Typographic Essay Book

The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible The Science of Typography Fluid Mechanics: Typography Now Rethinking Modernism, Revising Functionalism Is Best Really Better?

The Making of Typographic Man We Don’t Need New Fonts…

Tool (Or, Post-production for the Graphic Designer) Discovery by Design Experimental typography. Whatever that means.

Typeface As Programme: Interview with Erik Spiekermann Typographica Mea Culpa, Unethical Downloading Cult of the Ugly How To Be Ugly

Fuck Content

The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible

by Beatrice Warde (1900 – 1969) Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favourite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in colour. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent.

Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain.

Bear with me in this long-winded and fragrant metaphor; for you will find that almost all the virtues of the perfect wine-glass have a parallel in typography. There is the long, thin stem that obviates fingerprints on the bowl. Why? Because no cloud must come between your eyes and the fiery heart of the liquid. Are not the margins on book pages similarly meant to obviate the necessity of fingering the type-page? Again: the glass is colourless or at the most only faintly tinged in the bowl, because the connoisseur judges wine partly by its colour and is impatient of anything that alters it. There are a thousand mannerisms in typography that are as impudent and arbitrary as putting port in tumblers of red or green glass! When a goblet has a base that looks too small for security, it does not matter how cleverly it is weighted; you feel nervous lest it should tip over. There are ways of setting lines of type which may work well enough, and yet keep the reader subconsciously worried by the fear of ‘doubling’ lines, reading three words as one, and so forth.

Now the man who first chose glass instead of clay or metal to hold his wine was a ‘modernist’ in the sense in which I am going to use that term. That is, the first thing he asked of his particular object was not ‘How should it look?’ but ‘What must it do?’ and to that extent all good typography is modernist.

Wine is so strange and potent a thing that it has been used in the central ritual of religion in one place and time, and attacked by a virago with a hatchet in another.

There is only one thing in the world that is capable of stirring and altering men’s minds to the same extent, and that is the coherent expression of thought. That is man’s chief miracle, unique to man. There is no ‘explanation’ whatever of the fact that I can make arbitrary sounds which will lead a total stranger to think my own thought. It is sheer magic that I should be able to hold a one-sided conversation by

means of black marks on paper with an unknown “The Crystal Goblet,” Beatrice Warde 2 person half-way across the world. Talking, broadcasting, writing, and printing are all quite literally forms of thought transference, and it is the ability and eagerness to transfer and receive the contents of the mind that is almost alone responsible for human civilization.

If you agree with this, you will agree with my one main idea, i.e. that the most important thing about printing is that it conveys thought, ideas, images, from one mind to other minds. This statement is what you might call the front door of the science of typography. Within lie hundreds of rooms; but unless you start by assuming that printing is meant to convey specific and coherent ideas, it is very easy to find yourself in the wrong house altogether. Before asking what this statement leads to, let us see what it does not necessarily lead to. If books are printed in order to be read, we must distinguish readability from what the optician would call legibility. A page set in 14pt Bold Sans is, according to the laboratory tests, more ‘legible’ than one set in 11pt Baskerville.

A public speaker is more ‘audible’ in that sense when he bellows. But a good speaking voice is one which is inaudible as a voice. It is the transparent goblet again!

I need not warn you that if you begin listening to the inflections and speaking rhythms of a voice from a platform, you are falling asleep. When you listen to a song in a language you do not understand, part of your mind actually does fall asleep, leaving your quite separate aesthetic sensibilities to enjoy themselves unimpeded by your reasoning faculties. The fine arts do that; but that is not the purpose of printing. Type well used is invisible as type, just as the perfect talking voice is the unnoticed vehicle for the transmission of words, ideas.

We may say, therefore, that printing may be delightful for many reasons, but that it is important, first and foremost, as a means of doing something. That is why it is mischievous to call any printed piece a work of art, especially fine art: because that would imply that its first purpose was to exist as an expression of beauty for its own sake and for the delectation of the senses. Calligraphy can almost be considered a fine art nowadays, because its primary economic and educational purpose has been taken away; but printing in English will not qualify as an art until the present English language no longer conveys ideas to future generations, and until printing itself hands its usefulness to some yet unimagined successor.

There is no end to the maze of practices in typography, and this idea of printing as a conveyor is, at least in the minds of all the great typographers with whom I have

had the privilege of talking, the one clue that can guide you through the maze.

Without this essential humility of mind, I have seen ardent designers go more hopelessly wrong, make more ludicrous mistakes out of an excessive enthusiasm, than I could have thought “The Crystal Goblet,” Beatrice Warde 3 possible. And with this clue, this purposiveness in the back of your mind, it is possible to do the most unheard-of things, and find that they justify you triumphantly. It is not a waste of time to go to the simple fundamentals and reason from them. In the flurry of your individual problems, I think you will not mind spending half an hour on one broad and simple set of ideas involving abstract principles.

I once was talking to a man who designed a very pleasing advertising type which undoubtedly all of you have used. I said something about what artists think about a certain problem, and he replied with a beautiful gesture: ‘Ah, madam, we artists do not think---we feel!’ That same day I quoted that remark to another designer of my acquaintance, and he, being less poetically inclined, murmured: ‘I’m not feeling very well today, I think!’ He was right, he did think; he was the thinking sort; and that is why he is not so good a painter, and to my mind ten times better as a typographer and type designer than the man who instinctively avoided anything as coherent as a reason. I always suspect the typographic enthusiast who takes a printed page from a book and frames it to hang on the wall, for I believe that in order to gratify a sensory delight he has mutilated something infinitely more important. I remember that T.M. Cleland, the famous American typographer, once showed me a very beautiful layout for a Cadillac booklet involving decorations in colour. He did not have the actual text to work with in drawing up his specimen pages, so he had set the lines in Latin. This was not only for the reason that you will all think of; if you have seen the old typefoundries’ famous Quousque Tandem copy (i.e. that Latin has few descenders and thus gives a remarkably even line). No, he told me that originally he had set up the dullest ‘wording’ that he could find (I dare say it was from Hansard), and yet he discovered that the man to whom he submitted it would start reading and making comments on the text. I made some remark on the mentality of Boards of Directors, but Mr Cleland said, ‘No: you’re wrong; if the reader had not been practically forced to read---if he had not seen those words suddenly imbued with glamour and significance---then the layout would have been a failure. Setting it in Italian or Latin is only an easy way of saying “This is not the text as it will appear”.’

Let me start my specific conclusions with book typography, because that contains all the fundamentals, and then go on to a few points about advertising. The book typographer has the job of erecting a window between the reader inside the room and that landscape which is the author’s words. He may put up a stained-glass

window of marvellous beauty, but a failure as a window; that is, he may use some rich superb type like text gothic that is something to be looked at, not through. Or he may work in what I call transparent or invisible typography. I have a book at home, of which I have no visual recollection whatever as far as its typography goes; when I think of it, all I see is the Three Musketeers “The Crystal Goblet,” Beatrice Warde 4 and their comrades swaggering up and down the streets of Paris. The third type of window is one in which the glass is broken into relatively small leaded panes; and this corresponds to what is called ‘fine printing’ today, in that you are at least conscious that there is a window there, and that someone has enjoyed building it. That is not objectionable, because of a very important fact which has to do with the psychology of the subconscious mind. That is that the mental eye focuses through type and not upon it. The type which, through any arbitrary warping of design or excess of ‘colour’, gets in the way of the mental picture to be conveyed, is a bad type. Our subconsciousness is always afraid of blunders (which illogical setting, tight spacing and too-wide unleaded lines can trick us into), of boredom, and of officiousness. The running headline that keeps shouting at us, the line that looks like one long word, the capitals jammed together without hairspaces---these mean subconscious squinting and loss of mental focus.

And if what I have said is true of book printing, even of the most exquisite limited editions, it is fifty times more obvious in advertising, where the one and only justification for the purchase of space is that you are conveying a message---that you are implanting a desire, straight into the mind of the reader. It is tragically easy to throw away half the readerinterest of an advertisement by setting the simple and compelling argument in a face which is uncomfortably alien to the classic reasonableness of the book-face. Get attention as you will by your headline, and make any pretty type pictures you like if you are sure that the copy is useless as a means of selling goods; but if you are happy enough to have really good copy to work with, I beg you to remember that thousands of people pay hard-earned money for the privilege of reading quietly set book-pages, and that only your wildest ingenuity can stop people from reading a really interesting text. Printing demands a humility of mind, for the lack of which many of the fine arts are even now floundering in self-conscious and maudlin experiments. There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page. Vulgar ostentation is twice as easy as discipline. When you realise that ugly typography never effaces itself; you will be able to capture beauty as the wise men capture happiness by aiming at something

else. The ‘stunt typographer’ learns the fickleness of rich men who hate to read. Not for them are long breaths held over serif and kern, they will not appreciate your splitting of hair-spaces. Nobody (save the other craftsmen) will appreciate half your skill. But you may spend endless years of happy experiment in devising that crystalline goblet which is worthy to hold the vintage of the human mind.

The Science of Typography

by Ellen Lupton Despite heroic efforts to create a critical discourse for design, our field remains ruled, largely, by convention and intuition. Interested in alternative attitudes, I recently set out to examine the scientific literature on typography. From the late nineteenth century to the present, researchers from various fields—psychology, ergonomics, human computer interaction (HCI), and design—have tested typographic efficiency. This research, little known to practicing designers, takes a refreshingly rigorous—though often tedious and ultimately inconclusive—approach to how people respond to written words on page and screen.

What did I learn from slogging through hundreds of pages photocopied or downloaded from journals with titles like Behavior and Information Technology and International Journal of Man-Machine Studies? Both a little and a lot.

Each study isolates and tests certain variables (font style, line length, screen size, etc.). Although rational and scientific, this process is also problematic, as typographic variables interact with each other—a pull on one part of the system has repercussions elsewhere. For example, in 1929 Donald G. Paterson and Miles A. Tinker published an analysis of type sizes—part of a series of studies they launched in pursuit of “the hygiene of reading.”1 Texts were set in 6-, 8-, 10-, 12-, and 14-point type. The study emphatically concluded that 10 points is the “optimum size” for efficient reading—a result relevant, however, only for texts set at a particular line length (80 mm), in a particular typeface (not disclosed).

Another study by Paterson and Tinker tested ten different fonts, including tradi-

tional, serifed faces as well as the sans serif Kabel Lite, the monospaced American Typewriter, and the densely decorated, neo-medieval Cloister Black.2 Only the last two fonts—Typewriter and Cloister—caused any significant dip in reading speed. The authors’ conclusion: “Type faces [sic] in common use are equally legible” (613). Science leaves the designer more or less at sea in terms of font choice.

A 1998 study testing fonts on the screen revealed conflicts between how users performed and what they said they liked. An interdisciplinary team at Carnegie Mellon University compared Times Roman with Georgia, a serif font designed for the screen.3 Although the team found no objective difference, users preferred Georgia, which they judged sharper, more pleasing, and easier to read. A second test compared Georgia with Verdana, a sans serif face designed for on-screen viewing. In this case, users expressed a slight “subjective preference” for Verdana, but they performed better reading Georgia. Once again, the study concludes with no definitive guide. How is typographic efficiency judged? “Legibility” concerns the ease with which a letter or word can be recognized (as in an eye exam), whereas “readability” describes the ease with which a text can be understood (as in the mental processing of meaningful sentences).

Designers often distinguish “legibility” and “readability” as the objective and subjective sides of typographic experience. For scientists, however, readability can be objectively measured, as speed of reading + comprehension. Subjects in most of the studies cited here were asked to read a text and then answer questions. (Speed and comprehension are factored together because faster reading is often achieved at the expense of understanding content.)

The literature on readability includes numerous articles on whether (and why) paper is preferred over screens. In 1987 researchers working for IBM isolated and tested variables that affect text on both screen and page, including image quality, typeface, and line spacing.4 While the team hoped to successfully identify the culprit behind the poor performance of the screen, they discovered something else instead: an interplay of factors seemed to be at work, each variable interacting with others. The screen itself proved not to be the root cause of its own inefficiency; fault lay, instead, in the way text was presented—in short, its design.

In a second paper the IBM team proved that the efficiency difference between page and screen could be erased entirely if the screen were made to more closely resemble the “normal” conditions of print.5 This study presented black, anti-aliased typefaces on a light, high-resolution screen—features that became more or less standard in the 1990s. The IBM research thus established that design conventions evolved for print effectively translate to the realm of the screen.

While such work confirms the commonality of design for page and screen, other

research defies some of our most cherished assumptions. Consider the burning typographic questions of line length and the appropriate number of characters per line. The Swiss modernists have long promoted short, neat lines as ideal for reading, from Josef Müller-Brockman (seven words per line) to Ruedi Rüegg (forty to sixty characters). Such rules of thumb have become basic instinct for many designers. Science, however, tells a different tale. One study determined that long line lengths are more efficient than shorter ones, concluding that columns of text should fill up as much screen real estate as possible.6 (Grotesque images swim to mind of marginless, unstructured pages of HTML, expanding to fill the screen with one fat column.) Another study compared texts with 80 characters per line to texts with 40 characters per line. The 80-character lines were created—get this!—by collapsing the width of each letter, thus jamming more text into the same space.7 Despite this unforgivable crime against typography, the study found that subjects could read the denser lines more efficiently than lines with fewer—albeit normally proportioned—characters. Ugliness, we learn, does not always compromise function.

Upsetting assumptions is not a bad thing. Although the research cited here may not tell us exactly how to set type, its conclusions could be useful in other ways.

For example, it was once progressive to promote the use of “white space” in all things typographic. Perhaps it is time to reconsider the value of density, from page to screen to urban environment. Down with sprawl, down with vast distances from a to b, and up with greater richness, diversity, and compactness among information and ideas, people and places.

What we might expect from the science of type is a seamless web of rules. Such is not forthcoming. In its drive to uncover fixed standards, the research has affirmed, instead, human tolerance for typographic variation and the elasticity of the typographic system. Science can help ruffle our dogmas and create a clearer view of how variables interact to create living, breathing—and, yes, readable—typography.

