TOTAL ARMAGEDDON—A Slanted Reader on Design

A SLANTED READER ON DESIGN EDITED BY IAN LYNAM

Art and Artists in a Decade of War

TOTAL ARMAGEDDON

Total Armageddon

slanted

1

A SLANTED READER ON DESIGN Ian Lynam

An Introduction to the End, p. 10–15

Art and Artists in a Decade of War

1 SIGNS OF EMPIRE Silas Munro

Acting Up At Home, p. 18–23 Aleksander Tokarz

The Art of Resistance, p. 24–28 Jonathan M. Hansen

Give Guantanámo Back to Cuba, p. 29–31 Can Altay

Settings, Collectivities, Informalities:

Art and Public Space in Istanbul, p. 32–36 Mr. Keedy

The Global Style: Modernist

Typography after Postmodernism, p. 37–42 Ian Lynam

Plux Quba: the Era of Neoliberal Design,

p. 43–49 Thierry Somers

Reflecting the Times, p. 50–52

2 LOCALES Total Armageddon

Simon Baker

Marrakech: Shooting Light: Daidō Moriyama,

p. 54–55 Steven Heller

Typographic MAD, p. 56–58 3

Martin Giessen

Lorena Howard-Sheridan

Incunabula: Notes on Some of the First Books

Printed in the New World, p. 59–67

Christine Lhowe

The Neighborhoods and Their Personalities, p. 68–73 Ilka Helmig

A Few (Hi)stories about French Illustration, p. 74–79 Amélie Gastaut

History of the Poster in France, p. 80–85 Charlotte von Fritschen & Sonja Steppan

Boa Esperança!, p. 86–90

3 IF I CAN’T DANCE, IT’S NOT MY REVOLUTION Laure Boer

Ready to Luck, p. 92–94 Gerda Breuer & Julia Meer

Female(’s)Type: Women in the History

of Graphic Design and Typography, p. 95–102

Louise Rouse

Touching Concrete and Vinyl, p. 108–115 Jori Erdman

Behind the Veil, p. 116–118 4

From Slanted #32 Dubai

Yoon Soo Lee

Judgment and Beauty, p. 103–107

Art and Artists in a Decade of War

4 DAYS OF FUTURE PAST Emanuel Barbosa

Vintage Portuguese Motorcycle Graphics:

The Remains of a Lost Industry, p. 120–123 Ian Lynam

Making Waves: The Establishment

of Japanese Graphic Design, p. 124–137 Ingo Niermann

Where Desert Dreams Come True, p. 138–146

5 REBEL YELL Panos Papanagiotou

Voices of Exarchia, p. 148–152 Martin Giesen

Memories of Galérie Épreuve d’Artiste:

Art and Artists in a Decade of War, p. 153–159

Total Armageddon

Kiyonori Muroga

Kohei Sugiura: Pioneer of Asian,

Design Philosophy and Methodologies, p. 160–162

5

Martin Giessen

6 URBAN FABRIC Alexander Torell

Learning From Athens:

The Power of Negative Thinking, p. 164–173 Marcus Farr

Curtain Mosque: Mental Structures, p. 174–179 Natassa Pappa

Exit Signs Connecting Labyrinths

and the City’s Past, p. 180–182 Matilda Kivelä

Between the Devil and the Deep Sea, p. 183–191 Marianna Kellokoski

Aiming for a Functional, Efficient and Desirable

Place to Live—Helsinki as a Design City, p. 192–197 Piotr Rypson

Pierwsze Pokolenia 1900–1945, p. 198–208

Rene Wawrzkiewicz

The Polish Exhibition of Graphic Symbols, p. 209–213

Olga Drenda

Stereo, Super Quality, p. 215–222 Dermot Mac Cormack

Aino Aalto and the Birth of Finnish Modernism,

p. 223–225 6

From Slanted #32 Dubai

7 WORDS & PICTURES

Art and Artists in a Decade of War

Toshiaki Koga

Japan-ness in Typography: How do you Say

“Typography” in Japanese?, p. 226–237 Agata Szydłowska

Polish Battle on Poster: Warsaw Poster Biennale

and Debates Around it, p. 238–243 Niki Sioki

Do We Need a History

of Graphic Design in Greece?, p. 244–257

8 GIVING LANGUAGE FORM Kenneth FitzGerald

Singing the Surface, p. 259–267 Dr. Nadine Chahine

The Dubai Font: A Monument for Every Day,

p. 268–272 Gerry Leonidas

Slanted Babylon., p 273–279 Mathieu Lommen

Form Follows Architecture: German

Slab Serif Typefaces of the Early 20th Century

and their Specimen, p. 280–286 Total Armageddon

Onur F. Yazıcıgil

Notes on the Meaning of Two Scripts

In Turkey, p. 287–295

7

Martin Giessen

9 LANGUAGES INSIDE OF LANGUAGES Georgios Matthiopoulos

A Primer in Greek Typography

Until the Digital Revolution, p. 297–302 Piotr Rypson

Mieczysław Berman, p. 303–310 Interview with Wolfgang Weingart

The Liberation of Typography, p. 311–316 Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFarès

Arabic Typography as an Agent

of Resistance, p. 317–324 Eran Bacharach

Typopractica., p. 325–327 David Peacock

Glowing Type: Explorations in

Typography, Language and Light, p. 328–333 Alexander Negrelli

Sign On Canvas, p. 334–339 Angela Voulangas & Doug Clouse

Artistic Printing, p. 340–353

8

From Slanted #32 Dubai

Tim Loffing

Typography and Architecture, p. 354–359

Art and Artists in a Decade of War

10 END TIMES Carolina Laudon

The Story of the Futhark—

8th Century Tweets, p. 361–367 Will Hill

Painted Words: Language and Letterform

in 20th Century Visual Practice, p. 368–375 Randy Nakamura

Raygun Gothic vs. Memphis:

Equilibrium and Sottsass, p. 376–386 Iwona Kurz

Love in Ruins, p. 387–392 Natalia Ilyin

On Shooting Butterflies, p. 393–395

Total Armageddon

9

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE END IAN LYNAM

10

This publication that you are holding in your hands is a book about design with the essays within culled from the first 32 issues of Slanted, a German design publication alongside a number of essays chosen from other sources.

Slanted is a magazine that has a profound focus on typography, one of the essential aspects of graphic design that deals with designing with typefaces AKA fonts.

Typography is how visual language is given form and transmitted to audiences. It is a core part of design, and the casual reader may note an insistence upon it as a reference point, assorted metaphors, and the literal subject of many of the essays in this book.

This is Not an Accident—it is by Design.

Today, design is something that people care about more than ever before—both in regard to the canon of historical design, often capitalized as Design, as much as the lowercase everyday variant, which we concern ourselves with through the customization of PowerPoint presentations, the aesthetics of our assorted social media representations, what we clothe ourselves with, and how we style where we live. Design has seemingly transcended its role as Taste foisted upon the lower classes from on high and has become a full-contact sport for the masses.

This is quite possibly why you picked up this book, and the editorial staff of Slanted and I hope that this is the case. With the increased democratization of Design and design, there is an increased global dialogue and discourse around both aspects, as well. This includes consumers bashing brands’ logo redesigns, increased consideration of the designed spaces we inhabit, critiques of international sporting events’ visual representation, and how technology functions. This last word, function, is incredibly important, as the integration of both form and function are essential to examine the design of any object, subject or situation exposed to criticism of this nature. How things look and how things work 11

can, and should, be teased apart. It is a matter of due diligence on the part of any critic, be they (or you) a casual critic, a professional critic, or someone who straddles the line. If you’re going to engage in an examination, it is worth strapping on the proverbial rubber gloves and getting dirty.

Criticism itself may not be your entry point— perhaps you are merely interested in design as entertainment or design as sport, and this volume has been curated to offer those perspectives, as well as being largely educational in regard to approaching the culture of Design and the design of culture today. Beyond Design, contemporary global culture is obsessed with more than a few other things today, but perhaps at the forefront are notions of authenticity.

Authenticity is the cognitive distortion field that exists between how we appear and who we are. For anyone whose appearance and inner life do not match closely, or at least for appear to, societal accusations of shallowness or some other form of inner deviance or divergence rise to the top. We perceive seemingly inauthentic folks as shallow, plastic, or lacking substance, while individuals whose worldview is more closely aligned with their outward projection appear to be more authentic. This, in short, is how we judge people: our friends, our nemeses, our communities, our neighbors. Andrew Potter, the author of the book The Authenticity Hoax, puts it like this, “we are so concerned with this alignment of inner and outer selves that falseness, insincerity, and hypocrisy are seen as the great moral transgressions of our age.”

And so, we design our lives to appear authentic, and it is an all-consuming quest to equalize our actual, genuine internal selves with the selves we want others to perceive us as, modifying and tuning each to match a seemingly impossible set of scales. Me, I know this because I understand the disparity between who I am and who I say I am, plus I am not so concerned with the quest for 12

authenticity, because I am more interested in quality: quality of life, quality of meaning, a certain amount of quality of self-understanding, but also enough understanding to know the disparities between my own qualities. Or, to put it more bluntly, I am fucked up and I understand enough of how to know which parts not to meddle with, because if you try and brainwash your inner self or whitewash your outer self, the real incongruities begin.

That being said, this isn’t about me—it’s about you, and what I mean by that is the development of a critical world view about society, culture and representation, AKA design and authenticity. If you cast your gaze on the gamut of products that are offered to the kind of consumer who may have also consumed this book, you will notice the word authenticity appearing a lot—from authentic jeans to authentic coffee beans to authentic travel destinations to authentic ethnic restaurants to website restaurant reviews of restaurants labeling said restaurants as “authentic.” Authenticity has been noted as perhaps the greatest moral quandary of our time and more than a handful of incisive individuals are doing their utmost to try and sell what we already have hitched our wagons to in regard to our lives in a variety of aromas, flavors, hues, tints, cuts and other ______.

“Authentic” is code for “run away,” at least for me, because trying to “be authentic” highlights the contemporary struggle to mitigate reality and desire in the most unhealthy of ways, largely because it is fraught with fakery. Authenticity is the cultural trauma of the collective split between thinking of our minds and our bodies as being divorced, our spirituality and our corporeal realities as being separate, and our lives and our aspirations as being inseparable. It is problematic. And pervasive. And increasingly unbridgeable, because we have willed the gap into being.

I’m not interested in authenticity. I’m interested in what is real. And yet somehow, this book is real—a compendium of global conversations around design and 13

individuals’ personal, collective, intellectual, emotional, social, gendered, racial, orientational, financial, political and, for most, a mix of the preceding, entanglements with design as culture, designers as people, and a world that could use both maybe a bit more and a little bit less design.

