SUMMER 2014
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
i n d Editor in Chief Hugo Lindgren
Design Director Arem Duplessis
Deputy Editors Lauren Kern Joel Lovell
Managing Editor John Haskins Story Editors Sheila Glaser, Jonathan Kelly Ilena Silverman
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
INDEX
06/2014
Director of Photography Kathy Ryan
14 Creative Writing Tips and Tricks Where to start when your brain says “No!” By Ali Hale
Designer Oreoluwa Ayoade 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
+ 36 Essay Letterpress Thinking in solid air. Design educators are finding that letterpress nurtures creativity and visual abstraction. By Steve Rigley
d e x 43 Bridging the Gap Between Writing and Designing Typography for Writers, and Writing for Designers. By Roy Jacobsen
50 How To… A guide to self-publishing 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
SUMMER 2014
D:ZINE MAGAZINE
31 One From the Vaults A look back at excerpts from The New Typography by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy.
06/2014
ONE T H E VA
László Moholy-Nagy
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. By Fiona MacCarthy, originally published in the Guardian, March 2006.
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.
SUMMER 2014
Painter Photographer
FROM AULTS Moholy-Nagy settled in Berlin in 1920 and married soon after. His Czech-born wife, Lucia, had trained as a photographer and they worked together in developing the photogram, a photographic image made without a camera when objects on coated paper are exposed to light. They developed photoplastics, fluent, lyrical and curious photomontages, sometimes with drawn additions, which had enormous influence on 1960s graphics. At the same time, Moholy-Nagy was one of the first designers to realise the potential of photography in advertising and commercial art.