Design Literacy

by Steven Heller

  The keyboard is employed to create pathways in order for the user to make references and associations with the characters of the font. It acknowledges the conventions of language (e.g., vowels, consonants, upper and lower case) and uses shift, option, and normal keys to launch functions that allow for additional layers of exploration. For example, conventional “level one” keyboarding of any word will render a string of ideological statements (graphic picture boxes that frame such words or sayings as “sisters,” “rights,” “grrrls,” “mother,” “power,” “Thelma & Louise”). Progression through each additional keyboard level takes the user through a journey into what Triggs describes as a multilayered web of associations and representational sets of ideas about women, such as the following:

  Level 1 normal = empowerment of women

  Level 2 shift = ugly stereotypes

  Level 3 option = personal choices

  Level 4 shift+option = vulgar and sexual language

  The complex layering of messages embedded in this font, including fragmented line drawings of the female anatomy, gives users the chance to make serendipitous juxtapositions through random access or specific polemical statements by deliberate applications. Asterisks appear on selected icons/words indicating additional strata of information, such as textual quotes or images-sequences, which are accessed through other operating programs contained in the disc’s suitcase. Accessing these alternative strata, the user is allowed to highlight, among other things, a selection of “Hidden Heroines” who have made important contributions to art, design, and film. In addition, other elements are likely to appear throughout, including a witty animated sequence of women’s hands ranging from a revolutionary raised fist to a diamond-clad glove. Humor is an effective mediator in the communication of Pussy Galore’s decidedly ideological messages.

  Although Pussy Galore was created for an experimental design venue, it is not intended for a visual elite of sophisticated graphic designers alone. The digital nature of the font is accessible to anyone with a minimum of computer savvy. It serves both as a graphics tool for those who choose to integrate some or all of its forms into layouts or as a game of digital hide-and-seek for those who choose to uncover all the hidden messages. “Through the user’s ‘personalization’ of the typeface,” Triggs adds, “Pussy Galore’s aim of embracing democratization is underscored, removing any reliance upon ‘artistic’ sophistication which might render it alien to popular use.” The “letterforms” have indeed been created as simple shapes or pictograms for the user to reconstruct or redesign, and the possibilities are numerous: Through certain keyboard configurations a picture of Eve’s snake might be juxtaposed to a floppy “dumb blonde” hairdo. Likewise, strings of characters or words develop accidentally depending on the user, “but each connection is heavily charged with meaning and value,” says Triggs. “In this way technology is used to help users assemble their own visual languages, bringing to the typeface unique experiences, individual prejudices, and interpretations.”

  It is not likely that Pussy Galore will be bundled with the iMac or any other personal computer, at least not in the near future. But there is no reason why it should not be. Although conventional wisdom might argue that an essay in the World Book Encyclopedia (which is bundled on many computers) on feminism is a more straightforward method of conveying factual information, Pussy Galore’s interactivity ultimately invites more questions and presumably greater engagement in the issues it raises. What began as an attempt to challenge typographic principles in an experimental context has become a model of how new media encourages novel methods of communication. “The old gal has fared really well!” Triggs concludes. “We are really surprised that Pussy Galore has taken on a life of its own. What is really satisfying is when we get correspondence from students in New Zealand, Brazil, Mexico, and the United States who want to explore further the ideas we propose in research essays and in their own use of the typeface . We always said if we reached just one student/designer, the whole project was worthwhile!”

  Template Gothic

  BARRY DECK

  If period typefaces such as Broadway from the 1920s, Helvetica from the 1960s, or Avant Garde from the 1970s had been designed at any other time in history, would they have been as symbolic of their times? Or were they such total products of their eras that the question is moot? When William Caslon designed his only sans-serif typeface back in the early 1800s, it was considered an aesthetic monstrosity. Had it been created in the 1920s, however, when geometric sans-serif faces stood for progressive ideals, it would have been accepted without question. Typefaces, like automobile and clothing design, contribute to the Zeitgeist. But what makes the character of a particular type so endemic? “The process by which particular typefaces come to embody the look, mood, and aspirations of a period is mysterious and fascinating,” wrote Rick Poynor in Eye (No. 6, Vol. 2, 1992).

