Typography II Process Book: Editorial Type

PROj ECT/ IV editorial type Molly Magnell BFA Candidate in Communication Design, 2018

Washington University in St. Louis Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Art

Typography II Fall 2016

— Molly Magnell —

INTRODUCTION

I found Wesley Morris’s Who Do You Think You Are? off-putting, to say the least. Right off the bat, the line, “I hate to be the feminist of the two of us” made my skin crawl. As the essay continued on, I appreciated some of the pop culture references and emphasis on shows that broke the mold of prime time television.

But I couldn’t get excuse some of Morris’s language and poor phrasing.

While the essay’s intentions were good in highlighting what identity means in America, I think the article could’ve been written more carefully. In class, I criticized all the key areas that bothered me. I could feel my ears getting hot as I continued to explain the implications of some pieces of writing—such as why validating Rachel Dolezal’s trans-race identity undermines the work of other black people (It was as if she had arrived in a future that hadn’t yet caught up to her).

Morris’s entire definition of “identity” seemed superficial to me. While his piece did try to cover a lot of ground in only so many pages, there was something nonspecific about his writing. I knew I wanted a more tangible identity to accompany the article. Immediately, I thought of where the self really lies. In one of my philosophy classes, I read Daniel Dennett’s Where Am I?—a thought experiment on whether a person’s self is tied to a physical body or can exist within other entities. I also thought about some of the identities Morris glossed over in his writing. In high school, one two separate occasions I was assigned essays from Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Alexie’s essays have stuck with me over the years. I often reflect back on the characters’ sense of hopelessness and desire to break free of the systemic oppression tied to reservation life. I think about the pride the characters feel when they reflect on their heritage, and the hope they place on those fortunate enough to leave reservation life behind. Those stories have stuck with me because they were so eye opening. I hadn’t met any Native Americans before reading Alexie’s work, and the repercussions of white imperialism are swept under the rug in U.S. history classes. I felt it was important to share a story on identity that needed to be told.

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INSPIRATION

— Molly Magnell —

Concept: drawing connections to parts of the text

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— Project I —

Typographic Inspiration

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— Molly Magnell —

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— Project I —

DISCOVERY

Early on, my initial concept was to pull my own interpretation out of Morris’s text. I researched different means of connecting concepts and words (through physical materials, such as string, and through color).

I also thought about creating overlays that blocked out text except for my selection of words, which would form an expression. I wanted to create something handmade out of something that felt so sterile.

From the beginning I was inspired by books within books. I began by using different paper stocks and typefaces to differentiate between the two texts. Alexie’s The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore is almost all dialogue, which I thought was a good contrast against the Morris’s piece.

As I developed my work further, the more disconnected my texts felt. Working with Chrissi helped me realize that my texts weren’t as connected as I initially thought.

I couldn’t fully justify my choice in Alexie. Instead, she urged me to consider writing my own content— since I was so vocal about my opinions in class. Things immediately clicked and I thought about ways I can fill in the gaps in Morris’s work by integrating my own story and highlighting the intersectionality of identity.

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— Molly Magnell —

“GO AHEAD,” ADRIAN SAID. “PULL THE TRIGGER.” I held a pistol to my temple. I was sober but wished I was drunk enough to pull the trigger.

Adrian and I sat on the porch and watched the reservation. Nothing happened. From our chairs made rockers by unsteady legs, we could see that the only traffic signal on the reservation had stopped working.

“Hey, Victor,” Adrian asked. “Now when did that thing quit flashing?”

“Don’t know,” I said.

It was summer. Hot. But we kept our shirts on to hide our beer bellies and chicken-pox scars. At least, I wanted to hide my beer belly. I was a former basketball star fallen out of shape. It’s always kind of sad when that happens. There’s nothing more unattractive than a vain man, and that goes double for an Indian man.

“So,” Adrian asked. “What you want to do today?”

“Don’t know.”

“Go for it,” Adrian said. “You chickenshit.”

We watched a group of Indian boys walk by.

While I still held that pistol to my temple, I used my other hand to flip Adrian off. Then I made a fist with my third hand to gather a little bit of courage or stupidity, and wiped sweat from my forehead with my fourth hand.

“Here,” Adrian said. “Give me the damn thing.”

Adrian took the pistol, put the barrel in his mouth, smiled around the metal, and pulled the trigger. Then he cussed wildly, laughed, and spit out the BB. “Are you dead yet?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said. “Not yet. Give me another beer.”

“Hey, we don’t drink no more, remember? How about a Diet Pepsi?”

“That’s right, enit? I forgot. Give me a Pepsi.”

I’d like to think there were ten of them. But there were actually only four or five. They were skinny, darkened by sun, their hair long and wild. None of them looked like they had showered for a week.

Their smell made me jealous.

They were off to cause trouble somewhere, I’m sure. Little warriors looking for honor in some twentieth-century vandalism. Throw a few rocks through windows, kick a dog, slash a tire. Run like hell when the tribal cops drove slowly by the scene of the crime.