Fluid Mechanics: Typography Now

by Ellen Lupton Liquidity, saturation, and overflow are words that describe the information surplus that besets us at the start of the twenty-first century. Images proliferate in this media-rich environment, and so too does the written word. Far from diminishing in influence, text has continued to expand its power and pervasiveness. The visual expression of language has grown increasingly diverse, as new fonts and formats evolve to accommodate the relentless display of the word.

Typography is the art of designing letterforms and arranging them in space and time. Since its invention during the Renaissance, typography has been animated by the conflict between fixed architectural elements-such as the page and its margins-and the fluid substance of written words. Evolutions in the life of the letter arise from dialogs between wet and dry, soft and hard, slack and taut, amorphous and geometric, ragged and flush, planned and unpredicted. With unprecedented force, these conflicts are driving typographic innovation today. Typography is going under water as designers submerge themselves in the textures and transitions that bond letter, word, and surface. As rigid formats become open and pliant, the architectural hardware of typographic systems is melting down.

The flush, full page of the classical book is dominated by a single block of justified text, its characters mechanically spaced to completely occupy the designated volume. The page is like a glass into which text is poured, spilling over from one leaf to the next. By the early twentieth century, the classical page had given way to the multicolumned, mixed-media structures of the modern newspaper, magazine, and illustrated book. Today, the simultaneity of diverse content streams is a given. Alongside the archetype of the printed page, the new digital archetype of the window has taken hold. The window is a scrolling surface of unlimited length, whose width adjusts at the will of reader or writer. In both print and digital media, graphic designers devise ways to navigate bodies of information by exploring the structural possibilities of pages and windows, boxes and frames, edges and margins.

In 1978, Nicholas Negroponte and Muriel Cooper, working at mit’s Media Lab,

published a seminal essay on the notion of “soft copy,” the linguistic raw material of the digital age. The bastard offspring of hard copy, soft text lacks a fixed typographic identity. Owing allegiance to no font or format, it is willingly pasted, pirated, output, or repurposed in countless contexts. It is the ubiquitous medium of word-processing, desk-top publishing, e-mail, and the Internet. The burgeoning of soft copy had an enormous impact on graphic design in the 1980s and 1990s. In design for print, soft copy largely eliminated the mediation of the typesetter, the technician previously charged with converting the manuscript-which had been painstakingly marked up by hand with instructions from the designer-into galleys, or formal pages of type. Soft copy flows directly to designers in digital form from authors and editors. The designer is free to directly manipulate the text-without relying on the typesetter-and to adjust typographic details up to the final moments of production. The soft copy revolution led designers to plunge from an objective aerial view into the moving waters of text, where they shape it from within. Digital media enable both users and producers, readers and writers, to regulate the flow of language. As with design for print, the goal of interactive typography is to create “architectural” structures that accommodate the organic stream of text. But in the digital realm, these structures-and the content they support-have the possibility of continuous transformation. In their essay about soft copy, Negroponte and Cooper predicted the evolution of digital interfaces that would allow typography to transform its size, shape, and color. Muriel Cooper (1925-1994) went on to develop the idea of the three-dimensional “information landscape,” a model that breaks through the window frames that dominate electronic interfaces.

Viewed from a distance, a field of text is a block of gray. But when one comes in close to read, the individual characters predominate over the field. Text is a body of separate objects that move together as a mass, like cars in a flow of traffic or individuals in a crowd. Text is a fluid made from the hard, dry crystals of the alphabet.

Typeface designs in the Renaissance reflected the curving lines of handwriting, formed by ink flowing from the rigid nib of a pen. The cast metal types used for printing converted these organic sources into fixed, reproducible artifacts. As the printed book became the world’s dominant information medium, the design of typefaces grew ever more abstract and formalized, distanced from the liquid hand.

Today, designers look back at the systematic, abstracting tendencies of modern letter design and both celebrate and challenge that rationalizing impulse. They have exchanged the anthracite deposits of the classical letter for lines of text that quiver and bleed like living things.

The distinctive use of type, which can endow a long or complex document with a sense of unified personality or behavior, also builds the identity of brands and

institutions. Bruce Mau has described identity design as a “life problem,” arguing that the visual expression of a company or product should appear like a frame taken from a system in motion. The flat opacity of the printed page has been challenged by graphic designers who use image manipulation software to embed the word within the surface of the photographic image. A pioneer of such effects in the digital realm was P. Scott Makela (1960-1999). In the early 1990s, he began using PhotoShop, a software tool that had just been introduced, as a creative medium. In his designs for print and multimedia, type and image merge in dizzying swells and eddies as letters bulge, buckle, and morph. The techniques he helped forge have become part of the fundamental language of graphic design. The linear forms of typography have become planar surfaces, skimming across and below the pixelated skin of the image.

The alphabet is an ancient form that is deeply embedded in the mental hardware of readers. Graphic designers always ground their work, to some degree, in historic precedent, tapping the familiarity of existing symbols and styles even as they invent new idioms. While some designers pay their toll to history with reluctance, others dive eagerly into the reservoirs of pop culture. Tibor Kalman (19491999) led the graphic design world’s reclamation of visual detritus, borrowing from the commonplace vernacular of mail-order stationery and do-it-yourself signage. Designers now frankly embrace the humor and directness of everyday artifacts. In the aesthetic realm as in the economic one, pollution is a natural resource-one that is expanding rather than shrinking away. Thirty years ago, progressive designers often described their mission as “problem-solving.” They aimed to identify the functional requirements of a project and then discover the appropriate means to satisfy the brief. Today, it is more illuminating to speak of solvents than solutions. Design is often an attack on structure, or an attempt to create edifices that can withstand and engage the corrosive assault of content.

The clean, smooth surfaces of modernism proved an unsound fortress against popular culture, which is now invited inside to fuel the creation of new work.

Image and text eat away at the vessels that would seal them shut. Forms that are hard and sharp now appear only temporarily so, ready to melt, like ice, in response to small environmental changes. All systems leak, and all waters are contaminated, not only with foreign matter but with bits of structure itself. A fluid, by definition, is a substance that conforms to the outline of its container. Today, containers reconfigure in response to the matter they hold.

Rethinking Modernism, Revising Functionalism

by Katherine McCoy When I think of the undercurrents that shape my graphic design, I think of ideas about language and form. Ideas about coding and reading visual form, about challenging the viewer to construct individual interpretations, about layers of form and layers of meaning.

These are at the forefront of my mind, but behind that lie other deeper and older concerns that go back to my earliest years of design. Perhaps these are what could be called a philosophy or an ethic, a personal set of values and criteria, a thread that winds through the lifetime of work and sustains its rigor, the continuity in the cycles of change.

Undergraduate school in industrial design was a very idealistic time. The strong emphasis on problem-solving and a form follows functionalism struck a resonance with my personal approach toward the opportunities and problems of daily life.

As a college junior, I enthusiastically embraced the rationalism of the Museum of Modern Art’s Permanent Design Collection, abandoning the ambiguously intuitive territory of fine art. This somewhat vague midwestern American Modernist ethic had its roots in the Bauhaus, and our group of students gained a dim understanding of its application by the Ulm School of Germany. Added to this was a reverence for the insights of George Nelson, Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller. In hindsight I continue to appreciate the foundation built by those years of industrial design training. At that time, in the middle 1960s, even the best American education in graphic design would not have gone much further than an intuitive ‘ah ha’ method of conceptualizing design solutions and an emulation of the design masters of the moment.

This faith in rational functionalism (and not a polished portfolio) found me my first job, at Unimark International, then the American missionary for European Modernism, the graphic heir of the Bauhaus. There I had the opportunity to learn graphic design from “real” Swiss and to have my junior design work critiqued by Massimo Vignelli, the greatest missionary of them all, the master of Helvetica and the grid. Our ethic then was one of discipline, clarity and cleanliness. The highest praise for a piece of graphic design was, “This is really clean.” We saw ourselves as sweeping away the clutter and confusion of American advertising design with a professional rationality and objectivity that would define a new American design.

This approach was fairly foreign to American clients and in 1968 it was remarkably difficult to convince corporate clients that a grid-ordered page with only two weights of Helvetica was appropriate to their needs. Now, of course, one can hardly persuade them to let give up their hold on “Swiss”, so completely has the

corporate world embraced rationalist Modernism in graphic design.

But after a few years of striving to design as “purely” as possible, employing a minimalist typographic vocabulary, strongly gridded page structures and contrast in scale for visual interest, I came to view this desire for “cleanliness” as not much more than housekeeping.

Then in the mid 1980s at Cranbrook we found a new interest in verbal language in graphic design, as well as fine art. Text can be animated with voices and images can be read, as well as seen, with an emphasis on audience interpretation and participation in the construction of meaning. But now, as the cycles of change continue, Modernism may be reemerging somewhat, a renewed minimalism that is calming down the visual outburst of activity of the past fifteen years.

Through these years of continual change and new possibilities, where does the ethic lie? Does not the idea of ethic imply some sort of unshakable bedrock impervious to the winds of change? For me, there seems to be a habit of functionalism that shapes my process at the beginning of every design project, the rational analysis of the message and the audience, the objective structuring of the text. Each cycle of change during the passing years seems to have added another visual or conceptual layer laid upon that foundation of functionalism, but inside of every project it is always there. Although this emphasis on rationalism would seem to be at odds with recent experimentation at Cranbrook, in fact it has been the provocation to question accepted norms in graphic design, stimulating the search for new communications theories and visual languages. I have never lost my faith in rational functionalism, in spite of appearances to the contrary. The only thing lost was an absolute dedication to minimalist form, which is a completely different issue from rationalist process.

Part of this ethic is a strong conviction and enthusiasm that design is important, that it matters in life, not just mine, but in the lives of our audiences and users of designed communications. Graphic design can be a contribution to our audiences. It can enrich as it informs and communicates. And there is a faith in not only the possibility, but the necessity for advancement and growth in our field, an imperative for change. That only through change can we continue to push ahead in knowledge and expertise, theory and expression, continually building our collective knowledge of the process of communication. These convictions were formed early and sustain me today.

Is Best Really Better?

By Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum The developments in typeface design, typesetting and printing have always been aimed at the improvement of “quality”. Compared to printing techniques as they existed in the early 15th century we have indeed come a long way. We can digitally output the most perfectly drawn typefaces onto film in resolutions of up to 5000 lines per inch.

We can print in offset, in perfect registration, on the smoothest papers and finish it off with layers of varnish, all at a speed that our 15th century forefathers would find baffling. Technically we can create the slickest printing ever, reach the highest possible quality ever. Unfortunately, the results have too often become absolutely boring. The quality of a printed product, the high resolution of its typefaces, the perfect printing are not necessarily what makes for good design or clear communication. As a reaction to this development, we decided to create a typeface that would add liveliness to the page that has since long been lost using the modern technologies available.

Our typeface would have a high resolution distortion of its digital outlines with lengthy rasterizing times as opposed to most developments in digital type: the unsmooth and slow versus the slick and quick.

Type has always been in flux. Gutenberg started with whole copied pages cut from a single piece of wood. All the characters were hand-cut and no two a’s were the same. And did anyone mind?

Gutenberg imitated handwriting because it was the only model of letterforms available at that time. He simply developed a process that was already there, but he succeeded in doing it faster.

Only later were the advantages of movable type exploited, when hot metal type casting techniques made it possible to create large quantities of type in a relatively inexpensive fashion. This was also the period when letterforms started taking advantage of this new medium. Bodoni cut serifs so thin that it would have been impossible to produce them out of wood. It has always taken a while for people to realize the potential of a new technology. Today’s fonts work the way they do because they are still created in a hot metal, movable type kind of way. Their design is based upon the process of punchcutting, which creates a matrix from which an infinite number of identical copies of each letter can be made.

Digital type may even “crash” just as hot metal typesetting did. And, ironically, digital type has resulted in a revival of old style and non-lining numerals and even small caps. The usage of type is still based upon the proverbial typecases that were divided into different compartments, each for a different letter. When a certain letter is needed, it is put in line with the others to make words and sentences. Today the typecase is replaced by a font and a digital printer.

Through our experience with traditional typesetting methods, we have come to expect that the individual letterforms of a particular typeface should always look the same. This notion is the result of a technical process, not the other way round.

However, there is no technical reason for making a digital letter the same every time it is printed. It is possible to calculate every point and every curve differently each time the letter is generated by slightly moving the points that define a character in various “random” directions. We discovered that it was possible to create a font featuring these characteristics in PostScript; our result was Beowolf, the first “RandomFont” typeface of its kind. [Actually, Knuth got there first and he was nice about it.]

Random technology, which is what we call the programming that is involved, is about letting the rasterizer behave randomly within the boundaries of legibility.

Instead of recreating a fixed outline or bitmap, the Randomfont redefines its outlines every time they are called for. Thus, each character will be different each time it is printed. All the points that define the outline of any character will be nudged in a random direction. The distance moved depends on the parameters. For instance, Beowolf 21 has a little deviation, Beowolf 22 has a noticable wrinkle and Beowolf 23 is definitely mad. What is interesting about this typeface is that the deviations in the individual letterforms create an overall unity and the liveliness of the page that we were after is accomplished. We also discovered an interesting side effect when creating color separations for four color printing. Since the printer (Linotronic in this case) generates different outlines each time it prints a particular letter, the color separation will result in four different non-matching films. The resulting letterform in print will be outlined in bright colors.

While working on Randomfont we became aware that if we treated typefaces as computer data, instead of fixed letterforms, we could create some very bizarre systems. One idea was to connect a font file to a self copying moving mechanism to create a virus font; a self distributing typeface: a great way for young and ambitious type designers to get their typefaces known and used. No type manufacturer would be able to compete with that kind of immediate proliferation. Or we could change typographic awareness of computer users around the world by creating a font virus

that would transform every Helvetica into something much more desirable — the Post-modern typographer’s revenge. Virowolves that travel around the world in a single day, with typedesigners getting paid by buying network shares. Or we could hand out our fonts at conferences and meetings, but after a while the files will turn sour just like milk. A perfectly good font would turn random over time. A great way to force people to eventually buy a legitimate copy. And you better hurry, or the virus font will affect your other fonts as well!

