Simon Esterson

Recent articles by Simon Esterson

Fritz Gottschalk and the Swiss-Canadian connection

Issue 99, Autumn 2019

Feature

Gottschalk + Ash International spans more than five decades, a Swiss design studio with Modernist…

Liberté, égalité, typography

Issue 97, Autumn 2018

Feature

Serge Ricco, creative director of l’Obs, has shown this word-driven, left-wing French weekly the…

A note on the type

Issue 95, Winter 2018

Review

The Eye reviews desk bends under the weight of new books on type, from the…

Notes from the American North-West

Issue 93, Winter 2017

Review

With a notebook and pencil poking out of the top pocket of his denim work…

Book of the mag of the moment

Issue 93, Winter 2017

Review

IL is the monthly supplement of the Italian business newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore…

The book of Michael

Issue 92, Summer 2016

Review

It is a pleasure to read a book that is honest, accessible and direct about…

Reputations: Mucho

Issue 89, Winter 2014

Feature

‘We were interested in working internationally, to learn from different cultures and to know how…

All the news in theory and in action

Issue 88, Summer 2014

Review

Everybody is publishing books about small independent magazines these days…

An Atlas of Typeforms

Issue 86, Autumn 2013

Feature

As a sidebar to ‘Quiet man of letters’, Simon Esterson talks about his early encounters with this…

Sans serifs in suburbia

Issue 87, Spring 2014

Feature

Sainsbury’s brought 1960s Modernism to the kitchen cupboard

Well fed in the West End

Issue 87, Spring 2014

Feature

Ardizzone’s menus evoked a mid-century world of food-loving Londoners

Pictures on a page

Issue 84, Autumn 2012

Review

This Eye special issue about Monotype focuses on the technology of putting…

Robin Nicholas

Issue 84, Autumn 2012

Feature

‘I don’t see myself as a typeface designer. Hermann Zapf is a typeface designer. What I have done…

Dan Rhatigan: All about workflow

Issue 84, Autumn 2012

Feature

Monotype’s UK type director talks about the way the company’s 125-year history informs its…

Editorial Eye 84

Issue 84, Autumn 2012

Opinion

The original Monotype was an ingenious piece of highly disruptive technology that…

A tale of two diagrams

Issue 83, Summer 2012

Review

MacDonald Gill at ‘Mind the Map’ in London

When the pen was mighty

Issue 78, Winter 2010

Review

These two volumes (Custom Lettering of the 40s & 50s, Custom Lettering of the 60s…

Reputations: Commercial Type

Issue 82, Winter 2012

Feature

‘There has been typography on the Web for its entire existence, because there are words, and where…

Union of Soviet socialist images

Issue 71, Spring 2009

Review

Cover design for Red Star Over Russia (Tate). In 1970 David King was in…

Off the shelf

Issue 82, Winter 2012

Review

Jonny Trunk is obsessed by the childhood memory of a cornflake box seen on…

Brodovitch’s encore

Issue 80, Summer 2011

Review

In 1945, the small New York publisher J. J. Augustin published, in an edition…

Drink me

Issue 76, Summer 2010

Review

From its cork-finished covers to its wine-bottle proportions, Eduardo del…

Big book of books

Issue 73, Autumn 2009

Review

Bibliographic is a book about books. British designer Jason Godfrey has…

World of designer interiors

Issue 67, Spring 2008

Review

When Japanese designer Yashushi Fujimoto went on a road trip with his camera and…

Print, but not as we know it

Issue 66, Winter 2007

Review

This is one of nearly 50 case studies of contemporary print projects, by designers…

Beauty and process

Issue 65, Autumn 2007

Review

Les Plus Beaux Livres Suisses 2006 (Swiss Federal Office of Culture) is the third…

Passion for print

Issue 64, Summer 2007

Review

Created for Colophon2007, the title We Love Magazines tells you all you need to…

Ragbag of magazine design

Issue 49, Autumn 2003

Review

It is sad that a publication aiming to be a guide to designing in one genre…

You can judge by the cover

Issue 70, Winter 2008

Review

Designer Andrew Howard’s catalogue of his exhibition Gateways: An…

Soft-edged memoir

Issue 81, Autumn 2011

Review

Duncan Fallowell’s ‘memoir for misfits’ How to disappear (Ditto Press, £14.99) is…

Manual transmissions

Issue 68, Summer 2008

Review

Will Burtin was one of the pioneers of twentieth-century American graphic…

Head Trip

Issue 78, Winter 2010

Feature

Simon Esterson applauds the vivid drama of a pharmaceutical brochure

The ranged left years

Issue 74, Winter 2009

Review

As we leave the certainties of the last few decades behind (stable social and…

Putting the graph in graphic

Issue 70, Winter 2008

Review

Data Flow: Visualising Information in Graphic Design (Die Gestalten Verlag…

Printing.com

Issue 66, Winter 2007

Feature

Where digital tools changed design, global communications and green issues are redefining the world…

