GUTENBERG & BEYOND
Graphic Design in Review: Past, Present, Future
THE PRINTING PRESS CHANGES THE WORLD
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By Linn Vizard Design is one of the fundamental human activities we undertake as a species. Many definitions and characterizations of design capture this—for example Herbert Simon talks about design as moving from ‘existing situations to preferred situations.’ The act of designing is a human impulse to deal with the world around us and shape it to our convenience and liking. Victor Margolin talks about small d design as “what people have always created to satisfy needs and organize their environment.”
Table of Contents Introduction
CHAPTER 01
Johannes Gutenberg
Copperplate Engraving
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5 6
Movable Typography 10 Punch 12
CHAPTER 03
CHAPTER 02
Metropolis 16 Plakatstil 18 The Poster Goes to War
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Swiss Poster
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Design Is One of the Most Powerful Forces in Our Lives
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Can Posters Still Change the World?
Why Google Is More Consistent Than Apple’s Unorganized iPhone Mess
The Designer Who Humanized Corporate America A World Where A.I. Is Everywhere
If Google Were Mayor
CHAPTER 04
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35
37
40 44
Schedule
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Event Map
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Colophon
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Introduction Twenty‑some years ago, we found ourselves in awe of how computers and the Internet changed so many aspects of life. Just when we thought technology had reached its peak, we were also blithely aware that more was going to unfold. | Today we can only look back at the impact the digital revolution made on how we communicate, the way we work, and even the way we socialize. Graphic design is no exception to this change. Technology now plays a major role in the creation of digital work available in many fields. Portfolio design, presentations, signage, logos, websites, animations and even architectural production have all traveled far since the dawn of the digital revolution. Gone are the days when graphic design was solely focused on the obvious graphic elements of a product like its packaging and marketing materials.
GUTENBERG AND BEYOND
Technology has enabled brands to have more exposure online, allowing businesses to interact with their clients and consumers, which has also allowed us the ability to review and analyze real-time data to measure and see what sources are driving more traffic. We can actually analyze digitally the type of content and graphics that are getting more media impressions, more likes, more saves and, ultimately, are more appealing and converting to an audience. | With the internet as the major source of marketing and exposure, companies have invested so much ion content creation for customer communication, analytics and real-time feedback from consumers. Companies like Ikea and Johnson & Johnson employ the world’s most sophisticated marketing teams to spread their message and gain analytics across digital media globally. For example, according to the Digital Agency Network, Ikea launched a virtual-reality kitchen experience that brings you a life-size virtual IKEA kitchen. The pilot program is aimed at gathering feedback and suggestions from users. This is a great example of how companies are using analytics and customer feedback to improve their content marketing strategies and product offerings.
INTRODUCTION
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01 Printing Comes to Europe
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GUTENBERG AND BEYOND
PRINTING COMES TO EUROPE
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GUTENBERG AND BEYOND
Johannes Gutenberg In Europe, the printing press did not appear until 150 years after Wang Chen’s innovations. Goldsmith and inventor Johannes Gutenberg was a political exile from Mainz, Germany, when he began experimenting with printing in Strasbourg, France, in 1440. | He returned to Mainz several years later and by 1450, had a printing machine perfected and ready to use commercially. | Integral to Gutenberg’s design was replacing wood with metal and printing blocks with each letter, creating the European version of moveable type. | In order to make the type available in large quantities and to different stages of printing, Gutenberg applied the concept of replica-casting, which saw letters created in reverse in brass and then replicas made from these molds by pouring molten lead. | Researchers have speculated that Gutenberg actually used a sand-casting system that uses carved sand to create the metal molds. The letters were fashioned to fit together uniformly to create level lines of letters and consistent columns on flat media. | Gutenberg’s process would not have worked as seamlessly as it did if he had not made his own ink, devised to affix to metal rather than wood. Gutenberg was also able to perfect a method for flattening printing paper for use by using a winepress, traditionally used to press grapes for wine and olives for oil, retrofitted into his printing press design.
Gutenberg borrowed money from Johannes Fust to fund his project and in 1452, Fust joined Gutenberg as a partner to create books. They set about printing calendars, pamphlets and other ephemera. | In 1452, Gutenberg produced the one book to come out of his shop: a Bible. It’s estimated he printed 180 copies of the 1,300-paged Bible, as many as 60 of them on vellum. Each page of the Bible contained 42 lines of text in Gothic type, with double columns and featuring some letters in color. | For the Bible, Gutenberg used 300 separate molded letter blocks and 50,000 sheets of paper. Many fragments of the books survive, with 21 complete copies, and four complete copies of the vellum version. | In 1455, Fust foreclosed on Gutenberg and, in an ensuing lawsuit, all of Gutenberg’s equipment went to Fust and Peter Schoffer of Gernsheim, Germany, a former calligrapher. | Gutenberg is believed to have continued printing, probably producing an edition of the Catholicon, a Latin dictionary, in 1460. But Gutenberg ceased any efforts at printing after 1460, possibly due to impaired vision. He died in 1468.
The printing press is a device that allows for the mass production of uniform printed matter, mainly text in the form of books, pamphlets and newspapers. Created in China and revolutionizing society there, the press was further developed in Europe in the 15th Century.
During the Renaissance Schoffer made use of Gutenberg’s press as soon as it was acquired, and he is considered to be a technically better printer and typographer than Gutenberg was. Within two years of seizing Gutenberg’s press, he produced an acclaimed version of The Book of Psalms that featured a three—color title page and varying types within the book.
PRINTING COMES TO EUROPE
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Copperplate Engraving The highly skilled craft of engraving, in which a wedge-shaped metal tool known as a burin is used to gouge clear, sharp furrows in a metal plate, appears to have been adapted from goldsmithing. Two of the great early masters of the technique in the North, Martin Schongauer and Albrecht Dürer, had fathers who were goldsmiths, and in Italy the medium seems to have its origins in the niello plaques—small engraved plates of silver or gold whose incisions were filled with a dark substance to shade the design—made by Florentine goldsmiths. The earliest engravings were produced in Germany in the 1430s but the first monumental engravings, rivaling painting in their ambition, were created in the 1470s—in Germany by Schongauer and in Italy by the Italian painter Andrea Mantegna. Schongauer raised engraving from a minor craft to a major art form with compelling works like the Saint Anthony Tormented by Demons, in which deeply engraved lines create a vivid linear pattern against the white background. To create texture, Schongauer used a great variety of strokes—from the long, sinuous lines that create the beard of the saint and the curling fur of one of the demons, to the short flecks of the saint’s coarsely woven robe; he also made use of crosshatching in the deepest shadows to model the forms.
