People’s Graphic Design Archive

Comme des Garçons PLAY heart logo

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 23:05:33 +0000

In 2002, Comme des Garçons released this heart logo for a side brand called Comme des Garçons PLAY. The logo was created by Polish artist Filip Pągowski and chosen by Rei Kawakubo for the PLAY line. The design is a simple red, hand-drawn heart with slightly uneven eyes. It feels like a smaller character than a regular fashion logo.

NTT DoCoMo i-mode logo

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 23:04:59 +0000

This is the i-mode logo for NTT DoCoMo’s mobile internet service, launched in Japan on February 22, 1999. The i-mode was used on phones, menus, ads, service pages, and printed materials connected to DoCoMo’s mobile web service. The design matched the idea of internet access becoming something small, portable, and part of everyday phone use.

Untitled Girl Narrative (Nolan Park)

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 04:18:56 +0000

UNTITLED GIRL NARRATIVE is a three-act dance musical about three girls named "X", "Y" and "Z" as they navigate childhood and adolescence in today’s America. Spotlighting the BIPOC female identifying queer experience. Untitled follows the three girls as they struggle with societal expectations and finding true purpose.

According to Director & Choreographer Katharine Pettit, “KPC continues to create platforms that center and celebrate LGBTQ+ youth, in particular the Black and Brown community, throughout the COVID-19 global pandemic. Now more than ever we believe keeping people connected is of the utmost importance."

Katharine Pettit Creative (KPC) spotlights social injustices using the universal language of dance to change minds and open hearts through movement. KPC will share excerpts from UNTITLED GIRL NARRATIVE featuring their twelve company members. Each dancer will be showcased in the following excerpts:

"X Marks The Spot" (4 dancers)

"Glow" (3 dancers)

"My Turn" (5 dancers)

"Break Chains" (1 dancer)

"Alone" (2 dancers) follows the three girls as they struggle with societal expectations and finding true purpose.

Musical composition by Logan Evan Thomas.

Untitled Girl Narrative (Castle Williams)

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 04:19:35 +0000

"X Marks The Spot" (4 dancers)

"Glow" (3 dancers)

"My Turn" (5 dancers)

"Break Chains" (1 dancer)

"Alone" (2 dancers) follows the three girls as they struggle with societal expectations and finding true purpose.

Musical composition by Logan Evan Thomas.

Paprika/パプリカ poster

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 23:02:10 +0000

Paprika/パプリカ, a 2006 animated film directed by Satoshi Kon. The poster uses the film’s character design by Masashi Ando and title design by Kiyoshi Inagaki, with Paprika’s face placed above a crowded parade like setting.

No-Hype Type CD-ROM

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 23:00:40 +0000

Font collection CD from American typographer Robert Schenk (aka Ingrimayne Type).

Schenk had previosuly published fonts through Wayzata Technology, until the company eventually folded in 1996. Left with no distributor, Schenk begrudgingly self-published some 500 collected fonts, amalgamated and tweaked from previous releases.

From the back cover: ‘Why name the CD “No-Hype Type?” Because Ingrimayne Type is a small type foundry which does not have the funds to extensively advertise its products.’

A Conversation with Public Artists

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 23:00:04 +0000

Panel discussion at City College of the City of New York. Sold out event. CCNY alum Chakia Booker returns with MFA professors Colin Chase, Harriet Senie and Sandy Winters to talk on their practice and where art is moving.

Piet Zwart. Een Kleine Keuze Uit Onze Lettercollectie. 1932. Lithograph.

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 09:23:42 +0000

Piet Zwart (1885–1977) was a Dutch designer, photographer, and typographer who is considered one of the pioneers of modern graphic design. Influenced by the De Stijl movement and Constructivism, he developed a bold visual style using geometric shapes, dynamic layouts, and striking typography. Zwart believed that design should be functional as well as visually engaging. His innovative work for the Dutch cable company NKF and his experimental photomontages had a lasting influence on graphic design, making him one of the most important designers of the 20th century.

United Nations International Year of Light

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:53:58 +0000

West Harlem Art Fund, artist Vicki Da Silva and Duggal presented artworks that celebrated the UN International Year of Light in 2014. Image shot under the 12th Avenue Viaduct in the West Harlem neighborhood Manhattanville.

Vicki DaSilva was born in 1960 in Bethesda, Maryland, USA. She began making time exposure photographs in 1980 as an undergraduate art student at Kutztown University of PA. After receiving her BFA Vicki moved to NYC. She was influenced by both postmodern art and the convergence of street and graffiti art during the birth of hip-hop. She coined the term ‘light graffiti’ in the 80s to describe the act of creating drawings for the camera on location at night using a variety of colored light bulbs to mimic spray-painted graffiti.

