TYPOGRAPHY IN (RE)ACTION

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DIAGRAMA...................................................................................

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008 INTRODUÇÃO............................................

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PHILIP MEGGS .......“I AM TYPE! REVISITED”

ELLEN LUPTON ...................................“THE BIRTH OF THE USER”

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ELLEN LUPTON “THE POST-MORTEM ON DECONSTRUCTION?”.............

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WOLFGANG WEINGART ..........................................“MY WAY TO TYPOGRAPHY”

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KATHERINE MCCOY “TYPOGRAPHY AS DISCOURSE”.................

ED FELLA ..........................................................................“USING AND ABUSING”

035 STEFAN SAGMEISRER ..............“IF IT`S GOOD IT TOUCHES ME”

^ REFERENCIAS........

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Wolfgang weingart - My Way to Typography

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PHILIP Meggs - I AM TYPE! REVISITED

jonathan Bar - On Experim

o Novas Relac

Discurso Proprio e Individualizado

"Typography Katheri

Estudo da Expressao Individualista

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STEFAN SAGMEISTER - If it’s good it touches me

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efeito de reagir; REACcaO - Acto ou tra; resistencia; accao oposta a ou l. ao progresso socia sistema contrario

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Ellen Lupton - A Post-Mortem on Deconstruction

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ED Fella d Abusing an - Using

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Design como Provocacao

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ACTION Gary Hustwi - Helvetica (documentario)

Ellen Lupton - The Birth of The User

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Leitor

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Qual a função da tipografia? Qual o seu valor?

E como é que esta se articula na relação entre autor e objecto, e posterior confronto com o leitor?

A sociedade parece estar cada vez mais ciente de que a forma como algo se apresenta irá definir a forma como reagimos a tal objecto. É importante que se perceba, que o Design tem combatido e desejado ser visto como uma actividade social. O design soluciona, responde e, com isso, contribui para a “performance” do quotidiano, e para o ritmo da experiência social. É cientes deste processo, que devemos ter cada vez mais em conta, quando desenhamos um objecto. Para quem se destina, o quê e como. A tipografia trata-se de um dos veículos de que predispomos enquanto designer gráficos, e a nossa relação próxima, leva-nos a constatar, que por mais que saibemos que ela existe, nem toda a gente se apercebe da sua importância. Poucas são as pessoas que sabem das aversões e atritos que existem em volta da font Helvetica, ou tão pouco reconhecem o seu grau de importância no mundo do design. No entanto sendo designers ou não, convivemos com ela mais do que com os nossos familiares.

A minha abordagem inicia-se na ruptura contra o Modernismo, onde Wolfang Weingart, é um dos nomes que faz a ponte entre esses dois momentos (Estilo Internacional / New Wave e o Pós-Modernismo) importantíssimos do cenário do design gráfico do séc.

XX. Weingart contrariou dogmas e limitações de grelhas matemáticamente estruturadas que até então eram impostas pela Escola Suiça, passando a explorar novas famílias tipográficas, proporções, e os limites da legibilidade. Com esta ruptura dá-se uma revolução no mundo do design gráfico. A formação de uma visualidade irriquieta, torna-se agora uma das características fundamentais do design dos anos 60/70.

Onde uso de inúmeras tipografias num mesmo objecto, trás consigo o objectivo de criar, o jogo entre leitor e texto defendido por Roland Barthes. O leitor funciona agora como criador de significado, o texto acciona a sua leitura, e a tipografia, essa, é agora modo de interpretação. A importância de Cranbrook Academy of Art em Michingan vem propôr o design gráfico como provocação, reflectindo um período de complexidade e ambiguidade, que Katherine McCoy assume ser parte integrante desta disciplina: “If design is about LIFE, why shouldn’t it have all the complexity, variety, contradiction, and sublimity of life?”

Kath McCoy apresenta-se aqui como uma das maiores impulsionadoras e dos maiores nomes associados a esta escola, onde foi para além da experimentação radical de Weingart, explorando novas relações entre texto e imagem, accionando assim um estudo da expressão individualista. Reagindo à perfeição técnica da corrente principal do design gráfico. O refinamento, domínio/mestria são agora frequentemente rejeitados favorecendo a fraqueza sem rodeios, sem maneiras, desenhados à mão – afinal a perícia técnica já não é propriamente uma revelação. Valoriza-se assim a expressão ao estilo.

Rapidamente a desconstrução da linguagem verbal, passou a ser um filtro que inevitavelmente manipula a resposta do utilizador/leitor. O design pós-modernista quis afastar-se da ordem, clareza e limpeza, e sim, produzir algo que tivesse individualidade.

Mas como era previsto a desconstrução rapidamente se tornou em cliché...

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Na década de 90 a diversidade tipográfica difundiu-se pelo meio profissional. Esta barreira baseava-se agora, apenas, no estilo gráfico de desafio ao estilo suíço, provocando uma onda de acusações às escolas de design, que pretendiam difundir as suas ideias experimentais pelo mundo. Afirmava-se assim que o design tinha sido reduzido a um estilo sem substância, resultando numa avalanche de mensagens confusas e ambíguas.

