Poster & Type Issue ‘22 Arts & Culture Magazine - Where Designers Work - Design History 101 - Technology
Today’s Design is Shaped by Likes, And That’s a Problem.49203356 Christoph Niemann on Selecting His Toolkit + How the Materials Inform the TheProcess.Bauhaus’ Only Known Woman Graphic Designer Wild risks, a blank checkbook, and one impossibly fabulous editor
The Editor, Askold Melnyczuk
When we started putting together this issue, we knew from the beginning that it should revolve around the idea of originality. Going through the archives of the 47 years of W, the theme that stood out through every era was the celebration of indi viduality. For this issue, the first of another era, we chose two stars who are deeply true to themselves: Frank Ocean and Rosalía.
I have loved magazines for as long as I can remember. When I was growing up, my bedroom walls were plastered with pages from Vogue, Italian Vogue, Interview, and W. When I applied to New York University, instead of sending in the customary college application essay, I made a mini magazine; after graduating, I was lucky enough to work at actual magazines. Now, writing my editor’s letter as the first female Editor in Chief of W, I feel incredibly honored to have worked for some of the smartest and most boundary-pushing women throughout my career, learning how to make fashion pictures, commission stories, and find my own point of view.
I have been a fan of Ocean’s from the first time I heard Nostalgia, Ultra, and I knew that the only person who could capture his uniqueness was the brilliant Tim Walker. His pictures, paired with an insightful interview by Diane Solway, give us a peek into the world of the fiercely private musician.
A multifacetedhair-dryer, inks, and the “sexiest pencil ever”
Where Designers Work Christoph Niemann on Selecting His Toolkit + How the Materials Inform the Process.
There’s a particular store-front in Berlin where you’ll spot locals with their noses pressed up against the glass. It’s not selling the hottest new trainers or freshly baked pastries; in fact, it’s not selling anything at all.
Behind the glass you’ll spy an ink-based doodle. Or a screen print. Or an illustrated book open to a random page. Simple lines and clever pairings reveal the unmistakable hand of Christoph Niemann. If you peer in a little more, you’ll probably spot the world-re nowned German illustrator sketching on his tablet, sitting at a large desk occupied by two assistants. You’ll see a number of prints and paintings hung meticulously on the wall. The studio is clean and con sidered, tidy and organized. Everything is grey or white, like a blank canvas waiting to be drawn on.
Words By, MadelinePosterMorley&
Type IssueNiemann’s‘22
KristinePhotographsStudio,byKrause.
Niemann’s illustrations have a certain breeziness to them—they’re joyful to look at because of their sense of spontaneity; how they speedily and effort lessly convey a funny or poignant idea to the viewer. The illustrator’s ability to communicate in this way comes, in part, from his very particular relationship to his tools, and how he implements them—or fol lows their lead—to quickly articulate and sculpt a thought. Ultimately, it’s through having such an organ ized work space, and knowing exactly how to use material to its full potential, that Neimann is able to consistently deliver exciting work to tight deadlines.
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Where Designers Work
“With every creative endeavour, you’re simultaneously creating and judging. When you’re drawing on a blank piece of paper, the illustration grows in front of you. You can judge it right away. “This doesn’t happen with something like coding, when you’re in an extremely abstract field. When I started doing apps, I’d have to email someone and say ‘Can you make it green?’ Two days later, it’s green and I’m like, ‘Why did I make it green?’ I’m in a totally different headspace.
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“I’m, of course, obsessed with art supplies,” he says on a recent afternoon when I visit his studio. “They are an extension of your head, so you have a very emotional relationship to them.” I asked Niemann to take me on a tour of his current studio essentials.
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What I especially love is how you can layer two colors and see them come together. It’s almost like two different instruments chiming. What I like about this system is that I can control it in a way, but I also can’t control the exact density of the pig ment and how the colors will combine. It’s always a surprise, and you can’t get that with digital.
