MFA Thesis (Draft 00) by Alexander Bohn

Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

Feedback Loops in Graphic Design A Thesis / Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts in Graphic Design / in the Department of Graphic Design of the Rhode Island School of Design / By Alexander Bohn Rhode Island School of Design / 2008

© 1977 — 2008 Alexander Bohn, except where noted. “Graphic Design in the White Cube” is © 2003 Peter Bil’ak. Some Rights Reserved: Material in this book is licensed under the terms of Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ and the colophon for specific restrictions on the reproduction of the copyrighted material contained herein.

Produced at the Rhode Island School of Design. See colophon for details. This book is not certifiably archival quality, despite general effors to use preservation-friendly materials whenever possible.

Thesis Abstract As with all contemporary idea-based work, each thing that graphic designers make is never really a singular entity. If one looks behind any poster, book, typeface, or web site, one will find an elaborate system of interlocking ideas and interests, which take place at multiple scales and levels of resolution. When determining what things mean, context is everything — from the minutiae to the global. As technological progress paves the way for increasingly easy access to design tools, the overarching complexity of the ideas around us are more and more in need of a common mode of critique and discussion — a framework for talking back. I am interested in the notion of the feedback loop, and how this construct operates as a fundamental building block of the dynamics in graphic design. By investigating feedback loops throughout a range of design contexts — in theory, practice, and criticism — the key loop structures that operate both within my work and throughout the contexts that define it can be understood and described. From the smallest technical minutiae of design craft, up through the broadest overarching themes, we can see the circular paths inscribed by our ideas, concepts, and methods. When we think of a loop, we frequently think of a round shape — not the archetypical notion of a cycle, which can appear in a variety of forms, if any. The advantage to using loops as the primary visual metaphor for analysis lies in the fact that anything archetypally cyclical can be diagrammed with circular shapes — allowing complex interactions at many levels between design and context to be illustrated without being reduced. Design work never happens in a vacuum. The loops in design and its surrounding notions are, by definition, necessarily interlocked with those of the practitioners, audience, design tools, and the greater socioeconomic and canonical contexts in which I am enmeshed. When modeling design dynamics at this level, it is important to differentiate between passive loops and active loops. In passive loops — such as in recent memetic internet trends, like lolcats — the ideas and elements forming the loop are topical and static. Active loops, by contrast, encapsulate dialog; an active loop is a charged configuration. Unlike their passive counterparts, the forces within active loops can change the path of the loop itself as it passes throughout successive iterations. Active loops can be used by designers, such as 2x4’s recent use of an open system, rather than static guidelines, for the Brooklyn Museum — and also by critics, as one can see in contemporary design blogs, who accumulate and redistribute criticism at all levels of inquiry. By using graphic design itself to describe these loops, I will illuminate the loops in play all around me and my personal practice. My own body of work for this inquiry will yield a panoply of object lessons in loops and their attendant phenomena. Through rigorous typological systematization, my thesis work will yield a system that — like LEGO bricks — affords the construction of elaborate and nuanced models, while retaining tectonic comprehensibility due to their use of a very simple basic building block. I aim to construct a critical framework by analyzing loop dynamics in design, using both visual language systems and parallel critical analysis.

To my mom, who somehow taught me all the good tricks about design and the universe many years ago, while she sang me to sleep with old fight songs from Camp Delaware.

Introduction to Book I

Contents

Introduction

Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

Cybernetic Pseudoscience

Defaults, Practically and Critically

The White Cube and the Black Panthers

MFA Thesis Abstract

On “Just”, Awesomeness, and ™

Michael Radyk, on The Way It Looks Interview 1

Loop Taxonomies in Design Today Fall 2007 Thesis Presentation

Ffffantastic Bookmarking Distributed Curation, part 1

Ffffinding Out Distributed Curation, part 2

Design Process Statement

Bibliography and Citation Index

Colophon

04 ₪ Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

04 ₪ Feedback Loops in Graphic Design Preamble to my primary MFA thesis ideas, with some descriptions of relevant work, leading up to the slide presentation I gave on the 17th of May in 2008.

1: http://feedbackloopsingraphicdesign.com/

∞

Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

04.01 → Cybernetic Pseudoscience

In a conversation with a friend of mine, Portfolio art director Grace Lee stated that “design is design is design. It doesn’t matter what you’re doing.” An elegant tautology, to be sure.

§1 Rock, Michael: Graphic Authorship. Originally published in Eye #20, Spring 1996.

§2 Rock, Michael: Fuck Content. Self-published online (1), 2005.

1: http://www.2x4.org/_txt/reading_6.html

ETTING AN MFA in Graphic Design is a perilous task. During my years at risd, I have seen my colleagues in both the classroom and the field in general engage in an unending debate about what it is to be “a designer”. Everyone, it seems, wants the practice of graphic design to be defined as something more than the practice of graphic design.*1 This ontological impossibility has very real consequences for design practitioners. Feelings of inadequacy pervade throughout the profession, and many of my peers feel as though their work is under-appreciated or misunderstood by the general non-designing public. The critical reactions to this syndrome run the gamut from rigorous theoretical manifestos to emotionally charged screeds, with many outrageous and hilarious in-betweens. Michael Rock of 2x4 wrote an article called Graphic Authorship,§1 in which he talked about the “Designer as Author”. This speculative, analytical essay about auteur theory qua graphic design was almost never considered speculative or analytic: hordes of vocal young critics interpreted Graphic Authorship as an imperative plea for designers of all stripes to become full-fledged authors. Disgusted by the myopic sense of disenfranchisement which drove his peers to repurpose his essay, Rock wrote a terse rebuttal called Fuck Content,§2 in which he angrily clarified his stance on the matter.

Book I

Essays

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04 ₪ Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

Others have sought to personally play with the §3 semantics of “what is design” in order to cope with the Gerritzen, Mieke: EVERYONE IS A crisis. Mieke Gerrizen published a garish book called DESIGNER! MANIFEST FOR THE DESIGN ECONOMY. EVERYONE IS A DESIGNER! MANIFEST FOR THE Netherlands Design Institute, §3 1 May 2003. DESIGN ECONOMY . She punctuated this emphatic claim with pages and pages of eyeball-assaulting clip §4 art and other default-mode graphic language. The Helfland, Jessica & Drenttel, William: Wonders Revealed: Design and Faux discordant and incoherent claim supported by all of Science. AIGA Website (2), 14 October 2002. this was that because the technology of design practice 2:— http://www.ws2.hq.aiga.org/content.cfm/wonders-revealed-design-and-faux-science — Adobe software, the Internet, and cheap printing is so accessible, the notion of a professional “graphic designer” is therefore no longer necessary... which, I suppose, makes all of us actual design practitioners into de facto scientists and poets, or somesuch. I think both of these examples are pretty funny. They’re both so extreme in their rhetoric — FUCK CONTENT! EVERYONE IS A DESIGNER!! — and so they caricaturize graphic design’s ontological inadequacy problem. What concerns me, as a design practitioner, are some of the less visible trends that are engendered by this fundamental problem. One such trend, which I will elucidate here, is the creeping accumulation of pseudoscience in design. Graphic design is just one victim of this linguistic metastasis; everything from architectural design to textile design has been affected. “Science,” writes§4 Jessica Helfland, “has become the designers’ safe haven”:

It’s the new “look and feel.” And it’s an easy one to imitate. We grasp its formal conceits—its systematic language of documentation, its methodical alignments—and parlay them into a visual language that resonates with kick-ass authority. It’s a safe, if counterfeit posture for design, redolent of an aesthetic mindset that seems permanently lodged in the visual gestalt of circa-1965 Ciba Geigy pharmaceutical ephemera. Clean and lean. Formulaic. New and improved. It’s the DamienHirstization of everyday life.

Figure 1: Mieke Gerritzen’s eyeballassaulting cover design for Everyone is a Designer! Manifest for the Design Economy.

As a trend, the adoption of pseudoscience by design practitioners is a classic example of a feedback loop.

∞

Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

04.01 → Cybernetic Pseudoscience

§5 Wiener, Norbert: Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine.MIT Press (Second Edition), 15 March 1965.

I should take a minute to note that the definition of “feedback loop” I intend to use is indeed “classic”: I am referring to none other than the work of Norbert Wiener, the insanely intelligent and boundlessly polymathic author of Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine§5 . For the uninitiated, Cybernetics is no less than a quantification of how information and control signals work, at both the micro-level of neurotransmission, up through greater social forces. The book is an intoxicating blend of multivariate calculus and sociological theory, with references to Georg Hegel, John von Neumann, and Lewis Carroll alike. Wiener weaves such disparate sources together to illustrate the nature of both human and machine communications. Central to these illustrations is the notion of feedback — the mechanism of which is crucial to the stability of systems of communication. The mathematical models in Wieners’ chapter on feedback are slightly less intense than those which can be found throughout the rest of Cybernetics — proficiency through second-year multivariate calculus will suffice — but he is gracious enough to preface all of his math with written examples, in the style of Oliver Sacks:

Another patient comes in. While he sits at rest in his chair, there seems to be nothing wrong with him. However, offer him a cigarette, and he will swing his hand past it in trying to pick it up. This will be followed by an equally futile swing in the other direction, and this by still a third swing back, until his motion becomes nothing but a futile and violent oscillation. Give him a glass of water, and he will empty it in these swings before he is able to bring it to his mouth. What is the matter with him? What is the matter, as it turns out, is that his proprioceptive sense isn’t talking to his muscle-planning systems. Your proprioception is what tells you what your body is doing when you’re not looking at it — it’s what tells you how many fingers you’re holding up when you’ve got your hand behind your back. If you don’t know where your hands are, you can’t make good decisions

Book I

Essays

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04 ₪ Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

about where to move them. Right? Wiener, then, goes on to list several other examples: the dynamic between a the switch operator on a train line and the movement of a train; the (oddly sexual sounding) mechanism of a steam engines’ governor, which regulates its speed despite varying load forces; the reaction of a crowd to an indication of danger. You have to read this sort of thing several times before it becomes clear that the individual examples do not matter so much as the composite picture they create together — one of feedback loops churning away at every level one would care to observe. Functional specifics notwithstanding, Wiener’s illustration of feedback as the core of communication is most powerful in the manner in which it transcends any one scale. I find it useful to establish this as a fundament of any discussion of how graphic design works. Most arguments about “what is graphic design” are typically contextualized on a very narrow range of scales. Often, they merely span the nearsighted range with which the author (who is usually primarily a designer) is familiar. That’s why semantic feints like Gerritzen’s EVERYONE IS A DESIGNER! sort of almost work — of course everyone is a designer, if you’re only focused on the mechanics of one certain feedback circuit of information distribution, operating only at one scale, as the nature of being “a designer”. But Gerritzen’s argument falls apart when it is applied beyond some of the harsher realities of her chosen socioeconomc and logistical context — the parameters of which are implicit in her manifesto. Her assertions are true, but only for certain values of “designer”, so to speak.

∞

Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

04.02 ■ Defaults, Practically and Critically

SUBMIT THAT GRAPHIC DESIGN, concerning itself as it does with the fundaments of communication, involves the design practitioner in processes whose artifacts are visible at a broad spectrum of scales — similar to Wiener’s illustration of command and control loops throughout human and machine computation. Myself, I enjoy the core parts of design practice — the parts that are rooted in the history of printing and the nature of the written word. When I design, I take a great deal of pleasure in harnessing facets of graphic design method, and wiring them up with concordant elements of my content, audience, and context; this includes me and my proclivities and inclinations, which are a necessary part of that context.

The F2 and OFR posters are exemplary projects from my own body of work. The conceit of these posters is a straightforward one: they had to announce their respective events — a party and a gallery show, each featuring a variant of the same video installation — to the risd community. I wanted the events to be as big as possible, so I designed the posters to feel as big as possible, stretching the production mechanism using an array of tactics. I derived some of these tactics from within core design practice, and some come from the nature of the content in question. Each poster prominently employs patterns that are constructed from exaggerated halftones derived from

Book I

Essays

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04 ₪ Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

screen-resolution images from the video system itself. The screen angle of the halftones is set to zero for each color, and each color layer is slightly offset. This makes the pattern look like CRT pixels, if you’re up close... but at middle distances, the halftones behave as they typically do in print, visually resolving to a stylized version of the original image. The direct manipulation of halftone screens is a standard part of offset and web printing — processes that are used for much larger print runs than either the F2 or OFR posters actually enjoyed. Rather, these posters were printed on a refurbished 24-inch-wide EPSON machine, in small runs as was necessary. The evidence of the halftone manipulation in the final

∞

Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

Figures 2 and 3 (below): The OFR (at left) and F2 posters. Digital prints (Inkjet on EPSON proofing semimatte paper), editions of 5 each .

04.02 ■ Defaults, Practically and Critically

Figure4 (right): Details of the OFR poster, showing the manipulated halftones and pixel grids.

prints served as both an allusion to graphic design technical history, and as a pragmatic hedge against the “inkjet-ness” of the prints. The materiality of the posters speaks to a production mode — and thus a social station — that is bigger than it actually is. *1 — like the use of images from actual video feeback loops, and other such examples which I will revist later on (the intrepid and the impatient can skip directly to page XX).

