Eye on Design magazine - Issue #03 “Gossip” by Eye on Design

EYE ON DESIGN: ISSUE 3

ISSN 2577-0101

Brave New World TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

FRANKENSTEIN

Coming in 2019

The Old Man and the Sea

Inferno

Crime and Punishment

ORWELL1984 CONRAD

JANE EYRE

Heart of Darkness

A PASSAGE TO INDIA Emily BrontÃ«

Wuthering Heights Commercial Classics

commercialclassics.com

EDITORS' LET TER: SL ACK

PERRIN [12:02 PM]

LIZ [12:07 PM]

MEG [12:02 PM]

MADDY_MORLEY [12:08 PM]

So how’d we come up with this one? Who pitched this theme? Who gets the pat on the back this time around? Wait where’s Liz? LIZ [12:02 PM]

Here!

LIZ [12:03 PM]

Sorry, just finding the right mood music to drown out office chatter. MADDY_MORLEY [12:04 PM]

I think I pitched “Gossip” a year ago, and this seemed like the right time for it, now that we’re seeing how big of an impact things like tabloids and fake news can have on politics and culture. LIZ [12:05 PM]

Right, but we quickly came to realize that gossip wasn’t just about those knee-jerk negative connotations, which made the theme waaaaay more interesting. PERRIN [12:06 PM]

Were we ever afraid that we wouldn’t find a design thread? That maybe “Gossip” was actually too esoteric for a graphic design magazine? EMILY [12:06 PM]

I reckon we were down with the idea of gossip as a form of communication pretty quickly. And of course, design is communication, too. LIZ [12:07 PM]

EMILY [12:07 PM]

Like Liz said, that means gossip isn’t just trash-talking and housewife chat.

Unless you’re talking about Maddy’s piece on Tupperware—and then it really is. But even with the Tupperware piece, it became more about how, historically, gossip has been important for creating safe spaces. Decentralized gossip networks have long provided a place for marginalized groups to communicate, trade secrets, swap advice. MEG [12:09 PM]

We were always thinking about gossip as more than idle chatter—it can be a really effective way to communicate, and even to resist. Its power lies in the fact that it’s often overlooked and undermined. EMILY [12:10 PM]

That was the fun thing about writing about the New York School, who have come to be seen as such an important movement in art and poetry, but which even the most academic lit crit describes as being built from gossip, parties, and the like. PERRIN [12:11 PM]

I think because that kind of communication isn’t taken critically, that’s where people feel safe to share the truth, ironically. MEG [12:12]

Right, but the way information spreads these days isn’t always in service of the truth. There’s no way we could talk about gossip today without talking about fake news.

GOSSIP

MADDY_MORLEY [12:20 PM]

We also thought a lot about how we communicate online in other ways—how the internet has changed the way we read, when a browsing experience becomes a stream of interconnected stories, images, and words. We tried to reflect that in the structure of the magazine: each article relates to one another in a continuous stream. MEG [12:23 PM]

Perrin got some tips on magazine layout from her reporting trip to People. PERRIN [12:27 PM]

I was blown away by the level of rigor the designers at People bring to their work, even though it doesn’t look like a magazine that our readers might think of as ‘well designed.’ EMILY [12:27 PM]

I think what’s nice about that piece is looking at design from a place of “Who are we designing for?” MEG [12:28 PM]

Our designers got to design for both tabloid-y fodder and a “magazine about gossip” (not a gossip magazine!). TALA_SAFIE [12:29 PM]

The Spotted insert is hands down the funnest thing I’ve ever designed. We made sure to keep it visually distinct from the rest of the mag, borrowing obvious visual cues from tabloids, from floating heads to outlined italic headlines. LIZ [12:33 PM]

And when we brought on Allyn Hughes to do the overall magazine design, she instantly had a sense of what gossip means, both conceptually and visually.

TALA_SAFIE [12:33 PM]

Her style fits perfectly with our theme: loud type, subtle sense of humor. MADDY_MORLEY [12:33 PM]

She has her own experience with fake news. MEG [12:35 PM]

We knew that she’d be able to pull in a strong design voice in the issue, which is what we wanted. Her mark-ups and subtle design elements talk to each other, the content, and to the reader, and they reveal how design is always “editorializing”— providing hierarchy, giving emphasis, deciding what you see and what you don’t. PERRIN [12:35 PM]

It’ll be interesting to see how she lays out this conversation we’re having right now. Which of us will get the hierarchy?

ALLYN [3:28 AM] NO ONE IS GETTING SPECIAL TREATMENT!

EYE ON DESIGN: GOSSIP

TABLE OF CONTENTS EDITOR'S LETTER pg 05 DESIGNER'S LETTER pg 07 CONTRIBUTORS pg 158

BE UR BEST A comic by Raphaelle Macaron pg 10 CHURCHES OF CHATTER By Fiona Shipwright pg 12 WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT TALKING ABOUT DESIGN CRITICISM pg 20 DESIGNER FACE-OFFS By Anne Quito pg 32 PARTIES ARE THE ANSWER By Madeleine Morley pg 38 CREATING A BUZZ By Tala Safié pg 50

Never miss a story. Get the newsletter. aigaeod.co/EoDsignup Design doesn’t sleep. For daily coverage, follow us at: eyeondesign.aiga.org INSTAGRAM @AIGAeyeondesign TWITTER @AIGAeyeondesign FACEBOOK /AIGAeyeondesign Published by AIGA, the professional association for design aiga.org 233 Broadway #1740 New York, NY 10279 All paper courtesy of Mohawk. COVER Chromolux 700 in High White TEXT Via Satin in Pure White INSERT Via Smooth in light pink TYPEFACES Atlas Grotesk & Atlas Typewriter by Commercial Type Times by Linotype Arial Narrow by Monotype Printed, bound, and made with care by Hemlock.

HISTORY MADE IN THE MARGINS By Nathan Ma pg 54

TOP 10 CAREER TIPS FROM A TITAN OF DESIGN (A SATIRE) By James Cartwright pg 136

INTO THE GOSS By Perrin Drumm pg 66

THE FINE ART OF GOSSIP By Emily Gosling pg 140

IS WHAT YOU’RE READING REAL OR FAKE? pg 79

RITE OF PASSAGE By Allison P. Davis pg 148

THE DARK SIDE OF SHARING By Allyn Hughes pg 82

LOVE LETTER By James Cartwright pg 154

ULISES CARRIÓN pg 90 WHAT DESIGNERS SAY WHEN NO ONE’S LISTENING pg 92 THROUGH THE RUMOR MILL pg 98 SENSE & SENSIBILITY (AN INTERVIEW WITH APRIL GREIMAN) By Meg Miller pg 106 BRUTALIST DESIGN AND THE RAW WEB By Orit Gat pg 127

Eye on Design magazine is a tri-annual publication that explores the connections between graphic design and the wider world. Each new issue revolves around a central theme and is designed cover-to-cover by a guest designer, someone whose work we’ve long followed and admired. We think of the magazine as an extension of our daily online coverage (eyeondesign.aiga.org), and a space for longform writing, in-depth reporting, and collaborations with exceptional illustrators, photographers, and designers. 2018 Issue #01 Invisible Issue #02 Psych Issue #03 Gossip 2019 Issue #04 ????? Subscribe to find out. aigaeod.co/subscribe Subscriptions save up to 20% on the cover price + shipping.

GOSSIP

: T S E B BE UR ron a c a M lle Raphae s the dirt dishe mic o c t s e w e n r e h in

BEST r BE UR biting you u ll o ’ ave y n... it Will le anticipatio r mo e n nails i u guessing lue C yo keep ny game of a than ver could nes, e Jo” Jo o J " e n phi –Jose Spotted

 Six tales of insane intrigue... Supremely entertaining –Meg Miller, Eye on Design magazine

  geous... r t u a onal... i ar... o Stell s... emot y... u g o d i r e ... hila dent best fi n o c , ery the v e Morley . n i ele a.org –Mad esign.aig nd eyeo

 Exhilarating. Raphaelle Macaron has turned my world upside down –DJ Tala

Tragedy! Murder! Lies! Deceit! Don’t miss BE UR BEST, the brand new sensational drama from comic artist Raphaelle Macaron. Throughout the magazine, six stormy installments tell the saga of a squeaky clean start-up with something to hide.

, music the o pop f t o n r e w pow s dra i e the h n t o s r list ess of e studied aca n n e M e d g e l l n n e a h ra Rapha lbous type, bout the st on, Beirut, s ed Arabic u a n b a s w e b d o i e r n o L en n pulp, a m to tell st d raised in f the r s in Paris, o r e r b n fo live em na comic d. Bor an active m on currently ic novel. l r o w g ry ph ar st gra comin mpora l. Mac conte on, soon be Samanda g on her fir ati tive rkin illustr collec re she’s wo s c i m co e, whe Franc

TITLE

How the sauna, nail salon, and water cooler became hallowed ground for idle talk Words by Fiona Shipwright

Photography by Nora Hollstein

CHURCHES OF CHAT TER

When used as a noun, “gossip” describes the things you don’t want others to hear. Yet gossip the verb cannot be done alone. And while it is perfectly possible to gossip one-on-one at home or via digital remove, there’s something about certain communal spaces that coax out the utterances that might not surface behind closed doors. In public space, the precise arrangement of bodies within the solar system of gossip— inner orbit: the talkers and listeners; secondary orbit: the onlookers and eavesdroppers— is largely determined by the backdrop. The physical architecture of a space molds the social architecture of gossip. Take, for example, the sauna, the nail salon, and the office water cooler. Subconsciously or not, we use these spaces for chatter, and we preserve their gossip-facilitating designs when we build them anew. Of those three typologies, the sauna has remained the most structurally consistent over the course of several centuries, with long benches, usually arranged in two or three stacks, all nestled around a heater. This longevity is perhaps why saunas come with high etiquette expectations. The Finnish, who invented Western European sauna culture more than 2,000 years ago, have a saying that sums up this decorum: “Saunassa ollaan kuin kirkossa,” or “be in a sauna as in a church.” Saunas, like churches, are places of community—and thus places of gossip. Unlike in churches, however, in the sauna you’re completely naked—or at least stripped of any sartorial indicators of hierarchy.

Staggered benches make the perfect conduit for passing on knowledge without anyone noticing: Lie down on the top level, and you can deliver clandestine intelligence into the ear of an upright attendee below. The sizzle of water thrown on hot stones can act as the perfect censoring device. And just outside the sauna is the locker room, an Arrival-style airlock that serves as the buffer zone between the steamy sanctuary and the outside world. What was said in the sauna stays in the sauna. Behave in the sauna as you would in the confessional box. In the nail salon, on the other hand, a “buffer” zone means something else altogether. Where sauna gossip thrives in stillness and dim light, here it blossoms under the glare of fluorescents and the surveillance of masked technicians. The first U.S. salon, Mrs. Pray’s Manicure, was opened in 1878 by Mary E. Cobb, who brought the French art of the manicure to Manhattan’s West 23rd Street. A commercial venture right from the start, Cobb’s description of it as a parlor—traditionally, semi-private spaces reserved for the rich—was a canny move. An entry in Richard Edwards’ 1884 book New York’s Great Industries notes that Cobb’s “elegant parlors... have been the resort of some of our best and wealthiest families.” This changed in the 1970s when actress and activist Tippi Hedren arranged for a group of Vietnamese immigrants to train as manicurists in California. After graduating from beauty school, they set up salons offering services at more affordable prices; today more

CHURCHES OF CHAT TER

than half of the manicurists in the U.S. are of Vietnamese descent. Finally, we come to the office, where, unlike the relaxing environs of the sauna or the nail salon, you have to hide both the talk and the idleness. Enter that bastion of covert conversation enablement: the water cooler. This humble office staple traces its origins to the first water fountains designed in the early 20th century by Halsey W. Taylor, inventor of the Double Bubbler, and Luther Haws, whose company provided contamination-free water to public buildings in Berkeley, California. By the 1980s, the quiet hum of the more portable, plastic watercooler soundtracked offices worldwide.

The genius of the watercooler is not only that its environment necessitates hushed exchanges, its hydrating properties also offer the perfect cover-up. It’s not the promise of a catch-up that’s enticing Geoff from accounts and product manager Anita out from behind their respective walls of technology; it’s that doctor-ordered eight glasses a day, honest. Today’s water cooler—both in function and as a synonym for hearsay—is predated by another water dispenser more nautical in nature: the scuttlebutt, a cask of fresh water sailors would congregate around during the 19th century. Several centuries later, the internet threatened to change spaces of gossip forever. During the early dial-up years, new digital spaces mimicked the traditional places of gossip: Yahoo and MSN chat room listings were peppered with references to beauty salons, hot tubs, and cafés. But even now, in the era of subtweets and Snapchat, where rumors can spread instantaneously and anonymously, the gossip-begetting powers of IRL spaces show no sign of abating. Gossip always finds a way.

Illustration by Inkee Wang

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT

“Compared to art or film criticism, the term talking about social media. Discourse plays ‘graphic design criticism’ has an unfamiliar, out across Twitter and Instagram, in long slightly uncomfortable ring. It is one that threaded tweets, micro-reviews, and pithy even the most avid reader of graphic design hot takes. Arguments take place in fits and magazines and books will encounter only bursts in the comment sections and on rarely, if at all,” notes design critic Rick subreddits, and among internet friends in Poynor in a discussion with Michael Rock in closed Slack communities. There’s little a 1995 issue of design magazine Eye. This doubt that designers have opinions, but what was a time when the main complaint was that are the best conditions for those opinions to criticism was being “run side by side with develop into critical perspectives? And for ordinary journalism and other reader ser- those critical perspectives to shape the field vices.” In 2013, Michael Bierut ended an of design and then push beyond it, into the essay on Design Observer by mentioning a broader culture? We asked a group of designers and eduhandful of design magazines that were shuttered or downsizing, and wondering if it cators, as well as one design critic, to pick up would even be possible to fill a sixth volume the design criticism thread and weave it of Looking Closer, a series of design criti- within the current context. To start them off, cism anthologies he helped edit from 1994 to we asked the question that history has strug2006. A year later, design writer Chappell gled to answer: What is design criticism? Ellison took to the same site to lament the lack of critical discourse in a design press that the internet had made more widespread, but, at that point, consisted mostly of blogs for visual inspiration and industry news. THE PARTICIPANTS The discourse circling design discourse Carly Ayres (@carlyayres) dates back decades (come to the AIGA partner at HAWRAF Archives and take a look, if you require physZipeng Zhu (@zzdesign) ical evidence). The central questions—What founder of DAZZLE is graphic design criticism and what is its purpose? Who is allowed to practice it? What Joe Marianek (@joemarianek) designer, educator, is its effect on the field of design?—are still AIGA NY board president being asked. We still side-eye art, architecture, and literature, wondering why design Molly Heintz (@heintzmm) program chair of the SVA MA doesn’t have quite as robust a history of critiDesign Research program, cism. We still see a design press that’s not editor-in-chief of AIA critical enough, that’s too kind to its subjects, New York’s Oculus magazine and too eager to engage in idol worship. Ramon Tejada Though it seems little has changed, it independent designer, would be impossible to talk about criticism assistant professor at and critical discourse today without also Rhode Island School of Design

GOSSIP

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT

Molly Heintz: At the SVA MA Design Research program, we define criticism in the shorthand by asking the question, “So what?” In other words, how do we place this investigation of a particular design subject into a broader cultural context? We also emphasize research: You can have an opinion while practicing criticism, but it should be an informed opinion.

When I hear the word criticism, I always think, “How many people are involved in this critique? Is it one-to-one? Is it one-to-many?” When we talk about the need for critical discourse in the classroom, it means one thing. When we talk about a framework for critical discourse on Twitter, that means something else. Criticism is context specific. How can we meet people where they’re at, but also try to improve discourse all the time?

Joe Marianek:

Ramon Tejada: And is it us designers who should be writing the criticism? Maybe criticism is another field, people who are not necessarily part of the process or part of the making. Carly Ayres: I’ve been thinking about the difference between criticism, a review, and an in-studio crit. The latter tends to be part of the design process, where you’re soliciting feedback, and ideally that feedback influences the final result. Whereas capital D, capital C “Design Criticism” is usually something that comes from the outside.

One big thing that disdesign criticism from

Zipeng Zhu:

tinguishes

criticism in music, film, and art is that, with design, the client becomes part of the equation. We’re designing for somebody else. I think that makes design criticism a little bit more unfamiliar to people. Heintz: Architecture is an interesting point

of comparison. It historically has a much more robust tradition of criticism, but like design, architecture has one foot in art and one foot in function and serving a client. The question with architecture is obvious: How is this building impacting the urban environment around it? When it comes to design, those impacts might not be as “in your face,” but they are certainly there. The mass impact that design often has is an interesting starting point: Think about how many eyeballs see a design just because it is able to be disseminated far and wide. That is certainly part of the “so what?” It’s less obvious than in architecture, but it’s there.

There’s a difference between criticism and response, right? I really appreciate what Armin [Vit] is doing with Brand New—he critiques brands and really puts his heart and soul into what he writes. I would say they are fair, justified articles. It’s the comments section that gets problematic. That’s where a lot of people get all their emotions out, but without looking at things from an objective point of view. Zhu:

Tejada: But comments are the discussion. Otherwise, it’s not a two-way street.

GOSSIP

Marianek: Criticism in the age of new media is messy, and I think that acknowledging this is important. It’s a cop-out to say that Twitter banter and the “lynch mob” on social media is ultimately unproductive. What comes out of a snarky, messy, crappy conversation can funnel into a productive discourse. ` Ayres: The ideal scenario is that snark on Twitter would ladder up to a larger conversation, but I think the reason we don’t see that taking place very often is a consequence of the medium itself. Everything on social media platforms takes up the same amount of space. Whether you’re griping about the MTA or posting about the death of a loved one, it all just gets stacked on top of everything else. I think that’s really beautiful in the sense that everyone has the same access and the same opportunity to share their voice, but it means that the more thoughtful or nuanced perspectives don’t always surface. Every time a tweet goes viral, we see the limitations of the medium: It favors quick and clever hot takes over thoughtful conversation. Marianek: I actually think some hierarchies

are revealed when people circle around the conversation and retweet it. I’m thinking about the exchange that happened between

Erik Spiekermann and Laura Kalbag about her Accessibility for Everyone book. He tweeted something patronizing at her, and the entire internet supported her and destroyed him. It uncovered an awareness in many people of power structures and privilege that may not have existed before that conversation. Ayres: Yes, it comes back to the notion of opinions versus informed opinions. The question “When is your opinion ‘valuable?’ ” is inherently a dangerous one. You can say, “Oh, when it’s informed,” but I don’t agree with that. The lowest common denominator of engaging online—just shitting on stuff— can absolutely be valuable. Sometimes we just need to burn it all down. The snark comes out when you’re not able to articulate why you’re upset about something and it becomes this ad hominem attack, which is pretty detrimental, especially if you’re just attacking the individual. You need to be burning down the right things. We should be asking ourselves, “What am I trying to accomplish?” You don’t need to have a solution when you’re discovering a problem. But I think you need to be critical about why you’re engaging and why you’re asking the questions.

