Above: Portrait with I AM A MAN (Memphis) poster.
Photograph by Yoko Inoue.

I was really honored and excited when the editors of Idea Magazine asked me to be a part of their new issue, How does graphic design change? In the description that frames the issue, the editors write, “It is apparent that the line between the private and public domains of activity is blurring. The movement to acquire autonomy in client-oriented, heteronomous activities as well as the movement to gain a larger public audience for the products of self-initiated, autonomous activities are already underway. […] In a modern society, what mode of production will designers attempt to utilize and, on a daily basis, how will they attempt to construct the world in which they live?”

In a break from the usual magazine portfolio presentation, the editors asked each contributor to take time to write a reflection on the projects they were being asked to show. I found this to be a thoroughly helpful exercise. Many of the ideas in the passage below will be familiar to regular readers of this website, but I include it here as an introduction to some, a compact and easygoing synthesis for others, and, as usual, an archive for myself. —RG

Above: The “Give-and-Take” Business Card Holder by Design Within Reach. With one side for incoming cards and the other side for outgoing cards, a pattern of exchange is designed into the object itself.

In the spring of 2006, I had been thinking a lot about gifts. In a meeting with a cautious client one day, I pointed out that I couldn’t really sell him a finished business card—it would only become his business card when he handed it to someone else, or gave it away. Somehow, even though the design process was finished, the client’s business card could not be fully realized as an object until it was distributed by him. 

This offhand comment stayed on my mind for weeks, and the more I thought about it, the more interested in it I became. It seemed the card worked in a giftlike way. No one asked for it, and no one paid for it, it was simply given. In giving it, some kind of emotion was expected, or some kind of action was undertaken in response. Perhaps the receiver would be excited to have this new person’s contact information. Or perhaps he would pass the card along to someone with his recommendation. Whatever the case, distribution was an integral part in the design process, but it was one that designers seldom discussed openly. How does design enter the world once it’s been made? It seems like that question can be just as important as what the design itself looks like. Certainly that was the case with business cards.

Around this time I read an article in The New Yorker about the Shakers, which also mentioned gifts, and, in looking for a good book to read about the Shakers one day, I stumbled across a book called The Gift by Lewis Hyde and decided I had to read it. The Gift is not a book about design, but it fundamentally changed the way I think about design. I began reading it in the summer of 2006 and brought it with me everywhere I went.

In the meantime, I found myself thinking a lot about the work and writing of Milton Glaser, and particularly his thinking about the ethics of design and the role design plays in our culture. It seemed that—like all gifts—giftlike design could help to bring people together and feel a sense of shared identity, regardless of what it looked like. This idea transcended aesthetics and seemed critically quite important. Glaser, who I later discovered is also a fan of The Gift, put it quite well in a film by Hilllman Curtis: “[The] passing on of gifts is a device to prevent people from killing one another, because they all become part of a single experience. And [Hyde’s] leap of imagination occurs when he says this is what artists do. Artists provide that gift to the culture, so that people have something in common. And I think that all of us who identify with the role of artists in history want our work to serve that purpose.”

When you look at design through the lens of gift exchanges, its objective shifts from making the world more beautiful to making the world more shareable, and its basis shifts from the production of forms by its practitioners to the production of actions by its recipients. The way things look is still important, but the creation of compelling things now serves to maximize appeal and shared experiences. New designs are not always necessary to do create these shared experiences, and in fact often the recycling of forms is more effective in spreading and sharing a message.

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Above: y=mx+b magazine project. Custom tote bag designed and screenprinted by Yelena Avanesova.

Above: A spread of Ryan Quigley’s well story, “The Future of Fashion,” from y=mx+b. Page through the whole magazine from Issuu below, or visit the website to order or download your own copy.

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Above: Christopher Miller created “A Gentleman’s Guide to the 21st Century,” a buying guide divided into three booklets: work, play, and love. Inside, the guides mixed a kind of email informality with a nostalgia for the classicism of centuries past.

