. The culture of tagging is well established here. Street art, though, is just starting to take off. In the last few years, wheat-pasted posters and hand-painted imagery have been popping up on abandoned buildings, sidewalks, and light poles. These works of art—and these are art—evoke the likes of Banksy and Swoon, with subject matter that arrests us in our daily travels and reminds us to again see and question the city we occupy.

Perhaps the most accomplished street art in Baltimore right now is coming from a young artist named Gaia. Read more…

The Designboom Mart often acts as ICFF’s palate cleanser. When the glossier offerings on the show floor start feeling like too slick a pitch, it can be refreshing to see a group of mostly young designers selling their own inexpensive wares in a PR-free marketplace. And if a few of their products are more cloying than clever, there’s usually something better at the next table. But this year’s roster of 40-odd designers, from half as many countries, seem particularly inventive, and the addition of the Mart to the show proper (as opposed to just outside the entrance) helped integrate it into the fair. Here are a few favorites. Read more…

For me, the best thing about Rem Koolhaas’s much-hyped design of Prada’s New York “epicenter,” in the early oughties, was not the 180-foot zebrawood half-pipe so much as the wallpaper—a rotating selection of  slyly subversive graphic themes (with titles like Guilt and Vomit) by the New York design studio 2x4. Now even those of us who can’t afford to shop at Prada can have a little of 2x4’s visual savvy in our daily lives: The wall-graphic company Blik—which sells giant, removable stickers as a decorative alternative to wallpaper and painting—announced today that it is carrying four decal sets by the 2x4 team (including “Modular Icons,” above). The prices range from $25 to $55 per set; check out more photos of the new line after the jump. Read more…