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kottke.org posts about graphic art

Sato San, duct tape typographer

Tokyo subway's humble duct-tape typographer

Lovely story of a Tokyo security guard who’s enhancing his guidance work through constructions sites with some fantastic custom made signage. He crafts those crisp and distinctive signs with… duct tape and a knife! Having no formal training in graphic design, he managed to create a style so noticeable and appreciated that it is now “highly regarded by designers and curators” and is even known as “Shuetsu Sans.”

The man in question, Shuetsu Sato, also published an instructional book and has fans on Instagram, spotting and sharing his work!

Tokyo subway's humble duct-tape typographer


Orson Welles as a Graphic Artist

There are so many sides to Orson Welles that one of them is bound to get overlooked. Welles was a groundbreaking screen and voice actor, screenwriter, film director, radio producer, etc., etc. He was also a remarkable visual artist, which comes through in his films but is often attributed away to his great collaborators like cinematographer Gregg Toland. Even as a child, teen, and very young man, Welles was almost ruined by the fact that everything he did, he seemed to do so much better than the people around him. He was an undiscriminating prodigy, which is a very dangerous thing to be.

A new documentary by Mark Cousins, The Eyes of Orson Welles, focuses on Welles’s output in drawing, sketching, painting. It tries to recenter visual art as an essential, not accidental part of Welles’s work, and at the same time use it as a pathway to try to understand him as a person and artist.

I haven’t seen this documentary, but I’m very excited about it. Welles is one of those figures whose genius in his work almost obscures him; any new route in is welcome. It also doesn’t feel like a typical hagiographic documentary; it feels appropriately irreverent and experimental, two things which Welles almost was.