Gunther Kress
Design is most often analysed at a purely aesthetic level that concerns itself with the look, feel and beauty of a text, rather than being located in a socio-cultural context. Whilst design can be said to be largely about aesthetics, the practice of design is itself a product of socio-cultural, political, economic and technological influences. The notion, ‘socio-cultural ramifications’ is used here to refer to the way in which typographic design in the digital age extends far beyond simply an aesthetic level to a reorientation of socio-cultural practices and meaning-making. This chapter discusses five significant socio-cultural ramifications of magazine typographic design trends to arise from the digital age. These are as follows;
o Recognising the nature of ‘design’.
o The combination of theory and practice.
o A movement from the consumer to the producer.
o The supposed ‘death’ of typography and print.
o The debate over the ‘death’ of literacy.
Design is usually referred to as the surface level of a text, its visual appearance, whilst content is considered to be the more important aspect of the text, its deeper meaning. Form and content have long been considered as separate functions, with form (design), being transparent and of little significance compared to content. Frascara argues that "graphic design is viewed only from an aesthetic perspective, without enough consideration of communication and social significance."(2) The design of a magazine typographic text actually carries deep meanings of its own and can also work in many ways with the content of a text. The diversity of design possibilities enabled by computers, coupled with an increasing sense of style culture within contemporary capitalist society, is fostering a growing socio-cultural awareness of the significance of design.
Typographies are surface representations of several levels of deep meaning. Leaving aside the content a particular typography may be representing, such as a word or letter, a typography’s aesthetic surface is inhabited with deep meaning. Terry Eagleton argues that "to halt at the sensuous surface rather than hunt the illusory essence beneath it," is to "live superficially."(3) The digital typeform ‘skeetch’ for example, used for the subheadings of this thesis, represents the way in which handwriting has lingered on in an era where large portions of society use digital-electronic word processors to ‘write’ texts and letters. This typography implies an argument that digital technologies have not totally depersonalised the socio-cultural act of writing, as digital typographies can be adaptations of analog handwriting.
Design is gradually becoming recognised as an ‘active’ rather than ‘passive’ feature of texts. In understanding design as passive, one would be advocating the problematic notion that design is, and should be, transparent to content. By recognising design as active, its role in the communication of information is acknowledged by the text’s consumer to be actively assisting and playing with the communication of the content of a text. Designers of print magazines are generally aware of what particular design techniques, typographies, images and colours their specific audiences will best respond to. Ray Gun’s Brian Ferry spread analysed in chapter 3 is an extreme example of this. Through a mutation of typographic signifiers this spread is embedded with subversive implications for Brian Ferry, and the cultural-political ideologies of both the magazine’s producers and audience. The design of this Ray Gun magazine spread therefore communicates a content of its own that is far removed from what the actual words represented by the typographic signifiers may be saying.
Typography can also be used actively to simply reflect and enhance the content of a text. The Rolling Stone spread analysed in chapter 3 illustrates this notion well. The typewriter style positions the content of this Rolling Stone article in a specific socio-cultural and technological context that enhances the sensory communication of the content of the spread. The power of form to manipulate the communication of the content of a text is becoming more widely recognised by magazine and text producers who are now able, as a result of computers, to use and manipulate typography in ways that much more actively expresses the content of a magazine.
Form and content therefore should be reconsidered in terms of their inhabited traces within each other. Content cannot exist without form, and form cannot exist without content, any separation of the two is misconceived. The traditional boundaries between form and content, aesthetics and meaning, are concepts that through the process of deconstruction reveal the malleabilities of much of Western society’s binary hierarchical divisions.
The critical-interpretative and questioning strategies of deconstruction can help to reveal that design is not simply a transparent surface structure on the road to a higher level of meaning that is embedded in the content. Deconstruction, described as "the program of taking texts or cultural phenomena and trying to see what they are really saying,"(4) is a theory inextricably tied to its practical applications and possibilities. The development of a ‘deconstructionist’ typographic and design culture, exemplified by the works of David Carson, April Greiman, Rudy Vanderlans, Zuzana Licko and others of a similar ilk, has made considerable inroads into a combination of theory with practice.
