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Alvin Lustig Graphic Design Analysis

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Throughout the timeline of graphic design, designers have seemed to push boundaries, express passion, and create unique compositions. Alvin Lustig was born in Denver, CO in 1915. During his education days he studied at LA City college art center while working independently with Frank Lloyd Wright at his Taliesin studio. Alvin Lusig projects an overall theme of modernism within his design work. It is often that graphic design seems to repeat itself over time, but that is not the case for Alvin; his ideas were fresh, he took risks in his work by mixing typefaces and experimenting with different color pallets. Creativity sparked in 1937 when he began designing book jackets, and was eventually offered a position as the Director of Visual Research …show more content…

In the 1949 paperback cover for the novel Lorca: 3 Tragedies Lustig created a photographic composition that holds meaning. A pleasing part of the cover features the title Lorca is written in a cursive script written in sand. This is both innovative and visually pleasing because it isn’t a static typeface displaced on a page, it is hand drawn with an environment that adds to the aesthetic of the piece. If you compare this book cover to other contemporary book covers at this time, there is an overall sense of appreciate for the thoughtfulness of the collage of images. Heller states that “The current preference among American book jacket designers for fragmented images, photo-illustration, minimal typography and rebus-like compositions can be traced directly to Lusting’s stark black-and-white cover for Lorca, a grid of five symbolic photographs linked in poetic disharmony,” (Heller). This quote supports the idea as Alvin Lustig being one of the few pioneers of graphic design, by taking risks in design he sets expectations and boundaries for future graphic …show more content…

After discovering the crippling news Lustig decided to host a cocktail party with intent of announcing the news to all his coworkers and friends. During this time, he offered his business partners to take their work else were due to his conditions. “What the true nature of that imagination was I never fully understood until the last year, when he had lost his sight, and when, to our amazement, he not only continued to work, directing the eyes and hands of his wife and assistants as if they were his own, but produced some of his finest pieces, such as the final cover design for the magazine Perspectives USA,” (Laughlin). Elaine Lustig Cohen carried on the work and design process in hopes of keeping Alvin’s work alive.
In 1950 Alvin decided to relocate to Israel, because he believed that by doing this as a designer he would be able to exert a significant impact on society. Lustig worked at New Directions Publishing for a decade up until his death. During his time in publishing he created over seventy jackets for the New Classics series. Usually his design strategies included a limited color pallet in order to create a clean enticing design. The lines and geometry that made up the composition divided the page into vertical or horizontal

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