To dry ink, I use this hair-dryer. I mostly take it with me, but often in hotel rooms there is one, so I’ll dry my works that way. Experimenting with overlapping inks has made me think more about overlapping in screen printing. Then from experimenting with screen printing, I’ve dis covered something that I bring into more binary work. For example, when I do VR illustrations, I use the silkscreen effects of overlapping and color combinations.
I take so many photographs and I store them on memory cards. I don’t know what to do because even tually they’re going to take away these cards, which will be terrible because I live by these things. I love taking huge photographs—giant ones—and then I can then take a small crop from them and draw on top of it.”
For me, 2H is the perfect sketching pencil. You can’t go all the way black. It restrains you. You have to wait before you go in for the kill and actually use a black line. You want to hold that back as long as possible. I often like to explore different grains. There was a series I did for ZEIT this past week and I only used six different pencils. Once you work in such a limited space, there’s a huge difference between 5B and 3B or an F and a B. I also used the smudging tool—something I would never have dared to use while I was studying, it was completely forbidden! I have a very close rela tionship with these tools. When I was drawing with a 2H and a B one day during art school, at some point I realized that I could find them on the table by sensing their heat. I didn’t even have to look at them any more because I knew the last one I used was warmer and the other one was the cold one. That’s kind of Matrix level when you can heat-detect your pencils.
“I absolutely love these sketchbooks, a brand from Boesner called Aquarelle—I can only find them in Germany. It’s a pretty heavy stock, I usually use between 170g/m2 to 250g/m2, but it fits in a suitcase. These are my travel sketchbooks for all my National Geographic drawings. If I would work on a regular sketchpad, I’d have to rip off the drawings and put them in a portfolio. When I create 30 or 40 drawings on a trip, they’re all very compact and protected in here.
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Where Designers Work
I find these inks from Rohrer & Klingner incredible, but they, unfortunately, also don’t exist in the States. I take them with me wherever I go. One color has so much pigment and depth. You basically have multiple colors in one. “If I was drawing a face with these, I could create several layers and colors using just one ink. Deep blue can turn into a violet, or even more of a cyan. Brown can turn to bright yellow.
My favorite brand of pencil is a kind that I can’t find any more, the Rexel Cumberland, Derwent Graphic pencil. If a reader finds them, please let me know. The top part is black matte; the bottom part is shiny black; then there is a simple orange stripe. I probably couldn’t tell the difference to other pencils in terms of the drawing quality, but they’re the sexiest pencils ever. Now I use an inferior new version with a messed up tilted design.
For a flow to happen I need a tiny distance between the moment of creation and judging. With everything I do, whether it’s digital work or hand work, it’s all about this moment being tight.
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Where Designers
Words By, Madeline
PosterMorley&Type Issue ‘22 33
Design History 101
A time-line of her career from the early 20’s till late 40’s and forward, ranging almost a decade.
The DesignerWomanOnlyBauhaus’KnownGraphic
february,
And when she first began freelancing in the ’20s, it was almost unheard of for a woman to work in graphic design. Through a unique set of cir cumstances, Popitz slipped through a crack and into the field of commer cial arts, learning her craft from the originators of German Modernism, and going on to pursue her own career. When Popitz first enrolled as a student at the Bauhaus in October 1924, she’d just completed a sev en-year degree in draftsmanship at the prestigious Academy of the Arts
on the magazine alongside those celebrated men of Modernism was one lesser-known designer: she went by the name of Söre Popitz. Born Irmgard Sörensen in 1896, Popitz is the only known woman to have pursued a career in graphics after studying at the Bauhaus. The designer and artist passed away in 1993 at 97 years-old; her life encompassed nearly the entirety of the 20th century.
April, 1926: Freelancing in Leipzi 1949: The War and Post-War Years
October, 1924: Early life as a student
Design History 101
in Leipzig. There, she studied under the seminal Modernist type designer Jan Tschichold and was one of only a handful of women permitted into the school. When she moved on to the Weimar Bauhaus, the school had also progressively allowed women into the classroom, though they were encouraged to pursue weaving rather than the male-dominated mediums of painting, architecture, and typography.
