Books, Design and Culture
In a fascinating and wide-ranging conversation, design historian Steven Heller talks about design and his recent book 100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design with Debbie Millman on Design Matters:
Design Matters: Steven Heller mp3
Heller really is an astonishingly prolific author.
(Full disclosure: 100 Ideas That Changed Graphic Design is published by Laurence King and is distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books)
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Ways of Designing — Steven Heller chats with British graphic designer Richard Hollis, who designed the original cover for the classic Ways of Seeing by John Berger (among other things), at Imprint:
My generation went from hot-metal to photosetting to digital. Computers have changed everything, bringing total control to the designer. But they haven’t changed the way I design. Perhaps they should have. But the way people read hasn’t changed, the sequence, letter –words–sentences–paragraphs– columns of text. Fifty years ago the printer made the corrections and changes were expensive. Now clients know that changes can be made, and designers pay with their time. The alphabet hasn’t changed, while the range of type designs available is astonishingly increased. Two or three are plenty for me.
Fringe Behaviour — Richard King, author of How Soon is Now?, on the indie record labels that changed the British music industry at The Guardian:
The improvisatory space in which the indies thrived has shrunk for several reasons. One is the ever-prevalent and finely tuned ability for corporate culture to absorb fringe behaviour and repackage it and market it as cutting edge. Another is the formalising of Britain’s creative industries, a process that has seen the development of college degrees in music business, music journalism and, indeed, being in a band, lead to industry standardisation. The independent sector’s greatest attributes – its ability to ad-lib, to trust its instincts and to hang the consequences are both impracticable and unteachable in such rigid frameworks. The sort of behaviour that allowed Wilson, McGee, Watts-Russell and their contemporaries to conceive some of their more extreme and fanciful ideas would also be something of a stretch for a human resources department to manage.
Also in The Guardian, a profile of author of author Peter Carey.
Value the Medium — Mark Thwaite interviews Benjamin Eastham and Jacques Testard, editors of literary journal The White Review, at ReadySteadyBook:
[We] believe in the value of the book as a physical object. Neither do we consider this to be an old-fashioned attitude. Publishing will go down two different routes: there’s no point knocking out a cheap, poorly bound paperback on crap paper any more because you’re as well to read the content on an electronic reader. The book as a medium has to justify itself now, it’s no longer the default option, and this is to its benefit. We’ve witnessed an upsurge in beautifully produced books, with enormous amounts of time and creativity invested in them – check out Visual Editions, for just one example, and the work of artists and independent galleries exploring the possibilities offered by the book form. The design of The White Review is important to us – the quality of the images we reproduce, the balance of the colours, the alignment and legibility of the text. We value the content, so we value the medium in which it is reproduced.
The White Review is beautifully designed by Ray O’Meara in case you were wondering.
And finally…
Robert Lane Greene on the origins of the term “dude” for More Intelligent Life:
Though the term seems distinctly American, it had an interesting birth: one of its first written appearances came in 1883, in the American magazine, which referred to “the social ‘dude’ who affects English dress and the English drawl”. The teenage American republic was already a growing power, with the economy booming and the conquest of the West well under way. But Americans in cities often aped the dress and ways of Europe, especially Britain. Hence dude as a dismissive term: a dandy, someone so insecure in his Americanness that he felt the need to act British. It’s not clear where the word’s origins lay. Perhaps its mouth-feel was enough to make it sound dismissive.
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Design Auteur — Steven Heller on Erik Nitsche for Print Magazine:
For some, book publishing was akin to the Internet of the sixties and seventies, a means of communicating information to large numbers in large volumes. In this milieu Nitsche practiced design auteurship before it was given a name, and the body of work he produced is extraordinary even by today’s standards. After moving to Geneva in the early 1960s Nitsche Founded ENI, S.A. (Erik Nitsche International) to produce some of the finest illustrated history books ever designed. The first series, a twelve volume The New Illustrated Library of Science and Invention, with a multilingual print run of over two million copies, covered the histories of communication, transport, photography, architecture, astronomy, and the machine, and flight… The second ENI series on the History of Music was even more ambitious — twenty volumes — that covered an expansive range of musical experience from composition to instrumentation, from classical to jazz.
