BOOK1STAGELULU

a.s.a.t.s.i.
a.s.a.t.s.i.
a something about the something inbetween
Forward
An extensive body of research compiled throughout the first five months of 2012. An accumulation of interests, ranging from the void between print and digital in contemporary graphic design practice, to anything of inspiration between this and the outside world. Highlighting unique outcomes, both positive and negative, which are only possible in the medium in which they are found in. Some finds are credited and explained, some are anonymous or speak for themselves. Due to the nature of the content being incredibly current, it is likely to be out of date by the time the entirety of the research is compiled. So upon reading this book, expect to find post production corrections. At this stage I would like to apologise for any content which is uncredited or stolen.
Title
credit(s) source(s)
date sourced
+ =
My work / words / opinions Found in print Found on web Text Articles
Title
010 066 118 294
February March April May
Chapter One.
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February
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The Ideal Candidate. Simply having a great portfolio isnt enough to secure you your perfect position. Studios are looking for more than just evidence of excellent design worktheyre employing a person, and who you are, your approach and how you put that across is just as important as what youve done. Represent asked some of todays leading studios to share with us what they are looking for in a prospective employee, what makes them tick, and what you can do to make sure that youre their ideal candidate...
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www.idealcandidate.represent.uk.com
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Tauba Aurerbach RGB Colorspace Atlas 2011. Digital offset print on paper, case bound book, airbrushed cloth cover and page edges. 8 8 8 inches each 20.3 20.3 20.3 cm. Binding
co-designed by Daniel E. Kelm and Tauba Auerbach. The books were bound by Daniel E. Kelm assisted by Leah Hughes at the Wide Awake Garage.
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www.taubaauerbach.com
February 9th 2012
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Wear Your Favourite Net Artists. The brilliant thing about internet art is that its democratized. I mean, how many people have ever had the chance to spin Duchamps Bicycle Wheel until it became an interactive website? Thanks, Rafal Rozendaal. Now Sterling Crispins new curated t-shirt line, which launched this Monday, is taking the internet art out of the machine and into our closets. But unlike the free-forall accessibility of net art, the collection features six original designsfrom some ofthe internets most esteemed artists capped at just 10 pieces each. I wanted to provide a common platform for
contemporary artists to experiment with and make physical what would otherwise be a digital form, said Crispin via Facebook this week. Its exciting to watch the ways digital art can be translated into physical forms and I think clothing is a fresh and fun take on limited edition prints. Designing clothes, or industrial objects, is something I think a lot of artists think about and I could see the need for this sort of platform for experimentation to exist. Theres technically no theme to this debut collection, though each shirt reflects a postinternet sensibility. Crispin says all the artists were given free
range to create whatever they wanted. Rozendaals shirt, for example, was inspired by one of his websites, intotime.com. Are they physically connected to the internet? Only by concept and style, says Crispin. I think they act as hyperlinks in physical space to emerging concepts that artists are addressing on the internet.
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www.netstyl.es www.vicestyle.com
February 10th 2012
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Yes
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www.yesstudio.co.uk
February 11th 2012
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Mr Doob
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www.mrdoob.com
February 12th 2012
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Words as Images. Its Nice That Review. We were buzzing last Thursday after another evening of talks for our Words, Words Words programme at Selfridges Ultralounge. Examining the relationship between words and images in various contexts were designer and founder of Typography Summer School Fraser Muggeridge, illustrator Sara Fanelli and Andy Altman from award-winning design agency Why Not Associates. Fraser Muggeridge, donning some very dapper clobber, took us on a whistle stop tour of how well-executed typography can transcend words to become powerful images. By using the space of the page inventively, he demonstrated how writers and designers can create suitably considered visual compositions. Referencing concrete poetry, Fraser cited Bob Cobbings acclaimed Square Poem as how to do the aforementioned with aplomb. He showed one of his own projects exploring the possibilities of language without text. By replacing words with readable images, he created a new language as visual code, which he tested out on us. To finish off he discussed his recent experimental typeface project with Giorgio Sadotti, exploring the notion of transparency. Constructed by layering letters within letters, you glimpsed both elements and their new sculptural form. They also took this further with embedding pictures within letters a true interplay between word and image. The wonderful Sara Fanelli offered another take on the theme. As an illustrator she often faces the challenge of encapsulating and condensing a whole book or concept into a visual, using her book Sometimes I think, Sometimes I am. It was great hearing her talk with such passion about the research and background preparation she carried out. For anyone that hasnt flicked through it, I highly recommend having a read its a rich, beautifully-crafted collection of writing and illustrations broken up into thematic chapters such as Devils
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and Angels, love, colour, mythology and the absurd. Its various sections are peppered with big ideas and celebrated quotations from notable historical and philosophical figures from Descartes to Calvino, translated through Fanellis imaginative drawings. One of the favourites (circulating on Twitter) was Alan Fletchers frank but romantic statement from The Art of Looking Sideways: The person you love is 72.8% water. Andy Altman from the veteran design agency Why Not Associates , charmed the room and convinced us (without trying) that we had to visit Blackpool to see the Comedy Carpet. The combination of charisma, real belief and genuine enthusiasm for the project, won us over. The sheer scale of the endeavor became clear when he admitted the five year collaboration with artist Gordon Young at a cost of 2.6million involved setting up their own factory, and nearly killed them. The result is a 2,200 square metre public art installation on the promenade, celebrating the history of British humour and Blackpools position as a mecca for comedy. Featuring over 1000 comedians and comics catchphrases, the sea of type is a feat of construction and a testimony to human patience. Each letter was dyed, cast in concrete, laid out in position by hand, then set into the granite surface in sections. Pretty mind-boggling! No wonder Andy finds it infuriating when people mistakenly think its printed. Interestingly, Andy pointed out that the difference between this being considered art rather than graphic design was that they had complete freedom and werent expected to conform to client expectations/demands.
www.itsnicethat.com
February 16th 2012
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Graphic designers are ruining the web. Designers have turned webpages from simple sources of information into bloated showcases. What happens when you click on a weblink? Heres one answer: a request goes from your computer to a server identified by the URL of the desired link. The server then locates the webpage in its files and sends it back to your browser, which then displays it on your screen. Simple. Well, the process was indeed like that once a very long time ago. In the beginning, webpages were simple pages of text marked up with some tags that would enable a browser to display them correctly. But that meant that the browser, not the designer, controlled how a page would look to the user, and theres nothing that infuriates designers more than having someone (or something) determine the appearance of their work. So they embarked on a long, vigorous and ultimately successful campaign to exert the same kind of detailed control over the appearance of webpages as they did on their print counterparts right down to the last pixel. This had several consequences. Webpages began to look more attractive and, in some cases, became more userfriendly. They had pictures, video components, animations and colourful type in attractive fonts, and were easier on the eye than the staid, unimaginative pages of the early web. They began to resemble, in fact, pages in print magazines. And in order to make this possible, webpages ceased to be static text-objects fetched from a file store; instead, the server assembled each page on the fly, collecting its various graphic and other components from their various locations, and dispatching the whole caboodle in a stream to your browser, which then assembled them for your delectation. All of which was nice and dandy. But there was a 24 downside: webpages began to put on weight. Over the last
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decade, the size of web pages (measured in kilobytes) has more than septupled. From 2003 to 2011, the average web page grew from 93.7kB to over 679kB. You can see this for yourself by switching on the view status bar in your browser; this will tell you how many discrete items go into making up a page. Ive just looked at a few representative samples. The BBC News front page had 115 items; the online version of the Daily Mail had a whopping 344 and ITV.com had 116. Direct.gov had 71 while YouTube and Wikipedia, in contrast, came in much slimmer at 26 and 15 respectively. Whether you view this as a good thing or not depends on where you sit in the digital ecosystem. Aesthetes (and graphic design agencies) drool over the elegance of pages whose look and feel is determined down to the last pixel. Engineers fume at the appalling waste of bandwidth involved in shipping 679kB of data to communicate perhaps 5kB of information. Photographers love the way their highresolution images are now viewable on Flickr and Picasa. Futurists (and broadband suppliers) rejoice that this epidemic of obese webpages is driving a demand for faster (and more profitable) broadband contracts and point to the fact that communications bandwidth is increasing at a rate even faster than processing power. Personally, Im a minimalist: I value content more highly than aesthetics. The websites and pages that I like tend to be as underdesigned as they are cognitively loaded. Take for example, the home page of Peter Norvig, who is Googles director of research. In design terms it would make any graphic designer reach for the sickbag. And yet its highly functional, loads in a flash and contains tons of wonderful stuff such as his memorable demolition of the PowerPoint mentality in which he imagines how Abraham Lincolns Gettysburg Address would look as a presentation. Or his
John Naughton www.guardian.co.uk
February 19th 2012
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hilarious spoof of Einsteins annual performance review for 1905, the year in which he published the five papers that changes physics for ever. (Einstein, you may recall, was a humble patent clerk in Berne at the time.) But in addition to these plums, Norvigs site is full of links to fantastically useful resources such as the open source code that accompanies his textbooks. And its as easy to navigate as anything produced by a web-design agency for 100,000 plus an annual service contract. Sites like his remind one that the web is not just about shopping or LOLcats but is the most wonderful storehouse of information and knowledge that humanity has ever possessed. Think of it as the Library of Alexandria on steroids. And remember that its as accessible to someone in Africa on the end of a flaky internet connection as it is to a Virgin subscriber in Notting Hill who gets 50MB per second on a good day.
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John Naughton www.guardian.co.uk
February 19th 2012
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The street views Google wasnt expecting you to see.
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www.guardian.co.uk
February 20th 2012
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Into the Fold. 24 February13 March Camberwell Space
Camberwell Press seeks to create and ideal and interactive studio within a public space for two and half weeks. The exhibition will culminate in a
publication formed from material generated with collaborators via a series of talks, workshops, design & publishing projects.
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www.camberwellpress.org
February 22nd 2012
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Into the Fold. Day One. 27th February 2012. The first day of Into the Fold saw the fruits of an open discussion between Department 21, the construction of gigantic Word Sculptures by Philip Li and a talk with Brave New Alps about their Construction Site project. Philip Li is a recent graduate from Camberwell College of Arts (2009) and has been fusing together performance, sculpture, music, fashion, ceramics and styling into a live and uniquely styled vision. Li recently completed an artist-in-residence position at Camberwell. He was asked by the Press to come and make Word Sculptures in the gallery space all day, and working with Sculpture, 3D and Photography students, they created gigantic letterforms out of card. A discussion between Sophie Demay, Bethany Wells, Bianca Elzenbaumer and Robert Maslin of Department 21 took place in the Camberwell Space in the afternoon. Students, alumni, staff and the Press team were invited to talk through some of the reasonings behind the project. Department 21 was, at the beginning, a temporary, physical space established by students as an experiment in interdisciplinary practice, in the vacant Painting studios of the Royal College of Art. It was a project where designers, artists and architects can meet, collaborate and share working space beyond the institutional boundaries of their own disciplines. Read more about Department 21 here. Bianca Elzenbaumer from Brave New Alps came to talk about their Construction Site project. The Construction Site for Non-Affirmative Practice is a group of young Italian designers that came together in Autumn 2011 during thier collectivized artists residency at Careof, a non profit art space in Milan. Since then, the group has developed its own dynamics and together study and experiment with alternative criteria with which to act in the world and, in particular, the world of design.
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February 27th 2012
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Into the Fold. Day Two. 28th February 2012. The second day of Into the Fold brought more wealth of content and discussion. It saw Phil Baines give a talk about Grotesque typefaces and then a letterpress demonstration, Sam Winston running an interactive drawing project and Lynda Brockbank discussing the 99 Words project. British designer, typographer, writer and professor Phil Baines was in early in the morning, demonstrating and setting type downstairs in the Letterpress studio at Camberwell. The impetus of his visit was borne from the Flaxman SemiBold typeface, designed by Edward Wright, and Camberwell being the only place holding this typeface in its letterpress collection. He worked on a poster of a quote from Remake/Re-model by Michael Bracewell - using all Grotesque variants: Grot 19, Elongated Sans, Headline Bold and of course, Flaxman Semi-Bold. The restrictions of spacing, the body and how type goes together become so blatantly obvious with letterpress that it helps to explain structures and the way type is constructed. If youre interested in type design its really good, whatever the elasticity of the invisible em square. We always get our first-year students to draw letters with two pencils taped together. Its incredible nowadays how many kids have not been taught how to hold a pencil properly to the extent that they cant draw. Not just letters; they cant draw, at all, because they cant handle a pencil. Staggering. Sam Winston and Kate Smallshaws This Is Not a Brief saw a mixed-discipline group of students leaving behind their pre-conceptions of what they do and what they expect a brief to ask of them, to complete a set of tasks surrounding the theme of finite creativity. The first scenario gave them twelve months left as creatives and they had ten minutes to create a list of everything they would do in a year their answers spanned world travel, publishing tomes
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and completing long pined for projects about cats. Scenario two offered up five urgent minutes to decipher their lastmake with only 31 days left to create, and the final scenario saw them mastering a world with no tomorrows with only twelve hours left, how would you leave your mark? We have an emerging N O W made up of yellow, pink and blue post-its answering these questions on the front wall of Camberwell Space wisdoms so far include: abstract drawings, have lunch with my dads, a beautiful rug and in the words of Nike just do it. We are halfway through the O and have a bunch of post-its free for ideas from you. Later on in the day, designer Lynda Brockbank brought in the book You Have Breath For No More Than 99 Words. What Would They Be? designed at Crescent Lodge, the consultancy she co-founded in 1986. A creatively led group comprising practitioners from multiple backgrounds and supported by technical and planning specialists, they work alongside their clients to make functional, purposeful and out of the ordinary communications. 99 Words raised similar ideas to those posed in Sam Winstons non-brief the problem, identified by the author Liz Gray in a quote from Robert Wyatt, of getting so out of touch that words take the place of meaning. Gray suggests that rather than being morbid she is proposing a re-assessment, and a device for choosing ninety-nine essential words. Lynda went on to discuss work produced by Crescent Lodge for clients including BBC, Chelsea College of Art and Hackney Empire, showing innovative examples of solutions for deadlines, budgets and book design.
February 29th 2012
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Into the Fold. Day Three. 29th February 2012. Day three was small in numbers, but gigantic in content. We spent the morning in self-assessment, evaluation, and the afternoon in a skype discussion with Michle Champagne of That New Design Smell, in which she delivered a talk all the way from Toronto, beaming into the studio in Camberwell. She has kindly provided us with a summary of that talk, after the jump. Five Smelly Things The Design Press Could Mull Over, Even If For Just A Moment The first smelly thing is that design publishing is a mixed bag of goodies. Its not thriving or failing, good or bad, black or white. Its grey. Sometimes light grey, sometimes dark grey. But always grey. Consider how some view design publishing on computers and the internet. Some are optimistic and praise the holy wonders of online publishing. Woo hoo! Others are pessimistic and condemn it altogether. Yuck! Yet both are blind-sighted. Design publishing is going through both a renaissance and a nervous breakdown, all at the same time. That is the first smelly thing. The second smelly thing is that success and failure in design publishing is never evenly distributed. Publications can benefit some people and harm others. Consider the tablet magazine. Where tablets have taken hold, people find them a blessing. Not lease those who sought gratifying careers in online publishing, including executives, interface designers, programmers, media planners, editors and writers. They think tablets are super awesome. Now consider the career of lumberjacks, paper salesmen, printers and print designers. They might have tablets themselves, but know that tablets are terribly awful for their careers down the line. Who wins and who loses? Consider the wins and loses on the internet. A person can shop online twenty-four hours a day, easily bookmark thousands of findings and vote at home while eating BBQ chicken and watching the game.