We could release a typeface that deteriorates over time, slowly turning into a Beowolf-like face, scaring the hell out of its users. We could create letters that wear out through frequent use, combined with a feature that uses up certain often used letters. You want real letterpress quality? You can get it! How about a font that adds typos? Link a number of typos to a particular time of the day and simulate an erratic (human) typesetter, or a font that does not work overtime. If we put more data into our typefaces we can have some very intelligent fonts. Some applications could be quite practical. For instance the data could include the information to create automatic inktraps that would switch on or off automatically, or as specified by the user, depending on the size of the type or printing technique used. A font would modify its outline when it is to be printed in offset, or shown on TV or screened on wood, or whatever. Or a typeface could research weather data, in particular the amount of direct sunlight on the spot where it will be printed, and modify itself to the best possible contrast. The idea of Randomfont can be applied elsewhere too. Why should a letterhead always be the same? It can be slightly different each day. If you print your correspondence or invoices on a LaserWriter, you can have a randomlogo, a logo that changes itself, moves around the page or tells something interesting about your company, the person you are writing or the nature of the letter. The dynamic logo can be much more informative than its fixed alternative.

For years graphic designers, especially those who subscribe to the ideas and philosophies of Swiss design or modernism, have argued that logos and typefaces should appear consistent to establish recognition. We don’t think that this is necessary. Creating a randomlogo for a company, with letterheads and forms on which the logo would move around and change, does not necessarily decrease recognisability. Recognition does not come from simple repetition of the same form but is something much more intelligent, something that happens in our minds. When you hear somebody’s voice on the phone and he or she has a cold, you can still recognise who is talking. We can recognise handwriting, and even decipher how quickly a note was written and sometimes pick up on the state of mind the person was in when writing the note. Randomness and change can add new dimensions

to printwork. Randomness within typography is not a revolutionary idea either. Typographers have always had to deal with randomness because type has always lacked standardization and consistency. One example is the measurement of type. With hot metal type everybody measured the body size of a typeface. With phototype and digital type there is no body to be measured.

Some people like to measure the x-height, others the cap-height. Even the computer industry has added to the confusion. Software developers in different countries have each taken their national typographic standards and type measurement units and have written programs using their respective systems. This becomes a problem when for instance software written by an American developer is sold in Europe and the user must switch to the American measurement system.

There are software programs that will interpret between the various existing measurement systems, but the conversions are performed internally. So two centimeters will inevitable output as 2.0001 or 1.9999 centimeters. There is definitely not going to be a universal set of standards for type and typography. Maybe randomness is an inevitable result of human behaviour. Gutenberg’s letters came out looking slightly different each time they were printed. Letters wore out, some got damaged, the impression onto the paper differed. However, overall the printed results had a vibrant and human quality. At some point during the developement of type and typography, the graphic design industry decided that is was necessary to improve upon the “quality” of printing and type. In the process due to economic and commercial considerations, much vitality was lost. We believe that the computer, although considered by many to be cold and impersonal, can bring back some of these lost qualities. Randomfont is our contribution to this idea.

Randomness will always exiſt.

The Making of Typographic Man

By Ellen Lupton Marshall McLuhan published The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man in 1962. No easy read, this rather technical book overflows with opaque excerpts from seventeenthcentury poetry and bulk quotes from pioneering scholarship about print’s impact on the modern mind—readers today are advised to approach this book with a double shot of espresso. Despite its density, The Gutenberg Galaxy helped trigger McLuhan’s own remaking from a Canadian English professor into a global intellectual celebrity. The book uses typography in a remarkably aggressive way, breaking up its soporific pages of academic prose with slogan-esque “glosses” set in 18-point Bodoni Bold Italic. Bam! McLuhan was using type to invent the McLuhanism. Five years later, he produced the radical mass paperback The Media is the Massage with graphic designer Quentin Fiore, amplifying his early visual experiments to new levels of bombast.

Who is McLuhan’s Typographic Man? The concept of the human individual (an isolated self walled off from the collective urges of society) was born in the Renaissance and became the defining subject of modern systems of government, law, economics, religion, and more. This individual was, McLuhan argued, both product and producer of the most influential technology in the history of the modern West: typography. The use of uniform, repeatable characters to manufacture uniform, repeatable texts transformed the way people think, write, and talk and triggered the rise of a money-based economy and the Industrial Revolution. The vast enterprise of modernity all came down to letters printed on sheets of paper.

Typography amalgamated past inventions, the most important being the phonetic alphabet itself—a concise set of symbols that could, in theory, translate the sounds of any language into a simple string of marks. (In contrast, the Chinese writing system, with its thousands of unique characters was less conducive to automation.)

Gutenberg’s invention joined the phonetic alphabet with oil-based ink, linenbased paper, the printing press (derived from the wine press), and the crafts of goldmsithing and metal-casting (Gutenberg’s personal areas of expertise). Movable type engendered the system of mass production. This continuous process into a series of separate operations. The printed book became the world’s first commodity.

What happened to Typographic Man, and what is he doing today? The eyeball was this creature’s supreme sense organ, supplanting shared auditory experiences of preliterate society. McLuhan predicted that in the rising electronic age, the individualism of Typographic Man would succumb to the tribal chorus of the “global village,” whose collective existence was defined by radio and television (dominated by sound) rather than by private acts of reading (dominated by sight).

It hasn’t really worked out that way. Today, our lives contain more typography than ever, served up via text messaging, e-mail, and the Internet. Letters swarm across the surface of TV commercials and cable news shows, while global villagers in the developing world have discovered SMS as an indispensable business tool. Meanwhile, the collective experiences forged by Twitter and Facebook rely largely on the transmission of text. The most famous McLuhanism of all, “The medium is the message,” fared no better. In today’s world, the medium is often just the medium, as content seeks to migrate freely across platforms rather than embody the qualities of a specific medium. “Device independence” has become a goal more urgent than the task of crafting unique page layouts.

Although typography isn’t dead yet, every good font designer works with one foot in the grave. Typographers feed on past traditions in the way zombies lunch on brains. A survey of contemporary typefaces reveals a repetition or replay of the larger history of printed letters. And just as the first typographers were risk-taking entrepreneurs—seeking riches and facing ruin—type designers today are technical innovators and business advocates, building tools and standards for use by the broader type community while testing new markets and experimenting with alternative forms of distribution.

Strictly speaking, typography involves the use of repeatable, standardized letterforms (known as fonts), while lettering consists of custom alphabets, usually employed for headlines, logotypes, and posters rather than for running text. During the first hundred years of printing, calligraphy and type fluidly interacted, not yet seen as opposing enterprises. While it is well-known that Gutenberg and other early printers used manuscripts as models for typefaces, it is more surprising to learn that the scribes who were employed in the “scriptoriums” or writing factories of the day often produced madmade copies of printed books for their luxury clientele, using calligraphy to replace print. Today, a vital collision between the idioms of handwriting and mechanical and post-mechanical processes is shaping our typographic vocabulary.

With the introduction of desktop computing in the 1980s, the design and delivery of typefaces changed from a sequence of discrete processes requiring expensive equipment (mass production) into a fluid stream of managed by a few producers at low cost (cottage industry). Using desktop software, a graphic designer could now manufacture digital fonts and ship them out on floppy disks. Emigre Fonts, founded in Berkeley, California, by Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko, began producing bitmapped typefaces in 1984 that exploited the constraints of early desktop printers. An intoxicating discourse about experimental design sprang

up around these fonts, documented in Emigre, its eponymous magazine. By the mid-’90s, the jubilant fascination with high-concept display alphabets (distressed, narrative, hybridized, futuristic) was joined by a demand for full-range, full-bodied type families suitable for detailed editorial design (crafted by highly focused typographers in a field that was becoming, again, more specialized).

The same technologies that changed the way designers produce typefaces also changed the way we use them. Graphic designers could now manipulate fonts directly, instantly seeing them in their own layouts and testing them in different sizes and combinations. As the procedures of typesetting and layout merged, designers became direct consumers of fonts, no longer separated by layers of mediation from the essential raw material of their craft. In this intoxicating new era of instant alphabetic gratification, designers could not only buy, borrow, and steal digital fonts but could crack them open, violating the original designs to create alternate characters and even whole new typefaces. Designers stirred up the historic confusion between lettering and type in new ways by lettering the outliers of existing characters.

Custom lettering is a powerful current in contemporary design. Designers today combine physical and digital processes to create letterforms that grow, copulate, and fall apart. Vocabularies range from the lush organicism of Marian Bantjes and Antoine et Manuel to the geometric constructions of Philippe Apeloig, whose bitmapped forms suggest an animated process of assembly and dissolution. Letters drip, drag, and spring into life in the posters of Oded Ezer; they morph and metastasize across the CD and LP covers of Non-Format. Handmade letters provide the model for many contemporary typefaces, from Hubert Jocham’s Mommie (2007) to Laura Meseguer’s Rumba (2006) and Underware’s Liza Pro (2009).

Many recent script fonts recall the funky headlines that flooded the typographic scene in the 1950s and ‘60s, when designers such as Ed Benguiat used ink, pen, and brush to create more than 600 original alphabets. The idea of seeking originality in letterforms is a product of nineteenth century advertising culture. Before then, books were print’s primary medium, and book typography sought to define norms rather than seduce the eye with novelty. The neoclassical typefaces of Bodoni and Didot, with their hairline serifs and severe contrast between thick and thin strokes, opened the way to commercial typography by envisioning letters as a set of structural features subject to endless manipulation (proportion, weight, stress, stroke, serif, and so on). Many of the digital era’s most influential typefaces reference the work of Didot and Bodoni, including Jonathan Hoefler’s HTF Didot (1991), Zuzana Licko’s Filosifa (1996), and Peter Mohr’s Fayon (2010).

One new arrival to the Didone scene is Questa, designed collaboratively by Jos Buivenga and Martin Majoor. Buivenga began his own career as a typeface designer by committing a typographic abomination: giving away his work online.

So-called “free fonts”—which typically consist of poorly designed, badly programmed incomplete, and/or pirated software—are, alas, the source of first resort for many students and clueless amateurs. Some people accustomed to free content on the web still find it difficult to pay serious money—or any at all— for typefaces. Buivenga, a self-taught type designer new to the field, released several weights of his Museo family for free download in 2007. It became hugely popular, and Buivenga soon expanded his free offering to a full-fledged super family available to paying customers.

Museo joins a rich contemporary menu of low-contrast slab faces, including Tobias Frere-Jones’ Archer (2000), Henrik Kubel’s A2 FM (2006), Ross Milne’s Charlie (2008), and Type Together’s Adelle (2009). Adding another flavor to the slab serif tasting list, Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ Sentinel takes its roots from the Clarendon faces of the nineteenth century, whose slab serifs and meaty strokes were designed for display. With numerous weights in roman and italic, Sentinel works for both text and headlines.

Adelle, Museo, and other slab serifs have proven especially popular on the web, where their sturdy body parts hold up well to presentation on screen. Type design has arrived surprisingly late to written communication’s biggest event since the Renaissance. Typographic Man was born in 1450 and fattened up in the candy shops of commercial printing. Alas, during the opening decades of the World Wide Web, his diet was drastically reduced to the half-dozen fonts typically installed on end users’ own computer systems. This situation has finally begun to change, as members of the type design and web communities have agreed on ways to deploy diverse typefaces online without exposing them to shameless piracy. Services such as Type Kit, which legally host fonts and serve them to specific sites, have become big players in the omnivorous expansion of web typography.

The evolution of modern typography is not, of course, all about novelty and spectacle. Countering the restless appetite for sugarcoated change is a parallel hunger for anonymous, recessive purity. Gill Sans, Futura, and Helvetica—standards from the twentieth-century playlist—once laid claim to a cool neutrality suited to inter-

national communication in the machine age and beyond. While these classic faces have endured the shifting storms of taste and fashion, designers have sought out ever more subtle shades of basic black. Laurenz Brunner’s Akkurat (2004) has been heralded as “the new Helvetica,” while Auréle Sack’s LL Brown (2011) recalls Edward Johnston’s lettering for the London Underground. Paying soft-pedal homage to Futura, Radim Pesko’s Fugue (2010) flaunts a tentative bravado, like a teenager on a motorcycle.

Fugue, writes Pesko, “was conceived as an appreciation of and going-back-to-the-future-and-back-again with Paul Renner.”

Rounded end-strokes are another common craving among contemporary designers. Soft terminals restore a dash of humanity to the hard-edged realism sans serif typography.

Eric Olson has led the way with his widely used Bryant (2002) and his more recent Achor (2010), a condensed gothic whose plump, sausage like forms fit comfortably in narrow spaces. The rounded terminals of Jeremy Mickel’s Router (2008) flare out slightly, recalling the mechanical process employed to manufacture routed plastic signs.

Exploring the freshly cleared frontier of web typography, Christopher Clark is inventing surprising uses for SVG (vector graphics for the Web), HTML5 Canvas, and other emerging tools and protocols. Clark’s site WebTypographyfortheLonely.com not only showcases these startling portotypes but also provides instructive commentary and free code. At once generous and estranged, Clark’s “lonely guy” persona speaks to the Typographic Man of our time, whose open-hearted desire to share and connect undercuts his self-mocking alienation. Where is Typographic Man headed as he rides of f with his serifs and spurs into the digitally remastered sunset? He may always keep slipping partly backwards, looking for glimmers of black gold in the post-industrial ghost towns and open mine shafts of history. Like the modern individual McLuhan so poignantly described, today’s Typographic Man is an inward-looking loner, wrapped inside a personal cocoon of digital feeds. Yet Typographic Man has spun that protective narcissistic cocoon from the flux of public life. Today’s individual is the product of his own voracious image/music/text; he is equipped as-never before to bend typography with his own means to his own ends.

This self-involved creature is connecting to the social world in new ways. McLu-

han described typography as an essential medium of exchange in the modern age.

“Typography is not only a technology but is itself a natural resource or staple, like cotton or timber or radio; and, like any staple it shapes not only private sense ratios but also patterns of communal interdependence.” As the first industrial commodity, the printed book was portable, repeatable, and uniform. Unfurling today across the networked horizon, text is now mutable, interactive, and iterative, no longer melded to a solid medium. Yet as a means of exchange that ebbs and flows through communities, text remains more than ever an essential “natural resource” that offers access to participation in a world economy and a shared public life.