“Rather than viewing it as a style, I see it as a process – act of questioning (…) A work of design can be called “deconstruction” when it exposes and transforms the established rules of writing interrupting the sacred “inside” of content with the profane “outside” form.”

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A polémica em torno das novas tipografias passou então a girar em torno das questões da legibilidade e do respeito ao leitor. Estas tipografias foram acusadas de estarem a criar trabalhos meramente estéticos, dificultando a leitura em prol do culto designer as an artist defendido por Stefan Sagmeister.

O uso da tipografia é neste contexto elevado a um novo patamar. Hoje o designer pode direccionar e conferir ao objecto um certo grau de controlo. Nós podemos jogar com o texto, mas este também joga connosco.

The more the designer uses those typographic and graphic solutions the more familiar, predictable and ultimately dull they become.

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PHILIP MEGS

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“I bring into the light of day the precious stores of knowledge and wisdom long hidden in the grave of ignorance. I am the leaden army that conquers the world: I am type!” proclaimed a 1933 broadside designed and written by the great typeface designer Frederic Goudy. Were he alive today, Goudy would probably be alarmed at the turn American type design has taken a half-century after his death: His army of lead soldiers has been transformed into a fusillade of electronic, bits, bytes, and pixels. Today’s computer-based technology permits designers to extend the visual range of type into new directions that Goudy could hardly have foreseen.

Typography is no longer just a craft used to give visual form to the spoken language, for contemporary designers have reconstituted type into symbolic icons and expressive visual forms undreamed of by Goudy and his contemporaries. A number of significant changes in our modern culture have caused this revolution in the noble art of alphabets. In earlier times, the spoken word was ephemeral but the printed word remained fixes on carved stone or printed page. Electronic technology now makes possible recording of speech, permitting the spoken word to survive just as the printed word does. Typography has thus been freed from a mindset that viewed it as the sole documentary record of human thought.

The kinetics of film, video, and animation have greatly influenced print graphics, resulting in a new emphasis on movement and energy. The ability of type to literally march across the video screen, zoom back into infinity, or rush forward until de dot of a lowercase i fills the screen has not been lost on graphic designers working with a static printed page.

Capturing the vitality of kinetic energy and freezing it in printing inks is now commonplace.

Visual art has been redefined and twentieth-century artists and designers have proven that colors, textures and shapes – including letterforms – have lives of their own apart from their representational or symbolic meaning. In typographic design this non verbal level of expression can be teamed with the verbal meaning of words to intensify or enhance the message.

For over five hundred years, type marched in horizontal rows dictated by the relentless constraints of typesetting technology. Today, flexibility abounds. Technology places unprecedented control of space and scale in the hands of the designer. Both enormously large and minutely small sizes of type operate at extremes of scale that disregard the limitations of traditional technology. Spatial configurations warp, bend, fracture, and separate, defying the regimen of Goudy’s leaden army. Type can run over, around, and through images with any desired degree of transparency. All of these new possibilities can be accomplished with the click of a mouse. Tracking of letter spacing in measurements of 1/20.000 of an em, using negative line spacing, stretching type, bending it back in space, and setting type in circles, ovals, and any configuration devised by the designer’s imagination becomes routine.

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T Y P E

REVISITED”

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But the Alcibiades movement was spreading, in spite of all opposition.

Little by little the conservatives began to feel that no reputation is so well established as to be able to ignore the spirit of the time – no matter how decadent. Timidly, at first, they tried to join the movement. Some of them felt that it is perhaps safer and also more humane to cut the dog’s tail not all at once but little by little – an inch a month.

Others thought that, while cutting off the dog’s tail is unavoidable if one is to keep up with competition, a dog without a tail looks too angular and geometric, and that a little ornamentation would improve greatly his appearance without destroying the principle.

They invited a lot of tail designers and put the problem squarely before them.“Can we,” said they, “have a dog which has no tail but looks exactly as though he had one?”

The designers offered several solutions.

The most popular one was to supply the tailless dog with an artificial tail made out of chromium and bakelite. A tail was designed somewhat along old Greek lines and was called neoclassic.

Soon, however, sabotage reared its ugly head among tail designer. Some of them, in their heart of hearts, were contaminated by the teaching of Alcibiades; they introduced a new tail made of Nylon&Lucite.

Being transparent, this tail was invisible.

It was there and could be shown to the auditors, if necessary, but, to the casual observer, the dog with a Lucite tail looked completely tailless.

However, neither the dog with a tail, which looked tailless, nor the tailless dog, which looked as though he had a tail, had a very lasting vogue.

The compromise dogs had no news value and, therefore, an urgent need was felt for a

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further remodeling of the dog.

Strange as it may seem, attempts in this direction were not made by the left wing of the Alcibiades school, but rather by that branch of conservatives which had to deal with the ever-changing and jaded tastes of women. They felt that their license to use imagination and fantasy could be applied to dogs as well as to togas and chitons. They found that an entirely new kind of dog can be produced by plastic surgery, lavishly applied.

