Design Literacy

by Steven Heller

  Other related type designs followed in quick succession in what became known as “the black blitz.” Cooper Italic was described by Cooper as “much closer to its parent pen form than the roman.” Cooper Hilite was made by the simple expedient of painting a white highlight on a black proof of Cooper Black, with patterns cut and matrices engraved accordingly. “It’s good for sparkling headlines; it cannot be crowded like the black, but must have plenty of ‘air,’” wrote Cooper. Cooper Black Italic was completed in 1926 to cash in on the swell in sales of Cooper Black. Cooper Black Condensed was designed shortly afterward to have twenty percent less heft and be generally more useful. A complete metal font of Cooper Black weighed almost eighty-three pounds (thank heavens for transfer type) and strained the back of many a typesetter, so the condensed version was thought to save on costly chiropractor bills.

  Cooper’s designs initiated trends, but he refused to take part in “the itch of the times.” Nor was he a fan of what in 1928 he called “the balmy wing of modernism.” However, his last face, designed in 1929 for BB&S, originally called Cooper Fullface and later changed in ATF catalogs to Cooper Modern, was, in fact, consistent with the dominant styles. Of this face Cooper wrote, “This style, lately revived by the practitioners of the ‘modernistic’ typography, has created a demand for display letters that comport well with it—letters that reflect the sparkling contrasts of Bodoni, and that carry weight to meet the needs of advertisers, Cooper Fullface is such a letter.”

  In the 1930s Cooper curtailed his type design, and before his death in 1940 he turned his attention to protecting what he had created. Fighting for copyright protections for himself and all designers, he tried to convince the government that patents should be awarded for typefaces. He chided his colleagues about copying, too. Copying is shameful, he argued: “To work in the style of current trends or past periods is all right, but do it in your own way. Study the work of the leaders, but never have another’s work before you when you are trying to create. There was never a great imitator—not even in vaudeville. The way to become a master is by cultivating your own talent.”

  Homage to Velvet Touch Lettering

  It was the wee hours of Monday morning some months back when my computer died while I was designing a brochure that had to be finished later that day. Without a computer what could I do? Dependency is a horrible thing. But rather than self-indulgently wallow in misfortune, I walked over to a flat file where I stored dozens of old press type sheets. It had not been opened for a decade. Although I hadn’t worked with pressure sensitive materials since 1988 BC (before computer), I still knew how to use the burnishing tool (like riding a bike, you never ever forget), and began searching for any face I could find that included multiple letters of a full alphabet. The one that came closest to what I needed was Compacta Light (120pt).

  I know this was a bit rash. A few hours later my office building would be open and I could use the computer there. But the intense and obsessive anxiety of missing a deadline drove me to do the imponderable—return to those primitive, time-consuming methods when many like me spent hours making comps from Letraset, Formatt, Normatype, Letragraphica, and Chartpak Velvet Touch lettering.

  I was so happy to forget that process. But you know what? The press down experience wasn’t half as bad as I remembered it. In fact it was kind of a Zen-like pleasure to revisit the old velum sheets of black-and-white letters I once so delicately placed on illustration board when metal or phototype was unavailable (or too expensive).

  Most young designers will never know how difficult it was to set type, unless you leased your own Compugraphic or PhotoTypositor. It took hours, sometimes days to spec and then get back galleys. Today it is as easy as opening a suitcase. So during the BC era, press type was the poor-man/woman’s best means of hastily and cheaply composing display type. And it took real skill too. Pity those whose hands were unsteady. Expert burnish-people were worth their weight in gold, although they usually earned minimum wage.

  I recall the first time I was introduced to Letraset’s revolutionary “Spacematic,” a system of broken lines that when matched up served as a baseline. I thought I had found God—the results were so seemingly precise that even I could do it, (or that’s what I told myself.) When I looked at the type I set in this manner, I easily found many flaws. So I decided to make a virtue out of failure, and proceeded to copy Dada typography with multiple styles used in a single line or word. It’s easy to become good when you start with mistakes as the standard.