If we acknowledge ourselves as not just people who are trying to make better logos—as people who are producing culture, not just responding to briefs—then we should be having more critical conversations. Ultimately, if we’re the ones representing design, and we’re giving the lowest blows or the

Marianek:

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT Erik Spiekermann and Laura Kalbag tweetstorm.

GOSSIP

cheapest critical discourse, then it’s going to bring down what we do. I appreciate the responses, the cluster of OMGs. It tells you that this is something that people are responding to. I like the spice you get out of Twitter, but I do think of criticism as more nutritional—that you can get more out of it. Zhu:

What’s exciting about new media is that you can put an idea out there and you get a response immediately. Discussions on social media expose additional veins of inquiry that then become fodder for whole new conversations. Ultimately, that’s the goal of criticism—to start a conversation. In the past, when it was limited to print, that conversation could often be static or stalled. Now it doesn’t have to be.

Heintz:

Social media allows new voices to emerge—people who are knowledgeable and are trying to engage in the discussion. Of course, Twitter or Instagram can very quickly disintegrate into a complete crap show. There are so many people who shoot from the hip, and the opinions of the people who actually do know what they’re talking about can quickly get buried. How do you create spaces for those people to actually engage? Tejada:

Marianek: What about leading by example? If someone is seeing a person who is outspoken or really understands themselves and doesn’t feel like they need to be self-censored, then that’ll encourage others. But what is the framework needed for that person to form a critical opinion and then support it? Design just doesn’t have it for the 21st

century. Or if it does, it’s a [school] program that very few people can afford or be accepted into. Tejada: One place that I think does this type of discourse well is the Hollywood Reporter. I was also watching a Vanity Fair roundtable discussion with a group of transgender actors who were discussing where the community was, and I was just so blown away by it. They were sitting around a table having a very frank discussion about the issues that affect them. Even this conversation we’re having right now over video messaging is a fantastic way of engaging. It’s about trying to figure out who needs to be given that space to actually articulate opinions, or new points of view.

When it comes to online spaces of discourse, something important to consider is, “What are the rules of engagement?” Twitter does a horrible job of moderating and creating safe spaces to have these conversations, because it’s not in their financial interest to do so. It’s a platform where chaos and inflammatory comments are able to gain a lot of traction, because engagement, comments, and likes help their bottom line. In many of the online spaces that I occupy outside of Twitter, mostly Slack communities, there are codes of conduct; there are rules, there are three-strike policies or even one-strike policies. If you are in violation of those, then you’re booted out. Any sort of bad actors are quickly and swiftly removed. These kinds of smaller, closed communities are the spaces where I see the people who don’t feel comfortable expressing their opinions in a really public online

Ayres:

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT

context. It’s more of a controlled discourse where you can test your own opinions before getting the courage to be that person in the meeting who puts their hand up. Zhu: I’m a big advocate of putting your voice out there. I would also like to know what designers are interested in other than design. Who

are their favorite rappers? What movies do they like? What are the other cultural influences? I look at pretty work every single day; the internet is full of it. I’m more curious about the thinking behind the visuals than about the visuals themselves.

GOSSIP

Marianek: So let me get this right: You want to use graphic design as an excuse to talk about movies with other graphic designers?

Or rappers, or gossip. I’m all about rappers at the end of the day. Zhu:

Marianek: Maybe there’s something valuable to that. Because at least you’re coming

together in a room and talking about something. If we can’t have a critical discussion about graphic design, how can we talk about anything else? But maybe we have to start with safer things. Tejada: Maybe looking at the personal side gets to our core a little better and shows that we are not all the same. When you look at the history of design, it’s just one flat line of the

WHAT WE TALK ABOUT

same handful of people. I’m very critical of the fact that I spent all this money on design school and I never saw people who look like me in any of the history books. I’m supposed to believe that people who look like me don’t exist in design? That already leads to a critical perspective. So you have designers coming out of school already asking a lot of questions that don’t have anything to do with, “Is design advertising?” If you’re a human being of any profession, but especially one like design where you’re making work that people interact with and use, you have to acknowledge the current context, the current political climate, or risk being complicit in this entire other narrative. I think we can’t afford to not engage in a deeper level of criticism and conversation around what we do and why we do it. Otherwise you’re being—I don’t want to say irresponsible—but it’s fucking embarrassing.

Ayres:

Even if you do engage, though, there’s this feeling right now that you’re not allowed to disagree with the mainstream opinion. Personally, I think Black Panther is just an alright movie. Okay? It’s not the best superhero movie ever. Once I express that, I become a public villain. Why can’t I have my own opinion? Zhu:

Tejada: Doesn’t that go back to the separation between an opinion and a critical discourse? They are two different things. I can disagree with you that Black Panther is not the best superhero movie, but there’s a whole other level that goes into why Black Panther functions in a particular way, how it was made, and how they crafted the story. That’s

more of a critical perspective, versus just your initial opinion right after seeing the movie. As the non-designer here, I think it’s also a question of what audience you’re trying to reach with what conversation. It benefits everybody’s interests if designers are able to speak to a broader audience and not just a professional audience.

Heintz:

Tejada: That goes back to the idea of design for design’s sake. We have a history of loving to write for ourselves. Zhu: Narcissism. Tejada: Yes, the narcissistic tendency at conferences to talk about your project. That’s why I love lectures by designers who don’t show any of their work and talk about other things, because we all know what your work looks like. We’ve seen that on your website. It’s Nice That featured it as “amazing” again for the 1,200th fucking time. But it doesn’t say anything else. Marianek: There’s this really great Andrew Blauvelt essay about critical autonomy called “Towards Critical Autonomy, or Can Graphic Design Save Itself?” It’s kind of a meditation on the ’90s, when there was this placid plurality of everyone agreeing on the importance of profits. Then a little bit of an upset to the status quo kind of opened the doors for this new criticism, and that’s where the whole “burn your idols” movement arose from—this idea of questioning powers afforded to graphic design right now, which is great and sorely needed. It was really boring for the last five to ten years.

GOSSIP

Tejada: Because design is so entrenched in the history of Modernism and the universal system, where everyone is supposed to be the same, we’re not very good at allowing for somebody to come and read it from a different side, or a different angle. That’s a cultural issue that we’re facing right now, the idea of opening it up. There is no one way to look at anything; there never has been. Heintz: At SVA, we have one semester to teach “design history.” How are you going to crack that nut in one semester? We decided to call it “Approaches to Design History” and divide it into three modules: approaching design history through objects—using the object as a starting point; design history through systems, looking at things more related to technology and experience design; and design history through political and social issues. By thinking about design through different points of view, it unhooks us from the typical survey course that has a canonical, ossified way of talking about design. Marianek: It does fall on educators to set up the framework for all of these conversations. If you think of yourself as a dispenser, a candy machine of knowledge and history, then you’re going to do it wrong. You have to be the host of a conversation in the community

that enables students to think for themselves and to build that sort of critical practice. It’s very comfortable for us as teachers to immediately create a framework for critique. The first day of class, I can tell my students how we’re going to engage in a crit. But in the nebulous real world, those frameworks are not clearly marked. There are no rules—it’s a free-for-all. Maybe the question isn’t, “What is criticism?” Instead, it’s worth taking two or three steps back and saying, “What are we trying to critique now?” And then, “How do we do that, what is the framework?” It will be messy, and we’re not really good about being messy. We like to organize everything. But these types of shifts in perspective are what makes designers—and will continue to make designers—really relevant. Otherwise we’re just making visual stuff. Tejada:

A little discord can do a lot to shake up a complacent and selfcongratulatory industry

Words by Anne Quito

GOSSIP Images on previous page: Left: Joe Duffy and Tibor Kalman. Right: Joe Duffy and Michael Peters, advertisement for The Michael Peters / Duffy Design Group in The Wall Street Journal. 1989. Image courtesy of Joe Duffy. Image below: Tibor Kalman at the 1989 AIGA Awards Dinner.

“We live in an extremely conflict-avoidant society—and I don’t just mean the nice people,” Kasia Urbaniak said recently at a MoMA R&D salon. Urbaniak, who is a dominatrix turned power dynamics coach, could very well have been describing the genial graphic design industry today. The fact is, public arguments between graphic designers are rare. Compared to pugnacious novelists, catty couturiers, argumentative architects, or even temperamental typographers, graphic designers are an easy-going bunch—at least on the surface. There may be silent wars or a surfeit of snark on social media, but there hasn’t been an all-out ideological throwdown between two designers in decades. The defining duel in American graphic design happened nearly 30 years ago in San Antonio, Texas. Tibor Kalman shocked the polite crowd at the 1989 AIGA Design Conference when he attacked fellow designer Joe Duffy, who was seated in the audience. In his remarks as co-chair of the conference, Kalman summarized the design industry’s decline by flashing an advertisement that Duffy and his then partner Michael Peters took out in the Wall Street Journal. Chewing on the ad’s proposition— “How two guys with art degrees can do more for your business than a conference room full of MBAs.”—Kalman, along with historian Stuart Ewen and British art director Neville Brody, decried how graphic designers were compromising artistic integrity to serve the commercial goals of big corporate clients. “We’re not here to help clients eradicate everything of visual interest from the face of the earth. We’re here to make them think about what’s dangerous and unpredictable. We’re here to inject art into commerce,” said Kalman. “We’re here to be bad.” Kalman, who later showcased his peerless skills as a rabble-rouser as founding art director of Colors magazine, accepted Duffy’s challenge to an impromptu debate. “A hastily-scrawled sign was posted announcing an unscheduled debate: ‘tibor: you and me. today. 5:15. breakout room g. joe,” recalls Michael Bierut, writing about the legendary brawl in Design Observer. “Tibor had arranged the chairs in a circle. He and Duffy stood in the middle, circling each other like gladiators. It was pure theater, and more memorable for that than for anything that was said.” Steven Heller was summoned to referee. “When I arrived at the mirrored meeting room—a veritable Texas Versailles—there was already a

DESIGNER FACE-OFFS

large crowd of onlookers gathered in a predatory circle,” he recalls in a 2011 Print article. “Tibor pounced on a somewhat dazed-looking Joe... Joe attempted to duck and jab as best he could, but Tibor was in his element.” Sensing that Duffy didn’t get the chance to air his side fairly, Heller organized round two at the Print magazine headquarters in New York City. What emerged was a spirited tournament between two admired designers that stirred the complacent and increasingly self-congratulatory industry. “If Duffy and Kalman did not exactly bask in warmth, they did cast a great deal of light,” observes Julie Lasky, Print’s then associate editor. “In the end, the one virtue of the debate... was that heretofore unchallenged design practices were not simply taken for granted but viewed from an ethical and moral lens,” writes Heller. “I don’t believe there was a clear winner, but I still feel the design field won because the taboo against head-on criticism was busted, perhaps for the first time.” Kalman and Duffy ended on a cordial note but never spoke to each other again. In 2017, Colorado-based branding agency Moxie Sozo asked Duffy what his war with Kalman all meant. “The good news is, is that more and more people are concerned about good design,” he told them, “which is great for all of us designers.” The yin-yang concerns of art and commerce were also at the heart of a heated debate between Dutch design legends Wim Crouwel and Jan van Toorn in 1972. Before the recording was transcribed in 2000 and translated into English 15 years later, the van Toorn vs. Crouwel affair was a seminal moment in Dutch graphic design history that existed only as a collective memory. Amsterdam’s Museum Fodor, which closed in 1993, served as the arena for their duel. In one corner, Crouwel argued that designers should work with “austere rationalism.” Heavily influenced by Swiss design, he promoted the use of efficient grids in graphic communication. “I believe that as a designer I must never stand between the message and its recipient,” he said. “Many designers are living with the dilemma of wanting to be a visual artist rather than a good graphic designer.”

Image below: Wim Crouwel and Jan van Toorn, 2007. Photograph by Pieter Boersma. Image courtesy of The Monacelli Press.

GOSSIP Image below: Massimo and Lella Vignelli for the 1982 AIGA Medal. Photograph by Barry McKinley. Image opposite: Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko, 1997.

Arguing for the cause of artists, van Toorn asserted that it’s a designer’s duty to experiment with new forms and infuse each assignment with one’s personality. “The acts you perform take place through you, and you are a subjective link,” he said. At one point, he even goes so far as to blame Crouwel’s template mentality for the scourge of cold, corporate-looking design in the Netherlands. “You impose your design on others and level everything. You were at the forefront, and now our country is inundated by waves of trademarks and house styles and everything looks the same,” van Toorn said, eliciting cheers from some in the audience. The Monacelli Press immortalized the event in the 2015 book, The Debate: The Legendary Contest of Two Giants of Graphic Design, signaling that the decades-old existential face-off echoes the dilemma of many designers today. “Their positions derive from basic questions that designers ask themselves when they start out: should my ideas, my personality, my philosophy be evident in my work? Or should I just remove as much of my persona as possible and ‘follow the brief?’ Or is there a way to do both?” Alan Rapp, the book’s editor, explained to The Atlantic. Crouwel and van Toorn’s style dispute is similar to the clash between Massimo Vignelli and Emigre cofounders Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko in 1991. Unnerved by the duo’s groundbreaking computer-aided experimentations, Vignelli nixed the politesse to defend culture, as he saw it. “That is a national calamity,” he said, referring to the “disgraceful” Emigre magazine. “It’s not a freedom of culture, it’s an aberration of culture. One should not confuse freedom with [lack of] responsibility, and that is the problem. They show no responsibility. It’s just like freaking out, in a sense,” he said in a debate convened by Print magazine. The revered Italian master dismissed the upstarts, calling them a “typographic garbage factory.” “He had no clue that more than half the room thought Zuzana and Rudy were more

DESIGNER FACE-OFFS

important than he was,” says East Carolina University professor Gunnar Swanson, recalling an episode at an AIGA Leadership Retreat. Debates about style help foster diversity, he explains. “Some arguments moved people more toward pluralism and away from tribal restrictions—which is good.” Two topics roil designers: ethics and aesthetics. It’s not that designers today aren’t capable of critical exchange—there’s plenty of that on blogs and social media—but what’s missing today is “accountability and critical heft to these skirmishes,” as Rapp puts it. Pentagram partner Paula Scher says casual criticism hurts design as a whole. At the 2015 Brand New Conference, Scher outlined the dangers of casual logo commentary, in effect casting a side eye on popular logo forum UnderConsideration, which is published by the conference’s organizers, Bryony Gomez-Palacio and Armin Vit. Scher didn’t call them out by name, but she was emphatic about how the surge of myopic design mockery can make clients nervous and stifle innovation. Scher’s challenge was delivered with tempered eloquence, as many critical essays on graphic design tend to be today. Designers will draft manifestos, paint murals, cling to euphemisms, or criticize big corporations before opposing one another. Is the reluctance to spar a signal of urbanity or apathy? Why are graphic designers today so afraid of discord? Could it be the years of patience-building practice in client service that inclines us toward compromise? Is it the chumminess of design circles that makes personal feuds awkward to sustain? Or is it because online forums and social media, as Scher suggests, become the default places for critical exchange? What is missing is friction. Without the heat of conflict, well-meaning group initiatives for diversity, gender parity, or ethics could very well remain intellectual propositions. Urbaniak suggests that, ultimately, it’s not a panel discussion or a group proclamation that will lead to progress, but face-to-face dialogue between opposing minds. “It releases imagination and creates a whole new game for everyone else,” she says. “I believe that if people learn how to do this relationship in the form of a dyad, then every social interaction is a form of education.”

How Tupperware became the original social network of 1950s suburbia

Words by Madeleine Morley

GOSSIP Image previous page: At an event, Brownie Wise awards one of her Tupperware dealers with a diamond ring. Courtesy of the Brownie Wise Papers, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Image below: In this publicity photograph, Brownie Wise leads a Tupperware party. Courtesy of the Brownie Wise Papers, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

A frosted plastic bowl filled with purple grape juice flies across the living room of an American suburban home. Not a drop is spilled. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the 1950s. This unlikely game of catch is played by a cohort of housewives gathered around a table stacked with an assortment of fruit-colored kitchenware. Afterward, they complain about their husbands and children, then swap recipes for Spring Glow Angel Cake (cake mix with peach pie filling) and Spring Vegetable Salad (veggies set in Jell-O). As the activities come to an end, enthused guests leave with plastic kitchenware under their arms: strawberry and plum Wonder Bowls and Econo-Canisters, sapphire-blue TV Tumblers with matching drink stirrers, Ice-Tup popsicle molds, and Party Susan divided serving trays.

