NEWWORK magazine

I love the posi/nega-tive interplay in these grabs from NEWWORK magazine.

Hendrik Werkman

Back in college—my first year in the design program at BYU—I discovered Hendrik Werkman. I totally and completely fell in love with his work. At the time I was working on a project in class where we were designing a trilogy book jackets. I was doing mine on Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions, and Slapstick. Something about Werkman’s prints and Vonnegut’s disjointed, (black-) humorous writing style seemed to me to be the perfect marriage of art and literature. So I sampled some of Werkman’s prints to produce these:


I was extremely proud of these pieces. I felt that I had really nailed the look I was conceptually hoping for. And then someone brought up the point of plagiarism. They questioned whether my use of Werkman’s prints was ethical. I argued that it was, that it was like being an art director and hiring an illustrator (that line is often fuzzy as a student). For the most part, I altered or added to everything I found, and on the back covers I attempted my own Werkman-styled illustrations. They turned out ok.
Looking back now, though—and realizing that Hendrik Werkman’s work was not some diamond in the rough that I thought I discovered, but rather an extremely influential designer in European Avant Garde design—I do feel that using his prints as I did may not have been the right thing to do. Maybe not as much on an ethical level because I wasn’t attempting to cut corners on the project or trying to pass someone else’s work off as my own. But, something about it doesn’t sit so well with me now. I should have played with wood blocks and ink of my own.
At any rate. That’s the story. I love Hendrik Werkman’s prints. I love Kurt Vonnegut’s books. And I really like the pieces that I coordinated. Vonnegut and Werkman make a good couple.

turntable by Lamosca

I really love this. I don’t know what else to say. It’s just perfect.
By Lamosca from Barcelona.