writing

“The Golden Age of Jazz Covers,” an essay on the history of jazz album cover design, complete with interviews with outstanding artists in that field, Jim Flora and Burt Goldblatt. This material first appeared in the catalogue for the April 1999 companion catalogue for the exhibit “Jazz Gráfico” at Spain’s Institut Valencia d'Art Modern. You can also read the unedited transcript of my entire interview with Jim Flora.

I have written two articles and four Type Columns for Communication Arts: Album Cover Design: Past Influences, Present Struggles & Future Predictions, Jan/Feb 2001; House Industries unveils the Ed Benguiat Collection, Dec 2004; Type Column: Tall buildings, smart people and ogoneks, Dec, 2005; Type Column: Global Typography, Aug 2006; Type Column: OpenType, Jan/Feb 2007; Type Column: MyFonts.com: Changing the Way Type is Bought and Sold, Jan/Feb 2008.

I have written book reviews for Communication Arts since 1993. A few are sampled here. In addition, from 1999 to 2004, I reviewed books for Amazon, in their Computers and Internet section. I have also written one article for Print magazine, Sans Serif Hieroglyphics, which appeared in the May/Jun 1996 issue.

I plan to post all the articles and reviews I've written soon. They'll come in phases with the most recent posted first. However, in the meantime, here are just a few of some of my oldest book reviews. Note: these, as well as all at Commarts.com, are under copyright by Angelynn Grant and should not be copied without permission (infoplease at my name dot com).

List of titles

Reviews

Designing Modernity: The Arts of Reform and Persuasion 1885-1945, Selections from the Wolfsonian

Edited by Wendy Kaplan
Published by Thames and Hudson Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue
New York, New York 10110 $60.00

Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. amassed a unique collection of decorative arts and design, seeking out those objects that showed social and political as well as aesthetic reactions to modernism. His vast holdings (70,000 items) became the foundation for the Wolfsonian Museum in Miami Beach, Florida, which is mounting its first traveling exhibition over the next two years. Designing Modernity is both the companion catalog and a compelling profile of the socio-political drama from the turn of the century through the end of World War II, seen through the everyday artifacts.

With ten essays divided into three main sections, Designing Modernity describes the phases of reaction to modernism. In "Confronting Modernity," one sees the effects of ambivalence and even enmity towards industrialization by an increase in romantic nationalism, creating, as exhibit curator Wendy Kaplan shows "a variety of ways that regional design was used to help forge a national identity." Romantic nationalists were "deeply concerned about the negative consequences of modernity. This concern became manifested in a longing for the past, particularly for peasant cultures, which were perceived as unspoiled and as representing the continuity of ancient traditions." In Norway, the archeological excavations of Viking ships in 1880 led to a Viking revival in architecture, silver and furniture ("the dragon style"), for example an ornate armchair from 1899 decorated with carved dragon heads and complex interlacing patterns. "By distilling the past, romantic nationalists hoped to seize the future" not to be buffeted by overwhelming forces, but to be grounded by the essential nature of what it means to be Norwegian, Finnish, Russian, or Irish."

Sometimes this reaction to modernism caused not just the revival but the invention of traditions, as in the faux Russian folk art of the nested matrioshka dolls, created by Sergei Maliutin in 1891. As Peter Greenhalgh notes in his essay, "The English Compromise: Modern Design and National Consciousness 1870-1940," in England, "modernism was all about rephrasing the stereotypical narratives of English life. It was about new ways of telling old stories, or at least new ways of telling stories which had pretensions to being old."

In the second phase of reaction to the modern, one finds modernity domesticated and appropriated into everyday life. Discussing the period 1920-40, Jeffrey L. Meikle describes three modes for this embracing of the modern: placing modernity within the historical continuum of past, present and future (e.g., advertisements for air travel which picture both horse-drawn coach and airplane), confining modernity to city life so people could always escape to the "traditions" of the countryside and neutralizing the threatening aspects of modernity by "incorporating icons of the modern into one's own personal environment" as with the 1928 toy Graf Zeppelin.

The last three essays in Designing Modernity study the final phase of reaction: the exploitation of the modern by governments for propaganda. In "Political Things: Design in Fascist Italy," Dennis P. Doordan writes, "The club and the rifle were the instruments of oppression; design Š in all its varied manifestations Š served as the instrument of persuasion."

Each piece in this inaugural exhibit, "The Arts of Reform and Persuasion" is included here and extensively documented. Not just an excellent treatise on the decorative art history, Designing Modernity is also a beautiful book with 300 color and 117 black and white plates and a captivating exploration of everything from ephemera to posters, ceramics to furniture, interiors to monuments.
- Angelynn Grant

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The New Typography

By Jan Tschichold
Published by University of California Press
2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, California 94720

Any translation into English of the writings of Jan Tschichold is required reading for every designer. In his translator's forward to this first English translation of The New Typography, Scottish typographer and designer Ruari McLean seems to lament that this is a facsimile dedicated to the original edition and does not incorporate the later revisions he worked on with Tschichold. "It is therefore treated as a text of historical importance rather than the latest publication of Tschichold's thoughts." How ever, he does remark that the corrections, although numerous, were not of textual importance and all five of Tschichold's self-critical comments are included. And in the end, as McLean states, "Its fundamental tenets are still absolutely valid: the book is as well worth reading today as it ever was."

Tschichold's book is divided into two sections. In the first, "growth and nature of the new typography," he discusses the history and practice of the movement as it was in 1928. This section is replete with the manifesto language of the time, celebrating the machine age and "...a new kind of man: the engineer." In the second section, "principle typographic categories," Tschichold details the application of these modernist theories to nineteen different types of problems, from the very specific "The postcard with flap" to the general "The new book."

