 So I'm going to briefly introduce our speakers. Craig Welch will speak first. He is principal of Go Welch, a design studio in Lancaster, PA. He teaches design at Penn State Harrisburg and is a visiting instructor in the MFA graphic design program at Marywood University. You hear tonight to talk about a really fascinating collaboration that he recently completed with legendary designer Elaine Lustig Cohen. Together, they created Lustig Elements, a new type space based on modular letters that has been designed by Alvin Lustig in the 1930s. And Alvin Lustig was inspired by Oliver Burns, 1847, printed masterpiece, The Elements of Euclid. So you can see we have a very nerdy program here tonight for weaving some histories and stories and relationships. And tonight, Euclid will meet Richard Neeson, a leading new voice in graphic design from the Netherlands. Richard is known for his stunning posters and typography, his innovative institutional identities, and his active collaborations with artists. And a selection of his recent posters is on view in our exhibition Beauty, Cooper Hewitt Design which is open through August 2016. I hope some of you had a chance to see it this evening. As part of the exhibition, Richard also redesigned our passenger elevator. So be sure to take a ride on the weirdest graphic design elevator ever. All of us here at Cooper Hewitt are huge fans of Elaine Lustig Cohen, whose work is honored and included in such a beautiful way in Craig's project. In 2015, we had the honor of interviewing Elaine in her studio on the Upper East Side. And I'm going to show you 60 seconds of this historic interview, in which you will see a little bit of the project that Craig is going to talk about at more length. And we think it's just so cool to see her at work. She couldn't come here tonight, but she wishes everybody to have a great time and to enjoy the proceedings. Each one has a personality. If you have one person all alone or one person talking to another person, it's a different relationship. And of course that fascinated me. Typography, as I went on with design, became more and more important to me. The Z was hard, the V was hard, the Q, that was easy. The prints in front of me are from an alphabet I designed called Euclid. The reason it's called Euclid was when Alvin had his print shop in the late 30s and early 40s, he worked with geometric forms from the type case. I kept looking at that word and saying, I can do a whole alphabet based on that. I certainly never thought about being an artist in course. In my generation and in my parents, the venue they came from, I was going to be a nice Jewish art teacher. The thing about not being the famous artist, you can do whatever you want. She's famous to us, that's for sure. Euclid to the stage. I realized this slide's a bit misleading. This is actually not Euclid, this is future. I realized that in the presence of designers who know these things, it was really just this is Euclid. However, this was Euclid. Its name has since changed. It is now referenced as Lustic Elements. And I'd like to say thank you to Alvin and Susanna and everyone at Kipper Hewitt for inviting me. This has been a project that has been quite a passion for a number of years now. And it just was at Elaine's house prior to coming here this evening. And she's upset that she's not able to make it, but those wish everyone well, these independence tonight. She's an amazing person. So I thought I'd do kind of a timeline because I started wondering how did I get to this place that this project has arrived. The first time I ever actually knew anything about Alvin Lustic or Elaine was I continued July 16, 2008, an amazing grad program. Steve Brower was teaching in history of design class. And his projects were always seemingly five minutes long. So five minutes design, something about Alvin Lustic. So this was the first thing that I ever thought about with Alvin. And looking back at it, it definitely has this geometric feeling with that circle shape over a portion of his face. So Alvin's more, if you're not familiar with it, I just have a few slides. He is perhaps best known for his book cover design. He also did the Mastiff for Arts and Architecture magazine. And then the image on the right is one of the compositions that he put together using type case material that Elaine referenced in the video. So these are individual blocks that were combined to make four. Elaine also has a number of kind of iconic book covers that she had designed. But she also branched out into other media, some collage, some painting. And there is a book of her work with the title of the Geometry of Seeing. So Elaine clearly also had lots of geometry in how she worked and her thought process and how she was solving design challenges. She also did a number of projects related to type design. This is some of her work that's type related. The image on the right is a version of Euclid that she had designed. And this is this kind of amazing composition. I think there's maybe just four or five columns in this. All the letters of the alphabet are represented. And she's designed from what I've seen in her studio, perhaps four or five other sets of alphabets and fonts. I'm not sure that any of them were ever commercially available. So they were being produced by her. As was the case with Alvin in a lot of instances where the fonts were being designed for the purpose of being incorporated in other work. They weren't being designed as typefaces to be distributed commercially. So the name Euclid references Euclidean geometry and it's basically planes and solids. And there's this incredible book so that Elaine has an original copy, which when she brought it out, Nick who had worked on this is here tonight, I think he would back me up that when she brought this book out of this cabinet and in her home and put it on the table, it was like some very treasure from the Earth's deepest ocean had found its way through her table and this box she opens and this old book comes out. What is this? So thankfully there's a new version that is a lot less expensive than you can get which pretty accurately reproduces all of the pages. So this is from 1847. It's four colored throughout which would effectively have been letter pressed at the time. So the name Euclid is referencing the geometry. I also, in 2009, decided based on, this is the actual ad off of a site prior press which is kind of the letter press realm. Everything is highlighted in yellow. I at the time have no idea what any of this meant but I bought this letter press shop anyway because I thought it would be interesting. And so that's kind of become part of