There are other elements at play in these posters*, but the interplay of these production details with the context and content of the poster is an example of some of the secret weapons of communication — so to speak — that one can design with, if one is aware of how they might work. Interplay like this is made possible as artifacts of explicit “graphic design” are used in tandem with design elements derived from the given content — I could not have made posters that work like these, if I had pseudoscientifically relied on prerogative conferred from an unrelated system. Much of the authority in the F2 and OFR posters come from that which intrinsic to print itself, amplified by the pointed formal mimicry of an arguably more “authoritative” printing process. Design critic David Sokol, in his essay “Mind Your Mouth”, illustrates how a pseudoscientific authority grab can backfire, spiralling into a hilariously out-of-control bullshit. As a critic, he cautions that he “may pass you by[,] if you’re more prattle than substance”:

But this point is so well trodden that I’ve asked the gods to send me a press release, a media kit, something, that states my case better than I could articulate it myself.

Book I

Essays

☀ ⁄ ☔

04 ₪ Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

Et voila, without tactlessly naming names, here’s an invitation for the final performances of a site-specific work. Let’s choose a few opening excerpts about the artist: “…She challenges the traditional notion of facade as constituting a membrane that simultaneously separates and erotically joins the inside with the outside.” Neat. Our subject will one-up Vito Acconci by pleasuring herself in a doorjamb, or straddling a windowsill, in full public view. ... Sokol goes on to more or less reprint the entire press release, with only minimal intervention... because minimal intervention is all that he needs to show the failed attempt at assuming moral authority through language. This is typical of Sokol’s writing; he is a masterful critic, and he achieves this mastery by consideration of his context, tailoring his language to match. His choice of critical targets is quite poignant, as his subject is revealed at doing the exact opposite: the unnamed artist (problematically) tries to import authority from outside her context. If we reconsider the conundrum of authority, and the corollary feelings of inadequacy that is the plague of graphic design practice, we can return to the issue of pseudoscience. Helfland and Drenttel’s essay specifically deals with the adoption of Science™ as an aesthetic product, employed by designers to acquire

∞

Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

Figures 5 and 6 (below): Some crazy proposal sketch project thing by MVRDV ( far left), whom Rock was calling out as pseudoscientists; and Wim Crouwel's New Alphabet typeface. Both of these images were used in Rock's original presentation of Mad Dutch Disease.

04.02 â&#x2013; Defaults, Practically and Critically

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moral authority in their work. I would extend this by maintaining that Scienceâ&#x201E;˘ is also frequently adopted as a conceptual process by designers, strategically, to acquire authority for themselves and their design practice. Feedback dynamics then yield default-mode design as a pseudoscientific product of this adopted methodology (as opposed to Helfland/Drenttelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s more specific example of pseudoscientific design aesthetics as a default-mode product). Pseudoscience as a process element â&#x20AC;&#x201D; rather than an element of aesthetic product â&#x20AC;&#x201D; is called out in Mad Dutch Disease, an essay by our friend and content-fucker Michael Rock. Originally a presentation to an audience of designers, Mad Dutch Disease takes to task many of the dominant memes in contemporary Dutch design. His observations â&#x20AC;&#x201D; made from the viewpoint that â&#x20AC;&#x153;fundamentally Dutchâ&#x20AC;? ideas are as much a product of American-style globalist hypercapitalism as they are of anything else â&#x20AC;&#x201D; are therefore apt in this larger context: dominant in Western design in general is a â&#x20AC;&#x153;divided lust for expression on one side, and moral rectitude and modesty on the other, which seems to generate a range of singular behaviorsâ&#x20AC;?:

To assuage, or at least to mask, the ambition and ego necessary to build the figure of the author, the Dutch designer positions him/herself, not as originator, but as one who marshals undeniable economic, legal, textual, demographic and civic forces and follows them to their irrefutable conclusion. By this technique, the designer eschews celebrity, feigns anonymity, and assumes the role of systems manager. This bifurcated relationship â&#x20AC;&#x201D; dividing the desire to express and the drive for reason â&#x20AC;&#x201D; is already present in Crouwelâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s description of a rational design process. â&#x20AC;&#x153;The content determines the form, the typeface, the format, the cover, the binding. Every assignment can be divided into several factors, which are all interrelated. With each commission, as it were, you have to plot those

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04 ₪ Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

factors along a horizontal and a vertical axis, stretch out a string and then see where it takes you.” (Wim Crouwel, 1961) The image of the matrix is brutal: its findings, absolute. Notice the passivity, the submission to the data. You wait and see where the data takes you. [...] The feedback loop that reenforces pseudoscientific process is fueled by all of the systemic feelings of inadequacy: to feel optimally good about what they do, designers want to maximize their moral authority while also remaining as impervious to critique as possible. If you adopt scientific rhetoric and methods, you appear to also the authority associated with these things for free... while conveniently ducking any responsibility you might have for the outcome: Like Wim Crouwel, you simply wait and see where the data takes you. If the data happens to drop you off in a place that's ugly or illegible, you just stand there in your white lab coat, throwing up your hands, saying “hey, that’s how the system works. Don’t blame me!” So that’s one parameter of the feedback system. The other is that the passivity Rock describes can be countered in critique, because actual scientific methodology is geared towards quantitative results. If you’re a scientist, and your giant NIH-funded ten-year lab project doesn’t get the results you thought it would, you still write it up and publish what you got... the silver lining being that the scientific community still benefits, as your failure is thoroughly and rigorously parameterized, so at least no one else will make the same stupid mistake you did.

Figure 9 (above): A typical Werkplaats Typografie poster (photographed in the typical designers’ poster style).

In design, parameterized failure does not typically cut the mustard, however. You can’t concoct some crazy system, and then say to the client, “I know you asked for a business card, but what we got is this 30-foot-long monochromatic type installation... that’s where the data took us, man!” Now I know this is a bit disingenuous, as there are some designers out there who can artfully invert the formal constraints of a commercial project in exactly this fashion — 2x4’s perfection of system-as-identity (versus the more traditional identity-as-system) in 2005, for the Brooklyn Museum, leaps to mind.

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04.02 ■ Defaults, Practically and Critically

Figure 8 (above): Experimental Jet Set posters at an exhibition at SMCS in Amsterdam. Do you see what they did

But so: what do you do, if you’re not one of Michael Rock's acolytes? The convergent point is where you have a scientific-looking design process that has been engineered to poop out default-mode design. The science justifies the default design aesthetic, and you don’t have to take any risks. The Dutch design firm Experimental Jetset — arguably the most refined practitioners of this strategy — sits atop a pseudoscientific juggernaut that, miraculously, always yields a one- or two-color system that features Helvetica. I mean, what are the odds?!

there? While Experimental Jetset’s work is the most egregious example of false science propping up default-mode design, you can spot it all over the place. Really, everyone does it, from the arch-bullshitter Bruce Mau, to the students of the vaunted Werkplaats Typografie. I should mention that I am not saying work by these people is bad. Experimental Jetsets’ SMCS identity and signage system is default design at its finest and most apropos, for example... it specifies giant wall murals that are tiled onto standard A4 sheets of paper, and hung on the wall with standard A4 plastic paper-holders. This allows the museum to constantly update their printed wall murals without paying exorbitantly for large-format prints, because the A4 tiles can be printed on a 50-euro home-office inkjet printer at nominal cost. To sum up, thus far: default design can be described as the product of feedback loop systems in contemporary graphic design process. I am proposing the awareness, and ultimate employment, of crucial feedback loops like this one, as a design tool... One that can be positioned as a weapon against default-mode thinking, pseudoscience, and other methodological design pitfalls. In discussing Wiener’s notion of a feedback loop, I alluded to information transmission, both within a system and between systems. If we’re going to talk about feedback loops as a fundamental building block of a design system, I offer designer and design writer Dmitri Siegel’s working definition of feedback loop. In “The History of Feedback”, Siegel defines feedback simply as “any process or system where an output is returned to its own input.” He goes on to provide “a closer examination of the process itself”:

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Feedback is essentially a loop between a projector (like an amplifier) and a receiver (like a microphone or a guitar pickup). Sound or video is projected then received and projected again. This same sound or image begins racing toward itself, creating a telescoping effect in video and a hum or high pitched tone in sound. Essentially feedback is the act of the camera seeing itself or the microphone hearing itself. The loop between amplifier and receiver represents an equilibrium where the sound is simultaneously being made and recorded. Hence, feedback is actually a form of balance and unity, not chaos. One could say (with an almost straight face) that feedback is the self-actualization of the microphone or camera.

Figure 10 (above): Feedback, an

The active use of a feedback system as a mode of critique — my personal favorite kind — is not necessarily obvious if the definition of feedback is “a form of balance and unity”... but this is because criticism is so often portrayed as a counterforce to the thing being critiqued. An essay in The Smart Set by art critic Morgan Meis deftly illustrates the notion of critique as a dialog in harmony with its subject, by first dishing up the frustrated fulmination with contemporary art that we have come to sneeringly expect. He sarcastically decries the fact that “you can do pretty much whatever the hell you want and there’s someone fully prepared to take it seriously”:

installation by artist Gunilla Klingberg

Some lament this fact; they want a criterion back. I don’t. Critics are the owls of Minerva, flying around at dusk. We don’t command and determine the facts, and never did. Merely do we pick at corpses, sorting a few things out, making explicit what was already there, etc., etc. The 2008 Whitney Biennial is a feast and a freefor-all as far as the artists are concerned. You can make a realist painting (for God’s sake) or you

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04.02 ■ Defaults, Practically and Critically

can stick some poles and a stretch of metal fence into a block of cement. The latter work being, I mention as an aside, genuinely thrilling in that it successfully evades all possibility of being pleasing to the eye. — but then (then!) Meis comes back around after taking several Biennial participants to task. He slams the artist Charles Long, but then reconsiders the work, lowering his critical guard:

His sculptures, created of the trash collected from the L.A. River near his home, are oddly organic and meant to resemble piles of bird droppings. In an essay written for the catalog, Henriette Huldisch, one of the curators, says, “these sylphlike pieces perched on gridded structures are poetic and elegant, their underpinnings of ecological damage and renewal reconciled with such classical sculptural concerns as volume, line, and balance.” So there is something being worked out here. In this case, Long is trying to figure out what happens to volume, line, and balance when it is subjected to the conditions of the L.A. River. The rules of sculpture look different from the perspective of a fake river filled with refuse, not much water, and then repopulated by fish and birds. But it has its own aesthetic and Long has attempted to flesh out what that looks like. It looks like thin, spindly, semi-sickly forms trying to get themselves back into shape again. Long has even gone so far as to help these forms out a bit. He has framed them partially in metal boxes, almost like the splints gardeners will create for sapling trees. There’s thus a tenderness in Long’s approach to these strange new forms. He’s trying to teach himself how to be aesthetically sensitive to this urban

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swamp. And then he is capturing that feel in intentional objects that express the essentials of the place and the experience of being there. He “sculpturized” the L.A. River, to coin a term. The essay starts with the merciless skewering of contemporary art, but ends up celebrating it, after happening upon the joy of finding a common language — a loop of communication and dialog — for critique and conversation. Design as a feedback loop system, as I have framed it, is itself ideally suited to critique. To discuss design as a critical medium, I must revisit the notion of “Designer as Author”, and move beyond the simplistic definition I set up earlier and discuss authorship qua graphic design in a more involved fashion. Rock, in the aforecited Graphic Authorship, wrestles with many of the same issues that I have, concluding eventually that “the real challenge is to accept the multiplicity of methods that comprise design language”:

Perhaps we have to expand the modes of practice and elaborate our historical frame to include all forms of graphic discourse. We must move beyond the limiting questions of what is and isn’t design, when is the movement design becomes art, when modern ends and post- begins. In the end authorship is a device to rethink process and expand design methods. While theories of graphic authorship may change the way work is made, critics must still question what it does and how it does it, not where it comes from. I almost agree with this conclusion. What I don’t like is the implication that the critic and the “graphic author” are somehow dichotomous — it can be very effective to design something that critiques itself. Selfreferentiality can be narcissistic, but let’s not forget that Narcissus’ downfall was the fact that the terminally powerful beauty of his own image was brought to bear, inadvertantly, on himself.

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04.02 ■ Defaults, Practically and Critically

The first project I did while at RISD was the “Folded Pritzker Prize Book” (see below). This is an altered-book project in which I pleat-folded every single page from the 2000 Pritzker Prize ceremony program — the year Rem Koolhaas won the award — using a pleat-fold system from Sophia Vyzoviti’s book Folding Architecture.

Figure 11 (below): The Folded Pritzker Prize Book (September 2004). Photograph by G. A. Carafelli.

