90's Interview

Editor: Ingrid Sischy
Creative Director: Fabien Baron 

Issue: July 1990

I thought we'd kick off 2013 with an impulse ebay purchase over Christmas – one of my favourite magazines, 90’s Interview, Fabien Baron era. The magazine looks as great now as ever, but I think this is a beautiful example of Baron’s work of that period – carrying his signature style of vertical condensed Franklin Gothic page furniture in the first quarter of the magazine, followed by fireworks of big type and photography in the remaining pages. For me Fabien’s work isn’t amazing only because of the type, although he is of course a master in this respect, but he understands more than anyone the power of photography in editorial design. His striking type openers and page sequences owe a great deal to his taste and understanding of images and how to commission this for stories. Fernando Gutiérrez's comments on Baron’s work hit the mark in this short video for Phaidon.


 

Tom Eckersley

A few great Tom Eckersley posters from 1966 to 1988

P/M Magazine

A Design Student's Guide to The New York World's Fair
1939
Paul Rand

We here at things to look at are always in favour of bold, pure geometry and this just caught our eye.

Festival Times

The Festival Times
4 Issues from 1981
Edinburgh University Student Publishing Company
Designers: Simon Esterson & Nigel Billen
Editor: Tim Willis

Anyone who attended Simon Esterson's Typographic Circle talk last month might remember seeing this early piece of work. There is something very exciting about the angled headers and images.

Dennis Bailey

Dennis Bailey designed this contents page in 1963 for Olympia magazine

Varoom 15

The lastest issue of Varoom Magazine is out which is full of things we liked the look of.



Airside's illustrations for How To Make a How To Film. The animated versions are well worth checking out on the website.





Penguin's new editions of Nabakov featuring illustrators such as Luke Best, commissioned by Pentagram. It's a great contemporary angle on the very successful Poetry series patterns of the past.







Above: Illustrations by Astrid Chesney and ]Agnès Decourchelle. See more of these on Pentagrams website

It's quite interesting to compare them with the John Gall Nabakov covers, all of which you can see on Design Observer.





And of course, Marian Bantjes' map of an Isle of Knowledge charting all the ups and downs of the illustrator's world is beautifully rendered. The delta of common sense is not somewhere I hang out a lot and the swamp of failure seems to be ominously large.





There are more details on Marian Bantjes' website. They're well worth some scrutiny.

Wim Crouwel

Wim Crouwel; design hero. Even if you think you've seen it all before, the Design Museum have really come up trumps with their exhibition: Wim Crouwel: A Graphic Odyssey on from 30 March – 03 July. You can't help but be impressed by a huge wall of the posters we've all seen. It's an epic collection beautifully laid out. We here at Things to Look at particularly appreciated this poster.