walking for the digital era _andreia constantino
«
o texto acciona a sua leitura
(como uma porta, como uma máquina
o t e x t o como quem joga um jogo, Roland Barthes citado em Pensar com Tipos, Ellen Lupton (2006)
procurando uma prá
com o botĂŁo
play)
e o leitor sobreaciona-a,
t i c a q u e o r e p r o d u z a.Âť
jogando com
so, it is a MIXINGMESSAGES about « «»W
A
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Texto just Sintese esquemática; Personalidades e projectos
+ The Typographic Exper
Ensino / New wave
« MY AWAY TO TYPOGRAHY » Wolfgang Weingart by Armstrong, Helen in Graphic Design Theory - Reading
+ Entrevista a Wolfgang Weinga
Reflexão Crítica / New Wave / Desconstrução / Comp
+Type and de
O quebrar das regras e con
+ Type Heresy by Paul Felton, foreword by Jonathan Barnbrook in Breaking the + To the Hell with rules by Rick Poyner in Breaking the + On typography, entrevista com Jeffery Keedy in Breaking the
+ The obscence Typography Machine by Philipp Meggs in Te
Emigre Graph
tificativo do booklet; contexto cultural; weingart / desconstrução e desmaterialização da tipografia s de referência compreendidos à luz de referências bibliográficas consultadas +
riment, Radical Innovation in Contemporary Type Design, Teal Triggs
INTRO.
esquema_
07
wolfgag
WEINGART
e / Desconstrução
gs from the field art Emigre nº 14
11
putador /Cranbrook / Tipografia digital /Emigre / Neville Brody / David Carson
TYPE AND DECONSTRUCTION IN THE DIGITAL ERA nveções tipográficas outrora estabelecidas Ten Commandments of Typography TO THE HE LL WITH THE RULES Ten Commandments of Typography ! Ten Commandments of Typography
econstruction in the digital era by Rick Poynor in Looking Closer nº1
Tipografia digital / Prós e Contras
exts on type. Critical writings on typography
The
ob
WALKING IN THE DIGITAL ERA LOOKS FOR/ Designres / Contexto / Macintoch
17
scence
Typo.graphy Machine
hics in Graphic Design: A New History, by Stephen Eskilson (2007)
15
EMIGRE
Nelville Brody / Tipografia Digital + Fontshop Fuse in The graphic language of Neville Brody v.2
F u s e
David Carson / Conceito
Ray Gun Out of control by Dean Kuipers and Marvin Scott Jarrett (1997) TED TALKS with David Carson 09’
rAY
GUn
19
21
23
25
27
INTRO.
A segunda metade do século XX é marcada por mudanças sócio-culturais evidentes, onde a atitude crítica e o pluralismo cresciam à medida que as sociedades passavam a questionar os padrões anteriormente estabelecidos. Tal como Herbert Bayer e Jan Tschichold haviam adoptado uma nova abordagem no design tipográfico nos anos 20, cerca de quarenta anos mais tarde surge um movimento de oposição ao formalismo frio da tradição modernista difundido inicialmente na suíça mas que rapidamente se espalharia pelo resto do mundo: o pos-modernismo. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -- - - - - -
NO DESIGN, CADA NOVO PASSO NO PROCESSO CONTÍNUO NÃO É NECESSARIAMENTE MELHOR, MAS DIFERENTE.
AO MESMO TEMPO QUE SE EXPRESSA COMO REFLEXO DAS MANIFESTAÇÕES CULTURAIS QUE MOLDAM UM NOVO AMBIENTE. Dotados de um eminente sentido crítico os profissionais das ltimas décadas do século XX marcaram um importante
P O N T O DE R U P T U R A+
WOLFGANG WEINGART,
com o conservadorismo anterior. Nada mais natural que o surgimento de uma nova geração É REFERÊNCIA com ideias provocadoras que NESTE CONTEXTO, questionavam as formas de ILUSTRANDO-O DE percepção existentes e as noções FORMA EXEMPLAR estéticas outrora estabelecidas. TOMANDO Digital tools may have allowed designers new power and flexibility, but typography remains the bedrock of good graphics – and one of the most exciting areas of experimentation.
