Interview with
Robin Kirnoss
The Publick | 7th October 2009
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Interview with
Robin Kirnoss
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The Publick | 7th October 2009
Interview with
Robin Kirnoss
INTERVIEW WITH
ROBIN KINROSS
by Petra Cerne Oven
According to the Slovene dictionary, a hyphen is ‘a graphic symbol used to separate and link words’. Kinross’s dedication to graphic symbols used daily to create and pass on visual messages and his interest in the areas of typography that often seem to be ignored and neglected have resulted in some projects which have certainly not been ignored within typographic circles.
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etra Cerne Oven writes: Robin Kinross is a typographer, publisher, critic, and author of numerous articles in the field of visual communication and typography, published mainly in the UK, the Netherlands and the USA. He has contributed regularly to magazines such as Information Design Journal, Blueprint, Journal of Design History, and Eye. After secondary school, he studied English literature at (what was then) the North-West London Polytechnic in London, and then, from 1971, he studied Typography & Graphic Communication at the University of Reading. He founded the publishing imprint Hyphen Press in 1980. He is not a speaker; words come out of him after long pauses. I am puzzled by the gentle voice and almost childlike curiosity which characterize his communication. He puts a bottle of water and two glasses on the table, laughing spontaneously and saying that he had seen it in ‘real interviews’ on TV.
Why did you decide to study typography, after English literature?
It’s a complicated story. In fact I’d become interested in typography earlier on, when I was still at secondary school, about 15 years old. There was a little press at school. Somehow I was drawn to this, especially setting type by hand. The love for making things always stayed in mind. Doing literature, I became unhappy and wanted to find something more practical. It wasn’t difficult to get into the Department of Typography at the University of Reading “the typography unit”. Michael Twyman, the lecturer who had set up this Typography Unit, took anyone – well, not anyone, but he was very welcoming.
How did you know about Reading? Did you hear something?
I’d read a review of Michael Twyman’s book Printing 1770–1970, which had just come out, and which said there was a course that he was running.
What was so influential at Reading? In Modern typography you write ‘many of the ideas put forward here have been everyday currency there?’
To read the history of the activity, and to take history seriously, was one thing I learnt at Reading. There’s strength still in books like Updike’s book Printing types. And also, what you see in Updike as well, the unity of theory and practice. Updike was a working printer; yet he was a historian. The two things went hand in hand. For me that is the best thing at Reading.
The Publick | 7th October 2009
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Interview with
Robin Kirnoss
So how do you actually describe yourself? Graphic designer or typographer or publisher?
I used to say ‘typographer’, in the days when you had to say what you were in your passport. I also did a lot of writing, and now I do a lot of editing – which means, reading other people’s writing, and working with texts and working with another designer. So I think now I’m an editor. . I’m pleased with the idea of a ‘publisher’; it has some of the same good qualities as ‘typographer’. It’s not so much visual production as word production.
I know, but I have to ask you – because of the first book, What is a designer?
Yes it happened with that book. There’s something I do continually: if I see a newspaper article that I think will interest someone else, I cut it out and give it to them. Or I make two photocopies, and give one to that friend and the other to someone else. Maybe that’s the publishing activity at its most basic: perhaps it’s an instinct rather than a disease. Now to tell the story of the first book, Potter’s ‘What is a designer’. It had been important for me as a student at Reading. It was part of a large series and very cheap. I thought the book confirmed things for me, and it suggested fresh things. Then I began to hear about Norman Potter. He was part of this network of people that I had begun to become involved with. First I wrote a letter to him, saying ‘your book is out of print, why don’t you get it into print?’
‘Do so!’
Indeed. Norman wrote back saying ‘well, actually I’m just think of doing that’. We wrote a few letters first, then one or two phone calls. By this time I’d decided that I really wanted to work with him as an editor on this book. We weren’t sure who would publish it. We went together to Studio Vista, the first publisher, and said ‘either you reprint this book, or give us permission to do it’. It was clear that they weren’t in any position to do it. So then it was up to us to do what we wanted. That was when I became a publisher.
What about the content? I’m thinking of your idea that modern typography started 250 years after Gutenberg. That was quite a new approach?