Soon their dogs were so far removed from original species that they could hardly be recognized as mammals. In the most advanced form, they had five legs and three tails – all of different lengths, and pointing in all possible directions.

The further progress of this idea, however, was impaired by the discovery of the so called primitive dog. This dog, which was found painted on the wall of a carven, had a tail. It was such a nice simple, bucolic tail – neat, but not Gaudy - that it gave complete aesthetic and moral satisfaction to both the partisans of Alcibiades and their enemies.

At the same time, the research people, who were checking up on the manufacturing, operating, and maintenance costs of dogs’ tails and on their distribution, discovered that the great controversy about dogs’ tails did not reach further than the outskirts of Athens and that the rest of the country still had their dogs in their natural state, which was so much like the primitive dog in the cavern you could not tell them apart.

It was an easy matter thereafter for Alcibiades and his friends to procure several country dogs and to lead them triumphantly on the leash along the main street of Athens – the dogs’ tails waving like banners in this parade which opened a new era. The parade was a sensation.

All of Athens talked of nothing but the dogs of Alcibiades and their wonderful natural tails.

REVISITED”

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In the 1980s and early 90s, many experimental graphic designers embraced the idea of the readerly text. Inspired by theoretical ideas such as Roland Barthes’s “death of the author,” they used layers of text and interlocking grids to create works of design that engaged the reader in the making of meaning.

In place of the classical model of typography as a crystal goblet for content, this alternative view assumes that content itself changes with each act of representation.

Typography becomes a mode of interpretation, and the designer and reader (and the designer-as-reader) competed with the traditional author for control of the text.

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Another model surfaced at the end of the 1990s, borrowed not from literary criticism but from human-computer interaction (HCI) studies and the fields of interface and usability design. The dominant subject of our age has become neither reader nor writer but user, a figure conceived as a bundle of needs and impairments—cognitive, physical, emotional. Like a patient or child, the user is a figure to be protected and cared for but also scrutinized and controlled, submitted to research and testing.

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Someone clicked here to get over there. Someone who bought this also bought that. The interactive environment not only provides users with a degree of control and self-direction but also, more quietly and insidiously, it gathers data about its audiences.

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ELLEN

Graphic designers can use theories of user interaction to revisit some of our basic assumptions about visual communication. Why, for example, are readers on the Web less patient than readers of print? It is a common assumption that digital displays are inherently more difficult to read than ink on paper. Yet HCI studies conducted in the late 1980s proved that crisp black text on a white background can be read just as efficiently from a screen as from a printed page.

The impatience of the digital reader arises from culture, not from the essential character of display technologies. Users of Web sites have different expectations than users of print. They expect to feel “productive,” not contemplative. They expect to be in search mode, not processing mode. Users also expect to be disappointed,

distracted, and delayed by false leads. The cultural habits of the screen are driving changes in design for print, while at the same time affirming print’s role as a place where extended reading can still occur.

Another common assumption is that icons are a more universal mode of communication than text. Icons are central to the GUIs (graphical user interfaces) that routinely connect users with computers. Yet text can often provide a more specific and understandable cue than a picture. Icons don’t actually simplify the translation of content into multiple languages, because they require explanation in multiple languages. The endless icons of the digital desktop, often rendered with gratuitous detail and depth, function more to enforce brand identity than to support usability. In the twentieth century, modern

designers hailed pictures as a “universal” language, yet in the age of code, text has become a more common denominator than images—searchable, translatable, and capable of being reformatted and restyled for alternative or future media.

Perhaps the most persistent impulse of twentieth-century art and design was to physically integrate form and content.

The Dada and Futurist poets, for example, used typography to create texts whose content was

015 modernist myth that is under revision in the age of the user.

Modern designers discovered that open space on a page can have as much physical presence as printed areas. White space is not always a mental kindness, however. Edward Tufte, a fierce advocate of visual density, argues for maximizing the amount of data conveyed on a single page or screen.

In order to help readers make connections and comparisons as well as to find information quickly, a single surface packed with well-organized information is sometimes better than multiple pages with a lot of blank space. In typography as in urban life, density invites intimate exchange among people and ideas.

LUPTON their own cycles of decay and obsolescence.

inextricable from the concrete layout of specific letterforms on a page. In the twenty-first century, form and content are being pulled back apart. Style sheets, for example, compel designers to think globally and systematically instead of focusing on the fixed construction of a particular surface. This way of thinking allows content to be reformatted for different devices or users, and it also prepares for the afterlife of data as electronic storage media begin

In the twentieth century, modern artists and critics asserted that each medium is specific. They defined film, for instance, as a constructive language distinct from theater, and they described painting as a physical medium that refers to its own processes.