Our Dreams of Ourselves — An interview with Alan Moore in The Independent:
Moore was always ahead of the times with respect to female fans – unlike much of the comics industry, – and was the creator of the revolutionary The Ballad of Halo Jones, a sci-fi strip to run alongside Judge Dredd in the UK comic 2000AD. First appearing in 1984, Halo was one of the first non-superhero women to headline her own series, at a time when most girls’ comics had folded.
“There wasn’t a single – I mean, I was annoyed – there wasn’t a single girls’ comic in Britain,” Moore remembers. “I thought, well if you do more stories that are aimed at women, you’ll get more women reading the comics. It would seem fairly simple and straightforward, but there was a lot of resistance [to the idea].”
Insane, Not Crazy — Chip Kidd, book designing Bat-thusiast, reviews The Joker: A Visual History of the Clown Prince of Crime by Daniel Wallace:
Created by artist Jerry Robinson and writer Bill Finger in 1940 for “Batman” issue #1—though Batman himself first appeared in “Detective Comics” #27 the previous year—the Joker, with his garish purple suit, ashen skin and emerald hair, was imagined as the maniacally taunting yang to Batman’s unrelentingly stern yin. Thus was born perhaps the single most classic pair of adversaries in comics history. Really, does it get any better than the Dark Knight Detective and the Harlequin of Hate matching wits and ultimately duking it out? I don’t think so.
Step by Step — Umberto Eco talks about his new book The Prague Cemetery at The Paris Review:
For me, the process of writing usually takes six years. In those years I collect material, I write, I rewrite. I am in a sort of a private world of myself with my characters. I don’t know what will happen. I discover it step by step. And I become very sad when the novel is finished because there is no more pleasure, no more surprise.
And finally…
Melvyn Bragg on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath for The Guardian:
Comments closedIt was the bestselling book in America in 1939. A film version starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford followed, itself a classic. Arthur Miller wrote of Steinbeck, “I can’t think of another American writer, with the possible exception of Mark Twain, who so deeply penetrated the political life of the country.” And yet Steinbeck was also called “a liar”, “a communist” and “a Jew acting for Zionist-Communist interests”. The book was burned in the streets; it was banned in schools and libraries, with its explicit sexuality given as the excuse. It was virulently attacked in Congress, and Steinbeck’s subsequent success in Russia eroded his reputation from the cold war onwards. He bought himself a revolver for self-defence and had good reason to fear for his life. The book has sold about 14m copies and still sells steadily.
Issue #56 — Jessica Abel and Matt Madden discuss the latest volume of The Best American Comics at Comic Book Resources:
The problem with superheroes is it’s not a personal taste so much as it just requires so much insider knowledge to read these things. They don’t stand on their own. There have been about three superhero comics, maybe two, in the past five years that stand on their own. That you can just read and not have to know what happened in issue #56 and ever since. It’s a real problem, I think, and it’s a problem for the industry. How do you get into this stuff if you’re not into it already?
The Highs and Lows — Steven Heller, author of bazillion books on design, profiled in the Village Voice:
“The worst design writer is one who doesn’t tell a story,” Heller tells his students. “Facts are nice, but it’d be better to have the facts telling you some tale of highs, lows, and woes.”
Remaining Solvent — Bert Archer interviews Brooke Gladstone, author of The Influencing Machine, for the Toronto Standard:
“I see new structures already emerging, we are in the midst of a big, big change; it’s so obvious it’s pathetic to even say. We have to form new business models, modulate the ones that are already there; we need to acknowledge the role of the news consumer in the creation of news now, and acknowledge… that the precepts and principles that dominated during the time of television and mass media are beginning to disintegrate and fall back to the precepts and principles that guided journalism back when it was not a mass medium, back when you didn’t need to amass audiences at unprecedented size in order to remain solvent.”
