Jan van Toorn: The World in a Calendar

Jan van Toorn’s calendar for 1972/73, designed for the Dutch printer Mart.Spruijt, is one of the most extraordinary and provocative graphic artifacts of its era. The calendar proposed a new form of engagement for the graphic designer as a mediator and manipulator of photographic meaning. The project still looks utterly remarkable 40 years later in a new reprint undertaken by de Ruimte, a design company in Amsterdam.

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The Strange Afterlife of Common Objects

The pictures shown here were taken last week in a shop called The Works: “Objects of Desire” in the Çukurcuma district of Istanbul. No matter how seasoned you may be as a browser of junk shops, quirky antique dealers and flea markets, The Works is one of the great rococo emporiums of bric-a-brac. In shops like these, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk found the objects for his newly opened Museum of Innocence.

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Career Prospects in the Pain Business

I was browsing the Guardian newspaper’s recruitment ads this week when I saw this ad for a job as a Torturer. It caught me off guard — as it was meant to — and I felt a few seconds of profound shock and dismay. The three ads in the UK charity Freedom from Torture’s new awareness and fundraising campaign deliver perfectly calculated moments of cognitive dissonance.

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Studio Culture: The Materialism of Matter

I visited this design studio in Denver last year. Studio is something of an understatement. Matter, founded by former hardcore punk and now typophile Rick Griffith, is more like a studio/print shop/dance club with a store selling funky self-printed material out front. As a space, the Matter studio has a thickness of texture that comes from leaving the shell battered, rough and unfinished, like a lovingly arrested ruin-in-progress.

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Phil Sayer, Designer of Photo-Portraits

Like a lot of viewers, I first encountered Phil Sayer’s photographs in the pages of Blueprint. Then I got a job on the magazine and met the man himself. Photography was absolutely central to Blueprint and a whole cast of photographers did great work. For my money, Sayer was always the best, an image-maker whose way of shooting people helped to give the magazine a visual impact and presence that it has never equaled since.

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The Closed Shop of Design Academia

The academic publisher Berg has just sent me its design catalogue for 2012. As I checked out recent and forthcoming titles, I felt exhilarated by these signs of industrious scholarship, serious thought and intellectual commitment to design, and regretful that so little of this material is likely to make it into the field’s everyday discourse, let alone the public realm. Shouldn’t it be part of an academic’s brief to communicate more widely?

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The Enduring Influence of Richard Hollis

Outside of Britain, Richard Hollis is probably best known for his books Graphic Design: A Concise History and Swiss Graphic Design. Both volumes are indispensable components of any serious graphic design library. Hollis has also had a long and distinguished career as a designer working for publishers and galleries. An exhibition in London provides the first public opportunity to see and assess the entire shape of his output.

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On Display: Museum of Broken Relationships

I found the Museum of Broken Relationships by chance in the old part of Zagreb. Who could resist such an intriguing name? So in I went, imagining that it was some kind of art concept. It turned out to be much more straightforward than that. This is a museum about the experience and aftermath of breaking up with someone you once loved or still love, a public space consecrated to a universal experience of sadness and loss.

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The Covers of J.G. Ballard's Crash: An Update

In 2004, I wrote an essay for Eye magazine about the difficulty that cover designers had interpreting Crash, J.G. Ballard’s most disturbing novel. A shorter version with pictures was later published on the Ballardian website. Since then, quite a few new Crash covers have appeared — three in Britain alone. Finding a bizarre Croatian edition on a trip to Zagreb, as well as a new Serbian edition, provides a good pretext for an update.

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Typographic Stories of the City Streets

This beautifully atmospheric photograph was taken in Melbourne in the late 1960s, at the city’s busiest intersection, by a school teacher named Angus O’Callaghan. For decades it went unseen in a shoe box. Now the picture has been published, with many others, in a new book, Characters, by Australian designer Stephen Banham, about the way that letterforms can be interpreted as vivid narratives of life and history in our cities.

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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.