Work Hard, Play Hard

NO MORE RULES

E S S A Y

B Y

R I C K

E D I T O R I A L

C R Y S T A L

B Y

P O Y N O R

J E E

K I M

G O B L E T

NO MORE RULES

1

JEE KIM

CRYSTAL GOBLET

BY BEATRICE WARDE

DESIGNED / EDITED BY

TEXT

C O L O P H O N

B I B L I O G R A P H Y

NO MORE RULES: GR APHIC DESIGN AND POSTMODERNISM

BY RICK POYNOR IMAGES PHOTOS BY ROBERT DOISNE AU MARTINE FR ANCK ANNA KUNZ WINCZ VITALY SOKOLOVSK Y

T YPE SET IN META SERIF WHITNEY AVENIR NE X T PRINTED ON MOHAWK PAPER BIRCH 80T

W O R K

H A R D

P L A Y

H A R D

P

A

R

T

1

A design cannot fail to be informed, in some measure, by personal taste, cultural understanding, social and political beliefs, and deeply held aesthetic preferences. Moreover, designers have always insisted that, to function effectively, they need to question and perhaps ‘rewrite’ the client’s brief. They have argued that the client’s understanding of the communication problem may be imperfect and that this is why the client needs their help in the first place. At the same time, designers are motivated by the need for creative satisfaction and peer approval, significant but sometimes unacknowledged factors that have a powerful determining effect on their work.

I

magine 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 meant to contain.

many books appeared celebrating individual bodies of work. A few graphic designers – Neville Brody, David Carson, Tibor Kalman – even attracted attention in mainstream media, where they were presented as significant shapers of contemporary visual culture.

The tendency then, in the last 20 years, has been for graphic designers of all kinds to asset their presence and significance. Other people may view them as a group whose job is to take a client’s message and express it as effectively as possible in a spirit of neutral professionalism, and design rhetoric has often endorsed this interpretation of design’s role. However, the motives that lead someone to become a designer have always been more complicated than this suggests.

The act of designing can never be an entirely neutral process, since the designer always brings something extra to the project.

CRYSTAL GOBLET

Bear with me in this long-winded and fragrant metaphor; for you will find that almost all the virtues of the perfect wineglass 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. Aren’t the margins on book pages 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, be-

cause 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 subcon-

sciously worried by the fear of ‘doubling’ lines, reading three words as one, and things of similar nature.

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.

2

3 CRYSTAL GOBLET

ALL GOOD TYPOGRAPHY IS MODERNIST.

The emergence of the ‘designer as author’ is one of the key ideas in graphic design of the postmodern period. It is also one of the more problematic ideas, since, as some strands of critical theory would have it, the very notion of an ‘author’ as a validating source of authority for a cultural work is outdated, backward-looking and reactionary. This idea was most memorably expressed in Roland Brathes’ essay “The Death of the Author,” first published in1968, and then Author’s demise has been regularly proclaimed as a desirable goal ever since, even though in every practical sense the author – not least the postmodernist cultural critic – continues to flourish. Barthes makes an argument which is in some ways perfectly logical and reasonable. He notes that, while we continue to search for the explanation of a literary work in the life and experiences of the man or woman who produced it, in reality a piece of writing is a ‘tissue of quotations’ that owes everything to the mass of writing that preceded it. A text is ‘not a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning (the “message” of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety

of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.’ Take away the author, argues Barthes, and all claims to decipher a text and attribute to it a final, definitive meaning become futile.

He proposes instead a process of disentangling the multiplicity of texts ‘the structure can be followed, “run” (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of the writing is to be ranged over, not pierced.’

With the author pushed into the wings, the reader – usually overlooked by criticism – can take center stage. It is the reader; not the writer, who decides the meaning of the multiple quotations that compose a text, the reader who gives a text its unity, and it is consequently the reader on whom the future of writing depends. Barthes famously concludes: ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author.’

Designers attuned to postmodern theory and its popular expressions have often invoked the reader or viewer using similar ideas and terms. Their aim, they said, was not to impose a single closed and restrictive reading, but to provide open structures that encourage the

NO MORE RULES

12

audience’s participation and interpretation.