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But theyre also more easily traced and located by companies and governments keeping track of their internet crumbs. The third smelly thing is the powerful prejudices embedded in every design publication. Prejudices are often abstract and hidden, but have real-world effects. Publications predispose us to favor and value certain agendas and perspectives. Writing predisposes us to logic and analysis. Video clips predispose us to brevity and emotion. And the internet predisposes us to immediacy rather than history. This is given expression in how publications make people use their minds, or not. And in how they accentuate or disregard varying emotional and intellectual phenomena. In other words, the third smelly thing is the substance of what Marshall McLuhan meant when he said, The medium is the message. The fourth smelly thing is that change in design publication doesnt add up, its contextual. A new platform doesnt simply add another medium or platform; it changes everything. When the internet emerged in the 1990s, it wasnt the world plus the internet. It was a completely different world with completely different people, homes, schools, churches, industries and war. Smelly thing number four, then, is that change in design publication is contextual. The fifth smelly thing is that design publishing tends to be mythological. I dont mean as in allegories from the past or fake stories, like urban legends. I use the word mythological in the way used by Roland Barthes. He referred to our tendency to assume things are the way the are because theyre part of the natural order of things. Take fashion magazines, product catalogues or graphic billboards. They did not simply fall from the sky. Yet wed be hard pressed to identify when they were invented. When a publication becomes mythicas well as its editors, writers,
February 29th 2012
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articles and subjects which they representit is accepted as it appears and never questioned. The American architectural critic Alexandra Lange referred to this phenomena as sacred cows, which she identified as Paul Rand, Steve Jobs at Apple and Yves Behar with One Laptop Per Child, among others. Publication, like other forms of human creation, is not natural; its a product of human invention and its ability to be beneficial or consequential rests on our awareness of what it does for us and to us. That is the fifth smelly thing. In the past, we experienced change in design publishing as if we were zombie cheerleaders: sleep walking, half dead and always hoping for the best. Could we wrangle design publishing today without unbridled optimism or depressing pessimism? Could we wrangle design publishing tomorrow without hope nor fear? Only time will tell. And until then, perhaps the only way to make sense out of change is to plunge in with our eyes wide open, give publication a good shake, move with it, confront it, question it, re-design it and enjoy the dance.
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February 29th 2012
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Into the Fold. Day Four. 1st March 2012. It was a day of inside jobs as we saw two inner Press projects carried out in full steam. The Oxford School Trip was organised by Press team members Jake Hopwood, Alex Hough, Freddy Williams and BA Graphic Design third year Charlie Abbott. The Visualising Literature drawing workshop by Press members/ Illustrators Billie Muraben and Rosie Eveleigh. As well as these lively activities, Hato Press installed their mobile library in the gallery space and indulged us with a live twitter chat. Started by Ken Kirton, Jackson Lam and Louise Naunton Morgan, Hato Press is a speciality printing and publishing house based in London using both screen-printing and Risograph processes. For the Risograph prints they use soy based inks and only recycled paper, inkeeping with their economic and sustainable attitude. Into the Fold is the temporary housing space for their mobile library, featuring their most recent risographed publications. We also conducted a brief twitter interview which you can read live and dive into. In just 140 characters a go, they describe Risograph production as niche and highly economical and referenced William Morris Kelmscott Press as early inspiration for their formation. The School Trip project took 20 first year graphic design students to Oxford for the Day. The aim of the project was to encourage the students to explore a new place with a critical designers eye, and so they were encouraged to get lost, wander and collect, document and record anything that caught their attention. On day two, the students were asked to review and edit their research to communicate a coherent and specific aspect about the site. Using only the content collected in Oxford to produce A1 posters, the students explored how limited content and the language of posters (heirarchies, layout, scale and type) can be manipulated to communicate a message.
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The studio was taken up with cascades of visual material taken from the various institutions of Oxford: postcards from Pitt Rivers, old Pelican books from dusty bookshops, rubbings, drawings, ephemera and knick knacks. The students circled the mass of visual references and assimilated it into visual communication throughout the day. As part of the brief we held a still life speed dating afternoon with seven compositions made up of objects derived from pieces of text submitted by illustrators contributing to the project. Ranging from cream cakes and frankfurters to plastic hands holding pastel cigarettes, fighter jets and neon palm trees we started off with five-minute sessions on each composition and gradually increased the time as we progressed. Set as a means of developing a more extracted perspective on the provided texts, and the imagery they offered up and inspired, the intention was that the situation would be fertile ground for loose, playful drawing perhaps more so than working alone in a studio drawing, literally and figuratively, from your own kit. The workshop was supposed to last two hours, and be split into slots of one, five, fifteen and thirty minutes with re-jigging of compositions and quick-fire rounds where the impetus would be to draw the theme/feeling/cover of classic book titles. In practice, after making it once round the table in an act of musical chairs to a theme of the Talking Heads and a few grumbles, it was decided that wed scrap the timetable and work round the table at our own pace. Compositions were shifted, added to and disassembled, and drawing materials made continuous loops round the circuit of action. Almost four hours later, alerted by rumbling stomachs and a thirst only quenchable by hops, we put down our pencils and put away our castles, plantains and candlesticks satisfied by the great stack of work and the joy of just drawing.
March 1st 2012
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Into the Fold. Day Five. 2nd March 2012. The last day of the working week dedicated the whole day to Calverts, a co-operative communications design and printing company, based in Bethnal Green. In the morning, Sion Whellens delivered a Fold, Stitch and Trim talk, and then later in the afternoon, a Collaboration and Co-operation workshop. He gave practical, honest advice about the printing process, which hes kindly summed up for us into seven points, after the jump. Make Print Work. At first glance, different estimates for a printing project may seem to describe the same job, in a clear enough way. Dig a little deeper, though, and youll often find big differences in quality of service, materials, finish, after sales support and potential extra costs. If you dont know the printers youre talking to, here are seven questions you can usefully ask in response to receiving a printing quote. Not only will they help you avoid common pitfalls, but the quality of answers you get will tell you a lot about the people youre potentially going to entrust with your clients project and your own reputation as a print manager. 1. Artwork. Will the printer give you free, expert advice and support on setting up your files correctly? Many printers lack professionalism in this area, causing frustration and delay. They should be able to accept print artwork in the most recent versions of all the usual software packages, such as Creative Suite and Quark, as well as older versions. By all means supply a PDF as a visual check - many designers use PDF as a substitute for a hard copy dummy - but PDF is not foolproof, so you should also supply native files with any linked images, screen and printer fonts. A printer who balks at this may be worth avoiding.
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2. Repro. Between giving a printer artwork and receiving a proof, there is the crucial stage of repro. Will the printer routinely flightcheck your artwork before giving you a proof, to make sure that all files, fonts and images are present, and that what youve given them corresponds to what theyve quoted for? Will their repro department colour profile your job appropriately for the paper stock or substrate youve chosen? 3. Proofing. If a proof isnt included in the quote, ask for one. Most quotes will include a digital proof, but that doesnt mean much. The question is: does the proofing allow you to manage and check the quality of the job to the standard you need? Sometimes a printers PDF will be enough (if its a cheap and cheerful copying job, where colour isnt important, or its just to check that a type correction has been made). More often, youll want a hard proof of some sort - high resolution inkjet sometimes called by the brand name of the system its produced on, such as Epson or Cromalin. This should be a WYSIWYG (Whay You See Is What You Get) proof. In terms of content and resolution, it should be identical to the file that generates the printed job. Colour should be a good approximation to how it will look on the finished item. If you require a proof of a higher standard, you may need a wet proof on the specified paper, produced on the press thats going to print your job, whether digital, or litho. There are other kinds of proof that will allow you to manage quality and outcome with the minimum of fuss and cost. But when youre interrogating a print estimate, you need to know: exactly whats included, and what isnt? 4. Corrections and amendments. Does the printer intend to charge you extra for making even minor changes at proof
March 5st 2012
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stage? If so, how much? A really good printer, who assumes a duty of care, knows that extra costs can be debilitating to designers because they are extremely hard to sell to clients - even if the changes are being made on the clients instruction. A good print production person makes it her job to set up an artwork-proofing-printing critical path to minimise the probability of extra work and cost. 5. Materials. Does the quote specify a brand and weight of paper or printing substrate, or does it just describe a generic (for instance, 100gsm white offset, 400gsm silk coated, 120gsm recycled matt?) If the latter, you need to get some guarantees about quality, because papers vary widely in cost and performance. In the same way, some estimates are vague about binding and finishes. A good printer will make up a plain paper dummy of your job, or send you samples of alternative papers. 6. Small print. This may be controversial, but terms and conditions are usually there to protect the printer, not you. We dont think you should have to wade through paragraphs of small size legalese; remember that anything you agree in an email or even verbally is part of the printers contract with you. If you dont like what the small print says, ask to vary it. 7. Under the bonnet. Before you commit to using a printer, will they let you visit their premises, see the production setup and introduce you to the people who will be working on your project? Its perfectly reasonable to ask for this - a good printer will welcome you - and the state of their operation will tell you a lot about the state of the job theyll produce for you. After the projects delivered and billed, will the printer keep your job on file, and securely backed up, just in case you lose your own files or they become corrupted? A good printer will archive both hard
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and digital copies of your job for at least five years, be able to retrieve it quickly, and if necessary give it back to you, usually for a small cost or no cost at all. Of course, theres a lot more to choosing a printer than this. The bottom line is crucial: what does the printer want to charge you? But above the bottom line - although sometimes hidden - are the real costs of the job to you and your client, measured in quality, hidden extras, respect and courtesy, professionalism, trust and peace of mind. Calverts specialises in branding, publications and sustainable print, named in honour of Giles and Elizabeth Calvert, who published and printed many of the millenarian texts of the 17th century English revolution (and were frequently imprisoned for their efforts). Calverts demonstrates that radical ideas around worker co-operation can lead to innovative and successful businesses, bringing member benefits which other business models cannot equal. Running as a co-operative, it operates on the basis on equality and respect, education and skills development and the opportunity to exercise democratic self-management. Every member has an equal investment in the business, the hourly rates of pay are the same for a founder member with 30 years service as for a newlyqualified design or printing apprentice. All too have a personal training budget which allows them to develop knowledge relevant to their job role, but also to their personal aims. Successful and innovative business initiatives in Calverts have come from all areas of the co-op, which has always invested for the long term, and attributes the success of its investment strategy to rigorous discussion and testing of its plans.
March 5st 2012
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Into the Fold. Day Six. 5th March 2012. Stephen Fowlers Rubber Stamp Workshop. Stephen Fowlers artists books have been exhibited across the world and are housed in national collections, such as The Victoria and Albert Museum, the Tate Gallery, Leeds University and the University of the West of England. He has exhibited his collections, drawings and prints in Tate Modern, Fine Art Society, Beaconsfield, Kalied Editions and White Columns in New York. He runs printmaking and bookbinding workshops and teaches drawing at Kingston University, University of the Creative Arts and Oxford and Cherwell Valley College. Stephens Rubber beer matts. We asked him to come and hold one of his famous travelling rubber stamp workshops and he surpassed all expectations as he not only taught the rubber stamp printing method, but collated and printed an edition of 15 Into the Fold rubber stamp books for each contributor to take home. Mr.Smiths Letterpress Workshop. Meantime, the design team at the Press took time out from the busy schedule to join Kelvyn Smith at his letterpress Workshop in Walworth. Mr Smith, a typographer, tutor, technician and printing master, presented the team with a new project proposed to him from PFILM for their project 94 Elements. The purpose of this day was to produce a letterpress edition with the film project 94 Elements as the focus and context for what it was going to be. The idea of producing a type specimen sheet of Grotesques from Stephenson & Blake and Monotype referencing the periodic table resulted as a good fit. Throughout the day there were student, tutor and client visits to assess the progress of the print and to bombard
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Mr Smith with questions about the importance of letterpress, what he does, and to get some lead on their fingers. Mr Smith had a lot of patience and it was very clear by the end of the day the amount of work and effort that goes into his letterpress work. It was an informative day reminding us of the importance of having access to letterpress and the lessons it can teach you. Peckham Road - 1898,1973. Charlie Abbott and Theo Sions project Peckham Road 1898, 1973 started at John Lawrences original Camberwell Press logo, and ended with an irreverent diagrammatic glance at visual associations via vectorised drawings of the two blocks of Camberwell College. This abstracted visual thinking led them to pictures of whales, the National Theatre and the Philadelphia Museum scene in Rocky.
March 5st 2012
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Into the Fold. Day Seven. 6th March 2012. Day 7 consisted of two parallel projects running all day: upstairs Robert Sollis of Europa ran a workshop with Positive Futures, and downstairs ico design worked with James in the Letterpress studio. Positive Futures is the national youth crime prevention programme. Funded by the Home Office, the programme targets and supports 10-19 year olds to help them avoid becoming drawn into crime or alcohol misuse, and helps them in moving forward with their lives. Via the British Council, Europa were asked to refresh their current brand identity - to make it speak more to the young people the programme targets. Robert Sollis ran a workshop as a primer for the participants to come in and work through and present their own ideas about what the organisation means to them. The rationale being that the visual dialogue between designer and user(s) of the logo is richer than a verbal one, and when the logo is completed (in late March), when they look at the companys identity, they will see a part themselves in it. Robert asked the participants to brainstorm words beginning with each letter of Positive Futures, resulting in a compilation of words and phrases which they associated with the programme, which then formed the basis of an exercise in type design. Using the opposite side of the paper, with the leters printed in the reverse, the participants drew on and around the letters using the words that they had come up previously to inspire their own designs. In the afternoon, after a short talk about pictograms, everyone worked through a similar exercise as the morning - after another conversation about the kinds of activities Positive Futures are engaged in, everyone designed thier own pictograms using a grid designed by Otl Aicher for the 1972 Munich Olympic Games.
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From digital to physical and back again. Concurrently, ico design were working hard with James on two hashtag posters, both in editions of 20. ico is a small, sociable and prolific design team with a successful 12-year history. In their central London studio, they create brands and produce exceptional print and digital media pieces for clients from the arts, property, leisure, interior design and museum sector. They gave us the following summary of their day in the Letterpress studio: Graphic design and all it entails is both physical and digital, so if its your passion, how can you not be interested in both? As creatives were continually looking for innovative ways to solve a clients problem, different ways to tell a memorable story or how to present complex information in its most digestible form that is as true if you are creating a brand, building a website or crafting a book. While creativity can be expressed in its most basic form with a pencil and paper, with the added collaborative potential of the network, new possibilities emerge. Weve written before about the power of the hashtag to spark conversation, ignite campaigns and fire up political movements. One of digital communications real strengths is its capacity to spread and evolve. After collaborating with a number of colleges, helping students turn tweets into books and brands into experiences (and of course sharing the results online), we thought we should further spread the love by creating letterpress posters made up of our favourite hashtags. With some expert direction from James Edgar the art colleges in-house expert, we undertook a one-day project in the Camberwell letterpress workshop. It was a long day carefully typesetting content that is usually typed and shared in a fraction of the time. An activity like this gives
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us a chance to pause and think about the digital in a different light, becoming more appreciative of its playful spontaneity and the instant feedback it garners. We live in an age where visual design has many facets, from physical craft to immediate digital response. For us, the exciting thing is the potential of each medium to communicate in interesting, unexpected ways. When you have a passion for both the physical and the digital, the possibilities are endless. Now, #WFL? (whats for lunch?).
