Directors Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey have recently produced another design documentary that easily deserves a spot on the shelf next to Gary Hustwit’s trilogy, “Helvetica,” “Objectified” and “Urbanized.” Now screening at independent theaters around the country, “Charles & Ray Eames: The Architect and the Painter” provides fresh insight into the personal lives of the couple behind the iconic chairs. While best known for their modernist furniture, the Eames also dabbled in a variety of other creative mediums, including film and exhibition design. As Cohn argues in a recent interview I did with him, the Eames were ahead of their time in their almost contemporary approach to self-promotion and branding. “When you were buying a piece of Eames furniture, you were buying a little bit of that joie de vivre, the free and easy California lifestyle, that Charles and Ray represented to a generation of people,” he says.

The “Eames” film, which came out last month, recently debuted on PBS’s American Masters series, and can currently be viewed online on the PBS website. The DVD, which features nine extra scenes, can also be purchased from First Run Features.

What made you decide to do a documentary on the Eames?

I had a personal affinity for them, but I didn’t have a design background at all. I didn’t have hip parents who had a lot of Eames furniture in the house or anything like that. Their films have a cachet among a certain subculture of film geeks. You know, the kinds of guys who work at video stores and either live with their parents for the rest of their lives or become Quentin Tarantino. You always see their videos under “Staff Picks.” I think I was introduced to the films through a friend when I was in graduate school at Berkeley. I thought their films are very personal for how beautiful and different they are. They made me curious: What kind of people make films like this? These are not the kinds of films you’d make for commercial purposes, but they weren’t art films either.

One of the things I noticed early in the film was that you were telling not just the story of their design but also the story of their lives as designers and their creative process. How did you strike the balance between telling the story of their romance, which wasn’t always as rosy as it first might appear, and creating a truthful account?

If you’re writing a script for a romantic comedy, you get to fit it into a happy arc. But this is real life. And it wasn’t that happy in terms of their relationship at the end. I was a little bit self-conscious about that. There is so much success throughout the course of their career but towards the end of their lives you get the feeling there was a certain amount of disillusionment and disappointment in their relationship and that their marriage wasn’t what it had been. And Charles’ other relationships certainly took a toll on theirs. But on the other hand, there is also something uplifting in it. They weathered it. They loved each other very much until the very end. They came up with a very adult, mature way of living with a less than perfect relationship. Their family mattered to them and their work mattered to them and they continued to work with each until the very end.  I think they made certain sacrifices for things that really mattered to them. In the end, it’s not a romantic comedy. In the real world, that’s still a pretty good ending.

Can you talk a little bit about how you put the film together?

We had this access to all of that material, which includes 100 completed films and hundreds of thousands of photographs. We could only realistically manage to get our grubby little hands on a small fraction of it. Almost everything at the Eames Office is at the Library of Congress, but sometimes we found it easier just to get it from the Eames Office. They knew where stuff was. At the Library of Congress, it’s an important collection but it’s one of a million important collections.

One story that I love to tell is the one about how Charles’ grandson, Eames Dimitrios, goaded us into doing way more work than we had intended. He encouraged us to find the very best examples of prints of the Eames films. So we got the part where we were ready to finish the film, and we had acquired prints of films like “Powers of Ten” and “Tops.” We had done transfers off of 16 mm prints that were held in various archives. For most documentaries done for PBS, these would have been fantastic prints. Typically for documentary film, you’re just happy to be able to get your hands on something that is relatively clean. But Eames convinced us that it wasn’t good enough to have something that was good enough. For a lot of people, this was going to be their introduction to these films and this was going to be the Eames film for at least a generation. In their essence are about beauty and you had to have the most beautiful prints of them. We shut down and put together a hit squad on the Library of Congress. We showed up there with three people and the LOC offered us three or four interns and we spent three days going through shelf after shelf of film canisters. We found what we believe are very likely the best examples of their 35 mm prints.

We also found some incredible photography from Wayne Miller whose images had been buried. We also came across some films that had been made about the Eames for public television, including the raw footage from a 1973 film so we were able to get ahold of never-been-seen interview footage of Charles and Ray.

We’ve added a lot of that stuff to the DVD extras because Charles and Ray didn’t always have a very succinct way of talking. A lot of the stuff that we wanted to put in it would have taken them too long to get their thoughts out, but in a DVD extra you can just let them talk for two or three minutes. And that’s when you really get a feeling for how they talked.