The work of David Carson in particular contains strong ties with the theories of deconstruction, poststructuralism and postmodernism. Carson’s work radiates these theories through magazine typographic design practices that invokes critical arguments with traditional conceptions of reading, communication, legibility(5) and text presentation. Buchanan argues that "the power of design as deliberation and argument lies in overcoming … the separation of words and things, or theory and practice that remains a source of disruption and confusion in contemporary culture."(6) David Carson’s design for Ray Gun shows that design can be deeply imbued with debate and argument. Typographic designs which blur the boundaries between theory and practice reveal much of the previously suppressed potential of design as an active tool of social, cultural, political and economic argument.
One of the major channels through which design and typography has come to be recognised at a level beyond mere aesthetics is through the work of the avant-garde. Frascara writes, "the excessive importance given to the avant-garde movement in the context of graphic design history is based on the failure of theory to recognise graphic design as something other than an art form."(7) Avant-garde practice is recognised for its inhibition in questioning and arguing with features of mainstream culture that are just passively taken for granted. The ‘deconstructionist’ movement in typography was fostered initially by the avant-garde as a form of critical aesthetic argument in regards to the state of culture in the late twentieth century, a period dominanted by media and technology.
Many magazine consumers may not be familiar with the dense theoretical texts of postructuralism, postmodernism and deconstruction. However, through the increasing application of such theories in design culture, texts are being produced with a more fluid interaction between theories and practices and thus audiences are becoming familiar with these and other theories indirectly, or in a sense unconsciously. Through the combination of theory with design practice, consumers of magazine texts are being exposed to, as well as opening themselves up to critical analysis and engagement with the cultural practices of representation and communication.
The progressive activeness of the consumer in textual interpretation also sees the consumer becoming more of a producer due to their active role in producing meaning from the text. Not all people interpret texts in the same way. Each and every person has their own subjectivities such as gender, class, race, age and so on, that will actively effect the particular messages and meanings that are derived from the consumption of any text. A deconstructive and poststructural understanding put forward by Spivak is that "the description of the object is contaminated by the patterns of the subject’s desire."(8)
Magazine producers acknowledge that the consumer is as much the producer of the text as they themselves are, as it is at the point of consumption that a significant part of a text’s meaning is realised. Take women’s magazines for example, a great number of them are similar in content but are designed differently to atract different age and socio-economic groups.(9) Through design, magazines identify with specific niche audience and therefore the production of meaning can be in a sense tailored to a particular audience. Ien Ang writes;
The typographic design of the early Ray Gun and others who have embraced similar visual strategies such as Speak, Blah, Blah, Blah and Huh, encourage their audiences to consume the text in an active manner which in a sense turns the consumer of the text into its producer. The often complex, visually distorted and ‘noisy’ typographic design of these magazines actively seduces the targeted audiences of Generation X (also commonly referred to as the MTV Generation), as they build dynamic design interfaces that play on the features of media forms other than print. After the young audiences of these magazines have been actively seduced by design, they interpret the content and messages of the magazine text subjectively by moving through the many layers and paths of meaning that are embedded in such magazines through both the design and content.
The proliferation of personal computers and desktop publishing software over the last ten years is also enabling a heightened ability for the production of texts by the very people who were once just the consumers of texts.(11) With digital computers, scanners and printers accessible to a much wider segment of society than ever before, print production has moved away from established publishers, and into a rapidly expanding field of ‘self-made’ designers, producers and publishers. A student putting together an assignment on a computer, who actively makes typographic style, size, position and colour decisions should be considered at this level as a producer. The computer therefore has enabled the production of a diverse and extensive range of print publications to maintain many different socio-cultural groups. Penny Sparke writes, "style-consciousness has become a sine qua non, not just of the young, but of the whole spectrum of consumers … there are style-choices available for every social sub-group."(12) It is thus inescapable that the aesthetic surfaces of typography and design indeed carry deeper socio-cultural connotations and associations that actively effect the consumption or interpretation of any text, whether one would care to recognise this factor or not.
