Mindset promotions present:
First Things First. Nine online lectures unpacking the relationship between typography and consumption.
AWARENESS
Preface Introduction
2 3
Vince Frost// Introductions Biography
5 9
Jonathan Barnbrook// Design beyond commodification Biography
12 19
Ken Garland// I design, therefore I am Biography
22 27
Katherine McCoy// There is such a thing as society (wake up and smell the coffee) Biography
30 36
DESIRE
Ellen Lupton// Introductions Biography
39 43
Andrew Blauvelt// Towards a complex simplicity Biography
46 52
Jessica Helfand// You are under our control Biography
55 61
J. Abbott Miller// The idea is the machine Biography
64 68
PURCHASE
Ruby VanderLans// Introductions
71
Biography
76
Sian Cook// Infiltrate, infect and mutate: the problem with choice
79
Biography
81
Zuzana Licko// The big reveal: theatrical typography
85
Biography
88
Teal Triggs// The endless library at the end of print
90
Biography
94
Acknowledgments
96
Index
98
Ellen Lupton - 1963 - Philadelphia - USA
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Ellen Lupton: Biography.
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Like an interpretation of a musical score, reading is a performance of the written word.
-Ellen Lupton
Ellen Lupton is a writer, curator, and graphic designer. She is director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, where she also serves as director of the Centre for Design Thinking. As curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum since 1992, she has produced numerous exhibitions and books, including Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (1993), Mixing Messages: Graphic Design and Contemporary Culture (1996), Letters from the Avant-Garde (1996), and Skin: Surface, Substance + Design (2002). She recently has focused on bringing design awareness to broader audiences. Her book Thinking with Type (2004) is a basic guide to typography directed at everyone who works with words. D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself (2006), co-authored with her graduate students at MICA, explains design
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processes to a general audience. D.I.Y. Kids (October 2007), co-authored with Julia Lupton, is a design book for children illustrated with kids’ art. “It’s never too early,” they explain, “to talk to your child about design.”
Her most recent book is Graphic Design: The New Basics (with Jennifer Cole Phillips, 2008). She is the co-author with Abbott Miller of several books, including The Bathroom, the Bathroom, and the Aesthetics of Waste (1992), Design Writing Research (1996), and Swarm (2006).
Lupton is a 2007 recipient of the AIGA Gold Medal, one of the highest honours given to a graphic designer or design educator in the U.S. Ellen Lupton has contributed to various design magazines, including Print, Eye, I.D., and Metropolis. She has a regular column, “The El Word,” in Readymade magazine. Her editorial illustrations have been published in The New York Times. A frequent lecturer around the U.S. and the world, Lupton will speak about design to anyone who will listen. Other exhibitions she has curated and co-curated include the National Design Triennial series (2000, 2003, 2006), Feeding Desire: Design and the Tools of the Table, 1500–2005 (2006), Solos: New Design from Israel (2006), and Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age (1999), all at CooperHewitt, National Design Museum. 33
Andrew Blauvelt: Towards a complex simplicity.
In the face of global branding , designers are seeking inspiration from the everyday, the quotidian experiences found in the routines of daily life. What defines contemporary graphic design today? The shelves of your local bookshop provide at least one answer. Most books published on the socalled avant-garde of contemporary design represent the institutionalisation of graphic experimentation, only confirming that the radical signs surrounding design in the late 1980s and early 1990s have become thoroughly predictable. Not only has this kind of work become a marketable aesthetic niche, but it is perpetuated by educational institutions that dutifully churn out the latest incremental variations in formulaic fashion, fuelled by the twin myths of expressionism and stylistic pluralism. In his analysis of the 1980s art scene, the critic Hal Foster describes at least two conditions that identify a state of pluralism: a proliferation of accepted styles in the marketplace and a profusion of educational programmes that together constitute a new academy. I believe that graphic design operates under similar conditions today. The problem with pluralism is that styles become relative options, not critical choices. Although pluralism ensures many styles from which to choose, we lose any sense of critical alternatives because, as Foster states, “tolerance and acceptance doesn’t threaten the status quo”. Instead we have incremental or, in the parlance of 1990s economics, “managed” change. Just as the last round of “radical” graphics entered the profession in the late 1980s, many critics predicted an immedi38
ate opposite reaction, not understanding perhaps the speed and depth of assimilation such work would engender. The prevailing notion of what defines contemporary graphic design took hold early in the 1990s – variously and problematically referred to as Deconstructivism, grunge graphics, or simply, the “cult of the ugly”. In antithetical fashion, some critics foresaw an inevitable reaction to the trend by predicting a return to more minimal or reductive approaches. Emigre magazine devoted an issue to the subject (“Starting from Zero”) as early as 1991, in which the idea of reduction was taken to mean a return to the primal, and in 1995 Carel Kuitenbrouwer presciently saw the turn in contemporary Dutch design away from its baroque excesses and towards a “new sobriety” (Eye no. 17 vol. 5). The prophecies continue with the recent publication of Less Is More, by Steven Heller and Anne Fink, a collection of contemporary design defined by familiar yet retrograde notions of simplicity. In the wake of these predic-
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tions has the cult of complexity given way to an ethos of simplicity?
