I’ve got a review of the new edition of Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color in the most recent issue of Eye, but there’s also an interesting piece about the future of typography online that collects thoughts from Chester Jenkins, Jonathan Hoefler, and Stephen Coles that’s a good overview for those new to the subject. Titled “The End of Default,” this bit from Simon Esterson and Jay Prynne’s introduction caught my attention:

Clients such as corporations and publishers who were accustomed to branding every visible square inch with their custom fonts had to accept the default nature of the Web, and many designers have long resigned themselves to living through the typographic equivalent of the dark ages, relieved partially by the advent of Cascading style sheets (CSS) which allow much greater control over the styling elements of a website, including the size, weight and style of the (still limited range of) fonts.

For a significant minority of designers, the limited type palette became a signifier of authenticity, a cool hair shirt they could wear with pride. The “default look” of non-Flash websites has spilled into books, magazines and music design as a conscious style choice rather than necessity.

Back in 2003, I wrote a piece about defaults for Emigre that tried to present them as the thorny, complex topic that they still continue to be. Defaults still serve to self-reflexively critique their own making (as diagnosed above), but they also extend Modernist concepts into the present and update them. I wonder if they will continue to be a productive area of critical inquiry. Historically, they were an intriguing response to the ’90s debates about the possibility of designer-authors. Where once the question was, “How do designers assert themselves as authors?”, defaults countered, “What if you take designers out of the system altogether?”

While the Eye quote above has a slightly skeptical bent about this work, I see it today with more positive eyes. Rereading “Default Systems in Graphic Design” now, I feel increasingly distant from my point-of-view then. That tends to happen with certain kinds of critique; they become dated faster than the work they describe. My goal these days is to write things that, whenever possible, are slower, richer, and hopefully more enduring.

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Kelly at Nothing is New recently posted some of Lady Greyler’s scans of ESPRIT’s 1984–86 Catalog.

As a kid, I used to wander these stores with absolute delight. ESPRIT was perhaps one of the earliest brands I could pick out of a lineup. It still looks energetic and fresh today — the sassy, flirty sister of Memphis, decked out in its patterns, colors, and offbeat esprit.

MoMA acquires the @ symbol. NYT:

No one knows for sure when it first appeared. One suggestion is that it dates to the sixth or seventh century when it was adopted as an abbreviation of “ad,” the Latin word for “at” or “toward.” (The scribes of the day are said to have saved time by merging two letters and curling the stroke of the “d” around the “a.”) Another theory is that it was introduced in 16th-century Venice as shorthand for the “amphora,” a measuring device used by local tradesmen.

Whatever its origins, the @ appeared on the keyboard of the first typewriter, the American Underwood, in 1885 and was used, mostly in accounting documents, as shorthand for “at the rate of.” It remained an obscure keyboard character until 1971 when an American programmer, Raymond Tomlinson, added it to the address of the first e-mail message to be sent from one computer to another.

It was acquired formless—purely as a concept—and from the public domain:

[…] “MoMA’s collection has always been in touch with its time,” Ms. Antonelli said, “and design these days is often an act with aesthetic and ethical consequences, not necessarily a physical object.”

That’s why MoMA decided against adding a specific version of the @ to the collection in favor of using it in different typographic styles and sizes. Ms. Antonelli likens it to the museum’s acquisition of “The Kiss,” a performance art piece by Tino Sehgal, in which a couple embrace for several hours. Just like the @, each performance can take a different form with new protagonists — though there is a difference. MoMA reportedly paid $70,000 for “The Kiss,” while the @ is joining the collection free.

An absolutely fascinating interview with ECM founder Manfred Eicher on the occasion of the label’s 40th anniversary last November is now online. Though he downplays the importance of the label’s cover designs, they were tremendously influential in shaping my initial interest in graphic design. Lars Müller’s book of ECM covers Sleeves of Desire is almost always in reach of my desk, and another, Windfall Light, is soon on the way.

In answering jazz critic Gary Giddins’s question about the sleeve designs, Eichner cites Gertrude Stein’s maxim to “think of your ears as eyes.” ECM often uses the quote in its materials, but Eichner says it was used first in liner notes for the elegantly understated design of Keith Jarrett’s 10-LP box set The Sun Bear Concerts. (Eichner also playfully describes designer Barbara Wojirsch’s choice for the box binding material as “trash paper.”) The Tokyo concert’s meditative second section continues to be one of the most remarkably evocative things I’ve ever heard on the piano—play it, and you’ll no doubt see the rain falling.

David Shen asks, “Why aren’t there more graphic designer venture captialists?” His answer: fewer designers relative to other disciplines, lower chance of designers receiving a large cash windfall to get started, general fear of higher-risk investing among non-investors combined with lack of venturing know-how and adequate time horizons, and atypical skillsets vs. standard VCs with business and management backgrounds.