We Don’t Need New Fonts…

by Peter Biľak Is there any reason to make new fonts when there are so many already available for downloading? It’s time to reflect on motivation to draw new type. While there is no reason to make uninspired new fonts, still, there are typefaces which haven’t been made yet and which we do need.

It seems to be a golden age of type design—not only are there more type foundries now than ever before, not only is distribution easier and more direct, not only is type a hot topic for numerous specialised blogs and magazines, but even the general interest media are in on the conversation, (if only occasionally). New type design courses are opening regularly, churning out legions of type designers. And there are now over 150,000 fonts available for direct download. In spite of all the attention to type and the unprecedented conditions for type designers, the vast majority of new fonts desperately lack originality. Just as in the music industry, where cover versions and remixes are often more popular than new music, font designers seemingly prefer to exploit successful models from the past rather than strive for new solutions. Scant decades ago, new typefaces underwent a rigorous review procedure to ensure that they met the publisher’s artistic and technical criteria. Today, self-publishing has eliminated such processes, and there is little critical review, little effort to add something new to the evolution of the profession. Mediocrity abounds as quality control dwindles. Dozens of blogs (as well as

the print media) simply republish press releases without distinguishing between marketing and independent reviews, praising uninspired fonts and institutionalising the average. Many design awards do the same, perpetuating a false idea of what constitutes superior quality. We don’t need new fonts like this.

In my decade of experience teaching at Type & Media I have seen many students enter the course with no previous experience in type design. Over the eight months of the course they learn the structure of letterforms and the principles of construction that allow them to create well-designed typefaces, (not always terribly original, but convincing executions without obvious mistakes). Having mastered the formal execution of type, they can then move on to think about how to apply their skills. Obviously, creating type that is too closely related to existing models doesn’t justify the effort involved. Or as my Type & Media colleague Erik van Blokland says: “If an existing typeface does the job, there is no reason to make a new one.” Many people drawing type today have solid drawing skills, but no desire to advance the field (let alone rebel against it) by creating original solutions.

Can we call them type designers? I think not, at least not any more than we can call every fast, accurate typist a writer.

Content is at least as important as form, the ideas we express as important as how we express them.

Still, there are typefaces which haven’t been made yet and which we need. Type that reacts to our present reality rather than being constrained by past conventions; type for non-Latin scripts that gives its users more choices; type that brings readers from previous media to new ones. It is time to think about why we design type, not just how we design it.

Tool (Or, Post-production for the Graphic Designer)

by Andrew Blauvelt In a recent lecture, Ed Fella references a collage he made earlier in his long and prolific career as both a self-proclaimed “commercial artist ” and iconoclastic figure in the graphic design avant-garde. It shows various tools: a T-square, a compass, a bottle of ink, a cup of coffee, a burnisher, an ashtray—re-creating the work surface of a typical graphic designer circa 1975. He deadpans to the audience: “The only thing left is the coffee.” Today, the typical desktop of the graphic designer is a virtual one invented for them in the famed confines of Xerox Park and Apple Computer: some folders, a ticking wristwatch, a trash can, and a bomb. Perhaps nothing better illustrates the transformation of a profession from handicraft to technocrat, from skilled labor to managed service, than this metaphorical transformation of a workspace.

What supposedly distinguishes humans from their primate ancestors is their ability not to use tools but to integrate them into everyday activities, find fresh uses for them, and to create new ones. This evolutionary sequence was famously immortalized on the silver screen in Stanley Kubrik’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which opens with a group of early apelike humans learning to use a bone as both a tool and a weapon. After they triumphantly defeat a rival group, the bone is tossed into the air and transforms into an orbital satellite, a scene set some four million years in the future. The film’s main characters, Dave the astronaut, and HAL, his spaceship’s computer, eventually play out another cautionary tale about technology, as the human triumphs over the machine only to discover even higher-level and functioning extraterrestrial life, setting the stage for humankind’s next transformative evolution.Dave reborn as a kind of “star child” fetus gazes back upon the whole Earth—two spheres filling the screen, an amniotic sack and the proverbial big blue marble (Of course, this creative vision would not have been possible without the invention of the tools for fetal photography at one extreme, and satellite imagery taken from planetary orbit at the other.)

Later in the same year as this epic film’s release, counterculture guru Sewart Brand would publish the first edition of The Whole Earth Catalog (1968), aptly subtitled “access to tools.” This sixty-four-page premier issue, which would eventually grow to more than four hundred pages, brandished a cover image of our entire planet taken from a satellite. This compendium of the latest ideas, best practices, low-cost technologies, and useful tools of its time was part lifestyle bible and part workaday reference manual. Its lofty objective stated: “ We are as gods and might as well get good at it. So far remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where the gross defects

obscure actual gain. In response to this dilemma and to these gains a realm of the intimate, person power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.” The Whole Earth Catalog prestaged the introduction of the ultimate tool, the personal computer, and the technological ethos of today’s Internet culture that it would spawn: the world of self-publishing, user-generated and aggregated content, open source systems, distributive platforms such as app stores, and the networks and connectivity of social media, cloud computing, and file sharing. As Steve Jobs explained it to a graduating class at Stanford in 2005, “It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along.”

Human use of tools has been theorized as an explanation for human evolution stimulating such things as increased brain size coupled with the unique human ability to mimic behavior and thus spread ideas and techniques, which led to the rise of agriculture, the domestication of animals and, well, civilization itself.

The tool in effect transforms our material and virtual realities and, by doing so, it transforms us. Despite the grandiosity of the vision, the typical segregation one sees in the culture at large and in the design profession in particular, between hand skills and head skills—making and thinking—seems therefore both regretful and artificial. Nevertheless, this segregation of conception and production remains at the heart of much professional discourse and angst.

Graphic design was the first profession to be impacted by the introduction of the personal computer in the 1980s; its strategic objective was, after all, “desktop publishing.” More precisely, it transformed and eventually eliminated the work of various production artists, photomechanical technicians, keyliners, paste-up artists, typesetters, color separators and even some printers. It disrupted a field that has always had a rather confused and conflicted relationship between the spheres of creation and production, often separating conception from the labor and skill required to transform intentions and instructions into reproducible mass commodities. This separation reflected the divide created between the white-collar world of intellectual labor and the blue-collar world of manual labor—a division that continues to play itself out. However, what the personal computer took away from the workforce in jobs, it gave back to the graphic designer in ways both good and bad by increasing the ease and speed of visualizing ideas while simultaneously shortening the expected turnaround time of projects. The computer’s efficiency exponentially increased both the number of variations designers thought possible and the amount of changes clients deemed necessary. Its synthesis of formerly discrete functions in the process of designing promised designers a return to control over the craft and execution of work without properly preparing them for the types

of skills that were formerly outsourced.

Optimistic by nature and eschewing initial angst, graphic designers embraced the computer as just another tool on their creative workbench rather than as a replacement for them or their colleagues in the production process. Writing in 1998, about a decade after the personal computer was introduced in graphic design, Lorraine Wild would note the paradox of the situation at hand: “...many graphic designers believe that our futures depend on our ability to deliver conceptual solutions; but, ironically, digital technology has driving production back into the office, requiring constant attention. Design practice today requires the intellectual power of a thin tank and the turnaround capacity of a quickie-printer.”

Of course, this new tool was made not just for designers, but targeted at a general audience. Graphic design had emerged as a professional service similar to fields such as industrial design and architecture by relying on a cadre of skilled technicians and industries to realize its products. The sudden open access to the tools of producing graphic design meant that the traditional gatekeeping function of the profession was eroded and would eventually be circumvented. On the upside was demystification: not only did lay people such as your mother know what a font was, but general awareness of the activity of designing also increased, thereby fueling broader interest and producing more designers. This, in turn, produced a corresponding downside for the profession, which experienced increased competition, cheaper wages, a flood of amateur work, and an erosion of craft. Perhaps the most ominous effect for designers was the recasting of graphic design as just another tool.

Of course, the computer is not just another tool, nor is it simply a combination of discrete tools, a kind of digital Swiss army knife. Rather, the computer is a metatool: it makes other tools. Or as Jonathan Puckey, creator of tools such as Text Penil and the online dictionary for the Stedelijk Museum Bureau AMsterdam (SMBA) states: “Instead of collectively agreeing to the same streamlined tools sold to us by large software companies, we need to reclaim the personal relationship we used to have with our tools. We need to reintroduce interesting points of friction in our highly optimized software. We must learn to create tools ourselves. After all, the computer is exactly that: a tool for creating tools.”

A new generation of designers is doing precisely this. For instance, Jürg Lehni wrote Scriptographer, a program that translates digital vectors to more analog devices such as Hektor, a robot-operated spray-paint device: Empty Words, a machine for making die-cut message posters; or Viktor, a chalk-drawing ma-

chine. Casey Reas and Ben Fry created Processing, an open source programming language that many other designers have used to create visualizations. Nicholas Felton and Ryan Case’s app Daytum, which can help track personal data, was originally created for use in his personal Annual Report projects. These examples point to a new phase of maturation for design’s relationship to technology, when the definition of design extends to the creation of new tools that enable and empower others to design.

Ever since the demise of the medieval craft guild, modern design had sought to separate itself from one-off hand production in favor of mass-produced objects that bore few traces of the hand and more of the machine, the new laborer. Freed from production, the modern designer had to devise methods so that his intentions could be faithfully realized by others. Drawings, pasted-up layouts, instructional overlays coordinated color systems, standardized ink formulation and paper sizes, prototypes, models, and reprographic proofs were just some of the instruments invented to ensure that the faithfulness of a designer’s vision was executed according to plan. The separation of conception and planning from making and production were therefore part and parcel of being a modern designer. Craft, as such, did not disappear. It remained with acts of manual fabrication and was called precision in the case of machine production. For the designer, the values of craft were personally embodied in the acts of designing—all the processes and techniques necessary to envision and produce executable plans: drawing, rendering, making comps (a collage of materials used t o simulate a printed piece) and mechanicals (a layout of type and images that was photographed for reproduction). Knowledge about production was a necessary part of any design education, gained in the classroom through books such as James Craig’s 1974 classic Production for the Graphic Designer, or in the workplace, whether it was how something was

printed or bound in the case of graphic design, or manufactured and engineered in the case of products.

Wild’s aforementioned essay offered another definition of craft for graphic designers, one positioned against the prevailing her essay was not a nostalgic impulse to save graphic graphic design; rather, it articulated the value of craft as integral, tacit more distanced and descriptive. She quotes Malcolm McCullogh from his book Abstracting Craft: “The meaning of our wo the work of graphic designers over many years and across disparate projects. It is the connective thread that makes sense of graphic design, this might constitute what is meant by the ‘designer’s voice’—that part of design that is not industriously ad ‘body of work’ of a designer over and beyond the particular gal of each project. So craft is about tactics and concepts, seekin Wild’s definition of craft made sense for graphic designers, it was not enough to halt the juggernaut of self-doubt that plag

After all, if what you used to produce could be done by anyone with a computer, what does anyone need a designer for? Or, graphic designers required a new story about the value of design. Since the immediate impression was that the computer si path was chosen despite the fact that the computer could not immediately demystify the more inteangible aspects of design devotion to an activity that many likened to an artistic pursuit, or the problem-solving skills, communication strategies, and professionals, the field pursued a trajectory that emphasized its more verbal (as opposed to visual) and businesslike (rather t

Entire new sectors emerged devoted to left-brain pursuits such as design management, design strategy and innovation for b or online. What these kinds of practices share is a belief in the power of ideas, words and research to shape design, one that occasionally purposefully, this pursuit devalues the formal, the visual, and the material aspects of design as it shuns what it c page from critic Virginia Postrel, who argues for style, and surface in an age dominated by the visual: “this new era challeng between surface and substance, aesthetics and value. Designers have long lived in fear that people will not think that they’re for budget cuts. Nearly every definition of design starts emphatically by stating that the profession isn’t just about surfaces.” comparable to the built environment, as Metahaven notes : “ The production of surface is design’s equivalent to the product

Perhaps ironically, just as graphic designers were making their way out of the wilderness of “dumb” form to a higher concep making, largely through hand processes and occasionally in reaction to digital technologies. This is the do-it-yourself entrep immense inventory can be found on websites such as Etsy, Threadless, and Supermarket, or bought, traded, and shared at ga hands-on printing techniques such as letterpress and silkscreen, but is equally present in the general cultural renaissance of and curing your own meats, or the impassioned fringe production of guerrilla gardening and urban knitting.

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Onofthe other the realm circulated around the Internet onsingularity. various sites, namespoints of which indication both thehand, sensewe of have discovery and

the twenty-first-century version of show-and-tell, or more appropriately, make-and-post—a visual, self-perpetuating archiv As name suggests, this of is an after-market world of on preexisting formsdifferent that are than in effect remade by thepast. designer stand Theits atmosphere and tone these sites and the work them is quite it was in decades Gonewho is the air ideas of consumption, the object of postproduction is no longer simply consumed or used up, but rather extended, remade, tion. As Experimental Jetset notes: “It’s almost a punk/DIY explosion of graphic design: bold geometric forms, bright color upcycling, or downcycling of products, for instance), but it more oftenwe gains for example, compet holding them in the air Work that is unapologetically graphic.

