As a design candidate in the MCAD MFA program I was asked to write an “artist statement.” Producing an all-encompassing articulation of my work posed a challenge—aside from a certain violence inherent in definitions, the idea of an “artist statement” seemed somewhat problematic for a designer, having worked primarily on client-based projects for a number of years since receiving my BA. When I…

Mark your calendars! On Thursday, December 1, Anthony Burrill will lecture at the Walker. Walker Cinema, 7 pm FREE tickets are available from 6 pm at the Bazinet Garden Lobby desk. Above, page 98 of the Graphic Design: Now in Production catalogue featuring Burrill’s posters. Anthony Burrill is a graphic designer living and working on the Isle of Oxney in England. He designs and prints posters that…

Check out the opening-day talk for Graphic Design: Now in Production that took place October 22, 2011. The lecture is in the Pecha Kucha style (20 slides, 20 seconds each) and features presentations from all of the curators as well as some designers in the show. It’s fun to see people talk so fast . . .

The next few days are going to be quite busy for designers in the Twin Cities! On Monday night, join Andrew and me for a brief discussion about the ideas behind the Graphic Design: Now in Production catalogue, followed by a book signing, and then step right next door and check out the closing night of the WOMN: Women in Minnesota Designexhibition. And before that goes down, there are three great…

French graphic designer, Fanette Mellier, has two pieces in Graphic Design: Now in Production. The first is her Specimen poster, a meticulous patterning of printer’s marks and color bars, and the other is a conceptual redesign of the book Bastard Battle, a novel by French author, Céline Minard. I recently emailed Fanette and asked her a few short questions about her work. I quickly realized that the…

Check out Daniel Eatock explaining his piece Felt-Tip Print, which is featured in Graphic Design: Now in Production. Also, don’t forget that we have Eatock’s new wrapping paper (and many other things) for sale in our Graphic Design Shop.

Gigantic poster / tape drawing (I think) designed by Inva Cota for Andrew Blauvelt’s workshop at Yale. Yeah I see the resemblance.

The Origin of Tux The concept of the Linux mascot being a penguin came from Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux. Tux was created by Larry Ewing in 1996 after an initial suggestion made by Alan Cox and further refined by Linus Torvalds on the Linux kernel mailing list. Torvalds took his inspiration from a photograph he found on an FTP site, showing a penguin figurine looking strangely like the…

On the Self-Reflexive Page Louis Lüthi’s exquisitely authored and designed book On the Self-Reflexive Page (2010) documents the history of the page as a material arena to be foregrounded and exploited. This discourse of the page began with Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in the eighteenth century…