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Mantegna, on the other hand, was interested above all in achieving the tone that would give his figures a three-dimensional presence, evolved a technique of shading his engravings with short lines of varying width, a method that seems to have derived from his drawing practice. Mantegna’s idiosyncratic approach was not well suited to printing large editions; however, early impressions of his engravings such as the Bacchanal with a Wine Vat show the subtle tonalities that could be obtained with this method. Albrecht Dürer, a great admirer of Mantegna’s pictorial inventions, derived his engraving technique from Schongauer and other Northern engravers. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Dürer carried the technique to a degree of richness and detail that has never been surpassed. His Adam and Eve contains an almost unimaginable density of fine distinct lines, whose great variety creates form, texture, and shading simultaneously. Dürer’s closest rival was the Netherlandish artist Lucas van Leyden, whose innovative approach to both subject matter and technique can be seen in The Poet Virgil in a Basket. Lucas’s style of engraving is characterized by long, flowing, gently curved strokes that impart grace to his draped figures, emphasize gesture, and unify the image. | At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Italian engraver Marcantonio Raimondi developed an influential technique that effectively translated Raphael’s drawings into prints without imitating the painter’s actual marks.
Goltzius and his students and followers represent the last heroic age of engraving—in the next century, while the difficult craft of engraving would still be practiced by professionals as a means of reproducing the artwork of others, the most talented artists would turn to the more easily mastered technique of etching.
COPPERPLATE
PRINTING COMES TO EUROPE
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The Printing Press
GUTENBERG AND BEYOND
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Movable Typography
. Typography traces its origins to the first punches and dies used to make seals and currency in ancient times. The uneven spacing of the impressions on brick stamps found in the Mesopotamian cities of Uruk and Larsa, dating from the 2nd millennium BC, may have been evidence of type where the reuse of identical characters were applied to create cuneiform text. Babylonian cylinder seals were used to create an impression on a surface by rolling the seal on wet clay. Typography was also realized in the Phaistos Disc, an enigmatic Minoan print item from Crete, Greece, which dates between 1850 and 1600 BC. It has been proposed that Roman lead pipe inscriptions were created by movable type printing, but German typographer Herbert Brekle recently dismissed this view. | The essential criterion of type identity was met by medieval print artifacts such as the Latin Pruefening Abbey inscription of 1119 that was created by the same technique as the Phaistos disc. The silver altarpiece of patriarch Pellegrinus II (1195−1204) in the cathedral of Cividale was printed with individual letter punches. The same printing technique can apparently be found in 10th to 12th century Byzantine reliquaries. Individual letter tiles where the words are formed by assembling single letter tiles in the desired order were reasonably widespread in medieval Northern Europe.
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Typography is modulated by orthography and linguistics, word structures, word frequencies, morphology, phonetic constructs and linguistic syntax.
Modern movable type, along with the mechanical printing press, is most often attributed to the goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg, who independently invented the technology in mid-15th century Germany. His type pieces from a lead-based alloy suited printing purposes so well that the alloy is still used today. Gutenberg developed specialized techniques for casting and combining cheap copies of letterpunches in the vast quantities required to print multiple copies of texts. This technical breakthrough was instrumental in starting the Printing Revolution and printing the world’s first book (with movable type) the Gutenberg Bible. | Computer technology revolutionized typography in the 20th century. Personal computers in the 1980s like the Macintosh allowed type designers to create types digitally using commercial graphic design software. Digital technology also enabled designers to create more experimental typefaces, alongside the practical fonts of traditional typography. Designs for typefaces could be created faster with the new technology, and for more specific functions. The cost for developing typefaces was drastically lowered, becoming widely available to the masses. The change has been called the “democratization of type” and has given new designers more opportunities to enter the field.
MOVABLE TYPE
PRINTING COMES TO EUROPE
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COUNTER PUNCH
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Punch In traditional typography, punchcutting is the craft of cutting letter punches in steel from which matrices were made in copper for type founding in the letterpress era. Cutting punches and casting type was the first step of traditional typesetting. The cutting of letter punches was a highly skilled craft requiring much patience and practice. Often the designer of the type would not be personally involved in the cutting. | The initial design for type would be two dimensional, but a punch has depth, and the three dimensional shape of the punch, as well as factors such as the angle and depth to which it was driven into the matrix, would affect the appearance of the type on the page. The angle of the side of the punch was particularly significant. | The punchcutter begins by transferring the outline of a letter design to one end of a steel bar. The outer shape of the punch could be cut directly, but the internal curves of a small punch were particularly difficult as it was necessary to cut deep enough and straight into the metal. While this can be done with cutting tools; a counterpunch, a type of punch used in the cutting of other punches, was often used to create the negative space in or around a glyph. A counterpunch could be used to create this negative space, not just where the space was completely enclosed by the letter, but in any concavity (e.g. above and below the midbar in uppercase “H”). This was accomplished by heat tempering the counterpunch and softening the punch.
Of course, the counterpunch had to be harder than the punch itself. Such a tool solved two issues, one technical and one aesthetic, that arose in punchcutting. | Often the same counterpunch could be used for several letters in a typeface. For example, the negative space inside an uppercase “P” and “R” is usually very similar, and with the use of a counterpunch, they could be nearly identical. Counterpunches were regularly used in this way to give typefaces a more consistent look. The counterpunch would be struck into the face of the punch. The outer form of the letter is then shaped using files. | To test the punch, the punchcutter makes an imprint on a piece of paper after coating the punch with soot from an open flame. The soot left by the flame acts like ink to create an image on the paper (a smoke proof). | Once the punches are ready a mold could then be created from the punch by using the punch on a softer metal (such as copper) to create a matrix. Then, type metal, an alloy of lead, antimony, and tin, flows into the matrix to produce a single piece of type, ready for typesetting.
One characteristic of type metal that makes it valuable for this use is that it expands as it cools, keeping the accurate dimensions of letters. This characteristic is shared by the bronze used to cast sculptures, but copper-based alloys generally have melting points that are too high to be convenient for typesetting. (Water, silicon and bismuth are other substances that expand on freezing.)
