Digital technologies are becoming integrated into society to such an extent that many socio-cultural artifacts are experiencing the look and touch of these same technologies. Typographic practice, which itself transformed social and cultural practices in the 16th century, is once more being called into question in this digital age.(1) This project examines the way in which the digital age is influencing the reorientation of typographic design practice in print magazines.
The digital age is itself a questionable periodisation, as the digital process and its representations, can be traced back through history to well before the technological manifestations of the late twentieth century.(2) However, and most predominantly, the ‘digital age’ is the notion attributed to the mass proliferation of computers and other digital technologies between the 1970s and 1990s.(3) In this project, the digital age is identified as having a deep historical presence, but is materially a phase of the late twentieth century.
James O’Donnell argues, that in this historical moment, "the media on which the word relies are changing … to an extent not seen since the invention of movable type."(4) This project proposes that contemporary practices of typographic design in print magazines are an appropriation of digital-electronic presentation characteristics.(5)
Johannes Gutenburg is most famously credited with the invention of movable typography in Europe between 1440 and 1450.(6) However, the Chinese were printing from wood blocks very similar to Gutenburg’s invention six to seven hundred years earlier.(7) The notion of ‘typography’ today encompasses all forms of letter design and layout practices from movable lead type and photocomposition to binary-coded letters and layouts on digital computers. A definition that serves the purposes of this project is simply that ‘typography,’ is "the design of letterforms and their organisation in space."(8)
Typographic presentations are active in contributing meaning to the words they represent but this function is not directly recognised by many people. Jon Wozencroft argues that "our interpretation of information and thereby our behaviour when we come to act upon it, is always defined by its presentation, whether consciously acknowledged or otherwise."(9) This idea is important as typography, and the practices of graphic design, have long been regarded as transparent in the communication of the messages they represent.(10) Typographic designers in this digital age are calling for a rejection of the myth that typography is a transparent medium for a more realistic attitude that acknowledges typographic forms do carry meanings.(11)
This project proposes that typographic design and layout is no innocent bystander in the communication of messages, emotions or ideologies. Lewis Blackwell argues that typography "is a manifestation of our search for greater efficiency and greater power in the written word. It reveals personalities, politics, and economic factors."(12) Some typographies that illustrate this are: Helvetica, a sterile and impersonal symbol of technological definition but nonetheless a popular representational form. The Fraktur type family is often associated with the ideologies of Nazi Germany.(13) Cursive script types emphasise elegance and the resonance of typographic forms from early scribal and manuscript culture. digital typographies that appear degraded and appropriate older typeforms reveal a culture caught up in technology that fosters pastiche and parody. Whilst typeforms that reveal their fragmented structure call into question the relationship between print and the digital-electronic environment. Typography could thus be said to fit reasonably within Marshall McLuhan's notion of "the medium is the massage."(14) Typography however, is a double-edged communication sword - it possesses its own language and messages, as indicated briefly above, as well as representing another level of meaning, that of alphanumeric symbols of a language system such as English. Under these dual circumstances typography must be questioned.
By recognising the reorientations of print typographic practice brought about by television, we can begin to investigate typography’s most recent reorientations as a result of digital technologies. Television radically altered perceptions of the printed word as it presented typographies that moved and were combined with sound and images. Herb Lubalin, known as a master of typographic experimentation in the 1960s, argued that in 1959 television had begun to have an impact on the way type was read, and that the kineticism of type on television was similar to seeing type shoot by on the side of buses.(15) Lubalin reasoned that, "in this environment, smashing letterforms together … made type easier to decipher."(16) If people were accustomed to seeing typography physically move around them in society, then printed typographic texts which stressed movement rather than fixity, was assumed by designers to be a natural progression for both print media and culture in a technologically accelerating time.
Lupton and Miller describe the impact of television on magazine design in the mid 1950s as marking the transition from "word thinking to visual thinking," where magazines were designed to reflect the fast delivery of information and attention paid to images and sounds that television fostered. Lupton and Miller say that, "efforts to collapse the verbal and visual helped magazines compete with television’s rhythmic flow of imagery overlaid with spoken and typographic texts."(17) Thus the reorientation of print typographic design was a necessary factor in maintaining the financial viability of magazines when audiences were (and indeed still are), being lulled in vast numbers by the dynamic presentations of television.
The computer is the major communications technology development to occur since television. Print magazines have found themselves once again in a position where they must revitalise their texts to compete for audience attention. David Carson argues that "today’s audience has changed. It has a different visual orientation than readers did just a few years ago."(18) Carson’s motivation for pulling text typography as far from convention as possible in Ray Gun magazine is noted as an intention to encourage the MTV generation back to print media.(19) The ‘MTV generation’ are those who have in a sense been "rewired" by technological experiences and can "process much larger quantities of simultaneous information than earlier generations could handle."(20) Typographic practice in print magazines in this digitally accelerating era should be critically analysed and deconstructed to reveal the socio-cultural politics of their representational practices.