this. This is my letter press shop when we finally got the garage door open. This is after the first layer was removed. We spent three to four months getting all of this out of Ron's garage. He heated the place with propane heaters which propane heaters in a place filled with wood type paper and printing inks. Basically all the metal type is effectively shrapnel and how he survived is kind of incredible. You can see the kerosene heater, the propane heater underneath the boom box. So this is about a few years ago the print shop that I assembled in a whole potato chip factory. It's now much fuller. So in 2010, this book arrives and Steve Heller worked with Elaine on a book about Alvin's body of work called Board of Modern which I think this may be out of print. You can still find it on used sites. But it was this kind of incredible body of work and overview of Alvin's career. And Alvin passed away at the age of 40. So even though his career was very brief, his production of work, not only was it just an enormous quantity, but the quality of his work is unbelievably incredible. So if you haven't studied anything around Alvin's body of work, I would recommend it if you're interested in design. So in the book, it's like page 35, I saw this and so I just got all this letter pressed up. And when I saw this reference to Euclid, a new type and then seeing all these shapes at the top, I realized this is letter pressed. Alvin had a printing press that he worked on and I got really excited about making Euclid a new type in wood type. I just wanted to print with it. I'm not sure why that just took such a hold on me. I just wanted this in wood type. So I contacted Elaine through Steve and started talking to her. And so this is the full set of shapes from the book on the left. And then on the right is what we referenced as handy boxes. So you could order from one of the type manufacturers, the type founders. You could order a box of just different size geometric shapes. And so Alvin would use these shapes and he would combine them on the press to create letter forms. So this is one of the things that Alvin printed. I think Elaine still has a copy of this. So this was all handset metal type on the outer edges. So the body copy is all handset metal type. And then the illustration is just a combination or composition of all these little handy box pieces. Which is incredible to see if you're ever able to see something that he did in letter pressed closely. So I decided to hit play. I got together with a school that had an architecture program and a graphic design program. Four design students were to design what is now lusting out elements. And then the architecture students were going to cut it using a CNC roller in wood chop. So that was a big plan. And then that didn't work. So it got put on hold for a few years until I coincidentally went to Hamilton Wood type in two rivers of Wisconsin. Which is just an unbelievable place when it comes to letter pressed and wood type. And so in 2012, this is the original factory buildings. I was at this conference they have. And so this too is a piece of wood type. And at that point I'm pumped. This place is just fantastic. And so I saw that they were cutting new wood type. This is a type of face called Van Lennon that was designed by Matthew Carter. And the pieces at the bottom of this slide, they're called half rounds. This is the actual wood. This wood was milled and dried and planed down in the 1970s. And it sits on these pallets. So they've now, with lusting elements, lusting elements is the fifth new wood font that they've cut since the original factory has since been erased from the earth. They tore down the entire factory. So at this point I thought, oh man, so instead of the student direction, maybe I concluded it's Hamilton to cut this. So at the conference, the first time I went to Hamilton in the original building, they said, the last moment of the conference, they said, hey, we got some news. We're being evicted. We don't know what's gonna happen in the building. We gotta move to the museum. And I got really panicked because I just met this place. And so I convinced Ryan Heffernan, a photographer who's based in New Mexico, to fly to Wisconsin to meet me. So for two days we documented the attire building before it was torn down. So Jim Moran, at the bottom, is using a pantograph router that is how they cut wood type from templates. So it's all done by hand. The pantograph cutters who worked at Hamilton would have cut three pieces of wood type per minute. It's basically a stylus on one end and then a router bit on the other end. So when we were spinning around the building, we actually got on the roof when we went down. So if you guys have never been on the roof, you know the stack, and they thought, what? So you told us we could go anywhere, so we're on the roof. And so we got the museum stack to pose under the stack. So this is what it looked like from one of the inner courtyard spaces. This is all gone. It was 12 acres, a million square feet, all dedicated to the production of wood type and cabinets. So in 2013, I also decided I'd finally meet Elaine instead of just their emails getting to know her. So on this miserable day, I met this incredibly poor woman and I'm left completely fascinated. I don't even know if I talked about the font with her. I just was so excited that she had all this stuff and was so willing to participate. So Nick is in the blue shirt kind of in the middle of the top slide. Nick and Jordan who were interning at the time, we came back. Nick really started to get this moving. He established the grid. So we referenced Alvin's first, you put a new type forms, nothing else existed. And so we started working with Elaine and had her guidance to make sense of which shapes would most likely have been the decisions that would have been made in the 1930s. So every piece or every character is a combination of just these four shapes, a square, a half square, quarter square and a quarter round. And so this is the grid in its current form. So A through E, this is basically a breakdown of the individual pieces of the metal. So the E, Nick cut this in chipboard. So we pulled a print just using chipboard. So we cut the type in chipboard and then inked it at print shop and brought this just to kind of see if the section feels like a font. Oh, that's great. You played the video. She talks about the V. The V was really tricky. So how does the V seem like a V or feel like a V without it being a U? And so we did kind of the entry point on the upper left was rounded and then it got a hard edge on the bottom left. And so then we started looking at it in