You Will Not Fail Me, I promise you.

i learned how to fail this year.

i learned how to fail this year.

i learned how to fail this year.

the hard part is over.

Manoil Tzonev SVA 2012

Yego Moravia Albert Iganacio

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C O N C E P T U A L J O U R N E Y K I T

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Jason Heuer

TYPOGRAPHY

TYPOGRAPHY

A Novel from the Author of “The Office”

PARKS & RECREATION

PAR

KS &

REC

REAT

ION

By Greg Daniels

Greg Daniels

“Just watch it for yourself. I was drawn in by Amy Pohler, someone I didn’t really like before I saw this show, and i stayed because of the beautifully drawn characters. Because they’re deep characters, they’re not gonna slam you over the head with comedy. This ain’t My Name Is Earl, people. The show’s funny, but in a real, get to know everyone kind of way.” IMDB

“Like her show, Poehler is caustic yet sunny, sweet without being trea-cly, and entirely relatable. Fey said it best. When you meet her you instantly feel “My friend is here!” Kera Bolonik- NY Mag

“To act as if Parks has to be measured against that show’s [The Office] standard gives short shrift to a genuinely funny and engaging comedy that bears stylistic similarities to “Office” but has a heart and mind all its own.”

Daniel Carlson- Holly Wood Reporter

ION Publishing Co.- P.O. Box 605-New York, NY 10009 US

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B O O K J A C K E T

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A Novel from the Author of “The Office”

PARKS & RECREATION

PAR

KS &

REC

REAT

ION

By Greg Daniels

Greg Daniels

“Just watch it for yourself. I was drawn in by Amy Pohler, someone I didn’t really like before I saw this show, and i stayed because of the beautifully drawn characters. Because they’re deep characters, they’re not gonna slam you over the head with comedy. This ain’t My Name Is Earl, people. The show’s funny, but in a real, get to know everyone kind of way.” IMDB

“Like her show, Poehler is caustic yet sunny, sweet without being trea-cly, and entirely relatable. Fey said it best. When you meet her you instantly feel “My friend is here!” Kera Bolonik- NY Mag

“To act as if Parks has to be measured against that show’s [The Office] standard gives short shrift to a genuinely funny and engaging comedy that bears stylistic similarities to “Office” but has a heart and mind all its own.”

Daniel Carlson- Holly Wood Reporter

ION Publishing Co.- P.O. Box 605-New York, NY 10009 US

MA

DE

WHAT’S

HAPPENIN’

IN BY

FRED

ARMISENPORTLANDIA

PORTLANDIA

FRED ARMISEN

ION Publishing Co.- P.O. Box 605-New York, NY 10009

“Portlandia remains one of the most entertaining half-hours on television right now, capitalizing on the Zeitgeist (pardon the above hipsterisms) of a well-intentioned, but very self-involved culture.” Christine N. Ziemba- Paste Magazine

“But most of the story lines in “Portlandia” revolve around the sheer unnavigability of a city with no rules and no desire to have them.“

Jon Caramanica- NY TIMES

“Brownstein and Armisen move so effortlessly between char-acters, then execute their riffs, tics, styles and voices with such skilled abandon that before long this doesn’t seem like satire any longer but a fun house mirror reflection of intensely real people.” VERNE GAY- News Day

US

MA

DE

36

WHAT’S

HAPPENIN’

IN BY

FRED

ARMISEN

PORTLANDIAPORTLANDIA

FRED ARMISEN

ION Publishing Co.- P.O. Box 605-New York, NY 10009

“Portlandia remains one of the most entertaining half-hours on television right now, capitalizing on the Zeitgeist (pardon the above hipsterisms) of a well-intentioned, but very self-involved culture.” Christine N. Ziemba- Paste Magazine

“But most of the story lines in “Portlandia” revolve around the sheer unnavigability of a city with no rules and no desire to have them.“

Jon Caramanica- NY TIMES

“Brownstein and Armisen move so effortlessly between char-acters, then execute their riffs, tics, styles and voices with such skilled abandon that before long this doesn’t seem like satire any longer but a fun house mirror reflection of intensely real people.” VERNE GAY- News Day

US

M

AD

E

Postcard representing ‘hydrodynamics,’ a painting of a nautilus shell with the Nautilus submarine.

gone largely unheralded except for those aficionados who know (and collect) his posters and books.* (*Included on that Hall of Fame committee were Paul Rand, George Lois, Lou Dorsfman, and R.O. Blechman who voted unanimously for his inclusion)