  Recently, while throwing things out, I found yet another cache of my ancient “instant lettering.” There was not a single sheet that was not missing a few letters, and some were more decimated than others. The sheets serve as a mini-history of typographic style and personal proclivity. At least a dozen sheets of Avant Garde (med. 36pt) were in the folder, but with the exception of the AV combo, I never touched those dreadful ligatures. Other faces I remember using were Neon (I once composed an entire 200-word story at 24pt), Circus (there was something that said loving when using this face), Horatio Light (whatever came over me?), Delfin (pressure-sensitive elegance), and Welt Extra Bold (a replacement for all those News Gothics). Of course, there were standard faces too: The first time I ever used Univers 45 + 75 was in this format. And my introduction to Helvetica, though it was called Geneva, was thanks to press type.

  I can’t bear to throw these sheets away. Someday (if not today) they may be seen as valuable artifacts from that interregnum between hot and cold type, and between photo and digital composition. The computer put pressure on the pressure-sensitive type companies to find alternatives (or go out of business). But there is something to be said for working with type in this way. As for me, I finished the brochure using Compacta Light and it looked wretched. So I went into the office early and redid the job.

  Hand Lettering

  JOOST SWARTE

  Style is not a four-letter word, yet it does imply superficiality, conformity, and a foolish enslavement to fashion. The moderns condemned these attributes as detrimental to clear and efficient communication. And although the postmoderns reveled in stylisms, they insisted that theirs were not merely fads or fancies but rather necessary stimulants to ensure more engaging communications. The pendulum swings, and today the naysayers warn that obvious style must be avoided because it relegates the designer to a prison of the ancient or recent past. Hence, style is condemned as a tool of obsolescence.

  However, style is also a signature that need not be insincere or bankrupt. It can also be a cue for an underlying visual persona born of complex aesthetic and conceptual issues. Remember, graphic design is as much about signaling a message to a receiver in a unique, sometimes idiosyncratic, way as it is about neutrally conveying ideas and information. When style is efficiently used, it serves as an identifier and entry point. At its most successful, style modifies language as an accent indicating from where and perhaps from whom the message derives.

  As style goes, the graphic narratives and distinctive hand-lettered typography by Dutch designer, illustrator, and cartoonist Joost Swarte (b. 1947) is a tapestry of twentieth-century influences as viewed through a visionary’s lens. Swarte’s style draws directly from one of the century’s most ornamental epochs, between the 1920s and 1930s, when art moderne (or art deco) reigned supreme as a commercial alternative to utopian modernism. But Swarte’s interpretation of these fundamental modernistic attributes, among them rectilinear letterforms and ziggurat/sunburst printers’ ornaments, are adapted as elements of a personal vocabulary. Swarte’s routine references to the past are so consistent that his ownership is undeniable. Despite déjà vu among those who know the origin of his most common hand-lettered faces, over the course of his development they have become inextricably wed to his own hand. Letters that were used over half a century ago are revived not simply for the sake of pastiche but rather to express his own aesthetically playful urges.

  Swarte’s interpretation of these fundamental modernistic attributes
, among them rectilinear letterforms and ziggurat/sunburst printers’ ornaments, are adapted as elements of a personal vocabulary.

  Swarte’s is a seamless weave of both moderne and comic influences. His work is multidimensional and relies on letterforms to complement his narrative drawings. Regarding the latter, the influence of the simple linearity of the cartoon character Tintin by the Belgian artist Hergé is most apparent. “In the beginning I drew in Hergé’s style to study how he did it and I found it suited me well because I could draw so many details in architecture and objects,” explains Swarte, with a nod to his passion for buildings and ephemeral design objects. Swarte coined the term “clear line” to describe Hergé’s approach and his own. Yet he is quick to affirm that the line alone is only a means to achieve an end.