Tschichold's lucid writing makes his words timeless (credit must go to McLean, his translator for many years). His intention was "...to state clearly the principles of typography, and to demand the creation of a contemporary style." That style was to comprise standardized paper sizes, clearer and cleaner orthography (removing the excessive use of uppercase in written German), use of sans serif typefaces and the integration of photography into typographic design.

This reproduction maintains Tschichold's original design and typography: justified text with no paragraph indentation, a contrast of light weight type peppered with shots of extra bold for emphasis, the original bibliography, the addresses of like-minded artists ("El Lissitzky, Moskau, Strominka 26, Quartier 50") and illustrations he felt explicated his principles. Tschichold chose 148 reproductions from the work of contemporaries and a few are accompanied by Tschichold's clear warnings with captions shou ting in extra bold, "Wrong!" and detailing how they err. (This review was based on the pre-press galley text only.)

One bonus in this edition of The New Typography is the exceptionally well-written and informative introduction by Robin Kinross. Kinross gives a concise but thorough essay on the biographical and sociopolitical context within which Tschichold wrote the book and shows how many of the issues Tschichold raises came out of a larger community of thought.

The New Typography could never be just an historical artifact, for Jan Tschichold is important to graphic designers not only because he produced original design, but also because he left a legacy of good, opinionated writing from which new generations can now benefit.

- Angelynn Grant

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Picturing Modernism: Moholy-Nagy and Photography in Weimar Germany

By Eleanor M. Hight
Published by The MIT Press
55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142.

In 1936, in an article entitled, "A New Instrument of Vision," Laszlo Moholy-Nagy wrote, "Thanks to the photographer, humanity has acquired the power of perceiving its surroundings, and its very existence with new eyes," eyes that would be viewing the postwar, newly industrial world and acquiring a new visual language. In Picturing Modernism: Moholy-Nagy and Photography in Weimar Germany, author Eleanor M. Hight, Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of New Hampshire analyzes many of Moholy's photograms, photographs and photomontages, discusses his theories on the art of the photographic medium (the use of light to investigate form) and questions the established views of his aesthetic motivations. Hight sets out to "breakthrough this cloud of antimodernist criticism to identify the influences and essential concepts that Moholy synthesized in his photographs and the contexts in which they were created and used."

Hight claims right off that the predominant histories of Moholy up until recently have given insufficient attention to Moholy's photographic work (work which was largely done in the 1920s). In part, she lays the blame on Sibyl, Moholy's second wife, who Hight claims "did not recognize the medium's importance in his oeuvre." But even more objectionable to the author is the critical and historical emphasis placed on the technique and formalism of Moholy's art, rather than its social and cultural inspirations. "Examination of his subject matter points to his intense involvement with problems of modernization in every aspect of Weimar culture, whether social, economic, political, or technological. His photograms allude to theories of the space-time continuum, while the built environment dominates his camera photographs. His photomontages juxtapose images to scrutinize the clashes of social forces in the uncertain postwar world."

This argument for a non-formalist re-analysis of Moholy's work is the crux of Picturing Modernism. The book includes nearly 100 examples of Moholy's photographic output of the 20s, examined by Hight through the dual lenses of "German cultural studies" and Moholy's own life (about which only cursory background is given). She has "tried to interpret his work and intentions in light of his specific circumstances as an exiled artist in Weimar Germany."

Hight admits that Moholy himself was often responsible for the imbalanced attention paid to the technical innovations in his methods and the formal aspects of the pictures. In his Bauhaus Book, Malerei, Photographie, Film (1925), he placed x-rays of seashells alongside his photograms in order to show the formal properties of both. The author wonders why Moholy would often describe his work in such a "narrow formalist manner." She poses the hypothetical question: "....was he not used to discussing these works in more subjective terms, or not willing to do so?" And concludes with, "we find out the most about Moholy between his layers of logic, in what he does not say, and through his own photographs."

Hight's interpretations of Moholy's work from a psychological/emotional viewpoint (particularly of the work done at the time of the breakup of Moholy's first marriage) could not be checked against the photocopied illustrations in the bound galley available for this review. But one cannot help wonder at times if the author sees more than is there, for example in the following sentence: "[Moholy's] captions...minimize their emotional content in order to maintain the formalist, rationalist approach to photography that he advocated. From this distance it seem that Moholy carried on this charade for himself as much as for his audience....Yet rarely did he refer to his subject matter or to any psychological content." The author's aim of clarifying the artist's socio- political motivations and exploring his work's place within European society and mores, fascism, Marxism and other contexts is thus not always easy given the lack of Moholy's own opinions on these topics.

There are many fine qualities in Picturing Modernism. It covers several important aspects of the European artistic environment of the early twentieth century, including brief histories of photograms and photomontage, the dawn of relativistic physics and post World War I "new photography" (e.g., Die Neue Sachlichkeit, "The New Objectivity", a photographic movement, the author points out, with a methodology similar to Moholy's, but quite different in execution and intention). Here too are close readings of Moholy's early, major books, Malerei, Photographie, Film and Von Material zu Architektur (later editions to be re-titled The New Vision), a discussion of his difficult and changing relationship with El Lissitzky and the Constructivists and a lengthy comparison of the careers of Moholy and Rodchenko.

While Moholy's place in the history of design and education has long been established, Hight's effort to define his place in the history of photography provides a necessary first step in the acknowledgment of the importance of Moholy's contribution. Picturing Modernism will not be easy reading for anyone new to Moholy-Nagy or the history of photography or postmodern critical writing. However, undoubtedly, the finished version of Picturing Modernism, with all its marvelous reproductions, will be a valuable documentation of Moholy's photographic work. - Angelynn Grant

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George Nelson: The Design of Modern Design

By Stanley Abercrombie
Published by The MIT Press
55 Hayward Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02142.

