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design stories
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exercises emblems
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A studio/seminar investigation of the nature and practice of design as a story-telling and framing activity. Within this context, attention is devoted to episodes of design history, to the ways that history has been told, to the ways that any design tells stories about itself, and to design practice as a rhetorical activity. Participation involves research, development and presentation of ideas in seminar papers and in design exercises (as opposed to "projects").
Graphic design isn't so rarefied or special. It's not a profession, but a medium, a mode of address, a means of communication.
Design involves lending and borrowing, looks and authority. It's always about telling stories. Required text: Phil Meggs, A History of Graphic Design (3rd edition, 1998)
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View slides and examples of modern and contemporary emblems, discuss their structure and function. (A growing body of examples is available on the web, some key sources being listed at the instructor's emblemata pages.) Using photo stock books (or other sources of images, such as newspaper), build three emblems (either sequence or completely separate) using the three part structure
Output on paper. Bring these to class ready to view on Tuesday, 27 January. No size limitation (but 5 x 8 is a nice page ratio). Emblem-making, using borrowed components, gives us an opportunity to consider design as exploratory/investigative at one level, and communicative at another. We harness content, sometimes in very unlike units, to produce the opportunity for a viewer to engage in the work, and derive meaning, pleasure, instruction. |
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The fact is, Phaedrus, that writing involves a similar disadvantage to painting. The productions of painting look like living beings, but if you ask them a question they maintain a solemn silence. The same holds true of written words; you might suppose that they understand what they are saying, but if you ask them what they mean by anything they simply return the same answer over and over again.
...an immaculate surface that leaves no room for dialogue...
to make contexts visible...
Increasingly, language is caption.
We have noted that a good portion of the books printed in the 16th century -- e.g., those printed by Aldus Manutius -- were editions of classic Greek texts. One of those texts -- Plato's Phaedrus -- retains particular relevance for design because of its attention to the shortcomings, and possibilities, of the written and, by extension, printed text. You are asked to read the entirety of the dialogue, but in particular the prelude (pages 21-22) and pages 66-103, devoting special attention to the passages about the written versus the spoken word, beauty, and the soul. Pay attention also to notions of the "background", the setting, the cicadas. Some of the dialogue is poetical or mythic, some analytical; it is useful to think of these as two sides of the philosophical coin. The latter (analytical) is professional; the former (poetical) is metaphorical, attuned to the setting, the background. We will be focussing on these distinctions early in our discussion of the dialogue. Typeset copy from Plato's Phaedrus, either consecutive or compiled of different passages. Bring in other external information as required to bring out your sense of the passages and to connect it to present concerns (e.g., the purported seamlessness, transparency, neutrality of design; the im/possiblity of getting at truth via the printed (fixed) text, etc. Can design encourage communication, create a space for dialogue? and if so, how? You may wish to tap the short excerpts from Marcel Proust's preface to his translation of Sesame and Lilies (by John Ruskin), which approaches the issue of reading versus conversation from a very different angle. Plato's Socrates provides an extreme take on the impossibility of the written wordÕs expressing or getting anyone anywhere near truth, for it is unable to "find a suitable soul, [and to] plant and sow in it truths accompanied by knowledge" (99). The reason is that the printed text is dead, while the practitioner of the back-and-forth of dialectic can find what is needed by another, and tailor the message (tenor and vehicle) to that individual. Yet Plato's work is a work of literature, after all Ñ- fixed in words, reframed by translators it is true, but written nonetheless. Proust suggests that all is not lost, indeed, that solitary reading opens up the possibilities of freedom and imagination, a spark to a knowledge that lies within: "What is necessary, then, is an intervention which, while coming from another, takes place in our own innermost selves, which is indeed the impetus of another mind, but received in the midst of solitude. Now we have seen that this was precisely the definition of reading, and that it fitted only reading." (117) Proust is aware of the dangers of reading: "So long as reading is for us the inciter whose magic keys open to our innermost