Modernism, Craft & Technology

8/13/2019 Modernism, Craft & Technology

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MODERNISM

CRAFT &TECHNOLOGY

Technology has facilitated graphic designersability to

further embrace the DIY philosophy of modernism

and the value of craftsmanship. The personal

computer was introduced over 20 years ago and

technology has evolved so that everyone from a

layperson to a trained designer has tools at their

disposal that can potentially empower them. As a

result, designers have acquired more titles, with their

ability to edit, author, and publish. Print on demand

(POD) technology has grown significantly in the past

decade, which has also fostered the DIY,

entrepreneurial spirit seen in modernist designers.

Having a refined skill set, the drive to keep perfecting


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ones craft, is critical in design, because software

cannot duplicate the knowledge that comes when

something has been repeated so much that it hasbecome ingrained in the psyche. A craftsman-like,

modernist designer is armed with the potential for

creating projects independently, (that were previously

not possible), due to advances in technology.

Designers have the opportunity to create their ownvoice and/or determine what they would like to use

their design expertise on and how. The professional

control technology has given designers creates

opportunities to advance causes they feel are

important, and possibly improve the quality of life andlearning for others.


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While their heroes are modernist designers like Wim Crouwel,

they combine this affinity with a DIY punk spirit that they

claim has always been part of modernisms vocabulary

you seem to have created a viable compression of certain modernist tropes that

propagate into contemporary visual culture, comment on it, and demarcate a clear

position


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therehas been a consistent urge to treat modernism as a style sheet, where it can

be separated from its substance like a Helveticastyled identity can perfectly


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essentialize a luxury beauty product, an airplane, a mediocre sushi-bar franchise,

and countless other examples. No doubt part of the success of modernism is its

lightness, the fact that it can from some perspective be seen as a legitimizer of the

entity that it is pasted on. Nevertheless, your treatment of modernism is more

concerned with its substance and therefore must at some point have (perhaps

violently) confronted the sushi-bar version of the contemporary Helvetica fetish


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We never think in the categories of style and substance. We always preferred the

notion of language; after all, a language is a system that incorporates both style

and substance, both form and content. The idea of a language presupposes a sort of

embedded ideology, the weight of history, an inherent narrative dimension allthese notions seem to be missing from the word style. We see International Style

more as a language then a style.


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When we brought up the subject of modernisms subversiveness in the Helvetica

documentary, we were specifically thinking about modernism as a dialectical model

defined by deconstructive tendencies on one side and constructive tendencies on

the other side. On the one ide, there are movements like Dada and surrealism; on

the other side, there are movements such as Bauhaus and Constructivism. Whatmakes modernism so interesting, so multifaceted, and ultimately so paradoxical is

the fact that between these two poles, all different combinations and variations (of

destruction and construction) are possible. In fact, sometimes these opposite poles

can be active within one single person think of Theo van Doesburgs role in De Stijl

and his interest in Dada.)

We often see punk as a sort of scale model of modernism.After all, punk is also a

phenomenon defined by deconstructive tendencies on one side (No Future, Destroy)

and constructive tendencies on the other (the whole DIY culture). What we were

trying to explain in the Helvetica documentary is that we regard modernism in a

similar way. However, if you would ask us now to elaborate on the subversivenessof modernism, we would probably start by defining it. For us, modernism has

everything to do with the notion of breaking spells, and the ambition to go beyond

the chains of illusion. When we say beyond the chains of illusion, that is a specific

reference to Erich Fromms book of the same title, in which he tries to synthesize the

languages of Marx and Freud. And in our view, t is exactly in the push and pull

between Marx and Freud where modernism can be located. To quote Marx, The

demand to give up illusions about its condition is the demand to give up a condition

which needs illusions. This connects all modernist manifestations. From the most

fragmentary surrealist collage to the most grid-based Constructivist composition,

and everything in between: They all aim, each in their own way, to go beyond the

chains of illusion. In that sense, we believe that every manifestation of modernism isinherently subversive. We believe that even in its most harsh and rigid form,

modernism still offers a way out. Even in those rare cases when modernism puts on

an unbearable authoritarian face, it still gives the viewer the possibility to

completely disagree. It provides a person something to chew on, to work with, to

bounce off of. It always demands an active position. Therefore, we even believe that

the more corporate outgrowths of late modernism possess a subversive potential.

