Week 10 – Graphic Design

 Amateur Hour and the Perils of Absolutism

The reading for week 10 has required a lot of mental processing, but a few themes emerged for me. One is the cycle wherein an emerging technology is initially restrictive due to its expense or a scarcity of necessary components or skills but then becomes gradually more accessible until there are few barriers or gatekeepers.  Everyone and anyone is free to try their hand regardless of knowledge or skill. Eskilson (2007) describes this phenomenon as early as page 26 when he writes of the proliferation of printing during the Victorian era as “unskilled jobbing printers polluting the urban landscape with tasteless playbills, posters and other printed ephemera.”  Yet, at the same time, the energy and experimentation that can come from contributors unrestrained by traditions and rules should also be recognized and appreciated.  The cycle repeats as told in the story of Rudy VanderLans (p 359). VanderLans was trained as a graphic designer in the International Style in the Netherlands and came to work at the San Francisco Chronical in 1981.  There he was appalled to discover that the editors lacked either knowledge of or regard for basic design principals, the considerations about “legibility and good and bad type were swept aside.”  VanderLans could have dug in and insisted on reform, but instead he came to recognize and appreciate what Eskilson calls the “vernacular culture” of his new surroundings.  He began to advocate for an expanded conception of graphic design that allowed for the intuitive expressions of the designer and rejecting the “artist as engineer” foundations of International Style.  

 VanderLans’ evolution of ideology reminded me of Jan Tschichold introduced on page 233 as a calligrapher and typographer who became engaged with the New Typography movement after attending an exhibition at the Bauhaus in 1923.  Tschichold was instrumental in outlining the theory and practice of progressive typography, literally writing the book on the subject in 1928 when he published Die neue Typographie a handbook for designers that codified his own principles including asymmetry, engineering over artistry and the superiority of sans serif text.  At the time of this publication, Tschichold was an absolutist, countenancing no compromise or experimentation, asserting that axial symmetry was not just undesirable, but “dishonest” and photos could only be complemented by sans serif type.  There was also an underlying commitment to socialist ideals woven into the new typography movement, though it is unclear how fervently Tschichold supported them. (Eskilson, 2007, p. 237).  

 Like VanderLans, Tschichold eventually relaxed his fervid ideological views.  The text is not specific about his reasons but tells us it occurred around 1933 following his arrest and subsequent escape from Germany, then firmly in the control of the Nazi party.  One is left to imagine how that experience might have reshaped his worldview, but as early as 1935 he wrote that asymmetry might not be the only acceptable design structure, and by 1946 he was repudiating his own New Typography principals.  What struck me was his suggestion that the absolutist terms of the New Typography were not unlike the dictates of the Nazis (Eskilson, 2007 p. 288).  This, to me, is unquestionably true and a cycle we seem doomed to repeat culturally, politically and artistically.  Arthur M. Schlessinger Jr. and Arthur M. Schlessinger Sr. have advanced a “Cyclical Theory” model of political movements that identifies phases through which society vacillates between liberal and conservative values (Brown, 1992) which equally elucidates the rise and fall the various design movements with social reformist goals from Art Nouveau to New Typography.  The new movement rises in response to what has come before, and adherents are often uncompromising in their both their devotion and their definitions of what is acceptable within the new framework.  Those not immediately marginalized are likely to become dissatisfied as time passes.  We are left to conclude that resistance to the introduction of new design ideas and the relaxing of the standards we once defined and defended is quite simply futile.  We would be better served to follow the example of Rudy VanderLans who so quickly understood the value of the vernacular.

 Resources:

Brown, Jerald (June 1992), The Wave Theory Of American Social Movements

T for Tidy

Thirty years ago, progressive designers often described their mission as ‘problem-solving’. They aimed to identify the functional requirements of a project and then discover the appropriate means to satisfy the brief. Today, it is more illuminating to speak of solvents than solutions. Design is often an attack on structure, or an attempt to create edifices that can withstand and engage the corrosive assault of content.

Liquidity, saturation, and overflow are words that describe the information surplus that besets us at the start of the twenty-first century. Images proliferate in this media-rich environment, and so too does the written word. Far from diminishing in influence, text has continued to expand its power and pervasiveness. The visual expression of language has grown increasingly diverse, as new fonts and formats evolve to accommodate the relentless display of the word.

Typography is the art of designing letterforms and arranging them in space and time. Since its invention during the Renaissance, typography has been animated by the conflict between fixed architectural elements-such as the page and its margins-and the fluid substance of written words. Evolutions in the life of the letter arise from dialogs between wet and dry, soft and hard, slack and taut, amorphous and geometric, ragged and flush, planned and unpredicted. With unprecedented force, these conflicts are driving typographic innovation today. Typography is going under water as designers submerge themselves in the textures and transitions that bond letter, word, and surface. As rigid formats become open and pliant, the architectural hardware of typographic systems is melting down.

WOW! Added Robin’s post to my bookshelf. Checkout the 31 footnotes for further reading

We can trace a nervous path through the links and hearts that occupy our timelines. In search of answers, we’ve peeked under the covers of Material Design and examined hundreds of pattern libraries, since one of them might be secretly withholding the principles of good design within. But why are we obsessed with typographic rules? And if we were to make guidelines for setting text on the web, what form should those rules take?

“Good typography can never be humorous. It is precisely the opposite of adventure.” 

- Jan Tschichold, 1902–1974

“The essence of the New Typography is clarity. This puts it into deliberate opposition to the old typography whose aim was “beauty” and whose clarity did not attain the high level we require today. This utmost clarity is necessary today because of the manifold claims for our attention made by the extraordinary amount of print, which demands the greatest economy of expression.”

-  Jan Tschichold, Die neue Typographie 

“It’s tough for a typographer like me to admit it, but on the web we have to prioritise the text, and the font, independently.”

- Kenneth Ormandy, Efficient Web Type c. 1556

This has led me to three principles, suggestions, outlines, or rather things-that-I-ought-to-be nervous-about when setting text on the web.

Principles of the new web typography

We must prioritise the text over the font, or semantics over style.

We ought to use and/or make tools that reveal the consequences of typographic decisions.

We should acknowledge that web typography is only as strong as its weakest point.

Suggestion #1 The Value of Text

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The web developer Scott Jehl has shown10 that the FOIT approach caused the text in one example to be visible in 2.7s on a 3G connection whereas the FOUT approach made the text visible in 0.6s. The final approach, where the text is not hidden by css or JavaScript, is therefore much faster for the user, more robust for the network, and manages to prioritise the text over the font.

suggestion #2 The consequence of typographic decisions

suggestion #3 Web typography is only as strong as its weakest point

First, the typographic frailties to be found in the programming of these design systems are most likely to be revealed inside a large, half-organised codebase, mostly made up of css. For example, a measure of a website’s selector specificity18 is one instance where we can immediately identify structural weaknesses.

There are two noticeable peaks in the plot above where fragile code, or very specific css selectors, can be found. This is likely to cause problems elsewhere, as the code is either overwriting previous code or, even worse perhaps, it attempts to make sure that no-one can overwrite it in the future. Bits of code like this can influence the act of typography in strange and unpredictable ways—when we set text on the web we should ideally require a consistent and reliable api19 for doing so. Specific code like this is bound to stop us dead in our tracks because if we add a class to an element such as .font--bold and it doesn’t do what we expect it to then the programmatic weakness of the system is revealing its ugly face.