Above: Richard Serra, “Verb List Compilation: Actions to Relate to Oneself,” (1967–1968).
Serra’s list inspired me to make one of my own, which is drawn from some of the peculiarities of a designer’s particular lexicon.
Lined & Unlined
A filing cabinet on the internet by Rob Giampietro. Read essays; class lectures, assignments,
and syllabi; browse websites by hundreds of designers, booksellers, broadcasters, and
vendors; dig in to a growing list of recommended readings; and scan what’s on my actual
bookshelves in the library. Otherwise, start here.
Pamphlets for Friends
Above: Justin Beal, “RE: The Un/happy Ending of Jules Dassin’s Thieves’ Highway.”
Last summer I contacted a bunch of friends and asked them to give me the materials for a 16-page pamphlet. The pamphlet could be about anything they wanted, and I would design it for them. In my email introducing the project, I wrote,
The content for these pamphlets will be provided by you, edited by me, and about anything you would like. You can use these 16 black-and-white pages to promote a polical platform or republish your favorite short story. You can showcase your portfolio or the photos from your vacation. The pamphlet may be thematic and unified or intuitive and random. I will take whatever you decide give me.
In exchange for your participation, each of you will get a complete set of the 10 pamphlets I create, along with 10 additional copies of your own pamphlet to share with your friends and family. It would be impossible to replace any one of you in the group, so I hope you all decide to take part.
The idea for the project came out of my reading of Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift, and much of this thinking was channeled into a subsequent article I wrote called “Form-giving.” But I also wanted there to be some kind of creative expression beyond that essay, a reaction I’d make to Hyde’s book as a working designer. A project with friends seemed like the thing to do here, both because friends are people we enjoy giving gifts to, and because as a designer my friends sometimes hit me up for things I don’t particularly want to do—business cards, etc.—and this seemed like a more even exchange, a way for me to enjoy their talents just as much as they were hopefully enjoying mine.
14 September 2007 — Unpublished
Five Other Forms
In conversation with a friend the other day I was reminded of the following assignment, which I used in a Senior Thesis class at Parsons not long ago. As students go back to school and begin working on new projects, it seemed worth sharing here. —RG
Now that you’ve done some basic reading and research, I’d like you to begin synthesizing some of your ideas in written form. For those of you who feel comfortable writing an academic paper or scholarly essay, this format is perfectly fine. However, I’ve found students sometimes struggle with this form, especially in describing their own projects and processes. If this is the case for you, you may want to try some other strategies for generating the text required for next week’s class. I’ve outlined five options for you below.
04 September 2007 — Education, Assignments
Collected Words
Above: Richard Hamilton, Collected Words. Thames & Hudson, 1983. Cover design by Richard Hamilton.
Ames Room
Occupants of an Ames Room appear to those viewing it from a peephole at a fixed point to be greatly distorted in size. Someone may appear the size of a giant one moment, and, crossing the room, seem no larger than a baby the next. In fact, it is the room that is distorted, not its occupants. Created in 1946 by American opthamologist Adelbert Ames, Jr., almost none of the walls or floors of an Ames Room are at right angles, even though the room appears to be a perfect cube. Floor and ceiling slope; one back corner is much farther away than the other. The room plays on our predisposition to judge size comparatively and gauge space according to fixed laws of perspective defined during the Renaissance by Alberti and others.
The Fonts of Summer
Above: Amercian Apparel product page featuring ITC Grouch, 2007.
Some things are made for summer. The summer hit, for example. Recently, I’m thinking of “Crazy,” by Gnarls Barkley, “Hey Ya” by Outkast, or, this summer, Rhianna’s “Umbrella” (which you might want to stand under whether it’s raining or not). Summer brings us beach reads and popcorn flicks, and, of course, summer food—light, cool, and refreshing. Designwise, we’ve definitely got summer clothes and summer places: wear your flip-flops out on the deck or your seersucker and khakis out to your country house.
