topo-
graphical
typography
new zealand typographic study - south island research and exhibition catalogue
dave cochrane • dr mandy rudge • ian rotherham
UCOL funded research 2011 ©
EIT funded research 2015 ©
Typographic business signage trends in 10 communities in the South Island of Aotearoa / New Zealand
A UCOL research team posed the question: “Can typographic signage communicate the ideals/identity of a region within the North Island of New Zealand?” they travelled to 10 towns and cities to document business signage and observe trends in April 2015. This catalogue outlines their findings, individual views, and includes a creative output by one of the team members, photographer Ian Rotherham. Additional outputs were generated for Monotype’s Recorder, published in the UK (Dave Cochrane) and at the International Urban Design Conference, Brisbane (Dr. Mandy Rudge). Please navigate through the catalogue by swiping from page to page. We hope you enjoy browsing it as much as we enjoyed creating it.
typography |tī’pägrəfē| noun
the style and appearance of printed matter. the art or procedure of arranging type or processing data and printing from it.
TE WAIPOUNAMU: COLLECTIONS OF IMAGES
COLLECTION 1: documentary images
The images in this exhibition derive from a research project that documented commercial signage in 10 communities in the South Island. This project began in 2012 with a survey of signage in 43 communities in the North Island, the results of which were published as topographical typography: north island typographic study (Hoskin, Rudge & Rotherham, 2013). Collectively these studies were the first of their kind and generated a greater understanding of the characteristics and trends of commercial signage in Aotearoa. Besides documenting over 1,300 examples of signage for the South island study, Ian Rotherham photographed signage creatively and it is a selection of these images that form this exhibition.
The collection of images that document business signage was by far the largest numerically of all the collections we gathered in the South Island. These 1,300 images, stored in camera and duplicated on laptops and i-pads, documented all forms of signage used by an individual business in the survey area. It was by analysing this collection that we were able to draw conclusions about signage in the South Island. For example, in the businesses surveyed:
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the smallest number of signs on any business was 1 and the greatest number was 26
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black and white were the most common colours for type and background
• upper case letter forms were used more often than lower case •
fonts without a serif (the small line added to embellish a letter) were 3 times more common than those with a serif
Buhler notes that images never exist as a single isolated unit. It is through their references that they are related to multiple visual genres (such as portrait, documentary, landscape or travel photography), linked to multiple platforms (such as a book, e-publication, website, Facebook, Instagram or an exhibition) and connected to a variety of tropes (such as the ‘beauty’, ‘freedom’, the ‘everyday’). In the digital age where an image has the ability to travel at speed across platforms, within seconds of its creation it can be present in many places and reference multiple genres and tropes (Buhler, 2015). Additionally, it is not often that we make or see photographs singularly. “They come in sets, suites, series, sequences, pairings, iterations, photo-essays, albums, typologies, archives and so on” (Campany, 2013, para.1). It is because of these characteristics that I have chosen to focus on the idea of collections of images in this essay. In reviewing the experience of conducting research in Te Waipounamu, it became apparent that besides the collection of images that documented signage, there were several other collections we had created, gathered or were influenced by. Each of these collections were structured and ordered in different ways and it was by doing this that we made sense of the thousands of images in our 7 cameras, in the megabytes of data on our 3 laptops - and in the images stored in our memories.
Dunedin Business signage, no matter where it is placed or what colour it is, is designed as a location and identity device: it tells us where the business is and something about its products and services. But besides being detectable, conspicuous, legible and comprehensible, signage needs to communicate the brand personality of the organisation. Ideally, it should communicate the human characteristics that are relevant to its services and products (such as ‘masculine’, ‘exclusive’, ‘contemporary’ or ‘reliable’). If effective, signage has the potential to increase sales by a staggering 25-65 percent (US Fed News Service, 2011).
While some people feel besieged by sigange, for the research team, the everyday nature of the commercial landscape provided a degree of relief from the large distances we had to travel. Half of the signage in the areas surveyed related to franchises or corporates (such as the BNZ, Vodafone, NZPost, Shantons, Glasson’s and Farmers) and documenting this provided a sense of routine and familiarity in a new environment. In contrast, the signage for independently owned businesses was more likely to differ from the norm and, as in the North island survey, we were interested in anything unusual, novel, handcrafted or creative – not because it was necessarily ‘good’, but simply because it was new. COLLECTION 2: tourism industry images
Roxburgh While people learn to read business signage in order to navigate their worlds and find the products and services they want, increasingly they are learning not to see signage. Matt Soar describes this state as a response to ‘hypercommercialism’, a state in which it seems as if every available space in our urban environment is covered with advertising and marketing. (2009).