UM NOVO RUMO NO TRATAMENTO DA TIPOGRAFIA E DO DESIGN GRÁFICO: APLICANDO A
DESCONS/ T R U Ç Ã O.
Looking back on his teaching in 1985, Weingart stated: « I TRY TO TEACH STUDENTS TO VIEW TYPOGRAPHY FROM ALL ANGLES:
TYPE MUST NOT ALWAYS BE SET FLUSH LEFT/RAGGED RIGHT, NOR IN ONLY TWO TYPE SIZES, NOT IN NECESSARILY RIGHT - ANGLE ARRANGEMENTS, OR PRINTED IN EITHER BLACK OR RED. TYPOGRAPHY MUST NOT BE DRY, TIGHTLY O R D E R E D O R R IG I D . TYPE MAY BE SET CENTER AXIS, RAGGED LEFT/RAGG ED RIGHT, PERHAPS S O M E T I M E S I N C H A O S ...»
D E S M A T E R I A L I Z A Ç Ã O D A T I P O G R A F I A
Com esta eminente alteração de atitude, à medida que se caminhava para a era do digital, a prática do design encaminha-se para uma nova direcção, onde a tecnologia se assume como um factor importante, na medida em que aumenta o potencial e torna mais dinâmico todo o processo de criação. É neste sentido, que se procura estabelecer uma cadeia de referências em torno desta temática: reflecte-se essencialmente em torno da tipografia auxiliada pela tecnologia, aqui encarada «como possibilidade e necessidade». A tipografia associada ao design gráfico e a evolução no seu tratamento ao longo das últimas décadas surge como a linha condutora na exploração do período pós-modernista até à contemporaneidade. Centramo-nos nas novas linguagens gráficas e na consequente utilização tipográfica que rompem com as regras, constituindo manifestações experimentais que põem a legibilidade – uma qualidade de leitura eficiente, clara e simples - em conflito constante coma inteligibilidade – uma qualidade que promove o interesse, o prazer e o desafio da leitura. Pretende-se AQUI | COM ESTE OBJECTO GRÁFICO/TEÓRICO evidenciar a passagem da utilização da tipografia na era do digital como um trabalho auxiliado por computador compreendendo esta alteração de paradigma à luz das reflexões de designers e teóricos de referência.
CONCLUINDO, ASSINALAM-SE DESIGNERS E PROJECTOS EDITORIAIS ASSOCIADOS COMO MARCOS NA HISTÓRIA DO DESIGN, MARCADA PELA EXPERIMENTAÇÃO, PELA DESCONSTRUÇÃO E POR UMA LINGUAGEM GRÁFICA NÃO CONVENCIONAL NUMA ESTRUTURA SINTÁCTICA FRAGMENTADA. |07
MODERNISM
POSTMODERNISM
The Modern movement falls roughly between the 1860s and the 1970s. It is typically defined as artists’ attempts to cope with a newly industrialized society. Modernism is progressive and often Utopian, empowering humans to improve or remake their environments. Within modernism falls various other movements crucial to the development of graphic design. These include futurism, constructivism, and New Typography. The design community continues to debate the value of modernism, as basic modernist tenets still define conventional standards for effective design.