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At the beginning of the Nazi regime, Popitz had attempted to hide all of her Bauhaus studies in the basement of her husband’s doc tor’s office, yet they were still destroyed later during the bombing of Leipzig. The majority of her early work is lost. What exactly she produced for Otto Beyer during, Schröter notes that the true scope of Popitz’s commercial output will remain unknown. For the next half of her life, her largest body of commercial work was the design for a number of patterns for, a book series where each title is wrapped in an abstract background.
In Germany during the 1930s, there was just one lifestyle magazine that every young woman had to have. An essential for those donning flapper skirts, cropped haircuts, and dramatic eye-liner, die neue linie first appeared on the news-stands in 1929 with a sensationalist lower-case masthead and tips on everything from fashion and home decor to sports. Art directed by the Bauhaus’ Herbert Bayer—and featuring work by László and Walter Gropius—the stylish women’s monthly was as modern as it came. Working
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These playful, geometric stickfigures recall the costumes in Bauhaus professor Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet. The household appliances on each poster are drawn in elegant, thin black lines and lack detailing, which, along with the unfussy typography, communicates cleanliness and efficiency. Everything about these designs would have conveyed modernity, functionality, and simplicity: ideal for the modern consumer with their newly electronic, gas-heated, fullyfunctioning apartment. And Popitz’s stylish stick-women, rendered abstractly but with detailed clothes, ranged from the traditional to the modern, appealing to housewives and working women alike.
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Technology Today’s Design is Shaped by Likes, And That’s a Problem. Design intertwinedbecomehas with the most socialdynamicsharmfuloftheweb
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Words By, SahadevPosterHerma& Beatrice Sala.
Type IssuePhotograph‘22 by
Dribbble, a popular community and portfolio web site used by designers to share and discuss their work. On Dribbble, you can skim through designs for sophisticated banking apps, marketing websites for yet-to-ship start-ups, and designs for crypto mobile apps to buy and sell NFTs — the latest craze in the start-up world. Browsing the portfolios on Dribbble offers an anthropological view of the experience of many designers today. Surveying this work not only reveals the popular style of the day, but also a fly wheel of psychological mechanisms that, for many designers, has taken the rich and complex practice of design and flattened it to a performative, stylistic prac tice, ultimately changing both what it feels like to be a designer and reducing designers’ impact on the world.
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One of the most salient characteristics of the work on Dribbble, Behance, and in the world of start-ups more generally, is the eerie similarity of the design work from one designer to the next. The primary technique used by designers in these spaces is to simply remix the dominant patterns and trends created by popular tech companies, ensuring their work appears as stylistically sophisticated and elegant as the work they’re emulating, regardless of what kind of product they’re designing and for whom. A podcast app and a banking app and a meditation app seem one and the same, similar styles and elements cre ating a few generic interfaces. Designers who successfully emulate popular design work receive the kind of positive affirmation so many of us have come to crave on the web through our exposure to social media: likes, views, Re-tweets, comments, and other digital affirmations. It’s the design equivalent of staging a glamorous-looking photo in a fake private jet and posting it on Instagram.
I call this performative design. Performative design ultimately reduces the practice of design from a wide range of creative, psychological, communication, and problem-solving skills to a narrow practice focused on the reproduction of popular styles and interfaces for the sake of feeling like and being perceived as a skilled designer. The success of performative design isn’t meas ured by its usefulness or utility in the world — a more traditional method for evaluating the quality of a design — or the meaning the work brings to its users’ lives, but rather how closely their work mimics what is considered “good design.”
