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In the 1960s and 70s, making art with words was a way to avoid having a ‘thing’: words made it possible to replace the trace of the artist with the presence of the viewer. Artist Jonas Etter’s work both continues and inverts this tradition, turning the word itself into a ‘thing’ and a trace, writes Jane Cheng.

Top, above and below: Jonas Etter, Table (2007)

In 2006 Etter began pouring burnt sugar into moulds to make sculptures, which then melt slowly into sticky puddles.

The first sugar sculpture was a simple, traditional table (below): a transformation of the cheapest of ingredients into the most ordinary of objects. Such simplicity is, however, deceptive. For just as the sugar precedes the table, sugar cane, with its legacy of colonial exploitation and importation, precedes sugar. In each case the change of form is the result of an intervention (cultivating, harvesting, processing, boiling, pouring) that we rarely see.

Below: Jonas Etter, Tisch (table), 2006.

The final melting of the gallery object calls the viewer’s attention both to the very real consequences of these transformations and to their paradoxical invisibility.

Then, in 2007, a second iteration of the sugar project appeared. This time Etter revived the table as its own caption, burnt sugar words spelling ‘Table / 2006 / burnt sugar / 76 x 79 x 60 cm’ (top). In the manner of Joseph Kosuth in the 1950s, Etter points out the the difference between word and object – but this time it is not the gulf between them that is the point, but their proximity (in medium) and contingency (in form). Etter uses the typeface Univers – as straightforward as a kitchen table – as a paradigmatic ideal that emphasises the materiality of the sculpture.

A third iteration, in 2008, saw the words ‘courtesy of the artist’ spelled out in the negative (below).

Above and below: Jonas Etter, Courtesy (2008).

This time the even the letters have lost their substance. Reading negative space brings the viewer’s attention beyond the concrete – beyond the table, beyond the word ‘table’, and even beyond its maker – to the process of decipherment itself. As in minimalist art the presence of viewer a once again becomes central: but this time they find themselves at the end of a less innocent series of processes involving artist, time, history and coincidence.

Jonas Etter website, jonasetter.ch.

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It’s available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues. Eye 82 is out now – you can browse a visual sampler at Eye before you buy on Issuu.

Following the trend toward towards beautifully designed and illustrated publications for cyclists (see ‘Two wheels good’, my article in Eye 77) comes The Collarbone, a ‘pro-peleton photo-reportage’ journal for the iPad, writes John Ridpath.

Developed by brand and design studio Scheybeler+company, The Collarbone is a collaboration between designer Luke Scheybeler, co-founder of the cycling clothing brand Rapha, and photographer Camille Mcmillan, photographer and writer for The Times and former editor at large at Rouleur.

Top: Women’s world cup cyclocross Koksijde, Belgium. Photograph by Camille McMillan.

For Scheybeler, The Collarbone is less a magazine and more a ‘cross between a photo journal and a sticker book’. That is echoed in the interface, which has been deliberately designed with the look and feel of a Panini sticker book, emphasising missing content from the main page. ‘We hoped people would want to fill the gaps,’ says Scheybeler.

John Ridpath: Where does the appetite for this kind of cycling publication come from?

Luke Scheybeler: Well, the whole sport has become more sophisticated and design-aware. We were trying to shake up the industry with Rapha and Rouleur, and, certainly from a design and storytelling perspective, we’ve made a huge mark.

Other brands contributed enormously to this, too. Things like the Tweed Run are helping to bring foster participation and inclusiveness as well as a sense of style to city riding.

The Skoda commercial from last year’s Tour, it totally nailed the chaos and messiness of road racing … it’s a brilliant piece of film-making.

Road racing has more visceral raw material than the shiny, sterile, floodlit, corporate worlds that most sports now inhabit. Cycling is imperfect and messy. It’s raced on open roads. Riders dodge parked cars, dogs and broken glass. The backdrop is raw and wild, the High Alps, or Flanders, or the Massif Central. Contrast this with the synthetic commerciality of carbon and lycra, and you have all the ingredients for amazing imagery.

