When it comes to the sports section of the newspaper, we're fair-weather readers: grab us with a juicy headline or a story related to one of the few sports we follow and we'll read the whole thing; otherwise, we're skipping right to Arts. Yesterday we were drawn in by a doozy of a Wimbledon infographic on the front page of the New York Times sports section. Floating over the above-the-fold headline, "Two More Seeds Fall, Clearing Way for Williamses," was a graphic depiction of the tournament's early round knockouts, featuring an info-studded strip of photos of all ten top-seeded women players.

For those who had failed to advance to the quarterfinals, the tiny photos were faded and showed faces contorted in anguish, while those remaining (seeds five through seven: Elena Dementieva and the sisters Williams) were grinning in saturated shots. More info was added below each photo, where the player's name and seed was topped by a series of boxes that represented how far she had progressed and where applicable, noting the player who had beaten her. Sure, there was a key explaining the box scheme and pointing out that for the first time since 1927, none of the four top-seeded women had advanced to the quarters, but the smart, eye-catching graphic spoke for itself. Click here for the full graphic.

As Frank Lloyd Wright once noted, "If you tilt the whole country sideways, Los Angeles is the place where everything loose will fall." Designer and CalArts faculty member Louise Sandhaus has sorted through the rubble to better understand how the city formed its unique graphic design style. The findings of her ongoing project, "Earthquakes, Mudslides, Fires, and Riots: California and Graphic Design," are on view through July 13 at L.A.'s Municipal Art Gallery, reports Hugh Hart in his recent piece in the Los Angeles Times.

"Half-seriously, I began thinking in my crackpot imagination that graphic designers here [in L.A.] don't stick to tradition because the ground isn't firm enough," Sandhaus told Hart of the idea she hatched five years ago for a book proposal. "These great shifts might be connected to disaster, but earthquakes, mudslides, fires, and civil uprisings also produce change." Bolstering her case in the exhibition are posters, magazine ads, book covers, and fonts dating from 1935 to 1985 and infused with surf, sun, and the occasional controlled substance. Among them are hand-drawn covers for the free newspaper Kalifower, such as the one above from January 1970, which goes along with this week's Bucky Fuller theme (the cover story notes that geodesic domes "are lately enjoying an unprecedented popularity for reasons of their essential usefulness").

Meanwhile, Hart adds a bit about the show that didn't make it into print, telling us that "one of the categories for [Sandhaus's] concept is 'Sun-Baked Modernism'—exemplified by the uber-elegant book cover designer Alvin Lustig." As if you needed another reason to look forward to Steven Heller's imminent book about him.

Graphic artist Alton Kelley, best known for the trippy concert posters and album covers he designed with creative partner Stanley "Mouse" Miller for bands such as the Grateful Dead, died on Sunday at the age of 67 (although The Washington Post insists he was 68). "Kelley had the unique ability to translate the music being played into amazing images that capture the spirit of who we were and what the music was all about," noted the Grateful Dead's Mickey Hart in a statement released this week.

With influences ranging from the Zig-Zag rolling papers logo to The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Kelley and Mouse created such memorable rock imagery as the Dead's skull and roses motif (and oodles of album covers, posters, book covers, and stickers) and iconic posters for concerts at San Francisco's Avalon Ballroom and Fillmore Auditorium. For more on Kelley, we point you to San Francisco Chronicle music critic Joel Selvin's well-composed obit, in which he points out Kelley's fondness for painting pinstripes on motorcycle gas tanks and habit of getting kicked out of the public library when on inspiration-seeking trips there with Mouse.

"Stanley and I had no idea what we were doing," Mr. Kelley told The Chronicle last year. "But we went ahead and looked at American Indian stuff, Chinese stuff, Art Nouveau, Art Deco, Modern, Bauhaus, whatever. We were stunned by what we found and what we were able to do. We had free rein to just go graphically crazy. Where before that, all advertising was pretty much just typeset with a photograph of something."

From Galleycat comes literary trendspotter Ron Hogan's musings on the rise of doodle-laden book covers. He points to the casually sketched or scribbled covers (larger photo here) of Joe Dunthorne's Submarine, Megan Hustad's How To Be Useful, and Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances, which we think feels positively Rauschenbergian, although that observation could very well be a manifestation of our mourning of the artist, who passed away earlier this week and whose 1969 work "Red Body" sold last night at Sotheby's for $993,000 (including buyer's premium), well above the high estimate of $700,000. Meanwhile, a doodly Dubuffet work made in 1975-76 soared over its high estimate of $2 million to sell for $3.6 million, including buyer's premium, while Jeff Koons' polychromed aluminum doodlebug ("Caterpillar Chains") sold for just under $6 million.