Why? Our cities could largely use design to be a lot more livable, our planet to be more sustainable and our societies to become a lot more inclusive. It just might heal the gap, but like any conversation, you’ve got to start somewhere. I started writing for Slanted over a decade ago and besides the editors, my voice appears here a lot, because I care.

I totally give a shit about design. Slanted’s editors published my writing and helped lend seeming authenticity to my voice and credibility as a design-concerned writer and critic, even when things got weird along the way—when narratives went awry, deadlines got missed and when things got heated. Things get weird. We can’t help it, but that is sometimes good.

I’ve written this elsewhere, as it advice that I dole out to my students, and it is worth repeating: – If you can’t make good design, make weird design.

– If you can’t make weird design, make good design.

– That being said, the very best design is both good and weird.

I think that this advice is incredibly prescient for a book of writing that revolves around a long-running magazine named Slanted, as the definition of the term that the publication is named after means: 1. To slope or lean in a particular direction.

2. To diverge or cause to diverge from the vertical or horizontal.

The term “slanted” can be applied to notions of typography, one of the tentpoles of design, because contemporary italic and oblique typefaces are literally slanted—they are 14

sloped designs that are usually reminiscent of the chancery cursive as practiced by Renaissance scribe Ludovico degli Arrighi—italics and obliques use similar approaches to the rhythm and cadence of Arrighi’s work to keep our eyes moving. We as a species like to be on the move, and we like to do so in a variety of ways—humans like variety as much as we like repetition. We want patternbased comfort as much as we like to be surprised, and that mix is well-represented here in writing that embodies divergence and a panoply of perspectives about design and our world that range from the subjective and personal to the seeming objective and global.

Oh. And Typography.

People today are interested in typography. Helvetica wouldn’t be a thing people know about if we as a global culture were not interested in giving visual language form. We wouldn’t snicker about Comic Sans if not—be it in the form of irony, guilty pleasures, or actual attraction. The same goes for Papyrus, American pop culture’s latest typographic whipping boy. We want to understand these things, because it always feels like the end of the world when we are left hanging and waiting for what is going to be said next—when there is anticipation, but nothing uttered and we have to wait for a while to find the next bit that will help give meaning to it all …

The Pause Between Sentences.

The parting wave to family at the airport through the other side of security.

A lover’s maybe-final kiss …

It feels like the end of the world, that waiting.

15

CHAPTERS 1-10

Art and Artists in a Decade of War

1 SIGNS OF EMPIRE Power, control, resistance, tongue kisses, and blood, blood, blood.

This isn’t about Me. It’s about You.

Total Armageddon

Design culture felt so monolithic in terms of this thing that one might potentially move when I initially became interested. It felt palpably heavy. More than a vocation. More than an industry. More than mere lifestyle—something soburdened with accumulated and accretive history that it was seemingly immobile unless you were some sort of “industry insider,” not that I knew what the hell that meant 20 years ago.

Since then, I have learned that if you read a ton of history, you’ll learn more than the supposedly established textbooks, or at least aspects / periods of / in them.

Additionally, if you know more history than most folks, you can help to steer the future, or at least representations of parts of history itself—you can help give gravity to the folks who’ve been skipped over, you can fill in the gaps left behind by the white male clothesline of design history, you can meet people who feel similarly to you, and you can start to nudge the culture of design away from technocratic plutocracy and toward the honest thing that design was supposed to be.

Additionally, it can help you to understand your own history a whole lot more.

17

Silas Munro / silasmunro.com

ACTING UP AT HOME SILAS MUNRO A brief history of activism and graphic design at Housing Works as told by its former design director, Silas Munro.

A lone pink triangle on a black ground. Inverted to right side.

Turned up in protest. Bold, ultra-condensed, sans serif, white typography locked-up beneath it. Type set with a single, coded message: Silence = Death.

Early Foundations

18

From Slanted #26—New York

In 1987 seemingly out of the blue, this now iconic work is the visual birth site of a history of Graphic Design at Housing Works. Housing Works and its visual ethos can be traced back to this now highly charged graphic created by a collective of six Lower East Side artists / activists, simply known as the Silence = Death Project. This group would later come to be known in a different form, as Gran Fury. The collective was just that—a loose splinter group—really a precursor and a future graphic arm of the now much better known coalition of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power). ACT UP became a notorious activist clique that rose out of queer frustration to public policy reaction (or rather lack of reaction) to the AIDS epidemic and its brutal impact on New York City’s people. Silence = Death graphic was a visual rallying cry resulting from years of neglect and disregard for an epidemic that was rapidly claiming the lives of populations that were mainly gay, mostly low-income, and largely composed of people of color. While ACT UP and Gran Fury would emphasize provoking the street dialog and mobilizing anger for social action, Housing Works in 1990 took to actually providing

Acting Up At Home

crucial supportive services, especially housing and medical care for people living with AIDS and HIV. Housing Works’ four founders, Keith Cylar, Charles King, Eric Sawyer, and Virginia Shubert, as members of Act-Up’s Housing Coalition, were fed up. Tired of watching their brothers, sisters, and trans siblings being overlooked by New York City, New York State, and federal government officials, Housing Works was born to serve.

Like the foundation of Maslow’s Hierarchy or a well built home, Housing Works saw evidence that housing was the corner stone in keeping HIV-Positive people healthy, safe, and fulfilled. It was also key to preventing further spread of the virus. Combining case managers, social workers, medical professionals with judgement free policies around a range of services, they met their clients “where they were at.” Housing Works was a pioneer of inventive care but also an early innovator in the now prevalent business model for social enterprise. In 1995 they opened their first thrift shop to initial skepticism. It’s stylish and chic clothing and housewares became a fashion and economic hit with savvy New York shoppers. They spawned later ventures into multiple thrifts, a bookstore café, and a catering company. In addition to valuable income, the enterprises also housed a first-rate job training program that made a unique synergy to its services to clients.

Ultimately, this new financial approach was critical as Housing Works found itself in 1997 in a battle royal with then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his administration’s drive to cut city funding to Housing Works. The organization would later win a 5 million USD judgement against the city but went through a precarious time before finding a stable mix where 90 % of its revenue would come from a blend of the social enterprise businesses, health care, and other services. Housing Works has become one of the largest organizations of its kind. To date its has served more than 25,000 homeless and low-income New Yorkers living with HIV / AIDS.

Graphic Lineage

Total Armageddon

John Consigli can be credited with the first customized graphic specifically for Housing Works. His 1989 treatment borrowed the hot pink triangle from Silence = Death to form the roof of a house over the bold all capital words: “DEMAND HOUSING FOR HOMELESS PEOPLE LIVING WITH AIDS.” Inscribed in the pink roof was a black square with the bold white type “ACT UP.” This lived on t-shirts and posters for a few years, as Housing Works moved toward becoming incorporated as a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. Somehow

19

From Slanted #26—New York

20

Silas Munro

in 1991, during the shuffle of early startup that typifies nonprofits, this house was left behind for an even cruder gray triangle with “HOUSING WORKS” set along its roof line with the addition of three black bars with knocked out typography that kept the organization’s demands in writing. These bars implied a kind of super equal sign that conveyed the critical importance of community equality at the newly formed charity.

The design of the logo took many forms under unknown designers through the rest of the next 15 years. Always with the roof, always with three bars. It was not until 2005 with the addition of Scott Ballum, that Housing Works took on its first Design Director.

His effect on Housing Works’ first designed annual report set a kind of twenty-first century tone. He was followed by Ian Crowther, who also made an amazing pair of annual reports that further laid ground work. Crowther’s work with Keith Mancuso, Director of Integrated Technology, with Jeffery Zeldman’s web studio, Happy Cog, utilized those graphics to support the first modern version of Housing Works’ website that provided scaffolding for our later digital work on the identity. I replaced Ian in July of 2009. In early 2010 my team, along with the other marketing and communications staff took on the herculean task of contemporizing the Housing Works visual identity. I felt it was crucial that we not overly historicize or ignore Housing Works’ rich graphic past. Though that graphic language had evolved over time, the core DNA of the identity has always been linked to the immediacy of AIDS protest graphics. Bold, stark sans serif types with strong geometry, bright evocative color, and pointed imagery formed the backbone of what we knew would become the contemporary Housing Works look and feel. But how could we do that and be sensitive to the much more complex entity Housing Works had become? With vital support from my boss, Diana Boric, VP of Marketing and Communications, Matthew Bernardo, then-SVP of Business Ventures, and Charles King, thenCEO, we set out to update the identity with those myriad objectives.

I also had the good fortune to build an amazing team of designers that included, Meryl Friedman, Alex Pines, and some of the most talented interns in the land.

When researching the lineage of design at Housing Works, we were intimidated by what the early graphic activists had done.

Along with the prolific work of Gran Fury, were epic street murals

by Keith Haring, provocative type and photo collages by Barbara Kruger, and even re-purposed tattoos from gay concentration camp survivors in Nazi Germany. With time, we built on this layered foundation. We also had consultant support from SJI Associates who

Acting Up At Home

interviewed many people in the Housing Works Community to help us understand the core values of our community that boiled down to: “All people have a right to a life of dignity.”

Raising the Beams Ultimately we created a mutable set of systems and strategies that retained the activist roots of Housing Works while being flexible for the facets of a contemporary social entity that included “relentless activism, lifesaving services, and entrepreneurial businesses.”

A redrawn house, bright magenta, cool gray, and Typotheque’s Irma and Fedra Sans and Fedra Serif drawn by Peter Biľak formed a kind of graphic, color, and typographic glue that could flex and reform. These were joined by a host of other color palettes and typographic supporting roles from Darden Studio, Emigre, and Process Type Foundry. We made our own imagery, clip art, and photography standards to deal with the realties of design in an in-house nonprofit organization.

This new identity spread poly-modally into print, physical environments, web and e-commerce, event branding, activist happenings, and collaborations with academic institutions and other design firms. So much of the work was conceived in the collective spirit of community organizing with design concepts coming from everyone from David Thorpe, Director of Communications, to case managers in our neighboring offices. Over time these rebranding initiatives took on more complexity. A stand out, a redesign of the Health Care Guide to Services was co-created with an interdisciplinary team that included social workers, case managers, and our own team of designers.

The Key

Total Armageddon

In the final phases of my tenure, the design studio became a kind of social enterprise itself. One of the final projects that I oversaw was a publication called The Key. The Key was funded by a grant that we secured from the Sappi Ideas that Matter Foundation. Returning to the core issue of housing, the publication served as the reissue of a vintage community newsletter that was a fixture of Housing Works in the early 1990s that we discovered in the annuals of the Housing Works print archive. With the advent of desktop publishing, in its original incarnation, The Key was a myriad of typographic styles and photographic exuberance that indicated of the new freedoms of digital typesetting and the joy of grunge and deconstruction.