The shift in emphasis from the passive to active consumer and the proliferating numbers of print producers as a result of accessible digital technologies, is a contributing factor in further substantiating the presence of print media, and expanding the levels of electronic and digital literacy in society.
Neil Postman argues that "print is now merely a residual epistemology, and it will remain so, aided to some extent by the computer, and newspapers and magazines that are made to look like television screens."(13) Postman, a cultural conservative, argues from the perspective that television has polluted public communication. Joseph Giovannini also mourns for the loss of literary integrity in magazines. He blames, "competition from television, the VCR, and other non-print media," for "aggressively designed pages that freely mix and cut words, photographs, and graphic devices."(14) The death of typography is usually argued where traditional design practices are rejected for methods that subvert the power of the meaning of the word, for the power of the representation of the word.
We have not experienced the death of typography, print, or indeed culture from the proliferation of digital-electronic technology. The continually expanding range of print magazines is sound evidence supporting the fact that the digital-electronic age has not overthrown the print tradition. Heller and Fernandes note that more magazines are being published in the 1990s than ever before, for what one would expect to be a diminishing consumer base due to competition from digital and electronic media.(15) Developments in various media technologies has actually had a long lineage of redefining and reinforcing the presence of print typographic culture rather than replacing it.(16)
There has been a transformation of socio-cultural interest in recent years for commentary and information about the ‘new’ digital age in print form. This cultural orientation for print companions to digital technologies has encouraged a renaissance of the print media. The magazine industry responded to this profitable consumerist desire with an extensive proliferation of titles that include the likes of; WIRED, 21oC, Digital Video, Digital Photography, Macworld, PC World, Australian Net Guide, Mondo 2000. Robert Markley describes a great irony of our culture’s fascination with virtual technologies to be the fondness we have with consuming books and articles that proclaim the death of print culture.(17) Ray Gun has even participated in the death of print debate by running the tagline "the end of print" on its cover for a while.(18)
Rather than the death of print or typography, what we have tended to see, as Ross Harley writes, is "a kind of permanent revolution that fails to kill off the old monarchies. Old media merge, intermingle and mutate into hardy new strains that combine elements of old and new forms."(19) Computers disintegrate the representational distinctions between many media forms as they can produce static print texts that draw traces to the signifiers displayed in other media forms such as computers, television, film, video and music. The intermingling of sound, motion and visual characteristics from digital-electronic media into magazines, is particularly apparent in Wired. However, the culture magazines, Ray Gun, The Face, Cream and Mu are also designed with typography that alludes to movement, infers an audible trace, is pixelated, and contain a large number of digitally inscribed iconic symbols and references.
The appropriation of digital graphic interfaces by print is underpinned by a dual socio-cultural and economic agenda. Through design, Ray Gun and Wired have attracted and maintained audiences for their printed publications who would otherwise engage more with digital-electronic media than with print. Phillip Meggs says that David Carson’s design, "captured the imagination of young people, who’s primary information orientation, comes not from print media but from video and electronic means of communication."(20) The design of magazines is focussed on creating a text that their particular audiences will identify with most strongly, since it is the sizeable audience whose purchase and consumption of magazines guarantees their economic viability.
With the development of the Internet, we have seen the spread of online magazines known as ‘e-zines’ or ‘webzines’. E-zines can be generally considered as representing the transformation of a printed medium, the magazine, into a purely digital-electronic medium, the Internet. Heller and Drennan, argue however that e-zines "find it hard to escape the gravitational pull of the traditional print magazine."(21) E-zines, like print magazines, have a contents page, features and advertising.(22) Christopher Waller argues that the print magazine is a complex interface in which readers are "interacting, navigating, hyperlinking in real-time – all the common actions normally associated with electronic media."(23) The familiarity of the print environment adapted into the digital environment and visa-versa is a contributing factor in smoothly transporting the audience between different media forms.
