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Charles S. Peirce, Dada, Typography, Semiotics, Modernism (Art History), Jean Baudrillard, and 27 moreArt History, Visual Studies, Robin Kinross, Visual Semiotics, Laszlo Moholy Nagy, Design History, Grammatology, El Lissitzky, Architectural Theory, Hermann Muthesius, Victor Margolin, Visual_Culture, Otto Neurath, Jan Tschichold, Louis Hjelmslev, Umberto Eco, Kurt Schwitters, Legibility Research, Typeface Design, Sanserif, Josef Albers, Stanley Morison, Ferdinand de Saussure, Charles Kay Ogden, Basic English, Franz Roh, and Herbert Spencer (Typographer) edit
I wrote this in 2018 for a book that never came out (I think, the editor stopped answering mails). There's some juicy slander against the Independent Group towards the end, if you like that sort of thing. There are also many typos. Here's... more
I wrote this in 2018 for a book that never came out (I think, the editor stopped answering mails). There's some juicy slander against the Independent Group towards the end, if you like that sort of thing. There are also many typos. Here's the abstract:
The categories of New Traditionalism and Modernism are insufficient in accounting for British typography, and intellectual reflection on typography, from the 1930s to the 1960s. In the journals of the Shenval Press — particularly Typography (1936–1939) and Motif (1958–1967) — we find explicit rejection of the stylistic constraints of European modernism and native new traditionalism, and an embrace of the diversity and ephemerality of form in consumer culture. As such, this attitude in typography anticipates postmodernism and Pop Art. The rise and fall of this tendency — here called ‘British typographic pluralism’ — is traced through an examination of three journals of typography and the arts — Typography, Motif and Theo Crosby’s Uppercase (1958–1961).
The categories of New Traditionalism and Modernism are insufficient in accounting for British typography, and intellectual reflection on typography, from the 1930s to the 1960s. In the journals of the Shenval Press — particularly Typography (1936–1939) and Motif (1958–1967) — we find explicit rejection of the stylistic constraints of European modernism and native new traditionalism, and an embrace of the diversity and ephemerality of form in consumer culture. As such, this attitude in typography anticipates postmodernism and Pop Art. The rise and fall of this tendency — here called ‘British typographic pluralism’ — is traced through an examination of three journals of typography and the arts — Typography, Motif and Theo Crosby’s Uppercase (1958–1961).
Research Interests:
The course of sans-serif design in the twentieth century has been a move towards an increasing complex and nuanced language of style. While this has been the tendency in type design in general, what is interesting about sans serifs is... more
The course of sans-serif design in the twentieth century has been a move
towards an increasing complex and nuanced language of style. While this has been the tendency in type design in general, what is interesting about sans serifs is that they have been called upon, on more than one occasion, as the antidote to stylistic profusion. The sans serif emerged from a general explosion in typographic form in the nineteenth century, during which time it quickly developed multiple models. Throughout the twentieth century, sans serif substyles proliferated, cross-pollinating with each other as well as other styles of letter. As such, ‘sans serif’ is not a stable category,
akin to a biological classification, but a loose conceptual heuristic.
https://www.amalgam.online/journal/
towards an increasing complex and nuanced language of style. While this has been the tendency in type design in general, what is interesting about sans serifs is that they have been called upon, on more than one occasion, as the antidote to stylistic profusion. The sans serif emerged from a general explosion in typographic form in the nineteenth century, during which time it quickly developed multiple models. Throughout the twentieth century, sans serif substyles proliferated, cross-pollinating with each other as well as other styles of letter. As such, ‘sans serif’ is not a stable category,
akin to a biological classification, but a loose conceptual heuristic.
https://www.amalgam.online/journal/
Research Interests:
Robin Fuller Rick Griffin was a leading figure of the psychedelic design movement in late 1960s San Francisco. This paper argues that although not an overt theorist, in his lettering for posters and comic books, Griffin reveals aspects of... more
Robin Fuller Rick Griffin was a leading figure of the psychedelic design movement in late 1960s San Francisco. This paper argues that although not an overt theorist, in his lettering for posters and comic books, Griffin reveals aspects of the visual semiotics of writing that provide insights for the semiotic study of graphically-embodied language. Griffin was preoccupied with the visual substance of writing. Not only was Griffin a student of myriad styles of letter (including, cholo graffiti, comic book lettering, Jugendstil and Victorian typography), but he was also preoccupied with how writing functions and how letterforms attain meanings. Through an analysis of Griffin's comic book and poster lettering, this paper will discuss aspects of the visual semiotics of alphabetic writing including: the relationship of embodied tokens to alphabetical symbols, the socio-semiotic function of styles of letter, and lettering as aesthetic signification.
Research Interests:
This paper examines projects in universal communication from the interwar period, including Charles Kay Ogden's Basic English, Otto Neurath's Isotype, and László Moholy-Nagy's typo-photo. The projects under discussion — experiments in... more
This paper examines projects in universal communication from the interwar period, including Charles Kay Ogden's Basic English, Otto Neurath's Isotype, and László Moholy-Nagy's typo-photo. The projects under discussion — experiments in language reform, graphic design and photography — were all born from a dissatisfaction with the imprecise, arbitrary and historically-contingent nature of established languages and semiotic systems. A non-arbitrary mode of communication was sought, one that represented reality directly without translation through a cultural code.
