 Hi everyone take a seat So I don't know how many of you were here earlier on today for Michael's lecture. This is the second part of today's Series of lectures, and then there's more tomorrow Tom Griffiths is a partner at everything studio a multi-disciplinary firm working in all areas of print and interactive design recent clients include Brooklyn Public Library ICA Philadelphia Andrew Bard bomb magazine cabinet magazine the power station and Verso books in 2014 Thomas practice was featured in AI GA's owner at self series His design for curiosity and method ten years of cabinet to cabinet magazine was selected by the AI GA as one of the 50 best covers and books of 2012 in 2006 received his MFA in graphic design from Yale School of Art. So today he will talk his lecture is titled exercises in style and he will through historical and contemporary references tell us a little bit about sort of trends and the cycles of trends and You know graphic expressions in graph in graphic design Hey guys, okay Let's make sure this is working. Okay. So here we have the the great wheel of style or the or the Dallas style that was made by Lorraine Wilde and You can see that it's that that idea that's that That style becomes Fetched eyes that's revived it becomes interesting It's good design that it's mass market cliched We're all embarrassed by it. It's over and round and round we go and The title of It's a bit that wheel of style something I'll return to you later, but If you're curious about the title of this lecture, this is the the book exercises and style by Raymond Queen oh and The this book is it tells a story a very boring story of a man getting jostled in a bus and then remarking about another man who is Needs a button for the top of his coats at a train station It's a it's a tedious anecdote, but it's told 99 times in this in this book all in different literary modes and it's a kind of a You know you could say it's a kind of a metaphor for for graphic design and that you're given this content and you have this this kind of Infinity of of possibilities on a on a screen on the page This is one. Yeah, this is this is the a section Had a right here. So since we're exploring the in this conference the the the middle ground between Graphic design and and architecture This seems like a kind of a fitting place to start that I'm sure all of you are familiar with this book I think one of the things that I find most interesting about it is that Rem Coolhouse and Bruce Mao the graphic designer are given equal billing and I believe I'm not sure about this But I believe it was written into Bruce Mao's contract that that he Be given equal billing on this cover, but yeah, it's an amazing Work of virtuosity, you know, you can see right here the the way that it's it's it's led with all these different Things happening all at the same time along the along the left edge You can see this the marginalia with all these this strange glossary of terms. I think right there. Yes It's something about Stabbing victims what that has to do with with the rest of what's on that page. I don't know but it's you know, it's this book it's almost like a it's like a Kind of a city or an arcology all these things kind of teaming together Disperate elements here. He is yucking it up on Charlie Reyes and this is the you know, ten years later. This is almost like a As far as you can go in the opposite direction. This is not some vast impressive edifice of a book This is printed on very cheap magazine stock and it's and the the design right here He was referencing the kind of really really trashy magazines You can see that all these these conventions graphic conventions of the magazine these these sort of sidebars and and and little logos and little things pop them throughout it and actually the way that he Made this book. It was just he had you know, he's running ads in it and it was Yeah, it's just it's going all the way trashy So it's interesting to think about this the way in which architects engage with graphic design or graphic designers This is Frank Lloyd Wright's business letterhead and you know the the the form of these The letters that is little red square every single thing is just absolutely Frank Lloyd Wright in it's it's you know, just in the same way that That's kind of a lampshade in one of his houses looks like it it springs from him. So does his his letterhead. It's all part of the same Formal language and you know, it's what is it the quote that's always attributed to him It's that architecture is the is the mother of the applied arts that in some way graphic design is some kind of subsection or or, you know, it sort of falls beneath Beneath graphic design and that's Yeah, a graphic design, you know an architect can try their hand at anything So here you have the the letters on the outside of the the Bauhaus the and you can see that You know, obviously the this is a time when when the applied arts is very that, you know There's an amazing you unity in what was happening in this school this building by You know designed by Walter Gropius. If you look at these these letter forms that were This is Herbert bears Universal alphabets, you know, it's all based on Circles and squares and geometric reduction and you could say that every single thing This was a time of conciliance among all these all these disciplines So that that lettering on the on the outside of that building and makes a lot of sense a more contemporary version of that might be this the facade of the the Coupe Union building designed by Tom Maine and I think this is You know this I find this a little problematic because you know the the letter the The letters that you see right here. This is a typeface