In one of George Nelson's notebooks, he quotes Alfred North Whitehead: "Style, in its finest sense, is the last acquirement of the educated mind; it is also the most useful. It pervades the whole being. The administrator with a sense for style hates waste; the engineer with a sense for style economises his material; the artisan with a sense of style prefers good work. Style is the ultimate morality of mind." With George Nelson: The Design of Modern Design, Stanley Abercrombie, chief editor of Interior Design and architect, presents the ideas "behind and beyond" the products created by one of this country's greatest industrial designers, a thinker as well as a maker.

Starting from 1946, George Nelson was the major designer for Herman Miller, designing furniture, advertising, graphic design, interiors and showrooms. He was the designer of the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow where the famous Nixon-Krushchev "kitchen debate" took place, and he created and/or worked on many fixtures of our modern lives: the shopping mall, the multimedia presentation and the open-plan office system. Some of the famous designs of his studio include the asterisk/atom-shaped ball clock, the bubble lamp, the storage wall and the American Express logo. In his career, Nelson covered architecture, urban, interior, exhibition, graphic, furniture and product design, slide shows and films, articles and books.

However, George Nelson: The Design of Modern Design is not a chronicle of the events of Nelson's life nor a pictorial display of his achievements, although the reader will not come away uninformed in those areas. (Extensive information is included in the appendixes compiled by Judith Nasatir, covering a biographical chronology, a chronology of work, a bibliography of Nelson's writings and of writings about him.) Rather, Abercrombie has organized the book to show how Nelson's design process and theoretical principles evolved within each design area and through individual projects. In order to best explicate Nelson's views, Abercrombie regularly cites from Nelson's own writing. As Ettore Sottsass, Jr. (Nelson: "The only European I have ever known who is a 'Junior'") remarks in the foreword, Nelson "had a distinctive voice as a writer...and, like his talking, his writing was part of his working process....his writing was crucial to his work." Included here are previously unpublished texts from Nelson's notebooks and letters to such colleagues as Charles Eames and Frank Lloyd Wright. Other sources include his books, lectures and articles (he was editor for Architectural Forum, Fortune, Interiors and Design Journal).

While following the development of Nelson's design, a clear impression of his personality emerges. Sottsass declares Nelson was never boring and did not like to be bored. He was "impatient with pretence...took delight in deflating the self-important and in exposing the absurdity of widely held beliefs and commonly accepted knowledge." He was "acerbic as well as congenial," and Sottsass notes Nelson's "lack of dogma, his skeptical questioning, and his scrutiny of conventional wisdom and religion, and something very Socratic indeed in his love of talk with informal groups of disciples." In every area of design, Nelson found a new approach, at times contradictory to the very nature of the object. In the early 70s, during a course at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, Nelson proposed "that a substantial degree of visual pollution in cities is created by the buildings themselves," and he advocated underground and low profile buildings as a solution. In fact, Nelson is quoted later in the book asking Ivan Chermayeff at an excavation site, "Ivan, did you ever see a new building that looked as good as a hole in the ground?"

Nelson had long and productive collaborations with Buckminster Fuller as well as the Eames Office. In describing Nelson's personal approach to work, Abercrombie writes that "one might call Fuller a technophile enthusiastic about human potential and Nelson a humanist fascinated by science. Both of them were more concerned with generic concepts having broad application than with one-time solutions to one-time problems." In contrast, "one can imagine Eames tracing the outline of the back of a chair over and over until its shape was perfected, Nelson would never have the patience for such activity or great interest in such a result; he would prefer to consider more fundamental matters like the habit of sitting and the need for chairs."

Nicely designed by The MIT Press, George Nelson: The Design of Modern Design is fun to read and includes many humorous anecdotes, some to be found in the (extensive) footnotes (for example, Nelson's remarks about the opening exhibit of the Memphis furniture collection in 1981). Describing Nelson and Fuller's Seating Tool (a combination of aluminum reflector shields, a celluloid cone and a wire) Arthur Drexler points out its "remarkable strength," but that "unfortunately anyone sitting on this nearly invisible object completely overhung the seat, and appeared to be balancing painfully on a knitting needle." Another funny story involves NelsonÕs remarks on "Freudian theory" while showing slides at the Museum of Modern Art of a 1950s hood ornament designed by Raymond Loewy, who, also on the panel, was not amused. And there was the time Nelson's doodling of a robust nude female figure almost closed down the Moscow exhibit before it opened.

Abercrombie's thesis is that Nelson's career, which progressed from individual products to design systems and finally to abstract principles, mirrors the development of the field of modern design. Nelson, like the Shakers, demanded honesty rather than beauty in design. Beauty was seen as a by-product of appropriateness, the ultimate goal and solution of the design process. Nelson wrote, "The aim of the design process is always to produce an object that does something....The one absolutely irrefutable thing that can be said about design is that it evolves." To him, the most important ideas transcended the material, and he wrote of the "mistake in confusing the word 'design' with the activities of an exceedingly limited group of professionals, such as graphic, interior and product designers" for the world is designed by the millions who shape it.