Research Interests:
Herbert Bayer, Jan Tschichold and several other modernist typographers demanded that the alphabet be redesigned in order to represent speech more faithfully, yet Kurt Schwitters’s Systemschrift was the only such experiment that pursued to... more
Herbert Bayer, Jan Tschichold and several other modernist typographers demanded that the alphabet be redesigned in order to represent speech more faithfully, yet Kurt Schwitters’s Systemschrift was the only such experiment that pursued to the end the modernist typographers’ rally cry of ‘one sound, one sign’. To achieve this, Schwitters rejected the standard characters of the Latin alphabet and designed entirely new symbols informed by phonetic analysis of speech sounds. Further, Systemschrift included aspects of non-arbitrary signification through imagery; the characters can be interpreted as depictions of the articulatory positions of the vocal organ. In so doing, Schwitters emulated experiments conducted by nineteenth-century English phoneticians.
Research Interests:
This paper argues that the writings of cultural-theorist Jean Baudrillard from the late 1960s and early 1970s provided an important contribution to twentieth-century Design Theory. Baudrillard’s theory of consumer society was informed by... more
This paper argues that the writings of cultural-theorist Jean Baudrillard from the late 1960s and early 1970s provided an important contribution to twentieth-century Design Theory. Baudrillard’s theory of consumer society was informed by a critical engagement with themes that preoccupied twentieth-century design practice and theory. Rejecting the designer’s testimony as evidence, Baudrillard insisted that design be understood within the broader sociological context of consumer society. Towards the close of the 1960s, as the universalist project of Functionalism was attacked by various factions, Baudrillard uniquely argued that Functionalism had not simply failed to establish a singular mode of design in opposition to the multiplicity of fashion; rather Functionalism was fashion’s progenitor and perfect exemplar.
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Letterbomb: Dispatches from the front line of type and lettering design. Exhibition note. Published as a3 risograph two-sided poster We do a lot of things with letters. We write ourselves to — do lists, we classify corridors and... more
Letterbomb: Dispatches from the front line of type and lettering design.
Exhibition note.
Published as a3 risograph two-sided poster
We do a lot of things with letters. We write ourselves to — do lists, we classify corridors and stairwells, and we bind legal documents with signatures. Signatures are an aberration. The function of a signature rests in the idiosyncrasy of how the letters are rendered-that's how we know it was written by the person who wrote it. But in general, and in principle, writing works in precisely the opposite manner. Writing conveys information regardless of the formal nuances of its appearance.
Exhibition note.
Published as a3 risograph two-sided poster
We do a lot of things with letters. We write ourselves to — do lists, we classify corridors and stairwells, and we bind legal documents with signatures. Signatures are an aberration. The function of a signature rests in the idiosyncrasy of how the letters are rendered-that's how we know it was written by the person who wrote it. But in general, and in principle, writing works in precisely the opposite manner. Writing conveys information regardless of the formal nuances of its appearance.
Research Interests:
Certain styles of letter and typefaces carry political and cultural connotations. If you want to lure tourists into spending €7 a pint in your Temple Bar pub, choosing the appropriate “authentic” Irish lettering for your fascia is... more
Certain styles of letter and typefaces carry political and cultural connotations. If you want to lure tourists into spending €7 a pint in your Temple Bar pub, choosing the appropriate “authentic” Irish lettering for your fascia is important.
Similarly, if you want to promote a black metal group, you should probably stay away from Comic Sans. While the spikey, spider-web forms of a black metal group’s logo might seem to inherently convey the intended “evil”, more often there is nothing inherent in the shapes of letters that allow them to mean what they do.
Styles of letter come to mean what they mean through association over time. For the last year or so in Ireland, a particular typeface has become associated with protest and politically progressive movements: Bello.
Bello was released by the Dutch and Finnish typedesign firm Underware in 2004. It is designed to emulate the fluid forms of commercial brush lettering.
When drawing letters with a brush, the letterer can make spontaneous decisions and adjust letters to fit and link with one another. In contrast to hand-drawn letters, typefaces usually repeat each letter identically each time.
To get around this, and to emulate a hand-rendered feel, Bello comes with multiple alternatives for many letterforms, as well as ligatures, which are two characters linked.
The designer who uses Bello can alternate these forms to create the spontaneous, improvised feeling of hand-drawn letters. The result is a particularly jolly, blobby and playful typeface, well-suited to advertising ice cream. But, oddly, in Ireland today we find Bello used as the graphic voice of progressive politics.
To understand how Bello became associated with protest in Ireland we have to go back to 2008. In that year, American graffiti writer Stephen “Espo” Powers travelled to Ireland on a Fulbright scholarship to paint a series of murals in Dublin and Belfast.
Espo began as a graffiti writer in the classic New York hip-hop mould. Such graffiti is intentionally exclusive; letterforms are rendered in arcane, labyrinthine styles only legible to the initiate, and what is written is less important than how it is written.
Later, Espo evolved a unique style of graffiti influenced by commercial signwriting, featuring clear and legible letterforms. Unlike typical graffiti writers, Espo does not simply render his nom de guerre, but instead writes poignant, fragmentary messages, alluding to fuller stories.
His murals in Dublin included “Lonely for You Only”, which remained outside the Tivoli theatre for several years, and a series at the Bernard Shaw reading “Baby is Crying; Rent all Spent; Car Got Towed; Lost the Remote”. During his visit to Dublin, he was aided by a younger Dublin graffiti artist, named Maser.
Maser’s career has parallels with that of Espo. Although Maser is today known as Ireland’s most celebrated street artist, famed for clear lettering and large abstract compositions, he was first a graffiti writer, and an original, technically proficient and respected one too.
Following their collaboration in 2008, Espo’s influence on Maser was immediately apparent. In 2009, Maser and Damien Dempsey began a project called They Are Us, to raise awareness and money for the Simon Community.
