Fashion
Luella Bartley
Hui-Hui
Peter Jensen
Katie Gallagher

Entertainment
Alan Ball
Summer Bishil
Dr. Dog
Nima Nourizadeh
Chuck Palahniuk
Anthology Recodrings
Marina Zenovich
Zimmerman/Berg

Artists
Desireé Holman
Corndawg
Matt Furie
Molly Landreth
Matthew Lock
Nikolay Saveliev
Christopher Schulz
Darren Sylvester

Fiction
24 Hours on L16
Nobody Eats Oranges...
Some Mornings

Like Geoff McFetridge, Nikolay Saveliev is a graphic designer who plays in the astral sandbox of 1970s homage. But while McFetridge is content to revel in goofy California vibes inspired by high-school sketches and new-age children’s books, Saveliev’s work feels more like the woefully forgotten output of an unsettlingly avant-garde Ivy League minimalist with a soft-spot for the thinly-veiled formalism of sociopathic corporate art. And somehow, that’s incredibly fun. Saveliev is like Paul Rand’s misunderstood child prodigy, huddled over drafting paper until the wee hours of the morning, trying to add an enigmatic touch of hysterical beauty to a pamphlet about genital herpes.

His “Pop Matters” project, for instance, rehauls pop record sleeves from T.I., "Lil" Jon, Jessica Simpson, and a dozen others with the type of abstract precision you might expect from a text about Heidegger or Nuclear Physics. There’s something both hilarious and sublime about the gulf that Saveliev creates between the glitz and glamour of Kanye West and the scholarly sobriety of his restrained treatments. 140 copies of these faux-record sleeves were quietly slipped into various new and used record stores last year, in an art-prank that packed more punch than Banksy’s sorta-obvious and over-hyped Paris Hilton publicity stunt in 2006.

Just glancing at his stunningly beautiful RISD yearbook, or his program notes for a Michael Haneke retrospective film fest, you get the gut feeling that Saveliev actually cares about his audience. In the latter case, the designer circumvented the humdrum conventions of festival catalogues, forgoing the generic Kinko’s-stapled pamphlet. Instead, he crafted a set of separately sealed (spoiler alert!) pamphlets for each film in the program, lovingly presented inside a customized manila envelope. Relying entirely on his clever grasp of typeface and Haneke’s own striking images, Saveliev provided a unique, reverent supplement that no self-respecting cinéaste would leave under his or her seat at the end of a screening. That’s dedication.

Saveliev, who’s been garnering a lot of buzz on the internets lately, was gracious enough to answer a few questions. Read on to learn more about growing up in the shadow of a crumbling empire, the myths behind RISD, and the endless pleasures of Powerpoint-chic.