Gallery: Graphic: 500 Designs That Matter Is Like Time Travel for Design Nerds
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*Graphic: 500 Designs That Matter* is a new book coming out from Phaidon in March. It includes—you guessed it—500 pieces of graphic design. You’re less likely to guess how the pieces are organized. Phaidon’s editors matched up work from throughout history, according to visual overlap. Here, the book connects the Nazi symbol to Susan Kare’s 8-bit bomb design for Macintosh.
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Everyone knows the peace sign. It’s based on the flag-waving signals for the letters “N” (nuclear) and “D” (disarmament), but also evokes a cross. There’s something similar at play in this 1991 ad for United Colors of Benetton: it pictures a family grieving over a young man, dying of AIDS. But the young man looks remarkably like a Renaissance rendering of Christ.
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In 1954 Paul Rand took out a full-page ad in *The New York Times*. It used Morse Code to woo the Radio Corporation of America, which he wanted for a client. It didn't work, but Rand won an award. Use the Morse Code alphabet to the left to interpret his ad.
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Printer’s ornaments, like this “mutton fist” index finger, once helped to highlight to information in printed material. They precursed clip art (which precursed emoji). Michael Bierut’s poster for the Yale School of Architecture makes good use of a modern attention-grabbing tool: graphic arrows.
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The Apple logo, first released in resplendent rainbow colors in 1976, uses colors and a simple layout to symbolize a technology company. That design, by Rob Janoff, contrasts against a black-and-white poster for a play called *William Tell,* by Swiss designer Armin Hofmann. An apple fills the poster, but perhaps more interestingly, so does a jagged piece of text reading “Tell.” The treatment is supposed to make the letters fade into the distance, but it looks pixelated.
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Pie charts first appeared in 1801, in a theoretical book on graphic presentation. They relied heavily on math, as the graphic treatment had very little meaning without strict percentages to attach to it. The Japanese flag also uses a straightforward circle, but it’s meaning is thoroughly symbolic. The Hinomaru, or the “Sun Disc,” represents a rising sun on a field of white dates—an image that connects both to the central Shinto deity, or sun goddess.
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John Venn, creator of the eponymous diagram, published a paper in 1880. It included three interlinking circles, a symbol used to represent the Holy Trinity in medieval times. You can see thin outlines of overlapping circles appear nearly 200 years later on the CD cover for the band Spiritualized’s 1997 record, *Ladies and Gentlemen, We Are Floating Through Space*. The designer modeled the CD cover off a drugstore packet of pills. Said Spiritualized’s band leader: “Music is medicine for the soul.”
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For years, designers have sought ways to make movement visible. To the right, a mid-century poster for a motorsports racetrack north of Milan that hosted the Formula One Italian Grand Prix. To the left, Nike’s enduring symbol.
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The Mercator Projection is one of the most influential pieces of information design out there. “Today, it is still in use for Google Maps,” reads the index in *Graphic: 500*. It even forms the basis for the *Metropolitan World Atlas* from 2005, which uses an array of data visualizations to show how different cities compare to others around the world.
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Designers have long relied on grids, but Dutch designer Wim Crouwel’s poster *Vormgevers* was notable for using the grid as a part of the design. The effect looks pixelated, and therefore digital. But in its unorthodox approach to lettering, it actually echoes a poster that preceded it: the dripping typeface from the 1894 poster, *La Revue Blanche.*
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The International Maritime Flag system sits opposite the cover of Oliver Byrne’s Victorian-era edition of Euclid’s *Elements of Geometry* Both systems use color and simple layouts to express more complicated ideas.
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Both the London Underground Map and the Courier Sans typeface were born from experiments. The former came from an engineer who thought to model the transit system after electrical circuit diagrams; the latter came from a typography student who went rogue and cut the serifs off a typewriter font, eventually ending up with Courier Sans.