Dempsey wrote short one-liners or couplets evoking Dublin life in the recession, which Maser translated into large murals throughout the city, in a clear Espo-like style (at the 2010 Offset conference at the Grand Canal Theatre, Espo described the project as “those Damien Dempsey murals that look like [Espo’s work]”).
The murals included “Concrete Jungle Mother Farewell to Your Stairwell Forever”, covering the entire side of a Ballymun tower block, and “Greed is the Knife and the Scars Run Deep” on East Wall Road. The latter mural became an icon of the recession, and was used by several European newspapers in 2010 to illustrate articles on Ireland’s emaciated economy.
Maser used two styles of letter for the project: simple clear sans-serif capitals, and a familiar blobby, jovial italic. One of the curious things about Maser’s lettering was that, although it was rendered by hand, the italic was based directly on the typeface Bello. It is ironic that a typeface that was specifically designed to emulate hand-drawn forms became the model for Maser’s own hand-painted letters.
One of Damo’s lines read “Love Yourself Today”, which Maser rendered in white Bello letters on a red heart. Around the same time, Maser made graffiti stickers with his alias, also in Bello on a red heart. With “They Are Us”, Maser introduced Bello to Irish social politics, but it was not until 2016 that Bello would be at the front lines of protest.
In the lead-up to the marriage referendum in 2015, the blue wall of Temple Bar’s Project Arts Centre was enlivened by a mural of a fist wearing a knuckleduster reading “YES” by graffiti artist Sums. This was a modification of Sums’s signature graffiti stickers in which the knuckleduster features his own alias.
The following year in the same site, Maser did something similar, modifying his signature sticker design to read “Repeal the 8th” in Bello on a red heart. Most likely, the mural would have been enjoyed by some and then forgotten by all after a short period had the Catholic far-right not scored a monumental own goal by protesting its existence.
Anti-reproductive-rights organisations bombarded the centre and Dublin City Council with complaints, forcing the mural to be removed, and in the process, brought the mural to national attention.
Subsequently, The HunReal Issues, the website that had commissioned the mural, released the design online, which reproductive-rights activists downloaded and used to produce stickers and stencils, making Maser’s Bello-based design the de-facto logo of the repeal movement.
At this year’s March for Repeal, on 8 March, protesters could be seen holding handmade signs emulating Bello’s letterforms.
In December 2016, Bello broadened its political portfolio and entered into the movement addressing homelessness and the housing crisis. Home Sweet Home was established at a September 2016 meeting organised by Dean Scurry, attended by political activists and artists including John Connors, Damien Dempsey, Frankie Gaffney, and Ruairí McKiernan.
By early December they had a logo, “Home Sweet Home” in white Bello on a silhouette of a house. Home Sweet Home’s occupation of Apollo House again pushed Bello into the national spotlight, as Bello voiced the demand for the universal right to housing, and activists adorned posters, banners, T-shirts, high-vis jackets, and even taxis in Bello’s bouncing curves.
Scurry subsequently used Bello to advertise his talking tour of Ireland in March, and Bello can every so often be found in left-wing meme images.
Bello’s current association with progressive politics is limited to Ireland. It comes with no inherent politics. It was the official typeface of François Hollande’s successful presidential campaign in 2012; it was also used in the original Airbnb logo. Bello’s dalliance with the Irish left is probably coming to a close.
“Repeal” is now more often seen in white sans-serif caps on black jumpers than in Maser’s optimistic heart design. Unlike the letters that publicans use to convey Irishness, which have centuries-long cultural associations, Bello briefly drifted into Irish political discourse, and will probably drift off again.
However fleeting, Bello’s encouraging, optimistic forms have been a welcome break from the shouting bold sans-serifs and (shudder) eroded grunge fonts – Jobstown Not Guilty, I’m looking at you – that dominate the discourse of protest.
Similarly, if you want to promote a black metal group, you should probably stay away from Comic Sans. While the spikey, spider-web forms of a black metal group’s logo might seem to inherently convey the intended “evil”, more often there is nothing inherent in the shapes of letters that allow them to mean what they do.
Styles of letter come to mean what they mean through association over time. For the last year or so in Ireland, a particular typeface has become associated with protest and politically progressive movements: Bello.
Bello was released by the Dutch and Finnish typedesign firm Underware in 2004. It is designed to emulate the fluid forms of commercial brush lettering.
When drawing letters with a brush, the letterer can make spontaneous decisions and adjust letters to fit and link with one another. In contrast to hand-drawn letters, typefaces usually repeat each letter identically each time.
To get around this, and to emulate a hand-rendered feel, Bello comes with multiple alternatives for many letterforms, as well as ligatures, which are two characters linked.
The designer who uses Bello can alternate these forms to create the spontaneous, improvised feeling of hand-drawn letters. The result is a particularly jolly, blobby and playful typeface, well-suited to advertising ice cream. But, oddly, in Ireland today we find Bello used as the graphic voice of progressive politics.
To understand how Bello became associated with protest in Ireland we have to go back to 2008. In that year, American graffiti writer Stephen “Espo” Powers travelled to Ireland on a Fulbright scholarship to paint a series of murals in Dublin and Belfast.
Espo began as a graffiti writer in the classic New York hip-hop mould. Such graffiti is intentionally exclusive; letterforms are rendered in arcane, labyrinthine styles only legible to the initiate, and what is written is less important than how it is written.
Later, Espo evolved a unique style of graffiti influenced by commercial signwriting, featuring clear and legible letterforms. Unlike typical graffiti writers, Espo does not simply render his nom de guerre, but instead writes poignant, fragmentary messages, alluding to fuller stories.
