Remembering this series of feminist posters — mostly completely wordless — created by Delhi-based LifeTools in the early 1980s for the women’s movement. LifeTools was co-founded by Sheba Chhachhi and Jogi Panghaal to “provide product design and communication services to communities, both rural and urban, that needed design help.” LifeTools worked on a range of social design projects, from product design with artisans to communication design during the earliest wave of HIV/AIDS in India. Chhachhi later became the renowned photographer and artist, while Panghaal continues to work in design and teaches widely — including the authors of this log, when they were impressionable teenagers in their first year of design school.

Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the Shahenshah-e-Qawwali, became a prominent figure in World music during the 1990s through his collaborations and bold experiments with Western musicians and the record label RealWorld. The RealWorld album covers, designed by Malcolm Garrett, followed a system of wordless sleeves featuring stark photography and an iconic strip of colour bars — a tribute, perhaps, to Garrett’s friend and fellow Manchester legend Peter Saville’s New Order covers? This cover is especially potent: no other image quite captures the intensity and power of NFAK at his prime like this photograph by Sue Belk. Sometimes, the best graphic design is knowing when to step back.

Famed Scottish contemporary painter Peter Doig is well known for the cinematic quality of his paintings. Art critic Jonathan Jones perfectly captures how we feel about Doig: “Amid all the nonsense, impostors, rhetorical bullshit and sheer trash that pass for art in the 21st century, Doig is a jewel of genuine imagination, sincere work and humble creativity.” During his artist residency in Trinidad, Doig organised film screenings at his warehouse studio and created posters for them — usually just hours before the screenings themselves. The posters are phenomenal: beautiful, urgent, and they just feel... real. It’s an amazing body of work that we keep returning to.

November Specimen No. 2 is a set of postcards we created for the goodie bags at Designyatra 2023. The set features specimens and information on all of our retail, custom, and WIP typefaces — plus two sets of fun stickers.

Currently listening to the Gun Club’s seminal debut Fire of Love (1980). In the wonderfully diverse and postmodern era that was Post-Punk, groups explored a wide variety of ideas, genres, and historical roots on a punk foundation — from the dissonance of Public Image to the purism of Black Flag to the kaleidoscopic electronics of New Order. One of the more creative additions was LA’s Gun Club, who combined punk’s youthful rebellion with American roots music and the blues. The album is a tour de force that feels like a fiery, fever-dream drive through the American desert landscape.

Rewatching Cure (1997) by the master of modern Japanese horror, Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The film set the stage for the more popular Ringu and Ju-On: The Grudge, which all contributed to the explosion of Japanese horror's popularity worldwide. Cure is slow, atmospheric, and firmly rooted in the style-over-substance tradition — with near-static cinematography, suggested violence, and a chillingly mundane portrayal of evil. It's a mesmerizing, if perplexing, film with a stand-out visual language.

We met a long-time design hero in Basel last month at the AGI Congress: Niklaus Troxler, one of the most prolific and intensely productive graphic designers of the past half-century. Troxler is best known for his poster work, especially for the Willisau Jazz Festival, which he organizes himself. His work stubbornly defies categorization — style, era, genre — exploring hundreds of visual approaches. What really shines through is his absolute mastery of form, colour, and composition. We snapped this at his live Tape Performance, where he creates tape-based work set to experimental music.

The famed postmodernist designer and architect Ettore Sottsass traveled extensively in India. Many elements of Indian culture and history informed his practice, particularly the development of the Memphis Style — for instance, the Carlton Bookcase is said to have been influenced by the form of Kali. We love this image from a larger series of photographs Sottsass took during his travels in Tamil Nadu. The brightly colored, expressionistic homes of TN have been a staple for decades. One person’s kitsch is another person’s postmodern.