Nelson saw design working for positive change for society. In the mid-80s, he lectured that "...personal freedom is being steadily eroded and the rugged individual who used to be the American model is finding fewer places where it is comfortable for him to be either rugged or an individual....A mass society [is a] strange, sleazy place." In 1973, he wrote, "Technology cannot possibly be humanized unless people become human first, which is no mean task when we consider the extent to which the present passive acceptance of mass violence and truly insane brutality has gone....I cannot believe that the creative role for the designer now can be anything other than the production of humane environments. Anything else, given the social context, is anachronistic, inconsequential, egotistical and empty posturing....The human environment is not a slogan: it is a mystery which can only be penetrated by humane people."

George Nelson's career was unconventional and uncommercial and filled with potentially self-destructive contradictions: "it is the career of an architect who advocated the end of architecture, a furniture designer who imagined rooms without furniture, an urban designer who contemplated the hidden city, an industrial designer who questioned the future of the object and hated the obsession with products." It was Nelson's focus on the global principles, of the "art of seeing" rather than the application of design in order to ameliorate the human experience, that causes Abercrombie to state that NelsonÕs crowning achievement was perhaps the design of design itself. -Angelynn Grant

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Modern Typography

by Robin Kinross
Published by Hyphen Press
51 Grafton Road, London, England, NW5 3DX

In today's academic world, there seems to be no intellectual activity common to more fields than that of revising histories. This cannot be the first era that has so aggressively questioned accepted historical facts or theories, but perhaps it is peculiar to our age of easily accessible information to have such frequent upheavals. In truth, which stories we choose in composing a history, and how we choose to tell and interpret those stories, can drastically affect our view of where we have been and are going.

Although printing, and therefore typography, is 500 years old, graphic design as it is practiced today is so young a field of knowledge that its history needs such revisions and new perspectives as provided by Robin Kinross in his new book, Modern Typography, in order to prevent old accounts, now turned rote, from becoming excuses for visual excess in the name of the "new." It is Kinross's thesis that modern typography is not a "modernism of style;" it works in the spirit of rationality, it constitutes "the discussion, description and ordering of practice, rather than mere practice and mere products....as much what people have said as what has issued from their practice."

Kinross's major purpose of this revised history appears to be to define "modern" in order to dispel what is called "post-modern." "[Modern typography is not] a twentieth century phenomenon of the movements of art and design. The attempt of this book is to identify the modern as something longer in time-scale and broader in scope than such a modernism: a movement over some hundreds of years, which cannot be defined by visual appearances alone....What amounts to 'post-modern' is just the next phase in a process of continual supercession....Not only is it reactive (against what has gone before) rather than constructive (attending to the needs of its time), but it also reproduces the rejections already worked through by the avant-garde of Dada and the early new typography...This post-modernism may have done some service in its criticism of a manner that had become moribund. It does, however, open up the nightmare prospect of an endless series of 'modernisms,' of multiple pastiches and a sad, restless search for whatever might look new."

Modern Typography justifies this statement of purpose by relating some of the well-known events and debates on the histories of printing and typeface design, as well as many less well-known, covering both the social and technical incentives in differing cultures and countries for advancing typography. Included are the contributions of Fournier le Jeune, William Morris and the Kelmscott Press, D. B. Updike and the Merrymount Press, Stanley Morison, Peter Behrens and Jan Tschichold. Throughout Kinross summarizes the criteria for "good typography" from various manuals and manifestos: from T. L. DeVinne's writing that "[the printer] tries to make his work readable by its simplicity and its honest workmanship, and he succeeds perfectly when the reader finds it a pleasure to read his work, without thinking at all of the means by which this pleasure is had," to Tschichold's quoting of Goethe, "there is no past to which one may look back longingly, there is only an eternal new that is formed out of the extended elements of the past, and the pure longing must be continually productive, creating a new better thing."

Only a few illustrations are included; they are ones not often reproduced and serve to illustrate arguments within the text, featuring extensive captions containing physical details and other facts important to their inclusion. For example, invoices designed in the mid1920s and in 1949 by Johannes Molzahn and Anthony Froshaug, respectively, provide both interesting comparison and examples of the "new typography" not found in other history books. As befitting a proclaimed "essay," there is an extensive chapter on sources for commentary and bibliographic reference, which helps to encourage further reading and discussion. And the author has included a thorough index, raising the book from just a collection of musings on the history of type, to the level of useful educational tool and reference in itself.

As Paul Rand writes in his most recent book, Design, Form and Chaos, "Typography, no matter how it is viewed, remains a difficult, subtle, and exacting art. And even though a certain degree of technical skill is relatively common, typographic mastery is the province of the perceptive and the prerogative of the few." Ultimately, Kinross's Modern Typography is a "good read," telling a tale of discoveries, controversies and even occasional dramas, sending the reader off on an inspired quest for "articulate practice and constructive criticism."

- Angelynn Grant

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Fellow Readers: notes on multiplied language

By Robin Kinross
Published by Hyphen Press
51 Grafton Road, London, England NW5 3DX $7.50

If the often harsh disputes over poststructuralism leave you dizzy, then Robin Kinross's sane and clear writings are the prescription. Fellow Readers (more of a long pamphlet than an actual book), is a deliberate and logical thesis on how linguistic theory has been misused in the application of poststructuralist and deconstructionist theories to typography. The appendix offers a good beginning to Fellow Readers. In it, Kinross points out that these abstract, intellectual linguistic theories have inspired ambiguously layered design, the purported aim of which is to allow multiple interpretations in reading. As example he quotes Katherine McCoy's analysis of some deconstructionist design, "This work has an intellectual rigor that demands effort of the audience, but also rewards the audience with content and participation....Graphic designers have become dissatisfied with the obedient delivery of the client's message." And, according to Bridget Wilkins, "Legible is easy to read. If it is easy to read it bypasses the visual potential of the message. People prefer the comfort of legibility. The passive, comfortable approach and negative visual interrelationships of type and image were firmly rooted by Stanley Morison in the perpetuation of legibility and the cultural backwater of left to right reading in the 1930s." To the latter, Kinross responds, "The straw man of 'legibility' is set up, put into stiff 1930s clothing, and pilloried with deadly insults: 'passive,' 'comfortable,' 'negative.' Even 'left to right reading' comes in for blame: is this another attack on Western metaphysics?...All this fire-breathing polemic seems to lead merely to a plea for graphic designers to be allowed to make their presence known."