Today, however, the medium is not always the message. Design has become a “transmedia” enterprise, as authors and producers create worlds of characters, places, situations, and interactions that can appear across a variety of products. A game might live in different versions on a video screen, a desktop computer, a game console, and a cell phone, as well as on t-shirts, lunch boxes, and plastic toys.

The beauty and wonder of “white space” is another

In our much-fabled era of information overload, a person can still process only one message at a time. This brute fact of cognition is the secret behind magic tricks: sleights of hand occur while the attention of the audience is drawn elsewhere. Given the fierce competition for their attention, users have a chance to shape the information economy by choosing what to look at. Designers can help them make satisfying choices.

Typography is an interface to the alphabet. User theory tends to favor normative solutions over innovative ones, pushing design into the background.

Readers usually ignore the typographic interface, gliding comfortably along literacy’s habitual groove. Sometimes, however, the interface should be allowed to fail. By making itself evident, typography can illuminate the construction and identity of a page, screen, place, or product.

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A Post-Mortem on

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and graphic design have always been a problematic union. Perhaps graphic design is often approached more intuitively than intellectually; theory is rarely an explicit part of design practice. When theory does emerge as a topic among designer, it often serves to name a new style, a current stock of mannerisms. A conspicuous example of the surfacing of theory is the circulation of “deconstruction” within the graphic design community.

The term “deconstruction” was coined by the philosopher Jaccques Derrida in his book Of Grammatology, published in France in 1967 and translated into English in 1976. Deconstruction became a banner for advanced thought in American literary studies, scandalizing departments of English and French across the country. Deconstruction is part of the broader field of criticism known as “post-structuralism,” whose theorists have included Derrida as well as Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, and others. Each of these writers has looked at modes of representation – from alphabetic writing to photojournalism – as culturally powerful technologies that transform and construct “reality.”

In the mid- 1980’s, graduate students at were reading various post-structuralist works, finding in them analogues for their own ideas about communication.

Meanwhile, artists, architects, and photographers in art schools and studios across the country were connecting similar texts to visual practice. “Deconstructivism” catapulted into the mainstream design press with MoMA’s 1988 exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture, curated by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley. MoMA used the term “deconstructivism” to link contemporary architecture to Russian Constructivism, whose early years were marked by an imperfect vision of form and technology. The MoMA exhibition found a similarly skewed interpretation of Modernism in the works of Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Peter Eisenman, and others.

The phrase “deconstruction” quickly became a cliché in design Journalism, where it usually has described a style featuring fragmented shapes, extreme angles, and aggressively asymmetrical arrangements. This collection of formal devices was easily transferred from architecture to graphic design, where it named existing tendencies and catalyzed new ones. The labels “deconstructivism,””desconstructionism”, and just plain “decon” have served to blanket the differences between a broad range of design practices and an equally broad range of theoretical ideas.

Cranbrook

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ELLEN LUPTON

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In Derrida’s original theory, deconstruction asks a question: how does representation inhabit reality? How does the external appearance of the thing get inside its internal essence? How does the surface get under the skin?

For example, the Western tradition has tended to value the internal mind as the sacred source of soul and intellect, while denouncing the body as an earthly, mechanical shell. Countering this view is the understanding that the conditions of bodily experience temper the way we think and act. A parallel question for graphic design is this: how does visual form get inside the “content” of writing? How has typography refused to be a passive, transparent vessel for written texts, developing as a system with its own structures and devices?

A crucial opposition in Derrida’s theory of deconstruction is speech versus writing. The Western philosophical tradition has denigrated writing as an inferior, dead copy of the living, spoken word. When we speak, we draw on our inner consciousness, but when we write, our words are inert and abstract. The written word loses its connection to our inner selves. Language is set adrift.

Grammarian, schoolteachers, and other priests of verbal correctness have long bemoaned the inaccuracies of the alphabet –its inability to consistently and concisely represent sound of speech. In written English, for example, the function of a letter pair such as ph is woefully at odds with our expectations of how these letters behave individually. Herbert Bayer's "fonetic alphabet” (1958-60) attempted to reform this situation.

The Latin alphabet is supplemented by a range of conventions with no relation to speech at all. Spacing, punctuation, the styles of letterforms, the conventions of page layout –these are non-phonetic devices that the alphabet now depends on. Writing is not merely a bad copy, a faulty transcription, of the spoken word.

Writing has, in fact, changed the way we think and talk.

A work of design can be called “deconstruction” when it exposes and transforms the established rules of writing, interrupting the sacred “inside” of content with the profane “outside” of form .Modernist typography has long engaged in such structural games, from the calligrammes of Apollinaire, which use typography as an active picture rather than a passive frame, to the experiments with simultaneous overlapping texts produced within the “New Typography” of the 1970s and ‘80s. Such self-conscious explorations of Language and design within the context of Modernism are matched by numerous developments within the “vernacular” field of commercial publishing, which since de early nineteenth century has expanded the limits of classical book typography to meet the needs of advertising and popular media. The early nineteenth-century display face called Italian deliberately inverted the anatomical parts of the “modern” letterforms that had been formalizes in the late eighteenth century.