“Hey,” Adrian asked. “Isn’t that the Windmaker boy?”

“Yeah,” I said and watched Adrian lean forward to study Julius Windmaker, the best basketball player on the reservation, even though he was only fifteen years old.

Pages featuring text from the Sherman Alexie’s The Only Traffic Signal on the Reservation Doesn’t Flash Red Anymore

“HE LOOKS GOOD,” ADRIAN SAID. “YEAH, HE MUST NOT BE DRINKING.”

“YET.” “YEAH, YET.”

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— Molly Magnell —

At one point I did consider illustrating parts of my text to contrast the images used in the main book.

I pieced together my written response to the article, an excerpt from my Common App essay on what it means to grow up as an adopted, trans-race daughter, a brief glimpse of what it’s like to pass as middle class from a lower socioeconomic background, and a new response on why it’s important to recognize racial differences rather than erase them into homogeny.

I explored making my text feel more handmade by using craft paper, a brush font that later turned into my own handwriting, and sewing pages together with embroidery thread. It was exciting to create my own content and make a book that was truly my own. It housed some of my secrets and parts of me I tend to not bring up in conversation. I was actually nervous bringing it into class because I was afraid people would read the content and judge me based on what I wrote.

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— Project I —

REFINEMENT

Making a book that relied solely on visual connections and type with no images became a much less appealing challenge as I began making spreads. At first I was lost as to what pictures I could use that didn’t feel too literal. I started by looking at a portrait series by an photographer, who identified somewhere under the LGBTQIA spectrum. The pictures ended up feeling disconnected and looked like stock photos.

In the end, I shifted my strategy to show pictures of things directly mentioned in the article, but I decided to add my own captions to talk about all the identity nuances not mentioned in the article. As someone who struggles with creating a cohesive color palette, I made a Photoshop action to consistently make my photos monochromatic.

Initial concept layouts using just text and no color

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— Molly Magnell —

“ I hate to be the feminist, of the two of us...”

A

few weeks ago, I sat in a movie theater and grinned. Anne Hathaway was in ‘‘The Intern,’’ perched on a hotel bed in a hotel robe, eating from a can of overpriced nuts, having tea and freaking out. What would happen if she divorced her sweet, selfless stay-at-home dad of a husband? Would she ever meet anybody else? And if she didn’t, she would have no one to be buried next to — she’d be single for all eternity. And weren’t the problems in her marriage a direct result of her being a successful businesswoman — she was there but never quite present? ‘‘The Intern’’ is a Nancy Meyers movie, and these sorts of cute career-woman meltdowns are the Eddie Van Halen guitar solos of her romantic comedies.

but what’s funny about that scene — what had me grinning — is the response of the person across the bed from Hathaway.

After listening to her tearful rant, this person has had enough: Don’t you dare blame yourself or your career! Actually, the interruption begins, ‘‘I hate to be the feminist, of the two of us. … ’’ Hate to be because the person on the other side of the bed isn’t Judy Greer or Brie Larson.

It’s not Meryl Streep or Susan Sarandon.

It’s someone not far from the last person who comes to mind when you think

In June, the story of a woman named Rachel Dolezal began its viral spread through the news. She had recently been appointed president of the local chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. in Spokane, Wash. She had been married to a black man, had two black sons and was, by most accounts, a black woman. Her white biological parents begged to differ. The ensuing scandal resurrected questions about the nature of identity — what compelled Dolezal to darken her skin, perm her hair and pass in reverse? She might not have been biologically black, but she seemed well past feeling spiritually white.

Some people called her ‘‘transracial.’’

Others found insult in her masquerade, particularly when the country’s attention was being drawn, day after day, to how dangerous it can be to have black skin. The identities of the black men and women killed by white police officers and civilians, under an assortment of violent circumstances, remain fixed.

But there was something oddly compelling about Dolezal, too. She represented — dementedly but also earnestly — a longing to transcend our historical past and racial-

‘‘soul-baring bestie.’’ It’s Robert freaking De Niro, portrayer of psychos, savages and grouches no more.

On that bed with Hathaway, as her 70-year-old intern, he’s not Travis Bickle or the human wall of intolerance from those Focker movies. He’s Lena Dunham.

The attentiveness and stern feminism coming out of his mouth are where the comedy is. And while it’s perfectly obvious what Meyers is doing to De Niro — girlfriending him — that doesn’t make the overhaul any less effective. The whole movie is about the subtle and obvious ways in which men have been overly sensitized and women made self-estranged through breadwinning. It’s both a plaint against the present and a pining for the past, but also an acceptance that we are where we are.

And where are we? On one hand: in another of Nancy Meyers’s bourgeois pornographies. On the other: in the midst of a great cultural identity migration. Gender roles are merging. Races are being shed.

