Above: Time to Wonder (Level 13, Grade 4 of the Holt Basic Reading System). Also shown: People Need People, and Books and Games. Series design by Pellegrini Kaestle & Gross. Photography by Dick Frank.

Every designer I know gets visually obsessed with something from time to time. For me, one ongoing obsession happens to be the Holt Basic Reading System.

I don’t know too much about the books themselves—the series was launched in 1977, and, according to this study, it seems to have been a hit with teachers and school administrators. It was used in my elementary school, Countryside, and I must’ve stared at the Time to Wonder cover (above) for a whole year in 4th Grade, though I don’t have a strong memory of it. But shortly after finishing an article on ITC Grouch a few years ago, I went home to see my parents. I showed them the typeface I’d written about, and my mom, a lifelong teacher, pulled Time to Wonder off a basement shelf and said, “It reminds me of this old textbook.” Of course she’d spec’d the typeface perfectly, but what really captivated me was the image that went with it.

Above, top: Photos from the 2007 RISD Yearbook designed by Nikolay Saveliev, Caroline May, Steve Reinmuth and Frank Vandiver. More here. Above, bottom: Franklin Vandiver for Topic 11: Escape.

I took Time to Wonder into my studio, where it sat on my desk for a few weeks in summer 2007. Around that time, a young designer named Franklin Vandiver stopped by to show us his portfolio. In it was the RISD Yearbook, which he’d designed with a few friends. The dividers featured photo setups that strongly reminded me of the Holt Basic Reading System. I asked Topic Magazine to commission Franklin to do some similar photos for our upcoming Escape issue. The bright, playful tableaus act as teasers to the articles within.

Above, top: Phototrophy, Detail X, 2005 by Thomas Demand. Above, bottom: XYZ 1 cover for ‘Boards by RBG6.

A few months later, Ryan Nelson put up a post on the Walker Art Center’s Design Blog called “Balloons, Spilt Liquids and Paper Constructions.” He wrote,

There is no doubt that each of these elements are visually interesting, but besides that, I have had little luck finding an explanation to their existence (or even their emergence) in current graphic design and photography. Perhaps the use of spilt liquids originated with Swedish designers, RGB6 and their poster for the typeface Kada. While it’s even possible that the use of paper constructions could have stemmed from the intricate workings of German photographer, Thomas Demand.

To this keen observation, Nelson added a nicely Hamiltonian wordlist:

Balloons: celebration, youthfulness, pop, expressive/abstract typography, party, etc. Spilt Liquids: spontaneity, irresponsibility, mysteriousness, happy accidents, playfulness, etc. Paper Constructions: exaggerated representations of actual objects, a play between reality and fabrication, artificiality, etc.

Around the same time, the book Tactile appeared, and it seemed the trend was official.

I started grabbing any images I found that reminded me of the Holt Basic Reading System Covers, and I recently uploaded them to Flickr under the set name, “After Holt.” Included there are everything from a portrait of designer Charles Hollis Jones that Franklin sent me to some retro Lufthansa menus designed by Otl Aicher from the amazing user alphanumeric. If you’ve got anything to add, let me know.

More Holt Basic Reading System covers after the jump.

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Wired editor-in-chief and Free author Chris Anderson giving a lecture in Chile last October. Photo by Carito Orellana.

I’ve just finished Chris Anderson’s Free, which is available free on Google Books or as a free audiobook. There has been a debate raging around Anderson’s book for a week or two now. For those wishing to catch up, Eric Etheridge’s NYT Opinionator blog has a great roundup of yaysayers and naysayers, and it’s well worth a look.

Here’s useful tidbit from Malcolm Gladwell’s pointed critique:

There are four strands of argument here: a technological claim (digital infrastructure is effectively Free), a psychological claim (consumers love Free), a procedural claim (Free means never having to make a judgment), and a commercial claim (the market created by the technological Free and the psychological Free can make you a lot of money).

What’s really fun about reading Gladwell’s review is getting a sense of how his mind works. The quote above literally shows him sorting ideas into bins and tagging them as he goes. Fantastic.

Seth Godin responded to Gladwell’s critique in support of Anderson and added a few insights of his own. Worth repeating:

People will pay for content if it is so unique they can’t get it anywhere else, so fast they benefit from getting it before anyone else, or so related to their tribe that paying for it brings them closer to other people.

Very much agreed with Seth on that.