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Into the Fold. Day Eight. 7th March 2012. Day 8 focused on the broader context of graphic design, its field of inspiration, and application. Merrell Publishers delivered a talk on the process of publishing, from decision to reality, Rick Poynor let us in to the surreal world that informs his practice and Fraser Muggeridge selected a series of films that encapsulated his opinion of film as an essential source of content in design. Merrell Publishers is a small, independent publishing company specialising in books on art, architecture, photography and design. Nicola Bailey, Creative Director, delivered a talk on Wednesday morning which focused on the making of one of their spring 2012 titles Type Matters!. Nicola discussed the development of the book, due to be published in April, from its very inception through to design choices, printing practicalities, proofing and organisation. Later on in the day, Rick Poynor delivered a talk called Uncanny: Surrealism and the Graphic Image. Rick Poynor is a writer, critic, lecturer and curator, specialising in design, media, photography and visual culture. He founded Eye magazine and edited it between 1990 to 1997, co-founded the Design Observer and has taught at the RCA and the Jan van Eyck Academy. For Into the Fold, he delivered a talk about Graphic Design and Surrealism, based around an exhibition he curated called Uncanny: Surrealism and Graphic Design, the first wide-ranging overview of this subject, which ran at the Moravian Gallery in Brno, Czech Republic and Kunsthal, the Netherlands between 2010 and 2011. Michle Champagne: The good news is design publishing seems to be on everybodys lips. The bad news is design publishing is either claimed as brilliantly thriving or utterly failing. In an interview with Design Bureau from 2010, The New York Times design critic Alice Rawsthorn claimed: The current condition of design criticism is quite healthy, largely
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thanks to the blogs. Yet in its most recent 2011 issue, the editors of Grafiks Critical Voices feature claimed: Theres a grim irony in the fact that design has finally got its first serious influx of specially trained critics at the point when writers across the board are struggling in the face of dwindling fees, shrinking editorial budgets and a dearth of in-house opportunities, particularly in the design press. Ironically, and following the issues launch, you reported how Grafik itself abruptly ceased publishing. Whats going on? What exactly is design publishing? Design criticism? And, are their realities healthy or grim? Or a bit of both? Rick Poynor: Some of the confusion comes from the tendency to use terms too loosely. Design criticism is often used to describe design writing that is really journalism or opinion. Theres still plenty of design writing, though I dont see an advance right now in terms of either quantity or quality. In the UK, the mainstream press still gives design little serious attention. The closure of design magazines, which is likely to continue, is a setback. There are new opportunities online, but until we find a new financial model for online writing these will remain sporadic. Design criticism, like any form of criticism, has to be a serious and committed undertaking. This is highly motivated, personal writing that aims to go deeper; it needs to be historically aware, theoretically informed and grounded in wide knowledge and experience. The same high standards that apply to criticism in any other field should also apply to design criticism. Judged by those benchmarks, we still have a long way to go and there is a big question, never more so than now, as to whether many people, even including designers, want to read this kind of detailed criticism. How would you define quantity in design criticism? Are we talking of beastly 10,000 word affairs? Evgeny Morozovs smart and slamming 11,000 word review of Steve Jobs philosophy for The New Republic comes to mind.
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But maybe theres also room for excellence in 1,500 word articles or blog posts? Even captions? By quantity I was referring to the total amount of design writing going on now and in the past. I didnt mean the length of articles. I do believe, though, that excellence is possible in shorter texts. Most design articles published in the British design press tend to be in the region of 1,000 to 2,000 words, so those are the constraints that writers have to work within. Very few design articles run longer than 3,000 words. There are no limits online apart from the readers stamina and patiencethe longest article I have published on Design Observer is 5,000 words, plus notes. Academic journals expect long articles, but this is a more formally structured kind of writing not seen or read by most working designers (let alone the public). Experienced writers can make their points at any length. There is a real craft to writing short and journalism has always been a good training for this. Why do you believe the total amount of design criticism is lesser now than in the past? Where was design criticism before? Where does it no longer exist? And what are the most important elements affecting this move? I didnt say that the total amount of criticism was smaller than before. I suggested that it was probably about the sameits just differently dispersed. Obviously, design criticism used to be entirely print-based, in magazines, journals and, much less frequently (at least in Britain), in newspapers. The most significant design publication to disappear so far is I.D., which had a hugely confident run in the 1980s and 1990s, but lost its way in the last decade by failing, some said, to adapt to the new needs of the online environment. Reinvention is the challenge that all longstanding design publications have faced. Their competition, the new design blogs, had an obvious edge with their speed and freedom of response. In 2003, I became involved
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with co-founding Design Observer because I could see the possibilities, even as I doubted that unpaid writing could be a viable futureit cant be. So thats where we are now, in a phase of transition. The less money or no money online model of work has profound implications for all kinds of creative practice. Thats interesting, the amount of criticism today is about the same as in the past. In your article Designers Need Critics for Frame magazine, you mentioned fewer printedand-paid platforms for criticismwith I.D. and Grafik going out of print. You also wrote about a few new critical design blogslike Design Observer and Core77but you also wrote the online world has not seen the outbreak of compelling new critical voices in design one might have expected. Doesnt that suggest the amount of design criticism is lesser now than in the past? Or, that a few design blogs filled the quantity gap but not the quality gap? Its probably not worth labouring this point because who can give a definitive answer without undertaking some huge cross-media audit? The number of design critics was relatively small 15 years ago, compared to say art or film, and its still small. The key thing is that theres been no great advanceI think we agree on that. The way to cut to the heart of the matter is to see how many active and distinctive design critics one can name because this is always the best sign of whether criticism of any seriousness or impact is going on. Im assuming that were talking here about graphic design. If so, some of the names are the same as 15 years ago (for instance, Ellen Lupton). Some are quieter than they were, perhaps because they are designers who prefer to concentrate on design (Michael Rock), and some are more active (David Crowley). How we assess the health of design criticism will also depend on what area of design were talking about, but no part of design is now, or ever has
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been, overrun with critics. The most notable and talented critic to have emerged in the broad design area in the UK in the past five years is Owen Hatherley, who writes mainly about architecture, with excursions into music. His trenchant but always personal writing provides a good benchmark for what we mean by criticism. He has strong and outspoken arguments that he feels compelled to make. He does this with great panache. One wants to read him. As a writer, he has a voice. This is a tough one because I dont think we should use the term critic lightly. Unless a writer is brilliantly original, its going to take years of work to make a mark as a critic. You could be a good writer with all the right sceptical and critical tendencies and still not be a critic in the full sense of the wordand thats not meant to be a criticism. For instance, I think Andrew Losowsky is a highly engaging writer. He writes and edits travel guides and in his design writing he has concentrated on magazines. Everything he writes is sharp and thoughtful and well expressed. But is magazine design, as a subset of graphic design, broad enough to sustain its own field of criticism? Andrew might have extended his remit and written more widely on design, but I dont think he did much of that. Now hes become books editor of The Huffington Post, which takes up most of his time, according to his blog. Hes not the first talented writer to move away from design into bigger fields. On the D-Crit course at SVA in New York, where Im a visiting lecturer, I have met students of critical writing who seem very promising. I like Aileen Kwuns writing, for instanceshe now works as studio manager at Project Projects in New York. But we have to wait and see where this new generation can take it. Do they have the commitment and appetite? Can they find or create appropriate outlets? It you want to be any kind of writer, including a critic, the path is always the same: write, write, write.
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London-based designer Fraser Muggeridges practice is intent on maintaining the impact of content through a pared-down aesthetic and considered processing. He is the founder and tutor at Typography Summer School, a weeklong programme of typographic study for recent graduates and professionals. For Into The Fold he curated a selection of films on graphic design and its broader context. Fraser opened with the assertion that not enough film is shown in graphic design schools. One can find inspiration in all manner of disciplines, practices and concepts, and film, with its nature as an instant form of communication and availability online through sites like YouTube, Vimeo and social networking media, make it an ideal source for discourse.
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Into the Fold. Day Nine. 8th March 2012. Day seven was an opportunity to reference production methods from the past, their place in history and their influence and relevance now. Cedar Lewisohn and South East Zines Lisa Novak and Chris Dodson discussed small-press publishing, independent mind-sets and working within the canon with ideas that sit very much outside of it; Graham Congreve from Evolution Print came armed with a generous edition of Evolution Print posters to give away, extensive print know-how and an unbridled enthusiasm for the smell, look and feel of printed matter; Camberwell Press Editor Billie Muraben ran a cut and paste workshop with Illustration students and independent publishing afficionado Teal Triggs gve a talk on fanzines and counter-culture publishing, past and present. Teal Triggs is Professor of Graphic Design, Course Director of MA Design Writing Criticism, and co-Director of Information Environments at LCC. We asked her to give a talk with particular emphasis on fanzines and counterculture publishing. Street Readers & Writers: Fanzines by Graphic Designers spanned the conception of punk culture and 1970s fanzines to more contemporary work, highlighting the changing face of zine culture and production, the effects of technology, socio-political upheaval and the age of information, and noted how the underlying intention of fanzine authorship is still alive and thriving today. Teal discussed the work of writer, broadcaster and publisher Jon Savage and psycho-geographer Ian Sinclair, the trickle up of street and fanzine culture to advertising and the mass-aesthetic, and examples of fanzines that became a part of, and shape mass publishing like ID Magazine, edited by Terry Jones, which introduced the concept of straight up photography and experimental design and content to the glossies. Teal also went on to discuss ways in which the immediacy of the fanzine process had been adopted outside of punk culture by the Zerox
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Palaces in India, and how it had originated in the sciecefiction stories of the 1920s and 30s. Teal has kindly let us reproduce An American Perspective: From The Rag to Riches, her piece from the Things Happen fanzine in the Into the Fold publication. South East Zine is a new magazine founded by Lisa Novak and Chris Dodson that celebrates the creative talents and communities of South East London, it is a platform for new work and collaboration. Cedar Lewisohn is an artist and writer, his last book Abstract Graffiti was published my Merrell and designed by Lisa Novak of South East Zine. They came Into the Fold to discuss their own, and each others practice and where they meet. Points included: the problems of knowledge influencing design aesthetics, roots in and out of prescribed practice, unpaid internships and ways you can re-direct your work for establishments into establishing yourself. A full transcription of their discussion has been printed as part of the Into The Fold publication. Atlas Magazine Cut & Paste. Sylvanus Urban, inspired by the pen name of the editor of the first general interest magazine The Gentlemans Magazine (1731), and the work of magazine publisher, graphic designer and artist Jake Tilson, was a cut-and-paste DIY magazine workshop run by Press Editor Billie Muraben. The premise was to use materials and content available at Camberwell College to produce three pages per participant the first featuring the work of a practitioner, the second an interest/particular book unrelated to their practice, and the third a set of static images to form a montage kit.Inspired by examples of selfpublishing both past and present from the likes of Harmony Korrine, AA Bronson and The Secret Public, and anthologies 200 Trips by Barry Miles and Fanzines by Teal Triggs; the
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students gathered visual and text based information from the library, photocopied it in its masses and got stuck in, quite literally, to their double-page spreads. In only a few hours we had a 40-page zine covering everything from diagrams and graphs of the scale of kitsch to nuns, popsicles and the nuclear bomb. Whilst there was an initial sense of panic at having to work quickly and outside of usual go-to processes, the briefs ask to walk the length of the library aisles to find books that slip through the computer Search system proved rewarding in terms of both breadth of themes and encouraging the participants to see the great span of information that is available to them. With only a couple of hours to assemble, paste and pagenate everyone had to up their rate of production the process suits a degree of not so much carelessness, but a willingness to not be precious and focus on communication rather than striving for perfection. None of the students had made zines before, but the quality of what they produced, their enthusiasm and humour suggested that it could, and should be something they continue producing. Evolution Print Drop-in. Evolution Print are based in Sheffield and headed up by Jonathan Newbould and Graham Congreve. They print jobs that span all genres of publishing, from small-scale short runs to larger, more complex projects. Graham Congreve came Into The Fold armed with a generous edition of Evolution Print posters to give away to students, extensive print know-how and an unbridled enthusiasm for the smell, look and feel of printed matter.
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Into the Fold. Day Ten. 9th March 2012. Prompted by the articulate and sympathetic writing on curator Glenn Adamsons blog, From Sketch to Product, we asked the man himself, along with designer Kirsty Carter of APFEL and architect Andy Groarke of Carmody Groarke to come in and discuss their working processes behind the recent V&A exhibition, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 19701990. They discussed with generosity the conditions which made their cross disciplinary and experimental exhibition design possible, a suitable fitting for the final day of Into the Fold. We have included here an edited extract from that discussion. GA This is a good first image, because it suggests some of the interesting points about postmodernism. First of all it is highly graphic as an art movement and as a period, and it seemed to us often that many of the objects on view, were striving for the condition of graphic design: high impact, high communication and obviously, flat. And one thing that you can say of Postmodern buildings and objects, is that they tend towards the quality of the facade, or the stage set. And you can see that here, the image looks digitally rendered, when it is actually a photograph. And one of the things I always thought was striking about Postmodern Graphic Design, was that they almost seemed to have anticipated Photoshop and other digital programs. And although they were mostly working by hand, a lot of what they did looks like what people are doing now. Thats one of the many instances in which the material we were covering in the 70s and 80s seemed to anticipate the current day, and seemed to be newly relevant. While we were working on the show, there seemed to be a ground swell of publication and interest in the topic, and it seemed that when we opened the show last year in 2011, it seemed right on time, very fresh, very appealing. A lot of that had to do with subject matter, but also to do with the design.
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The exhibition design was on the cusp of our two design practices - 2d and 3d - and its quite unusual territory, especially for architects, to work in building things of such a temporary nature. Equally, its very challenging to be working collaboratively, and in a way that forces you to put yourself in the shoes of a visitor experience. An exhibition design is in a sense a chance to test ideas, about space, light, materials. And architecture is possibly one of the design forms that are more closely allied to other applied arts. I think thats why we forge such interesting relationships with other collaborative practices, such as APFEL; it forces you into a territory which takes you out of your normal field of practice.
AG
But, remember, this is with a very strong curatorial narrative behind the exhibition - the curators embarked on their journey on this project two years before they interviewed for designers. So there was a very strong sense of how the stories were going to unveil themselves, and really the responsibility of the creative team was to give shape to the environments that were telling those stories. That was a mixture through graphics, colour, pattern - a very theatrical visitor experience, almost hyperreal at times. In our first presentation with Glenn we included mood boards that showed the kind of language of materials and graphics we were looking at. Our big influence was Bladerunner, right from the beginning. I was obsessed with transparent perspex, I loved this idea of the glowing edge, neon, the refractions of the glass. This was exemplified by the room named The New Wave. We came up with this idea of crystal moment where you saw all this perspex and the reflections of the light and The New Wave neon opposite. Again, it was a bit of test for both 3d and 2d to
KC
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work together, because its an exhibition after all - the importance is on the object and not on the exhibition design - but you are feeding into the curatorial idea. But the objects in this room themselves were kinds of props, and not things that you would love under normal circumstances. Actually, as curators we didnt have a lot of affection for the objects we were showing, which is quite unusual situation, normally you would kill to get the best painting, and with Memphis furniture especially, you just sling it about there. You actually want an exhibition design which pulverises the objects and vice versa - you want that energy, not to treat them as some sort of sacrosanct object.