Vyzoviti specifically cited Koolhaas’ monolithic S,M,L,XL in describing the use of folding in architectural process. Previously, theoretical Deleuzian notions of architectural folding had been bandied about in architectural theory since 1990, when an issue of Architectural Design — aptly titled Folding in Architecture — collected a number of essays on the subject. Koolhaas took it one step further in S,M,L,XL, illustrating the use of paper-folding as a form generator: an iterative process whose relationship with the model material was systemic. I used Vyzoviti’s system, derived as it was from Koolhaas’ own method, and applied it back to Koolhaas himself, as represented by the documentation of his canonization. The book still functions in a booklike manner — you can flip through the pages. You can take out the individual sheets, flatten them out, and read them — they naturally spring back into their pleated shape. It also functions as a sculpture that alludes to Koolhaas’ design methodology. The sculpture component describes, literally, how he

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won the award that the book component is about. Now, is that critical? No. This is an example of what I call a passive feedback loop — the design is engaged with the subject matter but does not anchor it to any

dialog outside of the subjects’ original scope. If this were an active loop, the criticism would extend beyond the sort of formal pun that the “Folded Pritzker Prize Book” is based upon. In the diagram, the dynamics between the elements of the feedback loop are illustrated as a circle. This is the nature of most feedback loops: the act of visualizing them almost always yields something whose shapes are composed of the Platonic components of a “loop”: circles, sine waves, Mobiüs strips, and suchlike. But this tendency can also be a dangerous thing; when reflecting on design work in order to further design diagrams like this, one must be

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04.02 ■ Defaults, Practically and Critically

careful of one’s assumptions. In 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick published their paper on the structural form of DNA, they finished first in a highly charged race between several other high-profile scientists, all of whom had their own idea about how deoxyribonucleic acids worked. Problematically, many of these scientists — including the brilliant Linus Pauling — allowed their ideas about how DNA worked to influence their ideas about how it looked. Watson and Crick did not, and their ad-hoc X-ray crystallography technique yielded a structure — the now-familiar double-helix system — that immediately suggested how it might actually function. Their terse paper, which was only a page or so long, ended with the even terser cliff-hanger statement about the “structure's novel features of considerable biological interest”:

Figure 13: The helical two-stranded deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) replication method of reading from the complementary strand.)

It has not escaped our attention that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material. Watson and Crick’s follow-up publication detailed the first clues of this immediately suggested possible copying mechanism. They went on to earn their place as 20th-century household names... relegating Pauling, genius and all, to the annals of Trivial Pursuit and the like. I realize that I am gravely at risk at this point, having invoked an example from science, but the issue I am concerned with is that of perception. In the DNA race example, Pauling and his ilk were trying to divine how DNA looked, structurally, from how they assumed it to work. Watson and Crick tossed out those assumptions, and created a model of how it worked by paying attention to how it looked. Passive feedback loops in graphic design, like my “Folded Pritzker Prize Book”, frequently arise when designers impose their will on the system — when they make assumptions about how something looks based on how it is assumed to work. In making the folded book, I assumed that, naturally, one would formally employ Vizovyti's system. Unsurprisingly, I ended up with a thing that looked like the product of Vizovyti's system.

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Passive loops are common in American advertising. The design of many ads is often a pun — a simple play on words that often crosses over into the formal, becoming, in the terms of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott-Brown, a duck. Venturi and Scott-Brown described an emergent dichotomy in so-called “postmodern” architecture between ducks and decorated sheds:

We shall emphasize image — image over process or form — in asserting that architecture depends in its perception and creation on past experience and emotional association and that these symbolic and representational elements may often be contradictory to the form, structure, and program with which they combine in the same building. We shall survey this contradiction in its two main manifestations: 1. Where the architectural systems of space, structure, and program are submerged and distorted by a overall symbolic form. This kind of building-becoming-sculpture we call the duck in honor of the duck-shaped drive-in, "The Long Island Duckling," illustrated in God's Own Junkyard by Peter Blake. 2. Where systems and structure are directly at the service of program, and ornament is applied independently of them. This we call the decorated shed. The duck is the special building that is a symbol; the decorated shed is the conventional shelter that applies symbols. We maintain that both kinds of architecture are valid [...] If you substitute “graphic design” for “architecture”, as needed, throughout these definitions, they are equally valid in their new context. Venturi and Scott-Brown made this connection themselves when they revisisted

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04.02 ■ Defaults, Practically and Critically

the topic in 2004. In an interview with Rem Koolhaas for the OMA/AMO book Content, Robert Venturi specifically outlines how the “future of architecture is [in] graphic design.” Based on Venturi’s assessment, I would further submit that the default loop dynamic in play in an archetypical duck — in architecture, graphic design, or otherwise — is a passive one. Furthermore, decorated sheds tend to be active. Take, for example, the example of the archetypical dictionary. A dictionary is a loop — the words are all defined by other words. Its complexity extends beyond the merely tautological or punny: a diagram of a dictionary would undoubtedly be as complex as the dictionary itself, like the one-to-one scale map described in Borges’ The Exactitude of Science. Neither the dictionary itself (formally, a book or set of books, like any other) nor this putative visualization of a dictionary would inherently look “circular”, or “sinusoidal”, or anything obviously “loopy”. This lack of obviousness doesn’t make it any less of a loop. It's just not a duck loop. Venturi's dichotomy, and its parallel in graphic design,should be kept in mind when framing a feedback loop. The loop itself — the thing being visualized by the graphic design — is frequently not obvious in its loopiness: consider the New York subway system, or the human cardiopulmonary system. These loops are inextricable from their contexts: many additional loops tie into them. A subway system has no purpose without electricity to power it, drainage systems to keep it clear — and, most crucially, people to ride it, whose transportation needs are predicated on their lives and livelihoods, which are a product of the grander socioeconomic, political, and cultural systems in which they are enmeshed... all of which are loops of varying complexity. Likewise, the human cardiopulmonary system encompasses the human immune system. It services the endocrine system, carrying its hormones around the body. It provides the central nervous system with fuel (glucose) and a means of metabolising that fuel (oxygen, and a myriad range of other oxidising cofactors). Its central metronome is the heart, whose sinusoidal beat is generated endogenously and synchronized, by the vagus nerve and other nerve

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networks, throughout the body. Through the lungs, it interfaces with the environment — an unendingly complex ballet of loops into which we are all haplessly plugged. I wanted to build an active loop system in graphic design. To do this, I selected my context with care, and I reached out of my own graduate-school experience to designers in the critical and professional world. I started with Peter Bil'ak.

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Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

04.03 □◼ The White Cube and the Black Panthers

ETER BIL'AK IS A FAVORITE graphic designer of mine. His work is exhaustively cross-modal: he is known worldwide in design circles equally for his type designs, his critical writing on design and other tangental topics, his curatorial practice, his poster and stamp designs, and his web work.

I first Mr. Bil'ak him during the last day of TypeCon 2003 in Minneapolis, when I rode the elevator in the hotel down to the conference. I was on a lot of Vicodin at the time, and I only vaguely remember the meeting, but he left the impression of having been very nice.

ß , or the German tall/short ‘s’ ligature;

commonly mistaken for some variant of the letter ‘b’.

*1 I was specifically speaking of Joseph Pemberton of Typophile when I wrote this last sentence.

He crossed my path again nearly two years later, when he came to risd to give a Visting Designers' lecture and host a related workshop. While his type designs undoubtedly take up much of his time and generate the bulk of his designerly income and moral authority, his lecture spanned topics as diverse as modern dance and the logic contemporary comedy. His workshop project centered around the subjectivity of text, as exemplified by biographies of Peter Sellers, David Bowie, and Milan Kundera. This is specifically noteworthy, as your average TypeCon speaker will be able to talk your ear off about rare Dwiggins ephemera, or the history of the esset*1 — such that their type fanaticism precludes living the sort of well-rounded life that includes watching Dr. Strangelove or rocking out to Suffragette City on your Walkman.*1 Mr. Bil'ak was (and indeed is) a different sort of designer. He is able to take in both ends of the design-nerd

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spectrum simultaneously. The depth of his knowledge of type design, say, is not at a sacrifice to his experience with Python programming, or French philosophy, or where to buy books in Reykjavik, or what have you. The problem with a guy like Mr. Bil’ak is that because he is so awesome, in so many arenas, it becomes very difficult to call him out if he is at all being non-awesome in some way. Calling people out is an important part of coexisting with them. This fact was also imparted to me at TypeCon 2004, when Emory Douglas and Ayana Baltrip spoke about their design work for the Black Panther Community News Service. It is easy to dismiss the Black Panthers as violent radical extremists. It was not so easy to do so at Baltrip and Douglas lecture, at which they painted an inspiring and transcendant picture of design work that took place on a literal bleeding edge. They had no money or resources to speak of, but they produced design work that, through a balletic interplay between their type-heavy illustrations and their bare-metal*1 printing resources, communicated the drama and tragedy of post-Civil-Rights race relations. Everyone in the TypeCon auditorium was quite moved, and the Baltrip and Douglas received a resounding standing ovation after their talk.

literally

The question-and-answer session was notably tense, though. Everyone in the audience, more or less, was a white person of some middle-class-or-better privilege status. Queries about technical notes — “That color separation is amazing, did you do that on a Heidelberg?” — led right back to racially charged anecdotes — “That color had to be done as a wierd sort of overprint, because the FBI knew our main Pantone colors, and they were contaminating batches from our supplier as part of COINTELPRO.” The handwringing became notably audiable as time went on. Eventually, one nebbish-looking bald typesetter stood up and said, loosely paraphrased, “OK. It's obvious that most of us are a white and somewhat privileged and introvertedly nerdy. How can we make sure that we are using our potent skills of communication for good, and not for evil?” At this, Douglas paused, and then laughed. Baltrip smiled and told us all not to worry about it. “Just be

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04.03 □◼ The White Cube and the Black Panthers

smart, be respectful of everyone around you, regardless of race —

— and call people on their shit.” Emphasis mine. Everyone laughed, including me — and of course I never forgot that moment. I think it's very important to do this, especially with people you like or with your friends; after all, the loops that pass through your closer circles are bound to be more apropos for such important signals — to put it in terms we’re using in this document. So: criticism isn’t just some hideous, parasitic remora, hitching a ride on the powerful shark of design. It is part of the dynamics that define it. I chose Peter Bil’ak’s work as the subject of a large exhibition project that explicitly revealed the arc of criticism as part of the design process. And as I alluded to earlier, I chose his work precisely because his oeuvre is brimming with interconnected polymathic awesomeness.

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What happened was this: in the Fall semester of 2007, during my final year in the GD graduate program, I was handed — along with two of my fellow grad students, Jerlyn Jareunpoon and Hoon Kim — as the curator for the biennial graphic design student exhibition, slated to take place in the RISD Sol Koffler gallery. I will discuss this show in greater detail further on, but for now, allow me to offer a breif synopsys of the process by which we did this show. We had to curate with care, as since the show went under the banner of “the graphic design department”, each piece came with its own hornets’ nest of social and political entanglements, which flew angrily loose whenever we had to cut anything. This turned out to be more frequently than we, the ostensible curators, would have liked — the space has its share of limitations, and the administrative ur-curators employed by risd (FN: not naming names but...) had their own particularites that needed to be appeased. In these respects, it bore all the recogizable marks of a student art show. We had to cut down our ambitious conceptual curation and display strategies, and settle for a novel rearrangement of things. It was, mind you, a highly successful and pretty rearrangement of things — I will give it that. The lack of conceptual cohesion between the works was accounted for by the ad-hoc local juxtapositions we could make, the sheer numbe of pieces in the show, and the strength of the work itself. We were quite lucky to have the material to work with that we did, in these respects. After the show (which we had called “Continuum”) closed down, I found myself re-reading an essay called Graphic Design in the White Cube, by Peter Bil’ak. This essay will most likely be familiar to graphic design students, as it's frequently xeroxed, laserprinted, emailed, blogged, or otherwise invoked during graphic design seminars*1 at the point at which the question of design qua art, or perhaps design qua curation, inevitably comes up. To say that Graphic Design in the White Cube is canonical would be a bit strong an assertion, perhaps — but you could make that case, in this case. Graphic Design in the White Cube begins with the unequivocal-sounding statement that “organizing graphic design exhibitions is always problematic”:

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Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

§1 Bil’ak, Peter: Graphic Design in the White Cube. Originally published in Graphic Design in the White Cube (exhibit catalog). The Moravian Gallery in Brno (publisher), 2006.

all of which, at whatever school you go to, seem to consist of people standing around and going “yeah, but what is graphic design anyway, really?” followed by students and teacher alike flinging Deleuze and Barthes quotes at each other, with increacing menace and ill will, until the next person manages about what is it anyway, really... thus setting the cycle to begin anew.

