Call Me A Font Wonk
I love reading this kind of history. And the confessions of an Avant Garde abuser awoke the Avant Garde victim I hardly knew I had within me. It might drive the First Sea Load to motion sickness, but these designers are working for the betterment of the American People, and I salute them.
posted by Undersecretary to the Deputy Commissariat at 1:39 AM
2 Comments:
The University of Washington School of Art has always had a particular interest in typography, particularly of this clean, Swiss-designer quasi-modern flavor- to the extent that most of the SOA's posters for art shows, done in house, are design heavy and art-free, and consquently irritating. They have however, featured some tremendous history of design shows.
The danger is embodied perfectly in the story, and is not to be lost; the font was directly in service of free thought, intelligent counter-culture and aesthetic eroticism. Now it's a just another strip-mine for advertisers - where design is just a meaningless attribute whose sole purpose is to be distinguishable (which drives the abuses).
This font comes from the great era of the 20th century where design was directly connected to political philosophy, for bad (Italian futurism and fascism), for spectacular creativity and centralized socialism that was conviently inexpensive to build (Bauhaus, a direct antecendent for this font) and for sleek, machine clean elegance (the primarily French and politically feeble Art Deco).
The modern industrial font bete-noirs will devour anything that has a distinct look in service of a client - which makes them completely professional and totally amoral. They have no real interest in culture, let alone the ethical transformation and liberation of society which was often the direct goal of excellent design. So any really good new font, which is more likely to come from a honest designer with a deluded notion of making a contribution to communitication, will be abused as sure as the sun will rise, and it be dropped unceremoniously into the great vat of capitalist culture goo.
Does that qualify as motion sickness?
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