Launch issue by Abby Ayoade

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L A U N C H I S S U E

ISSN 9876-7658

9 779876 765320

LAUNCH ISSUE 06/2014

INDEX PAGE

05 Editorial by John L. Walters 10 Spotlight on Creativity This month, we look at

visualisation techniques for typographic layouts. By John L. Walters 22 D:zine News What’s been happening in the creative networks around the world

Editor in Chief Hugo Lindgren Design Director Arem Duplessis Director of Photography Kathy Ryan Deputy Editors Lauren Kern Joel Lovell Managing Editor John Haskins Story Editors Sheila Glaser, Jonathan Kelly Ilena Silverman

14 Creative Writing Tips and Tricks Where to start when your brain says “No!” By Ali Hale 26 Typographic Layout Systems An in-depth investigation of grids, alignments and hierarchies. By Viljami Salminen

Online Editor Samantha Henig Art Director Gail Bichler Deputy Art Director Caleb Bennett Designer Oreoluwa Ayoade

I N D E X

Design Assistant A.E. Velez

58 Book Jackets for Books Not Written Yet A new open collaborative project to work with writers and artists. By Alex Anderson of ME4Writers 61 Create:Write Creative Writing from Students at Manchester Met. By Dr Julie Armstrong

D:ZINE MAGAZINE: CREATIVE WRITING & TYPOGRAPHY

31 One From the Vaults A look back at excerpts from The New Typography by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. 36 Essay Letterpress Thinking in solid air. Design educators are finding that letterpress nurtures creativity and visual abstraction. By Steve Rigley

43 Bridging the Gap Between Writing and Designing Typography for Writers, and Writing for Designers. By Roy Jacobsen 50 How To… A guide to selfpublishing online with Blurb. By Hannah Gal

Deputy Photo Editor Joanna Milter Photo Editors Stacey Baker Clinton Cargill Amy Kellner Copy Chief Rob Hoerburger Copy Editors Harvey Dickson Wm. Ferguson David Vecsey Head of Research Nandi Rodrigo Research Editors Renee Michael Lia Miller Mark Van de Walle Production Chief Anick Pleven

74 Type Tuesday: The magazine now arriving at platform 15 Work produced at St Brides for Eye Magazine with Mark Porter 87 Adobe InDesign CS6. The latest revision of Adobe’s industry-leading layout software. Reviewed by Macworld’s Ben Steers 91 The Elements Of Typographic Style. By Robert Bringhurst. Reviewed by Richard Hollis

Production Editors Patty Rush, Hilary Shanahan Editorial Assistants Yuri Chong Maya Lau Chief National Correspondent Mark Leibovich

ONE FROM THE VAULTS

He was the most inventive and engaging of all the Bauhaus artists, galvanising the movement to ever-greater heights. What a shame Britain never embraced László Moholy-Nagy when he fled the Nazis in the 1930s. Moholy-Nagy settled in Berlin in 1920 and married soon after. His Czech-born wife, Lucia, had trained as a photographer and they worked together in developing the photogram, a photographic image made without the use of a camera when objects on coated paper are exposed to light. They developed photoplastics, fluent, lyrical and curious photomontages, sometimes with drawn additions, which had a very notable influence on 1960s graphics. At the same time, Moholy-Nagy was one of the first designers to realise the true potential of photography in advertising and commercial art. Moholy-Nagy left the Bauhaus after five years in 1928 and established his own studio for typography, exhibition design, photomontage and photo collage in Berlin. Here, in 1929, he created set designs for the Kroll-Oper and Piscator’s theatre. He was a born teacher, convinced that everyone had talent. In 1923, he joined the staff of the Bauhaus, which had been founded by Walter Gropius at Weimar four years before. Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger and Schlemmer were already teaching there. He was brought in at a time when the school was undergoing a decisive change of policy, shedding its original emphasis on handcraft. The driving force was now “the unity of art and technology”. Moholy-Nagy was entrusted with teaching the preliminary course in principles of form, materials and construction - the basis of the Bauhaus’s educational programme. His co-tutor on the course was the painter Josef Albers, whose career was to develop in parallel with his. Albers and Moholy-Nagy are joint subjects of a major exhibition at Tate Modern, London, which serves as a reminder of the exhilaration of being at the Bauhaus at that time. The hyper-energetic Moholy-Nagy also ran the metal workshop at the Bauhaus in Weimar and later in the purpose-designed buildings at Dessau. The metal shop was the most successful of departments at the Bauhaus in fulfilling Gropius’s vision of art for mass production, redefining the role of the artist to embrace that of designer as we have now come to understand the term. The workshop experimented with glass and Plexiglas as well as metal in developing the range of lighting that has almost come to define the Bauhaus.

