Publication digital interactive-research project.

BROCKMANN KEEDY

Two opposite views

“I would advise young people to look at everything they encounter in a critical light. . .Then I would urge them at all times to be self-critical.”

Josef Müller-Brockmann Reputations

Josef Müller-Brockmann was born in Rap p e r sw i l , Switzerland in 1914 and studied arc h i t e c t u re, design and h i s t o ryof art at the University of Zurich and at the city's Ku n s t g ewe r b e s c h u l e. He began his career as an apprentice to the designer and advertising consultant Walter Diggelman b e fo re, in 1936, establishing his own Zurich studio specialising in graphics, exhibition design and photography. By the 1950s he was established as the leading practitioner and theorist of the Swiss Style, which sought a universal graphic expression through a grid-base design purged of extraneous illustration and subjective feeling. His “Musica viva” poster series for the Zurich Tonhalle drew on the language of Constructivism to create a visual corre l a t i ve to the s t r u ctural harmonies of the music.

Müller-Brockmann was founder and, from 1958 to 1965, coeditor of the trilingual journal Neue Grafik (New Graphic D e s i g n) which spread the principles of Swiss design internationally. He was pro fessor of graphic design at the Kunstgewe r b e s c h u l e, Zurich from 1957 to 1960, and guest lecturer at the University of Osaka from 1961 and the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Ulm from 1963. F rom 1967 he was European design consultant for IBM. He is the author of The Graphic Artist and his Design Problems (1961), History of Visual Commu n i c a t i o n . 1971), History of Poster (with Shizuko M ü l l e r-Yoshikawa, 1971) and Grid Systems in Graphic Design (1981). He has contributed to many symposiums and has held one-man exhibitions in Zurich, Bern, Hamburg, Munich, Stuttgart, Berlin, Paris, New York, Chicago,Tokyo, Osaka, Caracas and Zagre b. In 1987 he was aw a rded a go l d medal for his cultural contribution by the State of Zurich.

Stefania Pa d a l i n o Art 327 Advanced Typography: Structures Oregon State University Fall 2004 Faculty: John Bowers 1

Interview:Yvonne, Schwemer-Scheddin, “Josef Müller-Brockmann.”

Eye, Number 19, (Winter 1996): 10-16.

Yvonne Schwe m e r-Scheddin You are the protagonist of the Swiss School and stand for objective, radically minimalist geometric design.You invented the grid system for graphic design and were the first systematically to outline the history of visual communication. For Le Corbusier, order was the key to life. Georges Braque said, “I love the law that ord e r s the cre a t i ve.” For Berthold Brecht, o rder cove red up a deficit.What does order mean to you?

Josef Müller Brockmann O rder was alw ays wishful thinking for me. For 60 years I have produced disorder in files, c o rrespondence and books. In my wo r k , h oweve r, I have a lw ays aspired to a distinct arrangement of typographic and pictorial elements, the clear identification of priorities.

The formal organization of the surface by means of the grid, a knowledge of the rules that govern legibility (line length, wo rd and letter spacing and so on) and the meaningful use of colour are among the tools a designer must master in o rd e r to complete his or her task in a rational and economic manner.

What do you regard as your best work?

The white reverse sides of my posters!

What was your most cre a t i ve period?

My most creative period was in fact the worst because at that time my work was still illustrative. But this period of discovery and clarification eventually led to the rich productivity of my 4Os.

You we re influenced by Carl Ju n g , but then lost interest. Why was that?

As a young man I was intrigued not only by psychology but also by graphology. When I met people who interested me I would read their handwriting and was rarely wrong in my judgments. But this gift began to disturb me, especially in my dealings with clients, where it would unnecessarily p rejudice discussion. So I abandoned it ove r n i g h t . Later I paid the price for giving up these analyses when, I took on partners and employees whose handwriting would have given me an early warning of trouble ahead.

What is the source of your effo rts to clarify eve rything and aspire to what is eternally valid? Is it a protest against death, or a fear of looking behind the picture to the unconscious?

The unconscious is part of the support structure : eve ry thing that is stored there comes to light in the work process. What I try to achieve in my work is to commu n i cate information about an idea, event or product as clearly as possible. Such a dow n - t o - e a rth presentation is barely affected by present day trends. Bus it is not so much a question of making a statement that will be valid for all time as of being able to communicate information to the recipient in a way that leaves him or her free to form a positive or negative opinion.

You work to quite a definite rational model, though life for the most part unfolds intuitively.

But the model is alw ays individual. Had you asked me 40 years ago, I would have been more confident in my defence of the rules than I am today. I have changed. Personality is defined in two ways: what is inherited and what is consciously assimilated. In my case, reading has broadened my knowledge, and my intuition, inspiration and emotions stem from what I have taken in. But rules are important. Laws enable multitudes of people to live together - no nation can exist without laws.They favour the freedom of the many at the expense of the individual.