Antisocial Behaviour — Gary Shteyngart on his novel Super Sad True Love Story and the effects of social media:
I know professors who can’t read an entire book–professors of English literature, mind you. So everyone’s attention span has been shot. We’re no longer used to processing long strings of information. When a book is no longer a book but yet another text file, it’s very hard to say, “OK, I’m gonna devote myself to the 300 pages of text on my screen” when I have all this other stuff that I need to do.
That’s why channels like HBO and Showtime have taken over to a big extent. The kind of stuff that used to appear in novel form now appears in “The Wire” or “Breaking Bad.” They deliver the narrative thrust that we need. They teach us about different worlds and different ways of living. But at the same time, they don’t require textual immersion. You just passively sit there and let these things happen on the screen.
And finally…
PJ Harvey on writing her award-winning album Let England Shake at GQ Magazine:
As I was doing my research to write this record I realized quite quickly I needed to gather a lot of historical information in order to understand more about our current-day wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, for example. So I started going through my history books and became so interested in the Gallipoli campaign. It really resonated in me. I felt like I could relate it in a way to some of our contemporary wars and I learned a lot by looking at it, but also just the sheer scale of the mismanagement of that campaign and the scale of the loss of life affected me very deeply. And I really wanted to write about it.
I have played Let England Shake a lot this fall.
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An interview with the talented Allison Colpoys, book designer at Penguin Books Australia, at The Design Files.
Particular Beasts — A brief interview with art director John Gall about teaching book design:
Each book is its own particular beast that has to be designed from the ground up. Every designer has their own way of looking at the problem and coming up with a solution. It can’t help but be personal on some level.
A Twist, Flourish or Quirk — Louise Fili and Steven Heller, authors of Scripts: Elegant Lettering from Design’s Golden Age, on script typefaces at Design Observer:
During the letterpress era [script typefaces] were in such great demand that many people “invented” them, and many others copied them. In some commercial printing shops, composing cases filled with scripts were stacked floor to ceiling to the exclusion of other type. Printers routinely amassed multiple styles of the heavy metal type fonts, each possessing a distinct twist, flourish or quirk, used to inject the hint of personality or dash of character to quotidian printed pieces… Scripts signaled propriety, suggested authority yet also exuded status and a bourgeois aesthetic. The wealthy classes couldn’t get enough fashionable scripts in their diet.
The Pilot Fish and The Whale — David Carr, media columnist at the New York Times, talks about the documentary Page One: Inside The New York Times with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin for Interview Magazine:
I think one of the things that Page One does an amazing job of demonstrating is the importance of editors. You can see our editor, Bruce Headlam, shaping, arguing, pushing back. Of course, that’s what you don’t have a lot of in the blogosphere. There is nobody pushing people to support what they’re saying, nobody arguing against the assumptions that are brought to the table…
Slow Journalism — An interview with cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco (Footnotes in Gaza) for the A.V. Club:
[I]t’s one of the slowest art forms or media there is. You know, there’s fast food and there’s the slow food movement; I guess this is slow journalism. It just forces you into it. It’s difficult for me because I love being in the field, so to speak. I love that day-to-day thrill of being in places, and the great privilege of meeting people and going into their homes and seeing what their lives are like. I love that. But when you compare how much time is spent reporting to how much time is spent at a desk just writing and drawing, the reporting is a fraction. That’s just the way it is.
And finally…
Sing Out — Dorian Lynskey, author of 33 Revolutions per Minute, recommends five books about protest songs. The cover of 33 Revolutions per Minute was designed by Jacob Covey.
Old Fashioned, Foldy, Inky Things — Daniel Gray (fellow member of the fictional League of Daniels) interviews Ben Olins and Jane Smillie about creating the wonderful Herb Lester city maps:
Old fashioned, foldy, inky things have personality, something which Google maps and web guides lack. But the limitations of the format also force you to be selective, to only recommend things you genuinely believe to be good. It’s a fallacy that comprehensive listings are useful, when really they’re just confusing – it’s so much easier when someone makes a decision for you.
