Above: Subway advertising for NYC’s new condom campaign.

I recently chatted with writer Emma Pearse from New York Magazine for an article about the city’s new condom campaign. Emma and I had a really wide-ranging conversation, and I found this topic a particularly engaging one as a graphic designer.

Magazine space is tight, and a few fragments from our conversation were finally smushed together to make the quote that ran. But since space is cheap online, I thought it might be worth my time to fill in the gaps and raise a few of the points that Emma couldn’t include in her piece. —RG

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Lined & Unlined has been up and running for about a year and a half now, and so far I’ve had the good fortune to hear from a few of you out there in one capacity or another. Everytime I have, I’ve been incredibly grateful for the insight, encouragement, or critique, not to mention a lot of virtual introductions to people from far and wide. The site doesn’t support comments right now (though someday I may reconsider this for certain posts), so other than sending me an email about something specific, there aren’t a lot of ways for all of us to interact.

In that sense, it seems like it’s time for the site to evolve. I’d like to get to know more of you, who you are, what you like, what you don’t, why you’re reading, what you’d want to read more of. And, since you know what a fan I am of gift-giving, I’d like to offer you something in return. Something non-virtual. Something real.

So, in that spirit, I decided it might be fun to take the blog offline for a week and do five “posts by post.” The week of 12 May 2008, I’ll be sending out five postcards to anyone that joins the L&UL mailing list. If you sign up, you’ll get one postcard per day sent right to you, wherever you are, totally free. Sort of a blog by mail, but cooler. Consider it a little dose of nerdy design goodness, and you don’t have to plug anything in to get it.

You can sign up using the form below or head over to the new subscription page anytime you like. You’ll find more details about the mailing list there as well.

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Above, from top: MacPaint tool palattes, designed by Susan Kare, 1983–84; George J. Sowden, interior designs, 1983.

Plastic laminates had been around for awhile. Cheap and cheery, the material has graced all kinds of restaurants and bars, though over time it could be most commonly found in corporate eateries like McDonalds and Baskin Robbins. Barbara Radice notes that “Plastic laminates today are still a metaphor for vulgarity, poverty, and bad taste.” Memphis sought to question this, bringing low-class laminates into high-class interior collectibles, and, in the process, paving the way for a reception in which their products were recognized as simultaneously avant-garde and ugly.

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Looking back at the last two posts on L&UL (here and here) made me think of this student project of mine from 2000, which seems to bridge those twin interests of concrete poetry and contemporary classical music. The assignment, as best as I can recall, was to turn a musician’s calendar of events into a short commercial using only type and sound. As a big Keith Jarrett fan, he was a natural choice, and I particularly liked the intensity and inventiveness of his improvised solo piano concerts for a project with such spartan constraints. (The music is from Tokyo: Part II of the Sun Bear Concerts from 1976. The concert schedule and venues are fictional.) Though it’s definitely still rough, I like how the keyframe counter’s time, normally invisible, surfaces as a grid that dictates when and where things appear onscreen. I was only able to output the keyframe counter in Monaco, so that became the typeface of choice, though its minimalism and monospatial modularity appeals to me in a piece about visualizing time.

Watch Keith Jarrett: Solo Concerts

Above: Daniel Plainview takes his injured son H.W. to safety after the explosion.

The night before I read my essay “Part Notes” at KGB Bar as part of SVA’s D-Crit Reading Series, I found myself stealing a free few hours to go see Paul Thomas Anderson’s breathtaking new film, There Will Be Blood.

About halfway through the film, there’s a gas explosion at one of Daniel Plainview’s derricks, and his adopted son H.W. is thrown back and hits his head from the blast. I was so emotionally engrossed in their relationship that for several minutes I did not realize that that the music playing beneath the scene was Arvo Pärt’s “Fratres,” the very piece of Pärt’s that’s the subject of “Part Notes.” And it’s not just any version of the piece: it’s the version I first heard, recorded on Tabula Rasa with Gideon Kremer on violin and Keith Jarrett on the prepared piano. My concerns about the datedness of an essay from several years ago faded: here was a bracing, delicate, and original use of Pärt’s thrilling piece. It seemed as relevant to me as ever.

