On May 16, "Metamorphosis: The Leading Role of Type in Changing Communications" attracted several hundred designers and students to Greenwich Village for a day-long series of presentations by top-of-the-line designers in all the major promotional media: print, television, and Web. Moderated by Margaret Richardson, the newly former editor of U&lc, Metamorphosis was sponsored by the Type Directors Club and hosted by Parsons School of Design/The New School. Although two of the scheduled speakers, David Carson and Jonathan Hoefler, were unable to attend, they were ably replaced by Matthew Carter and by William Travis and James Sommerville of The Attik. For those of you who couldn’t attend, here’s a tour of the high points of the various presentations (in order of appearance), along with a few links to relevant Web sites.
Milton Glaser gave a whimsical welcoming speech that celebrated the letters of the alphabet, accompanied by a charming slideshow. Though disappointing in his brevity--one wanted more hard content from the most influential graphic designer of the last fifty years--Mr. Glaser was generous in the program time he conceded to newer designers.
Paula Scher presented a retrospective of her crisp, stylish, type-intensive design, ranging from record covers to corporate identities to the current Ballet Tech poster campaign. The work she showed is in itself a demonstration of how the use of type as design object has changed over the past 25 years: the earliest samples, done for CBS, treated the letter as hero, and used it to stand for words and concepts, the part representing the whole; her later work is more apt to use lines of words as graphic elements, juxtaposing phrases and images for a collage effect in which the associations are the message. She finished with the succinct advice, “Keep it simple, and don’t get confused by a lot of bullshit.”
John Jay, who demonstrated his commitment to metamorphosis per se when he moved sight unseen to Oregon to join Wieden & Kennedy, showed a number of entertaining presentation tapes of ads for W&K customers, such as Nike and Coca Cola, including ads that did not make it into the finished campaigns. His buzzy, allusive, detail-intensive creative style provided an instructive contrast to Scher’s directness. He was the first of several speakers to sound a note of disillusion with the goals of advertisers and the mass media, saying that he’s come to terms with the thought that “much of what we do has little content. We’re not curing cancer here. This is graphic design.”
Chip Kidd gave a witty tour of his twelve years at Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., where his book jackets have redefined high-end book marketing. His accounting of how his creative process rubs against marketing considerations to spark startling images and such innovative solutions as the half-jacket (which can be removed to reveal an even more surprising image) was instructive and outspoken. Especially entertaining was his disclosure of certain arcane secrets of the Knopf borzoi logo, which, unlike most logos, can be interpreted in a different style with each use, as long as it shows a borzoi dog loping leftward. Among the various canine logos presented was the “disclaimer doggie,” which Mr. Kidd uses on cover designs that are forced upon him by other departments. As for what that logo looks like, well, you should have been here. He also talked about his own newly released book, Batman Collected.
The Attik, a British design firm with a newly opened New York office, gave a whirlwind tour of their multilayered, windblown, rather uneven work. A young firm without the decades of perspective shown by earlier speakers, they demonstrated a lively attitude (and received a big hand) when, in response to the news of a lost bet on a football match, Creative Director James Sommerville shaved the head of Group President William Travis onstage.
Matthew Carter, brought in at the last moment, gave a brilliant, erudite, and funny talk on experimental type design and alternative alphabets from historical and contemporary designers, starting with God and the angels, moving on to Sir Thomas More and Albrecht Dürer, and ending up with W. P. Dwiggins and Jonathan Hoefler. The experiments ranged from nonsense and substitution alphabets to typefaces created using radically simplified letters, letter tops, combined serif and sans-serif letters, italics that slant both ways at once, deconstructed letters and faces, and faces with highly specialized uses. (Of Hoefler’s experimental faces, for instance, one was not be used above 3 points, and the other was not be used at all.) Mr. Carter’s wide-ranging tour of the fringes of typeface design made it clear that, as he put it, ’there has been a typographic counterculture almost as long as there has been a typographic culture.”
Stefan Sagmeister, saying that he tries in his design work to transform stale thinking, showed a variety of immensely clever designs that dealt directly with the subject of metamorphosis. These included a playful graphic that turned a rabbit into a duck; a series of postcards that fold into working sundials, phonographs, and other surprisingly functional objects; and an album by the Transformer himself, Lou Reed. He also demonstrated a remarkable CD design, an homage, perhaps, to 18th-century masters of perspective ciphers: it came with a sheet of mirrored plastic, which, when rolled up and inserted into the disk’s center hole, revealed that the graphic on the CD’s surface was the record company’s logo. In what was certainly the day’s most graphic (though not the most melodramatic) mention of how one must suffer for the sake of art, Mr. Sagmeister described a CD design for which “we just took an X-acto knife and cut the type into my back.” (Presumably he did not do his own typography on this one.)
Neville Brody reprised a lecture he gave at Typo Berlin 98 in March, a series of trenchant comments indicating his disillusionment with commercial design. A sampling:
- Our industry was born out of the social need to give tangible form to communication.
- The box becomes the content. We can't hear the message.
- Advertising tends to take an original idea from a target culture and freeze it. Hiphop and the counter culture are examples of culture in the west being annulled through being converted to advertising.
- Design and advertising are part of an entertainment industry that creates an environment in which we don't have to think too clearly.
- The Internet is a series of roads to nowhere.
- On the Web we are more concerned with the choice of typeface than the choice of text.
- Type is not money, it is culture.
The final event, a panel on the current state of design for the World Wide Web, consisted of woeful lamentations on the Web’s typographic shortcomings by some of this country’s premier Web site designers: Peter Girardi of Funny Garbage, Craig M. Kanarick of Razorfish, Miles McMannus of OVEN Digital, and Gong Szeto of i/o 360. In contrast to the print and TV designers who had gone before them, these digital-media designers just didn’t seem to be having fun anymore. They berated their chosen medium for its very real lack of sensitivity to the needs of type-oriented design, and complained that the amount of technical detail they had to deal with was eating up their design time. One reason for their collective grumpiness may have been that we got to see none of their work: the New School's A/V system, which had been conspicuously balky with other presenters, came to a dead halt when confronted with the problem of displaying graphics from a computer screen. It’s unfortunate that attendees were deprived of a demonstration of what these forward-looking designers think is coolest about their own work.
Metamorphosis was truly an immersion experience in the current debate about the intersection between typography and design. There was perhaps a little too much of the portfolio-review about some presentations (though they were great portfolios), but by the end of the day, it was clear that the idea-to-noise ratio was heavily weighted toward ideas, by speakers who deeply care about the quality and traditions of typography. At the end of the day, the hundreds of attendees staggered out of the dark auditorium into a warm, sunny spring afternoon, blinking and shaking serifs out of their hair.