Collecting / Organizing / Cataloging — Steven Heller interviews Greg D’Onofrio and Patricia Belen of Kind Company about DISPLAY, their wonderful a collection of mid-century modern graphic design books and journals:
For us, one of the primary responsibilities of owning a collection is conducting research about the objects we acquire and finding out how they can far exceed their role as inspirational “eye candy”. The combination of collecting / organizing / cataloging has helped us see new, unique perspectives and discover a greater understanding of many of the principles, ideas and theories we so often admire.
See also: Steven Heller (who is apparently waging a one man occupation of the internet) on graphic designers and hoarding:
Design stuff finds refuge in drawers, on shelves, in boxes; we store it in offices, apartments, dens, living rooms, garages and attics (basements are too easily flooded). Along with lint balls, design stuff is often hiding under the bed. Design stuff is mostly paper, but can also be packaging or points-of-purchase displays—it may be small, medium or large. We hang it on walls and pay considerable amounts to have it framed. Uncontrollably, we hunger and devour it in stores, markets, shows and eBay (damn you, eBay!!). Ravenously, we hunger for and devour bargains, but when they don’t materialize, we pay sizable sums to own the more rare and costly stuff (sometimes realizing we owned it when we were children). In fact, knowing that years ago Mom might have thrown out some potential treasure, we are even more conditioned to hoard anything that could be construed as potentially valuable in the future.
Dead End — Cartoonist Joe Sacco on his most recent book, Footnotes in Gaza, in The Believer:
I think, for me, the book ends up being—this is going to sound strange—a dead end. Because I don’t know where to go from here, except to delve into human psychology. I think I understand how history works. I understand why one people are battling another people. I understand that they both want land. But ultimately there’s a level that I haven’t really got to yet. I’m touching on motive in places, like what makes someone pull a trigger? What makes one person beat another one to death? I know we can dehumanize people. Obviously, that’s the main thing. And I know we can fear them enough that we’d kill them before we think they’re going to kill us. There’s all that going on. But I think I need to go in another direction after this book. What am I going to do after this? Keep detailing massacres? For me, personally, I think I’m not going to get anything out of it anymore. I’ve come to the end of that.
And finally…
Simon Reynolds on his new book Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past in The Guardian:
2 CommentsThe deeper you venture into the underground, the more music involves pilfering from the past. This is one of the central mysteries that propelled me through the writing of Retromania: how come the very kind of people who would have once been in the vanguard of creating new music (bohemian early adopter types) have switched roles to become antiquarians and curators? In the underground, creativity has become recreativity. The techniques involved are salvage and citation; the sensibility mixes hyper-referential irony with reverent nostalgia.
The New Museum — Steven Heller profiles Will Schofield, the man behind the awesome 50 Watts blog, for The Atlantic:
For want of money, Schofield notes that he always bought cheap used copies and mass-market editions of the books he actually read. “So before I ever thought about design history, I had stacks of books from New Directions, Grove, Calder, Doubleday Anchor, Ace, and the Time Reading Program. Once I learned the names, I realized I had been long been admiring the work of designers like Paul Rand, Alvin Lustig, George Salter, Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, George Giusti, and Roy Kuhlman and illustrators like Edward Gorey and the Dillons.”
A Country Without Libraries — A stirring defence of public libraries by poet Charles Simic for the NYRB:
I don’t know of anything more disheartening than the sight of a shut down library. No matter how modest its building or its holdings, in many parts of this country a municipal library is often the only place where books in large number on every imaginable subject can be found, where both grownups and children are welcome to sit and read in peace, free of whatever distractions and aggravations await them outside. Like many other Americans of my generation, I owe much of my knowledge to thousands of books I withdrew from public libraries over a lifetime. I remember the sense of awe I felt as a teenager when I realized I could roam among the shelves, take down any book I wanted, examine it at my leisure at one of the library tables, and if it struck my fancy, bring it home. Not just some thriller or serious novel, but also big art books and recordings of everything from jazz to operas and symphonies.