Rick Poynor argues that the death of print and typography debates which have arisen out of the proliferation of digital and electronic communication media and typography’s perceived decline into chaos and anarchy, are misrepresented. Poynor believes it is still too early to tell if print will be subsumed by digital-electronic media.(24) To say that we are experiencing the death of print and typography as a result of the digital age would be presumptuous given such widespread evidence that suggests otherwise. Instead, what we are experiencing is a transformation of magazine typographic culture in response to the socio-cultural and technological orientations of the late twentieth century.
‘Literacy’, is traditionally defined as the ability to read and write. Myron Tuman however, argues that the meanings of "reading" and "writing" are themselves unstable. Tuman writes, "their meanings have shifted in the past and may shift again in the future, precisely in response to technological change."(25) Literacy should not be simply defined as the ability to read or write, but it should encompass the understanding and interpretation of evolving communication practices. Lanham argues that "we really must cease conducting the ‘literacy’ debate on the basis of a print technology which is even now in radical metamorphosis."(26)
In the digital age, we do not read or write as systematically and as linearly as we once did, however literacy is not obsolete, it is more important now than perhaps it has ever been. We must read and write in the traditional sense, but we must also learn to read and write in ‘new’ ways that allow us to keep up with the rapid changes and developments of the socio-cultural and technological world. Cynthia Selfe, uses the notion of ‘multi-layered literacy’ to describe the sense in which those trained by print culture will adjust to become computer and hypertextually literate.(27)
Common forms of literacy in contemporary times are computer and hypertext literacy. Tuman writes, "we routinely boot computers, load programs, open files, block and merge text."(28) These activities are some of the processes through which one reveals their level of computer literacy. Hypertext literacy involves the ability to understand and use the Internet’s highlighted words and suggestive icons to move between digital texts. Burbules describes one of the perennial questions concerning reading hypertexts to be whether, "hypertext itself is something new, or simply another attempt, this time in the digital domain, to deconstruct linear narrative."(29) Many children are now taught at schools how to use computers, the Internet and electronically word process, at the same time as they learn to read and write.(30) As more and more children are growing up with the literacy of many diverse types of media and communication technologies, it is inevitable that print text presentation techniques should reflect this socio-cultural shift.
The multi-layered texts of the digital-electronic environment have essentially fostered the multi-layered-ness of typography in magazines such as Ray Gun. For the Ray Gun audience, which is presumably literate in the fast cut, layered presentations of television, music videos, computers, and video games, the interpretation of complex ‘multi-layered’ print typographic presentations is an easier process. Vanderlans argues that with generations growing up on MTV and video games it is safe to assume that they have high levels of visual sophistication and would not be discouraged by less straight forward typography.(31) Philip Meggs describes magazines like Ray Gun and Émigré as surprisingly successful in light of the fact that they could be also said to be illegible and unreadable due to busy, layered typography and obscurely shaped layouts. Meggs writes:
"As Carson, Vanderlans, and others pushed their work to the edge of legibility, designers discovered many readers are more resilient than assumed, and messages were read under less than ideal circumstances. Perceptual aspects of film and video informed Carson’s magazine designs, for the hierarchical and regularized structure of page design yields to a shifting, kinetic spatial environment where type and image overlap, fade, and blur." (32)