It is tempting to see the internet as the ultimate fulfillment of the ideals of

modernism after all, the world wide web seems the perfect embodiment of Paul

Otlets Mudaneum.Also, when you look at it from a strictly formalist viewpoint,the whole visual landscape of the internet is made up of exactly those elements that

most people seem to associate with International Style: templates, grids, sans-serif

type, the specific use of empty space, flush-left ragged-right columns. Even the use

of all-lowercase letters in text messaging can be seen as stylistically linked to

International Style. But still we would say there is one fundamental, crucial

difference between the print culture of modernism and the digital culture of the

internet. In our view, print is still a more public medium. If a poster is hanging in the


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street, it is seen be every passerby in more or less the same way. Sure, the

interpretation of the poster will differ from person to person, but by and large, the

poster itself will appear in roughly the same way to every viewer, regardless of

his/her class, race, gender, age, personal preferences, etc.

This is different on the internet, where websites and pages conform themselvesinstantly to cater to the personal tastes and preferences of the individual viewer.

Google search results change from person to person, the advertisements that clutter

online profiles are specifically targeted toward the viewer, etc., etc. This makes the

online environment ultimately an individualistic, isolated experience, despite the

promise of being connected. It also makes most online activity a somewhat

unadventurous, undialectical affair, as you only will be confronted with stimuli that

are algorithmically curated for you, based on what large corporations (such as

Facebook and Google) expect you want to see. Whereas, within the context of the

street, you will be confronted with information that is not specifically intended for

you posters you might not immediately understand, slogans you might disagree

with (or not), kiosks carrying newspapers that are not necessarily tailored towardyour specific lifestyle, book stalls displaying secondhand books expressing

conflicting opinions. In our view, it is this notion of print culture within the urban

environment that offers the most dialectical, and therefore most modernist,

experience. So, its exactly that idea that we try to explore most in our work. And, as

paradoxical as it may sound, it is this theme of modernist print culture that is also

one of the main subjects of our online presence whether it is our actual website orthe Facebook group you mentioned.


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Writing in 1984, seven years after Never Mind the Bollocksand at a moment

when established New York art galleries were aggressively collecting the

likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, Rand points to punk and

graffiti as two of the most debased examples of graphic form giving: amateur,

trendy, and of-the-moment. The irony, of course, being that over the

subsequent two decades punk and graffiti (or, more precisely, hip hop) have

proven to be two of the most productive domains not only for graphic design,

but for popular culture at large. Meanwhile, Rands example remains a source

of inspiration to scores of art directors and graphic designers weaned on

breakbeats and powerchords.

what Rand means by a timeless principles of quality design is, of course,

modernism or, to be more specific, that form of graphic modernism first exported toAmerica with the diffusion of Bauhaus pedagogy in the wake of WWII and

subsequently popularized in the 1960s and early 1970s as the so-called Swiss

International Style. For vanguard American designers working in the mid-1980s

such work was largely felt to be exhausted and out of favor, associated with the

bankrupt corporate establishment of the Vietnam era and a vision of the designer

soon to be supplanted with the arrival of the Apple Macintosh.


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As Graphics Incognito the (GI) cover exemplifies this form of hardcore abstraction

and suggests an alternative to traditional modes of design authorship, pointing to

the open-secret of the collective, collaborative nature of all graphic design and the

productive reserves that remain to be tapped in design history, It is, in effect, the

logic of the logo, but in a context that is resolutely anti-corporate, anti-capitalistic,

and politically radical.

theBlack Flag bars are an example of hardcore abstraction par excellence. As if

fetched from the coarse geometric forms of De Stijl and early modernism, the four

black rectangles were originally meant to be a stylized representation of a waving

flag

Both Theo van Doesburg and Black Flag were committed to rupturing the surface of

bourgeois normality, and the tactics I have been describing strategic anonymity,pseudonym, and graphic abstraction were used as a way of disseminating their

radical message at all costs and on multiple fronts simultaneously. This rhizomatic,

networked logic, I want to argue, is the signature lesson that the graphic abstraction

of early American hardcore learns from early modernism without even knowing it.


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the story of early modernist abstraction is also a story of graphic designs origins,that, through De Stijl, inevitably takes us back to the Bauhaus and its pedagogy of

primary colors and abstract shapes.

