Rarely is the printed page considered a medium of plastic invention. Its design has become standardized, a machine-like element devoid of feeling and esthetic significance. This is cause for regret, for the variety of forms possible when typography and calligraphy are creatively used approaches that of abstract painting.

On the following six pages, Portfolio reproduces in facsimile a number of unusual pages which possess real visual charm and excitement.
For designers chafing under the conventional discipline of the printed page and seeking new directions, these pages should bring both pleasure and inspiration.

Miro on the walls — Wallpapers by Joan Miro and Ilonka Karasz.

The word "wallpaper" is no longer a synonym for the musty floral patterns that writhed endlessly on the gas-lit walls of Victorian front parlors. Within the past ten years, a renascence has taken place in the field of interior decoration that is restoring to the design of wallpaper some of the contemporary charm and significance that it possessed as a graphic art in the 18th Century.

Modern masters, such as Matisse, Miro and Calder, have designed wallpapers and printed wall-panels which reflect the spirit of the 20th Century in their imaginative handling of line, color and form. Their work has brought new dignity to wallpaper and given it creative stature among the decorative arts. Simultaneously, new and improved printing methods, such as silk-screen, offset lithography and photo-chemical processes, are permitting the reproduction of various techniques of drawing and painting which could not be approximated a few years ago.
The wallpapers shown here are from Katzenbach and Warren Inc., a contemporary-minded firm which has consistently pioneered modern design in the wallpaper industry.

Joseph Low, a soft-spoken, pale-faced, 39-year-old artist whose medium is linoleum prints, is well-known to many art directors and magazine editors, although few of them have ever encountered him in the flesh.

Low, who lives a rather hermit-like existence with his wife and two young daughters in a small house deep in rural New Jersey, has impressed the force of his work and personality upon advertising and editorial people almost entirely through the mail. Every two months or so, he mails to a selected list of people a self-promotional little broadside on which is imprinted an example of his work, together with a little message, usually based on an old English nursery rhyme, gently announcing his availability.

Low, who, incidentally, is a superb typographer, sets the type for the message himself and runs off the sheets on his own hand-powered printing press. He initiated the project less than two years ago, after he had resigned from an art instructorship at the University of Indiana and came east to earn his living as a freelance advertising artist.
He quickly found that he was unable to take the emotional punishment that waiting around in advertising agency ante-rooms entailed and he withdrew to the seclusion of his home where he evolved his method of self-promotion by mail.

Joseph Low, a soft-spoken, pale-faced, 39-year-old artist whose medium is linoleum prints, is well-known to many art directors and magazine editors, although few of them have ever encountered him in the flesh.

Low, who lives a rather hermit-like existence with his wife and two young daughters in a small house deep in rural New Jersey, has impressed the force of his work and personality upon advertising and editorial people almost entirely through the mail. Every two months or so, he mails to a selected list of people a self-promotional little broadside on which is imprinted an example of his work, together with a little message, usually based on an old English nursery rhyme, gently announcing his availability.

Low, who, incidentally, is a superb typographer, sets the type for the message himself and runs off the sheets on his own hand-powered printing press. He initiated the project less than two years ago, after he had resigned from an art instructorship at the University of Indiana and came east to earn his living as a freelance advertising artist.
He quickly found that he was unable to take the emotional punishment that waiting around in advertising agency ante-rooms entailed and he withdrew to the seclusion of his home where he evolved his method of self-promotion by mail.

Cattlebrands are a fascinating form of graphic Americana which have rarely, if ever, been considered from the standpoint of design. They represent a colorful pictorial language in which the American cowboy has expressed himself with characteristic Western pungency and humor.

The practice of branding cattle goes back to ancient Egyptian times, but the first cattlebrand in America belonged to Hernando Cortez, the Spanish Conquistador, who brought a few head of steer and a branding iron to the New World in 1540. His brand was a design of three crosses, representing the Holy Trinity. Many of the cattlebrands reproduced in the following insert have been in use on the Western range for more than one hundred years, and with practice, the greenest tenderfoot can learn to "read" these brands even though he may never get closer to a round-up than a Hopalong Cassidy telecast.