Nitsche’s career began virtually at birth. He was born into a family of commercial photographers on July 7, 1908 in Lausanne, Switzerland. His grandfather had worked in China during late nineteenth century and his father and uncles were noted portrait photographers. The artist Paul Klee was a family friend and exerted a profound influence on young Nitsche, who wanted to be an artist rather than enter the family business. Although Nitsche initially thought he might study with Klee at the Bauhaus, after a short stint at the College Classique in Lausanne when he was 18 years old, he attended the Kunstgewerbeschule in Munich. There he studied with the famous German typographer F.H. Ehmcke and eventually won a prestigious award for a poster competition for an annual Munich ball.

In 1930 Nitsche began his peripatetic professional life. He went Cologne, Germany, with Professor Ehmcke where together they designed The International Press Exhibit (Pressa). A year later Paris beckoned. But it was hard to sell what he calls ‘enlightened design’ in the City of Light at that time, recalling that ‘French advertising was unbelievably corny.’ Nevertheless, it was the period when A.M.

Cassandre and other French poster artists were beginning to make a profound impact with stylish work that opened up creative pos-sibilities. Moreover, French advertising agencies were smitten by Swiss graphic design, which was largely illustrative. The Draeger Freres agency, for whom Nitsche first worked, welcomed Swiss designers as though they were conquering heroes.

Nitsche was next hired by Maximilien Vox, an enterprising typographer, advertising designer, and writer for the influential applied arts magazine Arts & Metiérs Graphiques. He headed his own agency which did typographic work running the gamut from packages to labels to letterheads. At the time, the moderne (or Art Deco) style dominated the French scene, and Nitsche explains that ‘stylistically speaking, I did too many different things.’ However, he learned one essential French design principle: ‘Try to give every-thing you design a feeling of elegance,’ he says. But Nitsche was also attracted to the Bauhaus and its rationalist discipline which went counter to the French intuitive nature. It was not the look of the avant garde that impressed him: ‘I was not interested in what the Bauhaus produced as much as how they did it,’ he recalls. ‘Having gwrown up in Switzerland, I think I always had a sense of order.’ Thus that convergence of French and Bauhaus sensibilities defined his early efforts.

As a testament to Nitsche’s prolificacy he still has the original accounts ledger in which he chronicled every freelance job (and the payments he received). From around 1930 to 1935 he recorded

International Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy’ in Geneva.

literally hundreds of illustrations and political cartoons for weekly publications such as the French Vu, and the German Simpli-cissmus and Querschnitt, as well as scores of advertisements for magazines and newspapers. Working for both French German clients gave him considerable creative latitude and a fairly decent income during this dangerously inflationary period in Europe. But sensing the larger troubles to come, like many of his contem-poraries (including Alexey Brodovitch whom he first met in Paris), Nitsche decided to leave Europe for the United States in 1934. While Brodovitch landed in Philadelphia, Nitsche ventured on to Hollywood where he joined his friend Frederick Hollander, the song-writer for Marlene Dietrich, who got him a job designing sets and curtains for a musical called All Aboard. But since Hollywood was so obsessed with attitude and class, and Nitsche was such a devout social recluse, he remembers that it was an unbearable place to live and work. So after a year he packed his bags.

New York was still feeling the effects of the Great Depression. Apartments were cheap, and Nitsche fortuitously rented what he called a ‘marvelous studio’ penthouse adjacent to the Museum of Modern Art. He also found that it was surprisingly easy to get work. ‘I was a Swiss in the graphic arts,’ he explains. ‘I had no problem. I walked into places like Harper’s Bazzar [where Brodo-vitch had settled in as Art Director] and Town & Country [where

an old friend from Paris, Louis-Marie Eaud, was art director] and got work immediately.’ His assignments included witty editorial and fashion illustration, studio photography, and a modicum of layout. Working on fashion became his bread and butter for quite a while (although he was not terribly fond of the women editors with whom he worked and describes them as prone to ‘crying fits when they couldn’t handle a situation”). He also painted covers for Fortune, Vanity Fair, Stage, Arts & Decoration, and House Beautiful that were either comical or decorative. At another leading shelter magazine, House & Garden, he did product and still-life photography under the auspices of art director Leslie Gill. After a few years of collaboration Gill generously gave Nitsche.