GA
But also relating to that first slide, theres a sort of melding of turning objects into graphics. We discussed a strong spatial idea here with the lighting designer about turning certain parts of the experiences, where you have a certain cardinal viewpoint of a major introductory object, such as this dress, turning the artefact into almost a graphic. We were playing with that resonance of the image and the artifice of the object all the time. Through the happenstance of theatrical lighting or changing the perspective of a room through a graphic pattern on a wall, it turns space into 2d and back again.
AG
Theres a lot of variance of attitude among curators, but especially at the V&A, everyone being applied arts people, were quite willing to understand the things that Andy and Kirsty do as, at least the same register, if not the same status within in the exhibition. We have graphic designs and architectural models on view, so why would we not think of the graphics and architectual commissions as being a part of the show in that sense, as an aestheic complement. Obviously you have to prioritise the exhibits on show, but it is
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at least a kind of continum - We wanted the two aspects to have a kind of conversation. It also throws into discussion what is authentic, a lot of the material in the exhibition was heavily reproduced and went into several feedback loops of reproduction and redesign. A lot of the conversations were about those feedback loops.
AG
Well, one of the best known slogans of Postmodern theory is that is a period of simulacra without originals.
GA
March 19st 2012
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Chapter Two.
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March
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The Electric Information Age Book. McLuhan/Agel/Fiore and the Experimental Paperback. Adam Michaels, Jeffrey T. Schnapp. ISBN 9781616890346. 4.25 x 7 inches (10.8 x 17.8 cm), Paperback . 240 pages, 50 color illustrations, 150 b/w illustrations. Rights: World; Carton qty: 0; (405.0) The Electric Information Age Book explores the nineyear window of mass-market publishing in the sixties and seventies when formerly backstage playersdesigners, graphic artists, editorsstepped into the spotlight to produce a series of exceptional books. Aimed squarely at the young media-savvy consumers of
the Electronic Information Age, these small, inexpensive paperbacks aimed to bring the ideas of contemporary thinkers like Marshall McLuhan, R. Buckminster Fuller, Herman Kahn, and Carl Sagan to the masses. Graphic designers such as Quentin Fiore (The Medium is the Massage, 1967) employed a variety of radical techniques verbal visual collages and other typographic pyrotechnics that were as important to the content as the text. The Electric Information Age Book is the first book-length history of this brief yet highly influential publishing phenomenon. Jeffrey T. Schnapp holds the Pierotti Chair in Italian
Literature at Stanford, where he founded the Stanford Humanities Lab in 2000 with the aim of creating a transdisciplinary platform for testing out future scenarios for the arts and humanities in a post-print world. Since 2009, he has served as a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and visiting professor in Comparative Literature and at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.
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www.papress.com
March 1st 2012
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Qualite Graphique Garantie.
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www.qualitegraphiquegarantie.org March 2nd 2012
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iOS 86.
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www.work.repponen.com
March 2nd 2012
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Aurle Sack
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www.a--s.ch
March 4th 2012
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The Book on Books on Artists Books. The Everyday Press. The Book on Books on Artists Books is a bibliography of books, pamphlets and catalogues on artists books. It takes stock of a wide variety of publications on artists books since the early 1970s to draw attention to the kind of documentary trace of distribution, circulation and reception they represent.
It aims to be a source book of exhibition catalogues, collection catalogues, monographs, dealership catalogues and other lists published to inform, promote, describe, show, distribute and circulate artists books.
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www.mottodistribution.com
March 4th 2012
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In October 2011 148 posts, 904 comments and over 2.5m visits later Design Assembly turned 3. 3 archives over 100 published articles, comments included, as well as showcasing new and exclusive words and images from some incredible people. 100% of the profits from the sale of this publication will be shared proportionately between 3 charities with a combined global reach:
Cancer Research UK United Kingdom LIVESTRONG North America WCRF International Rest of world The total amount raised will be distributed proportionately between these 3 charities according to the percentage of profits generated by each catchment. For example, if 50% of profits are raised by pledges
from US billing addresses, 50% of profits will be donated to LIVESTRONG, and so on. According to Cancer Research UK, 1-in-3 of us will be diagnosed with some form of cancer in our lifetime. Can design make a difference?
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www.designassembly.org
March 7th 2012
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Emilio Gomariz exploits the Mac OS X desktop to create beautiful performances from the various commands and functions which form everyday user experience. From the meticulous arrangement of colour-coded folders, to setting up a sequence of maximising windows, Gomarizs art looks at first glance to be the product of time spent simply idling away at the computer. Spectrum Cube. This may well have informed his initial experiments (his first Mac piece, 2009s Folder Type, was created using 22,655 separate items) but a look at some of his more recent work suggests he takes his desktop organisation very seriously indeed. And just with performance art, many of these pieces only exist when Gomariz sets them off, recording the results as screen captures. Folder Type. The Spanish born artist, who trained as a technical engineer in industrial design before experimenting with digital media, also runs the digital art blog, Triangulation. He has worked in video and digital painting, and created projects for clients such as Django Django and the Fach & Asendorf Gallery (using another
favourite tool of his: the animated gif). But in 2009 he started using the Mac OS X interface to create interesting animations. Folder Type came from using the colour feature to organise folders, says Gomariz. I started toying with things creating lots of folders, putting them in sub-folders, until Id created a huge landscape of them which I then coloured and animated using the arrow keys and the scrollbar along the bottom. Despite the complexity of the process, Gomariz says his Mac pieces dont take that long to create, the hours are put into seeing how different files can be manipulated over the desktop. In the beginning I work on sketches, using few files as blanks, he says, to just look at how the files act and move over the desktop. If I like it, then I extend it by adding more files and colours. But behind each different piece, there are quite a few hours of experimenting and looking for the final composition. I always work on them manually, too by that I mean I dont use code to configure them. Spectrum Horizont. The image at the top of this post is one of those experiments which was then developed into his new Spectrum series; Cube and
Horizont are shown above. These pieces in particular rely on the exact placement of several ready made elements. There is of course a risk that the whole thing can come tumbling down if he clicks in the wrong place. With the Spectrum series I couldnt save the configuration of how the files were organised on the desktop, he says, but I like that because theyre then unique manifestations that lived on my computer. If I wanted to see something similar I would have to create it again. It all requires a steady hand and mouse. For Spectrum Cube, I placed around 75 different Text Edit files with exactly the same distance between them again, manually but I think this perfection is important, in this case, to get the great visual effect of the cube. More of Gomarizs projects can be seen at emiliogomariz.net and cmdshift3. net. His work appears as part of Astral Projection Abduction Fantasy at the Monster Truck Gallery in Dublin. The show opens today and runs for a month until March 23. More details on the show are here.
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www.creativereview.co.uk www.emiliogomariz.net
March 9th 2012
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Perspective Typography Brightens Brazilian Suburb. The creative collective of Boa Mistura made a poor suburb of Sao Paulo, Brazil a little more colourful. This has to be one of the most inspiring things we have seen in long time
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www.sizestores.co.uk
March 10th 2012
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Fraser Muggeridge. Its Nice That Article. The work of Fraser Muggeridge Studio (founded by Fraser and completed by Sarah Newitt and Stephen Barrett) is an output of largely artist, gallery, critically aesthetic content-driven publications and printed matter. With each project is an allowance for images and text to sustain their own intent and impact the sine qua non to the studios design, not style. Fraser Muggeridge is also an educator and founder of the Typography Summer School, and this week he will be bringing five examples of creative stimulus to our last guest post slot of 2011.
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www.itsnicethat.com www.pleasedonotbend.co.uk
March 12th 2012
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Phone Arts is an International collaborative project experimenting using only the mobile phone as the medium to create unique compositions. They explore the boundaries of the phone to create graphic illustrations and designs.
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www.phonearts.net
March 17th 2011
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Laaaarge.
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www.laaaarge.com
March 17th 2011
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QR Codes: Ugly, Overused and Doomed. Ive never understood the hype about QR codes. They appeared one day, and then suddenly every advertiser made them a priority, plastering them all over everything in print. It has always seemed like undue obsession with something that, ultimately, is not that useful to very many people -- and thats assuming most people even know what they are. I was pleased to discover that Im not the only one: the Guardian has set up a Tumblr called WTF QR CODES to catalog the many bizarre and inappropriate uses of the technology: Most people look at a QR code and see robot barf, but marketers seem to think they are a must-have technology for their advertising campaigns. In their minds, eager consumers wander around with their smartphones, scanning square codes wherever they appear. As a result, the codes appear just about everywhere, and often in some really absurd places. The examples range from the fairly mundane (QR codes in the subway, where there is no data reception and where they are often located on the inaccessible side of the tracks) to the completely outlandish and even dangerous (huge QR codes towed behind airplanes, or printed on highway-side billboards). Theres one thing the article doesnt mention that I think is an important point: even if QR codes were popular, they would be a doomed transitional technology no matter how you slice it. Image recognition technology has been progressing rapidly and is already being used in products like Google Goggles, which means visual machine languages are going to be unnecessary. The tech isnt perfect yet, but its already at the point that smartphones are capable of recognizing ads based on color, configuration and other indicators. As visual search becomes more common, consumers are going to get used to the idea that they can
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snap a photo of anything and find related information onlineand the QR code will be officially obsolete (at least as a marketing tool). Until then, I guess advertisers will keep slapping them on everything from bananas to condoms.
www.techdirt.com
March 18th 2011
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What The Fuck QR Codes.
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www.wtfqrcodes.com
March 19th 2011
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www.wtfqrcodes.com
March 19th 2011
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QR Dress Code. Dans une exploitation morbihanaise, un leveur uitlise des QR Code pour les appliquer ... sur ses vaches ! Reportage de Plurielle Productions pour An Oriant TV sur une ide de www.qrdresscode.com.
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www.qrdresscode.com
March 19th 2011
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Pixel Distortion. Ruslan Khasanov is doing wonderful things with type. Like Pixel Distortion (pictured) and Liquid Calligraphy, projects that use experimental physical filters
to push legibility in the nicest possible way. By using simple practical devices, Ruslan can create intriguing visuals that work right up close with all the incidental detail, delighting in
the way light or water affects the individual forms yet, as a whole, it is a fully applicable alphabet.
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www.itsnicethat.com www.ruskhasanov.com
March 20th 2011
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Manchester Design Symposium 2012
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www.manchesterdesignsymposium.com
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Playing pop music via paper posters with conductive ink. The Listening Post is a paper poster that plays song clips via printed electronics. The prototype Listening Post poster is a guide to bands performing locally. The interactive poster plays a short clip of a bands music when a thumbnail image is pressed. Tickets can also be booked via the poster. The low cost of printing mean anything that uses paper or card could soon be much more interactive, said the posters inventors. It is one of several paper apps that have been developed by a consortium of British scientists, musicians
and researchers being demonstrated at the South By Southwest Show in Austin, Texas. The group has also developed postcards that contain a sample of music that can be played via a paper player. The poster and postcards are the result of a research partnership with Cambridge firm Novalia (that has developed methods to print conductive ink), art group Found, musician King Creosote and Dr Jon Rogers from the University of Dundee. Work was also going ahead on shrinking circuit boards so they too can be incorporated in the printing process. The posters marry printed conductive
ink trails with a small circuit board holding a speaker and a small amount of memory. Future versions could incorporate web connections so that packages, posters and magazines might be able to be updated.
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March 23rd 2011
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Bob OshmanJack of all Trades
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Poster Tribune est un journal semestriel consacr laffiche, offrant 12 pages darticles illustrs et 3 affiches format 65 cm x 96 cm. Les affiches sont la fois crations artistiques, supports de communication et tmoins de courants sociaux, commerciaux et artistiques, des priodes prcises. Poster Tribune se penche sur ces affiches et redonne vie ces supports
phmres de la rue. A travers un thme conducteur, Poster fait la promotion de la scne graphique contemporaine suisse et internationale et informe sur lhistoire et lactualit de laffiche. Poster Tribune bnficie du soutien du Fond Cantonal dArt Contemporain de lEtat de Genve (FCAC).
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Brendan C. Smith
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March 26th 2011
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Valdemar Lamego
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March 26th 2011
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Speech Sythesizer
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March 26th 2011
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Chapter Three.
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8bit PE32
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Discussion on the Book Books on Books. With Christophe Daviet-Thery, Christoph Schifferli, Jrme Saint-Loubert Bi et Yann Srandour In the editorial project Books on Books, that united Christophe Daviet-Thery (editor / librarian specialised in artist editions), Christoph Schifferli (photographs and artist books collector), Jrme Saint-Loubert Bi (artist and graphic designer) and Yann
Srandour (artist), everyones role has been redistributed, the artists appearing to be passionate collectors, the collector taking the role of the curator, the graphic designer the role of the author and photographer, etc. The result is a book that blurs the limits defined by the usual categories of exhibition catalogues, artist books or photograph books. Starting from this common experience, this intervention will take an interest in the question
of the representation of the book by the book, throughout very different examples, chosen among the contemporary production or the history of the artist book, photograph book or graphic design, leaning particularly on the book Latin-American books of photographs.
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Artist Recreates Popular Pantone Colors As Fruit Tarts. French food designer Emilie de Griottes has brought new meaning to the phrase looks good enough to eat with with her latest culinary creation. Pictured above, de Griottes used her cooking abilities to recreate nine popular Pantone colors as fruit tarts. She brought the colors in question to life using different fruits and candies, with the results being something that has made my mouth begin to water. Created for a spread in Fricote magazine, de Griottes has successfully combined the world of graphic design with the culinary arts.
To create her edible works of art, de Griottes first baked a traditional tart pastry base, icing it white to create the background of the Pantone swatch she was emulating. From there she made use of both texture and food components to make each tart pop (see what I did there?). For example, Pantone 222 C in the top left corner of the picture below is a barney-esque purple/ pink combination. The foodstuff that de Griottes decided to use was a thick buttercream frosting that was tinted with food coloring to match. For Pantone 715 C located in the very middle below, she
used a combination of lemons and their peels to get the desired hue. You can almost smell the scent of fresh lemonade as you look at the picture. If you want to recreate these tarts, de Griottes has included the recipes in the French magazine Fricote mentioned above. Unfortunately, you will need to be able to read French because, well, its written in the romantic language. If you need help translating, I would be glad to oblige as long as I get to eat one of each!
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April 3rd 2012
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Inventory StudioThe Crash Pad Stress Cushion. The Crash Pad is a super soft stress cushion for the Mac user. Sometimes referred to as 'the rainbow wheel of death' this version of the screen icon doubles up as a desk pillow for any impromtu naps. Never Forget: +S.