Kinross advances the notion of "common reading:" with printed, "multiplied" language, we may read as individuals, but we understand as a community, one made up of the readers of any given text. "Texts become meeting places, grounds for open discussion between people." This common reading does not depend upon nor require the designer's "unveiling of mysteries within the text." "One only has to think of any reader turning the pages, misunderstanding, turning back to see what was said before, sneaking a look at the last chapter, being distracted by a phone call or the demands of a child, perhaps falling asleep and dreaming around the text, and then returning to this business of turning marks into meaning. The process is individual and unpredictable. As if we needed a designer to make this so! And yet the text is there as an irresistible and multiple fact: a common ground." In the end, he puts out a call for clarity: "The reproduction and distribution of text is part of the life-blood of social-critical dialogue. The argument for openness and clarity in typography is made, most importantly, for this reason."

Along the way, Kinross touches upon modernism and modern typography, Enlightenment (Kant's "have the courage to use your own understanding") and the "vernacular" in design ("the fad for vernacular bad taste may be an attempt by designers to survive by blending into the landscape, chameleon-like"). He builds his arguments slowly, clearly, at times academically and almost mathematically (each assertion referenced or based upon a previously built argument) but also with occasional reminders of the real world with its bedpillows to prop up when reading, the world within which typography exists.

Is this little book required reading? It is if a designer plans to participate in any discussion of the history or practice or theory of the profession, even if that participation is just passive observation. In fact, recalling his previous book, Modern Typography (with which Fellow Reader makes a visual and conceptual companion), it is safe to say that Robin Kinross's writings should be at the top of the professional reading list. It is sad to think that these books, lacking color illustrations, even many black and white ones, may go unread by those who need them most.

- Angelynn Grant

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The Funny Little Man: A Biography of a Graphic Image

By Virginia Smith
Published by Van Nostrand Reinhold
115 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10003

"The graphic image called the Funny Little Man (FLM) appeared in the early modern period,....It was a representation of the figure in print, miniaturized and made humorous, designed for purposes of selling or persuading....an early creation of the world of 'gebrauchsgraphik'- German commercial art." So begins Virginia Smith's The Funny Little Man, an informal history of 20th century design from the skewed perspective of a particular style of cartoon men sometimes used in illustration (big, round heads; small, abstracted bodies, e.g., Cassandre's Dubonnet man). The Funny Little Man traces the use of such characters in pre- and post-World War II Europe and America, touching on the Bauhaus (Oskar Schlemmer's theater figures), Constructivism (Rodchenko's geometric men advertising "the latest news"), Charlie Chaplin (the FLM incarnate) and Bart Simpson (the FLM as "alternative culture" brat), and including opposing realistic styles, from Ludwig Holwein to Norman Rockwell.

Along the way, The Funny Little Man attempts to build an historical context for this stylized figure, and to imbue it with symbolism ("graphic salesman"). Despite a thorough telling of the major contributors to the gebrauchsgraphik of the 20s and 30s, Smith's version of the genesis of the FLM remains cloudy, largely due to the absence of logical antecedents like 19th century political cartoons or early comic strips and animation. Instead, the background refers to the Renaissance and the Reformation: Durer, da Vinci and Tory rather than Daumier, Cruikshank and Fleischer. The given examples of FLMs are never convincingly shown to be part of a collective whole, either formally or conceptually. To be eligible for "symbol" status, an image must be shown to hold consistent meaning no matter what the context (like the abstracted heart or the Christian cross). The FLM cannot be said to be a "seller" and "persuader" just because it is shown here only in product ads; seen in other contexts, couldn't it just as easily "warn" or "inform?" Out of context, does it represent modernism, or is it just a product of it?

That the book purports to be about iconography and symbology is only one problem. So many stories in The Funny Little Man are not germane: just one cited FLM by Carlu or Cassandre prompt accounts of their lives, work and theories. A reader new to design history will find these narratives hard to follow for they are anecdotal not analytical, reductive not illuminating, digressive not logical. By retelling the most often told tales of modern art, design and world history in less than 200 pages, regardless of relevance to the FLM subject, the author builds a specious construct on an already weak foundation. The result is breathless and cursory. Some of the more outrageous or simplistic comments in The Funny Little Man include: "Being French, Carlu once reinterpreted the FLM as a Funny Little Woman." "The circle had long been recognized as a sign for a human head..." "At this moment the real man, Chaplin, merged with modernism's graphic invention the Funny Little Man." "This spectacle [50s TV shows], these entertaining neighbors, alleviated loneliness in American lives." Or, "There seems to have been too long a history of a real-ideal tradition in American popular imagery for the FLM to convert the country to abstraction." This last excerpt is one of many examples from The Funny Little Man where cause and effect are confused, and the FLM is anthropomorphized into taking an active role in the course of history. There is no evidence that this viewpoint is meant to be tongue-in-cheek. (There is a particularly ludicrous reference to the Mann Act: the Funny Little Man accused of perversion! )

