Creative Arts

CREATIVE DESIGN WRITING ILLUSTRATION PERFORMANCE FILM ISSUE 3

Create:Write Creative Writing from Students at Manchester Met.

By Dr Julie Armstrong

One from the Vaults

A look back at excerpts from The New Typography by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.

By Fiona MacCarthy

Adobe InDesign CS6

The latest revision of Adobe’s industry-leading layout software.

Reviewed by Macworld’s Ben Steers

08/13

£6.99

Credits Editor in Chief Hugo Lindgren Design Director Arem Duplessis Director of Photography Kathy Ryan Deputy Editors Lauren Kern Joel Lovell Managing Editor John Haskins Story Editors Sheila Glaser, Jonathan Kelly Ilena Silverman Online Editor Samantha Henig Art Director Gail Bichler Deputy Art Director Caleb Bennett Designer Jess Pritchard Design Assistant A.E. Velez Deputy Photo Editor Joanna Milter Photo Editors Stacey Baker Clinton Cargill Amy Kellner Copy Chief Rob Hoerburger Copy Editors Harvey Dickson Wm. Ferguson David Vecsey Head of Research Nandi Rodrigo Research Editors Renee Michael Lia Miller Mark Van de Walle Production Chief Anick Pleven Production Editors Patty Rush, Hilary Shanahan Editorial Assistants Yuri Chong Maya Lau Chief National Correspondent Mark Leibovich Contributing Writers Sam Anderson, Matt Bai, Peter Baker, Emily Bazelon, Ronen Bergman, Daniel Bergner, Mark Bittman, John Bowe, Chip Brown, Christopher Caldwell, Sara Corbett, Nicholas Dawidoff, Jonathan Dee, Benoit Denizet-Lewis, Susan Dominus, Robert Draper, Noah Feldman, Andrew Goldman, Cynthia Gorney, Robin Marantz Henig, Wil S. Hylton, Jack Hitt, Jim Holt, Maggie Jones, Pat Jordan, Chuck Klosterman, Dan Kois, Mark Leibovich Contributing Artist Christoph Niemann

CONTENTS REGULARS

FEATURES

SHOWCASE

05 Editorial by John L. Walters

14 Creative Writing Tips and Tricks

58 Book Jackets for Books Not Written Yet

10 Spotlight on Creativity

Where to start when your brain says This month, we look at visualisation “No!” By Ali Hale techniques for typographic layouts. By John L. Walters 26 Typographic Layout Systems

22 CreativeArts News

What’s been happening in the creative networks around the world

31 One From the Vaults

61 Create:Write An in-depth investigation of grids, alignments and hierarchies. By Viljami Creative Writing from Students Salminen at Manchester Met. By Dr Julie Armstrong 43 Bridging the Gap Between Writing and Designing

A look back at excerpts from The New Typography for Writers, and Writing Typography by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. for Designers. By Roy Jacobsen

By Fiona MacCarthy

36 Essay Letterpress Thinking in solid air.

Design educators are finding that letterpress nurtures creativity and visual abstraction. By Steve Rigley

A new open collaborative project to work with writers and artists. By Alex Anderson of ME4Writers

50 How To…

A guide to self-publishing online with Blurb. By Hannah Gal

74 Type Tuesday: The magazine now arriving at platform 15 Work produced at St Brides for Eye Magazine with Mark Porter

87 Adobe InDesign CS6.

The latest revision of Adobe’s industry-leading layout software.

Reviewed by Macworld’s Ben Steers

91 The Elements Of Typographic Style.

By Robert Bringhurst. Reviewed by Richard Hollis

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one from the

vaults H

e was the most inventive and engaging of all the Bauhaus artists, galvanising the movement to ever-greater heights. What a shame Britain never embraced László MoholyNagy when he fled the Nazis in the 1930s. By Fiona MacCarthy, originally published in the Guardian, March 2006.

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the unity of art and technology

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Moholy-Nagy settled in Berlin in 1920 and married soon after. His Czech-born wife, Lucia, had trained as a photographer and they worked together in developing the photogram, a photographic image made without a camera when objects on coated paper are exposed to light.