context and we started seeing this may be a viable option to it. The Z, again, it's great that you played the video because the Z had us tripped up until we did this and then this started to take shape. And so again, we put it in context and like, okay, so that's, so the Z in the two became really tricky. How does a two not feel like a Z in vice versa? So with the crossbar added, we really felt like that was different enough. This in the 1930s, right? No, I think you probably yelled it out. Nick got really feisty in these meetings with Elaine. Nick was very militant, must follow the grid, must follow the grid. And he's like, now we can break the grid. So the at symbol, I don't know how long we, I mean, we spent hours on an at symbol and the eight and there were a few other characters that really took a lot of time. Eric Speakerman has also had a font cut at Hamilton. So his font from Hamilton is called Arts. And so I was getting some pointers from him as to what he had experienced working with Hamilton to cut wood type. 2014, I convinced Ryan Heffernan again to now instead of going to Wisconsin to film and photograph to meet us at Elaine's place in New York. And so we filmed one of our meetings with Elaine and captured a number of things on both stills and in motion. This is Elaine in her dining room space. We're doing the font with us. And then 2015, so about a year ago, lowercase came into play because it was only ever uppercase and lowercase presented a whole new set of challenges and considerations that were really never part of it in its early, early days. And I was not anticipating doing lowercase. It's since been extended into a small cap and there's a cut line inline version. And it's been, so this is uppercase, lowercase and some of the new rows and symbols. And this is its full expression, 280 plus characters or glyphs. And the lowercase and all these other glyphs came about because P22, which is a digital type foundry, they have a relationship with Hamilton to bring wood fonts that Hamilton has in its archives to the digital space. And so they felt that we should really extend the character set much deeper if it would be a viable digital font. And so this is currently in development. It'll be finished next month. There'll be three versions, this, the inline and small caps. So this is back to the half rounds. And so we actually prototyped some of this stuff last year. This is one of the current pentagraph stations. And this is how wood type starts. It starts with a template. So the template is actually in its current process. It's CNC rounded. So it's computerized based on vector files that were supplied on Illustrator. And then the type at the bottom is the actual first cuts of elastic elements in wood type. So the type at the bottom is about two inches high. And the templates, maybe you know the exact dimensions. They're about six inches, maybe six, seven inches. So one template can be used to cut type anywhere from about an inch high to about nine inches. So there's a pretty big range based on one template size because you just adjust the position, the relative position of the pentagraph arms. And that's what changes the ratio of how big the cut is from stylus tracing to router cutting. So Ken Hyricks, a studio Hyricks out in San Francisco, he was the first person to use elastic elements in any commercial setting. So coincidentally, April 2016, which makes a lot of sense that we're here, April 2016 in his 365 calendar is elastic elements. This is the first place he's ever used. The two and the nine have changed since this was done. We've revised things since this was produced by KIT. So Kickstarter this year, a Kickstarter campaign, it concluded a few weeks ago. We'll make some other things available as this happens. So this will be a specimen sheet to be printed with the wood type that's cut at Hamilton. Let's probably go and press next month. And we're also doing this wide version, which is kind of interesting. They're so condensed and structured that seeing them all kind of lined up in a row became interesting just after having worked with them for so long. And then there will be notebooks, and I should have included a slide with this. So the notebooks on the inside, the grid of how the letter forms are constructed, that grid will be on all the pages in the interior of the notebooks. So that if anybody wants to try their hand at designing the characters within the elastic elements part of the world, there will be the grid to work from. And so currently atlastic elements is Twitter handle and Instagram handle. And then there is elastic elements.com that's in development. So probably sometime in May, the website will become fully functional. And some of the things that are being produced and printed will be available through that. And with that, I should have led with this. This is not a viewpoint, but this is elastic elements. Thank you very much. My name is Richard Nissen, as we say in Dutch, I'm from the Netherlands. Thank you, everyone else for inviting me to come here. Okay, let's start. I hope I will make it in the 20 minutes. First, a small introduction. I have to read it a little bit. And here's already, and you put us nicely together. Seeing your presentation, I think it fits very well. Because I'm going to talk about typographic masonry, which is going, okay. I'm gonna stick to the scheme. So our profession as per design is a form of art. One that is applied to everyday life. So collective science, symbols and ornaments, they form our language. And since languages are systems of dynamic relationships, with glyphs serving as a basic unit or a grid, our profession can be seen as a, or at least I see it as an architectural game. The building materials of which can be invented or reinterpreted. So in this age of digital screen-based communication, we can convert almost everything into building materials. They can be used to form new structures and to build a world of fluid rhetoric. So I'm from the Netherlands, from Amsterdam. And the Netherlands are always seen as the graphic wall hola in the 1980s and 90s. An Atlantis of design where a wild variety of building materials contributed to a rich biodiversity. So if you would go on the streets, you could see these posters announcing exhibitions of place. And they were very poetic or political and they put, for instance, in this case, this is a poster by Anton Weber. He made for a theater group Amsterdam. They put, well, I like the theme of the play in a new context. And we were paying with this kind of money designed by Bruno Nienaber of the Gilder. And they reflected a very open and self-conscious society. We sent