When lookinatsymbolic all thesevalue. youngTake, students, shapingatheir imm people submitted new versions based on BP’s official (award-winning) logo, and a kind of virtual tar and feathering the c is infectious. But if i could channel my old ‘90s-era skeptical self for a moment. I would note how most of this workof circula needed trade carefully so-called equity oftothe originaland mark: too much transformation speed oftoinformation andand the strategically constant flowonofthe new materialbrand and reaction it creates an intense feedback loop, like and a ca election, the campaign of Barack Obama employed a critically acclaimed logo that soon found its way to myriad However, I wouldn’t want to judge by past standards. Old-school concepts such as an original, copy, and imitationreuses: make han litt spread of unintentional usage is what ad industry types call “viral,” a cultural meme that finds its way into the hearts and m

The designer in the realm of postproduction is a producer or orchestrator of frameworks,systems, and actions that enable de tributors,” sometimes thousands of them. Take for instance three recent music video projects that employ crowdsourcing th and media artist Aaron Koblin collaborated on the creation of The Johnny Cash Project (2010), an online music video proje ously updated by drawing over randomly selected key frames. Users can also choose several options for viewing, such as the and Koblin also collaborated on The Wilderness Downtown (2010), an online film for the band Arcade Fire. Exploiting th Google Maps aerial and street views of the location, the video integrates this specific geographic information into the narra and customizable viewing options, but also the underlying capacity of collective creativity. Designers Jonathan Puckey and Fame (2010). Viewers can select frames of the video that accompany the song “More or Less,” and using their webcams sho

wisdom of the marketplace and the winds of of technological change sweeping through the profession of the 1990s. knowledge, the type gained through direct experience and know-how, just as valid as theoretical knowledge, which is ork is connected to how it is made, not just ‘concepted.’” For Wild, the ultimate value of craft is tied to how we view so much labor and identifies the body of work with a particular person “When craft is put into the framework of ddressing the ulterior motives of a project, but instead follows the inner agenda of the designers craft. This guides the ng opportunities in the gaps of what is know rather than trying to organize everything in a unifying theory.” While gued the profession, which wasn’t so worried about the loss of craft as much as the perceived devaluation of their skill.

r, in business-speak: as a designer, what’s your value-added? The natural instinct for self-preservation on the part of imply devalued traditional skills, the answer was to be found not in production, but in the realm of conception. This n work: the craft of typography, the form-making skills honed in years of education and practice, the passion and d ideation techniques learned typically through experience. Despite these important distinctions between novices and than artistlike) attributes.

business, and the design of services and systems, including consumer experiences, whether in bricks and mortar spaces t recasts design’s productive labor as a primarily conceptual and managerial activity. Sometimes inadvertently and considers the more decorative, trendy, and superficial characteristics associated with design. If only they had taken a ges all of us—designers, engineers, business executives, and the public at large—to think differently about the relation e frivolous, treating their work as ‘pretty but dumb,’ denigrating their hard-won expertise, and putting them first in line ” But of course graphic designers are in fact producers of surfaces, millions of them. This production is so vast that it is ction of space.”

ptual plane, many other people—amateurs, lay people, and younger designers—were discovering a renewed passion for preneurial culture that has found a way to seize both the means of production and the systems of distribution, whose atherings such as Flatstock or the NY Art Book Fair. A “handmade nation” is seen in the resurgent popularity of more artisanal endeavors of all sorts, whether it be fashioning classic cocktails, cultivating heirloom vegetables, butchering

e reproduction of it: ideas made visible and intentions made transmittable. Today, for graphic designers, there is little nd many tasks fully into the layouta more and design software itself. Rather, thewares, actiontoday’s lies elsewhere. the mmodate theirare work or integrated fret about how to reach sympathetic audience for their designersOn simply oducer—the creator and maker and perhaps even the distributor of the work.

This activity still carries with it overtones reated a market largely by themselves and targeted to people like them. This torrent of production is accessible and of postproduction, is of characterized by notions of coauthorship, and collectivity. dmthe seemingly ad hocwhich nature the hunt: Tumblr, StumbleUpon, Flickr,reference, VVork, Ffffound!, Behance, ManyStuff. This is

ve of millennial portfolio culture. dsofinskepticism, the position of the user, is to say asofthe consumer an existingoptimism, work. Butthe unlike traditional criticism, and which even pessimism therecipient 1990s. Inorits place is aofnew-found ecstasy of producand transformed.

In this way, postproduction adds value to the product, occasionally through new use value rs, large sheets of printed paper, experiments in folding. People proudly displaying posters that they made, by(recycling, simply tition sponsored

by Greenpeace UK to redesign BP’swe logo the wake of the Mexico oil Hundreds mediate environment in such a concrete direct way, feelinreally happy.”

AndGulf whoofwouldn’t?

Thespill. attitude, like a of smile, corporation ensued. Approaching the project space in the(or same they would an official designersThe ates in a free-floating contextless, post-critical lessway charitably, I would use thebrand wordredesign, “vacuum”these or “bubble”). dall-and-response the connection to original markItwould be lost: too little and might the 2008 ofthe graphic design. isn’t surprising then that so itmuch of go theunnoticed. work looksFor and feels of US the presidential same spirit. nd-rendered on everything from yard signs and temporary tattoos to jack-o-lanterns and home-baked cookies.

This tle sense in this new postproduction world. It isn’t about what is trendy (forms) as much as what is trending (topics). minds of consumers. It’s a coveted strategy that money can’t buy—literally.

esign to happen. The traditional role of the designer as the sole creator of a work has been displaced; usurped by “conhrough the participation of numerous users who each contribute their part of the collective whole. Director Chris Milk ect set to the late musician’s song “Ain’t No Grave.” Visitors to the site can contribute to the video, which is continue highest rated frames, a director’s cut version of selected or curated images, or by style: realistic, abstract, etc. Both Milk he browser capabilities of Google Chrome, the project asks viewers to type in their childhood home address. Using ative of Arcade Fire’s “We Used to Wait.” Both projects emphasize not only the desire for personalization of content Roel Wouters have created a participatory interactive video for the band C-Mon & Kypski entitled One Frame of oot a replacement frame and upload the result. More than 34,000 users have struck their pose, contributing a piece of

The old world of graphic design and production was, in effect, a preproduction enterprise. Design was everything before the debate for angst about this sphere of activity. Of course, designers are still expected to know about aspects of production, an one hand we see the activity of an all-encompassing, self-sustaining concept in the renaissance figure of the designer-as-pro of authorship, of originality, and singularity. Its reference points are often premodern. On the other hand, we have the realm

As its name suggests, this is an after-market world of preexisting forms that are in effect remade by the designer who stand ideas of consumption, the object of postproduction is no longer simply consumed or used up, but rather extended, remade, upcycling, or downcycling of products, for instance), but it more often gains in symbolic value. Take, for example, a compet people submitted new versions based on BP’s official (award-winning) logo, and a kind of virtual tar and feathering of the c needed to trade carefully and strategically on the so-called brand equity of the original mark: too much transformation and election, the campaign of Barack Obama employed a critically acclaimed logo that soon found its way to myriad reuses: ha These strategies can be seen within theadworld ofrypublishing the form of thememe reissuethat or bootleg spread of unintentional usage is what indust types call in “viral,” a cultural finds itsedition—material way into the heartspreviou and m lish “lost” historical material that expands contemporary discourse such as their facsimile edition of the Great Bear pamph areedone in collaboration artists whoion provide a new spin on classics as Dracula (2008).

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Discovery by Design

By Zuzana Licko “...Can new design - like new science - discover phenomena that already exist in the fabric of typographic possibility? If so, who owns discovery?” —Ellen Lupton, The 100 Show.

The sixteenth Annual of the American Center for Design. Although science and design are both based upon experimental investigation, the comparison is not altogether straightforward; science investigates naturally occurring phenomena, while design investigates culturally created phenomena. But if such a parallel is to be made, then we might replace a falling tree by a typographic possibility and thereby ask the question “Does a typographic phenomenon exist if no one recognizes it?”

Potentially, if every graphic and typographic possibility already exists, and each is waiting to be discovered, then we need only create an appropriate context in order to bring life to any of them. For example, consider the 26 letters in our alphabet and how they are combined to form words. There is a finite number of combinations, or words, if we limit ourselves to words of a certain length; say, five letters.

Then, for the ease of pronunciation, let’s omit all words that contain a string of three or more consecutive consonants. Even with these restraints to give some “meaning” within our understanding of words, there will be many words that will have no meaning to us. Does this mean that these are not words? Does a sequence of letters not form a word when we do not recognize its meaning?

It is important to note here, that the meanings of words are not intrinsic to the words themselves; the meanings are arbitrary, since the same word may have different meanings in different languages. In fact, the entire concept of using 26 letters is an arbitrary one. We could just as well have used 20 letters, or 30 letters, or thousands of ideograms like the Oriental cultures. Although these systems of communication and meanings are arbitrary, once they are established, they serve as the foundation for the creation of new meanings, and therefore do not appear to be as arbitrary as they really are. As another example, consider the grid of a computer video display, or that of a laser printer rasterizer; each point on the grid can be on or off; black or white. Given a fixed resolution, again, there is a finite number of combinations that these on/off sequences will compose. If a computer is programmed to run through all of the possible combinations, some will appear to us as pure gibberish, while others will be recognized as something that we already know or might be interested in getting to know better. Even though all these compositions are randomly generated, only those few that fit into our preconceived notions of context will have meaning. Therefore, it is the meaning, and not the form itself that has been created. New design is the creation of new meanings; that

is, new contexts for typographic possibilities. However, must be linked to existing ones. Even that design which “pushes the envelope” must build upon existing preconceptions. For unless a critical portion is understandable, the entire piece will be dismissed as complete nonsense. On the other hand, if no portion of the design is new, then it will appear so uninteresting that it might result in boredom and therefore be equally dismissed. Intriguing consumers with just the right amount of unrecognizable information spurs their interest. By initiating these changes of meaning, design educates the consumer to the changes in culture. Thus, design is a vet powerful component in controlling our collective consciousness. However, design is also a subconscious process, and it is therefore nearly impossible for a designer to intentionally alter a specific cultural concept.

This process of reassimilation and adding or changing of meaning with each step creates an environment in our popular culture that is conducive to the assimilation of particular ideas. As this environment changes, it makes certain ideas ripe, or “ready to be liked.” In this manner, meanings change, and over time great shifts take place. Since the creation of new meanings usually results in the replacement, displacement or change of older meanings, we may also wonder if some meanings become obsolete. We may ask, “Does obsolescence exist in design, and can we plan obsolescence?” It is possible to engineer the components of a car or refrigerator to break down after a certain duration of use, thereby defining the product’s obsolescence. But is it possible to do this with a design style, typeface, or typographic form? Unlike industrial products that have a physical life, the lifespan of a typographic possibility is purely conceptual. Designs become obsolete as they are consumed by our culture, and subsequently forgotten in favor of other ones. Yet what was obsolete years ago is often revived from obsolescence to be reassimilated or expanded upon as appropriate to fit into new cultural meanings. This process repeats itself again and again, making obsolescence a temporary state in the world of design possibilities.

Because this ongoing change is affected by many different forces from numerous directions, it is impossible to predict what will happen next, or even how long-or short-lived any particular design idea might be. Since the life, or lives, of a design idea are dictated by its appropriateness for currently accepted ideas, it would be impossible to specifically plan the longevity of a design without also controlling these forces of style.

This evolution of meanings is also unpredictable over time. Some meanings change very quickly, like the second hand on a stopwatch; others change so slowly that we don’t even see them change, like the hour hand on a grandfather clock. These slow changing ideas are seen as timeless, while those that change quickly are perceived as being timely. The words “timeless” and “timely” often have very strong nega-

tive or positive connotations, although neither is good nor bad, per se. The value of either of these qualities lies in the appropriateness of use, and appropriateness is usually a question of efficient use of design resources, or financial viability. For example, if it costs millions to change the signage in an airport or subway system, then a timeless design is appropriate. However, if a design can be changed every time it appears on, say, an interactive television platform, and especially if such change will stimulate interest and add levels of meaning to the audience, then a timely design would be appropriate.

However, more often than not, it is timelessness that is seen as most valuable.

Timeless creations are seen as the result of the process of refinement, and give us the impression that we are always working towards an ultimate goal of perfection, independent of the whims of fashion. This may appear so because history is told as a logical and progressive development. However, histories are composed in hindsight; actual events do not occur with such 20/20 vision. For example, once we identify a design idea as being fully developed, historians then work to explain its development by referring to the appropriate chain of events. However, this process also involves the filtering out of inappropriate events; events that nonetheless occupy the same time line. The inevitability of design ideas is therefore never so apparent when we’re standing on the other end of the time line. Although each development can be explained as an outcome of any number of preceding factors, this does not mean that any particular course of development is therefore inevitable. The sometimes arbitrary choices that are made along every step subsequently become a foundation for future developments, but there are usually many parallel, equally viable paths not taken.

So, who owns these design discoveries, if we are facilitating their existence through the appropriate contexts? It may be true that all designs exist in the fabric of typographic possibility. However, since not all possibilities can exist at the same time, there must be some way to intelligently choose possibilities that will have meaning; that intelligent force comes from designers. The discovery of a design possibility is therefore largely a matter of the designer being in the right place at the right time. However, it is the designer’s ability to recognize the opportunity, the talent to apply the idea to a specific creative work, the willingness to sometimes go out on a limb, and the perseverance to convince others that the idea has validity, that deserves claim to ownership. Because, in the end, it is the expertise to communicate new ideas to others that gives credibility to the designer’s existence.

Experimental typography. Whatever that means.

by Peter Biľak An epistemology of the word ‘experimental’ as it applies to design and type, contrasted with its scientific connotations. Examples of past and current design, type and reading/language, as well as scientific experiment, are taken into account.

Very few terms have been used so habitually and carelessly as the word ‘experiment’. In the field of graphic design and typography, experiment as a noun has been used to signify anything new, unconventional, defying easy categorization, or confounding expectations. As a verb, ‘to experiment’ is often synonymous with the design process itself, which may not exactly be helpful, considering that all design is a result of the design process. The term experiment can also have the connotation of an implicit disclaimer; it suggests not taking responsibility for the result.

When students are asked what they intend by creating certain forms, they often say, ‘It’s just an experiment…’, when they don’t have a better response.

In a scientific context, an experiment is a test of an idea; a set of actions performed to prove or disprove a hypothesis. Experimentation in this sense is an empirical approach to knowledge that lays a foundation upon which others can build.

It requires all measurements to be made objectively under controlled conditions, which allows the procedure to be repeated by others, thus proving that a phenomenon occurs after a certain action, and that the phenomenon does not occur in the absence of the action. An example of a famous scientific experiment would be Galileo Galilei’s dropping of two objects of different weights from the Pisa tower to demonstrate that both would land at the same time, proving his hypothesis about gravity. In this sense, a typographic experiment might be a procedure to determine whether humidity affects the transfer of ink onto a sheet of paper, and if it does, how.

