Monday, 3:00pm
21 January 2013

Noted #48

Illustration, music, life and death.

Here are a few links to exhibitions, illustrations and events that caught our attention in recent weeks.

Top: illustration by Christopher Worker exhibited at KK Outlet. Right: Massimo Vignelli. Photograph by Douglas Manchee, RIT.

Massimo

American Airlines’ new corporate identity has provoked fierce criticism online. Bloomberg Businessweek asked Massimo Vignelli, who designed the airline’s identity in the 1960s, for his thoughts on the rebranding. (For more about Vignelli see Reputations, Eye 83 and ‘A thoroughly Modernist marriage’, Eye 60).

Image from album cover shoot for Aladdin Sane. Photograph: Brian Duffy. Designer: Celia Philo. Make-up: Pierre La Roche. Image courtesy the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Album_cover_shoot_for_Aladdin_Sane_1973_Photograph_by_Brian_Duffy__Duffy_Archive

David Bowie has a new website, designed by Jonathan Barnbrook. Barnbrook has also designed the cover to Bowie’s album, The Next Day, out 12 March 2013. The Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition, ‘David Bowie is’ opens on 23 March 2013.

Sean Morris’s illustrated sticker for ‘Kurt and the Gang’ at KK Outlet.

Sean Morris

There’s more music-related work at KK Outlet in Shoreditch. The Belly Kids are exhibiting ‘Kurt and the Gang’, a series of illustrated stickers inspired by the late Kurt Cobain. Work by illustrators Christopher Worker, Paul Windle and Nick Alston, among others, are displayed in KK’s side gallery.

Ray Johnson, Untitled. Image courtesy Richard L. Feigen & Co.

L0072031 Ray Johnson, Untitled (Skulls with finger

‘Death: a self-portrait’ continues at the Wellcome Collection until 24 February. Forthcoming events linked to the exhibition include ‘The Thing is … Death’ (23 January 2013) and ‘What Makes a Good Death?’ (1-2 February 2013).

German illustrator and graphic designer Christoph Niemann’s ‘celebration of life’ for the late Maurice Sendak (1928-2012).

ChristophNiemann tribute to Maurice Sendak

The New York Times Magazine ‘The Lives They Lived’ feature included Christoph Niemann’s touching tribute to children’s book writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak. A selection of Sendak’s work will be up for auction, alongside work by Beatrix Potter, Charles Schulz and Garth Williams, at Swann (New York) on 24 January 2013. (See ‘Storytelling giant’, a profile of Niemann, in Eye 72.)

From Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.

Maurice Sendak_72

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It is available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions, back issues and single copies of the latest issue. You can see what Eye 84 looks like at Eye before You Buy on Vimeo.