Dunedin One source estimates that that we encounter between 247 and 3,000 ads in a wide variety of forms every single day. And, as Lamoureux notes, our brains simply can’t process that many messages. “We can’t notice, absorb, or even judge the personal merit of 3,000 visual attacks a day” (2014, para.1, my emphasis). Reiterating this concern, Campbell (2002) speaks of a world in which each new sign shouts as loud as it can, knowing that it has to compete. Others speak emotively of the feeling that their cities are ‘awash with public lettering or ‘besieged’ by signage (Concordia, 2007).
Although we were in the South island to conduct research, we were aware that we had some things in common with tourists. We were inadvertently following the scenic route around the island and were engaged in tourist type activities such as stopping to photograph, so it wasn’t surprising that in some places we were mistaken for them.
Influencing the type of photographs that tourists create are the images of their destination they see before they leave home. These pictures are not just encountered in brochures, but are increasingly seen in television programmes, on websites, blogs and social networking sites. Invariably the images feature the natural or built environment at its ‘best’: usually in sunshine, with blue skies, perfect cloud formations and certainly no rubbish. These images are designed to prompt the tourist to visit these places and, when they do, most are compelled to document the experience photographically. At times tourists seem so intent on re-creating these images that it isn’t until they return home and review them that they have a greater sense of where they have actually been (MacCannell, 1976). The research team had all seen the images produced by the tourism industry that supported the lavish descriptions of the South Island as a “palette of dramatic scenes… that showcase the best of nature’s assets where towering alps meet peaceful sounds and rugged coastlines merge with sweeping plains”. And we certainly encountered towering alps, peaceful sounds, rugged coastlines and sweeping plains, but at times this palette was almost too spectacular, too theatrical and too stunning.
We were not the only ones to experience this overload. When we stopped in a layby beside Lake Wakitipu, a European tourist told us jokingly that there was “nothing to see”.
COLLECTION 3: ‘tourist’ photographs The practice of taking images while traveling has a history as old as the camera. It has been suggested that the car window acts as a lens that frames the landscape and focuses the eye. Combined with the speed of travel this tends to result in instantaneous decisions being made about whether to stop and photograph or not. This fast paced process has the potential to facilitate spontaneity and accompanying this is the feeling of freedom that derives from being on the road, a sense of escape from everyday routines and a feeling of discovery. While most people have difficulty seeing the things they are most familiar with, photographs taken on the road have the potential to present the familiar back to us in a new way (Campany, 2014). Although we were researching business signage, the team were not immune from taking a few ‘snaps’ along the way. Some of us wanted to add to our collection of coffee photos, others recorded the team at various points in the journey and all of us took photos of the scenery. Like tourists, our images were sent (often within seconds of being created) to various platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and, via text and email, to colleagues, friends and family. This reinforces Buhler’s idea that images no longer exist as a single isolated unit but rapidly become part of many other collections of images (2015).
When people want to share their experience of travel, they reach for photos on their phones, blogs, i-pads or laptops. Less often do they reach for the printed image. Parr suggests that mobile phones and digital cameras have radically changed photographic behaviour; to the point that no longer do people take just one image in one place, they take several and on different devices. Such is this pre-occupation with photographic documentation that it appears that people spend very little time in a place just looking (Parr, 2012). And, as Urry notes, travel has become a search for the photographic (2002), which in the extreme is to the point that people’s lives become a function of the images they create (Flusser in Buhler, 2015a). Westergren’s advice is to photograph less while travelling. “Instead of scurrying through a laundry list of stops, have fewer but deeper experiences. While taking more time in those experiences, photograph them deliberately and creatively, in ways that center you in the moment (in Noel, 2015, para. 2). As Urry and Larsen note, photographs are not only a way of bringing the outside world home, but they are also a means of creating and accumulating memories (in Sun, Ryan and Pan, 2014). For the research team, our images serve to remind us of an experience and enable us to share that with others.
COLLECTION 5: ‘art’ images
COLLECTION 4: images in memory The fourth collection of images we gathered were those stored in our memories. In travelling a total of 2,000km and up to 500km a day, the landscape seen from the road provided an opportunity to create a collection of images in our minds – both moving and still. Collectively, these images related to the pace of the trip, the places through which we passed, the places in which we stopped, the people we met, the music we played and conversations we had. But they also related to the photos we didn’t take (intentionally or inadvertently). Stupples suggests that in our lives we receive “a constellation of visual images” (2003, p.133) and from this we necessarily select and archive. Our experience (of a trip, or a place) is therefore “not what one lived, but what one remembers (Marquez in Wood and Byatt, 2008, p. 118, my emphasis). And it is in meeting up with the team again and in reviewing our experience, memories and images that we re-remember.