  Timing may not be everything, but it does have a lot to do with why typefaces appeal to the public’s taste at any given moment. It certainly explains why CalArts graduate Barry Deck’s (b. 1962) Template Gothic (1990), a vernacular-inspired yet futuristic-looking typeface, became the most emblematic font in an epoch replete with emblems. At the time of Template Gothic’s inception graphic design was experiencing technological shifts that altered methods and mind sets. Modernism was being challenged by a growing number of heretics opposed to its dogma; universality had become the hobgoblin of cultural diversity; and Swiss influenced typography had become cold and trite. Template Gothic was one designer’s attempt to explore alternative influences that were more or less deemed taboo. “The design of these fonts came out of my desire to move beyond the traditional concerns of type designers,” Deck explained in Eye (No. 6, Vol. 2, 1992), “such as elegance and legibility, and to produce typographical forms which bring to language additional levels of meaning.”

  Some designers hold the traditional approach as sacrosanct as any religious doctrine. “Type is rigid and implacable,” wrote Frederic W. Goudy in Typologia (1921). But others see the past as a foundation upon which to build new traditions. “We’ve had five hundred years of movable type now we have mutable type,” conceded Matthew Carter in Fine Print on Type (1990). This mutable type requires mutable typographic rules. As Katherine McCoy wrote in Design Quarterly (No. 148, 1993), “Gone are the commercial artist’s servant role and the Swiss designer’s transparent neutrality… . Forms are appropriated with a critical awareness of their original meaning and contexts. This new work challenges its audience to slow down and read carefully in a world of fast forward and instant replay… .”

  After twenty years of grid-locked design, reappraisal was inevitable. Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko of Emigre had already opened up the laboratory doors, while academic hothouses, such as Cranbrook and CalArts, were encouraging students to push the boundaries. Conventional typeface design reprised or adapted historical models while strictly adhering to the tenets of balance and proportion. Conversely, the “new” typography started from zero. Without the benefit of precedent to guide them, type designers sought more eccentric influences both from exotic and mundane sources. Template Gothic was literally taken off the wall. “There was a sign in the laundromat where I do my laundry,” Deck said. “The sign was done with lettering templates and it was exquisite. It had obviously been done by someone who was totally naïve.” Although the stencil was itself professionally designed, manufactured, and commonly sold in stationery stores, the untutored rendering of the ad hoc laundry sign exemplified a colloquial graphic idiom that many designers viewed as a foreign language.

  Designers have for a long time dug up and collected visual detritus from the street as a kind of deep background. Even the moderns appreciated old hand-painted signs as quaint artifacts from an era before sophisticated design methods brought light and order to the world. Given the postmodern ethos for revaluation, many of these same artifacts were elevated to monuments of visual culture. In much the same way that the Trajan Column in Rome
provided the ancient inscriptions for the subsequent design of roman letters, the template inscriptions that influenced Deck were the basis for a distinct alphabet. Deck did not simply mimic the original, he built an aesthetic principle that challenged the prevailing concerns about legibility and accessibility.

  Perhaps the best reason for Template Gothic’s success was that it evoked the present and the future. A composite of low-and high-tech, it combined the vernacular traits of the mass-produced stencil and the futuristic character of early computer lettering. At the time it was released it captured the conscious and unconscious needs of designers to break from the recent past. In addition, Template Gothic is a curiously workable—user-friendly—mélange of irregular, tapering strokes, thick and thin bodies, and inconsistent weights, or what Deck called the “distortive ravages of photomechanical reproduction.” Conceptually playful and experimentally serious—purposefully imperfect—Template Gothic is a postmodern discourse on the standards and values of typographic form. It is also a distinguished display and text face with tremendous versatility.

