Extracted from Teaching Graphic Design History, edited by Steven Heller. Allworth Press and School for Visual Arts, 2019. All rights reserved. 30 WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT GRAPHIC DESIGN Scott-Martin Kosofsky Ever since the fifteenth century, people of a mathematical turn of mind have posited theories about the underlying geometric principles of the Classical Latin capital letters. It was thought that these perfect forms, which reached an apogee in Imperial Rome, must have been the product of some divine truth, like those put forward by Pythagoras as the “music of the spheres.” Luca Pacioli, a collaborator of Leonardo da Vinci’s, published such a set of geometrically composed letters in a 1509 book about mathematical and artistic proportions. Fra Luca was a supremely organized man—he is considered the father of modern accounting—but to graphic designers of my generation he is best remembered for his drawing of the letter M that, for thirty-five years, was the logo of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. One might ask if any of these theories ever influenced professional letterers or type designers. They did not—not in their own day and not later—because each one fell flat somewhere, creating distortions that the professional letterers, able to see subtleties more clearly than the theorists, would not tolerate. The work of the best hands and eyes always rise above formulas. The old Met logo was likely the highest use ever made of Fra Luca’s drawings, chiefly because it is visually interesting and alluring, but also because it is a symbol of inquiry and careful observation, like Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. In graphic design, being interesting and alluring—and clear—is always the higher truth. It’s what we’re after. But it is also a field that, like architecture and fashion design, makes use of its past in a remarkably full way, often for entirely different purposes. While Fra Luca’s theory of letterforms failed to cut muster for one group of designers, it succeeded famously for another. This is an example of how history provides our “stuff,” the things that are embedded into our consciousness, the material through which we draw ideas and develop our taste and critical judgment. It’s what we talk about when we talk about graphic design. What makes it so compelling is the way it can spring to life at any moment, such as when letters that were carved in stone two thousand years ago can suddenly become the hot new thing. Who could have predicted in 1988 that a digital font released the next year, based almost slavishly on the letters carved onto the base of Trajan’s Column, in 114 CE, would become the most popular typeface ever for movie posters? And that it would also become ubiquitous in packaging, advertising, and signage of all kinds? To realize that it was precisely the same style of lettering that Fra Luca and Albrecht Dürer 31 (Top left) M, logo of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1971–2016 (Top right) M from Fra Luca de Pacioli, De divine proportione, Venice, 1509. (yes, that Dürer) had dissected five hundred years earlier says quite a lot about how the waves of history resonate in graphic design, and not only in our letterforms. The codex, the bound book, had overtaken the scroll early in the Christian era, yet the scroll, a form long left for dead, made a comeback—shocking when you think about it—as the underlying form of the World Wide Web and most other things we read on screens. We are, as designers, constantly reviving and adapting, sometimes directly, though most often in ways that suit our current sense of style, and more importantly, the needs of the content we are designing. Why, then, do graphic design students say, as I am told they do, that history is irrelevant to them, that the courses often fail to reach them? Is it the way the subject has become segregated into a textbookdriven course without much, or any, connection to the problemsolving exercises in studio classes? I believe it may be. I also believe that the textbooks themselves reinforce the disconnection, in no small part because of their similarity to the stiff and leaden social studies textbooks that students yawn through in high school. What the books present is, by and large, a long cavalcade of instances arranged chronologically—too much to absorb, yet with too little effort invested in showing how the subjects and problems addressed by graphic design are common across the eras, and how their solutions may migrate or transform over time and into our day. It is by weaving these connecting threads that we make history usable for students and for ourselves, whether it’s old letterforms that appear as new again, art nouveau 32 The inscription on the base of Trajan’s Column, Rome, 114 ce. Photograph by Richard Kindersley and Movie posters featuring Adobe Trajan posters as the inspiration for psychedelic art in the 1960s (lately showing signs of revival), or how the organization of sixteenth-century science books can become the useful models for “big data” today. My friend Lance Hidy, who was a friend of Philip Meggs’s, told me that central among Meggs’s purposes in writing A History of Graphic Design, the most popular textbook in the field, was to establish graphic design as a discipline distinct from, and equal to, painting, sculpture, and architecture, and equally worthy of scholarly inquiry. Indeed, its organization is similar to that of the ubiquitous Janson’s History of Art. 33 If Meggs gives the impression of equality, it fails the “distinct from” test, and that’s unfortunate for graphic design students. First, the audiences for the two books are quite different from each other and have different needs. Janson’s primary users are liberal arts students on the grand tour of culture (art students are a small minority), whereas Meggs’s users are largely students in graphic design programs. Second, graphic design, which is a métier and not an art, has far more diverse applications. Students who find employment as graphic designers will work in a far greater variety of fields than will art students: the design of texts in books and journalism, information and data design, type design, This is an example of what can be seen through the use of modern digital imaging techniques. Image courtesy of E. M. Ginger, 42-Line, Oakland, CA. Baths of Diocletian, Rome, engraving by Roland Freart, The Whole Body of Antient and Modern Architecture. London: C. Wilkinson, etc., 1680. 