Yes, but I can think of some quite important precedents. I wrote with Kenneth Frampton’s suggestions in my mind, and his Modern architecture was a good model. And at the back of Frampton’s book is the theory of Jürgen Habermas about ‘the continuing project of modernity’ (he published it first in a lecture of 1980), which I quoted at the start of my book, as a kind of hypothesis, which I would test.
The book is out of print. If you re-publish it, will you change things, or do you think it is still?
No, no! It’s a difficult matter though. I do intend to revise it and publish it again. I think it will get longer. One of my clear wishes is to write more about other cultures in Europe
This volume is a collection of eleven essays and shorter articles which for the first time provide rich contexts – social, cultural, and political – for graphic design in Britain. Reaching from the Second World War to the early 1970s, From these disparate milieux emerged new ideas about designing.
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The Publick | 7th October 2009
Interview with
Robin Kirnoss
One of the things I felt I was discovering was the fact that different cultures have interesting periods in typography. Now I begin to think that I should have a look at the Far Eastern cultures. Maybe I should make the effort to look at what’s been happening in Japan. My first thought had been: that’s another script, and it’s a completely separate world; it’s far too difficult for me to know anything about Chinese or Japanese typography. Even Russian and Greek typography I excluded for these reasons. Maybe I should become a bit more adventurous. You are interested in different countries, and you publish books by authors from other countries. What are the stories behind this?
To give it credit, ATypI (the Association Typographique Internationale) has been important here, especially the conference they organized at Oxford in 1990. That was where I met Jost Hochuli and our collaboration grew from that. In the years when I was a student, I felt that this place is an island, is limited in what it offers: the foreigners who have come here contribute something. It was always very exciting and attractive. I can remember vividly how I met Marie Neurath. She had a great dignity, was beautiful – she had an aura about her.
This book explains the essential principles: work of ‘transforming’, or putting information into visual form. This deeper level of their work is routinely neglected in the assumption that Isotype is just a matter of symbols and pictograms. It contains unpublished essay “The principle Isotype transformer”
You have mentioned Marie Neurath. You wrote your MPhil thesis on Isotype, and you knew her as well. Can you say something about Isotype: what it is, and what is its importance?
Where it comes from is Vienna in 1925 and this strange figure of Otto Neurath. He’s one of those people who doesn’t really fit in anywhere. He was involved with projects of encyclopedic knowledge, especially later on in his life. But in Vienna after 1918 there was a remarkable local political development, especially in housing. Isotype really comes from a housing museum, explaining to the people what was going on in the city’s housing projects. Marie Neurath was the intermediary who did the detailed, planning work: the designer. Then Gerd Arntz was the main artist they employed. The great thing of Isotype, which is what Michael Twyman saw when he discovered it and then got the archive for Reading, is the logic of arrangement. It’s not simply putting things in rows from left to right. For example, take the famous births and deaths chart, with the births going one way and the deaths the other way. It has a system that you may be able to put into words and tell someone else how to do it. Except that in the imitations of Isotype, you see how other people misunderstand it. The things that Marie Neurath did are the true Isotype. It’s a familiar paradox. The Publick | 7th October 2009
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Interview with
Robin Kirnoss
The Hyphen Press Building Workplace Co-operative 115 115 Bartholomew Road, London NW5 2BJ
You develop a system. In principle you can tell other people how to do the work. But when it comes to it, you realize that it’s actually a little bit more complicated. What happened after the war?
Otto and Marie Neurath left the Netherlands in 1940. They were interned at first, as with all ‘enemy aliens’ in Britain then, but after release, they resumed their work. Isotype was, of course, always part of its context. The things that happened after the time in Vienna were different. You might say there isn’t any one Isotype: it’s what happened in these various situations and contexts. You can see this idea of universal communication, and a method of how to do it.
What about things that have been done after Isotype, for example Otl Aicher’s pictograms? How has Isotype influenced such things?
The pictograms are a bit misleading. It’s not the whole story. My idea of the whole story is that it’s about arrangement or configuration of elements, words and images. I don’t think influence matters, except in a deep way. I hope that, people respect it and carry on some of the traditions. I would say that their original system of signs has something of the same spirit as Isotype. This means the pictograms, yes, but also the whole system of deployment of elements: the treatment of words, the colours. There is a way of thinking here that you can find in other places.