Paul Kirchner is a comics artist and illustrator best known for his counterculture-era psychedelic comic strip Dope Rider, featuring a cowboy skeleton travelling through a surreal, inter-dimensional desert landscape. With lush, detailed, and complex illustrations, Dope Rider explores the infinite possibilities available when a comic is set in an undefined, surreal space. His other major work, however, explores the opposite end of the spectrum: The Bus features an unnamed character trying to hail a bus. That’s it. But even within this tiny, minute premise, Kirchner once again delves into infinite possibilities. The familiar setting is a stroke of genius, acting as a relatable anchor for the incredible experiences of the character. Truly an underrated gem.

We love Paris. We love that all the benches in the city are always filled with people, whether reading, drawing, writing, or listening to music. It has become a bit of a joke for us how rarely we spot someone on their phone — and when we do, it’s always another tourist. Parisians are living right.

Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984) is certainly a contender for the title of the most beautiful visuals ever captured in a film. As part of his research leading up to its making, Wenders spent time driving through Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California, taking photographs. The images capture the desert and its small towns in all their brutal magnificence, suffused with the magical realism of the American frontier — a theme that also obsessed and influenced the great Möebius. The resulting book, Written in the West, is a must-have.

Currently listening to Pran Nath’s Ragas (1971), the defining document of the Kirana Gharana style in Hindustani classical vocal traditions. Nath was an elusive figure who mastered the style and expanded it into a hypnotic, drone-based approach that heavily influenced the avant-garde jazz and minimalist scene in New York during the 1970s. His students, La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela (who designed the stunning album cover and other posters for Nath’s shows), invited him to move to the United States, where they established the Kirana Center for Indian Classical Music in 1972. We highly recommend this insightful piece by Alexander Keefe on Nath and his influential circle.

Love, love, LOVE this title lettering for Mani Ratnam’s sophomore film Unaroo (1984). The famed Tamil director’s debut was the Kannada film Pallavi Anu Pallavi (1983), now best remembered for its memorable theme music by Ilaiyaraja. Although only a moderate hit, it earned him the opportunity to make this Malayalam sleeper hit. The film itself is nothing to write home about, but the lettering is a stand-out. It utilizes and exaggerates the defining characteristic of Malayalam script: the loops. Used to great effect with perspective, it’s just such a brilliant piece of lettering. 10/10, no notes.

Currently rewatching David Cronenberg’s body-horror classic Videodrome (1983), a surreal parable on the effects of mass media, propaganda, and subliminal messaging. A work of stunning beauty that defies time and narrative structure, it is as perplexing now as it was when we first watched it as students. Also, as huge fans of Debbie Harry, we can’t help but wish she had done more films. Next up: Cronenberg’s other dystopian thriller, Scanners (1981).

We were ecstatic to discover a new reprinting of Peter Saville’s original record cover for New Order’s Blue Monday in a London record shop. The first truly electronic mega-hit, the original cover was designed to resemble a giant floppy disk, complete with die-cut details and individual Pantone colors for Saville’s color-code strip on the right. The strip is readable, based on a system he used for several New Order releases at the time. There’s an oft-repeated rumor that the cover was so expensive to produce it ended up costing Factory Records 8p per pressing. Hold this beauty in your hands and tell us it wasn’t worth it.

Katja Foyer’s excellent book on the political and cultural history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), or East Germany, seeks to challenge many long-held beliefs about everyday life behind the Iron Curtain. It is by no means ahistorical or myopic—it is indeed a story of mass surveillance, experiments in social conformity, and civil obedience. Yet, it is also a story of national aspirations, relative stability, and social mobility. What we love about the book is how it embraces the multitude of contradictions at the heart of this socialist experiment, starting with the nation’s name. It’s a great book—highly recommended!

The recent passing of Tamil author Indra Sounder Rajan reminded us of his greatest work: Marmadesam (“Land of Mystery”), a cult 1990s Tamil TV series that took the state by storm. It was a radical departure from the television offerings of the time, with its complexity, depth, and darkness. On the surface, the show follows a rationalist medical student from the city who investigates a series of ritualistic murders in a small village, attributed to a local deity. Through this seemingly straightforward premise, the show delves into the core of Tamil culture and society: the conflict between tradition and modernity, rationalism versus superstition, caste, myth-making, misogyny, patriarchy, and hyper-masculinity. It was a work of incredible magnitude, intelligence, and influence that could never be replicated. Fortunately, the entire series is now available on YouTube.