So: why not summer fonts? I can’t think of a good reason why not. Like all things summer, a summer font need only follow a few simple rules. Be catchy. Be simple. Be happy. And be gone soon enough to belong to a single summer only.
Everyone’s heard of the Summer of Love. But I predict that this summer—in nerdy font circles at least—will be the Summer of Grouch. ITC Grouch, that is.
Notes on a New Website
Above: Old vs new—the homepages of studio-gs.com.
Kevin and I have just completed a serious revamp of our old website, http://www.studio-gs.com, and naturally a lot of thinking went into it. The broad strokes of what’s new about the site were included in our email to clients and friends: a lot of new work, a showcase of details, and a richer and more dynamic “News” section. These changes are fairly obvious to anyone familiar with the old site, but some of the models and discussions that informed the new site are not. L&UL seems like an ideal place to capture and share some of these ideas while they’re still fresh in my mind, so that’s what I’ve tried to do in the collection of notes below.
28 March 2007 — Unpublished
Behind the Eight-Ball
As part of my teaching at Parsons, every so often I get asked to be a part of or help with student projects or exhibitions. One of these opportunities crossed my desk a few days ago, and read in part:
I am emailing you all on behalf of the Senior Thesis Exhibition Core Team. As a result of tonight’s meeting the students decided that their objective is to represent all senior students in the design of the card and therefore agreed upon creating a collaborative opportunity for all students to participate in the creation of the visuals for the post card. We ask each of you to decide upon a 1×1 inch icon/image that would represent yourself and/or your work. This image will become part of a larger grid.
I must admit, if I were a student, I would have had a really tough time with this particular assignment. For one thing, trying to encapsulate a senior project, especially midway through the process of making one, is pretty difficult for my students, many of whom are making a long-form, large-scale project for the first time. I also wonder—though it’s certainly well-meaning—how truly “collaborative” a grid of 1×1 inch images is. Sure, it gives you a cross-section of styles and approaches and everyone gets equal play, but it seems like saying my sock drawer collaborates with my underwear drawer to form a dresser, or my car collaborates with the car next to mine to form a lot of parked cars. Yes, they show parts of a whole, but a “collaborative” whole, to me, it’s not.
16 March 2007 — Unpublished
Modern Hieroglyphics
I was looking at Pentagram’s elegant new logo for the One Laptop Per Child program—the non-profit organization has the goal of providing laptop computers to all children in developing nations—and I couldn’t help but be reminded of a logo I’d just seen on my trip to Italy, where, in the sleepy Cinqueterre town of Vernazza, my sugar packet from Albergo Gianni had a similar four-part glyph:
It’s as charming and childlike as the Pentagram logo, almost a rebus, and I can’t help but enjoy the fact that the owner probably designed it himself.
15 February 2007 — Unpublished
Form-giving
1. BASKET
The Gift came, as gifts often do, without my asking for it. Its cover flashed up on my computer screen by way of an Amazon.com server that drew upon a collective memory of what customers like me had already purchased when I logged in one afternoon looking for a particular book on Shaker design. The cover, probably designed in part by The Gift’s author, Lewis Hyde, caught my eye because it featured a drawing that Hyde, who is an English professor at Kenyon College, credits inside as “Basket of Apples.” The drawing, however, is more properly credited as “A Little Basket Full of Beautiful Apples” and was made 150 years ago by a self-taught Shaker woman named Hannah Cohoon, who would have called it a “gift drawing.” I had first seen it several days before, in an article from The New Yorker by Adam Gopnik on the Shakers titled “Shining Tree of Life,” where he describes both the drawing and the circumstances of its making:
Final Journal Project
Above: Detail from the cover of “This is Not a Manifesto.”
Work together to produce 16 copies of a printed journal. Each of you will get 1 copy. Send 1 copy to me at the address below by the due date. The remaining copy will be filed with the office.
