When looking back at the modernist design revolution of the mid-twentieth century, Alvin Lustig doesn’t immediately jump to mind, despite the fact that his influence is all around us. Lustig’s career was cut short by diabetes developed as a teenager while he was growing up in Los Angeles. A year before his untimely death in 1955 at the age of forty, he lost his ability to see, yet he continued to work, dictating instructions to assistants and his wife, Elaine Lustig Cohen.

Now, along with Steven Heller, former art director of the New York Times Book Review and prolific design writer, Cohen