Design Observer

There are too many articles to read on Design Observer, so, instead of picking through any two, I went with what Rachel recommended.

I really like them all—funny and so creative! I particularly liked Stephen Doyle's work; he really is “ a graphic wordsmith!” (from Stephen Doyle: A Few Words). He is such a genius: WAS masked out on a SAW!; cut out “crafts and arts;” “enemy” with its “new” shadow; his “think!” dice... How does he come up with so many cool ideas for type? Seeing his type art inspires me to do something fun too. As William Drenttel mentioned in that article, Doyle doesn't just Photoshop to make the type; he actually blotted two book together; folded paper to make the word “paper,” and bent a book! I think one of the reasons he's so good is because he doesn't just Photoshop everything. Part of the fun is to actually make stuff, and if it's you’re job, might as well have some fun out of it.



Too cool!

In Jessica Helfand’s “Type Means Never Having To Say Sorry,” a senior graphic design student used the Futura typeface on her Sigmund Freud’s book jackets. Since I’m taking Design History right now, I have some idea of the time period the font and book was created, but if I wasn't taking the history class, I would have no idea and probably answered “I don't know” like the senior. Not that the typeface is inappropriate for the subject, but it is important to know the history/background of something you’re designing, and to have a good reason to why you chose something than just “because I like it and it’s cool.”
I hope when I graduate I’ll have better answers than that senior.
The Futura typeface is overused, like Helvetica, it is now seen everywhere. It is a beautiful and modern sans-serif, and the fact that it was designed in 1928 is just amazing! However, it is so overused, the things created just seem so oridinary and unoriginal—like Barbara Kruger’s graphical style of using Futura.



Barbara Kruger’s style—black & white background image, bold red block, and knocked out Futura—is so simple! I am pretty sure I’ve done this many times without the acknowledgement of the style and the fact that Kruger existed. Michael Bierut’s “Design Under the Influence” mentions the reasons graphic designers today design what they design. And I have to agree completely with him.

“Kruger’s work, after have been so well established for so many years, has simply become part of the atmosphere, inhaled by legions of artists, typographers, and design students everywhere, and exhaled, occasionally, as a piece of work that looks something like something Barbara Kruger would do.”

Can one artist/designer own a style? I don’t think so, and neither does Bierut.

Another article, also by Bierut, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Typeface,” is funny and informational. I had no idea a person could be (quoting Bierut) “typographically promiscous.” To use 37 typefaces across 16 pages is a bit too excessive, but if he can make his book work with 79 (yes, seventy-nine) typefaces, each chapter with its own typeface, and not be a bit messy at all, then I guess it’s a great thing. Maybe...

I think it’s still too many. I don’t even think Satan (see below) woule approve it.