PRINTING COMES TO EUROPE
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02 Pictorial Modernism
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PICTORIAL MODERNISM
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Metropolis Despite advances in filmmaking technology, no other film has surpassed Metropolis in terms of its impact on production design. In the allegorical tale written by Lang’s wife Thea Von Harbou (from her own novel), the luxurious, futuristic, Art Deco city of 2026—an industrial world with skyscrapers and bridges, was divided or stratified into an upper, elite, privileged class of powerful industrialists and a subterranean, nameless, oppressed and exploited, ant-like worker/slave class. Thousands and thousands of extras were employed, and crude but effective cinematographic special effects achieved many of the film’s unique hallucinatory imagery and dreamlike visions. | The film-with-a-message exhibits the influence of historical events occurring during its time frame of the burgeoning Industrial Revolution, including a time of economic misery and the rise of fascism in a pre-Hitler Weimar Republic Germany following the war, the rise of the American labor movement and unions during the 1920s due to oppressive working conditions, muckraking journalists (such as Jacob Riis), the contrast of poverty with the upper‑crust classes of the Roaring 20s, the rise of immigration into the US and exploitation of workers (i.e., the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911), labor strife (Capital or management vs. Labor), and the 1917 communist uprising in the Soviet Union. The 24 hour clocks in Metropolis have been redesigned, with only 10 hours on their dial.
Metropolis was not a success in its initial German release. It was cut by about a quarter from its original length of 153 minutes for its American release and a German rerelease. These shortened versions were further reedited many times over the decades, and various versions exist in different countries. It also reflects the ongoing struggle between light and dark, good and evil, and the dark ages (magic) vs. modern science. Sadly, the original 1927 version of the film at two hours and 33 minutes no longer exists—and about a fourth of the film has been lost forever, although recently a fuller version of the film was located in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Its fate followed the same legacy as many other classics that were butchered, recut, corrupted and lost, such as Greed (1924), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), and The Lady From Shanghai (1948). After its premiere, the movie was trimmed by 40 minutes and then shortened again. Initially unsuccessful at the box-office, American playwright Channing Pollock re-edited the film to “normal feature length” for its American release by Paramount and UFA (the German distributor that was nearly bankrupted), and reworded the English subtitles. Until recently, it was only available for viewing in blurry, ruined, truncated prints. This famous silent film has been restored most notably twice: | The scenes that were heavily edited out of the original film included the backstory on the conflict between the industrialist and the mad scientist/ inventor over a woman named Hel, another subplot involving the industrialist’s spy named the Thin Man or Slim, scenes taking place in the Yoshiwara “red—light” district of the metropolis, some of the symbolism in the dialogue, and much of the climactic chase scene. | The film Metropolis appears with an opening montage—superimpositions of a gigantic machine of pumping machine pistons, flywheels, a rotating crankshaft, and an off-center disk—all parts thrusting, moving, pounding and turning.
PICTORIAL MODERNISM
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Plakatstil Plakatstil (“poster style” in German), also known as sachplakat, was an early poster style of art that began in the early 1900s and originated out of Germany.
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It was started by Berliner Lucian Bernhard in 1906. The traits of this style of art are usually bold, straight font with flat colors. Shapes and objects are simplified while the subject of the poster remains detailed. Plakatstil incorporated color combinations not seen in other art forms such as Art nouveau. Plakatstil shied away from the complexity of Art Nouveau and helped emphasize a more modern outlook on poster art. Famous Plakatstil artists include Ludwig Hohlwein, Edmund Edel, Hans Lindenstadt, Julius Klinger, Julius Gipkens, Paul Scheurich, Karl Schulpig and Hans Rudi Erdt. | Das Plakat was a German art magazine that was published in 1910 from the Verein der Plakat Freunde (The Society for Friends of the Poster). The society and magazine were founded by dentist Hans Sachs. Lucian Bernhard was also director for the society. | For a poster competition sponsored by Preister matches he took the novel approach of drawing two large matches and writing the brand name above them in clean, bold letters.
Plakatstil, meaning poster style, is a reductive, simple, flat—color design style. The simplicity of this style marked a retreat from the decorative, organic style of Art Nouveau. This reductive design sparked a revolution in the graphic arts and advertising. From the style of Plakatstil, a new form of advertising emerged: the sachplakat (object poster).
The stark simplicity of the design won him the competition, and marked a departure from the fussy and decorative Art Nouveau style, which was beginning to lose its vitality. | With its reduction of naturalism and emphasis on flat colors and shapes, the new style was the next step beyond Toulouse—Lautrec in creating an abstract visual language. Bernhard’s style spread throughout Germany, and became the foundation for a revolution in commercial advertising in pre-war Berlin. The style is one of the most important variants of Early 20th Century Modernism that proved a bridge between Art Nouveau and Art Deco. | In Germany, during the early twentieth century, the style of Plakatstil emerged.
An equally powerful Plakatstil artist named Ludwig Hohlwein arose in Munich who would also have a profound influence on early Swiss poster design and Art Deco.
GUTENBERG AND BEYOND
These posters were done in the same aesthetic, and featured the object being advertised with a thick outline, placed on a flat color background, with bold text. These types of styles have had remarkable influence on modern day graphic design, advertising, and logo design. | While learning about Plakatstil in class, I was really drawn to the design aesthetic. I also found it very interesting how much this style has influenced artists today, including myself. | One contemporary artist that draws inspiration from the Plakatstil style is Nancy Stahl. Her illustration career began off the computer, mainly using mediums such as colored pencil and gouache. The posters she created were heavily inspired by the work of Ludwig Hohlwein. Hohlwein was a graphic artist who made advertisments and war posters in the style of Plakatstil. Her colored pencil and gouache posters were retro, bold, and extremely graphic. Stahl’s poster style was a turning point in her career, and would eventually have a huge influence on her digital work. When she was introduced to digital art, she was instantly hooked. She felt like the computer programs really gave her freedom to do anything. She continued to complete freelance assignments using gouache because the technology was so new and clients were not open to digital work yet. Once she bought her own Mac, she would recreate her assignments digitally in order to teach herself how to make digital work look like a traditionally painted piece. By teaching herself this process, she was able to create pieces of work that had all of the same elements as her paintings. Once Stahl’s clients switched to digital, there was no going back. Her work was becoming more and more popular. Even in this new medium her designs were still just as powerful because of the Plakatstil style that inspired her. Her work was used in corporate identity, in international publications, on packaging, and more. In the late ‘90s, she received her first assignment to create a United States postage stamp, and then she would go on to made more than 16 stamps. These famous stamps are done in a reductive, simple, flat-color style, and they are clearly inspired by the past artists that developed the style of Plakatstil.
