Designed by the influential Herb Lubalin, this magazine was the source of inspiration for students and professionals alike back then. As starving students, we couldn’t afford to buy CA or Graphis, but following our visit to New York, U&lc arrived every few months in our mailboxes for free! As an educational tool, U&lc showed us how beautiful type could be. Lubalin was the master of illustrative typography, and he used each typeface’s unique curves and counterforms to great effect, long before the Cranbrook/Carson era came along and made it uncool to use classic ITC fonts like Benguiat or Avant Garde with their seemingly never-ending collection of joined letter combinations—you’d design a wordmark just around those ligatures sometimes, but never as well as Lubalin did.



After I graduated, and could afford to buy “real” design magazines, U&lc lost a bit of its lustre, but I still looked forward to each new issue until they mysteriously stopped in the late 1990s. I think that’s why it was such a treat to review U&lc: influencing design and typography, edited by U&lc’s last editor John Berry and featuring articles and recollections by Joyce Rutter Kaye, Rhonda Rubenstein (art director in 1995) and Steven Heller. I never knew what happened to the magazine in its latter years, and the full story is lovingly told here, as well as tracing the development of typography, and the technology that drove it, from the heydays of photo lettering which was why U&lc was first created in 1973, as a showcase for ITC’s exclusive fonts, through to its final years on the internet and as a smaller “glossy” publication in 1999.



A major part of U&lc’s charm was its original tabloid-size and the fact that it was printed on newsprint (that would of course be yellowed by the time it reached your mailbox). Luckily, the almost full-size spreads are reproduced with that yellowing intact! The range of design is incredible, from the obvious look and feel of the Lubalin years, followed by Bob Farber, Mo Lebowitz, and later Ellen Shapiro, Pentagram and a host of guest designers and design firms rose to the challenge of bringing the pages of U&lc to life. Leading edge designers and design firms were often featured, such as Erik Speikermann of Meta or American stars like Paul Rand. But it wasn’t only U&lc’s design and typography that made it special, it was the varied subject matter of its articles—everything from new technology to studies of flour sack labels from the 1800s to patterns on butterfly wings—if it could be made visually interesting, or involved type, it was worthy of appearing on the pages of U&lc. Well over 100 of the best spreads are reproduced in the book, as well as complete listings of the contents of every issue, and biographies on all the designers who graced its masthead. Flipping through the pages, you are captured by the beauty of the typefaces (even ugly fonts looked great in U&lc!), the inspirational design, the images and of course, the text—you want to be able to turn the page and read the rest of the article!



The relevance of U&lc to designers and students today cannot be underestimated. U&lc showed how typography could be used as an art form to facilitate communication and convey ideas. Lubalin and his predessesors often did it by hand or with photo-lettering, whereas today we can use Illustrator and Photoshop. But the goal is the same, to create design that has emotion and power. The tools have evolved but the ingredients are the same—typefaces and the letterforms.



U&lc: influencing design and typography is a must-have to be added to the shelf of all type aficionados and students of design. Edited by John D. Berry. Hardcover, full colour throughout, 192-pages, 9.5” x 13.125”. Available for US$55 from Mark Batty Publisher in New York. www.markbattypublisher.com

Reviewed by Matt Warburton FGDC