Last month, we told you about the new and improved Interview, as editorial directors Fabien Baron and Glenn O'Brien marshal the Warhol-founded magazine toward a full-scale revamp. Now we point you to the May issue to highlight Vince Aletti's interview with photographer and filmmaker Jerry Schatzberg, whose photos of the 1962 Paris couture shows are the subject of a book published last week by Rizzoli. Aletti talks with Schatzberg about the book, how he got into fashion photography, and his work with famed Vogue art director Alexander Liberman, before ending the Q&A with a question about the other Alex. Did Schatzberg ever work with Alexey Brodovitch (pictured at right), former art director at Harper's Bazaar?

No, but I took his course at the New School. He taught me something that I've always remembered: After we did the initial assignment, he contradicted what he said the first week, and I said, "Okay." The next week, he contradicted what he said the second week. We went through 10 weeks of contradicting, and I thought maybe he was drunk. At the end, he said, "You may think I've contradicted myself, but there's no one way to do anything."

Artist, designer, blogger, and AIGA/NY Fresh Dialogue speaker Andrew Kuo was on Charlie Rose earlier this year, and while that show isn't available online, Mr. Rose's website offers up the below pre-show interview with Kuo, filmed at his recent exhibition at 33 Bond Gallery in New York City. In the video, Kuo talks about art, living in his studio, blogging, and getting over the fear of feedback. Among our favorite "Kuotes": "In high school school, one of my art school teachers thought I was colorblind, but I was just lazy. I just didn't want to mix colors, because I felt like as soon as I started mixing colors I would lose control." Makes us think about Mondrian's psyche in a whole new way.

We stumbledupon.com this web site, started by expert calligrapher, Michael Sull, who has mastered the nearly lost art of Spencerian script, which was developed after 1840, flourished throughout the U.S. almost to the turn of the 20th century, and then virtually disappeared, replaced by the Palmer Method. There's been a renewed interest in this particular type of calligraphy, mainly for its Victorian flair and romantic look. If you're so inclined, Sull offers special workshops on the topic in the fall.

Last Friday, New York's Museum of Modern Art opened its exhibition of Esquire covers designed by George Lois. On view through March of next year, the show features 32 of the 92 covers Lois created for Esquire from 1962 to 1972. "I have always seen myself as an artist. And this is the Museum of Modern Art. And I am an artist," said Lois in an interview with the Associated Press.

And Lois has had some experience dealing with artists whose work adorns the walls of MoMA. In Charles McGrath's piece on Lois and the exhibition in yesterday's New York Times, the writer discusses the remarkable ability of Lois' typically text-free Esquire covers to convey a single idea through an image. "Some were untouched photographs, but, in an era before Photoshop, some were created by the primitive technique of cutting and pasting, using photographs, clip art, and sometimes hand-drawn elements," writes McGrath, before extracting from Lois this gem of an anecdote about Esquire's May 1969 cover (pictured above), which featured Andy Warhol drowning in a can of Campbell's tomato soup.

"I remember when we were doing the Warhol cover," Mr. Lois recalled. "I explained to Andy what I had in mind, and he said, 'Oh, will you have to build a very big can?'"

While the human rights activists who are against the Beijing Olympics continue to build momentum for their cause, so with them come the designers. By way of 1+1=3, we ran across this great story in The Age newspaper on the role designers are playing in the protests, from creating parody ads to work for Amnesty International to miscellaneous YouTube films calling out the Chinese government for what the activists believe to be poor human rights considerations. Here's a bit:

The IOC's most sacred symbol, the five interlocking rings, have also been targeted.

In one image used by the French organisation Committee for Supporters of Tibet, the Olympic rings are shown as tank tracks.

In a poster, originally published by Amnesty's branch in Slovakia and later withdrawn, the rings are depicted as barbed wire loops. The image shows a man pointing a gun at the head of prisoner.

The poster uses the slogan "China is getting ready", the same one being used by the Beijing Olympic Organising Committee in the lead-up to the Games.

You've still got a week left to see the "Two Lines Align" exhibition at REDCAT in Los Angeles, but before you go, check out Hugh Hart's recent Los Angeles Times story. "It's a piece on what I'm calling Graphic Design Auteurs--visual talents who blur the line between personal work and graphics for hire," Hart tells us. "It's pegged to the Ed Fella and Geoff McFetridge show...but also includes people like Tim Biskup, Shepard Fairey, National Forest, James Jean, Gary Baseman, with comments from Walker Art Center." Some of our favorite analysis is that which Hart extracted from McFetridge himself (pictured at right):

Leafing through a pile of sketches in his studio, McFetridge sees the flux between self-inspired art and market-oriented graphics as being "very muddy, but maybe it's a positive kind of mud." On the other hand, he muses, trend-setting image makers who hitch their revenue stream to advertising campaigns just might overstay their welcome with patrons who write the checks.

"Corporations seek out people with the clear thoughts who exist on the fringe almost as if the corporations have no brain," McFetridge says. "But maybe companies will become much more proscriptive about their marketing and go back to 'We know best.' Kind of like at Apple where you've got Steve Jobs going, 'I know. Don't ask them, ask me.' That could be the future."