Vicki did an internship and later worked as an assistant for internationally acclaimed performance artist Joan Jonas. Through Jonas, she was introduced to many artists including Richard Serra, for whom she worked as a personal assistant throughout the 80s. Vicki’s work evolved during this time, and in the late 80s, she began to use four-foot and eventually eight-foot fluorescent lamps to make landscape-based light paintings in both urban and rural locations. She continues to make both light graffiti text works and abstract works using fluorescent tube lamps.

In November 2018 Vicki and Antonio relocated permanently to Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada. They have been making art and memories together there since 1988.

Exhibitions include Light Tartans at Studio 21 Fine Art Halifax (2021), The Billboard Creative 2021 L.A. Billboard Exhibition, Lumen Lineation at SL Gallery NYC (2018), Allentown X 7: Photographic Explorations at Allentown Art Museum (2017), Radical Love #FEMALELUST at The Crypt Gallery, London, UK (2017), Interference, International Light Art Project in Tunis (2016), East River Flows, NYC Art in the Parks (2015). In 2012 Vicki won the international competition Art Takes Times Square and her work was displayed on the 13 digital billboards of Times Square Arts Midnight Moment. In March 2015 during UNESCO’s International Year of Light, Vicki partnered with Oxfam in London’s Trafalgar Square to raise awareness of the Syrian conflict. Her work has been featured in individual and group shows, private and public collections, and has been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, and Paper Magazine among many others.

Under the Viaduct

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:53:45 +0000

Art intervention series with graffiti artists under the 12th Avenue Viaduct in West Harlem, NYC 2015. Featured graffiti artist was Lady K Fever using reflective tape.

LADY K-FEVER (b. Canada) is a New York based inter-disciplinary artist and curator working with painting, installation, photography, performance and public art projects. She began her career in Vancouver the early 1990’s when she was invited to create an installation with Riot Grrlz for Artropolis 93. In 2003, she became the first Canadian woman to paint at the legendary Graffiti Hall of Fame in East Harlem, New York and to be put down with NYC graffiti crews KD & TDS.

Her work has been exhibited in Bronx Lab Style Wars Bronx Museum, Graffiti Research lab MOMA, Figure8 El Museo del Barrio, Born again: Eight Artist Respond Longwood Art gallery, B-girl Be Intermedia Arts, This side of Paradise NoLonger Empty and Figment 2012 New York and published in the New York Times, New York Post, Daily News and in the magazines: Studio (Harlem), Mass Appeal (Brooklyn), Backspin (Germany), and Trace (international) among others, and in the books Graffiti Women: Street Art from Five Continents, and Burning New York: Graffiti NYC, and We B Girlz (New York). In 2013,her graffiti/street art has been presented at The Graffiti Hall Of Fame 2013, New York, Rooftop Legends 2013, New York, and The New York Walls Wynwood, Miami.

Story Piles

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 17:53:36 +0000

"Story Piles" was a site-specific installation featured at the Affordable Art Fair NYC in October 2012, created by Brooklyn-based artist Iliana Emilia Garcia in collaboration with the West Harlem Art Fund. The sculpture wove together antique wooden chairs and life stories to represent diverse human experiences

Piet Zwart, Brochure for Nijgh and van Ditmar, 1931

Thu, 09 Jul 2026 13:55:13 +0000

Piet Zwart (1885–1977) was a Dutch graphic designer, typographer, and industrial designer who played a key role in shaping modern graphic design. Known for his bold use of typography, photography, and asymmetrical layouts, he believed design should be functional, experimental, and accessible. His innovative work continues to influence graphic designers today.

Ugo Nespolo’s visual communication for television

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 19:44:07 +0000

Ugo Nespolo (Mosso, Biella, Italy, 1941) is an italian artist who, from the 1960s to the present day, has explored and experimented with many forms of contemporary art. Rejecting the notion of the single-medium artist, he developed an interdisciplinary practice ranging from painting and sculpture to film and visual communication, while cultivating a distinctive style influenced by major international avant-garde movements, including Futurism, Pop Art, Fluxus, and Arte Povera. Beginning in 1966, he developed a visual language based on interlocking compositions resembling puzzles, actively engaging the viewer, who is invited to intervene and reassemble forms and images. Movement and transformation thus became central elements of his artistic research. Through the use of visual languages derived from advertising and mass culture, his images retain a strong authorial identity while addressing a broad audience, overcoming the elitism traditionally associated with the avant-garde. This approach also comes from the influence of Futurism, which during the 1920s and 1930s envisioned an art closely connected to everyday life and conceived as a form of “advertising art.”