04.03 □◼ The White Cube and the Black Panthers

... graphic design does not exist in a vacuum, and the walls of the exhibition space effectively isolate the work of design from the real world. Placing a book, a music album, or a poster in a gallery removes it from the cultural, commercial, and historical context without which the work cannot be understood. The entire raison d’être of the work is lost as a side effect of losing the context of the work, and the result is frozen appearance stripped of meaning, liveliness and dynamism of use. In spite of this, it is more and more common to see design as ‘object’, not only in books and magazines, but also in the ‘white cube’ of the exhibition space. This sort of rhetoric is very persuasive... until you actually listen to what it says. If “white cube” gallery space is so problematically free of context, then what luck does a piece of art have in there? Artist statements and gallery tag-texts frequently approach novella-length in their increacing need to contextualize and prepresent their authors’ work. Such interperetation isn't an exact science, either: Art historians and curators will frequently clash — sometimes with the artists whose work is in question — over the key details of a piece, even when plenty of context is available. Many graphic design archetypes, by contrast, carry evidence of their context with them. Most posters have dates and places associated with them, if not explanatory text, or explicit references to corroborating cultural material. Music albums and books, by necessity of most publishing standards, also typically contain dates, locales, production notes, references... the lists go on. I, too, could go on (FN: see the actual essay “graphics design in the white cube” for more) but the nature of my disagreement with Graphic Design in the White Cube is not as important, for now, as the fact that I had such disagreements in the first place, and what I did with them. The project is called Graphics Design in the White Cube, and it has iteratively taken shape around Bil'ak’s neareponymous essay. I wrote up my reactions to Bilak’s

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essay, in the form of a counter-essay rebuttal, and typeset the two texts onto a series of six JB0-size posters. JB0 posters are enormous — 40.55" by 57.32" — and their proportions are close enough to those of standard 8.5" by 11" paper to allow me to treat them as a large text pages. Using a larger version of the typograpic grid I use for essaywriting, I set Bil'ak’s text and my own, in opposition. Bil'ak’s essay was set as text proportional to the page, allowing it to be read at moderate distances from the posters. My own essay was set in rich orange*1 at type sizes more typical for block text. This signals to the passing reader that something is amiss, and that closer investigation is warranted, both literally and figuratively. In this first iteration, I employed a few pull-quotes and other callouts and cites, but aside from page numbers, I left the texts to themselves and the reader. The posters were first hung in a busy hallway in the graduate GD department — with Sharpie markers hung alongside, so that readers could add their own comments.

Specifically, TOYO 0207... our studio's HP z3100ps gp printer has a powerful built-in rip. Combined with its generous gamut, thanks to its ink range, it ends up faking solid and formula inks far more accurately and brilliantly than anything else I've used.

I realized, as I hung the posters, that asking people to write on them could very well be seen as a fantastically spineless cop-out. After much hand-wringing about the subject, I decided the experiment was a valid one. Less valid, perhaps, would have been to present only Bil’ak’s text, or some other one-sided argument. Rather, I point to the fact that I provided my own words alongside the existant canonical text. My theory, effectively, was that those viewing the posters should be actively invited into the loop of design discourse. By displaying the posters in the gallery — Bil’ak’s “white cube” — the invited participants are at liberty to comment directly on the subject matter of the posters themselves. They’re in an alleged “white cube”, reading two opposing tracts by opinionated graphic designers about “white cubes”, and they can add to the discussion by literally commenting on the work. I got far better results than I had been hoping for. People amended my text quite liberally, across subjects as diverse as the tone of my writing, the quality of my rag (and many other typographic nitpicks), the nature of the printing process, the socioeconomic makeup of the other marker-wielding commenters as evidenced by handwriting. I can add, furthermore, that all of the comments were relevant to the topic at hand in some

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Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

04.03 □◼ The White Cube and the Black Panthers

way (however small)... I had been expecting a deluge of graffiti, which I was altogether spared ... until the second iteration, which was in an actual dedicated gallery space in the risd Design Center. Graphics Design in the White Cube calls for its primary constituent posters — the six panels upon which the audiences’ marker commentary is invited — to be redesigned between each showing, in a manner reflective of the comments that came before. As part of this first redesign, I did a good deal of straight-up design overhaul — not everything that is different results from audience commentary. For instance, the decision to knock my text out of giant orange splatty shapes was mine and mine alone, as was the idea of swapping Joshua Darden’s Freight Micro in for the verenable Miller Text. Some of the comments could be directly addressed: rag can be fixed and bad spelling can be contented with, et cetera, without attributing the source of such nitpicks. It was important to me that they did not necessarily fall by the wayside, however — I wanted, and still do want, the posters to build up, palimsest-style, into visual records of their own histories. The issue of attribution becomes increacingly more important as the audiences’ Sharpie conveyances get “bigger ” and more involved than mere typos. The second series saw the introduction of a new typographic layer, in which to store information in a manner that alludes to the marker process — without crossing the line into the territory of problematically metaphorical, or otherwise all-encompassing semioticsstyle referents. I contrasted the now-dominant bright orange hue of the posters with a light cyan color, with which I drew marker-ink-esque vector shapes, translating the comments harvested from the previous series. These translated marker drawings are all overtly indicated with a small icon depicting — unoriginally — an actual Sharpie. This indication, when coupled with a choice of a well-contrasting Sharpie color on a perinstallation basis, should generally keep people from becoming confused about when who said what to whom... in a very broad, anonymous sense of course. As you can see, I leave as much of the intent and spirit, if not the language, of the original note intact. Often I will

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04 ₪ Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

issue a reply, using the same faux-marker notation. H&FJ's Archer is used for type in the marker-record layer: it’s a slab-serif with a slew of handwritingesque touches. It plays well in both the world of fine typography and — with a little aesthetic nudging — the faceless abbatoir of pseudo-anonymous public debate.

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Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

05 ∑ MFA Thesis Abstract

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As with all contemporary idea-based work, each thing that graphic designers make is never really a singular entity. If one looks behind any poster, book, typeface, or web site, one will ﬁnd an elaborate system of interlocking ideas and interests, which take place at multiple scales and levels of resolution. When determining what things mean, context is everything — from the minutiae to the global. As technological progress paves the way for increasingly easy access to design tools, the overarching complexity of the ideas around us are more and more in need of a common mode of critique and discussion — a framework for talking back.

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Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

I am interested in the notion of the feedback loop, and how this construct operates as a fundamental building block of the dynamics in graphic design. By investigating feedback loops throughout a range of design contexts — in theory, practice, and criticism — the key loop structures that operate both within my work and throughout the contexts that deﬁne it can be understood and described. From the smallest technical minutiae of design craft, up through the broadest overarching themes, we can see the circular paths inscribed by our ideas, concepts, and methods. When we think of a loop, we frequently think of a round shape — not the archetypical notion of a cycle, which can appear in a variety of forms, if any. The advantage to

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05 ∑ MFA Thesis Abstract

using loops as the primary visual metaphor for analysis lies in the fact that anything archetypally cyclical can be diagrammed with circular shapes — allowing complex interactions at many levels between design and context to be illustrated without being reduced. Design work never happens in a vacuum. The loops in design and its surrounding notions are, by deﬁnition, necessarily interlocked with those of the practitioners, audience, design tools, and the greater socioeconomic and canonical contexts in which I am enmeshed. When modeling design dynamics at this level, it is important to differentiate between passive loops and active loops. In passive loops — such as in

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Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

recent memetic internet trends, like lolcats — the ideas and elements forming the loop are topical and static. Active loops, by contrast, encapsulate dialog; an active loop is a charged conﬁguration. Unlike their passive counterparts, the forces within active loops can change the path of the loop itself as it passes throughout successive iterations. Active loops can be used by designers, such as 2x4’s recent use of an open system, rather than static guidelines, for the Brooklyn Museum — and also by critics, as one can see in contemporary design blogs, who accumulate and redistribute criticism at all levels of inquiry. By using graphic design itself to describe these loops, I will illuminate the loops in play

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05 ∑ MFA Thesis Abstract

all around me and my personal practice. My own body of work for this inquiry will yield a panoply of object lessons in loops and their attendant phenomena. Through rigorous typological systematization, my thesis work will yield a system that — like LEGO bricks — affords the construction of elaborate and nuanced models, while retaining tectonic comprehensibility due to their use of a very simple basic building block. I aim to construct a critical framework by analyzing loop dynamics in design, using both visual language systems and parallel critical analysis.

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Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

06 ◊● On “Just,” Awesomeness, and ™ Originally published on SpeakUp in May 2007. A slightly expanded version is available on Writing Design Criticism. This version – the original – has a longer preamble, in which it discusses subjects like E-Prime, and the indominitable Walter Ong.

The symbol ◊ is used throughout this article to denote image references. Such images are located in the margins, near points to which they are relevant. 1: http://underconsideration.com/speakup/ 1: http://writingdesigncriticism.com/

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Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

decided, recently, to have a go at excising the word “just” from my vocabulary. Not in the adjectival usage (“just” as in “justice”) nor in the noun (“just” as in “a large-bellied pot with handles”, according to the OED) but as an adverb. Oh, you know, I’ll just write this article on language minutia and graphic design. That’s what I mean. I use it all the time, in that casually dismissive sense. So do most of my peers and contemporaries; it’s almost as common as the plague of “likes” with which my generation is constantly upsetting our more grammarconscious elders.

I’m not worried about offending them, though, or anyone else. By eliminating the dismissive adverbial form of “just” from my vocabulary, I’m trying to hack my own brain. If you say “I just have to design these four posters, and just work out the type treatment for the whole series” to yourself out loud, your eye-rolling is somehow implicit. You just have to do these things; they’re not even worthy of discussion, really. But the same sentence without the “just” sounds far more monumental: “I have to design four posters, and work out the type treatment for the whole series.” That, to me, sounds like a far more serious endeavor. The reason I find this topic particularly important, as a graphic designer, is that this inherently dismissive attitude can short-circuit the iterative processes that we use to make things awesome. For the purposes of this essay, I would define awesomeness as a state characterized by a rich holistic intertwining of style, content, and

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06 ◊● On “Just,” Awesomeness, and ™

meaning. An awesome graphic work is the sort that you might stare at for a few tense moments, upon first seeing it, before quietly uttering “fuck yeah,” under your breath. Consider, for example, 2x4’s entry◊1 in the Urban Forest Project… the buttons on this page that allow visitors to download the poster or order a totebag printed with it are laughable, as the poster is a blank white sheet of nothing. Ostensibly, this poster is “about the space between the trees”. Is this cute in a snarky, in-joke sort of way? Perhaps. Is it awesome? I would say no.

1: http://urbanforestproject.org/

There are many posters on the urbanforestproject.org website that are either formally elaborate, or technically so, or both… examples I am partial to the entries by Alan Dye◊2 and Petter Ringbom◊3 . These are awesome, as are many others. Some of the less complex posters are no less awesome; consider the entries by David Reinfurt◊4 or Nikki Chung◊5 .

◊

2x4 www.urbanforestproject.org

Petter Ringbom www.urbanforestproject.org

I would consider some of the entries that fall back on default modes to be generally less awesome. Whether the default mode in question is unique to the designer’s house style (see Paula Scher’s) or specific to the means of graphic production (see COMA’s), these posters invariably end up as one-liners. You read or see them, and that’s it, you’re done.

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Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

◊

But the 2x4 example epitomizes anti-awesomeness in the most thorough fashion. It is, I would submit, the ultimate product of the mentality fostered by the overuse of “just”. You can readily imagine the smirk on the author’s face when he or she decided to send in a blank PDF file, knowing full well that their authority as an agent of a highly regarded design firm would guarantee the blind acceptance of their imbecilic pun into the projects’ pantheon.

5 4

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Nikki Chung www.urbanforestproject.org

I don’t mean to single out the Urban Forest Project, but the fact that it collects such a wide range of designerauthors under one aegis makes it an ideal context in which to compare awesomeness, and test for the evidence of “just” default-mode thinking. If you’re familiar enough with a given aesthetic or school of thought, designwise, you can spot the “just” stuff easily, in any portfolio. Experimental Jetset, the Amsterdam-based design collective, has practically made a career of “just” employing default typefaces, monotonous color palettes, and other such deadpan decisions.

1: http://experimentaljetset.nl/

◊

I want to point out at this point that “just” design is not necessarily bad design, and awesome design is not necessarily good. Awesomeness can suck you in, but the design in question must hang together as a whole, or it will lose you, and the awesomeness will have been wasted. And sometimes the “just” move is the right move, as the signature type treatments of iconic artists like Jenny Holzer and Barbara Kruger indicate. In these cases, the simplistic repetition of the default type style in question becomes synonymous with the persona of the artist, and so encapsulates their message. (In design, we call this “branding.”) I propose that there is a perfect fulcrum between the opposing forces of absolute “just” and absolute awesomeness. At this point, the rote application of a default approach is harmoniously tempered by the rigors and context-dependant overtures that characterize awesomeness. Artists and designers who have reached this magic singularity in their practices can be said to have a ™.