His murals in Dublin included “Lonely for You Only”, which remained outside the Tivoli theatre for several years, and a series at the Bernard Shaw reading “Baby is Crying; Rent all Spent; Car Got Towed; Lost the Remote”. During his visit to Dublin, he was aided by a younger Dublin graffiti artist, named Maser.
Maser’s career has parallels with that of Espo. Although Maser is today known as Ireland’s most celebrated street artist, famed for clear lettering and large abstract compositions, he was first a graffiti writer, and an original, technically proficient and respected one too.
Following their collaboration in 2008, Espo’s influence on Maser was immediately apparent. In 2009, Maser and Damien Dempsey began a project called They Are Us, to raise awareness and money for the Simon Community.
Dempsey wrote short one-liners or couplets evoking Dublin life in the recession, which Maser translated into large murals throughout the city, in a clear Espo-like style (at the 2010 Offset conference at the Grand Canal Theatre, Espo described the project as “those Damien Dempsey murals that look like [Espo’s work]”).
The murals included “Concrete Jungle Mother Farewell to Your Stairwell Forever”, covering the entire side of a Ballymun tower block, and “Greed is the Knife and the Scars Run Deep” on East Wall Road. The latter mural became an icon of the recession, and was used by several European newspapers in 2010 to illustrate articles on Ireland’s emaciated economy.
Maser used two styles of letter for the project: simple clear sans-serif capitals, and a familiar blobby, jovial italic. One of the curious things about Maser’s lettering was that, although it was rendered by hand, the italic was based directly on the typeface Bello. It is ironic that a typeface that was specifically designed to emulate hand-drawn forms became the model for Maser’s own hand-painted letters.
One of Damo’s lines read “Love Yourself Today”, which Maser rendered in white Bello letters on a red heart. Around the same time, Maser made graffiti stickers with his alias, also in Bello on a red heart. With “They Are Us”, Maser introduced Bello to Irish social politics, but it was not until 2016 that Bello would be at the front lines of protest.
In the lead-up to the marriage referendum in 2015, the blue wall of Temple Bar’s Project Arts Centre was enlivened by a mural of a fist wearing a knuckleduster reading “YES” by graffiti artist Sums. This was a modification of Sums’s signature graffiti stickers in which the knuckleduster features his own alias.
The following year in the same site, Maser did something similar, modifying his signature sticker design to read “Repeal the 8th” in Bello on a red heart. Most likely, the mural would have been enjoyed by some and then forgotten by all after a short period had the Catholic far-right not scored a monumental own goal by protesting its existence.
Anti-reproductive-rights organisations bombarded the centre and Dublin City Council with complaints, forcing the mural to be removed, and in the process, brought the mural to national attention.
Subsequently, The HunReal Issues, the website that had commissioned the mural, released the design online, which reproductive-rights activists downloaded and used to produce stickers and stencils, making Maser’s Bello-based design the de-facto logo of the repeal movement.
At this year’s March for Repeal, on 8 March, protesters could be seen holding handmade signs emulating Bello’s letterforms.
In December 2016, Bello broadened its political portfolio and entered into the movement addressing homelessness and the housing crisis. Home Sweet Home was established at a September 2016 meeting organised by Dean Scurry, attended by political activists and artists including John Connors, Damien Dempsey, Frankie Gaffney, and Ruairí McKiernan.
By early December they had a logo, “Home Sweet Home” in white Bello on a silhouette of a house. Home Sweet Home’s occupation of Apollo House again pushed Bello into the national spotlight, as Bello voiced the demand for the universal right to housing, and activists adorned posters, banners, T-shirts, high-vis jackets, and even taxis in Bello’s bouncing curves.
Scurry subsequently used Bello to advertise his talking tour of Ireland in March, and Bello can every so often be found in left-wing meme images.
Bello’s current association with progressive politics is limited to Ireland. It comes with no inherent politics. It was the official typeface of François Hollande’s successful presidential campaign in 2012; it was also used in the original Airbnb logo. Bello’s dalliance with the Irish left is probably coming to a close.
“Repeal” is now more often seen in white sans-serif caps on black jumpers than in Maser’s optimistic heart design. Unlike the letters that publicans use to convey Irishness, which have centuries-long cultural associations, Bello briefly drifted into Irish political discourse, and will probably drift off again.
However fleeting, Bello’s encouraging, optimistic forms have been a welcome break from the shouting bold sans-serifs and (shudder) eroded grunge fonts – Jobstown Not Guilty, I’m looking at you – that dominate the discourse of protest.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Lasting only five issues, from 1958 and 1961, the journal Uppercase captured a moment of transition in British typography. Uppercase was edited by Theo Crosby, who would go on to be a founding partner of Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes and later... more
Lasting only five issues, from 1958 and 1961, the journal Uppercase captured a moment of transition in British typography.
Uppercase was edited by Theo Crosby, who would go on to be a founding partner of Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes and later Pentagram. As its first editorial announced, Uppercase was not devoted to typography but the ‘whole field of visual communication’. Subjects covered included British pop artists and interwar European modernists. The fifth and final issue was devoted to the Charles Morris-derived theory of semiotics-as-praxis, devised at Ulm by Tomás Maldonado and Gui Bonsiepe.
Rather than Uppercase representing a particular ideology, Crosby described his journal as being ‘tentative, incomplete and inconclusive.’ Nevertheless, formally Uppercase captured a moment of confrontation between typographic ideologies; a period when Britain’s native pluralistic approach to typography was being challenged by the restrictive ‘International’ (Swiss) style. Apart from the first issue (which had body text in Gill Sans bold), the only faces used in Uppercase were Monotype’s Grotesques 215 and 216. A Swiss-like consistency of grid and type size, and a minimal approach to distinguishing paragraphs and headings can be found throughout the series, yet Uppercase was not a direct imitation of Swiss typography. The editorial of its first issue announced that each issue would be ‘an experiment in type’, but this was an experiment of great subtlety — a sense of variation in rhythm was produced at a slow pace, through delicate contrasts of structure and changes in stock, spanning not only a single issue, but the entire series.