Postmodernists recognize that mea associated with the critical field of p to design. The postmodern moveme world. Critics describe postmodernis absolutes and universally applicable
NEW WAVE
NOVA TIPOGRAFIA
1960
1955
1965
1975
1970
WOLFGANG WEINGART TYPOGRAPHICA HERBERT SPENCER 1949/67 LONDON
«my away to typography» DESCONSTRUÇÃO NA TIPOGRAFIA E NO DESIGN GRÁFICO
Emigre Gra
+Type and deconstruction in the digital era by Rick Poynor in Looking Closer nº1 +Reading outside the Grid: Designers and society by Frances Butler in Looking Closer nº1 +A brave new worls: understandig deconstruction by Chuck and Martha Witte in Looking Closer nº1 +Desconstruction by Rick Poynor in No more rules and Design an Postmodernism + Type Heresy by Paul Felton, foreword by Jonathan Barnbrook in Breaking the Ten Commandments of Typography Entrevista a Wolfgan Weingart in Emigre nº 14 WILLI KUNZ
APRIL GREIMAN
«ARQUITECTO DA INFORMAÇÃO» TYPOGRAPHIC INTERPRETATIONS
LAYERS OF MEANING O DIGITAL | MACINTOSH
New wave in History of Graphic Design by Phillip Meggs +Red me! Part 1 LIteraci in graphic design by Lucienne Robertsin Eye nº37 The obscence Typography Machine by Philipp Meggs in Texts on type. Critical writings on typography AKZIDENZ GROTESK DAN FRIEDMAN CAPA TYPOGRAFISCHE MONATSBLATER VISIBLE LANGUAGE
MOVIMENTO PUNK
ning Is inherently unstable; there is no essence or center that one should strive to reach. The broad term postmodernism is closely poststructuralism. Within the design community it can be used to refer to a layered, complex style or a poststructuralist critical approach ent begins roughly in the 1960s. There is no definite end point, although most suggest we have already moved into a post-postmodern sm as either a reaction against or the ultimate continuation of modernism. Cither way, postmodernism moves away from the quest for values that characterize modernism.
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
TOUCH JON WOZENCROFT MULTIMEDIA PUBLISHING COMPANY
FUSE Fuse in The graphic language of Neville Brody v.2 Pixel Pirates: The Desktop Era in Merz to Emigre
EMIGRE’ 84
MAGAZINE | EMIGRE GRAPHICS | EMIGRE FONTS
aph ics in Graphic Design: A New History, by Stephen Eskilson (2007)
DIGITAL TYPOGRAPHY _
VANDERLANS & ZUZANA LICKO DIGITAL | MACINTOSH
NEVILLE BRODY JON WOZENCROFT
_
FONTSHOP
ED. FELLA NICK BELL BARRY DECK MR. KEEDY
DIGITAL TYPEFACES
KATHERINE MCCOY Typography as a dicourse in Graphic Design Theory + After Cranbrook: Katherine McCoy on the way ahead in Eye nº16
DAVID CARSON Ray Gun Out of control by Dean Kuipers and Marvin Scott Jarrett (1997) TED TALKS with David Carson 09’
CRANBROOK ACADEMY OF ART
VER visual intuitivo holístico simultâneo IMAGEM
PHIL BAINES MALCON GARRETT IAN SWIFT
LER verbal racional linear sequência TEXTO
BEACH CULTURE SURFER RAY GUN 92’95 BIKINI BLAH BLAH BLAH
P. SCOTT MAKELA GRAPHIC DESIGNER, MULTIMEDIA, TYPE DESIGNER
NEVILLE BRODY THE FACE ARENA DE-CONSTRUCTING TYPOGRAPHY’ 90 by philipp meggs
EXPERIMENTAL JETSET MARIEKE STOLK DANNY VAN DEN DUNGER ERWIN BRINKERS
HELVETICA DOCUMENTARY 2007 GARY HUSTW 2007
ÂŤ While studying under the Swiss masters, Armin Hofman and Emil Ruder at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel in the 1960s, Weingart reacted to existing standards by pushing typography to the limits of legibility and beyond. He narrowly escaped expulsion. Combining extreme letterspacing, slant, weight, size, and repetition with a fierce practical knowledge of printing, Weingart dismantled the rational methodology of his elders. Out of this radicality emerged a design movement appropriate to the changing postmodern times.