which to any graphic designer in the audience is instantly recognizable It's it's grid Nick that was originally designed by by by Vim Crowell in the Way back in the late 60s or early 70s and and here you can see the use of grid Nick on these on these poster stamps and in Holland and the that typeface has a very specific meaning the thing that that Vim Crowell was always so interested in there's always this this idea of Neutrality and grids and order and you know the reason it's called grid Nick is that that was his nickname He was all his friends called him. Mr. Grid Nick because he was so obsessed with grids and it seemed like a very strange sort of Idea the idea of applying it to that Coupe Union building which is far more kind of biomorphic. It doesn't really fit into that that You know the philosophy and the reference point of that that that typeface the the first the person behind that the The the application of that that identity system of that signage system on on Coupe Union was J. Abbott Miller and he's he said in Next in his explanation that he was inspired by these old letter forms on on the side of the building the this is the old Coupe Union building that have this this very kind of blocky Geometric and it does it is actually a little reminiscent of grid Nick So I can see why he went down that that path But you know and I probably would have approved of it and thought it was pretty interesting If there was more of a juxtaposition if it was grid Nick on being used as signage in this building I think it actually would be It would resonate pretty pretty nicely Instead it just feels a little a little contrived here, but moving on to more Kind of Ugly blocky letters. This is this is the exterior of the of the Port Authority bus terminal And these these kinds of letter forms you see all over New York This is a they don't have the kind of grace that you that you'd that and you know you can tell that a Typographer a skill, you know with any skill didn't put this together. It's very kind of awkward It looks like it's almost been made by an engineer It comes from a very different source and it was the inspiration, of course for the typeface Gotham designed by designed by Tobias for our Jones and he you know this is an incredibly You know well thought out beautiful typeface and it's kind of it But it still retains a lot of that that kind of gritty character of the original. Of course, it was used most famously for Obama's campaign and But it's it was you it was used to death you saw it in on packaging on you know Advertisements for luxury condo developments, and it was always used in the same way it was always this kind of It was used in all caps kind of slightly tracked out because that's the way it wants to be used That's the way it looks good, and we all got really sick of it, but I Remember when they were laying the the this is the cornerstone of the freedom tower And you could see that they decided to use Gotham right here and instead of what you'd typically Expect to see in on a monument You'd probably be something like Trajan it would be very very Formal and kind of kind of old-fashioned and the fact that they they decided to use Gotham it just I think was really wonderful I think that it's Unlike that previous example I was showing this the reference seems to make total sense You know it just speaks to the sort of spirit of New York, and I think that it's there's something kind of wonderful about that Okay, so let's say all of you you just don't care about all these esoteric meanings behind typefaces and references you just want to do away with all of that and you just want to present your work in a in a in a way where you're just You know Solving a problem. You're just making life easy on the reader. You want to build your portfolio and do something Which is just as functional as possible This is the the retreat. This is the the kind of ruins of the house where where Wittgenstein would go To escape all the you know the scholars of Cambridge and he would he needed to go to a place of absolute quiet and and to to write his you know anti philosophies is what the people have called it and The nearest thing we have to this to Wittgenstein's hut I suppose in the world of graphic design would be Vignelli's desk, which is this You know and I wouldn't call him an anti designer, but I would call him an anti decorator He's all about getting rid of anything all extraneous style of really getting down to the essence of something and Yeah, here he is with his with his his paper in his pencil conceiving of something and this is his most canonical work this is the The the subway map that he came up with and you can see here everything is based on These geometries it's all on the all the lines are either at 45 degree angles or 90 degree angles and It's this it's this perfect kind of circuit board where you can really understand all the connections. It's a very very Functional map although it doesn't refer at all to the geography of New York You can see that it was the that's Central Park here is a square and that's why ultimately they was I think it only lasted about two years before everyone It was so reviled by the public that it was it was withdrawn They went back to more sort of traditional map, but that's the interesting thing about Vignelli is always for him It was just about that object. It was about the thing working and this is his American Airlines Identity system that was at the time quite radical just Helvetica typeface red and white red and blue and Back to this idea of the of him being so interested in the sort of application the thing itself would be this this one of the Airplanes you can see what that's there's been