So did you trust to intuition in your illustrative period?

Yes, because I wanted to explore the limits of my artistic ability. Until I was 30 I had been trying out various styles and techniques to find out where my talent might lie. I had quite a lot of ap p a rent success with my illustrative wo r k , but as a result of my ruthless self-critical analysis I saw that I possessed no essential artistic talent beyond the ordinary, and the creativity of a mediocre person is of no general i n t e re s t .You can't learn to become an artist, but you can learn to become a useful graphic artist. I n t e n s i ve study of typography will reveal its laws, and the same holds for photography and compositions using typographical, photographic and graphic elements.

Why is the measurable, the demonstrable, so fascinating?

The greatest works of art impress through their balance, their harmony, their proportions, all of which can be meas u re d . That is one of the reasons why paintings, sculptures and buildings that are thousands of years old - by the Egyptians, Chinese, Assyrians and so on - are still fascinating to us today. Mondrian, on the other hand did not use measurements and therefore took a long time to do a painting. Howeve r, few artists posses as much intelligence, sensibility and intuition as Mondrian.

Josef Müller Brockmann

Reputations

3

So you opted for clear-sighted reason, for reducing things to their essential - to serve a democratic public?

I have always known that my illustrations, drawings and paintings are entertainment.They were quite good, but harml e s s .

I was also successful in using a mix of surrealistic i l l u s t r ation and factual information in exhibition designs in he 1940s and 1950 s but the lack of objectivity disturbed me. So fo r the “Landi 1964” [the Swiss regional exhibition], I eschewed all playfulness and subjectivity and arr i ved at an objet i ve typographic-pictorial solution. I had to teach myself how to look critically at my work and make distinctions between what is creative, imitative or merely intellectually calculating.

After four wo rthless years of war I wanted to have a positive, constructive role in society. I couldn't improve textualpictorial communication through my artistic work but I could do so through rational-object i ve typograp hy and functional, unmanipulative photograp hy. No one can exceed his or her limitations. A ny time I tried I failed. My limitations are closely circumscribed - I have not come far - but I have kept my sense of humour because I have accepted them.

Switzerland is a country of the norm. Genius flees this lands c ap e, this Zurich Gemütlichkeit, the c u l t u re of the farmer and the burgher. It is no accident that geniuses such as Le Corbusier, A rthur Honegger or the bridge-builder Othmar H. Ammann first found recognition abro a d .

How did you come to take up graphic design?

I become a graphic designer by accident. At school I was loth to write much for compositions so I put in Illustrations instead. My teacher enjoyed them and thought I had talent.

He suggested that I should pursue an artistic career : gravure etching or retouching, for instance. So I was ap p renticed as a retoucher in a printing works. I lasted one day because I said that this wasn't artistic wo r k . After that I was ap p re nticed to two elderly architects. With them I lasted fo u r we e k s .Then I went to see all the graphic designers I fo u n d listed in the telephone dire c t o ry because I wanted to find out what they did. Afterwards I enrolled to study grap hic design at the Zurich Gewerbeschule.

Back to Switzerland again. It was through yo u r work and that of your students and fe l l ow-art i s tsMax Bill, Richard P. Lohse, Hans Neuburg, Carlo Vivarelly and others - that Switzerland developed a cultural identity.

Bill, Lohse, Neuburg and Vivarelli were my mentors.

The first two through their artistic works, publications and their activity in the Swiss Werkbund, and Beuburg as a critic and designer, had a lasting positive influence on all areas of design. I too in my work - and thanks to good collaborators - was able to make a positive contribution in the 1950s and 1960s. My students in Zurich between 1957 and 1960 attracted attention later when their works were published in Neue Grafik.

The magazine Neue Grafik made the Swiss School known throughout the world. How did the publ i c ation come about?

I had the idea in 1955 of founding a periodical for rational and constructive graphic design to counter the excessively irrational, pseudo-artistic adve rtising I saw around me.

I allowed the idea to develop and then asked Lohse, Neuburg and Vivarelli if they would like to collaborate.The magazine appeared from 1958 to 1965.

You have written innovative books and a collection of your works and a slim volume of autobiography are soon to be published in English by Lars Müller in Zurich.When have you found time to write in the course of such a full professional career?

I have always regarded a book as a design opportunity, nothing more. It was more like enjoying myself in my free time. I was motivated to write something on the history of visual communication by the insight that from the beginning man has used images a defence against this inner and outer world, his fears of a threatening enviro n m e n t.At the time I knew of no book that dealt with this subject.