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I’ve been thinking about Emmett Williams a lot lately, even more since coming back from Amsterdam with a copy of his poem Sweethearts in hand. I’ve been thinking about the kind of verse that crops up in Sweethearts, where the word and its letters in their order become an engine to generate this whole world, and it saddens me that Williams was the only one exploring this particular form as deeply as he was. Like the sestina or the pantoum, two other highly structural and underused poetic forms, Williams’s form generates a tone and type of poetry all its own. I’ve explored the form just a bit already in a poem called Wastebasket. This is a longer and I think more successful attempt, written at the request of a friend doing a collaborative project whose submissions are acquired by way of a gift circle among contributors. When the circle turned toward me, I found myself looking at a short, silent film of a man standing on a windy bridge in the snow. I was asked to use the film in my response. Doing this poem was such an intense and quietly rewarding experience, and I hope to make many more of them as time goes on. I would like to see Williams’s form alive and flourishing, even in just a small way. The poem reads: “No owls as we wake now. As flakes fake snow, we fake OKs. So now we owe. Lakes soak. Oaks flake. No snow owls. No snow as we wake.” —RG

I was recently asked by Lauren Mackler, a former student of mine at RISD, to be part of a project she’s working on that will collect thoughts on the question of authorship in design from a range of people working in the field. While it’s an abstract and difficult subject to approach, I noticed that my writing has only dealt with this issue in a glancing way, and this seemed like a good time to get a few more concrete thoughts on the table. What follows really just lays out the issues as I see them in the broadest possible sense. It’s kind of a “brain dump.” There are, I’m sure, projects more nuanced and interstitial than those my analysis allows for, and I think that’s all for the good. Designers can and should challenge how their work is considered by the public and authorship is part of that. But as they initiate these challenges, they will inevitably encounter at least a few of the issues I outline below, and, in those cases, I hope that sharing these thoughts will be of some help. —RG

Authorship in design is a sticky question, and always has been. There are a few considerations: collaboration, control, voice, and limits. The questions that follow from these considerations are simple enough. If—like architects or filmmakers, but unlike bookwriters or oil painters—we collaborate on our projects with a huge array of people, including paying clients, regulatory and legal institutions, fellow design staff and subcontractors, printers and fabricators, merchants and mailing houses, are we even able to “author” a work? To aid us in this discussion on collaboration’s impact on authorship, some designers (in particular Michael Rock) have pointed out Andrew Sarris’s auteur model, developed for the analysis of filmmaking.

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Above: The author Lewis Hyde at home.

No doubt familiar to L&UL readers by now, one of my favorite books is Lewis Hyde’s The Gift. (Here are at least five posts so far: [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]) Published in 1983, it is now being issued in a 25th anniversary edition by Vintage. This article by Jeffrey MacIntyre of the New York Observer, while it wanders a bit in the middle, does come to a satisfying conclusion on the book’s significance:

Though it’s always enjoyed a small cult following and word-of-mouth circulation […], The Gift was generally overlooked when it was first published. But what once puzzled critics about Mr. Hyde’s ambitious and complex thesis looks prophetic today.

He shines particularly in anticipating the issues of culture in the age of the Internet. The radical democratization of access to media of all forms, from the print newsstand to blogs, from user-pay Radiohead album downloads to the long tail of Amazon’s back catalog, has irrevocably shifted our sense of the cost as well as the shelf life of art. It’s now cheaper than ever, in most cases, to produce and disseminate art—as well as to curate, discuss and appreciate it. Mr. Hyde’s central idea about art’s social function—that the consumption (and enduring value) of art ultimately transcends any commercial transaction—is looking increasingly like an idea tailor-made for our present moment.

The 25th anniversary edition’s subtitle has been changed from Hyde’s slightly awkward original “Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property” to the closer (but blander) “Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World.” The cover has been changed too, redesigned here by Angus Hyland in the UK and here by Mark Abrams in the US. I admire both of these designers’ work, but unfortunately both covers lose Hannah Cohoon’s iconic apple basket in favor of clichéd graphic hearts. I fear that Hyde’s opening observation has come true:

At the corner drugstore my neighbors and I can now buy a line of romantic novels written according to a formula developed through market research. […] Even the name of the series and the design of the cover has been tailored to the demands of the market.

