Since we’re on the subject of Dieter Rams this week, I thought I’d post on his Vitsoe Shelving series. You may remeber the name Vitsoe from the Name That Chair post a while back, but it’s not enough just to have a Rams chair, you must also surround it with his amazing shelves. The Vitsoe site features a nice gallery of the shelves in their natural habitat, and you’ll also catch a few 620 chairs in there.
If course, a setup like those in the gallery will no doubt cost you an arm and a leg, but it’s nice to look. It’s always funny, whenever I somehow randomly find myself in some rich guy house, they never have anything as cool as this. It’s either gaudy old classical gold leaf stuff dripping with ornament or garish nouveau riche style with white carpets and bad marble floors. Apparently you have to be broke or German to appreciate this stuff.
Just some random perfection from Mr. Crouwel for a perfectly random Thursday. Experimental Jetset has an interesting article about the invitation shown above (the third image down).
Some classics via Helloairecords. It always amazes me to see such forward thinking design from this period. It’s 1955 and design this evolved already exists, it’s incredible. Of course, this is Europe. Unfortunately, most of us in the states were too concerned with Elvis and Marilyn Monroe to appreciate the finer points of the grid system or minimalist design theory. There is something very pleasing about such simple shapes and colors modulated by the quirks and imperfections of the analog printing process, it really brings life to the composition.
Adolphe Jean Édouard-Marie Mouron is one of my favorite commercial poster artists. Unfortunately, he went from running a successful advertising agency (Alliance Graphique who’s work includes the Yves St. Laurent logo), to losing it all and serving in the French army in World War II, to doing set design to get by, and finally suffering from depression and committing suicide in 1968. It’s very sad to think this was the fate of a man who contributed so much to design. You can find more information on Cassandre here and here.
Perhaps his most recognizable work, the Dubonet Wine poster is all but ubiquitous in vintage poster collections these days. This style of poster art is sort of a bittersweet thing for me. I really do love it, but once you start seeing something sold at Target it’s hard to take it seriously as art. I have a few old advertisement posters from this period around the house (all reproductions), but I really want to start focusing on later modernist stuff.
Some Otl Aicher 1972 Munich Olympics pins. There is nothing better than green with that deep aqua-marine (top pin in particular). If I had these I would wear a different one every day on a short sleeved white button up shirt with horn rim glasses. Speaking of the ’72 Olympics, Spitz is still the champ in my book based on stylealone.
James White has posted a very nice collection of Saul Bass logos at his site, Signalnoise.com (also very nice). Going through this list, I am pretty amazed. I knew Bass did a few of them, but some of those are big surprises. Link
