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The mood of his images are so mellow and serene, extremely simple palettes of delicate pastels.

These are from his series of empty pools titled appropriately “pools”.

From Carlo’s “Orbs” series:

And lastly and actually what I find most interesting, is his series of images using an experimental camera originally designed in the 70′s to record what a psychic might see, it captures your “aura”.

Some information about the project found here:

These portraits are made with a Polaroid aura camera developed in the 1970s by an American scientist in an attempt to record what a psychic might see. This project explores the idea that a portrait photograph can reveal an otherwise unseen and accurate insight into the subject’s character.

The subject is connected directly to the camera by hand-plates that measure biofeedback, which the camera depicts as an aura of color in the Polaroid and translates into a printed diagram and description explaining the camera’s interpretation of the subject.

I mean, if this is the graphical energy these people are giving off, how amazing would that be? It’s fun in this case to susped disbelief, purely for the sake of enjoyment. Look at the beautiful images:

Gerard Unger is the designer of the Swift font family, and has released a revised version in 2009. It’s incredibly usable, and for a fairly new serif face, widely used. What’s most unusual is Gerard is fairly young for his accomplishments.

Here’s a link to his site & work.

Back to Swift, it has a very interesting history…

Here’s the story of the Swift family from the Linotype site:

During the early 1980s, Gerard Unger first designed Swift for a company named Dr.-Ing. Rudolf Hell GmbH. Known as “Hell” for short (a surname meaning “bright” in German), this company produced the very first digital typesetting machine – the Digiset, back in 1968. Hell had clients the world over, many of them in the newspaper industry. Unger had already created a number of original typefaces for Hell before he conceived of Swift. But Swift probably made the biggest impact of all his designs.

The Swift family brought in a breath of fresh air to 1980s newspaper design. In the past 25 years, Swift has achieved such broad use that it may be numbered among the most successful and popular serif typefaces of the 20th century. Linotype, which acquired the Hell company in 1989, has been distributing Swift since the mid-1980s.

Around 1995, Unger revisited Swift, bringing Swift 2.0 onto the market. Unger distributed Swift 2.0 on his own. The Swift 2.0 family had been redrawn from scratch using PostScript outlines; the original Swift had been digitized with the help of the now-defunct IKARUS system.

Recently, Linotype worked together with Unger to create new OpenType fonts based on Swift 2.0. These would not offer small caps and oldstyle figures as separate fonts, like in the days of old PostScript Type 1 files. Instead, all typographic features would be accessible as OpenType features, as customers have long-since come to accept!

Dubbing these “new Swift 2.0” fonts “Neue Swift” (“neue” means “new” in German), Linotype also expanded the character set, adding dozens of new glyphs per font. This allows speakers and readers of even more Central and Eastern European languages to set text in the new Swift design.

Some Neue Swift Samples:

This label’s releases are described as…

“…the most unusual record you have ever put on your turntable. It is a unique mixture of entertainment, excitement, beauty and practicality.” — Persuasive Percussion (1959) liner notes

My kind of music.

More from the gallery overview:

Command Records was founded in 1959 by Enoch Light (1905-1978), a classical violinist, bandleader, and sound recording engineer. Light went to extraordinary technical lengths, and often great expense, to create recordings of the absolute highest quality possible that took full advantage of new technical capabilities of home audio equipment in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Light specifically perfected stereo effects that bounced sounds between the right and left channel speakers, which was called a “ping-pong effect”.

On each album sleeve, Light would include lengthy technical descriptions about each song, the musicians, the depth and breadth of the sounds, and how they were recorded. In order to fit his descriptions, he doubled the size of a standard album sleeve and enabled it to fold open like a book, thereby inventing the gatefold-packaging format. The gatefold sleeve became highly popular in following decades.

Luckily there’s some great images on the gallery site. Josef Albers was a graphic artist but his massive influence on the profession was through his educational programs, such as his excellent color theory book, Interaction of Color.

He originally joined Total Design, Holland’s first multidisciplinary design studio (yes first) where he would work for nearly 30 years. Today, this amount of time spent at a single studio is virtually unheard of. His story at Total is not all happy, as his book describes challenges balancing his work as a creative visionary with the day to day realities of financial and office management. But I’ll let you read the book and avoid any spoilers here, but certainly this book is worth more of your time than a “flip for nice pictures”. This actually in a way reminded me of the fine book on Tibor Kalman’s life’s work and professional life in its honesty and frankness, as there are many contributions and reflections on Bos’ work life from co-workers.

In looking at his work, much like Wim Crouwell (his “great example”) he was a master of the simple form made expressive and unique. And his approach was very wholesome, originally a copywriter and journalist, who fell in love with design a little later in his life, his approach is extremely well rounded, and his ability to see the big picture I believe is what gifted him with the ability to create such broad identity programs, crossing brand identity, collateral, packaging, and interior design. The most amazing thing about Bos’ work though, is it’s timelessness. Looking through this book, much like Crouwell’s work, his artistry is both visionary and crosses the lines of time and trends. You’ll notice below an illustration that looks strikingly like the work of Eboy, yet, this is before the constraints of the pixel defined that style. To me this is unbelievable.

Here’s some images from my book, and following below I’ve posted some links for you to continue to enjoy both his work, the work of Total Design and the work of Bos’ Dutch contemporaries. I highly recommend this book, it’s hard to find but I came across this link for the book for sale:

Counter-Print.co.uk

More on Ben Bos and his important work:

Total Identity’s website, telling their story, you see Ben’s fro peeking out in the back.

A sampling of Graphic design books on Flickr that include samples from this book and Bos’ and Crowell’s Dutch contemporaries.

A great Dutch graphic design collection on Flickr.

”

- Daniel Eatock

One of his many interesting projects:

Good design is innovative
Good design makes a product useful
Good design is aesthetic
Good design helps us to understand a product
Good design is unobtrusive
Good design is honest
Good design is long-lasting
Good design is consequent to the last detail
Good design is concerned with the environment
Good design is as little design as possible