Design

In 1965, the UK designer F.H.K. Henrion was commissioned by the General Post Office to survey the state of design within the organization. The survey report was to form the basis for commissioning a new corporate identity, or ‘house style’, intended to visually unify the various operational divisions of the GPO as well as cultivate the image of a modern and progressive public entity in the minds of the public. Ultimately, thanks to factors that actively or indirectly hampered his efforts, Henrion’s attempt to produce a new, modern identity would, in large part, collapse. While it is true many professional projects do not bear fruit, one does not typically have a detailed account of the factors which might lead an initiative to fail. In this instance, archival records present a tale of intransigence precipitated by career civil servants determined to secure their positions, the conscious obstruction of change because of professional jealousy, and an overall general ineptitude when strength of leadership was required. This paper uses records from client correspondence, PO Board minutes, and internal memos housed in the British Postal Museum to trace the development of Henrion’s efforts from the client’s perspective.

Facing increased calls for “practical skills,” the arts and humanities are under immense pressure to demonstrate their value to a public that demands measurable metrics. As a response, graphic design has adopted the language of “research” as a way to engage with tangible benefits. Research, in turn, has emphasized applied learning and the field of engineering has been suggested by some as a possible model for graphic design education. This paper instead proposes architecture as a more aligned disciplinary model for education, practice, and research. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, architecture faced a crisis very similar to the one affecting graphic design today. But rather than relinquish disciplinary control to the positivist scientism of behavioral science, operational research, and design methods as they asserted control over the codes of architectural practice, a number of architects and educators sought architecture’s autonomy, an inward reflection on the methods, techniques, and questions that were restricted to how architecture sees itself. Architecture’s inward turn, or “criticism from within,” was ultimately responsible for its return to cultural significance.

Funded in part by a grant from the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

Briefly stated, a critical practice is one that examines and engages the normative standards of a given discipline. This paper will examine a context for critical positioning in graphic design, one which fulfills design’s communicative obligations while offering an alternative to prevailing conventions. A critical practice may seek to make those defined limits visible by actively rejecting the conventions of how graphic design ought to operate, while simultaneously working within those bounds to profane, judge and critique the languages of convention. Operating from within, a critical practice, engages what Roland Barthes describes as “a mask which points to itself.” In the interests of brevity, this paper will extend that understanding to a specific instance, the practice of art director, curator and publisher, Zak Kyes.

Between 1859 and 1860, Charles Baudelaire penned “The Painter of Modern Life.” His essay is an extended series of observations on the emergence of modernity in what was at the time contemporary society for Baudelaire. Nearly 150 years later, Baudelaire’s focus on the baser aspects of modern society — prostitutes, fashion, carriages, cosmetics — is still a worthy measuring stick to evaluate the state of modernity in graphic design today. This essay will look at a number of “degenerate” and “delinquent” design practices — designers whose production is among the most original, if not provocative, design work being made today. Modernity is often lamented for its degradation in quality, the loss of tradition, and its dehumanizing concern for the quality of life. But such a criticism assumes that tradition and the quality provided by locality are “fixed” and inviolate conditions.

The critique of modernity as the root cause of the debasement and loss of quality in life should be reexamined towards and understanding that in fact, traditions are evolving and new qualities are emerging. Modernity provides each successive generation with the opportunity to see itself in its own practice: it acts as a mirror to the passing of history. Rather than interpret emergent forms as “radical” and a symptom of the debasement of contemporary society, we can look to modernity as an opportunity to appreciate how each successive generation chooses to interpret its own visual culture and the relative icons it chooses to incorporate and elevate as part of its visual vocabulary. Design practices as diverse as Elliott Earls, Vier5, Cornell Windlin, Michael Amzalag & Mathias Augustyniak of m/m Paris, Antoine and Michel and Lorraine Wild, provide us with extreme examples of individuals whose work erases the artificial barriers between classic and populist, learned and ignorant, professional and hack.

This paper will highlight an instance of entrenched creative inertia in academia and the process involved in overcoming this roadblock. Specifically, creative inertia is a problem which can occur in any institution irrespective of size. In this particular example, an outside party — Scott Zukowski of California Institute of the Arts — was invited into a program to act as a mediating catalyst for change.