See also: Why Libraries Still Matter by Laura Miller for Salon.
God Arrived by Train — An interesting article about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and an exhibition on his life currently on display at Schwules Museum in Berlin, 60 years after his death:
Wittgenstein may have gained a reputation as a solitary, tormented and alienated philosopher, but the exhibition seeks to show the many social ties he had in England and Austria, which continued after he was no longer active in academia. Among others, he formed connections with prominent figures such as the philosophers of the “Vienna Circle” (whose school of logical positivism was deeply influenced by his thinking ) – architect Adolf Loos, writer and satirist Karl Kraus and economists Piero Sraffa and John Maynard Keynes. When Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge University in 1929, Keynes wrote to one of their friends: “Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 05:15 train.”
And finally…
Slate has an excerpt from The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone and illustrated by Josh Neufeld, mentioned earlier this week.
Scripts: Elegant Lettering from Design’s Golden Age — new from Steven Heller and Louise Fili, published by Thames & Hudson.
50/50 — Designer Andrew Henderson, curator of Lovely Book Covers, is going to spend 50 days designing 50 covers based on the 50 most influential books of the last 50 years.
See also: Matt Roeser’s New Cover project.
Why She Fell — An interesting article by Daniel Mendelsohn on Spider-Man and Julie Taymor’s ill-fated musical Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, in the NYRB:
What made Spider-Man unusual among superheroes when he debuted wasn’t so much the arachnid powers he derived from the radioactive spider…, but his very ordinariness. Bullied at school, worried about girls and money, fussing at and fussed at by his foster parents, the kindly Aunt May and Uncle Ben, Peter Parker is a regular lower-middle-class Joe with pretty average teenager problems… It’s not hard to see how all this made Spider-Man popular among teenaged comic book readers in the 1960s, that decade of the teenager. Indeed, the series marked the beginning of what one historian of the genre called a “revolution” — a newfound interest on the part of comic book creators in emphasizing the protagonist’s “everyday problems” rather than the glamour of being a superhero… The emphasis on Spidey’s ordinary humanness explains why this series, as opposed to a number of other superhero comics, is laden with “heavy doses of soap-opera and elements of melodrama.”
Sheep — Philosopher Simon Blackwell reviews How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One by Stanley Fish for The New Republic:
It is wrong to think that the sentence is a mere slave, whose function is to bear content, which, while being the really important thing, is also something that could equally have been borne by another. Change the shape and ring, and you change everything. The balance, the alliterations, the variation, the melody, the lights glimmering in the words, can work together to transform even an ugly thought into something iridescent, as when Eli Wallach in The Magnificent Seven expressed his character’s indifference to the suffering he brings the peasants in one perfect, albeit perfectly brutal, sentence: “If God didn’t want them sheared, he would not have made them sheep.” As Fish says in his analysis of this example, here the “air of finality and certainty” is clinched by “the parallelism of clauses that also feature the patterned repetition of consonants and vowels” and then, of course the inevitability of that last dismissive word. If the devil has the best tunes, sometimes the bandits have the best sentences.
And finally…
The aforementioned Steven Heller on the paintings of Paul Rand at Design Observer:
Comments closed[He] proceeded to tell me how he liked working in all media, including photography and painting and how it influences what he does and how rarely these “other things” are seen in print or elsewhere. Actually, he used excellent judgment insofar as the paintings and watercolors were appealing for their humor and craft, but they were paeans to Klee (and even Cezanne). They were not his true métier (pardon my French). They showed his interests and represented his eye, but painting was not his signature work…
What is there to say about these paintings and watercolors? Are they building blocks or respites from the rigors of graphic design? When I said, “Paul, one of the things I like about you, is that you don’t pretend to be a painter” he had a knowing look. I don’t think he wanted to be a painter, but he wanted to integrate art into graphic design, which he did so very well.