PARTIES ARE THE ANSWER

Scenes like this unfolded across America in the 1950s as women embraced the Tupperware party—an in-person, semiformal marketing strategy that made the company’s Wonder Bowls as synonymous with the idea of retro suburbia as turquoise Cadillacs and the Avon lady. Today, it’s still estimated that a new Tupperware party takes place every 2.5 seconds, and in 2016, Tupperware sales totaled $2.21 billion. The 1950s are often referred to as the “golden age” of mass advertising. It was a time of snappy copy and illustrated campaigns dreamt up by the ad masters of Madison Avenue. But unlike Lucky Strike or Coca-Cola, Tupperware didn’t become a classic through print ads and billboards; the kitchenware made its name in the living room, amidst circles of friends and an atmosphere of camaraderie. The home party plan, executed by Tupperware’s vice president of marketing, Brownie Wise, was a system based on social connections, one that proved far more effective for the company than any established forms of marketing. Indeed, the monumental rise of Tupperware was the result of a strategy familiar to today’s social media-fueled companies—networking, sponsored content, and influencer endorsements. When Earl Tupper invented his first line of flexible, translucent plastic containers in the 1940s by purifying a waste product of the oil refining process, he saw great promise; he called his polyethylene “Poly-T: Material of the Future.” But while his patented airtight seal could keep leftovers like lettuce leaves fresh and crisp for days on end, no amount of clever campaigning could convince the post-war consumer to bring plastic into the kitchen. It was an alien substance—one associated with dirty oil and industry—and the seal had to be “burped” in order to close properly, a confusing concept for people used to snapping shut glass jars. Introduced to the public in 1947, Tupperware languished on department store shelves until in 1949 when Wise, a recently divorced mother and former newspaper columnist, began selling impressive numbers of the containers door-to-door in her suburban Florida neighborhood. Her business was called Patio Parties, and it used a sales strategy pioneered by companies like Stanley Home Products, where sellers would demonstrate novel designs at planned domestic events.

Image below: Instructions on how to burp a Tupperware seal. Courtesy of the Ann and Thomas Damigella Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

Image: Brownie Wise in front of the Tupperware headquarters in Florida. Courtesy of the Brownie Wise Papers, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

Image above and below: Crop from a Tupperware catalogue. Courtesy of the Ann and Thomas Damigella Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

Through Patio Parties, Wise recruited friends to peddle various products from direct-sales companies, including brushes, brooms, and Poly-T, and then took a slice of the profits. One woman sold 56 Wonder Bowls in a single week. Irrepressibly charismatic, Wise believed that the best way to sell was through home demonstrations and socializing; her method was entirely grassroots, based on a tradition of door-to-door salesmanship rather than corporate notions of marketing. At her parties, Wise would not only show women how to burp a Wonder Bowl seal, she’d suggest what they could cook inside it and offer them other domestic and personal advice. “Wise didn’t invent the party home model, but she refined and feminized it,” says design historian Alison J. Clarke, author of Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America. “She focused on the positive idea of gossip and getting together. At one of her parties, sales were made secondary (or at least were seen to be).” Tupper noticed how quickly Wise was moving his product compared to department stores and other independent sellers. In 1951, he asked her to become vice president of marketing for the Tupperware Company and to spearhead a new home party plan. The company put an end to distributing in department stores and focused purely on home-selling strategies. “What’s incredible is that after only a few years using Wise’s home party plan, plastic kitchenware went from being virtually nonexistent to being prevalent in people’s homes and lives,” says Clarke. “And it wasn’t because of good advertising. It was because of women talking to other women.” By 1954, largely by word-of-mouth, the company had recruited 20,000 private contractors to work as dealers or distributors across the United States. Dealers would reach out to their personal networks to find

PARTIES ARE THE ANSWER

potential party hostesses (or even other dealers)—their hairdresser, or real estate agent, or a mother from the local church group. In return for providing her home and social network, a party hostess would then receive merchandise as a special thank you. To mark Tupperware’s rocketing success, Wise became the first woman to appear on the cover of Business Week in 1954. “If we build the people, they’ll build the business,” she proudly asserted. With Wise at the helm, Tupperware began placing aspirational advertisements in women’s magazines to recruit new dealers. The scenes depicted smiling, upper middle-class suburban housewives earning cash independently by simply socializing with their friends. “These images weren’t indicative of the people that were actually selling Tupperware, though,” says Clarke. “Many dealers were divorcees like Wise, or working-class women from diverse ethnic groups. On the flip side of those ads was the real 1950s America.” The party plan relied on social networks, which meant a dealer could tailor an event to the needs and culture of her local community; this ability to adapt and mold a party is what made the marketing strategy so effective. Recruitment campaigns in women’s magazines and later on television promised not just modern kitchenware, but a fabulous lifestyle of fun, sorority, and additional income. By the mid ’50s, potential new dealers across the United States were given Dorothy Dealer’s Dating Diary, a fullcolor cartoon booklet containing sales advice. It dissuaded women from adopting a corporate image and encouraged them to use their own personality and social skills to charm friends and neighbors. If a potential hostess had a reluctant husband, one less than keen on having a group of women in his house, Dorothy Dealer suggested that the wife appeal to his rational side: The money saved from all the free gifts would far outweigh a small inconvenience. A typical ’50s Tupperware party animated its products and encouraged bonding; guests would toss bowls around the room to test durability, and dealers would stand on top of containers in impressive balancing acts. Games like Waist Measurement, Game of Gossip, and Chatter focused on stereotypically feminine concerns, while Elastic Relay and Partner Balloon Burst required close contact. A game called Hubby asked women to write and then read aloud an imaginary newspaper advertisement selling their husband (an example cited in Clarke’s book reads: “One husband for sale. Balding, often cranky, stomach requiring considerable attention!”).

Image above: Brownie Wise on the cover of Business Week. Courtesy of the Brownie Wise Papers, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

GOSSIP

Image above: Crop from a Tupperware catalogue. Courtesy of the Ann and Thomas Damigella Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Image opposite: Tupperware Sparks magazine. Courtesy of the Brownie Wise Papers, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

These activities took advantage of women’s relationships to one another: Intimacy is a powerful tool for selling and manipulation. Wise’s games required women to physically touch and swap personal secrets, and it’s no surprise that when inhibitions are broken and people bond, they are far more likely to make purchases. While its exploitative nature is evident, Tupperware parties also subversively created a space for women to vent frustrations under the pretext of a domestic chore. In 1950s suburban America, there were few other excuses for all-female gatherings of this kind, especially ones in which women played games and talked about how terrible their partners were. The company started publishing a monthly newspaper called Tupperware Sparks to spread motivational stories and community news to the Tupperware women. It often featured photographs of Wise on the cover, as well as images of her pink canary, convertible, pet palomino pony, and luxury lakeside mansion. Wise developed elaborate incentive schemes and eliminated high-pressure and competitive sales strategies from her marketing model. Instead, with motivational rhetoric and a philosophy of positive thinking, she gave her dealers a feeling of hope and community. Free gifts encouraged them to collaborate and bond, as did lavish pep rallies and retreats thrown at the grand Tupperware headquarters in Florida. Clad in a silk dress and pearls, Wise would award extravagant prizes to her high-achieving Tupperware women. Mink coats, diamond rings, and couture dresses were not uncommon—romantic gifts just like those showered on Marilyn Monroe in How to Marry a Millionaire. Hundreds of Tupperware women would line up outside the headquarters’ Poly Pond to dip their hands into its “sacred” water, which Wise sprinkled with polyethylene pellets to give it that special “Tupper Magic.” Wise also carried a black chunk of polyethylene known as Poly around with her; she said it was the original slag Tupper had used for his experiments, and she encouraged dealers to rub Poly and make a wish. According to oral histories, Wise’s events 1 consolidated women’s feeling of belonging to the “Tupperware family,” and greatly enhanced feelings of self-esteem. “Her plan didn’t follow a pyramid scheme. Wise created a network that ran a lot like a sorority; women would attend a party so their friend could get free gifts, and top dealers would encourage other women to grow their network rather than compete with one another,” emphasizes Clarke. “It was charisma, ritual, gossip and sociality that made Tupperware successful. It’s what motivated people.” When Wise first brought selling into the home, it certainly felt like the shopping experience of the future. But it was not yet clear how prophetic

1. An in-house set designer at Tupperware built elaborate fantastical sets for the various annual events. One motivational getaway called Gold Digger Drive gave sales recruits sites on a “Big Dip” map that corresponded with their achievements. A huge area of land in Florida was filled with mock Western props, and Tupperware

her vision would turn out to be. While Mad Men were pouring energy into full-color billboards and catchy jingles for the radio, Wise recognized the untapped value of suburban influencers, personal endorsements, and social networks. Ultimately though, her endeavour was full of contradictions: Tupperware enabled women to participate in business while balancing homemaking, but it bound them to a contract; it provided women with a space for social conversation, but also made it a space of sales. It recognized the value of invisible female labor in the ’50s—of caretaking, social planning, and housekeeping—but it transformed that labor into a profit-making enterprise. The party plan capitalized on precedents for all-female gatherings like the sewing circle and quilting bee, and it, too, became a focal point for social activity and companionship. Tupper eventually dismissed Wise in 1958 and then sold the company. He was suspicious of Wise’s cult-like status and “megalomaniacal” leadership style, and deeply jealous of the fact that people attributed Tupperware’s success to her. Since the mid ’50s, he’d been trying to put an end to the home party plan so that his product could enter a conventional and more “legitimate” sales arena. Tupper could not control the spread and content of word-of-mouth networks in the same way he could the spread of a paid advertisement. And the parties likely raised for him the same questions that they did for many men at the time: What were women really doing and saying when gathered around the kitchen table? In the late ’50s, the Tupperware Corporation attempted to tap into a European market using mass advertising tactics, but its attempts gained little traction. Instead, “black market” Tupperware parties sprang up across the continent, as wives of army officers stationed in Europe brought bulk stock overseas to sell in their neighborhoods. In 1960, the company finally caved and officially took its home party plan abroad. The news of Tupperware traveled internationally by word-of-mouth, and Wise’s influence, games, and rhetoric spread across new cities and suburbs.

women would dig in the ground looking for their “buried treasure,” eventually uncovering radios, toasters, gold watches, and yes, more mink coats. A toy car was once surfaced from the soil—a stand-in for a full-size Ford.

Image: Signs at a Tupperware event. Courtesy of the Brownie Wise Papers, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

Creating a

GOSSIP

For her first solo museum show, Meriem Bennani fuses iPhone footage with hilarious post-production and an anthropomorphic fly Words by Tala SafiĂŠ

CREATING A BUZZ

I first came across Meriem Bennani’s work while browsing on Instagram. After stumbling upon her profile, I became intrigued by a video featuring a Moroccan wedding humorously distorted to the tunes of #philipglass. It was a 15-second excerpt from her 2016 multi-channel installation, FLY, an immersive video experience exhibited at MoMA PS1. The show consisted of variously shaped screens projecting personal footage, from lavish ceremonies to juicy car conversations. Added to the mix were playful sound and visual effects—think Photoshop’s Liquify tool gone wild—and an animated fly, guiding viewers to construct their own narrative from the fragmented footage. Tell me about the process of shooting FLY.

I had tickets to go to Morocco the week after MoMA PS1 gave me the slot for a solo show. I decided to film everything I did with my iPhone, almost like in a digital diary. I would notice threads that I was interested in, which guided and focused the process, but it was all really spontaneous. I wasn’t building a story or anything. Gossip is a predominant theme in the project, made manifest by the fly—a buzzing voyeur who acts as a guide throughout the video. What interests you about this theme?

The word “gossip” has a pretty negative connotation in Morocco and North Africa—but it’s also a national sport. I am mostly interested in the different ways you can read people’s performances on camera without them manifestly gossiping. For example, there is a scene where my grandma talks about this woman, and how her husband had a heart attack by the pool and died. It’s very cinematic. She then tells me how the wife is already going out to weddings and parties. That’s the part where she’s judging and telling me her own take on the story. I guess I’m interested in the subtlety of her telling me a simple fact while having other intentions. Video is a medium that can amplify all those layers of reading people. Ultimately, I am the one creating the gossip with my edits; it’s about manufacturing stories for entertainment. The fly is an interesting agent to pick.

The fly is multiple things. She is the storyteller. She also symbolizes surveillance systems: She’s like a camera, a device. Her 3D design and the material her body seems to be made from is like that super glowy and smooth material of smartphones. She travels everywhere, so she’s this kind of a symbol for globalization. She’s also annoying: Flies aren’t pleasant. They remind us of death, they eat corpses. There is something visceral about her, but she’s also cute

GOSSIP Image: Installation view of Meriem Bennani: FLY at MoMA PS1, 2016. Image courtesy of the artist and MoMA PS1. Photo by Pablo Enriquez.

and sings Rihanna songs. She creates this tension between cuteness and danger. You make a lot of conscious design decisions, like using corny typefaces or saturated color palettes. Tell me about these choices.

I’d like to think that nothing on the screen is there by default. I love doing my own subtitles because they are moments of decision-making. Subtitles are interpretation; no translation is fully accurate, especially when you’re translating slang. There’s a way of showing that they are a construct by playing with their placement on the screen, picking a particular font, and choosing a color without necessarily going for the default yellow with black stroke.

CREATING A BUZZ

Werner Herzog, when talking about cinema, said that truth “can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.” I find this statement is relevant to your work, in which you use documentary footage that you cleverly manipulate to create your own version of events.

I’m stealing that from you. I think that by over-manipulating real footage—or what one would think of as the “truth”—I’m actually trying to reveal how all media is manipulated. Documentary is a complete construct, a fabricated narrative. Reality can’t be condensed into an hour and a half of footage for a movie. The idea of excessively intervening on and editing footage is almost more true to the process. I try to reveal the structure of the film inside out, showing what I’m manipulating, and creating a tension where the audience is always waiting to be tricked and surprised. The idea is to have an active viewer who can’t chill too much.

You often use footage from private celebrations and family gatherings. How did you manage to exhibit private events to a big audience?

The wedding was actually that of a friend’s that I grew up with. She knew I had a lot of footage of the ceremony, and gave me the permission to use it. I never show the faces of the bride or groom, so it becomes more like the idea of a wedding: It doesn’t really matter whose it is, and all of a sudden, it’s not private anymore, you know? As for my grandma and aunt, the two women actually talking to the camera, they don’t care. I have found a lot of inspiration in the way women communicate in my family, and that’s what I’ve been filming, although I think I’m now ready to shift to something else. Meriem Bennani is a New York-based video artist. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at Saatchi Gallery, London and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.

All video stills: Bennani, Meriem, FLY, 2016. First shown at MoMA PS1. Image courtesy of the artist.

For more than 50 years, the radical intimacy of queer zines has flourished on the fringes Words by Nathan Ma

All images courtesy of the Queer Zine Archive Project.

GOSSIP

The history of queer zines is a history written in the margins. In 2018, 72 countries consider homosexuality a prosecutable offense. More still place sanctions on other non-normative expressions of gender and sexuality. Even where the representation of queerness is permitted, we find the same tired tropes in our own glossy magazines and broadsheets, rotating through the same hunky cover stars and patriarchal talking points that reveal a surprisingly narrow understanding of what it means to be queer. “Here I was, stressing over labels, what to call myself and balance how much I thought of one pleasurable act over another pleasurable act—one set of parts or another,” writes Puppy Dave in his one-off zine, How I Learned to Love Myself and Occasionally Other Men. Though the prolific zine maker and distributor had been active in the scene since 1993, this was his first self-proclaimed queer zine, and its popularity when printed in 2005 led to two rounds of reprints in later years. In the publication, the author reflects on how his own sexuality—his own gayness—functions, how he’s explored it with partners of varying gender markers and identities, and how he did, indeed, learn to love both himself and other men. The story unfolds like many traditional zines. Typed blocks of text are pasted onto pages from chapter books or photographs. Occasional hand-drawn sketches illustrate the narrative, and fragmented bits of

background material—a newspaper headline or the caption of a found photograph—are left uncovered, one declaring, “LOOK LIKE THE REAL THING!” The inside cover loudly states, “THIS IS A QUEER ZINE.” Puppy Dave’s zine is one of the hundreds of zines collected, archived, and catalogued by Milo Miller and Chris Wilde of the Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP), which has digitized more than 1,300 zines from around the globe, spanning nearly 50 years. On its website, the grassroots organization borrows from a well-worn explainer of zines originally published on Zine World: “[Zines are] publications that are not produced by a corporation with an eye to the bottom line, but by ordinary people who want to make their voices heard. If glossy magazines reflect the public sphere by documenting the cultural zeitgeist and fast-moving trends—meanwhile converting circulation into money, and money into power—zine culture thrives on intimacy. For queer people, it’s an intimacy that has historically been rigorously policed by both the self and the state. Since the ’70s, zines have been an archive of our stories and our lives, but also of the times we’ve lived through. Grimy and grubby or polished to perfection—they’re ours and ours alone. That’s not to say that the visual codes of traditional glossy magazines are lost on the zine makers. The first issue of Rough Play... Rough Trade, which was released in 1993 by a maker known only as Brian from Toronto,

HISTORY MADE IN THE MARGINS

pairs a personal anecdote about falling in love at the historic March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bi Equal Rights and Liberation with the hard bodies and hard cocks of a vintage porn shoot. A 1992 edition of Dragazine from West Hollywood’s Lois Commondenominator turns the spotlight on the drag queens and performers of the ’90s, with interviews and glamor shots that resemble the pages of Vogue or other high-fashion periodicals. Today it’s nothing new for the latest alumnus of RuPaul’s Drag Race or a politically-minded porn star to grace the cover of mainstream publications like Attitude, Out, or the Gay Times, but there’s a quiet sense of sexual radicalism in these artifacts from an era when AIDS was the leading cause of death among young men in America and stigmatization ran deep through queer communities. The zines in the QZAP collection convey a hectic maximalism, with collaged paragraphs and handwritten notes bleeding into punk-rock symbols, crude comics, and personal annotations scrawled into the margins. A handful of publications, however, take a more structured approach. The seminal pamphlet Queers Read This, which was distributed anonymously at NYC Pride in 1990, more closely resembles a textbook: strict chapters written in an ascetic sans serif and a small amount of photographs accompanying the call for queer rage. A one-off zine from Laura Wynholds, an academic and student in library and museum sciences, follows a similar no-frills approach to focus on healthcare and outreach resources for transgender people. At the heart of all these projects is a strong reverence for community and a tacit

sense of empathy. The zines, their audiences, and their creators span the full spectrum of queerness; their purposes range from self-expression to resource sharing to organizing revolutions. But they stand together as branches of the same tree: They’re made for, by, and with queer people, and they carry with them the love we as queer people often can’t express to one another out loud.

QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. GOSSIP

All images courtesy of Paul Soulellis.

QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK is a 2018 publication edited by Paul Soulellis. A collective resource of subversive artists and writers who reject normative narratives, the archive includes a broadside, two booklets, a brochure, and a few loose-leaf works on paper, all housed within a plastic sheath. On its website (queer.archive.work), the publication is defined as “a loose assembling of queer methodologies, with a particular view towards network culture, failure, and refutation.” Soulellis and the participating writers and artists were kind enough to let us run a few of the works contained within. QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK.

QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. BY JEFFREY CHEUNG AND GABRIEL RAMIREZ

QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK.

QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. BY nicole killian

QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK.

QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. BY SOMNATH BHAT T

QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK.

QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. BY BE OAKLEY

QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK. QUEER.ARCHIVE.WORK.

“

You think you know People, but you have no idea—this is the story of what it’s like to design for more than 90 million readers each week

We’ve had some big, beautiful covers, but mostly there’s just a lot of stuff on them. I find that hard. Sometimes you just want to do something that’s pretty.”

Special Look Inside!

GOSSIP Image below: Phoebe Weekes, design director.

I’m watching shimmery pools of nail polish and smudges of eye shadow spin around a page like constellations circling a celestial object; in this case, it’s the bright, shining star, Emma Stone, who’s endorsing one of these products as among the season’s “20 Best Beauty Products.” There are artfully-cracked cakes of concealer, spurts of CC cream, and swipes of mascara all moving as if in a dance, choreographed by the cursor of one of the five art directors who work at People magazine. After consulting several mastheads for the weekly issues, the franchise issues, the special issues, the book-a-zines, and the digital properties, five is just my best guess. But depending on who you ask, the answer to a question as seemingly benign as, How big is the design department?, could be 10, or 16, or more than 36, if you count photo, digital, and video. Or the answer might be “Not nearly big enough,” or “I have no idea. See all these desks? I don’t know what department this even is.” People is big. With one of the largest magazine readerships in America, People has gamely laid the table for our insatiable appetite for the lives of others ever since it was founded in 1974. It’s a seductive, if not always stylish spread, designed to appeal to the widest possible audience and to be devoured as quickly as our fingers can flick the pages. The layouts invite us to tuck in and take a bite without feeling too guilty about what we’re consuming. Advertisers are eating it up, too—annual ad revenues regularly top a billion dollars. At a time when print advertising is supposed to be dying a slow, silent death, how do they pull this off? People is also the country’s oldest celebrity entertainment magazine, so it’s had a few decades to establish itself in the hearts and homes of its devoted readers. As someone who’s previously only thumbed through it at the nail salon (and only if it was the last thing on the rack, and only if no one was looking), People has never been in either my heart or my home. I lumped it in with the other happy, shiny covers at the supermarket checkout; the ones full of low-grade celebrity photos and exclamation points at the end

INTO THE GOSS

of every headline. In the past few weeks, however, I’ve easily spent more time with the magazine than I have in my whole life combined. I have also gone to meet the people of People to observe them in their natural habitat, and I’ve discovered that I was wrong, that we were all wrong, and that there is a very clear reason why they are the biggest and the best-selling business in the print media game. I figured out how they do it, and I’m going to tell you, but you won’t like the answer: standards. Ethical standards. Moral standards. And yes, design standards. I will soon learn that Ms. Stone’s immaculate complexion has not, in fact, been photoshopped, that neither her hair nor lip color will be altered in any way (a practice that’s more common than you might think) before this “20 Best” beauty page lands in the mailboxes of the magazine’s 3.5 million subscribers and reaches its total, worldwide, digital, social, and IRL audience of over 90. Million. People. With great circulation comes great responsibility, and despite what its rainbow-bright color palette and excessive punctuation might imply, People takes that responsibility seriously. It doesn’t alter its photos. It doesn’t change the background or add fake ones. It doesn’t crop out bodies, rearrange them, or move them closer together to suggest relationships that don’t actually exist. It doesn’t slim anyone’s figure or remove anyone’s wrinkles. It’s very protective of children’s right to privacy, and it absolutely does not stand for stalkerazzi. Some readers are actually disappointed by how respectful People is. When other magazines go low—printing sensational rumors, half-truths, and outright lies—People sticks to the facts. Which makes designing it all the more challenging: How do you make facts go down like candy that tastes just as sweet to your retired grandpa, your single-and-lovin’-it gal pal, your working mom, your stay-at-home dad, and your celeb-obsessed 6th grader? As the art director puts the finishing touches on the beauty page, I watch an assistant scurry over to alert us that executive creative director Andrea Dunham will see us now. This is the meeting I’ve been trying to nail down for weeks. Staffers have been skirting around me all morning trying to extract a few minutes from her schedule; they are consulting their calendars and whispering behind low cubicle walls, and though no one says anything outright, I get the sense that I should be feeling lucky indeed to get any face time at all with this very busy woman. It seems that in pursuing this interview, I have made an odd request. For a magazine that says so much about the world, the world hasn’t had

GOSSIP All images of People magazine courtesy of People magazine. Images below: Royal Wedding Covers 1. Diana Spencer September 15, 1997. 2. Kate Middleton April 4, 2016. 3. Meghan Markle June 4, 2018.

much to say about People. It’s said even less about its design, and less still about its designers. There are no “famous” art directors or design tastemakers on the masthead—for instance, ones with personal Instagram accounts just as popular as the brand’s own. I start to wonder if this isn’t symptomatic of an internal power struggle. At the lively morning pitch meetings, the editors banter like old college pals while the design team sits quietly taking notes. There is one designer, however, who has a seat at the table, and that’s Dunham. The table where she’s seated at the big Wednesday morning pitch meeting is one of those comically long ones that exist only in the movies or in the boardrooms of banks or hedge funds or magazines owned by Time Inc. and Meredith, People’s parent company. Dunham seems extremely at ease there. She is one of those effortlessly chic women for whom I’ve been trying to think of a more clever nickname than “silver fox.” Her sleek, steel-gray mane cascades over louche layers of black (Mary Kate and Ashley, eat your hearts out), and I’m wondering if I’ll be stepping over some invisible line if I ask her where she got her buttery soft leather flats. The roughly three dozen staffers who gather at this mega-pitch meeting look like an advertisement for diversity and inclusion in the workplace; every age, race, and gender seems to be equally represented. They laugh and joke as the meeting kicks off with a slideshow of their fave celeb pics of the week. The first photo is of two British royals eating cake, and someone notes how sweet they look; it’s so nice to see them getting along after their recent public spat. Then there is a picture of Angela Bassett celebrating her 60th birthday at the beach, looking bangin’ in a bikini. Someone admires her abs. Someone calls her their hero. Someone wonders just how she does it. If you’re noticing a lack of negativity—and a lack of speculation about who’s doing what with whom behind who’s back—that’s because this is not a gossip magazine. It’s too true and too fact checked to be hearsay. This is People, people—a celebrity entertainment magazine where nice news is good news and actual reporting is the rule. The information they print often comes directly from the mouths of celebrities themselves, not “anonymous trusted sources.” When Hollywood picks up the phone, People is on the other end of the “party line,” congratulating them on their recent wedding, their new baby, their weight loss, their recovery, their three months sober. It’s a step above tacky tabloids, and a few steps below other weekly titles like New York Magazine—which turns out to be a very good place to be, indeed.

INTO THE GOSS

It’s honest-to-goodness kindness, not catiness, that gets People the direct celebrity access for which its known. They get exclusives. Actors, musicians, chefs, politicians, and reality TV contestants trust them, actually want to talk to them, because they know they’ll be handled with kid gloves. The exclusives may sometimes be puffy, like when a past U.S. president was asked about his “favorite family traditions” and what he puts in his girls’ Christmas stockings, but at a time when a major tabloid publisher is a key source for a federal investigation against the current commander-in-chief, it’s somehow comforting to know that there’s at least one mass market magazine that doesn’t have to skirt journalistic standards to chase sales. The celebrity exclusives extend to photos, too. At one point in the meeting, during a discussion about what imagery will be used for a celebrity news story, a low-res, low-quality photo is projected on-screen, and a few editors get excited. It’s a candid shot of two stars that looks like it was taken in a rush. I can’t understand why anyone with eyes on their face would get so excited about a shitty iPhone photo, but I’ve apparently missed the whole point. This “shittiness” means the photo wasn’t art directed and staged and then disseminated by the celebrity couple’s PR to every media outlet, rendering it a nonexclusive, and therefore nearly worthless. It means it was passed along to People by an insider, and that People alone will get to run it. I wonder how the design team is taking this. They’re the ones who’ll have to set this image in layout later today and make it look good. Or at least as good as they possibly can. They don’t betray much in the boardroom, but they’ll soon be opening up to me about things like shitty photos and shitty type and constricting page layouts. There’s a hushed reverence when I finally file into Dunham’s office along with a handful of people from the design and photo teams she runs. The office is small and warmly lit, and I see immediately that I was wrong to be put off by the protective PR bubble that’s been built up around her. She is open, direct, well-spoken, and surprisingly funny—and a pro, who, like everyone she manages, arrived at People with design experience at massive pubs like New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, and Women’s Health.

Andrea Dunham, executive creative director, and Sarah Burrows, photo editor (seated).

GOSSIP Image below: From right to left, Andrea Dunham, executive creative director; Phoebe Weekes, design director; Dean Markadakis, deputy design director; Sarah Burrows, photo editor; Elliot Stokes, deputy art director; David Janus, art director.

I’m told that this gathering, which includes deputy design director Dean Markadakis, design director Phoebe Weekes, and deputy art director Elliot Stokes, is unusual. Not that they don’t all work together on a daily basis, but crowding around the boss’ desk and calmly, methodically discussing design—that just doesn’t happen. With the unforgiving pace of producing a weekly magazine, I get the sense that page approvals happen on-the-fly, desk-side. Which is not to say that this is a messy, unstructured operation—just the opposite. The People design process runs like a fast-moving, expertly-oiled machine. As such, their design choices are often based on practicality and efficiency over cleverness or beauty. “Phoebe’s famous line is that we can never have anything nice,” Dunham laughs. She is kidding but also not kidding. “I do wish we had more flexibility with the covers,” says Weekes. “There are so many things you could do with them to make them more beautiful.” She’s referring to the template, which, rigid as it may be, has relaxed under the direction of Dunham, who’s more attuned to modern standards of editorial design. At the end of the day, however, the stories reign supreme, and it’s the editors who run the stories.

INTO THE GOSS

“Our editorial director is very good at saying, ‘Okay, if there’s too much stuff, then take it off,’” Weekes admits. “And we’ve had some big, beautiful covers, but mostly there’s just a lot of stuff on them. I find that hard. Sometimes you just want to do something that’s pretty.” While Dunham is quick to clarify that the editors know good design when they see it, their primary concern is with readership, which is getting older and busier (40% of their readers are working women, and 40%— men and women—are raising children). That means anything “pretty” takes a backseat to clear, simple type and practical layouts. “Sometimes we fight back because we want a particular image that’s more beautiful, or we want a typographic treatment that’s a little more special, and we have to battle that,” says Dunham. Working at People, you have to know when to pick your battles. “From week to week you suffer the indignity of designing something you really like, and then an editor saying, ‘I don’t like that fancy type,’ which is anything that they find illegible in any way. Or, ‘My daughter doesn’t like the color yellow,’ so we should never use it,” says Weekes. “For the daily pages, they just want us to be intelligent storytellers,” Dunham concedes. “And we’re all journalists—that’s what sets us apart from the design and photo teams at any other place I’ve ever worked. It’s that investment we feel in telling the story. We have to get it right.” Not just right, but fast and flexible, with the ability to compress a story (if more ad pages are bought), or expand it (if an ad falls through), or turn it into a cover feature at the very last minute. “This team is very good at putting those puzzle pieces together,” she says. “This is a news magazine, and it functions like a daily. We’re constantly reorganizing and reworking the lineup.” Weekes recalls the moment in 2014 when Robin Williams died. “We found out about it very late on a closed night and everybody stayed till 4:00 a.m. and redid an entire issue overnight. And that’s not unusual.” When Prince died in 2016, they pushed out a 138-page special issue with no ads, in just three-and-a-half days. A designer at the time reportedly commented, “I’ve never worked anywhere where I’ve seen people work this quickly and efficiently.” Dunham pauses to recall the 2012 year-end issue, one of the most popular franchise issues, which requires a huge time investment from the

Image above: You know People takes a cover seriously when they keep cover lines to a minimum and bring out the shiny gold effect. The minimal color palette lets this portrait of Robin Williams take center stage. August 25, 2014.

GOSSIP

INTO THE GOSS

1. People puts out a notable number of special issues around celebrity deaths, which are consistently top sellers. See John Lennon (1980 special issue), Princess Grace Kelly ('82), Karen Carpenter ('83), Rock Hudson ('85), Lucille Ball ('89), Paul Newman ('08), Michael Jackson ('09), and Carrie Fisher ('16), to name just a handful.

Image above: Elliot Stokes, deputy art director (third from left).

entire team starting about six months out. “It was the day before we were about to ship,” she says. “We had Sandra Bullock on the cover, and then the Sandy Hook shooting happened. We were here in the office watching all those children dying in real time, and calling in photographs of them. My job was to put together a cover that represented all of the deaths, and we had to do that amidst tears and exhaustion and frustration. It was a brutal night, but we put together a beautiful tribute to the loss 1 of all those children and teachers.” Originally, breaking news didn’t make the cover of People without a celebrity connection, but that changed in 1979 when the nuclear nearcalamity of Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania was too big not to talk about. It was swapped in as the cover story just before the issue went to print. “I always believed the heart of People was ordinary people going through extraordinary things, not vice versa,” said Jim Gaines, the assistant managing editor at the time. Local and international crime and human interest news stories are now a staple. Some readers have admitted to skipping over those sections; they tune into People to tune out, not to be “reminded of current events.” Still, the mix of local acts of kindness, national news coverage, and celebrity interest is the billion-dollar recipe that’s resonating with too many readers to tinker with. Designing for an audience that puts equal weight on the breaking news of celebrity breakups, celebrity deaths, and school shootings is its own challenge. The added time constraints creates a pressure-cooker environment that does breed some innovative design solutions, but it also makes more significant design updates near impossible. Sections are updated incrementally, in fits and starts. Bigger, more visible changes don’t see the light of day without significant market testing. The logo, which was designed by one of the magazine’s early design directors, Elton Robinson, has undergone only minor changes since it was

INTO THE GOSS

first created in 1974. But after four years into her role, Dunham grew tired of “the tyranny of the strip,” the block of cover lines running down the left rail of the cover as dictated by the logo lockup. “Then one day,” she recalls, “I made it across the page and I was like, ‘Why don’t we do it large?’ And they resisted and resisted.” Until the market test results proved her right. For the past six months, she and Weekes have undertaken a rigorous postmortem of every issue. “We’ve been working very hard on trying to bring the magazine into a more modern era. But we just don’t have the luxury to stop and take a deep breath and spend a few months doing a redesign.” From week to week, they’re just trying to get the magazine out the door. There are benefits to that. “If you don’t like something you’ve done, you have no time to grieve over it,” says Markadakis. “They’re reading it on the toilet,” nods Dunham. “So you just move on. You plug away, you have a thick skin.” “You have to compromise a lot,” says Weekes, “but you’re never bored. You’re always challenged. Your skills skyrocket. Designing for a monthly magazine has a certain prestige, but you don’t understand how hard it is to work at a weekly—and then how fulfilling that becomes. I don’t know if I could ever go back to a monthly.” “I came from a monthly magazine,” says Markadakis, who was the creative director of Fast Company for almost eight years. “The purpose of every feature that we designed was to win a design award, so you’re constantly pushing yourself. When I came here, it’s not that that drive went away, but I realized that the stories we’re doing here affect people. Readers really, really, really have a connection to this magazine.” I can’t help but wonder what they’d change if they didn’t have the feedback of editors and publishers and readers to contend with, or if they had a little more time to work through some of their design ideas. What would a “more modern” People look like? As soon as I ask, their defenses drop and they reply eagerly.

"And if the paper was better, it really

would be white!” n “More space to ru !” the photos bigger

“Less buttons!”

“More white .” space—period

“Mo re Ken ne d ys! ”

“More spac e to run the photos bigger!”

r, pe !” pa ay r gr te o et to “B ’s it

enn s K s e “L

!” dys

e typ he t get ” ’s . t e tos “L p ho e th

off

GOSSIP

2. A button is any graphic element that makes text stand out (i.e. a circle, a starburst)

Images above: Sexiest Man Alive Covers 1. Mel Gibson February 4, 1985. 2. Denzel Washington July 29, 1996. 3. Dwyane 'The Rock' Johnson November 28, 2016.

Buttons? Dunham clarifies: “It’s about real estate. I feel like we’re forced to share the real estate with the photography in ways that compromise the integrity of the shot,” she says. “We have to get a hed, a dek, a button,2 the beginning of the story, an exclusive, a this, a that, and by that time you’ve covered three-quarters of the fucking image, and you’re like really? Some real estate would be lovely.” She pauses, laughing, “So, if you can take all those notes and bring them to Meredith, that’d be great.” Apparently, it’s not something they can bring up themselves. Don’t they ever feel like working someplace where they can make basic design requests, ones that might ultimately improve the quality and the storytelling? Don’t they ever want to do anything more expressive, or dare I say it, more experimental? “Do we want to be more experimental, or do we want to work for the most successful magazine in the world?” Markadakis fires back. “I think we all want to be paid,” says Dunham. “Not just be paid, but also have the most influence and the most reach.” Ninety million is, indeed, a lot of reach. It’s a lot of buttons and bright fonts and compromises. It’s a lot of creative energy, too; it’s palpable. There’s an excitement in the room generated just by talking about ideas for the next issue. Our photographer who shot this article left wanting to know how he could get a job there. People does seem like a good place to work. The staff is as friendly as the magazine they slave over each week. Good is relative, of course. Does more money, more staff, and more standards mean good? If that’s the winning business equation, does that also add up to good design? Whether or not you care about celebrities, or think People’s “Sexiest Man Alive” is really the sexiest man living right now (FYI it’s Blake Shelton) is beside the point. By their own admission, the designers don’t care about everything they design. How could they? (Who can really, truly give a shit about the Kardashians?) But it’s undeniably powerful to create a magazine that everyone in the world knows and reads. Even if you don’t count yourself as a reader, trust me, you are a reader—in line at CVS, at your dentist’s office, at the hair stylist. You absorb the stories, the message, and the tone of voice immediately, don’t you? Like through osmosis. And the ability to communicate clearly and effectively—and fast—well, that’s just good design.