NEW WAVE
WAS BORN. (...) The teachers agreed on common
themes for the initial two years of the advanced program, the symbol and the package. Feeling more confident by the second year, bolstered by the students’ enthusiasm, I risked further experimentation, and my classes became a laboratory to test and expand models for a new typography. (...) Accelerated by the social unrest of our generation, the force behind Swiss typography and its philosophy of reduction was losing its international hold.
My students were inspired, we were on to something different, and we knew it. (...) Âť
wolfgag
WEINGART
EMIGRE: What do you think about this loss of cultural identity? WEINGART: I think nothing about it. I don’t care. I never cared about nationalism. To me “Swiss” design, or the so-called “Swiss Typography” such as Emil Ruder’s work, was never typically Swiss either. It all happened by accident. Sure, it is Swiss in the sense that it is clean and clear, but the Germans are very much like the Swiss people; very strict, clean and disciplined, and yet they design very differently. After Ruder left Basel, I came here purely by accident. My ideas were totally different from Ruder’s. They were somewhat parallel, but I continued where Ruder had reached a dead end. Swiss Typography was not too exciting, it was almost repetitious. There was a need for something new, a new
impact, and I happened to be around at that time, which is now some twenty years ago. These happenings were all accidental and had nothing to do with Switzerland directly. They had perhaps something to do with the Swiss educational system. Here, it was possible for every professional to teach (...) |11
EMIGRE: We can’t just stop. We’ll always want to explore the new and unfamiliar, that’s human nature.
Well, we are exploring. Especially with the computer, we are finding out new possibilities, new ways to communicate. This will be the next explosion. But now we’re just exploring. WEINGART:
That should be a reason to go on. WEINGART: No. I had to stop, in order to let the things that I produced sink in, and wait until the next, real explosion comes, so that designers in the new decade can copy me again... EMIGRE:
|13
IN THE AGE OF THE DESKTOP COMPUTER FONT DESIGN SOFTWARE AND PAGE MAKE UP PROGRAMS TYPE HAS ACQUIRED A FLUIDITY OF PHYICAL OUTLINE AN EASE OF MANIPULATION AND POTENTIALLY, A LACK OF CONCEPTUAL BOUNDARIES UNIMAGINABLE
ONLY
A
FEW
YEARS
AGO.
This essay is an interim report on these changes, filed while they are still under way. It addresses new work from America, Britain, Germany, France, and The Netherlands which is redefining our approach to typography. Some of them anticipate the aesthetic concerns of the NEW DIGITAL
TYPOGRAPHY, or reflect the freedoms that typography makes possible, while still being produced at the drawing board, or by letterpress. Some will stand the test of time; others will prove to have been representative of their period, but of no greater significance. Among these articles of faith, legibility is
perhaps the first and most emotive. If there is one characteristic that links the many visual strategies of the new typographers, it is their combined assault on this most sacred of cows.
Swiss Style Modernism composed orderly, linear, well tempered messages using supposedly objective, and certainly inexpressive, sans serif letterforms. The new typographers, reacting against this bloodless neutrality;justify their experiments by arguing that no typeface is inherently illegible; rather, in the words of type designer Zuzana Iicko of Emigre Graphics, it is the readers familiarity with faces that accounts for their legibility. Type design in the digital era is quirky, personal and unreservedly subjective. The authoritarian voices of Modernist typography, which seem to permit only a single authorized reading, are rejected as too corporate, inflexible and limiting, as though it may be a forlorn hope typographic diversity itself might somehow re enfranchise its readers. I think there are a lot of voices that have not been heard typographically, says type designer Jeffery Keedy, head of graphics at CalArts. Whenever I start a new job and try to pick a typeface, none of the typefaces give me the voice that I need. They just don’t relate to my experiences in my life. They’re about somebody else’s experiences, which don’t belong to me. Another American type designer, CalArts graduate Barry Deck, speaks of trading in the myth of the transparency of typographical form for a more realistic attitude toward form, acknowledging that form carries meaning. The aim is to promote multiple rather than fixed readings, to provoke
die reader into becoming an active participant in the construction of the message. Later Modernist typography sought to reduce complexityand to clarify content, but the new typographers relish ambiguity, preferring the provisional utterance, alternative take, and delayed punchline to the finely honed phrase. If someone interprets my work in a way that is totally new to me, I say fine, says Keedy. That way your work has a life of its own. You create a situation for people to do with it what they will, and you don’t create an enclosed or encapsulated moment.
