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Friday, May 22, 2009

Dada in Paris

Design credit to come
Buy this book from Amazon.com

The MIT Press has reissued Michel Sanouillet's seminal Dada in Paris. Before you say this isn't Dada enough for you, read the National Gallery of Art's description of Dadaist typography: "Dadaists delighted in uncoventional typographic design, frequently mixing fonts employing unorthodox punctuation, printing both horizontally and vetically on a single sheet, and sprinkling texts with randomly chosen printers' symbols." I call this close enough and pretty delightful.

13 comments:

Ian Koviak said...

very cute and appropriate. with a subject like dada, as a designer, this must be a hoot to work with.

I will never forget Rands famous DADA cover though.

My only beef is that I do not associate these letter forms with dadaism and that time period. But that's just me. I'm sure the designer did their due research.

Anonymous said...

Nice cover. Made me think of this: (from 2005)

http://www.amazon.com/American-Memoir-Franz-Olivier-Giesbert/dp/0375423672/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242990792&sr=1-13

Anonymous said...

I remember once in a computer class in high school (over 15 years ago) a teacher left us in a classroom to watch a video, and left for the almost entirety of the class. When he came back, there we were, completely bewildered as to why we were watching a VHS about the dada art movement!

I think the cover is at the very least playful. :)

orlando said...

I'm not a huge fan but only partly because the rand DADA keeps the bar so high.
Historically appropriate or not, the book is out NOW so i think its risky to go with a style that looks like it came out 5 years ago. It looks like the trendy typography everyone was doing when i was in school, black and red, bold clarendon, mixed with a grunged up edwardian-like script. I know there's got to be a way to make a historically sensitive dada cover that doesn't look like a freshly retired design fad.
but its not intrinsically bad at all! once the mid-2000s are far enough away this will be just fine.

Rebecca said...

Looks like "Dad in Paris" to me.

Tropolist said...

Seeing some of the responses to Kid's The Cheese Monkeys and Dry covers, I expect a lot of people to assume the placement is a printing error.

Tropolist said...

*Kidd's

Anonymous said...

Who is the designer? I think this is wonderful.

mog said...

Replacing the first "A" in "DADA" with the Eiffel Tower would be better, because then it couldn't be read as "Dad in Paris," which actually makes more sense to anyone unfamiliar with the word "dada." That really strikes me as a basic design mistake.

Joseph said...

Mog: that's a good point.

miumiu said...

The cover made me nickname this "The dada files". I like it, though!

Unknown said...

I'm really not seeing the Dada in this design. To me this is more constructivist/swiss/with a bit of contemporary grunge.

Dada design is so much more expressive and organic than this slight tilt on centered type...

Not a good design.

Anonymous said...

Hi, I'm the cover designer for this one. I just wanted to thank mog for their post. Because of it the eiffel tower is changing location!