Anyway, take a look at some of the presidential buttons from way back when:

You also have your "Goldwater", a "Nixon/Agnew", and the "Kennedy" button (which I'd still wear today).

Remember the "WIN" button? Although that was a Ford thing, I remember that simple button as being very effective, nonetheless.

Now, let's look at the logos of the 2008 presidential candidates:

Last, but not least, I found a button of old that speaks of a day when we really believed and trusted in our Leader. I personally would NEVER wear this one now.

This brings me back to art.

There is a Website I found about 3 years ago that deals with and addresses the many facets of war messaging in these modern times using the style of the propaganda posters from the '40s and '50s (well, most of them). The messages are clear, somewhat ironic, and tell the truth of what really is going on these days. I went back to the site and saw that the posters and other 'collectibles' are still being designed and can be purchased (or not). You can start from the beginning and check out all of the posters, jump to the newest posters, and even read the Hate Mail. (It's always funny to me how, just because we question the war or the methods involved surrounding it, we're not supporting the troops.)

The artist, Micah Wright, became interested in propaganda posters, and ultimately anti-war posters, after this mess started in 2001. His art is great! Open your mind, even a little, a think of the messages these posters contain.

Enough of my rant, let's see some art:

There you have it. The 475-odd posters and related messages are pretty powerful and thought-provoking. That's what art and freedom of expression are all about it. It doesn't mean that we're un-patriotic or un-American - just the opposite, in my view. It's just too bad that we're still expressing this sort of message some 5 years later.

Thank you for allowing me to express my anger and get this out.

Peace. 

I guess the best thing about Process for me is that, with each of the 50 highlighted designers and pieces, the design process is shown, from sketches to production and to completed product. It is interesting to see the new, and sometimes unorthodox, technology used to produce these pieces. Check out the Tavalone table or the Ampora vase which is made by bees' honeycombs.

You will also see the $100 One Laptop Per Child Computer, by Yves Behar of fuseproject. (The final version of this computer doesn't have a hand-crank and all components serve a double-purpose - mainly for dirt and dust protection.) It's a great concept and an empowering endeavor.

Other designers showcased in Process are Marten Baas, Laura Birdsall, Patrick Jouin, and the ever-popular Karim Rashid.

Other than the $100 laptop, there are no prices listed for the products. Makes me wonder. However, since some of the products are one-offs or produced in limited quantities, I guess the 'call for prices' concept applies. I don't think the $100 computer is really that price, either.

Process is a good book and extremely educational. I think it would be a good thing for young artists-to-be to be exposed to. It will get their creative and imaginative juices flowing and hopefully will inspire them to continue on with the tradition. The book will, of course, also be inspiring to practicing product artisans as well as instructors. Heck, it may even be of interest to other visual communicators like me.

This gave a local artist, John Kuzich, an idea. He wanted to use these colorful and ephemeral passes for something more. He thought that there must be stories behind each Fast Pass and desired to capture them in an artistic way.

John decided to post signs in his neighborhood requesting folks to send him their out-of-date Passes for an art project. 15,000 Passes later, he has some of the most colorful murals in the City. He started out with some smaller collages but the big project is to have a mural of 4 panels of 720 passes each. The end result will be a behemoth 28 feet wide and 5 feet high. That's a lot of transit users.

[MUNI Fast Passes have been around since 1974 and cost $11 each at that time. Today, more than 100,000 of them are sold each month at a cost of $45 each. A rider has to use his or her pass 30 times in the month to break even. MUNI Fast Passes are good for unlimited rides on all MUNI busses, street cars and cable cars, and on the BART system within San Francisco.]

It's really good to see something being done with old bus passes that can not only be a colorful work of art, but also capture some of the stories behind them. I am proud of John Kuzich and support his vision. Now, if only the damn busses came on time.

The book is filled with period illustrations, presented in illustrious color, of twenty-four different flowering plants in various color palettes. Fans of the Arts and Crafts and Art Nouveau styles will be in heaven over this book. Plant lovers will will be in awe over it as well.

Plants and Their Application to Ornament will give readers ideas on tile patterns and options for decorative and household objects. There's also few written words in the book - a plus for lazy readers like yours truly.

Not only a feast for the eyes, this book will be sure to be a conversation piece when placed on anyone's coffee table.
I have just two words for this book - GOR GEOUS!

Colors were bright and neon prevailed late in the decade. Many corporate logos went through a metamorphosis to coincide with the booming economy of the day. Some, like Enron, may have been doing more with the economy than we knew
(Paul Rand didn't even know).

While Starbuck's was revamping an old logo so as not to offend with exposed breasts. Ah, some things never change.