For those who are only marginally, or not at all literate in the technologies and communications of the digital-electronic domain, the typographic designs of Ray Gun and Émigré foster confusion and ambiguity. Massimo Vignelli, a graphic designer described as the "high priest of New York Modernism", has publicly described the pages of Émigré as "disgraceful", "garbage", and an "aberration of culture".(33) However, any debate over what may or may not be appropriate print typographic design is essentially tied up with the generational subdivisions of magazine producers and consumers. Vignelli was born in 1931 and is a "passionate protagonist of rational design theory."(34) Émigré’s producers - Zuzana Licko and Rudy Vanderlans on the other hand, have evolved with the more recent developments of digital technology and new practices of design that strongly integrate theory with practice.(35)
Walter Ong discusses culture as a series of stages or phases such as the oral, written, print and electronic. Ong proposed that each of these stages had different characteristics but also coloured the culture that they were seen to be replacing. Thus Ong refers to a culture dominantly based on electronic technologies as the age of "secondary orality".(36) Michael Hiem summarises Ong’s central arguments of socio-cultural and technological evolutions within society:
"...each new medium builds upon and extends the previous media: literacy builds upon oral communication; typography absorbs both the voice and the skills of literacy; electronic media assimilate or depend upon the oral delivery of (usually) literacy-based texts or typographic scripts as well as upon a general public familiar with printed material available in the press, magazines and books."(37)
From this understanding advocated by Ong, the dynamic interplay between media technologies and socio-cultural practices can be uncovered. As culture has moved through various stages of technological emphasis, the nature of literacy has likewise developed and expanded. However, Ong does not go into discussing digital culture which follows on from electronic culture. This project builds on Ong’s discussion to pose a position for the socio-cultural literate orientations of this digital era.
Digital media technologies, communication and production tools enhance the ‘secondary orality’ of electronic culture as well as further diversifying it. Along with visual and verbal modes of representation, digital culture is one of constant and fast-paced motion. It has also significantly revived the sensory orientation of tactility through the use of the keyboard and mouse. It would be accurate then to describe the digital age as a ‘multimodal’ culture, where the literacies of oral, written, print and electronic cultures coalesce, and subsequently result in a hybridisation of socio-cultural orientations.
‘Multimodal’ is the notion used by Gunther Kress to describe texts made up of many different semiotic modes, such as language, image, text, sound and movement.(38) Multimedia texts are obviously ‘mulitmodal’, however digitally produced print texts are becoming increasingly ‘mulitmodal’ as they draw together the signifiers of many different textual forms to produce print texts that render a similar sense of multimodality to that of multimedia texts. Magazine’s such as, Ray Gun, Wired, Cream and Mu are the most obvious examples of the intentions of print to stimulate a culture of ‘multimodality’ that can more easily interpret and make sense of integrated media representations and technologies.
1) G.Kress, ‘Visual and Verbal Modes of Representation in Electronically Mediated Communication: The Potentials of New Forms of Text,’ in I.Snyda, ed. Page to Screen, Taking Literacy into the Electronic Era, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1997, p.77.
2) J.Frascara, ‘Graphic Design: Fine Art or Social Science?’ in V.Margolin & R.Buchanan, eds. The Idea Of Design, A Design Issues Reader, The MIT Press, Cambridge, 1995, p.46.
3) T.Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford, 1990, p.258.
4) R.Rucker, R.U.Sirius, & Q.Mu, Mondo 2000, A Users Guide to the New Edge, Thames & Hudson, London, 1992, p.80.
5) ‘Legibility’ refers to the quality of the distinction between characters, or the clarity of individual letters. Eric Gill, a type designer of the early twentieth century, argues that, "legibility, in practice, amounts to what one is accustomed to." Cited in S.Heller & G.Anderson, Typeplay, Nippan Shuppan Hanbai, Dusseldorf, 1994, p.11.
6) R.Buchanan, ‘Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,’ in Margolin & Buchanan, eds., 1995, p.18-19.
7) J.Frascara, ‘Graphic Design: Fine Art or Social Science?’ in Margolin & Buchanan, eds. 1995, p.46.
8) G.C.Spivak, ‘Translator’s Preface,’ in J.Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. G.C.Spivak, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1976, p.lix.
9) Some of the many women’s magazines that I am refering to here include: Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire, Harpers Bazaar, Cleo, Cosmopolitan and She.
