A lyrical essay by the late Memphis founder Ettore Sottsass on Design Observer.

I would like to break this strange mechanism I’ve been driven into. I would like to break it for myself and for others, for me and with others. I would like not to have to play the role of the artist only because this way I get paid, and I wish it wouldn’t even occur to others that there’s anyone who gets paid for being an artist. I would like all of us or none of us to be artists, as we were when we did drawings, boats, ships and windmills, cableways and telescopes.

Well worth a read.

Three of Archigram’s wonderful experiments—Walking City, Plug-In City, and Instant City—are well-displayed here (via Design Observer).

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!

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.

In the newest issue of Eye, Jason Grant contribues an essay called “Awards Madness,” which considers the role of design awards. Among his many sources Grant quotes Slovenian design theorist Oliver Vodeb: “Many designers are experts in decoding what kind of work will have a chance of winning which award. The competitive context not only shapes the nature and quality of the outcome but affects the whole philosophy of design. It creates a mindset of decontextualised design thinking and practice. It reduces design, design thinking and practising to a self-referential commodity.” Winners keep winning. Grant also cites James English’s book The Economy of Prestige, which was central to my essay on design awards from Design Observer two years ago.

From Alice Twemlow’s great post on Design Observer about the GTF show at the Art Institute of Chicago: “Graphic design has been displayed in museums as art, as cultural or historic artifact and as consumable commodity, but rarely in a way that reflects its full complexity as a functioning entity embedded within systems of use. Here, using the display mechanism of the institutional bulletin board, GTF have presented their work as information.” As a long-time GTF fan, I can’t wait to check out this show when I’m in Chicago in a few weeks.

Above: American 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.

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Left: Conway Library, London. Right: Witt Library, London. Photographs by Candida Höfer, 2003–5 (via The Nonist).

When it comes to the organization of knowledge, a lot is revealed by the system of organization that’s used. For most serious academic libraries in America, the organizational system of choice was invented in 1874 by Melville Louis Kossuth Dewey (or Melvil Dui, as he liked to spell it), who was an assistant librarian at Amherst College when his eponymous system was devised.

The Dewey Decimal Classification system (or DDC) is definitely widespread, however there are some notable exceptions. The Library of Congress, for example, has its own system, known as LCC. And The New York Public Library has not one, but two, arcane systems: One is the Billings Classification, a broad subject classification created in the 1890’s and recently retired in favor of LCC; the other is a fixed-order scheme arranged by the size of books.

So that’s how the pros do it. But what about the rest of us?

Before I consider that question, let’s get back to Dewey for a second. A trailblazer in many ways, Dewey was the founder and editor of Library Journal, a cofounder of the American Library Association, and an outspoken advocate of spelling reform, a 19th-century movement which suggested changing odd-looking British words like “catalogue” to more familiar-looking American ones like “catalog.”

One of the words that would have caught Dewey’s eye was “colour” — or, more patriotically spelled, “color” — and on this subject Dewey’s opinions were perhaps a bit unorthodox. Later in his life, Dewey sponsored several pamphlets about Ro, a language created by Rev. Edward Powell Foster in which words are constructed using a categorical system similar to Dewey’s own system for books. In Ro, words starting with “bofo-” are color words, as in “bofoc” for red (c=crimson?), and “bofof” for yellow (f=who knows?). Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, does it? Replace the color words of this lovely final line from Robert Haas’s poem “The Problem of Describing Color,”

Red, I said. Sudden, red.

with the Ro equivalents,

Bofoc, I said. Sudden, bofoc.

The poetic effect is not really the same. It’s a bit like saying the hexadecimal color equivalent of medium goldenrod — “EAEAAE” — out loud. Like a computer language, Ro is not a language of nuance, it is a language of hard, driving logic. Such a regimented worldview may have also shaded one of Dewey’s other unorthodox color opinions: he was rumored to be an extreme racist and advocate of racial segregation.