One of the things that struck me was the discussion in the film about how the Eames put together the film for the 1959 Kitchen Debate between Nixon and Khrushchev at the height of the Cold War. I didn’t know they had been involved in that. Can you elaborate a little bit on what you found out about that?

What they were doing was pretty experimental. It wasn’t the first multi-screen slide show, but they were still one of the first. It’s not like they could outsource to some production company to figure out how to do it. They had to build that thing up from the ground up. It took them a long time to figure out how many screens to use and they settled on seven. They had to figure out the shape of the screen. Eventually they decided on this oval shape. For them, it was very much a design process, figuring out how to make the thing work and how to get the seven projectors to be all synced up at once with the music. So it was an experimental design process of trial and error.

In addition to introducing the Eames to people who may not be familiar with design, the film brought up another topic that is particularly relevant to those in the design industry and that was the issue of credit and the Eames office. That’s an issue that modern designers and architects still face as you have the big names that become brands.

It was an issue in their time and it continues to be an issue. Unless we were just going to tell a completely hagiographic story with no blemishes whatsoever, we had to tell that. But my personal feeling is that it’s just kind of the way that it is. If you have the guts to do what Charles and Ray did and start your own studio, then you can put your name on stuff.

There’s a lot of he said/she said stories about what happened in the early years with Harry Bertoia and Herbert Matter. I think the source for a lot of the storytelling is Marilyn Neuhart, who wrote the two-volume book “The Story of Eames Furniture.” She’s been telling the story about how when the Eames plywood chair came out in 1946, a lot of people in the office believed they had a different relationship with Charles and role in the office than it turned out they actually did. They thought it was a co-op and they didn’t think they were working for Charles Eames, but rather with Charles Eames. Bertoia thought he had made the most important breakthroughs in the chair, and there’s documentation that goes both ways. In the end, it’s way more detailed than we could get into in the film.

The point of talking about that story would be to say that Charles was extremely ambitious and maybe a little bit cutthroat in his career. I do think that it was important to him to build a strong brand. The way that he used the image of them as a couple to publicize and self-promote was far thinking. I think that he and Ray intuited that when you are selling a mass-produced item like a chair or an iPod, it’s not quite enough to have something that is beautiful, works well and at the right price point. It helps when you can buy a tiny piece of the designer as well. Just like Steve Jobs did that with Apple, Ray and Charles did that with their furniture. When you were buying a piece of Eames furniture, you were buying a little bit of that joie de vivre, the free and easy California lifestyle, that Charles and Ray represented to a generation of people.

Do you have a favorite moment in the film?

It changes all the time but one scene that I’ve always loved is “Tops.” I love that film and I love how (former Eames office designer) Jeannine Oppewall narrates that film. I love how it illustrates this idea of images serving as ideas, but I also like that we did the opposite and inserted words into it.

I think there’s a kind of interesting duality in this idea of visual articulateness and verbal inarticulateness. I think that Ray and Charles were not always verbally articulate, but they were incredibly visually articulate. So I just love using that as an example of how they can express an idea so beautifully.

Are there any stories you wanted to include that you couldn’t?

Holy crap man, it’s unbelievable. There is so much stuff that the DVD has nine extra scenes that we cut from early versions of the film and there’s easily another nine that we could have put in. Charles and Ray’s early back story got cut so you don’t know that Ray was from Sacramento and went to New York to go to a finishing school. You pick up on her when she’s with painter Hans Hoffmann in the 1930s. You have no sense of Charles growing up in St. Louis or his first marriage. There is this really amazing story about Charles in St. Louis in the early 1930s at the height of the Depression. He had dropped out of architecture school so he wasn’t very well equipped to make a living during the Depression. There wasn’t a lot of work for architects anyway, so being an unlicensed architect in St. Louis at that time was kind of a drag. He basically deposited his wife and kids with her parents, and he took off on his own to Mexico in a beat-up old Model T. He traveled around Mexico for four or five months, just painting pictures, painting houses and doing odd jobs. It was during that period that he became interested in Mexican handcraft and folk art, which would have an impact on their later work and films like Day of the Dead. He also came back with a sense of himself and that he didn’t need to make a lot of money. At least in the folklore of Charles Eames that’s come down through the family, that’s one of the most important stories.

In the film, you briefly touch upon how Ray emerged as the leader of the firm after Charles’ death in 1978. Can you elaborate a little bit on that?