  Manson/Mason

  JONATHAN BARNBROOK

  On the surface, the spiky roman typeface Manson, reminiscent of medieval inscriptions and replete with crucifixated Ts and Os, exudes a kind of mysterious Gregorian atmosphere. But Jonathan Barnbrook’s typeface is more than a family of quirky letterforms, it is a case study of how and why typefaces are named, and the relationship that a user has to both the name and face. Christened after mass-murderer Charles Manson, according to Barnbrook in Emigre (No. 23, 1992), this is merely a “different way of looking at the naming of a typeface.” Shortly after it was introduced, Manson was criticized not for its form, but its name. One of the letters to Emigre read: “In a time of random violence, individual, organized, and institutionalized, why are you naming a typeface after Charles Manson? As part of our media culture, in fact a well-respected one, what kind of humor are you projecting? What kind of responsibility are you neglecting? This is no subtle joke. We are shocked at your inhumanity and callousness.” Although Barnbrook’s description of Manson in Emigre did not sufficiently address the reason for celebrating this particular criminal, he did offer this: “While reading the word Manson, associations with other words such as mason and mansion might be evoked, names that do not relate somewhat to the elegant look of the typeface. The surname Charles also sounds quite sophisticated. But then you realize that it’s the name of a mass murderer and you reassess your attitude to the typeface.” Barnbrook’s doublespeak may not do justice to his seductive medievalized Roman derived from his 1991 design of Exocet, based on a primitive Greek stone carving. Nevertheless, taken at his word, this is not merely a novel or gratuitously named typeface, but rather a test of what motivates someone to choose a particular type.

  The name Manson forces the user to address a fundamental relationship. What, for instance, does the face signify? Aesthetics aside, why would someone buy a font with such a namesake? Apparently the name is more experimental than the typeface design itself, for it tests the limits of signification and association. While most typeface names are comparatively benign, something called Manson cannot avoid conjuring up images of violence and criminality, in the same way that Nixon conjures deception and deceit. Given this name, the quirky letters are no longer just the distant relations of ancient Greek inscriptions, but are kissing cousins of the swastika tattoo carved into Manson’s forehead or the words Helter Skelter that were drawn in blood on the walls of Sharon Tate’s home.

  Something called Manson cannot avoid conjuring up images of violence and criminality, in the same way that Nixon conjures deception and deceit.

  Bowing to criticism, however, and thereby eschewing the issues that Barnbrook initially sought to raise, the 1995 Emigre Fonts catalog included a specimen of Manson renamed Mason; perhaps suggesting the Order of Masons, which itself has a cultist underpinning, or the ethnocentric comedian Jackie Mason, who has a large cult following, or more likely it refers to a stone mason, from whence the inscriptions derived. But despite revisionist nomenclature, the name Manson not only sticks, but also gives the face an aura, if not a meaning, that it would not have had if it were originally called Mason. As proof, two recent book jackets for The Death of Hitler and The Violence of Our Lives: Interviews with American Murderers used Manson/Mason for what critics of this nomenclature would assert were the wrong reasons: to signify and/or dignify violence. Although only designers who know the name, not the average reader, will actually get the reference, the impetus to use this face was its name, which when linked to these specific titles reinforces the idea that this typeface represents violence.

  Typefaces are given names either to define otherwise abstract letterforms according to purpose (e.g., News Gothic), or to celebrate the face’s maker or inspiration (e.g., Benguiat), or to sell a particular fashion (e.g., Cubist Bold). In the 1930s, A. M. Cassandre named his transitional sans-serif Peignot after Charles Peignot, the design impresario who helped launch his career; Frederic Goudy called one of his numerous type designs Deepdeen after his rural New York State retreat. And Milton Glaser called his popular display face, originally used on his Dylan poster, Baby Teeth because of the physical relationship to a baby’s pearly whites (yet it could easily have been called Stairstep for the same reason). The majority of classical text faces are named after their designers: Garamond, Bodoni, Firmin Didot, Baskerville, Caslon, Gill, Cooper, and Bernhard are the major street signs of typography. Naming a face after its creator is one way to ensure immortality, or at least notoriety.

  Typography for Children

  When Lewis Carroll painstakingly curled lines of hot metal type into the shape of a mouse’s tail in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), he engaged in typeplay that would seldom be repeated in children’s books for another fifty years, and would take another sixty to become the trend it is today. Since children’s books offer many possibilities for creative play it is curious that for so long children’s typography remained comparatively tame. Certainly in the post–World War II period artists under the spell of modern art liberated both style and content. Following the postwar baby boom mainstream book publishers, particularly in the United States, reconsidered their audiences and took risks with subjects, styles, and, to a lesser extent, layouts. Ignoring librarians’ warnings against overstepping the strict conventions that they had persistently maintained through choosing what books to buy for their libraries, publishers allowed artists and writers to push the limits of children’s book art by challenging taboos—like allowing a snake to appear as a book’s main character for the first time in Tomi Ungerer’s 1959 Crictor.