Questionable personal beliefs aside, I have never found the Dewey Decimal Classification system to be an accurate reflection of how books are organized in my own mind — or anybody else’s for that matter. Certainly I understand the DDC’s advantages when it comes to large-scale collections, but if how we choose to organize our personal effects says something about who we are, then an arbitrary numeric system says very little about me. My library is, to borrow from Georges Perec, “a sum of books constituted by a non-professional reader for his own pleasure and daily use.” Perec’s definition comes from a wonderful essay of his titled “Brief Notes on the Art and Manner of Arranging One’s Books” and includes such other quoteables as “The problem of the library is shown to be twofold: a problem of space first of all, then a problem of order.” I am well aware of both.

Perec lists several possible ordering schemes in his essay, and in practice I have used a number of these, sometimes alone and sometimes in combination with one another. Randomness (or chance) has dominated certain shelves of mine for a while. Loose categories governed by architectural constraints was a working method of mine, too, with a large wall grouping my novels and a side table sheltering the smattering of books I have on the dramatic arts. Sometimes the size of the books themselves is the governing agent: I have ganged up a set of cheap paperbacks on a squat shelf because they fit there splendidly. A book’s value can govern my placement of it, for example, I keep my expensive books away from the sun. In other cases, time is the reason for a book’s placement, with older books piling up in a dark corner of my studio while newer books are proudly displayed on my coffee table. “None of these classifications systems is satisfactory by itself,” warns Perec, and he is right. But one idea from his list, “ordering by color,” seems to be gathering a small following of late, particularly among the visually-inclined.

Recently, I stopped by a design studio in my building called Thumb to see my friend Luke Bulman. He’d just reorganized his books by color, and I asked him why he did it. A few reasons resonated with me, and helped to illuminate his logic.

Above: Luke Bulman’s studio.

For one, books he’s purchased or received as gifts are books he knows and often loves, and the color of these books is a major part of the experience of interacting with them. He’s not the only one. When I glance at my own bookshelf, I immediately react to the black spine and stacked caps of Tibor, the metallic silver heft of a monograph on Frank O. Gehry, the austere white backdrop of Sol LeWitt, and the optical orange punch of the 15th edition of The Chicago Manual of Style.

Another of Luke’s reasons is this: organizing his books by color allows him to discover new and unexpected relationships between books he knows well already. When two unrelated books are forced to occupy the same shelf simply because of their spine color, the shelver is asked to think about whether they have ideas to share between them. Perhaps the designers of these chromatically-related books saw something in the books’ content that even their authors did not. Maybe their ideals share a common hue.

The orange of my Chicago Manual of Style (which in my own theoretical color-coded library would be shelved next to Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading) seems to support this romantic notion about the color of ideas, which has been explored more fully by Dmitri Siegel in his short piece for Dot Dot Dot 8 entitled, “Why Are All These Books Orange?” Siegel shows four books at the start of the piece: An Introduction to the Principles of Transformational Syntax, Metacritique: The Philosophical Argument of Jürgen Habermas, Adorno and Horkheimer’s irresistible “Dialectic of Enlightenment”, and, last but not least, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. None of these, despite their common sunny color, are exactly what you’d think of as beach reading. In thinking over the titular question, Siegel decides that “I search out these books because their relentless orangeness speaks to the relationship between theory and visual practice. Just as the designer enforces a uniform surface to market this genre, the content of the genre — theory itself — is used by savvy designers to add a marketable mystique to their work.”

This “marketable mystique” may also be a part of Luke’s final reason for organizing his books by color: pleasure. Our bookshelves often take up a good deal of space in the places we live and work, and organizing them by color transforms them from a banal backdrop into a poppy, rainbow-colored focal point. Books organized by color are cool to look at. Just ask designer Mark Owens, who transformed a photograph of color-coded binders in at a European office supply store into a 15-second bumper for the MTV show “Video Clash.”

Above: “Video Clash” by Mark Owens. © MTV Networks, 2003.

Or artist Chris Cobb, who (along with 20 volunteers) recently reshelved the 20,000 books at San Francisco’s Adobe Bookshop according to the color wheel.

Above: “There Is Nothing Wrong In This Whole Wide World” by Chris Cobb, in Adobe Books, 2004. (Photographs via Tomas Apodaca.)