Yet there was usually not the smallest hint of self-effacement, let alone a death wish, in this strategy. Experimental design drew attention to itself and the inevitable result was to throw the spotlight on its makers.

Since the earliest days of commercial art, a handful of designers had always become ‘stars’ of the profession, their work lauded in trade magazines, exhibitions and sometimes in monographs. Nevertheless, professional rhetoric insisted, at least until the 1960s (and sometimes even today), that design was essentially an anonymous activity, and in many ways it was and still is: few members of the public would be able to name even one graphic designer. In the 1980s, as design’s sense of its own importance grew, so did its fascination with itself. The number of informal ‘show and tell’ lectures by designers and well-attended conferences featuring the same travelling band of international design luminaries increased dramatically.

The nature of design journalism also changed. Enthusiastic profiles became commonplace, paying as much attention to the designers’ personalities as their designs, and

CRYSTAL GOBLET

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’

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 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 res-

If you agree with this, you will agree with my one main idea 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

whatever of the fact that I can make arbitrary sounds which will lead a total

ponsible for human civilization.

easy to find yourself in the wrong house.

4

CRYSTAL GOBLET

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 14-pt Bold Sans is, according to the laboratory tests, more ‘legible’ than one set in 11-pt Baskerville. A public speaker is more ‘audible’ in that sense when he bellows. But a

again! I need not warn you that if you begin listening to the inflections as well as 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

perfect talking voice is the unnoticed vehicle for the transmission of words, ideas.

good speaking voice is one inaudible as a voice. It is the transparent goblet

that is not the purpose of printing. Type well used is invisible as type, just as the

was to exist as an expression of beauty for its own sake and for the delectation

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 a printed piece a work of art, especially fine art: that that would imply that its first purpose

5

is a myth. We create only from using what already exists. There are no new colors. Retrievialism acknowledges the past, yet detest nostalgia. We must by necessity retrieve from the past to re-invent the future. This is a new Futurist age.’ Garrett seems to argue to agree with Jameson’s argument that stylistic innovation is no longer possible and that everything has already been invested, yet he insists that postmodern recombinations of the old can still become the building blocks of an authentic cultural moment.

What gets overlooked, when the past is treated as a quarry from which useful visual material can be extracted at will, are the changes of meaning – the drainage of meaning – that occurs when visual ideas with specific purposes are applied in new contexts.

Open-endedness and freedom of personal interpretation were often used as rationales to explain how Ray Gun and similar projects engaged their audiences. As Ellen Lupton and Abbott Miller remark: ‘Post-structuralism’s emphasis on the openness of meaning has been incorporated by many designers into a romantic theory of self-expression:

NO MORE RULES

could be used as a critical tool to ‘expose and revise’ the mechanics of representation.

erate. From this basis, they argue for a more focused application of deconstruction and a

return to the ideas set out by Derrida in On Grammatology, The Truth in Painting and other texts. Instead of consigning decontruction to a brief moment in the 1980s and early 1990s, they see it as a part of the continuing development of design and typography as modes of representation. They suggest that a study of typography and writing informed by deconstruction would examine graphic structures that ‘dramatize the intrusion of visual form into verbal cntent, the invasion of “ideas” by graphic marks, gaps, and differences.’ By reshuffling and reinhabiting’ the normative structures of mass media, design

as the argument goes, because signification is not fixed in material fors, designers and readers share in the spontaneous creation of meaning. Interpretatations are private and personal, generated by the unique sensibilities of akers and readers. Such a view can be used to justify almost anything and, in practice, often effaces rather than facilitates critical thinking. In their book Design Writing Research (1996), Lupton and Miller suggest that we see the production of meaning not as a private matter but as structured by external codes in language, education, media and custom within which an individual must op-

10

CRYSTAL GOBLET

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

minds of all the great typographers with whom I have had the privilege of talking, the 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 possible. And with this clue, this purposiveness in the back of your mind,

practices in typography, and this idea of printing as a conveyor is, at least in the

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.

6

A R T.

I S

A N

T Y P O G R A P H Y

P R O V E

T H AT

F I N A L L Y, T O

THIS IS WHY IT ’S MISCHIEVOUS TO CALL ANY PRINTED PIECE A WORK OF ART.