For Keedy, Deck, Emigre Graphics, and colleagues such as Neville Brody and Jonathan Barnbrook in Britain, and Max Kisman in The Netherlands, designing typefaces for personal use is a way of ensuring that graphic design projects carry their own specific identity and tone of voice. The pre digital typefaces that Brody drew for The Face emphasized the new perspectives on contemporary culture embodied in the magazine’s editorial content. They also functioned as a medium through which Brody could develop a socio-cultural commentary of his own. Typeface Two, designed in 1984, was deliberately authoritarian in mood, in order, Brody said, to draw a parallel between the social climate of the 1930s and 1980s. The typeface’s geometric rigidity was persistency undermined by the light-hearted manner in which it was applied. Other designers take an even more idiosyncratic approach. For Barry Deck, the starting point for a type design is not traditional notions of legibility or elegance, but a highly subjective and seemingly arbitrary narrative founded on what he perceives as the correlation between sexuality and letterforms.
S
TYPE AND DECONSTRUCTION IN THE DIGITAL ERA Ambitious publishing projects such as Emigre suggest that the tradition of experimental typography initiated by Futurism, Dada and the Bauhaus, and sustained by the work of Robert Massin. Wolfgang Weingart, Warren Lehrer and others, is being refreshed. None of these projects is part of the typographic mainstream, or reaches a particularly wide readership, yet they are exerting an influence well beyond their milieu. Jonathan Barnbrook goes a step further by extending this randomizing principle to the text itself. As if to imply an extreme suspicion of content, his typeface Burroughs (named after the novelist with a penchant for textual “cut-ups”) replaces whatever is typeset with a stream of gibberish generated at random by the software. Hand in hand with this investigation of the new aesthetic possibilities of the computer comes a revaluation of the artless and the ugly, the hand-made and the ready-made. For designers who are dissatisfied with the glib solutions and formulaic perfection of professional graphics, naive vernacular approaches to type (and imagery) appear to offer a rich seam of authenticity, allusion, expression, and meaning. Hard Werken, The Thunder Jockeys, John Weber and Barry Deck value letterforms hand drawn and mechanical for their impurities and flaws. I am really interested in type that isn’t perfect, says Deck. Type that reflects more truly the imperfect language of an imperfect world inhabited by imperfect beings. In Fella’s agitated hands, type is spun, tilted, stretched, sliced, fractured, drawn as if with a broken nib, and set loose among fields of ink-blotter doodles and deranged networks of rules. He is perhaps the most extreme example of the typographer as artist, an innovator who assumes and achieves the same level of creative freedom as the painters and sculptors whose exhibitions he promotes in catalogues and posters. Cranbrook has been at the forefront in exploring the dense, complex layering most salient (ana frequently cnaazea; characteristics ot tne new typographic design. Unlike the earlier work of the New Wave designers, this is not simply a formal exercise in collagemaking; the method arises directly from an engagement with content. When the deconstructionist approach is applied to design, write American critics Chuck Byrne and Martha Witte, “each layer, through the use of language and image, is an intentional performer in a deliberately playful game wherein the viewer can discover and experience the hidden complexities of language.” Work by Cranbrook co-chair Katherine McCoy and academy graduates Allen Hon and P. Scott Makela is a direct challenge to its audience, which must learn to “read” these allusive, open-ended image/type constructions with the same close attention that it would bring to a demanding piece of text. Although the idea of Deconstruction is gaining ground among designers in the U.S., and enjoys some currency in Europe where it originated, tew typographers at this point would feel sufficiently confident of the theoretical basis of the term to describe themselves as deconstructionists. Yet the visual strategies of deconstruction, driven by the layering capabilities of the computer, are already widely dispersed. The Californian surfing magazine Beach Culture rapidly became both cause célèbre and designers’ bete noire for the deconstructive frenzy with which its art director, David Carson dismantled the typography of contents pages, headlines, and text. |15
How important are the leu Commandments of Typography, and mu st we rigidly abide by them? The first thi
ns; one learns ab out typography and type design is tha t there are many rul es and maxims tha t enlighten the ne ophyte. The seco nd is that such rules are made to be broke n. And the third is that ‘breaking the rules’ has always been just another one of the rules.