21

Silas Munro

Our newer version of The Key pushed the edges of our new identity to the max. Irma’s typographic texture became wilder and unmoored from the strong wall inspired by 1980s protest posters.

We blended contemporary photography from Julie Turkewitz in a reportage style shot with natural light and the revamped palette of the new identity. To launch The Key, we collaborated with a large cast of partners including Gavin Browning, of Columbia University; Greta Hansen, independent architect; MICA graduate students, and Glenn Cummings, MTWTF, to design an immersive installation of one of our housing units at our largest fundraising event of the year, Design on a Dime.

We also visualized large sets of data gathered by one of Housing Works’ founders, Ginny Shubert. These data visualizations were ultimately an attempt for the studio to come full circle and be as direct as possible an homage to Gran Fury’s stark and iconic visual language. Time will tell if these isotope inspired treatments endure.

I do know that Housing Works and its visual rally cries won’t stop until there is justice for homeless and low-income people living with HIV and AIDS.

Further Acts

22

From Slanted #26—New York

It’s so powerful to see that the work I was involved in is but one point in a continuum of something bigger. Juan Astasio, former designer at MTWTF, now leads an amazing new design team at Housing Works, including Ben Tuttle, a rising design activist. The two have collaborated on everything from handmade lettering for the bookstore Café, to custom typography based on Irma, to a unique comic book conceived of for health care outreach and made from custom characters drawn by an outside illustrator.

To quote the words of Jason Bauman, one of the original members of the Silence = Death Project: “An image may be authored and so, at least at that point, arguably owned. But once it reaches the public sphere, if it manages to tap into the zeitgeist, it may have its ‘moment.’ It’s the audience that drives the ‘moment,’ not the author. For this cultural nanosecond, the public sphere is actually an exercise in collectivity. And the ‘moment’ is an independent thing, free in its entirety, and un­ controllable. From that moment on, Silence = Death belonged—and it always will—to those who respond to its call.”

A pink triangle. On the ground of the world. A code unlocked, ready and open to all who respond to its call. Acting up, wherever anyone calls home.

Acting Up At Home Advertisement for The Silence = Death Project used by permission by ACT-UP,

Total Armageddon

The AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power. Color lithograph, 1987.

Current and past members of Housing Works Design Team who all contributed to its collective effort: ACT UP, Juan Astasio, Scott Ballum, John Consigli, Ian Crowther, Meryl Friedman, Greg Gazdowicz, Grand Fury, Scott Korn, Shira Inbar, Shawn Lisle, Keith Mancuso, Raymond Manlo, Silas Munro, Sarah Pakora, Alex Pines, Colleen Roxas, Laura Scherling, Ben Tuttle, and Andrew Walters.

23

Can Altay / can-altay.com

SETTINGS, COLLECTIVITIES, INFORMALITIES: ART AND PUBLIC SPACE IN ISTANBUL CAN ALTAY Inhabitation

32

From Slanted #24—Istanbul

Urban space is not only a physical, infra- or super-structural construct, but also a social, political and economic one; which is steadily produced and reproduced. Urban space is composed of layers, of structural strata, of institutional constructs, of networks, and of life. Istanbul is a city that is constantly composed and recomposed through shuffles, ruptures, and sutures across this strata.

Instead of talking about an infra-structure, it would be poignant to talk about inter-structure; meaning the amenities, foundations, technical services, grids, and sub-systems that are vital to any city, literally “squeeze” in between existing structures. Most often, the infrastructure is not prior, but posterior here: it follows the city’s growth, rather than lead it. Sometimes the cost of this can be high, there may not be much violence in human scale, but on urban scale, a different story.

What attracts me to inhabitation, or being an inhabitant in any space or system, is the self-claimed power to produce meaning, or the ability towards unpredictable reconfigurations. Whatever you do contributes or intervenes to the city, whether in its actuality or to the knowledge of it. It is not a matter of overvaluing one’s own doings, but seeing oneself as entangled and enmeshed to this

Settings, Collectivities, Informalities

network of infrastructures, power structures, objects, people, their actions, animals, plants; things that refer to social, physical, and abstract worlds that overlay on top of one another to form cities.

Informalities My appreciation of the city (and the work I do) is rooted in the informal: the things that fall out from, or do not find their place in the system. It can be a forgotten place or item, a left-over space that no longer operate in the organizing logic of the city; or it can be the practices of people or life that finds a way to inhabit such zones, without waiting for permissions. Informality is double-edged, it’s inspiring, but you can’t be too romantic about it, there is almost always a dark side to it. A harsher capitalism usually finds its way into exploiting informal labor for example, or suddenly an un­ claimed space becomes simply too valuable. But still, the various acts of inhabiting reveal fields of possibilities, sometimes about how the city works and sometimes even about its histories.

PARK: bir ihtimal with works by Nils Norman, Ceren Oykut, Sinek Sekiz, and the Park Collective, 2010. Photo by Laleper Aytek.

Stuffed Mussels Total Armageddon

When we started investigating the street food of stuffed mussels with fellow artist Jeremiah Day, we immediately traced the phenomenon linking to a multiplicity of histories, geographies, and practices. The mussels themselves are called “kidneys of the Bosphorus,” they filter through all the commercial vessels passing through the strait. The Bosphorus crosses the city, and links the Black Sea to

33

From Slanted #15—Experimental

52

Thierry Somers

records. Brody became friends with the owner of the Fetish record label, Rod Pearce, who gave him total artistic freedom. Brody designed sleeves for bands like Clock DVA, Throbbing Gristle, The Bongos, 8-eyed Spy, and 23Skidoo. Here he experienced an atmosphere of like-minded people working together. “Creatively we never used the word synergy ever, but it was a synergy. I was interpreting or expressing the music of the bands. I wasn’t illustrating the music.” In The Graphic Language of Neville Brody, he says about his work for the record label, “My work for Fetish came out of a gut reaction to its music and the situation in which it was being published. I wanted to force the record buyer into a state of consideration, a gut reaction to my initial reaction.” The designer says that experimentation was at the heart of what he was doing. “It needed to be a new aspiration, it was a craft,” Brody says. “It wasn’t about an easy solution at all. In those days I would sometimes spend three months on one record cover. If someone spends three hours these days, it’s a luxury. At that time you went through so much experimentation, trying out ideas, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. There was real commitment, not because someone was telling you what to do, but because the opportunity was there to explore ideas and have them published and that was an extraordinary time. Someone was paying you maybe 50 pounds, but you would spend a month to get it right. There was a real commitment.”

For the sleeves, Brody designed typefaces and logos, sometimes painted the artwork and experimented tirelessly with photocopiers and a Photo Mechanical Transfer machine, a grant-enlarger with the ability to make new images and scaled type and logos to be used in artwork. When Brody became the art director of The Face, and later Arena, he continued to create typefaces, logos and artwork which were in complete synergy with the politically engaged content of the magazine. Brody’s work for the magazine was seen as the benchmark within the graphic design world and inspired many young designers to create their own typefaces.

Art and Artists in a Decade of War

2 LOCALES Places, spaces, communities, histories, herstories, and wherestories.

Total Armageddon

I am from a small town. My parents used to subscribe to the New Yorker and leave it on the coffee table because that was a signifier of the aspirational first-generation middle class in upstate New York in the 1980s. My parents wanted me to be interested in what was happening in New York City in terms of Broadway and literature and the trappings of the cultured and the moneyed. My parents wanted me to be cultured and moneyed, because they were and are incredibly good parents.

To their dismay, I was more interested in the subculture of things that came from New York: zines, small press initiatives, and independent publishing, the postCBGB stylings of the bands that played assorted filthy venues, and the food that came out of bodegas and barrios.

In short, the underbelly of acceptable culture of the Big Apple. However, I was far more interested in the West Coast variants of all of these things. California seemed like a kind of leftist utopia compared to the cow fields and horse stables of my hometown and the heroinsoaked, squatted, harsh, harsh realities of nearby NYC. Despite years of subscriptions to the altars which I was supposed to worship at, instead I made a pilgrimage to San Francisco Bay ‌ offering my life as sacrifice.

53

Steven Heller / hellerbooks.com

TYPOGRAPHIC MAD STEVEN HELLER Typographic inspiration comes from many sources. Steven Heller found his in the pages of his childhood humor magazine that taught him good typography is not always good type.

56

From Slanted #26—New York

Everything I know about type, typography, and especially typographic tomfoolery I learned from MAD, the New York based humor magazine where comic irreverence flourished during the quite dreary fifties in postwar America. MAD’s satiric comics significantly influenced radical sixties underground comic artists, while its cluttered, though disciplined, layout was the model for untutored underground newspaper “designers,” like me. I didn’t need no fancy degree from Yale University, I just copied how it was done in MAD. MAD’s design was not based on less is more modernism— the typefaces were often goofy novelties or functional workhorse gothics and slab serifs used on pages packed with visual stuff that sometimes overflowed into the margins. White space was anathema, but MAD’s format was the perfect frame for the wild cartoon parodies of popular movies and TV shows and libelous lampoons of MADison Avenue’s iconic yet cloying ads that filled the magazine.

MAD began as a comic book in 1952 with the legendary artist Harvey Kurtzman as founding editor and continued to publish at that scale for 23 issues until the industry’s self-policing arm, the Comics Code Authority, imposed its prescription for sanitized comics content and rejected anything that threatened American values.

MAD was indeed a threat to complacency and status quo. So, in 1955 publisher William Gaines folded MAD, the comic, and launched MAD, the magazine, with a permanent logo, regular departments

Typographic MAD

MAD, the magazine, with a permanent logo, regular departments and identifiable mascot, Alfred E. Neuman—the awkwardly largeeared, freckled-face goon with a missing tooth and moronic grin— whose motto, “What me worry?” became a mantra of a generation.

Once MAD gave up its comic book status, it was no longer subjected to the reactionary restrictions imposed by the Comics Code and was free to be as mad as the law allowed, and then some.

MAD deflated the pompous, undermined folly and preferred the idea of “humor in a jugular vein.” Since nothing was sacred, advertisers never bought space, worried they would be targets for parodies.

The first typographical component to capture my eye was Kurtzman’s hand drawn bifurcated Tuscan logo that has identified MAD for over half a century. It exists to this day and has equally high recognition value even next to magazines like Time, Vogue, and Playboy. As a magazine of primarily comic strips, cartoons and manipulated photos, MAD’s interior typography could not be as loud as the logo or compete with the magazine’s visual features. So, a deliberately random sampling of display typefaces was used, which was sometimes aesthetically in sync with the tone of the features but not always— a haphazard but decidedly logical selection of character styles that gave MAD its typographic character.