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The Poster Goes to War Less than two weeks after America entered World War I, the Society of Illustrators held a meeting in New York City to examine the ways in which artists might rally to their country's cause. Charles Dana Gibson, America's highest-paid artist and President of the Society, received a telegram from former journalist George Creel, currently the Chairman of the United States Committee on Public Information, with a request from President Woodrow Wilson. That request would ask Gibson to appoint a committee of artists to help in producing artwork for the Great War effort. On April 17, 1917, at a dinner at the Hotel Majestic in New York City, the first gathering of artists after the declaration of war took place. Gibson recalled that "We were just finishing dinner when the telegram arrived asking us to participate as artists to produce artwork for our country's cause. Art work that would bolster morale, and compel citizens to enlist for combat, buy war bonds, conserve resources, and to accept sacrifices and losses for their country. That telegram from the President gave us our focus point; we would make art that would inspire a nation."
On April 22, 1917, Gibson met with Creel in New York City and the Division of Pictorial Publicity of the Committee on Public Information was formally launched, just nine days after Creel himself had received his mandate from President Wilson. Creel later described his feelings: "Even in the rush of the first days. | I had the conviction that the poster must play a great part in the fight for public opinion. The printed word might not be read; people might not chose to attend meetings or to watch motion pictures, but the poster billboard was something that caught even the most indifferent eye. What was needed, what we absolutely had to have, were posters that represented the best work of the best creative artists of our time. Looking the field over, it was decided that Charles Dana Gibson was the best man to lead the army of artists." | The muster roll of the Division of Pictorial Publicity contained the names of 279 artists and 33 cartoonists. Among them were such well known painters as George Bellows, Kenyon Cox, Arthur G. Dove, William Glackens, F. Luis Mora, Joseph Pennell, Frank E. Schhoonover, Albert Sterner, H. Giles, and N.C. Wyeth. The roster also included very famous illustrators such as Howard Chandler Christy, Harrison Fisher, Joseph Leyendecker, Edward Penfield, Jessie Wilcox Smith and James Montgomery Flagg to name but a few. In addition there were those whose work for the Division made them famous: Charles Livingston Bull, Dean Cornwell, Harvey Dunn, Gordon Grant, Herbert Paus, and Ellsworth Young. What do we need to do today to support our Troops and to inspire our Nation?
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Gibson described the division operations in a New York Times article: "We have a meeting every Friday night where we meet men who are sent to us by different departments in Washington with their requests for posters, ideas are exchanged and the best artist for the job is selected." Gibson constantly encouraged his artists to create posters to represent ideas, not events. "We must see more of the spiritual side of the conflict and we must illustrate the great aims of this country in fighting this war." Gibson also stated that "there wasn't an artist in the whole division, man or woman who didn't offer the best that was in him." In its twenty months of existence between April, 1917, and November, 1918, the Division of Pictorial Publicity produced seven hundred poster designs for fifty—eight separate government departments and patriotic committees.
PICTORIAL MODERNISM
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Pictorial Modernism
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GUTENBERG AND BEYOND
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Swiss Poster Swiss posters are recognised worldwide for the excellence of their graphic design. From the Swiss travel posters of the early twentieth century to the Sachplakat or Object poster, from the Art Concret or the International Style, Swiss posters have had great international influence on this art form. | The history of this information medium posted in public places dates back hundreds of years. But the poster, the printed sheet of paper on public display was born with the printing industry in the 15th century while the modern poster first appeared in the 19th century. The modern poster characterized by simple colourful motifs printed on large size paper is a direct by—product of both: the invention of lithography and the industrial revolution. | For centuries, the poster was essentially informative in nature; it was the only information medium, which could be used to inform the masses and it is the reason why governments used them as means to maintain their authority. During the 19th century unprecedented economic and urban development brought about the massive production of posters. Numerous businesses, industries, theatres and circuses were created and turned to posters to publicize their activities, to sell their merchandise or to attract visitors. To attract the public’s attention, creators constantly strived to stand out by changing typographic fonts and by trying out inventive designs although it was the introduction of illustrations that truly increased their impact as publicity tools. | The first illustrations were representations reminiscent of popular imagery and book illustrations. The pictures, rich in details had to be closely examined and the text still dominated the page. Sponsors soon realised that by adding a motif they were able to capture the attention of passers-by who stopped to look at the poster and absorbed its content at the same time.
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Thus the evolution of the poster had started from an essentially written content to a pictorial medium. The use of colour lithography further accelerated this process. | Lithography is a process based on the chemical repellence of oil and water. It was invented in 1798 by Alois Senefelder in Bavaria. This technique allows drawing directly on a piece of limestone with a pencil or greasy ink and then rinsing it with water. Oily ink, applied with a roller, adheres only to the drawing and is repelled by the wet parts of the stone. The print is then made by pressing paper against the inked drawing. This process, which can be repeated indefinitely, has totally modified the artist’s relationship to his work. There is no need to call upon a specialised engraver to engrave the initial creation onto wood or metal. The use of limestone in the poster printing process allows the same flexibility and detail one has when drawing directly on paper while fulfilling the requirements of cost reduction, handling and surface. Given these reasons, this new flat printing process quickly spread throughout Europe and has constantly evolved since then. | At first, artists shied away from posters because they were too closely linked to commercial publicity. Subservient to the demands of sponsors, the commercial poster left very little space for creativity. When artists did create posters they often preferred not to sign them.
Other artists like Ferdinand Hodler, managed to make a living from their art and therefore preferred to ignore this process, which was deemed rather demeaning. They usually only created posters to publicize their own exhibits.