A scientific approach to experimentation, however, seems to be valid only in a situation where empirical knowledge is applicable, or in a situation where the outcome of the experiment can be reliably measured. What happens however when the outcome is ambiguous, non-objective, not based on pure reason? In the recent book The Typographic Experiment: Radical Innovation in Contemporary Type Design, the author Teal Triggs asked thirty-seven internationally-recognized designers to define their understandings of the term experiment. As expected, the published definitions couldn’t have been more disparate. They are marked by personal belief systems and biased by the experiences of the designers. While Hamish Muir of 8vo writes: ‘Every type job is experiment’, Melle Hammer insists that: ‘Experimental typography does not exist, nor ever has’. So how is it possible that there are such

diverse understandings of a term that is so commonly used?

Among the designers’ various interpretations, two notions of experimentation were dominant. The first one was formulated by the American designer David Carson: ‘Experimental is something I haven’t tried before … something that hasn’t been seen and heard’. Carson and several other designers suggest that the nature of experiment lies in the formal novelty of the result. There are many precedents for this opinion, but in an era when information travels faster than ever before and when we have achieved unprecedented archival of information, it becomes significantly more difficult to claim a complete novelty of forms. While over ninety years ago Kurt Schwitters proclaimed that to ‘do it in a way that no one has done it before’ was sufficient for the definition of the new typography of his day — and his work was an appropriate example of such an approach — today things are different.

Designers are more aware of the body of work and the discourse accompanying it.

Proclaiming novelty today can seem like historical ignorance on a designer’s part.

Interestingly, Carson’s statement also suggests that the essence of experimentation is in going against the prevailing patterns, rather than being guided by conventions. This is directly opposed to the scientific usage of the word, where an experiment is designed to add to the accumulation of knowledge; in design, where results are measured subjectively, there is a tendency to go against the generally accepted base of knowledge. In science a single person can make valuable experiments, but a design experiment that is rooted in anti-conventionalism can only exist against the background of other — conventional — solutions. In this sense, it would be impossible to experiment if one were the only designer on earth, because there would be no standard for the experiment. Anti-conventionalism requires going against prevailing styles, which is perceived as conventional. If more designers joined forces and worked in a similar fashion, the scale would change, and the former convention would become anti-conventional. The fate of such experimentation is a permanent confrontation with the mainstream; a circular, cyclical race, where it is not certain who is chasing whom.

Does type design and typography allow an experimental approach at all? The alphabet is by its very nature dependent on and defined by conventions. Type design that is not bound by convention is like a private language: both lack the ability to communicate. Yet it is precisely the constraints of the alphabet which inspire many designers. A recent example is the work of Thomas Huot-Marchand, a French postgraduate student of type-design who investigates the limits of legibility while physically reducing the basic forms of the alphabet. Minuscule is his project of size-specific typography. While the letters for regular reading sizes are very close to conventional book typefaces, each step down in size results in simplification of

the letter-shapes. In the extremely small sizes (2pt) Miniscule becomes an abstract reduction of the alphabet, free of all the details and optical corrections which are usual for fonts designed for text reading. Huot-Marchand’s project builds upon the work of French ophthalmologist Louis Emile Javal, who published similar research at the beginning of the 20th century. The practical contribution of both projects is limited, since the reading process is still guided by the physical limitations of the human eye, however, Huot-Marchand and Javal both investigate the constraints of legibility within which typography functions.

The second dominant notion of experiment in The Typographic Experiment was formulated by Michael Worthington, a British designer and educator based in the USA: ‘True experimentation means to take risks.’ If taken literally, such a statement is of little value: immediately we would ask what is at stake and what typographers are really risking. Worthington, however, is referring to the risk involved with not knowing the exact outcome of the experiment in which the designers are

engaged. A similar definition is offered by the E.A.T. (Experiment And Typography) exhibition presenting 35 type designers and typographers from the Czech Republic and Slovakia, which coincidentally will arrive in the Netherlands shortly.

Alan Záruba and Johanna Balušíková, the curators of E.A.T. put their focus on development and process when describing the concept of the exhibition: ‘The show focuses on projects which document the development of designers’ ideas. Attention is paid to the process of creating innovative solutions in the field of type design and typography, often engaging experimental processes as a means to approach unknown territory.’

An experiment in this sense has no preconceived idea of the outcome; it only sets out to determine a cause-and-effect relationship. As such, experimentation is

amethod of working which is contrary to production-oriented design, where the aim of the process is not to create something new, but to achieve an already known, pre-formulated result. Belgian designer Brecht Cuppens has created Sprawl, an experimental typeface based on cartography, which takes into account the density of population in Belgium. In Sprawl, the silhouette of each letter is identical, so that when typed they lock into each other. The filling of the letters however varies according to the frequency of use of the letter in the Dutch language.

The most frequently used letter (e) represents the highest density of population.

The most infrequently used letter (q) corresponds to the lowest density.

Setting a sample text creates a Cuppens representation of the Belgian landscape.

Another example of experiment as a process of creation without anticipation of the fixed result is an online project . Ortho-type Trio of authors, Enrico Bravi, Mikkel Crone Koser, and Paolo Palma, describe ortho-type as ‘an exercise in perception, a stimulus for the mind and the eye to pick out and process three-dimensional planes on a flat surface‌’. Ortho-type is an online application of a typeface designed to be recognizable in three dimensions. In each view, the viewer can set any of the available variables: length, breadth, depth, thickness, colour and rotation, and generate multiple variations of the model. The user can also generate those variations as a traditional 2D PostScript font.

Although this kind of experimental process has no commercial application, its results may feed other experiments and be adapted to commercial activities. Once assimilated, the product is no longer experimental. David Carson may have started his formal experiments out of curiosity, but now similar formal solutions have been adapted by commercial giants such as Nike, Pepsi, or Sony. Following this line, we can go further to suggest that no completed project can be seriously considered experimental. It is experimental only in the process of its creation. When completed it only becomes part of the body of work which it was meant to challenge.

As soon as the experiment achieves its final form it can be named, categorized and analyzed according to any conventional system of classification and referencing.

An experimental technique which is frequently used is to bring together various working methods which are recognized separately but rarely combined. For example, language is studied systematically by linguists, who are chiefly interested in spoken languages and in the problems of analyzing them as they operate at a given point in time. Linguists rarely, however, venture into the visible representation of language, because they consider it artificial and thus secondary to spoken language.

Typographers on the other hand are concerned with the appearance of type in print and other reproduction technologies; they often have substantial knowledge of composition, color theories, proportions, paper, etc., yet often lack knowledge of the language which they represent.

These contrasting interests are brought together in the work of Pierre di Sciullo, a French designer who pursues his typographic research in a wide variety of media.

His typeface Sintétik reduces the letters of the French alphabet to the core phonemes (sounds which distinguish one word from another) and compresses it to 16 characters. Di Sciullo stresses the economic aspect of such a system, with an average book being reduced by about 30% percent when multiple spellings of the same sound are made redundant. For example, the French words for skin (peaux) and pot (pot) are both reduced to the simplest representation of their pronunciation — po. Words set in Sintétik can be understood only when read aloud returning the reader to the medieval experience of oral reading. Quantange is another font specific to the French language. It is basically a phonetic alphabet which visually suggests the pronunciation, rhythm and pace of reading. Every letter in Quantange has as many different shapes as there are ways of pronouncing it: the letter c for example has two forms because it can be pronounced as s or k. Di Sciullo suggests that Quantange would be particularly useful to foreign students of French or to actors and presenters who need to articulate the inflectional aspect of language not indicated by traditional scripts. This project builds on experiments of early avantgarde designers, the work of the Bauhaus, Kurt Schwitters, and Jan Tschichold.

Di Sciullo took inspiration from the reading process, when he designed a typeface for setting the horizontal palindromes of Georges Perec (Perec has written the longest palindrome on record, a poem of 1388 words which can be read both ways.

The typeface is a combination of lower and upper case and is designed to be read from both sides, left and right. (This is great news to every Bob, Hannah or Eve.) Di Sciullo’s typefaces are very playful and their practical aspects are limited, yet like the other presented examples of experiments in typography, his works points to previously unexplored areas of interest which enlarge our understanding of the field. Although most of the examples shown here are marked by the recent shift of interest of European graphic design from forms to ideas, and the best examples combine both, there is no definitive explanation of what constitutes an experiment in typography. As the profession develops and more people practice this subtle art, we continually redefine the purpose of experimentation and become aware of its moving boundaries.

Typeface As Programme: Interview with Erik Spiekermann

by Jürg Lehni Jürg Lehni interviews Erik Spiekermann about the legal definition of typefaces, web font distribution models and parametric fonts. Jürg Lehni: Erik, I am curious to find out more about the reasons behind the legal definition of typefaces as software, rather than artworks. Is it simply the fact that OpenType, PostScript, and TrueType all have aspects of programming languages in them, or is it linked to the fact that digital typefaces are simulating something that was once sold as tools, a collection of cast metal letter-forms, to be typeset by hand? Could you elaborate the nature of this decision a bit more? In my research I have found very little about the reasoning behind it.

Erik Spiekermann: The main reason for the definition of typefaces as software is the fact that typefaces can hardly be protected since most people do not even see a difference between a Garamond or Bodoni, let alone Helvetica and Arial. The requirements for a text typeface to not put itself between the reader and the text, but at best to offer a slight aesthetic added value is a disadvantage for the estimation of the “artistic” contribution as added value that is required by copyright law. This is why the most bizarre ornate typefaces that no one would want to copy anyway are protected. They are clearly recognisable as creations rather than simply the reordering of generally known parameters, as would be the case with more serious typefaces. An “A” needs to look like an “A”, so why should the “A” be protected if it looks exactly like all the others, at least to the layman’s eye? It appears to be a problem of the framework of copyright law, which has a lack of suitable rules for typefaces, since they hold a strange position in-between tools and artworks.

But let us assume for a moment that all typefaces would indeed be legally defined as artworks. In this case, a royalty-based system as it is in place for example in the music industry would surely make far more sense. Would this not be a desirable solution for the way digital typography is sold today? Was the lobby of font designers not strong enough to enforce a proper legal handling of their works, or are there good reasons why the definition

of software are preferable to this alternative scenario?

Of course it would be better for the type designers and foundries, since font licenses would be accounted for based on the distribution of the media in question, but who would control all this? When radio stations play music, they have to take note of every title played and send the list to associations that control the usage. In Germany this is handled by the GEMA. These associations then distribute royalties to composers, musicians and authors, based on the broadcasting’s reach. A small local station therefore pays less than for example the ARD (National Public TV).

But how could the runs of printed matter be controlled? Maybe it could work for books and newspapers, but even there it would require excessive bureaucracy. For the sake of fairness, the amount of text would have to be precisely counted, otherwise the designer of a typeface that sometimes is used for a caption only would receive the same amount as one who created the text typeface for a whole newspaper, used to typeset millions of characters per issue. With music, longer pieces also pay more than shorter ones, but on radio and TV usually only one song plays at a time and the amount therefore is easily measured.

But if we look at the embedding of typefaces on websites, there could indeed be a viable way to charge licenses based on automatically measured usage. For a typeface on a private website, seen by 300 visitors per month, I would pay 10 dollars a year, respectively a few cents per “hit�. A newspaper like the NZZ on the other hand would then maybe end up paying 1000 dollars per year. The web offers the possibility to automatically register and calculate usage through visitors, as used for example by Google as their way of handling advertising. But I doubt that such models will be successfully established in the type sector, since typefaces have degenerated to a ubiquitous and cheap commodity. I therefore do not really expect anyone to be willing to abandon the current model.

Since the first part of this interview was conducted, two new such efforts have emerged, based on recent additions to browsers like Firefox and Safari that now allow embedding of fonts in websites even if they are not installed in the operating system:TypeKit and Kernest. How do you see their chances of becoming a viable business model, a new alternative way of distributing and charging for the use of digital typefaces?

Both of these companies propose a service which would provide fonts from their servers, charging not the end-user, but the publisher of a website and paying the foundries for the use of the fonts. Obviously, foundries may offer the same service. To me, a veteran of a few font wars and typographic revolutions, this sounds almost like typesetting in the

old days. We would send our manuscript to a typesetter with some instruction about the formatting, and we’d get back a negative, a print or even data. The service was charged by the hour, which in turn was a mix calculation taking into account the cost of the equipment, the level of operators’ expertise and the exclusivity of the fonts chosen. These services might work, but only if they do not obstruct the user’s experience. Nobody will tolerate error messages because a certain font cannot be retrieved from a remote server or if the license does not permit the use in a given domain or country or time of day.

Another model is the way foundries handle typefaces that are licensed to big companies. Software companies like Microsoft charge up to 100 dollars per user and year for the use of their programs. If that method was applied to the licensing of fonts, it would result in massive sums for big corporations like Bosch with 60,000 users, without requiring any additional work, since updates are charged for extra. This is why smart corporations usually license the exclusive right for a typeface. This way they only need to negotiate with the designer one time, as we did with Bosch.

I would like to go back to the question of the legal definition once more. What if we turn the situation around? If typefaces really are to be defined as software, should they not act more like software, in a more modular, flexible way? At certain points in the past there were proposals of more dynamic, parametrized typefaces, such as Adobe’s Multiple Master (MM), or Donald E. Knuth’s Metafont language.

At one point MM was even integrated into most of Adobe’s own applications. But in the meantime the technology has disappeared—apparently it could not establish itself as a standard. Why do you think it has failed? Was the user overwhelmed by the amount of options, or was the standard not flexible enough? Typefaces are still parametrisable, but only by the experts. Adobe has stopped MM because nobody was using it. But many of the type designers still work with MM which is now integrated in FontLab. Typefaces are so easy to use that nobody wants to think about them. This is also the reason why all the more complicated licensing schemes are hardly feasible. Most of them would eradicate the huge advantage that for most users fonts are installed somewhere hidden in the operating system and can simply be chosen through a pull-down menu. Even professional users such as graphic designers often know very little about the underlying technology. Mostly they simply want to be able to use the right typeface immediately, at a low price, and without having to read complicated contracts first.

Typographica Mea Culpa, Unethical Downloading

by Steven Heller When I collected stamps as a kid I sent away for “approval” packs with the proviso that I’d return what I did not pay for in five days. Needless to say, I broke the covenant, and I felt exhilarated the first time I kept all the stamps without paying for them. During the course of my mail-order crime spree I accumulated a drawer full of “bill me later” subscription invoices to magazines and ignored the futile collection letters. I later graduated to newspaper honor boxes. How many of you have taken more than one? I did, until I realized that I only really needed one paper. That’s when I had an epiphany. I was speeding down the road to perdition. I changed my evil ways and have been upstanding ever since. Well, almost..

