The Irresistible Attraction of Self Storage

Concealed receptacles no bigger than wardrobes. Cavernous hangars the size of a four-car garage. The unfathomable mystery of locked doors, unknown objects left, sometimes for years, in darkened repositories, and secret chambers that must remain off-limits to all but the key holder, if they are visited at all. Self storage centers are places of private and public fascination and I always knew that one day I would succumb.

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The Conceptual Posters of Boris Bucan

What still seems surprising about the posters Boris Bućan designed in the late 1960s and early 1970s for the Student Center Gallery, the Zagreb Drama Theater, and other Croatian clients is how confidently reductive they are. If this is not quite anti-design, it is certainly design gripped by a powerful sense of restraint. I recall my first impression of the posters in a gallery. The images seemed sharply defined, cerebral and enigmatic.

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The Age of Wire and String Rebooted

The Age of Wire and String by Ben Marcus is a fiction of incomparable strangeness. What and where is the world that its stories describe with such dedicated observational precision? A new edition from the London literary publisher Granta has pulled off the improbable feat of making the book seem even stranger. Its visual interpretation by British artist and illustrator Catrin Morgan goes way beyond the norm for an illustrated book.

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On the Trail of The Eater of Darkness

I stumbled upon The Eater of Darkness while undertaking research into visual prose, sometimes also called visual writing, for a lecture. First published in Paris in 1926, Robert M. Coates’s novel is a genre-busting collision of science fiction, murder mystery, and Dada and Surrealism, with artful typographic arrangements and fragmented syntax. An added bonus: the 1959 edition has an early cover design by Milton Glaser.

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The Practical Virtue of Works That Work

“Creativity,” much as we depend on it, is perilously close to becoming one of those overused, tuneless, cheerleading terms like “vision” or “innovation” that sometimes make you wonder whether the very opposite is most likely to be the outcome. Peter Bil’ak’s Works That Work magazine reclaims the word from the stultifying embrace of branding culture and design thinking by being wonderfully low-key and “vernacular” about it.

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Utopian Image: Politics and Posters

While the interest of an institution such as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in political posters has the aims of scholarly understanding and public education, this curatorial enterprise cannot escape the Atelier Populaire’s words of warning. To step back from the political struggle to study its products with detachment, as objects of aesthetic interest, is to accept the established order that makes this manner of study possible.

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On My Shelf: Fin de Copenhague

According to legend, Fin de Copenhague was composed and printed in the space of just 24 hours. Or maybe it was 48 hours. Either way it was pulled off with a dizzying burst of speed and with nonchalantly scathing brilliance by the Danish artist Asger Jorn and the French theorist and writer Guy Debord. It’s a Situationist classic and a scintillating piece of design that anticipated later typographic experiments by several decades.

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The Experiential Thrill of Driving in Films

I’m not a driver but from the moment I saw its title, a new book, Drive, had me buckled into the front seat ready to hit the freeway. Treating films of all kinds as evidence, architecture professor Iain Borden’s study shows how the car scenes in movies help us understand the experience of modernity: “Cinema, more than any other representational form, provides the most direct sense of what it actually feels like to drive.”

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A Dictionary of Surrealism and the Graphic Image

Surrealism’s influence on graphic design has never been properly acknowledged. Surreal design breaks free from the limits imposed by bureaucracy and taste to follow the impulses of a wayward, dreamlike logic and arrive at its own kind of equilibrium and form. This alphabetical guide considers some significant designers alongside key Surrealist concepts such as chance encounter, desire, the marvelous, and the uncanny.

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Herbert Spencer and The Book of Numbers

Writing a recent post about the designer Herbert Spencer reminded me of a little known book he created with his daughter. The Book of Numbers was meant to encourage children to think about numbers in the environment. But its visual approach is more “photobook” than “schoolbook,” and the best pictures go beyond simple descriptions chosen to serve the book’s educational agenda. They would be intriguing in any context.

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Rick Poynor is a writer, critic, lecturer and curator, specialising in design, media and visual culture. He founded Eye, co-founded Design Observer, and contributes columns to Eye and Print. His latest book is Uncanny: Surrealism and Graphic Design.

Recent Book

Uncanny: Surrealism and Graphic Design
Rick Poynor
Moravian Gallery, 2010
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