Similarly I hadn't found anything interesting written about the history of the poster.

How can you be so sure that objective communication of knowledge is uplifting?

I have never maintained that objective-informative advertising is uplifting. It clearly isn't like that, but it does reflect an honest attempt to present unmanipulated information to the general public. S u b j e c t i ve interpretation leads to a falsification of the message.

Instead of illustration you favour sober, realistic photography.Are you disturbed by emotion in images?

Illustrations are alw ays understood as an artistic product, a subjective statement. Photography is a credible reflection of reality that enables me to make an objective statement.

Emotion in images, as in painted realizations of ideas and visions, can produce genuine works of art , but in advert i sing I value as much objectivity as possible.

The 1978 jubilee book for heating systems manufacturer Weishaupt contains pages that are pictorial and multi-layered. But information is conveyed and there is no emotional noise.The 1986 invitation card for the Hans Arp exhibition also has several visual layers.Was this suggested by the subject matter?

Yes, the subject matter suggested the need for imaginat i ve design.

Isn't that, in the Müller-Brockmann sense, s u b j e ctive, if non-illustrative?

In the Weishaupt publication the computer, functionally ever more important in industry, is presented in the third dimension, in depth.This pictorial element is to be understood as a simple comment. In the Arp card I used pictorial symbols that Arp had created and which could be read as his illustrations.

Josef Müller Brockmann

Reputations

5

Many now famous graphic designers have worked in your studio. One repeatedly hears that they felt h ap py and highly motivated there. How did you achieve that?

Many young people were attracted to my professional aproach.

It allowed for an individual interpretation and development of my ideas without lapsing into a subjective and alienating interpretation of the job. I alw ays focused on the theme, the product, the event, and it was this which gave rise to the design solution. Until Müller-Brockmann & Co was set up, all the work that left my studio was checke d , ev a l u a t e d and p o s s i b ly amended by me.Thereafter the partners took on projects that they saw through independently from start to finish.

You sold all the antique furniture and porcelain that your first wife Ve rena brought into your mariage, acquiring twentieth century furniture by Le Corbusier, Mies van der Tohe and Marcel Breuer in its place.

What does tradition mean to you?

I feel a deep obligation to tradition in so far as it is the c o nd u i t of timeless values. My effo rts to educate myself, to understand the interconnections in Constructivism fo r instance, explain perhaps my openness to other disciplines such as art and architecture.These supplied to spiritual and aesthetic soil for the growth of a corresponding personal formal idiom, and architectonic typograp hy that confined itself to essential and found a contemporary expression for universal values.

You orientate yourself on the best of what mankind has achieved.

I try to keep this orientation open and alive. For instance in the case of typefaces, I exploit what brilliant people have c rea te d in the way of knowledge, imagination and psychological truth.

For years you ran an internationally famous gallery for Concrete A rt . How important is art to you?

It is a genuine compulsion. The study of art has been one of my basic needs and I have consciously sought an art i s t as my companion in life: my first wife, who died tragically early in a car crash, was a musician and my second wife, Shizuko Yoshikawa, is a painter. Concrete Art is the kind of art that appeals to me most directly as a graphic artist.

Its principles, which are open to analy s i s , can be transmu ted into graphic terms. Of all the art movements of the twentieth century it is the art in which I can discover the fewest flaws.

In a sense you are a late-avant-gardist.You have made Modern art and the ideas of the Bauhau ususeful.

No. What a Klee or a Moholy-N a gy could achieve was never within my scope. I could only adopt their attitude. I possess all 14 of the Bauhaus books and their underlying sensibility, the intellectual breadth and imaginative range of Klee and Schlemmer, Itten and Kandinsky, have impressed me enormously.The achievements of the av a nt-g a rde woke me up and fo rced me to reflect. In my work I have tried to use their thought processes to find clear fo r mulations for my own thoughts in the light of contemporary conditions.

Unlike your democratic, socio-humanist design work, El Lissitzky and the Russian Constructivists we re highly political. Or think of Futurism's role in glorifying war.

All design work has a political character. It can be socially oriented, or humanist, or conservative. Italian Futurism was bellicose, but that has nothing to do with Modern typograp hy. El Lissitzky's poster “Beat the Whites with Red We d g e” was not Modern typography but design with geometric forms. Jan Tschichold's New Typography, by contrast, was poetic, transparent and open, not at all despotic or tyrannical. I have never understood why Tschichold reve rted to centred type, unless it was old age - we all become softer, more conservative as we grow older.

Tschichold rejected the fascist element concealed in the form.

But symmetry and the central axis are what characterize fascist architecture. Modernism and democracy reject the axis.

One senses that your work is rooted in an ethic of industriousness and personal integrity.