One of the great things about Anderson’s book is its broad look at the idea of “free.” As an armchair read, it’s hard to get bored by all the fascinating examples and stories Anderson shares. However, this breadth is also a trap, because each invested community will tend to read Free narrowly, complete with its own predispositions, seeing holes in Anderson’s arguments as a result.

I see two faults in it as a book, one minor and one major. Minorly, it feels padded: Anderson repeats himself often. (I assume this is because he feels much of his audience will skim the book, not read it in full in order.) Majorly, it feels overreaching: while it’s true that “free” is a game-changer, Anderson occasionally lapses into what an economist might call “irrational exuberance” over his thesis. I think this happens because Anderson wants to fit Free into a category of business book that we all know well from airports and conferences: the “how to think about, recognize, describe, and potentially monetize a current cultural trend” book. This is, of course, a category owned by Gladwell, which is why it’s so fun to see them locking horns here. With this book, Anderson may have triggered the Tipping Point of Free. We don’t get much intellectual bloodsport like this these days.

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Three years after Real Time was published, Jennifer Bartlett first showed her mammoth painting Rhapsody at Soho’s Paula Cooper Gallery in 1976. In the essay that opens the book designed by Harry N. Abrams Design Director Sam Antupit nearly a decade later, critic Roberta Smith writes, “Rhapsody is Bartlett’s great and imperfect epic, a visual event that unfolds in real time, real space, and above all, real thought, without ever leaving the wall.” Indeed, for some viewers the work might’ve amounted to sensory overload. Painted on steel plates primed with white enamel and grey silkscreened grids, Rhapsody uses materials derived for subway signage and assumes a similar amount of running space as a typical station: 153 feet of wall for its 987 12x12 inch plates.

When it first appeared, it took the art world by storm. A short article in Art in America notes, “The piece traveled triumphantly for two years, with stops including Documenta 6 and the Whitney’s landmark ‘New Image Painting’ show. A second museum tour followed in 1985–86,” for which this book was made, and then “like Rosenquist’s F-111, Chicago’s The Dinner Party or Serra’s Tilted Arc, Rhapsody became an art-book legend, an oversized milestone, inconvenient and unseen.” In 2006 MoMA installed Rhapsody in its atrium and produced this short video interview with Bartlett (scroll down) talking more about the piece.

But Rhapsody’s ideal vessel, in my humble opinion, is the catalog that documents it. Smith’s essay, written specifically for the book, hints that she might agree:

Rhapsody’s disjointed narrative adapts extremely well to book form. Its reconstitution here makes Rhapsody more continuously available than it has ever been—providing the chance to pore over it ad infinitum, aided by Bartlett’s own text listing the conceptual impetus behind each plate. And, actually, a handheld Rhapsody is not at all farfetched. Like the Abstract Expressionists, Bartlett works large in order to be intimate. The plates are page-size to begin with, and painted mostly one at a time. And this book’s contrasts of installation views with big reproductions of single plates underscores the way Rhapsody continually pushes viewers back for the long shot, then pulls them close for an inch-by-inch examination. This contrast should also reveal that what looks dense and rich from afar is, up close, often startingly thin, forcing the viewer to balance an overall meditative resonance with a dashed-off nonchalance, which, in keeping with Rhapsody’s mass-produced surface, makes no concession to “beauty” or “touch.”

Set in square justified blocks of Richard Isbell’s expansive Americana, Antupit’s font choice may seem a bit quirky at first, but the reader quickly adapts. It is expansively horizontal, a vista, produced in anticipation of America’s bicentennial—an occasion that calls to mind all the breath, history, and amibitions of Bartlett’s painting.

I found these books propping up a coffee table at a thrift store in northern Maine, and I was instantly drawn to their dry subtitle, proclaiming them to be simply, “a catalog of ideas and information.” Both were published in 1973 – just a year before Vint Cerf would first use the term “internet” – and the series sought to deliver information in “packets” as swiftly as possible to readers, without the usually publishing lags or delays. Edited by John Brockman and Ed Rosenfeld, Real Time was in many ways the cultural predecessor to Brockman’s Reality Club, active from 1981–1996, which was itself a predecessor of the TED Conference, founded three years later in 1984. Brockman is a well-known literary agent and cultural impresario, as well as the founder of the Edge Foundation. Rosenfeld is notable for authoring The Book of Highs, a handbook for “altering consciousness without drugs.”

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MJ (1958–2009)

Whenever I have my studio lights set up I try to take some photos of books from my bookshelves at home along with whatever I’m photographing for work. I am a huge fan of sharing books on Flickr, but I thought it would be fun to share them here, too. I’ll try to do this as often as I can. —RG

I first bought Auguste Edouart’s Silhouettes of Eminent Americans for my friend Kate Wolkoff because of her interest in silhouettes (see her portfolio titled “Nocturne”), but then I loved it so much I went out and found a copy for myself.

