Mick and Graphic Design

"Beauty Through Structure..."

Those words, excerpted from a quote from architect Minoru Yamasaki, in describing what he hoped to achieve in a certain building, resounded within me when I first read them, in no small way due to their similarity to "Peace Through Understanding", the ironic slogan of the 1964 World's Fair.

If "Beauty Through Structure" is a worthy goal, why not "Structure Through Beauty" as well? At any rate, it's what I'm attempting here. And I have to confess a weakness for important-sounding yet meaningless catch-phrases, and inverted ones at that ...

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A little history: back at the dawn of the Reagan era, The Multiethnic Foundation, a band of Staten Island-based 'merry pranksters', took their place among the left-leaning insurgency of the time. Embracing the post-Punk and New Wave ethic of DIY music and media to propagandize The Message, the MEF (and its Pop-Punk offspring, The Ethniks) self-published numerous tracts and pamphlets "dedicated to a greater pan-cultural understanding".

My own design sensibility was formed while toiling for the Foundation, and I'll be forever in its debt...