NO MORE RULES

8

C O M M U N I C A T I O N C A L L S

F O R

E X C H A N G E F L U I D S

A N O F

A N D

T E N S I O N S ,

A

P R O V O C A T I O N , A

C H A L L E N G E

CRYSTAL GOBLET

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 whatartists 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:

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 more delight he has mutilated

American typographer, once showed me a 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. No, he told me that originally he had set up

‘I’m not feeling very well today, I think!’

He was right, he did think; he was the

something infinitely more important. I remember that T.M. Cleland, the famous

the dullest ‘wording’ that he could find and yet he discovered that the man to

8

In the late 1980s and 1990s, designers would go much further in their attempts to create multilayered communications that captured the complexity and ambiguity of modern expreince. Despite Weingart’s experiments with text setting, most early postmodern designers accepted the established rules of intelligible typographic delivery and they concentrated their attention on what happened around the edges of the text rather than on new ways of handling text itself.

The Memphis design group founded in Milan

by Ettore Sottsass, Michele De Lucchi and others took its name – according to Memphis chronicler Barbara Radice – from the Bob Dylan song ‘Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again.’ Memphis objects were most striking for their use of plastic laminates printed with a wild variety of colourful patterns. Like roadside neon signs, laminates were identified with ordinary, ‘undesigned’ environments: coffee shops, ice cream parlours, milk bars, fast-food restaurants, and kitchens and bathrooms in the home. Memphis applied this cheap-looking material to luxurious pieces for the living room that were

as willful and bizarre as they were aesthetically compelling. Memphis designs, Radice observes, are ‘assemblages, agglomerates … deposits of decorations that overlap, intersect, add up and flow together …’ She goes on to explain: ‘The whole Memphis idea is oriented toward a sensory concentration based on instability, on provisional representation of provisional states and of events and signs that fade, blur, fog up and are consumed … Communication – true communication – is not simply the transmission of information …. Communication always calls for an exchange of fluids and tensions, for a provocation, and a challenge. Memphis does not claim to know what people “need,” but it runs the risk of guessing what people “want”.

In Britain, in the late 1970s, Barney Bubbles was a crucial figure in the development of postmodern graphic design. He was already an influence on an emerging, younger generation of designers because of his work for the hippie rock group Hawkwind, when in 1976, at the highest of punk, he became full-time designer for Stiff Records, set up by Jake Rivera. Bubble’s exceptional facility as

NO MORE RULES

7

a ‘new wave’ image-maker of the post-punk period was soon evident in his cover or the album Music for Pleasure by the Damned (1977), a Kandinsky-like semi-abstract built out of lines, zig-zags, semi-circles, symbols and planes of color mashed together in a composition that throbs with kinetic energy.

His most ambitious sleeve, Armed Forces (1979), for Elvis Costello and the Attractions, is a riotous mélange of art historical allusions to Mondrian, Abstract Expressionism, Op Art and Pop, fronted by a painting of a herd of elephants in a kitsch popular style. Younger British designers such as Malcolm Garett and Neville Brody were quick to acknowledge Bubbles’ influence on their work. However, for these designers and for Peter Saville, with whom they are often grouped, historical inspiration came, even more than it did for Bubbles, not only from postwar art, but as with Die Mensch-Machine – from early twentieth century modernism in art and design.

In 1990, declaring that “All art is theft,’ Garrett coined the term ‘Retrievalism’ to describe his method. We live in a Retrievalist world where the past is a bottomless pit that can be infinitely ransacked. Invention

CRYSTAL GOBLET

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 an easy way of saying “This is not the text as it will appear.”

9

T H I S

I S

N O T

C H A R G E D C O M P L E X I T Y ; I T

I S

N O I S E .

CRYSTAL GOBLET

10

NO MORE RULES

5

istered concern at the eruption of wayward subjectivity and resisted the idea, expressed

by Weingart and Greiman, that design might be a form of art. These critics saw the new wave’s stylistic elements and effects as obstacles to the lucid transmission of the client’s message and they dismissed these experimentsas a passing fad. An early article about the new wave, titled ‘Play and Dismay in Post-Modern Graphics,’ quotes a senior New York designer: ‘I don’t consider graphic design to be an opportunity to advance art forms. It has to advance the client’s interest.’ For the critic Mark Treib, postmodernism’s assault on the eye with pages of blips, slits, dots and zits was initially enjoyable, an exhilarating relief from ordinary design, but rapidly became exhausting and tedious. ‘It is like listening to six radios playing at once, each with a different station.