The font now arriving at Platform 1

Issue 75, Spring 2010

Review

Stories in the glossier design books usually have neat endings: the project is…

Penguin in pictures

Issue 73, Autumn 2009

Review

The Penguin Collectors’ Society is an owners club for people who worship at…

The elegant simplicity of torn paper

Issue 69, Autumn 2008

Review

There is an elegant simplicity about this combined book and DVD on the Dutch…

Glimpses of a graphic reality

Issue 33, Autumn 1999

Review

Admit it. What graphic designers really want is to see work by other graphic…

Taking care of business

Issue 80, Summer 2011

Feature

The pages of Bloomberg Businessweek explode with infographics, illustration and design experiment.…

That’s art direction

Issue 61, Autumn 2006

Feature

Words and pictures – and the way they are used to tell a story – lie at the heart of every…

In few words / Manplan 1

Issue 54, Winter 2004

Feature

The AR’s Manplan is a tactile reminder of a time when magazines lived dangerously

Kit of parts

Issue 44, Summer 2002

Feature

A newspaper is a giant kit of parts that gets assembled in different ways each day. Contemporary…

First Things First Manifesto 2000

Issue 33, Autumn 1999

Feature

Thirty-three visual communicators renew the 1964 call for a change of priorities

Monitor: End of default

Issue 75, Spring 2010

Opinion

The technology that allows us to control type on the Web is available. Now designers and foundries…

The Vignellis: a thoroughly Modernist marriage

Issue 60, Summer 2006

Opinion

Lella and Massimo Vignelli talk to Eye’s
John L. Walters and Simon Esterson

Inspiration

Issue 58, Winter 2005

Opinion

Designer Simon Esterson finds inspiration in Ken Briggs’s National Theatre programmes from the…

Could this be the death of the dot?

Issue 14, Autumn 1994

Review

How can you make a picture look its best on the printed page? In recent years the…

Recent blog posts by Simon Esterson

Letterpress celebration

13 October 2020

Italy’s Tipoteca museum commemorates its quarter century with 25 specially commissioned posters. By Simon Esterson and James Clough
Based in Cornuda in the northeast of Italy, Tipoteca is one of the finest printing museums in the world.

Every Eye ever

26 June 2020

A display of every edition of Eye from 1 to 100 turned magCulture into a surreal cross between gallery and newsagent, complete with masked customers. Art director Simon Esterson reports
On Thursday 18 June 2020, Jeremy Leslie was keen to celebrate customers being able to browse magazines in his shop magCulture again, writes Eye’s art director Simon Esterson.

Reportage lives

12 August 2016

Long reads, big pictures. Newspaper magazines rise to the challenge of telling real stories
This weekend two newspaper magazines step out of their usual structures and remind us what is possible with their formats when you think about content in a different way, writes Simon Esterson.

Type on the tongue

20 December 2013

Eye’s panel checks out the taste of Helvetica, Impact and Comic Sans (as cooked up by Sarah Hyndman)
Designer Sarah Hyndman is known for her Type Tasting workshops – popular events at Pick Me Up and London Design Festival this year. For Hyndman’s latest project, A Taste of Type, she has reversed the approach by asking, ‘what does type taste like?’

Type Tuesday: Reputations

3 July 2012

Commercial Type’s Christian Schwartz & Paul Barnes – interviewed in Eye 82
‘There has been typography on the Web for its entire existence, because there are words, and where there are words there is typography … Some people believe that there is going to be a radical change in the process of reading because of webfonts. Actually, no.’

Beatrice Warde lecture

27 October 2010

Sébastien Morlighem’s gripping tale of Excoffon and the Fonderie Olive.
Tuesday night: to Bridewell Hall at the St Bride Library for the annual Beatrice Warde lecture, this year given by Sébastien Morlighem on ‘Researching Excoffon and the Fonderie Olive: Type as document.’

Early adopter: Desmond Jeffery

4 November 2009

St Bride hails the ‘non-designer’ who’s an unsung hero of British Modernism
The most exciting graphic design exhibition I’ve seen in London recently is at the St Bride Library, writes Simon Esterson. But its subject would never have admitted to being a designer.

Jan van Toorn at the Mermaid

29 March 2009

‘Collecting images is not enough. How democratic is it?’
In a very polite, and very Dutch way, writes Simon Esterson, Jan van Toorn used the latest D&AD lecture to remind the audience at London’s Mermaid Theatre about graphic design’s social possibilities. He told us we should break out of our design stereotypes because, ‘it’s boring to produce neat things’.

Founding father of infodesign

28 July 2008

How Will Burtin used design for science in exhibitions and magazines
Above: the walk-in Cell exhibition, a million times larger than life, designed by Will Burtin for UpJohn. From Design and Science: The Life and Work of Will Burtin, reviewed by Eye art director Simon Esterson in Eye no. 68.