branded and the the letters here You can see that that they didn't give they didn't paint the whole paint the whole plain white They left the fuselage Exposed you can see the metal underneath and I think they I mean they saved an enormous amount of money just in the weight of Of the plane just on fuel cast is and there's something just really beautiful about about that and kind of pure the most I think the contemporary kind of exponent of that same ideal would be experimental jet set. This is Actually, I just cut and pasted this off that off their site So it's a little rough this this text, but it's from an interview And it and it speaks to the same idea by underlining the physical proportions qualities and inner logic of our designs We try to stress the fact that they are objects. This may sound obvious and futile and not very revolutionary But it's our humble way of resisting a dissolve into an immaterialized visual culture in which there are only Representations and the object is completely disconnected from its image We try to go against this alienation by focusing on the idea of design as matter One way how we try to How we try to stress the idea of design as an object is through this notion of self reference by referring to itself Or its context the object gains some kind of self-awareness. It becomes an object in itself and I think this is a good example of what they're talking about this is a a signage system they came up with for the for the steedlick museum and it's made up of of these these a four pieces of paper that have slotted into these these Plexi holders and it makes it incredibly, you know this really mutable system If at any time there's some new exhibit or something that is happening You can just very easily go to the printer press print and then swap it out And it's kind of amazing to see the the the way that it's yeah, the The way that in which this is produced is just so apparent to you And speaking about this condition of surface, I guess from the this kind of The from the opposite direction, I suppose would be would be metahaven this is Daniel van der Velden I'd assume wrote this he's the he's the kind of I guess he'd be the closest thing that graphic designers have to like a Rem cool house. He's very bombastic, and he's very and he has he's a sort of theorist as well as a designer This is his his his spiel from from his manifesto. We had designing surface Surface multiplies beyond any measure of necessity beyond the laws of demand and supply beyond reason The multiplication of surface formally called information overload is the new reality of design. It's unit of measurement as virtual Surface is not territory territory, which is actual and geographical for that reason limited in supply May be contested and may become the site of an actual conflict a physical confrontation This cannot happen on or to a surface surface is to territory what speculative capital is to gold Surface may be multiplied without encountering the physical limitations Opposed by someone else's terrain opinion presence of personality if surface is a kind of place or site the designer is its Geographer and this is his work. This is you know, it looks like it's it's some kind of assemblage of found bits and bobs of Different graphic styles all kind of floating together And this is from his his book Incorporate identities where it's a lot of his writing with this kind of very very lush visual language typography So this is a badoni a and it's it's what you'd call modern typography. It's the way It's characteristic is that it has this this hairline serif Shares that with with this is actually it shares it with with DDo. That was the French equivalent of this This is badoni was drawn by Gianventista badoni in Italy and it's you know It's very much a product of the Enlightenment You can see it right here that it's it has this this almost kind of architectural eternal quality to it and One of the reasons why it was produced was just to show off the printing technology at the time. I mean this was Incredible because it does have those hairline serifs. It's an incredibly difficult thing to Make work with with the tools that they had at the time You had to use the best paper and it really it really showed off the craft of the of the Press that it was where it's getting made and even to this day. It's still This is the a style We can see it on on on this Alexi Brodovic Harper's Bazaar magazine and it you know, it's it's still she she It's still this this this elevated high-end It has that meaning and it and it continues to have that to this day It's in fact, it was it was chosen and I know if you go back to the 80s You can see a lot of books. This is a more I think this one's from the 90s But this is a Richard Richard Mayer has been using it Richard my Richard my Forgive me. He's been using this for for for yonks, and he just it's it somehow works for him with his with the I think with his architectural style. There's a there's a it's a very It's a it's a very comfortable fit and even you know This is his website of his did yesterday and took a screenshot. He's he sticks with it and and it does make sense this is future and Going back to that Universal alphabet that we were looking at earlier that was made up of perfect circles and squares This is with this came out around the same time in the 20s And it was and it emerges from the same kind of idea, but it's incredibly well Put together. It's it. You know if you really did make a perfect Circle and square alphabet. It would be very very difficult to read. This isn't difficult to read It works. It's easy to set it beautifully in text, which is why it became one of the classic typefaces of the 20th