This near religious experience did not extend to type fonts. In fact, until recently I always discarded the licensing agreements that come with type because the words “Read Me” had an onerous ring. By not reading the large print I chose not to acknowledge the muddy ethical waters in which I was about to wade. Through ignorance or malice, or the malice that comes from voluntary ignorance, many designers that I know simply ignore type licenses and, therefore, cavalierly trade or transfer entire fonts to fellow designers, service bureaus, mechanical artists, printers, lovers, or in-laws. The digital age has made this easy, but as I realized it does not make it right. Illicit type sharing betrays an honor system that can only work if we are all honorable.

The fact is, design is an honorable profession. We are not the cut-throat garment industry where styles and fabrics are routinely stolen by both big and small. Designers tend to respect one another’s intellectual property lines and do not as a rule engage in extreme larceny. And yet we have a skeweed sense of entitlement when it comes to type. Perhaps because type is the most common means of written communication we assume the license to usurp it at will and without ramification as though it were decoupage. The computer put the means of production in our hands and doing so it implied freedom from vendors. Before the computer type was bought directly from type-shops. We received a proof or film strip of type and paid our money. It was a clear-cut transaction. But even then I said to myself: “If only I had my own PhotoTypositor (remember them?) I would make my own fonts and never have to pay for type again. Then I actually got my own Typositor and found that making custom film fonts was even more expensive than buying them.

So I reasoned that the only explanation for paying for them was convenience, and secretly longed for the day that type was made readily available. Hey what about a box on my desk? Then I’ll never pay for type again. And low and behold the Ma-

cintosh was invented and type was available in a box on my desk. And you know something? It was (and is) easy to get some fonts without paying for them.

Well, not the really good ones. So, for those faces unavailable through shareware (or a share-buddy) I paid my money and got the font. What I did not know, however, because as I said I never read the licensing agreements, was the limitations imposed on my “ownership.” I reckoned that whenever I used a legitimately purchased font, it was mine to do with as I pleased and had the right to pass it along to anyone on the production assembly line that needed to work with my particular document and with the particular face(s). Therefore, I copied the font and send it to them. I wasn’t even consciously stealing because I presumed this was my eminent domain.

Like the Church Lady used to say: “Isn’t that Conveeeenient”

I was dead wrong, type sharing is akin to tapping into cable TV. In fact, as it turns out, I was technically engaging in copyright infringement. All font software is protected by copyright and some typeface designs are protected by patents, which provides foundries with legal recourse. Some foundries have successfully gone to court over these issues, and in a few cases the FBI (the same body that never came after me for pilfering stamps) has been involved. I am told that this happened with someone who posted hundreds of fonts from dozens of foundries on the Internet for anybody to download (functioning somewhat like Napster). The FBI impounded his computers and the case is currently awaiting trial. “All typefaces, from almost every foundry (from Adobe to House), are automatically licensed for a specific number of output devices and CPUs at one location. It is an industry standard,” explains Rudy Vanderlans, founder of Émigré Fonts. “If you gave the font to someone else to carry through the designs, that means that they now have a free, illegally obtained copy on their computer. Most likely they will use it for another design job sometime in the future without remembering or being concerned where that font originally came from. It’s a scenario we come across nearly every single day.” In the face of this, my mea culpa may sound disingenuous. After all, I work with and have written about type designers. I thought I knew their concerns, and Vanderlans is not alone. Every digital type founder that I have since spoken to complains of sharing abuses. Not surprisingly, many designers I’ve contacted admit to sharing because they “didn’t know it was wrong.” To this Vanderlans rebukes, “[They] simply didn’t read the license agreement that comes with the font.

He’s right. I would not use a font without paying for it yet once installed I have readily share with others. Type vendors have gone to great lengths and expense to publicize these issues, yet designers have either not heard or ignored them for reasons that are endemic to unrealistic notions of entitlement. Why do we feel we Ignorance is no excuse.

have a right to unlimited access to digital fonts? Is it becausein the digital realm ownership is still fuzzy? Or are we lulled into lackadaisical ethical behavior because in the digital realm it is so easy to download images and text? Or is it simply a primal need to get the proverbial free lunch that H.L. Mencken admonished did not really exist?

As fundamental as it is to visual communication, type is not considered sacrosanct in the same way as, say, a photograph or illustration. The principle of “one time usage” or “one person licensee” seems foreign when it comes to type. Vanderlans says that when this is brought to violators’ attention “people usually admit their error and pay for the fonts.” But some designers resent any strictures: “I bought a font for use in a book,” explains a designer that I know, “it never occurred to me that I could not give it to my mechanical person, and from him to the printer. Isn’t it enough that I paid for it? Do the foundries have to bleed me for an additional fee each time I use it on a job?” Vanderlans counters that he does not charge anybody an additional fee for each use. “Once you purchase a copy, users can use the font on as many jobs, for as long as they want. And there is a way to hand your design job to a service bureau without breaching the font license. You can supply your documents as EPS files or Adobe Acrobat files with fonts embedded so you don’t have to give the service bureau a copy of the font(s). Or users can buy a special license that allows them to take a font to their service bureau.”

Nonetheless, veterans who are unfamiliar with the new or are used to the old methods may be confused by current procedures and, therefore, take the line of least resistance. It’s easy to copy fonts, so they copy away. Younger designers, who are used to downloading shareware and other freebees may be spoiled by the bounty of entitlements (the Napster ethic). The education process continues.

Fontographer made it possible for anyone with skill to design a typeface. Some ethically challenged type vendors have pilfered original designs from the leading digital foundries, changed the name of the type, and sold them at cut-rate prices.

This is obviously wrong, and Vanderlans notes that “most have been taken to court and lost, or settled by paying large sums of money, and ultimately discontinued their pirate ways.” Yet it should not take a lot of additional soul-searching to conclude that violating the “industry standard” licensing agreement is also unfair to the people who have worked hard to make the type that we all use.

For years I have allowed designers working for me to infringe the agreement that I have failed to read. Forget about legality, without adherence to the fundamental principle, we place our colleagues in financial jeopardy and we become much less ethical in the bargain.

Cult of the Ugly

by Steven Heller ‘Ask a toad what is beauty… He will answer that it is a female with two great round eyes coming out of her little head, a large flat mouth, a yellow belly and a brown back.’ (Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, 1794). Ask Paul Rand what is beauty and he will answer that ‘the separation of form and function, of concept and execution, is not likely to produce objects of aesthetic value.’ (Paul Rand, A Designer’s Art, 1985). Then ask the same question to the Cranbrook Academy of Art students who created the ad hoc desktop publication Output (1992), and judge by the evidence they might answer that beauty is chaos born of found letters layered on top of random patterns and shapes. Those who value functional simplicity would argue that the Cranbrook student’s publication, like a toad’s warts, is ugly. The difference is that unlike the toad, the Cranbrook students have deliberately given themselves the warts.

Output is eight unbound pages of blips, type fragments, random words, and other graphic minutiae purposefully given the serendipitous look of a printer’s makeready. The lack of any explanatory précis (and only this end note: ‘Upcoming Issues From: School of the Art Institute of Chicago [and] University of Texas,’) leaves the reader confused as to its purpose or meaning, though its form leads one to presume that it is intended as a design manifesto, another “experiment” in the current plethora of aesthetically questionable graphic output. Given the increase in graduate school programs which provide both a laboratory setting and freedom from professional responsibility, the word experiment has to justify a multitude of sins.

The value of design experiments should not of course be measured only by what succeeds, since failures are often steps towards new discoveries. Experimentation is the engine of progress, its fuel a mixture of instinct, intelligence or discipline is in the mix. This is the case with certain of the graphic design experiments that have emanated from graduate schools in the U. S. and Europe in recent years work driven by instincts and obscured by theory, with ugliness its foremost by-product.

How is ugly to be defined in the current Post-modern climate where existing systems are up for re-evaluation, order is under attack and the forced collision of disparate forms is the rule? For the moment, let us say that ugly design, as opposed to classical design (where adherence to the golden mean and a preference for balance and harmony serve as the foundation for even the most unconventional compositions) is the layering of inharmonious graphic forms in a way that results in confusing messages. By this definition, Output could be considered a prime example of ugliness in the service of fashionable experimentation. Though not intended to function in the commercial world, it was distributed to thousands of practising designers on the American Institute of Graphic Arts and American Center for

Design mailing lists, so rather than remain cloistered and protected from criticism as on-campus “research”, it is a fair subject for scrutiny. It can legitimately be described as representing the current cult of ugliness. 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. Like the output of communications rebels of the past (whether 1920s Futurists or 1960s psychedelic artists), this work demands that the viewer or reader accept non-traditional formats which at best guide the eye for a specific purpose through a range of non-linear “pathways”, and at worst result in confusion.

But the reasons behind this wave are dubious. Does the current social and cultural condition involve the kind of upheaval to which critical ugliness is a time-honoured companion? Or in the wake of earlier, more serious experimentation, has ugliness simply been assimilated into popular culture and become a stylish conceit?

The current wave began in the mid-1970s with the English punk scene, a raw expression of youth frustration manifested through shocking dress, music and art.

Punk’s naive graphic language – an aggressive rejection of rational typography that echoes Dada and Futurist work – influenced designers during the late 1970s who seriously tested the limits imposed by Modernist formalism. Punk’s violent demeanour surfaced in Swiss, American, Dutch and French design and spread to the mainstream in the form of a “new wave”, or what American punk artist Gary Panter has called “sanitised punk”. A key anti-canonical approach later called Swiss Punk – which in comparison with the gridlocked Swiss International Style was menacingly chaotic, though rooted in its own logic – was born in the mecca of rationalism, Basel, during the late 1970s. For the elders who were threatened by the onslaught to criticise Swiss Punk was attacked not so much because of its appearance as because it symbolised the demise of Modernist hegemony.

Ugly design can be a conscious attempt to create and define alternative standards.

Like war-paint, the dissonant styles which many contemporary designers have applied to their visual communications are meant to shock an enemy – complacency – as well as to encourage new reading and viewing patterns. The work of American designer Art Chantry combines the shock-and-educate approach with a concern for appropriateness. For over a decade Chantry has been creating eyecatching, low-budget graphics for the Seattle punk scene by using found commercial artefacts from industrial merchandise catalogues as key elements in his posters and flyers. While these ‘unsophisticated’ graphics may be horrifying to designers who prefer Shaker functionalism to punk vernacular, Chantry’s design is decidedly functional within its context. Chantry’s clever manipulations of found ‘art’ into accessible, though unconventional, compositions prove that using ostensibly ugly

forms can result in good design.

Post-modernism inspired a debate in graphic design in the mid-1970s by revealing that many perceptions of art and culture were one-dimensional. Post-modernism urgently questioned certainties laid down by Modernism and rebelled against grand Eurocentric narratives in favour of multiplicity. The result in graphic design was to strip Modernist formality of both its infrastructure and outer covering. The grid was demolished, while neo-classical and contemporary ornament, such as dots, blips and arrows, replaced the tidiness of the canonical approach. As in most artistic revolutions, the previous generation was attacked, while the generations before were curiously rehabilitated. The visual hallmarks of this rebellion, however, were inevitably reduced to stylistic mannerisms which forced even more radical experimentation.

Extremism gave rise to fashionable ugliness as a form of nihilistic expression.

In “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819), the Romantic poet John Keats wrote the famous lines: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty, – that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’ Yet in today’s environment, one standard of beauty is no more the truth than is one standard of ugliness. It is possible that the most conventional-busting graphic design by students and alumni of Cranbrook, CalArts and Rhode Island Design among other School of Design, hothouses where theoretical constructs are used to justify what the untutored eye might deem ugly, could become the foundation for new standards

based on contemporary sensibilities. Certainly, these approaches have attracted many followers throughout the design world.

‘Where does beauty begin and where does it end?’ wrote John Cage in Silence (1961). ‘Where it ends is where the artist begins.’ So in order to stretch the perimeters of art and design to any serious extent it becomes necessary to suspend popular notions of beauty so that alternative aesthetic standards can be explored.

This concept is essential to an analysis of a recent work by the Chicago company Segura, who designed the programme/announcement for the 1993 HowMagazine “Creative Vision” conference and whose work represents the professional wing of the hothouse sensibility. Compared to the artless Output, Segura’s seemingly anarchic booklet is an artfully engineered attempt to direct the reader through a maze of mundane information. Yet while the work might purport to confront complacency, it often merely obstructs comprehension.

A compilation of variegated visuals, the How piece is a veritable primer of cultish extremes at once compelling for its ingenuity yet undermined by its superficiality.

Like a glutton, Segura has stuffed itself with all the latest conceits (including some of its own concoction) and has regurgitated them on to the pages. At first the juxtapositions of discordant visual material appear organic, but in fact little is left to chance. The result is a catalogue of disharmony in the service of contemporaneity, an artefact that is already ossifying into a 1990s design style. It is a style that presumes that more is hipper than less, confusion is better than simplicity, fragmentation is smarter than continuity, and that ugliness is its own reward.

But is it possible that the surface might blind one to the inner beauty (i.e. intelligence) of this work? Ralph Waldo Emerson in The Conduct of Life (1860) wrote: ‘The secret of ugliness consists not in irregularity, but in being uninteresting.’

Given Emerson’s measure, it could be argued that design is only ugly when devoid of aesthetic or conceptual forethought – for example, generic restaurant menus, store signs and packages. Perhaps, then, the How booklet, which is drowning in forethought, should be “read” on a variety of levels wherein beauty and ugliness are mitigated by context and purpose. Perhaps – but given the excesses in this work, the result can only be described as a catalogue of pretence. During the late 1940s and 1950s the Modernist mission was to develop design systems that would protect the global (not just corporate) visual environment from blight. Yet while Modernism smoothed out the rough edges of communications by prescribing a limited number of options, it also created a recipe for mediocrity. If a Modernist design system is followed by rote, the result can be as uninteresting and therefore as ugly – according to Emerson’s standard – as any non-designed newsletter or advertise-

ment. So design that aggressively challenge the senses and intellect rather than following the pack should in theory be tolerated, if not encouraged.

