VISUAL WRITTEN COMMUNICATION

This week’s lecture discovering and analyzing the relationship between written content and form. We explore the importance of structure, pacing, and tone of voice. We research the outputs of designer authors making contributions to publishing for visual consumers. We analyze the intersection of type, layout, color, materials, and format and their impact on aiding communication.

PRE-1920s

What drives the visual designer or artist to write about visual culture? We are asked this as our lecture begins in the early nineteen hundreds, the first World War, and poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism, published in 1910 in Le Figaro. His commentary was to defy and let go of the classics and look only to the modern, future world ahead.

 I suddenly felt that all the poems, articles, and debates were no longer sufficient. A change of method was absolutely imperative: to get down into the streets, to attack the theaters, and to bring the fist into the midst of the artistic struggle.

— Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. 

We are introduced to Wyndam Lewis and Vorticism. The vorticists were a British avant-garde group formed in London in 1914 with the aim of creating art that expressed the dynamism of the modern world. Influenced by the Futurists, they favored urban, industrial subjects and promoted a hard-edged, angular style.

Lewis’ Blast magazine arrives in 914 with a vitriolic tone and commentary on pop culture with short plays by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot's poems. 

1920s-1930S

In 1928, Jan Tschichold, a typographer, publishes Die Nue Typographie, a tome that will influence the graphic design community for nearly a hundred years. Influenced by the Bauhaus movement and Russian Constructivism, within Die Nue Typographie Tschichold set forth rules for standardization of practices relating to modern type usage. He condemned all typefaces except for sans-serif types, advocated standardized sizes of paper and set forth guidelines for establishing a typographic hierarchy when using type in design. 

Tschichold slowly abandoned his rigid beliefs from around 1932 onwards. He also spent part of his career with Penguin Books and while he was there he developed a standardized practice for creating the covers for all of the books produced by Penguin.

MIDCENTURY

Swiss style dominates the midcentury of design. Central to the journal, Neue Grafik — published between 1958-65 — was the concept of the designer as an individual endowed with a great deal of social responsibility. With the authority to effectively communicate ideas, the founders held, came responsibility to uphold values and justice. The journal was also known for advocating the use of photography as a central element in graphic design. Antecedent to the globally popular Helvetica, Neue Grafik’s type and clean, grid-based system would influence graphic design for the foreseeable future.

Paul Rand, a self-taught designer, one of the first American commercial artists to embrace and practice the Swiss Style of graphic design, developed unique identities for IBM, UPS, ABC Television and many more.

As a designer, it is our job to make things memorable…. To improve the design of the message, and often times, the product itself.

—Paul Rand

PRESENT DAY

Fast forward forty years and we arrive at the designer, director, and author, Adrien Shaughnessey, co-founder of Unit Edition, a book publisher of “design books for designers, by designers. For Shaughnessey, the impotence for starting his own publishing firm was out of frustration of wanting to write and being overly constrained by traditional publishers.

Designer and author, Craig Oldham’s foray into publishing was quite personal. His father, a third generation miner in the UK, was part of the year-long strike brought about when former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher abruptly closes dozens of coal mines, leaving thousands of families without work. So keen on telling the story of the miners expressions of protest and creativity, the author used pulverized coal from the site of his father’s former mine in the printing process for the book’s jacket. Brilliant.

REFERENCE:

Element Talks (2017) Adrian Shaughnessy – The graphic designer as writer, editor and publisher, [online video]. Available at Adrian Shaughnessy - The graphic designer as writer, editor and publisher. [Accessed 31 January 2019].

Falmouth University (2018). Visual Written Communication | Lecture. History and Futures GDE720 19/20 Part-Time Study Block S2 (Falmouth, UK: Falmouth University)

It’s Nice That (2015) Nicer Tuesdays: Craig Oldham on Books, [online video]. Available at Nicer Tuesdays: Craig Oldham on Books  [Accessed 31 January 2019].

TOC (2011) Anna Gerber and Britt Iverson, Visual Editions: Part Revolution, Part Reinvention, Part Making it Up Along the Way, [online video]. Available at TOC 2011: Anna Gerber & Britt Iverson, "Visual Editions: Part Revolution, Part Reinvention..." [Accessed 31 January 2019].