century And it's been used everywhere absolutely done to death Here it is being used for design within reach and And it's interesting because you know if you think about what it's original intention. It was a very radical Inventive thing and here it becomes something which is I don't know a little bit a little bit kitsch Just look at think about the way that sort of Wes Anderson uses it in his and is the title cards in his movies Or you know, it reminds me, you know speaking of design within reach You know, if you look at a look a busier Lounge chair be very difficult for him to imagine it being you know looking this this cute his his more more more cute applications of a future for vitra and Then we've of course we have to come to Helvetica Which is something that that I could talk endlessly about and people do there's actually an extremely good Film about it called Helvetica that I'm not sure if you guys have seen it, but I'd definitely recommend Checking it out, but it's and a lot of that movie deals with with what is the meaning of this typeface What does Helvetica mean and of course it means a million things to it's almost It means it's so many different things to so many different people I think one of my favorite lines from the film is It's actually Tobias Fred Jones is talking about Helvetica is the the logical end point for a certain way of reasoning a certain way of looking at typeface design And that's why I think that it's it's always interesting to see how what preceded it and how we we got to that point This is the predecessor accidents grotesque another grotesque font and this This is an early version, which is this is Of a grotesque font and this is by the type foundry shelter in Giusecchi And you can see here that there's these these little flourishes Can you see on the the uppercase a the kind of or the the alternate G which is in the on the bottom line There's almost this kind of like it's this this moment in history where we're moving from Art Nouveau and and Arts and crafts and something which that that sort of thing to this kind of new more austere modern style and if you think about if if how you know if if those great grotesques a kind of Yeah, that this something like Helvetica is is is a kind of a the end point of a certain way of looking at graphic of Typography then I guess this is the way that those kinds of grotesques want to be used the most I mean, this is where how they look good. This is by Yoast Huckley in I guess people call it the sort of international style for Typography and he's done in the in the 60s in Switzerland. This is a This is a designs for I believe their their election Publicity material and it's you know, it still looks as as fresh today as it did back then It's it's impossible to really rail against this that hard or think of anything better I mean, I definitely have those as posters on my wall. I think they're they're gorgeous It's it's it's very difficult to hate it. Even even this the cigarette packet. It's just so cool It makes me want to take up smoking myself So so Clean design. I mean most of the time when I get a new client I'm sure it's what you hear as architects when you meet with clients and you ask someone what they want They say well, you know, I want something clean. I want something modern. That's that's usually what you hear and it's It's interesting to think about how this this Style of this really clean modern crisp Swiss International typographic style. Why did it happen in Switzerland then in the book? Was it Swiss graphic design by by Richard Hollis he this is a page from that book where he is a picture from a Swiss Swiss national exhibition in the 60s and these are all these these flags from Switzerland And I think it's just something apart. That's a part of Swiss culture almost going back to sort of medieval times all these municipalities had these very simple graphic reductive Symbols and it's just I think it's something to do with the national character maybe because there is so much diversity in terms of its language and the culture in Switzerland that it's something about these very simple reductive forms which is appealing to them. I'm not sure but This is the the kind of the maybe the best kind of rulebook of how to do this kind of design It's by Joseph Moon of Brockman grid systems And it's it kind of schematizes how you do this kind of design which works so well This is a one page from it And here you can see that that he has all these rules for how you know you do apply captions and images Everything hanging off this this scaffolding And it did become it became just the dominant way of doing everything In terms of book design for for many decades subsequent. This is a Book actually I think yeah, this is designed by Vanielli for the moment This is the the cover actually without the dust jacket on and you can see on the inside It's absolutely following this this template to a to a tee of you know You've got the left alignments the rag the grotesque type face etc etc and other this isn't this is an AIGA annual Again tiny little type on the cover. I mean, this is a tiny little book booklet, but it's just so So many acres of white space and here right here, I mean it It's it doesn't really matter that it's quite difficult to see these these tiny little images that are being reproduced here It's just It's just so stylish, but the the you know the Big daddy of them all is definitely this one the Bauhaus book designed by Muriel Cooper, which is You know, it's it's a superb almost a culmination of of all these of all this this This style really and you can see right here. This is the flip through some of these pages It's a it's a very it's an enormous