letters with these postage stamps. They were issued by the PTT governmental company. And there were small layered masterpieces. And it was a deeply felt awareness that graphic designers should have the freedom to create beautiful things. That well-designed work was serving the community. Okay, so probably maybe the same thing happened in the US, but at least in the Netherlands, under pressure of efficiency, marketing, communication departments, and the fact that silks were now seen as clients, the poetics and the detours are now squeezed out of graphic design. You could say that this Atlantis of the 1980s and 90s is flooded. And what you see in the public domain right now is posters like this. So this is the same theater group. They are just showing the famous actresses and actors on their posters. They are only branding their brand, actually. Or other posters in the cultural domain like this. It's not far from sort of lifestyle and servicement. These are our new coins. They're designed by a photographer. I think he just used one Photoshop player. And he has another Photoshop player designed. Our new stamps actually designed as two-year Yoku is also in the exhibition. They do great work, but they should not know any design stamps, or maybe it's not their fault, but maybe it's the commissioner. Probably it is the commissioner. So I can say that this new flatness and lack of diversity in the visual language is a symptom. And in his book, The Revolt of the Masses, which I just recently read, which is just translated in Dutch. And this Jose Ortega Igizet writes in 1929 that the worst symptom of homogeneity and stupidity that occurred in the end of the Roman Empire can be found in the language. And I thought it was an interesting line. So the original complex languages were slowly replaced by a language called Valgar Latin, which with a very simple mathematical structure, so childish and poor that Ortega Igizet calls it a gargah language, a language without imaginative and moral power. If you see the invention of writing as the beginning of graphic design, you could say that throughout history we, as graphic designers, have consistently played a key role in the development of human communities, not only on the administrative level, but also in ceremonial sense. So writing and design is used to record myths, for example, and express community values. And it's important to realize that to this day, our work is used as an instrument for gene group identities and myths. So it forms a crucial parameter in social interaction. More than a graphic designer, I consider myself a typographic maserner. Part of this secret brotherhood of practitioners overcrowded devoted to transmutive science, almost a secret, secret practitioner brotherhood, science and symbols and ornaments into amalgams. Amalgams. So to purify, mature, and perfect our building bricks and building metals and play this architectural game guided by almost analytic principles. With the goal to turn lead, or wood, into gold. This is opposed by architect designer Weidefeld from the 1920s, and he made this completely out of metal type. And his work was also nicknamed typographic maserner. All right, so that's a very sad story, but the word palace sometimes used to describe an ornamented building for public entertainment or exhibitions. And that's sort of a counterstatement to his new flatness I just described. I thought it would be a good idea to build up for a stabilization institute completely dedicated to those graphical abundance, Poetics and Detours, a place where the mystical part of graphic design is cherished. A hiding place for this secret brotherhood. So in other words, a palace of typographic masering. And you have all these palaces that are from the past like these palaces of folk's flight from Amsterdam or Crystal Palace, and they don't burn down. This one, I don't know if you know it, it's the Encyclopedic Palace of the World. It's a model made by Marino Oriti in the 1950s and it was designed to hold all the works of man in whatever field. Discoveries made and those which may follow. It's part of the folk art museum, right? But you also have these things called memory palaces. So you create in your head an imaginary architectural structure and you put your concepts in there. So this is an example, it's a temple of time representing all kinds of historical fests. Or this is a palace of music by Robert Flop in the 16th century. Besides those palaces, you also have, I really like this one, it's the Palais Edel and it's secretly created by a postman called Joseph Fédihan Cheval in France, in the south of France in the 19th century. And when he was doing his round, he would pick some stones and he would secretly go to this place and start building this palace and nobody knew about it one more time. Okay, so in middle ages, when you would wanted to build a cathedral, for instance, masoners from all over the country were attracted and they worked from a workplace near the cathedral called the Lodge. And in this Lodge, they would prepare and plan the work. So here you can find, for instance, the tools and the plans and the guides and the bricks they needed. So let's start this palace of typographic masonry in the Lodge. So here's a scheme I made on a sketchbook. So in this Lodge, in the palace, you would need bricks to build it. So the first step was to design the building bricks that would define what the palace would stand for. So the first one was it should be a place where the craft can take out of the daily flow and be listed on the stage. The second one, to create a frame of reference. The third one, to show and explain the relevant landscape of the craft. The fourth, to recognize individuals. Fifth, to create serious intention. So here are they together. And I made this poster out of it. So what else we have in the Lodge? The second? Where am I? Okay. So in the Lodge, there's also rulers and the plan. And previously, I had made a poster of the seven rulers which I use as a frame of reference. So for the plan, I tried to make all kinds of floor plans for the palace. But I think it's just like a lot of Arab palaces. It probably increases little by little without an overall plan. So the distribution of the courses and the apartments, the gates and the halls is rather distorted than a two-wrapped levy ring. So each new part comes with new specific building bricks and reaching the language and its meaning. So the plan is actually more a description since there's no real plan to these palaces. But the rulers will guide the typographic masoner and the plan and the rules are in the Lodge made palace. So when I was asked to contribute