Gizmo

Gizmo is a collection of design-led art prints built around the machines that shaped how we made music, wrote code, played and connected with the world. Synths and drum machines. Cameras and home computers. Calculators and handheld devices that once felt like the future.

Adapted from and inspired by Simon Tyler's forthcoming Laurence King book Gizmo: Retro-Tech We Loved and Lost, these are not generic retro posters or loose nostalgia pieces. Each print is a carefully constructed illustration that isolates what made an object memorable in the first place - its proportions, controls, typography, surfaces and small acts of engineering intelligence.

The objects in Gizmo come from a specific window in design history - roughly 1965 to 2000 - when consumer technology was still working out what it wanted to be. Devices wore their functions openly. Controls, displays, vents, labels and speaker grilles all helped explain what a product was and how it worked. The constraints of manufacturing and interface design produced objects with more graphic character than almost anything made since.

That period is now far enough away to see clearly. The Minimoog, the IBM 5150, the Braun ET66, the JVC RC-550 - these aren't just nostalgic objects. They're evidence of a particular kind of thinking: that how something worked and how it looked were the same problem.

That's what Gizmo is interested in. Not the nostalgia, but the intelligence.