While discussing the simultaneous use of a Chaplin figure (for IBM) and realist, neo-Aryan models (for Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren) in 1980s advertisements, the author asks, "What dialectic requires that the small humorous figure evoke its opposite?" The universality of such a figure, the action of any "evocation" and the possibility of any dialectic all remain unproved at the end of this meandering. Facile diversions into events past do not provide any context for the alleged symbolic icon, rather they fill the void left by the absence of apposite scholarship. -Angelynn Grant

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Mies van der Rohe: The Art of Structure

by Werner Blaser
Published by the Whitney Library of Design
Watson-Guptill Publication
1515 Broadway, New York, NY, 10036, $60.00

"The unswerving determination to dispense with all accessories and to make only what is essential the object of the creative work, the determination to confine oneself to clear structure alone is not a limitation but a great help," said a truly innovative architect of our century, Mies van der Rohe, during one of many conversations with Swiss architect Werner Blaser between 1963 and 1964, conversations which gave the inspiration for this thorough documentation of Mies's work. The Art of Structure was a project authorized by Mies 30 years ago (the letter giving sole permission to Blaser to use certain of Mies's material is reproduced on the book jacket). The text clearly discusses Mies's theory of structure in design and analyzes over 30 of his most important projects, arranged chronologically and ranging from glass houses with steel frames to glass and steel office towers, buildings for educational institutions and even his famous Barcelona chair. Among the buildings profiled are the Seagram Administration Building in New York, Lake Shore Drive Apartments in Chicago, Lafayette Park in Detroit and several buildings for Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Blaser has updated this important book with photographs of many of the buildings in their current surroundings to show their structural development. There are over 250 illustrations (20 in color), including plans for each work. The text includes information on position, construction, material and dimensions for each building, and in each case, Blaser has "attempted to sketch Mies van der Rohe's basic philosophy such as he passes on to his associates and pupils as a kind of education in architecture." All the text is drawn from Blaser's privileged access to conversations with Mies and his diaries. Also here are a chronology of Mies's life, an extensive catalogue of his work, a bibliography and a list of books from his personal library. Mies van der Rohe: The Art of Structure is handsomely designed and should find a home on the bookshelves of any architect, student and admirer of form and function.

- Angelynn Grant

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Industrial Design: Reflection of a Century

edited by Jocelyn de Noblet
Published by Flammarion 26, rue Racine, 75278 Paris, Cedex 06. $65.00

In April of last year, the exhibit "Industrial Design, Mirror of the Century" opened at the Grand Palais in Paris. This visual history was set on a grand scale (the space was 57 feet wide by 492 feet long): "at one's feet extends the exhibition spanning, on a gentle incline, the entire length of the nave. A century and a half of history visible at a single glance." Industrial Design: Reflection of a Century is the companion book to this exhibit, described by the publisher as an "exhaustive survey of the history and theory of industrial design." Exhaustive and at times exhausting, this ambitious tome weighs in with over 400 pages densely packed with essays from historians, journalists, philosophers and designers interjected with profiles of outstanding inventions and other objects deemed "design classics." With a running chronology from 1769 to the present, this beautifully designed book with elegant typography features over 500 exquisitely reproduced paintings, engravings, photos and other illustrations to visually document the large scope of industrial design.

The story starts in 1851 with the construction of the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition in London, during a time when manufacturing shifted from the specialized craft industries to the mass production of the Industrial Revolution. Every aspect in the birth of industrial design is covered here, including some of the related history of engineering in an essay on the design of machine tools, the growing need for an industrial standardization of measurement and the interchangeability of parts. The reader will also find "Dandyism: From Luxury to Immateriality," recounting the habits of the renowned elegant aesthete, George Bryan Brummell and editor Jocelyn de Noblet's essay "Design for the Happy Days," telling how the admixture of the transistor, polyvinyl chloride and Elvis Presley affected design in the 1950s.

Among the "design classics" highlighted are such useful inventions as the Pullman Sleeping car, 1864; the Remington typewriter, 1873; the Edison lamp, 1879; the Kodak camera, 1887 and the Willys Jeep, 1940, not to mention such cultural landmarks as Legos (invented in the 1940s by Dane Ole Kirk Christiansen, the name of which derives from leg godt meaning "play well"); the miniskirt; the Vespa scooter; the disposable cigarette lighter and the Barbie doll.

Despite the comprehensive chronology/timeline, the reader who is already well-versed in the movements and innovators will find the greatest satisfaction from this book, since the thrust of the essays are theoretical discussions and questions on the past, present and future state of industrial design. The analytical nature of the essays introduces some interesting viewpoints, as in "Ornament and Industrial Design: Culture and Identity" by Jonathan M. Woodham and "New Questions: The Fluidification of Matter, the Acceleration of Time and the Production of Meaning" by Ezio Manzini.

Even though Industrial Design: Reflection of a Century rounds out with an extensive index, notes and bibliography, a student should not mistake it for a beginning history textbook, although it would provide an excellent reference in an educational setting, and should be required reading for all who study industrial design. It satisfies the reader by capturing in book form the intention of the companion exhibit where "at the opposite end of the nave, an immense tilted mirror reflects the Grand Palais and the exhibition in a disorientating tilted perspective." Without any such disorientation, Industrial Design: Reflection of a Century reflects and reflects upon this unique profession which covers both form and function, aesthetics and engineering, the everyday object and the socially revolutionary machine. -Angelynn Grant

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The Measure of Man and Woman: Human Factors in Design

By Henry Dreyfuss Associates
Published by The Whitney Library of Design
Watson-Guptill Publications 1515 Broadway New York, New York 10036 $60

Million-year-old thumb tools, nine-thousand-year-old jagged-edged mirrors rimmed with plaster and four- thousand-year-old chariots measured to fit both a driver and an archer are just some of the archeological evidence of man's efforts to design with regard to the body's mechanical needs and comfort. But the study of human dimensional capabilities, limitations and range of movements, called human factors or ergonomics, did not arise until the engineering of the modern military in World War II.