to this beauty exhibition in this museum, I thought one of the rulers for the seven rulers, which is also this poster. Oh, I'm missing one. Yeah. And it's the ruler of beauty. So I thought, and here it is again. It's a French ruler. Thinking about beauty, I think there should not be one ruler of beauty, but more because there's so many theories of what beauty is. So here they are together, some of them. And then I create this and then we start screen printing and this is the guy whose head is cut off. That's Gaze Maas, who I always print with. And while printing, we change colors. So it turns out to be like this. Okay, so that's all in the Lodge and probably there will be more in the future. So let's enter the palace. So we enter the palace through the gate of cybersyn code. Here it is. Okay, so this gate is dedicated to all kinds of codes and cybers, part of this ferrite landscape of science and science systems that our craft is working with, like this SkyTail or this GiraGraph and as many others, but I use these to create two users in building bricks. So this is the poster for it. And going through that gate of cybersyn codes, you will enter the courtyard, the courtyard of honor. And on this courtyard, there will be various pavilions. First, and these pavilions are dedicated to my sort of precursors. So here we have Gio Ponti, Italian designer. They were the Proloxie, Scottish sculptorist. And then Hori Yoko, a Japanese graphic designer. Here he is again, by default. And my former teacher was out. So they all got their pavilions and the poster. Then we go to the gallery of modernity and nostalgia. And in this gallery, I brought together the work of a few contemporary graphic designers in the Netherlands. So it's this place where the craft can be listed on the stage. So first, the work of Lust and Moniker and Metahagen. And they are sort of searching the new, you could say. Then we have Joost Grotens, Tonic, Mavis and von Durse and Pirma Bou. And they are just really good at what they do. Then we have Experimente Jetset, Arma Lindberg and Hansje van Halen. And they are somewhat driven by nostalgia. So I put them, they all meet in the gallery. It's sort of a back end game. They are sort of a new photographic in a way because they are on their place in the field. So it turns out to be this poster. Then there is the conversation room where all kinds of conversations can be take place. But in this case, I wanted to put together different voices dealing with new culture. I just read this book called The New Women's, which means the new human in a way. And it deals about how the, yeah, it takes too long to explain. It's about the cultural revolution and somehow after I mentioned it, the starting of mass communication, things like that. So all these, like there's more people than Wim Kau and Jan van Thoren and there's a lot of people saying something about that cultural phenomenon and they are together in some sort of ball game. So all their voices come together in this poster, in the conversation room. So all these new groups together they form this sort of this language from which we can build. And it reminds me very much of a game set like this. I'm going to show you one more room in the palace called the Masonic lobby. And lobbies in buildings are mostly, like they are commonly adorned with artworks, permanent or temporary exhibitions related to the activity of the institution. So in this case, I wanted to put together a space showing what type of recognition ring is. But this also puzzles me a bit. So these are the building bricks of this space. I put them together like this. And this is the poster. Yeah, and all the pieces they are elements that form together. That's the Masonic. So there's a lot of help again and other people that I think should be part of the story. So here they are, all together in the beauty exhibition. And yeah, in the meantime, I also worked on other spaces, like the labyrinth of scripts and from where it's in the kitchen, the rhythm section, and pretty soon I will start with the atrium of the Inevitable Serif. But I don't have time yet to make those posters. So for me, this palace of fabricationary becomes more and more real in a way. And it proves to me, at least, how imaginative graphic design can be. It's an endless building game. So, thank you. Yeah? Thank you guys for coming up and joining us. I want to thank everybody for being here. I also especially want to thank the Dutch Culture USA program of the Consulate General of the Netherlands in New York for bringing Richard to us tonight. And also for all the amazing Dutch design, graphic, and other wives that's in our exhibition. So it's really fun to have Richard here to talk about Dutch design. It was interesting hearing you complain about it. You are evidence that it is alive and well. And this is the first stop in Richard's East Coast tour of graphic design. He'll be going to Baltimore for four days to continue building the palace of typographic masonry with students at Micah. So that's really cool. My head pretty much exploded tonight. This was the nerdiest thing ever. I love the geometry and theory and philosophy and complaining about the state things and then proving that it's all great by doing wonderful work. I love the contrast between America and Europe. We have a guy who took a bunch of junk out of a garage and put it in a potato chip factory in Pennsylvania and is like full of optimism about type and making new stuff. And then these amazing theoretical maps of the psyche and the history of civilization. I'm just totally amazed. What could be more Cooper Hewitt? Half the stuff in both of your talks is in our collection. We have all those book covers by Alvin Lustig. We have those letter press prints that Alvin did. We have Elaine's covers. We have the Viadvel poster. We have the experimental yet set. Now I know how to say that correctly. So anyway, I'm just like dying up here of pleasure. That's too cool. But I have to ask you some questions. So there's a theme of modularity which obviously is why I put you together, right? Building fonts out of the camera. It's clever, right? It's very nice. Fonts are supposed to have curves. But for some reason, people in the 20th and 21st century have been fascinated by trying to make them without curves, right? To make them on a grid. And what's really cool in Euclid, of course, is it has these little half round elements. So talk to me about modularity and why that matters to you so much. So I've tried to figure that out as well because I've been in the space trying to deal with this grid for Mustang Elements. So my first training when I was in college was