This is not charged complexity; it is noise.’

11 CRYSTAL GOBLET

TYPE WELL USED IS INVISIBLE.

D E S I G N

C O U L D

S O M E T I M E S A

M E D I U M

B E

F O R

A U T O N O M O U S A R T I S T I C E X P R E S S I O N .

CRYSTAL GOBLET

Let me start my specic 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

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 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

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 ‘color’, gets in the way of the mental picture to be conveyed, is a bad type. Our

some rich superb type like text gothic that is to be looked at, not through. Or he

what is called ‘fine printing’ today, in that you are at least conscious that there

subconsciousness is always afraid of blunders (which illogical setting, tight

12

The editors declined to publish his text in full, fearing they would lose the reductive conventions of Swiss modernist typography, which in his view had hardened into orthodoxy and formula. Using lead type and letterpress, he began to investigate basic typographic relationships, such as size, weight, slant, and the limits of readability. He was fascinated by the effects of letterspacing and he stretched words and lines until the text came close to being unintelligible. In 1972 and 1973, he designed a series of 14 related covers for Typografische Monastbalatter magazine, which introduced his challenging ideas to Swiss and international readers.

Weingart’s complex pictorial spaces, unprecedented at the time, fused typography, graphic elements and fragments of photographs on

equal terms. He exposed sections of the grid, violating its purity with jagged outlines, torn edges, random shapes and imploding sheets of texture, as in the second ‘Kuntskredit’ poster (1979). Weingart ruptured, twisted and layered his surfaces into multifaceted cubist geometries that embodied a new kind of self-referential graphic space. His photomechanical expressionism, discovered in the darkroom and at the lightbox in the process of working, acted on the viewer’s sense and emotions to show that, in the right hands, graphic design could sometimes be a medium for autonomous artistic expression.

NO MORE RULES

3

o appreciate the new wave’s impact on design in the United States, it is necessary to understand how constrained prevailing concepts of design had become. An issue of Print magazine devoted to communication design in the 1970s is titled ‘The Triumph of the Corporate Style’ and there is a striking homogeneity in the examples of design and advertising it shows. ‘The 1970s was marked by the rise of the Corporate Style in communications design and the subsequent enfeeblement of imaginative activity,’ concludes the issue’s introduction. ‘it was a period in which security and safety replaced risk as the dominant selling tool.’ The writer wonders whether anything can be done to bring about a transformation of attitudes in the 1980s, though, as we have seen, such changes were already under way. However necessary these changes might have been, early responses to the new wave were often negative. Older designers, accustomed to rigorously suppressing the personal, reg-

CRYSTAL GOBLET

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.

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 with no hair-spaces; these mean subconscious squinting and ultimately, even loss of mental focus.

And if what I have said is true of book

sire, straight into the mind of the reader.

It is tragically easy to throw away half the reader-interest 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

printing, it is fifty times more obvious in advertising that you are implanting a de-

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.

13

CRYSTAL GOBLET

14

I

n graphic design, Wolfgang Weingart was a seminal figure in the development of the ‘new wave’ that came, in time, to be called postmodernist. Weingart trained as a typesetter in Basle, Switzerland, and from 1968 he was a tutor at Basle’s Kunstgwebeschule. As a typesetting apprentice, he had been obliged to memorize and regurgitate dozens of ‘correct’ answers to design problems set out in teaching manuals for typography. ‘It seemed as if everything that made me curious was forbidden: to question established typographic practice, change the rules, and to reevaulate its potential,’ he writes. ‘I was motivated to provoke this stodgy profession and to stretch the typeshop’s capabilities to the breaking point, and finally, to prove once again that typography is an art.’ In 1964, in an article for the trade journal Druckspiegel, he wrote that ‘Phototypesetting with its technical possibilities is leading today’s typography into a game without game rules.’

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.

CRYSTAL GOBLET

2

CLOSE AND FLIP BOOK T O P R O C E E D T O PA R T 2

W O R K

H A R D

P L A Y

H A R D

P

A

R

T

2

N O

M O R E

R U L E S