The lamps were produced in small production runs, and some were taken up by outside factories. The royalties made a welcome contribution to the school’s always precarious finances. Wilhelm Wagenfeld’s table lamp, with its sheeny opaque dome, has remained in production and spawned many imitations. As we choose our pseudo-Bauhaus lighting from Ikea, it is Moholy-Nagy we must thank.

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

“FIERY STIMULATOR,

PRINCIPAL DRUMMER BOY AND TEETH CHATTERER”

: the recollections of other Bauhaus masters and his students have left a strong impression of Moholy-Nagy’s galvanic personality. He became in effect chief publiciser of the Bauhaus, designing the layout for its publications and directing the typography for the “Bauhaus books”, textbooks of Bauhaus principles. Through his “new typography”, Moholy-Nagy set an unmistakable visual image for the school using simple modern letter forms, strong colour, intriguing combinations of photography and text. Single letters, vowels, consonants would be isolated and treated as compositional elements. This typographic approach was serious yet comedic, as was the Bauhaus itself. It was also at the Bauhaus that Moholy-Nagy began the project that was to preoccupy him over the next decade and take its place in his mythology as a kind of alter ego, a Frankenstein’s monster. This is the Light Prop for an Electric Stage, a huge kinetic sculpture for the theatre composed of colour, light and movement: light as performance art. The light prop takes the form of a cubic box containing a glass and polished metal mechanism designed to stand alone on a darkened stage. The audience watches, through a porthole in the box, the machine’s direct response to a two-minute illumination sequence created by 116 coloured lightbulbs flashing on and off.

By the time the light prop was at last completed, he was embarking on yet another life. Moholy-Nagy was now remarried, to Sybil Pietsch, a film scriptwriter he had worked with in Berlin. As the German political situation darkened, they travelled hopefully to London via Holland. Moholy-Nagy’s friendship with JG Crowther, science correspondent of the then Manchester Guardian, had encouraged him to seek refuge in this country. He was also influenced by his reading of Voltaire’s Lettres Philosophiques sur les Anglais, which convinced him that England was a haven of free speech. Of the influx of mainly Jewish refugees arriving in England in the 1930s, many were artists, architects, designers. Moholy-Nagy had been preceded by his former Bauhaus colleagues Gropius and Marcel Breuer. He and Sybil joined them briefly at Lawn Road Flats in Hampstead, one of London’s few modernist buildings, before moving into their own house in Golders Green. There was a solidarity among the émigrés. A touching picture of Moholy-Nagy at this period shows him on the promenade at Bexhill-on-Sea photographing the just completed De La Warr pavilion, whose architect, Erich Mendelsohn, was another recent exile from Berlin.

Moholy-Nagy’s fellow Hungarian Alexander Korda commissioned him to design special effects for the science fiction film Things to Come. He was asked to make a film about the sex life of the lobster, at a time when David Attenborough was still a boy. A quizzical Moholy-Nagy spent several weeks on the Sussex coast getting to know the fishermen, grappling with their dialect, recording their families and close community. At the other end of the social spectrum, he took photographs for Bernard Fergusson’s book Portrait of Eton and John Betjeman’s Oxford University Chest. Where Sybil responded to 1930s England with an often explosive impatience at its snobbery, Moholy-Nagy remained unemotional, professional. The English class structure was the object of his fascinated observation.