To what extent is there an ethical responsibility in graphic design. You wrote something in Fellow readers?
It’s not easy. You can’t really define these things. But it’s certainly one of the differences between postmodernism and what I thought was or is modernism. We thought that postmodernism was cynical; it didn’t have (in certain definitions, at least) any sense of seriousness or – I really hesitate with the word ‘ethical’. There are all those arguments about honest construction, or good materials. For example, if you are making a building, and you have the main structure in steel, but then put some bricks on the outside walls, like wallpaper, then they are not part of the structure. So that is something one could disagree with say that’s dishonest design. To be honest design, those bricks should be supporting the roof. And bricks are a lot of labour, put in place one by one. Could you not find a simpler way of making that wall? That’s why one takes architecture: the arguments are easy to see. With graphic design – the arguments are really not so important.
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The Publick | 7th October 2009
Interview with
Robin Kirnoss
What about the question of reading, perhaps a hot topic. You criticized the idea that the designer should interpret the text for the reader. What do you call it? Postructuralism?
IDENTITY POLITICS
Yes, or ‘deconstruction’. I think that argument has gone away now. But certainly four or five years ago, it was there. I’m not sure why I got so involved. It certainly was an argument, that’s the right word. There were people making these manifestos, even, about what graphic design could or should be. My attempt was to discuss the arguments, and not the design that followed There is another thing I began to realize, which is that there was a specifically American dimension to this. It connects with what is called political correctness, which I begin to think is largely a matter of people surviving in a multi-cultural society. It becomes very dangerous to criticize anyone for anything. The immediate way in which someone will respond to criticism is to say ‘I’m a black person; I’m a woman; I’m gay; I’m a disabled person; I’m an old person; I’m a young person.’ Everything comes down to what you are. There were some arguments I had with people, where I felt I really couldn’t say anything, because I would be taken as criticizing them personally. I suppose this became a wish of mine: to make arguments for some sort of objectivity. So that it is possible to make remarks about a piece of work that is in the world, without any criticism of the person who made it. A student at Central Saint Martins once told me ‘we had a lecture, and we were told that common sense doesn’t exist’. I felt I knew for sure what that lecturer had been saying: ‘common sense is the voice of authority; it’s a kind of repression; it’s your parents telling you to behave properly: “it’s common sense” they say’.
Everything comes down to what you are. There is no room for ‘is this a good argument? Is this a bad argument? Does it make sense?’ All you can say is ‘look at me’. It’s what is called identity politics.
They reduce the idea?
Yes. And I sympathize with this a lot. But I think a part of the argument is to say that each reader makes his or her own reading: ‘don’t interfere with the reading that I am making; it’s mine.’ So yes, to boil it down, that was what that was all about. And now I think it has passed on. What is fashionable now, in purely visual terms, is not that wild deconstruction. Things have changed.
Can design criticism help in the development of the profession?
I think that it can be part of some sort of public dialogue. So the designers would read what the critics have written: that part of the dialogue happens. Perhaps people still don’t know what it is, really. Just to talk about it, to say ‘that was designed’, was one function of the graphic design critic. That is before you ever go on to say ‘this is good; this is bad’. I don’t know if that battle has been won or not.
Design criticism has mainly been written by people who have been art historians. To what extent can art historians explain design?
I might say ‘not at all’. It depends. I don’t see anything in art history that prepares you for design. But, having said all that, I should acknowledge that art history has changed. It has become more historical or more social. There was a kind of arrogance about this: design was just a part of the territory of art, and it wasn’t seen as art anyway. It was more or less like compost in a vegetable garden; something like that – just a load of rubbish. From the mid-1970s onwards people were fighting a mission to get design taken seriously. Now I’m not sure. I think the revolution went too far. Design became too big. Design, as it’s studied by the design historians, now seems to mean just everything – anything in the world. Some of them have lost sight of what designers – you or I or our friends – what we are doing. We’re just part of the whole visual landscape.
The Publick | 7th October 2009
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Interview with
Robin Kirnoss
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The Publick | 7th October 2009