Over the last decade, typographic design has entered a new form of critical discourse that melds theory with practice. This ‘new wave’ of research has been strongly influenced by design schools such as Cranbrook and CalArts and draws deeply from French critical theory such as that of Jacques Derrida. This project identifies itself within this evolving tradition of blending theory with practice for a deeper critical understanding of the subject, in this instance, typographic design in print magazines.
The digital environment itself is an active force in the disintegration of boundaries between theory and practice, but also of the melding of static and fluid, economics and aesthetics, mainstream and avant-garde. April Grieman’s design is an exploration of the digital environment’s role in breaking down boundaries that were once distinct and rigid, and have become less distinguishable and considerably more porous. The breakdown of ‘traditional’ boundaries, specifically between theory and practice, has spawned this new critical perspective for the analysis of typographic practice.
Ellen Lupton and J. Abbott Miller’s (1996) Design, Writing, Research; Writing on Graphic Design, argues that traditional literary and linguistic research tends to overlook the significance of the graphic presentation of texts. They argue that graphic elements such as - typographic style, layout, spacing, and framing - have an active and transformative effect on the meanings of texts. Lupton and Miller’s text is strongly informed by poststructural and deconstructive interpretative strategies and offers a disparate collection of examples with which to argue its case. This project concurs with Lupton and Miller’s argument, but extends their research by focussing on several case studies of contemporary print magazine pages.
Case studies are most appropriate for theoretical and practically integrated research, in that they are detailed analyses that aim to get inside the complexities of a text with the insight of theoretically informed research methodologies. The project specifically uses Derridean Deconstruction as the critical methodology to analyse texts within a case study form. The case study approach to research requires the displacement of both socio-cultural and personal presumptions that may hinder the process of examining a case. Thus, in the research of typographic practice one must put aside the general cultural presumption that typography is a transparent element of communications media. Using the case study form as a research method focuses on the investigation of a "phenomenon within its real-life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident." Therefore a case study of magazine typographic practice in the digital age requires the contextualisation of changing typographic practices within a broader scheme of active socio-cultural, political, economic and institutional factors. Thus a more accurate and comprehensive analysis of the nature of print magazine typographic practice can be gained by using a case study approach than would a quantitative collection of many briefly notated examples.
Lewis Blackwell’s (1998) 20th Century Type, Remix, examines typographic practice from the 1900s to the 1990s. Blackwell reveals that technological, socio-cultural, political and institutional ideologies have informed the production and use of typographic forms right throughout the twentieth century. However, Blackwell prematurely ends his analysis of type in the 1990s after a couple of short paragraphs, simply arguing that the computer is where typographic practice is now bonded, and "type is just starting to act and move beyond its life as the printed word." This project continues where Blackwell’s exemplary ‘remix’ of typographic practice ends. This being the 1990s, where a long history of static print typography is being transformed by the mutable and fluid representations of digital-electronic environments, most notably that of the computer.
Steven Heller and Thereza Fernandes’, (1996) Magazines, Inside and Out, briefly analyses a diverse selection of magazines from around the world in terms of the importance that visual design has in expressing a magazine’s ideas and communicating its information to its audience. They argue that design took on the proportions of a "miracle cure" when television threatened the magazine market in the 1960s. ‘Miracle cure’ is a notion used to refer to the way in which a change of design practices breathed new life into print magazines which were losing their audiences to television. Heller and Fernandes’ argument of television’s impact on design and print culture confirms that further investigation is necessary which examines the response of print magazines to digital media such as computers and the Internet - the major competitors to print magazines since television. This research project takes this next step from Heller and Fernandes’ debate, keeping discussion and analysis up to speed with the movements of culture.
Rick Poynor’s (1996) Typography Now Two, Implosion, says that styles of typographic design that were considered ‘experimental’ in the early 1990s, are now accepted as mainstream. He argues that the typographic fluidity and expression of magazines such as: Ray Gun, WIRED, The Face and Émigré were responsible for breaking the ground in experimental typographic design. David Carson’s design, is also argued as a causal factor in stimulating the reform of ‘traditional’ typographic and magazine design practices. These arguments present a lack in that they do not contextualise the associative factors of how or why such typographic design practices were able to reorientate more traditional or mainstream magazine typographic practices. This project responds to this absence of critical analysis and contextualises magazine typographic practice in terms of technological and socio-cultural change.
This project positions itself within existing research of typographic and print magazine culture to foster critical analysis of the dynamics occurring in these traditions in the contemporary era of the digital age. This specific area of typographic design in magazine production has not yet been extensively addressed by the emerging theoretical and practically intertwined discourses of design culture. This omission is exemplified in the texts of people such as Rick Poynor, Lewis Blackwell and Steven Heller.
1) The Cranbrook Academy of Arts is in Michigan, America and can be accessed online @ http://www.cranbrookart.edu and CalArts, the California Institute of the Arts can be found online @ http://www.calarts.edu.
2) Throughout this thesis the melding of a theoretical and practical analysis will identify the ongoing disintegration of these boundaries that have been evident in Western society for some time.
3) April Grieman is a Californian designer whose work in the 1980s and 1990s has been described as anticipating the "emotionally-charged" work of David Carson. (R.Poynor, ‘Alternative by Design,’ in D.Kuipers & C.Ashworth, eds. Ray Gun, Out of Control, Simon & Schuster Editions, New York, 1997, p.231.) Eric Martin describes Grieman’s approach to design as one that "questions the conventional idea that dualities are opposites. Instead she suggests that they are interdependent possibilities at play in a common field." (A.Grieman, Hybrid Imagery, The Fusion of Technology and Graphic Design, with overviews by E.Martin, Watson-Guptill Publications, New York, 1990, p.13.)
4) E.Lupon & J.A.Miller, Design, Writing, Research, Writing on Graphic Design, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1996, p.23.
5) Lupton & Miller’s text contains case studies of the American newspaper, USA Today and Marshall McLuhan & Quinten Fiore’s, The Medium is the Massage, An Inventory of Effects, Bantam Books, New York, 1967. However, predominantly they briefly cite a diverse range of examples which include: Derrida’s, Glas, A.Ronal’s, The Telephone Book, and numerous other books from deep within the cannons of literary culture, magazine covers, scholarly journals, posters, various historical newspaper pages, advertising and media photography.
6) R.Stake, The Art of Case Study Research, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, 1995, p.1.
7) R.Yin, Case Study Research, Design and Methods, Second Edition, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, 1994, p.13.
8) L.Blackwell, 20th Century Type, Remix, Laurence King Publishing, London, 1998.
9) Blackwell, 1998, p.157.
10) S.Heller & T.Fernandes, Magazines Inside and Out, PBC International, New York, 1996, p.6.
11) R.Poynor, Typography Now Two, Implosion, Booth-Clibborn Editions, London, 1996, pps.1-16.
12) See L.Blackwell, The End of Print, The Graphic Design of David Carson, Laurence King Publishing, London, 1995, unpaginated and L.Blackwell, David Carson, 2nd Sight, Graphik Design After the End of Print, Laurence King Publishing, London, 1997, unpaginated.