The neoclassical fonts of Didot and Bodoni epitomized the tendency to view typography as a system of abstract relationships –thick and thin, serif and stem, vertical and horizontal. The designer of Italian turned the serifs inside out, demonstrating that the forms of letter are not bound by the authority of divine proportions, but are open to endless manipulation.

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Within the context of philosophy and literary theory, deconstruction is just one question among many that emerged out of the body of critical ideas known as post-structuralism. Roland Barthes’s theory of “mythology” looks at how images validate key beliefs in modern culture –such as “progress” or ”individualism”-making ideologically loaded concepts seem like natural and inevitable truths. Graphic design can reveal cultural myths by using familiar symbols and styles in new ways. A typeface such as Barry Deck’s Template Gothic, based on an industrial stencil, calls into question the values of polished perfection commonly associated with technology. Deck calls his typeface “an imperfect typeface for an imperfect world,” countering utopian beliefs in technology as social savior or corporate notions of technology as law and order.

It has recently become unfashionable to compare language and design. In the fields of architecture and products, the paradigm of language is losing luster as theoretical model –we no longer want to think of buildings, teapots, or fax machines as “communicating” cultural messages, in the manner of post-Modern classicism or product semantics. Yet the link between language and typography is quite different from the link between language and three-dimensional objects, because typography is so close to the language. In fact, typography is the frontier between language and objects, language and images. Typography turns language into a visible, tangible artifact, and in the process transforms it irrevocably.

For the design fields, “deconstruction” has been reduced to the name of a historical period rather than an ongoing way of approaching design. Derrida made a similar point himself in a 1994 interview in the New York Times Magazine, when asked if he felt that deconstruction was losing credibility in the academic world, he answered that deconstruction will never be over, because it describes a way of thinking about language that has always existed. For graphic design, deconstruction isn’t dead, either, because it’s not a style or a movement, but a way of asking questions through our work. Critical for making will always be part of design practice, whatever theoretical tools one might use to identify it.

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it as a style, – an act of questioning.

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W O L F G A N G W E I N G A R T T U R N E D A R E B E L L I O U S E Y E T O S W I S S R A T I O N A L T Y P O G R A P H Y , R E S C U I N G I T F R O M W H A T H E D E S C R I B E S A S " T H E T H R E S H O L D O F S T A G N A T I O N . "

While studying under the Swiss masters, Armin Hofman and Emil Ruder at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel in the 1960s, Weingart reacted to existing standards by oushing typography to the limits of legibility and beyond. He narrowly escaped expulsion.

Combining extreme letterspacing, slant, weight, size, and repetition with a fierce practical knowledge of printing, Weingart dismantled the rational methodology of his elders. Out of this radicality emerged a design movement appropriate to the changing post-

modern times. New Wave was born. Weingart and the students he later taught at the Kunstgewerbeschule in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, including April Greiman and Dan Friedman, used their intimate knowledge of Swiss modernism to open its unrelenting structure to the dynamic experiments of a new era. His audacity urges us to look deeply at our own time and, in so doing, “to question established typography standards, change the rules, and to reevaluate its potential.�

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In an era when lead type was virtually obsolete, the environment of a traditionally equipped type shop—its elements and tools in metal, wood, or synthetic materials—was the context, in fact, the impetus that enabled me to develop a progressive curriculum for the Kunstgewerbeschule Basel.

Swiss typography in general, and the typography of the Basel school in particular, played an important international role from the fifties until the end of the sixties. Its development, however, was on the threshold of stagna¬tion; it became sterile and anonymous. My vision, fundamentally compatible with our school's philosophy, was to breathe new life into the teaching of typography by reexamining the assumed principles of its current practice.

The only way to break typographic rules was to know them. I acquired this advantage during my apprenticeship as I became expert in letterpress printin g. I assigned my students exercises that not only addressed basic design relationships with type placement, size, and weight, but also encouraged them to critically analyze letterspacing to experiment with the limits of readability. We discovered that as increased space was inserted between letters, the words or word groups became graphic in expression, and that understanding the message was less dependent upon reading than we had supposed.Our activities challenged the viewpoint of Emil Ruder and his followers.

In the mid-sixties he wrote a succinct manifesto, a part of which I typographically interpreted for the cover of Typographische Monatsblätter, Number 5/1973:

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"Typography has one plain dut vey information in writing. N can absolve typography from cannot be read becomes a pr than graphic design, typograp nology, precision, and good or

023 Founded by Emil Ruder and Armin Hofmann, the Weiterbildungsklasse für Graphik, the international Advanced Program for Graphic Design, was scheduled to begin in April 1968. Ruder's heartfelt wish was to teach typography, but because of additional obligations as the school director, he would need a teaching assistant. He asked me, and I readily accepted. Tragically, his unexpected illness and regular hospital confinements in Basel precluded the chance of ever working together.