This paper will discuss the typography of Uppercase in the context of contemporary journals, including Neue Grafik (launched the same year), and the British Journals Motif and Typographica.
Uppercase was edited by Theo Crosby, who would go on to be a founding partner of Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes and later Pentagram. As its first editorial announced, Uppercase was not devoted to typography but the ‘whole field of visual communication’. Subjects covered included British pop artists and interwar European modernists. The fifth and final issue was devoted to the Charles Morris-derived theory of semiotics-as-praxis, devised at Ulm by Tomás Maldonado and Gui Bonsiepe.
Rather than Uppercase representing a particular ideology, Crosby described his journal as being ‘tentative, incomplete and inconclusive.’ Nevertheless, formally Uppercase captured a moment of confrontation between typographic ideologies; a period when Britain’s native pluralistic approach to typography was being challenged by the restrictive ‘International’ (Swiss) style. Apart from the first issue (which had body text in Gill Sans bold), the only faces used in Uppercase were Monotype’s Grotesques 215 and 216. A Swiss-like consistency of grid and type size, and a minimal approach to distinguishing paragraphs and headings can be found throughout the series, yet Uppercase was not a direct imitation of Swiss typography. The editorial of its first issue announced that each issue would be ‘an experiment in type’, but this was an experiment of great subtlety — a sense of variation in rhythm was produced at a slow pace, through delicate contrasts of structure and changes in stock, spanning not only a single issue, but the entire series.
This paper will discuss the typography of Uppercase in the context of contemporary journals, including Neue Grafik (launched the same year), and the British Journals Motif and Typographica.
Research Interests:
The impact of the quasi-philosophical movement ‘General Semantics’, founded by Alfred Korzybski, on post-war visual communication theory has yet to be fully explicated. While Korzybski’s influence on the British ‘Independent Group’ of the... more
The impact of the quasi-philosophical movement ‘General Semantics’, founded by Alfred Korzybski, on post-war visual communication theory has yet to be fully explicated. While Korzybski’s influence on the British ‘Independent Group’ of the 1950s is recognised (c.f. Massey 1995), and more recently contacts between General Semantics and post-war modernism in the United States have been exposed (Vallye 2009), the philosophical and historical connections between General Semantics and László Moholy-Nagy and György Kepes of the New Bauhaus Chicago remain under explored.
Ideological and methodological homologies between the Dessau Bauhaus and the Vienna Circle Logical Positivists have been elucidated by Peter Galison (1990, 1996). A core aspect of what unites Logical Positivism and modernist design theory is a concern that inherited languages (even ‘visual languages’) interfere in some way with understanding; that languages bring with them conceptual schemes and therefore, potentially, conceptual distortions. Thus, some form of purified language is sought; one that will erase national, cultural and historical peculiarity, and bring forth an age of technological reason.
But of course these ideas recur throughout twentieth-century discourse. We find them not only in the cradle of analytical philosophy, but also in the (less reputable) theory of General Semantics. General Semantics was founded by Korzybski in 1933 with a vanity-published tome, Science and Sanity: An introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and General Semantics. Korzybski was not a philosopher in any typical sense (and in fact, he was rejected as a quack by analytical philosophers including Ernest Nagel, W.V.O. Quine and Alfred Tarksi). Like the Logical Positivists, Korzybski was concerned that natural languages engendered illogical habits of thought. However, Korzybski’s aim was not simply to refute misguided notions, but to invent a psychotherapeutic technique. At the expense of a short course from The Institute of General Semantics, one could break the ‘historico-grammatical’ bonds of language and fulfill one’s intellectual potential. General Semantics was presented as a cure-all snake oil, capable of remedying ‘neuroses and psychoses; various learning, reading or speech difficulties […], general maladjustments in professional and / or personal lives […], heart digestive, respiratory, and ‘sex’ disorders, some chronic joint diseases, arthritis, dental caries, migraines, skin diseases, alcoholism’.
A spate of books followed Science and Sanity in the late-30s and early-40s, popularising Korzybski’s ideas. These included Stuart Chase’s bestseller, The Tyranny of Words (1938) and S.I. Hayakawa’s Language in Action (1939). It was Hayakawa (at one-stage Korzybski’s heir apparent), that did the most to consolidate connections between modernist design theory and General Semantics. In 1940 Hayakawa attended summer sessions taught by Moholy-Nagy and the two became close friends. This led to Moholy-Nagy inviting Hayakawa to give seminars on ‘semantics’ to his students.
More than a personal friendship, Hayakawa found homologies to General Semantics in Moholy-Nagy’s and Korzybski’s writings. The theory of visual communication developed in post-war America by Moholy-Nagy in Vision in Motion (1947) and The New Vision (1947) and by Kepes in Language of Vision (1944) (for which Hayakawa provided the introduction), was derived from the theory of modernist painting of the European and Russian avant-gardes. Central to Moholy-Nagy and Kepes’s account was the claim that the inherited mode of perspectival spatial representation was not based on fidelity to reality, but was rather an inherited ‘visual language’. The arbitrariness of this ‘language’ had been proven by developments in physics and non-Euclidean geometry which described the world in more than three dimensions. The task of modernist visual communication was to develop new non-arbitrary modes of spatial representation, which would be scientific and transcultural, and therefore tethered to a vaguely defined metanarrative of emancipation through science. For Hayakawa, this was a direct analogue of the General Semanticists’ claims regarding the necessity of overcoming ‘insane’ linguistic habits.