They developed photoplastics, fluent, lyrical and curious photomontages, sometimes with drawn additions, which had enormous influence on 1960s graphics. At the same time, Moholy-Nagy was one of the first designers to realise the potential of photography in advertising and commercial art.

He was a born teacher, convinced that everyone had talent. In 1923, he joined the staff of the Bauhaus, which had been founded by Walter Gropius at Weimar four years before. Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger and Schlemmer were already teaching there. He was brought in at a time when the school was undergoing a decisive change of policy, shedding its original emphasis on handcraft. The driving force was now “the unity of art and technology”.

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Moholy-Nagy was entrusted with teaching the preliminary course in principles of form, materials and construction - the basis of the Bauhaus’s educational programme. His co-tutor on the course was the painter Josef Albers, whose career was to develop in parallel with his.

Albers and Moholy-Nagy are joint subjects of a major exhibition at Tate Modern, London, which serves as a reminder of the exhilaration of being at the Bauhaus at that time.

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The hyper-energetic Moholy-Nagy also ran the metal workshop at the Bauhaus in Weimar and later in the purpose-designed buildings at Dessau. The metal shop was the most successful of departments at the Bauhaus in fulfilling Gropius’s vision of art for mass production, redefining the role of the artist to embrace that of designer as we have now come to understand the term. The workshop experimented with glass and Plexiglas as well as metal in developing the range of lighting that has almost come to define the Bauhaus. The lamps were produced in small production runs, and some were taken up by outside factories. The royalties made a welcome contribution to the school’s always precarious finances. Wilhelm Wagenfeld’s table lamp, with its sheeny opaque dome, has remained in production and spawned many imitations. As we choose our pseudo-Bauhaus lighting from Ikea, it is Moholy-Nagy we must thank.

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“Fiery stimulator”, “principal drummer boy and teeth chatterer”: the recollections of other Bauhaus masters and his students have left a strong impression of Moholy-Nagy’s galvanic personality.

He became in effect chief publiciser of the Bauhaus, designing the layout for its publications and directing the typography for the “Bauhaus books”, textbooks of Bauhaus principles. Through his “new typography”, Moholy-Nagy set an unmistakable visual image for the school using simple modern letter forms, strong colour, intriguing combinations of photography and text. Single letters, vowels, consonants would be isolated and treated as compositional elements. This typographic approach was serious yet comedic, as was the Bauhaus itself.

It was also at the Bauhaus that MoholyNagy began the project that was to preoccupy him over the next decade and take its place in his mythology as a kind of alter ego, a Frankenstein’s monster.

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This is the Light Prop for an Electric Stage, a huge kinetic sculpture for the theatre composed of colour, light and movement: light as performance art. The light prop takes the form of a cubic box containing a glass and polished metal mechanism designed to stand alone on a darkened stage. The audience watches, through a porthole in the box, the machine’s direct response to a two-minute illumination sequence created by 116 coloured lightbulbs flashing on and off.

“Fiery stimulator”, “principal drummer boy and teeth chatterer”

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In 1930, the light prop was the hero of Moholy-Nagy’s abstract film Light Play: Black-White-Grey. Though I knew the work well from illustrations, it was only last summer that I came face to face with the lifesize replica at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. I found myself agreeing with Moholy-Nagy: its effect was magical beyond belief.

By the time the light prop was at last completed, he was embarking on yet another life. Moholy-Nagy was

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now remarried, to Sybil Pietsch, a film scriptwriter he had worked with in Berlin. As the German political situation darkened, they travelled hopefully to London via Holland. Moholy-Nagy’s friendship with JG Crowther, science correspondent of the then Manchester Guardian, had encouraged him to seek refuge in this country. He was also influenced by his reading of Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophiques sur les Anglais, which convinced him that England was a haven of free speech.

Of the influx of mainly Jewish refugees arriving in England in the 1930s, many were artists, architects, designers.

Moholy-Nagy had been preceded by his former Bauhaus colleagues Gropius and Marcel Breuer. He and Sybil joined them briefly at Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, one of London’s few modernist buildings, before moving into their own house in Golders Green.

There was a solidarity among the émigrés. A touching picture of MoholyNagy at this period shows him on the promenade at Bexhill-on-Sea photographing the just completed De La Warr pavilion, whose architect, Erich Mendelsohn, was another recent exile from Berlin. Moholy-Nagy’s fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda commissioned him to design special effects for the science fiction film Things to Come. He was asked to make a film about the sex life of the lobster, at a time when David Attenborough was still a boy.