We got to visit IDEA Books, the coolest bookstore on the internet, IRL in London. No photography was allowed, but we sneakily snapped this photo of their door. It was unsurprisingly a treasure trove: books we’d ogled at online that we could finally hold in our hands, inspect the printing, and smell the paper (OK, TMI). There were stacks and stacks of old magazines (golden-age Interview, WET, cool Japanese style magazines, LUI, etc.), along with experimental books, monographs, and incredibly rare works. We especially loved the huge collection of Comme des Garçons printed matter, designed by Inoue Tsuguya (whose super rare monograph was there, too).

We had our studio portraits taken by our friend Anurag Banerjee (whose new book we had the pleasure of working on recently), and it was an interesting exercise in thinking about how a portrait can best represent our studio’s ethos and work. We began thinking about studio portraits from history that we love: the Total Design one immediately comes to mind, as does the graphic one for Graphic Thought Facility. But our favorite has to be this surreal portrait by the Canadian art group General Idea. GI were pioneers in creating a model for conceptual and media-based art that engaged directly with the public—through publishing magazines, books, public installations, et al. We love that the portrait invites inquiry and references early experimental photography.

Tibor Kalman’s insatiable curiosity about the world formed the foundation of his work. Before his untimely passing, he and his wife, the acclaimed illustrator Maira Kalman, traveled the world collecting images of the ways humans adorn themselves. Their resulting book, Un(Fashion), is a revelation. It has no page numbers, index, or any text. Through the images, the book explores cultures, ideas of modesty, taboos, style, conformity and rebellion, community and personality. There are many gems one might find through random searches on Indian Amazon.

Matthew Carter’s well-known euphemism about typefaces—that they are a beautiful collection of letters rather than a collection of beautiful letters—is best embodied by Czech type design legend František Štorm. Wildly prolific, not just as a type designer but also as a woodblock artist, death metal musician (really), and artist, Štorm’s work is deeply rooted in Czech type history and aesthetics. We used his Anselm Serif for our JIIA project: the individual shapes are so odd and idiosyncratic, yet somehow the typeface manages to create an incredible texture in bodies of text. Seen here is his classic Searpion, another perplexing design.

We had the absolute pleasure of visiting the great Simon Easterson and John Walters at the Eye Magazine offices. The place was a goldmine of design books and artifacts, and it was quite a day having Mr. Easterson take us through their archives of cool stuff. Juhi got to nerd out on rare and inexplicable paper samples from luxury printers — a highlight of the year. The best part was the Irma Boom section in the bookshelf.

One of the 20th century’s greatest artists and iconic German enfant terrible Martin Kippenberger was prolific in numerous mediums and styles. One body of work that doesn’t get as much attention is his graphic design: Kippenberger designed hundreds of posters and invitations for his own exhibitions, events, and even parties. The posters showcase Kippenberger’s painterly eye and expert form-making skills, but it’s the disregard for traditional design rules of the time that really shines. If graphic design is a language, Kippenberger was singing in scat.

We were on the lookout for fun gifts for friends who are starting to have kids, and lo and behold, we found this gem in a bookstore. Ridiculously funny and timely, we love how far this author went in making his point. Now we just need to figure out which friend we want to offend the most.

The radical cover for the Durutti Column’s debut (ironically titled) The Return of The Durutti Column (1980) was a sheet of rough sandpaper with FACT 14 (Factory’s ingenious cataloguing system) stencilled on. Designed by Factory supremo Tony Wilson himself and inspired by the Situationists and Guy Debord’s Mémoires (1959), the original intention was that the record would destroy its neighbours. The first 2,000 copies were assembled by hand by the band members and labelmates Joy Division.