MAD No. 57, Sept. 1960. Art Director: John Putnam, Illustrator: George Woodbridge.

MAD No. 67, Dec. 1961 Art Director: John Putnam, Illustrator: Kelly Freas.

MAD No. 57, Sept.1960. Art Director: John Putnam, Illustrator: Joe Orlando.

Total Armageddon

Typefaces and hand letters were used when making parodies of product trademarks, such as the “Baby Rot” send-up of Baby Ruth candy. Prefiguring contemporary hipster fashions, MAD offered its own facial alphabet called “initialed Beards,” “for the Beatnik who wants to maintain his own ‘individuality.’” There were also features where type played with the language of road signs, billboards,

57

Christine Lhowe / christinelhowe.com

THE NEIGHBORHOODS AND THEIR PERSONALITIES CHRISTINE LHOWE Christine Lhowe is a New York based designer interested in creating experiences that better connect people together.

In this essay she explores the variations in design and type throughout neighborhoods in Manhattan and the insight that it gives about the culture within.

68

From Slanted #26—New York

I’m a native New Yorker. I grew up and lived for the first twenty years of my life in a suburb of New York City and have spent my professional career, so far, in Manhattan. New York City has been my home, my escape, my friend, and sometimes even my enemy.

No matter what it is, it’s always a source of inspiration.

I’m a curious person. I like to people-watch. When I’m not getting caught in the hustle and bustle of the fast-paced work culture, I am easily intrigued by my surroundings. Every once in a while I make sure to remind myself to slow down and enjoy the cultural mecca around me. In addition, as a graphic designer designing primarily for a New York based audience, it’s important to understand the people that my work impacts and their needs. Much of this is done through observing, listening, and getting to know the environments in which they live. Something that continues to fascinate me about New York is the unique personality that each neighborhood has and the vast distinctions between each. There are roughly

The Neighborhoods and Their Personalities

80 neighborhoods in Manhattan alone. That doesn’t even count the other four boroughs—Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. It’s addicting to try to understand what makes each neighborhood distinct, why it differs from another that may only be a few blocks away, and how the division came about.

As you walk from one neighborhood to another, culture changes, wealth shifts, and social class divides are apparent. Sometimes you can ride one subway stop or walk a few blocks and go from the poorest of neighborhoods to the richest. At times the changes tear at my heart strings. At times I’m fascinated by a new way of living that isn’t familiar to me. All the times, I’m intrigued.

With these shifts also come variations in the design and typography utilized. It’s noticeable in the architecture, store facades, signage, and even details such as trash cans. I always wonder, is it the neighborhood that influences the people or do the people influence the neighborhood? While the design of where we live shape our lives and how we function, the visitors and residents play a participatory role in the design through the symbols, signs, and marks that they add to the space—whether legally or not.

Total Armageddon

Times Square

There are a few neighborhoods that I feel I can call home. These are ones that I have spent a good amount of time in and have really gotten to know. From the upper-class Flatiron and Financial Districts

69

90

From Slanted #27—Portugal

Photos made in Cape Town.

Charlotte von Fritschen & Sonja Steppan

happened during the colonial times, I’ll have to pick the most modern buildings, made during the 20th century. There is an architectural style that I love the most, it’s called Português Suave (“Soft Portuguese,” in English). Around the world there are beautiful samples of this architectonic style, like in Luanda with the National Bank of Angola. But my favorite building happens to be in Lisbon. It’s at Rua da Palmira #33 and it was in fact my home for seven years. It’s a masterpiece of Cassiano Branco and a great example of curved facades, one of his most known signatures. Lucky me! “She actually got to live in Cassiano Branco’s Rua da Palmira #33!” I had that luck! It’s a building and something I love about Cassiano is that he used to plan the buildings from inside to outside. On the curved facades buildings, that means that the inside walls are also round. It’s perfect!”

CvF: Speaking of Angola in the 20th century, as Ana mentions. Let’s talk about the plethora of cinemas! Art-deco in style, but also influenced by the environment, the land, by the leap of the impala—or so were the arches of Cinema Impala in Namibe. These buildings have only recently been recognized in the past ten years as an important part of the architectural landscape, although now they are faded and dilapidated (it seems the Portuguese are not very good at their own PR). Not to mention they housed an important cultural asset, film. In fact film was such a part of life, that the Cinema Infante Sagres in Luanda—a really mammoth cinema— included living areas, meeting and social spaces, terraced balconies—apart from the auditorium. Some of them are more like amphitheaters, since Castro Rodrigues envisioned the cine esplanandas (they soon found that the open-air cinemas make more sense in the tropical climate). Unfortunately racial segregation meant that it was mostly kept for white and colonial elite enjoyment. But the Goethe Institute Angola is planning to restore a few of them. It would now be an inclusive space, for collaboration between old and new, film and architecture as adjunct art forms, and who knows what else. Obviously four decades of Civil War tends to dampen cultural progress. But Angola’s economy is rising to new heights and hopefully this affects the arts in a positive way.

3 IF I CAN’T DANCE, IT’S NOT MY REVOLUTION Friends, sisters, mothers, heroines, and others.

My mother’s last words were, “you’ll be back.”

She was right.

NOTE: Moms are usually right.

The thing is, I only came back for a visit.

I teach a couple of classes where we read about the notions of nostalgia and authenticity quite a bit. Both are incredibly valuable bits of cultural currency in the present moment. I often find myself so caught up in aspects of them that I am unable to discern bow, stern, fore or aft.

Total Armageddon

91

Laure Boer

average age of executive employees tends to be higher as well, making it near impossible for women to be acknowledged as experts in their field. Fortunately, I lead our design agency BANK™ alongside my partner Sebastian Bissinger. We complement each other both professionally and personally. The combination of male and female is an advantage in this case. It makes it easier for our clients that they can choose who they feel more comfortable working with.

The fact remains, “women in design” is a complex subject.

To really do it justice you have to include both genders in the conversation. It’s our task to understand and learn where the strengths of our opposite lie, be they male or female.

1 managermagazin, June 2007.

From Slanted #12–Women, Typography, Graphic Design

94

Gerda Breuer & Julia Meer / gerdabreuer.de / juliameer.de

FEMALE(’S) TYPE: WOMEN IN THE HISTORY OF GRAPHIC DESIGN AND TYPOGRAPHY GERDA BREUER & JULIA MEER

From Slanted #12–Women, Typography, Graphic Design

The story of female typographers has the familiar ring of stereotype tales about the inequality of the sexes. What Silvie Bovenschen wrote about art history in the 70s, easily translates to the graphic design world. Women inhabit these graphical worlds without ever stepping on the scene as their creators or sources.

There is a crass disparity between the abundance of images and the hidden existence of creative women. On top of this, there were female typographers in all parts of design history, who were quite successful in their time, but, pushed to the blind spot of historiography, remain unmentioned. The tendency to equate male gender with creativity, success, and acknowledgment and the resulting conflict between artistic intellect and “femininity” is continued.

To this day women have not been able to attain cultural attention, despite making up a great part of design students, being successful in their career fields and teaching at eminent higher

95

Gerda Breuer & Julia Meer

education institutions. Due to this, little information can be gathered from statistics. Instead the problem of social disparity must be viewed from the gender perspective, which takes into account the gender norms contingent on social and cultural aspects.

Cover, Deutsche Kunst und Dekoration, Margaret MacDonald, May 1902.

Cover, Gebrauchsgraphik, Dore Mönkemeyer-Corty, 1925.

96

From Slanted #12–Women, Typography, Graphic Design

Clearly historians weren’t very interested in female graphic designers and the women themselves rarely insisted on their place in history. There are almost no statistics about this, showing that this discrepancy was not understood to be a relevant issue for study.

Though the short-haired women of the 20s and 30s, smoking cigarettes in the drivers seats of their convertibles, seem modern, most parts of the male-world were still inaccessible to them. What Gropius thought of the Bauhaus women is well-known, though the 1919 Bauhaus program read “Every respectable person, whose previous education has been deemed sufficient, will be admitted, regardless of their age and gender.” Equality was not an issue, even though women quantitatively made up a large part of the student body. Personalities such as Marianne Brandt and Gunta Stölzl were exceptions. The famous photograph of the “Masters of Form” on the Bauhaus roof terrace 1927 shows a “group portrait, with lady”— Gunta Stölzl was the only women among the teaching staff.

To comply with the idea of the “new woman” in the culturally tumultuous Weimar Republic was a stony path as well. Alice Rühle-Gerstl writes 1932 “the transition from old to new feminity is

Female(’s)Type

no straight line” in “Female issues of the present”1. Despite this, the spirit of emancipation and modern taste inspired masses of women to work in city, artistic milieus. Their biographies can only be reconstructed in fragments.

It can be assumed, however, that most women, who were successful in their chosen profession, came from middle-class and upper middle-class backgrounds, and had access to financial backing this way. It’s probably only half of the truth, when Hildegard Schwab-Felisch wrote in 1928: “A breed of productive women is currently working, as nobody might have predicted or thought possible.

Actresses, singers, politicians, novelists, scientists, milliners, photographers, architects—no matter where one looks—everywhere the same scene: a life of surprises, wealth, power and confidence”.2 No research has previously been done to find out more about the shadowy existence of graphic designers in the public eye as opposed to a few papers which have been written in the realm of product design. While the Bauhaus and the female students of School of Design Ulm, the two most eminent design schools in Germany, have been subject of multiple publications in recent years, female typographers have not played a role in any sort of research project. There was no female Herbert Bayer at Bauhaus, or a Marianne Brandt in metal work in the graphic departments.

A search for a female equivalent to the multi-talented Otl Aicher at School of Design Ulm would yield no results. There is no female star to shine on the freelancers working in typography or illustration, poster and book design, fashion drawing and artistic graphics.

These professions are today, as they have been, subject to the prevalent judgement of service related jobs. Authorship was not indicated through the signature, as in fine art, a problem other applied art fields such as photography, product design, etc. share.

One

Total Armageddon

Having researched this topic thus far, the following observations can be made: Only in connection with large emancipatory movements like the suffragettes in Great Britain, the Russian revolution, the feminism of the 1970s in the USA and the expansion of modern research perspectives like sender studies, the interest in diversity and female support institutions, the topic of female graphic designers is part of the conversation.

