Lucy Sandilands: week 5

Emigre Magazine (1984-2004) published by EmigreGraphics in San Francisco with an international style.

Rudy Vanderlands
Zuuzanna Licko

First digital type foundry
Sold or gave away the fonts used in the magazine
very popular stylistically
digital and portable

exploited the possibilities of apple software to produce a new innovative design language.
Very digital (deliberate) typefaces, bitmap 'un-smoothed' out type.

(experimental jetset had article published in Magazine)
http://sandilandslucy.blogspot.co.uk/2016/10/low-budget-typographic-posters.html
(worked with DesignersRepublic, published their work)
http://sandilandslucy.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/ian-anderson-lecture.html

Content

"Dear Emigre"- Letters to Emigre.

funny venting that is published in a magazine.
Form of trolling?
some essay length submissions
back and forth discussion
writer and reader discussions
firey
disguised political debate of post modernism and modernism
fought out through type and composition, as metaphor for political debate.

Format changes- attempt to move away

CD and dvd format editions in a period before you would've seen this
open to changed
Tabloid
Smaller 'news' magazine
Emigre music publishing
"Catfish"

Monotony of International Style

graphic interventions
the grid strips away unconventional things on the page.

Barry Deck- Originally design template Gothic (postmodern graphic design style)
vernacular style- understood and used by ordinary people on an ordinary basis.
The future as imagined by those in the 1950's. Mass Produced.

Critics

Massimo Vignelli (neo-modernists)- 'A national calamity', 'An aberration of culture'

David Carson (postmodern)- Beach culture magazine published an issue with a cover one that boasted "no Emigre fonts", although the logo itself was set in Licko's Senator.

Ironically it was designers like Carson who popularised it.

Allies

Stephen McCarthy- "the voice of a new generation of graphic designers: post-modern, deconstructed, experimental".

Break lines of text
use a mix of fonts
deconstructive layout.
broke affordances (broke rules) you could introduce awareness of what they are reading.
crafting digital technologies

working with computer based technologies, but can also be mapped on to traditions such as arts and crafts movements (William Morris).(Eric Gill)- Gill sans 'humanist' font, which had a big impact on Futura and LondonUnder Ground signage.

vernacular again, due to everyday use.

Vaughn Oliver- deep human qualities but highly surrealistic. Contemporary designer sensibility in animation (e.g. Tim Burton surrealism, poetic, Freudian references). Juxtaposition. Everyday objects with imposed human sensibility.

typographic style was calligraphy.
Starts with part of the body/ human cultural artefact.

Katherine McCoy- Cranbook. Communicate ethos of the Cranbrook course. Legibility and communication shouldn't be confused. Deconstruction can convey that message if thats what you want to portray. Collaboration of artists (Cal arts also).