Soulellis Studio

The spring issue of our twice-yearly magazine for Cornell University is finally printed. This one's a beauty, perhaps our best yet. Working with gorgeous photography — like the James Turrell cover shot (by Florian Holzherr), and the 58 images of contemporary Portuguese architecture — made an incredible difference in the overall design.

Great news: we’ve been honored with a Gold Award in the Graphis Poster Annual '08-'09 for the Waterworks Architectonics poster. Here are all of the winners. (We're in really good company.) First published in 1944, Graphis is one of the design industry’s most respected publications, and is recognized globally as a visual archive of the most significant and influential communication design being done today.

Graphis Poster Annual ’08-’09 will be available in June.

We're starting to see the results of a really productive winter — a lot of new work launching here, between now and June. The entire issue of AAP's "NEWS04" is hanging in our office and about to get its final review, with James Turrell on the cover, and a gorgeous pull-out section on Portuguese architecture. To the printer, later this week.

Here's some freshly-printed letterhead of a freshly-designed identity for a totally new non-profit by the author of this (and founder of this). But the real home of this brand is going to be online, not in print. More soon, after it launches.

AAP, Spring 2008. NEWS04 coming soon. Take a look at NEWS03, NEWS02, and the first issue.

I had a nice design surprise last week. I showed up at MAS for a meeting and saw that the Architectural League had opened a small show of Herzog & de Meuron's design for the new Parrish Art Museum in Southampton. All beautifully presented on a single, giant platform. The tabletop was set with all kinds of models, and a single drawing was laminated to the wall. Great installation, but the real surprise was a stack of one-color pamphlets, presumably designed by 2x4 (they are credited on the table). This thing was so modest: flimsy paper, a sort of folded photocopy. One side presents a layout of the objects on the table, rendered in thin black lines. The other side, lots of words and numbers — in reverse. I didn't understand why, but kept it anyway because it looked good. The next day I realized that if held up to the light, I can see the reversed words through the lightweight paper, back-lit onto the diagram — these are the titles and dates for each piece. Nice.

UPDATE: just got a note from the Architectural League that the entire exhibition, including the pamphlet, was designed by Herzog & de Meuron. 2x4 will be designing the graphics for the museum.

"For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other. Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives." (WSJ)

Richard Saul Wurman just spoke at TED and introduced 19.20.21., his latest mega-creation/passion/project. (The fantastic Flash site is by @radical.media.) Here's our mini contribution (so far) — a cute little thing that isn't sure if it's a pamphlet or a business card.

Here's a little book we just designed. The remarkable cover — the entire front and back unfolds ingeniously to reveal Cornell students at a Katrina disaster clean-up scene — was the idea of Dan Geva, who worked with us briefly last year. The elegant piece will be used to attract new students to the graduate program in City and Regional Planning at Cornell AAP.

Lest anyone think that we only use typefaces designed before 1965 at Soulellis Studio, I'd like to take a moment to introduce you to Omnes, a fine rounded typeface by Brooklyn-based Joshua Darden. We're proposing Omnes as the primary typeface for a new identity this week and hoping the client agrees that it's exactly the right kind of friendly for a serious NYC non-profit.

UPDATE — The client chose the *other* concept, so we'll be using Hoefler & Frere-Jones' Knockout.

I'm itching to get to MoMA to see Design and the Elastic Mind. Meanwhile, the online exhibition is worth perusing, and seeing GoogleEarth figure so prominently reminds me that I should post something here about the incredible work produced in our MArch2 design studio last semester at Cornell. We asked the students to explore the work of Flusser, and use a framework of disjuncture and network to propose ideas about "the city" in Google Earth. Pictured here is an image from the work of Jinang Yang — a sort of mirror-image brand city floating above Chicago.

In addition to a new identity and all of the print communications for the Council on Competitiveness, we've been redesigning the Council's website at Compete.org. And this is a total top-to-bottom overhaul — including new content and strategic focus. It launched quietly earlier this week and it's really satisfying to see a non-profit brand fully rejuvenated, from web to print. More screenshots after the jump.

An incredible web resource: Elif Ayiter's beautifully designed history of visual communication — from cave paintings to Gutenberg to Maeda. (Pictured: a spread from Bradbury Thompson's Westvaco Books, 1940s–50s.)

That last link, by the way, goes to another one of my favorite image resources: Alki1's collection on Flickr. She's 80 years old and totally inspiring.

The spring 08 Cornell AAP events poster — freshly printed.

Spring 2008, that is. The printer's proof for this semester's AAP events poster (Cornell University). It's scheduled to print in Rochester next week; we'll post it again when we get our samples.