  Swarte uses lettering and line drawing like personal speech. His singular vision emerges through a combination of dramatic, witty, and absurd comic images within a total narrative. As a designer, he enjoys artifacts of the past, but as storyteller he starts from zero. And where he diverges from his main influence is clear in this statement: “Hergé tries to take the reader to the real world, I take the reader into my world.”

  The galaxies for Swarte’s world are comic strips, children’s books, record covers, posters, wine labels, shopping bags, ex libris, magazine covers, postage stamps for the PTT (the Dutch postal service), and architectural interiors. He has published his own comics magazines including Tante Leny (Aunt Leny), and Vrij Nederland (Free Netherlands); in addition, he served as a contributor to Submarine (a Belgian counterculture journal), Charlie (a French humor paper), Humo (the Belgian TV and radio guide), the Dutch comics magazine Jippo, and RAW, through which he was introduced to the American public. Whether a publication contains an exclusive collection of his work or the occasional contribution, there is no mistaking a “Swarte” for the work of any other artist. Style combined with conceptual mastery are his virtues.

  Swarte’s style is ultimately secondary to the tales he tells. Six stories originally published in Charlie, for example, are collected in the 1979 book Modern Art, of which the title story is a satire on the nature of style and art. It stars Anton Makassar, one of Swarte’s cartoon alter egos about whom Swarte says: “As always with comics, you invent your character out of your character so that parts of yourself come out of a character in extremo.” Another Swarte standin is the character Jopo de Pojo (he chose the name because it sounded so pleasing), who reflects Swarte’s shy and isolated side, while Makassar (named after the city in Indonesia) suggests the artist’s self-proclaimed professorial side. “He is a bit of an inventor. He always comes up with crazy ideas, and is proud of himself. That’s me, too.” The third part of the personality puzzle is Pierre Van Ganderen (which, translated, means “of simple mind”). “He is a working man who does what he has to do, who is a bit childish and sometimes naïve.”

  Swarte is not wed to conventional cartoon situation comedies but, rather, varies his story lines as much as he pushes the technical boundaries to transcend any hint of nostalgia. For example, although the adventures of Makassar resemble 1920s comic artist George McManus’s “Bringing Up Father,” it is clearly synthesis not revival. “A young artist must grow out of the past to build up a solid background,” he says. “But one must find one’s own way out of nostalgia and stop looking too much over the shoulder.” When 1930s type design and early-twentieth-century cartooning converge, a certain timelessness is evoked. Of Swarte’s mastery, Art Spiegelman, former RAW editor/publisher, explains that he “has a refined visual intelligence wed to a sense of humor and history. He experiments within a tradition, and is always trying things that are so daring yet made so simple that by the time they are accomplished it looks so easy that it betrays the courage involved.”

  Every part of Swarte’s lettering and drawing is meticulously rendered. His clear line may be reduced to the necessary strokes, but his images are flooded with ideas. Ironically, in an era when coarse, expressionistic art brut is in vogue, Swarte’s circumspect precisionism is often called retro. Yet attention to detail is not stylistic conceit, it is timeless.

  Pussy Galore

  TEAL TRIGGS, LIZ MCQUISTON, AND SIAN COOK

  During the late 1960s, when the feminist movement was in full tilt, two women writers known for their satiric essays in Bitch, a New York–based underground newspaper that they edited, decided that the English language was the principal tool of male oppression against women. Therefore, their publication would not include any word that had a gender specific prefix or suffix, such as “man” or “son.” Instead, the neutral word “one” was substituted so that the word “person” became “perone,” and the word “woman” (which they deemed was most subjugated of all words) became “woperone.” They applied the new spelling to common nongendered words as well, like “many” (peroney), “season” (seapone), and “manifold” (peronefold), which forced readers to examine the so-called masculine dominance in the English language. However, the editors ultimately admitted that these linguistic alterations were unwieldy in their own writing, and after an issue or two they reverted back to standard spellings.

