The AIGA Journal for December 1969 featured the association’s annual review of textbooks and teaching aids. The latter ranged from sets of workbooks to a crate-size tool chest with several drawers of Platonic solids. Dangerous Parallel, pictured, was a Korean war simulation.

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Comment was a promotional periodical produced by consortium of printers in the early sixties. Issue 200 included contributions from Saul Bass, Will Burtin, and Henry Wolf.

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Chermayeff & Geismar Collection, Box 44, Folder 3.

Lincoln Center’s groundbreaking ceremony took place in on May 14, 1959, so this book cover designed by Chermayeff & Geismar must have been created some time in the early 1960s. According to the text, Lincoln Center would make New York City “… the international capital of the performing arts, just as the United Nations makes it a capital for world affairs.”

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Pentagram Partners’ Feedback, five volumes, London 1976–1996

Among the ephemera in the Henry Wolf Collection are five early editions of Pentagram’s Feedback — guidebooks for globetrotting designers. Excerpts from David Hockney, Olivier Morgue and Bob Gill follow.

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A birth announcement illustrated by Jack Roberts (for his daughter), archived in Henry Wolf’s correspondence.

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Massimo Vignelli, from Alliance Graphique Internationale Los Angeles No. 12, 20/août 1985. (From somewhere in the Henry Wolf Collection.)

It surprises no one that the side of 60s design that Vignelli decides to focus on is the modularity and rigid systematization that he specialized in.

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Henry Wolf Collection, Series 2: Box 5B, Folder 28.

Wolf shot the photograph for this ca. 1980s Papermate ad, which was originally a full magazine spread. Presumably the art direction credit here includes the choice of this outrageous but strangely compelling combination of magenta boots, purple legwarmers, and high-cut acid-wash jeans. Against their layered, cool-tone palette, the yellow barrel of the pen stands out, its silver clip echoing the silver italic copy. The only snag here, in my opinion, is the affected rhythm of “Think, Re-think, State, Re-state,” which falls too comfortably into the exhausted “Big Idea” voice that was so prevalent in advertising a few decades before, and doesn’t really achieve any meaningful interaction with the image.

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