The magazines featured in this study can be described as ‘culture’ magazines. Culture magazines have a prominent visual function, where as genres like the business magazine, weekly tabloid and news magazine are more traditionally text orientated. This project specifically examines typographic use on pages taken from the magazines, Wired, Ray Gun, Cream and Rolling Stone. This project does not attempt to be a comprehensive study of the typographic design of these magazines. Rather, the focus is on typographic practices therein that reveal a reorientation largely due to the influence of the digital-electronic age.
The magazine publishing industry is a highly competitive business and if the typographic dynamics occurring on their pages are to be accurately examined it is important to understand the major forces behind their production. The commercial magazine primarily serves two parties - the advertiser, and the reader/consumer. Spiekermann and Ginger write that, "depending on readership, magazines can look old-fashioned, conservative, pseudo-classic, trendy, cool, technical, newsy and noisy."(23) On the other hand, a magazine’s design must be conducive to advertising interests in order to gain the economic support of the advertising dollar. Many contemporary magazines are actually turning editorial space into ‘advertorial’ to please and draw more advertisers.(24) Theodore Peterson argues that the commercial magazine’s visual design, is essentially conservative for two reasons:
… the magazine was a business enterprise with a vested interest in the maintenance of the existing economic system, and it could be expected to share the fundamental views of the industries which filled its pages with advertising. On the other hand, the magazine had to earn its keep in the marketplace. To stay in business, a publisher needed readers, a very large number or a few with exceedingly high purchasing power.(25) Through the visual representation and reflection of a niche audience’s interests, magazines deliver readers to advertisers that in turn economically support the magazine. Rick Poynor notes that the immediate impact of Ray Gun from its debut in November 1992 confirmed and consolidated advertising trends that had been gaining momentum since the 1980s.(26) Advertising has become a cutting edge field of media production and design, however this study focuses on the magazine’s editorial pages, as advertising is too large an area to cover within the scope of this research project.
David Carson is a prominent contemporary designer particularly noted for his time as art director of the culture magazines, Transworld Skateboarding (1983-1987), Musician (1988), Beach Culture (1989-1991), Surfer (1991-1992) and Ray Gun (1992-1996). Carson’s typographic work has been described as representing the language which visualises the desires and ambitions of Generation X.(27) Generation X is the category under which contemporary teenagers and young adults are commonly grouped.(28) For media producers, Generation X’ers are those that have grown up in an ever accelerating and complex, digital-electronic media saturated world, and are also often referred to as the MTV generation. David Carson's design displays a shift from typographic tradition that exemplifies the way in which contemporary youth subcultures communicate in comparison to older generations.
‘New’ design styles filter into the mainstream through avant-garde or experimental publications, and designers such as David Carson. Heller and Fernandes argue that mutable youth orientated magazines like Ray Gun have an influence on the mainstream in that they inspire broader typographic freedom in traditional magazines, as well as spawning many imitators.(29) Rita Felski, in discussing avant-garde practice, argues that:
The oppositional function of experimental aesthetic techniques is further undermined by their acceptance and institutionalisation in contemporary culture; the avant-garde celebration of the new as the most advanced can be seen in this context as offering a parallel to the fetishization of novelty which is a hallmark of a capitalist consumer culture built upon immediate obsolescence.(30)
Ray Gun can be described as an ‘avant-garde’ publication. It embraces design that challenges the reader and traditional conceptions of textual production and communication practices. However, mainstream culture of the late twentieth century, one that is always hankering for something different and new, has turned its gaze towards the mass appropriation of avant-garde practices.(31) Ray Gun’s avant-garde visual style found its way into mainstream texts and advertising within a few years of its debut but in 1999 Ray Gun has lost much of the ‘avant-garde’ edge that it had previously fostered. Ray Gun is then a vivid example of the process of cultural consumption that Felski writes about. Its appropriation by mainstream culture caused the obsolescence of its design as cutting edge. A Ray Gun reader, in an anonymous letter to the editor, reflects this consumption of avant-garde practice by the mainstream that contemporary culture fosters – "I love the mag. It’s a design combo with a super size of deconstructionist fries."(32)
1) Scott Cook compiles various perspectives on the social and technological transformations of movable type printing in Europe by Gutenburg between 1440-1450. These include the mass distribution of the printed word, the explosion of knowledge, learning and literacy beyond the elite ranks of society to the masses. S.Cook, ‘Technological Revolutions and the Gutenburg Myth,’ in M.Stefik, ed. Internet Dreams; Archetypes, Myths and Metaphors, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1996, p.69. See also Marshall McLuhan’s Gutenburg Galaxy, The Making of Typographic Man, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1962.