Particularly significant is his work in television and audiovisual communication. In these projects, Nespolo found the opportunity to animate his puzzles introducing dynamic transformation and fragmentation into his visual constructions. From the 1980s onward, his interest in the applied arts intensified, and it was during this period that his collaboration with RAI began. Between 1987 and 1988, Nespolo created numerous television title sequences and commercials for RAI, turning them into important sites of experimentation with moving images and intersections between art, graphic design, and technology. Although designed to introduce television programs and structure the broadcasting schedule, these short audiovisual works maintain a strong artistic autonomy. His productions may therefore be regarded as forms in which art moves beyond mere representation to enter directly into the media system, appropriating its languages, technologies, and modes of communication.

Among the title sequences created by Nespolo, the one for Indietro tutta! (1987), hosted by Renzo Arbore and Nino Frassica on Rai 2, is particularly noteworthy. The artist designed a sequence of animals and objects that transform into the countdown preceding the broadcast. These temporal intervals, varying in duration, proved especially suited to his visual language based on the juxtaposition of autonomous modules, fragments, and continuous recompositions. Figures, signs, and objects assemble and disintegrate in an uninterrupted flow of metamorphoses, creating a playful and colorful visual universe. Through these transformations, the viewer is encouraged to participate actively in the construction of meaning, following a succession of images that continually reconfigure themselves into new forms.

His work in short-form television also includes the commercial created for Campari on the occasion of the 1990 FIFA World Cup, an event of extraordinary media significance. This projects belongs to the earliest phase of Italian computer-generated advertising and demonstrates Nespolo’s interest in the integration of different artistic languages. Italia ‘90 also coincided with a period of intense technological experimentation, as demonstrated by Olivetti’s role in introducing advanced technologies for the management and live broadcasting of football matches. The commercial explicitly references the work of Fortunato Depero, who had played a central role in a historic collaboration with Campari that produced posters, objects, and advertising campaigns that became part of the collective imagination. The commercial unfolds as a football match in which the iconic Campari bottles transform into players competing on the field. The gestures of the figures, characterized by vivid colors and strong visual recognizability, are emphasized through the multiplication of limbs, recalling the dynamic representations of Giacomo Balla. Colorful shapes in the background reinforce the sense of energy and speed, making the image immediate and highly effective from a communicative standpoint.

In 2010, Nespolo created another commercial for Campari to celebrate the company’s 150th anniversary. Constructed as a collage of historical advertising campaigns, the work assembles archival materials, painting, cinema, and advertising, deconstructing and recomposing the brand’s visual imagery through the artist’s personal lens. The result is an immediate and communicative form of art, capable of engaging viewers and creating a fluid and immersive visual experience.

Nespolo’s work is grounded in the continuous deconstruction of the languages, formulas, and conventions established by the artistic avant-gardes. His visual universe does not reject mass culture, but instead it reinterprets it in a playful manner, transforming it into a space of imaginative freedom. In this sense, his postmodern approach challenges the logic of frenetic consumerism and opens communication to freer and more unpredictable forms.

PlayStation 2 ads

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 19:42:25 +0000

ads

Idea Magazine: Iss. 374, 2016, 7

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 19:41:32 +0000

Issue 374 of Idea magazine, about international art and graphic design, was released in July of 2016. This edition of Idea’s cover was edited by Helmut Schmid, and features an interestingly composed front cover. Two abstract contour drawings of people kissing take up the center of the cover, with the tongues of one figure colored in high-contrast yellow. At the bottom of the cover is the photograph of a large snail being held in the palm of a woman’s hand. All fonts within the front page is in light blue, with the background of the page being in a muddy gold-brownish color.

Idea Magazine: Iss. 334, 2009. 5

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 19:40:32 +0000

This archive documents the front and back cover design of Idea Iss. 334 from May 2009. This issue of Idea magazine’s cover was designed by Takanao Shirai with cover illustrations done by Kiyohiko Azuma. The magazine, as described on the front cover in yellow text, is about graphic design for manga, anime, and light novels. In relation to the magazine issue’s theme, comedy manga character Yotsuba Koiwai is on the front cover, taking up nearly a third of both the front and back cover. Additionally, aside from Yotsuba on the cover is a large green exclamation mark with text announcing it as a special issue, with the same exclamation mark being replaced with a question mark on the back cover of the magazine.