Edouart was one of the great silhouettists of the 19th Century. He arrived in New York from France in 1838 and began travelling to many towns up and down the East Coast cutting silhouettes, including the affluent community of Saratoga Springs. Whenever he was commissioned to make a silhouette, he in fact cut two, one for his client and one for himself. By the time he decided to return to France in 1849, he had amassed a collection of nearly 10,000. Edouart left because of the advent of the daguerreotype left his business struggling, so he loaded all his portfolio cases on a boat bound for France with the intention of assembling a promotional monograph upon his arrival. It was not meant to be: the boat was shipwrecked, and only 16 of Edouart’s 50 cases were recovered. The National Portrait Gallery has assembled the surviving 348 silhouettes into this fine book, which is as remarkable for its colorful stories as it is for its colorless illustrations.

Above: The homepage at rg.linedandunlined.com.

Lifesite
When L&UL redesigned last fall, I wanted to create a kit of design parts simple enough to accomodate a wide variety of content over a long period of time. A “lifesite,” more or less. Some of that content (writing, teaching, resources) existed here already. Some of that content (design projects) existed somewhere else. And some of that content I haven’t even conceived of yet, or it’s been sitting around waiting for a month or two’s worth of rainy days to finally get off the ground. With the redesign, the goal was to find a place for each of these things under one roof.

Once again, Wordpress was the answer, and, again with Randy’s help, we built a project archive, which is now online. It’s still a work in progress, and I will be adding to it in the weeks and months ahead, but there’s enough there now to get a feel for how it works, so go ahead and have a look.

Visual vs Verbal Navigation
This might just be my taste, but when I arrive at site full of design projects I want to navigate with pictures first and words second. Project titles or completion dates may have meaning to their author, but they have little meaning to their user, particularly if the user is unfamiliar with the designer’s work.

I am a huge fan of Flickr’s “Detail View,” which shows thumbnails in a three-column array. If it’s powerful enough to find a needle in a haystack full of reference photos, it’s a good enough for visitors to this archive to find what they’re looking for quickly and easily.

If I do want to use words to navigate, I usually want to use words that I already know. Words like “Books,” if that’s what I need help making. Or “Nonprofit,” if that’s the type of project I’m interested in seeing more of. Or maybe a client’s name or a former studio affiliation. Basically, I want to describe projects with tags, not titles.

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One of my top five favorite films, The Limey, turned ten this year, and independently of that started popping up on the pop-culture radar again in a few different places. First in January on Elvis Mitchell’s wonderful podcast The Treatment, filmmaker Steven Soderbergh described his newest film, The Girlfriend Experience, as his most “Limey-like” film since the original. It’s about an elite call girl working in the pre-election hubbub of October 2008 and stars real-life porn star Sasha Grey. Then recently on The Onion’s awesome “New Cult Canon” series (which last week canonized another favorite of mine, Eyes Wide Shut), critic Scott Tobias added not just The Limey but also the film’s DVD Commentary track to its stellar lineup of films.

It was watching The Limey’s DVD commentary several times that spurred me to begin thinking about it in relation to another film I love, Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. In 2001 I was taking a course on Hitchcock and proposed an extended comparative essay about the two films as my final project. Most of the introduction is dry and overly academic, but the following paragraph cuts to the core of my interest in making the comparison:

Some of the most heated debates of the ’60s/New Wave were Marxist-Capitalist debates, but in these two films Hitchcock and Soderbergh actually visualize these opposing ideologies by consistently placing them in formal opposition to one another and moving their characters between them. North by Northwest, made in 1959, came at a cusp point of the Atomic Age amidst the post-WWII prosperity in America, and its finale, in which both Communism is thwarted (though it’s not said outright) and a marrage is made, wreckons with these twin late-’50s predicaments. The Limey, made in 1999, came after the end of the Cold War and amidst a wave dot-com prosperity in America. That the Marxist is a villan in one and a hero in the other speaks volumes about these thrillers. That both films are thrillers helps determine exactly how. Again and again, Soderbergh and Hitchcock use the idea of exchange over time, and, more importantly, over space to discuss Marxist and Capitalist ideologies. By coupling movement—which is concerned with the formal kinetics of the characters, camera, and shots—with ideology—which is concerned with the social implications of the films’ content—both directors formulate a relationship between the way things move on screen and what they ideologically represent.

