Made a trip up to Skidmore to check out Steven Heller give a lecture on "Weapons of Mass Dissemination: The Propaganda of War." Mr. Heller is the art director of The New York Times Book Review and has managed to completely chronicle the past hundred years of graphic design to such an extent & depth that his influence cannot help but be felt by every design student and practitioner everywhere in the world.

His interest in European graphic design has enabled him to point out some stylistic differences based on culture. "There are different sensibilities between different cultures. In U.S. design history, the word has had primacy over the image. Some other cultures give the image primacy over the text, for example in Berlin around the turn of the century."

He went on to talk about how Italian fascists sold fascism to their youth culture and how the Germans/Nazis picked up the swastika. In Sanskrit, swastika literally means "it is well." As the symbol of auspiciousness, it is fittingly associated with the sun, both in its resemblance to a sunwheel and as an emblem of the sun's munificent power. Some say the twisting path of the swastika's intersecting arms denotes the sudden leaps on the path to self-realization. According to the Italian Buddhist scholar Giuseppe Tucci, Buddhism sees the swastika as an endless knot with neither beginning nor end: the infinite peace of the balanced and enlightened mind.