Anatomy of Design

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ANATOMY OF DESIGN

Elaborate paper cutouts have a long history, if not in the highest echelons of art

then in the quotidian province of folk art. In colonial America, paper silhouettes

were a common portrait medium; throughout Mexico, fanciful cutout scenes are

ubiquitously hung during Day of the Dead celebrations; and in the People's

Republic of China, didactic tableaux were used as political propaganda during the

Cultural Revolution. Before the computer, these shadow pictures were laboriously

hand-rendered, usually by skilled craftpersons, for mass consumption (and also

served as découpage scrap for erstwhile amateurs); today they are far more

easily, though no less intricately, fabricated using laser technology.

Despite (or probably because) it can be so excessively decorative, the

cutout art form has been currently revived by a young generation of designers

who have instigated a new (retro) style of ornament and decoration. The 2004

cover of London-based

Amelia's magazine, an alternative culture journal known

for its tactile covers (including one of scratch-and-sniff material) and removable

inserts, is a fanciful laser cutout glued to a blank undersheet and designed so

it can be detached and framed as a piece of art. In addition to the forest green

Arthur Rackhamesque tableau of pixie characters frolicking in bramble and vines,

each cover also includes a removable cutlass pendant by either Tatty Devine or

Reino Lehtonen-Riley nestled in an egg-shaped hole cut into the pages of the

magazine and the cover, sitting in a nest made of laser-cut twigs. Produced in

a limited edition of two thousand, the magazine is an object as well as virtual

gallery drawing on a number of special effect graphic techniques.

Amelia's die-cut bird's nest is not unique, nor is the insertion of a

surprise object-though a pendant is a novel notion (and not easy to do, either).

Die-cuts on book and record covers are fairly common; even so, like the most

familiar magic trick, they always have a special allure. Die-cuts not only give

the illusion of three dimensions, they actually reveal hidden graphic secrets.

Many are visual puns that serve a conceptual idea. Some are quite intricate,

with varied shapes and multiple layers of visual information, while others are

more basic. Of the latter, the die-cut hole on the cover of Seymour Chwast's

indie magazine

The Nose is the window/door revealing a comical man twirling in

a rinse cycle. The die-cut hole in the middle of Art Chantry's CD cover for The

Thrown Ups, which is actually the notched fastener on which the compact disk is

attached, also seconds as a woman's nipple. The hole in Curious Boym, a

monograph on the industrial designers Constantine and Laurene Boym, is a

spotlight on one of their furniture designs.

Die-cuts are not merely symbolic windows but real openings that allow

designers to expand their viewer's visual experience. While the technique was

introduced for commercial reasons beginning sometime in the late nineteenth

century, applied mostly to early children's books, and only later used for food

and sundry packages, it was also adopted by modern artists. The

Dadaist/surrealist Max Ernst designed a cover and back cover for the 1942

surrealist magazine

VVV in the shape of a woman's torso under which was

glued a piece of metal mesh fence through which was visible an imprisoned

female form. The cover accomplished an artistic context free from the

constraints of the bottom line. Nonetheless, this method of making graphic art

statements has influenced a score of commercial and semicommercial

independent magazines, from Alexey Brodovitch and Frank Zachary's 1949

Portfolio to Art Spiegelman and François Mouly's 1989 Raw to Joe Holzman's

2000 Nest—with others in between.

Amelia's is marketed to a small, targeted audience willing to pay the

additional price for ambitious production conceits and objectness. But

increasingly the interest in—indeed, the market for—constructed magazines is

on the rise. As long as the technology is available to make the old new, the

laborious easy, and the expensive less costly, designers continue to make the

effects happen.

Amelia's Magazine

Publisher/Editor/Art Director: Amelia Gregory

2004 Amelia's Magazine, magazine

ad: Amelia Gregory d: Scott Bendall, Asger Bruun Jakobsen

Published and edited by Amelia Gregory, London-based Amelia’s Magazine is an alternative

culture journal known for it’s tactile covers and removable inserts. Cover design on this

piece is by Rob Ryan.

Silhouettes and papercuts

Hole on the cover

Hidden treasures

Holes through pages