David Reinfurt www.urbanforestproject.org

A fine example of a ™ practitioner is M/M Paris, the French design studio chaired by Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustniak. M/M Paris’ aesthetic is highly distinctive and contiguous throughout their work, but they completely eschew the bog-standard default

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06 ◊● On “Just,” Awesomeness, and ™

styles, having created their own sort of “just” approach using the methodology of awesomeness. Many of their posters contain hand-drawn type, and the letterforms themselves often have line weights, contrast values, and other parameters that are notably common to many of M/M Paris’ works. But in each case, these letterforms are manifest for their given context, and their given context only. We can refer to this hybridized approach as M/M Paris™. It is a systematic default style that can be applied in a veneer, but a veneer that can only be concocted (and summarily decocted) by M/M Paris themselves, as only they retain the distinct strains of awesome that are essential for the styles’ formulation. Many of the established upper echelons of graphic designs’ canon are ™ practitioners. The likes of Ogilvy™, Landor™, Wieden+Kennedy™, Pentagram™, Vignelli Associates™, and their ilk, continue to land lucrative contracts. They have the same appeal to their clients as does a company like Ford™, or Charles Schwab™, or Maytag™… the breath and scope of their respective histories have achieved the critical mass necessary to sustain their ™ equilibrium. Likewise, relatively younger independent entities such as Fons Hickmann™, Tomato™, Aesthetic Apparatus™, Graphic Thought Facility™, Harmen Liemburg™, et cetera, all are nimble enough to maintain the trappings of ™ness at small sizes. At both ends of the spectrum, their work is both serially recognizable and utterly distinctive. It is important to note, however, that these luminaries™, as well as their up-and-coming subordinates™ with less namebrand recognition, have all historically been delivered to the nirvana of the ™ state through paths lined with hard-earned awesomeness. The dichotomy of “just” and awesome is an inequitable one, and the spiraling gravitic arms surrounding the ™ state only spin in one direction. This is the primary reason I want to purge the actual word “just” from my speech. As Orwell postulated, if I can’t think it, I can’t do it. And so it will go. This act will constitute but a tiny fraction of the journey down Awesome Street, but it’s high time I got going. I just have to fix my brain first, and I’ll be right there.

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Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

07 ↗↘ Michael Radyk, on The Way It Looks Interview conducted by Alexander Bohn in May 2008, at the Rhode Island School of Design, for the Design Rock City News . Slated for publication in the DRCN's inaugural issue, this coming July 2008. 1: http://designrockcity.com/

Details on The Design Rock City News can be found in Book II, on page 244

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Interview 1

esign speak is often infuriating and opaque, even to other designers.

When I first sat down to talk to Michael Radyk about his work, I was most intrigued by the fact that he had created such strikingly sublime textures out of gimp — a material that many Americans associate with summer-camp “arts and crafts” work. I asked him, “is it a sort of D.I.Y., on-demand, tactical-materialsdistribution type of thing?” “No,” he replied, “I just like the way it looks.” As both a practicing graphic designer and a risd MFA graduate student, I was quite shocked by this rationale. One of the first things the risd graphic design curriculum beats out of its new members is the use of most subjective descriptive terms, like “beautiful” or “disgusting.” This leads many of my peers to make bizarrely pseudoscientific proclamations like “This generates a fantastic visceral response” when talking in critiques. My conversations with Michael were quite illuminating, due to the way he talked about his work, as much as the nature of the work itself...

In the background: Michael Radyk himself.

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07 ↗↘ Michael Radyk, on The Way It Looks

FISH: What can you tell me about your work prior to coming to the grad Textiles program at risd? Michael Radyk: My work prior to risd was much more craft-based. I made handwoven blankets for Takashima, a Japanese department store in New York. Eventually, that work lead me to want to make less functional pieces... I have some of these on my website, they’re wall pieces. Weaving, you see, is like a primal form of architecture. For me, it’s a way to engage with some of the visionary architecture I’m inspired by. Charles MacKintosh, Louis Sullivan and Antonio Gaudi... these artist-architects have distinct personalities, which are expressed with and united by their perfect synthesis of function and form. I am also influenced by the beauty of Japanese and African textiles, as well as by the memory of my grandmother’s skillful hands. I’m trying to develop a language of textiles that’s more like what existed in pre-tapestry times. I’m trying to do embroidery and weaving in a way that is outside the context of utility... my work functions more as an ethnographic rediscovery of ceremonial and ritual textiles. In my most recent pre-risd stuff, I was trying to integrate this sort of language with handwoven surfaces, and other such constructions. I was particularly drawn to the shapes people end up choosing as their own symbols, and how these build up to create their own personal language. The embroidered images and symbols I was employing were an acknowledgement of my

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Interview 1

personal history, but also of my investigations into the slow spill of time, memory and space. F: Your work in the graduate program seems to have veered away from symbolic language like that — is your use of gimp part of a progression? Like, are you now working with material and color as languages, rather than symbolic systems? MR: Yes and no. I wasn’t aiming to use gimp as a symbol... I have never seen gimp used in textile design outside of risd. You’ll see some similar material in wall-based work: plastic tape, for example. That stuff is mainly used in wall coverings, some furniture for contract markets, et cetera. I started using gimp because I wanted a new material for my work — I never went to summer camp! So I don’t have that connection to it. Most other people have a strong reaction to it specifically as gimp, the material from their childhood “arts and crafts” memories. F: In your industry — the textiles industry — when you talk about your design work, or your peers, can you say things like what you said to me earlier? Like “I just like the way this looks” ... Or do you have to “dress up” your language for different people? MR: Haha, yeah, I was addressing you as a peer. To my peers, I can talk like that, and they’ll understand that, no problem.

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07 ↗↘ Michael Radyk, on The Way It Looks

But outside of people I’m friends with who are at my level, we can say “I like it because of the way it works.” Slight difference there, but an important one Most of the time, though, we talk about color, structure and the context of the textile work in question. It’s a different thing to address a textile that’s going to be a wall hanging, versus something that’ll be made into apparel, or what have you... but there is a common vocabulary in many cases. I think that the question of language is so interesting. Every discipline has such a unique language... especially textiles, with all its history and context. In ethnographic textiles, historic textiles, and now with design and craft taking the lead. The language we use seems to be more layered and analytical, compared to how painters or sculptors might talk about their work, say. F: Do you ever have trouble talking with designers who aren’t experienced textile designers, because of language that’s specific to their discipline? MR: Sometimes. Usually, it’s the typical sort of problem any artist or designer faces, which is where you have to set up your personal context for them to really see the work. For example, before risd, I was particularly inspired by the weavings of the Iban and Iban-related peoples of Borneo. They have a complex relationship with their pua, which is a type of patterned textile. These are large cloths that are hung at ceremonies, to define ritual space and to attract the gods’ blessings with their beauty. Pua designs are almost always patterned with warp ikat, or wrapped supplementary wefts. They range from very simple to frightfully complex, and they

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Interview 1

often encode very significant concepts. The weaver often receives inspiration for the designs in a dream, and is then challenged to undertake the making of a pua. This is not at all a trivial project: the weaving of certain complex patterns is believed to be so inherently perilous to the weaver. Pua artists are often compared to the most successful headhunters of the traditional Iban Society. So that’s one part of my working context. Another is the notions in Torajan artifacts. On the island of Sulawesi, the Toraja people use their textiles in the service of the dead. Large symbols and patterned textiles are used wrap the dead for burial, while others are flown from poles or draped over the house facades. The textiles, known as mawa and sarita, are thought to have been brought to earth by the Toraga ancestors from their original abode in the heavens. A Toraga family’s well-being resides in its holding of these immeasurably charged textiles, which [the textiles] not only comfort the dead, but ensure the fertility of the living, and provide a window to the dead into the afterlife.

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07 ↗↘ Michael Radyk, on The Way It Looks

That’s a lot of big ideas, right? But so there is more: Japanese Noh robes. We have a huge collection of Noh robes here in the risd museum, did you know that? F: I did not know that. MR: You should see them... in Japan, see, no two Noh costumes are exactly alike. Even costumes that are copies of older robes show a lot of variation in their patterns and colors. This is as it should be, because Noh is a one-time art: the performance is now, never to be repeated by the same people in the same place. At the same time, tradition is at the core of Noh, and the weaving and tailoring of its costumes. Formulaic language patterns are the building blocks of all aspects of Noh: the lyric symbolic texts, the restrained, suggestive dance movements, the punctuating drumbeats that set the rhythms of the play, the melodies of the chant... all of it. The interplay of these patterns — as the Noh drummer responds to symbols on the cloth and to the chants and dancer echoes with alliteration — those ephemeral elements in the here-now of the performance are the crucial bits that breathe life into the set formulas. Our discourse necessarily has to have room for explanations of context, so that I can put up my wall weaves and then tell people how I got to making them. It doesn’t all have to be self-evident, but it does have to add up, to make sense, basically.

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Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

04 ₪ Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

08 ₪ Loop Taxonomies in Design Today Presentation slides from a short talk on my MFA thesis work, delivered at RISD in the Fall of 2007.

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Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

04.04 ▲▼ 04.05 Loop Taxonomies {×} Situation in Design and Curation Today

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04 ₪ Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

=<<;98:B CFFGJ

Good morning. I’d like to talk about feedback loops. To start, I’d like to read something I wrote on my blog*1 during my first semester here:

This would be my personal blog, Scintillating Bullshit (1) The article in question is archived therein (1).

“So yeah. Everthing is a loop. This is what I have 1: http://objectsinspaceandtime.com/~/fish/sb/ been thinking of lately, how everything is a loop. 1: http://objectsinspaceandtime.com/~/fish/sb/2004/09/my_kingdom_for_a_kohinoor_sele.php When you create something, you create a loop. The loop breaks when the thing is destroyed.

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Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

04.04 ▲▼ 04.05 Loop Taxonomies {×} Situation in Design and Curation Today

“You’re a loop: your heart beat and nervous system

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04 ₪ Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

“are controlled by complex waveforms that repeat until you’re dead.

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Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

04.04 ▲▼ 04.05 Loop Taxonomies {×} Situation in Design and Curation Today

“Your relationships

this image: my classmates Nikki Chung and Melissa Lankhaar, slowdancing. See also: 1.

1: http://flickr.com/photos/fish2000/sets/72157594417833638/

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“are closed loops.

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Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

04.04 ▲▼ 04.05 Loop Taxonomies {×} Situation in Design and Curation Today

import sys _libdir = ‘/lib/python’ + sys.version[:3] _parent = ‘/’.join(__file__.split(‘/’)[:-1]) if not _parent.endswith(_libdir): _parent += _libdir sys.path.append(_parent + ‘/site-packages.zip’) sys.path.insert(0, _parent + ‘/lib-dynload’) import os

def makepath(*paths): dir = os.path.abspath(os.path.join(*paths)) return dir, os.path.normcase(dir) for m in sys.modules.values(): f = getattr(m, ‘__file__’, None) if isinstance(f, basestring) and os.path.exists(f ): m.__file__ = os.path.abspath(m.__file__) del m L = [] _dirs_in_sys_path = {} dir = dircase = None # sys.path may be empty at this point for dir in sys.path: dir, dircase = makepath(dir) if not dircase in _dirs_in_sys_path: L.append(dir) _dirs_in_sys_path[dircase] = 1 sys.path[:] = L del dir, dircase, L _dirs_in_sys_path = None def _init_pathinfo(): global _dirs_in_sys_path _dirs_in_sys_path = d = {}

“Your computer boots into something called a

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04 ₪ Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

“main loop, which is a piece of code that repeats itself until you turn the thing off.

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Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

04.04 ▲▼ 04.05 Loop Taxonomies {×} Situation in Design and Curation Today

“A contract is a loop. businesses often

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04 ₪ Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

“forge loops between themselves that spin too fast and

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Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

04.04 ▲▼ 04.05 Loop Taxonomies {×} Situation in Design and Curation Today

“too hard for their own internal loops to deal with.

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04 ₪ Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

“Wheels and

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Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

04.04 ▲▼ 04.05 Loop Taxonomies {×} Situation in Design and Curation Today

“hard drives and

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04 ₪ Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

“tape capstans spin.

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Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

04.04 ▲▼ 04.05 Loop Taxonomies {×} Situation in Design and Curation Today

“rain evaporates.

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04 ₪ Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

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Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

04.04 ▲▼ 04.05 Loop Taxonomies {×} Situation in Design and Curation Today

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“that

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04 ₪ Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

8CC K?8K J?@K% “shit.

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Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

04.04 ▲▼ 04.05 Loop Taxonomies {×} Situation in Design and Curation Today

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“Closed loops.”

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04 ₪ Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

8 cffg `j X jkilZkli\ n_fj\ Y\^èeè^ `j afè\[ n`k_ `kj \e[% So. For our purposes, we’ll say that a loop is a structure whose beginning is joined with its end.

this image: Promotional material from Studio AAD. See also: 1.

1: http://www.studioaad.com/recent.php

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Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

04.04 ▲▼ 04.05 Loop Taxonomies {×} Situation in Design and Curation Today

N_\e n\ k_èb f] X cffg# n\ ]i\hl\ekcp k_èb f] X ifle[ k_è^% When we think of a loop, we frequently think of a round thing.