The goal of this course is to introduce students to the creation of narrative structures outside of print-based media. The projects are not specific to any particular “use value,” i.e. film credits for a particular movie, or a mock television promo. To do so, would be to rely on a student’s preconception of what narrative structures are, which is to say, rely on what he or she has already seen on television or other media. Instead, the assignments asks a students to “tell stories” or react to an individual’s own experiences.

The path a student takes is undoubtedly a slow and methodological journey and the educational journey of the type designer perhaps among the slowest. That Gerrit Noordzij has had an influence on contemporary type design is indisputable. Exactly how he has been able to accomplish this feat is altogether another matter of discussion. The intent of this study is twofold. First, however brief, it examines how Noordzij approached the classroom environment, the way he approached student learning and the method by which he relayed information. Second, it examines the techniques and conceptual apparatus Noordzij introduced in the classroom and in the discipline. It does not, however, make the assumption that Noordzij’s success can be codified and reproduced. Quite the contrary, such a naïve assumption is detrimental to the learning environment and precisely counter to Noordzij’s success as a teacher. Rather, this essay attempts to treat teaching and learning as a discursive practice with its own language, mutable theory and practical outcomes. This paper will be a reworked form of my MA dissertation from the University of Reading under the direction of Gerry Leonidas.

Paper presented at Contesting Absences: Exploring Unexamined Influences, ACSA West Regional Meeting, Eugene OR, 15–16 October 1999.

Critical objection to the simulacrum, or "false copy," has a long history in the visual arts beginning with Plato through to the present. In architecture, the legitimate copy is determined via typological extension, historical derivation, or "proper" transformation as the work moves from conception through modeling to final construction. These architectural copies maintain a "truth of resemblance" to the extent that each is founded (internally and spiritually) on the Idea of the thing. The simulacrum however, is made from below, it is a copy in the form of the image without passing through the Idea. The simulacrum negates both original and copy, model and reproduction: Selection is no longer possible. As image-without-referent and perfect impostor, the simulacrum's mimetic capacity allows it to insert itself within the confines of disciplinary limits, thereby subverting the categorizations of the Real: truth, foundation, and model. Using the 1933 Schminke House of Hans Scharoun and its double, the Barnes House of John and Patricia Patkau completed in 1993, this paper asserts that in an era where media images are an ever more pervasive force in society, the simulacrum emerges as an authentic category in its own right.

Paper presented at Triangulating the Bodies of Architecture, 1996 ACSA Northeast Regional Meeting, Buffalo NY, 4–6 October.

Conventional architectural discourse on representation operates between two poles of a binary system. In one instance the presence of representative content is seen to affirm a hegemonic reality and the values of a dominant culture; in the other, which is noted by an absence, architectural form is interpreted as disengaged and autonomous, devoid of social and historical circumstance. While seemingly opposite poles, both share a common bond to logocentric thought and a common disregard for the material presence of architecture. In the face of this idealized conception of reality, "material representation" is suggested as a third term in an effort to extract discourse from the confines of conventional representational practice. Rather than simply yield to the forces of an a priori cultural order or the limitations of economic pressures, material engagement or "immersion in particularity," offers up a dialectical situation, one which acts through the particularities of form in the discovery of a social structure in a particular historical configuration. Acting through the filter of the individual subject — which is resistant to affirmation — coupled with a direct material engagement — which explicitly grounds the work in a context and time — it is possible to produce an architecture which does not dissolve representation nor further reflect the boundaries of a secure reality. Such an example can be found in Le Corbusier's chapel at Ronchamp, a building which continues to exceed absorption by the unifying confines of rationalizing processes.

Special Feature: Edward Fella
This issue of IDEA features Edward Fella’s unique typographic works in extraordinary volume with an Introduction by Lewis Blackwell and the essay “Lettering Beyond the Borders: The Art of Ed Fella” by David Cabianca.

I am a junior faculty member now teaching graphic design but I began my studies in architecture. Today, working towards my tenure requirements at a large university, I am asked to provide some biographical information whenever a piece of my writing finds the light of day in a publication, however infrequently that may be. This request always makes me uneasy because I am aware of the contrast between how this information is written for architecture and graphic design audiences.

Architects list accomplishments in their biographies: the names of building projects, completed and uncompleted; competitions entered, winning or nonwinning entries. Graphic designers provide client lists.