About 60 years ago, in order to build machines better suited to the human dimensions, the Department of Agriculture and the WPA accumulated information on measurements of the average-sized man, and a few years later, the Department of Defense published standards based on 90% of the adult males available for military service. A precedent-setting book in this new science was The Measure of Man, published in 1959 by Henry Dreyfuss Associates, an industrial design consultancy in New York, founded in 1929 by one of the forefathers of industrial design. Growing out of the work of Dreyfuss and his colleagues on the design of an army tank interior, The Measure of Man charted the human body in different postures. This recent work, The Measure of Man and Woman, does much more than update the original; it includes a vast amount of information which is useful and necessary in today's design and engineering: mensuration which takes into account user age, abilities, physiological, psychological and cognitive stages and much more.

The Measure of Man and Woman contains 180 precisely-detailed anthropometric diagrams covering several age and ethnic variations in men and women (even pregnant working women) using new US Man/Woman body dimensions covering a wider percentage of the population. It introduces new work on the stages of development and growth patterns in infants and children (boys and girls) including timelines denoting cognitive stages (for example, at seven months "cooing changes to babbling"). Also here are comprehensive chapters devoted to the differently-abled (incorporating the requirements of the Americans With Disabilities Act), a chapter on the elderly, and considerations of the modern work environment including computer work stations.

What could have been an overwhelming amount of data is presented both clearly organized and elegantly designed, and is accompanied by ample tabular material and a well-written text explaining the history, the derivation and methods of human factors engineering, and with extensive information on environmental measurements: noise levels, mechanical vibrations, chemical hazards and many others. The Measure of Man and Woman is a cornucopia of fascinating revelations about our favorite subject: ourselves. One bountiful section is about color, detailing, among other things, color coding for road safety and dangerous products, the visibility of colors, colors for foods and even color symbolism in universities (for example, "scarlet stands for theology...yellow stands for science").

The Measure of Man and Woman would obviously be of value as a reference to architects, industrial and interior designers; it even includes two large posters to be used for making plastic templates of male and female figures. But anyone in interested in ergonomics, or perhaps anthropology, will enjoy spending hours at a time finding insights into his or her own breadth and scope.

Alvin R. Tilley, a former Henry Dreyfuss Associates human factors engineer, was the major contributor to the original The Measure of Man and he also co-authored 1974's Human Scale; it was largely his compilation of data that is the foundation for this new book. Sadly, he passed away last summer, before the publication date. The Measure of Man and Woman will stand as a tribute to him, and is a notable achievement for all who worked on it. -Angelynn Grant

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Pentagram : The Compendium

By the Pentagram Partners
Published by Chronicle Books
275 Fifth Street, San Francisco, California 94103

One of the world's most famous studios thoroughly displays its work, history and design theories in this latest major retrospective since 1978's Living by Design. Executed on a scale both visually grand and intellectually provoking, this is no mere vanity production. Pentagram, with offices in London, New York and San Francisco, has tackled all aspects of graphic, industrial, interior, and retail design and architecture for a wide range of international clients (Lloyd's of London, Nissan, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Art & Architecture magazine, Polaroid and many others). The book's generous amount of photos (350, most in color) are accompanied with detailed captions which often include lengthy comments on some particular aspect of a job. (Alan Fletcher's recounting of the creation of a logo for the Commercial Bank of Kuwait is both enlightening and amusing.)

By far the best feature of Pentagram: The Compendium are the essays by the partners, with titles like "Designed to be made," "Architect as an art director," "3 D thoughts" and "Being paid to talk," as well as an enjoyable history of the studio by Colin Forbes. (Paula Scher's brief "Parody and Zeitgeist" will raise more questions than it answers about appropriation and influence in design.) Although all the essays deserve mention, Fletcher's in particular stand out as excellent and entertaining, covering the evolution of letterforms, mark making and the design process, among other topics.

Beautifully designed and printed, Pentagram: The Compendium even comes housed in a elegant but sturdy black slipcase. Along with their achievements, reputation, influence and endurance, Pentagram can now be proud of this family album, which goes beyond documenting to educating. -Angelynn Grant

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Hey Skinny!: Great Advertisements from the Golden Age of Comic Books

by Miles Beller and Jerry Liebowitz
Published by Chronicle Books
275 Fifth Street, San Francisco, California 94103, $10.95.

"Boys, Look! A New Toy! Genuine OCD Gas Masks," "Be Lovelier than Ever...in a Twinkling! with this 2-Way Stretch All Nylon Girdle!" and "Friends! Here's How to Get At Almost No Cost: New, Live Miniature Monkey" are just three of the enticing ads that were ubiquitous in the comic books of the baby boomerÕs youth. Beller, television critic for the Hollywood Reporter and Liebowitz, graphic designer and founder of the comics newspaper, L. A.. Funnies, have chosen from their collections some of the funniest and most outrageous examples of these "low" mass advertisements. "Long before art movements such as Pop appropriated the image of a muscle-bound bully kicking sand at a terrified wimp...the cheap advertisements crammed into comic books of the 1940s and 1950s were an essential part of the American experience, revealing more about the national character than the tony appeals in more respectable publications." Reproduced on uncoated newsprint-like stock, with their washed-out colors and in all their blurry, ill-registered grainy glory, these print-equivalents of the snake oil salesmen point out our former innocence with their "naked hyperbole and unfettered hype." One favorite: the ad extolling Trulove perfumes with the cry, "Win Power Over Men with these Compelling Perfumes!" like Blue Passion ("Can You make Strong Men Weak?"), Lovescent ("Do You want to Marry Now?") and Fury ("Fury commands and no man can refuse!"). Jay Chiat of Chiat-Day provides the brief preface wherein he confesses to owning the amazing Vacutex with the ability to suck on blackheads and cause days of embarrassment for any teenager. Hey Skinny! is a fun book, guaranteed not to break in two days or cause a rash. -Angelynn Grant