  The point, however, was clear. Woperones were afforded second-class citizenship in ways that were matter-of-factly ingrained from birth in the minds of both genders. And although certain habits, such as written language, were not going to change overnight—or as easily as the popular acceptance of the alternative Ms. instead of Miss or Mrs. (which, in fact, did not happen overnight)—it was important to expose cultural and societal absolutes that were prejudicial and detrimental toward women. Even if the spelling experiment was just a satiric exercise that reached a small number of readers of an arcane alternative newspaper, it was a good lesson in how archetypes and stereotypes are retained through inertia. It was also an indication that other confrontations were in the offing.

  Gender issues have not been ignored by the graphic design profession—which prior to the 1980s was predominantly a men’s club and today is weighted more toward women in designer and design management roles. Yet, although female graphic designers have increased their overall presence and individual prestige within the field, few have used their design and communications skills to redefine or restructure visual language. The editors of Bitch realized that while it was not easy to alter basic lexicons, it was important to raise fundamental issues about gender inequities that had been simmering below the surface for ages.

  Toward this end, yet with greater determination to make a substantive (and educational) impact, members of a design collective in England called the Women’s Design and Research Unit (WD+RU)—founded in 1994 and including Teal Triggs (b. 1957), Liz McQuiston (b. 1952), and Sian Cook (b. 1962)—sought means of addressing continuing inequities within the design field. They targeted the once-arcane yet newly democratized digital realm of font design as both a forum and medium for altering values and perceptions. They decided to create a font comprised of symbolic pictographs and word-bites that were engaged by using conventional keyboard strokes. This, they hoped, would be an effective way to both enter and engage the consciousness of users.

  Although female graphic designers have increased their overall presence and individual prestige within the field, few have used their design and communications skills to redefine or restructure visual language.

  The resulting font, Pussy Galore, named after the bombshell heroine of James Bond’s Goldfinger film and memorably played by the actress Honour Blackman, was begun in 1994 and completed in early 1995 (although it continues to be somewhat open-ended in terms of final form). It was commissioned by Jon Wozencroft, the editor of Fuse (the experimental-type magazine published by FontShop International), for publication in Fuse 12: Propaganda (winter 1994), but only a portion of the entire typeface was published at that time due to a variety of technical reasons.

  Pussy Galore, the fictional character, was what McQuiston and Triggs call a “femme fatale with a mission,” who maximized her sensual endowment as
a tool of power rather than subservience. “She was wonderfully sexy and at the same time strong and in control,” says Triggs. “We hope by appropriating Pussy Galore as a term and typeface title that it “will get people to think twice not only about its use but also about other words that usually denote [the] negative … concerning women. We also wanted to use language which celebrated women—hence the ambiguity of the term.”

  So, whatever contemporary or nostalgic images or ideas that Pussy Galore evokes in the minds of beholders—cocksmanship or Blackman’s sexual omnipotence—the font offers unique independent frames of reference that reveal numerous myths about women. In this way, Pussy Galore is a “conceptual typeface” designed to help explore the roots of misconceptions about women propagated through contemporary vocabularies of Western culture. As Triggs explains in Baseline: Issue 20 (1995), “Pussy Galore is an ‘interactive tool’ which invites response and urges you to talk back, challenge, and reassess, not only [about] how women have been constituted by language, but also the structure of language itself.”

  Pussy Galore is not, however, a typical typeface—in fact, “typeface” may be the preferred description because it functions in relation to a keyboard but an inaccurate one because Pussy Galore bears no relation to a conventional alphabet. Rather, it is a clever commingling of Otto Neurath’s Isotype system of the 1930s and a sampling of printer’s cuts and dingbats. The pictographs and word pictures that comprise the Pussy Galore font are fragments of narrative that individually serve as stop signs and, when fashioned together, as vehicles for various archetypes and stereotypes.