Valerie Hegarty

I could get a lot of uncomplicated pleasure just looking at this one image:

But I think there’s more to Valerie Hegarty’s work than just the welcome, sadistic satisfaction of seeing bad things find Rothko.

They’re beautiful in their own right and tense with an appealing antagonism. And I love how that last image, in the context of the other work, neatly suggests two contradictory thoughts: tracing a visual similarity between the growth of roots and the destruction of tattered remains, and placing conventional art as itself the destruction of something prior.

See more at Guild & Greyshkul and The Saatchi Gallery.

(via Coudal)

at 20.21 on
26 October 2009

1

Left vs Right – in which I make clever use of the word Sinister and have way too much class to draw anyone’s attention to it

It turns out that this striking visualization of the differences between the political left and right that I had admired and saved to enjoysthin.gs is also the work of Stefanie Posavec, the designer at Penguin responsible for the Great Stars series.

I know this because her name is on the chart, and she’s clearly credited at Information is Beautiful where I saw the chart. And also because, after I had missed these telltale signs, Stefanie told me it was her.

Here are a few details, but you should just go and look at the whole glorious spread.

To my mind, as well as being extremely visually elegant, it’s an intelligent attempt to simplify some very complicated (perceived) distinctions. Yes it’s reductive and doubtless deals in generalisations, but for a single image and no more than a few hundred words of copy, it’s a provocative and honest effort. But, this being the internet, there are commenters decrying it for being insultingly left-centric, seeing it as a sinister plot to confound more nuanced debate, and plenty who want it to be something it isn’t.

No it doesn’t accurately represent the whole spectrum of political thought. Did you really think it could?

It’s taken from David McCandless’s upcoming book The Visual Miscellaneum, so look out for that.

at 17.19 on
26 October 2009

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Stefanie Posavec
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info visualization

Great Stars

So I was in Arran for a while. I planned to make a post about the Penguin ‘Great Stars’ series when I got back, but the day before I did, Joseph at the Book Design Review beat me to the punch. Well, the one thing he hadn’t figured on was that I’d already taken photos of the books. YOU DIDN’T THINK OF THAT, DID YOU JOSEPH? That’s right: nobody’s impressed by your tastefully curated, regularly updated blog that’s really a must-read for anyone interested in book design. NOBODY. Also, I like your logo.

I may be slow on the draw, but I will steadfastly refuse to concede that something I have planned to do has been rendered redundant. Call it strength of character.

The series was designed by Stefanie Posavec, and they’re very appealing pocket-sized matte books, written by David Thomson, the critic and author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. Unfortunately they’re not really a steal at £7.99. Or if they are a steal, it is the wrong kind of steal. It is the kind of steal where you wonder where your money has gone and maybe you feel taken advantage of. They’re a bit more affordable at Amazon though.

These are the four books (the quotes are from the back covers):

Look, I’m hardly pretty, he seems to say. I sound like gravel; I look rough and tough; and, honest, I don’t give you the soft, foolish answers the pretty boys will give you. You may not like what I say, but you better believe it.

Humphrey Bogart – 9781846140761 – cover – Amazon

Cooper was heroic, of course, in his own mind as much as in his scripts. He was manly, tall, ruggedly handsome. He was a man for a fight.

Gary Cooper – 9781846140778 – cover – Amazon

Ingrid Bergman was far more than just a sweet, virtuous, “natural” Swedish girl - she was a dark sensualist over whom many men might go mad. Her very gaze delivered a climate of adult romantic expectation.

Ingrid Bergman – 9781846140785 – cover – Amazon

She could look demure while behaving like an empress. Blonde, with eyes like pearls too big for her head, she was very striking, but marginally pretty and certainly not beautiful … But it was her edge that made her memorable – her upstart superiority, her reluctance to pretend deference to others.

Bette Davis – 9781846140723 – cover – Amazon

at 15.51 on
23 October 2009

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Penguin
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Stefanie Posavec
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cover design