A brand usually consists of a letter, numeral, character or symbol, or a combination of one or any of these elements. Brands are read from left to right. If the characters are placed on top of one another, they are read downward. A letter that is slightly tilted is "tumbling." A letter that is lying down on its side or back is "lazy." A letter that is stretched out and has a curving flare on top is "running." A letter with wings—a dash at the left and a dash at the right on top—is "flying." A letter placed so that the bottom of it touches the inside of a curve is "rocking." Originally, many brands grew out of personal naives. Rancher T. E. Money's brand was the $ sign, Peter Coffin's brand was a P in a pine-box. The famous 6666 brand (Four-Six) in Texas was coined when its owner won his grubstake in a poker game. His winning handheld four sixes. Still other brands were designed from the shapes of everyday objects observed on the range—stirrups, saddles, dippers, guns, the sun and moon, etc., many of them showing a striking use of imagery and symbolism.

One day in 1787, in his printing shop in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin received a specimen sheet of typefaces from Giambattista Bodoni of Parma, Italy. This was the first time that Franklin had seen the work of the man considered Europe's foremost type designer and printer, and he was greatly impressed.

"I have had the great pleasure of receiving and perusing your excellent "Essai des Characteres de L'Imprimere," he wrote Bodoni. It is one of the most beautiful that Art has hitherto produced. As the first American to go on record in appreciation of the Bodoni typeface, sage old Ben Franklin pioneered a trend in U. S. typography, which was to have far-reaching effect on the design of printed matter in our time.

Portfolio was not conceived as a magazine in the conventional sense, but as a radical editorial experiment. Published between 1950 and 1951, it functioned as an open laboratory in which photography, typography, illustration, and sequencing were treated as a single expressive system rather than as separate disciplines.

Under the direction of Alexey Brodovitch, each issue rejected fixed layouts, recurring formats, and commercial constraints. Pages were assembled through contrast, rhythm, and interruption, allowing images and text to interact dynamically across spreads. White space, scale shifts, and abrupt visual transitions became active elements of meaning rather than neutral containers.

Produced without advertising and printed in limited numbers, Portfolio was financially unsustainable but intellectually decisive. Only three issues were released, yet their influence proved disproportionate: the magazine established a new model of editorial authorship, redefining the role of the art director as both editor and composer of visual narratives.

Seen today as a continuous sequence rather than a set of iconic pages, Portfolio remains a foundational document of modern editorial design.

In his never-ending search for new ways of presenting the too-familiar, the experimental graphic artist has been given a new tool from an unexpected quarter—the electronics laboratory.

Recently, the Battelle Memorial Institute of Columbus, Ohio, an organization dealing in basic scientific research, began inviting selected representatives of the photographic world to a series of demonstrations of a new reproduction medium of their development, which they called Xerography, the first revolutionary development in rendering a photographic image since Daguerre coated his first plate 110 years earlier. It substitutes an electrically charged plate for the film now in use.
The Battelle demonstrator placed an ordinary plate holder into the back of a view camera. He made his exposure and disappeared with his holder into the darkroom. The onlookers settled down for a thirty-minute wait, but after one minute, the demonstrator returned, waving a dry, finished print.

Saul Steinberg, a Rumanian-born ex-architect, is one of the few U.S. cartoonists who also happens to be an artist at his work. When the Museum of Modern Art hung an exhibit of his drawings, one newspaper reviewer questioned the show with an article entitled "It's Funny—But Is It Art"?

But Steinberg's admirers seem to include most persons who have seen his drawings in The New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, Town and Country, and other magazines; this was like asking if Charlie Chaplin could be taken seriously as a social critic because he wears baggy pants and crooked shoes.
Steinberg is compared with Chaplin because although the mediums they operate are two different things—their comic technique springs from the same source. Steinberg eschews the written word as Chaplin eschews the spoken word and speaks only through the pantomime of his pen.

His strange, silent world is peopled with chinless, blank-faced men, beady-eyed women with monstrous headdresses, precocious animals, and weird architectural fantasies, all drawn in a thin, wiry line that often wanders into an embellishment of scrolls and flourishes as Steinberg pauses to extract the Freudian implications of a cluttered interior, the curl of a beard, or just a plain doodle. At other times, the economy of his line is amazing, as in his drawing of the little man walking against a rain of empty clefs on a music sheet.

Reproduced here are eight pages of Steinberg drawings from his unpublished private sketchbooks.

Saul Steinberg, a Rumanian-born ex-architect, is one of the few U.S. cartoonists who also happens to be an artist at his work. When the Museum of Modern Art hung an exhibit of his drawings, one newspaper reviewer questioned the show with an article entitled "It's Funny—But Is It Art"?