Process Magazine

PRO CESS

A Journey Through the Process of Using Typographic Grids All Designs and Writting Done by Richard McKaba

As a graphic designer and a typographer, the

typographic grid is one of the many tools used to not only design the page, but to give form and depth in a flat environment. The grid has been a tool since humans began to create book and keep records in the form of word, a set boundary within a page that allowed a viewer to be given a path to follow, a line to guide them, and a containment system for their eye. The grid may have been the first tool that came around that helped to design the world we know today.

McKaba

Branding

Media

Table of Contents

Making and Understanding the Grid

p2

The Foundation of What Type is and What it Can Be

p4—5

Dividing the Workspace: Where Columns Come Into Play

p 9 — 10

Let’s Bring Design to the More Modern Era

p 14

Articles All examples of grid structures are a collaboration with ProPublica and Matter All articles were written by Richard McKaba

Typefaces Neue Haas Unica Pro

Adobe Calson Pro

Adobe Garamond

Gill Sans

designed by Toshi Omagari designed by Adobe designed by Robert Slimbach designed by Eric Gill

making understanding T H E

1

A N D

GRID

When it comes to understanding the typographic grid, there is no better way to comprehend something so many may overlook, then with a combination of both readings and hands on trial and error. That is exactly how the typographic grid was presented and expressed in class. We were given readings and were then give the opportunity to use the information we had read about to actually go out and set type from a source which we had no control over.

This although in the beginning seemed to be the hardest part, actually became one of the best learning tools we could have had.

It was in being given a text that we could not alter that forced many of us to work beyond ourselves to not only make the entire article fit, but also to make the overall layout one that eased a reader into wanting to read, gave enough space that would allow the reader to not get lost in a massive body of text, and also avoided over-hyphenation along with widows and orphans.

As we dove into working with the grid, we must first be knowledgeable of how each grid system can be used and what function each grid systems serves.

This issue of PROCESS looks to go through the way in which the grids can be used, the idea function for each grid, and also examples of each grid to go along with grid system covered. This issue will also be from the workshop of the apprentice graphic designer, Richard McKaba, under the direction of master typographer Jason Dilworth. All of the examples shown are articles from “Killing the Colorado� by Pro Publica.

As one begins to not only understand the way in which a grid should be used but also how to make one grid work on a multitude of levels, that is when typesetting, and the art of typograpy truly take off and te beauty of each letter begins to create a work of art in a set of margin system.

The first grid we will focus on will be the manuscript grid.

The project under which all of this experimentation, investigation, and practical technique was to do just that; Professor Jason Dilworth set out to use a set article selection to not focus on content on which the type held, but instead on the basic workings and foundation techniques of typographic setting and also the knowledge of the current program in which this technique is done, at the time of this article, it is Adobe InDesign. From this, the novice typographers were then sent to use the given articles to explore the program in the overall goal of learning the ways in which type can be set, how one should start a length of body copy, and ways in which to aid the process in using the programs built in shortcuts. Along the way Professor Dilworth would give tutorials in certain aspects that would not only increase the skill that the finished pieces would present.

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Figure 1

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Figure 2

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Much like a drawing has it sketches that preceed it, the typographic work shown through this magazine also has its first stages.

These first stages being the paper size and margin size skecthes.

I set forth to come up with 10 unique sketches and margin dimensions and then to use each to create all three of the assigned grid structures.

3

The Foundation of What Type is and

What it Can Be

J

ust as child must learn to stand before they can walk, type as well must have a starting point. For many this is to start where books and the written words started as well, in the block of text style that the scribes would coin. Now called the manuscript style of type, it is a place that even those who have no knowledge of type also start and stay. For typographers, it is the foundation for greater typesetting and grids to be built out of.

For me, all grids that I use always start off as a basic manuscript setup and are from that point built up to a more complex grid. But it took me nearly the entire process to come to this way of working and to completely gain a grasp of how to even work with a manuscript grid. Being that to me, all grids are fundamentally an expansion of a manuscript grid, I also feel that the manuscript grid also holds the most potential for type to be communicated.

My process for manuscript grid is a very long and intense process, but one I have come to love and have passion for setting up. Although the fact that this grid is one of the most simple to put into place; it is also one that has to be handled so delicately and with a higher skill than most

other grids need to be successful. To this designer, success is so much more than having the type fit into a page and not be cut off by the printing process, spans more than just readability and spacing. But it is instead the act in which one is able to go beyond having a block of text, but is instead the ability to have the text evoke a sense of purpose and place within the page.

It is also the ability to put together such a well-balanced, intertwined system that can remain unseen to the viewer and instead simple add to the overall being of the work. So setting a manuscript grid is about understanding the text to such a degree that the typographer can understand how much space the text needs as a gutter both between the edge of the page and between the spine.

Therefore for at least for this novice typographer, the time and thought that goes into the margins is a large quantity of the process, to set the boundaries for the text, to allow the space needed for the article to speak the volumes if must to be heard, and to give the reader the negative space to completely take in the message of the text. I feel that when it comes to setting type, that yes the information and body copy is important and essential to the process yet the negative space, gutters, and tracking are just as impor-

tant as a good typeface and a lack of widows/orphans.

To be able to successfully complete this task is something that is not often a quick trick or only a couple times of practice, but instead takes years, hours, and review to perfect. For this reason I feel that no matter how amazing a manuscript grid may appear, it is often the case that it can still be worked on and

made to be even more impressive.

I go these experimentations not to become the greatest typographer who can make a page sing in an angelic chorus, not instead to take a path that will make my typesettings my own, have my own visions and beliefs spoken through them. But even more importantly, to remain unseen by the masses who will see my work. I feel that the overall goal and the highest level of typesetting should not be to be known and recongized but instead the opposite to remain unseen as an unsung hero.

For it is not in the knowing of the grid that it is most useful, but it is instead the invisible guides that lead the viewer through the page that a typographers true talent can be shown and expressed. For the grid, guides, and path to be seen is for the beauty and hours spent practicing to

Manuscript

4

be for not, if the grid is exposed, the magiciain has exposed his deepest and most sout after secret.

For so many of my manuscript grid typographic works, are often my more balanced works when it comes to the negative and positive spaces coexisting and interconnecting. Thanks to the amount of time that I spend on the grids that are more often than not the base and foundation of the more complex grids, the delicacy of my column grid systems and modern/modular grids also contain many of the same elements of their foundational start.

The confinement to be connected, the space to speak, and the white boundaries to add importance to the

words they frame for the viewer to never have to notice. It is only when the text is set so poorly that the viewer is forced to acknowledge it. It is also the job of the typographer, while to do their best work, to also highlight and invoke a sense of power into the reader, into the author that they are abile to comprehend these dense and complex assortment of symbols placed on the page in a way that has been practices for years, was the form that the intellectual humans to come before us would use. The manuscript grid is more than just a foundation, it is the format for type to go from being a post-it not to a classic novel. It is the greatest tool that a typographer will ever be given.

Use It or Lose It Across the West, Exercising One’s Right to Waste Water

By Abrahm n Photographs by Bryan Schutmaat Part 3 of Killing the Colorado

Manuscript fig. 1

A collaboration with ProPublica

High in the Rocky Mountains, snowmelt fills a stream that trickles down into Ohio Creek and then onward toward the Upper Gunnison River. From there, it tumbles through the chasms of the Black Canyon, joining the Colorado River, filling the giant Lake Powell reservoir, and, one day, flowing to Los Angeles. But before the water gets more than a few miles off the mountain, much

5

Manuscript

High in the Rocky Mountains, snowmelt fills a stream that trickles down into Ohio Creek and then onward toward the Upper Gunnison River. From there, it tumbles through the chasms of the Black Canyon, joining the Colorado River, filling the giant Lake Powell reservoir, and, one day, flowing to Los Angeles. But before the water gets more than a few miles off the mountain, much of this stream is di-

For 26 years, Pat Mulroy was the chief arbiter of water in Las Vegas.