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04 ₪ Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

?fn\m\i# cffgj ZXe Y\ hl`k\ Zfdgc\o2 However, loops can be quite complex;

this image: a screengrab from “Visual Poetry 06”, by Boris Müller. See also: 1.

1:http://www.esono.com/boris/projects/poetry06/visualpoetry06/

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Xe[ k_\p e\\[ efk Y\ ZìZlcXi è Xgg\XiXeZ\% %%% Xj `j k_\ ZXj\ n`k_ pfli ZìZlcXkfip jpjk\d#

this image: Source unknown, found via

and they need not be circular in appearance — as is the case with your circulatory system,

ffffound.com. See also: 1, ☀ ⁄☔08-09 (p. 130, 136). 1: http://ffffound.com/image/78d699fa2ca18ff51435b2bac8c282be51592c87

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Xj n\cc Xj pfli jlYnXp jpjk\d%

as well as your subway system.

this image: the New York Subway map. See also: 1.

1: http://www.mta.info/

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Cffgj gifm`[\ Xe `ccljkiXk`fe f] k_\ ]leZk`feXc \c\d\ekj `e [\j`^e giXZk`Z\# Loops provide an illustration of the functional elements in design practice,

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]ifd k_\ dèlkX\ f] Zcfjè^ gXk_j è =fekCXY# from the minuta of closing paths in FontLab,*1

FontLab is, at the time of writing, the primary software used to draw and render typefaces, and to produce font files. More information may be had at its website (1), naturally.

1: http://www.fontlab.com/

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lg k_ifl^_ k_\ fm\i$ XiZ_`e^ \Zfefd`Z Xe[ jfZ`Xc ]fiZ\j k_Xk n\Ëi\ \ed\j_\[ `e# up through the overarching economic and social forces that we’re enmeshed in,

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Xe[ \m\ipk_`e^ `e Y\kn\\e%

and everything in between.

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@ Xd èk\i\jk\[ è ]\\[YXZb cffgj Xj k_\ Yl`c[è^ YcfZbj f] Zfddle`ZXk`fe Xe[ Zfdd\ekXip% I am interested in feedback loops as the building blocks of communication and commentary.

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È=fc[\[ Gi`kqb\i Gi`q\ 9ffbÉ =Xcc )''+

This project — the very first project I did during my tenure here at RISD — is the “Folded Pritzker Prize book.” It forms a loop with its contexts to meaningfully situate itself.

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Gc\Xj\#

8CCFN D< KF <OGC8@E

Please, allow me to explain.

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Sophia Vyzoviti described a method for pleating paper

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§1 Vyzoviti, Sophia: Folding Architecture: Spatial, Structural, and Organizational Diagrams. BIS Publishers, 2003.

in her book, Folding Architecture§1.

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She cites Rem Koolhaas’ seminal S,M,L,XL§1

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§1 Mau, Bruce & Koolhaas, Rem: S,M,L,XL. The Monacelli Press, 1997.

04.04 ▲▼ 04.05 Loop Taxonomies {×} Situation in Design and Curation Today

as a primogenitor of the practical application of this sort of thing.

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After I read this, I decided to literally apply the technique she described back to Koolhaas. I got a copy of the 2000 Pritzker Prize ceremony program — the year Koolhaas was the recepient. I systematically used the same pleat system on the entire book.

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... thus bringing the idea full-circle.

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@E 8E @;<8C =<<;98:B CFFG1 Now, in an ideal feedback loop,

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K?<FI<K@:8C

GI8:K@:8C @;<8CCP# K?@J @J ?FN K?@J JFIK F= K?@E> NFLC; NFIB%

:FDD<EK8IP

what I produced would provide self-evident commentary. In re-examining past projects such as this one, I see now that loops describe an inherent part of the way that I work.

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G8JJ@M<

8:K@M<

The loops were there, even when I wasn’t conscious of it. By being conscious, I can actively use loop dynamics throughout the design process.

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=FI <O8DGC<1

For example:

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After curating

this image: The Continuum show. See also:

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ʘ06 (p. 178).

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this image: The

the recent graduate show

Continuum show. See also:

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ʘ06 (p. 178).

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our department had in the Sol Koffler gallery,

this image: The Continuum show. See also:

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ʘ06 (p. 178).

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this image: Hoon Kim

(along with Hoon and Jerlyn, my fellow curators)

and Jerlyn Jareunpoon, risd GD classmates and fellow curators of Continuum.

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I re-read Peter Bil’ak’s Graphic Design in the White Cube essay,§1

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§1 Bil’ak, Peter: Graphic Design in the White Cube. Originally published in Graphic Design in the White Cube (exhibit catalog). The Moravian Gallery in Brno (publisher), 2006.

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and found myself disagreeing with much of it.

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I wrote a counter-essay, and typeset it, along with Mr. Bil’ak’s original text

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on large posters laid out

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like text pages,

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DI% 9@CË8B

<JJ8PJ

< K? @K< N? < 9 :L

which are designed to be displayed in a “white cube” gallery.

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04 â&#x201A;Ş Feedback Loops in Graphic Design

The audience is invited to contribute their own sentiments and corrections

â&#x2C6;&#x17E;

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via large red pens that have been hung with the posters.

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Thus, the posters’ audience experiences the text about the white cube, in the context of the white cube itself,

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with an opportunity to actively engage in the debate.

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My experimentation with these techniques

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has been a success thus far —

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people have amended

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both my text

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and Mr. Bil’ak’s.

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The final phase of this project, which is yet to be realized, will document the showing of the posters and the resultant contributions from the audience

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DI% 9@CË8B

<JJ8PJ

in book form... a copy of which will be sent to Mr. Bil’ak via the post — thus closing the loop.

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>F@E> =FIN8I;#

So, going forward,

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8:K@M<

J<C=$ JLJK8@E@E>

I will continue this experimentation with the goal of finding a way to build truly selfsustaining loops, which I intend to build,

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this image: Source unknown, found via ffffound.com.

so that I might bring the potent force behind our celestial clockwork to bear on the pragmatics of design.

See also: 1, ☀ ⁄☔08-09 (p. 130, 136). 1: http://ffffound.com/image/32983db08ce4d77fa636ce1f9b9ac071ddd77d3e

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K?8EB PFL =FI PFLI K@D< Thank you for your time.

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=<<;98:B CFFGJ `e >I8G?@: ;<J@>E d]X k_\j`j nfib Yp

8C<O8E;<I 9F?E

₣₣

ffffantastic bookmarking Originally published on SpeakUp in October 2007. It's also available on Writing Design Criticism.

1: http://underconsideration.com/speakup/ 1: http://writingdesigncriticism.com/

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Distributed Curation, part 1

1: http://manystuff.com/ 1: http://monoscope.com/ 1: http://www.yourdailyawesome.com/ 1: http://vvork.com/ 1: http://ffffound.com/ 1: http://yugop.net/

1: http://ffffound.com/home/fish2000/found/

Figure 1: The ffffound.com bookmarklet in action. Upon invocation, all fffound-worthy images on the page in question are highlighted in blue, with the ffffound logo.

Figure 2: Clicking a highlighted image sends it back to ffffound, where it is displayed at the top of the clickee’s profile page.

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raphic design might not work in the white cube, but it flourishes on a white background. A new mutated strain of design blog has evolved: The Randomly Curated Other People’s Images White Background Site, or RCOPIWS. Sites like Manystuff, Monoscope, Your Daily Awesome, and VVORK  (among countless others) offer designers and design aficionados a constant flood of typographic morsels, interesting photos, arresting new art, and the like. One such site sets itself apart, notably, from the other RCOPIWSes: the collaborative image-bookmarking site ffffound.com — allegedly, but unconfirmed, initiated by online fiend Yugo Nakamura.,* I started using ffffound last week, and it's quite a fascinating place, really. The idea is that you bookmark images. Yup, that's pretty much it.* Like flickr, your account on ffffound consists primarily of a series of images, presented in chronological order with regards to their post date. Unlike flickr, which is geared towards sharing personal photographs, ffffound users share images they find anywhere on the web. The layout ffffound employs looks simple, but the bookmarking technique is eyebrow-raisingly sophisticated: The site furnishes you with a bookmarklet which will highlight all of the images on a page with a blue border. You click the one you want, and it is then replaced by an amusing graphic that says “FFFFOUND!” in amphetaminic chalkboardesqe handwriting.

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Ffffounds’ bookmarklet only highlights images that are within a predetermined range of scales; this prevents you from accedentally posting 5-pixel-square site navigation images. The whole bookmarking process is remarkably unobtrusive, because you aren’t whisked back to ffffound, and you can keep using the site you are on. All of the stuff you post ends up on your page. Each image has three other images associated with it, randomly, chosen from the images you (and anyone else who has posted that image, as identified by a hash of the url) has already posted. This results in a constant churn of new visual shit, both for users of the site and for casual browsers. At the time of writing, ffffound is awash with designy stuff: type samples, color studies, abstract form, diagrammatic architectural illustrations, crazy visualizations, posters, photographs of old equipment… I have not witnessed such a collaborative confluence of design-oriented material in one place. 1: http://ffffound.com/image/70a0f4487f1d4a092143f1fba13684c53652ac72 1: http://ffffound.com/image/5acf1ba76541efb5f029725bdb4d6f2f5fd9b99f?c=87062 1: http://ffffound.com/image/bf067c98584c52d92b9665f5fb5d55c9f4768711 1: http://ffffound.com/image/329ba914a4e0993d6dea4e8c6f6fc96ac6ca815e 1: http://ffffound.com/image/815c7928f8adc5566783e6932c7dfe3fe9da245a 1: http://ffffound.com/image/b52a132aa9e7116d0ef0d0953851feaa9f55ce94

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Distributed Curation, part 1

At first brush, ffffound's paradigm looks to be based on your typical “Web 2.0” socially-networked navelgazery, because ffffound users have “favorite users” and “followers”. There are a lot of key differences however… You can’t tag anything, you can’t comment on anything, or write testimonials about people. You don't even control the social network; you gather “fans”, or become one yourself, based on who bookmarks images that someone else bookmarked before you. Furthermore, there is no RESTful API, no XML, no JSON, no pingbacks… Aside from pretty vanilla RSS syndication, ffffound offers none of the oft-vaunted programmatic interfaces that characterize “Web 2.0” sites. It’s reassuring to note, however, that the lack of these things is not an impediment to the site. It is closed and one can only join by an invitation from existing users (who can only invite three people),* and therefore self-curating — I would imagine that the quality of the images in general (which right now is pretty fucking high, at least if you’re a type-nerd, designer-face like me) would degrade rapidly if anyone could join. That’s not a very democratic statement, I know; but design plus democracy equals drop shadows and other X-TREME photoshop filters, and the lack of “democracy” in the case of ffffound is in line with its stealth anti-Web 2.0 ethos.

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08 ₣₣ Ffffantastic Bookmarking

That’s not to say I don’t enjoy a bit of blogging and tagging myself. Really, being able to tag and comment and manage and share and reorganize your thingies, alongside other peoples’ thingies, in all sorts of ways in a coherent and intuitive fashion, et cetera, is why flickr and its ilk are at once both excellent resources and useful tools. But your flickr account is your shit, specifically, implicitly, as indicated by its integrated creative commons licensing and general nomenclature — 1:http://www.flickr.com/creativecommons/ images you upload are specifically labeled “your photos,” for example. Ffffound, on the other hand, is implicitly someone else’s shit, which is a verrrry sensitive issue, even with all the happy-go-lucky “sharing” rhetoric that characterizes “Web 2.0” discussions. Ffffound goes out of its way to remind you of this: All images are headlined with the title of the page from which they are “quoted” (as ffffound has it), with links back to their sources. Ffffound’s lack of other typical user controls allows it to maintain that crucial distinction: By removing your voice, ffffound does exactly what it claims to do, which is grant you the capacity to bookmark images. The de-emphasis of the user's voice has a very interesting effect on ffffound's content. User voice is such a cornerstone of “Web 2.0” malarkey, where many business models are variants of the idea that you, the user, shoot your mouth off so someone else can get AdSense 1:http://www.uncov.com/2007/4/17/pageflakes-get-it-together money. As such, the action ffffound affords you is the ability to sycophantically declare that you like something, by bookmarking it. These things then get posted to your account, and if other people like them, they voice their approval in kind. You can't really use ffffound to hate things, or otherwise. Contrastingly, I frequently use del.icio.us to hate things*1; del.icio.us remains gorgeously minimal, but your tags and comments combine with the *1 For a fine example, have a look at the links you post to provide people looking at your account comment here (1) by fishea. page with a general composite viewport into your tastes. 1: http://del.icio.us/url/2b3765b6f256e5cc42ac0f231f5e9127

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Distributed Curation, part 1

Ffffound, on the other hand, can only illustrate your particular sensibility in the arena of graphic awesomeness. Perhaps this is why so many of the images on ffffound are typographic: Images of type are the best way to directly say something within the confines of ffffound’s system. If I was getting a degree in “postmodern anthropology”, or somesuch, I would say that ffffound is like a “distributed digital Cabinet of Wonders”, or maybe a “data-driven Exquisite Corpse, fashioned into an endless möbius strip”… but no, I’m getting an MFA in graphic design, and at the end of the day, I’m here for the type. I would say to you that ffffound is quite an interesting gem, and I’d add that the exclusivity isn’t as off-putting as it might sound… I was happy with visiting the site before an invitation serendipitously came my way. Do have a look… at the very least, you might find some crazy color palette to rip off or otherwise inspire you. Indeed!