A quizzical Moholy-Nagy spent several weeks on the Sussex coast getting to know the fishermen, grappling with their dialect, recording their families and close community. At the other end of the social spectrum, he took photographs for Bernard Fergusson’s book Portrait

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of Eton and John Betjeman’s Oxford University Chest. Where Sybil responded to 1930s England with an often explosive impatience at its snobbery, Moholy-Nagy remained unemotional, professional. The English class structure was the object of his fascinated observation.

But Moholy-Nagy was not totally coldshouldered. He designed the publicity for Jack Pritchard’s English modernist Isokon Furniture Company. One leaflet included a typically dreamlike small drawing of a figure floating in a bath, suggesting that a Breuer Long Chair gave a similar sensation. Imperial Airways commissioned him to design a mobile exhibition to tour the British empire in a railroad car, promoting the still-novel idea of air travel.

He became display consultant for the menswear store Simpsons of Piccadilly, bemusing passersby with his abstract compositions of striped shirts and bowler hats. But these activities were desultory in relation to Moholy-Nagy’s far-reaching design philosophy.

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The New Typography

by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy

T

ypography is a tool of communication. It must be communication in its most intense form. The emphasis must be on absolute clarity since this distinguishes the character of our own writing from that of ancient pictographic forms.

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Typography is a tool of communication.

It must be communication in its most intense form. The emphasis must be on absolute clarity since this distinguishes the character of our own writing from that of ancient pictographic forms. Our intellectual relationship to the world is individual-exact (e.g., this individual-exact relationship is in a state of transition toward a collective-exact orientation).

This is in contrast to the ancient individual-amorphous and later collectiveamorphous mode of communication.

Therefore priority: unequivocal clarity in all typographical compositions. Legibility communication must never be impaired by an a priori aesthetics. Letters may never be forced into a preconceived framework, for instance a square.

The printed image corresponds to the contents through its specific optical and psychological laws, demanding their typical form. The essence and the purpose of printing demand an uninhibited use of all linear directions (therefore not only horizontal articulation). We use all typefaces, type sizes, geometric forms, colours, etc. We want to create a new language of typography whose elasticity, variability; and freshness of typographical composition is exclusively dictated by

the inner law of expression and the optical effect.

The most important aspect of contemporary typography is the use of zincographic techniques, meaning the mechanical production of photoprints in all sizes. What the Egyptians started in their inexact hieroglyphs whose interpretation rested on tradition and personal imagination, has become the most precise expression through the inclusion of photography into the typographic method. Already today we have books (mostly scientific ones) with precise photographic reproductions; but these photographs are only secondary explanations of the text. The latest development supersedes this phase, and small or large photos are placed in the text where formerly we used inexact, individually interpreted concepts and expressions. The objectivity of photography liberates the receptive reader from the crutches of the author’s personal idiosyncrasies and forces him into the formation of his own opinion.It is safe to predict that this increasing documentation through photography will lead in the near future to a replacement of literature by film. The indications of this development are apparent already in the increased

use of the telephone which makes letterwriting obsolete. It is no valid objection that the production of films demands too intricate and costly an apparatus. Soon the making of a film will be as simple and available as now printing books.

An equally decisive change in the typographical image will occur in the making of posters, as soon as photography has replaced poster-painting.

The effective poster must act with immediate impact on all psychological receptacles. Through an expert use of the camera, and of all photographic techniques, such as retouching, blocking, superimposition, distortion, enlargement, etc., in combination with the liberated typographical line, the effectiveness of posters can be immensely enlarged.

The new poster relies on photography, which is the new storytelling device of civilization, combined with the shock effect of new typefaces and brilliant colour effects, depending on the desired intensity of the message.

The new typography is a simultaneous experience of vision and communication.

Originally published in Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, 1919-23 (Munich, 1923).

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SHOWCASE

create:write

Creative Writing from Students at Manchester Met

D

r Julie Armstrong, Senior Lecturer for the BA Creative Writing Course (in the Department of Contemporary Arts at Manchester Metropolitan University) explains the thinking behind experimental works produced by one of her students.

