gds131blogdavidwillis

2009-12-09T00:29:00.000-08:00

This is an album cover for A Debbie Harry album by Swiss surrealist H. R. Giger. He mostly does non-commercial paintings but he has done other album covers for Danzig and the Dead Kennedys.
He is probably best known for his design work on the movie Alien in 1979.

2009-11-17T18:35:00.001-08:00

This is a poster for the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. It was made by April Greiman and Jayme Odgers. It definitely has a sense of depth like all April Greiman's work with the legs looking as though they are stepping out of a pool towards the viewer.

2009-11-10T12:48:00.000-08:00

This is a book by German designers Ben Wittner and Sascha Thoma called Arabesque Graphic Design from the Arab World and Persia.

Of all the design history books I've seen none of them had anything about current graphic design from the middle east. The calligraphy is very cool I like the arab script font.

2009-11-02T23:06:00.000-08:00

This is a poster by Peter Max from 1971. It says Life is Beautiful stay alive don't smoke cigarettes it was commissioned by the American cancer society. I think it looks very much like the animation from the movie yellow submarine even more so than other psychedelic
art.

2009-10-27T22:43:00.000-07:00

The smiley face was a very popular design from the 70's. It was on all kinds of novelty items like shirts, coffee mugs and bumper stickers sometimes with the slogan "have a nice day" under it. It became such an iconic design that it's still used today in emoticon icons and it was in the recent movie version of The Watchmen.

2009-10-20T02:44:00.000-07:00

This is a design that Herb Lubalin did for a book cover by Reginald Reynolds called "Beards". It's a literal interpretation of the title and a simple concept. The words become the focus of the design just as in most of Lubalin's work.

2009-10-08T16:58:00.000-07:00

This is a Buck Rogers atomic disintegrator toy . It was made in the 1930,s and a perfect example of art deco design.

2009-09-28T20:53:00.000-07:00

This is one of many self portraits Vincent Van Gogh did. When I did a search for Vincent Van Gogh self portraits it was very interesting to see the stylistic progression of his paintings.

William Morris Tapestry

2009-09-21T21:49:00.001-07:00

This is a tapestry made by William Morris. It shows his background in romantic medieval paintings as well as some of his floral patterns.

Sonic Youth poster

2009-09-14T21:45:00.000-07:00

This is a Sonic Youth poster I came across while on the internet. I like the clean vector graphics look of it and the color scheme. I guess this would be considered a collage. I don't think there is any type because I pretty sure the text at the bottom was from the website and not on the original poster.

Allerton trail run flyer

2009-09-07T22:09:00.000-07:00

This is the front of a flyer I got in the mail Last year promoting the annual allerton park trail run. I didn't throw it away because I like the picture of the fu dog statue in shadows. Allerton Park is near Monticello where I grew up, I've been there many times and of all the statues at Allerton the fu dogs were always my favorite. I think they are inspired by Chinese style dragons. The type looks like some kind of san serif bold.