For a new generation’s ideas of good design – and beauty – to be challenged by its forerunners is, of course, a familiar pattern. Paul Rand, when criticised as one of those “Bauhaus boys” by American type master W. A. Dwiggins in the late 1930s, told an interviewer that he had always respected Dwiggins’ work, ‘so why couldn’t he see the value of what we were doing?’ Rudy VanderLans, whose clarion call of the “new typography” Emigre has been vituperatively criticised by Massimo Vignelli, has not returned the fire, but rather countered that he admires Vignelli’s work despite his own interest in exploring alternatives made possible by new technologies. It could be argued that the language invented by Rand’s “Bauhaus boys” challenged contemporary aesthetics in much the same way as VanderLans is doing in Emigre today. Indeed VanderLans, and those designers whom Emigre celebrates for their inventions – including Cranbrook alumni Edward Fella, Jeffery Keedy and Allen Hori – are promoting new ways of making and seeing typography. The difference is that Rand’s method was based strictly on ideas of balance and harmony which hold up under close scrutiny even today. The new young turks, by contrast, reject such verities in favour of imposed discordance and disharmony, which might be rationalised as personal expression, but not as viable visual communication, and so in the end will be a blip (or tangent) in the continuum of graphic design history.

Edward Fella’s work is a good example. Fella began his career as a commercial artist, became a guest critic at Cranbrook and later enrolled as a graduate student, imbuing in other students an appreciation for the naïf (or folk) traditions of commercial culture. He ‘convincingly deployed highly personal art-based imagery and typography in his design for the public,’ explains Lorraine Wild in her essay “Transgression and Delight: Graphic Design at Cranbrook” (Cranbrook Cranbrook Design: the ). He also introduced what Wild describes as “the vernacular, New Diſcourse, 1990). the impure, the incorrect, and all the other forbidden excesses” to his graduate studies. These excesses, such as nineteenth-century fat faces, comical stock printers’ cuts, ornamental dingbats, hand scrawls and out-of-focus photographs, were anathema to the early Modernists, who had battled to expunge such eyesores from public view. Similar forms had been used prior to the 1980ss in a more sanitised way by American designers such as Phil Gips in Monocle magazine, Otto Storch in McCalls magazines, and Bea Feitler in Ms. magazine. For these designers, novelty job printers’ typefaces and rules were not just crass curios employed as affectations, but appropriate components of stylish layouts. While they provided an alternative to the cold, systematic

typefaces favoured by the International Style, they appeared in compositions that were nonetheless clean and accessible. These were not experiments, but “solutions” to design problems.

Two decades later, Fella too re-employed many of the typically ugly novelty typefaces as well as otherwise neutral canonical letterforms, which he stretched and distorted to achieve purposefully artless effects for use on gallery and exhibition announcements. Unlike Gips’ and Feitler’s work, these were aggressively unconventional. In Cranbrook Design: the New Discourse, Fella’s challenges to “normal” expectations of typography are described as ranging from “low parody to high seriousness”. But the line that separates parody and seriousness is thin, and the result is ugliness. As a critique of the slick design practised throughout corporate culture, Fella’s work is not without a certain acerbity. As personal research, indeed as personal art, it can be justified, but as a model for commercial practice, this kind of ugliness is a dead end.

‘Just maybe, a small independent graduate program is precisely where such daunting research and invention in graphic design should occur,’ argues Wild. And one would have to agree that given the strictures of the marketplace, it is hard to break meaningful ground while serving a clients needs and wants. Nevertheless, the marketplace can provide important safeguards – Rand, for example, never had the opportunity to experiment outside the business arena and since he was ostensibly self-taught, virtually everything he invented was “on the job”. Jeffery Keedy and Allen Hori, both of whom had a modicum of design experience before attending Cranbrook, availed themselves of the luxury of experimenting free of marketplace demands. For them, graduate school was a place to test out ideas that “transgressed” as far as possible from accepted standards. So Wild is correct in her assertion that it is better to do research and development in a dedicated and sympathetic atmosphere. But such an atmosphere can also be polluted by its own freedoms.

The ugly excesses – or Frankenstein’s little monsters like Output – are often exhibited in public to promulgate “the new design discourse”. In fact, they merely further the cause of ambiguity and ugliness. Since graduate school hothouses push their work into the real world, some of what is purely experimental is accepted by neophytes as a viable model, and students, being students, will inevitably misuse it. Who can blame them if their mentors are doing so, too? Common to all graphic designers practising in the current wave is the self-indulgence that informs some of the worst experimental fine art. But what ultimately derails much of this work is what critic Dugald Stermer calls “adults making kids’ drawings”. When Art Chantry uses naive or ugly design elements

he transforms them into viable tools. Conversely, Jeffery Keedy’s Lushus, a bawdy shove-it-in-your-face novelty typeface, is taken seriously by some and turns up on printed materials (such as the Dutch Best Book Designs cover) as an affront to, not a parody of, typographic standards. When the layered, vernacular look is practised in the extreme, whether with forethought or not, it simply contributes to the perpetuation of bad design.

Rarely has beauty been an end in itself wrote Paul Rand in Paul Rand: A Designer’s Art. And it is equally mistaken to treat ugliness as an end result in itself. Ugliness is valid, even refreshing, when it is key to an indigenous language representing alternative ideas and cultures. The problem with the cult of ugly graphic design emanating from the major design academies and their alumni is that it has so quickly become a style that appeals to anyone without the intelligence, discipline or good sense to make something more interesting out of it. While the proponents are following their various muses, their followers are misusing their signature designs and typography as style without substance. Ugliness as a tool, a weapon, even as a code is not a problem when it is a result of form following function. But ugliness as its own virtue – or as a knee-jerk reaction to the status quo – diminishes all design.

How To Be Ugly

by Michael Bierut I’m no purist when it comes to graphic design, and I thought I had seen it all. But that was before I saw Mike Meiré’s redesign of German culture magazine 032c. Am I easily shocked? No. But with 032c, Meiré builds a whole publication around what I now realize is the last taboo in graphic design: the vertical and horizontal scaling of type.

Dear God in heaven: at long last, is nothing sacred? If you’re unfamiliar with the work of Meiré und Meiré, you might just assume that 032 was simply the output of a naive amateur. But Mike Meiré is a great designer, and he’s been responsible for some extraordinarily beautiful magazines, including the innovative business journal brand eins and its predecessor Econy, both models of taste, precision and understatement. Meiré knows exactly what he’s doing, and what he’s doing with 032c is telling the world that we can take taste, precision and understatement...and shove them.

Behold the style pendulum in the midst of another swing. The fits, literal and otherwise, that attended the unveiling of the London 2012 Olympics logo were a clear signal that ugly was getting ready for a comeback. It only took a day or two for the backlash to the backlash to set in; as the folks at Coudal told us, what we were witnessing were the birth pangs of the New Brutalism. And lest anyone write this moment off as a mere anomaly, Wolff Olins, the design firm that created the 2012 campaign, quickly followed it up with the jammed-together-on-a-stalleddowntown-No. 4-train-at-rush-hour New York City tourism logo, as well as the hey-mom-when-did-you-learn-Photoshop Wacom identity, both of which extend New Brutalism, or (in the case of Wacom) just plain ugliness, to new levels. When similar symptoms are detected at both hyper-trendy German culture magazines and massive corporate identity consultancies, a trend might be said to approach pre-epidemic stages.

“Ugly is back!” With these words, Patrick Burgoyne confirmed the diagnosis a few months ago in Creative Review, recalling the “mother of all rows” back in the early 90s that attended the publication in Eye of Steve Heller’s now-legendary article”The Cult of the Ugly.” As for this time around, Burgoyne asks, “are we witnessing a knee-jerk reaction to the slick sameness of so much design or a genuine cultural shift?” Whether reactionary spasm or irrevocable paradigm shift, if history is a guide, once the game is afoot, scores of designers will be eager to get with the program. Obviously, doing ugly work isn’t difficult. The trick is to surround it with enough attitude so it will be properly perceived not as the product of everyday

incompetence, but rather as evidence of one’s attunement with the zeitgeist.

This is harder than it looks. Breaking rules is reactive and, perhaps, needlessly provocative. One approach is to declare a complete ignorance of the rules, and cloak oneself in a aura of Eden-like innocence. David Carson provides a classic example with his monologue in Helvetica, recalling his unawareness, at the outset of his career, that some guys had spent a lot of time setting up a bunch of standards or something. Rules? What rules? Burgoyne updates this approach with his “charitable” explanation for the design of the truly alarming magazine Super Super, the appearance of which has been likened to “a clown being sick.” Creative director Steve Slocombe’s lack of formal design training, he offers, “has left him unencumbered by the profession’s history and therefore more able to seek out new forms of expression.”

That’s one way to put it. Not everyone, however, is so blissfully unencumbered.

The alternative approach, then, is to elevate differentiation to the end that justifies all means. If you can’t ignore the rules, break them. “We have created something original in a world where it is increasingly difficult to make something different,”announced Wolff Olins chairman Brian Boylan in the midst of the brouhaha surrounding the London 2012 launch. “I became a bit tired of all these look-a-like magazines,” said Mike Meiré in Creative Review. “They’re all made very professionally but I was looking for something more charismatic. I wanted to search for an interesting look that was beyond the mainstream.”

At all costs, however, onlookers should be a reassured that the results, no matter how careless-looking, were achieved through the same painstaking attention to detail that one would associate with more conventional solutions. Maybe even more!

“It takes perfectionism to get this kind of design just exactly not quite right,”said Hugh Aldersey-Williams about the work of the late master of anti-design Tibor Kalman, whose former employees all have stories about spending endless hours on deliciously bad letterspacing. Similarly, when Meiré was asked about the stretched headline type in 032 — a typographic effect seemingly mastered by everyone in my neighborhood who has ever lost a cat — he answered, “This was actually the hardest job to get right.”

When ugly is done properly, the conventional-minded are properly outraged. This should never be admitted as the goal, however. “This is the most appropriate way to communicate to our audience,” offered Super Super’s Steve Slocombe. Or, as Mike Meiré says, “It is what it is.” But finally there may come a stage when the public’s outrage is too much to ignore: at that point, claim that this was precisely the plan in the first place. “Its design is intentionally raw, which means it doesn’t

immediately sit there and ask to be liked very much,” said Wolff Olins’s Patrick Cox of the 2012 logo. “It was meant to be something that did provoke a response, like the little thorn in the chair that gets you to breathe in, sit up and take notice.”

And what say you, Mr. Cox, to the inevitable complaint is lodged that a four-yearold could do it? “When people are saying that a child could have done it, or are coming up with their own designs, that’s what we want: we want everyone to be able to do something with it.” Check and mate.

So The New Ugly may be here to stay for a while. If you’re familiar with art and design, you know the perils of condemning the shock of the new. After all, no one wants to risk being one of the bourgoisie sneering at the unveiling of Les Mademoiselles D’Avignon or booing at the debut of Le Sacre du Printemps.

But only some of the time does that little thorn in the chair turn out to be a Picasso or a Stravinsky. Most of the time, it’s just a pain in the ass. Until further notice, be careful where you decide to sit.

When ugly is done properly, the conventionalminded are properly outraged.

Fuck Content

by Michael Rock In Designer as Author I argued that we are insecure about the value of our work. We are envious of the power, social position and cachet that artists and authors seem to command.

By declaring ourselves “designer/authors” we hope to garner similar respect. Our deep-seated anxiety has motivated a movement in design that values origination of content over manipulation of content. Designer as Author was an attempt to recuperate the act of design itself as essentially linguistic—a vibrant, evocative language. However, it has often been read as a call for designers to generate content: in effect, to become designers and authors, not designers as authors. While I am all for more authors, that was not quite the point I wanted to make. The problem is one of content. The misconception is that without deep content, design is reduced to pure style, a bag of dubious tricks. In graphic-design circles, form-followsfunction is reconfigured as form-follows-content. If content is the source of form, always preceding it and imbuing it with meaning, form without content (as if that were even possible) is some kind of empty shell. The apotheosis of this notion, repeated ad nauseum (still!), is Beatrice Warde’s famous Crystal Goblet metaphor, which asserts that design (the glass) should be a transparent vessel for content (the wine). Anyone who favored the ornate or the bejeweled was a knuckle-dragging oaf. Agitators on both sides of the ideological spectrum took up the debate: minimalists embraced it as a manifesto; maximalists decried it as aesthetic fascism. Neither camp questioned the basic, implicit premise: it’s all about the wine.

This false dichotomy has circulated for so long that we have started to believe it ourselves. It has become a central tenet of design education and the benchmark against which all design is judged. We seem to accept the fact that developing content is more essential than shaping it, that good content is the measure of good design. Back when Paul Rand wrote “There is no such thing as bad content, only bad form,” I remember being intensely annoyed. I took it as an abdication of a designer’s responsibility to meaning. Over time, I have come to read it differently: he was not defending hate speech or schlock or banality; he meant that the designer’s purview is to shape, not to write. But that shaping itself is a profoundly affecting form. (Perhaps this is the reason that modern designers—Rand, Munari, Leoni—always seem to end their careers designing children’s books. The children’s book is the purest venue of the designer/author because the content is negligible and the evocative potential of the form unlimited.)? So what else is new? This seems to be a rather mundane point, but for some reason we don’t really believe it.

We don’t believe shaping is enough. So to bring design out from under the thumb of content we must go one step further and observe that treatment is, in fact, a kind of text itself, as complex and referential as any traditional and conventional

role between the user and the world. By manipulating form, design reshapes that essential relationship. Form is replaced by exchange. The things we make negotiate a relationship over which we have a profound control. The trick is to find ways to speak through treatment, via a range of rhetorical devices—?from the written to the visual to the operational—to make those proclamations as poignant as possible, and to return consistently to central ideas, to re-examine and re-express. In this way we build a body of work, and from that body of work emerges a singular message, maybe even what it feels like to be living now. As a popular film critic once wrote, “A movie is not what it is about, it’s how it is about it.” Likewise, for us, our What is a How. Our content is, perpetually, Design itself.

End?

Colophon

This compilation of typography and design essays is made by Ishaan Bose Verma for Type 2, 2016. It is set in Adobe Caslon Pro and Univers. It has been printed and bound through Blurb.