Humor

At the dawn of the automobile age, Americans’ predilection for wanderlust prompted a new wave of inventive entrepreneurs to cater to this new mode of transportation. Starting in the 1920s, attention-grabbing buildings began to appear that would draw in passing drivers for snacks, provisions, souvenirs, or a quick meal. The architectural establishment of the day dismissed these roadside buildings as “monstrosities”.

Yet, they flourished, especially along America’s Sunbelt, and in particular, in Southern California, as proprietors indulged their creative impulses in the form of giant, eccentric constructions — from owls, dolls, pigs, and ships, to coffee pots and fruit. Their symbolic intent was guileless, yet they were marginalized by history. But, over the past 40 years, California’s architectural anomalies have regained their integrity, and are now being celebrated in this freshly revised compendium of buildings, California Crazy.

Brimming with the best examples of this architectural genre, California Crazy includes essays exploring the influences that fostered the nascent architectural movement, as well as identifying the unconventional landscapes and attitudes found on Los Angeles and Hollywood roadsides which allowed these buildings to flourish in profusion.

In addition, California Crazy features David Gebhard’s definitive essay, which defined this vernacular movement almost forty years ago. The California Crazy concept is expanded to include domestic architecture, eccentric signage, and the automobile as a fanciful object.

Leading graphic designer Yang Liu brings the way we were face to face with the way we are. Reissued in four languages, Today meets Yesterday deploys vivid pictogram pairings to explore the transformations, and the challenges, of our ever-evolving world.

Liu has made her name with a combination of graphic precision and incisive observation of behavior patterns. In Today meets Yesterday, her eye for tastes and trends takes ambitious scope, juxtaposing past with present to explore fundamental shifts in society. Along the way, we encounter the tussle between competing ideologies, historic and current global dangers, our interaction with the environment, and the wholesale impact of technology on our ways of living, learning, and loving, from online retail to the rise of the “smombie.”

With an eye on everything from geopolitics to concentration spans, Liu’s panorama incorporates the details of daily experience as much as the momentous happenings in history. Through Facebook, food waste, collectivism, and much more, Today meets Yesterday casts the familiar situation in a crisp and discerning light, bringing fresh awareness, as well as some ironies, to who we are and where we came from.

As children, the world is our playground, our parents are both almighty heroes and merciless adversaries, and our homes are the territories where big and small battle for dominance. As adults, we lament the innocence, boundless wonder, and simple pleasures of childhood. In this fourth installment of Yang Liu’s best-selling pictogram series, the award-winning designer encapsulates the delights and debacles of family life with her characteristic measure of wit. Combining minimal infographics with incisive and touching observations about human nature, the crisp pictorials draw upon Liu’s Chinese heritage; as in traditional calligraphy, the simpler the depiction, the deeper-seated the truth that is expressed. With graphic precision, Big meets Little takes on the daily happenings of a family home by visually pairing the perspectives of grown-ups and our tiny counterparts. Simultaneously humorous and honest, Liu distills the parenting narrative into bite-sized, insightful lessons. Over 128 pages, the clothbound volume cleverly contrasts the reality of parenthood with the glossy family portraits we’re often sold—though not without a dose of tongue-in-cheek humor.

As children, the world is our playground, our parents are both almighty heroes and merciless adversaries, and our homes are the territories where big and small battle for dominance. As adults, we lament the innocence, boundless wonder, and simple pleasures of childhood. In this fourth installment of Yang Liu’s best-selling pictogram series, the award-winning designer encapsulates the delights and debacles of family life with her characteristic measure of wit. Combining minimal infographics with incisive and touching observations about human nature, the crisp pictorials draw upon Liu’s Chinese heritage; as in traditional calligraphy, the simpler the depiction, the deeper-seated the truth that is expressed. With graphic precision, Big meets Little takes on the daily happenings of a family home by visually pairing the perspectives of grown-ups and our tiny counterparts. Simultaneously humorous and honest, Liu distills the parenting narrative into bite-sized, insightful lessons. Over 128 pages, the clothbound volume cleverly contrasts the reality of parenthood with the glossy family portraits we’re often sold—though not without a dose of tongue-in-cheek humor.