  As for design, in the nineteenth century a page of text was routinely set as a tightly leaded block, sometimes relieved by an initial cap or spot illumination. Picture and alphabet books, though graphically more exciting, were nonetheless typographically subdued to avoid distracting the child. For a brief period during the 1920s children’s books were transformed by the modern revolution. Lazar El Lissitzky’s suprematist classic, Of Two Squares (designed in Vitebsk in 1920 but first published in Berlin in 1922), which was based on his famous political poster, BEAT THE WHITES WITH THE RED WEDGE, was the first break from traditional children’s layout and content. According to N. Khadzhiev in a 1962 essay “El Lissitzky Book Designer” (reprinted in El Lissitzky, Thames and Hudson, 1968), it was the first time that the artist applied the revolutionary typographic language that he would later use in adult-oriented ads and brochures. Of Two Squares used only symbolic abstract forms, or what Lissitzky called “elementary means,” rather than representational narrative devices. Lissitzky wrote that he intended to engage all children in a thrilling game: “Don’t read the story, take paper sticks, your building bricks, and put it together, paint it, build it.” The book flows like a comic strip or film. “All the frames are linked by the uninterrupted movement of simple related figures in a sequence which ends in the final chord of the red square,” explained N. Khadzhiev
. “The words move within the fields of force of the figures as they act: these are squares, universal and specifically plastic forces are brought forth typographically.”

  Of Two Squares inspired Kurt Schwitters, Käte Steinitz, and Theo Van Doesburg’s The Scarecrow (Aposs-Verlag, 1925), in which the letters B, O, and X are characters of the comic story about a pitiful scarecrow who is unable to scare anything and runs afoul of a farmer. These witty typecase anthropomorphisms, a shift from naturalism to symbolism in children’s iconography, tested the limits of visual and textual comprehension. Like Of Two Squares, The Scarecrow was originally derived from adult typographic experiments, in this case Schwitters’s own Merz nonsense poems. The Scarecrow was certainly in Lissitzky’s mind when in 1929 he designed his second children’s book, Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication, Division, in which capital letters were transformed into bodies and limbs of a factory worker, farmer, and Red Army soldier, each a symbolic component of Soviet society used as mnemonic tools to teach arithmetic. “This is how to use letters to put together every kind of arithmetical method—try it yourself!” Lissitzky commanded his readers. This book, however, was never published and only the dummy remains. Following Lissitzky’s inspirational path, Piet Zwart created Het Boek Van PTT in 1938 to inform children about the Dutch postal, telephone, and telegraphic company (PTT). Full-color photomontages, three-dimensional objects, and necklaces of typographic material were combined in an anarchic but decidedly transparent step-by-step instructional guide that was as playful as it was sophisticated.

  This typographic revolution did not, however, make an impact on the conventions of children’s book publishing because the books were no printed in large enough quantities and generally landed on the shelves of collectors rather than children. James Fraser, editor of Phaedrus: An Annual of Children’s Literature Research, said there was also a lack of interest in these avant-garde experiments among average readers: “I used to find ex-library copies of the avant-garde experiments in surprisingly very good condition, while copies of the standard text and picture books were tattered and worn.” Indeed for substantive change to have occurred a radical shift in adult design conventions would have been necessary, which even during the 1920s when experimental design was at its zenith did not affect the children’s book genre. Educators maintained rigid standards over how children were to be taught, and children’s librarians generally decided which books were suitable to that task. Adults determined the conventions that governed the content and design of picture books for prereaders, picture/story books for young readers, and illustrated novels for older readers. Illustration was either realistic or fanciful, typography was straightforward and legible—any deviation from these norms was termed inappropriate. Neil Postman writes in The Disappearance of Childhood (Delacorte Press, New York, 1982) that “a particular form of information, controlled by adults, was made available in stages to children in what was judged to be psychologically assimilable ways.” Until the advent of television (and now, increasingly, digital media) the printed book was the vessel in which this information was stored and distributed; its presentation has, therefore, always been controlled by adult assumptions about what best suited children. Left unchallenged, many assumptions were further adopted as marketing truths.