SWI
PICTORIAL MODERNISM
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03 Digital Design
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DIGITAL DESIGN
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“Design Is One of the Most Poweful Forces in Our Lives” A new book from critic Alice Rawsthorn explains how graphic, product, and interactive design help—and sometimes unintentionally hinder—humans. “Do you ring a doorbell with a finger or a thumb?” That’s the kind of question Alice Rawsthorn, design critic for The International New York Times, asks when she thinks about design—all design—and the major role designers have in altering our lives. | Her answer, however, reveals a lot about how she thinks of design’s evolution. “The older you are, the likelier you will be to press it with a finger, probably your index finger,” she writes in her latest book of essays, Hello World: Where Design Meets Life. “If you are younger, you may well use a thumb, because it will have been exercised so thoroughly by typing text messages and gunning down digital assailants on game consoles that it is likely to be stronger and nimbler than any of your fingers.” [ Rawsthorn cites this and other mundane behavior to show how technology has impacted design and how graphic, product, and interactive design are key in almost everything we experience today. It’s no wonder, then, that when Rawsthorn speaks, people who care about design’s influences listen. I recently exchanged emails with her to learn more about her mission to get the public to think more critically about design. | “Design is one of the most powerful forces in our lives, whether or not we are aware of it, and can also be inspiring, empowering and enlightening,” she explained to me. 16th-century Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde for example, “invented” the common equals sign when he had tired of writing the words “is equal to” and sought a less onerous way of conveying their meaning. “Choosing a pair of parallel lines of equal length was an inspired solution, and a brilliant example of [graphic] design’s power to solve a practical problem,” she wrote. “There are countless other examples of adroitly designed symbols, not all of which were designed from scratch. The digital incarnations of the hashtag and @ symbol are equally successful examples of design appropriation, rather than invention.” | Rawsthorn added, “It always astonishes me that so many people still fail to appreciate those qualities.” Maybe that includes editors at major publications that cover design routinely as part of a larger commercial eco-system.
But Rawsthorn’s method is to look at intention and function first and then the commercial benefits second. “As a writer,” she continued, “I find design endlessly fascinating, because it is richly contextualized and constantly changing, forcing me to continually reassess my understanding of it.” | As the title of her book touts, the essays in Hello World: Where Design Meets Life evoke cautious optimism in the ability of designers to do the right thing. “Design should always be in the service of a better life, but, unfortunately, it does not always achieve that objective,” Rawsthorn noted. “We can all think of examples of design projects, even the best intentioned ones, which threaten to make our lives worse rather than better. | “One of the most notorious examples is the design of the ballot cards for the 2000 U.S. presidential election in Palm Beach County, Florida,” Rawsthorn explained. “The design was changed in the interests of clarity and legibility, but proved so confusing to voters that it may well have changed the outcome not only of the vote there, but the entire election.” | Design can empower people, and for Rawsthorn, always striving to make design empowering is the ideal. But she concedes that disempowerment, like the case of the hanging chad, is also a consequence of unintentional factors. “I have yet to meet a designer who wants his or her work to be dysfunctional, dispiriting, demeaning, or disempowering, but sometimes it is,” she said. “Not that it is always their fault. Some design projects prove to be damaging because of the way in which they are applied. The computer virus was originally designed as a self-replicating form of software that could be installed remotely without the user’s knowledge, but it was not intended to be malignant. Quite the contrary. Sadly, though, it proved to be open to abuse and to create destructive viruses.” | Many designers are hard-wired to control their environment, so Rawsthorn accepts that design is often steeped in a yearning for power. “But that does not necessarily make it [malignant],” she noted. “Take an information design project, like a road signage system or a subway map, which is intended to be entirely beneficial by helping us to make sense of our surroundings and guiding us safely and efficiently from place to place, ensuring that we arrive at our chosen destination on time and unharmed.
DIGITAL DESIGN
We are controlled by the design of the signage or map throughout that process, but in a benevolent way.”
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Can Posters Still Change the World? For centuries, printed and mass-produced signs have helped activists spread the message of everything from AIDS awareness to the plight of Syrian refugees. In 1987, commuters in New York City started seeing posters on the street reading “Silence = Death.” The images were the work of the pioneering AIDSawareness group ACT UP, and their stark simplicity made an immediate impact. | Two years later, the organization had a graphic-design arm, Gran Fury, which produced a new poster that appeared on the sides of buses showing three couples kissing, two of which were same-sex. Their message: “Kissing Doesn’t Kill: Greed and Indifference Do.” As works of both art and activism, the ACT UP posters gave a face to same-sex couples, inspiring compassion and encouraging awareness of what the group described as “government inaction and public indifference” to the AIDS crisis. | Such was the power of public images to transmit targeted messages long before the advent of social media. From Ben Shahn’s antiH-Bomb design to the Guerrilla Girls’s campaign against gender inequality in art museums, posters have a long history of engaging and informing people through a mixture of artistry, wit, and economy. It would be easy to assume that posters have lost some of their impact in a hyper-connected landscape. But in many ways, the rise of social media has given protest and advocacy posters a bigger audience than ever before, while platforms like Facebook are creating ways to let users craft images featuring their own photo to further the causes they identify with. | This doesn’t mean posters aren’t facing challenges in the Internet age. Commercial ads and billboards are almost always placed in approved venues, and have adapted well to the new technology of the 21st century, with many featuring QR codes, video sequences, and even facial-recognition software. But the humble advocacy poster is printed with ink on paper, and usually hung illegally on buildings, lampposts, and hoardings replete with the “post no bills” imperative. Since most of those locations are controlled by commercial businesses that guard their real estate, they’re often removed before they can be seen by more than a handful of people. | “No one cares about posters anymore, except the designers who make them,” says the graphic designer Matteo Bologna.
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Posters, he implies, are often simply feel-good portfolio pieces that do more for their designers’ careers than for the cause they’re seeking to raise awareness for. | But a number of images, placed by guerrilla campaigners in a large number of spots late at night, have made themselves noticed. In 2014, posters designed by the street artist Banksy appeared as if by magic on Capitol Hill, featuring an image of a small girl wearing a headscarf and letting go of a red balloon. Below the image was the message #WithSyria—encouraging viewers to explore the hashtag to understand the poster’s message, and replicate it by posting the image online themselves. | Banksy isn’t alone in his belief that the medium is still alive. “Posters are a practical way for passionate artists to communicate important ideas and play a role in shaping that public sentiment,” says Aaron Perry-Zucker. “You don’t choose a channel or type in a URL to see them. They come to you as you walk down the street.” | Perry-Zucker is the co-founder of the Creative Action Network, an online community of artists and designers who help raise awareness and funds for various causes. CAN bridges the gap between digital and analog by using crowd-sourcing methods to acquire and distribute printed posters from contributors. In addition to campaigns advocating for such diverse issues as gun control, funding for libraries, and marriage equality, CAN recently launched a collaboration with Earthjustice, a group of environmental lawyers, for a campaign called “JoinThePack,” to increase understanding of the plight of the endangered gray wolf. Posters and shirts are sold for $25 to $30. | “The strength and beauty of a well-designed poster cannot be beat,” says Mark Randall, the co-founder of Design Ignites Change, a New York-based firm that has engaged in grass-roots social-advocacy campaigns for more than a decade. “A poster lodges in your memory more than other mediums because it distills an idea to its core. [It] becomes a brand statement around the issue it represents.” | Randall is currently collaborating with the group Make Art With Purpose (MAP) to develop a nationwide public-art initiative empowering teams of community representatives, artists, and designers to create posters, public murals, and banners that address themes connected to race and social justice. “The images are not a means to an end,” says Randall.
