Bert Clarke, The Thistle Golf Club

In 1986, I moved to New York and started my first job as a designer for The New York Public Library. This was a perfect fit. Book design was my first love. I was fortunate to work with two people who were masters of fine typography, Marilan Lund and William Coakley. In 1987, the Library held an exhibition on Bert (Bertram) Clarke. I knew Clarke as the designer at A. Colish in Mount Vernon, New York. There is nothing flashy in his books. The beauty is in the fine detail.

Centered typography can easily end up looking like a thermometer. I recall Marilan Lund telling me that a good symmetrical composition should be like a delicate but strong crystal chandelier. Clarke’s typeface choices are relevant to the material and always surprising. The typography on the title page for The Thistle Golf Club is not only regal, but echoes the form of a thistle. The heart dingbats for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland are delightful and subtle. I love the treatment for the wonderful title, “A Few Rambling Remarks on Golf.” If you look closely, you can see the shape of a chandelier in all of these compositions.

There is a beautiful sense of accomplishment to groom text and focus on the most minute of typographic issues. On Star Trek Voyager, the Borg’s religion was perfection, and creating order from chaos. If only they had found Clarke’s books, they could have stopped their relentless path of galactic destruction. Hey, this might be nerdy, but you’ve got to give me props for mixing classical typography with the Borg.

Bert Clarke, The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant

Bert Clarke

Bert Clarke, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Bert Clarke, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Bert Clarke, A Few Rambling Remarks on Golf

Bert Clarke, Chapter The Third, The Wimblehurst Apprenticeship

Masters of Design: Corporate Brochures (my preferred title was Corporate Communications

My newest book in the Masters of Design series hit the shelves recently. A few years after we founded AdamsMorioka, a large publisher approached us about a monograph. Saul Bass gave me the advice, “Never get hot. Always stay very warm.” He suggested that we get some more experience under our belt first. We passed, and decided that if we were to write a book, we’d rather make it about something we loved, not just us, although we do have a love/hate thing with ourselves. The first book we wrote, Logo Design Workbook, has remained a bestseller in its category for years. We were asked to write others, Color Design Workbook, Masters of Design: Identity, and the new book.

The Masters of Design series idea came from a book I have, Graphic Designers in U.S.A.: Louis Danziger, Peter Max, Herb Lubalin, Henry Wolf v. 1. It’s a wonderful book with four great designers who weren’t over-published. Emily Potts gave me the green light, and I started writing. I delivered a list of the 20 designers who I believed were the masters in each category to the publisher. We negotiated back and forth in a process not unlike selecting a Supreme Court Justice. Fortunately, everyone I invited agreed kindly to be part of the book. We sent a list of questions and request for images. Most sent everything back in a timely manner, and I began writing. However, some designers didn’t seem to want to send me images or information. That was the hardest part of doing this book. In the end, we received everything we wanted and I love all of the work included. I feel fortunate that I have the true masters in the book.

Now here’s the truth that I don’t typically tell. This happened in the midst of my term as AIGA president, and I was writing a monthly column for Step magazine with a different designer each month. When I was done with this book, and my term was over, I was, well, burned-out over promoting other designers. Not that I don’t love it, and as my mother always says, “A life without service is not a life.” But now I’m taking a break, and just relaxing—except for this post, which is kind of promoting the designers in this book. Old habits die hard.

spread, Michael Vanderbyl

spread, Shinmura Design

spread, Carin Goldberg

spread, Pentagram

Postmortem by Laurel Saville, final cover

Laurel Saville is a well known design writer. Last year, she sent me the manuscript for a book she had written, Postmortem, and asked me to design the cover. She described the book in her email to me as a story about her relationship with her mother. I anticipated a nice and polite story with a few angry episodes and a wonderful growing experience at the end. I thought it would be a literary version of a Lifetime network movie. I was wrong. The opening chapter could be summed up in this sentence by Laurel, “By the time she was in her 40s, she was a dirty vagrant bumming cigarette butts; at 53, she was stabbed and strangled in a burned-out building that had once been our home near Hollywood and Vine.” Not to sound too corny, but I couldn’t put the manuscript down. I read all of it on a flight from LAX to JFK. Now I had to do justice to the quality of the story with the cover. The story, for me, was not about a tragic murder, but about life on the edge, emotionally and literally. There was an aspect of growing up in turmoil. Not the on-going abuse of a parent, but of the floor being ripped out unexpectedly, of standing by helplessly as someone actively destroys their own life. Now, you may say, this isn’t too optimistic, and that’s why I’m here at burningsettlerscabin. But it is. Laurel built a life for herself that is full of success and joy. She did this in the midst of a constant blazing car accident. That’s heroic.

Postmortem cover study

Postmortem cover study

Postmortem cover study

Postmortem cover study