That's because I have taken my love of order to the point of manifest boredom, producing design solutions which are valid by deadly boring. Thanks to the passage of time, I am now just about able to examine my posters for the Zurich Tonhalle to discover why some are better than others. I am amazed how many are bad.The Beethove n poster is good, also the “Musica viva” poster of 1970 with the green lettering on a blue background and the two Tonhalle's poster of 1969 and 1972 with the rhythmic type.

That is typographic Concrete Art. Concrete Art is based on measurable proportions. In my designs for posters, a d ve rtisements, bro c h u res and exhibitions, subjectivity is suppressed in favour of a geometric grid that determines the arrangement of the type and images. The grid is an organisational system that makes it easier to read the message.

T h e re is a noticeable deve l o p m e n t , in the mu s i c posters as we l l , f rom pictorial illustration to pure ly abstract rhythms.

The design of the music posters is a special case in that t h ey we re not sales oriented - their appeal was intended to be artistic. The stylistic difference between the posters with pictorial geometric forms and the pure ly typograp h i c ones is that the latter contain no pictorial interpretation of the musical programme. Without exception they are free creations that took shape within the underlying grid system.

For the most part the effect of these posters is lighter and more poetic.

Josef Müller Brockmann

Reputations

7

Would you still teach the grid and order today?

Can you imagine Chart res Cathedral, the Eiffel Tower ore the works of Le Corbusier other than how they are? o great work is created without material rules, without knowing about stress ratios or the laws of perc e p t i o n . Sometimes I would set me students an intro d u c t o ry exe rcise of depicting a dam bust typograp h i c a l ly to bring out the diffe rence b e t ween expre s s i ve and info r m a t i ve design. We always go t interesting, and occasionally hilarious, results.Tomorrow or in ten or 20 years time aesthetic tastes will have changed, but laws last and are independent of time. The golden section, for instance, is a simple, elegant ratio of proportions that is understood by all cultures and is present in both man and nature. In teaching I try to establish rational- objective foundations that are accepted by all and which can be developed individually.

One doesn't notice the grid in your traffic posters, though your sketches for them look like Concrete Art. The grid allows endless individual variations.The Italian Roberto Lanterio found rich, wide-ranging solutions using the grid, the Germans use it soberly, the Swedes fill it with i m a g i n a t i o n . Its applications are as varied as the designer it is no more than an aid.The grid has existed in town planning, in China for instance, since at least 1500 BC. Rectilinear streets are the most economical solution.What I did was apply the grid system to graphic design.The impulse to do this did not come only from architecture typography since Gutenberg has striven for order.The grid is an organizational system that enables you to achieve an orderly result at a minimum cost.The task is solved more e a s i ly, faster and better. It brings the arbitrary organis ation of test into a logical system in keeping with the content.

It can demonstrate uniformity that reaches beyond national boundaries, a boon to adve rtising from which IBM, for instance has profited Objective-rational design means legible design, objective information that is communicated without superlatives or emotional subjectivity.

You reject artistic training for graphic designers, though you find art and music highly stimu l a t i n g and are in favour of cultural diversity. Might your students not experience and judge the world in a very one-sided way?

In training young people to be designers the first thing that must be taught are the laws of design which enable them to develop their own talents and to ap p roach rational projects in a rational way. A pre d o m i n a n t ly artistic fo u n d at i o n may be ap p ropriate for artists, painters and sculptors, but as a teacher of graphic design I have repeatedly imprepressed upon my students that while it is important to be interested in mu s i c, old and new, in theatre and opera, old and new architecture, they must also concern themselves with town planning, environmental issues and politics.

What is your opinion of contemporary decorative and digital typefaces?

Some set themselves the task of making typography so unreadable that it is almost like a picture puzzle.The illegibility is than sold as an artistic product. I wouldn't read something like that unless I had to.The same rational criterion applies to wo b b ly forms and blurred contours: can I read this faster? Text is communication of content, a fact reflected in classical typefaces and legible typograp hy.

The idea today is that be appealing to people's emotions, stirring their interest by exciting their visual sense, t h ey will be encouraged to re a d .

We ' re building on a shaky foundation if we have to use these methods to encourage people to read.

What do you think of the typefaces designed for Neville Brody's Fuse?

These typefaces are not suitable for adve rtisements or posters.They are exceptions to the rule and individual cases are no a basis for teaching graphic design.These alphabets are confused, aesthetically lacking and bad. Playing around is always an excuse for too little understanding, which makes people fall back on imagination and speak of a rtistic freedom, inspiration and good ideas. Such typefaces a re interesting as studies in legibility. But I don't see a ny sense in them. They are a personal attempt to deal with a problem and I find them not only bad but senseless because they lack an area of application.