“The goal is to support and continue the public dialogue around one of the most pressing issues of our time.” | Randall agrees that contemporary posters must be part of an overall media strategy and “should move people to do something tangible.”
Yet he notes that some posters become iconic on their own owing to a confluence of events and timing. These include Milton Glaser’s 2001 design I Love NY More Than Ever, Shepard Fairey’s 2008 Hope poster, and the meme-ified British World War II sign imploring viewers to “Keep Calm and Carry On.” | Social media also allows new viability and greater distribution for posters through the countless sharing opportunities on Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and personal websites. “Before digital technology, you had to be out of your home environment. Now, anyone with access to the Internet can view them,” says Elizabeth Resnick, a curator of the Massachusetts College of Art exhibition “The Graphic Imperative: International Posters for Peace, Social Justice and the Environment 1965–2005.” “The world of the poster is now available to anyone on a very personal basis. How we interact with posters has completely changed, and because of its accessibility, people have altered the way they view and respond to them.” | Earlier this year, following the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling on same-sex marriage, Facebook allowed users to cover their profile pictures with a rainbow filter, making their image a poster expressing solidarity with the movement for marriage equality. In some ways, the rainbow posters were the perfect 21st-century heir to the AIDS awareness posters designed by Gran Fury, adding millions of faces to the gay—marriage movement, on a platform more visible and widely accessible than earlier designers could have dreamed. Posters, Resnick says, are made for causes, issues, and campaigns that need “a kick of emotion and energy—issues that are widely understood, but need more action.”
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Why Google’s Design Is More Consistent Than Apple’s Unorganized iPhone Mess A week after Apple’s not‑so‑successful release of its new iPhone operating system, today we get an in-depth look at the strict guidelines that dictate Google’s design team, showing exactly why the Google app icons all have a similar look and Apple’s most certainly do not. Google, per a Visual Assets Guidelines document dug up by Fast Company’s Kyle Vanhemert, has very specific examples that only allow for outlined shapes as icons, rather than nasty photos, or both combined: | Apple, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have a rule like that. The new iOS 7 features some icons that are just shapes, like for the Photos app. But others go for more of a Google-esque geometric shape look, like the Camera app: | Google’s color palette is also, really, really simple with very specific rules on how to use the limited options: | Apple, on the other hand, doesn’t have a specific color set, but it also doesn’t seem to care about the consistency of color usage. On the Safari and Mail apps, for example, the gradient inverts from light-to-dark on one supremely popular, built-in app, then switches to dark-on-the-outsidelight-on-the-inside right nextdoor: A little internal organization, it turns out, goes a long way toward helping everyone else organize their own lives with your product.
That Google has these kinds of guidelines is “not especially surprising,” explains Vanhemert. “The company’s graphic designers, spread across heaps of products on several different platforms, have to have something to reference when they’re nailing down things like app icons,” he writes. “But it’s nice to actually see the guidelines laid out so clearly, if for no other reason than a bit of proof that Google’s continuing to sweat the details.” | What’s more surprising is that Apple, as a company known for sweating details (they even have a new ad out about how “we spend a lot of time on a few great things”), seemingly doesn’t abide by synced-up guidelines for the look of the iPhone; the whole design process seems to have a type of disorganization that Apple just doesn’t usually allow. Apparently, marketing and communications teams designed so many aspects of icons that it clashes with the app design team building others for the launch of iOS 7, sources told The Next Web’s Mathew Panzarino. “From what we’ve heard, SVP of Design Jony Ive (also now Apple’s head of Human Interaction) brought the print and web marketing design team in to set the look and color palette of the stock app icons,” he explains. “They then handed those off to the app design teams who did their own work on the ‘interiors’, with those palettes as a guide.”
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The Designer Who Humanized Corporate America A new exhibit celebrates Paul Rand, a pioneer who re—envisioned the look of megacompanies with whimsical, colorful logos and illustrations. “Visual communications of any kind … from billboards to birth announcements, should be seen as the embodiment of form and function: the integration of the beautiful and the useful,” wrote Paul Rand (1914-1996) in 1947’s Thoughts on Design. | It was a mantra Rand, one of America’s premier mid-century modern graphic designers, lived and championed. An interpreter of European modernism, Rand helped give a playful corporate identity to major American industries and designed some of the nation’s most recognizable business logos—for IBM, Westinghouse, UPS, ABC, even Colorforms. Logos were his forte— but he also lent his minimalist style to book covers, children’s book illustrations, posters, and package designs. | Now, a portion of this tremendous body of work is on display at the Museum of the City of New York. “Everything is Design: The Work of Paul Rand,” curated by Donald Albrecht, is Rand’s first solo New York museum exhibition. For Albrecht, Rand’s work presented an opportunity for the museum to explore graphic design’s considerable impact on the city’s visual culture. “[Rand] is one of those ‘only in New York’ stories of re-invention that many of us New Yorkers think makes the city tick,” Albrecht says. | No Way Out poster designed by Paul Rand (Courtesy of Steve Heller) Rand was born in Brooklyn to two Orthodox Jewish grocers and studied, along with his twin brother, at a Yeshiva. After a period spent learning about the Bauhaus and studying at the Arts Students League of New York with George Grosz—Rand went to work in advertising.