An example for the cultural context that allowed for more movement within creative professions for women to happen, is the emancipatory movement of the late 19th century. Important writers

97

From Slanted #32—Dubai

118

Jori Erdman

she thought was troubling. She seemed to just be resigned to the condition, but it’s hard to know what she might really think, given the limitations on free speech. Although I accustomed to seeing the different ways of hijab, I couldn’t help but compare these young women to my own twelve-year-old daughter who spends her days studying different clothes, hair, and makeup. She fills time thinking about how she wants to present herself to the world and how her physical appearance represents the kind of person she aspires to become. In privacy of the home, this is no different than many of the women in the Middle East, I’m sure, but the difference is the ability to publicly wear that self-image. This really hit me one day as I packed up in the gym. A young woman with long beautiful hair was getting ready also. As I was tying up my shoes, she began wrapping her hair up in the headscarf and pulled on her abaya; suddenly she was a much more muted, anonymous version of the previous woman … much more difficult to identify. Although I absolutely respect the choice of women to dress however they feel comfortable, I couldn’t help but get choked up knowing that so many choose or don’t have a choice. They aren’t fully able to express their identities in public through physical appearance in ways that are taken for granted in my everyday world.

In working and speaking with students over the semester, I got more of a sense of the complexity with which they are faced.

Many women who are getting an education face social and familial resistance, despite garnering enough support to have ultimately ended up in school. Some students said that their mothers feared they would never find a husband or that it would be “too late” by the time they finished school. A career path for women in the Middle East is uncertain depending on their citizenship, family pressures, and limited opportunities. But for most of our students, the university is a safe space where they are engaged in getting an “American” education which includes mixed gender class rooms, open and critical discussions about the subject matter, and challenges to preconceived ideas about art, design, architecture, and urbanism.

In the end, the experience of teaching and living in the UAE revealed my ignorance, but also helped remediate that ignorance through the generosity and warmth of the people I met. I’m not sure I penetrated the facade or got behind the veil, but at least now I know there is a facade and have some ideas about how that façade developed and is maintained. My memories of the students at AUS are of strong, intelligent, talented, ambitious young people who will build on their educational experiences to begin to allow more westerners and others to share in their world and lives.

Art and Artists in a Decade of War

4 DAYS OF FUTURE PAST Polished chrome, protruding fittings, folding beach chairs, the smell of printed books, family photo albums, and the lack thereof.

Total Armageddon

The other night, I was perusing a real estate website advertising a house on a lake near where I grew up. It’s a really beautiful house in a rustic, upstate New York kind of way. Wood walls with a lot of glass and a price point that means that I could buy it, even on my meager teaching salary, and pay it off in a couple years. It looks really nice, but then I remembered: I don’t want to fucking live there.

I have spent my whole life running from my past. (That’s not true, really—just my twenties were literally spent running.) Affordable and pretty real estate does not undo the seeming traumas of childhood. I would like to buy a small house lakeside, but somewhere else.

Somewhere very different.

Memory, however, only suggests the things that we know.

I know this because I took my wife to visit my hometown a bunch of years ago and it was pretty terrifying. My family left there years ago, so the presence of that town manifests itself only in my psyche and through Facebook communication that I shot down really quickly shortly after Facebook debuted and gained mass popularity.

Nostalgia for me exists only in unconsciously trying to reconstruct that tenuous comfort of false memory— yeah maybe it might be better the second time around.

119

The first motorcycles produced in Portugal date back to 1902. After WW II, several companies produced small low fuel consumption motorcycles. Names like Honda (Japan), Mobilette (France), Vespa (Italy), or Ducati (Italy) are contemporary to Portuguese brands like Alma, Vilar, or Pachancho, but the scale of the Portuguese closed market and the political and economical situation of the country didn’t

120

From Slanted #27—Portugal

Portugal is not the first country that comes to mind when we talk about motorcycles. In fact, with the exception of some cafe-racer workshops, like Maria Riding Company or TonUp Motorcycles that produce shiny examples, of trendy two wheelers, and AJP, a company specializing in off-road motorcycles, all Portuguese moped and motorcycle brands are now extinct.

Emanuel Barbosa / motosdeportugal.com

VINTAGE PORTUGUESE MOTORCYCLE GRAPHICS: THE REMAINS OF A LOST INDUSTRY EMANUEL BARBOSA

Vintage Portuguese Motorcycle Graphics

Total Armageddon

121

Ingo Niermann

decorated their future with the renderings and names of these projects. They took the Bilbao effect to a new level, where merely announcing it was enough to trigger it. In some cases, they did not even do any PR, leaving that to the initiative of the architecture firms. Everything that was actually built was done so without the western star system. The general designs were instead left to Hungarians or Saudis in their mid-twenties, to be later modified at will. Rem Koolhaas now describes the projects his architecture firm, OMA, planned for the Emirates as “efforts that were slightly pre­mature.” We may read this as a polite circumlocution for, “The Emirates were not yet ready,” and hear the hope in it that the tide may turn yet.

My solutions have time. Some require much, too much to be realized in the next few years. Far from pretending to help with Dubai’s urgent problems, they are even more insane castles in the air. The reader might think that I am trying to satirize Dubai’s past boom. But assuming that Dubai does indeed act on one of my ideas, would that not make me the stooge of an anti-democratic system?

Anyone who engages in or profits from trade with nondemocracies collaborates with them—that is, virtually every citizen of the earth. Yet the question the advocate of democracy faces is this: What can be done either to strengthen the existing democracies or to foster new ones? Weakening the existing non-democracies is not necessarily the way to do that. They might merely become more brutal, and the existing democracies more negligent.

From Slanted #32—Dubai

146

Art and Artists in a Decade of War

5 REBEL YELL Burning flags, beatings, the smell of napalm, charred flesh and the evening news.

Nostalgia, obviously, is a Thing. It is one of the struts that holds up so many aspects of our lives, both in terms of real and perceived nostalgia. This is supported by contemporary understanding of memory—if we only truly remember a micro-fraction of what we have truly experienced, then nostalgia is our primary stand-in: the would’ve, could’ve, should’ve’s that manifest as doppelgängers for the shame, fear, dread, anxiety and real things that we lived through. I think that most folks predicate their existences on imaginary best outcome experiences that they never truly lived as the defining mundanity that is the seeming stuff of their / our lives.

(Alternate theory: I am batshit crazy.)

Total Armageddon

147

The voices of Athens’ most controversial district aren’t meant to be heard, but can be seen: written in ink on its walls.

148

From Slanted #30—Athens

Back in 2004, along with three friends in a car, I was challenged to jump out at a random place and tag something on the wall with a spray can I happened to carry with me, on my way back from university. I accepted the challenge and right behind the Leeds Train Station I found the perfect blank white wall. No extra thoughts whatsoever and I find myself writing Π Α Ο Κ (the name of a Greek football team; a rather random choice as my expertise in football is literally zero). My rebellious session was not over until I decided to put a circle around the second letter, gloriously suggesting that this was not a message about football or some random Greek letters. This was a political act, my “anarchy in the UK moment” that placed me on the very top of my friends’ respect list and some kind of security camera’s black one.

Some years later, I find myself looking for a place to live in an apartment in Exarchia, right in the city center of Athens. From the clean walls and the almost sterile environment of the UK to a whole opposite situation with the streets looking tired and dirty, public spaces suffering from uncomfortable and unpleasant places to rest, cars parked everywhere and walls filled with spray marks up to their very last bit. I was transferred to a different planet. A much warmer one for sure but most importantly one with a new language I had to comprehend and start using instantly. I am Greek and I should have been used to this but Exarchia is a special place like no other. With a long reputation of political history, during the last 60 years, Exarchia managed to get together a rather interesting mix of

Panos Papanagiotou / hellopanos.co.uk

VOICES OF EXARCHIA PANOS PAPANAGIOTOU

Voices of Exarchia

people, including artists, musicians, intellectuals, young people, and students. First the hippies of the 70s and later the punk movement of the 80s brought a strong political tradition to the place that is still carried along.

Now, in 2017, Exarchia is the kind of area parents don’t like.

The one that you hear about on the news, the area where the people that live here should be wearing an achievement badge for being able to resist to abandon it for a “better” place. Somehow romantic and full of energy with a great sense of neighborhood, the residents love to hate Exarchia and fight for their right to be somehow independent and detached from the rest of the city.

Total Armageddon

Every possible surface in Exarchia is painted. Walls, windows, entrances, the sidewalk and even the street itself, all covered with hundreds of tags, messages, stickers, posters, drawings with markers, paintings too, sometimes of massive scale. And everywhere, like a stamp of approval, the “A” inside a circle, the anarchists “alphadi” as it is called Greek slang, validating the message and the writer.

Yes, this is the most atomic element of this neighborhood. The glue of its visual language that connects everything together. It might not be something all the residents believe in but surely a sign of respect or sometimes just an excuse for our unwillingness to change and rethink our living.

149

Kiyonori Muroga / idea-mag.com

KOHEI SUGIURA: PIONEER OF ASIAN DESIGN PHILOSOPHY AND METHODOLOGIES KIYONORI MUROGA “If you consider Sugiura Kohei a designer, others are not designers.”

— Toshihiro Katayama1

160

From Slanted #31—Tokyo

As this comment suggests, Sugiura was one of a kind in modern Japanese graphic design history—an outstanding talent who has had an incredible career. Sugiura kept his distance from the design com­ munity where posters were the most appreciated form of graphic design output, and thus had few occasions to be introduced to global audiences, whereas designers like Yusaku Kamekura and Ikko Tanaka are quite well known globally.

The aim of this article is to provide a quick overview of Sugiura’s achievements and recent activities.

Kohei Sugiura

Sugiura’s work ranges from graphic design to book design to the design of diagrams. If one tries to illustrate his significance in design history, Sugiura initially adopted western modernism and developed it into Asian postmodernism, suggesting an alternative way of being designer in opposition to typical modern design.

Educated in architecture, Sugiura started his career as a progressive modernist designer in the 1960s. While his predecessors and contemporaries begun with pictorial approaches, Sugiura practiced his design in a different level, adopting information science, psychology and anthropology as design methods with a deep understanding of mathematical structure, as well as an interest in media and technology. He actively communicated with avantgarde architects, musicians, and novelists, and became one of the main actors in many intermedia projects. After the 1970s, Sugiura completely changed his modernist approach and started to explore the potential of Asian design. A trigger for this big shift was his teaching experience at the Ulm School of Design in West Germany in the mid-1960s. After being exposed to Hellenism and Hebraism, fundamental concepts for western thinking behind “design,” he shifted his focus to design cultures in Japan and other Asian countries.