The first seven students came from the United States, Canada, England, and Switzerland, expecting to study with the masters Hofmann and Ruder. When I showed up as the typography teacher, their shock was obvious. Because of my training and radical experiments, and because we were around the same age, the students began to trust me.

Eventually, disappointment gave way to curiosity.

The teachers agreed on common themes for the initial two years of the advanced program, the symbol and the package. Feeling more confident by the second year, bolstered by the students' enthusiasm, I risked further experimentation, and my classes became a laboratory to test and expand models for a new typography.

It was a major undertaking to organize my extremely diverse typographic ideas when I was asked to exhibit at the Stuttgart gallery Knauer-Expo in December 1969.1 designed eleven broadsides relating to thoughts and fantasies about my life. One of them, entitled "was ich morgen am liebsten machen würde" (what I would most like to do tomorrow), was a list of wishes and dreams, and it has become one of my favorite works. Accelerated by the social unrest of our generation, the force behind Swiss typography and its philosophy of reduction was losing its international hold. My students were inspired, we were on to something different, and we knew it.

F I F T H INDE PE NDE NT P R O JECT: TYP O G R A P HY AS ENDLE SS RE PE T I T I ON

Years after our explosive rebellion against the prevailing status of Swiss typography and all the values that it had come to embody, my work, too, became repetitive. Disheartening as it was, I had to admit that our school type shop, although well stocked in metal type, rule lines, symbols, and ornaments, flexible in all possible techniques, no longer offered creative potential, not for me personally and not in the professional practice of design.

Since the invention of printing, typography had been the domain of craftsmen. The artists and designers of the twenties and thirties, the so-called pioneers of modern typography, El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, Piet Zwart, whose work anticipated a future direction in graphic design, perhaps came to a similar dead end due to the inherent limitations of perpendicular composition in lead typography.

In my case the crisis came at the beginning of the seventies when the student unrest had subsided, when many of us were trying to envision a new life. The renewed challenge to find other possibilities in my work, to find my way out of a leaden typographic cage, seemed futile.It was too soon to imagine the potential of layering lithographic films. Nor could I predict that in the darkroom another world of surprise awaited: transparency and superimposed dot screens.

From a feeling of nowhere to go, a low point and a standstill, I set repeated, single type elements. The pictures conjured up many associations: the endless expanse of the desert, the steps of archaeological sites, the discipline of my apprenticeship, and, from childhood, the drudgery of survival in a postwar economy and a report card with the failing grade that would never improve— in Germany, the number i. Lines that spanned a double-page spread reminded me of first grade in Salem Valley and my practice notebook for handwriting. The word “schon,” set in b old with two fine points above it, defined my idea of beauty. The rows of Rs were elephants with their long trunks, a peaceable herd roaming a dry river valley at the foot of a steep mountain massif The cross, the registration mark of the printer, was the intersection of north, south, east, and west. The letter Y was a dichotomy, the arid desert strewn with colorful tulips. Pages of bold points and vertical lines were abstractions o f photographs brought back from journeys in the Near East.

This phase of my work may well have been influenced by Serial Art, or by Repetition Typography practiced in the class of Emil Ruder during the sixties. The typeface Univers designed by Adrian Frutiger of Switzerland, a longtime friend of Ruder, offered Basel a progressive approach to the arrangement of typography. The design of Univers was ideal for Ruder’s own typographic work and that of his students, especially favored by Hans-Rudolf Lutz who studied at the Basel school for one year from 1963 to 1964. Lutz and a few of his colleagues designed typographic pictures that would have been difficult to compose in any other typeface.

Since the invention of book printing, Univers was the first entire font system to be designed with interchangeable weights, proportions, and corre¬sponding italics. In the design of older typefaces visual alignment among such variations was not a standard consideration. For a given size of type all twenty-one variations of Univers, whether light, regular, medium, bold, condensed, expanded, or italic, had the same X-height (the height of lowercase letters without ascenders or descenders) and the same baseline. This simplified letterpress printing and increased the possibilities for visual contrast in tone, weight, width, and direction, available in eleven sizes for metal typesetting.

When I came to the Basel School of Design the coarse Berthold Akzidenz- Grotesk, so rarely used, was fast asleep in the type drawer under a blanket of dust. I woke it up.

ty before it and that is to conNo argument or consideration this duty. A printed work that roduct without purpose. More phy is an expression of tech-

rder."

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“ “ KATHERINE McCOY GALVANIZED THE DESIGN COMMUNITY DURING THE LATE 1970s AND 1980s. UNDER HER LEADERSHIP, EXPERIMENTAL WORK UNDERTAKEN AT CRANBROOK ACADEMY Of ART IN MICHIGAN TRANSFORMED GRAPHIC DESIGN INTO PROVOCATION.

Balking against the modern constraints of Swiss typographic systems. Her students ushered in a period of complexity, ambiguity, and subjectivity.

Moving beyond the more formal radical experimentation of Wolfgang Weingart, McCoy explored "new relationships between text and image�.