Type well used is invisible as type, just as the perfect talking voice is the unnoticed vehicle for the transmission of words, ideas. -Beatrice Warde
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At the beginning of the decade it seemed as if there was an ever-expanding universe of graphic possibilities, yet now it feels as if we have reached the limit. Is there no way forward when everything seems possible? In this infinity of possibilities, we may arrive at zero. But to begin again does not mean returning to the “good old days” of clarity, legibility and objectivity. Starting from zero does not mean that contemporary design arrives free of the past.
There are signs of different forms of design taking hold, projects and solutions that embrace reductive not additive working methods, explicit rather than implicit structures of organisation, a preference for the literal over the ambiguous, and where the ordinary and the quotidian, not the exoticised subcultures of the vernacular, are sources of inspiration. At their best such projects are a critical encounter with problems of representation, both verbal 39
and visual, rather than the next round of
The diagrammatic and the eccentric converge in Timothy McSweeney’s, a
stylistic permutations. This shift away from
literary journal in which words reign supreme. This is confirmed by the ad-
the simply complex and towards a complex
monishment on the cover of issue two: “If words are to be used as design
simplicity is a condition that I would like to
elements then let designers write them.” Prone to confabulation, this small,
read against many of the most celebrated
book-like journal is set in only one typeface, Garamond, about which is
characteristics of design produced in the
provided a five-page pseudo-colophon. McSweeney’s is typically bereft of
1990s.
imagery, especially photography, preferring small line illustrations and the occasional diagram or dingbat. Its well crafted covers evoke Victorian typo-
A complex simplicity.
graphic guises with elaborate extended prose and marginalia, while intricate charts structure the contents of each issue in much the way that nineteenthcentury physiognomy charts tried to map human nature. McSweeney’s relies
In the realm of the simply complex, frag-
on verbal explication and finds a visual corollary in the diagram. The contents
mentation is preferred as the viewer as-
of issue two, for example, are represented by the number of words per ar-
sembles various bits of text and image to
ticle and approximate reading time, and by a pie chart that categorises the
form an aggregate message. Such work
offerings by percentage, for example, “Stories that want you to be happy:
tends to treat language as a free-floating
19%.” Carefully ordered, but abhorrent of white space, it leaves no place
talisman, isolated words drifting across the
unused. Witness, from the third issue cover, messages such as “This area
page in search of meaning. By contrast a
was blank for the longest time” or “Nothing need happen here”, or an article
complex simplicity relies on enumeration
printed on the spine. For McSweeney’s the modernist principle of “activated”
and explication, a series of digressions and
white space seems empty, both wasteful and useless, because every place is
elaborations linked in the flow of language.
a seen as a potential space to hold meaning.