Create a product catalog for an object from the future. This should be an object that you will desire, but it may be anything from an overpriced luxury item to an essential tool for surviving 10 to 20 years from now. Use your imagination. The market for this product will be an important consideration. Your catalog should be largely image-driven and should use minimal text. It should pursuade, convince, and seduce us.

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Above: Yelena Avanesova’s project focused on a book she decided to read for the class, Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, which imagines our planet after the last human has died off. Yelena’s underlined passages combined with imagery from vintage National Geographic magazines in this unique presentation of a world and text remembered. More + 10 to 20 projects below.

Above: Isaac Weeber’s book centered around sorting predictions about the future into three categories: plausible, possible, and impossible. These were color-coded and these colors showed up on the outer margins of all the content he chose to reproduce depending on his personal opinion.

Above: Yu Chung Lim’s book was a catalog of existing experimental architecture projects that she felt pointed a way toward the future of building and urbanization.

Generate a book about the future. This future should not be hundreds of years away, however: I’m interested in what you think about the immediate future, within your own lifetime, no more than 10 to 20 years from now.

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Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

These are slides from the lecture I gave to my publication design students on the first day of class. The first half of the lecture was focused on craft. I basically looked at Case da Abitare, a beautifully redesigned Italian home magazine, and then showed my students how to take it apart. (There is a great interview with the magazine’s creative director Tyler Brûlé, art director Kuchar Swara, and photo director Stephen Ledger-Lomas logged here on our class blog.) I started with a heavily-gridded page, the Index, and reveal the magazine’s basic 12-column structure. I went on to show how lines and rules are applied to the gutters and outer margins of that 12-column grid. Then I showed how the type is sitting on a p3.5 baseline grid which governs the placement of all horizontal elements on the page. Basically, the height of any element on Case da Abitare’s pages is a multiple of p3.5. Then I showed students how to guess at type sizes based on baseline reoccurrance, and finally I showed how all of these templated elements play out across a variety of grid schemes.

The second part of the presentation is a set of “Notes on Magazines.” First, I asked students to consider magazines as a publication form by contrasting them to other types of publications. (For the sake of simplicity, I definited a “publication” as any object with multiple pages made available to the public.) This included newspapers, journals, brochures, books, and blogs. Then we looked at various “toggles” within the magazine form itself. These included timing (or frequency), scope, length, number of authors, quantity of advertising, makeup of audience, and different strategies for distribution. Finally, I sketched a “garden variety” three-act magazine. This is what most lay readers learn as the magazine form proper: front of book, feature well, and back of book, with all the content-driven and stylistic assumptions that come with those sections. —RG

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The last two pages of the 1979 book Future Cities: Homes and Living into the 21st Century describe what will happen on earth over the next 120 years. Reproduced below are the authors’ predictions for the first ten of those 120 years, from 1980–1990. Source: Paleo-Future.com

1980–1990

• Satellites in Earth orbit beam educational programmes to many countries in the underdeveloped Third World.
• Wind turbines—modern windmill designs—are developed which can supply electricity economically.
• Domestic computers run household equipment. Electronic chores include keeping accounts, ordering supplies, suggesting menus, cooking meals and keeping a diary for the people living in the house.
• Newspapers supplied to homes either via a computer print-out or in electronic form over the TV screen.
• First domestic robots used as household “slaves” to do simple tasks.
• Terrorists steal nuclear warhead from military base. Threaten to blow up a city unless their demands are met. General realization of the appalling risks of poor security promote measures to keep atomic weapons under proper “lock and key.”

Nuclear fuel detector-satellite placed in orbit to maintain a watchful electronic eye on the world’s supplies of atomic material.

• Good insulation and other energy-saving features built into all new houses.
• Solar panels in general use to heat water in homes. Solar-electric cells used to generate electricity for some uses, such as recharging batteries.
• World tree planting programme begun. Aim is to restore the oxygen-producing capacity of the world’s plant life. Centuries of being chopped down have reduced the world’s forest areas to a fraction of their former size. Other benefits include the production of wood-alcohol to use as a substitute for petrol in cars.