Who can't forget Swatch watches? I loved mine! I think I had about 4 different Swatches at one time - and wore them at one time as well (that was the fad). Paula Scher did a great job on the Swatch campaign which, I'm sure, made her her first million.

Typography was evolutionary then, as well. Letterforms were wide and thick, sometimes so wide you couldn't even see through them.
Many typographic layouts were simple and clean.
Yet, we still had plump. We were a plump culture even then.

So, there you have it. My trip down memory lane to the MTV-generated culture that were my formative years. Yes, even the new-generation of computers were big.

Abraham Lincoln, on the other hand, would be all about a simple and clean look when it comes to design.
He would go for a simple "Abe" logotype and would be partial to Din as his favorite typeface. He also would've been a Mac user.

Some of the other Presidents down the line shouldn't be forgotten when it comes to their probable design sensibilities. Jimmy Carter wouldn't be able to get away from the "peanut" icon,
Richard Nixon would have an ironic fondness of the Constructivist movement and Times typeface,
and Bill Clinton would like anything Muny - Kid Robot and adopt the Moonglow typeface (you can sort of see right through it).

Then there's Dubbya. He would be happy with any shape, as long as it's round, like a bouncing rubber ball, and not too complicated. He would go for Frutiger or maybe Helvetica, 'cuz it's easy to read, and really like the Bauhaus movement. He couldn't spell it, but he'd like it.

That's just my take on a few of the graphic design choices or likes of our past Presidents. I think it's always good to get the word out about graphic design and its merits in any way possible. So, on this President's Day time of year, let's focus on them. What are your ideas on our past Leaders that I have missed? Please share them here and let's have some Presidential fun.

The restaurants' menus, placemats, napkins, business cards, and overall signage, for instance, are displayed in the book from those firms that got it - and got it good. There are firms, and eating and drinking establishment, represented from ALL over the world - from the UK to the Netherlands, Sydney to Sacramento. I have to wonder why there are not more West Coast firms and establishments represented here. I know we have quite a few that rank right up there. (Uh-hum, has anyone ever heard of the restaurant capital of the world, San Francisco?!)

Yes, there is a McDonald's restaurant in the book, but don't dismay, it's the only commercial fast food establishment in there. A few of my favorites are Dana Centre Restaurant in the UK, The Butcher Shop out of Boston, and Bravo Charlie in Germany.

So, pick up this book, get familiar with what to look for, and when you go out again you can be an ambience critic like me. Let those other critics deal with the food.

Other, phenomenal presentations were given by Scott Stowell of Open and Good Magazine, Valerie Casey of IDEO, and Jane Savage of Nike.
(If you haven't heard of or picked up a copy of Good yet, you will soon - it's GREAT!)

One of the great things presented at the conference that we can all get behind is the Designer's Accord. The Designer's Accord is "a call to arms for the creative community to reduce the environmental impact caused by design, and to work collaboratively to inspire sustainable change." Sounds good to me.

AIGA San Francisco and the AIGA Center for Sustainable Design brought Compostmodern '08 to us and Presenting Sponsors were Adobe, Mohawk Paper, Cenveo, New Leaf Paper, Academy of Art University, and Boisset Family Estates. The environmentally-friendly winery treated us to a wonderful reception at the close of the conference. After a day full of great and inspiring information, the reception was sorely needed.

Since the conference is held every other year, the next Compostmodern will be in January 2010. Make plans to attend now - we have no time to waste.

Not only is this book beautifully packaged (the felt cover is soft enough to use as a pillow!) the layout and imagery inside is fascinating and extremely awe-inspiring. There is even a DVD hidden in the back cover of the book so you can experience all of the featured studios' work in action.

Motion Blur 2 is a great book that will be of interest to virtually anyone in the graphic design and digital film or motion graphics areas. The suggested $65 price tag is a little hefty, but with over 250 pages, 1,000 color examples and illustrations, and the DVD in the back cover, it may be worth the cash. The packaging and cover is a conversation-piece in itself.

For some reason, I have never been a fan of tree branches or stems holding birds or flowers - and especially those with a bad script font on the cover. It's not that hard to get a little more creative in these areas - or at least ask someone that has a little design sense to help out. I just feel that branches or sticks are a sell-out.

Then there are those cards that have random angels or other icons of the season on them that either offend someone or make someone else feel guilty that they haven't gone to church in a while (not me, of course).

I always love the cards that make me laugh and have a joke or some other satirical notion on the cover. Holidays gone wrong or satirical twists on the "Joy" of the season are always winners, in my book.

Don't get me wrong. It is nice to be remembered and thought of during this time of year and I am grateful to actually receive some cards from people I know. There are also some good designs out there that may even prompt people to display or place on the mantel.