Two major industrial hazards for hard working creatives are: 1 Spending far too much time in front of a computer when you could be napping on the sofa. 2 Computers crashing and losing all that hard work.
Punch/sleep on The Crash Pad and not your computer, as we know we secretly love them and would never do anything to hurt them. Designed and manufactured in the UK. Digitally printed in full colour, with duck feather pillow. Approx size when filled: 38cm x 38cm x 8cm
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April 3rd 2012
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No Mans an Island
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April 3rd 2012
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OlloBibliothque. Brand creation including strategy, naming and visual identity for a new telecoms brand providing high-speed internet access to emerging markets. The Ollo concept is simple. A single line of communication that provides access to the web in communities where online demand sits alongside limited infrastructure. Our brief was to develop a brand experience that would differentiate the new product
within the saturated telecoms market. Following thorough research and analysis of the competitive landscape, we formulated the strategic position of new possibilities for a new audience. This informed the brand name, tone of voice, logotype and subsequent visual language. The logo is the first to exploit the new multi-touch hardware of smart phones and tablets. Custom software allows
for interactive manipulation of the logo to become a creative tool in building the visual language. Playing with the interactive logo allows the designer to create an infinite number of brandorientated digital assets that can be integrated into the brand. The Ollo brand is currently being soft-launched into the first of its markets and it will be rolled out over a further 15 countries in the near future.
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April 5th 2012
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Kwadraat Bladen. A Series of Graphic Experiments. 195574. Essay: Dingenus van de Vrie. Foreword: Wim Crouwel. Editors: Adrian Shaughnessy and Tony Brook. Kwadraat-Bladen was the brainchild of graphic designer Pieter Brattinga (1931-2004). He set out to prove that his familys printing firm was the best in the Netherlands by publishing a journal that would surprise its readers with its radical content, unusual format, and state-of-theart production techniques. Brattinga was a visionary: he was amongst the first to encourage designers to enter the print works and to collaborate
with printers. He invited many of the best Dutch artists and designers to produce an edition of Kwadraat-Bladen that pushed design and print to the outer limits. Artists and designers who designed editions of KwadraatBladen included: Wim Crouwel Anthon Beeke Willem Sandberg Jan Bons Otto Treuman Dieter Roth Unit Editions is delighted to publish the first English language book devoted to this revolutionary publishing venture, which mixed art and design and used every known print and print
production technique. The book has a scholarly essay by Dutch design historian Dingenus van de Vrie and a foreword by Wim Crouwel. 144 Pages 152 230mm Paperback
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April 5th 2012
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Pour une Critique du Design Graphique. Catherine de Smet 216 pages 165mm 235mm
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Google web fonts
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Miscellaneous Web Errors
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April 5th 2012
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Names in a Hat. Have you ever needed to randomly pick names out of a hat and not have the necessary materials to do so? Ive heard the scenario all too many times. You have the names,
but what about a hat? Theres not a fedora in sight. Your sleepless nights are about to end!
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April 7th 2012
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Kill Comic Sans. Personsally I dont think its too bad, it certainly has its uses.
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April 8th 2012
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Mr Kipling Unveils Exceedingly Good Bus Shelters. Mr Kipling is unveiling a new outdoor campaign secured by Starcom through JCDecaux, featuring poster sites which dispense free cake from specially converted poster sites. To promote the launch of the snap pack format, 500 Angel Slices will be distributed a day at each of 19 locations, including sites in London, Nottingham, Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield and Glasgow. The creative was handled by 101. Michelle Wilde, brand director of cakes, said: The repositioning of Mr Kipling is a major commitment for Premier
Foods and we are already seeing some success with our new products and pack formats instore. This activity forms a key part of a whole new campaign for the brand in 2012. As well as issuing cakes, the vinyl-wrapped shelter will emit the smell of Angel Slices from a scent spray used on the poster site. Actress Joanna Page from Gavin & Stacy fame is fronting the PR side of the campaign, including switching on the first dispenser on Londons Tottenham Court Road. The dispenser ads will also be supported by a major experiential campaign with a
Cakemobile touring the UK from 27 March until 9 May. The activity will focus on an interactive vehicle commissioned and managed by sampling agency RPM and will promote the brands snap pack format in a celebration of cake-to-go to around 500,000 consumers.
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April 14th 2012
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Apple Spinning Beachball of Death.
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April 14th 2012
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ASOS and Its Nice That: Hawaiian Shirts. Get up, rub the hibernatory winter sleep from your eyes and ring out the bells summers here! But hold on just a minute, what the heck are you going to wear? Those thick winter threads arent going to cut it now senor sunshines rocked into town. As you were, weve got you covered. Weve teamed up with our pals at ASOS once again to commission these limited edition
Hawaiian shirts designed by five of our favourite artists in the entire world. See who we signed up after the jump Hawaiian shirts have a rich heritage so we couldnt just approach any old creative for this collaboration the weight of quirkily-coloured mayhem was on their shoulders. So after a lot of deliberation and rumination we settled on Australian mixed
media master Jonathan Zawada, London-based Michael Willis who combines pyschadelia and kitsch to devastating effect, effortlessley elegant French designer Mario Hugo and two of Brooklyns best Hisham Bharoocha and Mike Perry.
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April 14th 2012
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Grilli Type is an independent Swiss type foundry. Founded in 2009, we offer a range of display and text typefaces, based on historical sources or with an experimental
background. We strive to produce high-quality, interesting typefaces in the Swiss tradition.
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April 15th 2012
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How to Teach Art in 89 Simple Lessons Draw It With Your Eyes Closed, Edited by Paper Monument. When the American painter, sculptor and installation artist Paul Thek (1933-88) taught art classes at Cooper Union in the late 1970s, he wrote and then gave to his students a long, provocative and now famous list of questions and marching orders he titled Teaching Notes. Patricia Wall/The New York Times DRAW IT WITH YOUR EYES CLOSED The Art of the Art Assignment Edited by Paper Monument 128 pages. Paper Monument. Theks sometimes intimate questions included On what do you sleep? and Have you ever been seriously ill? Among his tantalizing assignments for students were Add a station to the cross, Redesign the human genitals so that they might be more equitable and Design an abstract monument to Uncle Tom. Id walk a long way to see Richard Serra or Cindy Sherman attempt any of these, especially the middle one. Teaching Notes closed with this statement, which professors (and critics) everywhere should etch onto the bottom rims of their reading glasses, facing outward: Remember, Im going to mark you, its my great pleasure to reward real effort, its my great pleasure to punish stupidity, laziness and insincerity. Theks list has been passed around by serious art teachers for decades. It is now reprinted in and its spirit lingers over a mischievous and nourishing new book called Draw It With Your Eyes Closed: The Art of the Art Assignment, compiled by the editors of the art magazine
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Paper Monument, a sibling publication of the literary magazine n + 1. Heres what Paper Monuments editors, in this slim book, have had the wit to do: Theyve asked dozens of artists and teachers, some well known and some not, to speak about the best art assignments theyve given or received or even heard of. The results are aimed at M.F.A.-level teachers, but these 89 entries are accessible to anyone, many even to children. Like the conversation in the final hour of a boozy art opening, these small anecdotal essays mix gossip, profundity, bogosity and lecherousness in equal parts. The book is buzzy and wild, like real talk. Some of the assignments printed here read like haiku. Take an 18 x 24 inch piece of paper and make a drawing using nothing but your car; Defenestrate objects. Photo them in mid-air; Go into your studio. Using all the clothes you are wearing, make a work of art. Leave the studio naked. Others sound like party games, albeit the kind that will have the neighbors ringing the police at midnight. There are stories here of pianos being demolished and then reassembled; of male nude models developing stubborn erections; of art made from nearly every bodily emission; about an entire class unwittingly eating pot muffins at 8 a.m. on a Tuesday because a student has brought them along. Kevin Zucker, an artist who teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design, relates the pot muffin story. His essay includes this observation: Later that afternoon you will have to endure a lengthy meeting with someone from the colleges risk management. The officials job description, enthusiasm for discharging his duties, and Mens Wearhouse suit will all combine to make you bottomlessly sad.
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About another assignment, Mr. Zucker writes: Nobody will admit to pinning the skidmarked undies to the wall. Luckily this work vanishes before students must critique it. Some of these small essays are autobiographical, others confessional. More than a few are dyspeptic. Theres a lot of (legitimate) pushback to the notion that art can be taught, or that assignments do anything except promote subservience and callow grade grubbing. A contributor named Justin Lieberman speaks for many when he says he often tells his students: I am not your father! Do what you want! The editors note that many of the anti-assignments collected in this book use the slippery logic of I command you to disobey me and other infamous tricks of the oracle. Most of the contributors, however, respond in the spirit of the undertaking. Their essays are a pleasure, in that they show us serious thinkers returning to bedrock principles. They remind us that every artist was an apprentice once. This is the book to read on the subway while on your way to the Whitney Biennial. It allows you to consider the long and improbable leap from novitiate art to the real and electric thing. One surprise is that a book like this one doesnt already exist. The editors began work on it, they write in an afterword, because they were surprised to find, in art literature, how little attention was paid to the nuts and bolts of art teaching. They point out that art assignments have largely been an oral tradition, adapted, shared, and reworked. This book thus comprises a mini-canon. Paper Monument is adept at this kind of small, unpretentious volume. In 2009 it published a demonic little pamphlet titled I Like Your Work: Art and Etiquette. It was packed with sardonic advice about how to behave at openings and elsewhere. It addressed issues like when to act like a jerk, and how to dress if you happen to be obese.
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A fair amount of flatulent academic writing clouds the air in Draw It With Your Eyes Closed. (All art should kind of assault the domestic interior; begin by revising your previous notions of space.) But if you follow art and cant stomach a certain level of pretentiousness, youll forever be stuck in the shallow end of the pool. Draw It With Your Eyes Closed is an upbeat and idiosyncratic book that also happens to speak some uncomfortable truths about the art world. One of them is this: Its quite difficult to get a foothold if somebody older than you doesnt take an active interest. Perhaps more pertinently, there is this advice to any teacher who lords it over his or her students: Dont forget how easy it is for them to find images of your own work on the Internet.
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April 15th 2012
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RitatorFORUM Quarterly Journal for Anthroposophy (Anthroposophical Society in Sweden). FORUM is a quarterly magazine for members of the Anthroposophical Society, containing news, articles, letters and book reviews relating to the anthroposophical movement. The journal reports the activities of the Waldorf Schools, and developments in biodynamic
agriculture, curative education and Anthroposophical medicine. Art Direction and Graphic Design by Ritator. A bank of hand drawn characters was created, with different versions of every letter. Characters can be selected to create unique headline typography, and allow every word or phrase to be individual and dynamic.
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RitatorUnder, Peter Johansson. Under is a book commissioned by artist Peter Johansson. In 1989 Johansson cast twenty concrete sculptures. Each sculpture has a different material combined with the concrete, such as metal, sausage, soap, plaster or cheese. They were buried in Falu Koppargruva, a very large, old mine in central Sweden. Johansson then documented the
erosion over a period of years. The book describes the artists process as well as bringing together imagery, texts and local stories. Art Direction and Graphic Design by Ritator. Inspired by the process of erosion which took place underground, Ritator created unique book jackets, using acid to remove colour from the bookrum.
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April 15th 2012
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RitatorDegree Show Catalogue. Royal Institute of Art. Degree Show at Royal Institute of Art, an institution for higher education with a long artistic tradition dating all the way back to the 18th century.
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April 15th 2012
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Graphic DesignHistory in the writing. The first anthology of its kind, Graphic Design: History in the Writing (1984 2011) comprises some of the most influential published texts about graphic design history. The book documents the development of the relatively young field of graphic design history from 1983 to today, underscoring the aesthetic, theoretical, political and social tensions that have underpinned it from the beginning. Included in the anthology are texts by: Jeremy Aynsley Steve Baker Andrew Blauvelt Piers Carey
Franois Chastanet Wen Huei Chou Denise Gonzales Crisp Brian Donnelly Johanna Drucker Steven Heller Richard Hollis Robin Kinross Ellen Lupton Victor Margolin Ellen Mazur Thomson Philip B. Meggs Grard Mermoz Abbott Miller Rick Poynor Martha Scotford Catherine de Smet Teal Triggs Massimo Vignelli Bridget Wilkins
Edited by Catherine de Smet and Sara De Bondt A4, 304 pages, soft cover, black and white
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Email and web use to be monitored under new laws. The government will be able to monitor the calls, emails, texts and website visits of everyone in the UK under new legislation set to be announced soon. Internet firms will be required to give intelligence agency GCHQ access to communications on demand, in real time.The Home Office says the move is key to tackling crime and terrorism, but civil liberties groups have criticised it. Tory MP David Davis called it an unnecessary extension of the ability of the state to snoop on ordinary people. Attempts by the last Labour government to take similar steps failed after huge opposition, including from the Tories. Unprecedented step A new law - which may be announced in the forthcoming Queens Speech in May would not allow GCHQ to access the content of emails, calls or messages without a warrant. But it would enable intelligence officers to identify who an individual or group is in contact with, how often and for how long. They would also be able to see which websites someone had visited. In a statement, the Home Office said action was needed to maintain the continued availability of communications data as technology changes. It is vital that police and security services are able to obtain communications data in certain circumstances to investigate serious crime and terrorism and to protect the public, a spokesman said. As set out in the Strategic Defence and Security Review we will legislate as soon as parliamentary time allows to ensure that the use of communications data is compatible with the governments approach to civil liberties. But Conservative MP and former shadow home secretary David Davis said it would make it easier for the government to eavesdrop on vast numbers of people.
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What this is talking about doing is not focusing on terrorists or criminals, its absolutely everybodys emails, phone calls, web access... he told the BBC. All thats got to be recorded for two years and the government will be able to get at it with no by your leave from anybody. He said that until now anyone wishing to monitor communications had been required to gain permission from a magistrate. You shouldnt go beyond that in a decent civilised society, but thats whats being proposed. Attack on privacy Nick Pickles, director of the Big Brother Watch campaign group, called the move an unprecedented step that will see Britain adopt the same kind of surveillance seen in China and Iran. This is an absolute attack on privacy online and it is far from clear this will actually improve public safety, while adding significant costs to internet businesses, he said. Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, added: This is more ambitious than anything that has been done before. It is a pretty drastic step in a democracy. The Internet Service Providers Association said any change in the law must be proportionate, respect freedom of expression and the privacy of users. The Sunday Times quoted an industry official who warned it would be expensive, intrusive [and] a nightmare to run legally. Even if the move is announced in the Queens Speech, any new law would still have to make it through Parliament, potentially in the face of opposition in both the Commons and the Lords. The previous Labour government attempted to introduce a central, government-run database of everyones phone calls and emails, but eventually dropped the bid after widespread anger.
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The then Home Secretary Jacqui Smith did pursue efforts similar to those being revisited now, but the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats continued to voice their concerns. The shadow home secretary at the time, Chris Grayling, said the government had built a culture of surveillance which goes far beyond counter terrorism and serious crime. Chris Huhne, then the Lib Dem home affairs spokesman, said any legislation requiring communications providers to keep records of contact would need strong safeguards on access, and a careful balance would have to be struck between investigative powers and the right to privacy.