She maintained relationships with IBM and Herman Miller and work did continue at the office. I think she spent several years really grieving. Over time she sort of came out of that shell, and she started doing things that she had never done before, like speaking engagements. Whereas Charles had always been the one who was invited to go and give talks, Ray started to give the talks with slide shows. At first she was very tentative, but over time she became much more confident.

But she was in her 70s, and she considered her main job at that point in her life to secure the their legacy. They put together the book “The Story of Eames,” which is an encyclopedia of everything they did together, with John and Marilyn Neuhart. I think that was a very combative relationship. I think Marilyn had a very different perspective on the Eames Office than Ray did, and an agenda that was the opposite of Ray’s. They also had to try and organize and categorize all of that stuff for the Library of Congress. For an older woman who was grieving the death of her lifelong partner, I think that she had a lot on her plate.

What I think is significant and interesting, it’s not so much what she did but what happened around her. Feminism eventually found its way to modernism and modernist scholarship, so people like design scholars Pat Kirkham and Joseph Giovannini started digging through Ray’s trunk at the Library of Congress for evidence of what she brought to the partnership. It was a revision of history. There was a kind of revising upward of her status in the Eames Office. In the late 1970s through the ’80s and ’90s, she began to be seen as a co-equal of Charles whereas previously she hadn’t been.

It made me think of the partnership between husband-and-wife architect team Alvar and Aino Aalto in Finland.

Pat Kirkham, a design scholar at Bard Graduate School in New York who wrote the first authorized biography of the Eames, just wrote a biography of Saul Bass and his wife, Elaine. She can probably tell you a list of 20 architects and designers where it’s actually the same story: Elaine and Saul Bass; Robbin and Lucienne Day, who were Charles and Ray’s contemporaries in England; and Le Corbusier and Charlotte Perriand, though I don’t think they were ever involved romantically.

Have you become more interested in design since working on the documentary?

Yeah, within a limited range. I’ve become really interested in that period, in particular California design. I’m not a full-fledged design geek, but I’m enough of a furniture geek I can walk into a vintage shop and identify pieces from that era. I guess I’m on my way.

Do you want to do any more design documentaries?

I would love to. But I would only do design documentaries if I felt the designer had something to say. George Nelson, for instance. I feel like designers very often lead interesting lives and have a lot more to say than is immediately evident in looking at their products and designs, unless you really know how to read them as texts.

Do you own any Eames furniture?
I do. In fact, I’m sitting in an Eames chair right now.

See the trailer for the Eames movie and the video for Powers of Ten below:

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.

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Illustration for Bloomberg View, 2011

The first thing you ought to know about Brendan Griffiths is this: Do not click on the exclamation mark.

The objectionable glyph follows the name of the 29-year-old’s firm, Zut Alors!, on its website, zutalorsinc.com. Griffiths joined the company of the founding partner, Frank DeRose, last May, after picking up his M.F.A. in graphic design from Yale. While still in New Haven, he helped develop the site into a statement of the practice’s principles, a statement that has proved to be “very polarizing,” according to Griffiths. “People either love it or hate it.”

That’s just the kind of response the partners were looking for. Since coming aboard ZA!, Griffiths had been turning out bracing, acerbic graphic work for clients such as Bloomberg Businessweek, as well as iPad apps for Condé Nast titles. “Whenever we hire Zut, we always get really wild ideas,” says Gary Fogelson, whose firm, Other Means, has commissioned illustration from the office for Bloomberg’s editorial page, Bloomberg View. Appropriating familiar images and pairing them with bitingly sarcastic text, Griffiths and Zut Alors! have articulated a distinct visual language; what it says, Fogelson says, is “fuck you.” It’s an attitude that gets attention, and if it gives the client some in-your-face cred, so much the better for them.

Zut Alors! website ,2011

Yale Graphic Design M.F.A. 2011 website, with Juan Astasio Soriano and Brian Watterson, 2011

 

Paperweight for senior thesis, 2011

The message comes through in infographics, bookmaking, and typography, but perhaps nowhere more so than on the firm’s website, full of blind alleys and blinking icons. This iconoclastic approach matches Griffith’s own. At school, he and a group of colleagues created the Book Trust, a theory-minded but tangible design catalog in which other artists could purchase “shares”; they peddled it — in full corporate drag, name tags and all — around the New York Art Book Fair.

The Book Trust Prospectus, published by Investment Future Strategy, Ltd., with Benjamin Critton, Harry Gassel, Zak Klauck, and Mylinh Nguyen, 2012

“Almost all of graphic design is very commercial, including a lot of work I make,” Griffiths says. Alternating satire with confrontation, he is trying to work his way out of the design-world straitjacket, even as he’s piecing together how to operate a professional partnership. Griffiths says, “We’re just figuring it out as we go along.”