All three members of the team are Lecturers in Visual Imaging, so we were all aware of the images of the South island that had been created artists and photographers. At certain times it felt like those images were travelling with us. Around a corner we would come across a landscape that in our minds was a ‘Colin McCahon’, a ‘Craig Potton’ a ‘Rita Angus’ or a ‘Ralph Hotere’. Ian’s creative photographic work rests against a backdrop of work by other photographers who have sought to convey something of the relationship people have with Te Waipounamu. In 1975, the New Topographic movement saw the creation of images that combined both the natural landscape and the built environment. This combination of landscape and documentary photography is evident in early NZ photography in images by the Burton brothers who explored the intersect of culture and nature, in the more recent conservation focussed work of John Johns and explorations of the changing relationship people have with nature, as evidenced in the work of contemporary photographers such as Wayne Barrar and Haruhiko Sameshima (Goldthorpe, 2013). Of the greatest influence on Ian’s work are images by Robin Morrison. His images and, in particular his book The South Island of New Zealand from the Road (1981), were certainly present in Ian’s mind as he created the images that would form the basis of this exhibition. As we travelled around the island, we had no doubt that this was the place where images such as Skateboarding at the Surf Pavilion (Dunedin), Webster’s Butchery (Picton) and the Gospel Hall (Tasman) (Morrison, 1981) had been created. Morrison’s approach, style and content featured centrally in Ian’s 2006 Post Morrisonism show at Wellington’s Photospace gallery. As Ian said at the time: “I have always found Robin’s photographs to be graphically strong, decisive, incisive, to the point and moving” (The Dominion Post, 06 Sep, 2006). Added to his respect for Robin’s work is Ian’s interest in the struggle of small towns that are either flourishing as tourist destinations or struggling economically. These two influences continue in Rotherham’s present collection of work. COLLECTION 6: Ian Rotherham’s images As we adapted to a daily pattern of travel, documentation and more travel (interspersed with regular breaks for coffee and food), Ian searched for images of signage that had the potential to convey something more to a viewer than simply the name of the business and what it sold.
While the 1,300 images Ian created for the survey are intentionally devoid of context, some of the images in this exhibition include their environments. It is these glimpses of the natural or built landscape that provide clues as to where this sign might be. By including a context these images speak about the ways in which people who live and work in these places inscribe a commercial landscape with meanings. Conversely for some of Ian’s images, the environment has been excluded, which makes it more of a challenge to work out where the signage is. This prompts thoughts about whether the sign could in fact be anywhere. As Ian points out, “Photography isolates aspects of the world and enables people to engage with views of the world they wouldn’t normally” (in Hoskins, Rudge and Rotherham 2013, p12). Interestingly, people’s responses to Ian’s images frequently centre round trying to locate the sign in the image and, if they have seen it before, they will often recount their memories of it. I find it interesting that while the sign was initially designed to locate a business, a photograph of a sign devoid of context often prompts the viewer to re-locate it. This illustrates how people use signage to navigate their environment and highlights why signage is so strongly associated with a sense of ‘place’. We know that Ian’s images are not the signs in themselves, but a re-presentation of them. We know that considerable effort was required to create them, that they are likely to be influenced by the work of other photographers and that the content is manipulated through the use of the square format, cropping and Photoshop. We know that shadows and blemishes have probably been removed, that the colour was probably enhanced. We know that the digital image is a re-presentation of reality, that it is highly malleable and layered (Buehler, 2015). So it is therefore somewhat paradoxical that we still associate a photograph with values such as ‘objectivity’, ‘truthfulness’ and ‘authenticity’. And, I would suggest, Ian’s images are no exception. Momentarily we see past the layers, the modifications, and we search our memory for experiences of that sign. We give a sign, photographically removed from its context, a place. These photographs provide a constructed space for the viewer to reflect on something as commonplace as business signage in a new way. As Hamish Keith reminds us, good photographs “bring us news” (in Morrison, 1981). It is in Ian’s choice of what to photograph, his framing and his knowledge of the photographic medium that the viewer’s thoughts are directed to another way of understanding signage. I have no doubt that many of these images will activate your own collections of images (stored in memory, in files and on various platforms) about signage in Te Waipounamu.
Dr Mandy Rudge Research team leader, Senior Lecturer, Ideaschool, EIT (Eastern Institute of Technology), Taradale Campus, Hawke’s Bay. June 2015.
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