The whole time she preached conservation while backing growth.

By Abrahm Lustgarten Photographs by Christaan Felber Part 2 of Killing the Colorado A collaboration with ProPublica

Manuscript fig. 4

Across the West, Exercising One’s Right to Waste Water

By Abrahm n Photographs by Bryan Schutmaat Part 3 of Killing the Colorado

One afternoon last summer, Pat Mulroy stood in 106-degree heat at the broad concrete banister atop the Hoover Dam, the wall that holds back the mighty Colorado River, and with it the nation’s largest reserve of water.

The reservoir is the brain stem of the system that helps sustain just about every person from here to San Diego. But as Mulroy looked out over the drought-beleaguered pool, then at 39 percent capacity, it appeared almost empty.“Scary,” Mulroy said.

The high water mark and an old pumping station on Lake Mead.Few people have played a greater role in determining how the reservoir’s coveted and contested water supply has been used than Mulroy. Much of it has gone to nourish the Southwest’s booming cities, and for 26 years, Mulroy was the chief arbiter of water for the fastest-growing city of them all, Las Vegas.

As the head of the Las Vegas Valley Water District, she handled the day-to-day approval of water for new housing developments, emerald golf courses and towering casinos. As the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority — a second job she held starting in 1993 — she also budgeted water for Las Vegas’ future, helping to decide its limits. As the Water Authority’s general director, Mulroy stretched her enormous influence over state bounds, shaping how Nevada negotiated with the six other states sharing Colorado River water.

Deploying a prickly wit and a rare willingness to speak truth about the water challenges hammering the Western states, Mulroy met head-on a reality few other leaders wished to face: that the Colorado River’s ability to support the West’s thirst to grow its economy and embrace the large population that came with it was not unbounded. She has been lionized for espousing conservation and pioneering a list of progressive urban water programs in Las Vegas while fiercely negotiating tough agreements between the states to use their water more efficiently and come to terms with having less.

But an examination of Mulroy’s reign shows that, despite her conservation bona

momentum of its own.

Los Angeles went through this spurt first, roaring through the 1920s with Hollywood’s ascendance and having its own legendary water wars. Then came Phoenix and Denver. Las Vegas, in many ways, was last. But in its story the tensions are the strongest, the lessons the loudest and the crisis the most imminent.It is all the more powerful because the person charged with managing Las Vegas’ water strategy was Mulroy, whose knowledge and moxie suggested she better than almost anyone could tackle the quandary Western cities had gotten themselves into.

Mulroy, of course, was not the emperor of Las Vegas. She did not have autonomy over every decision the city made about growth. But she did have enormous say.

Dina Titus, the U.S. congresswoman who represents Las Vegas, thinks Mulroy squandered her chance to get ahead of the water problem by managing growth, instead of supporting it unconditionally.

“The Water Authority had the attitude that if people come, they’ll get the water, beg, borrow or steal,” Titus said. “And that’s what they set out to do with very little long-term concern for what the impact was going to be.”

Today Las Vegas is on the brink of a new building binge, and Mulroy, 62, remains uncompromisingly bullish. Standing 5-foot-5, her gray-blond hair wilting in the sweltering sunshine, her upper lip curled as she contemplated the idea that the city should rein itself in. Water can be found, she said emphatically, standing over the near-empty reservoir. Without growth, cities have no jobs and no future to offer coming generations.

“You have Detroit,” she warned. “There isn’t a city in the country or the world that wants to be Detroit.”

Pat Mulroy first landed in Las Vegas in 1974, getting a $50 room at the Desert Rose Motel and sleeping on a round bed with a red velvet comforter beneath a mirror mounted on the ceiling.

She had flown in from Frankfurt, Germany, where she was born and raised, to accept a scholarship to study German literature at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. A narrow slit of windows was cut into the hotel’s cinderblock wall and it looked away from Las Vegas Boulevard, into the desert. The morning after her arrival, Mulroy, 21 years old, spread the curtains, gazed outside and saw what looked like a lava pit. “Oh my god I’m on Mars,” she recalled thinking.

Mulroy went on to earn first a bachelor’s and then a master’s degree at U.N.L.V. Initially, she said she intended to chase a career with the State Department, an interest she picked up from her father, who worked as a civilian in the Air Force.

He was an Irish Catholic Kennedy Democrat. Her mother was German but had grown up in India, spoke five languages

fides, she always had one paramount mission: to find more water for Las Vegas and use it to help the city keep expanding.

Mulroy wheeled and dealed, filing for rights to aquifers in northern Nevada for Las Vegas, and getting California to use less water while her city took more. She helped shape legislation that, over her time at the Water Authority, allowed Las Vegas’ metropolitan footprint to more than double. She supported building expensive mechanisms with which to extract more water for the city’s exploding needs — two tunnels out of Lake Mead and a proposed pipeline carrying groundwater from farms in the east of the state. Not once in her tenure did the Authority or the Las Vegas Valley Water District she ran beneath it reject a development proposal based on its use of water. The valley’s total withdrawals from the Colorado River jumped by more than 60 percent on her watch.

Yet even last summer — staring at the effects of growth and drought on the reservoir, where once-drowned islands were visible for the first time in as much as 75 years — Mulroy apologized for none of it. She bridled at the idea that Las Vegas or other desert cities had reached the outer edge of what their environments could support.

“That’s the silliest thing I have ever heard,” she said, her voice rising in anger. “I’ve had it right up to here with all this ‘Stop your growth.’”ProPublica is exploring how the West’s water crisis reflects man-made policies and management strategies as much, or possibly more, than it does drought and climate change.

Whether and how cities grow is one of the most decisive factors in determining the future of Western water supplies, and, to some extent, the nation’s economy. For much of the last century the West has been guided by a sort of “bring ’em on” philosophy of the more people the better. Teddy Roosevelt first envisioned using the Colorado River’s resources to move west a population the size of that day’s Eastern Seaboard. They came in droves, supported by infrastructure the federal government built — including the Hoover Dam — and the water those facilities helped supply.

The Hoover Dam as seen from the Black Canyon; the fountains at the Bellagio.To an arid region blessed with little rain, the newcomers brought their Eastern tastes: Kentucky bluegrass planted across sprawling yards; fountains flowing with abundance; fruits and vegetables growing in an Eden-like oasis. Hundreds of thousands of settlers turned into tens of millions of people still dividing the same finite supply of water, one that was stretched thin from the very start. By the time it became apparent that growth might need to be controlled to be both productive and efficient, Western sprawl, like a sort of Frankenstein monster, had taken on a

Manuscript fig. 3

A collaboration with ProPublica

verted into dirt ditches used by ranchers along the Ohio Creek Valley. Standing astride one of those ditches one day last fall, Bill Ketterhagen dug his boot soles against the concrete edge of a 5-foot-wide dam. He spun a steel wheel and opened a gate that allowed water to pour into his fields of hay crops. Ketterhagen, 39, manages a 750-acre ranch outside the town of Gunnison, Colorado, for its outof-state owners, mostly growing a mixture of Meadow Foxtail, Timothy, wheat grasses and some alfalfa. The grasses, knee-high with bursts of clover flowers and flat, slender leaves, are cut, baled and shipped to feedlots where it fattens cattle soon to be slaughtered for beef. Thickly built, wearing overalls and a four-day beard, Ketterhagen has a degree in biology and natural resource management and once worked in a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He knows his fields

The ‘Water Witch’

Use It or Lose It

High in the Rocky Mountains, snowmelt fills a stream that trickles down into Ohio Creek and then onward toward the Upper Gunnison River. From there, it tumbles through the chasms of the Black Canyon, joining the Colorado River, filling the giant Lake Powell reservoir, and, one day, flowing to Los Angeles. But before the water gets more than a few miles off the mountain, much

The ‘Water Witch’

Manuscript fig. 5

Across the West, Exercising One’s Right to Waste Water

By Abrahm Lustgarten Photographs by Bryan Schutmaat Part 3 of Killing the Colorado A collaboration with ProPublica

Manuscript fig. 2

Use It or Lose It

One afternoon last summer, Pat Mulroy stood in 106-degree heat at the broad concrete banister atop the Hoover Dam, the wall that holds back the mighty Colorado River, and with it the nation’s largest reserve of water.