A guide to the visual clues of fake news Fake news is designed to mimic the elements of credible outlets, deceiving readers in order to maximize traffic and profit. In an era of false information and deliberate trickery, being able to scan a considered design eye over news sources has become an increasingly valuable skill. Here, we present you with our web design hacks for detecting the hoaxes.

GOSSIP

A fake news website might have... Unusual URL. Identify the top-level domain of a URL. It will usually either tell you the purpose of the site (.edu, .com) or the country the site is hosted (.ca, .au). Fake news sites will mimic legitimate sites but with different top-level domain (real: abcnews. go.com v. fake: abcnews.com.co).

You can’t select the text with your mouse. Fake news organizations don’t want you to be able to copy-andpaste their stories. They need visitors to share their links so that they can increase visitor traffic and generate more ad revenue. No ‘Contact Us’ page. A genuine news source should provide you with a way to get in touch. It should also offer information about its staffers.

Inconsistent design

No company logo

Default favicon

No Site Map or Privacy Policy

Inconsistent use of punctuation in the headlines. A ridiculous story needs a ridiculous amount of exclamation marks…

https → safe vs. http → possibly not safe. The “S” stands for secure.

No social media accounts. A fake news site is extremely unlikely to have a social media presence. If they do have one, then 1. Be careful that links are not phishing attempts, 2. check the number of followers to verify credibility, and 3. check when the account was opened (the newer it is, the more likely it’s fake).

All articles are attributed to the same author. Some articles aren’t attributed at all.

In addition to other factors, it might be a self-hosted WordPress site. To find out, right click the site and select View Page Source. Code will appear in a new window. Type Ctrl+F or Cmd+F to bring up the keyword function. Search: “wordpress,” “wp-admin,” or “wp-content.”

Plenty of opportunity to share stories.

Default typography: Less reputable sources are likelier to use typefaces that are easier to spot as cheap or lazy defaults.

REAL OR FAKE

A true story of fake news, video slander, and alt-right Dicks

Words by Allyn Hughes

GOSSIP

All images courtesy of the writer.

One morning in March of 2017, I woke up embroiled in a full-on rightwing conspiracy theory. It was the type of sunny spring day right at the turn of the season that made everything feel crisp and new. I turned off my alarm and opened up Instagram only to be greeted by a barrage of alerts. Total strangers had spent the night writing unsettling comments on months-old posts, and I had no idea why. I put my phone down and got ready for work, my anxiety slowly building. By the time I arrived at my office desk, I was ready to explode. I sat down and Googled my name. Nothing. Then I did a search for my Instagram handle, and that’s when I found it: a YouTube video that had been posted the previous evening. As I clicked the play button, a sinking feeling came over me; I realized how little control I had over whatever was about to unfold on the screen. What followed was a nine-minute-long video produced by a man named Dan Dicks for his YouTube channel, Press for Truth, which had almost 100,000 subscribers at the time. The video was a continuous screen-share from his computer, where he was live-trolling my Instagram account. There I was at Costco, eating hotdogs with a friend. A dinner I cooked a year and a half ago flashed onto the screen, then some graffiti I’d seen while visiting grad schools. As the video continued, Dicks used my photos to construct a bizarre narrative in a way I can only liken to a kind of corkboard-and-yarn serial-killer-board, with Dicks connecting the dots—only the story being pieced together was mine. And it was completely—and absurdly—wrong. As Dicks, a self-proclaimed investigative journalist, explained in his narration, he found me while perusing the Instagram profile of a chef and pizzeria owner named James Alefantis, where I came up as a suggested user. My profile, it turned out, was a veritable alt-right conspiracy theory goldmine. The photo of me flipping off the camera after a bad day was, to Dicks, a subliminal communication of sexuality through a “phallic” composition. A photo of my friend’s art piece captioned “This makes me feel things” became further evidence of my sexual perversion. Then there was that photo of me holding a peach. As the video finally neared its end, a picture of pizza boxes piled up high on a conference table filled the screen. I recognized it as a photo I took after a long night while working as a senior designer on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign six months earlier. To Dicks, however, this was a smoking gun: It linked me to Pizzagate, a 2016 conspiracy theory about a secret pedophilia ring operated by several key figures of the Democratic Party. He ended the video by urging his tens of thousands of followers to continue his research. And by research, he meant harass me endlessly.

THE DARK SIDE OF SHARING

For the uninformed, Pizzagate was one of the most bizarre and baseless conspiracy theories to come out of an election marked by bombastic claims and the deliberate spreading of misinformation. It started when the personal emails of John Podesta, a former White House chief of staff and chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, were released by Russian hackers via WikiLeaks. Everyone from professional reporters to internet denizens swarmed the email trove, scouring it for evidence of corruption and wrongdoing, or just something snarky, embarrassing, or meme-worthy. Amidst political gossip and office cattiness, some factual revelations came out of the leaked emails: the contents of Clinton’s profitable Wall Street speeches, evidence of leaked debate questions, and information that suggested Clinton Foundation donors received “special access.” Other things were... stretches of the imagination. For example, there were emails in which Podesta talked about several pizza party fundraising events, including one with the aforementioned restaurateur James Alefantis. A 4chan user speculated that phrases like “cheese pizza” (c=child, p=porn ography) and “hot dogs” (little boy) were code words relating to child sex trafficking. From there, Reddit user DumbScribblyUnctious published a thread called “Comet Ping Pong - Pizzagate Summary,” which snowballed as other tenuous connections were made. Basically, the theory was this: Prominent democrats like Hillary Clinton, Podesta, and President Barack Obama were part of an underground child-sex-trafficking ring run out of the basement of the Alefantis pizza restaurant, Comet Ping Pong (c=child, p=pornography). Far-flung evidence, like minute design elements of the Comet Ping Pong logo, a photo of a walk-in refrigerator, and a picture of President Obama playing ping pong with a kid at the White House were collected, connected, and used to strengthen a conspiracy theory now egged on by thousands of anonymous right-wing internet users. #Pizzagate moved on to social media and was then amplified by alt-right media platforms like Breitbart, InfoWars, and Fox News, until it took a very serious, real-world turn. Almost a month after the election, a man entered Comet Ping Pong with an assault rifle, claiming to be searching for the children being held in the restaurant’s basement. The internet is the great democratizer. It offers access to lots of information, more information than we’ve ever had access to at once. It doesn’t delegate who gets this information; anyone with access to the

GOSSIP

internet has access to all that it holds. It opens up the opportunity for voices outside of the mainstream media to be heard. The flip side, of course, is that even dangerous voices can gain traction. In fact, many of our social media platforms are designed to favor the most salacious information—the hot takes and finger-pointing ledes—regardless of their credibility. This has proven to be the perfect breeding ground for the rise of the alt-right, a community that thrives on the spread of misinformation, with leaders like InfoWars’ Alex Jones, Fox’s Sean Hannity, and #QAnon. Heeding the call of the alt-right, the gunman drove six hours across state lines to investigate an underground sex-trafficking ring run out of a pizzeria basement. After storming Comet Ping Pong, he could find no corroborating evidence and surrendered to the police. In March of 2017, he pled guilty for his actions and Alex Jones issued an apology to the pizza place for spreading fake news. At this point, the theory should have been put to rest, yet like an endless game of Whac-A-Mole, another baseless thread emerged. Four days after Jones’ apology, Dan Dicks released his video investigation into my Instagram account, presumably as an attempt to reignite Pizzagate. I know that when I put things online they become part of the public discourse. I am a graphic designer; I make things for public consumption, hoping that they will be shared by users (aka brand engagement). I understand the intricate mechanisms through which information spreads. When I make a graphic for social media, I know that type on an image will perform better than type on a flat colored background. A graphic with a white background will perform well on Facebook, but poorly on Twitter. A still image will almost always get more likes than an animation. This knowledge is part intuitive, part learned, and it’s subject to change depending on audience and content. One thing I learned while making graphics for the Hillary Clinton campaign was that once something is public, it’s out of your control. When the Hillary logo was released, there were countless memes made about the arrow in the crossbar of the H. While you want an audience to share your graphics, you’d prefer them not to change their meaning. But the very technology that makes it possible to share your work also makes it possible to alter its intentions. Even knowing exactly what goes into getting an online follower to engage, it can still be a surprise when they do. When my friend’s mom comments IRL on my Instagram story, I feel a little jolt of “How do you know that?” even if I know they follow me. When it comes back to you outside of the platform it was originally shared on—say, a friend texts you a screenshot of your Facebook activity—it feels even weirder. Instagram has been around since 2010, and still there’s a

THE DARK SIDE OF SHARING

cognitive gap that it seems we just can’t shake—what’s public is really public, even when, physically speaking, it’s just you and your device. You can imagine your mom—or your crush or even the company that you’d like to stand out to—seeing it, and what the reaction might be. But it’s still difficult to conceptualize the wider, anonymous public that is watching. And you can’t always anticipate what their response will be—especially when it’s batshit crazy. Dicks’ Pizzagate video is an extreme example of this. Even after I filed a complaint to YouTube, it took five days for the site to remove it, at which point over 10,000 people had viewed the video. The comments section had close to 300 responses. After the video was taken down, commenters moved their discussion over to message boards, which continue to exist online in some form or other. People tweeted about it and shared it on Facebook. Some of those same viewers then commented on my Instagram and direct-messaged me threats. Because of the sheer number of followers that Dan Dicks had accumulated, the video spread widely in less than 24 hours. Ultimately, YouTube did not take the video down because it was fake news—they took it down because my personal information was published. Claims that I’ve been a “naughty girl” still pop up when you Google my name. It’s easy to see parallels with the way fake news spreads on Facebook; the more outlandish the headlines, the more likely a user is to engage with the content. Most social media platforms are designed so that every post is given more or less the same amount of space, and only what is re-shared by the masses rises to the top. This means that the YouTube video on Press for Truth has seemingly the same credibility as a well-researched documentary. It also means that, as internet and social media users, we need to be more savvy about what we consume—the most popular news is not always true news. There was a time when I read conspiracy theories as a form of entertainment—I peaked in 2012 when the Mayan calendar forecasted the end of the world. I didn’t ever believe that the world was going to end, but there was something truly consuming about a story so wild and coincidental. While I have a much harder time understanding how people can make the leap from cheese pizza to child porn, I have to assume they also got swept up in the allure of fabrication. But I also have to assume it’s a lie they wanted to believe.

GOSSIP

Images opposite: Carrión, Ulises, "Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners" video still. 1981. Images courtesy of Archivo Lafuente.

The Mexican artist Ulises Carrión was preoccupied with two subjects in particular: communication and distribution. In the 1970s, he ran Other Books and So in his adopted home of Amsterdam, which served as a central cultural hub for exhibitions, collaborations, performances, and the making and publishing of artist's books. His Mail Art in the late ’70s and early ’80s involved soliciting artists from around the world to contribute to collective art pieces through submission by mail. And in a 1981 performance piece titled Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners, Carrion asked a select group of friends to help him spread gossip about himself, then tracked its evolution throughout the city of Amsterdam. He concluded the project with a lecture at the University of Amsterdam and a video piece. The diagrams on the opposite page are stills from the video, demonstrating patterns of information exchange and distributional networks of communication.

ULISES CARRIÃ&#x201C;N

We put out an online call for your tips on poor workplace practices, and hundreds of you answered. This call-to-action is part of an ongoing investigative project that will bear fruit in 2019 (and yes, finger-waggers, it will be fact-checked and reported). What follows here is a taste of the uncorroborated reportsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;with names redactedâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;from the early stages of our journalistic efforts. Take them with a heaping grain of salt.

Through the Rumor Mill Designers around the world play a visu al game of telephone

THROUGH THE RUMOR MILL

You’ve probably played a game of Telephone before. You know the rules: Think of a phrase and whisper it into the ear of the person next to you. They whisper what they heard you say to the person beside them. This continues around a circle, until the very last person stands up and announces what they heard. It is inevitably very far from the the original. An eruption of laughter ensues. Or maybe, depending on where you live and where you’re from, you know this game as Whisper Down the Lane, Broken Telephone, Operator, Grapevine, Don’t Drink the Milk, Secret Message, The Messenger Game, or Pass the Message. The game is a metaphor for cumulative error; for the inaccuracies of rumors as they spread further and further throughout a network of people. It’s analogous to the unreliability and fragmentation of human memory and oral traditions. It

tracks how a phrase evolves in meaning and form as it’s passed from lip to lip. And it all ends with a kind of collectively generated, absurdist piece of poetry—a sentence rendered unrecognizable after a few scattered, hushed whispers. But what if the game were played not just with whispered words, but with images as well? And if instead of being in a room together, the participants were scattered throughout the world? We’ve reinterpreted the rules of the game for an international group of designers and illustrators, asking them to create a piece of work together without ever having met, and tracking not just how phrases evolve, but how images do, too.

THE RULES OF VISUAL TELEPHONE The first designer is given a description. They draw a response, and then write a new description of their image. The new description is passed on to the next designer. They draw a response, and then write a new description of their image. This is passed on to the next designer. The chain continues.

The original description: “Shapes in a desert, trying to be modern.” Eye on Design, New York, U.S. / London, UK / Berlin, Germany Image left: Illustrated by Matt Lancaster

“There is a contrast between the desert and cerulean, shiney rectangles. All architecture is wrapped in blue varnished mosaics.” Alejandro Olávarri is a graphic designer and assistant curator at Archivo in Mexico City, Mexico. olavarri.com

â&#x20AC;&#x153;A scattered face where the brain has turned into blue boxes communicating messages. Everything floats in a deserted space with pink mountains.â&#x20AC;? Lina Forsgren is an art director and graphic designer from Stockholm, Sweden. linaforsgren.com

â&#x20AC;&#x153;A partial head exists in a peaceful, pink desert space. The brain is surrounded by blue boxes with digital messages.â&#x20AC;? McKenna Kemp is an art director and graphic designer in Yangon, Myanmar. mckennakemp.com

â&#x20AC;&#x153;In the night, among luminous pink sand dunes, a partial head floats with thoughts that appear as text messages.â&#x20AC;? Shiva Nallaperumal is graphic designer and type designer in Chennai, India. shiva-n.com

GOSSIP

I dream the dream of dreams, painted in violet – staring at visitors in the night.

“I dream the dream of dreams, painted in violet–staring at visitors in the night.” Jon Key is an artist and designer in New York, USA. jonathankey.com

105

TITLE

Now You Try!

In the 1980s, April Greiman reasoned that the computer would become an integral tool for graphic design, but many didnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to hear it

Words by Meg Miller

Photos by Nolwen Cifuentes

GOSSIP

This is my favorite line ever uttered in one of those flipping-through-the-portfolio presentations that designers love to give: “Only a spiral galaxy can bring forth new stars perpetually.” It was said by April Greiman during a 1996 talk at SCI-Arc, the Southern California Institute of Architecture, where she was introduced by three male architects who all claimed to be her boyfriend (including her husband, architect and SCI-Arc co-founder Michael Rotondi). It was a reference to the spiral galaxy in her famed poster “Does It Make Sense?,” a five foot, four inch visual timeline of creativity and creation, starting with the Big Bang and ending with the designer herself. Situated among the images of supernovas, ancient symbols, and lunar landings is a life-sized portrait of Greiman, two-headed 1 and completely nude. Foregoing clean lines and Swiss grids, “Does It Make Sense?” is populated with floating low-res video images and bitmapped type. In response to the piece’s titular question, Greiman has been known to paraphrase Wittgenstein: “It makes sense if you give it sense.” The Modernists were shook. It’s the kind of image that might have broken the internet if the internet was a thing in 1986. Instead, the giant fold-out poster arrived to Design Quarterly subscribers by mail and proceeded to crack the graphic design community wide open. Some critics found it to be thoughtless, self-indulgent, and lewd. Others hailed it as a radical advancement in the then-nascent field of digital design. Greiman used an early Macintosh computer to compose her opus, way before the Mac was the default design tool, and was instead considered by many as a potential assault on the fine craft of graphic design.

SENSE & SENSIBILIT Y

By the mid-’80s, Greiman was used to the heated debates and spirited industry chatter that her designs tended to incite. Studying at Kansas City Art Institute and later under Armin Hofmann at Basel School of Design in Switzerland, Greiman possessed the skills of the Modernist tradition, but always had an itch for experimentation. Moving to Los Angeles further inspired her use of bright colors, drop shadow, diagonal type, mixed media, and penchant for DayGlo orange. With designer and photographer Jayme Odgers, she ushered in the California New Wave movement, ran a functional art company called Visual Energy, and designed issues of Wet, the infamous late ’70s/ early ’80s “magazine of gourmet bathing.” By the time she became the director of the graphic design program at CalArts in 1982, she was already enough of a threat that, by Greiman’s account, many of the predominantly male faculty were openly disparaging her work and discouraging students from taking her seriously. She left in 1984 to return to a full-time design practice. Behind the divisive aesthetics of New Wave typography and postmodern style, the driving force for many of Greiman’s best-known works has been a genuine curiosity towards and fervent belief in new technology as a way to push design forward. She moved from photography to video-based imagery, from early computer graphics workstations to the Macintosh. When computers were just at the cusp of accessibility, she was merging handset type with digital elements in her “hybrid imagery” pieces. She got a lot of flack for being an early adopter, but design is undeniably better off for it. It takes a certain amount of fearlessness to stay perpetually ahead of the curve.

Image left: Greiman, April, ‘Does It Make Sense’, Design Quarterly #133, 1986. Image courtesy of the artist.

1. In a video interview with AIGA/ LA, Greiman explains how the two heads came about: "When I started the process of layering the imagery, I had long hair. When I finished it, just about the time that it was going to go to the printer, I cut my hair. So I had to put that in, too; it's a two-headed dragon."

109

GOSSIP Image below: Greiman, April, ‘Does It Make Sense’, Design Quarterly #133, 1986. Image courtesy of the artist.

Rumor has it that you attended Alan Kay’s 1984 TED Talk, and from there you went immediately to Macy’s department store and bought your first Mac.

Yes, that’s true. I was the guest of one of the founders of TED, Harry Marks. In my mind, Harry is the inventor of broadcast motion graphics. He and I were video buddies; he showed me a lot about how to use video and we used to go out on shoots together. So I went to the first TED conference with him, and he said, “You gotta go see this computer.” I said, “I don’t want to see this stupid computer,” but he dragged me. I bought my first Mac from Macy’s in Carmel, California. I was probably making the line go around the back of the store while I engaged with it. I just couldn’t stop looking. What convinced you that you had to have it?