The resulting multilayered personal work consciously provoked interpretation from the audience. Modernism's emphasis on form gave way to a highly KATHERINE McCoy with David frej / 1988

individuated study of expression. Typography became discourse to be evaluated and discussed within the dense cultural context of philosophy, linguistics, and cultural theory.

Angry modernists protested the work as "ugly" and "impractical," kicking off the "Legibility Wars" of the 1990s. This uproar drives home the importance of Cranbrook.

The work at this small rustbelt school forced the modern tenets underlying our profession to the surface. There they could be critically examined and addressed through fresh postmodern eyes.

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The recent history of graphic design in the United States reveals a series of actions and This copy-concept and image-oriented direction was challenged in the sixties by the import between graphic design and advertising. Predictably, designers in the next decade rebelle corporate style. In the early seventies, Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in American graphic design students. Simultaneously, Switzerland's Basel school was transform to U.S. schools.Academia's rediscovery of early-twentieth-century Modernism, the appearanc Weingartian structural expressionism all came together in the graphic explosion labeled as than the antiseptic discipline of the classical Swiss school.

After a brief flurry of diatribes in the graphic design press, this permissive new approac tamed, codified into a formalistic style that fills our design annuals with endlessly soph as predictable as Beaux Arts architecture. It is the new status quo - the New Academy, as Determining whether New Wave is postmodernism or just late Modernism is important in under dissections and recombinations of graphic design’s grammar. Layered images and textures co But the addition of vernacular imagery and colors reflects postmodern architecture’s disco pre twentieth-century history. Taken as a whole, however, New Wave’s complex arrangements The New Academy’s knowing, often slick iterations have left some graphic designers dissati text, and imagery, are beginning to resurface. Much of this recent work steps outside the come from fine art, photographic, or literary backgrounds rather than graphic design train When one looks for experimental typography today, what one finds is not so much new typogr over the past ten years of structuralist dissection is disappearing. The look and structur symbols, is instead relied upon.

*

The best new work is often aformal and sometimes decidedly anti-formal, despite the presen of some New Wave elements. Reacting to the technical perfection of mainstream graphic desi refinement and mastery are frequently rejected in favor of the directness of unmannered, hand-drawn, or vernacular forms-after all, technical expertise is hardly a revelation anym These designers value expression over style.

Here on the edges of graphic design, the presence of the designer is sometimes so oblique certain pieces would seem to spring directly from our popular culture. Reflecting current linguistic theory, the notion of "authorship" as a personal, ; no longer are there one-way statements from designers. The layering of content, as op New Wave's formal layering of collage elements, is the key to this exchange. Objective com tion is enhanced by deferred meanings, hidden stories, and alternative interpretations.

Sources for much current experimentation can be traced to recent fine art and photography, literary and art criticism. Influenced by French post structuralism, critics and artists d verbal language as a filter or bias that inescapably manipulates the reader's response. Wh proach is applied to art and photography, form is treated as a visual language to be read Both the texts and the images are to be read in detail, their meanings decoded. Clearly, t ized communication asks a lot of its audience; this is harder work than the formal pleasures of Much new typography is very quiet. Some of the most interesting, in fact, is impossible to radically modest scale or its subtle development through a sequence of pages. Some is bold that it makes little in the way of a visual statement. (One designer calls these strictly typography.) Typefaces now range from the classics to banal, often industrial sans serifs.

-differentiated blocks of words-without the mannered manipulations of New Wave, where sent express their parts. Text is no longer the syntactic playground of Weingart's descendants.

These cryptic, poker-faced juxtapositions of text and image do not always strive for elega The focus now is on expression through semantic content, utilizing the intellectual softwa Modernism. It is an interactive process that- as art always anticipates social evolution-

*

027

reactions. The fifties saw the flowering of U.S. graphic design in the New York School. tation of Swiss minimalism, a structural and typographic system that forced a split ed against Helvetica and the grid system that had become the official American Architecture emerged alongside the study of graphic design history as influences on med by Wolfgang Weingart's syntactical experimentation, an enthusiasm that quickly spread ce of historicized and vernacular architectural postmodernism, and the spread of s New Wave. Shattering the constraints of minimalism was exhilarating and far more fun

ch quickly moved into the professional mainstream. Today, however, the maverick has been histicated renditions. What was originally a revolution is now an institution, Phil Meggs calls it. rstanding new work today. New Wave extends the classical Swiss interest in structure to ontinue the collage aesthetic begun by Cubism, Constructivism, and Dada. overy of popular culture, and the reintroduction of the classic serif typefaces draws on are largely syntactical, abstracting type and images into baroquely Modern compositions. isfied. As a result, long-neglected design elements, such as semantic expression in form, lineage of Bauhaus / Basel / New Wave, and, not surprisingly, some of its practitioners ning. raphy as new relationships between text and image. In fact, the typography so celebrated re of the letter is underplayed, and verbal signification, interacting with imagery and

nce ign,

more. that

pposed to mmunica-

, and to deconstruct hen this apas well as seen. this intellectual-

f New Wave. o show here because of its d in scale but so matter-of-fact linguistic intentions "nonallusive" . Copy is often treated as just that-untences and words are playfully exploded to . ance or refinement, although they may achieve it inadvertently. are of visual language as well as the structural hardware and graphic grammar of heralds our emerging information economy, in which meanings are as important as materials.