Nitsche had a distinct design methodology, finally emerged in the early 1940s. After a chance meeting with Philip and Helen Andrews, publishers of specialized magazines, including Air Tech and Air News, he was hired as art director with total control of the format and illustrations. What for many designers would have been a hellish assignment — to design charts and graphs about aerodynamics — for Nitsche was pure heaven. He was tired of the fashion industry and savored designing ‘meaningful’ technical data for such things.

Postcard “Atomic” Part of General Dynamics Campaign

General Dynamics Postcard

Postcard representing exploring the universe, and the “energetic sea.”

NO FORMAT | NOVEMBER 18thNO FORMAT | NOVEMBER 18th3736

‘I walked into places like Harper’s Bazzar [where Brodovitch had settled in as Art Director] and

Town & Country [where an old friend from Paris, Louis-Marie Eaud, was art director] and got work immediately.’

‘French advertising was unbelievably corny.’

and designed between 1957 and 1960, to Herbert Bayer’s landmark Geo-Graphic Atlas for its innovation in the area of information graphics. And Walter Bernard, principal of WBMG, routinely shows slides of Dynamic America in lectures describing his early influences. Bernard also credits the book’s exceptional cinematic pacing as having radically changed the way that he achieved kinetic flow in his own books when he was a designer for American Her-itage in the early 1960s.

Nitsche’s books, annual reports, and other sequential printed material rely on metic-ulous attention to the details of page composition, the elegance of simple type pre-sentation, and the expressive juxtaposition of historical and contemporary artifacts on a page. His method exerted an impact on a portion of the field that had become too reliant on rigid Modern for-mulas, which in turn limited variety and fluidity. Yet this reluctant Modernist was so absorbed with creating and

producing his own wares that he had little time to reflect on what he was actually doing to change the attitudes of other designers. Even today he is surprised to hear that his work made an impression.

In fact, during his long career Nitsche neither sought the limelight nor participated in design organizations (other than an invitational mem-bership into the Alliance Graphique Internationale — AGI). Although his work started appearing in European graphic design annuals and magazines back in the early 1930s, Nitsche did not engage in the social politicking that might insure his place in the design pantheon. His induction into the Art Direc-tor’s Club Hall of Fame came as a pleasant surprise. But nev-ertheless, he says that it came too late to ‘do me any good,’ implying that had he been inducted earlier he might have benefited by attracting new clients, which is not the usual outcome anyway. Nevertheless, his induction validates the major contribution that has

THE

RELUCTANTMODERNIST

Erik Nitsche

Eric Nitsche may not be as well known today as his contem-poraries, Lester Beall, Paul Rand, or Saul Bass, but he is their equal. Almost 90 years old, this Swiss born graphic

designer is arguably one of the last surviving Modern design pio-neers. Although he never claimed to be either a progenitor or follower of any dogma, philosophy, or style other than his own intuition, the work that earned him induction last year into the New York Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame, including the total identity for General Dynamics Corporation from 1955 to 1965 and the series of scientific, music, and world history illustrated books, which he designed and packaged during the 1960s and 1970s, fits squarely into the Modernist tradition.

Yet Nitsche’s approach was not a cookie-cutter Modern formula that so many designers blindly followed at that time. It was a personal fusion of early influences (classical and otherwise) and contemporary aesthetics based on fast pacing and dra-matic juxtapositions. Rather than adherence to Mod-ernist orthodoxy, Nitsche insists that the methodology that most closely resembles a Modern manner, clean, systematic, and ordered, developed because of his rest-lessness at doing mostly illus-trative work during the early part of his.

Although he might not own up to the fact that he

had played a formidable role in the Modernist legacy, Nitsche does not deny that he was as good - certainly as prolific, if not more so - than any other designer of his age. He also speculates that had it not been for his asocial tendencies (“I preferred to do the work, not talk about it”) and a few poor business decisions along the way (he says he turned down a job at IBM that later went to Paul Rand), he might be as well known today as any of the other acknowledged pioneers. In fact, he worked for many of the same clients, including Orbachs, Bloomingdale’s, Decca Records, RCA Records, Filene’s, 20th Century Fox, The Museum of Modern Art,

Container Corporation of America, the New York Transit Authority, Revlon, and more. Judging from the sheer volume of work bearing his signature or type credit, there are few others who can make this claim. Both his General Dynamics work and book packages had a profound influence on younger designers during the 1960s and 70s. Seymour Chwast, co-founder of Push Pin Studios, compares his tattered, well-thumbed copy of Dynamic America, the ambitious corporate history that Nitsche edited

NO FORMAT | NOVEMBER 18thNO FORMAT | NOVEMBER 18th

NO FO

RMAT

| ED

ITORIA

L

3534

The life and work of the quietly pivotal Swiss modern designer Erik Nitsche, who’s clients ranged from the MOMA to RCA ina

career that spanned the 20th century.