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April 17th 2012
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Maps TD
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WT Residency, Amsterdam. Starting from September 2012 Werkplaats Typografie launches a residency programme for committed designers, artists and makers, researchers and thinkers who want to fully dedicate their time to a design related practical project or research. The WT Residency provides working space for three to four residents. The 70m2
studio in the Amsterdam area De Pijp is equipped with basic work stations, book shelfs and a small kitchen, accessible seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Weekly tutorials are held at the studio, regarding design and conceptual questions, as for inquiries regarding editorial, research and publishing. The Residency studio is a framework to focus on personal projects, and progress through concentrated
work, as well as in exchange with other residents and tutors. A programme of occasional studio visits from international designers and artists, as well as visits to exhibitions or events in The Netherlands and the neighbouring countries, adds to the studio culture.
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April 18th 2012
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Musical Jellies. Raphal Pluvinage and Marianne Cauvards Noisy Jelly project is a game that allows each player to create their own musical instrument out of jelly. The video for the project uses absolutely no sound editing, and needs to be seen and heard to be believed... Using a mini chemistry lab, each player makes their own set of jellies using water, agar agar powder and a series of molds. The jelly shapes
are then placed on the game board, and can be manipulated to create sound. If you, like us, are slightly bewildered about how all this works, theres some proper science behind it. The game board is a capacitative sensor, and the variations in the shape of the jelly and its salt concentration, as well as the distance and strength of the finger contact, all affect the final sound. The diagram below helps explain things somewhat.
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April 22nd 2012
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Nobody draws like Matthew Hodson draws
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Twitter is just a new home for old bores. People say social media are enormously important. Yes they do. Presumably they tweet this sort of thing to one another: Social media are enormously important because they create new virtual communities that offer all the advantages of propinquity without the drawbacks of phys prxmty. I say presumably because Ive never actually tweeted myself, so I dont know if they compose their pithy 140 character apothegms intuitively - or aim for an approximate count then abbreviate as above. In the giddy months when Twitter was trilling up and up to its current state of cacophonous ubiquity, I was asked on a radio panel show if Id ever consider tweeting and replied that the only circumstances under which I could imagine doing such a thing would be if a songbird flew into my mouth. Nowadays Im not feeling so secure on the matter. A friend who works in publishing told me recently that use of social media is now part of her regular job assessment; and furthermore, claimed that in ten years time no one would be able to have her sort of career if they couldnt tweet. It does seem surpassing strange to me that an ability to discover, assay then disseminate 140,000-word texts should be predicated on the broadcasting of 140 character slogans - but then what do I know? I wasnt even aware that F Day had been reached on 13 February this year - hell, I didnt even know what F Day was. My next door neighbour filled me in: F Day is when the number of Farmville players in the west officially exceeded the number of actual farmers. But when will Peak Farmville occur? This being the point at which so many people are engaged in playing Farmville, Angry Birds and all the other little time-wasters that theres no one left to produce the food necessary to keep them alive. And if Peak Farmville, why not Peak Twitter? Apparently the tweets currently posted on the Twitter site each day could fill 8,721 copies of War and Peace.
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Good gossip. Twitter seems to be a way of getting together with people and showing off, or having a good old gossip. On Twitter some tweet streams are openaccess, others are confined to followers, still more are mere birdbaths sipped on by a pair. An adept twitterer can shift between all these conversations, scanning the tweet deck as a socialite of old mightve worked the room - dropping in on this colloquy, passing by that chronic bore, peering over this obstructive and insignificant shoulder to see if anyone more important is in the offing. I know all this because Ive been talked through the practice and considered it anthropologically, as Mauss did the sexual goings-on of the Trobriand islanders. Thus all the things that happen in the messy world of physical propinquity do end up - albeit distorted - taking place in the realms of social media: people buddy-up, seduce, bully and ostracise; the Twittersphere fuses and fissions like a murmuration of birds hovering over the tidal flats of our culture. Suburban vision. Is all this human twittering in any meaningful sense crazy? Not, Id argue, if you see it for what it is - but if its considered to be an advance of some kind in the sphere of human relatedness. I spent a great deal of the 1970s avoiding bores with slide carousels who wanted their holiday slides writ large on suburban walls - why on earth would I want to reacquaint myself with such tedium in the form of Facebooks petabytes of snapshots? I think it was the anthropologist Robin Dunbar - one of the proponents of the social mind conception of human cognitive evolution - who theorised that language developed as an outgrowth of the group cohesion that other great apes cement by picking parasites from each others fur. I always find parties, dinners and meetings go with a certain swing if I visualise all the attendees naked and
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April 22nd 2012
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nitcombing one another . . . The other day my wife, who has a long tail of Twitter followers, looked up from her laptop to say that shed been tweeted by a man who asked whether or not I might be prepared to engage with my followers on Twitter a bit more directly, rather than palming them off with automatic tweets generated by my website, to which the only possible response is, Sorry, Im fully occupied visualising naked furry humans grunting - oh, and imagining what it would be like to have a live songbird in my mouth.
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April 22nd 2012
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The Worlds Sweetest Scrabble Set Is Now A Reality. One of the most popular games gets upgraded with a medley of typefaces and a solid walnut board. Scrabble is such a mainstay of American board games that its easy to overlook the fact that theres much that it could so easily be improved. In fact, its ripe for a major redesign if you ask Andrew Capener. A recent design-school grad, he created a special typographic edition, which we featured last year and is now available for pre-order. In keeping with his A-1 Scrabble prototype, Capener dispenses with the original News Gothic-y look in favor of an assortment of 15 typefaces. (The final list of which will be decided once he has finished negotiations with the various foundries.) The board, too, has been upgraded:
Six magnetized panels come in a solid walnut box and snap together to form a 19-by-17-inch playing surface. Whereas the designer originally specified the tile racks be made of wood, he has since changed the material to metal. The board and tile rack combination became too monochromatic, and I felt that there needed to be some pacing in the set, Capener tells Co.Design. The material echoes the magnets that hold the six game panels together. We also wanted to do all that we could to give the end user a set that was made from the finest materials possible. The first limited-edition run of 1,200 (each hand-signed and numbered) is expected to ship in August, after which Capener will release single-type packs, so type obsessives can collect their favorites. (Were guessing Helvetica will be among them.) We really want to excite current
type lovers and encourage a whole new crowd of people to explore the beauty that is the art of typography, the designer says. Order Scrabble Typography Edition for $199 through Winning Solution, an official licensee of some Hasbro games. And do so soon--as of this posting, there were only 66 left!
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April 22nd 2012
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CLS LINE INPUT C:\DOS\BBS\GOOGLE>; A$ LINE INPUT C:\DOS\BBS\GOOGLE>; A$ LINE INPUT C:\DOS\BBS\GOOGLE>; A$ PRINT Loading... LINE INPUT ; A$ CLS WIDTH 80, 25 LOCATE 25, 1: COLOR 14, 1: PRINT SQUIRREL-MONKEY BBS Se COLOR 7, 0 FOR A = 1 TO 25 PRINT NEXT A LOCATE 24, 1 COLOR 7, 0 SOUND 29999, 1.5 PRINT SOUND 29999, 4.5 PRINT Selected BBS [GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINE] SOUND 29999, 8.5 PRINT Dialing number... SOUND 29999, 9.5 PRINT Sending connection key... SOUND 29999, 3.5 PRINT Receiving data... SOUND 29999, 5.3 FOR A = 1 TO 160 STEP 1 COLOR 7: PRINT .; s = INT(RND * 2) SOUND 29999, s NEXT A PRINT PRINT PRINT ; : COLOR 2: PRINT Welcome back, ANONYMOUS. Toda PRINT
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SOUND 29999, .5 SOUND 29999, 1 COLOR 7: PRINT ; : COLOR 9: PRINT ; : COLOR 4: PR COLOR 10: PRINT ,,; : COLOR 4: PRINT ; : COLOR 7: PRINT SOUND 29999, 2.5 COLOR 7: PRINT ; : COLOR 9: PRINT .g8; CHR$(34); ; CH PRINT ; : COLOR 9: PRINT ; : COLOR 10: PRINT `7MM; : C ; : COLOR 7: PRINT ; SOUND 29999, 5.5 COLOR 7: PRINT ; : COLOR 9: PRINT .dP `M ; : COLOR 4 ; : COLOR 10: PRINT MM; : COLOR 4: PRINT ; : COLOR 7: PRINT SOUND 29999, 3.5 COLOR 7: PRINT ; : COLOR 9: PRINT dM ` ; : COLOR 4: CHR$(34); Wq. ; : COLOR 9: PRINT .P; CHR$(34); Ybmmm; : COLOR CHR$(34); Ya ; : COLOR 7: PRINT ; SOUND 29999, 2.5 COLOR 7: PRINT ; : COLOR 9: PRINT MM ; : COLOR 4: :MI I8 ; : COLOR 10: PRINT MM; : COLOR 4: PRINT ,M Yb; : COL SOUND 29999, 1.5 COLOR 7: PRINT ; : COLOR 9: PRINT MM. `7MMF; : COLO PRINT WmmmP; CHR$(34); ; : COLOR 10: PRINT MM; : COLOR 4: CHR$(34); ; CHR$(34); ; CHR$(34); ; CHR$(34); ; : COLOR 7: P SOUND 29999, 2.5 COLOR 7: PRINT ; : COLOR 9: PRINT `Mb. MM; : COLOR 4 8M ; : COLOR 10: PRINT MM; : COLOR 4: PRINT YM. ,; : COLOR SOUND 29999, 3.5 COLOR 7: PRINT ; : COLOR 9: PRINT `; CHR$(34); bmmmd COLOR 9: PRINT YMMMMMb; : COLOR 10: PRINT .JMML.; : COLOR 4: ; SOUND 29999, 4.5 COLOR 7: PRINT ; : COLOR 9: PRINT 6 SOUND 29999, 2.5 COLOR 7: PRINT BBS SEARCH ENGINE; : COLOR 9: PR ;
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SOUND 29999, 2.5 PRINT SOUND 29999, .5 PRINT SOUND 29999, .5 COLOR 10 PRINT TODAYS NEWS | AL GORE INVENTS THE INTERNET COLOR 11 PRINT | MICHAEL JACKSON OWNS PLUTO COLOR 10 PRINT | RONALD REAGAN VISITS BELGIUM BY ACCIDEN COLOR 11 PRINT | FIRST DEMOCRAT IN SPACE COLOR 7 PRINT BEEP LOCATE 24, 1: PRINT ; : COLOR 15: PRINT Google (S)earch; COLOR 27: PRINT Choose (S/L) ; : COLOR 7: PRINT LOCATE 23, 66: COLOR 27, 0: LINE INPUT ; A$ COLOR 7, 0 LOCATE 24, 1: PRINT ; : COLOR 15: PRINT What is your search 0: PRINT LOCATE 23, 39: COLOR 14, 4: LINE INPUT ; A$
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]; : COLOR 7,
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April 23rd 2012
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Design by Wildlife
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April 23rd 2012
Wildlife by Design
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April 23rd 2012
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April 25th 2012
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Birth of a Book: how a hardback book is made
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April 25th 2012
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April 25th 2012
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4 Problems Google Glasses Have To Solve Before Becoming A Hit. Google is planning to augment reality, and its a design problem that will require more than mere algorithms to solve. Google has never been a design-forward company, revolutionizing our lives through interface design. Instead, theyve taken over the world building products with raw intellectual horsepower--brilliant artificial intelligence to fuel search, wise mapping systems to take us from point A to point B, and clever cloud-syncing apps that allow us to collaborate on projects from around the globe. Google never had to be pretty. Its always been smart. Yesterday, Google officially revealed a project that will push them to their creative limits. Its called Project Glass, and its a pair of glasses that layers digital information over the real world. Its your smartphone, right in your eyes. You can read text messages. You can take photos. You can listen to music (thanks to some built-in earbuds). You can even be told that the subway is closed as you walk up to it, and be redirected to your destination by foot. ITS YOUR SMARTPHONE, RIGHT IN YOUR EYES. But maybe most notably, nothing about what Google has presented is an actual product yet, or considered close to finalized. We wanted to let people know about what were doing, and what we hope to achieve with it, a Google spokesperson told Co.Design, But in terms of the graphics, the visuals, the hardware setup, theres a lot of experimentation going on. And a lot of rapid prototyping on the team. The concept video Google has shared is meant to signify what the team feels would be of most value to people, and what theyre closest to actualizing. Now that this concept is public, Google will be entering what they
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called the feedback gathering phase, in which theyre looking for the community to chime in on what they want to see (and dont want to see) in a fully realized product. So where does this leave us for now? What Google has shown is promising, but their design challenges are clear: 1. GOOGLE NEEDS TO AVOID THE SEGWAY PROBLEM Theres a reason that video glasses havent taken off yet (and by that, I dont mean augmented reality glasses like Googles, but something more like Vuzix). And, for lack of a better term, well call it The Segway Problem. Technology can be a symbol of your future-forwardness, or it can be the exact opposite: a sign of the futures ridiculousness. The Segway flopped in part for its cost and in part for the fact that humanity isnt quite that lazy, but there was a deeper, visceral reaction to the core of the product that signified a silly future rather than an inspiring one. So far, the actual glasses Google is showing off arent inspiring. To succeed, Google will need to sell us on either the stylishness, or the invisibility, of video glasses. And may we suggest copying the iPod in this approach? Make the technology as obscured on the user as possible, except for one trademark calling card (in the iPods case, white earbuds). 2. GOOGLE NEEDS TO NAVIGATE THE ALWAYS ON PROBLEM As inspiring as moments in Googles concept video may be--and the photo-taking moment is an aha moment if Ive ever seen one--its also stuffed with notification, none of which is fundamentally different from what we could be checking on our cell phones less intrusively. The functions that Google blocks will be as integral to the platforms success as those that are enabled. Finding the perfect level of obtrusiveness within an omnipresent Internet connection could be the largest challenge of
www.fastcodedesign.com
April 25th 2012
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human-device interaction the electronics industry has ever encountered. And as Google is paving new ground, theyre working outside their comfort zone: Google has no data to mine for how much notification is too much notification. If ever theres been a product ripe for Google Labs field testing, its Project Glass. 3. GOOGLE NEEDS TO FIND A KILLER USE-CASE People in the Valley used to talk all the time about finding killer apps--that is, the one, defining use of a technology thatll spark its mass adoption. And no wonder: With technologies such as augmented reality and Project Glass, the possibilites seem to outstrip the actual need. As I suggested before, these glasses arent yet doing anything our phones cant. So why do they need to be glasses? A good counter-example is the iPad. Lots of people dismissed it when it first came out, saying, Sure, its cool, but what does anyone need another computer for? Well, it turns out, people didnt need another computer so much as they wanted one--a computer that would make surfing the web from your bed or couch a lot less clunky and more fun. With Project Glass, Im not sure that they have that usecase yet--that is, the perfect scenario where this just makes sense in peoples lives. There might be some set of features and interactions that makes it so, but these havent quite appeared just yet. 4. GOOGLE NEEDS TO ATTENUATE THE TOO MUCH FEEDBACK PROBLEM Where Project Glass is at now, what one spokesperson labeled the feedback gathering phase in our brief conversation today, is a tenuous spot to be in. Crowdsourcing can create great products, but when it comes to inventing something that no one has conceptualized before, we need bold visionaries, not naysaying Internet whiners. Not just anyone can design
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a user interface. And Id posit that almost no one can design a usable interface that will sit in our eyeballs 24/7. Crowdsourcing user feedback at the invisible level--the advanced A/B testing Google does when they test the color blue without us even knowing it--could be integral to fine tuning Project Glass at a number of levels. But at heart, they will need to present us with a most singular vision if they expect any of us to don a pair of glasses, not a mishmash of suggestions from the peanut gallery. The little things, the softest touches of design, will define Project Glasss future in the marketplace. Is the interface loud or quiet? Do we use vocal commands with some functions or all functions? Are notifications really in the center of the screen, or can they be repositioned? Will images be opaque or partially transparent? What will the glasses show when I sit at my computer or when I drive? All of these how does it feel components will matter even more than they do in a cell phone. But on top of all this, and maybe most importantly, well need to know the one big reason that well all want to wear our phones rather than keep them tucked away in our pockets. As of right now, I dont think weve seen it. Most of us interact with at least one Google product every day. Many of us use their products all day, every day. Whether or not youve been particularly inspired by their design, you cant argue that their approach hasnt worked well enough so far. But its been a while since Google was the first to market in uncharted territory (and it begs the question, have they ever been, really?). Wearing a computer has the potential to redefine the human experience even more than PCs or smartphones did. With Project Glass, Google has the task of designing the interface of our lives, and I cant imagine a greater challenge ahead.