10) I.Ang, Living Room Wars, Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World, Routledge, London, 1996, p.10.
11) See Ellen Lupton’s, Mixing Messages, Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1996, p.33, for references to the movement of publishing to the desktop and subsequently to the wider society outside the print publishing professional.
12) P.Sparke, Design in Context, Bloomsbury, London, 1987, p.248.
13) N.Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Methuen Paperback, London, 1987, p.28.
14) Cited in Lupton, 1996, p.131. The original source of these statements by J.Giovannini is, ‘Zero Degree of Graphics,’ in M.Friedman, ed. Graphic Design in America, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1989, pps.201-213.
15) S.Heller & T.Fernandes, Magazines, Inside and Out, PBC International, New York, 1996, p.6.
16) The media technologies: radio, film, television and video have previously influenced the reorientation of print texts to maintain their position in culture rather than to be replaced by these ‘new’ forms of media communications.
17) R.Markley, ed. Virtual Realities and their Discontents, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1996, p.1.
18) R.Poynor, ‘Alternative by Design,’ Ray Gun, Out of Control, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1997, p.231. Poynor further writes that "for a magazine that has generated such apocalyptic claims about the future of communication in our time…Ray Gun has been subject to little analysis, as either media presence or design construct." (p.231)
19) R.Harley, ed. New Media Technologies, Australian Film, Television & Radio School, Sydney, 1993, p.4.
20) P.Meggs, A History of Graphic Design, Third Edition, John Wiley & Sons Inc, New York, 1998, p.463.
21) S.Heller & D.Drennan, The Digital Designer, The Graphic Artist’s Guide To The New Media, Watson-Guptill Publications, New York, 1997, p.16.
22) See for example Wired’s e-zine @ http://www.hotwired.com
23) C.Waller, ‘New Media Vs Old Media, Or What We Can Learn From the Past,’ Desktop Magazine, June 1999, p.38.
24) R.Poynor, Typography Now Two, Implosion, Booth-Clibborn Editions, London, 1996, p.15.
25) M.Tuman, Word Perfect, Literacy in the Computer Age, Falmer Press, London, 1992, p.2.
26) R.Lanham, The Electronic Word, Democracy, Technology and the Arts, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993, p.134.
27) Cited in Tuman, 1992, p.66. The original paper in which Cynthia Selfe discusses this concept is ‘Redefining Literacy,’ in G.Hawisher & C.Selfe eds. Critical Perspectives on Computers and Composition Instruction, Teachers College, New York, 1989, pp.3-15.
28) Tuman, 1992, p.1.
29) N.Burbules, ‘Rhetorics of the Web, Hyperreading and Critical Literacy,’ in Snyder, ed. 1997, p.102.
30) See Computer Based Learning in the Primary KLAs, Enhancing Student Learning, Curriculum Support Directorate, New South Wales Department of Education and Training, 1997.
31) Z.Licko, R.Vanderlans & M.E.Gray, Emigré, Graphic Design into the Digital Realm, Van Nostrand Rhienhold, New York, 1993, p.54.
32) Meggs, 1998, p.463.
33) Cited in R.Poynor, ‘Graphic Weapons, Ray Gun,’ in R.Poynor, ed. Design Without Boundaries, Visual Communication in Transition, Booth-Clibborn Editions, London, 1998, p.217.
34) Lupton, 1996, p.47.
35) Refer to interviews with Licko and Vanderlans on the Emigré website for backgrounds to their design practices, and Emigré magazine @ http://www.émigré.com/VanderLans.html" and http://www.émigré.com/Licko.html
36) W.Ong, Orality and Literacy, The Technologising of the Word, Routledge, London, 1988, p.136.
37) M.Heim, Electric Language, A Philosophical Study of Word Processing, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1987, p.66-67.
38) G.Kress, ‘Visual and Verbal Modes of Representation in Electronically Mediated Communication: The Potentials of New Forms of Text,’ in Synder, ed. 1997, p.73.