The reservoir is the brain stem of the system that helps sustain just about every person from here to San Diego. But as Mulroy looked out over the drought-beleaguered pool, then at 39 percent capacity, it appeared almost empty.“Scary,” Mulroy said.

The high water mark and an old pumping station on Lake Mead.Few people have played a greater role in determining how the reservoir’s coveted and contested water supply has been used than Mulroy. Much of it has gone to nourish the Southwest’s booming cities, and for 26 years, Mulroy was the chief arbiter of water for the fastest-growing city of them all, Las Vegas. As the head of the Las Vegas Valley Water District, she handled the day-to-day approval of water for new housing developments, emerald golf courses and towering casinos. As the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority — a second job she held starting in 1993 — she also budgeted water for Las Vegas’ future, helping to decide its limits. As the Water Authority’s general director, Mulroy stretched her enormous influence over state bounds, shaping how Nevada negotiated with the six other states sharing Colorado River water.

Deploying a prickly wit and a rare willingness to speak truth about the water challenges hammering the Western states, Mulroy met head-on a reality few other leaders wished to face: that the Colorado River’s ability to support the West’s thirst to grow its economy and embrace the large population that came with it was not unbounded. She has been lionized

For 26 years, Pat Mulroy was the chief arbiter of water in Las Vegas. The whole time she preached conservation while backing growth.

By Abrahm Lustgarten Photographs by Christaan Felber Part 2 of Killing the Colorado A collaboration with ProPublica

for espousing conservation and pioneering a list of progressive urban water programs in Las Vegas while fiercely negotiating tough agreements between the states to use their water more efficiently and come to terms with having less.

But an examination of Mulroy’s reign shows that, despite her conservation bona fides, she always had one paramount mission: to find more water for Las Vegas and use it to help the city keep expanding.

Mulroy wheeled and dealed, filing for rights to aquifers in northern Nevada for Las Vegas, and getting California to use less water while her city took more. She helped shape legislation that, over her time at

With the manuscript grid, I found that it not only gave the most interesting results, but also allowed me the most space. With this knowledge I set out to not only push what could be fit into the margins, but to also attempt to use the gutter as something other than negative space and instead use it to give the text an visually compelling shape or orientation. This is most visible in the top left example where the type was forced to lay perpendicular to the body to fit. It also aided in making a corner of the page that was already there more noticeable and pushing the viewers eye to the start point of the article.

Manuscript

6

Across the West, Exercising One’s Right to Waste Water

By Abrahm Lustgarten Photographs by Bryan Schutmaat Part 3 of Killing the Colorado A collaboration with ProPublica

Manuscript fig. 6

Use It or Lose It

High in the Rocky Mountains, snowmelt fills a stream that trickles down into Ohio Creek and then onward toward the Upper Gunnison River. From there, it tumbles through the chasms of the Black Canyon, joining the Colorado River, filling the giant Lake Powell reservoir, and, one day, flowing to Los Angeles.But before the water gets more than a few miles off the The afternoon last summer, Pat Mulroy stood in 106-degree heat at the broad concrete banister atop the Hoover Dam, the mountain, much of this stream is diverted intoOne dirt wall that holds back the mighty Colorado River, and with it the nation’s largest reserve of water.

‘Water reservoir is the brain stem of the system that helps sustain just about every person from here to San Diego. But as Mulroy ditches used by ranchers along the Ohio CreekThe Valley. looked out over the drought-beleaguered pool, then at 39 percent capacity, it appeared almost empty.“Scary,” Mulroy said.

Witch’ high water mark and an old pumping station on Lake Mead.Few people have played a greater role in determining how the Standing astride one of those For ditches one day The last fall, 26 years, Pat Mulroy reservoir’s coveted and contested water supply has been used than Mulroy. Much of it has gone to nourish the Southwest’s was the chief arbiter of booming cities, and for 26 years, Mulroy was the chief arbiter of water for the fastest-growing city of them all, Las Vegas. As Bill Ketterhagen dug his boot soles against the concrete water in Las Vegas. The the head of the Las Vegas Valley Water District, she handled the day-to-day approval of water for new housing developments, time she preached emerald golf courses and towering casinos. As the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority — a second job edge of a 5-foot-wide dam. Hewhole spun a steel wheel and conservation while she held starting in 1993 — she also budgeted water for Las Vegas’ future, helping to decide its limits. As the Water Authority’s backing growth. director, Mulroy stretched her enormous influence over state bounds, shaping how Nevada negotiated with the six opened a gate that allowed water to pour into general his fields other states sharing Colorado River water.

By Abrahm of hay crops. Ketterhagen, 39, manages a 750-acre Deploying a prickly wit and a rare willingness to speak truth about the water challenges hammering the Western states, Lustgarten Photographs Mulroy met head-on a reality few other leaders wished to face: that the Colorado River’s ability to support the West’s thirst to by Christaan Felber ranch outside the town of Gunnison, Colorado,grow for its and embrace the large population that came with it was not unbounded. She has been lionized for espousits economy Part 2 of Killing the Colorado A collaboration with ProPublica

With all my manuscriptgrids, I aimed to not only use the space effectively while also allowing the type to not consume the space. But also to keep true to the form in its ancient and histocial ways.

I attempted in most if not all of my grids to stay true and honest to how a scribe would set this if it were to be hand written.

7

Manuscript

ing conservation and pioneering a list of progressive urban water programs in Las Vegas while fiercely negotiating tough agreements between the states to use their water more efficiently and come to terms with having less.

But an examination of Mulroy’s reign shows that, despite her conservation bona fides, she always had one paramount mission: to find more water for Las Vegas and use it to help the city keep expanding.

Mulroy wheeled and dealed, filing for rights to aquifers in northern Nevada for Las Vegas, and getting California to use less water while her city took more. She helped shape legislation that, over her time at the Water Authority, allowed Las Vegas’ metropolitan footprint to more than double. She supported building expensive mechanisms with which to extract more water for the city’s exploding needs — two tunnels out of Lake Mead and a proposed pipeline carrying groundwater from farms in

Manuscript fig. 7

Use It or Lose It

Across the West, Exercising One’s Right to Waste Water

By Abrahm Lustgarten Photographs by Bryan Schutmaat Part 3 of Killing the Colorado A collaboration with ProPublica

Manuscript fig. 8

High in the Rocky Mountains, snowmelt fills a stream that trickles down into Ohio Creek and then onward toward the Upper Gunnison River.

From there, it tumbles through the chasms of the Black Canyon, joining the Colorado River, filling the giant Lake Powell reservoir, and, one day, flowing to Los Angeles. But before the water gets more than a few miles off the mountain, much of this stream is diverted into dirt ditches used by ranchers along the Ohio Creek Valley. Standing astride one of those ditches one day last fall, Bill Ketterhagen dug his boot soles against the concrete edge of a 5-foot-wide dam. He spun a steel wheel and opened a gate that allowed water to pour into his fields of hay crops. Ketterhagen, 39, manages a 750-acre ranch outside the town of Gunnison, Colorado, for its out-of-state owners, mostly growing a mixture of Meadow Foxtail, Timothy, wheat grasses and some alfalfa. The grasses, knee-high with bursts of clover flowers and flat, slender leaves, are cut, baled and shipped to feedlots where it fattens cattle soon to be slaughtered for beef. Thickly

built, wearing overalls and a four-day beard, Ketterhagen has a degree in biology and natural resource management and once worked in a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He knows his fields could thrive with

much smaller amounts of water — he’s seen them do so in dry years — but the property owners he works for have the legal right to take a large supply, and he applies the water generously.