In the last six years or so, but especially in 2015, we’ve been made to see how trans and bi and poly-ambi-omni- we are. If Meyers is clued into this confusion, then you know it really has gone far, wide and middlebrow. We can see it in the instantly beloved hit ‘‘Transparent,’’ about a family whose patriarch becomes a trans woman

ized present. This is a country founded on independence and yet comfortable with racial domination, a country that has forever been trying to legislate the lines between whiteness and nonwhiteness, between borrowing and genocidal theft.

We’ve wanted to think we’re better than a history we can’t seem to stop repeating.

Dolezal’s unwavering certainty that she was black was a measure of how seriously she believed in integration: It was as if she had arrived in a future that hadn’t yet caught up to her.

It wasn’t so long ago that many Americans felt they were living in that future. Barack Obama’s election was the dynamite that broke open the country. It was a moment.

It was the moment. Obama was biological proof of some kind of progress — the product of an interracial relationship, the kind that was outlawed in some states as recently as 1967 but was normalized. He seemed to absolve us of original sin and take us past this stupid, dangerous race stuff. What if suddenly anything was possible? What if we could be and do whatever and whoever we wanted? In that moment, the country was changing. We were changing.

Dolezal’s unwavering certainty that she was black was a measure of how seriously she believed in integration: It was as if she had arrived in a future that hadn’t yet caught up to her.

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— Project I —

An experiment that connects different modifiers of race and identity

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— Molly Magnell —

Initial experimentation with creating my own content out of Morris’s work.

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— Project I —

the year we obsessed over identity

wesley morris

I HATE TO BE THE FEMINIST OF THE TWO OF US, BUT...

A few weeks ago, I sat in a movie theater and grinned. Anne Hathaway was in ‘‘The Intern,’’ perched on a hotel bed in a hotel robe, eating from a can of overpriced nuts, having tea and freaking out. What would happen if she divorced her sweet, selfless stay-at-home dad of a husband? Would she ever meet anybody else? And if she didn’t, she would have no one to be buried next to — she’d be single for all eternity. And weren’t the problems in her marriage a direct result of her being a successful businesswoman — she was there but never quite present? ‘‘The Intern’’ is a Nancy Meyers movie, and these sorts of cute career-woman meltdowns are the Eddie Van Halen guitar solos of her romantic comedies.

But what’s funny about that scene — what had me grinning — is the response of the person across the bed from Hathaway. After listening to her tearful rant, this person has had enough: Don’t you dare blame yourself or your career! Actually, the interruption begins, ‘‘I hate to be the feminist, of the two of us. … ’’ Hate to be because the person on the other side of the bed isn’t Judy Greer or Brie 2

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the year we obsessed over identity

wesley morris

WE’RE ALL BECOM-ING ONE ANOTHER. WELL, WE ARE.

AND WE’RE NOT.

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Early layouts using photos from Tillett Wright’s Self Evident Truths series.

I moved away from pink because it implied a stronger focus on gender identity rather than my hollistic approach on identity.

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We can see it in the recently departed half-hour sketch comedy ‘‘Key & Peele,’’ which took race as a construct that could be reshuffled and remixed until it seemed to lose its meaning. The sitcom ‘‘Black-ish’’ likewise makes weekly farcical discourse out of how much black identity has warped — and how much it hasn’t — over 50 years and across three generations. ‘‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’’ turns selfhood into a circus, introducing us to a lower-middle-class Native American teenager who eventually succeeds at becoming a rich white lady, and to other characters who try out new selves every 10 minutes, as if they’re auditioning for ‘‘Snapchat: The Musical.’’ Last month, Ryan Adams released a remake of Taylor Swift’s album ‘‘1989,’’ song for song, as a rock record that combines a male voice with a perspective that still sounds like a woman’s, like Lindsey Buckingham trying on Stevie Nicks’s clothes. Dancing on the fringes of mainstream pop are androgynous black men like Le1f, Stromae and Shamir.

What started this flux? For more than a decade, we’ve lived with personal technologies — video games and social-media platforms — that have helped us create alternate or auxiliary personae.

We’ve also spent a dozen years in the daily grip of makeover shows, in which a team of experts transforms your personal style, your home, your body, your spouse. There are TV competitions for the best fashion design, body painting, drag queen. Some forms of cosmetic alteration have become perfectly normal, and there are shows for that, too. Our reinventions feel gleeful and liberating — and tied to an essentially American optimism. After centuries of women living alongside men, and of the races living adjacent to one another, even if only notionally, our rigidly enforced gender and racial lines are finally breaking down. There’s a sense of fluidity and permissiveness and a smashing of binaries. We’re all becoming one another. Well, we are. And we’re not.

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— Molly Magnell —

CRITICISM

Overall, I’m very satisfied with my final piece, and my work received a lot of positive attention during the class critique. I was worried the binding wouldn’t work out, and that it would come out messy. I’m curious to see what would happen if I created a hardcover to contain my bulging pages and make the book lay more flat.

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