What seems trivial and tangential becomes essential – like so many bits and pieces of
It is also possible for the form to structure itself. For example, various bits
data in the detritus of the information age.
of data taken together form a powerful gestalt in Jeremy Coysten’s poster
This abundance of information is employed
series on aeroplane crashes and traffic accidents. Coolly rendered as scat-
to dramatic and occasionally humorous
terplots, Coysten’s Civil Airline Disasters 1950-1998 fixes the location and
effect. Structure becomes paramount in or-
death toll of 607 aviation tragedies, their resulting dispersal pattern forming
der to handle large quantities of texts and
an image of the world. Coysten’s poster was prompted by his own near-miss
images: a penchant for charts, diagrams
incident aboard a flight to Australia. A second poster in the series docu-
and maps prevails. But in the most inter-
ments road accidents in the uk over one week. In both instances the rational
esting work what appears to be good old
forms of information design have been employed to register the seemingly
information design reveals, upon closer ex-
irrational loss of life. The calculated nature of the statistics contrasts with
amination, something more subjective – a
random events or accidents. The posters are produced for sale and are not
kind of over-rationalised explication – that
commissioned for public safety campaigns. In this way information becomes
undermines its historical associations of
both a product and a surrogate form of experience.
neutrality and objectivity.
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Sublimating expression. While the overt intervention of the designer figured prominently as a signifier of self-expression, one can detect the suspension of many of the designer’s more subjective decision-making tasks. Like forms of conceptual art, the preferred mode is more detached, relying on systematic approaches to produce solutions. Sol LeWitt once proclaimed that “the idea is the machine that makes the art”. The systematic nature of a predetermined process generates its form, and in this way it is the process itself that becomes the concept. Although the designer has not been entirely removed, what is foregrounded is the visible traces of the process. Unlike some Modernist attempts at abandoning subjectivity in favour of machine-like rationality, certain projects provide a framework for future actions outside the usual control of the designer and are often completed by the viewer. An example of such participatory, rather than prescriptive, design is a poster by Paul Elliman for a conference on the work of the French writer Lautréamont (see Eye no. 25 vol. 7, page 31). White boxes have been inserted between the words “image”, “Maldoror” and “text”, for conference participants to complete, alter or negate. This simple gesture allows the project to generate a multitude of responses, which as an action echoes the nature of the event’s interpretive agenda. In a similar but more extreme vein, Daniel Eatock’s utilitarian poster project, essentially a generic form silk-screened on newsprint paper, methodically guides the user through the steps of creating their own advertisement, and includes blanks to insert relevant information, such as titles of events, images, persons to contact, etc. In this instance the work is wholly dependent on viewer response, the absence of which denies the piece its essential content. Anne Burdick’s design for Wörterbuch der Redensarten, a dictionary of idioms, demonstrates an intricate form of complexity that weaves together various texts. Gathered from the work of Karl Krauss’s Die Fackel, a literary journal published between 1899 and 1936, Burdick worked with a group of researchers in Vienna to generate a series of design directions for the
subsequent layout of 1,056 pages. The aim of the project is interpretative, not exhaustive, therefore the body of the text comprises only 144 expressions used by Krauss in Die Fackel. The purpose of this dictionary is to register the nuances of Krauss’s concepts and expressions. Representing a decidedly postmodern “tissue of quotations”, Burdick has structured the pages so that the central column of text includes excerpts from Krauss’s writings, while the left column contains citations and cross-references, and the right column contains texts that perform “interpretative actions” on the main passage. Because Krauss often used typography and imagery semantically in his writings, the central column frequently contains images and passages of text lifted directly from the original. Burdick acknowledges that conventional assumptions of design authorship were hampered by both the scope of the project and the barrier of a foreign language. Relying instead on a series of instructions, Burdick’s solution nevertheless bears the traces of the designer’s close attention to the details that would allow the project to realise its most appropriate polyphonic form. Simple complexity demands typographic experimentation, highly articulated structures and eccentric typefaces. By contrast, a complex simplicity revels in the spartan vocabulary of what might be called “vanilla typography”, where typography has been reduced to a near-zero degree of expression – neither pretty nor eccentric, but quite plain. This is an inverted world where the ordinary stands out from the crowd as a distinctive gesture. By comparison, yesteryear’s shaped paragraph blocks and micromanaged type treatments look like fussy affectations, so many histrionics in the passion play of design. This change in typographies signals not only a shift in fashion, but also helps expose the expressionistic fallacy behind much 1990s design. Expressionism denies its existence as a language, and thus a style, in order to preserve a sense of immediacy, a supposedly unmediated or direct connection to individual desire and the unconscious. Indeed, in most forms of contemporary design, expressionism has become synonymous with individuality. While modern typography in the 1960s and 1970s could be easily linked with the increasing rationality of the then-emerging industrial technocracy, today’s similar but simpler typography is aligned with the cultural sectors of fashion and art. This simplified approach to typography, while relatively common to many culture magazines, is most often employed in conjunction 42
with the nouveau realist photography of the quotidian.
