{"id":10545,"date":"2025-11-24T11:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-24T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rutha.org\/?p=10545"},"modified":"2025-11-28T12:25:16","modified_gmt":"2025-11-28T12:25:16","slug":"the-daily-heller-eternal-lessons-for-life-as-designer-thinker-and-teacher","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rutha.org\/index.php\/2025\/11\/24\/the-daily-heller-eternal-lessons-for-life-as-designer-thinker-and-teacher\/","title":{"rendered":"The Daily Heller: Eternal Lessons for Life as Designer, Thinker and Teacher"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bruno Munari (1907\u20131998) was the sum of many parts. He was a second-generation Futurist painter; an advertising and editorial illustrator; a children\u2019s book author; a product, interior and furniture designer; a theorist, a historian, a teacher, a thinker and an instigator. His many books for kids are filled with inventive and interactive energy, and are inspiring for all ages. In addition to telling stories, his work would often explain how various phenomena were conceived and produced. His mastery of paper engineering, for instance, raised a bar for creative production. Dozens of his books have been republished by Corraini Editions in multiple languages over the years\u2014and now, at last, the first-ever English translation of Munari\u2019s Design and Visual Communication<\/a> <\/em>(Design e Comunicazione Visiva<\/em>, 1968) has just been published by Inventory Press<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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All images courtesy of Inventory Press.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Design and Visual Communication<\/em> is an essential guide to wedding design education and everyday life. Munari had served as visiting professor at Harvard\u2019s Carpenter Center, and this book is comprised of 50 lessons and class materials that describe life in America. It is a book about the future of art, architecture and design, and is conceived as a living volume intended \u201cas inspiration to current and future designers to push beyond the past, however recent, and develop new tools to see and understand tomorrow\u2019s world,\u201d write the editors at Inventory Press (which holds the rights for Munari\u2019s English editions).<\/p>\n

Working closely with professor and Munari scholar Jeffrey Schnapp<\/a>, this is the publisher\u2019s second English translation of Munari\u2019s seminal texts after the success of Fantasy<\/a><\/em> last year (originally Fantasia<\/em>, 1977).<\/p>\n

In an era when AI has become a hot potato in design education, this singular investigation and guide brings together conventional and \u201cadvanced\u201d values, what Munari refers to as rear-guard Avant Garde research. About the latter, he wrote, \u201cThe difference between Avant Gardism and research is that the former is subjective and the latter propelled forward by technical considerations.\u201d The latter\u2019s point of departure, he adds, \u201cis the pursuit of expressive efficacy from the standpoint of visual communication, irrespective of informational content of aesthetic canons, whether past or future.\u201d<\/p>\n

Munari\u2019s books always stimulate the intellectual processes. He covers patterns, textures, forms and a panoply of ingredients in every design, not in a schematic fashion but with intuition and through surprise. What a gift to have been among his Harvard students\u2014now re-gifted in this invaluably timeless series of visual and tactile observations. Through random and deliberate juxtapositions, Munari formulates languages and methods of design that serve any purpose (or no purpose at all). Designed in a paperback (pocket-sized) format, the black-and-white images, including drawings by Munari, create an inspiring experience that is accessible and functional\u2014two of Munari\u2019s favorite design outcomes.<\/p>\n

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The post The Daily Heller: Eternal Lessons for Life as Designer, Thinker and Teacher<\/a> appeared first on PRINT Magazine<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Bruno Munari (1907\u20131998) was the sum of many parts. He was a second-generation Futurist painter; an advertising and editorial illustrator; a children\u2019s book author; a … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":10547,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-architecture","latest_post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rutha.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rutha.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rutha.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rutha.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rutha.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10545"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/rutha.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10545\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10546,"href":"https:\/\/rutha.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10545\/revisions\/10546"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rutha.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rutha.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rutha.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rutha.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}