in architecture school. And I think a lot of that structure and kind of... I now understand this. Is this on? Yeah. Oh, I stepped out of the closet. So I thought it was really incredible the way that you had things that you didn't know were going to maybe show up between our two presentations. I almost had a slide of blocks because my son now has Elaine Lustick Cohen's daughter's block set when she was a kid. So my kid is constructing letter forms and things with the blocks that Elaine's daughter had used. I think the modularity is natural in the pixel-based space that we seem to occupy more than the actual physical space. I think letterpress, from my experience with that, it is very structured and the blocks are typically very rectilinear and you have to assemble and compose things, locking them with furniture. Doing anything on an angle, or especially a curve in letterpress, is really tricky until you get some level of aptitude or skill. So I think trying to deal with the font felt natural in the letterpress space and it's really, like, diagonal. Right, that's the origin of what I was doing, building it out as a little. What did you call it? Makey set. Handi-box. Handi-box. Everybody should have a handi-box. Makey set. Can you speak about modularity? There's actually an image I want to put on the thing. You go ahead and talk while I find this picture. That's why. Go ahead. Don't worry about me, I'm just putting something up here. Well, before I was doing these things, you are giving bricks to children, but I steal them to make my work. You steal them from your kids. Yeah, they say, you can't find them anymore because they're in my workspace. But, yeah, before I was also doing, I think, the computer and the brick-on computer and how it feels magnetic, it's just, it's this building game. So, it's everything that was possible. I was also doing it quite quickly. And I think it's the same, it's also the fascination to make things logic, in a way. If you make the alphabet and then you have to adjust the fee, it's still part of the series, but then it's just by turning them, it's a big puzzle. And I think it's sort of a human natural thing to want to make those puzzles. Or maybe just a graphic designer thing. Yeah. Because we want to have, there would be a reason. Yeah. And maybe that modularity. So, I put this image up here because I love it so much. And it's nice to go to these French curves. Like they were an attempt to create all the curves that you would ever need in this template, in this device. So, they were like this anti-rectilinear ruler. Yeah. But somehow, but they represent a kind of system of curves. And they require an insane skill to actually use. Like, I've bought one in college. I'm like, what the hell do I do with this? I mean, I was like, oh, now I can actually draw a font. No. No, it's mostly used in fashion, of course. So, it's not such a graphic design tool. Right, they were used for designing ships, but also for letterforms, for finding the curves and letterforms. But it is a kind of system, like a modular system of curves. That's not blocks, right? That's not a grid. I think that's kind of cool. Because one of the themes in our exhibition upstairs is like how nature becomes this palette of rules and designers like Mary Oxman and Jenny Saban, whose work is upstairs, who are creating these kind of new geometries that are systematic and rule-based but not rectilinear. So, anyway, that was something I wanted to ask you about. I had plenty of these things in architecture program. When I was an undergrad, we had probably half a year. You were allowed to make curves? We were allowed to make curves, but then we usually ditched them because we had wood shop, and wood shop was cutting blocks and pieces and then assembling. So, I love the typographic nationry. I think that's a really great idea. But yeah, we had these, but they kind of got thrown to the side pretty quickly. So, how about a question from the audience? What can we tell you about? I have one right here. Thank you. Go ahead. You have to speak in your word. I'm blasting this out for you. Hello. Hi. Thank you so much for doing this. I'm a big nerd, and I love Escher. My question is that in many ways, the work you're doing, it's considered old school work because especially with the advances of technology and computer design, do you feel that because the use of work work, because I see that there's a new generation of artists and designers that want to go back to doing things by hand? What's your experience? Have you had younger people who are like, we would call Gen Y coming to you saying, could you please teach me this? That's a great question. So, I feel like I should ask Nick because I'm looking at him. Nick and I got... So, Nick was in a school close to my studio, and we connected through Twitter. I called you on Twitter. And you emailed me two days later. Hey, you guys, thanks for following me. You're his first follower? Yeah. I know. Thank you so much. You're so welcome. That was the point you said you were an artist. Yeah, it was. And you like said you're a bunch of... So, yeah, I guess like the training... Do you like print, Spandu? Yeah. So, I think the training in my studio has evolved with the introduction of the letterpress shop in a lot of ways that the constraints that letterpress requires you to work with it as a designer are so different than the training that occurs I think for a lot of young designers now because they're so computer-based that the physical interaction with material, you have a finite point size that you have. And you may not even have enough characters within a font of type in the type case. So, how do you... How do you solve things as a designer without having all the necessary pieces that you would expect on the computer so the computers keep typing everything? So, one of the things that happened is we had a Gothic wood font, but we had no punctuation. We had nothing but the uppercase characters. So, when we got... We needed a comma pretty desperately to make this work. I always do that. So, we got a little... a very small font and we just spelled out comma. And it was like dear so-and-so comma and then a little word comma showed up and it actually... it made that feel so much more interesting and resolved as a design solution that I think when you're working with letterpress with this physical material it forces you to consider several steps past where the immediate attention is being spent. So, on the computer you can... you can work so fluidly and go down, say, versions and commands that you're way back and history palette your way through Photoshop. So, I think training