eye
contents no.31 vol.8 spring 1999
cover

2 Editorial
Sampling the modern inheritance
Current critiques of Modernism often fail to acknowledge the movement’s close linking of style, structure and content
Max Bruinsma

6 Agenda
Publishing by numbers
The boom in lavish graphic design books bulging with the latest cool images cannot conceal the papery thinness of the sector's contents
Rick Poynor

8 Screen
Space: The Final Frontier (excerpt)
The immaterial world of the screen is in dire need of new paradigms of place, freed of the shackles of Cartesian logic
Jessica Helfand

10 Reputations
Adrian Frutiger
“I've always lived in two dimensions. The third one belongs to the future.”
Interview by Yvonne Schwemer-Scheddin

26 Overview
West coast Latitudes
An unfettered group of critical spirits, eight independent designers working in education, commerce and culture defy mass media in Los Angeles
Ken Coupland

38 Archive
In every home an architect
Two government booklets, Space in the Home and Metric House Shells, endorse Modernist concepts of good design for the public wellbeing
David Heathcote

40 Illustration
Stories unfolding in time and space
With a revival of journalistic visual essays in US magazines, illustrators are once again becoming integral contributors to the editorial mix
Steve Heller

48 Language
Travellers’ tales
A global Esperanto of icons, warning signs on boxes speak a visual language that leaves no room for misunderstanding
Chris Vermaas

50 Interface
What your see is what you think
A student competition resulted in hybrids of browser and search engine that redraw the fundamentals of ‘surfing the web’
Max Bruinsma

56 History
A blip in the continuum
Jan Tschichold’s November 1925 issue of Typographische Mitteilungen dramatically broke with typographic convention
Steve Heller

58 Visual Essay
A grammar of ornament
The Owen Jones Memorial Trophy, designed in an acknowledgement of the inspirational knick-knacks that ornament our desktops
Graphic Thought Facility (Paul Neale and Andy Stevens, photographs by Angela Moore)

64 History
Typographica 1949 - 1967
Modernist in a broad sense, Herbert Spencer’s magazine prefigured the transgressional design of the last decade.
Rick Poynor

81 Reviews
Paul Renner rediscovered; Information Graphics,ideological Modernism "is alive and well and living under an assumed name"; "Modern Britain 1929-39" preaching to the converted in London; Groincentered egoboosting; Re-play, time for computers to grow up; Tibor, Manhattan's Goofy Dictator; playing with Doors of Perception; cutural ambivalence at the Berlin Biennale