These digital experiments are a quest for a new visual idiom.

When Picasso invented a new way of painting he didn't say: I experimented.” He had worked it through.When you look at typefaces like these, they seem feeble, and what is feeble can never be good. Eve rything in history that has been good has had power and expression. If there is only a hint of greatness, then it cannot be built upon. But when young people lack knowledge and vision, when they are ascinated by something they think is great because they lack terms of refe re n c e, then in their ignorance they find such experiments acceptable. It's nice to try something out that is positive - but it doesn't mean I should ignore the negative aspects.

This is perhaps the advent of the final inertia which was described a century ago by H.G. Wells in The Time Machine, or the death of creativity.

Creativity is innate in eve ryo n e. It is open to new techniques, instruments and social arr a n g e m e n t s .You can only glimpse which new cre a t i ve forms will be good enough to surv i ve the passage of time, but what we have up to now are hopeless attempts. For instance, this “C” here [Lucas de Groot's Move me] is not closed enough, has too much of an opening.The tension is dissipated.When I was asked to do the logo, headline face and layout for the German cultural magazine Transatlantik, I told Hans Magnu s Enzensberger that I was not the right man. For me a perio dical is too open a vehicle.The quality of the text varies and I have no idea what form it might take in the future.

To draw a typeface is too difficult for me. I am not a genius, I am mediocre. People like Bodoni, Garamond, Caslon or Baskerville were type designers of genius. I don't consider the Transatlantik type go o d . I must stand by this though it's uncomfo rtable. Others must know that what I leave is not good.

Josef Müller Brockmann

Reputations

9

What typeface would you choose if you we re a young graphic designer today?

Berthold's Akzidenz Grotesk and the Classical Toman types such as Garamond, Bodoni, Caslon and Baskerville. I have come to value Akzidenz Grotesk more than its successor H e l vetica and Unive r s . It is more expre s s i ve and its format foundations are more unive r s a l .The end of the “e,” fo r instance, is a diagonal which produces right angles. In the case of Helvetica and Univers the endings are straight, producing acute or obtuse angles subjective angles.

You often use the word “anonymous” in connection with type. Do you mean neutral-rational? Genu i n e ly anonymous design is achieved with digital instruments where by the author no longer exists. Does this suggest that in the future visual communication will be much more anonymous, banal?

You're right. By anonymous I mean neutral, rational typography which has nothing to do with banal typograp hy. Our western typefaces are based on the universal shapes of circle, square and triangle. That makes them rational and objective and gives them an elegance that is recognizable by all cultures.A classical Roman, for instance, is equally good for m a ny purposes and is thus objective ly useful. It is not seen primarily as an individual type but as legible and anonymous.

What influence did Japan have on you when you taught there?

In Japan I saw Noh theatre for the first time and was instantly cap t i v a t e d . E ve ry movement of the Noh actor is measurable and bursting with tension. Nothing is left to chance, yet it is full of life and poetry. Japanese temples also had a profound effect on me. I discovered the secrets of Zen landscape architecture only a couple of years ago when I spent two days out of four in Kyoto studying Zen gardens.

Why was Japan interested in the Swiss School?

At the end of the 1950s Japan's interest in the west was enormous.Then came the 1960 World Design Confe rence in Tokyo, to which I was invited. I outlined my teaching method.The next day two schools presidents invited me to come and teach in Tokyo and Osaka. I think at first the best-k n own Japanese designers and architects came to my Sunday classes out of curiosity. I told them to study their own history, which contains everything they need for good design: the Noh theatre, the temples, the gardens.Their Japanese teachers at the time spoke only of Euro p e.

You live in and with your books, you browse in your library.Will future generations browse only the virtual data banks? Will they still communicate?

The experience of holding a valuable book in your hands cannot be replaced by technology, no matter how perfect.

To be ale to cap t u re an interesting thought in elegant t y p o g r ap hy will always be an incomparable delight. But future generations will no doubt learn to use the opportunities that data banks provide in a positive way, in a communicative spirit, because communication is a basic human need.

When you look at today's increasing irr a t i o n a l i t y, the endless lust for power and its destructive consequences, do you see any hope for reason and humane communication? What can designers c o ntribute?

Negative things can also provo ke positive things. The search for a better quality of life has led to the creation of m a ny institutions concerned with examining eastern and western philosophy in order to find the meaning of our lives and how we might live accordingly, In the various areas of design the democratic ap p roach - the awareness that our professional effort should be directed to the good of the general public - has become stronger.The contribution of this ap p roach to the achievement of a more humane future should not be underestimated.