Picturing the everyday. One of the more influential publications in this genre is Paris-based Purple, which surveys
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the worlds of art, fashion, fiction, prose and interiors. Segregating the verbal (prose, fiction)
Design is not just what it looks like and feels like.Design is how it works.
from the visual (art, fashion, interiors), Purple’s
-Steve Jobs
its requisite need for elaborate lighting set-
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preferred image is the snapshot, the most immediate form of photographic address. Uncomplicated, unstudied, and frequently unstaged, the snapshot negates the conditions of professional, commercial photography, with ups, make-up, styling and retouching. While images have undergone extensive digital manipulation in the past decade, the recent resurgence of the snapshot makes one wonder whether this form of representation is a critical alternative or simply a fashionable one. The extensive presence of fashion advertising that mimics this look in the pages of Purple suggests the latter.
In this image world, life is collected in
(a man and a woman) appear fresh from a sexual encounter – replete with
pictures documenting the everyday in the
small beads of perspiration on their faces. Inside, the clichés of sex are
face of a highly mediated, spectacularised
distributed accordingly – sexual innuendo and phallicism, photos of stained
existence. The moment preserved by the
mattresses and bits of blacked-out (“censored”) texts. Importantly, the sub-
snapshot is valued because it signifies
jects of re- are ordinary people, not celebrities. The texts remain first-person
“realness”. This theme appears in cultiver
accounts, either testimonials, diaristic thoughts, or confessions.
notre jardin, by Jan van Toorn. Using a structure of perforated and folded pages, Van Toorn alternates between colour and
The ordinary made extraordinary.
black and white images – pictures taken mainly by him – of people, friends and places
With the reconsideration of the ordinary and everyday within graphic design,
around the world. Interspersed through the
one may ask whether we are witnessing the end of what was once referred
book are quotations about social reality,
to as “the society of the spectacle”. It is more likely that with today’s cam-
mediated experience and notions of public
paigns for global branding – the process that transforms the ordinary into
and private space, including a quote by
the memorable – we long for the less-mediated experiences found in the
social critic Mike Davis, who argues for a
routines of daily life. Perhaps we can’t recognise the spectacle because it
re-examination of nineteenth-century real-
exists all around us.
ism and its relationship to everyday life. Van Toorn extols us to “cultivate our own
After attending America: Cult and Culture, last year’s AIGA [American Insti-
garden”, by carving out a space in the pub-
tute of Graphic Arts] conference in Las Vegas (Reviews, Eye no. 34 vol. 9),
lic sphere in what have become expanding
it seemed all too easy to leave the spectacle behind as my plane departed.
corporate and institutional fields.
Watching television at home, a group of rather ordinary young men and women dressed casually but alike were singing along to an old Madonna
Rather than striving to record moments
tune. The minimal white stage set and the uninflected karaoke ushered in
of realness as it happens, other designers
the autumn season of clothing for The Gap and I found myself transfixed:
prefer a much more mediated approach to
ordinary clothes worn by average people elevated to a new aesthetic. At that
representation. Eschewing visual ambigu-
moment it was difficult, but not impossible, to remember that the truly ordi-
ity, including the clichéd stylistic affecta-
nary lies in opposition to the brand. I was reminded of the architect Deborah
tions of blurriness, the preferred mode of
Berke’s warning, in writing about the transformation of the landscape from
pictorial represent-ation is documentary
banal to branded: “To confuse ubiquitous logos with generic identity [is] to
realness – not an attempt at capturing the
mistake successful marketing for ‘popular’ culture.” At the eclipse of the so-
authentic, but a much more studied trope
ciety of the spectacle, the ordinary is made extraordinary and the trivial and
that signifies the real but does not try to
mundane become memorable.
stand in for it. This strategy is evinced in Jop van Bennekom’s self-initiated project, re-, a magazine about everyday life. In an issue devoted to sex, the cover models
Originally published in Eye Magazine. Text copyright Eye Magazine © 2001.
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“
Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing.No argument or consideration can absolve typography from this duty.
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-Emil Ruder
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