The finest parts of the essay, however, are not these broader theoretical constructions but the two sections that work hardest to closely observe how these films move, how their directors work with the camera, and how their editing schemes organize the scenes and story. This is done first on a formal level and then on a more narrative level, as the each of the films’ characters and settings are aligned with different types of transactions, both political and economic. The essay’s methodological cousin is Frederic Jameson’s worthwhile high-wire analysis of Hitchcock’s film, “Spatial Systems in North by Northwest,” available in its entirety on Google Books here. —RG

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Above: Spinning DNA into GOD with seven moves.

Doublets, or Word Ladders, is a game invented by Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll for “two little girls who found nothing to do” on Christmas Day 1877, though there is some evidence that writers played with the form during Luther’s Protestant Reformation or perhaps even earlier in the Odyssey. Carroll originally called the the game “word-links,” but by 1879 he had published enough of the puzzles in Vanity Fair magazine to merit a collection by Macmillan titled “Doublets: a word puzzle,” a reference to the witches’ incatation in Macbeth, “Double, double, toil, and trouble.” The name stuck, and the game was an immediate and runaway hit.

The rules are simple: change one word into another by altering a single letter, which counts for a step. Each step needs to read as a word, and the start and end words are often related in some poetic way. Carroll’s explanatory example involved changing HEAD to TAIL in five moves: HEAD / HEAL / TEAL / TELL / TALL / TAIL. Other popular doublets include making a DOOR LOCK, obtaining a LOAN from a BANK, and turning WHEAT into BREAD (more here and here). Later, other gamers followed in Carroll’s footsteps, adding rules for Studdlets, Splices, Splits, and Splinters (see David Miller’s excellent “Word Games for Formal Logic,” here).

In this 1996 article from The Mathematical Gazette, magician, math writer, and Carroll scholar Martin Gardner writes of Stanford computer scientist (and TeX inventor) Donald Knuth’s experiments with using computers to solve doublet puzzles:

[Knuth] constructed a graph on which 5,757 of the most common five-letter English words (proper nouns excluded) are represented by points, each joined by a line to every word to which it can be changed by altering just one letter. The graph has 14,135 lines. […] Most pairs of five-letter words on Knuth’s list can be joined by ladders. Some—Knuth calls them ALOOF words because one of them is “aloof”—have no neighbors. The graph has 671 ALOOF words, such as EARTH, OCEAN, BELOW, SUGAR, LAUGH, FIRST, THIRD, NINTH. Two words, BARES and CORES, are connected to 25 other words; none to a higher number. There are 103 word pairs with no neighbors except each other, such as ODIUM-OPIUM and MONAD-GONAD. Knuth’s 1992 Christmas card featured the smallest ladder (11 steps) that changes SWORD to PEACE by using only words found in the Bible’s Revised Standard Version.

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Above: “A More Perfect Union” pamphlet by Sam Potts Inc. (Photos by Swissmiss.)

I arrived home tonight and found the small booklet above in the day’s post. It was a simple republication of Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech sent by my friend and fellow AIGA/NY Board Member Sam Potts. I’ve written about the power of pamphlets before, but this one moved me a great deal. It came on a day when Obama, a candidate whose campaign was still reeling from the release of the Rev Wright tapes when he gave this speech last March, was about to give his first primetime press conference as President. And it came on a day when Amazon.com announced the Kindle 2, a device that may successfully uncouple print from the page for good. While Obama’s election made me feel young at heart, the Kindle 2’s release left me gripped by the sense that I was glimpsing the future while clinging the past. In short, I felt, for the first time, middle-aged. And while I can see myself buying and even enjoying a Kindle 2, I’m a book person at heart, and always will be. It’s like someone asked me to swap my beloved pet for a Tamagotchi. No dice.

When Obama concluded his press conference this evening, I turned off the TV, sat in my chair, and read Sam’s pamphlet from start to finish. He had carefully chosen this small manila envelope, this beautiful slate-blue paper, and this optimistic, tipped-in note. He had offered me Obama’s speech again at the perfect time in a new and beautiful way. I was deeply touched. Sometimes things come together as they should. Sam’s pamphlet is a case in point.

Below is the passage from Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech that I remembered as vividly when I read it tonight as when I first heard it on YouTube last March. As Republicans and Democrats sit in deadlock over the stimulus bill while America’s tide of unemployment swells dangerously higher, Obama’s call to transcend bitter partisanship and stand for hope in the midst of cyncism rings truer than ever.

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