This is a poster was done by Roman Cieslewicz for Vertigo in 1963. It is one of my more favorite pieces of design work that I found in the book. This poster is so fascinating and genius because of the way he went about using text and different images to bring a new one into play. When you first look at this piece you see a dead man with a target on his head, but with further examining you can clearly make out the different elements that create this dominate image on the page. I also like the fact that he placed the rest of the text tword the top of the page to sort of balance out the white space. All around I think it is an amazingly unique piece and is definately inspiring to designers.

This was a poster done by Henry K. Tomaszewski in 1964 for the play Marie and Napoleon. I chose to write about this piece because I think it is simply atrocious. If I was the the person who told this designer I wanted a poster for my play and he came back to me with this I would have to ask 'Are you kidding me?' I'm not sure if its the head of a doll looking figure with wings randomly floating around on the plain white page or if its the objects that are randomly placed around and beside one another or if it is the text that he used to write the name of the play at the top, but I find this to be horribly dreadful. It almost feels as though he went into a childs playroom and found some scraps of paper, a couple crayons and a head of a doll that had been ripped off of a body and place them all on a piece of paper and called it art. I feel like this is almost poking fun at designers in general and is almost offensive to me. People do not realize all the time and effort that goes into designing anything and then Mr. Henry here goes and presents a piece in which looks like this and it almost feels as if its saying so easy a child could design...

Black Square

Ultimately I had to say something about this piece of work. When I saw this in our book for the first time I thought it was a joke. I could not believe that someone actually called this giant geometric object real design or art. I could not see past what it truly was, which is just a black square. Then I thought about it for a bit and after questioning why the designer thought this was ok, I realized something. This giant black square may be the design, but you have to look past the design into your feelings and mind. It is not about what the object is or the color, it is about what could lie beyond this or what could even be inside this deep darkness. I ultimately decided I actually like the concept behind the piece, whether I just made it up or it was intended by the artist I think it could open doors to others minds as well.

Harper's Magazine-July Edition

This is just one of many of Harper's magazine covers that was featured in our book. I chose this one, however, because it is my favorite. The initial design of the cover is fairly simple, yet is very appealing. I like how there is not outrageous color or pattern and I also think the text is appropriate and readable. Also, the fact that they used images of firecrackers to create the text JULY is just so very clever and that is another reason I like it so much. The fact that the girl on the cover is lighting the fireworks while reading the magazine is great because its almost saying hey, you're probably going to enjoy you're 4th of july, but not as much as you will reading this magazine.

Packaging