1:http://www.underconsideration.com/speakup/archives/003367.html

1: http://www.underconsideration.com/speakup/archives/003405.html

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₣₣

ffffinding out Originally published on Scintillating Bullshit in December 2007.

A foreword to the published version states: A few months ago, I wrote an article about the collaborative imagebookmarking site ffffound , which ran on SpeakUp  and is archived here as part of Writing Design Criticism  . My initial assesment of ffffound was super-mega-thumbs-up, but the more I’ve used the site, the more I got kind of bothered by certain fundamental aspects of it. So here’s a devils’-advocate rebuttal to my own article. Indeed.

1: http://objectsinspaceandtime.com/~/fish/sb/ 1: http://ffffound.com/ 1: http://underconsideration.com/speakup/ 1: http://writingdesigncriticism.com/

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OK,

1:http://msl1.mit.edu/ESD10/docs/darknet5.pdf

*1 This term is explicated in an article of the same name, available here: (1)

— so: ffffound is to graphic design what Napster was to music. Seriously. Look: I used to blow hundreds of dollars at Other Music and Tower and Satellite and Fat Beats, et al, making my feet sore walking to as many record stores as I could in one fell swoop, all to find that elusive catchy hook or strange beat that I’d overheard someone cooler than me talking about on the train or someshit. But: then came Napster, and its various P2P children and grandchildren, and I didn’t have to leave my seat. Based on the music-snob knowledge I’d already amassed, I could feed the right words into the search engines of the darknet*1, and lo: all the music I wanted was just a status bar away. Now, I go to a record store maybe once a year. Yeah, of course I go to see bands I like whenever I can, and of course I always buy CDs and other merch direct from the table, to assuage the guilt from my gluttony, and to support the music — in that order. I love music with all my heart, and it is that love that keeps this cycle so fantastically well-oiled, throughout all the complex circumlocutions and moralizations that surround the muddled notion of digital copyright infringement. Similarly (nay, analogously), I used to buy books and read blogs and ferret out design morsels in the library and elsewhere… but now I just look at ffffound. For example: the other day, while I was doing a diagram for a collaborative book my class is putting out on lulu, I skipped through both my personal ffffound archives

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and those of the ffffound front page, and lasered off about 20 letter-sized images that somehow spoke to what I was doing. Each reflected my idea in some facet of their design — in their type contrasts, maybe, or in their visualization methodology, or in their basic form, or what have you — but they all were from seriously far-flung sources, only temporarily united in the service of my quest only by virtue of their status as ffffound objects. I pinned them on the wall, sketched a bit, conferred with my colleagues, sketched more, and knocked out the diagram. In the course of all this, I did not pause for a moment and sink into a comfy chair with my wellthumbed edition of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, nor did I lovingly tease any slowlyoxygenating prints out of my graduated colleagues’ flatfiles, or anything like that. I pretty much stayed in my standard I-am-designing-shit pose, which was: hunched over a computer. Printouts notwithstanding… If I’d had a monitor that was large enough, or if I hadn’t needed to collaborate with my friends in order to do the thing that I was doing, I wouldn’t have even bothered with the lasers (which laserprints — let’s admit it — are totally screentastic in their glossy quick’n’dirtiness). The point is: ffffound has emerged as a single repository where I can instantly gratify my urge to see new design thingees. I can root through dozens of pieces of other people’s work, with nothing to give me pause, making no payments of any kind, and with no consequence. It was one thing, back in the early days, when the Internet was brand-new… wow! So much design, so much of it from far away, and all right at your fingertips! But you still had to work for it, and engage with your subject matter. To do design research — and I use that term provisionally here — with a computer, you had to balance queries to Corbis with those to Nexis. You had to know when to root through your bookmarks for samples from some weird blog, and when to hit up Flickr or the Prelinger Archives, or when to pack it in and buy a fucking stock image of a woman walking along a beach with a sunset.

Figure 1: Some of ffffound's most popular images.

Figure 2: Good design (via ffffound).

1: http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger

Or when to stand up from the computer and look in a book. Or when to talk to someone who would know.

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Distributed Curation, part 2

Ffffound gives you all that stuff in one place, all conveniently pre-curated by a slaverishly devoted volunteer staff of designers and design fans. You don’t have to have been blessed with one of its coveted invites to subscribe to its main RSS feed, and then there you go: 1:http://feeds.feedburner.com/ffffound/everyone a fountain of fresh design, photography, and art, right there in your feed reader, with new stuff piped in from the zeitgeist minute by minute. Sure, the system hasn’t got any tags or search boxes, yeah, but with a modicum of hunting around, you can find a user whose tastes appeal to your desires, and subscribe to their individual feed. And kablam: their graphic tastes are at your fingertips whenever you like. Ffffound’s look-but-don’t-post invite-only policy promotes a distribution model similar to that which was engendered by Napster and its P2P descendants, in which a small number of taste-making uploaders can distribute a schmorgasboard of content to hordes of downloaders in a vastly asymmetric fashion. But by passing out invitations through the social network of its users, ffffound follows in the footsteps of OiNK (the now-legendary BitTorrnet music hub) in creating a selfreinforcing community standard. Invites only go to those who users think would use ffffound “right”, the nature of which can only be gleaned from observation.

1: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/tees/7057812.stm

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Distributed Curation, part 2

Figure 3: Tips for designers who want to be ffffound. Ripped off from Jasper Johns’ Tips for Artists Who Want To Sell ( figure 4, below).

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Much as psychoacoustically compressed audio files are delivered minus the grounding context of record packaging and liner notes, images on ffffound are ripped from their context and tossed upon the totalizing non-ground that is the sites’ white background. The “quoted from” link that ffffound furnishes is, in many cases, completely useless — bookmarking an image after going directly to its URL simply renders the “quote” link redundant. Furthermore, if such a directly-posted image is from a site with many users (like flickr, say, or facebook) it is impossible to trace the post back to the page in which it was originally situated. The “quoted from” link is also less than compatible with blogs: if I post to ffffound from a blogs’ front page, and the blogger puts up a few new entries, the originating article will move off of the page. To find the source of the image, then, you’d have to root through the blogs’ archive… a task which ranges from eye-rollingly irritating to nigh-impossible, depending on whose site you’re specifically concerned with.

1: http://ffffound.com/image/7e6dca878bc65620558b324a10a57349a452d660?c=203167

And but so: ffffound users could themselves navigate to the right urls, only posting images when it is respectful (morally, if not legally) to do so. But they don’t. I know I don’t: when I see an image I like on the internet these days, I almost immediately ask, “is it ffffindable??” I have even caught myself thinking this about actual physical objects I see in real life.

1: http://flickr.com/photos/fish2000/sets/72157603337021757/

Figure 5 (left): Rrrreal Llllife Ffffound. (It was inevitable.)

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□□□■□

Distributed Curation, part 2

See, what really drives ffffound, though, is love. I love finding and sharing and swapping and trading ffffound images until I’m swimming in them. We all do. It’s sorta like the card game War, and sorta like going to Printed Matter… sorta del.icio.us and sorta HotOrNot (or, more currently, commandshift3). But I am starting to fear that that love may eventually create something nasty. Ffffound already has climbed to the top of many designers’ bookmark lists; the individuals behind some of the more popular design blogs, like SwissMiss and SpeakUp, have presences  on ffffound. Such highprofile endorsement legitimizes ffffound as a resource, and allows visitors to gloss over the complex issues of attribution and intellectual property as they ogle ffffound’s visual schmorgasbord. I fear that with each image we post to it, ffffound gets riper for some sort of reckoning in these perilously unresolved arenas.

1:http://printedmatter.org/ 1:http://commandshift3.com/ 1: http://swissmiss.typepad.com/

We shall see. Will they add more features? Will they take some away? Will the site remain in beta, or will it open its doors to the public? Will an imitator challenge ffffound’s hegemonous hold on “image bookmarking”? Will such an imitator fall first to legal scuffles? Who the fuck knows. I do not. Yeah.

1: http://underconsideration.com/speakup/ 1: http://ffffound.com/home/underconsideration/found/ 1: http://ffffound.com/home/swissmiss/found/ 1: http://www.mandatorythinking.co.uk/adaptation.html

Figure 6 (background): Escape, from Mandatory Thinking.

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13 ◊▶▶ Influences: A Crossmodal Trainwreck

11 ◊▶▶ Influences: A Crossmodal Trainwreck Originally written for “Writing Design Criticism”, a RISD graduate studies class on the eponymous subject, taught by David Sokol in the Spring of 2006. First published online in March 2007, on *0 The collaborative blog got its name from this class, as it began its life as a repository for the articles produced in its course. David suggested it and I built it. In the very near future, it will likely be consumed by Design Rock City.

Writing Design Criticism.*0 

1: http://writingdesigncriticism.com/

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W *1 Or, more likely, one which had commissioned from a technically-minded subordinate of theirs. *2 See the entries for “book reviews” and “grandmother” in Influences, on pages 33 and 102, respectively, for examples of this sort of thing. *3 See “internal structures” in Influences, on page 122 (although as with content from Wikipedia and such sources, the veracity and precision of any userauthored reference source is always debatable.)

hen Anna Gerber and Anja Lutz presented Influences at a lecture at RISD last year, they focused on the unique database application they had concocted*1 . At first brush, Influences wasn’t even a book, it was a wiki-esque compendium of design-oriented footnotes and citations. The content they went through ranged from the personal anecdotes of A- and B-list designers,*2 to somewhat more rigorous explications.*3 Designers, artists, and others who personally knew Anna and Anja had been doled out login credentials to their database, where they could expound on any designrelated topic that they chose.

I was convinced that Influences was a website until halfway through the presentation, when Anna and Anja revealed that they had commissioned a tool that could transform the content of the entire database into an InDesign file, rendering a print version of the sites’ dynamic content with the click of a button. This, they described, was how they would produce Influences, the book, as the output of the database “would provide an excellent starting point” for such a project. What they did not show was how the elaborate crosslinking of the all the database entries would be handled, but I assumed they would come up with a wonderful and marvelous typographic footnoting system, or some such thing. To me, this was the exciting kernel of such an ambitious project. How would such renowned and intelligent designers manage to condense and distill the dynamic power of a modern database system into a book?

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How, indeed. Upon opening Influences for the first time, I was dismayed to see pages that almost exactly resembled the raw output of the transformation program Anna and Anja had demonstrated. It consists of a simple two-column layout, with room at the top for thumbnail images. Upon leafing through, I found that only eight or so spreads within the 268-page primary “lexicon” broke from this format. That would be fine, really, if the information in the book was of any use. It’s hard, I will grant, to translate hypertextual information into a legible print system.*4 But Influences fails at the task.

Figure 1 (below): Influences, pages 104 - 105

God knows, many have tried, including myself. In my own work, when I had to cite URLs, I used a special footnote symbol, with its own color, to denote a URL. I then listed the URL itself in the margin, and I reproduced a URL index at the end of the book, for maximum clarity. ... To be sure, that’s not the only way to do it. My goal was to give the reader the most information on the cite without disrupting the flow.

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*5 As far as I could divine, Influences does not include any sort of system for citing references outside of itself.

Twemlow, Alice: What is Graphic Design For? Rotovision SA, 2006.

*7 Phaidon Press (Editors): The Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture. Phaidon, 2005.

*8 Mau, Bruce (Editor): Life Style. Phaidon, 2000.

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Terms that refer to other terms within Influences are underlined, and preceded with an arrow symbol (→). This makes →most of the text rather →difficult to →scan, as you might →imagine. Furthermore, the actual location of the referent information itself is left as an exercise to the reader. The book is alphabetized, which I suppose makes things a bit easier... Consider an entry such as the one for “Grid Systems in Graphic Design”, on page 105. This entry contains seven such callouts, three of which are within a quote. The quotee in this case, one Nik Thoenen, is not himself an Influences referent, so neophyte designers such as myself have to look this Nik person up the old-fashioned way, using reference systems outside of Influences like Google or Nexis*5 . This leads me to wonder: is the whole thing a big in-joke? Only friends of the authors could contribute to the database, and the whole thing is impossible to even view online, at the time of writing. In fact, I only know about Influences’ data backend because I attended the lecture; not only does the book fail to explain this aspect of its authorship in any way, it explains nothing about itself whatsoever. There is no introduction, no foreword, no “how to use this book” type thing. We are only offered some maddeningly vague, selfcongratulatory bullshit that appears in the endpapers:

“Who’s Who” style books are quite the rage in the graphic design realm. Alice Twemlow put one out last summer*6 after surveying a broad range of contemporary practitioners. Phaidon has given us their mammoth Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture*7, and the AIGA regularly pumps out annuals and compendiums that are equally at home on a designer’s shelf or a coffeetable in a Wallpaper* photoshoot. It is therefore hard to understand why Anna and Anja would painstakingly create a system that could set their work apart from the others — their database — and then subsequently use it so poorly. Perhaps they will eventually release the fruits of their contributors’ labors to the public, and create a resource that is truly “cumulative, but always in flux”, as the endpapers say.Until then, Influences will likely suffer a fate similar to Life Style*8: largely unread by those who conspicuously display it on their bookshelves.