“When we have it, we’ll use it,” he said. “You’ll open your head gate all the

way and take as much as you can — whether you need it or not.”

Ketterhagen feels he has little choice. A vestige of 139-year-old water

Manuscript

8

Dividing the Workspace: Where Columns Come Into Play The column grid, pillar of the newsprint and the color magazines; that which divides our world and delivers information in the quickest manner possible. That is what the column grid does, it limits the amount of time it takes to read through an article and the speed at which the words can be read. For me, the column grid is one in which the world can be organized beyond the block of text of the manuscript into a grander and more stable system that allows for the world to fit what needs to be said into a rectangle of text named after that which would hold the roof of the palaces to the gods in Greece. It is just that which is what the column does, it raises words and information to a level we now know as news, it takes the stories we know and tell and give them the ability to be taken as fact.

For this reason, in my work I feel that a column must be used not to trick a viewer into taking something as a hard fact or to force the mind to see the words as more than the symbols put to paper in ink, but instead this grid that can give godly power to mere words should be restricted 9

Column

to that which must be told, that which must be known, and the truth.

This is not to say that it is impossible to use a column grid without making words into gods, but instead that one must approach the grid with knowledge of the power it holds and understanding of how one must use it to organize information, and not simple make words seem more important. One example that shows how the column grid can be used for something beyond news is the humble menu.

In this situation, the column grid is not used to utilize the page and the space given. It gives the text, when lacking, the space to breathe without it also become disconnected. As well as limiting the space for the information to drift apart, it also allows the text to fill the page far more than a block (on column) manuscript grid would allow.

It could also be said to be the only grid that nearly everyone in the world knows. This is also interesting to the idea that even though in other areas of design and typography, every country in the world has their own ways of expressing words, the column is used nearly everywhere for papers and to deliver news. Yet this

form of typesetting is one of the most powerful of the grid systems as it allows for not only speed reading and a powerful stance for the information, but it also allows for a high level of difference. That is to say that in any page there is the possibility for numerous columns, this is in contrast to readability. There is a set number of columns in which the readability does reach its peak, any fewer and there may be too many characters per line, and to many columns and the lines may become so short that any attempt to read them confused and loses the reader. For this designer it is in this reach for the perfect number that the interesting piece comes into play. For example in this current article, I have chosen 3 to limit the number of characters while also giving a far left, center, and far right column. This in hopes that with the simplicity of the placement the reader will be able to not only follow the writing but also not lose their place. Yet some may say that I have already missed the ideal number of characters per line (this being known as 75) yet I truly do feel that while 75 may be a “perfect� number per line, 20-30 allows for the reader to shoot down the page at a rapid pace, allows for skimming to oc-

cur much easier and also allows the viewer to get a greater grasp of the content faster. Much like any other form of design there are the accpeted forms and accepted ways, and still there are always diverse and uniqie ways of viewing the same problem.

It is for this designer where the true magic lay, in the unique and daring techniques.

separated, equalized, balanced, and at the same time made to make the reader burst through them and let the “read all about it”. For that is the true purpose of a grid, to be read. Yet for this one grid, unlike the manuscript and the modern grid, it is not one that needs to be hidden, it does not rush to the back and stay shy; it is pronounced and there, and it is so well established that we all have come to accept that no matter what we do, where we go, or how we try to change it, the column grid gives news its new quality yet timeless feel.

In practice, the column grid is much like any other typographic tool. It allows the text to be formed and shaped to give the words more volume, compose a page beyond that which a single column could do. It also opens up the possibility of a side-bar, or smaller column that would allow for further complexity of the type. It allows words to be

Use It or Lose It

Across the West, Exercising One’s Right to Waste Water

By Abrahm Lustgarten Photographs by Bryan Schutmaat Part 3 of Killing the Colorado A collaboration with ProPublica High in the Rocky Mountains, snowmelt fills a stream that trickles down into Ohio Creek and then onward toward the Upper Gunnison River.

From there, it tumbles through the chasms of the Black Canyon, joining the Colorado River, filling the giant Lake Powell reservoir, and, one day, flowing to Los Angeles.But before the water gets more than a few miles off the mountain, much of this stream is diverted into dirt ditches used by ranchers along the Ohio Creek Valley. Standing astride one of those ditches one day last fall, Bill Ketterhagen dug his boot soles against the concrete edge of a 5-foot-wide dam. He spun a steel wheel and opened a gate that allowed water to pour into his fields of hay crops.

Ketterhagen, 39, manages a 750-acre ranch

outside the town of Gunnison,

known, are common in state laws throughout the

Colorado, for its out-of-state owners,

Colorado River basin and give the farmers,

mostly growing a mixture of Meadow

ranchers and governments holding water rights a

Foxtail, Timothy, wheat grasses and

powerful incentive to use more water than they

some alfalfa. The grasses, knee-high

need. Under the provisions of these measures,

with bursts of clover flowers and flat,

people who use less water than they are legally

slender leaves, are cut, baled and

entitled to risk seeing their allotment slashed.

shipped to feedlots where it fattens

There are few starker examples of how man’s

cattle soon to be slaughtered for beef.

missteps and policies are contributing to the

Thickly built, wearing overalls and a four-day

water shortage currently afflicting the western

beard, Ketterhagen has a degree in biology and

United States. In a series of reports, ProPublica is

natural resource management and once worked

examining how decisions on water management

in a division of the U.S. Department of

and growth have exacerbated more than a

Agriculture. He knows his fields could thrive with

decade of drought, bringing the West to the point

much smaller amounts of water — he’s seen them

of crisis. The Colorado River is the most

do so in dry years — but the property owners he

important source of water for nearly 40 million

works for have the legal right to take a large

people across California, Arizona, Nevada, New

supply, and he applies the water generously.

Mexico, Wyoming, Utah and Colorado, and

“When we have it, we’ll use it,” he said. “You’ll

supports some 15 percent of the nation’s food

open your head gate all the way and take as

crops.

much as you can — whether you need it or not.”

But the river is in trouble, and water laws are one

Ketterhagen feels he has little choice. A vestige

significant cause. Legal water rights and state

of 139-year-old water law pushes ranchers to use

allocations have been issued for more water than

as much water as they possibly can, even during

the river, in an average year, can provide.

a drought. “Use it or lose it” clauses, as they are

Meanwhile its annual flow has been steadily

Column fig. 1 Column

10

The ‘Water Witch’

The ‘Water Witch’ For 26 years, Pat Mulroy was the chief arbiter of water in Las Vegas.

The whole time she preached conservation while backing growth.

By Abrahm Lustgarten Photographs by Christaan

For 26 years, Pat Mulroy was the chief arbiter of water in Las Vegas. The whole time she preached conservation while backing growth.

By Abrahm Lustgarten Photographs by Christaan Felber Part 2 of Killing the Colorado A collaboration with ProPublica

Felber Part 2 of Killing the Colorado A collaboration with ProPublica

One afternoon last summer, Pat Mulroy stood in 106-degree heat at the broad concrete banister atop the Hoover Dam, the wall that holds back the mighty Colorado River, and with it the nation’s largest reserve of water.

The reservoir is the brain stem of the system that helps sustain just about every person from here to San Diego.