I didn’t really get what it was. I just thought, “Oh, I should get this computer because I can probably have some fun with it.” I don’t think I realized what it would become. At some point you started to think that you could use it to design, which was not necessarily a prevailing attitude among graphic designers in the mid-’80s.

Some years into the Macintosh, maybe in the late ’80s, I went to a lecture of Milton Glaser’s at ArtCenter [College of Design in Pasadena]. There are very few people in the world that give a better talk than Milton Glaser. I have the greatest respect for his work and his mind. But at the end of his presentation, a student in the audience asked what he thought about the Macintosh. He said he was proud to say that the original Mac that Steve Jobs sent him was still sitting in the box, unopened, in his basement. Meanwhile, I won my first color Mac by entering Macworld’s first art competition—I could never have afforded it otherwise. So I’m there drooling, wondering who puts together that mailing list for Steve Jobs. One of the funniest thing that’s ever been said about it was also in the late ’80s, maybe early ’90s, at a lecture

SENSE + SENSIBILIT Y

that Paula Scher gave at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles. She is a genius in so many ways. Somebody asked her whether she used the Mac, and she said no. They asked her why, and she said, “Because it doesn’t smell good like my other art supplies.” I mean that’s so Paula, right? That’s so brilliant. When I was starting to work on the Mac in the early- to mid-’80s, I was head of the design program at CalArts. I was schlepping my little Mac into the classrooms to let people play with it and think about it. The students were not to up for it, I think because the predominantly male faculty that had preceded me in the design department were saying things like, “Greiman’s work is like she takes a bunch of typesetting and stands at the top of the stairs and throws it down, and where it lands is her design.” I was also on the national board for AIGA at that time, and this is what got me to resign.2 I got so tired of some of the famous men who were also on the board saying things like, “This is the end of everything,” and that the Mac is crap and they’ll just stick with their pencil. I’m sure I’m quoted somewhere as saying, “This is just another pencil.” Or I would challenge some of these men by saying, “You know how much crap has been done with a pencil over the last couple of thousand years?” In fact it wasn’t true that the Mac was just another pencil. It was an incredible creativity-enhancement tool, kind of a co-creator, if you will. But those were the kinds of things that people were saying. Your dad was a computer scientist and analyst. Were you exposed to computing early on?

I was never really privy to seeing him work. When I was growing up in the late ’50s and early ’60s, he worked as the VP of data processing for the lighting company Lightolier. He set up their mainframe computer, which had the air-conditioned room, the platform enclosed in glass, and all that. When the president of the company moved to California, they imported my dad out here to Los Angeles. He worked as a consultant to Technicolor, setting up the first minicomputers for film processing and writing the code to do so. Then he did the same thing for Warner. I was already out here when my parents got the bug and moved to L.A. for good. My mom actually moved out first; she came out and got a job and a condo, and then my dad joined her. She kind of left my dad in the dust to figure out how to wrap things up back East, which is where we were all born and where we lived until 1980.

2. A decade later, Greiman was awarded the 1998 AIGA Medal, one of the highest honors for graphic designers. In an essay that accompanied the award, she’s called “a pioneer of digital communications design.”

113

other programming languages, the best known of which is BASIC.

GOSSIP

You grew up in New York and then left to study graphic design at Kansas City Art Institute in Missouri. That must have been quite a change of scenery. What type of design education did you get at KCAI?

The head of the program was a Yale graduate, Rob Roy Kelly, and he was setting it up for all of us to become corporate designers. The program was influenced by the Modernists for sure. We were doing giant logos and collateral systems. Everybody was gaga for grids. The irony was that our school in particular didn’t have a type shop, so we were rubbing down body text and headlines and doing all these major things in typography without having access to real equipment. That was one of the seriously motivating factors for me to go to Basel, to really learn how to make typography.

3. In 1968, Armin Hofmann invited Weingart, then only 27 years old, to teach the typography class at Basel. Through his students over the decades, Weingart introduced a more experimental and expressive approach to typography that was massively influential throughout the design world.

4. Originally developed by IBM in the 1950s, Fortran is a general-purpose, compiled imperative programming language that is especially suited to scientific and engineering applications. It was a dominant programming language in the early days of computing, and became the basis for many

Was it a much different environment at Basel?

When I got to Basel, instead of continuing on the path of doing Swiss gridded typography, I had the Madman of Typography, [Wolfgang] Weingart,3 as a teacher. He freed us up to experiment and try different things and think about type, not merely as the little column of stuff you put at the bottom of a page or flow into a grid system, but as something that could be expressive. In a sense, it encouraged me to start to see type as image. Type as image fully blossomed when we had the tools to do that, like the Macintosh and other technology. When I moved from Philly, where I was teaching at the former Philadelphia College of Art, to Connecticut, and I took a course at Yale in computer programming. We were learning Fortran,4 which was dreadful; I pretty much failed. I thought I needed to learn at least the basics of programming because I wanted to design a calendar using one of the phototypesetting machines that I knew that they had at Yale. My teacher pulled me aside one day and said, “Why didn’t you tell me that you’re an artist?” He set up a time for me in the computer lab where I could experiment with some help from a computer operator. Did you retain any of your Fortran knowledge, or end up using that programming experience in your later work?

Not so much on the programming side, but watching somebody operate the computer gave me a glimpse of how computers think. I had a feeling, almost through osmosis, of what was going on. It wasn’t until many years later, in the early '80s, when I started working again with video Paintboxes that I had become a little more fearless with technology. Whenever I encounter fear, I don’t flee—I kind of fling myself into deep water and see if I swim.

SENSE + SENSIBILIT Y

What is a Paintbox?

The first Quantel Paintbox was for making broadcast graphics. When you see little spinning TV logos from that time, those would have been done on the first Quantel Paintbox. It had its own font library, and you could scan things in and animate them for broadcast. Since they were just appearing for two seconds, the output was video quality—it was much lower res than print. I started playing with those because I was working with Esprit and Lifetime Television, doing their motion identifiers. A few years later, Quantel came out with what is known as the Graphic Paintbox. That was like my toilet training for the release of the Macintosh. The Mac seemed like it mimicked everything those high-end Paintboxes could do. Those tools got me immersed in understanding computers. Not technically, as an operator would, but conceptually. I could understand how they think and how they work. At that time, I also had my typography typeset by Vernon Simpson, who was the finest typesetter in Los Angeles. That’s what made up my “hybrid imagery”5—sometimes it was my video images and sometimes it was handset type, traditionally pasted up. Why did you move out to L.A. in the late ’70s?

I was working freelance at MoMA, and had finished up a project, so I started interviewing. In New York at that time you had to be a specialist: You either had to design annual reports or you had to do signage or you had to do corporate design or publication design. I always wanted to do all of it. I just didn’t have any particular track I wanted to focus on. I went to the Aspen Design Conference in the summer of ’76, and I met some people from Los Angeles and San Francisco. I was going to go to San Francisco anyway to see some relatives, and they said, “If you’re going to go to San Francisco, we’ll pay for you to just come down to L.A. for a couple days.” I think they thought I was good party material. I did that in early summer and I had such a good time here. I wasn’t that long off the boat from Basel, and I liked being free and experimenting and using a lot of color. The influence was Armin Hofmann. I interviewed at Saul Bass’s design firm with his partner Herbert Yager. I dropped off my portfolio, and when he called back I was so excited. When I came in, he just said he’d never seen a portfolio like that, he didn’t have a single question for me; he couldn’t even begin to ask me questions. [My work] was too non-corporate, I guess. Before that, in New York, I had also applied for a junior designer position at Chermayeff & Geismar. I dropped off my portfolio and after a week they called and said, “You can come pick up your portfolio.” When I went to their office, Tom Geismar actually came out into the reception area and said, “Why are you applying to this job as a junior designer?” And I said, “Well, I would like to work here.” And he said, “Two things:

5. Greiman also considers her work with architects on spaces and environments to be an aspect of "hybridizing."

115

GOSSIP

One, your work is so well-developed and so different than what you’d do here.” But he also said, “You’re way beyond junior designer level.” It didn’t matter to me, I just wanted to work in a good office and have the feeling of what it’s like. But that’s how it went down. I was not hireable. I did get offered a job by a friend who started a corporate design planning firm in Century City. He said he liked me and my work, so he hired me to work for half a year. I said, “Great, I’ll move out to L.A.” Then he fired me. Why did he fire you?

Because for one of the projects we did, an ad campaign, I hired Jayme Odgers, who was working as a photographer at the time, and who later became my creative partner. My employer noted that he had a feeling that Jayme and I would become a couple, which we weren’t at the time. One morning I was standing there talking to his receptionist and I glanced at what she was typing. It was a resignation letter written from me to my boss. When I asked him about it, he said that he felt like I was developing a stronger personal relationship with this photographer and that I’d rather go into business with him. I worked for three years with Jayme, and we did end up developing a personal relationship. That body of work is quite famous, like the early CalArts folder poster and Wet magazine. You and Jayme are credited as founding the California New Wave movement. Did you have a sense at the time that what you were doing would end up being so influential?

I kind of always resented later being called “Queen of New Wave” or “Pomo.” Those aren’t things that I identify with. But then, you know, that’s

119

SENSE + SENSIBILIT Y

how journalism sometimes goes. I felt like as soon as you’ve given it a name, it’s dead. Jayme and I were just having fun. His work was spatial and kind of spiritual. I call him the inventor of the drop shadow in graphic design, because anything that he photographed had a shadow, or he would airbrush in a shadow. Everything was always floating. He was Paul Rand’s assistant for many years, by the way. I didn’t know that.

Jayme probably still has some of the best hand skills of any designer I know. I learned a lot about pasting things up and cutting things and wrapping things and preparing artwork. But also, his work was, even as a photographer, in alignment with my work. The strong thing about that period creatively was that we were combining word and image. Typography, for us, wasn’t just a little column at the bottom of the poster or the ad. It was integral, that combination of word and image. Even at Basel, I was always thinking of things as objects in space. Why people didn’t put typography on the diagonal, I could never figure out. When Jayme and I started collaborating, the only cover of Wet we did together was that cover with Ricky Nelson. Prior to that, we started a company called Visual Energy and we made what were known as space mats. Space mats were like placements, only they were our photographic or collage images, offset printed and laminated. We sold them around the world, to Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s. We had a little run for a couple of years, so we would put our own ads in the Wet magazines.

Image on previous page: Left: Greiman, April, poster for an exhibition of graphic design, 'Pacific Wave, Museo Fortuny’ Venice. 1987. Color offset lithograph. Image courtesy of the artist. Right: Greiman, April, ‘Iris Light’ poster. 1984. Silkscreen. Image courtesy of the artist. Image below: Greiman, April and Odgers, Jayme, creative director, admission poster / folder mailer for CalArts, 1978. Image courtesy of the artist.

6. Up until this year, Greiman owned a Palm Springs resort called Miracle Manor, which was completely designed in her style.

7. Annual meeting for AIGA members and national board.

GOSSIP

That sounds like so much fun, which is also how the work you guys made together looked: loud, colorful, irreverent—almost joyous in a way.

That’s the reason I stayed in L.A.6 I was completely knocked out by this natural color here. I remember being mesmerized every day around sunset when this golden light, this pink-gold light, would just drape the whole city. It was spiritual, but it was also something that I felt really affected my physical experience, too. It woke up a sensibility in me that I hadn’t really felt in New York, like ever. I ended up doing some early work, even corporate work, in bright colors and DayGlo orange. A lot of the work from the ’80s I’ve just started thinking about as a strong body of work. You can really follow a technological thread through my work, from high-end photography, to videography, to computer work, to hybridized design, to motion, to doing things that had sound. I also did the piece for Design Quarterly in that period. Right, called “Does It Make Sense?” Can you talk about how it came about?

One of my biggest allies and supporters was Mickey Friedman [the design curator who put Walker Art Center on the map, along with her husband Martin Friedman]. We met at an AIGA Leadership Retreat,7 because she was on the AIGA national board at the same time I was. When she commissioned me to do an issue of Design Quarterly, I could have easily done a magazine that was a full retrospective of work that had already been published, which would have been a completely boring thing for me to do,

121

SENSE + SENSIBILIT Y

but good for my ego. Instead I said, “I’m going to tackle something new and learn a new piece of software, use my video equipment, and just try some things.” When I was head of the design program at CalArts, I was suffering from bad criticism in the U.S., being called an airhead, and “let’s see if she’s in business in five years,” that kind of stuff. This was “the end of design.” My work was too personal. My “Does It Make Sense?” piece for Design Quarterly arose from my own internal chatter and imaginations. I was at a crossroads in my early career. My work in the late ’70s and early ’80s was both infamous and highly acknowledged, contributing to a sort of early fame. At the same time, there was this backlash from the established New York male graphic design community, who were saying it wasn’t graphic design at all, it was fine art. So the chatter—the dialogue, that conversation in my own head—had to do with them saying my work was personal and not real, serious design. I was going back and forth on what’s personal and what’s public, or what’s a personal agenda versus a client’s agenda. The title, “Does It Make Sense?” was me trying to reconcile with my abilities, my thinking, my skill sets. Did things have to make sense along the rigid line that was being drawn by that predominantly East Coast male community of designers who were twice my age? And in fact, was there a line? From there I began to ask, “What is creativity?” Aside from the biblical creation myth, if you go with the sciences and physics, you would say everything was created out of the Big Bang. Image left: Greiman, April, ‘Does It Make Sense’ back, videography, Design Quarterly #133. 1986. Image courtesy of the artist.

GOSSIP Image below: Greiman, April, ‘Graphic Design in America’ poster. 1989. Color offset Lithograph. Image courtesy of the artist.

That’s the idea behind the whole running chronology of dates at the bottom of the piece. I cut ahead quite a few years to when the Macintosh got introduced, then there’s landing on the moon and other things that I thought were relevant to my personal timeline. The journey was about, “What’s personal and what’s professional design or commercial design?” That timeline was to help me give it sense. The piece is radical in a lot of ways: You were looking at creativity and its origin, and questioning the line between personal and commercial in graphic design. You were challenging the medium by making the magazine a poster. But also, putting your body on the piece like that takes a lot of guts. Did you ever second guess yourself?

As I thought about what’s personal and not personal, I said, “What could I use to represent that?” And then I thought, I could use my person. I could literally use a portrait of myself as the canvas for representing the evolution of thinking. My biggest fear was presenting it to Mickey first. I was fully prepared for her to say “Whoa, I don’t know about this,” but she was just like, “This is great.” I found the printer, but Mickey got the paper donated, so she had to bring them a full-sized comp and present them my idea. They said they were absolutely not donating paper; their only policy was that nothing they sponsor could ever portray nudity. She said to them, “Well, you’re setting yourself back pre-Renaissance, then. There’s nothing lewd or pornographic that’s being displayed here.” They ended up saying that we could use the paper if we didn’t put their name on it. Wow. How fortunate to have an advocate like that.

Mickey was a genius. I mean, she just egged me on. When I told her what

123

SENSE + SENSIBILIT Y

some of these established male designers were saying about my work, she said, “Well now you know you’re a serious threat, if they’re acting so badly.” She was such an ally, and remained so until the very end of her life. What do you think you were doing stylistically that made you such a threat?

I don’t know. I was using a lot of color. I was putting type on the diagonal. I was designing pieces that you could turn upside down. For a catalog for a big museum show, I literally trimmed off the corner and made it a trapezoid. Some people realized that there was a thought process and there was a concept behind what I was doing. But for other people it was just, “Where are those Swiss grids?” I read somewhere that Massimo Vignelli made a comment, after seeing the Design Quarterly poster, that he wanted to see the back side. I realize it was in jest, but were you getting back a lot of comments like that?

Well, my current husband, Michael [Rotondi], was a subscriber to Design Quarterly. He was aware of my work, but after he got that, he said, “I definitely want to have a meeting with her.” [Laughs] I think there’s also a male design journalist who’s fairly well known and who wrote an article about it calling me overly self-indulgent and narcissistic. But nothing too bad. I think people were genuinely embarrassed that I did this, because there was nothing like it. There were at least a couple of female journalists who wrote about my work in that period and accused me of being kind of brain-dead, and accused my work of being all fluff and no content. They didn’t see the thought behind it. This was the ’80s, when feminism was experiencing something of a backlash. Did you consider yourself, or the work you were doing, to be feminist?

I was a quasi-feminist. I wasn’t hardcore, and I regret it because I wasn’t being thoughtful enough about the long-range plan. A lot of the women I knew personally who were hardcore feminists were really pretty rough to be around. They were too severe for me, too stern, too principled. It didn’t allow for any fun or any acknowledgement that there were good things about being a woman. I got some really good work and appreciation from clients because I was easier to work with. Instead of the handful of male designers they would call for a job, I was the only woman, and I was young, and they enjoyed my being lighter and a little more energetic about collaborating. There was one job for this artificial intelligence company, a very early

GOSSIP Images opposite: Top left: Greiman, April, Made in Space, branding material for Nicola Restaurant, Los Angeles, CA. 1993. Image courtesy of the artist.

one, and one of the main competitors I was bidding against for the project was Saul Bass. When I saw who I was being interviewed against, I couldn’t believe it. It emboldened me, and when they asked what kind of fee I would charge, I just came up with something really high. And I got the job.

Top right: Greiman, April, Made in Space, with Ken Smith Landscape Architect, Orange County Great Park color consultant, branding and wayfinding, City of Irvine, CA. 2008. Image courtesy of the artist.

One of the things I liked reading about with your time at CalArts is that you lobbied to change the department name from Graphic Design to Visual Communications. You also prefer to go by trans-media artist, not graphic designer. I love this pushing up against language that you feel is limiting to what you’re actually doing.

Greiman, April, ‘Hand Holding a Bowl of Rice’.public art 8,200 sq. ft. mural, Wilshire Vermont Station, Los Angeles, CA. 2007. Image courtesy of the artist. Greiman, April, Made in Space, branding system for Coop Himmelb(l)au Architects, seen on company’s construction vests. 1990-2013. Image courtesy of the artist.