Perhaps because you wisely limited your field of activity, you were able to attain a unity of life and wo r k .Will this still be possible in the future. With increasing fragmentation and individualization?

E ve ryone must face this question and eve ryone must find their own answer. I see the task of parents and teachers as being to instill a positive attitude in young people, to explain that each individual can have a vital social and cultural function and to direct their work tow a rds the interests of the general public.

When you look back on your wo r k , what ap p e a r s important to you? What would you like to pass on to young people?

I have alw ays felt obliged to make a constructive contribution to the future of society. I have never lost the feeling that I have a task to perform.What pleases me is that I have always sought what is better, that I have remained selfcritical, and that I am still interested in things outside my own field. My library is the expression of my curiosity I would advise young people to look at eve rything they encounter in a critical light and try to find a better solution.Then I would urge them at all time to be self-critical.

Josef Müller Brockmann

Reputations

11

Stefania Pa d a l i n o Art 327 Advanced Typography: Structures Oregon State University Fall 2004 Faculty: John Bowers 1

Jeffery Keedy Remove specifics and convert to

Ambiguities

As designer, writer and educator, Je f fery Keedy is a committed proponent of postmodernism.

Rick, Poynor, Eye, Number 20 (Spring 1996): 62-69

As designer, writer, teacher and soon entrep re n e u r, Je f fe ry Keedy campaigns for a postmodern conception of graphic authorship Jeffery Keedy may be the first graphic designer to try to transform himself into a brand name.

In the cantankerous guise of “Mr Keedy”, as he has signed himself on and off since the mid-1980s, the Los Angeles-based California Institute of the Arts instructor has earned a reputation as a pugnacious, entertaining and rare ly less than controversial observer of the contemporary graphic design scene. Lately, Keedy has begun to travel outside the US, with thoughtful appearances at the Fuse c o n fe rences in London and Berlin. In Europe, though, he is still probably best known for his Fuse magazine typeface LushUS - “m o re is not a bore”- and for Keedy Sans, an increasingly popular post-modern chameleon that basks with equal assurance on the cover of a book about underground film or emblazoned across a billboard for Colgate toothpaste.

Mr Keedy is an educator with attitude, a critic of waspish insight, and an apologist for the uncertainties of post-modernism who publicly chastises the faint-hearted with unflagging conviction and zeal.Where most in his tenured position would proceed with some caution, Keedy has chosen time after time to “stick my neck out”, naming names, telling it like he sees it, and enraging the opposition. “This was the most i m m a t u re and ridiculous article I have read by someone p rofessing to be an academic,” was one reader's response to a recent Keedy diatribe in Emigre on the subject of “Zombie Modernism.”

But while his bullishness has, Keedy admits, entailed some personal costs, ultimately it seems to have worked both for him and for CalArts.

The graphic design programme he deve l o p e d with Lorraine Wild and Edward Fella and directed from 1991-95 is widely perceived as one of the most pro g re s s i ve and conceptually challenging in the US and for the students Keedy's high profile helps to attract, he is a demanding and inspirational figure. “My interest has been for designers to become authors,” says Keedy. And in essays such as “I like the vernacular. . . NOT!” and the public lectures which he insists on scripting as a mark of respect for the audience he has practiced what he preaches.

Anyone who has been on the receiving end of a Mr Keedy broadside - this office has been the target of several- quickly senses that he relishes the debates and clashes of opinion to an unusual degree.

"I enjoy them a lot because that's where you really learn," he agrees.

"You start to put your money where your mouth is.You really put to the test what you are thinking.The reward is intellectual exercise, helping you think and figure things out."

As a designer, though, Keedy, now 38, has a much less definite air.There is a disjointed character to his output that is pro b a b ly to be expected in someone whose primary commitment is teaching. M o re suprising, p e r h ap s , in a designer of declared authorial intention is that his work, though intellectually coherent, shows no unifying stylistic themes; unlike a Brody,Valicenti or Fella, you would not recognize a Keedy at a glance. It may be that he is a late deve l o p e r, with his most significant design work still to come.

Since 1989 he has been working towards the launch of his own type design company, Cipher, and he hopes f i n a l lyto achieve this in April. "In the print world, in a lot of what I've done I have a bit more interest in the ideas and I knock things out," he explains. “But with a typeface, once it's out there it's liter a l ly out there forever and I'm interested in showing that quality is part of the new work.”

WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE?

To understand the passion that informs Keedy's position you have to go back to his time as an undergraduate, studying graphic design and photography a t Western Michigan Unive r s i t y. After the energy and i nvention of the 1960s, the following decade had witnessed “The Triumph of the Corporate Style”- as a P rint magazine cover story dubbed it in 1980.