Muriel Coopers landmark English-language edition of The Bauhaus: Weimar, Dessau,Berlin, Chicagoby Hans M. Wingler, first published by MIT Press in1969 and in a

smaller, expanded paperback edition in 1978. By any measure the book is a tour de

force of graphic design. Set entirely in Helvetica with the tight margins and rigorous

grid system of the International Style, it is a mammoth, comprehensive collection of

primary sources and photographs bound in a black slipcase with BAUHAUS set in

all-caps vertically along the left and side. Often referred to as the Bauhaus Bible, the

book as a totemic object, as much as anything else made the radical ideas of the

Bauhaus (including its often overlooked early bohemian, mystical, utopian phase)not simply available, but tangible to an entire generation of designers educated in

the wake of May 1968.


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Muriel Coopers other great contribution to graphic design is the MIT PresslogoCooper designed the MIT Press logo in 1963 while running her own studio in

Boston, and , in 1967, joined the Press as its first art director, pioneering new

directions in book design, including Learning From Las Vegasand the Bauhaus book.

While at MIT Press Cooper also founded a special experimental initiative to explorecomputer typesetting, book arts, and modes of self-publishing inspired by the

example of The Whole Earth Catalog. In 1973 Cooper went on to co-found the MIT

Media Labs Visible Language Workshop, and over a 20-year career conducted

groundbreaking research into the use of typography and graphics in the dynamic

representation of information in interactive media and interface design.


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the Bauhaus vocabulary of primary shapes and colors can be seen to have

spawned not only to a certain type of corporate modernism, but to any number of

bastard or soft varieties.

Modernism was an attempt to jettison the confining aspects of history. It replaced

the nineteenth centurys deep infatuation with the past with a twentieth-centuryoptimism about the present and the future.

The Modernists invented new formal languages that changed not just how things

looked, but how people saw. Modernism was a heartfelt attempt at using design to

change the world.

I think design definitely is a cultural forceAnd design should be educational

Modernism was optimistic about the role of design. Even the prissiest Modernists,

the Dadaists and Futurists, believed that design has a responsibility to carry a new

message


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This is the do-it-yourself entrepreneurial culture that has found a way to seize both

the means of production and the systems of distribution


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Technical skill has been removed from imagination, tangible reality doubted by

religion, pride in ones work treated as a luxury. If the craftsman is special becausehe or she is an engaged human being, still the craftsmans aspirations and trials hold

up a mirror to these larger issues past and present.


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All craftsmanship is quality driven work; Plato formulated this aim as the arte, the

standard of excellence, implicit in any act: the aspiration for quality will drive acraftsman to improve, to get better rather than get by.

Going over an action again and again, by contrast, enables self-criticism. Modern

education fears repetitive learning as mind-numbing but this deprives children of

the experience of studying their own ingrained practice and modulating it from

within.


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Skill development depends on how repetition is organized As skill expands, the

capacity to sustain repetition increases.

You get to know a terrain by tracing and retracing it, not by letting the computer

regenerate it for you.

You build up a kind of circularity between drawing and making and then back again

repetition and practice is very typical of the craftsmans approach. You thinkand do at the same time. You draw and you make. Drawingis revisited. You do it,

you redo it, and you redo it again.

Abuses of CAD illustrate how, when the head and the hand are separate, it is the

head that suffers.

Computer-assisted design might serve as an emblem of a large challenge faced by

modern society: how to think like craftsmen in making good use of technology

thinking like a craftsman is more than a state of mind; it has asharp social edge.`

a renewed recognition of the value of craft in graphic design

The obsessions of the Designers Voice camp are there to be seen in the enthusiasmfor individual production, DIY methods, design that starts with ones own fonts, low-

tech printing, and the shift toward self-publishing


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Its not about the world of design. Its about the design of the world.


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Massive Change was an ambitious project initiated by Bruce Mau Design and the

Institute without Boundaries created by MauComprising an exhibition, a book, a

radio program, an online forum, and various events and public programs, Massive

Changewas a multiplatform operation that harnessed the vision of its impresario to

the research capacity of its many student participants. The project fused the utopianspirit of the power of design to solve global problems with the dystopian worldview

of a planet facing enormous social and ecological challenges. Premised on the

answer to the fundamental question, Now that we can do anything, what will wedo? the project begun in the early 2000s was a bellwether of several trends,

including social impact or humanitarian design, research-based design practices,

transdisciplinary investigations and collaborations, and professional offices offering

educational experiences, such as Weiden & Kennedys W+K12 program (Portland,Oregon) and Benneton Group Communications Fabrica (Treviso, Italy)


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On the iPad, eye and hand movement are brought together and held captive within a

massive black frame.