The journal’s pages will be in 6 x 9 inch format, tape- or glue-bound. Each student will be responsible for 12 pages plus a short contributor bio with email/contact info. The content of your pages must include at least 2 and not more than 6 of your individual assignments from this class. You may also use portions of your reading responses, graphic/visual experiments from other classes this semester, and other students’ assignments from this class with their consent.
10 January 2007 — Education, Assignments
50 Footnotes
Above: Michael Trovela’s response to the assignment, which made use of on-screen PDF footnoting software. Spread from “This is Not a Manifesto.”
Using one of the essays from this week, add 50 footnotes (or annotations) derived from your personal experience of design education at RISD. Your notes may be visual, verbal, sonic, cross-referential, etc.
This assignment is from the class Graphic Design & Critical Thinking.
10 January 2007 — Education, Assignments
Ethics Poll
Above: Meg Dreyer’s response to the assignment, in which she compiled the data on the designers and then put the same questions to a professional attorney. His answers were often surprising. Spread from “This is Not a Manifesto.”
In 2 days, work together to compile 100 responses to Milton Glaser’s 12 steps. Ask for yes/no responses and ask respondents to provide additional comments where they’re willing. Prepare a results report using the quantitative data, an condensed set of qualitative responses, and supporting real-world examples of Glaser’s hypotheticals.
This assignment is from the class Graphic Design & Critical Thinking.
10 January 2007 — Education, Assignments
Recommended Readings
- 469. If you're in NYC this Tuesday 25 November, I'll be taking part in Dexter Sinister's CUBIST VARIETY SHOW at The Kitchen, a kind of living microfiche adaptation of their True Mirror project from this year's Whitney Biennial. I (or another) will be reading, along with fellow contributors Cory Arcangel, Mark Beasley, Walead Beshty, Sarah Crowner, Jason Fulford, Larissa Harris, Michael Portnoy, Steve Rushton, and Alex Waterman.
- 468. OPEN CALL FOR A WILLIAMS WORD GENERATOR. I've just posted a new Williams Poem called "Spraypaint," and to go with that I wanted to issue an open call for a little web application I'm unofficially dubbing the "Williams Word Generator." A Williams Word Generator is essentially a widget or applet that would allow someone (say, me) to type a word into a text box and then scan that word's letters in sequence for other possible words. The letters have to be used in sequence and cannot be used more than once (for an example, see "Spraypaint"). Would this be difficult to do? Email me and let me know!
- 467. "At present, U.S. copyright protects an individual's work for his or her lifetime, plus 50 years; corporations with works 'made for hire' hold rights for 75 years. Under [Sen. Christopher] Dodd's proposal, at the end of each of these terms, the rights to an additional 20 years would be publicly auctioned, the proceeds going to build an endowment dedicated to the arts and humanities." Sen. Christopher Dodd reads into the Congressional Record an article by Lewis Hyde from the L.A. Times on the so-called "Arts Endowing the Arts Act," which auctions off copyright extensions on fading copyrights (like Mickey Mouse), in order to build an endowment for new arts and humanities work in the future.
- 466. Daniel B. Smith has written a lengthy profile of Lewis Hyde for this week's New York Times Magazine. In addition to delivering an endearing (and enduring) profile of Hyde and his practice (a favorite phrase: "I worked on how I work"), the article traces Hyde's development as a poet in Minnesota, his work as an alcoholism counselor at the Cambridge City Ward, his travels to Cuernavaca to meet Ivan Illich, and, most interesting to me, his writing and the initial public reception of The Gift: "Hyde worked on The Gift for seven years, barely scraping by, spending long months hunting through obscure folk tales for narratives that reflected what he came to call 'the commerce of the creative spirit.' When the book was finally published, the critic Martha Bayles castigated it in The New York Times for naïvely 'esp[ying] a noble savage in every struggling artist'—a critique that was echoed elsewhere. Yet the artistic community immediately embraced Hyde’s work. A bevy of poets, including Robert Pinsky, Donald Hall and Gary Snyder, published a group letter in The Times responding to Bayles’s review and praising Hyde’s ‘search to regain the unity of economic, aesthetic, social and religious life.' Bill Viola, the pioneering video artist, remembers New York artists in the 1980s excitedly exchanging dog-eared, marked-up copies. 'In a society that mostly talks about money,' says Margaret Atwood, who keeps a half-dozen copies of The Gift on hand at all times to distribute to artists she thinks will benefit from it, 'Lewis carved out a little island where you can say, "Life doesn’t always work that way."’" I routinely give copies of The Gift to friends as well, but I love the idea of exchanging it with notes. (Hyde would call this "giving increase.") Last but not least, Smith shares that Hyde is at work on a follow-up (of sorts) to The Gift, which focuses on the idea of the commons from its development in medieval times to its arrival in America. An abstract and 11-page PDF excerpt is available (free) on Hyde's website here.