As Galison has shown, connections with the Logical Positivists were continued at The New Bauhaus in Chicago; however, in the United States both groups shed their left-wing internationalist associations. It is telling that as links between the Positivists and the Bauhaus came undone on American soil, Moholy-Nagy and Kepes were drawn to General Semantics, a commodified form of linguistic philosophy.
References
Dahms, Hans-Jaochim, ‘Neue Sachlichkeit in the Architecture and Philosophy of the 1920s’, in Carnap Brought Home: The view from Jena, ed. by Steve Awodey and Carsten Klein (Chicago: Open Court, 2004), pp, 357–376
Galison, Peter, ‘Aufbau/Bahuas’, Critical Inquiry 16/4, 1990, pp. 709–752
——, ‘Constructing Modernism: the cultural location of Aufbau’, in Origins of Logical Empiricism, ed. by Ronald N. Giere and Alan W. Richardson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996), pp. 17–44
Massey, Anne, The Independent Group: Modernism and mass culture in Britain, 1945–59 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995)
Vallye, Anna, ‘The Strategic Universality of trans/formation, 1950–1952’, Grey Room 35, 2009, pp. 28–57
Ideological and methodological homologies between the Dessau Bauhaus and the Vienna Circle Logical Positivists have been elucidated by Peter Galison (1990, 1996). A core aspect of what unites Logical Positivism and modernist design theory is a concern that inherited languages (even ‘visual languages’) interfere in some way with understanding; that languages bring with them conceptual schemes and therefore, potentially, conceptual distortions. Thus, some form of purified language is sought; one that will erase national, cultural and historical peculiarity, and bring forth an age of technological reason.
But of course these ideas recur throughout twentieth-century discourse. We find them not only in the cradle of analytical philosophy, but also in the (less reputable) theory of General Semantics. General Semantics was founded by Korzybski in 1933 with a vanity-published tome, Science and Sanity: An introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and General Semantics. Korzybski was not a philosopher in any typical sense (and in fact, he was rejected as a quack by analytical philosophers including Ernest Nagel, W.V.O. Quine and Alfred Tarksi). Like the Logical Positivists, Korzybski was concerned that natural languages engendered illogical habits of thought. However, Korzybski’s aim was not simply to refute misguided notions, but to invent a psychotherapeutic technique. At the expense of a short course from The Institute of General Semantics, one could break the ‘historico-grammatical’ bonds of language and fulfill one’s intellectual potential. General Semantics was presented as a cure-all snake oil, capable of remedying ‘neuroses and psychoses; various learning, reading or speech difficulties […], general maladjustments in professional and / or personal lives […], heart digestive, respiratory, and ‘sex’ disorders, some chronic joint diseases, arthritis, dental caries, migraines, skin diseases, alcoholism’.
A spate of books followed Science and Sanity in the late-30s and early-40s, popularising Korzybski’s ideas. These included Stuart Chase’s bestseller, The Tyranny of Words (1938) and S.I. Hayakawa’s Language in Action (1939). It was Hayakawa (at one-stage Korzybski’s heir apparent), that did the most to consolidate connections between modernist design theory and General Semantics. In 1940 Hayakawa attended summer sessions taught by Moholy-Nagy and the two became close friends. This led to Moholy-Nagy inviting Hayakawa to give seminars on ‘semantics’ to his students.
More than a personal friendship, Hayakawa found homologies to General Semantics in Moholy-Nagy’s and Korzybski’s writings. The theory of visual communication developed in post-war America by Moholy-Nagy in Vision in Motion (1947) and The New Vision (1947) and by Kepes in Language of Vision (1944) (for which Hayakawa provided the introduction), was derived from the theory of modernist painting of the European and Russian avant-gardes. Central to Moholy-Nagy and Kepes’s account was the claim that the inherited mode of perspectival spatial representation was not based on fidelity to reality, but was rather an inherited ‘visual language’. The arbitrariness of this ‘language’ had been proven by developments in physics and non-Euclidean geometry which described the world in more than three dimensions. The task of modernist visual communication was to develop new non-arbitrary modes of spatial representation, which would be scientific and transcultural, and therefore tethered to a vaguely defined metanarrative of emancipation through science. For Hayakawa, this was a direct analogue of the General Semanticists’ claims regarding the necessity of overcoming ‘insane’ linguistic habits.
As Galison has shown, connections with the Logical Positivists were continued at The New Bauhaus in Chicago; however, in the United States both groups shed their left-wing internationalist associations. It is telling that as links between the Positivists and the Bauhaus came undone on American soil, Moholy-Nagy and Kepes were drawn to General Semantics, a commodified form of linguistic philosophy.
References
Dahms, Hans-Jaochim, ‘Neue Sachlichkeit in the Architecture and Philosophy of the 1920s’, in Carnap Brought Home: The view from Jena, ed. by Steve Awodey and Carsten Klein (Chicago: Open Court, 2004), pp, 357–376
Galison, Peter, ‘Aufbau/Bahuas’, Critical Inquiry 16/4, 1990, pp. 709–752
——, ‘Constructing Modernism: the cultural location of Aufbau’, in Origins of Logical Empiricism, ed. by Ronald N. Giere and Alan W. Richardson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996), pp. 17–44
Massey, Anne, The Independent Group: Modernism and mass culture in Britain, 1945–59 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995)
Vallye, Anna, ‘The Strategic Universality of trans/formation, 1950–1952’, Grey Room 35, 2009, pp. 28–57
Research Interests:
The aims of this paper are as follows. Firstly, I will locate certain commonly-held views on the relationships between typography, writing, and language as they have been expressed in typographic discourse throughout the twentieth and... more
The aims of this paper are as follows. Firstly, I will locate certain commonly-held views on the relationships between typography, writing, and language as they have been expressed in typographic discourse throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; views common to a diverse range of typographers and writers on typography, representative of movements that are in other ways ideologically distinct, including New Traditionalism, Interwar New Typography and Swiss Modernism. Secondly, I outline parallels to typographers’ treatment of the relationship of writing and speech in twentieth century linguistic and grammatological theory. Finally, I will uncover (and then challenge) the ideological underpinnings of such theorisations on writing and language.