April 25th 2012
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April 25th 2012
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April 27th 2012
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Sleeperhold is a publication platform. Sleeperhold will have 10 numbers, so Sleeperhold will die. Every number is an experiment in approach / collaboration / distribution / media. There is no recurring theme, there is no recurring format, there is no recurring audience. #1 is a photobook.
#2 is a poster set. #3 is a deck of cards. #4 are short stories. #5 is open. #6 is open. #7 is open. #8 is open. #9 is open. #10 is open and the end.
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April 28th 2012
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April 28th 2012
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April 28th 2012
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Offscreen magazine: issue 1. What happens when pixels meet print you may ask? Well for all you MagLovers out there its called Offscreen Magazine. Offscreen Magazine is a real gem! This old-fashioned magazine in high-quality print, explores the life and work of the people that create websites and apps and is a treat. As they tell the less obvious human stories of creativity, passion and hard work that hide behind every interface. Featured below is Issue 1 with the second Issue being created as we speak. Each issue is built around six lengthy interviews with creative minds of successful websites, apps and other digital products. We talk to aspiring freelancers and renowned designers and developers, and ask them about their professional and private lives, what inspires and motivates them, and what goes
on behind the scenes of some of the Webs biggest names. We give digital products a real face by going beyond the About section of a website and introduce some of the lesser known people of the digital industry, presenting their personal stories. We explore how web folks collaborate, what their workspaces look like or what you may find on their desks. As the name suggests, Offscreen is a magazine that explores what happens off the screen outside our digital world. We encourage you to put your iPad down, grab a cup of coffee and enjoy a high quality read the old-fashioned way. A physical product that can be touched, collected, and read anywhere, we believe, is a logical way to present this type of content. Reading it offline, in a distraction-free environment, allows us to step away from the
digital context and reflect on our industry from a more perennial angle. And, lets be honest, who doesnt like flipping through a real magazine? 112 pp, 18cm 25cm 300gm/115gm, 100% recycled, uncoated Cyclone by H&FJ, Calluna by exljbris Designed/published by Kai Brach
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www.offscreenmag.com www.magspreads.net
April 29th 2012
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Get rid of digital handcuffs, says European commission vice-president. EC vice-president Neelie Kroes has voiced support for the open web. Photograph: Georges Gobet/AFP/ Getty Images The openness of the web needs to be protected and digital handcuffs need to be removed, Neelie Kroes, the vice-president of the European commission with responsibility for Europes digital agenda, has said. Speaking at the World Wide Web (WWW2012) conference in Lyon on Thursday, Kroes examined the idea of an open web and spoke of its benefits. With a truly open, universal platform, we can deliver choice and competition; innovation and opportunity; freedom and democratic accountability, she said. Holding up a pair of handcuffs sent to her the previous day by the Free Software Foundation along with a letter asking if she was with them on openness, she said: Let me show you, these handcuffs are not closed, not locked. I can open them if and when I want. Thats what I mean by being open online, what it means to me to get rid of digital handcuffs. In her keynote speech, she stressed the value of an open web, adding that Europe was only beginning to discover what openness means. The benefits, she said would affect consumers and help boost the economy as well as informing voters. Privacy was another key thought on Kroes mind, believing that openness should not come at the price of privacy or safety, When you go online, you arent stripped of your fundamental right to privacy, she said. The commissioner also spoke strongly about copyrighted material and the complex licensing systems, explaining that these guarantee that Europeans miss out on great content, they discourage business innovation, and they fail to serve the creative people in whose name they were established.
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Kroes stressed that people should become more open to online models, allowing creators to make their work accessible but also recognising the price of a product or a service, Whatever youre producing, whether its a scientific experiment or a new video mash-up, making it isnt free. It is legitimate and right to reward and recognise creation and innovation. If we are too rigid or too constraining in our approach, we will put artificial limits on innovation and discovery. And thats not being open. Kroes echoes comments made by web founder Sir Tim Berners-Lee who delivered his speech at the event on Wednesday. Human discourse depends on an open internet said Berners-Lee. I want you thinking about what youre leaving behind for the next generation after this. He was also present at the panel that followed Kroess speech and expressed once again his concerns over surveillance of the internet. The WWW2012 event srun until Friday at the Lyon Convention Centre in France and is aimed at bringing together developers, business, media and analysts.
www.guardian.co.uk
19th April 2012
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Chapter Four
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May
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Kabel LT Std Heavy or Geometric231 BT Bold.
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000webhostOur mailserver is currently on the maintenance, it will be back online soon.
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Every fucking day.
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10,00 Digital Paintings. 10,000 unique digital paintings, created for paper manufacturer GFSmith latest Print Test brochure.
Each sleeve features a different view on a hypercomplex sculpture, generated through a process combining generative coding with creative intuition.
process
The energy of a dynamic
caught in a timeless medium.
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May 6th 2012
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Daily Mouse Tracking
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Damien Hirst 360 Formaldehyde.
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May 6th 2012
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Good things about Twitter. Several light-years ago in Web time, Jonathan Franzen spoke at Tulane University and said that he found Twitter unspeakably irritating, expressing a concern for serious readers and writers and the mediums inability to cite facts or create an argument. I like that Franzen doesnt sound like a celebrity worried about reducing friction and shifting units. He is the Kanye West of fiction: popular, gifted, influential, and willing to make unpopular statements without the intervention of handlers. But Thomas Jones at the London Review of Books points out that Franzen makes a category error by pitching Twitter users against serious readers/writers. The two coxist, happily. Maud Newton and Sarah Weinman are some of the closest readers I know, and using Twitter has not hampered their ability to create arguments or to be serious. Authors are on Twitter: Sheila Heti, Lynne Tillman, Margaret Atwood, Colson Whitehead, and Neil Gaiman come to mind most quickly, though they are hardly alone. One of the most felicitous uses of Twitter is to promote long-form nonfiction by circulating a blurb leading to the full text. Since the practice started, people have shared current long magazine and newspaper pieces and dusted off archival ones. Now organizations like @longform and @ longreads and @TheByliner work specifically to find and share excellent pieces that stretch up to three thousand words and beyond. Before Twitter, I was reading half as much extended nonfiction and fiction as I do now on the iPhone or iPad, using apps like Readability and Instapaper. Two pernicious fallacies embedded in criticism of Twitterand, by extension, blogs, tumblrs, and GIFs of catbots who kill with laser eyesare that non-traditional forms of expression can wipe out existing ones, and that these forms are somehow impoverished. The variables unique to the Internethyperlinks, GIFs, chat, commentshave
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enabled new writing voices with their own distinct syntaxes. But we are not dealing with fungible goodsthe new forms will never push out older ones because theyre insufficiently similar. You might overdose on unicorn GIFs and go to bed too tired to read Freedom, but unicorn GIFs will never replace Freedom. Four years ago, the New York Times Magazine published a cover story by Emily Gould that included anecdotes about her blogging while young and appearing on television because of that blogging. Many of the 1216 comments that were posted (before the Times closed the thread) expressed a fear that publishing first-person writing of this sort about first-person writing of another sort might imperil worthwhile reporting. Last Sundays magazine featured crack reporting on gambling, silence, and China, so this fear seems to have been groundless. As for Franzens concerns about rigor: citing facts and creating arguments is one of Twitters strongest features. Or, to be more accurate, Twitter is good at letting facts circulate through argument. One example is the emergency landing of US Airways Flight 1549 on the morning of January 15, 2009. As the plane was gliding onto the Hudson River, I was heading into a subway station in Brooklyn and checking Twitter on my iPhone. Friends with river views on the West Side of Manhattan were tweeting things like Holy shit, a plane just landed in the river. When you have used Twitter for a while, you know to hang fire and wait for rumors to gel. The length of a train ride is about right. By the time I had surfaced in Manhattan, my feed was filled with personal accounts and statements from news organizations. The amateurs had not gotten it wrong; a goddamned plane had landed in the goddamned Hudson. Hearing from a human with a west-facing window wont necessarily enhance the historical record, but it did enhance the moment, and I am not above that kind of adrenaline
www.newyorker.com
15th May 2012
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Scooby Snack. Increasingly, the historical record ends up folding in this type of citizen journalism right alongside pieces by professional reporters, many of whom are dedicated Twitter users. But sometimes the plane isnt a plane and an unsubstantiated rumor takes wing. (Kim Jong-il assassinated? Rowan Atkinson dead?) Twitter is both where the untruth flies first and where it gets shot down. Its sort of a self-cleaning oven, where the wisdom of the crowd can work out the kinks. A reliable version of events generally emerges because vanity (in the form of a visible number of retweets for the user who posts the canonical version) fuels the process, much as a writers byline can press ego into the service of good writing. Thats the vegetables. What else is on Twitter? A poetic spambot named Horse_ebooks that spits out isolated phrases like monopoly on your radio or fragments like 33 Dependence on chance may seem a burden and a limitation on fraternity. Occasionally this found poetry comes with a link to a terrible e-book such as Pizza Recipes, which would seem to be the original purpose of Horse_ebooks. Adrian Chen of Gawker recently reported on the feeds origin (Russia) and purpose (inept commerce) and poetic engine (maybe automated, maybe human). Why do more than fifty-five thousand people follow Horse_ebooks? Because he/it tweets Pocket Change Written Plan Ball Games Family Haircuts and, after youve read the name Santorum for the 456th time, these are the words that keep hope alive. Comedians do well. (One-liners and that.) The deliciously perverse Megan Amram has the best avatar around, and bats way above .750. Some recent entries: Its cool how in England they call trucks lorries and dentists never and this dyad: HOW DO YOU TURN OFF CAPS LOCK and OK AWESOME I THINK I FIGURED OUT HOW TO TURN OFF CAPS LOCK. If you want more perversity,
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follow Rob Delaney; for more familiar perversity, go to Sarah Silverman; and for a melancholy blend of perversity and directness, theres Lena Dunham. All free, all day long. How does a common squirrel like to spend its afternoon? Now you know. What does dubstep sound like? Let Twitter tell you. Every word in the English language, being tweeted one by one? Yes. A reporters dog? A faithful user. If that sounds like ephemera and you are drifting towards Franzenian irritation, look to the literary canon that has been ported onto Twitter by fans. All of Shakespeare, line by line; sentences from Donald Westlake alter ego Richard Stark; or quotes from Philip Larkin. The critic asks: Why not read them in the original? The supporter offers: all of these sentences, stripped of context, reveal strengths that are washed over when taken up in the river of narrative. It takes an investment to make Twitter work. You need to edit and trim your feed for weeks, or months, to find the people who link to relevant material, write elegantly within a small space (a good exercise for any writer), and dont tweet too much. If youre unconvinced, then here are feeds that confirm how Twitter is not like another form, and does things that cannot be done elsewhere: Wise Kaplan and ElBloombito and Jenny Holzer, Mom and Im out of characters.
www.newyorker.com
15th May 2012
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500 Internal Server Error Sorry, something went wrong. A team of highly trained monkeys has been dispatched to deal with this situation. If you see them, show them this information: nUCC8CrKiGupvtIyH4TVRI8FPD5dYmk2QDVEUjS4eoyS itaS_5BJhdhMwk1p yoz4Ntwhhb-NawNJFWh5yMCSnje-Hy_ q2nw9B4-5UYEazAOG9bVRc1QPUC2Z 9FIE-FPElCY9A6fsyZjBIQfmqw00381ZqFJJLoOyziXar ik1YdmgQ3AaY57Z kmgvl17p-tV40N_LVEBV0bk6SulZGydE4kcLurhjrh6cJs3hvZZoalMEla7 CEbfnXqb8GO-TftzhCRnS9D05_uduZvR61ehM-3VamhO hKHhj_7sqhWOrI3jDhXcI8vzWQc4T32HDvJqZzytgcBFLDnaY z8pJCOer6L 7g2lYdbl0OxeMb0EKkvUGDh1MPLztWV778S8_ yCyW05wJXa6jglGGePirty2MushIA9XrM77iEOwNZKB5sX iZ-25rlKInRh2lgUCmIkSCm6-3M-xzGH7v40ylO0BcsSSfHY7 utFYbjo320aCNlAIRSl7Mfzsy8gxUUFWqqPfhTDCKatcdjSBp2RYYV3nRLwzldd-2J_lGxCIxTZ6XeBkmvX97OY8w5q9R1y6MzrF pG-Ud9GuZSo-lKfvGJkEkEadFRS1C33IM7SKMOwFzsJTTZZw GhNOyJyaakXVvRld8_Sw5--U2LwyaISXNm3xFFCaBleiqdEo4 8ydOYXWKOeCCbHWY1rHIgfn-558rpCe 2Jzl0m_8Z2dA1MZjocLfKZlpyLsj8TrlYJWYZWxm43KfNVMc3RNQ5-ByAUx fxBefe3baqbbNkqUE3bkCn8Zzoxpkony6NhbGwYdr61BLu xt6dyl9N6-6Bu-u6tDcPkyI0VzRZKnfaQjNBpJm7jTKEyzJd6ht Q1oC10vX1FMeAW8zm6CCyMkYvBDfIkGK5nmE1spAzOA9jZA kMwqACStLjBj9Gj7PknEU3J0NfmWF_v6_2xFQEq9VaEYFjhh 0YsQJVlbPMwjtuXpxRL9axMHpMVxjUBbQFh aHj01LTJ4tGTE1IZNc53-7SPr5Ku8vo8iTR0Zbdr5IHlLUJM9 Anw4xT3ZSZE_1-wiLfGbJuAJwrj4gtfaWXPp59ba0hk9gOhxa 4j-c4ixBe4vWcm50BAsk8d
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15th May 2012
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15th May 2012
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15th May 2012
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Typefaces used in 2012.
