Posts in Books

I’ve always been a huge fan of books on modernism, but unless you’re Dave from Grain Edit, it’s pretty hard to get your hands on the good stuff. And so it was with great pleasure that I stumbled onto Modernism 101 booksellers. the site, featuring a vast collection of rare and out of print books on modern design and architecture, serves up cover images and very detailed information on a wide array of classic design texts. Many of the books featured are have sold, but they archive the pages so it’s a great resource for images and information on many books that you’ll probably not find elsewhere. I’ll be running a (hopefully) weekly feature aptly titled “Modernism 101” highlighting the best examples from their collection.

Today’s selection is a collection of Dutch printmaker H.N. Werkman’s work edited by Fridolin Müller. Enjoy!


H. N. WERKMAN
Fridolin Müller

out of stock

Via Modernism 101

My dad was a civil engineer so he would sometimes bring home project models and I loved to play around with them, but most were your basic hotel mock-ups and the like. It’s probably for the best though, if he had brought home anything like the examples above my head would have exploded. These are simply amazing. I want these under a plexi-glass bubble in the middle of my living room. Apparently they were taken from Taschen’s “Hundertwasser Architecture: For a more human architecture in harmony with nature” book. I found the pics on Doctor Casino’s flickr page where there are more details. Link

Crabstick has some nice shots of this amazing Charles Harper book up on flickr.

DDR Design – East German Design from 1949 – 1989.

Taschen most of the time never fails, I could probably close my eyes and grab a book by them at random and find something fascinating to look at. The products here are a showcase of consumer products from East Germany during this period in time. The simple shape and color schemes make today’s consumer product designs look like gimmick covered nonsense in my opinion.

Foncercolor has a very nice collection of book scans at their Flickr page featuring some quality disembodied-head-action by the likes of Happypets Products and Bastien Aubry.

Via This Isn’t Happiness

I usually stick to the rule of only posting images that are at least 450px wide, but this was such an amazing cover I thought I’d break that rule. I searched all over for it but couldn’t find a full size, perhaps someone has a scan? Dave from Grain Edit had the 71/72 edition, it was amazing. I’ve never seen this one in person though.

Afiler’s Flickr has some excerpts from a book by Ladislav Sutnar aptly entitled How To Show Telephone Numbers On Letterheads. As you may have guessed, the book features various examples of type placement in letterheads. It’s a very nice set of classic examples of a dying art form and is designed by one of the key architects of information design. I’ve always seen letterheads as a great opportunity to get away with being a minimalist in an otherwise standard design scenario. It’s pretty easy to convince a client that clean, efficient design is the answer in the case of a letterhead as most of the page is required to be blank by default. Of course they will probably still ask you to make the logo bigger. View the entire set on Flickr

Some more pages from Graphis 190 (1977/78) via insect54

Yes sir, Mr. Crouwel. Via FFFOUND via insect54.

Shepard Fairey has re-designed the covers for two of George Orwell’s classic novels: his dystopian masterpiece, 1984 and his totalitarian allegory, Animal Farm. I can’t think of a better artist to tap for such a task, these two concepts fit nicely with the decidedly cynical slant of Shepard’s work. I really like his take on the covers, but must admit that the minimalist / modernist in me is still partial to Art Brenner’s original for Animal Farm (above).