BROOKLYN - from the pages of Pulled: A Catalog of Screen Printing

From Andy Warhol to the sassy designers of today, screen-printing is a medium with undeniable panache. Prized for its accessibility and bold, saturated colors, screen-printing is cheap, versatile, and a little dirty. Not to mention fast. Author Mike Perry (Hand Job, Over and Over) screened his first shirt in college and wore it later that night. So listen up, burgeoning artistes: it can’t always be bad to wear your heart on your sleeve.

Pulled stretches screen-printing in all directions, leaving no element untouched. This book is a survey and a how-to, a collection of prints and an idea bank. It brings together more than forty talented screen printers, including Aesthetic Apparatus, Deanne Cheuk, Steven Harrington, Maya Hayuk, Cody Hudson, Jeremyville, Andy Mueller, Rinzen, and Andy Smith, among many others. Pulled is for the creative person who wants to leave his mark on cotton, or anything else.

Flip through Princeton Architectural Press’ stunning Fall 2011 Calendar

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From the pages of Function, Restraint, and Subversion in Typography by @Namdev Hardisty

The beauty of contemporary graphic design is that dozens of movements emerge and re-emerge from view. Yet, too often we are left with only the vague impression that something is going on. To appreciate what that might be requires us to slow down, ignore superficial trends, and take a more in-depth look. This is the approach taken by Function, Restraint, and Subversion in Typography, a survey of minimalist and brutalist typography in contemporary graphic design. This international collection documents the work of more than twenty-four graphic designers who engage in an aggressively simple typography. Lavishly illustrated with commentary by author J. Namdev Hardisty, the book explores the innovative posters, books, signage, and other forms of print design by such well-known designers as Daniel Eatock, Experimental Jetset, Spin, the Walker Art Center’s design studio, as well as those just beginning to make a mark on the design world, including MGMT., Project Projects, SEA, Xavier Encinas, Manuel Raeder, YES, and more.


Namdev Hardisty is the founder, with Kimberlee Whaley, of The MVA, through which he has worked on print, web, and signage projects for a variety of clients, including Intermedia Arts, Minneapolis College of Art & Design, The Weisman Art Museum, and Analog Clothing. Namdev’s work is featured in Over & Over: A Catalog of Hand-drawn Patterns and Hand Job: A Catalogue of Type, both published by Princeton Architectural Press. He is also the author and designer of New Skateboard Graphics (2009). He received his BFA in Graphic Design from Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2003.

| From the pages of Form+Code in Design, Art, and Architecture

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The last decade has witnessed a proliferation of artists whose primary medium is software. Algorithmic processes, harnessed through the medium of computer code, allow artists to generate increasingly complex visual forms that they otherwise might not have been able to imagine, let alone delineate. The newest volume in our Design Brief series Form+Code in Design, Art, and Architecture is a non-technical introduction to the history, theory, and practice of software in the arts. Organized into themes linked to aspects of code—repetition, transformation, parameters, visualization, and simulation—each of the book’s sections contains an essay, code samples, and numerous illustrations. An accompanying website(www.formandcode.com) features code samples in various programming languages for the examples in the book. An ideal introductory text for digital design and media arts courses, this unique primer will also appeal to students and professionals looking for a survey of this exciting new area of artistic production.

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From Lettering & Type: Creating Letters and Designing Typefaces

by Bruce Willen, Nolan Strals & Ellen Lupton

No component of graphic design has attracted as much interest or inspired as much innovation in recent years as lettering and type. These fundamentals of design, once the exclusive domain of professional typographers, have become an essential starting point for anyone looking for a fresh way to communicate. Practical information about creating letters and type often amounts to a series of guidelines for executing a particular process, font program, or style. But what makes lettering and type endlessly fascinating is the flexibility to interpret and sometimes even break these rules. Lettering & Type is a smart-but-not-dense guide to creating and bending letters to one’s will. More than just another pretty survey, it is a powerful how-to book full of relevant theory, history, explanatory diagrams, and exercises. While other type design books get hung up on the technical and technological issues of type design and lettering, Lettering & Type features the context and creativity that shape letters and make them interesting.

Authors and designers Bruce Willen and Nolen Strals examine classic design examples as well as exciting contemporary lettering of all stripes—from editorial illustrations to concert posters to radical conceptual alphabets. Lettering & Type is ideal for anyone looking to move beyond existing typography and fonts to create, explore, and use original or customized letterforms. This latest addition to our best-selling Design Briefs series features a foreword by Ellen Lupton and hundreds of images and examples of work by historical and contemporary designers, artists, and illustrators, including Marian Bantjes, Stefan Sagmeister, Matthew Carter, Christoph Niemann, Steve Powers (ESPO), House Industries, Christian Schwartz, Margaret Kilgallen, James Victore, Abbott Miller, Sibylle Hagmann, Ed Fella, and many more. Throughout the book interviews with type designers, artists, and graphic designers provide real-world perspective from contemporary practitioners.

