Glaser Design Archives / SVA Archives

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July 15, 2013

SVA Continuing Education courses in the ’60s

During the 1960s, SVA published a series of course announcements advertising the practical aspects of its evening classes. The text was often dry but the graphics were playful and eye-catching. Here, having some fun with type, are Ivan Chermayeff and Tony Palladino. Chermayeff and Bob Gill are after the jump.

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July 12, 2013

Man in the shadows

He wanted to live in a world in which one could find “Gershwin playing all night in penthouses, while George Kaufman fired one-liners into the guests and Harpo scrambled eggs in their hats.” Milton Glaser’s cover, with its punchy color combined with austere but evocative line, seems neatly suited to such a world.

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July 07, 2013

Twombly at SVA

Cy Twombly was the subject of two solo exhibitions at SVA, in 1973 and 1977, just before his idiosyncratic work found new favor with the rising generation of neo-Expressionists.

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July 07, 2013

Glaser for RCA Computers

In 1970, Milton Glaser did a series of three posters for RCA’s Computer Division entitled Memory Unbound. They express the abstract promise of technology that was at least a decade away for most people.

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June 25, 2013

Candy men

Fanciful candy packaging for Audience magazine.

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June 22, 2013

Notes from the underground

Letterhead from early in Steve Heller’s career as an art director.

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June 17, 2013

First Look: David Mazzucchelli Collection

A small (but in part, rare) sample of the printed work of comic book artist David Mazzucchelli is the latest addition to our Design Study Collection.

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June 17, 2013

Sol LeWitt’s conceptual graphics

In March 1976, Sol Lewitt had his first solo exhibition at the Visual Arts Museum (209 E. 23rd Street). The work exhibited wasn’t the piece itself, but rather the result of instructions he gave to third parties: they assembled a large graphic combination drawn from a vocabulary of white-on-black linear figures provided by the artist. Instead of hiring technicians or specialists to screen the shapes in a particular order, the artist made explicit that the idea or set of instructions for the art was itself the art, rather than the artifact it produced. He continued the process across several similar pieces, some of which used the same graphic forms — one, Wall Drawing #260, was the subject of a recent focus exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

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June 15, 2013

How does one become an Emigre?

Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko’s Emigre defined the look of new media that emerged with the proliferation of the personal computer.

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June 14, 2013

Underground Images

SVA’s New York City subway posters exhibited in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

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June 07, 2013

I can’t see my flag anymore

This detail from an anti-Vietnam war poster is represented only on a slide in the Tony Palladino collection. In serif text above the image, the original includes the complaint “I can’t see my flag anymore”—which has some of the same arch plainness or indirection of Chwast’s anti-war End Bad Breath poster of two years prior. Here’s another of various flags by Palladino, one graphic symbol whose permutations he remained fascinated by throughout his career. Despite its relative lack of exposure today, it is one of two Palladino posters in the Library of Congress.

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June 07, 2013

Borges by McMullan

James McMullan’s watercolor book jackets capture the spirit of Borges.

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June 04, 2013

Pan Am modular displays

George Tscherny designed this installation for Pan American Airways, to be sent to travel agencies promoting their vacation locations. Details about the modular system follow.

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June 01, 2013

Josef Presser and Bob Gill

Bob Gill lets Josef Presser’s words speak for themselves in this visually simple but verbally playful announcement for Presser’s exhibition at SVA.

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May 25, 2013

Pepsi Generation

The design firm of Brownjohn, Chermayeff & Geismar established their reputation for brilliant corporate identity work with one of their earliest clients, Pepsi-Cola.

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May 21, 2013

The new graphic art, 1959

Another recent addition from Ivan Chermayeff: the beautiful slipcased hardcover for The new graphic art, a trilingual history of the basis for the Swiss design style, compiled by Karl Gerstner and Markus Kutter in 1959.

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May 19, 2013

Portrait of a gallery

Earlier, we highlighted a look at the SVA Tribeca Gallery, which was open from 1979-1980 in the American Thread Building on West Broadway and featured SVA student work in a professional gallery setting. The complete history of this seminal gallery is now available on our web site (designed by Archives staff member Zachary Sachs). Some featured artworks follow.

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May 17, 2013

Dusty and the Duke

Milton Glaser illustrates the stark contrast between two film stars of 1969 — Dustin Hoffman and John Wayne.

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May 14, 2013

107 graphic designers

The most recent addition to the Chermayeff & Geismar Collection is twelve boxes of old and rare art books, ranging from annuals to architecture; Switzerland to Japan. As always, there were plenty of surprises: one was the catalog for an AGI exhibition from 1976, which featured, alongside reproductions of their work, dramatic photos of the designers.

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May 14, 2013

The Composing Room type specimens

Some more examples of The Composing Room’s elegant type specimens series Typography and Paper after the jump.

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