Even the The New York Times Magazine’s style section recently featured the home of art collector Andy Stillpass, which houses a number of site-specific works by leading contemporary artists in a wide variety of media, including Stillpass’s own books, which were rearranged first by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster to form “The Blue Vein” in 1993 and then further juggled by Rirkrit Tiravanija to form “The Red Threat” several years later.

Above: Photograph by Jason Schmidt for The New York Times, 2006.

“The Red Threat” indeed. Ours is a color-coded age, and the prime example is the Department of Homeland Security’s Advisory System, where the highest rating on the scale, “SEVERE,” is colored red. The more you look, the more you see an enthusiasm for color-coding in every corner of our culture. A cursory glance at Flickr does well at articulating the range. Users there are sharing photos of color-coding systems they’ve observed on everything from condiments to bike racks, from dress shoes to trash cans. In addition to books, I know a number of people who’ve organized their records by color, and this makes lots of sense too. The many moods of music seem well-suited to color-coding, as does the indescribably abstract quality of the artform itself.

So, will Pantone’s numbers replace Dewey’s decimals anytime soon? Probably not. But don’t let that discourage you. To rearrange your books is to see them afresh and to investigate yourself in the process. Even if you make a terrible mess, Perec reminds us that “Disorder in a library is not serious in itself; it ranks with ‘Which drawer did I put my socks in?’” and your sock drawer is probably color-coded already.

This article first appeared on 27 August 2006 at Design Observer. © 2006 Rob Giampietro.

Update: I was thrilled at the response this piece got from the readers at Design Observer, and their sharp minds were quick to point out few oversights on my part and additional points of interest. Ann noted that “the cataloging system most widely used by research and university libraries […] is, indeed the Library of Congress system. DDS is mostly used in public libraries, not academic libraries.” Very correct. Prem spoke of the contributions of Willy Fleckhaus, who, when he “designed the paperback line for German publisher Suhrkamp in 1963, set up a color coding system for every title based on subject.” Parts of Fleckhaus’s project are visible here (spines visible) and here (covers visible). —RG.

We get the word “koan” from Zen Buddhism, where in Japanese it translates literally as “a matter for public thought,” sort of an open-source philosophy for ancient times. Koans often demonstrated the inability of logical reasoning to produce enlightened thought, and, as a trained lawyer and insurance clerk throughout his life, no one knew the deadening effects of logic better than Franz Kafka. Writing was his escape, his meditation, and, fittingly, Meditation was the title of his first published work, released in 1913. While all 18 koans inside are very much worth enjoying, it’s the shortest of them all—the penultimate “Die Bäume,” or “The Trees”—that I’d like to read as a meditation on typography.

The first of its three sentences plays with our expectations, our human predisposition to empathize. Kafka writes from the first-person plural, “we are like tree trunks in the snow,” and we, the readers, picture ourselves as such. No sooner have we done this when Kafka shifts tenses to the third-person: “they lie sleekly.” We are no longer in the trunks’ position. The shift seems illogical. Looking more closely at the first sentence, it now appears to be only a fragment beginning with “for,” like the second half of a thought. And the thought itself is not explicit, but metaphorical. Everything is twice-removed, yet “wedded to the ground,” immobile.

Kafka’s words are not intended to be logical, and they have as many interpretations as they do readers. But several readers have suggested that the “we” in the first sentence is not a human “we” but a set of printed letters. For many, including myself, the voice at the start of “The Trees” belongs to Kafka’s letters themselves, speaking directly to the reader: “we are like tree trunks in the snow.” Picture a field after a recent snowfall. Think of the straight, almost runic lines of the fallen boughs. Approaching them, they seem like characters from an unused alphabet. Just as with the wispy marks on a printed page, it seems as if they could be easily brushed aside: “a little push should be enough to set them rolling.” It is not, however, as Kafka reminds us, “They are firmly wedded to the ground.”