Seventies design was highly professional, but slick, formulaic and empty. “It was the tail end of Modernism, when it was at its very worst,” remembers Keedy.“There was nothing left at that point.”

The only interesting work was coming from new wavers such as April Greiman and Dan Friedman, whose innovations were vigorously opposed by the Modernists. Advised by a New York headhunter that he would never find a job with his new wave portfolio, Keedy nevertheless landed a position in 1981designing advertising and promotions at CBS television in Boston.The following year he moved to Honolulu, where he designed corporate s i g n i n g , l o gos and symbols for Clarence Lee Design and Associates.Ke edy was rap i d ly coming to the conclusion that his future lay not in practice but in teaching. “I knew that something was wrong and I had a gut feeling that there was more to design than that - that it was more interesting s o m e h ow and more important.” In 1983 he started an MFA at Cranb rook Academy of art where he began for the first time to read theorists such as J. Christopher Jones,but above all Roland Barthes. “He b rought low cultural critique into the self-re fe rential high practice of literary criticism,” notes Keedy. “The reason I was part i c u l a r ly interested in Barthes m o re than the other post-structuralists and deconstructionists - was because he was engaged in a pop culture critique, a critique of his own discipline, literature,and because he was a ‘formalist

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H ow Keedy's emerging conception of design as cultural practice rather than problem-solving tool might be translated into practice itself was at this stage unclear. Confronted by course director Katherine McCoy's inevitable question “What does it look like?” he could only answer that these ideas were intended to generate a new kind of thought process; there was no one-to-one correlation with visual form.

Some of the eventual consequences of this theoretical reading (fragmentation, layering, degenerative imagery, antimastery) are already apparent in a poster Keedy designed for Cranbrook's fibre studies programme, which caused some consternation in the design department. Dozens of tiny student sketchbook drawings and notations are distributed across the surface in a graphically even weave to form a metaphor of creative process which has none of the clear, hierarchical organization usually expected of a poster. It is a design that makes considerably m o re sense now, in the light of what fo l l owe d , than it could have made at the After time.

Cranbrook, Keedy moved to Los Angeles, encouraged by the o f fer of a part -time teaching job at CalArts. He had never been to the city befo re and it seemed to offer unlimited possibilities. In the late 1980s he wo r ked for cultural institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary A rt and the San Francisco Artspace and for two years designed a series of calendars for Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) in which he introduced early versions of his own typefaces. Drawing on chaos theory - fashionable at the time they represent his most extre m e e xplorations of the “anti-aesthetic”.

Keedy's growing reputation for working with experimental artists culminated in the Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s catalogue (1992), where he was an “ equal part n e r” with curator Paul Schimmel and editor Catherine Gudis. His first intervention was to challenge conventional catalogue structure and emphasise the book's status as an anthology of art and cre a t i ve writing by replacing the contents page with a seven-page contributors section that m i xed artists, writers and essayists together. Keedy proposed augmenting the art's alarming mood of i m p e n ding social bre a k d own and urban ap o c a lypse by using the Macintosh to cut into the text columns with smooth “r a z o r” slashes and irregular tears. “ When the editor first saw them she was dumbfounded,” he recalls. “She thought it was a computer e rro r.When she realized it was intentional she was mortified. In the end Keedy was allowed just a handful of the less destructive incisions in the book's introductory texts, though the effect - in the setting- was startling enough. "It looks tame by today's stand a rd s ," he concedes. "But not in the context of 'serious' art catalogues." Once again, Keedy used two of his own typefaces. H a rd times, representing the writers, had prev i o u s ly fe a t ured in the Californian art magazine S h i f t and in the 91/93 CalArts catalogue; Skelter, rep resenting the artist and critics - an “angst-ridden retro-fit”- was designed specially for the book.

They combine most powerf u l ly in the titlepiece, w h ere “Ske l t e r” is fract u red across t h ree lines. ( Both typefaces we re later licensed to Condé Nast's Details magazine).

Ke ddy's method as a type designer, he told his Berlin Fuse audience, is to have two or three contradictory ideas operating in each typeface because the resulting complexity ambiguity give the typographer a greater potential range of expression. “In Hard Times,” he explained, “the old jagged irregularity [of Times Roman] is juxtaposed with the new smooth ovals and the sloping ‘e’- bar, oblique serifs, opened counters and other details.” Skelter's large x-height, on the other hand, gives it a “c a rt o o ny and cute aspect” that can be either cheerful or sinister depending on how it is used.

