New Essay

Hey guys,

I decided to change my idea from cultural imagery differences. I was having trouble finding an issue that I could take a stand on that related to it, I guess.

Anyways, I've decided to do a piece that talks about whether or not we NEED so many fonts these days. I've begun researching and reading quite a bit and have got some real good references, so I think it should turn out well.

Do any of you have a strong belief in this topic? More fonts? Less fonts?

B

Recording from 15/03/10 Skype Call

Hey guys,

Here is the link to the recording from our Skype conference call on March 15th. It's quite large so I would just stream it through your web browser, but it's up to.


https://designnola.sslpowered.com/bcurley.com/groupA/design-discourse-15-03-10.mp3

An international picture language?

A passage from Ellen Lupton essay "Science of typography"

"In common usage, the term “graphic” describes a high-contrast image: black against white, white against black. The silhouette is the dominant strategy behind the language of international pictures, suggesting an objective shadow of material reality, a schematic index of fact. The ideal of an international picture language has been part of modernist design since the 1920’s, and reached the intensity of an obsession during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Sign systems, such as the Department of Transportation’s 1974 symbol set, designed under the guidance of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, aspire to the semiotic consistency of a typeface.2 The quest for uniform symbols for public information parallels the rise of coherent corporate identity programs and the emergence of an international consumer hieroglyphics.3

Such civic and commercial marks signal the challenges of cross-cultural communication in the next millennium. For as the globe is rendered increasingly accessible by communication technologies and forces of economic consolidation, it is at the same time segmented by diverse national, racial, and ethnic identities. The contradictory mandate of designers in the 21st century is to create visual scripts which can communicate across cultural and linguistic barriers without flattening diversity into caricature. Differences must be maintained to counter the domination of what Herbert Marcuse has called “one-dimensional man,” whose culture has been robbed of ambivalence and negativity in favor of a mass media capable of assimilating, and thus neutralizing, any form of cultural difference or dissent.4

International communication carries the dangers of homogeneity and hegemony alongside the hopeful promise of an integrated global village lined with universally legible street signs and uniformly available products. Designers working at the edge of the millennium are faced with the conflicting imperatives to both expand and contract these formal languages: to reach a diverse public without succumbing to the dangers of assimilation. The one-world, one-language ideal of heroic modernism is an untenable solution for design in the next century."

(Ellen Lupton “Cold Eye: Big Science,” Print magazine, Summer 2003)

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