34 High-quality reproductions make a big difference. Clockwise from top left: detail from Filippo Marinetti, Les Mots en Liberté Futuristes, Edizionii Futuriste di Poesia, Milan, 1919; detail from Kazimir Malevich, Pervyi Tsikl Lektsii by Nikolai Punin, St. Petersburg, 1920; detail from Piet Zwart, commercial brochure, 1931; detail from a manuscript leaf on vellum showing the late Carolingian minuscule, Northern Italy, ca. 1120; detail from a flong (stereotype matrix) used as the cover of PM magazine, New York, 1935; detail from Giovanni Antonio Tagliente, Lo Presente Libro, Venice, 1544; detail from Harrild and Sons, wood type specimen, circa 1895; detail from Nicolas Jenson’s Euclid, Venice, 1474. Images courtesy of The Letterform Archive, San Francisco, CA. advertising and marketing, packaging, logos and signage, public and broadcast communications, printed ephemera—and the Web and multimedia implementation of all of them. Graphic design history should be organized accordingly, by content and application, keeping in mind that among them all there is common ground: typography, the use of images, the use of space, and, most importantly, getting a message across clearly. 35 “ If graphic design education were to become more content-centered, an approach in which style is the response, not the driver, then we might see a revival in students’ interest in history, and in literacy, too, as they begin to search more widely for models and inspiration.” Architecture is a better model than art for a history of graphic design, because it, too, has diverse applications. In the professional practice and education of architects, a distinction is made between building architecture and interior architecture. There were, and are, architects who excel at both (think Frank Lloyd Wright) and others who seldom, if ever, cross the line. There are schools and course paths that emphasize design and others that emphasize engineering. While there are allinclusive histories of architecture that are organized chronologically, the ones used by students on a professional path are arranged by typology (and sometimes by geography): dwellings, government buildings, industrial buildings, commercial spaces, houses of worship, museums, and so on. A graphic design textbook organized by applications will not appear overnight, and one has to wonder whether a textbook is what’s needed at all, considering the vast number of area studies that are now in print. Yet, something must be done, as students need exposure to the best examples drawn from all of graphic design history. Real examples. Ask any prominent designer about their formative experiences and they will tell you about the connections they made with certain works that excited their interests. While it is only in the rarest institutions that students might have access to original books and documents, it is conceivable that a number of schools could band together to create an organized online repository of expertly photographed images that could be printed on-demand by high-end inkjet at full or near full size 36 by each teacher. The examples could be brought into the classroom and discussed critically, passed around or viewed after class—and made available for the students to download themselves. The images could form the basis for a wiki, in which students and teachers could participate in expanding the knowledge base and share opinions. Each department and each instructor could use these images to make their own curricula, according to the needs of their students and the subjects at hand. The digital images will be a help, but not an end. I believe strongly that opportunities to view great work of the past are an urgent need of graphic design students, just as they are for art students. This will mean visits to library special collections, museums (who often own more graphic art than they exhibit), and rare book dealers and shows. I know from my own experience that one can understand next to nothing about the work of, say, Bodoni or William Morris without seeing it in person, up close. The scale, the ink color and intensity, the paper, and the presswork are symphonic, working together in a way that that renders even the best reproductions inadequate. Experiencing such works, both as design and as high craft, will be transformative for students. If graphic design education were to become more content-centered, an approach in which style is the response, not the driver, then we might see a revival in students’ interest in history, and in literacy, too, as they begin to search more widely for models and inspiration. This approach would emphasize the why, as well as the how, design is integrated throughout a work, deep inside, not only as a veneer that sits on the surface. Moreover, a visual portal to the many kinds of work involving graphic design can point to career paths that students, whose exposure to design might still be limited to just a few things, might not have considered but may someday wish to follow. Scott-Martin Kosofsky develops, produces, designs, edits, composes, and makes types for books in Rhinebeck, New York, where he is a partner in the Philidor Company. He is also an award-winning writer. His work falls largely into two categories: image-rich books on a wide range of subjects—from forgotten architecture to letterforms to the Apollo Lunar Program—and Judaic books in liturgy, Bible, and history.