Leon Golub: Paintings catalog cover and poster

The crop-and-repeat move is a technique that modernist typographers keep coming back to since the late 1960s. Perhaps the most striking execution – if you want to fill an entire page with type – is the crop-and-repeat that starts from both the top and bottom and ends with a complete title in the center. So far, our earliest example of this on Fonts In Use is Mencken by Carl Bode, designed by George Lenox in 1969. This exhibition catalog cover by Jacqueline Casey is the second. Once you open the wrapper to reveal the back cover, you see Casey took the technique even further, continuing the repeat in the lateral direction.

A profile of Casey from Display, where I just acquired this item for Letterform Archive’s collection:

Casey headed MIT’s Office of Design Services from 1955 to 1989 where she and her colleagues played a critical role in popularizing functional Modernism and the International Typographic Style in the USA. “My work combines two cultures: The American interest in visual metaphor on the one hand, and the Swiss fascination with planning, fastidiousness, and control over technical execution on the other.”

She designed the poster (see last image) for this exhibition of which she said: “Golub used strong, sweeping, horizontal brushstrokes. I wanted the type to respond to his technique and the colors to his sober subject matter.”