Typography has become a medium of communication for all, not just a select group who use it.

The modernist movement was slow in making its impress on the art of typography. Once the new influences were upon the printing world, “the first rumbles rapidly grew into a roar”. Reconstructed to modern values. Form follows function.

Function of typography is to convey a message to its readers. Ease and speed. Convenience. 

Clarity is essential feature of modern typography. To stand a chance of being read amongst everything else, typography should display its message as clearly and directly as possible. Easy comprehension defines the form. Be guided solely by the interpretation of the typography. This effects the presentation, as it should be fluid. Proportions accentuate things.

Present-day living’s most notable characteristic is the fast pace, which should therefore be reflected in typography. Dynamic rather than static, quick tempo, as is modern living.

The modern typographer sees central layouts as signifying or giving importance to the word that appears in the very centre, which of course is often not the case. Central layouts also bring the eye to a point of rest repeatedly, which does not help with readability and fluidity. Left alignment therefore is the best way to display type, as the eye knows where to return to after reading each line. Lines of unequal length do not disrupt reading as they would if centre aligned. 

Notes from Zombie Modernism.

In graphic design, there is no alternative to modernism. The designer was born out of modernism. Compared to art, music, architecture, literature, etc, graphic design did not have sufficient time to develop a mature sense of self.

When modernism died, many designers’ ideology died too. That is the fate of the zombie modernist, the living dead who design among us - refusing to acknowledge their ideological demise.

Design was a tool for converting the masses to modernism, spreading it to a conservative majority. Therefore, design was lead to be moderist practice, therefore design’s history exists almost entirely within the modernist paradigm.

Unfortunately, design’s modernism is an ill-considered version of art’s modernism.

Only in the past few years has there emerged significant amounts of work to challenge the hegemony of design modernism. Some designers have re-evaluated and re-defined modernism.

Design modernism’s hegemony is revealed in various publications to have the primary function of establishing a universal standard of excellence. Problem solving, clarity, and having a rationalist obsession with attacking anything new.

The core philosophy of modernist design is in instrumentalist or pragmatic thought. 

“Pragmatism is America’s only native philosophy” It is goal orientated, practical and distrustful of all things metaphysical. 

Habermas’s and Dewey’s pragmatism is not an unlikely source of interest for designers, particularly die-hard modernists.

Many designer’s are disturbed by the Marxist and leftist politics of postmodernist theorists, but absolutely nothing has been said of the right-wing conservatism of the modernist theorist. Simply because design consists of a silent conservative majority?

From the Bauhaus to our house “Father knows best” has always passed for design theory. Graphic design’s alleged birthplace, the Bauhaus, from the start has been idealised and mythologised by designers. The school was destroyed by Fascism which may have enhanced its credibility in post-war Europe and the USA. Its ideal of universalism was a mirage, shattered by consumerism and the demands of society. 

The Zombie Modernist refuses to let go of modernism.

For them, anything outside of modernism is superficial and of poor quality. It became increasingly difficult to keep the myth alive. 

Granddad of Zombie Modernism, Paul Rand complains in his latest book “The Bauhaus, into whose history is woven the very fabric of modernism, is seen as a style rather than an idea”

Important thing is, modernism is not a style. Or at least, no longer a style, but an ideology. That ideology is conservatism. 

Design has become primarily an ideologically conservative practice. In Design, Form and Practice, Paul Rand quotes A. N Whitehead “Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing. Mere conservation without change cannot conserve”. (First sentence is Rand’s. Modernist designers believe the function of design is to ‘conserve’ universal values in designed objects. 

Post 1984; experimental, chaotic, ugly, anarchic, grunge, excessive.

Technology as a means of finding release from servitude. 

1984 Apple released Macintosh. Commercial shown in the Superbowl. Regimented. References to ‘Big Brother’. Big Brother character on screen, ‘Big Blue’ IBM - Dominant PC manufacturers. 

Macintosh: a shift away from machines for business, they supported creative capabilities. Desktop publishing. Development of digital typefaces. Revolutionised digital typography. 