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Jackets Required: An Illustrated History of American Book Jacket Design, 1920-1950

by Steven Heller and Seymour Chwast
Published by Chronicle Books
275 Fifth Street, San Francisco, California 94103, $19.95

At a recent exhibit of the work of Elaine Lustig Cohen at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York, several paperback cover designs of her first husband, Alvin Lustig, were hung for comparison to her work. Both sets were a striking reminder of the visual wealth of this part of graphic design, especially the design done for certain forward-thinking publishers (in this case, New Directions). In Jackets Required, Chronicle Books has again provided us with a valuable collection from another slice of visual history, with 270 beautifully reproduced book jackets, amply captioned by Heller, senior art director at The New York Times and editor of the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design and Chwast, author, illustrator and director of the Push Pin Group. The book includes a brief history, separate chapters for fiction and nonfiction (each divided into thematic sections like "Romance" and "War") and then an immensely enlightening chapter devoted to the covers of "The Great Designers," among them Alvin Lustig, E. McKnight Kauffer, W. A. Dwiggins, Authur Hawkins, Jr., George Salter and Paul Rand. Each piece is indexed by designer and title and a bibliography of a few books on the history of book jacket design is added at the end. Just to see Lustig's designs for books by Kafka, D. H. Lawrence, Baudelaire, Flaubert and others, with typography and artwork evocative of Miro, Picasso, Arp and Dali, is more than worth the price of admission. -Angelynn Grant

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Design After Dark: The Story of Dancefloor Style

by Cynthia Rose
Published by Thames and Hudson Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10110.

"During the latter half of the 1980s, London witnessed the making of remarkable social history. From illicit radio stations through improvised nightclubs, young Londoners helped to construct a completely alternative leisure landscape. Its aim was celebration, its glue was music...." So writes Cynthia Rose of the visual fallout from the rave parties, the soul underground, the sound systems, the skateboarders and other musical vibes in the postpunk UK. Design After Dark: The Story of the Dancefloor Style is a colorful history of the many trends and artists of this visual youth movement. Evolving from the Anglo-Soviet graphic style of 1970s punk (a "designer socialism" inspired by the Russian Constructivists of the early 20th century) these diverse visual languages all shared the same "do-it- yourself" (DIY) ethos and fresh energy.

Posters, fanzines and handbills (called "tickets") declaring both musical happenings and affinities, were created with the DIY limitations of lack of money and facilities, where photocopying becomes key. They were made with a graphic improvisation similar to the situationism of raves and other one-off warehouse parties, and each ticket had to compete with 40 others each night to grab the eye of the clubgoers. The art paralleled the sound sampling and remixing of house, acid, rare groove and other music, becoming a visual sampling and remixing of iconic images: famous logos like Chanel's or Nike's, 70s album covers like SuperFly or symbolism from religions or from the 60s and 70s like the acid house "smiley face."

A lot of the art in Design After Dark was created by young clubgoers whose pirate skills were learned outside of formal training, in record and clothing shops and from each other. There was a community of guerrilla communication, and the skateboarding culture and the dancefloor explosion admitted "no boundaries between art and life, work and enjoyment," sharing graphic design as they shared fashion and sounds. Teamwork outweighed individual celebrity, and the young artists didn’t care what the design press said, for, as designer Ian Swift says, "they never thought it would notice them."

This well-designed and well-printed book shows a dizzying number of different styles and designs. Even a casual flip-through can convince the reader that the members of this scene were living their art, delighting in the music and community. What a bonus that Design After Dark stands up to careful reading, building an engaging tale of how one look led to another, how this young entrepreneur created a visual groove of his or her own which then inspired someone else.

Design After Dark also profiles eleven "dancefloor designers", like Paul Elliman, art director in the mid 80s for Wire, a British jazz magazine. The lovely blends of conservative modernist typography with photographs in the classic 50s jazz cover tradition have now become the visual vernacular of the neo-bop movement in the USA as well as in Britain. A self-described unschooled designer, EllimanÕs elegant use of Garamond in Wire was just another case of using whatever was available, the "working-within-limitations" methodology that characterizes all of the work in Design After Dark .

Also of note are the portraits created for the New Music Express by Ian Wright: Grandmaster Flash rendered in table salt on black paper, or the cubist Sun Ra inked on a breadboard. Illustrator Fiona Hawthorne captures the bop musicians, both neo- and original, with pen and ink drawings and watercolors in the style of 40s jazz cover artist, David Stone Martin. Ian Swift, the designer of the jazz fanzine Straight No Chaser (the layouts the layouts of which are done completely on the Macintosh) creates spreads less classic modern as in Wire, but more like visual jazz meets hip hop. Also check out Trevor Jackson's cartoon-happy logos and record sleeves, reflecting that he's "into haircuts, Saul Bass typography, JD King cartoons." He's "just trying to make things fun." Which serves as a fine assessment of all the work in this book.

It might make one nervous to be serious about a history so recent that there's no perspective available. But author Cynthia Rose has written in such an entertaining style and with images so infectious, that Design After Dark allows any reader to sample the fun and youthful inspiration of the dancefloor without breaking a sweat.

- Angelynn Grant

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