Historically, there is a direct relationship between our letters and the trees. Apart from having “leaves,” our word for “book” comes from the German word for beech trees, on which many runes were originally carved. Wood type, made by cutting letters from trees, is a practice as old as printing itself. As early as 2900 B.C., pictographic signs were influenced by the shape and rigidity of trees when Sumerian scribes began shaping styluses from the woody reeds that grew abundantly in marshy Mesopotamia. The blunted ends of these styluses were carved into a wedge Latin—giving the script Cuneiform its name.

A passage in George Jean’s book Writing: The Story of Alphabets and Scripts on Cuneiform gives a clue to the meaning of the final sentence of “The Trees,” where Kafka seems to remove meaning just as quickly as he’s hatched it. Jean writes that in Cuneiform, “each sign could have several different meanings, depending on context; the sign that represents a human foot could be understood as ‘to walk,’ ‘to stand up,’ ‘to move,’ and so on….” Our signs, so loaded with meanings, may conjure much in a single stroke. As soon as the picturesque image of a field in winter has entered our mind, Kafka is quick to remind us that it does not exist. It is merely an image in our minds, made by letters on a page and the writer who wrote them. The image’s existence is a metaphor for the shape of language, but it is only one of many metaphors. When Kafka’s letters spoke, they described not their true form, but a ghost of that form, an apparition, like a spirit in the trees.

This article first appeared on 20 June 2006 at Design Observer. © 2006 Rob Giampietro.

Last year’s I.D. Forty was a controversial affair. In Julie Lasky’s editorial note preceding this ranking of design’s movers and shakers, she observes that its “most important value is that it offers perspective, to us editors as well as to you.” Backpedaling from a critical stance, she asks rhetorically, “Why do I feel so defensive about the I.D. Forty? Is it that best-of lists, with their peppy exhortations of confident attitudes, look easy, when in fact they’re wrenchingly difficult?” To allay her anxiety, I.D.’s editors went for hard data, polling 800 “experts.” The result was a list of the 40 knee-jerkiest names in the design biz. In closing, Lasky quips, “The I.D. Forty grabs the zeitgeist—I have no doubt about that. As for seizing your attention, I can only hope.” (She needn’t have worried: Rick Poynor and the design community did take notice.)

This year’s I.D. Forty opens with an editorial note titled “The Fickle Finger of Fame.” In it, Lasky explains that during the process of compiling design’s most powerful, the editors uncovered some of design’s most undersung. The cover line asks, “Who deserves more attention?” If last year’s list rankled the masses by perpetuating what everyone in the design community already knew but didn’t want to talk about, this list, with its confident swagger of conferring not just affirmation but merit, seems aimed squarely at stirring the pot. Lasky admits as much: “We expect this issue to raise hackles. We hope it inspires debate about the relationship between talent, eminence, and publicity.”

But while the last list provoked outrage, this new list has scarcely gotten a mention. Why?

For answers, I turned to a book that turned up on a number of best-of lists that came out as I.D.’s editors were compiling theirs: James English’s The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value. English devotes his stellar book to a sociological study of a wide range of cultural prizes and awards. In so doing, he surveys the dynamics of our current cultural marketplace and evaluates the behavior of the individuals involved in that system when prizes are given, and—sometimes more interestingly—when they’re not received.

With any cultural prize, whether it’s the Nobel for Literature or the AIGA 365 Design Competition, there is a claim being made by the prizegivers on several levels. They claim, for example, that they are the ones who should be giving such a prize. They also claim that the prize is being given to the “genuine article,” a true example of what the prize stands for. Finally, they claim that a prize itself is possible to give in the arena of cultural endeavors. (All of these claims, of course, are frequently contested.)

English cites a breakdown of the first claim in the case of Beloved, Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel that failed to win both the National Book Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. In response, 48 black critics and writers drafted a letter to The New York Times Book Review questioning the “oversight and harmful whimsy” on the part of the two award committees who’d failed to recognize Morrison’s book. The result? Beloved went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and, several years later, Morrison herself won the Nobel Prize for Literature. (As an aside, I’ve often wondered what the “Nobel” for design might be. For years, it was the Chrysler Design Awards; today, it’s undoubtedly the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Awards.)