book and it's very very Osteer and it's a severe book even that guy's haircut is severe look at that and Moving flashing forward the present. This is a this is a book Which is still done within a kind of a modernist style This is a book by mevison and does and the opening spread. It's for it's for the new bit of the the Stidelich Museum and and Right here you can see that it's it's you start off on the as a Kind of zooming over the city in this aerial view and then you you zoom in a little bit closer And you can see that here it is Landed in this old city like a kind of a spaceship and if you as we click through here You can see the the way that these these layouts look, you know It's it's in a dialogue with that style that we're talking about before but it's you know It's it is more stylized. There's there's certain things here You sense that there's some kind of Something going on under the surface that that's driving these formal decisions and that's all these sorts of unpredictable things are happening on these layouts that You don't quite Understand, but it does look very very hip and But it's not your you know It's not your mum is modernism is it and then moving forward. This is by experimental jet set this is that for the the Venice Biennale and it's a series of booklets that sort of fold out and At this point, I mean, this is really tiny little type There's all sorts of blotches on the pages that they have this kind of Rorschach theme which is running throughout it. It's a totally Bizarre almost like a kind of I guess you could call it like a caricature of That modernist style that we're we're looking at Okay, so Strange structures. Let's let's talk about Karl Martens. This is he's the the designer of this this is his monograph a and it's You know, it's it's super. It's a superb book. It's it's this is if you're Seeing this right here. You can see how how the typography right here goes so Dangerously close to the to the edge of the page You really I mean, it's it's a very sort of daring layout in this book But it's it's it completely works one of the reasons it works is because of the book's construction This is every single page is French folded. So there was it was never gonna be any problem in terms of the trimming you can be you can skate very close to the edge there, but it's And it's a very interesting layout. I mean, it's throughout this book You have all his work and it kind of it kind of floats behind in this kind of layer that that moves across these pages and you and you have the Dutch and English texts that are I think the which one is it the One is in cyan the other ones in black and of course the reason he uses cyan and black those are both process colors right and the reason why it's the scale it is that this book is and you often see the scale and a lot of Dutch books and journals and things it's always because I think it has to do with the size of Paper the paper that they have at the press that if you trim it or you fold it a certain number of times It fits it's the most efficient use of that paper. So every single thing is it's work for this kind of work I think it's it's really to do with the with aestheticizing the printing process This is another Dutch book of same same size and This is one of my favorite books and architecture with it's just so brutal I've never read it, but it just I think that just the fact that they can just cram so much on a page It's so intense and I'm just I just burst with admiration Just the fact that they could get a publisher to make this, you know only only in Holland It's it's just unbelievable Look at that and So So ways of seeing by by John Berger This is yeah, this came out in the early 70s and it accompanied a at the TV show About art that was that was put out on the BBC and It's you know, it's really stood the test of time and it has a very odd structure to it. It's this This idea that you know in the it almost reminds me of the way that things You sometimes design things on the web where you're dropping an image and then you have text flowing in then another image This this kind of flow that's I mean That I think that that is something reminiscent of that in this in this book But of course the difficulty with that is when you're doing that the image is going to have much more Optical weight than the typography which is going to feel a little thin and feeble by comparison so he used universe bowls and He had these very you can see right here these very extreme tabs So that there's a just there's a nice kind of flow between image and text and it's and so it's actually a very enjoyable read and Yeah, it just and again, it just it really stood the test of time. I think it's way way ahead of its time This is a book by Bucky Fuller That was designed by Quentin Fiori. You may know Quentin Fiori. He designed the medium is the is the massage and This is a book which goes in two directions and this is a more contemporary version of that again by designed by medicine man does and this is the front cover and this is the back cover or vice versa depending on which which way you're reading it and one side is in Dutch and the other side is is in English and Maybe some anderson they were designed you are and apparently they didn't see what the other person was doing as they were designing it So the book came together and they'd both come up with these these strange Layout structures and I don't know what any of this means, you know I'm sure that these little black box boxes and yellow fields and it has something to do with with Relationship to the information, but I couldn't tell you what that is So which brings us back to the the the great wheel of style that I was we started off