Happily, the 25th anniversary edition also includes an expanded prologue and afterword by Hyde, both of which are valuable. (A PDF of the afterword is on Hyde’s own website here.) Like his introduction to the book, Hyde’s prologue deals with the marketing of books themselves, and particularly how it was difficult in the beginning for The Gift to find support from book merchants because its contents couldn’t be summed up in, as Hyde writes, “ten words or less.” By the end of the prologue he proposes a ten-word summary line anyway, which I think is fantastic: “Bad-boy critic takes on vampire economy.” The poetry of Hyde’s tagline reminds me of this little book by Eva Weinmayr of headline placards written for the Evening Standard. It’s another book that’s full of poetry and well worth picking up.

My friend Cindy Heller, wonderful designer of Bidoun magazine and a building mate here at 195 Chrystie Street is doing a great project called Wanderbag. Wanderbag is “a collaborative art project through which artists and small businesses promote greater environmental responsibility.” Cindy’s asked a handful of friends, artists, and other inspiring folks to design the fronts of cotton tote bags so we’ve got a fashionable way to use the same bag to go from bookstore to grocery store and back again.

My contribution is an homage to the groundbreaking Concrete poet and Fluxus chronicler Emmett Williams, who passed away this February as Cindy had started asking for submissions. My WASTEBASKET poem (above) works in almost exactly the same way as Emmett’s famous poem SWEETHEARTS (the introduction to which was written by none other than Richard Hamilton.).

My poem reads, “weak webs / a teak base / seas east west / wake bake / take wastebasket.” For further reading on Williams’s work, try starting with this interview from Hans Ulrich Obrist. Designers may also find it interesting that one of his poems comes up prominently at the end of this interview with Experimental Jetset [PDF]. Williams’s work has been very influential for me, and I’m sure for many more. He will be missed.

Wanderbags, Cindy tells me, will be available early next year. Stay tuned.

I’ve made a few improvements to the site over the last few weeks, and now that they’re working the way they should I figured I’d let everyone know that they’re there to use. I envisioned L&UL as a big collection of resources, readings, and (hopefully) useful information, and I think both of these upgrades are in keeping with that spirit. A big thank you, as always, to Renda for her help and advice.

Google Search
The first major improvement is that I’ve swapped out Wordpress’s search engine for a custom search engine (or CSE) powered by Google. I got this idea from Khoi Vinh of Subtraction.com, who’s switched his site over and written thoughtfully about that process in this post. The Google CSE is free and the only downside is that visitors have to deal with a few Google ads off to the side, which at this point I think everyone’s used to. The benefits, though, are huge. You can now search the library and the recommended readings much more comprehensively, for potentially long-lost things like this reading about the Hausdorff dimension or maybe a book by Clifford Stoll.

Designers, Booksellers, and Broadcasts
Delicious is an incredibly powerful tool for storing information, and one of my favorite things they offer is a Linkroll bookmarklet, which allows you to feed any set of links with a particular tag to your own blog or website. With this tool, I’ve built three new pages—one for Designers’ websites, another for Booksellers’ websites, and a third for Blogs and Podcasts—each of which will be dynamically updated anytime I tag a new site. I love scanning blogrolls for valuable new links, but often times lists can get so long that they become unwieldy. Hopefully this approach alieviates this problem by focusing the content a bit, as Delicious itself does. My links list has always lived in the library section of the site, since I think of it as a set of “online resources.” Scroll down and look to the right on that page, from now on they’ll always be permanently accessible there.

Recent critiques of Olympic Games imagery have understated the difference between identity and symbol.

A game’s identity embodies a specific place and time, while its symbols are placeless and timeless. London 2012’s jagged neon constitutes those games’ identity, while the International Olympic Committee’s five rings are the institution’s enduring symbol of global unity. The IOC insists on this distinction, laying claim to its symbols explicitly, which triggered the recent rethink of Chicago’s Olympic bid.

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