Seigo Matsuoka ed., Zen Uchishi (Summa Cosmographica), Kosakusha, 1979. The encyclopedic book of cosmology consist of various information sections structured in three dimensions to be architectural object of information: a folded cosmos with

Total Armageddon

white text and images against a jet-black background.

What he found diverges from the reductionist view of modern design—the vernacular symbols and patterns from non-western cultures integrate design with a vision of nature and the universe.

Sugiura actively applied this perspective to his own design practice,

161

Kiyonori Muroga

as well as to writings and exhibitions on Asian visual culture. These activities have eventually resulted in his book, Nihon no Katachi, Ajia no Katachi (Asian and Japanese forms and designs), Katachi Tanjo (Forms coming alive) and other publications since the mid-90s.

Sugiura’s creative journey stimulated many Chinese and Korean graphic designers after the end of the Cold War—this vital confrontation between Eastern and Western perspectives had, and continue to have, tremendous influence on a wide range of Asian design practitioners. Since the 2000s, Sugiura has enthusiastically schematized his philosophy and methodology through exhibitions and research projects in addition to his role as a director at Research Institute of Asian Design at Kobe Design University.

It is certain that Sugiura’s unique perspectives and ways of thinking will be increasingly important in this globalized world— where the rampant spread of technology, as evinced most popularly by widespread adoption of social media, designs human lives.

Ginka (Silver Flower), Bunka Shuppankyoku, 1970–2010. A quarterly magazine highKatachi Tanjo (Forms coming alive), NHK book, 1997. Part of the Theatre of Correspondences Series. Writing by Sugiura on his research and observation on Asian design.

1 Toshihiro Katayama (1928–2013), graphic designer, artist, former Professor Emeritus, and Director of The Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard

University, legacy.com/obituaries/bostonglobe/obituary.aspx?pid=162286068.

162

From Slanted #31—Tokyo

lighting the traditional arts and aesthetics of Japan, and their roots in mainland Asia.

Art and Artists in a Decade of War

6 URBAN FABRIC Streets without trees, lines painted on streets without trees, cracks in buildings, cracked buildings wrapped in plastic, history, and modernity.

I’d offer an extension of the preceding theory instead: I think that everyone wants to like themselves (or at least people from guilt-based societies like the United States and Germany) so each of us forgives our proverbial trespasses, though it may take days or even months for the internal simultaneous scriptwriter, audience and protagonist to provide the possibility that drunken altercation might have been a deviant dream sequence that is incalculable in regards to the protagonist’s worth in regards to moral / ethical / behavioral fiber.

We, the guilt-ridden of the world, know this because we live it. If I were to make it both really personal as well as indelibly salient, I would just need to invoke the meta-stained coterie of contemporary individuals that I call my friends: the cheaters, the cheated-upon, the seeming flagellants, the über-moral with the substance abuse issues, the litany of error-riddled humans in my life whom I know all too well and hold too closely.

Total Armageddon

163

Natassa Pappa / natassapappa.com

EXIT SIGNS CONNECTING LABYRINTHS AND THE CITY’S PAST NATASSA PAPPA The stones of Athens’ many monuments could tell tales of centuries past, but not all stories are lost in antiquity. Some are just around the corner—at the end of a Stoa.

When wandering in the historical center of Athens, one can be led to the now decadent commercial center which was booming until the 90s. The so called “commercial triangle” stretches through both the old and the new parts of the city, creating a chaotic Athenian district, which is ideal for inquisitive strolls. Its irregular urban grid, fragmented signage and its sometimes slightly shady zones, are all factors that break down the walking experience. However, if you are in an exploratory mood it can turn into a rewarding experience.

From Slanted #30—Athens

180

Exit Signs Connecting Labyrinths and the City’s Past

The ongoing research project Into Stoas answers to that fragmentation of the urban experience and proposes narratives by focusing on the triangle’s passageways. “The most hidden aspect of the big cities […] the labyrinths” as Walter Benjamin refers to them in the Arcades Project. Passages, arcades, or just gaps of the urban fabric (“stoas” in Greek) often connect streets. The map Into Stoas— Athens Walkthrough connects the exits by following the remaining, often overlooked, exit signs on the passage entrances, to reveal an alternative walking network away from traffic, yet an picturesque setting of old family businesses and vernacular typography.

Total Armageddon

181

184

Between the Devil and the Deep Sea Total Armageddon

The boys smile through the haze, their smiles widened by tea laced with rectified spirit. Their sloppily constructed hairdos are starting to droop, exhausted from the heat, the cheap oil used to hold their hair in place glistening in the soft overhead lights. They tug at their double-breasted suit jackets that have suddenly become too small.

They buy another drink and their grins become wider. The supplies are running low. The last of the remaining alcohol is hidden behind the counter, just in case a policeman decides to knock on the door.

Alcohol is not the only king that reigns tonight. The seductive white powder descended on the city some years ago and is now distributed widely. The girls are eating fruit marmalades laced with something sweeter than sugar and the doorman has a bag of it in his jacket pocket. The drug has become the talk of the town, first arriving hidden in the suitcases of German drug mules on their way to supply the hedonistic nouveau riche of St. Petersburg with their daily doses. It has now worked its way into every fashionable party in town. The tabloids are warning about the dangers of the drug that enables hungry girls and boys to dance until the first morning light to the latest jazz tracks that have been smuggled from Stockholm.

The windows fog up and it is almost impossible to tell that winter is here. Nobody has time to think about it now, as everybody is busy tapping their unpolished shoes on the wooden floors, making the walls reverberate with volatile energy. Nobody talks about politics, the war or rationing here. Nobody talks at all, as the night slyly and slowly turns into a new dawn. Nobody feels a storm brewing. The sea shows its might tonight. It hurls its waves in full force against the low sides of the small wooden boat unfit to carry five sturdy men who are fighting against the tide. The ripples stretch high to lick the lapels of their coats and fill their mouths with salty water. It is an operation that needs a sleight of hand and a keen eye for the temperament of the waves.

The sea allows traveling unseen—but only under the cover of a violent storm when daylight is long gone. The salt water is as much an enemy as it is a friend and tales of smugglers who have been lost in the murky waters for good have been doing rounds since the operations started. Smuggling offers high profits for those to manage to pay their dues to the sea—contraband alcohol is known to have paid for villas with colorful facades, shiny black cars imported from the other side of the Atlantic and soft fur coats. The devil’s liquid has a power of its own, as the tabloids scream, and it is known to seduce men into firing their guns and drinking their fortunes in big gulps. A bright torch sweeps the black waves. It is a police boat. The men cut the thick cords that hold their contraband in its place as they have

185

Helsinki’s objective is to improve its residents’ lives with the help of design. The goal is an urban habitat that has been designed together with the users, or citizens, with their needs taken into account. In recent years, Helsinki has developed many of their public services together with design professionals. People from around the world are already coming here to see how challenges in the public sector have been solved with the tools of design. In the future, Helsinki

192

From Slanted #29—Helsinki

A good city is like a successfully designed utensil: it looks and feels so good that you want to make sure coming generations can enjoy it, too—but a city is also a constantly evolving thing. We asked six experts what significance design has had for the City of Helsinki, and why design is important for the future.

Marianna Kellokoski

AIMING FOR A FUNCTIONAL, EFFICIENT, AND DESIRABLE PLACE TO LIVE— HELSINKI AS A DESIGN CITY MARIANNA KELLOKOSKI

Helsinki as a Design City

will be even more widely known as a model city of design, because design here is an integral part of the city’s core up to its administration: the city is now appointing a Chief Design Officer for the first time. Helsinki will also change historically much in the coming years. Combined with influential achievements and people, the end result will bring about a well-designed city and everyday life.

Classic Objects and Open Governance through Design The birth of Finnish design is pinpointed to the time after the country gained independence, when little by little, a national identity started being constructed by creating a new style of their own. The pace increased after the world wars, when the country was rebuilt for the needs of a growing population. The material deficit caused by the war placed demands on producing everything efficiently and economically in daily life, while not forgetting aesthetic values. As a product of the golden era of design, as it was called, a vast number of buildings and utensils were born, many of which have since risen to an iconic position both at home and overseas. International award-winning designers became Finland’s national heroes.

Flow Festival

Total Armageddon

Entering the 1960s, alongside growing prosperity, design became everyday mass production and Finland slowly started becoming urbanized. Especially Helsinki grew and developed at a fast pace.

At the end of the millennium, the world’s cities started competing with each other for international resources due to accelerating

193

Martin Giessen

7 WORDS & PICTURES Meaning, narrative, and understanding— not just information.

Once upon a time, there was an American DIY punk band named Cringer that screamed this line into a microphone a number of times over the years: I take my desires for reality.

From Slanted #32 Dubai

214

Olga Drenda / Facebook.com/duchologia

STEREO, SUPER QUALITY OLGA DRENDA One can often find them in photographs dated 1989, 1990, or 1991—they seem to haunt the frames: Niewiadów-brand camper vans turned into makeshift grocery shops or fast-food bars serving zapiekanki (open-face grilled baguettes, and Polishstyle hot-dogs with mushrooms, sometimes simply named “stuffed buns.” These sunlit scenes are captured at the height of the food poisoning season. The TV warns of an epidemic, advises one to avoid milk, ice cream, and—God forbid—eggs.

“Salmonella, I don’t love you,” sing postpunk band Klaus Mit Foch (after splitting with original singer Lech Janerka, who will become a punk poet in the mode of Julian Cope).

From Slanted #28—Warsaw

Later, Yugo-kiosks appear on the streets. Picture this: a stream of people move down the pavement—blonde perms, denim jackets.

Every now and again someone stops, leans over a shopping stall.

The red roof of a K67 kiosk stands out from the blue-and-grey crowd.

This neat modular booth, designed by the Slovenian Saša J. Mächtig, is a 1960s project, but it materializes in Poland in the middle of the transformation period. After introducing “Wilczek’s bill,” which liberalized the private enterprise laws, as the streets are crowded with makeshift huts peddling a hodgepodge of items, the city authorities give an ultimatum to the vendors: you can sell your cassettes and sweets, but only in a “clean Yugoslavian kiosk.”

215

Martin Giessen

8 GIVING LANGUAGE FORM We all want to be heard.

Of all of the ideologies of America, the only ones I subscribe to are of mobility: notably social, economic, and geographic, but more than anything, those of imagination, and that later one of re-imagination: the disassembly and re-assembly of one’s self. Ralph Waldo Emerson argued that we each wholly become ourselves by mounting an inner war to free ourselves from the tyranny of previous thought. Independence, revolution, freedom are concepts that are part and parcel of what it is to be “American.”

The thing is: this is not an American book.