selves the doors of abodes into which we would not have known how to penetrate, its role in our life is salutary. But, on the other hand, reading becomes dangerous when instead of waking us to the personal life of the spirit, it tends to substitute itself for it, when truth no longer appears to us as an idea we can realize only through the intimate progress of our thought and the effort of our heart, but as a material thing, deposited between the leaves of a book..." (118) A picture risks overdetermining (limiting) its text's meaning, just like the caption can limit the meaning of its image. The modernist designed text is, like Kinross suggests, immaculate in its surface, and leaves no cracks or seams for purchase (anchor, grip) or dialogue. Use of language in this way does not encourage reflection, re-reading, careful listening. Yet we have seen that behind advertising phrases and images lies their own archaeological past, a palimpsest whose memories remain accessible under the right light, read awry. We know, too, that the emblematic picture or text can undermine its own intentions, posit new opportunities for meaning for the viewer, opportunistic or temporarily disarmed alike. Your work may take the form of a sequence of codex pages, a poster, an HTML document. The out-of-copyright Jowett translation is available from classics.mit (easiest on-screen read) and via Project Gutenberg. |
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Nineteenth Century Printing Technologies : A Design Handbook contributions by
The introduction, evolution and waning of these technologies had implications for design practice and, eventually, the emergence of graphic design as a separate profession. |
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Style is connection.
Reading:
Lupton writes : "Modernist advertising drew its energy from Dada and Constructivisim, while the upright structures of information design reflected the Neue Sachlicheit, or new objectivity, coursing through the visual culture of Weimar Germany. Together these two impulses -- so vividly diagrammed by Schwitters in his own promotional brochure -- fueled the founding of modern graphic design, a profession built on the conflicts between free expression and technological precision, between consumer culture and social critique, between the deliberately opaque experiments of the avant-garde and the New Typography's dream of a transparent language." Work up a poster that addresses the issue of style versus function, the conflict between free expression and technological precision. Your poster might take up exemplary figures of each end of the spectrum, or otherwise present your information. It might take the form of a functional information graphic, or have a more expressive (advertising) form. It might get into the Jan Tschichold / Max Bill debate about functional versus a looser, advertising-related typography. It should draw on specific historical references or figures, or stylistic elements that you encounter in Meggs, Lupton, or elsewhere for the period under review (ca 1900-1930). |
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hommages et refractions : exemplary figure, movement Pairs of evidence regarding continuity / change, sameness / difference. Our time or place versus earlier times or places (first half of 20th century). Each image must be referenced by a caption or other source information. Pair or sequence must be accompanied by a minimum one-paragraph essay about its significance. |
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alternative history, design 1980 - present Read Lorraine Wild, "Castles Made of Sand," in Emigre 66 (Nudging graphic design), 2004. This is one of two reviews in this "book" of Rick PoynorÕs No More Rules : Graphic Design and Postmodernism (2003). Read the Wild essay in conjunction with a browse through Poynor, and also the last two chapters of Meggs -- 25 Postmodern Design (432-454) and 26 The Digital Revolution (455-474). As discussed in class on Tuesday, the work is to tell what might be called an "alternative history of the last 20 years in design" primarily by the presentation of specific images -- uninflected, documentary -- either in juxtapositions or sequenced cuts. There would need to be captions identifying the images, and presumably some other minimal text that clues us into the import of the juxtapositions. These might function something like the five themes used by Poynor: deconstruction, appropriation, techno, authorship, and opposition. The project might also be called a "juxtapositional essay" on recent design. You always want to tell the story in cuts. Which is to say, through a juxtaposition of images that are basically uninflected. A shot of a teacup. A shot of a spoon. A shot of a fork. A shot of a door. Let the cut tell the story. Because otherwise you have not got dramatic action, you have narration...
Man, Robert Frost said thinkin' was just putting one thing beside another and lookin' at 'em. What you call ramblin' is what I call thinkin'...
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archive Sue Macaione, pedestrian instructions (spring 98)
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