But as Mulroy looked out over the droughtbeleaguered pool, then at 39 percent capacity, it appeared almost empty.“Scary,” Mulroy said.

The high water mark

and an old pumping station on Lake Mead.Few people have played a greater role in determining how the reservoir’s coveted and contested water supply has been used than Mulroy.

Much of it has gone to nourish the Southwest’s booming cities, and for 26 years, Mulroy was the chief arbiter of water for the fastest-growing city of them all, Las Vegas. As the head of the Las Vegas Valley Water District, she handled the day-today approval of water for new housing developments, emerald golf courses and

One afternoon last summer, Pat Mulroy stood in 106-degree heat at the broad concrete banister atop the Hoover Dam, the wall that holds back the mighty Colorado River, and with it the nation’s largest reserve of water.

The reservoir is the brain stem of the system that helps sustain just about every person from here to San Diego. But as Mulroy looked out over the drought-beleaguered pool, then at 39 percent capacity, it appeared almost empty.“Scary,” Mulroy said.

The high water mark and an old pumping station on Lake Mead.Few people have played a greater role in determining how the reservoir’s coveted and contested water supply has been used than Mulroy. Much of it has gone to nourish the Southwest’s booming cities, and for 26 years, Mulroy was the chief arbiter of water for the fastest-growing city of them all, Las Vegas.

As the head of the Las Vegas Valley Water District, she handled the day-to-day approval of water for new housing developments, emerald golf courses and towering casinos. As the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority — a second job she held starting in 1993 — she also budgeted water for Las Vegas’ future, helping to decide its limits. As the Water Authority’s general director, Mulroy stretched her enormous influence over state bounds, shaping how Nevada negotiated with the six other states sharing Colorado River water.

Deploying a prickly wit and a rare willingness to speak truth about the water challenges hammering the Western states, Mulroy met head-on a reality few other leaders wished to face: that the Colorado River’s ability to support the West’s thirst to grow its economy and embrace the large population that came with it was not unbounded. She has been lionized for espousing conservation and pioneering a list of progressive urban water programs in Las Vegas while fiercely negotiating tough agreements between the states to use their water more efficiently and come to terms with having less.

But an examination of Mulroy’s reign shows that, despite her conservation bona

momentum of its own.

Los Angeles went through this spurt first, roaring through the 1920s with Hollywood’s ascendance and having its own legendary water wars. Then came Phoenix and Denver. Las Vegas, in many ways, was last. But in its story the tensions are the strongest, the lessons the loudest and the crisis the most imminent.It is all the more powerful because the person charged with managing Las Vegas’ water strategy was Mulroy, whose knowledge and moxie suggested she better than almost anyone could tackle the quandary Western cities had gotten themselves into.

Mulroy, of course, was not the emperor of Las Vegas. She did not have autonomy over every decision the city made about growth. But she did have enormous say.

Dina Titus, the U.S. congresswoman who represents Las Vegas, thinks Mulroy squandered her chance to get ahead of the water problem by managing growth, instead of supporting it unconditionally.

“The Water Authority had the attitude that if people come, they’ll get the water, beg, borrow or steal,” Titus said. “And that’s what they set out to do with very little long-term concern for what the impact was going to be.”

Today Las Vegas is on the brink of a new building binge, and Mulroy, 62, remains uncompromisingly bullish. Standing 5-foot-5, her gray-blond hair wilting in the sweltering sunshine, her upper lip curled as she contemplated the idea that the city should rein itself in. Water can be found, she said emphatically, standing over the near-empty reservoir. Without growth, cities have no jobs and no future to offer coming generations.

“You have Detroit,” she warned. “There isn’t a city in the country or the world that wants to be Detroit.”

Pat Mulroy first landed in Las Vegas in 1974, getting a $50 room at the Desert Rose Motel and sleeping on a round bed with a red velvet comforter beneath a mirror mounted on the ceiling.

She had flown in from Frankfurt, Germany, where she was born and raised, to accept a scholarship to study German literature at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. A narrow slit of windows was cut into the hotel’s cinderblock wall and it looked away from Las Vegas Boulevard, into the desert. The morning after her arrival, Mulroy, 21 years old, spread the curtains, gazed outside and saw what looked like a lava pit. “Oh my god I’m on Mars,” she recalled thinking.

Mulroy went on to earn first a bachelor’s and then a master’s degree at U.N.L.V. Initially, she said she intended to chase a career with the State Department, an interest she picked up from her father, who worked as a civilian in the Air Force.

He was an Irish Catholic Kennedy Democrat. Her mother was German but had grown up in India, spoke five languages

Column fig. 3

Column fig. 2

USE IT OR LOSE IT

Use It or Lose It Across the West, Exercising One’s Right to Waste Water

By Abrahm Lustgarten Photographs

by Bryan Schutmaat Part 3 of Killing the Colorado A collaboration with ProPublica

High in the Rocky Mountains, snowmelt fills a stream that trickles down into Ohio Creek and then onward toward the Upper Gunnison River. From there, it tumbles through the chasms of the Black Canyon, joining the Colorado River, filling the giant Lake Powell reservoir, and, one day, flowing to Los Angeles.But before the water gets more than a few miles off the mountain, much of this stream is diverted into dirt ditches used by ranchers along the Ohio Creek Valley. Standing astride one of those ditches one day last fall, Bill Ketterhagen dug his boot soles against the con-

Column fig. 4

11

Column

crete edge of a 5-foot-wide dam.

He spun a steel wheel and opened a gate that allowed water to pour into his fields of hay crops. Ketterhagen, 39, manages a 750-acre ranch outside the town of Gunnison, Colorado, for its out-of-state owners, mostly growing a mixture of Meadow Foxtail, Timothy, wheat grasses and some alfalfa. The grasses, kneehigh with bursts of clover flowers and flat, slender leaves, are cut, baled and shipped to feedlots where it fattens cattle soon to be slaughtered for beef.

Thickly built, wearing overalls and a four-day beard, Ketterha-

fides, she always had one paramount mission: to find more water for Las Vegas and use it to help the city keep expanding.

Mulroy wheeled and dealed, filing for rights to aquifers in northern Nevada for Las Vegas, and getting California to use less water while her city took more. She helped shape legislation that, over her time at the Water Authority, allowed Las Vegas’ metropolitan footprint to more than double. She supported building expensive mechanisms with which to extract more water for the city’s exploding needs — two tunnels out of Lake Mead and a proposed pipeline carrying groundwater from farms in the east of the state. Not once in her tenure did the Authority or the Las Vegas Valley Water District she ran beneath it reject a development proposal based on its use of water. The valley’s total withdrawals from the Colorado River jumped by more than 60 percent on her watch.

Yet even last summer — staring at the effects of growth and drought on the reservoir, where once-drowned islands were visible for the first time in as much as 75 years — Mulroy apologized for none of it. She bridled at the idea that Las Vegas or other desert cities had reached the outer edge of what their environments could support.

“That’s the silliest thing I have ever heard,” she said, her voice rising in anger. “I’ve had it right up to here with all this ‘Stop your growth.’”ProPublica is exploring how the West’s water crisis reflects man-made policies and management strategies as much, or possibly more, than it does drought and climate change.

Whether and how cities grow is one of the most decisive factors in determining the future of Western water supplies, and, to some extent, the nation’s economy. For much of the last century the West has been guided by a sort of “bring ’em on” philosophy of the more people the better. Teddy Roosevelt first envisioned using the Colorado River’s resources to move west a population the size of that day’s Eastern Seaboard. They came in droves, supported by infrastructure the federal government built — including the Hoover Dam — and the water those facilities helped supply.