Steven Heller, editor of I Heart Design and author/editor of countless other books about design, at 10 Answers.
And Steven Heller is one of the designers featured in BBC Radio documentary I Heart Milton Glaser about the iconic I (Heart) NY logo and the designer who created it (go listen now because it’s only available for a few more days).
Print and the City –a fascinating look at whether movable type printing presses were the drivers of economic growth in cities by Jeremiah Dittmar (via The Browser):
[C]ities in which printing presses were established 1450-1500 had no prior growth advantage, but subsequently grew far faster than similar cities without printing presses… Cities that adopted print media benefitted from positive spillovers in human capital accumulation and technological change broadly defined. These spillovers exerted an upward pressure on the returns to labour, made cities culturally dynamic, and attracted migrants.
In the pre-industrial era, commerce was a more important source of urban wealth and income than tradable industrial production. Print media played a key role in the development of skills that were valuable to merchants. Following the invention printing, European presses produced a stream of math textbooks used by students preparing for careers in business.
The Savage Marketplace — A really interesting and thoughtful survey of the current state of book editing in the UK by Alex Clark , with contributions from Diana Athill, Blake Morrison, Jeannette Winterson and others, for The Guardian:
[W]hat saps the spirit are the manuscripts that leave you with the question: why did no one sit down with the writer and point out where this isn’t working? Why didn’t a red pen mark the hackneyed phrase, or the stock character, or the creaky dialogue? And, sometimes, why didn’t someone deliver the unfortunate verdict: this simply isn’t ready yet, and may never be?
And finally, if you’re in London… Kemistry Gallery have an exhibition of film posters by Saul Bass from the BFI archive, February 17th to March 17th:
More Than Words — Yves Peters takes a typographical look at the winners of British Book Design and Production Awards 2010 for FontFeed. The winners all look wonderful, but, as Peters notes, it is a shame that only the publishers are credited, not the designers of the books.
An Archaeology of Business Cards — Penguin book designer Coralie Bickford-Smith discusses her workspace and her work with From the Desk Of…:
Right now I’m in the middle of designing a 20-book series, as well as sundry standalone titles, and my desk is usually a mess of ideas and scribbles on innumerable scraps of paper. There’s a whole archaeology of business cards, post-it notes and other treasures under there. I like to be surrounded by the current proofs to make sure the designs are working and that any tweaks are made in time for the final print. I like my desk – it’s my own tiny world in a big office.
My Q & A with Coralie is here.
Reading the Process — The New Yorker’s Book Bench interviews book designer Rodrigo Corral:
Reading is always part of the process when we’re working on a book jacket or cover for fiction. I read, I take notes, I take breaks. I’ll stop on the title, re-read it, and think about how it plays into the book and its overall message and intent. It’s rare to be able to illustrate the tone of the entire story by only depicting one moment from the book, so I prefer using a new image or design that I feel represents the story accurately.
The Rejection of Literalism — Steven Heller talks about his biography of designer Alvin Lustig Born Modern* with Imprint:
I did not get the impression that Lustig went into the book jacket biz with a literary bent. He did, however, have the temerity to try just about anything. And since, as a kid, he was interested in designing his way, he just, well, designed his way. So, I guess “confidence” is the right word. It was ballsiness. He had a vision—wherever it came from—and he pursued it. He was largely self-taught.
Design Dossier: Graphic Design for Kids by Pamela Pease published by Paintbox Press, seen at The Daily Heller.
12 Reasons to be Excited About Publishing’s Future — Following up an earlier post about the love of books, Digital Book World‘s Guy LeCharles Gonzalez asks book industry folks why they’re excited about publishing.
And finally…
“Help Me Destroy Public Radio” — Alec Baldwin channels Jack Donaghy for his “Do Not Pledge To Public Radio” pledge drive promo for NPR.
* Born Modern is published by Chronicle Books, who are distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books.
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