From Slanted #32 Dubai

258

Kenneth FitzGerald / ephemeralstates.com

SINGING THE SURFACE KENNETH FITZGERALD Strictly considered, writing about music is as illogical as singing about economics.

All the other arts can be talked about in the terms of ordinary life and experience.

A poem, a statue, a painting, or a play is a representation of somebody or something, and can be measurably described (the purely aesthetic values aside) by describing what it represents.1

For Total Armageddon

What I do as a critical writer is respond to creativity. And setting my mind to it, I can condense everything wrong, and everything right, about doing this to three words. This trinity has bothered me for some time but I never fully contemplated why.

The three words conjure a ludicrous image ripe for parody: a caricature Martha Graham prancing and swooning across a bleak brick plaza at the foot of some austere, anonymous steel and glass skyscraper, tulle swirling with every grand, affected, sweeping gesture. Maybe it’s an entire troupe capering about like loony fools.

Modern dance meets modern design. Cue the laugh track. That’s dancing about architecture.

“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” is the full, familiar formulation of the quip in question. It has no definitive attribution, being contemporarily credited to Steve Martin, Frank Zappa, Laurie Anderson, and, most recently, Elvis Costello.

There’s some evidence that each of them made at least an approximation of the jibe but not for its coinage. The distinctive personalities involved provide affirmation for each claimant—sounds

259

Dr. Nadine Chahine / arabictype.com

THE DUBAI FONT: A MONUMENT FOR EVERY DAY DR. NADINE CHAHINE The Story: How It All Started Like most projects these days, it all started with a simple email.

Our Sales Director had emailed us, saying that the Dubai Executive Council is interested in commissioning a custom typeface from us— can I please be on the call? At the time, I was the UK Type Director for Monotype and their resident Arabic expert. The chance to design a custom typeface for Dubai, a city I knew and loved, was exciting!

Though projects can differ in how they start and what process they go through, sometimes you can tell, from that first call, that a project is going to work out. As it is with people we meet in our social lives, there are these occasions when designers and clients connect and you know that there is an alignment of vision of what to do, and how to go about it. This was the case here. We prepared our estimates, and soon the project was ours. The agreement was that I would fly to Dubai to pick up the design brief in person, and that turned out to be an excellent way to start.

From its inception, the project was very clear: to design a typeface that carries the name of Dubai and embodies its vision for its future.

But when I arrived in Dubai, there was a new twist that added a whole new dimension to the project: The typeface was going to ship with Microsoft’s Office 365 and would sit alongside Microsoft’s curated collection of typefaces. This would make it available to tens of millions of users. It also brought the need to make it suitable for

268

From Slanted #32—Dubai

The Brief

The Dubai Font: A Monument for Every Day

use in Office applications into focus, alongside the usual design ones. Thus, the typeface needed to be legible and to contain matching Latin and Arabic parts that would be in harmony with one another. The design needed to be versatile, so it can be used in a variety of situations, and the weight distribution would include Light, Regular, Medium, and Bold.

Total Armageddon

The first meetings with the Executive Council very quickly established that we were all in agreement as to what the typeface is supposed to do. Of central importance were legibility, reading, and capturing what Dubai is and what it aims to be. I was very fortunate to have already lived in Dubai and to have visited it so regularly that there was no need to introduce what Dubai is to me. I had already experienced first-hand its cosmopolitan flavor, its ambitions on the world stage, and its drive to establish itself as a world destination that is open to one and all. This spirit of openness had always fascinated me about Dubai. It’s so Arabic, and yet so international, a model to aspire to in terms of harmony and co-existence. It is no wonder then that the typefaces had to reflect that, to bring Latin and Arabic scripts in harmony, while still being true to their respective roots and heritage. It’s all in the acceptance of the other and of ourselves, and that is where the solution for the design became apparent. In terms of typographic style, we were given the freedom to experiment with the caveat that we need to submit three proposals and His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the Crown Prince of Dubai, would chose the most suitable one. This meant that the brief was more focused on what the typeface needs to represent, and how it needs to function, than on the actual design implementation of that. This brings great advantages to the design process as the design team can have the space to translate that conceptual framework into actual outlines.

269

The 20s and 30s of the last century saw the emergence of a movement called New Typography (or Elementary Typography). This counterpart to the German New Building or New Objectivity movement has come to be known for functionality, mechanization, standardization (DIN) and the utilization of photography

280

From Slanted #20—Slab Serifs

Matthieu Lommen is the University library’s curator for Graphic Design and Typography at Amsterdam University, which allows him access to over 70 meter of type specimen as well as original drafts and drawings. Beyond his work there, he publishes about the typography of the 19th and 20th century. In his essay he grants a studied historical overview of German Egyptienne typefaces.

Matthieu Lommen / bijzonderecollecties.uva.nl

FORM FOLLOWS ARCHITECTURE: GERMAN SLAB SERIF TYPEFACES OF THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY MATTHIEU LOMMEN

Form Follows Architecture

(Typophoto). Undoubtedly this novel typography also needed novel typefaces. Besides sans serif fonts, Egyptiennes had a revival, especially in advertising. Both font categories had been seen in English type specimens for the first time in the second century of the 19th century. In accordance with keeping with the type specimen collection of Amsterdam University, this text outlines the “branding” of these new German Egyptiennes.

Beton: ein Bauelement für moderne Typografie. Bauersche Gießerei, 1930 (?). 27 cm.

Total Armageddon

In 1925, Jan Tschichold, the most influential representative of New Typography, summed it up as follows: “Elementary feature is the Grotesque of all variations: thin, semibold, bold, from condensed to extended.” Germany was the center of these typographic innovations and many German type foundries released new sans serif Linear Antiquas. These were a drastic deviation from the wellknown designs like Akzidenz-Grotesk and Venus. In 1926, Ludwig & Mayer in Frankfurt a.M. were the first foundry to present a geometric Sans Serif, drawn up by Jakob Erbar. A special type specimen from around 1930 explains the design as follows: “new forms of construction are no longer in the old sense: construction plus facade. the new dress is no longer a costume. new writing is not calligraphy. buildings, clothes, typefaces are ruled in form by their most basic elements.” Through Erbar-Grotesk, Ludwig & Mayer sought to connect to the machine aesthetic of the modern era. Their well-known Walter Cyliax catalog design, with a spiral binding and gray metallic

281

The type foundry D. Stempel, situated in Frankfurt, created two geometric Sans Serifs in 1928: the still-popular Neuzeit-Grotesk and the Elegant-Grotesk. In the introduction to the Elegant Grotesk type specimen, a connection to modern architecture is made once more: “Just as the new manner of construction is joint by common features, the ubiquitous use of modernized grotesque typefaces can be seen as an emanation of the times.” Stempel must have made good profits in

282

From Slanted #20—Slab Serifs

Welt-Antiqua, Ludwig & Mayer, 1931. 19 cm.

Mathieu Lommen

cover, also speaks to this desire. At Bauhaus, which also propagated strict lower case writing as can be seen in the quote above, experimentation with geometric font styles took place as well. Shortly after the release of Erbar-Grotesk, Bauer Type Foundry published a closely related typeface, Futura by Paul Renner, in 1927. However, it can be assumed that Erbar-Grotesk and other similar Sans Serifs of those years were based on Renners original concepts, which he released in 1925. Though the typeface Kabel (Gebr. Klingspor, 1927)

by Rudolf Koch was presented as a grid-based design, in reality it wasn’t quite so neutral upon closer examination.

Form Follows Architecture Total Armageddon

those years, as the ten centimeter thick main specimen (about 1,200 pages), that was published in 1925 to celebrate the foundry’s 30th anniversary, can only be compared in scope to the American Specimen Book of Type Styles from 1912 (about 1,300 pages), the largest type specimen the American Type Founders Company ever released.

It seems like an obvious next step, but Stempel took it first, by presenting a version of the Futura with right-angle serifs in 1929: The typeface Memphis was the first in a line of geometric Egyptiennes that showed much less thick / thin variation than their predecessors from the 19th century and with stroke widths that seemed visually identical. This formal concept was to significantly decrease the areas of application of these typefaces.

Named after the old Egyptian city, Memphis was a typeface design by Stempel-employee Rudolf Wolf. An early specimen launched the typeface with a nod to modern architecture: “Related to technical forms and those of the new building in its construction and style, this modern typeface offers heightened possibilities for expression.” It included alternative glyphs, which was unusual at the time. The brochure was typeset, printed and produced and likely bound in-house. A prestigious publication with the title Die Memphis in der Weltpraxis (Memphis in Praxis, 1933?) showed a plethora of distinct examples for its use, taken from international advertising: “This publication is a success-report, showing the far reaching spread and effect of the Memphis-thought.” The typeface was built into an extensive type family between 1929 and 1943. A book style was simultaneously adapted for the LinotypeTypesetting machine in 1932.

Of course the competition wasn’t resting. As soon as 1930 Bauer Type Foundry released the typeface Beton, in addition to continuing work on their popular font Futura. Beton was a design by Heinrich Jost, a former student of Paul Renner. A few glyphs have grooved serifs. In case somebody might have missed the meaning of the typeface’s name, the title of an advertisement read: “Beton the new construction material, Beton the new typeface.”

The description to one of the first type specimen begins as follows: “Typography has always been compared to architecture. The objective clarity of modern buildings must be paralleled by equally modern print products.” Notably beautiful, even according to Tschichold’s views, is the type specimen Imre Reiner designed in 1931, which included fold out spreads. This English brochure was made with American customers in mind (Bauer had a New York branch since 1927) and shows fictional uses of the five weights of the typeface (How to use Bauer Beton). The Brochure identifies Beton

283

Martin Giessen

9 LANGUAGES INSIDE OF LANGUAGES Independence is often overrated and overvalued, revolutions tend to be bloody, full of friendly fire, and don’t offer very much resolution. As for freedom ‌ well, freedom is largely a myth of history that is trotted out to billow the sails of the various agendas of politicians all over the world, no matter their actual platform.

From Slanted #32 Dubai

296

Georgios Matthiopoulos / greekfontsociety.gr

A PRIMER IN GREEK TYPOGRAPHY UNTIL THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION GEORGIOS MATTHIOPOULOS Enduringly the alphabet of ancient scholars and poets, the intricate and dynamic forms of Greek script connect it to its history, much like its tales have connected us.