The Hoover Dam as seen from the Black Canyon; the fountains at the Bellagio.To an arid region blessed with little rain, the newcomers brought their Eastern tastes: Kentucky bluegrass planted across sprawling yards; fountains flowing with abundance; fruits and vegetables growing in an Eden-like oasis. Hundreds of thousands of settlers turned into tens of millions of people still dividing the same finite supply of water, one that was stretched thin from the very start. By the time it became apparent that growth might need to be controlled to be both productive and efficient, Western sprawl, like a sort of Frankenstein monster, had taken on a

state allocations have been issued for more water than the river, in an average year, can provide. Meanwhile its annual flow has been steadily decreasing as the climate changes and drought grips the region.

And so, for more than a decade, states and the federal government have tried to wring more supply out of the Colorado and spread it further, in part by persuading the farmers and ranchers who use the vast majority of the river’s water and have the largest water rights to conserve it. But in many ways it’s the vast body of oftenantiquated law governing western water rights, officials acknowledge, that actively undermines conservation, making waste — or at least heavy use — entirely rational.

“Water is money,” said Eugene Backhaus, a state

resource conservationist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, which works to help ranchers use water more efficiently. “The way the current water law structure is, if they don’t use it for the assigned use, they could lose the water right.” Adding to the problems, the states linked by reliance on the Colorado govern their water resources separately and have not standardized their water laws. While states have made incremental Across the West, Exercising One’s Right to Waste Water adjustments to those laws, Lustgarten Photographs by Bryan Schutmaat

By Abrahm they have not recast them Part 3 of Killing the Colorado that allowed water to pour collaboration with ProPublica to address the newAneeds into his fields of hay crops. of a region undergoing High in the Rocky Ketterhagen, 39, manages vast changes. Some rules Mountains, snowmelt a 750-acre ranch outside fills a stream that trickles force ranchers to dry up down into Ohio Creek and the town of Gunnison, entire streams; others Colorado, for its outthen onward toward the ignore the ecological of-state owners, mostly Upper Gunnison River. growing a mixture of value of maintaining a From there, it tumbles healthy river. The common through the chasms of the Meadow Foxtail, Timothy, element of all these laws Black Canyon, joining the wheat grasses and some

Column fig. 5

Columns although a simple choice and grid to arrange, became one of the many I had to really think about. The space needed to read, the spacing between paragraphs, all of this was in the forfront of my mind as I attempted to set the given articles in this format of grid.

Use It or Lose It

Colorado River, filling the giant Lake Powell reservoir, and, one day, flowing to Los Angeles.

But before the water gets more than a few miles off the mountain, much of this stream is diverted into dirt ditches used by ranchers along the Ohio Creek Valley. Standing astride one of those ditches one day last fall, Bill Ketterhagen dug his boot soles against the concrete edge of a 5-footwide dam. He spun a steel wheel and opened a gate

alfalfa. The grasses, kneehigh with bursts of clover flowers and flat, slender leaves, are cut, baled and shipped to feedlots where it fattens cattle soon to be slaughtered for beef.

Thickly built, wearing overalls and a four-day beard, Ketterhagen has a degree in biology and natural resource management and once worked in a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He knows his fields could thrive with much smaller amounts

Column fig. 6

Column

12

Less than Zero

staring down imminent

By Abrahm Lustgarten Animation by Jöns Mellgren and Anna Mantzaris

allowing their residents to

rationing of Colorado River

Despite Decades of Accepted Science, California and Arizona Are Still Miscounting Their Water Supplies

Part 5 of Killing the Colorado

of the drought-stricken West is a stash of water sequestered between layers of rock and sometimes built up over centuries.Officials in the Colorado River basin states have long treated this liquid treasure as a type of environmental retirement account — an additional sup-

tap underground resources this way, regulators and legislators in Southwest-

A collaboration with ProPublica Deep beneath the bleached-out, dusty surface

water, pumps nearly half its supply from aquifers. But in

ply of water they can raid to get through the driest years

ern states have ignored an

and make up for the chronic

how much water is actually available for people to use:

overuse of the rivers themselves.

In recent years, the withdrawals have taken on even more importance: At least 60 percent of California’s water now comes from underground, some researchers say. Arizona,

inconvenient truth about

In many places, groundwater and surface water are not independent supplies at all. Rather, they are interconnected parts of the same system.

The science has been clear for the better part of

Column fig. 7

Tucked into Pavley’s package was a little-noticed provision that explicitly prohibits California state regulators from addressing the interconnection between groundwater and surface water in local water plans until 2025, a compromise meant to give local water agencies a leisurely runway to adjust to a new way of

Arizona law, too, treats groundwater and surface water as unconnected, as Pavley said the prospect does Arizona’s state water of more immediately acplan, which purports to acknowledging the overlap count for water resources between ground and surand to estimate how many face waters threatened to years of supply remain. derail the legislation entirely, Its authors know better, triggering fierce opposiArizona’s top water official tion from the Agricultural acknowledged, but rewritCouncil of California, the ing them to be more truthful California Chamber of Comwould be politically imposmerce and other industry sible and economically groups.“Those who have damaging. unlimited water supply don’t “We know for a fact that particularly like the idea of pumping aquifers can dry changing that,” she said. up rivers,” said Thomas “You can’t manage what you Buschatzke, the director don’t measure.” of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, who counting.

ously sucking them dry from above and below.

“If you don’t connect the

Column fig. 7.2

Column fig. 7.1

other issue the state faces,” said Fran Pavley, a California state senator who helped draft a much-praised package of state laws passed last year regulating groundwater withdrawals for the first time.

two, then you don’t understand the system,” said John Bredehoeft, a leading hydrogeologist who for many years managed the U.S. government’s western states water program for the U.S. Geological Survey. “And if you don’t understand the system, I don’t know how in the hell you’re going to make any kind of judgment about how much water you’ve got to work with.”

Atabout 30,000 feet above the Earth, oxygen becomes scarce, and the stratosphere

begins. Hydrogeologists estimate that the part of the Earth that holds water stretches almost as deep beneath our feet. Down there, another dark, invisible frontier awaits.If you were to slice a knife through the Earth, a cross section would show bands of rock bent over like a bell or bent up like a bowl. When it rains, water soaks into the soil, through compacted dirt and rock, until it is blocked by an impermeable surface.

There, the water can sit undisturbed for tens of thousands of years. The deeper the water, the more it is saturated with salt and min-

One of my greatest challenges through this entire process, was the want to not only the spark to learn something I have never done before, but also the obstacle of doing all of this while also trying to create my own unqiue ideas.

With both the readings, and my own personal journey into the world of typographer grid, I had to be excessively careful that I was constantly reamaining insprired and not stealing someone elses idea.

13

Column

erals. But the shallowest layers — say, the first mile — can hold natural reservoirs, or aquifers, with water sweeter and cleaner than almost any other on Earth.

Ever since people figured out how to dig a hole, they have relied on this underground water. Villages from Jerusalem to central Texas were settled around wells and artesian springs. The water was hauled up by human muscle and a pulley or, eventually, with the aid of wind-powered gears.

Harnessing the power of the combustion engine allowed people to pump water

Let’s Bring Design to the More Modern Era Where we finish is where a lot of those around me began.

That is in the modern grid, or the modular grid. Being the one, at least for this designer, still stuck to the books that teach it and not much else where, it relies on the designer’s knowledge of how to shape a page and how to make type work instead of aiding the process with limits. This is where my greatest challenge in this entire project arose, how to design the page.

The modern grid pushes the designer to think about not only the text, surrounding space, and the two’s interconnecting dance.

The grid allows a freedom that is then only restricted. It opens up the idea and creativity to allow the body copy to flow, yet at the same time also sets far stricter boundaries that even the column grid can. It can be said that the modern grid ( as it should be) is what occurs when a manuscript grid gets combined with a column grid.

