Mirko Ilić: Fist to Face
From the Publisher. Mirko Ilić has a reputation as a rebel, but his iconoclasm is matched with tremendous gifts as an illustrator, a designer, and an educator. Ilić is a visionary and a leading voice of visual culture across disciplines and continents.
This visual biography of one of the most prolific and distinguished designers of the last half century traces Ilić’s formative years as a precocious youth in Yugoslavia during the Communist-bloc era; his early illustrations for comic books and magazines; and his eventual move to the United States, where he quickly achieved notoriety as the art director of Time magazine’s international edition and the New York Times’ op-ed pages. As a designer, Ilić has constantly pushed his craft to new limits, experimenting and reinventing himself at every turn.
Throughout his illustrious career, Ilić has collaborated with design luminaries like Steven Heller and Milton Glaser. He has designed album covers for Rage Against the Machine, created film titles for You’ve Got Mail, and written or designed a number of books, including Genius Moves, The Design of Dissent, The Anatomy of Design, and Stop Think Go Do.
He has taught advanced design classes at Cooper Union with Milton Glaser and now teaches illustration at the School of Visual Arts. His studio, Mirko Ilić Corp., has received awards from the Society of Illustrators, the Society of Publication Designers, the Art Directors Club, I.D., Print, and HOW.
Substantial monographs about contemporary designers don’t come along that often and this one about Mirko Ilić bursts at the seams with the man’s energy, generosity, loquacity and sense of danger. Yugoslavia—as it was then—was never going to be big enough to contain him and he went on to take New York by storm with op-ed illustrations and design concepts of uncompromising directness, and no inhibiting qualms about good taste. Croatian writer Dejan Kršić does a great job of relating the story and the book is packed with the provocative, high-octane images that make Ilić one of a kind.
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