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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Motif Magazine: The World Made Visible

Motif magazine, founded in 1958, ran meticulously researched, beautifully illustrated articles about painting, sculpture, art education, graphic design, typography, illustration, photography, and architecture. Its presentation of all these visual arts on an equal footing, long before “visual culture” became a branch of academic inquiry, anticipated a new way of seeing, documenting and appreciating the “visible world.”

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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
More books by Rick Poynor >>

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