A vast network of lines creating a cityscape for the words to live and build their residence; yet it goes beyond simply setting boundaries and instead looks into forcing readability to cross paths with spacing and distance. These elements all come

together to force the viewer to understand a text or become completely lost with no hope of return.

For this exact reason, I feel that the modern grid is a format that should only be used when a designer is fully prepared to spend the time and energy needed to make a text work.

The choice of grid should also be carefully choice as a text that is made to fit within a manuscript may be able to fit within a column or modern one, yet the feeling and emotion of the text will be horrifically altered.

For me, as a designer, I have plans to aviod the modern grid for its harshness and lack of connection. Where my work flows and is entirely interconnected the modern grid, much akin to the Modernists who aided in their creation, is lacking in a certain gentleness, humility, and honor. The modern/modular grid forces the eye to do as it is commanded with no plan to assist or give external aid. It can engulf a space while staying unreadable. It is truly a grid that would take a master to use properly.

Modern

14

The ‘Water Witch’ For 26 years, Pat Mulroy was the chief arbiter of water in Las Vegas. The whole time she preached conservation while backing growth.

Despite Decades of Accepted Science, California and Arizona Are Still Miscounting Their Water Supplies

By Abrahm Lustgarten Animation by Jöns Mellgren and Anna Mantzaris Part 5 of Killing the Colorado A collaboration with ProPublica

Part 2 of Killing the Colorado A collaboration with ProPublica

One afternoon last summer, Pat Mulroy stood in 106-degree heat at the broad concrete banister atop the Hoover Dam, the wall that holds back the mighty Colorado River, and with it the

Deep beneath the bleached-out, dusty surface of the drought-stricken West is a stash of water sequestered between layers of rock and sometimes built up over centuries.

Officials in the Colorado River basin states have long treated this liquid treasure as a type of environmental retirement account — an additional supply of water they can raid to get through the driest years and make up for the chronic overuse of the rivers themselves.

nation’s largest reserve of water.

The reservoir is the brain stem of the system that helps sustain

Modern fig. 3

stream, Colorado’s ranchers are under siege.

“The municipalities will come here and condemn us, or buy us out,” he said. Indeed, western cities have become increasingly critical of the imbalance between rural and urban regions when it comes to rights to water.

“There is a very small number of people that control a huge amount of water,” said Douglas Kenney, director of the Western Water Policy Program at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder. “Is it truly equitable that water was allocated 100 years ago and now we are locked into that forever? Denver and other eastern Colorado cities already take 154 billion gallons of water across the Continental Divide from western Colorado each year. Schemes to build more tunnels to divert more water from rural western areas like Gunnison are a constant concern. And last July the utilities and groups that represent the

Douglas Kenney, director of the Western Water Policy Program at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder. “Is it truly equitable that water was allocated 100 years ago and now we are locked into that forever? Denver and other eastern Colorado cities already take 154 billion gallons of water across the Continental Divide from western Colorado each year. Schemes to build more tunnels to divert more water from rural western areas like Gunnison are a constant concern. And last July the utilities and groups that represent the lower river states’ biggest urban areas — including Las Vegas, Denver and Los Angeles — proposed a pilot program to find additional water supplies in the agriculturally rich parts of Colorado, in part by paying people like Trampe to fallow fields, be more water-efficient or perhaps lease or sell their water rights.

“The cities continue to grow and grow and grow … and they expect me — or us as an industry — to give up water,” Trampe said. “Why should I suffer for their sprawl?”

In 2012, it hardly snowed in Colorado. Even in the Colorado River’s uppermost reaches, streams narrowed to a desper-

ate trickle in the early summer, and long before Gunnison’s ranchers could take their water, Ohio Creek and the other tributaries nearly ran dry. A strange thing happened as a result.

Walking through shoulderhigh Garrison grass, Ketterhagen recounted the lessons of that summer: His fields did great, perhaps better than they have done since. He has come to think the grasses — a pasture mix of slender wheat, Garrison, clover and alfalfa — suffer with too much water. The dry year trained them to withstand the rigors of

Modern grids were one of the hardest for me to undertsand and put to use. Where columns simply added lines and breaks where type could not sit. It is only in a modern gird, that the lines and breaks are not choice for me but instead put down by me. This pushed me into the problem of allowing the idea of the grid to come through while also struggling to keep my typographer readable and connected as it ran through the modules.

15

Modern

Modern fig. 4

concerns is that conservation would wind up cutting off return flows the next farmer counts on.

“Over a century, we’ve been irrigating this country, and we’ve established an ecology based on what we’ve been doing,” he said.

Trampe also sees conservation efforts as a sort of Trojan horse.

He says that, squeezed between Denver to the east and all the big thirsty desert cities down-

In recent years, the withdrawals have taken on even more importance: At least 60 percent of California’s water now comes from underground, some researchers say. Arizona, staring down imminent rationing of Colorado River water,

pumps nearly half its supply from aquifers.

But in allowing their residents to tap underground resources this way, regulators and legislators in Southwestern states have ignored an inconvenient truth about how much water is actually available for people to use: In many places, groundwater and surface water are not independent supplies at all.

Rather, they

Modern fig. 2

By Abrahm Lustgarten Photographs by Christaan Felber

Modern fig. 1

Less than Zero

Modern fig. 5

$13,000-a-year job as a junior management analyst with Clark County. She became part of the county’s legislative team, lobbying for tax and governance bills up in Carson City.

It was impossible to work for Las Vegasarea government and not find yourself staring at the underbelly of Nevada’s culture. Gangsters walked the halls of the county seat, crowding hearings or petitioning the commissioners for their building projects.

“Where do you find people to build a gaming industry those days?” she asked. “It was with the mob.”“I knew Moe Dalitz, I knew Morris Shenker.

I had to deal with Tony Spilotro,” Mulroy went

on, ticking off some of the most notorious criminals and mob associates in Nevada history. “Moe Dalitz was the greatest gentleman you ever wanted to meet. Tony Spilotro was a scumbag — a dirty, filthy scumbag.”

Pat Mulroy driving to the Western Governors’ Drought Forum.Cash flowed like water in those days, she said, and early one morning before a county commission vote, her boss, in the hopes of keeping the process clean, dispatched her to retrieve envelopes off the desks of commissioners before they arrived to discover what was in them. The envelopes were each stuffed with 50 $100 bills.

In 1985, Mulroy was promoted out of a county administrative post to help run the Las Vegas Valley Water District, one of seven feuding water utilities that served Las Vegas and the rest of Clark County. When her boss lost the confidence of his board in 1989, she inherited the whole department. “I didn’t want the job. I didn’t have the self-confidence. I didn’t think I could do it,” she said recently. “It seemed daunting.”

Indeed, Mulroy, though ambitious, had no engineering or environmental experience, and had thought little about water as a resource. She was 36 then, with two children younger than 3 years old at home. Her attention, as she put it, was “kind of split,” and she was weighted by guilt for the hours she poured into work and just as torn about the hours she spent away from the office.

But the job was politics, not science, and that came to her naturally. She had learned that politics works through relationships, not rules, and she applied the lesson to her new position. The valley, back then, still had a quaintness to it, with a population of just 741,000 and a Las Vegas strip that

The ‘Water Witch’

By Abrahm Lustgarten Photographs by Christaan Felber Part 2 of Killing the Colorado A collaboration with ProPublica

for espousing conservation and pioneering a list of progressive urban water programs in Las Vegas while fiercely negotiating tough agreements between the states to use their water more efficiently and come to terms with having less.

But an examination of Mulroy’s reign shows that, despite her conservation bona fides, she always had one paramount mission: to find more water for Las Vegas and use it to help the city keep expanding.