Design By Manoil Tzonev

M A G A Z I N E S P R E A D

38

and designed between 1957 and 1960, to Herbert Bayer’s landmark Geo-Graphic Atlas for its innovation in the area of information graphics. And Walter Bernard, principal of WBMG, routinely shows slides of Dynamic America in lectures describing his early influences. Bernard also credits the book’s exceptional cinematic pacing as having radically changed the way that he achieved kinetic flow in his own books when he was a designer for American Her-itage in the early 1960s.

Nitsche’s books, annual reports, and other sequential printed material rely on metic-ulous attention to the details of page composition, the elegance of simple type pre-sentation, and the expressive juxtaposition of historical and contemporary artifacts on a page. His method exerted an impact on a portion of the field that had become too reliant on rigid Modern for-mulas, which in turn limited variety and fluidity. Yet this reluctant Modernist was so absorbed with creating and

producing his own wares that he had little time to reflect on what he was actually doing to change the attitudes of other designers. Even today he is surprised to hear that his work made an impression.

In fact, during his long career Nitsche neither sought the limelight nor participated in design organizations (other than an invitational mem-bership into the Alliance Graphique Internationale — AGI). Although his work started appearing in European graphic design annuals and magazines back in the early 1930s, Nitsche did not engage in the social politicking that might insure his place in the design pantheon. His induction into the Art Direc-tor’s Club Hall of Fame came as a pleasant surprise. But nev-ertheless, he says that it came too late to ‘do me any good,’ implying that had he been inducted earlier he might have benefited by attracting new clients, which is not the usual outcome anyway. Nevertheless, his induction validates the major contribution that has

THE

RELUCTANTMODERNIST

Erik Nitsche

Eric Nitsche may not be as well known today as his contem-poraries, Lester Beall, Paul Rand, or Saul Bass, but he is their equal. Almost 90 years old, this Swiss born graphic

designer is arguably one of the last surviving Modern design pio-neers. Although he never claimed to be either a progenitor or follower of any dogma, philosophy, or style other than his own intuition, the work that earned him induction last year into the New York Art Director’s Club Hall of Fame, including the total identity for General Dynamics Corporation from 1955 to 1965 and the series of scientific, music, and world history illustrated books, which he designed and packaged during the 1960s and 1970s, fits squarely into the Modernist tradition.

Yet Nitsche’s approach was not a cookie-cutter Modern formula that so many designers blindly followed at that time. It was a personal fusion of early influences (classical and otherwise) and contemporary aesthetics based on fast pacing and dra-matic juxtapositions. Rather than adherence to Mod-ernist orthodoxy, Nitsche insists that the methodology that most closely resembles a Modern manner, clean, systematic, and ordered, developed because of his rest-lessness at doing mostly illus-trative work during the early part of his.

Although he might not own up to the fact that he

had played a formidable role in the Modernist legacy, Nitsche does not deny that he was as good - certainly as prolific, if not more so - than any other designer of his age. He also speculates that had it not been for his asocial tendencies (“I preferred to do the work, not talk about it”) and a few poor business decisions along the way (he says he turned down a job at IBM that later went to Paul Rand), he might be as well known today as any of the other acknowledged pioneers. In fact, he worked for many of the same clients, including Orbachs, Bloomingdale’s, Decca Records, RCA Records, Filene’s, 20th Century Fox, The Museum of Modern Art,

Container Corporation of America, the New York Transit Authority, Revlon, and more. Judging from the sheer volume of work bearing his signature or type credit, there are few others who can make this claim. Both his General Dynamics work and book packages had a profound influence on younger designers during the 1960s and 70s. Seymour Chwast, co-founder of Push Pin Studios, compares his tattered, well-thumbed copy of Dynamic America, the ambitious corporate history that Nitsche edited

NO FORMAT | NOVEMBER 18thNO FORMAT | NOVEMBER 18th

NO FO

RMAT

| ED

ITORIA

L

3534

The life and work of the quietly pivotal Swiss modern designer Erik Nitsche, who’s clients ranged from the MOMA to RCA ina

career that spanned the 20th century.

Design By Manoil Tzonev

T Y P O G R A P H I C P O S T E R

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M U LT I - M E D I A T Y P E E X P L O R A T I O N

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