The current vogue for Keedy Sans, released by E m i g re Fonts in 1991, suggests that popular taste is n ow catching up with his double-codings. At first, Keedy recalls, the face just looked “illegible and weird” (it was also, perhaps, s l i g h t ly too strongli identified with E m i g re itself ). “Most typefaces are logically sytematic,” he says. “If you see a few letters you can pretty much guess what the rest of the font will look like. I wanted a typeface that would wilfully contradict those expectations. It was a typically post-modern strategy of a work to call attention to the flaws and artifice of its own construction." Four years on, the face's openendedness can signify the tecnological av a n t - g a rde in the pages of the Cyborg Handbok, or mass-audience popular culture, announcing the evening's attractions on London Weekend Television.Where it functions less successfully - see, for instance, a recent across Elvis' face for B&W loud speakers ad in A rena - is as a middlebrow signifier of “contemporary style.”

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But to use Keddy Sans in this way is to miss the point.

Keedy intends the Cipher typefaces - Hard Times, Hard Line, Skelter, Jot, Manu Sans and others in preparation - to act as catalysts for a new kind of design. Planning, i n c re a s i n g ly, to be his own client, he sees his role as a typeface publisher as that of both author-by-proxy and “enabler”.“We're at a critical point with the millennium where no one seems to know what to do,” he explains. “In the post-modern sense everything is now possible.There's the new technology and there's a lot of confusion and directionlessness.What I want to do with Cipher is to make a pretty specific statement and to provide a set of directions. I like to see the typefaces as a set of opportunities - new tools that h ave inherent within them a set of ideas and options that people can act on.”

TRADITIONALIST AT HEART

While Keedy has shown an exceptional commitment to new work and new ideas in graphic design, the larger purpose of his critique is less certain than his plainspeaking might lead one to expect. Despite his repeated plea for a cultural criticism of design's role in production and consumption that would (presumably) link what designers do and how they think about their practice to its consequences in the world, his own published commentary is on the whole centred self-referentially on design as a goal in itself. It has never been my ambi-tion to ‘change the world’ with design, “Keddy wrote in a “Designer's Statement” in19 9 5 .“Even the modest and vague ambition ‘to make to world a better place' is too naïve, and difficult to qualify or quantify. My only hope is that my design be a rumi-nation of life in all of its complexity and contraditions, and thatit exists in the world with vitality.

P ressed to explain this laissez- faire cre d o, Keedy seems to backtrack slightly. He says that design as a total practice is “affirmative” and that by making things work better and look more aesthetically pleasing, “it can't help but make the world a better place”. At the same time, he points out, there is nothing inherently liberal about g r aphic design: it can be used to affirm any kind of agenda, even the most dangeous.

It seems reasonable at this point to ask Keedy about his own politics espec i a l ly since he claims in “Zombie Modernism” (Emigre no. 34) to detect a similarity of rhetoric between suppose d ly Modernist design critics and figures of the American far right such as Newt Gingrich and radio commentator Rush Limbaugh.The implication of this strange equation is tha taethetic radicals such as Keedy must necessarily adhere to a liberal agenda.

But Keedy, usually so loquacious, declines to answer.“I don't know if that's interesting for graphic designers, or if that's an important part of it. Probably not. In fact, that's the problem I had with ‘Zombie Modernis.’ The minute I bare ly mentioned politics, everyone focuses on that and it goes way off in leftfield.Who cares what my political views are? I don't think I’m politically that savvy. I do think I am savvy about design, so people should care about my view s on that.” Fair enough. Except that if, as Keedy once suggested to me, deconstruction's lesson is that those who are engaged in cultural production and criticism are also engaged in the “politics of power”- manifested in form and style - then it is not at all clear how one could engage meaningfully in such a criticism without being willing to make one's political assumptions e xplicit. What it is easy to miss about Keedy is the degree to which the public post-modernist nu rtures what he himself calls “traditional values” at heart.

One of his complaints about Modernism is precisely that it sought to put an end to tradition. Keddy wants Cipher to show that the new design is just as committed to the idea of quality as the old.

Asked todefine what this quality is and how we will recognise it, he gives the oldest answer in the book.

“Yo u rexperience tells yo u . If yo u ' ve seen 10,000 type faces and studied typography for several ye a r s , that will help you decide.The only thing you have to go on in that respect is experience.You can't have an ove rriding theoretical idea. Maybe you could use that at some point, but you can't re ly on it.” Keedy likes to think of Cipher as an operation on the lines of the traditional American “mom and pop shop”.

It will be garage-sized company, with an international dimension, much of its distribution, at least in the us, being accomplished through the Internet. Keedy identifies with the American type design lineage of Goudy, Dwiggins and Cooper and, like his literate forebears, he will continue to publish as well as design.

“My writing is on a very specific trajectory,” he reveals, explaining that little by little the essays are building into a book. And the next contentious instalment?

“I may even talk about the problems of post-modernism,” says Mr Keedy with m o re than a hint of irony.

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