Recently completed: An interactive annual report website for the world’s largest asset manager.

Click image to visit site

Features: JQuery stock ticker, slideshow and asymmetrical background images

Firm: Decker Design

These advertising supplements targeted three segments of the telecom industry. A. Consumers—Access to communications everywhere, every time. B. Operators—Global standards and compliance among industry players. C. Networks—Convergence of data, video and voice. Chalk illustrations by Michael Aron. client: Business Week

Herb Lubalin was my teacher, mentor, and boss. He was virtually mute, ambidextrous, and amazingly talented.

Early Herb Lubalin Design Studio Sign

I rescued this brass sign from the trash when I worked there back in the 1980s. Read his brief biography here. My favorite memory is driving around with him in his fantastic Volvo P1800 ES, a tour de force of automotive design. Herb definitely had style. This sign definitely is the work of Tom Carnase, and you can see a resemblance to the New York Magazine logo he modified years later.

Spring arrived in New York and a lazy walk down to Chinatown and Little Italy yielded a trove of type treasures.

Moe's Meat Market, Nolita, NYC

I’m glad that the Moe’s Meat Market sign is still hanging, even though you can only buy rather uninspired art within.

Bess, NYC

Bess N.Y.C., in the shadow of the Puck Building, sells all sorts of provocative clothing and artifacts.

Tacombi, Elizabeth Street, NYC

Tacombi is a faux Mexican vintage sign inside the wonderfully hip Fonda Nolita on Elizabeth Street. They really nailed the spirit of roadside taco stand typography.

Peking Duck, Lafayette Street, NYC

Peking Duck is screen printed on glass in Agency Gothic, designed by Morris Fuller Benton in 1932. It appears on the window at the Lafayette Street restaurant Chinatown.

Chinatown Sign

I really am fond of the untrained lettering artist who finds novel ways to draw common letterforms. I’m not sure why they put the bar across the top of the “N” but it works just fine. Perhaps it is a funny joke in Chinese?

A recent visit to the Museum of Modern Art yielded this wonderful piece I’d never seen before. “Bleu O Noir” by Jacques Villeglé, Done in 1955. Paper on canvas.

He calls this art methodology “Ultra-Lettrist psychogeographical hypergraphics.” That’s awesome.

Jacques Villeglé, born Jacques Mahé de la Villeglé (1926, Quimper, Brittany) is a French mixed-media artist and affichiste famous for his alphabet with symbolic letters and decollage with ripped or lacerated posters. He builds posters in which one has been placed over another or others, and the top poster or posters have been ripped, revealing to a greater or lesser degree the poster or posters underneath. He is a member of the Nouveau Réalisme art group (1960–1963). His work has primarily focused on the anonymous and on the marginal remains of civilization.

Villeglé first started producing art in 1947 in Saint-Malo by collecting found objects (steel wires, bricks from Saint-Malo’s Atlantic retaining wall). In December 1949, he concentrated his work on ripped advertising posters from the street. Working with fellow artist Raymond Hains, Villeglé began to use collage and found/ripped posters from street advertisements in creating Ultra-Lettrist psychogeographical hypergraphics in the 1950s, and in June 1953, he published Hepérile Éclaté, a phonetic poem by Camille Bryen, which was made unreadable when read through strips of grooved glass made by Hains. In February 1954, Villeglé and Hains met the Lettrism poet François Dufrêne, and this latter introduced them to Yves Klein, Pierre Restany and Jean Tinguely. In 1958, Villeglé published an overview of his work on ripped posters, Des Réalités collectives, which is to a certain degree a prefiguration of the manifesto of the New Realism group (1960) which he joined at its inception.

Wikipedia provided the above text summary

This modernist package is one my favorite possessions. I purchased it for a few bucks at a flea market in Philadelphia.

Paul Rand El Producto cigar box

It was designed by the legendary Paul Rand and features a photogram on the cover—hence the title “Cigar Album.” It is made from cedar and wrapped in offset printed paper and had dividers inside blocking the cigars into compartments. The interior is bright red. I use it to hold pens and pencils. Not sure of the year. Looks to be mid-sixties? Man Ray or Laszlo Moholy-Nagy influenced no doubt. More on Rand here.

From Wikipedia: Among the accolades Rand received were those of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy:

“Among these young Americans it seems to be that Paul Rand is one of the best and most capable [. . .] He is a painter, lecturer, industrial designer, [and] advertising artist who draws his knowledge and creativeness from the resources of this country. He is an idealist and a realist, using the language of the poet and business man. He thinks in terms of need and function. He is able to analyze his problems but his fantasy is boundless.”

—Heller, Steven. “Thoughts on Rand.” Print, May–June 1997

Davidson Dawson & Clark LLP website

As part of a larger rebranding program, we produced a new website for Davidson Dawson & Clark LLP, the metropolitan area’s largest trusts & estates boutique. Their offices are located in New York and Connecticut, along scenic Long Island Sound. Many of the partners are avid sailors—hence the nautical art on the site and adorning their offices. The site features a custom content management system so the client can add and edit pages using a standard web browser. We built an easy-to-use SEO input panel so that each page has well-optimized metadata. The typography on the site is of particular note—we are using Adobe Caslon Pro and the rendering engine Typekit. Say goodbye to boring web fonts.

Browse our other law firm website designs.

Photography by Michael Paras, programming by Reconstrukt

Apple had done it again. They created software for the creation of iBooks that’s easy to use and produces excellent results. We tried it out the day it was released and found it to be an excellent alternative to the more complex Adobe products. It’s designed for the textbook market, but obviously it can generate iPad-friendly projects of any type.

The iBooks Author interface is simple and intuitive

Download our first test here:

deckerdesign.ibooks

Instructions: Download the file (a .zip file) then uncompress it. To view the book on your iPad, make sure you have the latest free iBooks 2 app and iOS 5, and do the following:

Drag the book file (with the extension .ibooks) to the iTunes window and sync the book to your iPad. For more information, see iTunes Help.

Web design and development is a massively time consuming and complex process. From initial concept, to wireframes, to functional spec, to layered psd files, to database programming and population, testing, and launch. Then again, some clients just do not have the time. We did the whole project, including language translator in one weekend. Here’s how…

First of all we develop in WordPress, which streamlines the process tremendously. The client provided all art and copy. That helps. We registered the domain and set up the hosting Friday night. We designed the logo, site layout and processed the photos on Saturday. We installed the Thesis theme on to the server, customized the CSS, then installed a few essential plugins including WP Touch, which converts our pages into iPhone style navigation for mobile users. The custom CSS includes use of one of Google’s new web fonts, Cardo—which looks like Garamond. Say goodbye to Georgia and Arial. We populated the pages with text and metadata, set up Google Analytics, added photos to the NextGen Gallery plugin, built the complex application forms using Fast Secure Contact Forms plugin, and then registered with all of the major search engines. By Monday the site was tested and visible to the search engines.

Visit the site and check out the amazing language translator