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When I started my last start-up, the success I pictured for myself was tied more to the image of me walking out on stage at a conference to raucous applause than it was about designing something truly useful or impactful. I didn’t do a single user testing session before launching that start-up, for example, because in reality I wasn’t focused on creating something useful. Not coincidentally, my designs mimicked the work that was considered “good design” at the time. I wanted to believe that if I created work that looked like “good design,” I would inherit the exceptional qualities of the designers I was emulating. It’s clear to me now that I was mostly motivated to duplicate other’s work because of fear of failure and the desire to be accepted. This is an uncomfortable thing for me to admit. I believed, as Anna Weiner put in her memoir, Uncanny Valley, that it was “safer, then, to join a group that told itself, and the world, that it was superior: a hedge against uncertainty, isolation, insecurity.” Designers may create duplicative, performative work for economic reasons, of course: creating a designer persona online can be an effective and sometimes necessary way to get work and survive in an age of economic turmoil. Performative design’s systemic impact, though, is primarily reducing
Technology
The primary technique used by designers in these spaces is to simply remix the dominant patterns and trends created by popular tech companies, ensuring their work appears as stylistically sophisticated and elegant as the work they’re emulating, regardless of what kind of product they’re designing and for whom.
The popularity of sites like Dribbble, Behance, and others; and the uniformity of design in so many start-ups is evidence that performative design has a significant influence on the culture of design and the experience of being a designer. I couldn’t find a single comment on Dribbble, for example, that amounted to anything other than a proverbial “thumbs up.” How is it that there are so many comments in a creative community and none have even the slightest edge of criticism, constructive, or otherwise? The elimination of critique, I believe, stems from designers’ fear that their identity as a “good designer” is at risk when critique is present. Joining a community that has implicitly agreed to eliminate critique provides a safe haven for perform ative design and, in turn, accelerates the adoption of performative design.
Photograph by Beatrice Sala.
designers’ ability to have meaningful positive impact through their work and diminishes the emotional and social experience possible in other forms of design.
The flywheel that motivates performative design can be seen clearly when we look at both a designer’s work and the emotional experience behind it. The flywheel starts when designers create work and share it online in order to quench their craving to be seen and applauded as skilled designers. This is the same kind of craving that is woven into so many of our online experiences today, and is also inherent in the fact that, in the internet age, our work as designers is now seen and evaluated on the web. Second, by reducing “good design” to a narrow collection of styles and interface trends — think Swiss grids, lots of white space, airy illustrations, and polished icons — designers can more easily replicate “good design” and, as a result, more easily create an image of themselves online that represents what they believe a talented designer’s work looks like. Third, designers who participate in performative design avoid criticism in order to maintain the shared belief that the stylistic trends they follow are the definition of “good design.” The trap inherent in this flywheel is convincing designers that they’re seeing themselves as skilled, successful designers when they replicate the most popular trends of the day, when in reality these designers are simply being applauded for performing as the designers whose work they are emulating.
Type Issue ‘22
The magazine was remarkably innovative, and not just for 1950; Cowles wanted to make an object that was, above all things, tactile and surprising, like a children’s book for adults. The pages of the magazine had cut-out trap doors, pamphlet inserts, photo spreads with a flip-book full of captions run ning underneath the central image. The pages did not come in a single stock, but instead Cowles was known to pepper several types of paper throughout a single issue; the reader could flip from heavy cardstock to flimsy, onionskin newsprint to high-gloss fashion pages that felt almost slick to the touch.156
Words By, RachelPosterSyme&
Design History 101 gnikamehtdFleurCowlesanfoyrotsiH tMosBeautifulMagazine. Wild risks, a blank checkbook, and one fabulousimpossiblyeditor
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Alexander Tochilovsky, the curator of the Herb Lubalin Study Center at Cooper Union, an archive devoted to iconic typographic and magazine design, keeps all 12 copies of Flair in the library, along with the Flair Annual, a hulking 1953 coffee table book that attempted to re-capture some of the magic of the magazine after its untimely death. He delights in showing off Cowles’ shortlived oeuvre to students. It breaks them out of their Helvetica ruts, he said, out of their constant worship of minimal, white space.
Over half of the 12 covers featured complicated cut-out overlays. The spring issue, which featured a painting of a rose on its cover (in her later years, Cowles would come to be associated with the flower), was particularly opulent: every single page smelled like tea roses. Cowles held nothing back when creating Flair: it was a sensory feast. You could touch it, smell it, marvel at its art direction, down to the carefully placed advertisements. If the technology had existed in 1950 for lickable paper, Cowles likely would have made the maga zine edible, too.
Design History 101