Mulroy wheeled and dealed, filing for rights to aquifers in northern Nevada for Las Vegas, and getting California to use less water while her city took more. She helped shape legislation that, over her time at

Modern

Modern fig. 6

looked little like it does today. There was no ersatz Eiffel Tower or Empire State Building and no Bellagio hotel, with its musically synchronized water cannons. As Las Vegas grew up and corporate bigwigs displaced mobsters as the city’s ruling class, Mulroy prided herself on being a student of character.

“You develop an instinct and a political sixth sense. I can smell a phony a mile off,” she says One now.afternoon “The minute last someone summer, Pat Mulroy stood in 106-degree flatters you, back up, take a hard look. more sweetness heatThe at the broad concrete banister atop the Hoover Dam, and niceties that come out of someone’s mouth, especially if mighty Colorado River, and with the wall that holds back the they don’t know you, beware, don’titget thecaught.” nation’s largest reserve of water.

The reservoir is the brain stem of the system that helps sustain just about every person from here to San Diego. But as Mulroy looked out over the drought-beleaguered pool, then at 39 percent capacity, it appeared almost empty.“Scary,” Mulroy said.

The high water mark and an old pumping station on Lake Mead.Few people have played a greater role in determining how the reservoir’s coveted and contested water supply has been used than Mulroy. Much of it has gone to nourish the Southwest’s booming cities, and for 26 years, Mulroy was the chief arbiter of water for the fastest-growing city of them all, Las Vegas. As the head of the Las Vegas Valley Water District, she handled the day-to-day approval of water for new housing developments, emerald golf courses and towering casinos. As the general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority — a second job she held starting in 1993 — she also budgeted water for Las Vegas’ future, helping to decide its limits. As the Water Authority’s general director, Mulroy stretched her enormous influence over state bounds, shaping how Nevada negotiated with the six other states sharing Colorado River water.

Deploying a prickly wit and a rare willingness to speak truth about the water challenges hammering the Western states, Mulroy met head-on a reality few other leaders wished to face: that the Colorado River’s ability to support the West’s thirst to grow its economy and embrace the large population that came with it was not unbounded. She has been lionized

For 26 years, Pat Mulroy was the chief arbiter of water in Las Vegas. The whole time she preached conservation while backing growth.

16

the states agreed on an estimate of the amount of water in the river. The rights to most of the flow were split between states in the upper and lower basins. Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico got half, while

issue the state faces,” said Fran Pavley, a California state senator who helped draft a much-praised package of state laws passed last year regulating groundwater withdrawals for the first time.

got the rest. This was, in part, to keep California — already the most populous and industrious of western states — from taking it all. Each state continued to govern the rights to water distributed within its borders.

But even in that first 1922 compact, more water was divvied up on paper than would actually run through the river. Officials, it turned out, had estimated the Colorado’s average

Use It or Lose It Across the West, Exercising One’s Right to Waste Water

By Abrahm Lustgarten Photographs by Bryan Schutmaat Part 3 of Killing the Colorado A collaboration with ProPublica High in the Rocky Mountains,

Modern fig. 9

snowmelt fills a stream that trickles

17

down into Ohio Creek and then onward toward the Upper Gunnison River. From there, it tumbles through the chasms of the Black Canyon, joining the Colorado River, filling the giant Lake Powell reservoir, and, one day, flowing to

Tucked into Pavley’s package was a little-noticed provision that explicitly prohibits California state regulators from addressing the interconnection between groundwater and surface water in local water plans until 2025, a compromise meant to give local water agencies a leisurely runway to adjust to a new way of counting.

Pavley said the prospect of more immediately acknowledging the overlap between ground and surface waters threatened to derail the legislation entirely, triggering fierce opposition from the Agricultural Council of California, the California Chamber of Commerce and other industry groups.“Those who have unlimited water supply don’t particularly like the idea of changing that,” she said. “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

Arizona law, too, treats groundwater and surface water as unconnected, as does Arizona’s state water plan, which purports to account for water resources and to estimate how many years of supply remain. Its authors know better, Arizona’s top water official acknowledged, but rewriting them to

Ketterhagen dug his boot

the way and take as much as you

soles against the concrete

can — whether you need it or not.”

edge of a 5-foot-wide dam.

Ketterhagen feels he has little

He spun a steel wheel and

choice. A vestige of 139-year-old

opened a gate that allowed

water law pushes ranchers to use

water to pour into his fields

as much water as they possibly can,

of hay crops. Ketterhagen,

even during a drought. “Use it or

39, manages a 750-acre ranch outside the town of Gunnison, Colorado, for its

out-of-state owners, mostly growing a mixture of Meadow Foxtail, Timothy, wheat grasses and some alfalfa. The grasses, knee-high with bursts of clover flowers and flat, slender leaves, are cut, baled and shipped to feedlots where it fattens

lose it” clauses, as they are known, cattle soon to be slaughtered for beef. Thickly built, wearing overalls and a four-day beard, Ketterhagen has a degree in biology and natural resource management and once worked in a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He knows his fields could thrive with much smaller amounts of

Los Angeles.But before the water

water — he’s seen them do so in dry

gets more than a few miles off the

years — but the property owners he

mountain, much of this stream is

works for have the legal right to take

diverted into dirt ditches used by

a large supply, and he applies the

ranchers along the Ohio Creek

water generously.

Valley. Standing astride one of those

“When we have it, we’ll use it,” he

ditches one day last fall, Bill

said. “You’ll open your head gate all

Modern

are common in state laws throughout the Colorado River basin and give the farmers, ranchers and governments holding water rights a powerful incentive to use more water than they need. Under the provisions of these measures, people who use less water than they are legally entitled to risk

Modern fig. 8

Modern fig. 7

Arizona, California and Nevada

be more truthful would be politically impossible and economically damaging.

“We know for a fact that pumping aquifers can dry up rivers,” said Thomas Buschatzke, the director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources, who says his policy is bound by the Legislature and court rulings. “But it is the law … it would be a huge upset to the economy

Richard McKaba Graphic Designer &Typographer

Education State University of New York at Fredonia Graphic Design BA Expected 2013-2017

Design Experience Freelance

richardmckaba.com where-vectors-meet-pixels.tumblr.com

Designer 07/2015 - Present

rmckaba@fredonia.edu richardmckaba@gmail.com

Designed digital assets for websites such as banners, headers, etc.

845-337-0526

Hackensack Tennis Program

About Richard McKaba is a graphic designer who is highly influenced by the past greats and a basic color scheme. He has the imagination of a child, the drive of an adult, and passion for everything that is design.

He looks to express that design is the key that opens a door to a new and untouched path that allow any emotion, feeling, idea or theory to be show within the framework of a page, to express what could never verbalize and evoke a that reaches beyond just a visual level to a deeper level than an essay, poem, or written work could express, with the combination of type and design incorporated together.

Skills Adobe Photoshop Adobe Illustrator Adobe InDesign Adobe After Effects Typography Drawing Hand-Lettering Vinyl-Application Screen Printing Mold-Making Sculpture Welding Wood Working

Graphic Designer 09/2012 - Present

Created and developed custom logos, videos, and programs for events and sales for both Tennis Program and The Comet Invitational Tournament.

Melcom LLC

Graphic Designer 02/2010 - 04/2010

Developed and created custom web pages for Eisenberg International clothing’s website.

Other Experience Rite Aid of Fredonia Front End Associate 06/2015 - Present

Jersey Mike’s of Northvale Sandwich Artist 06/2014 - 08/2014

Shoprite of New City Cashier 08/2012 - 02/2013

Acheivements 5-Year Achievement Award “Comet Invitiational Tournament” 09/2015 Award Winning Designer “The Assembly Call” 07/2015 SUNY Fredonia Deans List Spring 2015

To contact the designer referred to in this issue of Process, please feel free to reach out during normal business hours at either his personal website or via telephone call.

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