Limited - one colour, edges were jagged. But revolutionary. 

Steven Heller. Postmodernism urgently questioned certainties laid down by Modernism and rebelled against grand Eurocentric narratives in favour of multiplicity.

Shift against modernism. 

New complexities / new readings.

Overriding focus on visual / conceptual opposed to textual. No rules or restrictions. Subjectivity. Designers could make these decisions again.

Barry Deck “I am really interested in type that isn’t perfect”. Typographers and designers wanted imperfection, gritty, something more human.

Tomato projects.

Typography called on to somehow reflect aspects of urban life / living.

Community with the urban experience.

David Carson. Ray Gun and the cult of ugly.

Edged ‘deconstruction’ towards the mainstream. 

Designer as personality. 

“You cannot not communicate”

Question readability. Introduces students to the idea of typography as an expressive medium.

Emigre. Graphic design in the digital realm.

Fuse and the digital font.

Enfant - terrible of British typography in the 1980s (Neville Brody) attempts to locate a new kind of publication for new typographies; new channels of distributions; seemingly unwilling to lose the physical.

Marinetti materiality and sensation

There is a great deal of noise in his work

Exhausting

Johanna Drucker - The Visible World

A graphic language of resistance. Vehicles for subcultural communication. Sex Pistols.

The law of diminishing returns.

Where to go after all the rules have been broken?

The de functioning of function. Guilt after previous excesses. ‘Polyester’ Modernism / the rise of Default Design; style as fashion. A loss of voice / a loss of confidence.

New systems. Rob Giampietro. 

Default systems in Graphic Design 2003.

From Bits to Atoms.

Return to the idea of utility. Society. Recession.

Words of Wool. Rudiger Scholmer.

Hand rendered. Next shift.

Here are important parts of the previous article I want to re-read:

“Typographic “modern,” I don’t mean Modernity”. The project of Modernity spanned a century or more; the novelty of modern typography lasted a few decades at best.

Contemporary designers Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller explain, “writing is… a set of signs for representing signs. The design of letterforms is removed one step further: it is a medium whose signified is not words but rather the alphabet.”

Typography, as a commercial art, is generally tied to the co-opting processes of Capitalism, which move slowly as a necessary condition of the marketplace. 

In light of this sluggish distance, one is tempted to question the worthiness of charting a constellation of typographic claims in the Modern universe, even though such claims may very well exist in theory, like a star whose presence is known by its disturbance of other stars, though the star itself is unseen.

“To the famous maxim, ‘Good typography is invisible,’” writes Dutch Typographer Piet Schreuders, “one might add: ‘Good typography is secret.”

Here, despite its conceptual jet lag, typography catches up with Modernity in by a similar kind of proliferation of “truths.” What qualifies as a “natural” form, for instance? Who practiced “primitive” typography? How is an “organic” page shape created? What kinds of criteria govern the “legible”? When is a layout “kinetic” and when is it “optical”? What makes a typeface “universal” and a style “international”?

Finding a quintessential example to stand for the whole modern typographic endeavor is certainly a useless task, for even the obvious choices are less than exemplary. Posters of the Russian Constructivists and books of the Bauhaus, while they are classified as modern typography, are thoroughly diversified both in terms of their artistic aims and their visual forms. The publication of Jan Tschichold’s Die neue Typographie in 1928, though it articulates reasons for founding principles such as asymmetric grid structures and sans-serif typefaces, was rejected several years later by its author as a piece of “juvenilia” when he went to work for Penguin Books, where his subsequent work exhibited a kind of solitary neoclassicism.

TO BE CONTINUED

Patron Saint: Josef Müller-Brockmann (1914-1996)

“…[t]he grid…is the expression of a certain mental attitude inasmuch as it shows that the designer conceives his work in terms that are constructive and oriented to the future…the designer’s work should have the clearly intelligible, objective, functional and aesthetic quality of mathematical thinking… [it] should be a contribution to general culture and itself form part of it.” Müller-Brockmann, Grid and Design Philosophy

A higher purpose?

