Click the play button to watch Metropolis’s creative director, Criswell Lappin, talk about this month’s cover-design process.
We’ve nicknamed the January issue of Metropolis the “1 - 5 - 10 Issue” for its cover story, called “What Next,” in which architecture and design leaders forecast events in their fields—one, five, and ten years from now. It’s a perfect example of the kind of forward-looking, interdisciplinary design coverage you can only find in the pages of Metropolis. Click here to subscribe today.
‘Tis the season for new graphic identities, apparently. Already this month, three institutions—the Art Directors Club, Chrysler, and the New York Public Library— have unveiled updated logos. Here’s a quick look at the changes. .
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Art Directors Club Trollbäck + Company’s new design spells out the 89-year-old organization’s name inside a bold pink rectangle—a major departure from Paula Scher’s original logo, which, according to the folks at Unbeige,was based on Albrecht Dürer’s monogram.
A Cartagen map of Berlin, color-coded by the users who submitted map data. (Click to view a larger image.)
Scarcely a week goes by without an excited report on Google Maps: the breadth and depth of its coverage, its multiplying features, and all the innovative uses people are finding for it. But could the ubiquitous program be stunting the field of map design?
“Before Google Maps, designers thought much more broadly about what maps could do,” the MIT researcher Jeffrey Warren says. “Now, most mapping on the Web consists just of using Google Maps and sticking pins on it.” In the name of reclaiming some of that creativity, he’s created a software platform called Cartagen, the latest version of which debuted last week. It uses Google’s geographic data as a starting point, but lets people choose which features to include on their maps—streets, parks, churches, and so on—and how to visually represent those features, creating their maps from the ground up. Users can also add new data, which Cartagen can represent not just as points on the map but as outlines, polygons, overlapping shaded clouds—the possibilities are still expanding as Warren’s team brainstorms new potential uses for its creation. Read more…
Richard Woods, a British artist known for covering public spaces with whimsical architecturally-inspired graphics, recently opened his latest installation at New York’s City Hall Park. Commissioned by the Public Art Fund, wall and door and roof transforms two security booths plus an interior door in the lobby. Recently, I spoke with Woods—whose work was also featured this summer in an exhibition at the Perry Rubenstein Gallery—about the motives behind wall and door and roof, his impressions of City Hall, and viewer reactions to his work.
Tell me a bit about the development of this project. How did you come up with the idea, and how long did it take to execute?
My public projects regularly take one architectural style and impose a contradictory style onto the surface. I liked the idea of juxtaposing a surface pattern synonymous with low-cost private housing onto this great public building. The work took approximately a week to manufacture in the studio and about the same time to install on site. Read more…
The final July/August cover (left) and an alternate version featuring the Four Seasons
For this month’s cover it was New York vs. Alabama, suits vs. students. Both directions were valid. Each had a pedigree backed by a design legend—Philip Johnson at the Four Seasons, Samuel Mockbee at Auburn University’s Rural Studio. The deciding factor? There were other magazines that could feature the Four Seasons, but only Metropolis could take the Rural Studio’s $20,000 house and put it on the cover. I wonder how many dinners on 52nd Street $20K buys.
The final June cover (left) and an alternate version. Illustration: Aesthetic Apparatus
“It took the editors around here a couple of tries to get used to saying their name without giggling,” says Metropolis’s creative director, Criswell Lappin, of Aesthetic Apparatus, the Minneapolis-based firm that illustrated this month’s cover. “By then we had found one of their concepts particularly compelling: the idea that the future of green building (in this case, the new headquarters of the U.S. Green Building Council, in Washington, D.C.) would involve utilizing existing structures. We just needed to determine whether it should be type- or image-driven. After Michael Byzewski put in a tad more quality time, we went with this image—a generic-looking concrete structure—but not before pumping up the type a bit.”
For our May cover we approached Brian Collins to create a conceptual illustration for the winning Next Generation project. He and his talented team—John Fullbrook III, Timothy Goodman, and Jason Nuttal—passed along a handful of smart directions, but the pinwheel/pylon juxtaposition really piqued our interest. That concept turned out to be the one John felt the strongest about as well, and he was excited about developing it further. The final cover—fun, bold, and hopeful—clearly reflects our winner’s idea. And be on the loookout for pinwheels; they’re likely to pop up in the oddest places…
Left: an alternate version of the May cover; click to view a larger image.
Want people to recognize what a graphic-design aficionado you are, but tired of lugging around that Josef Müller-Brockman monograph everywhere you go? Skreened’s new Graphic Design Heroes T-shirts can help. The sartorial homages to Paul Rand, Milton Glaser, Wim Crouwel, and 14 other masters were created by Paul Nini, a professor of design at the Ohio State University. (Nini previously created a line of Great Typefaces shirts.) But graphic-design students should be careful not to get caught wearing one to class, lest you make the equivalent of the dreaded band T-shirt faux pas.
In thinking about the April cover, the famous Philip Johnson expression, “galloping off in all directions” comes to mind. We explored ideas for three of the six features, and even considered turning a front-of-the-book story on Muji into a feature (during production, no less) because the image worked so well as a potential cover. Alas, the editorial timing of that story was not ideal, so we decided against it. Then we channeled a little George Lois and came up with conceptual directions for the bathroom story and pitted them against a new restaurant in Midtown and a hotel on the outskirts of London. In the end, the idea of redefining luxury seemed the most provocative, considering the current economic climate. Read more…
She’d been a designer at Rolling Stone for fifteen years, she knew how to make something stand out in Times Square, and she received the AIGA medal last year. Why not ask her to design the March cover? Well, not only did we get to collaborate with Gail Anderson, but I think most of the SpotCo design team came with her. From pencil sketches to final compositions, Gail, Amanda Spielman, and Jeff Rogers kept a steady line of communication open, responding directly to our questions and requests with each iteration. Near the end of the process, we had our pick of three excellent directions. But what everyone (and I mean everyone - a rare event) loved about the final cover was how you understood everything about the issue just by looking at it.
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