Steven Heller
Recent articles by Steven Heller
The anti-Rockwell
Issue 95, Winter 2018
Blechman pioneered a less-is-more aesthetic. His scratchy shorthand expresses ideas with a punchy…
A 2D man comes to life
Issue 95, Winter 2018
Crayon game
Issue 93, Winter 2017
The unexpected craze for adult colouring books has created a bonanza for publishers. Can they keep…
The ‘bookness’ of books
Issue 93, Winter 2017
Dreaming in Colors
Issue 91, Spring 2016
Love songs for Piano
Issue 90, Summer 2015
Guerrilla graphics
Issue 4, Summer 1991
Design has the power to effect change. Now it must develop a social conscience
Unpacked baggage
Issue 88, Summer 2014
Leftovers with a bad taste
Issue 87, Spring 2014
In the past century the use of ‘trade characters’ built brand loyalty while reinforcing…
Raw and radical
Issue 86, Autumn 2013
Surfing a 1960s California wave
Issue 86, Autumn 2013
The physics of sitting
Issue 85, Spring 2013
Turn of the Screw
Issue 84, Autumn 2012
Commercial Surrealist
Issue 5, Winter 1991
Are the pictures of Dallas photographer Geof Kern postmodern retro or authentic art?
Miss Fixit
Issue 83, Summer 2012
Tina Roth Eisenberg never had a business plan. But all the things she dreams up – the Swissmiss…
Signs of life under an iron fist
Issue 83, Summer 2012
From dump to designer bookshelf
Issue 79, Spring 2011
Hergé’s adventures in the world of graphics
Issue 69, Autumn 2008
Reputations: Alex Steinweiss
Issue 76, Summer 2010
‘I got this idea that the way they were selling these albums was ridiculous. The covers were just…
Gnomic utterances
Issue 75, Spring 2010
Found Master
Issue 70, Winter 2008
Murket forces
Issue 70, Winter 2008
It is what it is
Issue 53, Autumn 2004
Scott Stowell’s Open brings innovation, style and plain speaking to broadcast design
How to write a Modernist’s obituary
Issue 67, Spring 2008
Crumb’s graphic sweepings
Issue 41, Autumn 2001
Erotic fantasies of a proto-Goth
Issue 71, Spring 2009
When Andy got his sticky fingers on an album . . .
Issue 71, Spring 2009
Moderne times
Issue 61, Autumn 2006
Why has France’s influence upon European graphic design been underestimated and neglected?
Drawing aside the veil over Tehran
Issue 72, Summer 2009
Credits where due
Issue 68, Summer 2008
TASS’s take on a tumultuous century [extract]
Issue 67, Spring 2008
Paper tigers [extract]
Issue 67, Spring 2008
Jan the preacher man
Issue 64, Summer 2007
Mini-museums, little magazines
Issue 79, Spring 2011
The alchemist
Issue 60, Summer 2006
Animator Jeff Scher uses dense, unorthodox techniques to make his highly original, image-rich films…
Eisner puts straight an anti-semitic slander
Issue 57, Autumn 2005
Cartoon knowledge
Issue 76, Summer 2010
Sex and pulp and rock’n’roll
Issue 70, Winter 2008
Stereotyping for pictures, power and profit
Issue 62, Winter 2006
America: the lost decades
Issue 1, Autumn 1990
Better than the real thing?
Issue 73, Autumn 2009
Facsimiles give scholars and students the chance to enjoy, understand and literally get to grips…
Face to face with the Afrikan written tradition
Issue 53, Autumn 2004
MoMA’s must-have book of books
Issue 44, Summer 2002
Genteel rebels of Philadelphia
Issue 37, Autumn 2000
Modernism and me: a survivor’s tale
Issue 59, Spring 2006
New frontier
Issue 68, Summer 2008
When art director Art Paul made the journey from Bauhaus to Hefner’s Playboy mansion, men’s mags…
Keepers of the flame
Issue 80, Summer 2011
US picture magazines of the late 1960s and 70s are still a vital source of inspiration
Once upon a time…
Issue 69, Autumn 2008
… there was a Big Bad President. How satirists use children’s tales to puncture the huffing and…
Buy this book
Issue 58, Winter 2005
Jürgen Holstein’s volume of rare Weimar-era jackets and covers is an extraordinary labour of love…
Storytelling giant
Issue 72, Summer 2009
Everything Christoph Niemann makes, from visual blogs to picture books, reveals his witty, literate…
Taking a scalpel to the dictators
Issue 80, Summer 2011
Religion’s universal message (board)
Issue 57, Autumn 2005
World religions put their faith in the standard quarter-inch grooved changeable letter board
Who’s zooming whom?
