Episode 118: Excelsior!

With Jessica settling in Los Angeles for her residency at Caltech, Michael describes the 19th-century broadside designed by Brooklyn artist Rusty Zimmerman that New York governor Andrew Cuomo commissioned for his annual State of the State address:

While some designers mocked the governor for his attraction to archaic visual styles. Michael adds that designers have always needed good content strategists, even though they didn’t call them that, to tell effective stories:

If you were a muralist, you could hire someone to do the thematic narrative for your mural, to give you a brief in a way for the mural. And that person would say, “OK, the mural should contain a boat called the Ship of State, navigating around the Reefs of Inequity and it headed towards the Summit of Prosperity.” And that was actually a job you could have: to be the thematic narrative development subconsultant. 

And so one of the problems is, I don’t think Cuomo had the best dramatic narrative subconsultant for this particular document.

Also mentioned this week:

• Nick Reisman State of Politics, A Visual Representation of New York in 2020, as designed by Cuomo, 
• Leonard Cohen, Democracy
• Harvard Map Collection, Embellishing the Map: How Cartographers Confronted Empty Spaces (2015)
• History.com on William Jennings Bryan
• Daniel Okrent, Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center (2003)
• Andrew Cushing’s fake startup Twitter thread; Hyperakt helps out with fake branding
• Rick Poynor, Design Observer, Vaughan Oliver entry in A Dictionary of Surrealism and the Graphic Image (2013)
• Creative Review, Remembering Vaughan Oliver, 
• Deborah Solomon, New York Times, John Baldessari, An Artist In A Class By Himself, 
• ARTnews, Was John Baldessari the 20th Century Most Important Art Professor?, 
• New York Times, Sonny Mehta, Venerable Knopf Publisher, Is Dead at 72
• Madhulika Sikka, The Washington Post, Sonny Mehta Brought His Impeccable Taste and Keen Commercial Instincts to the World of Books, 

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