From Slanted #30—Athens

The Greek alphabet was the first widely established mode of writing in Europe with an unbroken line of development since the Archaic period (ca. 8th c. BC). Greek typographic presence dates back to the early decades of the revolutionary invention of printing by Johannes Gutenberg. As printing know how broke away from Mainz and the new art was brought south of the Alps to meet the gathering pace of the Italian humanism, the need to incorporate Greek texts became apparent. Classical Greek texts were extremely valuable to the awakening intellect of Europe and many scholars had come to realize that Latin translations were scarce and often a poor substitute for the wealth of ideas and the beauty of expression that the originals contained. At that period, in the 1460s and 1470s, few Greek scholars were available to consult the printers / publishers and no Greek was yet trained into the intricate work of type cutting. After having a cursory look to any Greek manuscript of the 15th century or earlier,

297

Martin Giessen

10 END TIMES The Opposite of Once Upon A Time

Instead of independence, revolution, and freedom, we could all do with a bit more community, empathy and agency instead—those are more realistic and globally oriented values that might actually be of help no matter what corner of the world you are from (but this is an American writing this—though ideologically a “bad” one— and Americans are always attempting to impose their own subjective narratives of the future on others). These just might be some of the bullet points that might help us nudge our splintered professions along, as much as our lives, and just as much: the future.

From Slanted #32 Dubai

360

Carolina Laudon / laudon.se

THE STORY OF THE FUTHARK— 8TH CENTURY TWEETS CAROLINA LAUDON Carolina Laudon is a Swedish typographer and type designer who runs her own studio in Goteborg, Sweden—a country with an interesting heritage: more than sixty percent of runes are located in Sweden. In short, her article is about Swedish thoughts on runes, some of the most important stones and writing with runes in Sweden.

From Slanted #22—Art Type

As a young girl in the 70s, I was occasionally taken to school excursions into the forests of Sweden, to see our common heritage, petroglyphs and runestones. On such days it was always cold—the wind blew in the trees and the cold made me shiver. I would rather have stayed indoors to draw, but was left standing there in the middle of some forest, staring at totally incomprehensible inscriptions, with a schoolmarm named Bodil, enthusiastically trotting around the bushes. Perhaps we did this a little more often than other schoolkids, because north of Stockholm, runestones are plentiful. I was incredibly afraid of gnomes and elves, of which the forest was sure to be rife with. By that I’m not in any way referring to the character named Santa Claus, as invented by Coca-Cola (and, accidentally, drawn by

361

Carolina Laudon

lay down the law. You simply had to cut it short. Most runestones were placed along roads or other places for public view. Like the billboards of today, they were smack up in the face of any passerby. But there are some exceptions, where the runes were allowed to take up space and tell a longer story. The early 9th century Rök Runestone in Sweden, with its 760 runes, reveals tales of the Norse mythology and marks the beginning of Swedish literature.

Detail of Rök Rune Stone, 1995. Copyright: Macduff Everton / Corbis.

364

From Slanted #22—Art Type

The Elder Futhark only consist of 24 runes, of which most derive from the Latin alphabet. This runic alphabet has ligatures, just like the Greek and Latin ones. But the shapes and order deviates, and so does the phonetic values. Runes were boustrophedonic, meaning they could be written and read from both left and right. We have learned to interpret them by the help of recurrent words and related enunciations from modern Nordic languages. Even though most of the characters are phonetic, there are also ideograms for mysterious phenomena.

Sometimes runic writing only consists of a straight line, but often it’s inscribed into a framed loop, a little like the cartouches of the hieroglyphs, with the head of a snake-like creature indicating where to begin reading. From the head, of course. Obvious, don’t you agree?

There are different forms of the runic alphabet, deviating just as much as the Cyrillic from the Latin alphabet. Perhaps it took a higher power in society to reach an established form. In the 8th century, around the same time as the writing reform of Charlemagne in

The Story of the Futhark—8th Century Tweets

France, the alphabet was changed and the 24 runes were reduced to the mere 16 runes of the Vikings, and now referred to as the Younger Futhark. They were developed further for a period, and then gradually exchanged, although in use up until the 13th century, before they finally gave way to the Latin alphabet. On the island of Gotland though, they scribbled in runes all the way until the 16th century.

By scribbling, I mean writing short inscriptions on reused material.

There are other examples from the 13th century of trying to keep runic alive, but on paper and more as an expression of nostalgia.

Although runes enjoyed a comparatively short life in the spotlight, they occurred on many different writing surfaces, stone, bone, wooden trays, metal, and paper. It was the last form that really drew my attention to its letterforms a couple of years ago. Perhaps it was the paper itself that brought it up close to what I usually do. It surely wasn’t the prospect of getting into bone carving.

Björketorp Runestone, Blekinge, Sweden. Copyright: Henrik Sendelbach, Wikimedia Commons.

Total Armageddon

The Magic of Runes There is a form of rune mysticism related to the worship of Odin, where runes were seen as an expression of lives’ inner meaning.4 Odin was the god of Vikings, war, poetry and runes. The latter was

365

Martin Giessen

From Slanted #32 Dubai

396

Art and Artists in a Decade of War

WE GROW A SUSTAINABLE FUTURE The marketeer’s tool box includes all the senses—sight, smell, touch, hearing, and taste.

It might be hard to find the right paper, but doing it carefully and with a lot of consideration will definitely pay off. Take this reader for example—it has a great feel, don’t you think?

And it’s a climate smart paper too. Choosing a sustainable paper is as important as functionality and appearance. In fact, clean water and fresh fibers from our own carefully managed forests are the key ingredients in producing paper that can make all the difference.

Start exploring the possibilities and find inspiration at holmen.com/paper

Total Armageddon

397

IMPRINT

TOTAL ARMAGEDDON— A Slanted Reader on Design Publisher

Production

Slanted Publishers

Printing

Nebeniusstraße 10

76137 Karlsruhe

druckerei-vogl.de

Druckerei Vogl

Germany

T +49 (0) 721 85148268

Cover Material

info@slanted.de

Invercote G, 300 g / sm

slanted.de

+ 29 g / sm Metalprint

@slanted_publishers

Iggesund Paperboard

iggesund.com Editor

Ian Lynam

ianlynam.com Creative Direction

Paper

Holmen BOOK Extra 2.0, 80 g / sm

Holmen Paper

holmen.com

Lars Harmsen Fonts

Art Direction

Beatrice

Julia Kahl, Clara Weinreich

Sharp Type

sharptype.co Proofreading and Translation

Isabella Krüger, Lies Wolf

Photography inside Cover

Edit Serif

Atlas Font Foundry

atlasfonts.com

Stefan Braun

braunphotography.de

With Thanks to Christoph Dunst, Juliane Hohlbaum, Yuki Kameguchi, Chantra Malee, Dagmar

© 2019, Slanted Publishers, Karlsruhe,

Näther, Renna Okubo, Holger Tietje,

slanted.de, as well as the authors

Frederique Rosenauer, Lucas Sharp, and

ISBN: 978-3-9818296-6-2

Ralf Vogl.

398

Kickstarter Support

Acknowledgement

Thanks to all the 164 backers who helped to

This book could not have been realized with-

fund this book and celebrate 15 wonderful years of independent publishing!

These people made an extra generous dona-

tion. We call them our friends and sponsors:

Jonathan M. Hansen, Steven Heller, Ilka

Jannick Choon Wai Teoh

Fikra Design Studio

Leonidas, Christine Lhowe, Tim Loffing, Mathieu Lommen, Ian Lynam, Dermot Mac Cormack, Georgios Matthiopoulos, Julia Meer, Silas Munro, Kiyonori Muroga, Randy Nakamura, Alexander Negrelli, Ingo

fikradesigns.com

Niermann, Panos Papanagiotou, Natassa Pappa, David Peacock, Louise Rouse, Piotr

Sigi Ramoser

Sägenvier DesignKommunikation

saegenvier.at

Rypson, Niki Sioki, Huda Smitshuijzen AbiFarès, Thierry Somers, Sonja Steppan, Agata Szydłowska, Aleksander Tokarz, Alexander Torell, Angela Voulangas, Rene Wawrzkiewicz,

Marisa Ten Brink

Wolfgang Weingart, and Onur F. Yazıcıgil.

marisatenbrink.com Sponsors

Chantra Malee & Lucas Sharp

Sharp Type

sharptype.co

Natalia Ilyin, Mr. Keedy, Marianna Kellokoski, Carolina Laudon, Yoon Soo Lee, Gerry

danalyons.design Salem Al-Qassimi

Helmig, Will Hill, Lorena Howard-Sheridan, Matilda Kivelä, Toshiaki Koga, Iwona Kurz,

Dana Lyons

Laure Boer, Gerda Breuer, Dr. Nadine Chahine,

von Fritschen, Amélie Gastaut, Martin Giesen,

jcwt.de

Bacharach, Simon Baker, Emanuel Barbosa,

Marcus Farr, Kenneth FitzGerald, Charlotte

Nick Adam

NickAdam.co

(alphabetical order): Can Altay, Eran

Doug Clouse, Olga Drenda, Jori Erdman,

Friends

out the enthusiasm and support of all authors

Stanley D. Wolfersberger

399

Martin Giessen

From Slanted #32 Dubai

400

Slanted Publishers was founded in 2014 by Lars Harmsen and Julia Kahl.

They edit and publish the award-winning blog and print magazine Slanted, giving an inside view into the international design and creative scenes. In addition to the blog and magazine, Slanted initiates and creates design-related projects and publications. slanted.de Ian Lynam works at the intersection of graphic design, design education, and design research in Tokyo. He is faculty at Temple University Japan, Vermont College of Fine Arts’ MFA in Graphic Design Program, and at Meme Design School.

He operates the design studio Ian Lynam Design, working across identity, typography, type design, and interior graphics. ianlynam.com

This is a book about design. And culture. And complexity, notably how we, as a global civilization, deal with science fiction, taste, social media, the cities we live in, aesthetics, PowerPoint, burkas, authenticity, monuments, HIV, screens, representation, Big Tech, full-contact sports, and other thorny topics.

This book is full of essays culled from the first 32 issues of Slanted, the leading international design journal, alongside a number of writings from elsewhere, all specifically chosen for this book. They include essays written by the most vital and vibrant global voices in writing on design and culture today from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, and the Middle East. Writers like Natalia Ilyin, Randy Nakamura, Steven Heller, Piotr Rypson, Silas Munro, Gerry Leonidas, Yoon Soo Lee, Kenneth FitzGerald, Kiyonori Muroga, and a host of others.

In a world that feels like it is bursting at the seams due to overpopulation, climate change, economic downturns, strife, selfies, discord, and all-out war, we need somewhere to turn. Our mobile devices tell us that the apocalypse is just around the corner ‌ perhaps we just need to look the future in the face by examining the present and all of it’s designed faults, fractures, beauties, luminosity, issues, complexities, and cracked screens.

Welcome, friends, to the end of the world.

ISBN: 978-3-9818296-6-2