with and You know, it's when I've old enough now that I've been through I've lived through two cycles of style There's been when I was in an undergrad a lot of my teachers emerged from this kind of postmodern style that you're looking at Right here. This is before I was in college But a lot of my teachers were exposed to this and we're kind of bought into it hook line and sinker And this is the graphic design journal emigre and you can see here that it's That's that you know at this time it was like The whole idea was was breaking down these binary oppositions between word and image between high and low art These were the this is the kind of discourse this is Ed Fellow's Yeah, what was one of my favorite designers in the 90s and actually still I still adore his work, but this is an interview with him, but By the time I went to grad school that had completely faded away It died and it was almost like this kind of embarrassment where we all We all kind of swept it under the carpet and nobody wanted to talk about it anymore and and everything had moved on what by the time I was in grad school it The the dominant way of thinking about graphic design. It was really what I've been showing you in these slides It was a lot of it was about creating These these kinds of systems that are extrinsic to the designer that from some other place some kind of thing Some kind of system, which is yeah, which is which isn't which you've devised But then is dictating what the design should be that was the way that people Wanted to design if you asked any student Who is a contemporary of mine at the time? Okay, what are you interested in that every single one would say I'm interested in systems that was the thing and after I graduated the kind of pinnacle of that ideal would probably be this this architecture magazine pin-up that was actually started by Two of my friends they were the graphic designers involved and you can see here that this is a kind of a kind of a logical Outgrowth of a lot of what I've been talking about in this in this in this lecture So you can see this is a spread right here and and you know that each section would use of a very Uniform, you know, you'd use a Process color and then you'd move on to another signature and it'd be a different color or it'd be in for color But each time you'd really be feeling the kind of the production methods and no one wants it was interested in decoration anymore This is just so Uncool everyone wanted it to be as default default was the word default as possible one of the things one of the symbols of that would be the underlying that you can see on this cover and and Right here in these on even on the captions all over the place You'll find underlines festooning this this the graphic designer this period and this was you know This was like I said this was the kind of the zenith or I guess the nadir depending on your point of view of that of that That form of graphic expression and to be honest like, you know, Sam Seraf typography You know grotesques, especially don't really want to be italicized It's you know if you're gonna have a title it does, you know makes some sense on one level to underline it but yeah, this the underline became the symbol of of this of this kind of design trend and everyone Including all the people who've been you've been you know talking to you over the course of this conference This was Neil. This is some of his work from around the same period. He he was talking to you yesterday Dan Michelson or this link by air. I think I believe he's gonna be giving a talk. This is some of his work from the time and My previous speaker Michael Rock this came out of two by four This was even this and this was actually designed by the organizer of this conference. You can see the the title right here Underlined it just became this kind of disease that spread everywhere and this is the you know The interior of the book and and I wasn't immune to it either This is a spread from from a magazine that I was designing But it's you know, it's interesting and this you know It's an irony that that we you know, we all try and escape this this this wheel of style and And try and do something which Which right right here that we're trying to get something down to something which is pure and essential, but we're still Stuck on it spinning round and round and now we have to you know scrub it off our websites and and pretend that it never happened and And move on with our lives, but thank you. I like the underline I Just have one one question that sort of I think I became curious about as I was listening to you Talk about style and this kind of the wheel of style, which I think is an amazing diagram by Lauren while that you started with by the way Do you think designers now that we live in a very different kind of condition the contemporary condition where? You know, we have so much access to different kinds of media We know exactly what this little cool studio within you know in Switzerland, you know what they're up to at this moment and you know it's we practice in a different time and do you think that designers have a different Relationship to style then designers did let's say 20 years ago Like we've reached some kind of terminal velocity of style where there is nothing which can be that there is no such thing as the Underline that can't exist anymore because we've moved beyond it right because it's the cycle is so quick Well, that's the problem. You can never see beyond the horizon of your own influence So at the time we thought we could but we didn't and we probably aren't now So I don't it's the the the answer is I don't know I Think that's good answer. Thank you. Thank you so much Tom nailed it