Issue 41, Autumn 2001
Boy’s Own inventions
Issue 82, Winter 2012
Form follows performance
Issue 28, Summer 1998
Richard Saul Wurman, FAIA, is an architect, cartographer and the author and designer of more than…
Mighty pen
Issue 68, Summer 2008
Recalling the Vignelli experience
Issue 54, Winter 2004
Telling and selling
Issue 7, Summer 1992
Cooper Black is one of the emblematic typefaces of the twentieth century. Who was the man behind the…
Beyond Blackletter
Issue 79, Spring 2011
The lettering on the covers of Germany’s most popular film magazine expressed plot and tone with…
Testament to tenacity
Issue 81, Autumn 2011
Joyously tasteless art direction
Issue 78, Winter 2010
A place in the sun
Issue 65, Autumn 2007
An Art Deco warehouse in Miami Beach throws unexpected light on the dark arts of design
Comic sans the grown-ups
Issue 74, Winter 2009
Spaniards’ works
Issue 73, Autumn 2009
A terrible beauty
Issue 49, Autumn 2003
The atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud has become the logo of annihilation
Advertising: mother of graphic design [extract]
Issue 17, Summer 1995
The word ‘advertising’ makes designers cringe. But it is central to the profession’s history…
Born modern
Issue 10, Autumn 1993
Painting is dead, long live the dustjacket. Alvin Lustig brought modern art into American bookshops…
Reputations: George Lois
Issue 29, Autumn 1998
‘You can’t research a big idea. The only ideas that truly research well are mediocre ideas. In…
Back after these messages: the No. 17 show
Issue 39, Spring 2001
With Number Seventeen, their New York design practice, Emily Oberman and Bonnie Siegler have…
Type play for kids
Issue 19, Winter 1995
It has taken decades for expressive typography to win acceptance in the world of the children's book…
Designing heroes
Issue 43, Spring 2002
Every era creates heroic imagery that conforms to its specific needs
Darkness visible
Issue 20, Spring 1996
Amy Guip reconciles commercial image-making with a need to explore more personal themes
Big ideas that built America
Issue 22, Autumn 1996
In the 1950s and 1960s, American art directors led a creative revolution. Thier secret weapon was…
The man who invented graphic design
Issue 23, Winter 1996
When W.A. Dwiggins called himself a graphic designer, he coined the phrase that would define…
[Sutnar]
Issue 13, Summer 1994
Born in Czechoslovakia, Ladislav Sutnar was a pioneer of information design. Working in America in…
Eyes on the world
Issue 26, Autumn 1997
They are obsolete now, but the picture magazines of the pre-TV era were breeding pens for today's…
Scrap merchants
Issue 27, Spring 1998
Peter Giradi's practice creates digital landscapes composed of detritus scavenged from the…
Lessons in printing trade journalism
Issue 31, Spring 1999
For one issue, under Jan Tschichold’s stewardship, a monthly trade journal, Typographische…
Stories unfolding in time and space
Issue 31, Spring 1999
With a revival of journalistic visual essays in US magazines, illustrators are once again becoming…
Smartest letterer on the planet
Issue 45, Autumn 2002
Chicago’s comic book hero has a finely tuned gift for hand-lettering
Reputations: Michael Bierut
Issue 24, Spring 1997
‘The biggest challenge that faces a designer isn’t the quest for novelty, but coming to grips with…
Comics for damned intellectuals
Issue 8, Autumn 1993
It is ten years since Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman impetuously founded Raw Books and…
Eros
Issue 25, Summer 1997
In 1962 Ralph Ginsburg and Herb Lubalin defied puritantical America with the four issues of their…
Gothic horror
Issue 62, Winter 2006
The Nazi party’s obsession with cultural dominance extended far into calligraphy, lettering and…
Sue Coe: eyewitness
Issue 21, Summer 1996
The New York-based artist makes ferocious images as instruments of social change. Her timely new…
Writing on the wall
Issue 30, Winter 1998
This committed New Yorker tackles personal, self-financed projects that hammer home graphic…
Multi-coloured mirrors
Issue 57, Autumn 2005
Alan Aldridge’s art direction of Beatles lyrics gave a graphic twist to the Swinging Sixties
Reputations: John Plunkett
Issue 28, Summer 1998
‘We wanted to avoid the unspoken design taboo: Good design = subtle, tasteful, elegant…
Look away
Issue 38, Winter 2000
‘The South’, Seymour Chwast’s special civil rights issue of Push Pin Graphic, was a virtuoso…
Art directing the opposition
Issue 16, Spring 1995
Daniel Walsh, former US Marine, founder of Liberation Graphics and self-styled ‘communications…
Dr Leslie’s type clinic
Issue 15, Winter 1994
Through its publications and gallery, the Composing Room promoted the new American design
The meanings of type
Issue 50, Winter 2003
The back-stories, informed by trends, cults, philosophies and nationhood
Mr Roughcut
Issue 32, Summer 1999
or: how graphic designer Pablo Ferro learned to split the screen, cut the crap and tell the story…
Reputations: Bruce Mau
Issue 38, Winter 2000
‘I think it is one of the paradoxical conditions of design authorship, that you have to be both…
Reputations: Maira Kalman
Issue 47, Spring 2003
‘I was out walking the dear dog and I saw 500 things that made me want to make art.’
Fast track songlines for type
Issue 75, Spring 2010
Steven Heller on Gail Anderson's SVA class in typographic animation
Repossession
Issue 74, Winter 2009
After years of wrangling, the posters that the Nazis stole from Hans Sachs are to be returned to his…
Cult of the squiggly
Issue 72, Summer 2009
Over-abundant embellishment is spiralling out of control. Time to get out the shears, cries Steven…
The ‘L’ Word
Issue 66, Winter 2007
Not all designers are liberals. But you’d never know it from design conferences. Or the pages of…
Recent blog posts by Steven Heller
The last magazine czar
24 June 2014
Typorama spectacular
13 January 2014
Objects of desire
28 February 2013