AisleOne. A visual journal on design, photography, film, music and culture.
Khoi Vinh and Allan Cole have created Basic Maths, an excellent grid-based theme for WordPress that includes features like microformats, color-scheme control, full widget support and a key shortcut to display the grid. Not to mention it’s beautifully designed.
You can purchase it for $45. Well worth the price.
My jaw dropped when I saw the work of Herbert W. Kapitzki over at Grain Edit this morning. Never heard of him before today but I’m glad I stumbled upon his work.
Kapitzki was a former student of Willi Baumeister, conceived and designed exhibitions for the state industrial inspection board (Landesgewerbeamt) in Stuttgart in the 1950s and the early 1960s. He later invited by Otl Aicher to teach at the Academy of Design in Ulm.
His poster work is exceptional and I also love his logo and pictograms. What an excellent collection of work but unfortunately the quality of the images are poor. I really wish all of this classic work was better archived. Too many great pieces from great designers are getting lost.
Carl Bernhard Graf (1926-1968) was a Zürich based graphic designer that not many people know about. But the work that he left behind is just as good as the well-known designers of his time.
There isn’t much information on Graf (hence the terrible quality of the photo above) but Jonathan Turner has put together a Flickr set comprised of his work. You can also see more of Graf’s work in the classic design books “Graphic Design in Swiss Industry” and “Publicity and Graphic Design in the Chemical Industry“.
If you have any extra cash laying around, you can pick up an original Graf poster for $350.
I’ve been working on a 2010 calendar poster that I plan to have letterpressed and figured that it would also work well as a wallpaper. So I put some wallpapers together based on the poster design that features a 2010 calendar and the year written out in English, Italian, French and German. Available in pink and white at 1920×1200.
A new version (1.3) of the excellent Grid Calculator has been released for the Mac. The main feature of this upgrade is the ability to calculate grids for web design. It’s the only stand-alone app that I know of that supports both print and web. Pretty sweet. I’ve been told that the PC version is coming soon.
Here are some more new features:
• Inches and Points support.
• More paper sizes (DIN, ANSI and Arch).
• Great new time-saving feature “Copy Settings” introduced – NO more back and forth!
• Modified “Quick conversion” section.
• Web designer friendly, use Points in 72 ppi resolution and calculate your grid.
Michael Kosmicki is a graphic design student at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, and his work simply blows me away. I’m amazed at how refined it is, but what I love the most is Michael’s classic sense of style. A lot of his pieces feel like they’re right out of the golden age of Swiss design. Perfect in every way. If we did any print work here, I’d hire this kid in a second.