Designer Projects

Designer:

Ellen Lupton

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Project Details

Title: Form/Content Illustration

Category

Graphic Design

Location:

Clients:

The New York Times

Collaborators:

Art director: Nicholas Blechman

PROJECT IMAGES

ABOUT THE DESIGNER

Ellen Lupton is a writer, curator, and graphic designer. She is director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, where she also serves as director of the Center for Design Thinking. As curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum since 1992, she has produced numerous exhibitions and books, including Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (1993), Mixing Messages: Graphic Design and Contemporary Culture (1996), Letters from the Avant-Garde (1996), and Skin: Surface, Substance + Design (2002).

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Illustration by Ellen Lupton for NY Times Book Review
Description:
I was honored to illustrate the NYTimes's review of Chip Kidd's novel The Learners, reviewed in the paper today by James Poniewozik. Chip is the world's most influential designer of book covers and jackets, and he is a formidable writer as well. I count him among my most admired colleagues and "design friends." Poniewozik's review centers on the conflict between form and content in Kidd's novel, a dark comedy about life as a graphic designer in a New Haven ad agency in the 1960s. My illustration picks up on that theme and illustrates one of my favorite verbal images from the annals of literary theory. The structural linguist Ferdinand de Saussure used a piece of paper as a metaphor for the connection between the signifier and the signified, form and meaning. Just as every word consists of both sound and sense, every piece of paper has two sides, a front and a back, and they can never be cut apart (not even with an Xacto knife). This mental image has fascinated me since I first encountered linguistic theory in college. I was convinced that it was an important image for us as graphic designers. In our culture, content is the favored side of the paper, but form is always there, ready to pounce. I don't expect NYT readers to "get" this personal back story, but the story is there, and I've been waiting twenty-five years to tell it.