As this is a quite vast topic and time is limited, the two (closely-interrelated) ideas that I will focus on are, firstly, the belief that the purpose of written (or printed) language is to be a direct analogue of speech, and secondly, the belief that alphabetical writing is the most ‘evolutionarily advanced’ form of writing. I will argue that neither of these ideas are accurate or useful, and that typographic discourse would do well to abandon them.
As this is a quite vast topic and time is limited, the two (closely-interrelated) ideas that I will focus on are, firstly, the belief that the purpose of written (or printed) language is to be a direct analogue of speech, and secondly, the belief that alphabetical writing is the most ‘evolutionarily advanced’ form of writing. I will argue that neither of these ideas are accurate or useful, and that typographic discourse would do well to abandon them.
Research Interests:
‘What is a letter?’ may at first seem to be a grammatological question. Geoffrey Sampson (1985), and other grammatologists, have shown the variety of roles letters can play within writing systems. Beyond grammatology, the extra-linguistic... more
‘What is a letter?’ may at first seem to be a grammatological question. Geoffrey Sampson (1985), and other grammatologists, have shown the variety of roles letters can play within writing systems. Beyond grammatology, the extra-linguistic meanings attributed to ‘visual’ or ‘material’ aspects of letters is of increasing concern — notably in ‘Linguistic Landscapes’ (cf. Seargeant 2012), and the semiotics of typography (cf. Van Leeuwen 2006). For the grammatologist letters are differential units of orthography; for the visual-semiotician the letter is often a polysemous aggregate of connotations. Rather than these two positions contradicting one another, each describes the letter in a different semiotic context. This paper seeks a fundamental semiotics of the letter, arguing that the letter is not defined by linguistic uses; nor does the letter’s semiotic foundation reside in ‘materiality’.
David Abercrombie (1949) defined the three attributes of the letter in Classical grammar as follows — ‘figura was the letter as written, potestas as pronounced, and by its nomen it could be identified for discussion’. Although Abercrombie was concerned with the letter only in orthography, this paper uses expanded definitions of these three attributes to discuss the fundamental semiotics of the letter. Potestas here means any function attributed to a letter (phonetic, algebraic, etc.). A comparison of orthographies and mathematical notation reveals that letters are not restricted to any function. If the letter is not potestas, but that to which a potestas is given, should it be defined as figura — as shape? Palaeography and the history of typography reveal that for each letter there are many figura. Ultimately then, the letter is to be understood as nomen — here meaning not literally ‘name’, but conventionally-established category. Drawing on Charles S. Peirce’s analysis of symbol and replica (1931–58), and Umberto Eco’s type/token ratio (1976), the relationship of figura to nomen is modelled.
Letters pre-exist — structurally if not historically — the systems that supply them with potestas. Nevertheless, letters are not semiotically neutral prior to their exploitation in particular semiotic systems. Letters have been developed into a uniquely vast range of styles that can be rendered and recognised with ease in an array of functional contexts. What allows this is recognition of the letter as nomen — it is only when the identity of letters is recognised that visual similarities and differences can become meaningful.
David Abercrombie (1949) defined the three attributes of the letter in Classical grammar as follows — ‘figura was the letter as written, potestas as pronounced, and by its nomen it could be identified for discussion’. Although Abercrombie was concerned with the letter only in orthography, this paper uses expanded definitions of these three attributes to discuss the fundamental semiotics of the letter. Potestas here means any function attributed to a letter (phonetic, algebraic, etc.). A comparison of orthographies and mathematical notation reveals that letters are not restricted to any function. If the letter is not potestas, but that to which a potestas is given, should it be defined as figura — as shape? Palaeography and the history of typography reveal that for each letter there are many figura. Ultimately then, the letter is to be understood as nomen — here meaning not literally ‘name’, but conventionally-established category. Drawing on Charles S. Peirce’s analysis of symbol and replica (1931–58), and Umberto Eco’s type/token ratio (1976), the relationship of figura to nomen is modelled.
Letters pre-exist — structurally if not historically — the systems that supply them with potestas. Nevertheless, letters are not semiotically neutral prior to their exploitation in particular semiotic systems. Letters have been developed into a uniquely vast range of styles that can be rendered and recognised with ease in an array of functional contexts. What allows this is recognition of the letter as nomen — it is only when the identity of letters is recognised that visual similarities and differences can become meaningful.
Research Interests:
Functionalist modernist design of the 1920s was often committed to universalism and internationalism, in opposition to the specificity of national identity. Yet the form internationalism takes can be as nationally specific as nationalism... more
Functionalist modernist design of the 1920s was often committed to universalism and internationalism, in opposition to the specificity of national identity. Yet the form internationalism takes can be as nationally specific as nationalism itself, as each proposal for the universal is defined in opposition to the nationally and culturally peculiar. Germany was peculiar among Latin-alphabet Europe in the 1920s in that specific letterforms (the Fraktur and Schwabacher typeface styles and the handwriting style Kurrentschrift) were considered an integral component of national identity. The unique character of Germany’s typographic culture made the design of letters a particularly important battleground for modernist design.
