Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots: California and Graphic Design, 1936-1986

Unbeige

Stephanie Murg

To understand the shape-shifting nature of the California design scene, look no further than earthquakes, mudslides, fires, and riots. These natural and manmade disasters endemic to the Left Coast provide the cataclysmic title of a forthcoming book by Louise Sandhaus.

San Diego Magazine

Angela Carone

Sandhaus believes that designers took visual risks because the ground and culture was always shifting. This is the first collection celebrating distinctive, 20th-century graphic design coming out of California.

Metropolis Magazine

Komal Sharma

This book may not be a history lesson, but it's quite the trip, capturing the california state of mind. It has the classics, the fetishized, and the radical, but also the anonymous, the little known, and the graphic designs that were ahead of their time.

scpr.org

David Kipen

A book that explores The Golden State, not through words, but in graphics."Earthquakes! Mudslides! Fires! and Riots!: California Graphic Design, 1936-1986," by designer Louise Sandhaus. It isn't just a coffee table book -- it's a 'lap' book -- you can't leave it on the coffee table no matter how hard you try.

Grain Edit

The Editors

Edited and designed by graphic designer Louise Sandhaus, this raucous gathering of smart, offbeat, groundbreaking graphic design from the “Left Coast” will amaze readers with its breadth and richness.

The New York Times Book Review

Steven Heller

This sweeping attempt at a history of such an unsung hot spot for design exuberance may not be definitive. But it’s fun.

Designers & Books

The Editors

From the Publisher. Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots is the first publication to capture the enormous body of distinctive and visually ecstatic graphic design that emanated from this great state throughout most of the twentieth century. Edited and designed by graphic designer Louise Sandhaus, this raucous gathering of smart, offbeat, groundbreaking graphic design from the “Left Coast” will amaze readers with its breadth and richness. The fruit of more than a decade of research, the volume is arranged in four sections: “Sunbaked Modernism,” “Industry and the Indies,” “60s Alt 60s” and “California Girls.” Included are books and magazines designed by Merle Armitage, Alvin Lustig, Herbert Matter and Sheila Levrant DeBretteville; posters for Disneyland, Cream and Herman Miller; Marget Larsen’s print ads for Joseph Magnin; title cards or title sequences for Lassie, The Smothers Brothers and other hit TV shows; title sequences for films from Taxi Driver to Tron; motion graphics from the earliest animated abstractions to the classic 7-Up “Bubbles” ad and Atari video games; immersive live shows of Bill Ham and Single Wing Turquoise Bird; architectural supergraphics by Barbara Stauffacher Solomon and Alexander Girard; print and environmental designs by Gere Kavanaugh and Deborah Sussman; and much, much more. With contributions by Denise Gonzales Crisp, Lorraine Wild, Michael Worthington.

KCRW, Design & Architecture

Frances Anderton

Worth buying for the cover alone, Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires and Riots: California & Graphic Design 1936 – 1986 recalls a time when orange “was rarely utilized by serious graphic designers east of the Rockies.” Designer and CalArts professor Louise Sandhaus spent ten years on this subjective, sumptuous opus about California graphic design in the pre- and post-war years of the 20th century. 400 eye-popping pages show work of known and lesser-known California designers (including Merle Armitage, Alvin Lustig, Herbert Matter, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville, April Greiman and Deborah Sussman). Michael Worthington, Lorraine Wild and Denise Gonzales Crisp contribute illuminating essays.

The New York Times, Home Section

Alexandra Lange

And the same can be said of the new book “Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots: California Graphic Design, 1936-1986” (Metropolis Books, $55), written and designed by Louise Sandhaus, 59, a graphic designer. As she writes in her introduction, she chose not to honor text over graphics, and she wasn’t interested in being definitive. Rather, looking through archives and talking to makers, she asked questions like, “Is this historically important work, versus is this fabulous and distinctive and sooooooo California?” The pieces in the book range in mood from the calm abstraction of John Follis’s “Arts & Architecture” magazine covers to the pixelated trips in David Theurer’s “I, Robot” Atari game.

The Guardian

Corrine Jones

A gorgeous new book highlights Californian designs for posters, books, magazines, record covers and more, over a 50-year period. “So what makes California design deserving of special attention?” asks the book’s editor, Louise Sandhaus, a graphic designer. “California has no terra firma – earthquakes, mudslides, fires and the occasional civil uprising cause incessant upheaval and change… Without solid ground, tradition lacks secure footing; old rules go out the door and new motivations rush in, resulting in new and vibrant forms.”

itsnicethat.com

Rob Alderson

As you’d expect this is a bright, colourful and celebratory book but there’s some impressively (and refreshingly) unpretentious design writing here too.

Slate

Kristin Hohenadel

The vibrantly designed book explores the transformation of European traditions in California; the culture of screen graphics, from film titles to video games; the influential women who shaped 20th-century design in California; and 1960s California graphic design.

fastcodesign.com

Carey Dunne

The book showcases more than 250 examples of groundbreaking graphic design projects from the left coast in the mid-20th century.

The Architect's Newspaper

Jeremy Mende

Earthquakes is a deeply informative and visually rewarding review of a place and time largely overlooked by more standardized histories. Its seismic effect will be two-fold: First, it firmly establishes the impact of California’s contribution to the development of an American modernism; and second, it reinforces the postmodern form of the “eccentric history”—a hybrid of personal experience and historical fact, à la Reyner Banham—as perhaps the only way to honor the multiplicities that we inadequately file under the title “modernism.”

Gizmodo

Alissa Walker

The book features exuberant, experimental specimens from hundreds of designers, splayed out across the pages with bright fluorescent pink and orange gradients, like the late summer sun sinking over the Pacific. And like the independent, free-spirited work that fills the pages, this is Sandhaus' personal take on the topic.

Print Magazine

Ellen Shapiro

Earthquakes, Mudslides is off the Richter Scale. Way more than a book, it’s building a community.

Santa Barbara Magazine

L. D. Porter

IT’S THE MUST-HAVE BOOK OF THE YEAR: Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires & Riots: California & Graphic Design 1936-1986 (Metropolis, $55, chaucersbooks.com) written by Ojai resident/CalArts professor/designer Louise Sanhaus, lsd-studio.net. Ten years in the making, the 415-page tome is an eclectic romp through 50 years of California graphic design, including Saul Bass’s groundbreaking movie titles for Otto Preminger’s Man with the Golden Arm, psychedelic rock concert posters, the Whole Earth Catalog, and John Van Hamersveld’s iconic poster for the ’60s surf documentary The Endless Summer—an enduring image of the California dream.

Los Angeles Review of Books

Lyra Kilston

Wild’s observation, like many others in this captivating, dayglo-jacketed book, celebrates a visual history of an environment that seems to counter the stringent, sometimes monotone rules of both life and design.

Azure

Henry Tyminski

This colourful collection of Californian graphic art is as dramatic, mellow and full of twists as a scenic drive down the Pacific coast. As the title suggests, the state's graphic design is affected by its nervous history with its lively environment, which provides fertile soil for creativity and offbeat ideas.

Eye 90

Abbott Miller

Sandhaus has created a book worthy of its topic, with an engaging and provocative eye.

The Design Observer Group

Michael Bierut

The essential record of America’s most American design movement, in a form that perfectly matches its content.

Design Observer

Michael Bierut

The essential record of America's most American design movement, in a form that perfectly matches its content.

The Design Observer Group

Adrian Shaughnessy

A wonderfully eclectic, undogmatic, and free-wheeling crash zoom through a fertile era of exuberant and iconoclastic American visual expression.