TO THE HELL WITH THE RULES ! How has We propose a revolution in typography. Satan and his Fallen Angels are renouncing the sacred Commandments. The typography of the disciples is dull rigid, linear, well-tempered design using extremely unexpressive sansserif letterforms. We reject the authoritarian voices of the disciples, who preach a single reading; there is hardly any interaction between the message and the reader. Rick Poyner says: “The aim is to promove multiple, rather than fixed,
the emergence of rulebreaking typography changed the way a viewer interacts with a piece of work? Deliberate, wilfu l rul
readings, to provoke the reader into becoming an active participant in the construction of the message. later modernist typography sought to reduce complexity, and to claryfy content, but the new typographers relish ambiguity ...”
We are here to sh ow the light to de signers who are bo Fallen Angel Barry red by the dull solut Deck says: ions and rigid
e-breaking is do ne for the desired eff ect of getting the viewer’s attentio n. It works - that’s why people do it But some people bre ak the rules simply beca use they don’t kn ow them. It is importa nt to remember that ‘rule-breaking’ pre dates ‘rule-makin g’ by quite a few ye ars. In the histor y of typography, very little of what ha s been produced follow s the rules, but thi s may change as ma ny of the rules wi be incorporated ll into our software . Then people will be fol lowing rules tha t they aren’t even aware of. Is this progre ss?
perfection that the « I am really Commandments off er. ed in typography that is the imperfect inlatengreuastge n’ t pe rf ec t, ty pe of an imperfect world, in People who cherish cts more truly the Commandmen habited by imthpeatrfreecfle ts are stuck with tra Baines, Legibility ditional uninteresti presents informati t be ings. » ng on de as sig facts rat that the n solut
y satisfy only the rat ions. According to her than as an expe one of the antichri rience.” He believe ional side of the bra insight and simult sts, Phil s that logic and lin in. For Poyner and aneous perception earity can sometim the Fallen Angels,Typog , and stimulate ou es be OK, but our design as much raphy should addre r senses as well as as we typographe ss our capacity for engaging our intell rs are. Help us cre intuitive ect.” So let the da ate Armageddon for y of the Commandm the Ten Commandm ent in ents and let all he ll break loose!
One of the Commandm ents states that you should not apply more than three typefaces in a document. What are your views on this? Simple methodo log
ies generate sim ple results. Complex methodologies generate complex results. The idea that it is “re ally difficult to do something simple very well” is a load of Modernist propaganda (crap ), but will always be very popular with lazy and unimag inative designers. But, most importa ntly, simple is fas t, and designers are expected to work ridiculously fast nowadays, so it is no wonder that the y have made the good old clean an d simple Modern ism fashionable (again ).
|17
The
Typ Mac
At a recent Washington AIGA meeting, editors from four major design publications held a panel discussion. One of the shills in the audience asked,
“Do the design magazines establish design trends, or do you merely follow and report about them?�
After all of the editors replied that they weren’t too interested in stylistic trends or the latest fashion, one editor commented that the one real trend that everyone in the room should watch closely is the increasing importance of computers in graphic design. Most designers who I have overcome their computer phobu and learned computer-assisted design have become mesmerized by its possibilities.