Focus and distraction, linearity and nonlinearity: these conflicting categories of form

and experience define who we are as contemporary makers and users of media. We

hunger for focus because we feast on distraction; we crave linearity because we sooften drift off task. Read-later apps enable users to gather links and absorb them at

another time in an ad-free, typographically hygienic environment.


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Oliver Reichenstein and his colleagues at Information Architects have embraced the

iPads status as a holding cell for the distracted mind by creating the hugely

successful tool iA Writer, a word processor equipped with just one monospace font.

(Starve the eye, and the mind will flourish.) When struggling to compose a toughsentence in iA Writer, the aspiring author can switch into FocusMode, which grays

out the surrounding text; the icon for this constrained state of consciousness is a

padlock. Put your brain on lockdown.


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The telephone, invented to deliver the living human voice, is now used for writing

more than talking.


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In the traditional business model, publishers supply the capital required to

manufacture and distribute books, paying a printing plant to produce books in

volume and then providing copies at low cost for resale by bookstores. Today

technologies such as print-on-demand, low-cost digital printing, and web-based

distribution to name just a few are challenging this familiar model by enablingsmall presses and individual artists or authors to create books for narrower markets

at lower risk. Many designers today are using their knowledge of the book industry

to become publishers themselves.


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Editing is the act of selecting and preparing materials particularly texts and images

for publication. Using processes of selecting, condensing, managing, correcting,

modifying, and ordering these materials, editors, work with authors and designers

to help shape and realize books. Designers have begun acting as editors in variouspublishing projects.


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Book design has an enduring place in the tradition of publishing. In books with

complex and varied content, the designers role becomes as crucial as that of the

author and editor. Designers determine the materiality of a publication paper,

binding, page size, printing methods while creating a visual framework that invites

readers to seek, find, and wander. Often working with vast archives of potential

subject matter, designers actively gather, edit, frame, and sequence content. Thepossibilities become even broader in digital books, with their complex navigation

and diverse media components. While e-readers have proven especially conducive

to the linearity of fiction, visual books provoke a different kind of experience; an

atlas or an artists monograph aims to be collected, preserved, and perused out of

sequence rather than to be read from front to back. Some visual books may remain

well matched to the physicality of print, even as new types of media open up new

ways to combine words and pictures.


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Read-Later apps allow users to bookmark web pages for consumption at a future

time. Services such as Readability and Instapaper display content in a streamlined

format, stripped of advertising, navigation, and other competing elements. By

creating a reading environment that minimizes distraction, such services allow

users to harvest content from the crowded, action-oriented environment of the web

and then consume it in a place of refuge. Bookmarked content can be read from aweb browser, synced to a mobile device, or printed on paper. Readability, whose

elegant typographic format recalls the conventions of print, offers to support the

publishing industry by sharing membership fees with content producers. Unlike

publishing models based on advertising, which bombard the users eyeballs with

commercial pitches, Readability focuses on delivering content to people willing to

pay for a focused experience. The concept is built around mutual respect for readers

and writers


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Software applications designed to convert screen-based information into speech or

Braille, screen readers can be applied to websites, electronic books, and other

media, allowing blind, low-vision, illiterate, and learning-disabled users to access a

broad range of content. For screen readers to be effective, content must be

presented in a linear form, and visual elements such as images and buttons must be

captioned and explained. Features such as speech verbosity allow users to skip

over formatting descriptions or lists; language verbosity allows a text originating

from the United Kingdom to be read in an English accent.


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An application or website that collects headlines, blogs, podcasts, and othersyndicated content into a single stream or window, a news reader allows users to

quickly scan information harvested from diverse sources. Also called a news

aggregator of RSS feed, these readers take content from one context and present it

in a new one, stripped of its distinctive typographic features and endowing with

new. Websites that aggregate news stories can be carefully edited or curated

(Drudge Report), or they can be wholly automated (Google News). For mobile

devices, apps such as Flipboard, Pulse, and MyTaptu allow users to build custom


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streams from news and social media sites. Several designers have experimented

visually with and editorially with the idea of a news reader. Jonathon Puckeys TheQuick Brown gathers links to Fox News articles and uses typography to note changes

in the headline copy. Information Architects The TPUTHis a machine generated,

hand-polished news site that employs i/As web trends engine to collect links from

online opinion leaders

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