2) The prehistory of the digital process and representation will be highlighted throughout chapters 1 and 2 of this thesis.
3) See N.Negraponte, Being Digital, Hodder & Stoughton, Rydalmere, 1995. M.Poster, The Second Media Age, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1995 and D.Petre & D.Herrington, The Clever Country? Australia’s Digital Future, Landsdowne Publishing, Sydney, 1996, p.24.
4) J.O’Donnel, Avatars of the Word, From Papyrus to Cyberspace, Harvard University Press, London, 1998, p.9. O’Donnel goes on further to say, "the changes have been building through the twentieth century, as the spoken word reanimated communication over television and radio, and as the moving image on film and television supplemented the ‘mere’ word. The invention and dissemination of the personal computer and now the explosive growth in links between those computers on the worldwide networks of the Internet create a genuinely new and transformative environment." (p.9)
5) Digital characteristics that include, mutability, implosion, fluidity and pixelation will be closely addressed in Chapter 2.
6) See S.H.Steinberg, Five Hundred Years of Printing, Penguin Books, England, 1974.
7) A.Robinson, The Story of Writing, Thames & Hudson, London, 1995, pps.12 & 16.
8) E.Lupton, Mixing Messages, Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1996, p.29.
9) J.Wozencroft, The Graphic Language of Neville Brody 2, Thames & Hudson, London, 1994, p.6.
10) The debate of the transparency of typography and graphic design has been around for a long time. One such advocate of this understanding is Andre Jute who writes, "the purpose of graphic design is to communicate the message. Period. ‘The message’ is the message intended by whoever wrote the text, or the original creator of the illustrations in a mainly illustrated item. Thus the designer’s personality should never be visible." A.Jute, Grids, The Structure of Graphic Design, RotoVision, Switzerland, 1996, p.11.
11) R.Poynor, Typography Now, The Next Wave, Internos Books, London, 1991, p.8.
12) L.Blackwell, 20th Century Type, Remix, Laurence King Publishing, London, 1998, p.7.
13) S.Heller & A.Fink, Faces on the Edge, Type in the Digital Age, Van Nostrand Rhienhold, New York, 1997, p.4.
14) M.McLuhan & Q.Fiore, The Medium Is The Massage, An Inventory of Effects, Bantam Books, New York, 1967, p.26. McLuhan argues that "all media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage." (p.26)
15) S.Heller & G.Anderson, Typeplay, Nippan Shuppan Hanbai, Dusseldorf, 1994, p.10.
16) Cited in Heller & Anderson, 1994, p.10.
17) E.Lupton & J.A.Miller, Design, Writing, Research, Writing on Graphic Design, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1996, p.195.
18) Cited in L.Blackwell, The End of Print, The Graphic Design of David Carson, Laurence King Publishing, London, 1995, unpaginated.
19) R.Poynor, Typography Now Two, Implosion, Booth-Clibborn Editions, London, 1996, p.13.
20) R.Poynor, ‘Alternative By Design,’ in D.Kuipers & C.Ashworth, eds. Ray Gun, Out of Control, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1997, p.223.
21) S.Thornton, Club Cultures, Music, Media and Subcultural Capital, Wesleyan University Press, Hanover, 1996, p.151.
22) Lupton, 1996, p. 134.
23) E.Spiekermann & E.M.Ginger, Stop Stealing Sheep and Find Out How Type Works, Adobe Press, Mountain View, 1993, p.81.
24) ‘Advertorial’ is the notion used to describe instances where magazines will print editorial copy in their magazine within the paying advertiser’s advertisement.
25) T.Peterson, Magazines in the Twentieth Century, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 1975, p.445.
26) Poynor, 1996, p.9.
27) Lupton, 1996, p.133.
28) Generation X’ers are generally recognised as the children of the baby-boomer generation that were born between 1945-1955. For a further discussion of Generation X, see Russel Storer, ‘0075 Generation X’ in Cream, Autumn 1999, Issue 5, p.71.
29) S.Heller & T.Fernandes, Magazines, Inside and Out, PBC International, New York, 1996, p.8-9.
30) R.Felski, ‘Feminism, Realism and the Avant-Gaurde’ in A.Milner, P.Thompson & C.Worth, eds. Postmodern Conditions, Berg Publishers, New York, 1990, p.64.
31) Independent, art house and foriegn films are an area that has recently moved from the ‘avant-garde’ fringes to the mass mainstream. Also the recently renewed popularity of punk and ‘atlernative’ music reveal another channel through which the avant-garde has moved into the mainstream.
32) Anonymous, ‘Actual Letters,’ Ray Gun, April 1999, Issue 66, p.20.