Beginning in the mid-1920s in Germany several designers (including Herbert Bayer, Kurt Schwitters and Jan Tschichold) attempted to design a universally legible and ‘rational’ style of letter by reducing letterforms to basic geometric shapes. Such rational letters would function as pure alphabetical symbols unobstructed by cultural, historical or national connotations deemed to be superfluous to the ‘function’ of letters. Yet these designers soon discovered that even with the removal of national stylistic characteristics, the alphabet itself was not quite rational enough for their liking — German orthography needed to be reformed.
Views on the graphic form such international letters should take as well as the specific reforms required for German orthography varied from designer to designer; each had their own version of the universal. Having provided the historical context, this paper will examine the designs for orthographically reformed alphabets proposed by Bayer and Tschichold on a formal and semiotic levels, and also discuss the orthographic and phonetic theory each of the designs expressed, culminating in a detailed analysis of Kurt Schwitters’ non-alphabetical featural writing system Systemschrift.
Beginning in the mid-1920s in Germany several designers (including Herbert Bayer, Kurt Schwitters and Jan Tschichold) attempted to design a universally legible and ‘rational’ style of letter by reducing letterforms to basic geometric shapes. Such rational letters would function as pure alphabetical symbols unobstructed by cultural, historical or national connotations deemed to be superfluous to the ‘function’ of letters. Yet these designers soon discovered that even with the removal of national stylistic characteristics, the alphabet itself was not quite rational enough for their liking — German orthography needed to be reformed.
Views on the graphic form such international letters should take as well as the specific reforms required for German orthography varied from designer to designer; each had their own version of the universal. Having provided the historical context, this paper will examine the designs for orthographically reformed alphabets proposed by Bayer and Tschichold on a formal and semiotic levels, and also discuss the orthographic and phonetic theory each of the designs expressed, culminating in a detailed analysis of Kurt Schwitters’ non-alphabetical featural writing system Systemschrift.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
"This paper provides a formal analysis of the treatment of space in Lissitzky’s ‘Proun’ series of non-figurative compositions from the late 1910s and 1920s. Lissitzky was a student of Kazimir Malevich, inventor of Suprematism — a school... more
"This paper provides a formal analysis of the treatment of space in Lissitzky’s ‘Proun’ series of non-figurative compositions from the late 1910s and 1920s. Lissitzky was a student of Kazimir Malevich, inventor of Suprematism — a school of abstract painting characterised by the use of two-dimensional geometric shapes. Lissitzky expanded on Malevich’s Suprematism with apparently three-dimensional forms. These forms were unstable in their presentation of three-dimensionality, employing simultaneously incommensurable representations of space.
In his approach to conveying space, Lissitzky claimed influence from the mathematics of non-Euclidean geometry. Nevertheless, he was not an artist-mathematician, and the arrangement of elements in the Proun compositions did not result from the direct application of mathematical concepts. Lissitzky believed that n-dimensional mathematics could not be expressed visually. Therefore for him mathematical theory was not a source of methodology but a pool of stimulating ideas on the nature of space and its representation. That mathematicians had developed geometries with more than three dimensions was for Lissitzky proof that linear-perspective, derived from Euclidean geometry, did not have a privileged status as the natural and objective way of representing space.
That the Prouns do not adhere to strict mathematical principles does not mean that they are composed at random. Through detailed cross-analysis of the Proun compositions, this paper locates several of the techniques of spatial representation deployed by Lissitzky through-out the series, and demonstrates that Lissitzky used conventional modes of geometric projection in unconventional ways, resulting in ambiguous spaces."
In his approach to conveying space, Lissitzky claimed influence from the mathematics of non-Euclidean geometry. Nevertheless, he was not an artist-mathematician, and the arrangement of elements in the Proun compositions did not result from the direct application of mathematical concepts. Lissitzky believed that n-dimensional mathematics could not be expressed visually. Therefore for him mathematical theory was not a source of methodology but a pool of stimulating ideas on the nature of space and its representation. That mathematicians had developed geometries with more than three dimensions was for Lissitzky proof that linear-perspective, derived from Euclidean geometry, did not have a privileged status as the natural and objective way of representing space.
That the Prouns do not adhere to strict mathematical principles does not mean that they are composed at random. Through detailed cross-analysis of the Proun compositions, this paper locates several of the techniques of spatial representation deployed by Lissitzky through-out the series, and demonstrates that Lissitzky used conventional modes of geometric projection in unconventional ways, resulting in ambiguous spaces."
Research Interests:
In 1920s Germany a new style of letter emerged known as the Geometric Sans-serif. The experimental alphabets of Bauhaus designers including Herbert Bayer and Josef Albers, and typefaces such as Paul Renner’s Futura and Rudolf Koch’s Kabel... more
In 1920s Germany a new style of letter emerged known as the Geometric Sans-serif. The experimental alphabets of Bauhaus designers including Herbert Bayer and Josef Albers, and typefaces such as Paul Renner’s Futura and Rudolf Koch’s Kabel were largely attempts to design a universally legible and rational style of letter, free of cultural, historical or national nuance. Nevertheless, as this paper will demonstrate, the Geometric Sans-serifs arose from the specific circumstances of German typographic culture. The Geometric Sans-serif alphabets and typefaces were, in semiotic terms, attempts to design letterforms that would function as pure alphabetical symbols without second-order signification. It will be argued in this paper that this was an impossible task – designed letters always express more than the alphabet.