I hope I’m remembering this right, but I think it was one of my favorite teachers, Paul Elliman, who once remarked that some classes start with a program and others start with a provocation. He was often fond of the latter approach, and in the case of teaching this class, so was I. The goal of the class was to introduce students to different kinds of publications, but I chose to focus on artists’ books, catalogs, and magazines. Simply designing these forms in a vacuum, however, wouldn’t do: what makes any publication great is its context and, more importantly, its content.

This conversation continued as we passed content around and began reforming it into other publication types, first as a sales brochure and then as a full-length magazine. Throughout, we had discussions about not only the future, but about the nature of collaboration and about the many publications and periodicals that inspired us to think about what’s coming next. —RG

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I’m interested in Borge Morgenson’s J39 Chair.

In 1927, a No. 7 armed rocking chair designed at a Shaker workshop in Mt. Lebanon, NY somehow arrived in Denmark, where it immediately captivated Kaare Klint, a leading figure in the modern movement there. It was the same kind of chair Brother Robert Wagan’s workshop had been producing since the 1870s, but the Danes had never seen anything like it, nor had they ever heard of the Shakers. Klint ordered a replica and shared it with his students. In 1947, one of those students, Borge Morgenson, designed his J39 chair, which drew heavily on the Shaker sources. The chair quickly became a familiar icon in Denmark and would soon be one of the first modern Scandinavian designs to be marketed in the U.S. by its producer, the Danish Cooperative FDB Mobler.

It might seem like this is a story about influence, and of course it is, but if you look at it that way it’s because you’re seeing things from the causal side, from the side that considers how an object comes to look how it looks and who made it that way.

If you look at this story in terms of effects, the question, I think, is much more interesting. Is the J39 chair a Shaker chair? Is it only possible for Shaker chairs to be made by the Shakers themselves? Put even more simply: what makes a Shaker chair a Shaker chair?

Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that only the Shakers can make a Shaker chair. This is a tricky argument to make: not even the Shakers considered themselves the “makers” of the things they made. There was only one maker, and it was God. The No. 7 armed rocking chair was a gift from God. It was no more a Shaker chair as it was anyone else’s.

Nonetheless, to support themselves and their communities, the Shakers were among the first in America to try mass production, and they were so successful at it that the Shaker name became synonymous with quality. Mail-order catalogs of Shaker goods were distributed up and down the east coast of the U.S.

So: who really created Shaker chairs if the Shaker’s didn’t? You might argue it was the people that bought the chairs from the Shakers’ catalogs. Shaker chairs became Shaker chairs not because of their designers, but because of their customers. Identification, after all, rests on recognition.

Anyway, one of those chairs ends up on a boat and the boat ends up in Denmark, where no one has heard of the Shakers. To Kaare Klint and his fellow Danish designers it’s just a chair but it’s not just a chair, it’s a very special chair. They copy it. Were the copy to be purchased by someone who recognized it as a Shaker chair, would that make the copy a Shaker chair? And: is it now a Danish chair also?

Above: The cover of Emmet Williams’s booklength poem Sweethearts, published by Hansjörg Mayer (1967).

Kaolin Fire created an online Williams Word Generator for 10 letters or less, and Todd L. has helped me created a PERL-based generator that runs locally on my computer for longer words. Because of this, I now have a complete word list for the 11-letter word “sweethearts,” the engine of Williams’s famous poem. It beats every other 11-letter word I’ve tried both in quality of words and in quantity. There are subjects (she, he, we), great nouns (art, heart, tea, sea, wart), and verbs in singular and plural forms (eats, hears, wears). Williams was absolutely a master at work.

The complete list follows after the jump.

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I’ve written two Williams Poems before. “Spraypaint” is my third. I have shown it here in stencil; Williams often used stencils in his work, most prominently in his poem “THE VOY AGE.” In my dreams, “Spraypaint” would be applied using Jürg Lehni’s Hektor in performance. (Hektor is a device I think Williams would’ve really liked.) I have also shown the poem here in two panels, which is another device I have adopted from Williams himself. The poem reads, “A saint I ain’t. I rap in sin. I rain in print. I pray in rap. I rant in pain. An ant I ain’t. I paint.”

Above: Barack Obama’s signature O designed by Sender LLC and Mode of Chicago, IL.