I tried to introduce video as an option to students in my program, and made a proposal to the provost to bring in a couple of Macintoshes. The school followed through with that, but then when the equipment arrived, they put it right into the film school. It was impossible to cross creative lines; it’s a misnomer, these schools that call themselves multidisciplinary. When Lorraine Wild came in a year or so after I stepped down at CalArts, she immediately turned the name back to Graphic Design. When I left, I was kind of on a roll with my own design practice. I didn’t know where it was going, which is why I liked it so much. It was an undefined aesthetic. Video and the computer—those were things I felt needed to be explored and not judged.

125

SENSE + SENSIBILIT Y

BRUTALIST DESIGN AND THE RAW WEB The stripped-down style is a rejection of web design that’s too clean and an internet that’s increasingly corporate

Words by Orit Gat

GOSSIP

On the top left corner of brutalistwebsites. com is a single-sentence explanation of brutalist web design: “In its ruggedness and lack of concern to look comfortable or easy, Brutalism can be seen as a reaction by a younger generation to the lightness, optimism, and frivolity of today’s web design.” It’s paraphrased from Wikipedia, with a small twist: The original entry describes Brutalist architecture, the concrete-laden mid-century style that rejects ornament in favor of functionality. The architectural term was appropriated in 2014 by creative director Pascal Deville, founder of the agency Freundliche Grüsse, for the page he created to index websites that display a brutalist aesthetic. The websites Deville displays are more Craigslist than Airbnb. They’re spare and quick-loading, often populated by blue links, familiar typefaces, and few images. Their barebones design highlights the building blocks of the web—namely, code. Like the buildings with which they share a name, the materiality of brutalist websites is also the marker of a specific ideology—one that looks to the utopic visions of the early web as its model. “I’ve been in the field of design for 15 years,” says Deville. “Around 2014, I started to realize that some designers are trying to find a new language in web design after websites like Squarespace came up.” Compared to template-based sites built on Squarespace or Cargo Collective—or even sites like Facebook or Gmail, which are designed to be optimized for billions of users—Brutalist design looks like non-design. Its philosophical roots stretch back to the web pioneers of the 1960s, who saw the nascent network as a place of independent exploration away from

the corporate sphere. Its stylistic characteristics reflect the technologically constrained websites of the ’90s, when that philosophy still seemed viable. Brutalism can perhaps best be understood as a rejection of today’s web—which is more centralized and corporate than any of those early pioneers imagined—and the homogenous interface design that occupies it. Yet since 2014, Brutalism has become more recognizable, legible, and popular, the aesthetic has shifted from objection to simply an object—copied and diffused by exactly those sites the design seeks to counter. While much of contemporary web design involves lots of white space, image splash pages, animated graphics, and sans serif fonts, Brutalism stands for hand-coded, DIY, and artisanal. “[Deville’s index] relates to the early web and the ability of the early web to visualize and show the structure of how it’s built and how it’s working,” says designer Paul Soulellis, whose website for a long-term project, Library of the Printed Web, is included on the site. As with Brutalist architecture, “the bruteness comes from the materiality,” he says. “The material is both surface and structure, and that created an architecture that some people saw as a kind of honesty, and a lot of people saw as total ugliness.” The same goes for Brutalism in its new web design context. Soulellis references “Cult of the Ugly,” a 1993 essay by Steven Heller published in Eye magazine with the subtitle, “Designers used to stand for beauty and order. Now beauty is passé and ugliness is smart. How did we get here and is there any way out?” Heller writes about graphic

129

BRUTALIST DESIGN AND THE RAW WEB

design, but his descriptions are familiar to any internet user: “The layered images, vernacular hybrids, low-resolution reproductions and cacophonous blends of different types and letters at once challenge prevailing aesthetic beliefs and propose alternative paradigms.” He traces the current wave of ugly to 1970s punk, “a raw expression of youth frustration” that manifested in dress, music, art, and a design language that aggressively rejected rational typography. Like punk, Brutalist web design is also an expression of frustrated youth. This time, young designers are rejecting the contemporary emphasis on intuitiveness in favor of models dating back to a version of the web they may not remember. But ugly here is not

contrasted with beauti- Image above: Screenshot of Printed ful—it’s contrasted with Web. Designed by Paul Soulellis. clean. Retrieved February 17, 2017 from Achieving the airy printedweb.org. design of the contemporary web—replete with high-res images, rounded corners, and pared-down type— requires many more lines of code than your average Brutalist website. Designer Laurel Schwulst brings up performance budgeting, a method employed by organizations like CNN (lite.cnn.com) and NPR (text.npr.org) that involves testing a version of their website so it will load faster on an older device. It ends up looking a lot like Craigslist: When you strip off the layers of images, video, and fonts, what you’re left with is text and links.

GOSSIP

Brutalism is swiftly moving across the web; Deville says he’s spotted Brutalist designs for the websites of a variety of big brands, such as Nike, Adidas, and Gucci. Balenciaga’s homepage is like a Brutalist nesting doll of tables. The spare, black-andwhite page features a three-column table with options for women, men, and all. Click “women,” and another table of text awaits: shoes, archetypes, ready-to-wear, and so on. It takes three more clicks before you even reach an image of a model wearing an item for sale. It’s a classic example of what is lost in corporate co-opting, when only a look is adopted. The efficiency of light design disappears in favor of a stylistic wink. “Maybe I’m too involved in the trend business, but I don’t see Brutalism as refusal anymore; I just see it being replicated over and over again,” says designer Shira Inbar. Ugly or clean, heavy or light, the migration of Brutalist aesthetics away from personal websites and small commissions and into the Adidas realm shows that the aesthetics

associated with this design can easily be appropriated. Deville says he expects that Squarespace and other website builders are already working on Brutalist templates. For his part, Deville hopes that young designers will move away from templates and start making their own websites. “This is really part of the creative process—to build the site, not just pick the right template and fill it with work,” he says. This DIY ethos, however, could be seen as exclusionary—a web where programming is required for publishing. Inbar, who built her website using Cargo Collective, stresses that “templates give users a crack in the door, an entry.” When Inbar and I met at a café in Manhattan, we sat next to two children who were assembling a small replica of the Statue of Liberty from a box of building blocks. They were engaging with something tactile, exploring the material, building it themselves, from its raw elements. As Inbar noted, “these kids bought a box in a store, but their experience of it is unique and special.”

131

BRUTALIST DESIGN AND THE RAW WEB

The Squarespace-versus-Brutalism, uglyversus-clean, handmade-versus-template binaries aren’t particularly useful when you consider that networked culture is increasingly homogenizing. Today, to go online is to experience near-total seamlessness. On a list of top 10 most popular websites in 2018 compiled by the statistics and analytics service Alexa, Google ranks first followed by Google-owned YouTube. To email a YouTube link using Gmail on a Chrome browser is an everyday example of the consistency of users’ experience of the internet. If intuitiveness is the main tool for keeping users within the web’s sealed proprietary spaces, then the co-opting of oppositional sites and aesthetics is perhaps key to how the system continues to expand. When I video conference with Soulellis, he holds up his iPhone to the screen, and says, “There’s something about the smooth flow of networked culture—and it is getting smoother and smoother—that represents the idea of networked culture as a condition.

There’s the idea of the Image above: Screenshots of the natural interface: that we Balenciaga website. Designed by Bureau talk to the phone, the AC Mirko Borsche. Retrieved August 22, unit, the car, and it 2018 from responds. I think part of balenciaga.com. the appeal, both stylistically and ideologically, of the Brutalist website, is that clunkiness is a form of resistance to that. It pushes back against the iPhone and everything it represents.” If intuitiveness is a state of not-asking—of accepting the familiar over the provisional—we can look to Brutalist web design as a monument to the promise of resistance to smoothness.

GOSSIP

133

BRUTALIST DESIGN AND THE RAW WEB

GOSSIP

Images on previous page: Screenshot of Halvor Nordrum’s website. Designed by Halvor Nordrum, March 2018. Retrieved August 22, 2018 from halvor.work. Screenshot of Christoph Knoth's website. Designed by Christoph Knoth, 2010. Retrieved August 22, 2018 from christophknoth.com. Screenshot of Possible Bitmats. Designed by Travis Hallenbeck, 2010. Retrieved August 23, 2018 from possiblebitmaps. com. Screenshot of Cole Jorissen’s website. Designed by Cole Jorissen, June, 2018. Retrieved August 22, 2018 from colejorissen.com.

Image above: Screenshot of School for Poetic Computation’s ‘Society for Power Control’ Summer Show website, 2016. Designed by Min Guhong Manufacturing, August 2016. Retrieved August 22, 2018 from sfpc.io/classes/ summer2016show.

Words by James Cartwright

Illustrations by Tala SafiĂŠ

137

TOP 10 CAREER TIPS

To talk of Byron Cox is to talk in superlatives. The amazing design legend has been at the forefront of New York’s incredible creative scene since founding his magnificent eponymous studio in the mid-1980s; his client list is a litany of prestigious names: Apple, Google, Facebook, the New York Times, The New Yorker, the New York Jets, the New York Philharmonic, the New York City Ballet, the New York Public Library—Cox was even the creative director of New York Magazine for a spell. Still deeply involved in the day-to-day output of his studio, Cox splits his time between managing the highly successful design editorial platform, Noticing Design, lecturing twice a week at the Masters programs at SVA, RISD, ArtCenter, and ECAL, art directing books for celebrated publishing house Jonathan Ostrich, and writing at least one design book a year for the past decade. He is also the Design Ambassador for the North West, West, South West, Midwest, South East, Mid-Atlantic, and North East United States, and still manages to find time to take a seven-year sabbatical every three years. We sat down with him on the occasion of his 60th birthday to get his top tips for a successful career in design.

1. DESIGN IS PASSION

All true designers make their work with passion, whether they’re designing an album cover for their favorite band at age 23, or branding a new investment bank at 55. If you can’t approach every project you take on with either passion, enthusiasm, élan, verve, or at least a modicum of pep, then perhaps a career in design is not for you. Perhaps you would make a good barista. 2. INSPIRATION IS EVERYWHERE

The designer should be interested in the world around them because design is everything and everything is design. But to be a generalist is gauche. To overcome this, it is essential to develop niche specialisms that can be referenced in moments when intellectual superiority is paramount—like a client meeting. Some of my niche interests include the early pencil lead experiments of Henry Darger, aviation manuals of the late 18th century, the romantic escapades of Adrian Frutiger, and British heraldry in military quilting. All of these subjects can be referenced at length when charging $50,000 to remove the drop shadow from an existing logo. 3. VISUAL IS THE NEW VERBAL

Designers now dominate every aspect of modern culture. We are the gatekeepers of meaning. Before there were designers, humans would communicate with written and spoken words that distracted them from

Image above: Eye on Design has built a special relationship with Byron Cox over the decades, having dedicated several issues to the designer since 2000. In our Millennium issue, we featured Cox and the legendary Dawn Ott in conversation.

GOSSIP

developing their personal brand. Modern people are much too busy to read or speak to one another. Nowadays communication happens more effectively with brightly colored pictures and empowering slogans. ‘Be more pirate!’ ‘Walk in, stupid!’ ‘Follow your bliss!’ The world of the verbal is no longer a useful part of the designer’s toolkit. 4. WORK HARD AND BE NICE TO PEOPLE

There’s a reason why this slogan hangs on the walls of every design studio; the designer is nothing without graft and humility. I learned this very early on in my career, working under my mentor, Giacomo Dutti. Every day I would work until the studio closed at 6 p.m., at which time I would hide in the drawers of my desk until everyone else had gone home, and then reemerge to do another full day’s work. At 3 a.m. I would unroll my little sleeping bag onto the studio floor and prepare for a hard-earned nap—but not before writing notes of admiration and support to all of my colleagues, which I would place on their desks in time for their arrival the following day. I did this for over 10 years before I became a partner at the studio and achieved global recognition. Then I stopped. When you’re famous you can treat everyone like shit. 5. LEARN TO SELF-EDIT

Over many years I have acquired an incredible ability to sift through complex information quickly. I often work on projects where large volumes of research are compiled by experts and presented to me at the start of the design process. I reject all of it immediately. Some information is useful to the designer, some information is useless. When you encounter information that is useless, cast it from your mind and never think of it again. There is too much information in the world anyway. 6. NEVER WORK FOR FREE

Artists make work for love and hope one day that love may be rewarded with material payment, but a designer should only make work in exchange for cash. Money is the lubrication that enables the cogs in the designer’s mind to move freely and unencumbered. Without it the design process would come grinding to a halt. 7. NEVER BE A BOSS

Leadership is for people who wear suits in tall buildings made of metal and glass and is stifling to those of us who need to be creative in order to

139

TOP 10 CAREER TIPS

truly thrive. Creativity demands equality and equality can only be achieved through close collaboration. To the outside world, collaboration can sometimes look like stealing ideas from junior designers, but how can you steal from junior designers when your design studio has no hierarchy? You cannot. Collaboration is the sincerest form of flattery. 8. EMBRACE YOUR STATUS

When you’re famous, many people will see your work and comment on how brilliant it is. This is good for your profile and for the profile of your client. The work is elevated by your fame, the profile of your client is elevated by your fame, and your ego is massaged by the uncritical opinions of your fans who want to work as your unpaid summer interns. If you’re not famous, there is a very serious risk that nobody will see or be interested in your work. So be famous! 9. YOUR BEST WORK HAPPENS ONLY ONCE

It’s important to approach each brief as if it were your last, and then go and make the best work you possibly can. But never deliver that work to the client. As the due date draws near, sabotage certain elements of the project so that the results are slightly worse than they could be. This way you will ensure that your best work is always yet to come, and you will continue to be relevant for many more years. Once you’ve done your best work, you’ve done it. Then you’re done. 10. THE BEST CLIENTS SHARE YOUR VISION

Design is not a service industry, so don’t treat your clients as a tip-hungry server would treat theirs. The client is an imbecile (why else would they come to you to fix their problems?) so you must always be sure to treat their ideas with disdain. An ideal client is like the ideal child and should be seen and not heard. If a client comes to you and does not want the things that you want, you must send them away until they do. A shared vision is essential.

Images below: In our 2006 Noticing Design Awards special, Cox revealed the secrets behind his judging process. In 2015, we released our special Byron Cox retrospective issue, featuring the longest, most in-depth interview with the designer to date.

In 1950s New York, a new kind of creative collaboration emerged based on fun, experimentation, and idle chatter Words by Emily Gosling

Rivers, Larry and O’Hara, Frank, ‘Love’ from Stones. 1958 (published 1960). Lithograph from illustrated book with thirteen lithographs: 14 3/16 x 16” (36 x 40.6 cm); page: 19 x 23 1/4” (48.3 x 59.1 cm) © VAGA at ARS, NY. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/ Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

1. The group worked together on illustrated chapbooks and collated their works together in small magazines such as Folder, Locus Solus, and Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts.

2. The Cedar Tavern (or Cedar Street Tavern) was at University Place, near 8th Street in Greenwich Village, and in its heyday was known as the haunt of many prominent Abstract Expressionist artists and poets including Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Allen Ginsberg, and LeRoi Jones.

GOSSIP

There’s nothing radical about gossip. Especially when it’s about the Bacchanalian delights of your circle of friends: Who will be at what party and when? What will they wear? Who will they leave with? It’s the kind of chatter that’s set social life abuzz since time immemorial. But in 1950s New York, that tittle-tattle turned into something much more in the socially adept hands of celebrated poet Frank O’Hara and his contemporaries in the New York School of poetry. When a coterie begets creativity, gossip practically becomes an art form. O’Hara’s poems were intimate and resolutely anti-intellectual, often moving from poignance to coquettish glee in a single stanza. As he declared in his 1959 faux manifesto, Personism (“a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about”), O’Hara wants the poem to sit “squarely between the poet and the person,” so that if he wanted to, he could “use the telephone instead of writing the poem.” The names he drops in his works read like a who’s who of the New York School’s set of pals and collaborators, so that we, too, feel on first name terms with Joe (Brainard), John (Ashbery), and Joan (Mitchell). Other key early figures include poets Kenneth Koch and James Schuyler. The term “New York School” was coined in 1961 by John Bernard Myers, founder of Manhattan’s Tibor de Nagy Gallery, though the group itself, in which visual artists1 were as central as the poets themselves, had been around for a decade or so prior. The group has since been hailed as central to establishing New York as the post-war global hub for art. In the early 1950s, Myers began issuing limited-edition chapbooks that combined the work of a poet and a painter. One of the first was Frank O’Hara’s A City Winter and Other Poems (1951), illustrated by artist Larry Rivers. It’s the relationship—both personal and professional—that emerged between the two that best exemplifies how friendships in this set were forged through playfulness, experimentation, and, yes, gossip. The New York School of poets, painters, and artists found common ground in the simple joy of hanging out with one another at parties, openings, studio visits, and in their homes. Collaborations arose naturally. The School shared intentions, curiosities, and conversations; poets wrote about painters and were painted by them. O’Hara was known to write directly from overheard arguments between painters in the Cedar Tavern .2 “The whole New York School ran on parties and gossip,” says University College London professor Mark Ford. “New York was where what’s happening was happening. These artists mostly came there as an escape from other places, and in New York you could be gay, and meet

other gay men at the Cedar Tavern or the clubs on 8th Street, who shared your sophisticated tastes, and escape bourgeois heterosexual normality. “They all had a common purpose, a notion of creating a new kind of art somehow. The poems and the paintings became part of the gossip.” O’Hara’s dedication to making poems born of everyday minutiae— and the relationships and tales that make such minutiae feel important— saw him work on numerous, often spontaneous, collaborations with the visual artists that made up his coterie.3 O’Hara has frequently been dubbed a “poet among painters” (or a “professional fan” of art, as Rivers put it), thanks not only to his predilection for visually inclined social circles, but his professional life; he worked at MoMA as an assistant curator in the 1960s, and wrote for various art publications, including ARTnews. “O’Hara moved in painterly circles and was a bit of a kingmaker in terms of the reputations of second generation New York poets and Abstract Expressionists,” says Ford. “He was probably seen as the king, or queen, of gossip, and found ways of turning gossip into a poetic art form.” O’Hara and Rivers first met in 1950 at a cocktail party hosted by the poet John Ashbery, a mutual friend. “We shook hands and talked our heads off for two hours. Repairing to a quiet spot behind a window drape, we kissed,” Rivers recalls, with all the whimsy of a romantic heroine. O’Hara described Rivers’ assimilation into the group as though a “demented telephone” had appeared. “Nobody knew whether they wanted it in the library, the kitchen or the toilet, but it was electric,” he wrote. “I thought he was crazy and he thought I was even crazier,” O’Hara wrote of their meeting. “I was very shy, which he thought was intelligence; he was garrulous, which I assumed was brilliance—and on such misinterpretations, thank heavens, many a friendship is based.” Like O’Hara, Rivers worked spontaneously, drawing on nearby objects and places and the emotions and relationships that illuminate them in new ways. They both relished in the sense of poetry and art as inseparable from life itself; friendship, the city, parties, and fun were all synthesized into one creative composite. In “Life Among the Stones,” an article published in 1963, Rivers described O’Hara’s sassy yet rigorously accomplished work as “a colorfully decorated gossip column where the content is so obscure you are forced to look for something else to distract yourself. What it was for us was chunks of the canvas devoted to mutually experienced parties, neighborhoods, resorts, houses, studios, people, and restaurants.”

of Grace”); Nell Blaine; and Jane Freilicher, who is said to have suggested that O’Hara is the subject of so many paintings thanks to his always hanging around artist’s studios across Manhattan.

