Nigerian posters

As I finish my book Poster: Paper as Fetish, Enchantment, and Trash in the Twenty-First Century, I've become hooked on the status of West African  posters today.  While I love popular posters that describe current events as well as urban legends, like this description of a secret cult.

 

But I've become especially interested in the heavy posting of election posters. To this end, I was amazed to see a 31 second, this television spot, issued by the Federal Road Safety Corps of Nigeria and posted on You Tube earlier this month, highlighting a safety hazard  has posted a short promo warning of election posters.  For years, pundits decried the ensuing visual mayhem as posters were plastered "indiscriminately on bridges, road medians, major roads and expressways across the state.” But a poster covering a highway safety sign? Note the car crash in the background. 

Electric Dreams

I'm currently writing on retro-futurism and am startled to find a  series of chromolithograph postcards published by the printer Villemard.  Their visions for the future in the year 2000 include flying firemen and teachers who feed books to machines hooked up to  students' brains. Books go into the meat grinder and behold, ideas come out like electricity.

The Woman Behind Mac's Icons

As I get deeper and deeper into my current research project (California's Matriarchy of Design) the more I admire the early designers and adopters of the Macintosh. So I was especially pleased to see that Susan Kare has come out with Susan Kare Icons, a self published book on her innovative work for Apple in the 1980s and numerous other clients ever since.  Especially interesting are the sketches that she made (on a $2.50 graph paper sketch pad purchased at University Art Supplies in Palo Alto no less!) that introduce the now familiar interactive icons for the Mac.  Steve Silberman has published parts of the new book's introductory essay on NeuroTribes.