We just need to remember to recycle these cards, creative design or not. It's sad for me to think that there are trees out there that actually gave their lives for a poorly-designed card. Let's all think about the cards we received - and sent - this year and remember to think a little more carefully in the future.

Anyway, Peter Koch, who is an acclaimed publisher of fine editions and artists books, wanted to pay homage to a favorite author of his, Joseph Brodsky, the exiled poet from Russia who fled to Italy, and went on the quest to print and bind the work, Watermark, the way it would've been done in the 15th century.

He contacted a friend of his, Sandro Berra, and Italian graphic designer as well as Executive Coordinator of the Tipoteca Italiana Fondazione, to assist with the visual style. Koch and his partner, Susan Filter, wanted to output the piece and have it be reminiscent of Manutius' most beautiful and enigmatic book, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. So they did it.

The evening's lecture was filled with slides and images of Venice, of course, and the process by which Koch and Filter went through to get the work finished. They had to find a studio, an apartment, ship a printing press on a gondola through Venice, make the Twinrocker "Da Vinci" paper, hand-set and print the text from Monotype Dante type (cast in lead from the Olivieri Typefoundry in Milan), and ship it all back to Berkeley, California where it was bound by hand. Of course, this sounds like a quick and easy thing (right!), but, in the end, it was anything but.

Watermark was printed in 50 copies, with a few being special edition, and the rest are for premium sale.

There were a few of the books at the reception that followed, and they were perfect as well as a feast for the eyes.

One side note for this lecture was the slide show that Sandro Berra gave on the Tipoteca Italiana Type and Printing Museum, in Cornuda, Italy. My mouth was watering as I saw the magnificent presses, lead type, and beautiful pieces that are printed there. I now know where my next "business" trip will be! I also know that Mr. Koch is ready to do the whole book thing all over again. Any takers?

The uproar is over the mixed typefaces, mainly. Not only are the fonts wrong, but the spacing is also pretty bad. What went wrong and, more importantly, how could the Big Apple do this?

According to Core77, the firm of Wolff Olins got the job to do this, beating out Smart Design. (However, the TLC site gives credit to Smart Design - what gives?)
If Wolff Olins sounds familiar, these are the same folks who designed another rather controversial logo - the one for the 2012 London Olympics. You've seen that one, right? Here it is again:

Core77 also had an iteration of another logo that could've been used for the NYC taxis and it's quite good.

Who did it, though? I'm not sure. But, it is clever, classic, and I could see it on tshirts, proudly worn by cabbies and normal joes and janes alike. Oh, what missed opportunities arise when a brand or logo change is done by committee. Sheez!

Brodovitch's innovative style was continued by art directors including Henry Wolf (at Esquire and Harper's Bazaar) and Otto Storch (at McCall's) to page layout in large-format magazines. Storch (who was awesome!) believed that concept, text, type, and image should be inseparable in editorial design - and he showed this is grand style. Remember, this was done back in the days before Quark and InDesign, when art was photographed, developed, cut with Exacto knives, and pasted up when "camera-ready".

(He fell in love with photography and art direction after taking an evening class taught by Mister Brodovitch, while he was art director at Dell Publishing in the early '50s.)

His obituary in the New York Times states that Mr. Storch "was part of the New York School, a group of editorial and advertising designers who based layouts on unified visual ideas rather than merely embellishing the page with ornamentation." He "wed stylish typefaces and studio photography into word-pictures, so that a headline or text type was an integrated component of the illustration rather than separated from it..."

Otto Storch died in 1999 at the age of 86. It seems that his layout style died with him. We have so many page layout tools available to us these days. Why can't we bring these beautiful layouts back? Are magazine editors of today too conservative and afraid to take chances? Have we all just fallen back into what's been done over and over again and accepted the status quo? I hope not and I don't want to. Alexey Brodovitch, Henry Wolf, and Otto Storch have motivated me, and I wish to pass this on to you.

Rex Ray (although born with a different name) is a San Francisco-based fine artist who has worked in many differents media forms, like paper cutouts and fabric, and has also done graphic design work for the likes of David Bowie (album covers) and R.E.M., The Cure, and Beck (concert posters).

Start looking through this book of Rex Ray's work and you will end up saying to yourself, "Oh yeah! I've seen that before!" It happens.

The Interview at the end of the book with Rex Ray is really great. He seems like such a nice guy and has a lot of passion - for his art as well as his community. I not only highly recommend this book, I want to meet him.

Oh yeah, in the book you will also learn where the name "Rex Ray" came from, what his dog's name is, and how he really feels about art school. You'll love it as much as I did.