Beautiful advertisement for Arkwright-Interlaken, Inc designed by Malcolm Grear Designers. Dates back to the early 1960s.

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Brochure for the Rancho San Miguel (Walnut Creek,CA) Eichler development c1950s

In honor of the upcoming Birth of Cool: Mid-Century Modern design in California exhibition, I thought it would be nice to post this Eichler brochure. I found the brochure several years ago at an estate sale in Lafayette, California. I love the photo. Most likely the photographer is Ernest (Ernie) Braun.

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Julius Shulman, photograph of Case Study House #21 (Pierre Koenig, architect)

Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury—opening May 17 at the Oakland Museum of California—looks at the painting, architecture, furniture design, decorative and graphic arts, film, and music that launched mid-century modernism in the United States, and established Los Angeles as a major American cultural center. The exhibition continues through August 17, 2008.

Birth of the Cool is accompanied by a 300-page illustrated book (published with Prestel Publishers, 2007), which provides a thorough reassessment of the era.

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Many thanks to the good people at Tomorrow for stopping by last week, and for the gift of this beautiful bookmark. The bookmark is part of a promotional piece marking their recent contribution to “Trees for the Future“.

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El Gran Robo Del Tren De San Trinian – c1968

I recently received an email for this great new blog that focuses on Cuban posters. The site is a wonderful resource for posters produced by ICAIC, OSPAAAL, COR, Casa de las Americas and other cultural, political and social agencies in Cuba.

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Mar Hernández aka Malota aka really cool designer living and working in Valencia, Spain, offers an extremely fun and inspiring collection of work for our viewing pleasure. Mar’s style is really bold and graphic, but very detailed and complex at the same time. She has a nice range of work — from very flat, computer drawn images, to a sketchier, looser, hand drawn style.

Check out the video entitled “Greenville.” Very cool motion graphics.

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Poster for Salon auto geneve – march 14-24 1963

Easily in my top ten favorite posters.

Salon Auto Geneve (Salon International de l’Auto) is an annual auto show held in March in the Swiss city of Geneva. I admire Brun’s decision to represent the event in an a very abstract way. The white circles used as automobile headlamps look like they are derived from a compositional exercise in one of Armin Hofmann’s classes. This would make sense since Donald Brun taught at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule (Basel School of Design) along side Hofmann.

also worth checking out:
Poster by Swiss designer Hans Neuburg

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Cool work from Brooklyn based illustrator and designer Stephen Kelleher aka Frankenstyles.

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Sabena label from the late 1950s/ early 1960s

Wow, amazing luggage label from Belgian airlines Sabena. This label is promoting travel to Africa. Look at those colors! I love how the illustrator portrays the faceted shades of the girl’s face in bold “Fauvist” hues.

This is part of Art of the Luggage label’s amazing collection of luggage labels on flickr. Please check them out. They were nice enough to add the label to grain edit’s mid century modern sticker, label and stamp club as well.

Be sure to check these luggage labels we’ve posted in the past.
Modern Swiss label
Portuguese modern label

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[pictobrowser 10159078@N03 72157604770297324]
Richard Erdoes – Policemen around the world c1967

Richard Erdoes was an author and illustrator. He was born in Vienna, Austria in 1912 and later immigrated to the United States. The book above is one of a 3 part “around the world” series. The other two books were Musicians of the world and Peddlers and Vendors of the world. Both of which, were produced around the same time in the late 1960s.

It looks like Erdoes’ used a combination of Pen/ Ink and gouache to achieve the finished look found in the images above. This reminds me of the work of Miroslav Sasek who I believe used gouache as well.

Many thanks to grain edit reader Thorsten Schmidt for sending the following Richard Erdoes link in:
Richard Erdoes magazine illustration

You can pick up a copy of Policemen around the world at Amazon.

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Also available for your viewing pleasure: Ryohei Yanagihara

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