This great flash site of Josef Muller Brockman posters shares some of the highlights of a current gallery show in Dublin.

Brockman is one of the great poster designers from the Swiss school of design.

A lovely site, Arts et Métiers Graphiques, about the French Graphic arts magazine that was published from 1927 to 1939 by Charles Peignot, head of the French typefoundry Deberny et Peignot in France. Done as part of a Masters Thesis at RIT (my MFA alma mater) this site taps into the collection at the Cary Library and has indexed the full run of the publications in a searchable database.

Poking around PhotoDistrict News online and I discover a wealth of special "Legends Online" presentations from pdn and Kodak. This one on Richard Avedon has a ton of spreads from the book Avedon: The Sixties and is full of images of famous rock stars from the era.

There are a couple dozen other photographers featured in the Legends series as well, including Sebastiao Salgado, Jerry Uelsmann and Joyce Tenneson.

Communication Arts online has republished their Pioneers article on Alexey Brodovitch on their website.

Brodovitch was a pioneer in magazine design and he influenced the work of designers and photographers for more than a generation. A portfolio of his work accompanies the brief bio article.

Dean Allen of Textism writes about Jan Tschichold and his tenure at Penguin Books. Actually, the post is mostly about Penguin Books, but he spends some time discussing Tschichold's transformation of Penguin Books and how his standards guidelines set the tone for the printing of their books for decades.

Allen's post reminds me that Tschichold is one of those designers from the Bauhaus era who is not heard about much in design history. We learn about him and his contributions - predominantly around typography - but he isn't brought up over and over again like the Herbert Bayer's or other more well known designer's of the day. I have often wondered why - his work was intense and quite elegant, even when he cast off the modernist, international style and changed his way of thinking. Perhaps it is because many other designers had a longer time in the spotlight or a larger body of work? Maybe it's an American thing.

Information about Tschichold is not abundant on the web and much of it is from font houses because of the fact that Tschichold designed the face Sabon.

Here are a few of the better sites:
Frostdigital
Linotype: Font Store
Inventory of the Jan and Edith Tschichold Papers | 1899-1979 | Getty Research Institute

Related Books:
The New Typography: A Handbook for Modern Designers by Jan Tschichold. This book is a classic if you are interested in studying about the modernist international style of typography as practiced by the Bauhaus designers.
Jan Tschichold: A Life in Typography by Ruari McLean. About the designer and his work and cultural influences.

Check out the wonderful collection of swiss posters that have been collected in the Carnegie Mellon Special Collections. Sponsered by the School of Design at CMU, this website presents the posters in a nice pre-categorized way. The information section of the site is quite interesting: giving a bit of history about Swiss posters - the Swiss School legacy and then background about the collection.

Organized by the following categories: Type Dominant, Hand Lettering, Illustration, B/W Photography, Color Photography, Concerts, Exhibits, Theater/Film. Sports, Fashion, Food and Drink, Consumer Products, Tourism/Travel, Politics and Safety - the collection can easily be browsed. Each poster is presented with the known data - date, title, client, ad agency, designer and printer. Within each category you can move forward and back and see a larger version of the poster in a pop up window (although the icon for this - a square - led me to think that it would take me back to the main menu rather than popping up an enlargement).

In addition to the browse (Tour) mode, you can search as well by a variety of criteria.

The collection focuses on posters from the 1970's forward.

When I was in art school, one of the classes I loved best was art history. Most of my classmates despised it - sitting in the dark, listening to the professor drone on while showing slides of old stuff that had no relevance to the modern world. I guess for me, I loved art history because of the connections. Visibly seeing the world progress. I feel the same way about design history. Understanding and following history means you can visually track changes in culture, in the way people think. One of the most interesting connections, for me, was when I realized that art history related to world history and anthropology. The connections, the motivations and the perspective made me want to KNOW, to LEARN.

One of the best and first examples of these connections can be found in the paintings at Lascaux, in France. The cave paintings of Lascaux can be now be visited, virtually. These paintings are prime examples of story telling and early culture and are beautiful works of art and communication.

I came across these two sites recently: Transnational Poster Art and Cuban Poster Art Archive. They are both full of several pages of posters - a lot of political propganda posters. This art form is extremely interesting to study. Many of the great graphic designers we study in this country, originally came from Europe so it is nice to see collections of work from designers from other countries.

The Cuban poster site has over 60 posters listed with credits. The only problem is that you can't enlarge the images. Bummer. But many of the posters can be bought at this online gallery. The gallery site also has larger versions to enjoy.

The Transnational site is interesting in that it covers work from East Germany and Latin America - most specifically Chile and Nicaragua. There is also a whole section on Anti-USA Posters with posters going up to 1986.

daildala has another really interesting post right now. An homage to the work of designer Peter Saville and the label Factory.

Not familiar with either of these, this homage was very interesting. The work is astounding. The link to the discography goes to an amazing collection of information by Dennis Remmer.

Tribute site for Saul Bass is done in Flash and features Prints -- movie posters and graphic design work, Stills —still clips from movie opening sequences, and Movies — quicktime clips of opening sequences from several Hitchcock movies, Vertigo, Psycho and North by Northwest, several Otto Preminger movies, Anatomy of a Murder, The Man with the Golden Arm and Exodus and several Scorsese movies, Cape Fear and Casino.

Compare the work and style of the sequences between the Hitchcock work and the more recent Cape Fear.

Bass was a genius. “Symbolize and summarize” were the words he lived by according to the author of this site, Brendan Dawes, and that is overtly evident in all his work.

There is also a funky timeline of Bass's work covering the 1950's to the 1990's and a biography of his life and work. He died in 1996.