In the end, were the National Book Awards or the National Book Critics Circle Awards harmed by their oversight? No. Was Toni Morrison a beneficiary, in some way, of this oversight? Absolutely. As English points out, “The threat of scandal is constitutive of the cultural prize.” This means that we can’t have prizes without scandals, and we can’t have others winning awards without complaining that the awards don’t mean anything in the first place. The first claim—”What gives you people the right to give an award?”—is followed by the third—”How can you give awards to art, anyway?”

In recent weeks, we’ve witnessed a similar breakdown with the popular book A Million Little Pieces (whose AIGA award-winning cover, by Rodrigo Corral, I’ve always admired). Should James Frey’s embellished memoir have received Oprah’s coveted stamp of approval? Perhaps not. But Frey will almost certainly sell more copies, and Oprah’s future choices will almost certainly come with greater anticipation and scrutiny; the prize of being a part of Oprah’s Book Club is precisely the instrument used to engineer this in both cases. (Frey’s book shot to #1 on The New York Times paperback nonfiction bestseller list; Oprah’s new selection, Night by Elie Wiesel, shot to #1 earlier this week on Amazon’s sales rankings.)

Prizes that engender scandal routinely become more significant as prizes. First, who really wants to win a prize that no one really cares about? Further, as the brilliant Louis Menand writes in his New Yorker review of English’s book, “Accusations of inauthenticity shore up our faith that there is such a thing as authenticity.” In the case of the I.D. Forty this year, the reverse of this statement may also be true. Advertisements of scandal shore up our faith that there is no scandal to be found.

In addition to the claims above, each new prizegiver enters the cultural marketplace needing to make an additional claim: the claim that the new prize addresses something that is not being addressed elsewhere. Often this “something” comes out of Claim #1 (who’s giving the prize) or Claim #2 (what the prize awards). In recent years, design, like film and writing, has seen an increase in the number of prizes offered to its practioners.

As English points out, the film industry now issues more new awards than films. Yet, when anyone browses the year’s best-of lists, they can’t help but note the lists’ selfsameness. This is because in the awards economy, the rich get richer. Prizes beget more prizes. Attention begets more attention. This accrual of prizes results, ultimately, in value for their recipients. Once anointed, these high priests of an artform can then confer this value on less-acknowledged practitioners. (Stefan Sagmeister, #9 on I.D.’s power list last year, did precisely this, and graciously, during his presentation at last year’s AIGA conference in Boston.) This also is what this year’s I.D. Forty aspires to—the role of anointer.

What makes design financially valuable, despite all this talk of “innovation,” is the recognition of its value by a wide range of audiences. Prizes are a primary mode of recognition, used widely by designers (including this one) in their own marketing and self-promotion. Am I saying that winning prizes can result in financial gain? You bet.

This makes prizes valuable in and of themselves. So not only do scandalous prizes reinforce their importance, they also help to pay their own bills. The more you want a prize, the more you’ll pay to be considered for it or others will pay to have it continue to exist. But talk like this in the prize world is, of course, very hush-hush: most design magazines would not exist without the revenues from their highly-profitable awards.

As a result, English might accuse me (and perhaps himself) of breaking an implicit taboo for what I’ve written here. He observes, “As we lose our ability or our willingness to see the prize as a fundamentally scandalous institution, there is bound to be a period of painful contraction in the awards industry.” Fewer awards? I certainly hope so. But what I really hope for are awards that get us talking, get us debating, get us passionate about what our profession’s doing, where it’s going, and who’s leading it. There are many who’ve said privately to me that this year’s I.D. Forty was their bravest yet, and, with a few reservations, I agree. But how come no one out there seems to care?

There are good scandals and there are bad scandals. Bad scandals ruin careers and embarass institutions. Good scandals get us talking about our most deeply-held convictions and beliefs. Every scandal surroundng a prize is ultimately a collaboration between its issuers and its audience.

What design needs right now is precisely a really good scandal.

This article first appeared on 26 January 2006 at Design Observer. © 2006 Rob Giampietro.