Typical typography books follow a format designers could probably navigate in their sleep. There’s an impressive intro from a well-known designer, a developed thesis or reason for the following selection, and by the end, one might even be convinced this is the future (if only of graphic design). Function, Restraint, and Subversion in Typography, however, is no typical typography book.

This book is no counterfeit watershed, no tired and self-serving synthesis, no declaration of the state of graphic design today. Instead, it is one of the many states of graphic design today. It’s a back to basics, black coffee, shot of whisky approach to type. Nothing is added that might detract from the message. Perhaps not surprisingly, ninety percent of the projects were not created for the louder faster brighter world of advertising. What’s inside is “culture”—designs for museums and art galleries, independent bookstores, schools, and art projects. J. Namdev Hardisty’s striking survey offers clarity, brevity, and wit through discernable isms: Brutalism, Modernism, and Minimalism. But please, don’t label it.

In the end, this book is simple. That is what makes it so extraordinary.

Gagosian PopArtis,

from the pages of  Function, Restraint, and Subversion in Typography

The beauty of contemporary graphic design is that dozens of movements emerge and re-emerge from view. Yet, too often we are left with only the vague impression that something is going on. To appreciate what that might be requires us to slow down, ignore superficial trends, and take a more in-depth look. This is the approach taken by Function, Restraint, and Subversion in Typography, a survey of minimalist and brutalist typography in contemporary graphic design. This international collection documents the work of more than twenty-four graphic designers who engage in an aggressively simple typography. Lavishly illustrated with commentary by author J. Namdev Hardisty, the book explores the innovative posters, books, signage, and other forms of print design by such well-known designers as Daniel Eatock, Experimental Jetset, Spin, the Walker Art Center’s design studio, as well as those just beginning to make a mark on the design world, including MGMT., Project Projects, SEA, Xavier Encinas, Manuel Raeder, YES, and more.

This is the third and final pressing of Karel Maren’s, Printed Matter/Drukwerk

Upon its publication in 1996, Printed Matter became an instant classic in the world of design publishing. This beautifully designed visual survey of the career of Dutch graphic designer Karel Martens is a tactile distillation of Martens’ unique and personal approach to design. Projects—ranging from postage stamps to books to signs on buildings—are arranged in layouts that fully explore the print process. The first edition of Printed Matter quickly sold out along with a second edition published in 2001, and both have become valuable collectors’ items. This third and final edition includes a new interview with Martens and brings the survey of his work to 2010, marking fifty years of practice.

From Hello World: A Life in Ham Radio

“… a profusely visual, clever and handsomely designed (the title on the book cover is not set in words but in Morse code) paean to ham radio presented through reproductions of hundreds of QSL cards and other ephemera collected and annotated for more than 70 years by an avid New Jersey enthusiast and found by the authors at a flea market after he died.”

— Steven Heller, The New York Times Book Review (June 29, 2003)

To an outsider, the world of ham radio is one of basement transmitters, clunky microphones, Morse code, and crackly, possibly clandestine, worldwide communications, a world both mysterious and geeky. But the real story is a lot more interesting: indeed, there are more than two million operators worldwide, including people like Walter Cronkite and Priscilla Presley. Gandhi had a ham radio, as do Marlon Brando and Juan Carlos, king of Spain.

Hello World takes us on a seventy-year odyssey through the world of ham radio. From 1927 until his death in 2001, operator Jerry Powell transmitted radio signals from his bedroom in Hackensack, New Jersey, touring the world’s most remote locations and communicating with people from Greenland to occupied Japan. Once he made contact with a fellow ham operator, he exchanged special postcards—known as QSLs cards—with them. For seven decades, Powell collected hundreds of these cards, documenting his fascinating career in amateur radio and providing a dazzling graphic inventory of people and places far flung.

This book is both an introduction to the fascinating world of ham and a visual feast for anyone interested in the universal language of graphic design.

On his French identity card, legendary architect Le Corbusier listed his profession as “Homme de Lettres” (Man of Letters). Celebrated for his architecture, which numbers fewer than sixty buildings, Le Corbusier also wrote more than fifty books, hundreds of articles, and thousands of letters. Le Corbusier, Homme de Lettres is the first in-depth study of Le Corbusier as a writer as well as an architect. Featuring more than two hundred archival images from Le Corbusier’s life and work, this groundbreaking book examines his many writing projects from 1907 to 1947, as well as his letters written to two mentors: Charles L’Eplattenier and William Ritter. In Le Corbusier, Homme de Lettres author M. Christine Boyer focuses on the development of his writing style as it morphed from romantic prose to aphorisms and telegraphic bulletins. For each of his books, Le Corbusier was meticulous about the design of the page layout, the form of the type, the impact of the ideas, and even the promotional material. As a man of letters, Le Corbusier expected to contribute to the cultural atmosphere of the twentieth century. Le Corbusier, Homme de Lettres shows for the first time how his voluminous output—books, diaries, letters, sketchbooks, travel notebooks, lecture transcriptions, exposition catalogs, journal articles—reflects not just a compulsion to write, but a passion for advancing his ideas about the relationship between architecture, urbanism, and society in a new machine age.