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What Will Become of the Paper Book? How their design will evolve in the age of the Kindle. The change has come more slowly to books than it came to music or to business correspondence, but by now it feels inevitable. The digital era is upon us. The Twilights andFreedoms of 2025 will be consumed primarily as e-books. In many ways, this is good news. Books will become cheaper and more easily accessible. Hypertext, embedded video, and other undreamt-of technologies will give rise to new poetic, rhetorical, and narrative possibilities. But a literary culture that has defined itself through paper books for centuries will surely feel the loss as they pass away. In the past several years, weve all heard readers mourn the passing of the printed word. The elegy is familiar: I crave the smell of a well-worn book, the weight of it in my hands; all of my favorite books I discovered through loans from a friend, that minor but still-significant ritual of trust; I need to see it on my shelf after Ive read it (and I dont mind if others see it too); and what is a classic if not a book where Im forced to rediscover my own embarrassing college-age marginalia? Luddites can take comfort in the persistence of vinyl records, postcards, and photographic film. The paper book will likewise survive, but its place in the culture will change significantly. As it loses its traditional value as an efficient vessel for text, the paper books other qualitiesfrom its role in literary history to its inimitable design possibilities to its potential for physical beautywill take on more importance. The future is yet to be written, but a few possibilities for the fate of the paper book are already on display on bookshelves near you. Were warned from an early age not to be taken in by the sensuous aspects of a paper books design, such as its cover. Yet the visual effect of a well-made book, even
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an inexpensive paperback, unquestionably shapes our interpretation and appreciation of the text. Consider this Penguin UK collection of essays by the German critic Walter Benjamin. The front cover comments on the books status as a manufactured object. This is in harmony with Benjamins text: [T]hat which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art. By making many reproductions it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence. Now, as we move into the digital age, the well-made copy has come to occupy a familiar, almost nostalgic middle ground between the aura of an original and the ghostly quality of a computer file. A mass-produced paper book, though bulkier and more expensive, may continue to be more desirable because it carries with it this material presence. And presence means somethingor it can, at least, in the hands of a good book designer. The mechanical reproduction of literary texts is a very old storymore than 500 years old. Printed books were an early experiment in the mass production of art. Out of that successful venture, among other literary advances, the novel was born. Writers like Cervantes recognized and realized the potential of the printed book, that ingenious device for delivering stories and ideas to an idle provincial reader. The story of Don Quixote features countless printed books, and the entire novel can be read as a commentary on and intellectual advancement of that revolutionary technology. Is it any more appropriate to consume Quixote on an e-reader than it is to, say, watch a colorized, 3-DCitizen Kane? This question points to a second possible mode of survival for the paper book in the digital age. Purists will argue that some important texts ought to be read in their original form. This may be especially convincing when it comes to the novel, a literary form so bound up in the
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history of the printed bookand, by many accounts, well past its golden age as the digital transition begins. Of course, advances in book technology often add to texts as much as they take away. For example, innovations in wood engraving led to Gustav Dors famous 1863 illustrations of Quixote. When we speak of illustrations, book covers, typesetting, and other features specific to a given print edition, were analyzing what the French theorist Grard Genette calls paratexts. InParatexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, he writes, [A]lthough we do not always know whether these productions are to be regarded as belonging to the text, in any case they surround and extend it, precisely in order to present it, in the usual sense of this verb but also in the strongest sense: to make present, to ensure the texts presence in the world, its reception and consumption in the form (nowadays, at least) of a book. As e-books overhaul and re-present many long-standing paratextual categories, we trade off layers of established meaning. The typescript page shown here, from James Joyces Ulysses, is a famous example of a paratext with clear authorial intent. Joyce asked the printer to enlarge the final, redundant period at the end of the Ithaca chapter. On a Kindle, the reader can adjust the font size herself. Joyce wanted his free-floating period to be especially visible because it meant more than the average punctuation markit gave a full stop to the long sentence that was Ulysses. Recently, several young writers have further cultivated paratextual elements like punctuation, typesetting, and binding as arenas of authorial expression. Dave Eggers prints body text on the cover of his book; Mark Z. Danielewski uses colored, upside-down, and Braille fonts; Salvador Plascencia crosses out words and blacks over whole columns of text. Laurence Sternes 1759 novel Tristram Shandy, with its blank, black, and marbled pages, stands as
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an early precedent for these sorts of explorations. Tree of Codes, Jonathan Safran Foers 2010 novelby-erasure, is one example of a paratextually audacious paper book that would lose much in translation to an e-book. Foer picked through the pages of his favorite novel (Bruno Schulzs Street of Crocodiles), pulling out words to create a new narrative composed entirely from Schulzs raw material. Foers originality can be questioned (Tom Phillips A Humument tried the same trick 40 years ago), and his finished product arguably fails to bridge the divide between conceptual art and literature, but the design work is unimpeachable. Substantial portions of each page are die cut, creating evocative, three-dimensional wells of negative space. Schulz was killed in the Holocaust at the age of 50 with several good works likely left in him. Foers tribute gives paratextual emphasis to this loss. Unlike Cervantes, Joyce, and Schulz, living writers can raise objections when their work is adulterated to fit new forms of literary consumption. For example, Salvador Plascencia, author of the 2005 McSweeneys novel The People of Paper, has been vocal in asking that readers enjoy his book in printed form and not on Kindle, Nook, iPad, or other e-readers. He points to the title of his novel by way of an explanation. Readers would be missing an essential material metaphor if they were on a pixel reader, he says. That, and I dont want hapless readers enlarging my fonts and thinking that the book lives in this androgynous space that is neither recto nor verso, Plascencia adds. The book is sexed:on your left you have a verso, in the middle your gutter, and to the right your recto. E-readers are neutering and spaying our sexy novels. In The People of Paper, for example, different storylines play out in verso and recto, respectively, with odd-numbered pages following one set of characters and even-numbered pages another.
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This is one future for the paper book in the age of digital proliferationa select group of design-conscious authors will continue to address their creations specifically to the printed medium. Their themes, like Plascencias and Foers, will likely revolve around the history and practice of writing books, but thats nothing out of the ordinary one of literatures greatest themes has always been itself. Other writers go even further, making over the entire paratextual edifice, as Anne Carson does for her recent New Directions publication, Nox. When my brother died I made an epitaph for him in the form of a book, she writes on the back cover. This is a replica of it, as close as we could get. The book is indeed a facsimile of a handmade original, bound accordion-style and boxed. Verso pages translate a Catullus elegy by offering long Latin-English dictionary entries for each word in the poem. Recto pages tell the story of Carsons relationship to her brother through fragments of lyric essay and primary materials like photographs and letters.Carson, a classicist, is well aware of the ways texts evolve or disappear when confronted with changes in modes of transmission. For instance, her Autobiography of Red (1999) purports to complete a once-famous ancient Greek epic of which only a few fragments now survive. She must have been thinking in that long view, embracing the uncertain future of the book, as she assembled this tribute to her brother in a mortal coil of paperfragile, tactually sensuous, and fully incarnate in its physical form. Carsons approach fits into the burgeoning category of artists bookmeaning roughly that the design and paratextual elements of the book are at least as artistically significant as the text. William Blake is often regarded as the father of the genre. To separate his text from its setting is to lose an essential dimension of meaning and expression. So his images, the product of an archaic process of engraving
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and hand-coloring, have survived through centuries of changing print technologies. Though students often first encounter Blakes poems stripped of their illustrations in paper anthologies, facsimile editions of his major works remain available in bookstores to this day. The tendency to read Blake in facsimile will likely survive the digital transition as wella testimony to Blakes unique and successful blending of literary and visual arts. Along the same lines, a first-edition Blake boasts an aura equal to that of a great painting or sculpture. This opens another possibility for the paper book in the digital age: As paper books lose their use value and become collectors objects, writers gain access to the speculative art market. If Blake were alive today, he would find an art market primed and ready to pay vast sums for limited edition copies produced in his studio. This could become an enticing alternative for art- and prestige-oriented writers squeezed by a declining publishing industry. Andrew Hoyems San Francisco-based Arion Press can be thought of as a sort of laboratory for fine-art approaches to publishing literature. Arions catalog features a 50-pound Monotype folio Bible; an elegant Moby Dick with commissioned wood engravings; a radical, twodimensionalFlatland that folds out to form a 30-foot plane of text; and a Pale Fire with John Shades meta-fictional poem printed on index cards in a separate volume. A common Arion approach is to pair a hand-setting of a text with new work by a contemporary artist. Pictured below are Kiki Smiths illustrations of I Love My Love by the early Beat poet Helen Adam. Only 101 copies were printed. Many fine presses around the country put out similarly handcrafted products, often featuring new fiction or poetry. Absent the contributions of well-known artists like Smith, these publications are often labors of love, driven more by an ascendant creative-class interest in pre-digital
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technologies than any existing profit model. However, as mass-market paperbacks give way to e-books, fine press editions seem poised to appeal to the nostalgic consumer of paper books. Who will buy these new, well-made paper books? One likely result of the transition to e-books is that paper book culture will move further out of reach for those without disposable income. Debt-ridden college students, underemployed autodidacts, and the everyday mass of bargain-hunters will find better deals on the digital side of the divide. (Netflix for books, anyone?) As paper books become more unusual, some will continue to buy them as collectors items, others for the superior sensory experience they afford. Theres reason to think this is happening already: Carl Jungs Red Book, a facsimile edition featuring hand-painted text and illustrations, sold well in America in 2010 despite its $195 price tag. When readers believe that a book is special in itself, as an object, they can be persuaded to pay more. Bookshelves will survive in the homes of serious digitalage readers, but their contents will be much more judiciously curated. The next generation of paper books will likely rival the art hanging beside them on the walls for beauty, expense, and aurafor better or for worse. Theres a whole class of paper books we havent discussed yetthe paratextually unremarkable, unimaginatively designed rows of paperbacks and lateedition hardcovers that line most of our shelves. These are headed for the same place most manufactured objects go eventuallythe scrapheap. In its own way, even the well-made paper book may someday reach a similar fate. The art market may have deep pockets, but historically it hasnt been very hospitable to literature. As far as the artists book is concerned, the first term in the phrase has tended to take precedence, in the
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past century at least. A lover of literature cant help feeling thatas the conventions of the paper book have come under the interrogation of the visual artspoetry, rhetoric, narrative, and meaning have often suffered.
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Has the internet run out of ideas already? The internet has delivered much, but now seems in a state of inventive stasis. Earlier this year, American legal scholar Tim Wu published a sobering book: The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires. In it, he surveyed the history of the great communications technologies of the 20th century the telephone, movies, broadcast radio and TV. And in the story of each of these technologies, Wu discerned a pattern a typical progression of information technologies: from somebodys hobby to somebodys industry; from juryrigged contraption to slick production marvel; from a freely accessible channel to one strictly controlled by a single corporation or cartel from open to closed system. It is a progression so common as to seem inevitable, though it would hardly have seemed so at the dawn of any of the past centurys transformative technologies, whether telephony, radio, television or film. Each of these technologies, Wu argued, started out as gloriously creative, anarchic and uncontrolled. But in the end each was captured by corporate power, usually aided and abetted by the state. And the process in each case was the same: a charismatic entrepreneur arrived with a better consumer proposition for example, a unified system and the guarantee of a dial tone in telephony; or a steady flow of good-quality movies created by a vertically integrated studio system in the case of movies that enabled a corporation or a cartel to attain control of the industry. The big question, Wu asked, is whether this will happen to the net. Its a good question. The internet was another one of those gloriously creative, anarchic technologies that spawned utopian dreams. Its internal architecture its technical DNA, if you like enabled an explosion of what Barbara van Schewick called permissionless innovation: all you needed to prosper was ingenuity, software skills and
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imagination. So what the networks designers created was, in effect, a global machine for springing surprises. For the last two decades, weve been gratified, bamboozled, astonished and sometimes alarmed by the surprises it has sprung. The first-order ones were innovations such as the world wide web, file-sharing, VoIP (internet telephony) and malicious software. In turn, these first-order surprises generated other, second-order ones. The web, for example, served as the foundation for search engines, Flickr, blogging, YouTube, Wikipedia and, latterly, smartphones and Facebook. Were now at the stage where we should be getting the next wave of disruptive surprises. But guess what? theyre nowhere to be seen. Instead, were getting an endless stream of incremental changes and me-tooism. If I see one more proposal for a photo-sharing or locationbased web service, anything with app in it, or anything that invites me to rate something, Ill scream. Were stuck. Were clean out of ideas. And if you want evidence of that, just look at the nauseating epidemic of patent wars that now disfigures the entire world of information technology. The first thing a start-up has to do now is to hire a patent attorney. I had a fascinating conversation recently with someone whos good at getting the pin-ups of the industry the bosses of Google, Facebook, Amazon et al into one room. He recounted how at a recent such gathering, he suddenly realised that everyone present was currently suing or being sued for patent infringement by one or more of the others. How have we got ourselves into this mess? How long have you got? But here are a few of the obvious culprits. One is our obsolete intellectual property regime, which, instead of encouraging innovation, is nowadays mainly used to discourage it. Another is our failure to build the kind of networking infrastructure that could form the basis for
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really disruptive applications of IT. Fixed-line bandwidth in the UK is poor enough, but its lightspeed compared with the shambles of mobile broadband, as any smartphone user will testify. A third sheet-anchor is provided by the business models currently dominant in the industry, namely the provision of free services in return for massive intrusions on privacy and other swindles. As a nice chart on the Pinboard blog shows, the bigger free services get, the more money they lose and that revenue has to come from somewhere. In the end, the only stable, ethical business models will be those based on consumers paying for services. And the likelihood of that happening soon is negligible. But perhaps the biggest curb on innovation is the fact that the technologies that might serve as the springboards for next-generation surprises are increasingly closed and controlled. Facebook, for example, was built on the web, which is an open platform. But Facebook is busily creating a walled garden in which the only innovations that can arise from it are ones allowed by the proprietors. The same applies to the tethered devices.
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We are about to make history. lautet das Motto der ersten ABOUT in Mainz. Die Messe fr Kleinverlage und Selbstverleger aus dem Umfeld der Kunst- und Designszene findet vom 4. bis 6. Mai im Rahmen des Symposiums der Gesellschaft fr Designgeschichte Schrift/Macht/Welten. Das Mastergebude der FH Mainz bietet auf mehr als 200qm Platz fr Prsentation und Verkauf von Publikationen und
regt zum konstruktiven Dialog mit Gleichgesinnten an. ber 25 Aussteller aus aller Welt und viele Gestaltungshochschulen werden vor Ort sein und ihre Hochschulmagazine sowie studentische Arbeiten vorstellen. Begleitet wird die Messe von der Ausstellung FLAGS, die Flaggenentwrfe namhafter Designer und Knstler aus der ganzen Welt zeigt. Auerdem wird Samstag Abends eine Pecha Kucha Night stattfinden,
auf der jeder Vortragende sein selbstgewhltes Thema in 20 Folien prsentiert, wobei jede Folie nur 20 Sekunden zu sehen sein wird.
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Rafal Rozendaal.
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Rafal Rozendaal.
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Rafal Rozendaal.
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Rafal Rozendaal.
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Rafal Rozendaal.
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Rafal Rozendaal.
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+ =
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In a book about everything I love. Theres just one thing I hate. I mean really fucking hate. Pancakes. Look at that Face. Clearly Fucking Distraught.
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+ =
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Colophon. 460pp. Royal. 156 234mm. Printed by Lulu. Design by Aaron Skipper. www.aaronskipper.co.uk. Typeset in Raisonne and Times New Roman.

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