ob scence
Text can be poured into columns, PMS match-color backgrounds can be changed instantly to try different color combinations, and type size and style can be changed at will. For thousands of organizations with publications budgets too small to afford design and typesetting services, desktop publishing allows a significant upgrade of routine printed material ranging from internal company publications to public-school study guides and church bulletins. But this wonderful new tool that is revolutionizing graphic design has its dark side.
po.graphy chine U n f o r t u n a t e l y , the ease computer
use
puts
potent
of
g r a p h i c
c a p a b i l i t i e s in t o t h e h a n d s o f pe opl e w h o a r e d ev o id o f a n y es t he ti c s en se
a bo ut
t yp o gr a p h y
and
hav e
little o r n o un d er s t a n d in g o f t h e m o s t bas ic n ew Aldus
p r in cip les s o ft w a r e Fr eeh a n d
of
d es ign - Po w e r f u l
p r o gr a m s and
in cl u d i n g
Illus t r a t o r
88
give t h e d es ign er ( o r m o r o n , a s the cas e m a y be) t h e p o w er t o flip , r o u te , s tre tch , o r ben d t yp o gr a p h y w ith the click o f t h e m o us e but t o n . This permits
The obscene typography machine can also be the sublime typography machine. Professional designers can explore new creative possibilities and spend more time developing concepts and designing and less time laboriously executing their work. +
As this technology becomes available in third-world nations, their efforts toward education and development can take quantum leaps forward as a result of the economy of desktop publishing.
some of the most obscene type-forms ever devised or imagined. Certainly, distortion can be a useful and innovative design tool when handled with sensitivity and intelligence, but we are seeing type distorted in violation of everything that has been learned over the past 500 years about making functional and beautiful letterforms. Newspaper advertisements are a major source of grotesque typographic distortion, as headlines are stretched or condensed to fiwith about as much grace as a fat lady squeezing into a too-small girdle.
|19
WAL
KING IN THE DIGITAL AGE LOOKS FOR/
EMIGRE
,
and
FUSE ,
RAY GUN
|21
The California design team of Zuzana Licko and Rudy VanderLans founded Emigre Graphics in Oakland, California, in 1984. VanderLans, originally from the Netherlands, where he studied graphic design under teachers devoted to the International Style, immigrated to the San Francisco area in 1980.
_
VanderLans was inspired by the idea that “people read best what they read most” and the design of the paper was perfectly legible to its daily readers. This concept opened up his eyes to the vernacular culture of the world around him, as he realized that there was much more room for experi¬mentation outside the strictures of the International Style.
In 1983, VanderLans founded Emigre magazine, along with two other Dutch expatriates he had met in San Francisco. The name, of course, referred to their status as migrants, and in fact the original vision for this large-format magazine was as a show¬case for Dutch artists who had moved to the United States. The name, of course, referred to their status as migrants, and in fact the original vision for this large-format magazine was as a show¬case for Dutch artists who had moved to the United States. I The first issue of Emigre shows VanderLans’s reaction against the International Style, as he laid out torn, collaged photographs in a disorienting fashion alongside
«... Therefore, when I came to the United States and started working at a newspaper, of all places, I was just stunned. ... All the things that they taught me at art school [in the Netherlands] about legibility and good fl type and bad type were swept aside. » VanderLans
EMIGRE typewriter type. The historian Rick Poynor has pointed out that while the digital revolution in graphic design is widely recognized, what could be called the “Xerox revolution” that began in the 1960s has been largely ignored. The widespread availability of the photocopier in the predigital age allowed artists such as VanderLans to appropri¬ate fragments of popular culture and use them to create radically unconventional new designs. While the use of the
photocopier and the typewriter partly reflected the low budget for Emigre, I it also displayed VanderLans penchant for using vernacular sources; like many
postmodernists, VanderLans
wanted to use these simple elements not for their own sake, but as a jumping-off point for experiments in graphic design. He also wanted to make graphic design a medium that allowed for the intuitive expression of the artist. This desire is part of the general postmodern trend whereby designers rejected the model of «artist as engineer»— a concept that arose
in the 1920s and become part of the fabric of the International Style — in favor of the idea of the designer as a creative, artistic individual who puts his or her own stamp on each project. |23
In the last 500 years of typographic history, the most signifi-cant changes have taken place in the last five years. Given that the digital conversion affects all spheres of human activity, It’Is remarkable that therfe should be such limited attention in the mainstream media to how this change might be visually represented. The Fuse project was seit up by the Brody studio in October 1990 not as a strictly commercial venture but as a necessity. Published through the FontShop network as a new medium to highlight the creative possibilities of creates an outlet that allows type designers to challenge digital typography,Fuse conventional thinking about the form and function of
F u s e
typography. Producers and purchasers are urged to experiment with digital language in a context lib-erated from client/commercial constraints contributors are briefed to push the boundaries of both the printed word and its fusing into electronic language so that typography’s profes-sional representation in graphic design is revolutionised, and digital type can be seen as a common feature of everyday life and not something that happens in confinement.