young designers is maybe slow down a bit and tell the computer what you needed to do rather than assume the computer gives you all the options that you want and so letterpress doesn't really give you options. You have to fit within that structure. I think it's interesting that you're making the wood font which, you know, is... that's like one of each letter or something? No, so, yeah. So, it's going to be like... we have enough to actually spell stuff. Okay, but then that exists in a vault in the mid-west. But then there's this digital version that's sort of having the LP and the LP3, right? So, we can all use it and we can mess with it and stretch it. I'll mention one thing about the wood type. Dropshadow. Dropshadow is on it. So, on the wood type, I was able to convince Hamilton because there was palettes of half rounds that they have. There's a finite amount that was produced in the 1970s and they're very thinking about what they cut with that wood. And so, I was able to convince them that we will cut two sets of elastic elements. So, one of the things that will happen on the website, a second set... So, the first set will live at Hamilton. The second set will be made available to people. How that mechanism works, I'm not sure yet, but through the site, there will be some means to... We're going to sell it off character. Yeah, I know. So, there will be some ability for someone else to use it and physically get their hands on it, which I think will be interesting to see what people do with the actual wood product. Okay, let's take another question from the audience and then I have a really tough question. Anybody? Yeah, thank you. You're welcome. I have a practical question. A practical question. Are they making any more of those wood pieces that they made in the 70s? Are they making some now for 20 years from now? No. To my knowledge, I don't believe... There are no more trees. There are no more trees. No, there's no more trees. They're right out of trees. No, I don't believe they are. Hamilton wood type and printing museum is primarily a museum, a functioning museum now, and cutting new wood type is not really what their mission is any longer. So, they're very picky or selective about what they use that for. So, I don't know. It may be that when they've run out, when they've cut all those, that will be the end of their production, because they're really not intending to be a wood type manufacturer. But calling oneself a functioning museum is sort of an oxymoron. Yeah. Never seen one. Any other questions from our audience? Okay, so Richard. Oh, no. So, I was really interested in typography. So, it's the palace of typographic masonry. It seemed like you have this thing about, like, courier and almost this typeface that... How do I say this, actually? It doesn't seem like you love the type. Like, it's a... Yeah. Tell us about the type. Well, it's that way, oh my, making these beautiful fonts. No, I think I also have this problem that I have to limit myself. So, normally in my other design work, I only use maybe four or five different typefaces and always the same ones. Because when I... When you do... At least it's my experience. When I make, like, all these shapes around it, then it's pretty hard to... Like, the typeface already says a lot on its own. So, combining with a lot of other forms, it becomes messy. So, that's why I, at least, yeah, I can't do anything else. Then I decided to... use only the courier for the blocks, which are in the palace. But this one is different. If you go a little bit back, yeah, because on the rulers, each ruler has a different typeface. And that's actually all the typefaces that I use. Take a picture of this, yeah. This is all you need. So, yeah, and they all have a certain character. So, at times, this is a reform, which is sort of a modern one. And then the Jensen is a more renaissance one. And then I have, I don't know, the Menlo. See somebody in Fesco. That's one objective one. And then the courier, and accidents, and that's it. And so, what does the courier mean to you? Because that seems like almost the brand of the overall project. Yeah, I don't know. I just, I wanted a sort of super default kind of form. And it worked well with the blocks, because as soon as you start, if you would use the accidents, right, it misses the small details. Somehow it just works. Well, I have the kind of lightness. I knew it. Anybody else have a question? The same thing as, I think, all these limitless possibilities of the courier. But I think, when I look at my students, they don't have that problem so much. Because we sort of still grew up with the limits of the courier. And it was, to me, super nice to work with that. It was really a tool that I could use with the creative stuff and build with it like that. But once it becomes easy to make almost everything, I had to limit myself somehow. Because I'm just limited. We need freedom. Graphic designers are terrified of freedom. Right? Yeah, but sometimes students say they can do everything and they think directly, and, okay, I can make everything on that. And if you could, I'm really amazed what they come up with. And they don't feel this need to limit themselves. Anybody want to speak to that? And there's so many young people here. Do you like to be free? Do you long for the grid to pin you down? And do you want to have only five typefaces, one of them being courier? Is this the future you imagine? Think for yourself. Yes. I see a young person raising his hand. So actually, I deal primarily with interactive design. So I just kind of grew up natively in English with computers. And I think there is an interesting dilemma growing up as like a younger graphic designer working primarily with computers. There's a desire to both be tactile. I went to art school when I loved playing around with letterpress and working in the medium. Sometimes I find that with interactive work that you self-impose boundaries through the computer. So the computer can do limitless things to you, but you actually create almost a mental framework that you work within it. So rather than it being a tool of which you can create anything, you actually almost like a brief who you get from art school or school project where you have certain constraints that you work within. I think what the interesting stuff is, is how does the computer start to do things that you couldn't even imagine that it could do? And I feel like most of the work that's out there right now isn't really pushing the boundaries of how we interact with that space. Computers are still like a box we step into and step out of. Phones are like in some ways changing that part of our