- 465. Illustrator Paul Davis comes to AIGA/NY Small Talks on 11/19, followed by artist Tom Sachs on 12/02. I wrote about Sachs the other day, but I forgot to mention one of my favorite shows of his, his jaw-dropping Space Station exhibition for Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills.
- 464. A whole host of interesting and thought-provoking work by Aleksandra Mir. First, from her recent show at Mary Boone, Gary spotted an interesting example of Neuland in use. Visually the drawing reminds me most of the cover of Wulf Sachs's book Black Anger, shown here on the right. The exhibition had a great name, playing off the politics of color and the supposed purity of whiteness. The words WHITE HOUSE were paired variously with PURPLE HEART, IVORY TOWER, RED NECK, AGENT ORGANGE, GREEN THUMB, SILVER LININGS, and others. Second, I am sad to have missed Mir's show Newsroom 1986–2000, but she is distributing the catalog free on her website along with other catalogs, which are collected here. This PDF distribution of artists' catalogs is a very interesting and timely gesture, as is Mir's starting Newsroom's catalog with the project's Press Release. Over 200 front pages from the New York Post and Daily News were recreated to build a narrative of found phrases from the city in the years leading up to 9/11. Interesting, too, were these pages' production of which Mir writes, "During the two months of the duration of this show, I will create an environment that primitively simulates a newsroom of a major agency or newspaper. The material output of the agency will take the form of drawings, which for me are traces of activities such as reading, moving, talking, remembering and reporting. Together with a team of assistants, I plan to create 200 drawings inspired by the aforementioned tabloid covers and my personal references to them." A photo of the team in action can be found here.
- 463. Like my friend Brian Sholis, who just reviewed her show for Artforum.com, I am obsessed with the still-life photographs of Sharon Core, currently on view at Yancey Richardson Gallery. Haunting, cryptic, and beautiful.
- 462. The Designers page has been updated with a bunch of new studios and is now working better than ever thanks to Randy. As always, you can check it out here or grab the RSS feed.
- 461. From NYT this summer, quoting Christine Rosen's article in The New Atlantis on multitasking: "William James, the great psychologist, wrote at length about the varieties of human attention.[...] To James, steady attention was thus the default condition of a mature mind, an ordinary state undone only by perturbation. To readers a century later, that placid portrayal may seem alien—as though depicting a bygone world. Instead, today’s multitasking adult may find something more familiar in James’s description of the youthful mind: an 'extreme mobility of the attention' that 'makes the child seem to belong less to himself than to every object which happens to catch his notice.' For some people, James noted, this challenge is never overcome; such people only get their work done 'in the interstices of their mind-wandering.'" In my case, that description hits rather close to home.
- 460. From Tom Sachs's "Glue Gun Manifesto," as quoted in Lauren Collins's New Yorker Talk of the Town piece: "18. Do a messy job first. Then take the time to repair it more thoroughly. The overall time will be the same but the result will be more 'fucked up' and show the evidence of your labor; 19. We want it to be 'fucked up.' That is good; 25. If it’s too drippy, schmear it—schmearing is wiping molten glue with a scraper—until the drops are gone." And don't forget: "I will keep my knife sharp because a sharp knife is a safe knife. I will not carve my initials into any living thing or anything that is not my property."
