Above: Interior of Interaction of Color from Eye 75. Photo by Noah Kalina.

There are two types of primary colors: additive and subtractive. The subtractive primaries (CMYK) are made of pigment and become darker when combined, while the additive primaries (RGB) are made of light and become brighter when combined. In this formulation, Yale University Press’s new expanded edition of Josef Albers’s Interaction of Color is distinctly additive, brightening the corners of this influential classic and broadening it to a two-volume slipcased set.

With colored bindings inspired by one of Albers’s lessons, these volumes operate in concordance: one carries the text, the other an expanded set of 145 plates created by the artist and his students. The reworked design brings Interaction of Color closer to its original 1963 edition, which, according to Nicholas Fox Weber, the executive director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, was a “set of unbound folders […] heavier and larger than anything Yale University Press had ever published.”

Once again more suited to a museum patron’s coffee table than an art student’s backpack, this comprehensive set changes our interaction with Interaction, insisting we clear a space, spread the book of plates beside Albers’s descriptions, and learn the act of seeing color afresh. In lesson after lesson, Albers shows the mutability and pliancy of color as a creative material, how it is changed by the colors surrounding it, by the time we spend looking at it, by its distance from our eye, and by our eye’s own imperfections as a perceptual apparatus.

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Above: Ministry of Information poster, made but not distributed in 1939, later rediscovered by Stuart Manley of Barter Books.

In her seminal 1970 essay on posters, Susan Sontag begins by making a distinction between the poster and the public notice. “Posters are simply not public notices,” she writes. “Both posters and public notices address the person not as an individual, but as an unidentified member of the body politic. But the poster, as distinct from the public notice, presupposes the modern concept of the public—in which the members of a society are defined primarily as spectators or consumers. A public notice aims to inform or command. A poster aims to seduce, to exhort, to sell, to educate, to convince, to appeal.” There are many tools in the poster designer’s arsenal to create the appeal Sontag describes, and the very rise of the poster as a form is tied to the rise of a technology needed to produce this appeal: color lithography. Implicit in Sontag’s argument, though, is a claim about the form of information itself. The information the public notice offers arrives pure, unvarnished, unadorned. The information the poster offers is designed, decorated, expressed. One’s form is neutral and the other’s is inflected. But is information ever formless? Can it ever be delivered without some influence from its carrier?

The public notice as an object presents us with a challenge: Where does seeing stop and reading start? Where does information end and design begin? As we witness the rise of a sober new Helvetica age, the public notice’s flat language and style shows up more and more in contemporary design. Here’s a look at some of that work, some earlier artistic predecessors, and some of the issues that arise from working with language as a medium in art and design.

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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.

Here’s a bit of exciting news: editor John Walters has purchased Eye Magazine from Haymarket Media Group. Very eager to see where John and his group will take the magazine next.

Two great links from Eye magazine editor John Walters’s moving small talk at the AIGA National Conference in Denver a few weeks ago. The first is Walters’s own magazine Unknown Public, a subscription-based music “magazine” of sorts. Walters’s comment on the name—”I felt there was an ‘unknown public’ out there that would respond to these things”—is as good a reason for starting a magazine as any I’ve heard. The box format of UP reminds me a bit of some of the later issues of Neville Brody’s font subscription ‘zine FUSE. Walters’s talk also introduced me to early electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott, who is quite a fascinating character. Contemporary proponents of Scott’s eccentric commercial scores include Gorilliaz, Soul Coughing, Mark Mothersbaugh, and The Kleptones. Scott: “The composer must bear in mind that the radio listener does not hear music directly. He hears it only after the sound has passed through a microphone, amplifiers, transmission lines, radio transmitter, receiving set, and, finally, the loud speaker apparatus itself.”