As one of the youngest art directors for New Yorkbased advertising agency Weintraub, he designed for Orbach’s department store, El Producto cigars, and the aperitif liquor Dubonnet. He worked for Manhattan publishers Knopf, Vintage, and Pantheon creating abstract book covers and jackets, and gained a reputation with designs for blue-chip companies like IBM, Cummins Engines, Westinghouse, Morningstar, even Enron. [ By 1986 he was such a star that Steve Jobs received special dispensation from Apple’s sworn rival, IBM, to enlist Rand to design his post-Apple venture, the NeXT logo. | The show begins with a selection of his distinct magazine cover designs from the 1930s (including covers for the left-wing Direction and fashion-centric Men’s Apparel), which show him adapting sophisticated European avant-garde ideas about symbolism and dislocation to American commerce at a very young age. It also includes a few examples of the European magazines he was inspired by, as well as a copy of the forward-looking American magazine Look. | “With material this great,” Albrecht says, “a big assertive curatorial viewpoint isn’t needed or welcome.” | The exhibit, designed by the Martin Perrin Studio, has a minimal-modern aesthetic that fits Rand’s own sensibility and underscores the wide range of Rand’s inventiveness. Albrecht particularly wants visitors to the museum to appreciate that art comes from the commercial, as well as the private, sphere. “Maybe that’s something artists like Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons have shown us,” he says, “But Rand was an early and extraordinary advocate of the concept.” | For Albrecht, curating the show was a lesson in learning the power of deft design to boil complex companies down to singularly human symbols. STEVEN HELLER is a contributing writer for The Atlantic, the co-chair of the MFA Design program at the School of Visual Arts, and the co-founder of its MFA Design Criticism program.
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04 The Future of Design
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A World Where A.I. Is Everywhere Microsoft Shows What It Would be Like to Live In A world full of Intelligence. At its big conference for developers on Monday, Microsoft executives were showing what it will be like to live in a world infused with artificial intelligence. | Cortana, the company’s digital assistant and its rival to Amazon Alexa and Apple’s Siri, is at the heart of Microsoft’s effort to embed voice and image recognition into more of its services. Microsoft representatives demonstrated how artificial intelligence could help drones spot anomalies they see from above and recognize the people who come into a conference room for a meeting, speedily transcribing what they say. | Four years into his gig running Microsoft—and after initially proclaiming that the world is primarily mobile-first and cloud-first—CEO Satya Nadella is focused on expanding the powers of Cortana, which is embedded into Windows 10 and has nearly 150 million people using it every month. | But there are limitations, and among them is Alexa’s popularity in the home through the Amazon Echo. Recognizing that Microsoft won’t be supplanting Amazon, Nadella knows that people who use Cortana for core Microsoft services like email and scheduling need to be able to communicate using their home Echo devices. | “We want to make it possible for our customers to be able to get the most out of their personal digital assistants, not to be bound to some single walled garden,” Nadella said, at the Build developer conference in Seattle, as the company demonstrated how consumers will be able to reach Cortana through Alexa, and vice-versa. Microsoft also has some momentum with Cortana. Last year the company began a public preview of the Cortana Skills Kit—mirroring Amazon’s Alexa Skills Kit—where developers could build extensions for the assistant. There were 230 Cortana skills as of December.
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While Microsoft is highlighting the many ways Cortana can be used in the office, the company has yet to introduce a workplace-specific service, even though it could potentially be a way to pick up AI revenue from customers with tens of thousands of employees. It’s yet another way that Amazon is out in front—in November, the company announced Alexa for Business, integrating AI into more of its enterprise services. | The competition doesn’t end there. Apple, Facebook and Google have also been weaving AI into their business products, with varying degrees of success making money from them. If anything, Build is showing just how much Microsoft has to do to catch up. | In AI research, Google’s parent Alphabet is generally viewed as the corporate leader. Last year Alphabet’s DeepMind stunned the field when a computer system it built beat the world’s top-ranked player of the Chinese board game Go. | And in the public cloud business, Amazon has a commanding lead, with 33 percent of the cloud infrastructure services market, compared with 13 percent for Microsoft, according to Synergy Research Group. | Microsoft still has a big advantage, in that it’s been serving large enterprises with Windows, Office and data center software for decades. That customer base could be the key opportunity for building an AI business, just as it should enable Azure to win contracts from companies migrating to the cloud.
Nadella said on Monday that companies need “privacy‑preserving AI, or private AI.”
On Monday, Microsoft showed a few new uses of Cortana in its own apps. Users of Word can have Cortana helpfully chime in and provide information that’s relevant to what they type. And in the Teams chat app that competes with Slack, Cortana can detect that a group of people needs to meet, and will intelligently suggest times when everyone will be free. [ Nadella is trying to show the world that Microsoft can both innovate with cutting-edge services and still be the trusted provider that’s helped protect their sensitive data. While other tech companies are reasonably new to the enterprise and have traditional businesses that involve collecting vast amounts of consumer data, Microsoft is an enterprise software company. And nowhere is that more important than with AI. Nadella said on Monday that companies need “privacy-preserving AI, or private AI.”
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If Google Were Mayor A sister company of the tech giant wants to help develop—and then collect data on—a waterfront neighborhood in Toronto. At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show, there are more vendors listed as selling “smart cities” technologies than gaming products or drones. | That’s a break from the past. The annual mega-gathering of the tech world—which started in Las Vegas on Tuesday—was once a parade of TV screens, smartphones, and other personal electronics. But CES’s dazzling displays have increasingly focused on cities themselves, and the profit potential they present to technology companies. The question, as always, is where that leaves the people who live in them. | From that perspective, perhaps no other project in the world has drawn as much curiosity as “Quayside,” a 12-acre slice of Toronto waterfront in line to be developed by Sidewalk Labs, the urban-tech-focused subsidiary of Google’s parent company Alphabet. Launched in 2015 by its CEO, Dan Doctoroff, and a number of other Michael Bloomberg affiliates, Sidewalk Labs makes much of its urbanist bona fides. The company is now primarily focused on turning the patch of Toronto-owned land into what it calls the “world’s first neighborhood built from the internet up.” | That could mean nearly anything, based on the 196-page vision document Sidewalk Labs prepared that responded to (and won, last fall) a public request for proposals. In working with Waterfront Toronto, the public entity that owns the land, to develop Quayside, Sidewalk Labs would reimagine five dimensions of urban life—housing, energy, mobility, social services, and shared public spaces—with an aim to “serve as a model for sustainable neighborhoods” around the world.
This might be a way for Sidewalk Labs to emphasize how different Quayside will look from, say, Masdar or Songdo, two “smart cities” planned from the top down in Abu Dhabi and South Korea that have fallen far short of their tech-utopian promises.