A new day dawns.

The best part? It was there the day Obama announced his candidacy and they never went back, never changed, never wavered. The symbol was fresh and original from the start, but it became an icon because Obama stuck by it and continues to stick by it. An admirable quality in both a leader and a logo. Stay true. The greatest strength comes from confidence, consistency, and vision.

For this second post in this series of highlighted passages (first post here), I’ve chosen “Escape Attempts,” Lucy Lippard’s introduction to her famous book on conceptual art, Six Years: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Austrialia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones), edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard. The hyperlinks sometimes illustrate examples from the text and sometimes annotate it with something drawn from my own interests, but hopefully either way they’re worth a click. —RG

On the tenets of Conceptual art
Conceptual art, for me, means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or “dematerialized.” […] Conceptual artists gloried in speeding past the cumbersome established process of museum-sponsored exhibitions and catalogues by means of mail art, rapidly edited and published books of art, and other small-is-better strategies. […] [W]e saw “ultra-conceptual art” emerging from two directions: art as idea and art as action. […] Communication (but not community) and distribution (but not accessiblity) were inherent in Conceptual art. Although forms pointed toward democratic outreach, the content did not. However rebellious the escape attempts, most of the work remained art-referential, and neither economic nor aesthetic ties to the art world were fully severed. […] Verbal strategies enabled Conceptual art to be political, but not populist. Communication between people was subordinate to communication about communication. […] For the most part communication was perceived as distribution, and it was in this area that populist desires were raised but unfulfilled. Distribution was often built into the piece. […] Decentralization and internationalism were major aspects of the prevailing distribution strategies. […] The easily portable, easily communicated forms of Conceptual art made it possible for artists working ourside the major art centers to participated in the early stages of new ideas. […] Perhaps most important, Conceptualists indicated that the most exciting “art” might still be buried in social energies not yet recognized as art.

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Above: The same post, before and after. Before, the post’s title was on-grid, but it did not align with either the left-hand margin or the descriptive header above. Now, metadata has been moved to the bottom of the post so the title can align properly. Yellow highlighting has been added to increase emphasis on the title and also to help direct readers that they are not on the homepage but on a sub-level post. The double header bars have been replaced with a single underline. Also, the three vertical links from version 1 have now been incorporated into a longer, chattier header that gives visitors full access to the content of the site.

I’d been admiring the work of designer Randy J. Hunt and his studio Citizen Scholar for quite awhile. I was really knocked out by the beauty and elegance of his work on the great designer goodies site Supermarket, and after that I was determined to find a way to work with him on something. During a break from my studio this summer that has since become permanent, I did a bit of travelling, cleaned house, and then turned my attention to some of those rainy-day jobs you always save for tomorrow. Highest on my list was taking a fresh look at Lined & Unlined, and I dropped Randy a note to see if he’d be interested in helping me out. A design writer himself, he has done a stellar job as our blogger at AIGA/NY for over a year, and I knew our conversation about reworking the site would inevitably take us into thoughtful critical territory as well. After a ton of hard work and a great deal of patience with his demanding client, Randy and I wrapped L&UL v2. A few weeks ago, we sat down to talk about what’s new. —RG

Randy J. Hunt: What interested me most when we first started working, other than the content of course, was the idea of “not changing much.”

Rob Giampietro: That’s a good place to start. I’m fond of this saying by Stewart Brand from his “How Buildings Learn” BBC series. He says, “the chief architect of buildings is time.” I think in a way L&UL was a house I’d lived in for 2 years, and it was just time to move some furniture around, paint a wall, add a new driveway, etc.

RJH: Absolutely. In all cases I try to realize a design in service of content approach, but sometimes that’s difficult. In this case, I don’t think it could have been any other way.

RG: Sometimes when you start a new design project, the temptation is to throw things away. But this can be akin to saving over a file, you lose the thread of your thinking. I think we weren’t looking to throw anything away or save over anything in this case, Renda had done an amazing job building the foundation. We only wanted to look at a site that had grown organically over a good period of time and try to make some specific adjustments that will help it receive more of that kind of content and, also, to endure.

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