Shen’s post was written at the end of 2009 and cites Method and Fuseproject as counterexamples, design firms that have worked for part-equity stakes (rather than service fees) in the past, and commenters rightly include 37signals and Coudal Partners as well. However, many of the obstacles Shen mentions are already in flux: there are more design grads, more designers owning their own small businesses, more designers seeding other designers’ startup projects, etc. In short, I think we’re on track to see more and more designer VCs in the years ahead, and Shen agrees. Here’s hoping.

I’ve tried to find the pearl in the oyster where others have not. And there’s a lot of branding Wolff Olins does that I’ll happily support. The megabranding agency may be “every designer’s favorite hate piñata,” as Armin Vit so humorously put it, but I do try to give every new branding program a fair shake when I first see it.

But when it comes to AOL—excuse me, Aol.—I am at a loss. The company’s name, derived from an acronym, is now reconfigured as a meaninglessly unpronounceable word. (Apparently it was done to shake us up.) The word’s accompanying period, which completes no sentence I can find, is instead a flippantly ungrammatical affectation. (It connotes, in alternate-reality brandspeak, “confidence, completeness” and is a “pivot point” for offshoot brands.) Its adjoining artwork, far from remarkable, is instead an utterly uncommunitive, anything-goes venture into Blandsville. Even the new brand’s strategy, which attempts to reposition Aol. (I almost can’t write it that way) as a content company as other more august content companies fight for survival, seems rather misguided. Design Observer has a roundup of other opinions, but that’s mine.

I know clients aren’t perfect. Designers aren’t either. Companies change hands and have to fly under new flags. I get it. But here’s what these companies should realize: symbols change too. They change by being put out in the world and they are changed by us, the people who learn and invest in understanding them. (When you put something in the fridge, it’s part of your life.)

The old AOL’s running man, while he may have stood for speed back in the dial-up days, now stands for an IM client used by millions of people everyday to stay in touch with their friends and loved ones. He has tremendous value. He stands for connectivity, and, very simply, for AOL. We recognize him, and have spent time learning to do so. As for the goldfish-hand-swirl-blob-doodle-squiggle-etc clipart, I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to pick it out of a crowd, puzzling, as I surely will, over how I’m supposed to say the word emblazoned across the front. As with doctors, the first rule of redesigns should be simple: first, do no harm.

At Yucca Mountain, where nuclear waste will remain stored for over 1,000,000 years, the issue is how to create a warning durable enough to last for that long. The answer is in diversification:

We have looked very closely at what WIPP is doing—the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico. They did a study with futurists and other people-sociologists and language specialists. They decided to come up with markers in seven languages, basically like a Rosetta Stone, with the idea that there will always be someone in the world who studies ancient languages, even 10,000 years from now, someone who will be able to resurrect what the meanings of these stelae are. They will basically say, “This is not a place of honor, don’t dig here, this is not good material,” etc.

New problems, classic solutions (via Kottke). One of my students at Parsons arrived at the same solution earlier this year when I put the challenge to my Experimental Typography class. Project description here.

Jason Santa Maria asked me to contribute to his monthlong Candygram series, celebrating the joys of candy. I took on Smarties in my essay “Brain Food.” Here’s a sample:

The Smarties package of my youth was an exercise in minimalism. Its graphic interest, the stripes of color, came directly from the different flavors inside. Its structural integrity came from stacking the tablets atop one another and twisting them tight. It’s as if Ce De Candy channeled Hideyuki Oka’s classic “How to Wrap Five Eggs” when they concocted the package. Today’s Smarties differ in one unfortunate respect: they depict the package on the package itself. Maybe it’s a symptom of our meta-obsessed times, or maybe it’s a fear of pure abstraction, but this minor graphic revision leaves the prospective Smarties consumer feeling a bit of the Dröste Effect with a dash of Cluckin’ Chicken thrown in for good measure.

Read the whole thing here.

PERMUTATIONS
W/ DANIEL EATOCK & ROB GIAMPIETRO

Opening reception/
Energy Yes!
Thursday, October 15
7–9 PM

W/————
141 Division Street
New York NY 10002
www.jiminie.org/WITH

So we’ll each make a work and place them together. Or side-by-side. Or within one another. I’d like to make a new work with glass clipframes. I’ll use the words then, clipframes and permutations. Maybe your poems in my frames? I like this idea of an accident waiting to happen. What if it’s more specific to the space itself? Because it’s quite small, it’s only a storefront. The show’s not up for long, so consider the duration. Roughness, too. And compression. Yours are modular in the same way as mine. They’re permutations, visual rhymes of each other. That’s what gives it meaning. It should be quite an empty gallery when you look at first. Yes, the gaps are what will fill it.

Taking us one step beyond Flickr monographs, the ABC Verlag Flickr Pool is devoted to a publisher. Documenting the beautiful and increasingly rare books produced by this Zurich-based art and design press, the pool includes such classics of Modernism as Graphic Art of a Swiss Town, Publicity and Graphic Design in the Chemical Industry, Design Concept Realisation, and Official Graphic Art in Switzerland, which is still waiting to be photographed.