Published December 2022, Plastikcomb Magazine issue #5 Nearly two decades since its publication, Charles Wilkin’s INDEX-A remains a grand source of inspiration for artists, graphic designers, and illustrators. Although, the way Wilkin puts it, “I was just trying to make beautiful pages … things that interested me, things that [reflected what was] happening in the […]

01.27.22 @5:51PM John Gall is a graphic designer. This bears repeating, not because graphic design stands above agnate disciplines but, rather, because taxonomies are easily conflated. Graphic design is not art, no matter the temptation to liken professional typography and layout to “art”. By shuttling between book cover design and art making (his collages), Gall […]

Published selection of captioned imagery for “Made You Look”, June 2022, Plastikcomb Magazine issue #4 (sold out) 01Metaphysical portrait. Framed by strips of black. Yellow square. Below it, window to a room. Green and white walls, power tool plugged into unidentifiable industrial object at right. Further to the right, something soft, supple, gray. One floor […]

Published June 2022, Plastikcomb Magazine issue #4 (sold out) Muted tones, powder colors; noticeable patina of senescence as only ochre, shell pink, newsprint gray, washed-out greens, blues, mustard yellows, faded, and deteriorating material can deliver. Bolder hues and fabrications that oscillate between garish, kitsch, lurid, amusing, idyllic, industrial, and grotesque are scattered but, all in […]

The presentation of language will always be relevant to readers whatever the medium. From typography, you learn to look at, think about, and discern visual forms; from it you learn what words can be made to do for the benefit of readers, and from it you learn to make accessible and visually engaging messages. Good […]

Notes on this essay: Gerard Unger passed away in 2018 and, with him, a powerful vision about type design, typography, reading, and legibility. Happily, his typefaces, his words, and his teachings remain. Before his passing, Gerard designed new typefaces, Alverata and Sanserata, both available for licensing through TypeTogether, an outstanding digital type foundry led by […]

Dutch fonts, particularly those crafted by van Dyck for the printers Elzevir, were famously described by the American scholar/printer, Daniel Berkeley Updike, as “recognizable … by their sturdy qualities of workmanship, and … in the smaller sizes of roman and italic, by a tiresome evenness of design.” He added, “Their closely fitted, large face on […]

Teaching graphic design at a private institution on the Jersey shore has its advantages. The most obvious is the relative solitude of a suburban environment conducive to focused study. A disadvantage is the feeling that we constantly live in the shadow of New York, which makes my responsibility as a design educator all the more […]

William Addison Dwiggins coined the term [graphic design] in 1922 to describe himself and to express the broader, artistic aspects of a field, which at the time was primarily centered on advertising. I am hard-pressed to conjure a definition (since there are many) reflecting the field’s continually changing landscape, one that is enriched by a […]

He awakens to a pitched ceiling, a broken window, sundry grays, and a dream that his younger brother’s sleeping soundly in the bed next to his. It’s winter, its cold, and he’s alone. The bedroom’s musty and full of memories. It’s green at first glance, sylvan when the paisley pattern on the walls merge. The […]