Design is Play

Ray Bradbury, Jaron Lanier, and “The Digital Flattening of Expression”

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A short piece Mark wrote—“Ray Bradbury, Jaron Lanier, and ‘The Digital Flattening of Expression’”—was recently published on the site Designers & Books. It explores thematic connections between Fahrenheit 451 and You Are Not a Gadget, in particular ideas about originality and authorship.

Mark also updated his book list on the site, adding new recommendations such as Tools of the Imagination: Drawing Tools and Technologies from the Eighteenth Century to the Present by Susan C. Piedmont-Palladino. Each book recommendations is accompanied by a brief “review” of sorts.

Play at Play: Happy Chinese New Year!

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 Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast. —The White Queen to Alice

We are committed fans of the impossible here at Design is Play. In fact, our very existence as print designers in twenty-first century San Francisco seems dubious at times, but we intend to thrive here nonetheless. For those of you whose Chinese is a little rusty, the character in the upper-right corner of our card reads wealth. We wish our friends and colleagues much success in this New Year, regardless of the persistence of the “Print is Dead” crowd.

As with our 2013 Valentine, our New Year card was screen printed by Kevin Giffen at Wranch Studio in Santa Monica, California. Kevin printed the design in three colors: two metallics and a black on a ridiculously heavy chipboard stock. Angie set the Lewis Carroll passage on the back of the card in Marian 1742, a monoline slab serif and close relative of Marian Black, the face we used for our Valentine.

In Memorium: Irving Oaklander, 1924–2012

(left) Irving Oaklander, proprietor of Oaklander Books in New York City, on December 23, 2010. Irving holds a rare copy of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1923 book For the Voice (Dlia Golosa) which was designed by El Lissitsky. (right) Angie holds a page of For the Voice up to the light to reveal the compositional correspondence between pages 17 and 18.

(left) Irving Oaklander, proprietor of Oaklander Books in New York City, on December 23, 2010. Irving holds a rare copy of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1923 book “For the Voice” (Dlia Golosa) which was designed by El Lissitsky. (right) Angie holds a page of “For the Voice” up to the light to reveal the compositional correspondence between pages 17 and 18.

Irving was curious and notably generous—two qualities that made him a natural teacher. (Not surprisingly, Irving taught in New York City’s public schools for many years before opening Oaklander Books.) Angie and I were fortunate to spend long hours on two separate occasions in his crowded Chelsea shop poring over his singular collection of design and typography books. Not only did Irving let us handle Mayakovsky’s For the Voice, but also, memorably, one of the Million Mark banknotes designed by Herbert Bayer in 1923.

Although Irving died one year ago this August, Angie and I think of him frequently, especially when Angie brings our type specimens to school to share with her students. Among the letterpress specimen books we bought from Irving are those for Trump-Deutsch (1938) designed by Georg Trump and released by H. Berthold, AG; Ingeborg Antiqua (c. 1909) designed by Professor F.W. Kleukens and released by D. Stempel, AG; and Ehmcke-Mediaeval (1924) designed by F.H. Ehmcke and released by D. Stempel, AG.

(left) A page from the Trump-Deutsch specimen book. (right) The title page from the Ingeborg Antiqua specimen book.

(left) A page from the Trump-Deutsch specimen book. (right) The title page from the Ingeborg Antiqua specimen book.

Steven Heller, who also frequented Oaklander Books, wrote a remembrance of Irving for Print Magazine in August of 2012 which can be read here. Swann Galleries in New York auctioned off some of Irving’s rare books in May of 2013, many of which can be seen in the auction catalog. Incidentally, Irving’s copy of For the Voice sold for $7,500. [MF]

Cate and Lukas at Play: Puffoglyphs

A complete showing of the Puffoglyphs by Lukas, 2012.

A complete showing of the Puffoglyphs by Lukas, 2012.

Cate’s drawing examining the relationship between the “sacred” glyphs O, P and Q, 2012.

Cate’s drawing examining the relationship between the “sacred” glyphs O, P and Q, 2012.

Each of the twenty-six upper- and lowercase letters in our alphabet has a distinct structure, but all are comprised of only four elemental strokes: vertical, horizontal, diagonal, and curvilinear.

It was the Greeks who created this system of standardization approximately 3,500 years ago. In addition to imposing geometric order on the irregular letterforms they adopted from the Phoenicians, the Greeks established the use of a baseline and uniform letterspacing. (It would be another two millennia before the Frankish king Charlemagne mandated the adoption of three additional guidelines still in use today: ascenders, descenders, and a common x-height.)

As a natural extension of their play, our children Cate (age 11) and Lukas (age 8) created a code for their own use they call the Puffoglyphs. They intuitively broke down the Latin alphabet into its four stroke variants and then recombined the component parts to create new, “encoded” typographic forms.

“Elementary letterforms and signs composed of vertical, horizontal, slanted and curvilinear strokes.” Detail from Typography: Formation + Transformation by Willi Kunz.

“Elementary letterforms and signs composed of vertical, horizontal, slanted and curvilinear strokes.” Detail from Typography: Formation + Transformation by Willi Kunz.

 

American designer Willi Kunz explores the four elemental strokes in his 2003 Typography: Formation + Transformation. Of the illustration we feature from his book, Kunz notes that “Even though the individual forms are abstract, the forms begin to suggest a typographic composition.” The dynamic that Kunz articulates, Cate and Lukas experienced through an act of play. [AW]

Angie at Play

Angie Wang’s photographs (1:25)
Amsterdam, Paris, and St. Petersburg, 2004–2007.

Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look. —John Cage

Prior to a trip to Paris in 2004, Mark asked me to return with responses to the following prompts:
The best visual contrast;
The most beautiful piece of type;
The most lush color combination;
The most memorable bite (flavor);
A fifth sensation of note.

These images are the result of what has become an ongoing exercise in my paying attention. Whether with photographs, sketches, or journal entries, I’ve learned to document my travels in an active way because it heightens my awareness of what I see and experience.

Mark and I incorporated a version of this exercise into our 2007 summer study abroad class in Amsterdam. As we stated in our syllabus, “The act of seeing is made more acute by the act of recording.” [AW]