One of the rationales behind Writing Contexts 2 is the notion of the thinking writer: (Mark Haddon: ‘The main impetus for being a writer is thinking.’ Don DeLillo: ‘Writing is an intense form of thought.’

David Shields: ‘I’m drawn to literature as a form of thinking, consciousness, wisdomseeking.’) one who is aware of a cultural context in which the arts happen and who can situate their work in relation to that context.

Writing often records history and the questions writing raises about history; it reflects social, economic, political and cultural shifts, it captures history and allows the reader to experience it.

Nadine Gordimer, Nobel Prize in Literature, 1991. Speaking at the Hay Festival 2010:

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‘Wherever you live, the social, political and personal circumstances are all fantastic subjects to write about. If Tolstoy hadn’t been in Russia at that time, could he ever have written War And Peace?’ She also said: ‘The duty of a writer is to write as well as she can and to have something to say.’

In Showcase this month, we share excerpts from a range of experimental literary works from one of the students on this course.

SEACWOHS

Trapped

by Sophie Picton

They always say the grass is greener on the other side… I can see it. On the other side of this fence. The people wear clothes, they’re not black and white, it’s plagued with colour which hurts my eyes. Green is no longer a word that melts into the pages but a colour which soaks into the world. The guards move me on with the butt of their gun when I try to stop to look, their hoods billow outwards towards me, shunting me away from the pocket of life.

I brush my hand along the fence, ignoring the pain, until the butt of the gun is rammed into my back again. I fly through the air like I have done a thousand times before.

The dark never leaves. It multiplies in ourselves then flies; to the window, through the glass, a hand grasping at thick air and blunt nails…

The guards lie. I must tell you the guards all lie.

There is colour in the world because I’ve seen it.

I’ve seen it all, every last drop of it.

And the dirt was dug up.

And the prison is where we had once stood.

Once it was just one hut.

Now it’s a yard… apparently.

Yes it’s a full world.

Now my little sister, who they will kill tomorrow, told me that she’ll live as long as she wants. She’s only 7 years old. But she says when they kill her she’ll be drained of colour, and that colour will live on beyond the fence.

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Cinderella

by Sophie Picton

I was once the princess in school… That was until I walked through the school gates on my first day and had to step out of my own head. I didn’t like the place, its big gates and whispering walls. In less than a month I became home schooled with my twin brother Chris.

A stranger, Neil 33, from Bristol – then married with a nine-year-old son – came and taught me what a pen was, how it was the most powerful weapon on the planet. He came for lunches with my family. We were all happy…Then dad went on holiday and a decade later mum went off with Neil and no kids.

One minute you’re happy. The next second they’re gone.Now I’m the one who’s sat with the pen. Whilst Chris cooks, I’m working and writing, working and writing. Still I have no time because the pen won’t move. The ideas mock me from the back of my head. Stress dominates. Stress about non-existent words millions of miles away from the place I want to be. I scribble, a fish, a line, a square. A word, which procreates to make two, and as the third crawls onto the page I think I’ve got somewhere… then it happens, the lights go out, the sleep descends, the knocks on the door start their cycle and then the police arrive… Or maybe it’s the fire or the medics this time; we’re not in that type of pain. My dog looks up from its pit of blankets, mocking me with the easy life; sleep, eat, play… whilst I chew a pen and nothing happens.

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SEACWOHS

If it keeps on happening

by Sophie Picton

Every night the smoke drifts through the metal vent, a strangling choke.

It’s different every night. The glowing embers light my face, laced with sweat.

You hold that lighter up… just out of sight.

Taunting me with the flame.

Always hiding. Lost…?

Always laughing, a high pitched cackle, amplified by the wind… (which always messed up your hair.)

No matter how far away I move, you find a way in. I’ve tried to move on. I’ve really tried.

At the top of a block of flats yet you never liked heights. you fall and blunder through always clumsy.

the vents.

When I look out for you, you run… I lay awake waiting last night.

You were cautious. See why I’m scared?

You know that I can sense you there. I’m moving on, it’s too late.

Did you not remember how you can’t fit through the vent… I’m sorry, so sorry.

I had it changed when I moved in.

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