i s neville brody & a l a n g u a g e Jon Wozencroft r e s e a r c h p r o j e c t . D e s i g n e r s a r e c o m m i s s i o n e d t o d e v e l o p a n e x p e r i m e n t a l t y p e f a c e t h a t f o l l o w s t h r o u g h a t h o u g h t p r o c e s s o n t h e s t a t e o f t h e v i s u a l w o r d , a n d o n a n a c c o m p a n y i n g A 2 p o s t e r t h e y I m p l y I t s c r e a t i v e p o t e n t i a l . AN EDITORIAL BOOKLET
or poster outlfnes the theme and focus of each quarterly issue. Brody designs a promotional poster for each release, ancksince Fuse 5 he has designed a “hidden” font to accompany fie set of four. The digital format of computerdisk is packaged with five posters in a corrugated card case, reflecting the hybrid state between print and screen.
The contrast between the two methods of
storage and display Is used as a platform to
promote a dialogue on the extent to which
the digital fibde alters communication.
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«o intelecto pouco interessa na estrada da descoberta.»
«há um vão na consciência (Chame-o de i n t u i ç ã o , como queira ) não sabemos de onde vem ou porquê.»
rAY
GUn
«não confunda legibilidade com comunicação.» David Carson
N o w t h e w o r d, t h e p r i n t e d w o r d , i s a n i n t e r f a c e o f q u i t e a s t o n i s h i n g d e p t a n d c o m p l e x i t y - so complex that whole years of training are required before an operator can access anything like the full bandwidth of any written language. (Skilled readers, accessing text, after their inner states at will. This is why dictators still seek to control presses.)
Its “look and feel”, has tended, for the past two centuries, to evolve toward transparency, the optimal
We are told that typography, this potent interface’s most intimate design.
interface being viewed as one which the reader is least conscious of ...
To a c c e p t t h i s t o o l i t e r a l l y i s t o r u l e o u t d e s i g n s which allow our awareness of the interface to constit u t e a m a j o r a n d o n g o i n g a s p e c t o f t e x t u a l p l e a s u r e.
T a c o
h e e v e n t - h o r i z o n o f f u t u r y , c l o s e n y w i n d s h i e l d , i t s t e x t u r e s m a p p e d h a n n e l - z a p a n d t h e s e q u e n t i a l d e c a f i m a g e s f a x e d a n d r e f a x e d into illegibility . .
The designres of this book strategies drawn from newer sreceens. Thoroughly roughed up: brave new worlds abraded on the concrete of the now.T h i s
i s design publishing back a g a i n s t onsl aught of an unt h i n k a b l e p re s e n t .
a s i n d y .
t h e |27
ÂŤ EMIGRE: The real explosion? Where will it come from?
WEINGART: I
am waiting for the next explosion.
I t w i l l h a p p e n. »
MIXINGMESSEGES DC4 2010’11 Faculdade de Belas Artes | UL 3ºAno . 1º Semestre _ Andreia Constantino, 4767