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Looking Closer 2: Critical Writings on Graphic Design edited by
Michael Bierut, William Drenttel, Steven Heller, and D.K. Holland
Allworth Press, 274 pp. $18.95
| A trio of books recently published by the Allworth Press offer
a compact self-study course on the practice and appreciation of
graphic design. These books, Design Literacy, Design Culture,
and Looking Closer 2, are intended as an alternative to the diet
of eye candy that sustains many graphic designers. The message?
Look with your brain first. by Philip Nobel Three years after the publication of The End of Print, the David Carson juggernaut has returned to the shelves. With 2nd Sight, the self-taught surf-punk graphic designer and his booster Lewis Blackwell try to repeat the magic combination of flash and pop that made The End of Print (Chronicle Books, 1995) the best-selling graphic design book of all time and established Carson as the hottest graphic designer of the decade. Over 120,000 copies are now in print, bringing Carson's restless vision out of niche publications like Beach Culture and Ray Gun and into the hands of eager kids everywhere. In 2nd Sight, though, we are encountering David Carson after his influence has grown even more widespread, after years of lectures and major exhibitions, and after his commercial work (print and TV campaigns for Microsoft, Lucent, Xerox, MCI, Armani, Ray Ban, and others) has made his vision a public commodity. 2nd Sight is a record of these travels and triumphs. What this book makes very clear is how thoroughly Carson has seeded the world--particularly students--with his private language, and how hungry the initiates are for more. The best part of 2nd Sight takes us into student workshops in New Zealand, Israel, Chile, and elsewhere. Some student projects are shown: magazine spreads that are "entirely inappropriate for a given story," a satirical "how to design like David Carson" book prepared by students in Düsseldorf. The repeated shots of chic, adoring students and peeling exhibition broadsides on distant city streets (Belgrade, Venice, Bern) are good entry points into the international Carson phenomenon, but the accompanying text and captions by Lewis Blackwell cast it all in a self-congratulatory glare that any balanced reader will blink at in amazement. For example: "Contrary to what New York magazine said (in a headline) at the time of the New York Cooper Union talk, Carson is not god. But the Hamburg audience turned out to be pretty keen... They even sang a surprise Happy Birthday to the speaker while clutching sparklers, throwing his presentation cool." Looking at and reading 2nd Sight is disorienting, but not for the reasons that Carson or Blackwell might have hoped. Deciphering the seductive digital runes in each layout is a joy, but it is hard to reconcile them with their explanatory text. The writing celebrates intuition as a prime virtue for designers, but it toasts Carson's intuition to the point of parody. It would be interesting to take Blackwell's text and pour it into a cleaner format, say double-spaced 12-point Helvetica on white 8 1/2-by-11 paper, stapled in the upper-left corner. When the smoke cleared and Carson's mirrors were carted away, one would find an amazingly obsequious paean to the Great Designer that undermines the level, unpretentious way that Carson presents, discusses, and produces his work. The vindictive, gun-for-hire slant of a review by Chip Kidd also sours the tone of this travelogue. Kidd, a graphic designer of some fame himself, trashes a graphic design establishment figure who dared to ask Carson some dumb questions at a public forum. Carson is still holding on to some of his original cool, but his job would be easier if there were more substance to the text that he wrestles with in his own books. A trio of books recently published by the Allworth Press offer a compact self-study course on the practice and appreciation of graphic design. These books, Design Literacy, Design Culture, and Looking Closer 2, are intended as an alternative to the diet of eye candy that sustains many graphic designers. Of the three, only Design Literacy is illustrated, and that only sparingly, with black-and-white thumbnails. The message? Look with your brain first. The course starts with Design Literacy, a look at the stories behind 100 milestone designs. These case studies--the authors call them "object lessons"--spin out from the objects, illuminating their social, political, or cultural contexts: Who commissioned Tomi Ungerer's famous "Black Power/White Power" cartoon? How did postage stamps come to be sites for high design? What were the politics behind the short life of New York City's 1970s subway map? Unfortunately though, the vignettes are uneven. Many bring you right into the world that produced the work in question--the section on design in mass media is especially strong--but others skate across the surface. Each entry in Design Literacy is illustrated by a single image. This restraint adds to the engaging simplicity of the book--it's nice to flip through until something catches your eye and then to read the lively essay on its history or meaning--but it can be frustrating when the authors refer to works without illustrating them, or focus on a topic only loosely related to the image shown. One lesson I learned: Make an exception to a rigorous design scheme if it will aid communication. The second book in this informal course is Design Culture, a collection of 78 essays, interviews, and reviews published in the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design between 1984 and 1996. In this book, some of the country's best known graphic designers speak out about issues in the field and in the designed environment. Massimo Vignelli writes in praise of the ubiquitous "Nutrition Facts" chart, Michael Bierut proposes a historic preservation movement for corporate trademarks, and the late Paul Rand weighs in on "The Seduction of Contemporary Design." The journalistic writing in Design Culture straddles the gap between the accessible overviews in Design Literacy and the more involved criticism of the third book in the group, Looking Closer 2. The original Looking Closer, published in 1994, was the first book to codify graphic design criticism as a distinct and vital enterprise. As the introduction to Looking Closer 2 makes clear, the practice of writing critically about graphic design is a very recent development, beginning in earnest only in the 1980s. It is not surprising, then, that the writing here draws from a variety of "non-native" sources, including art and architecture criticism. Among the 50 diverse essays in the book is "Paganini Unplugged," a critical profile of David Carson by Rick Poynor, reprinted from I.D. For the big picture, take a look at it before plunging into 2nd Sight. Philip Nobel is a Brooklyn-based architectural historian. |
Keywords:
David Carson, Design, Typography, book
