Those with graphic inclinations might enjoy a couple of local shows: Matt Liddle, graphic design instructor at Western Carolina University, is currently featured on the walls of Sylva’s City Lights Café, and over at the university’s Fine Art Museum a show called “Boundless: Selections from the Book Arts Collection” is up until later in the summer.

Here’s a description from the school:

“Boundless” explores a wide variety of formats and structures of the “artist book,” a synthesis of form and content that provides a bridge between the traditional book and contemporary art. This exhibit includes a variety of artists, including noted book artists such as Joni Mabe and Dieter Roth as well unique books by photographers, sculptors and painters such as Ed Ruscha. Visitors are encouraged to handle a select grouping of tactile books where a viewer’s actions are required to complete the aesthetic idea.

Visit the museum’s website here.

In addition, Martin DeWitt, that museum’s retired Director, just opened a show of his recent works at the Oconaluftee Center in Cherokee. It’ll run through May 28. More information is available at 828.497.3945.

I’d fully planned to be a fly on the wall last week when Sylva photographer Terri Clark and Tuckasegee Reader co-publisher Giles Morris interviewed and photographed Sylva basketball star Jackson Simmons last week. I couldn’t make it, but the results were really nice all the way around.

Here’s our lead image from the story:

Read the piece and view Clark’s photos at the Tuckasegee Reader, here.

Today’s Facebook Trump-for-president parody and a recent conversation with City Lights Bookstore‘s Eon Alden about his profile dawg, jostled up my shine for Plakatstil – Poster Style – a century-old style of commercial illustration with German origins.

The sachplakat – object poster – was singular for its minimalism and bold interplay of color and pattern, and would influence design for decades forward. I found my fondness for this type of minimalism in the eighties, in an embarrassing-but-brief infatuation the art of Patrick Nagle.

Lucian Bernhard was one of Plakatstil’s main names. Here are some samples of the style, followed by Eon’s dog, and a fine, fine candidate:

Waynesville’s Charles Mills is surely one of the western mountain’s most talented illustrators and designers. As such, he flies pretty far underneath radar, but he’s done quite a bit to help the Haywood Arts Regional Theater in Waynesville to reach some pretty high levels of success. He developed most all of their commercial design over the years, and lent his talent in many other ways.

But the purpose of this note isn’t to catalog those efforts, but to give a shout out to his Facebook profile image, which suits this design nerd just fine:

alsam Mountain Preserve is a high-end gated golf community with a stated ethic of environmental stewardship.

Some two-thirds of the 4,400-acre parcel is placed in a conservation easement, never to be developed, and administered by an independent not-for-profit trust. The remainder is developed with low-density goals in mind.

During a seven-year relationship, Corner Idea Company developed many facets of the community’s core identity, from visual concepts to primary copy; and was involved in the development of a broad range of advertising and promotional material.

Services: Concept development, copy writing, photography, imagery and illustration, art direction, graphic design, advertising concept development.