eye
contents no.27 vol.7 spring 1998
cover

2 Editorial
A rhetoric of images
To acquire the status of serious conveyors of ideas, images still have to overcome a “class struggle” with verbal language
Max Bruinsma

6 Agenda
Fanfare for the common hack
Theorists cannot afford to turn a deaf ear to the everyday working experience of “down-in-the-trenches” designers
Kenneth FitzGerald

8 Screen
All the news that fits (excerpt)
Hold the front page! When it comes to the big news stories, what has happened to the visual hierarchy of choice?
Jessica Helfand

10 Reputations
Gérard Paris-Clavel
“I always transform the commission: the role of all graphic designers is to question the brief before answering it”
Ursula Held

26 Profile: Funny Garbage
Scrap merchants
Peter Girardi’s practice creates digital landscapes composed of detritus scavenged from the wasteland of traditional media
Steven Heller

36 Report
Don’t buy this
In a high street shop, an installation for Friends of the Earth questions the material obsessions of global consumerism
Rick Poynor

38 Critique
The endless library at the end of print
Does the current avalanche of glossy books constitute a genuine design history – or mere graphic ephemera?
Teal Triggs

48 Overview
This is not a book
An artist’s book can be a sculpture, an object and a private exhibition – a medium liberated from its well-defined formats
Jonathan Ward

56 Report
Best before
British supermarkets display packets and tins whose graphic design codes have a longer shelf life than the food inside

58 Personal view
My Typographies
The rhythms of letters are not confined to printed words. For the typographic eye, all the world is a readable place
Paul Elliman

64 History
New world order
Now that information management is a priority, the logical graphic style of Erik Nitsche has acquired a new relevance
Paul Rennie

72 Visual essay
Remote control
Images engage in conversation on the gulf between perception and sensation. The first of Eye’s new series of visual essays
Nick Bell/Eye

81 Reviews
Jambalaya: AIGA in the melting pot; more Web grabs; a primer in Design Literacy; concrete possibilities in Maastricht

86 Archive
The Mechanical Bride, Marshall McLuhan’s 1951 analysis
of advertising’s unholy trinity of sex, death and technology