Contributing to a higher purpose - society and the views of the people within it. Clear, focussed, contributing to a social good.

International Typographic Style / the Swiss Style

Modernist trends in typography. Two design schools in Switzerland founded on Bauhaus principles. These schools were led by Armin Hofmann and Emil Ruder in Basel and Muller-Brockmann in Zurich. Minimalism and neutralism were the important themes for both of these design schools. Something we can take from their methods is the fact perfection is only achieved when you can take nothing else away without effecting the function of the object - this depicts the minimalist yet functional thinking of the Bauhaus. 

According to El Lissitzsky (1923), Swiss typography had become a global phenomenon after 1946, and had a much greater reach than any prior typographic movement. Everything was useful to them, and a major factor they focused upon. The Swiss style was developed to consist of typefaces which were functional, and to be easily adaptable to any possible design situation (Rob Giampietro, ‘The Typographic ‘Modern’).

Neutral technology

This neutral Swiss style leads me to research the idea of neutral technology. Is it possible? The majority of people merely see technology as a tool to help you with one thing or another, and technology can be used well or badly depending on the skills of the user and their purpose for it. The user controls the overall outcome more so than said piece of technology (Jerry Mander ‘Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television’ p. 43).  

Ideology in Technology

“One technological process cannot exist without the other, creating symbiotic relationships among technologies themselves…the basic form of the institution and the technology determines its interaction with the world” Jerry Mander ‘Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television’ p.45

This determines the ways in which the technology will be used, the audience and the purpose. According to Muller-Brockmann (Grid and Design Philosophy 1981) the ways in which this is interpreted and the basic need for order is of great importance to humans.

Modernism

A reform, a rebirth, the response to war, rebellion, a shift in social norms and values as part of a move away from traditional values of society and ways of thinking. Consistency and speed, function and usefulness. 

Systems and rules:

The above values are represented through various means such as; asymmetry, positive deployment of empty space, meaningful use of colour / exploitation of contrast, lack of interest in visual balance, acceptance of constraint.

According to Robin Kinross (Introduction to ‘Die neue Typographie’ p.xxvii), “Standardisation” was a means for bringing order to industrialised societies.

Helvetica

The people’s typeface. Constructed to be neutral with a use and purpose for all design situations. Part of the cultural landscape.

Utilitarian Greeting Cards. Daniel Eatock c.2000. These are functional and neutral cards with no illustrative design work on them, merely typography which can be emphasised by the user using a ‘tick box’ for which ever function they desire.

This is part of a ‘default design’, ‘non-aesthetics’ as a set of settings to be selected. This is mirroring Modernism’s quest for purity.

Arose from a ‘shame’ / self-consciousness; a reaction to indulgence; deliberately invisible.

The trouble with rules: Dogmatism.

If certain rules are learnt, this means almost anyone could replicate them or apply them to the real world. 

“addLib mixes the Grid System, a fractal theory, 

This is something that appears to have been created at random, however this is far from the truth of which the layout has in fact been generated from a calculation.

Brief typing up of lecture notes, edit at later date.

Patron Saint: Walter J Ong (1912-2003), ‘Orality and Literacy’

Interface: A point of connection, where two systems, subjects etc, meet and interact. A surface forming a common boundary between two positions of matters or space.

Logocentrism. Language becomes transparent but not neutral.

‘Where ever human beings exist, they have a language that exists basically as spoken and sound, in the world of sound” (Ong, p7)

Photocentrism. Speech is the true language. Written words are coded symbols.

From silence, to sound, to speech.

The art of memory. From memory to writing.

Writing is a technology. 

Script represents sounds as a thing: eg a text, no way of showing humour to the receiver of the text, letters are the same and have no way of depicting emotion in the way speech does.

‘Print situates words in space more relentlessly than writing ever did. Control of position is everything in print’ (Ong) ‘Print suggests words as things more than writing ever did’

Penguin books developed to mass produce paper-back books.