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A self-contained thermal grid would recirculate energy from non–fossil-fuel sources to heat and cool buildings, while a food-disposal system would keep food waste out of landfills. For cars and trucks, Quayside would be less hospitable than other areas in the city: Part of the neighborhood would prohibit non-emergency vehicles entirely, while bike-share stations, transit stops, and cycling and walking paths—kept useable through the Canadian winter with sidewalk snow melters and automated awnings—would offer “efficient alternatives to driving, all at lower cost than owning a car.” An autonomous transit shuttle would rove some streets. (Waymo, a leading developer of self-driving-vehicle software, is also an Alphabet subsidiary.) | Buildings would be largely prefabricated using eco-friendly materials, to cut back on waste. With a “strong shell and minimalistic interior,” they could be adapted to multiple uses, morphing from residential to retail to industrial, and back again. To support such a futuristic vision, Quayside would test a novel “outcome-based” zoning code focused on limiting things like pollution and noise rather than specific land uses. If it doesn’t bother the neighbors, one might operate a whiskey distillery in the middle of an apartment complex. | With its generous tree canopy, bike lanes, and bustling storefronts, the Quayside pictured in the vision document looks like “quality urbanism as we might know it,” Wellington Reiter, an architect and executive director of Arizona State University’s University City Exchange—an initiative focused on integrating campus developments into Phoenix’s larger urban plan—told me. In many ways, it’s not an especially futuristic vision: In the 1960s, out-there architects explored the idea of implementing modular housing at scale. Microgrid technology and snow-melting sidewalks are not new. And planners have long dreamed up dense and walkable developments that mixed retail, housing, and light industry. Save for the driverless cars, perhaps, these outward-facing innovations are familiar New Urbanist fare.
Rohit Aggarwala, who leads urban policy implementation at Sidewalk Labs, is addressing the CES crowds in a panel this week—one of many ways Alphabet is raising its profile at the convention this year. Aggarwala resists the term “smart city” when describing his work. “It reflects this early–21st century arrogance, that all that’s gone before is obsolete,” he told me in October at CityLab Paris, a conference run by CityLab, a sister site of The Atlantic. He feels the term is also too closely associated with software products focused on wringing maximum efficiency out of cash-strapped city services. Smart tech or not, citizens still must decide how to use the tools that are available to them, Aggarwala said: “We are not the people of Toronto. We need them to help us figure out how to apply this.” | Yet what has drawn the most concern and curiosity with regards to Quayside is a uniquely 21st-century feature: a data-harvesting, wifi-beaming “digital layer” that would underpin each proposed facet of Quayside life.
According to Sidewalk Labs, this would provide “a single unified source of information about what is going on” to an astonishing level of detail, as well as a centralized platform for efficiently managing it all. | Kitchen appliances switched on too long, overflowing trash bins, and high-traffic park benches could be monitored and addressed by this digital layer. So could changes in air quality and spikes in noise levels. Each passing footstep and bicycle tire could be accounted for and managed. This ocean of data could inform urban planning, research, and new software development, including a special platform by which Quayside residents could access public services. | It’s the kind of all-seeing urban omniscience that would stir the heart of any utopia builder. But to whom, and how, would this data be made available? And what would such an arrangement mean for any Quaysider who doesn’t wish to be monitored? In Toronto and beyond, the depth and details of the data collection have sparked public debate. At the first public forum on the project, and in a list of questions related to the project compiled by the journalist Bianca Wylie at Torontoist, privacy questions and fears have come up again and again. | So have issues like inclusion and access. Toronto’s affordable-housing shortage rivals that of many pricey American cities. Aggarwala asserted that, to be successful, Quayside must be home to a representative sample of Toronto’s economically and ethnically diverse population.
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EVOLUTION‑CON CONFERENCE
Schedule
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Juniper Room
Speakers
Monday 3D Print Type Explorations
8:30 am to 5:00 pm 8:30 am to 5:00 pm
Willow Room
Walnut Room
Laurel Room Thursday Design of the 20th Century UX Design Research
Design Exponent, Automattic
Ti Chang
Chris Do
8:30 am to 5:00 pm 8:30 am to 5:00 pm
Cofounder and VP of Design, Crave
Founder and CEO, The Futur
Speakers
Wednesday Design Evolution Design Technology
Strategic Designer
Tuesday
Ashleigh Axios
Speakers
Mind Maps Design Research
Jorge Camacho
8:30 am to 5:00 pm 8:30 am to 5:00 pm
8:30 am to 5:00 pm 8:30 am to 5:00 pm
Alexis Lloyd
An Xiao Mina
Head of Design Innovation, Automattic
Director of Product, Meedan
Franรงoise Mouly
Kat Holmes
Art Director, The New Yorker
Founder, mismatch.design Director of UX Design, Google
Speakers
SCHEDULE
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EVOLUTION‑CON CONFERENCE
Event Map
Design Conference Shows Juniper Room 3D Print Type Explorations
Willow Room Mind Maps Design Research
Walnut Room Design Evolution Design Technology
Laurel Room Design of the 20th Century UX Design Research
780 Mission Street, San Franicsco, CA 94103 USA
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C3
B2
Mission Street
A1
C2
C1
Willow
Tunnel to Yerba Buena Ballroom
Golden Gate Prefunction
Juniper
Elevators
Elevators Shipping Receiving
Walnut
Laurel
EVENT MAP
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Colophon This book was designed by Paul Lubianker. The fonts used are Calluna Sans, Calluna Serif, and Niveau Grotesk. Paper is Moab, Print vendor Plotnet.
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Bibliography Introduction Natalie Norcross Forbes Council forbes.com Johannes Gutenberg Printing Press History.com Editors Copperplate Engraving historygraphicdesign.com Movable Typography historygraphicdesign.com Punch historygraphicdesign.com Metropolis amc filmsite.org — Lee Pfeiffer britannica.com Plakatstil historygraphicdesign.com — internationalposter.com — achambe6.wordpress.com The Poster Goes to War army.mil By James P. McNally, Army Heritage and Education Center. Swiss Poster Swiss Poster History nb.admin.ch Design Is One of the Most Poweful Forces in Our Lives Steven Heller theatlantic.com Can Posters Still Change the World? Steven Heller theatlantic.com Why Google’s Design Is More Consistent Than Apple’s Unorganized iPhone Mess Rebecca Greenfield theatlantic.com The Designer Who Humanized Corporate America Steven Heller theatlantic.com A World Where A.I. Is Everywhere Jordan Novet cnbc.com If Google Were Mayor Laura Bliss theatlantic.com
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Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer—that the designers are handed this box and told, “Make it look good!” That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. —Steve Jobs
AIGA San Francisco 2019 The Professional Association for Design 130 Sutter St, Ste 600, SF, CA, 94104 +1 415 626 6008