- 459. Last week at SVA I spoke a little bit about copying and its many benfits and byproducts. Among my examples was Milton Glaser's incredible I ♥ NY logo, which, as I've said before, is an advertisement for itself and has enjoyed widespread recognition and repetition not just for its graphic charm and brilliance but also for its open-ended sense of possibility. You can ♥ anything. Well, now you really can ♥ anything, because Dahl & Dane are making tshirts and tote bags according to Glaser's 1977 logo specifications, complete with the authentic American Typewriter (accept no substitutes). Order one today for you or the initials you love (via Joanna's wonderful Cup of Jo).
- 458. The wonderful Mr. William Drenttel wrote in to ask that I remind everyone to come out for the big, bumping Design Observer Fifth Anniversary Bash in NYC on 11/05. The great DJ Chroma (aka Mr. Kevin Smith) will be dropping the jams, it's going to be hott (with two t's). Come one, come all. And, between then and now, VOTE!
- 457. "I always quote a guy called Lewis Hyde who wrote about primitive cultures where there's an exchange of gifts that cannot be kept but have to be passed on. And 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. Certainly as much as we want to work to sell product. (Although not everybody feels the same way.)" Milton Glaser, from this wonderful short film by Hillman Curtis from a few years ago. I never knew Glaser had read Hyde when I compared his thinking on design ethics to Hyde's book in my essay "Form-giving," but of course now it makes perfect sense why the two are so beautifully in sync. Perhaps an even bigger coincidence is that I just happened to stop by Glaser's office the day Hillman Curtis was shooting there, and you see me for a moment in the film as I shake Glaser's hand just after he finishes saying this quote.
- 456. We've got two very special events coming up for AIGA/NY. First, on 11/11, Michael Rock (2x4), Eilzabeth Diller (Diller Scofidio + Renfro), and Jake Barton (Local Projects) are in conversation at FIT. After that, on 11/20, we've got legendary designer/publisher for an intimate evening Lars Müller at Bumble & Bumble. Both are not to be missed—hope to see you there.
- 455. Need a last-minute Halloween costume? You can always go as designer extraordinaire Wolfgang Weingart.
- 454. I'm just back from doing a bit of moderating at the outstanding WebbyConnect Conference near L.A. A nice roundup of links and ideas from that conference coming soon, but in the meantime I wanted to mention that I'll be speaking at SVA tomorrow as part of the D.Crit program's Fall Lecture Series. The talk is free and open to the public. Seeming to sense that I needed a bit of last-minute inspiration, Kevin sent me this TED talk from the always-stellar John Hodgeman. (Now if only there were some way to work the movie Dune into my talk...)
- 453. The New York Art Book Fair kicks off this weekend, and I'll be rushing back from LA to catch the last day of it on Sunday. It's always one of the highlights of the year. In tandem with the fair is the ARLIS/NY Contemporary Artists' Book Fair Conference, whose participants include my friends Stuart and David at Dexter Sinister along with Jason Fulford of J&L Books and Matt Keegan of North Drive Press. A lot of other great artists, critics, and art historians will be there as well; all the conference abstracts are here. Register here. David and Stuart are producing a special gift book for all attendees called Library Book, which collects and distributes PDFs archived on their website here.
- 452. If your interest is piqued after reading my recent post on game theory, this brand-new course by Professor Ben Polak on Game Theory from Yale's amazing Open Course initiative is well worth a look and listen. I've just started but, so far, highly recommended.
- 451. Only a few days left until the big election. That's right: the People's Design Award. Design Observer turns five this year, and I'll be casting my vote for them. They could use your support, too: vote here before 6:00pm EST on 10/21.
- 450. I love these postcards by designer Alison Haigh, which draw from imagery used on IQ tests (via It's Nice That).