THE FINE ART OF GOSSIP

3. These included Joe Brainard, who wrote the charming, sweet, occasionally superbly poignant “I Remember” (the pair worked on collages and cartoons together); Grace Hartigan (who designed the cover for a collection of O’Hara’s poems, and to whom O’Hara dedicated several poems including “For Grace, After a Party” and “Portrait

143

4. O’Hara wrote “Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]” on the way to give a reading with Robert Lowell (whose work he was known to not be keen on) at Wagner College on Staten Island. It’s based on a New York Post story about how Hollywood actress Lana Turner had collapsed.

Rivers, Larry and O’Hara, Frank, ‘Students’ from Stones. 1958 (published 1960). Lithograph from illustrated book with thirteen lithographs: 14 3/16 x 16” (36 x 40.6 cm); page: 19 x 23 1/4” (48.3 x 59.1 cm) © VAGA at ARS, NY. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

The gossip that underpinned O’Hara’s work wasn’t just central to his relationships, but to his themes. His 1964 “Poem [Lana Turner has collapsed!]” 4 begins incredulously, before he ends on a familiar, jocular note: I have been to lots of parties and acted perfectly disgraceful but I never actually collapsed Here and elsewhere in his work, we see gossip’s cousin, camp, making an appearance with a cheery wave, and O’Hara has often been read in relation to Susan Sontag’s 1964 “Notes on ‘Camp.’” As Ford points out, the formation of camp in speech and gesture was born of having to create certain cues that hint at sexual preferences to those in the know, and are unnoticed by those who aren’t. “You can think about the formation of camp as a mini tribe within society, and gossip is a kind of code that lets you codify who’s in and who’s out,” says Ford. “Camp and gossip create a resistance in their interpretation from outsiders—they’re somehow defiant in opposition to mainstream things.” While O’Hara’s homosexuality is certainly central to much of his work, it’s less so in his collaborations. The union of O’Hara and Rivers relied on the pair’s shared artistic sensibilities and very close friendship, though they were lovers for a short time, too. According to Jenni Quilter,

6. Their first formalized collaboration was when Rivers created the sets for O’Hara’s 1953 play Try! Try!.

the author of New York School Painters & Poets: Neon in Daylight, the sexual side of their relationship was “just a function of them being curious creatures and interested in as wide a range of expression as possible. I don’t think it had anything more than that to it, and their sexual experimentation together was fairly brief… They were very, very fond of one another and boiling it down to the extremity of a sexual relationship doesn’t do it justice.” Rivers and O’Hara hit it off thanks not only to a shared restlessness and impulsivity, but they both saw their disciplines in direct companionship with their love of other visual art forms, jazz, and dance. In more straightforward terms, the use of color in Rivers’ paintings engendered certain associations that informed O’Hara’s writing, and they frequently spitballed names for works and other ideas. Rivers’ 1953 painting Washington Crossing the Delaware is indicative of the kind of proclivity for wry campiness he and O’Hara 5 shared. “From the earliest moments of our friendship we were enthusiastic about each other’s work,” says Rivers. “Frank O’Hara was a big influence on me, but I think I influenced him too.” 6 Such influence—or at least, shared preoccupations—is evident in how both take commonplace objects and explore their expressive potential. Neither O’Hara nor Rivers deal in abstractions. Together, they worked on poems, plays, lithographs, and pseudo-manifestos, such as “How to Proceed in the Arts: A detailed study of the creative act.” This is typically irreverent, turning an academic seriousness into jest through in-jokes and shared knowledge. “When involved with abstractions, refrain, as much as possible from personal symbolism, unless your point is gossip... Everyone knows size counts.” Rivers and O’Hara were “joyously close,” as Quilter puts it. “They were both very gung ho and keen to try things out and take risks,” she says. “Rivers loved shocking people on some level. They were both very content to be an engrossing force in the room, and relished in each other’s energy.” The pair frequently worked side by side in Rivers’ studio, where O’Hara wrote much of his long poem “Second Avenue,” the street where the studio was located, in between poses as Rivers sculpted him. The symbiosis of their work is seen in Rivers’ painting a few years later, Second Avenue with “THE.” While O’Hara’s poem reassembles fragmented imagery from the street, Rivers’ painting takes objects from within his studio, such as the floorboards and window lettering, and reconfigures them.7 Like O’Hara, Rivers’ work trades in energy and accidents, drawing on the immediacy of his surroundings and elevating it.

7. Similarly, the structure of O’Hara’s “Ode to Michael Goldberg” can be seen as analogous to Rivers’ “painted autobiography” Me II. Both works are formed of disparate vignettes of family life through to adulthood, collating snapshots into a wider composition that speaks more broadly about life.

THE FINE ART OF GOSSIP

5. O'Hara later wrote the poem "On Seeing Larry Rivers' Washington Crossing the Delaware at the Museum of Modern Art" about the piece.

145

8. “Among the other artworks resulting from the pair’s close bond are Rivers’ 1954 painting O’Hara Nude with Boots; and Rivers’ Frank O’Hara sculpture (c. 1955), which looks to petrify O’Hara’s knack of wringing dynamism from a personal stance in plaster.”

9. In the piece “Springtemps” from Stones, Rivers has drawn a flower, perhaps representing O’Hara’s line: “Joe comes in with/a new pair of flowers and/ we have another May whiskey.” Yet no other objects are directly pictured: instead we see a human-like form, perhaps, which could be “Joe”, or a

representation of whisky, or an illustration showing the line “we go on working.”

GOSSIP

Their shared delight in gossip, shock, and self-parody is evident in the play O’Hara and Rivers collaborated on, Kenneth Koch: A Tragedy ,8 a piece that simultaneously depicted and satirized the New York School. O’Hara quipped, it “cannot be printed because it is so filled with ̓50s art gossip that everyone would sue us.” Throughout Rivers’ and O’Hara’s numerous collaborations, the beauty lies in the indirectness. Rivers doesn’t simply illustrate O’Hara’s work, and O’Hara doesn’t just narrate that of Rivers. Nothing is taken literally. Take Stones,9 a series of lithograph prints created intermittently over a period of approximately three years, beginning in 1957. O’Hara might go to Rivers’ place and create one in an afternoon, then months would pass before another was attempted. They worked quickly on each piece, alternating on a single surface with O’Hara writing directly around Rivers’ images using a mirror, giving each work a sense of urgency—a characteristic of O’Hara, who was known to dash off a poem on the way to a party, at lunch, or while on the telephone (all, fortuitously, gossip-rich situations). No close friendship is easy, especially between those making work as well as merry together, especially when they run in the same circles. O’Hara and Rivers’ letters unearth the rows catalyzed by closeness, the dissents born of a sexual relationship becoming platonic, the painter’s conflicts around his claims of heteronormative heterosexuality. Rivers’ recollections discuss O’Hara’s drinking and the painters’ own substance use, and the promiscuity of both. But such “menacing flare-ups... subsided,” Rivers writes. When O’Hara died tragically at just 40, after being run over by a beach buggy on Fire Island, artists’ eulogies poured in, a sign of his generosity and capacity for forging meaningful friendships. “Frank O’Hara was my best friend,” said Rivers at his funeral. “There are at least sixty people in New York who thought Frank O’Hara was their best friend.” We get to be his friend, too. All we have to do is read one of his poems.

147

THE FINE ART OF GOSSIP

Rivers, Larry and O’Hara, Frank, ‘Where are They’ from Stones. 1958 (published 1960). Lithograph from illustrated book with thirteen lithographs: 14 3/16 x 16" (36 x 40.6 cm); page: 19 x 23 1/4" (48.3 x 59.1 cm) © VAGA at ARS, NY. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY.

GOSSIP

Words by Allison P. Davis

Illustration by Daiana Ruiz

149

RITE OF PASSAGE

If there was going to be a Harvard Business Review case study in Note Passing, this would be it: In 1998, a sixth grader, Allison (that’s me), went to Disney World with her parents. The trip required skipping school on Thursday, Friday, and Monday. There was a brunch with the Disney princesses. They stayed at the Grand Floridian. Trust me, it totally ruled. In Allison’s absence, a minor scandal broke out at her all-girls middle school when a classmate, Betsy, found an unsigned, handwritten note shoved into the slats of her locker door on Monday morning. Someone had scrawled, “Betsy is a SKANK,” on lined notebook paper in iceblue Gelly Roll pen. Betsy was upset. Her friends rallied around her, vowing to figure out who wrote the note. The evidence they used to narrow it down to a single suspect is as follows: On the Friday night prior to the offense, Betsy had attended a house party, where she kissed a boy during a game of spin the bottle. Allison previously had a crush on said boy. Allison also loved Gelly Roll pens (find me an 11-year-old who doesn’t). That was enough information for Betsy’s friends to go through the work in Allison’s art cubby to obtain a writing sample. From that sample they concluded that the way Allison looped her S’s absolutely matched the S in “SKANK.” Case closed. Allison returned from Orlando and was found guilty of a crime she didn’t commit, all because some jealous bitches were mad they didn’t get to go to Disney World. Anyway. The Betsy is a Skank incident teaches us most of what we

need to know about passing notes: What they look like (ripped out pieces of paper; scrawls in ink), why we pass them (to transmit our most urgent communications and feelings), and how they are received (with equally fervent emotion). Skank ’98 might have happened two decades ago, but passing notes still remains one of the most effective modes of communication. I no longer have that same teenage urge to do it (or the teenage crushes, grudges, or underdeveloped brain that gives in to the whim), but there’s no way of expressing yourself—your purest, truest, most intense self—that feels quite as imperative or emotionally charged as folding up a scribbled note and surreptitiously handing it off. Passing a note always felt like pressing your mouth to someone’s ear and whispering your truth right into their brain, knowing that they would be able to smell your breath and might judge you for it. Sometimes when I send a text or an email, especially one with stakes (an apology, a fuck you, a confession), I think back on my days of note passing and how there was something more genuine, more vulnerable, and less ephemeral about it than the digitalia we communicate with now. Notes are like offering up a little chunk of your identity to a person. There’s your handwriting—an almost subconscious broadcasting of who you are and your mindset. You can look at someone’s handwriting and say, “Oh, my Mom wrote that,”

GOSSIP

or “That’s my best friend’s handwriting,” and you automatically conjure the person. Then there’s the deliberateness required of the form, which speaks volumes. You have to choose your pen; you have to choose the words that best express what you mean (and what you can spell). If you cross something out and add in a word, you’re showing a thought process. If you write your notes hastily, impulsively, offhandedly, you’re showing an emotional state, a bald desire for something. It could just be a “Hang after school?” or an “I like you, do you like me?” or a “You’re a dirty skank,” but it’s a reveal no matter what. And man, you really have to mean what you say, like, mean it the most, because once you make the choice to show your ass and muster the courage to place that note directly into someone’s hands (or locker or backpack), your intentions are undeniable. They’re also no longer yours. A note is a contract between the passer and the receiver. Once it’s out of your hands, you can’t expect a response, or a judgment, or even a record of it, should they throw it away. And once received, the note should remain private (even though, c’mon), unjudged, and cherished. And to think, there we were, passing around these little pieces of our souls at that awkward, foundational time when our personalities were just taking shape. Were we insane? Or are notes the perfect way to transmit who you really are? I vote perfect. Think of all the other ways we try to preserve some of that purity of expression. We dash off emotional emails without spell-checking (and then delete from “Sent” because who can face that?). We

compose thoughts on our phones’ Notes app and then post it to social media to convey a heartfelt authenticity and avoid self-conscious Tweets and labored-over Instagram captions. These are attempts to replicate that sense of intimacy—but it doesn’t really ever work, does it? The last note I ever thought about passing was in 10th grade. I loved a dopey guy named Paul Wallace who couldn’t play guitar but hung out with a guy who could. I wrote out a whole note on unlined cream paper ripped from my journal, and used a dark blue Uni-ball pen that conveyed a sense of maturity. (He was a junior.) I thought about leaving it in his backpack during play practice, but didn’t. Instead, I just wrote him an email. I’m not quite sure why. It felt less risky, and everything happened over email in 2002 anyhow, according to Seventeen. The magazine’s editors even provided a form letter: “How to Email Your Crush,” and I just plugged and played. He responded. The rejection letter plopped into my inbox unceremoniously during first period French class and almost knocked me out. I scanned it. Deleted it. Went back to conjugating verbs. And now it’s gone forever because both of our email addresses were deactivated after we graduated. Now I wonder though, maybe if I’d written it by hand.* (*Nothing would have happened. Paul has a lovely husband.)

RETURN TO THE FOLD

When it comes to passing notes, the way it’s folded says just as much as the words scrawled inside. Here’s a step-by-step guide to the most romantic of all folds—just be careful who you pass it to.

START WITH A RECTANGULAR PIECE OF PAPER. FOLD IT IN HALF LENGTHWISE.

FOLD IT IN HALF LENGTHWISE AGAIN.

ROTATE THE PAPER 90° SO IT’S VERTICALLY ORIENTED IN FRONT OF YOU, THEN FOLD IT IN HALF AGAIN SO THERE’S A CENTER CREASE.

FOLD THE LEFT SIDE SO THE BOTTOM EDGE ALIGNS WITH THE CENTER FOLD. THE NEW SHAPE WILL LOOK LIKE A CREST.

FLIP THE PIECE OF PAPER OVER SO THE TRIANGLE IS POINTING DOWN.

FOLD THE TOP LEFT CORNER OF THE RIGHT FLAP DOWN SO THE POINT OF THE FLAP TOUCHES THE RIGHT EDGE. IT SHOULD FORM A TRIANGLE. REPEAT ON THE LEFT SIDE.

TAKE BOTH FLAPS AND FOLD THEM INTO THE OPEN SPACE WHERE THE TRIANGLE BEGINS.

UNFOLD TO REVEAL THE CREASE, THEN ROTATE IT BACK SO IT’S HORIZONTALLY ORIENTED IN FRONT OF YOU. FOLD THE RIGHT SIDE UPWARDS SO THE BOTTOM EDGE ALIGNS WITH THE CENTER FOLD.

FINAL RESULT:

GOSSIP

LOVE LET TER

Liam Cobb. Spread from ‘The Party’ in Shampoo. 2016.

EYE ON DESIGN ISSUE 3

FOUNDER & DIRECTOR Perrin Drumm @perrindrumm MANAGING EDITOR Liz Stinson @lizstins SENIOR EDITORS Emily Gosling @nalascarlett Meg Miller @Megilllah ASSOCIATE EDITOR & ART DIRECTOR Madeleine Morley @mdimorl DESIGNER Tala Safié @talasafie COPY EDITORS Liz Carbonell Max Boersma SOCIAL MEDIA Plural

FEATURED GUEST DESIGNER Allyn Hughes is a graphic designer and educator in New York City. She designed this issue with the assistance of Matt Lancaster. allynhughes.com COMIC Raphaelle Macaron is an illustrator and comic artist who divides her time between Beirut and Paris. She is a member of the Samandal comics collective. raphaellemacaron.com

James Cartwright lives in nature, bakes bread, and is currently on the hunt for a “cool” baby papoose. @jdmcartwright Allison P. Davis is a writer in Brooklyn, like everyone else. @AllisonPDavis Orit Gat is a writer and contributing editor at The White Review. She’s written about contemporary art and digital culture for e-flux journal, ArtReview, the Times Literary Supplement, and VICE, among others. oritgat.com Nathan Ma is a writer based in Berlin. You’ll find his byline in Broadly, Sleek Magazine, Teen Vogue, and The Outline. nathanashma.com

Anne Quito covers design and architecture for Quartz. She holds a masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s degree in visual culture from Georgetown University and an MFA in design criticism from the School of Visual Arts. @annequito Fiona Shipwright is an architecture writer and editor based in Berlin. Her writing appears in rhizome, super/collider, and The Architectural Review. fionashipwright.wordpress.com Liv Siddall is a writer and podcaster from London. livsiddall.com

Daiana Ruiz is an illustrator based in Buenos Aires. Her illustrations have appeared in The New Yorker, Riposte, Rolling Stone, and Lenny Letter. daianaruiz.tumblr.com Inkee Wang is an illustrator, animator, and character designer based in Shanghai. Her clients include the Tate Museum, the Printmaking Museum of China, and Bloomberg Businessweek. Inkee-wang.com Matt Lancaster is an illustrator and designer living in Brooklyn. matthewlancaster.com

Nolwen Cifuentes is a photographer based in Los Angeles. Her clients include i-D Magazine, Dazed & Confused, Bloomberg Businessweek and The FADER. nolwencifuentes.com Nora Hollstein is a photographer based in Berlin. She studied graphic design at Berlinâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s University of the Arts. norahollstein.tumblr.com Nicholas Prakas is a photographer who splits his time between Greece and New York, working mostly in fashion. nicholasprakas.com Images on this page and designer letter from the Reanimation Library.

hemlock.com

Eye on Design magazine - Issue #03 “Gossip”

Articles inside

Sense & Sensibility

Into the Goss

Editors’ Letter + Table of Contents