life. And I think the modularity of that aspect is interesting because actually design systems online are becoming infinitely more modular if there are less templates, right? And there are more components of systems of things that come together. There's this natural need both in typography over time in human history, like we've created systems of language and letterform, and then computers are now going towards like more systematic creations of content, how bits and pieces come together, not just like the long sexy brochure from the law firm that existed in early 2000s, right? Like not the repository, it's sort of information, but more dynamic. And like based on what your preferences are, first my preferences, which is kind of like a unique distinction that we can't necessarily derive from books and other mediums. Not really a question. But one of you has to answer it anyway. Craig, you answer this one. I'm answering that. What is the kind of like question of that? It's not. You have to answer it. I think the underlying question was, do you like it, like as a more interactive designer, do you still feel constraints? Like what are the desires for constraints? I think we seek them maybe in a different way. Like maybe they're mental creations rather than limited by the technology, but we create kind of the affectation for ourselves for outcomes. So in terms of the practitioner part of the equation, the making of them, I think those constraints are probably more often included because of time that you have to, like the timeline isn't always defined by the designer. And so I think in that respect, the constraints would be developed more frequently by the clients dictating the timelines and maybe budget that you don't have all the time or resources available. I think that's why I found such interest in this project with Elaine, because this is now... No budget, no time. Right. It's so many years. And I get asked frequently that, why did this take so long? And like, why? Could you just do that in, you know, a weekend? And we could have, but it... I think that the whole point of the grant, the modulation, is to make it efficient. Right. Not efficient. Yeah, so... Oh, I love your notebooks. Yeah. The notebooks with a little grid and stuff. I can't wait to get that. Yeah, so, I mean, if it was done quickly, we wouldn't have discovered all these things along the way. Like, I wouldn't have known Hamilton. It would have just been cut by some architecture students for the CNC router and I would have inked it in the potato chip factory and no one would really know other than me, Elaine and maybe a couple other people. But because it took so long, it kind of blossomed in a way that was never thought through. It just, it kind of took on this new life. And it's really exciting now because other people, like, will have access to it and they'll be able to make potentially new things that extend its life. And so I think, like, we've been trying to figure out what is the project really about because it has so many layers now in 20 minutes. I was really tripped up by 20 minutes on you. So many layers. So it's really, I think, when I challenged that idea of what is it about, I think it's about endurance. It's the endurance of something that Alvin began in the 30s to be carried through with the guidance of Elaine, 75-ish years later. It's the endurance of Hamilton to have watched their original factory buildings be taken off the face of the planet, but they still exist. They still make wood type, even though it's a different form. Elaine's personal story is one of great endurance and achievement. And so there's something really fascinating about that to me that we were so constantly temporary and fleeting and quick. And it's, you know, I like, I like, I like, right? There's no real commitment in much of what we do on a daily basis. And I think this font is kind of pushing back against a lot of that. And I really have enjoyed seeing that part of this process be revealed over the last five, six years, which if it had been done in a weekend, none of that would have been part of it. Well, but maybe we could end it by, I want to ask Richard, what's your work about? What's your work about? Yeah, Richard. Shut down. Shut down, Richard. What's that about Richard? Like, in general, what my work is about? Yeah, like, the philosophy already told us, but like, yeah. Well, it's this, it's this, the secret society, the secret brotherhood of... I just went to this folk art museum where there is this thing. You're like the crazy postman, building this weird mental world. Yeah, that's wonderful. But I also like that in this folk art museum they have a show now on Freemasonry, like all the objects that they have. So I really like objects and, yeah, graphic works that sort of, yeah, for me it shows how the world could be in a way. Like when I work on the little town in the Netherlands, I picked out some posters, took them off the wall, and in the end they turned out to be Triland Nesters or Anton Bay, you know, the real layout. So for me it was like, I already, that was the only, it was the promising landscape that I wanted to go to. So I think that's something that I more and more would like to emphasize also in my work, that it's, we are making these images and we are constructing the language that all of us can use. So I think I've become more and more a fan of our profession that was already in the beginning. That's great. I think we'll also see that it needs a good hiding place or something to, yeah. Well that's beautiful because I think, you know, that's the idea of creating a language that others can use, it's really what photography is all about. Yeah, to really say something with the work, which clients may get sometimes more difficult. At least that's my experience with a lot of museums in the Netherlands. Like 20 years ago it was more easy to translate an exhibition in an image and now it's just you create the frame like you make the branding for a museum and it was the paintings that will show. Well that's because they're all functioning museums. Yeah. Well this was really great. Do the people, the first three people who asked a question, do you remember who you were? I know you were one of them. What was the second question? The woman who was back there. And who was the third person? Okay because we have a calendar for the first three people that asked a question. How's that? That works. Does that help? That works really well. I just came up with that. So thank you all. You're welcome to come up and chat with our amazing typographic brotherhood up here. And thanks for coming to Cooper Hewitt and thank you very much.