See the other 2012 New Visual Artists:

• Sang Mun
• Erin Schell
• Berton Hasebe
• Drea Zlanabitnig
• Casper Heijkenskjöld
• Kelsey Dake
• Jerome Corgier
• Tracy Ma
• Olimpia Zagnoli
• Ryan Thacker
• John Passafiume
• Lisa Hedge
• Jungyeon Roh
• Dafi Kühne
• Jing Wei
• Caleb Bennett
• Naz Sahin
• Serifcan Ozcan
• Brendan Griffiths
• George Michael Brower

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More Design Resources:

• Learn about the next generation of app design from one of the industry’s leaders!
• Available now: Print Magazine’s Guest Art Director Digital Collection
• Get an inside look at logo design from Chermayeff & Geismar

I bet many of you don’t know what the Michelin Man, also known as the Bibendum, is made of. Take a wild guess! French cartoonist Marius Rossillon, also known as O’Galop, created the prototype for a Munich brewery (he was holding a glass of beer and quoting Horace’s phrase “Nunc est bibendum” — now’s the time to drink). It was rejected. But the Michelin brothers saw the image and suggested replacing O’Galop’s man with a figure made — yes indeed — from tires. Voila! The Bibendum is now one of the world’s most recognized and collected trademarks in the world.

England has a long tradition of dystopian prophecy in literature and cinema. The likes of H.G. Wells, George Orwell, J.G. Ballard, and Ridley Scott all seem to revel in presenting doomsday scenarios. Films such as 1961′s “The Day the Earth Caught Fire,” and the 1965 BBC docudrama “The War Game,” depicting a Soviet nuclear strike on England, as well as books like Raymond Briggs’ “When the Wind Blows,” a deceivingly innocent tale of untold horror, are among the works that underscore the British fascination with and fixation on nuclear devastation.

“When did music become so important?” That’s Don Draper from last week’s “Mad Men,” set in 1966. Later in the episode he turns off “Tomorrow Never Knows,” from the Beatles album “Revolver,” and walks out of the room.

art: Rick Griffin

There’s something happening here, but you don’t know what it is — do you, Mr. Draper? One year later, Rolling Stone magazine will make its debut, followed soon by “Rock and Other Four Letter Words.”

“Rock,” a 250-plus-page Bantam paperback, was published in January 1968 and subtitled “Music of the Electric Generation.” It was one of the first books of its kind, chronicling a cultural revolution that was still in the midst of its own creation. Crammed with black-and-white portraits of bands and musicians, it’s part oral history, part visual LSD trip. One of its fold-out spreads has an intricate, circuitlike diagram that connects over a hundred names, from the Butterfield Blues Band, the Beach Boys, and the Byrds to Busby Berkeley, Brubeck and Bach.

The editor-designer was a writer named J Marks. The photographer for most of the images was Linda Eastman, who went on to work for Rolling Stone and — oh, yes — marry Paul McCartney.

By the sheer force of its graphic presentation, ”Rock and Other Four Letter Words” conveys the mid-1960s music scene’s spirit, vitality and relevance.

 

Memory is evanescent. I can’t recall where I made the purchase; perhaps it was during an elementary-school or Cub Scout trip. Nor do I remember my exact age; it was anywhere between 8 and 10. What I do remember vividly is the visceral experience: the feel and smell of the paper as I unfurled it. The sense that I was both witnessing and experiencing history, which I then held tangibly in my hands. In the morning of that day, my mother had given me some small change for the day’s trip, and I spent it on a reproduction of the Declaration of Independence. It was printed on a rough-hewn, yellow paper stock with stains on both sides, and it had a rigidity that made it hard to open (it was folded in quarters). The reproduction possessed a distinct smell, and the texture was coarse, as if it was once damp and left to dry. “Onion paper,” my mother explained when I got home. It sounded exotic. Sadly, I’ve forgotten the whereabouts of that formative piece of paper, but the power of the experience has remained.

As I remember it. Every defect was a hidden treasure.

Around that same time my father came home with a present for me. It was a ream of blank newsprint paper. He was a transit worker, and he explained that someone had left it behind on the subway. For me it became a treasured gift, as the paper looked exactly like the paper of the comic books I so fervently read. With the paper as my narrative canvases, I began producing my own comics by the score: Dr. Sol, The Crusaders, The Saturator, Gas-Man! et al.

