Design Cult. Steven Heller
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Design Cult - Steven Heller страница 3
![Design Cult - Steven Heller Design Cult - Steven Heller](/cover_pre683015.jpg)
Where’s the proof, Mr. Pundit? Anecdotally, I draw the rationales for various students entering the MFA Designer as Author program I co-chair (with Lita Talarico). When asked why the first wave of students entered from the late nineties through mid-2000s, the answer was “to get back to the hand.” Now, this does not mean a total rejection of the computer (for that would be professional suicide), but it does mean that the craft aspect of design was lacking in their formal educations and practices. With the increase of the DIY sensibility, with renewed emphasis on “making things from scratch,” designers were feeling a need to make physical (not virtual) contact with their materials and outcomes. It is no surprise that sewing and scrapbooking emerged as popular hobbies, but it was somewhat novel that they were integrated into the graphic design practice.
Over the past five years I co-authored three books that support this “antidigital” claim: Handwritten (with Mirko Ilić) and New Vintage Type and New Ornamental Type (with Gail Anderson). The first is totally focused on typography done by the original ten digits (although unavoidably it was scanned into a computer). The other two books revisit older styles and eras, and a good amount of the material is generated by hand with a DIY underpinning. Consistent with this assertion, hand typesetting, letterpress printing, and silkscreen techniques are on the rise in schools and workshops. And speaking of workshops, as a thesis, a former MFA Designer as Author student created a workshop titled “Dirty Weekend”, a series of three weekend sessions that focus exclusively on painting, carving, cutting, and printing by hand. The recent turn-outs at the ADC in New York proved that the hand is at least as mighty as the pixel.
Why call this “antidigital”? Isn’t it just an alternative to the dominant medium, but certainly not a substitute for it? Perhaps. But since pundits like to sum up moments, especially decades, for purposes of further debate I will refer to this as “The Decade of Dirty Design” until someone proves otherwise.
Cult of the Squiggly
Vines and tendrils recently have been strangling designed surfaces and objects without mercy. Yet, unlike almost all our other earthly woes, it has nothing to do with global warming—unless, of course, graphic designers are instinctively compensating for the depletion of the polar ice caps and degradation of the rainforest ecosystem by planting ornamental graphic vegetation on things. It may be symbolic simpatico for the faltering environment or, as I suspect, a reaction to the dominance of sterile modernism that rears its head from time to time. Arguably, lush forests of typographic and imagistic embellishment are responses to a basic aesthetic need for—and underabundance of—decoration in the overall design diet.
The cult of the squiggly, as we’ll call this manifestation, has evolved gradually with a few innovative form givers, including Marian Bantjes, whose mastery of craft is exceptional. The masters seed scores of exponents until eventually, like fungus, the trend spreads everywhere—from the most appropriate to the most nonsensical uses. We have reached a point where the time has come to prune the invasive squigglies. But this is not the first time.
In the 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime,” Austrian architect Adolf Loos proclaimed that “the evolution of culture marches with the elimination of ornament from useful objects.” Design was then, as now, in an ornamental quagmire. Many years after the initial blooming of art nouveau (Jugendstil, Vienna Secession, Stile Liberty, etc.), which began in 1896, forests of twisted stems and tendrils—what historians call floriated madness—covered everything from posters and typography to furniture and buildings. Loos’s preference for “smooth and precious surfaces” derived from his belief that functional objects swathed in ornament were guaranteed instantaneous obsolescence. Loos believed that superfluous design was not merely a waste of a designer’s time; it was downright immoral. Obsolescence was, therefore, a venal sin. Yet barely twenty years later, just prior to the first Great Depression, the strategy known as “forced obsolescence” or what the innovative American adman Earnest Elmo Calkins referred to as “styling the goods” was being celebrated for having to some degree brought the United States economy back from stagnation to vibrancy—in large part by adding ornament (in this case art deco) onto products and structures like some sort of camouflage.
Visual austerity might be seen as a denial of aesthetic pleasure, a puritanical notion. For who would argue that an ornamented Persian miniature, with its complex graphic layering, or The Book of Kells, with the interlocking patterns and serpentine filigree that fill its pages, are not among the most beautiful (and in a sense, most functional) of graphic artifacts? How could baroque and rococo motifs in print or on edifices be pilloried for crimes against the eye or society in general, despite what they have come to symbolize?
William Morris, the late-nineteenth-century designer, printer, author, social critic, and founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, exalted in ornamentation as a high form of expression. His design for The Kelmscott Chaucer, the pinnacle of his career as a craftsman, reintroduced the medieval or gothic approach from its lavish ornamental borders to its decorative capitals and frames. But The Kelmscott Chaucer did more than simply revive an antique style. It was the realization of Morris’s belief that a combination of modern printing techniques and traditional arts and crafts could counteract the corrosive impact of industrialization. Ornament was not merely a veil to hide ugly industrial machines and wares; it was an antidote to the perceived poisons spewing from factory chimneys—a prescient concept at that.
Ornamental embellishment is not inherently evil, even in excessive doses. In fact, sometimes excess is truly divine. Nonetheless, passions are often inflamed when the topic of ornamentation is injected into high-minded matters of design. The Bauhaus masters rejected ornamentation as symptomatic of a bourgeois aesthetic order. Followers of the Bauhaus and adherents of orthodox modernism, even to this day, have maintained the belief that minimalism enables the clearest communication—purity is transcendent. They rail against what advertisers in the twenties and thirties called “froufrou” and fight it in manifestos and essays about less being more. Yet there has long been a desire, indeed a compulsion, to inject graphic complexity and even planned superfluity into certain design.
Ornament’s startling, though predictable, comeback in the late 1990s (see Alice Twemlow in EYE 58 ) is as widespread and popular today as it was in the Victorian, art nouveau, and art deco eras. Decorative patterns, an offshoot of the current ornamental trend, are largely born out of the hip-hop and street-culture aesthetics, rising in various media, from textiles to clothing to web to print. Illustrated letter forms—not calligraphy in the classical sense nor illumination in the Biblical context—have complemented these new decorative tendencies. Lettering in variegated forms—stitching, scrawling, scraping, carving, and more—has added an even more profound ornamental overlay to design of the twenty-first century. Sometime during the early 2000s, well over a decade after the computer became the primary design tool, squiggly, serpentine, floral ornamentation was resurrected with a vengeance from its Gilded Age crypt. Rebellion against the blandness of template-driven computer-generated design has been one motivating factor. But more likely, the practical fact that once-difficult drafting processes are now much simpler with computer programs has spawned a new appreciation for ornament.
The DIY movements of the mid-1990s contributed to the growth of digital foundries that offered scores of “novelty” faces made from countless nontraditional type materials, including such naturalistic ones as twigs, flowers, and trees. The employ of leaves, stamens, and pistils today is flowering throughout the design world. In some instances, the plant is a perfect foil for modernist austerity, but in others it is simply overly fussy. Lettering made from branches and bark has a long history, used both as a sign system for rustic homes and campsites as well as graphically illustrated lettering. One of the most popular nineteenth-century novelty faces was Figgins’s