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Usin an d g //

Abusi

Is a typographer totally governed by the vicissitudes of style, or is there a more standardized aesthetic?

Partly,one should stay current as being part of

the time one works in and at least, be aware of whats going on if only to go against it which is usually the exception and,in most cases,

unnecessary. but also keep aware of the basics necessary for decent communication.

It's kind of a complex balance not easily or

What determin T h e c o a typeface wor quickly answered.

029

HOW DO YOU TEACH TYPE DESIGN? I really dont and never have, as such. Of course, I can crit i after its done, but I have never formally taught it before its done! Because I never had to,actually.

Does one need to be a type designer to be a good typographer?

No, certainly not. History abounds with great typographers who never designed type.

On the other hand, it might be interesting to match typogÂŹraphers with type designers

sing

and take a closer look at what the differences might be.

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What would you say constitutes a "good typographer"?

One who really knows what he or she is doing

nes whether n t e x t rks or not?

in relation to what you think of the result.

.

030 As a type designer, do you feel proprietary about your work once it is out in the world?

NO.

How do you feel, as a typographer, about manipulating others' type designs?

No problem. I'm all for the using and abusing.

Go ahead, put a moustache on Baskerville.

Jan Tschichold went from classic to modern to classic. Do you feel this evolutionary cycle is common to typographers?

Don't know, other than old age conservatism; didnt Churchill say something about that?

YES!YE

Should typography be the "language" course in design school, or the raison d'etre of design?

031 If you had to design type pedagogy; what would be the first thing students must learn?

Denote plus connote, vis-A-vis, context!!!. I'm kind of dumb when it comes to answering these kinds ot questions, but I have a beautifully lettered page that I just did, and might nor necessarily use, for the cover of a student publication in Venice, Italy. It says, "Practice and preach and/or theorize and teach. " That is my answer.

ES!YES!

B A S K E R V I L L E

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How do you teach type design?

I never taught a pure type class, as type is always just one part of the whole of a class project. For good type, the same is true as for any other design element: It is good if it touches me. Type can do this in many ways: either by its fantastic content, its unbelievable form, its unusual execution, its incredible style, by reminding me of some important event of my past, by making me want to revisit it, or by showing me that its maker needed courage to produce it.

Is typography totally governed by the vicissitudes of style, or is there a more standardized aesthetic?

There is always the old galloping readability horse (which is also, in part, a style question - how much

033

a reader is used to reading a

* My gut.

certain style will determine its readability.

oD

How do you feel, as a typographer, about manipulating other’s type designs?

If it's a classic font, I have no trouble messing with it in all sorts of manners; if its a new and fairly unknown design, I'd probably want to leave it in its virgin form. We rarely use fonts that show lots of individuality of its designer. I always feel like using somebody else's work, for the same reason we seldom use stock photos.

Should typography be the "language" course in design school, or the raison d'etre of design?

STEFAN

SAGMEISTER

Language. I know some great designers who did not have a clue about type (Tibor claimed to have never heard of Helvetica, which, I'm sure, was not true, but he surely didn't have a formal type education).

No, not at all. People who never designed a complete typeface designed most of my favorite typographic pieces.

Does one need to be a type designer to be a good typographer?

S

What determines whether a typeface works or not?

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“The Birth of the User “ - Ellen Lupton

Lupton, Ellen (ed.2004) - THINKING WITH TYPE: A critical guide for designers, writers, editors and students.

“A Post-Mortem on Deconstruction?”

- Ellen Lupton

Heller, Steven e Phillip B. Meggs (ed.2001) -TEXTS ON TYPE: Critical writings on typography

“I Am TYPE! Revisited“ - Philip Meggs Armstrong, Helen (ed.2009) -GRAPHIC DESIGN THEORY - Readings from the field

“My Way to Typography“ - Wolfang Weingart “On Experiment “ - Jonathan Barnbrook

Heller, Steven (ed.2004) - THE EDUCATION OF A TYPOGRAPHER

“If it’s Good it Touches Me” - Stefan Sagmeister “Using and Abusing “ - Ed Fella Documentário: -Helvetica - Gary Hustwi

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Wolfang Weingart / Katherine McCoY / April Greiman / Jonathan Barnbrook / Peter Saville / Ed Fella / Bruce Mau / Paula Sher / Irma Boom / Neville Brody / David Carson / Eric Spiekermann / Experimental Jet Set / Stefan Sagmeister Dimitri Bruni / Manuel Krebs / WHY NOT ASSOCIATES / Hard WERKEN

FACULDADE DE BELAS ARTES - UNIVERSIDADE DE LISBOA CURSO DE DESIGN DE COMUNICAÇÂO 3º ANO - 1º SEMESTRE

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