Pelican Parts has a fairly sizable collection of Porsche Racing posters and have kindly posted high-res scans on their site. There are several eras represented, each with their own distinct style. Really shows off how classic the Porsche logo is, it seems to work pretty much anywhere you put it. Note the various 917’s in there.
I remember seeing some similar posters up on Grain Edit a while back with a link to VP Racing where you could buy some. I always meant to pick one up, but I just checked back and pretty much all the ones I wanted are gone. Someone really needs to reprint these.
There’s an article over at the Porsche site about Eric Strenger, who designed a lot of the Porsche racing posters during these periods. Looking through his work it’s amazing how much range he had as an artist. I would never have guessed some of these were by the same person.
A Danish company called Davone has released their second model of Ray speakers. They have a nice shape wrapped in walnut veneer that gives them a home alongside the Eames lounge chair. I’m all caught up in the beauty of these speakers but could only justify saving for these if the sound was exceptional. If you’ve had the pleasure of listening to audio from these speakers, please let us know in the comments.
The speakers use an 8″ woofer and a 1″ tweeter with a rated frequency response of 38Hz – 20kHz. The impedance is 8 Ohms, with 89dB/W/m sensitivity and a hefty price of $6,000—yeah, that’s $6,000 a pair. Extremely pricey isn’t it? Maybe some of you audio-savy folks can make sense of the specs to help justify the price tag.
Designed by Centro Stile Fiat, the 1972 Fiat X1/23 City Car concept was an all electric concept far ahead of it’s time. I can’t even explain how hard I would roll this thing all over San Francisco if I could get my hands on one and the battery lasted longer than 5 minutes (assuming they weren’t very efficient given that we still haven’t gotten the whole thing right 40 years later). I see a lot of those Smart Cars all around the city and get jealous when I see them park perpendicular. Does anyone have an ultra-compact like this? Did it live up to the hype?
I came across a beautiful set of The Paris Review covers over at Belacquashua’s Flickr today. The Paris Review is still around (see current site here) but apparently they fired their art director around 1970, because this isn’t exactly moving design. Just another casualty of the age of desktop publishing I guess. I have two theories relating to this sort of phenomenon: either quality design has just become too expensive for smaller publications to employ or the owner’s son downloaded Photoshop and he decided to “do everything himself because those designers never listened to me anyways”.
What’s most interesting is that the modern covers seem to be sort of cheap ripoffs of their own 50’s era covers. Another culprit in this mess might be digital photography. You’ll notice that a lot of the newer ones (example) aren’t bad at all design-wise but they have a completely raw, coldly digital photo where the beautiful, hand-drawn illustrations used to be. I guess illustrators are pretty expensive these days too.
Has anybody here studied this phenomenon in depth? I know this is a somewhat isolated case, but from my own subjective observations, the decline of quality design in magazines and books seems to be a constant across the board. Please let us know in the comments if you have any thoughts on this trend. I’d love to know what’s driving this.
Awesome collection of covers from Totodo.jp, a Japanese vintage bookstore. I want the CITIES one just to scan it and blow it up on my wall. I can hear Alex’s bank account emptying.
Great new series of posters by the Heads of State. I love the colors! (Vaguely reminiscent of the 826LA Time Travel series, with less type or floating people…) I wish travel agencies packed their walls with anything nearly this cool looking. I might actually decide to go somewhere based on the poster — as opposed to questioning my travel plans as I stare at a 1980’s US Air sponsored photograph of “Miami”.
These are some original mock-ups of Cuban posters; painted on boards and then sent to the printers to have the shapes cut out and separated into colors for silk screening. It’s amazing to see how much the printing industry has changed. It seems that back then the printer had a more of a role in the composition itself, defining the edges and choosing the colors. I can’t imagine dropping off a painting at a modern print shop and expecting them to deliver a silkscreened masterpiece based on it.