Page from The Saturator, created when I was 11. At long last, I could produce comic books that looked like comic books.

Cut forward to 2001 when I first began to go through the Woody Guthrie Archives, located in Manhattan, to explore whether it was possible to make a book of his artwork. (It was.) Peering through his drawings and journals, I had the same experience I had as a child, although this time the documents had authentically aged: The years had added a yellow patina to many of these pieces, despite the fact that they were stored in a climate-controlled environment. This was the first time I was confronted with the question of how best to reproduce this work. Does one attempt to imagine it as it was when originally created, with pristine white backgrounds and colors that have not yet faded? Or reveal it as it exists today, less vivid but with the stains of time present? Since the former was impossible to know, I came to the conclusion that only the latter made sense.

I experienced this again a few years later with Louis Armstrong’s collages, which he “laminated” with Scotch tape. With these collages there was no question about heading back in time—the dried tape was as much a part of the collages as every photo was.

Woody Guthrie’s journals gain gravitas with the patina of passing years.

 

In Armstrong’s collages, yellowing tape adds to the experience.

Which brings me back to comics. One of the first collections I ever purchased, in the 1980s, was Bill Blackbeard’s oversize “Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics,” first published in 1977. Within the anthology, “Hogan’s Alley,” “Little Nemo in Slumberland,” “Gasoline Alley,” “Buster Brown,” and myriad others were lovingly and photographically reproduced with great detail on a paper stock closely akin to newsprint.

Imagine my surprise when I began to explore hardcover anthologies of comic books from DC and Marvel, released in the same era. “DC Archives” and “Marvel Masterworks” could not have been more different from Blackbeard’s groundbreaking accomplishment. They were garishly colored on high-gloss white stock; I had the sensation that I would need sunglasses to read them. I soon learned that since the original comics were unavailable—as were photostats—and the original artwork had been lost, destroyed, or scattered, the reproduction involved hiring present-day artists to trace and recolor the comics. The final effect was not so much of a black-and-white MGM classic colorized by Turner but rather like Gus Van Sant’s frame-by-frame remake of “Psycho,” starring Vince Vaughn as Norman Bates.

A page from Bill Blackbeard’s seminal work on newspaper comic strips, beautifully photographed in the pre-scanning days.

 

A side-by-side comparison of the original Fantastic Four #4 comic and a Marvel Masterworks “recreation.” Not only are the tracings inaccurate, the coloring does not adhere to the original.

The first time I became aware that change was in the air was when DC released “Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus, Vol. 1. “Here, an off-white paper replicated the look and feel (although happily not the fragility) of newsprint, and the line art was reproduced from the original stats. Fortunately, DC has employed this technique for other releases, although Marvel has opted for the strategy of tracing and reproducing on bright paper.

Smaller publishers like Fantagraphics followed Blackbeard’s lead, and since the advent of digital scanning, many others have chosen similar tacks: Abrams, IDW, Dark Horse, Titan, and Yoe Books all beautifully reproduce from the source. Still, two schools of thought have emerged about how best to achieve an optimum reading experience, both utilizing matte paper. One approach keeps the yellowing borders intact, while the other involves removing the borders and enhancing the colors, as if the comics had originally been printed on white, higher quality stock.

The DC release Jack Kirby’s Fourth World Omnibus, Vol. 1, successfully replicates the look and feel of the original comics.

In the next month, two books of comics reprints I’ve edited will be released, showcasing both techniques. “Golden Age Western Comics,” published by powerHouse Books, reproduces the original pages whole cloth, although the blacks and colors have been enhanced to replicate how they would have appeared before fading. In addition, we made minor touch-ups. Up until this point, this generally would have been my preference, as I prefer the viewing experience to be as close to reading a 60-year-old comic as possible; these comics were never printed on white paper to begin with. However, Fantagraphics has removed the borders and all signs of aging on our Mort Meskin book of reprint stories, “Out of the Shadows.” Comparing the two releases, I’ve come to appreciate the advantages of both approaches. As a genre, Westerns are mired in nostalgia, having long since been replaced by other action tropes in modern-day entertainment. With that in mind, a book as object set in a distant time and place seems appropriate. For the Mort Meskin collection, we hoped that a contemporary audience would rediscover him; Fantagraphic’s fresh, newly minted approach goes a long way toward achieving that.

A page from Golden Age Western Comics, published by powerHouse.

A page from Out of the Shadows, released by Fantagraphics.