The Technology of Man: A Visual History

Science & Math

Birdsall, Derek

Cipolla, Carlo M.

Technology

HOLT. RINEHART AND WINSTON

In a career spanning more than forty years, Derek Birdsall has achieved renown as a leading book designer in Britain. This practical and inspirational book distils a lifetime’s professional experience. It presents and discusses nearly fifty books he has designed, showing 360 spreads and covers, all in full color and to scale.
The designs range from Penguin paperback covers in the 1960s to a recent complete redesign of The Church of England’s book of Common Worship. Among Birdsall’s projects are award-winning art catalogues, catalogues raisonné on such major artists as Mark Rothko and Georgia O’Keeffe, and books on wine, chess, astronomy, architecture, and fine paper. Birdsall discusses and illustrates the process of book design, from brief to deadline (which he calls the designer’s muse). He includes specimen settings of his favorite text faces as well as an innovative metric grid system for designing books. In addition, he lists books he himself has found useful or inspiring. For every reader curious about the design or production of books, this is a uniquely informative and instructive book.

Notes on Book Design

Arts & Photography

Graphic Design

Yale University Press

The technology of man: A visual history

Wildwood House

We know Paul Rand through the stunning advertising, editorial, publishing, institutional, identity, corporate and intellectual legacy he left behind. A major figure at the epicenter of twentieth-century design, his impact on modern communication practice and theory was unparalleled. For him, Modernism was a way of life and a form of belief, not a style. Like his European colleagues, he understood Modernism's tenets as a something that could be employed to better human experience in the modern world. Whether he was designing for the American Broadcasting Company, IBM Corporation or United Parcel Service, or teaching at Cooper Union or Pratt Institute, Rand gave life to his art, definition to graphic design and a reputation for quality to a discipline that needed it. His was an early voice in proposing the essence of Modernist theories in visual communication, and he was both ruthlessly pragmatic and startlingly visionary. His passion for his subject and his understanding of the theories and realities of perception and communication were immense, and he was often able to illuminate for the layperson the complexities and accomplishments of his triumphant art. Rand's contemporaries, students and friends knew him as a man even more extraordinarily cultivated and diverse in his talents and interests. Here their diversity of voices combine to give a vivid, personal and uniquely informative introduction to Rand and his achievements. A compendium of essays, interviews, photographic reproductions, a contextual timeline and an extensive bibliography, Paul Rand: Modernist Design adds to the growing literature on Rand, helping to place him in the proper context within a century of innovative art, design, architecture and technology.

Paul Rand: Modernist Design

HELLER, Steven

Garland, Nathan

Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, UMBC

A huge Afro frames the deadpan features of a bikini-clad sunbathing woman, her luxuriant skin dotted in pinpoints of perspiration... a close-up of a female hand with perfectly varnished nails leads to a cigarette held between fleshy red lips.... a model mouths her way around a suggestively pink lollipop... Yes, this is the calendar world of the late 1960s, as rendered by Harri Peccinotti. A fashion photographer, graphic designer and all-around artist whose work strongly influenced the fashion and collective imagination of the day, Peccinotti coined the Pirelli-calendar idiom of gleaming bodies and strong, sleek sexuality. Both objects of the male gaze and liberated leaders of the sexual revolution, women are certainly the protagonists of H.P.--sexy, sporty, independent, portrayed on dream beaches or against the background of original fashion sets. From his celebrated sunflower for the 1968 Pirelli calendar to his famous nude immersed in a bathtub of green water, H.P. presents a broad selection of shots published in fashion magazines, together with page proofs, book jackets and album covers created by Peccinotti over a period of about 40 years. Harri Peccinotti, born in 1938, served as Art Director of Flair, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Vogue and Nova--one of the most influential magazines of the 1960s, which introduced epoch-making changes in graphics, formats and photo editing. One of the first photographers to bring black women into fashion photography, Peccinotti's fame is synonymous with two Pirelli calendars (1968 and 1969) and, as a designer, with the restyling of the French daily Le Matin in the 1970s.

Harri Peccinotti: H.P.

Individual Artists

Damiani

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Books by Birdsall, Derek