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14 • □▪ Praxis: MFA Thesis Defense Presentation Slides

08 •□▪ Praxis: MFA Thesis Defense Presentation Slides The text slides from my MFA defense presentation, as I delivered it on 17 May, 2008, in Room 103 of the RISD Mason Building (née “CIT.”)

The talk I gave with these slides, and the presentation of my work and its subsequent discussion, was witnessed by my graduating class and many members of the full-time faculty. Critics included Alicia Cheng, David Reinfurt, and Alice Twemlow.

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10 ◊● Graphics Design: Parallel Practices Originally published on Scintillating Bullshit in December 2007.

1: http://objectsinspaceandtime.com/~/fish/sb/

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1: http://wc.rootsweb.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/igm.cgi?op=GET&db=brianrandall&id=I406 1: http://suenguyen.com/

realize that I throw the term graphics design around without defining it, and that is bad. I would like to take a moment to point out that graphics design is a separate field from ours — a fraternal-twin idea and methodology to what we know as graphic design. Although graphics designers frequently share tools and techniques that are also employed by graphic designers — most notably Adobe Photoshop — graphics designs’ systems and methods of practice are distinctly parallel. Its uniqueness extends to its related topics and key sub-disciplines, such as illustration, typography, visual language, and composition logic.

*1 The origin of Angell Street’s second “l” was in fact a typographic error, which became “correct” after standing uncorrected long enough. (See 1 for notes and discussion). Other streets throughout Providence (and, presumably, the rest of humankinds’ kingdom) have acquired their names in a similar fashion.

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I, myself, was confused by the phrase at first — I thought it to be a simple neologism, coined by ignoramuses, perchance formed when an innocent spelling error was erroneously allowed to stet. The subsequent and seemingly innocuous addition of the “s” to “graphic design” had thus been incorporated into the trade lexicon, in the same way the extra “l” was added to Angell Street in Providence.*1 At the beginning of the 2006 Fall semester, risd graphic design graduate student Sue Nguyen spotted an 8x10” laser-printed ad with tear-off phone numbers, set in Times New Roman via Microsoft Word, advertising the need of a local business for a “graphics designer.” The ad went on to detail a fantastically shitty proposition in which you, this putatively employed graphics designer, would be saddled with a fantastic spectrum of horribly grueling work for the company in question. Furthermore, you wouldn’t get paid, or recompensed for your extraordinary services in

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any other way, but that was OK because “the work would contribute to your portfolio” or some such nonsense. Sue had plucked this ad from the provence of whatever bulletin board she found it, and stuck it on the interior door of the studio as a provocative joke. In this, it was quite effective. The advertisement’s blatant contempt for the employee it was meant to ensnare — the spelling of whose professional title wasn’t worth a second thought — was pretty amusing to all of us in the studio. We joked about our own “graphics design” when self-conscious or unsure of ourselves, as was wont to happen as we pursued our expensive graduate educations through the night and beyond. Our usage of “graphics design” evolved out of this camaraderie — as critically-minded, theoretically trained designers, it’s handy to have a derisive nom de guerre when referencing the sort of contemporary graphic work that is pervasive in spite of (and perhaps because of) its lack of nuance and contextual awareness. You know — awkward, thoughtless shit. The clumsiness of graphics designs’ superfulously pendant “s” makes it a perfect match to describe, say, the compositional trainwrecks that frequently grace American institutional brochures. Or the stumblingly self-assured typography used by architects — even famous, well-paid architects — whose cross-disciplinary design skills are truly unbounded in their ambition and scope. I was quite amused to find the term in active use in many other places besides the risd graduate studio, employed in the same fashion by many other design practitioners just like us. Linguistically, the meaning of the phrase “graphics design” directly correlates to how it is used: practitioners who lack enough systematic rigor and contextual concern to not care about the extra “s” are, in all likelihood, equally oblivious to the sort of straightforward concerns that specifically delineate the one-“s” graphic designers.*1

1: http://unstudio.com/

A wonderful case-in-point in this case can be had by inspecting the graphicsdesign tag on Flickr (1). Since Flickr is updated in realtime, queries for new and evolving terms like ours offer a peek at the Internetusing populist Zeitgeist of language, which is very neat, I think.

1: http://flickr.com/photos/tags/graphicsdesign/

“Deliniation from what?”— the question is worth asking, considering my unflinching assertion of an endemic self-conscious blight on the self-esteem of contemporary designers since the first paragraph of this document. As I’ve discussed, one element of the feedback loop that fuels this malaise is the idea, prevalent among designers, that accessible technology cheapens the

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practice of graphic design. We fear that a pirated copy of Photoshop is all you need these days to claim a level of communicative power that, previously, could only be attained through years of exhaustive study, backbreaking apprenticeship, calculated business strategy, and the like.

*1 Dare I invoke his reviled name.

It is important to note, in many cases, that these fears are quite well-justified. At the end of the day, design has no sacred cows beyond what is perceived of it by its audience. The systems and scales of communication can frequently sing most harmoniously when smashed to bits. For every heroically anal Müller-Brockmann or Bringhurst, there’s a preeningly iconoclastic Chantry or Carson.*1 Default design is often adopted by designers attempting to exploit the accumulated moral authority of the hard sciences, framed as the logical conclusion to pervasive and logical systems that have been mapped out by the experts who have come before us. Conversely, the precedents set by visible iconoclasts’ vocal rejection and distortion of canonical norms pile up, over time, into a legitimacy and language that untrained Photoshop monkeys can use to defend and justify their sloppy work. Tomato and dadaists are famous! See, no one needs to use grids anymore — why should I?

*1 Much like his contemporary, the canonically noteworthy Adolf Loos, Jan Tschichold had a well-articulated appreciation for stuff that wasn’t perfectly designed: “The book designer strives for perfection; yet every perfect thing lives somewhere in the neighborhood of dullness and is frequently mistaken for it by the insensitive. In a time that hungers for tangible novelties, dull perfection holds no advertising value at all. A really well-designed book is therefore recognizable as such only by a select few. The large majority of readers will have only a vague sense of its exceptional qualities. Even from the outside, a truly beautiful book cannot be a novelty. It must settle for mere perfection instead.” This quote, from The Form of the Book (§1), could be talking about graphics design qua contemporary advertising. If you think about it. §1 Tschichold, Jan: The Form of the Book (Essays on the Morality of Good Design). Hartley & Marks, 1991 (3rd Ed.), pp. 180.

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I’d worry that I should sound like a bitterly fulminating curmudgeon at this point, but for the fact that you can’t really swing a dead cat without hitting a corroborating example. Illegible type, suboptimal color schemes, ugly and unnecessary formal elaboration — it’s much more productive, ultimately, to criticise the whiny ontological trickery of my fellow graphic designers, and leave the discussion of graphics design to its respective experts. To call out graphics design for being bad graphic design is to aim for the low-hanging fruit — talking shit about the unending mountains of problematic amateur work out there (which, for what it’s worth, is often executed with the best of intentions) does not make for better graphic design. At least, not beyond the cautionary value that can be wrung from the occasional deft Tschicholdian skewering.*1 But really, it’s healthier to let graphics design flourish. It’s clearly a highly entrenched and evolved practice — a parallel agency, like the shadow police department in Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep — with its own conventions and modes. As we know it, graphic design is far less equipped to take on the tasks

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in graphics design’s purview — we would overthink the typographic heritage of every “Doritos” wrapper. A welltrained graphics designer can make animated fifty web banners in the time it takes a graphic designer to sketch out as many concept directions for a logotype, and the nimble moves of such a graphics designer may very be attributable to her very lack of contextual awareness. This is what we talk about, when we talk about graphics design. As a neologism, the term may not be fated to find its way into the canonical lexicon, but the idea of graphics design has been around a while. I particularly like it because of its contextually-correlated meaning, which serves to solidify its usage as a descriptive term, rather than an insult or a slur. That said, it’s pretty snarky — but snark is best served on platter of sneaky references and in-jokes, rather than invective. I’ll leave its future use up to the future graphic designers who take my place here at risd... after all, it’s likely that a few of them are graphics designers who are looking to change careers.

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Berman, Marshall. All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. Penguin Books (Reprint), 1988. Engels, Friedrich & Marx, Karl. The Communist Manifesto. Penguin Classics (Reprint), 1985. Hofstadter, Douglas R. Gödel, Escher, Bach. Vintage (Reprint), 1985. Ronell, Avital. Stupidity. University of Illinois Press, 2003. McKirahan, Jr., Richard D. Philosophy Before Socrates. Hackett, 1994. Hackforth, R. (Annotator). Plato’s Phaedrus. Cambridge University Press (Reprint, Translation), 1997. Jowett, Benjamin (Translator and Annotator). Plato’s Republic. Barnes and Noble Books (Reprint, Translation), 1999. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things. Vintage (Reprint), 1994. Shunryu, Suzuki. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. John Weatherhill (Reprint), 1983. Paul Reps (Compiler). Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. Arkana / Penguin Books, 1957. Norman, Donald A. The Design of Everyday Things. Basic Books (Reprint), 2002. Huyler, Jerome. Locke in America. University Press of Kansas, 1995. Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. Princeton University Press, 2005. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden and Civil Disobedience. Houghton Mifflin (Reprint), 2000. West, Cornell. Race Matters. Vintage, 1994. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning Of Style. Routledge (Reprint), 1999. Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. MIT Press (Reprint), 1965. Lionni, Leo. Little Blue and Little Yellow. HarperCollins, 1959. Reprotype Typeface Catalogue. Publishing date unknown. Stein, Freidl Ott. Typography. Black Dog & Leventhal, 1998. Child, Heather. Calligraphy Today. Studio Books, 1963. Müller-Brockmann, Josef. Grid Systems in Graphic Design. Niggli (Reprint), 1996. Kunz, Will. Typography: Macro- +Micro-Aesthetics. Niggli, 2000.

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Spiekermann, Erik. Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works. Adobe Press, 1993. Tschichold, Jan. Die Neue Typographie. University of California Press (Reprint, Translation), 1998. Hornung, Clarence P. Hornungâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Handbook of Designs and Devices. Dover, 1932. Bringhurst, Robert. The Elements of Typographical Style (Version 2.5). Hartley & Marks, 2002. Strunk Jr, William & White, E. B. The Elements of Style. Penguin Press (Illustrated reprint), 2005. Elam, Kimberly. The Geometry of Design. Princeton Architectural Press, 2001. Bailey, Stuart & Bilak, Peter. Dot Dot Dot #7. Dot Dot Dot, 2003. Bailey, Stuart & Bilak, Peter. Dot Dot Dot #8. Dot Dot Dot, 2004. Bailey, Stuart & Bilak, Peter. Dot Dot Dot #9. Dot Dot Dot, 2005. Martens, Karel. Printed Matter / Drunkwerk. Hyphen, 1996. Froelich, Janet (Editor, Compiler). Fresh Dialogue #2. AIGA / Princeton Architectural Press, 2001. Emigre (Editors, Publishers). Emigre #67. Emigre / Princeton Architectural Press, 2004. Emigre (Editors, Publishers). Emigre #64. Emigre / Princeton Architectural Press, 2003. Codrington, Andrea (Editor). AIGA Trace V1N1. AIGA, 2001. Codrington, Andrea (Editor). AIGA Trace V1N3. AIGA, 2001. Helfland, Jessica. Screen: Essays on Graphic Design, New Media, and Visual Culture. Princeton Architectural Press, 2001. Heiss, Florian (Editor, Compiler). Fuse #17. Fuse, 1999. Nurosi, Aki. Colorful Illusions. Sterling, 2000. Albers, Josef. Interaction of Color (Revised Edition). Yale University Press (Reprint), 1975. Itten, Johannes. The Elements of Color. Wiley (Reprint, Translation), 2003. Itten, Johannes. Design and Form (Revised Edition). Wiley (Reprint, Translation), 2003.

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Colophon It is not possible for me to thank the massive horde of individuals who has helped me in some way with this,so I am not even going to try to enumerate them all. but I am confident that anyone who actually reads this will be able to step up to a mirror, meet their own gaze, and know for themself how I feel about them.