JR: For Andrew Diprose (of The Ride), the aesthetics of cycling are a big part of the experience. How do you feel about the link between the craft of bicycles and the craft of design?

LS: Of course there are parallels. Bikes are simultaneously engineered machines and cultural stylistic statements. When we launched Rapha, cycling was still very geeky, the clothing was unappealing and the pro scene was very one-dimensional. So we plundered the sport’s history for inspiration.

A lot of the type I did at Rapha was inspired by post-war commercial graphics, the sort of stuff you’d get on a jersey. The Rapha logotype, the condensed sans-serif, it’s all quite comfortable and nostalgic, but also had an established premium feel.

JR: In terms of design, what was the route to the finished product?

LS: The longest process was coming up with the name. We took it from about 1000 ridiculous possibilities to about ten realistic options and then sat on it for about two months. When we came back to the list I was convinced that The Collarbone was right.

It sounded like it was a brand already, but no one had used it in cycling, which was very surprising. It’s obviously relevant to the sport – in an insider’s kind of a way – you have to know that it’s the bone that cyclists always break.

We didn’t hang around exploring too many different design routes. In terms of the identity, we used very heavy Akzidenz Super, contrasted with a delicate sort of medical textbook illustration. Fragility with weight, solidity and lightness.

If you’re first to market, pick red, it’s the strongest colour – that’s what Al Ries said, right? Red, black and cream. Bone and blood. It’s a little dark.

The Collarbone iPad app is available, free, from the iTunes App Store.

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It’s available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues. Eye 82 is out now – you can browse a visual sampler at Eye before you buy on Issuu.

There’s more to Brighton Artists Open Houses (AOH) than artsy-crafty delights and polymer-clay fairies, writes Chloë King. The event, which began in 1982 as a protest against the lack of visual arts in the Brighton Festival, runs on weekends from 5-27 May and comprises twelve official trails and a number of independents.

Like the original Brighton Festival, AOH also has spin-offs, including the brand new The Underground House Movement and the new(ish) House festival, of high quality, curated contemporary art.

The format of AOH is special in that it offers a unique insight into the breadth of creative activity in Brighton: from hobbyists to professionals in every medium you can imagine, from printmaking to, well, polymer clay.

Sean Sims, who is exhibiting at AOH for the second time this year, at 14 Southdown Avenue, likes the event because as an illustrator, it gives him ‘a break from the solitary confinement of my office’.  It’s a viewpoint shared by many of the participants I spoke to, who enjoy the opportunity to engage face to face with an audience of not just of art buffs, but nosy types as well.

‘Seeing inside some wonderful Brighton homes is a big attraction,’ says Sean. ‘It’s so huge now with all the various trails, that it’s virtually impossible to visit all on show, so the sitting down planning what to see is all part of the fun.’

The danger of AOH is that the quantity of items on display – mixed in with the distraction of so much bunting, tea, cakes, and artists’ friends and family – has the potential to blind. It takes time, and an element of chance, to discover what houses might be your cup of tea. The guidebook, though comprehensive and fair, remains rather dry, and leaves much to the imagination.

Artist of the Year Louise Bristow, who is exhibiting at The Old Market, Hove says,  ‘I am ambivalent about the domestic setting – sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but one of the best aspects for me is that it’s a space in which you can do something on your own terms.’

Many places across the UK run similar events, but the format has taken real force in Brighton, perhaps because it’s a city that prides itself on its independent spirit. Or maybe because, in spite of its thriving community of creative professionals and renowned University Arts Faculty, there is still a conspicuous lack of dedicated exhibition spaces in the city.

Louise says, ‘[AOH is] a bottom-up thing that happens because artists and audience want it to. This is how it started, and it’s still why and how it happens. Even if it has got more polished and professional-looking, it is still essentially individuals showing their work in accessible settings, without much (or any) funding and without validation from ‘the art world’.’

This is a sentiment shared by illustrator Jonny Hannah (see Dress, below), who describes AOH as ‘punk rock exhibiting’. ‘Have some wall space and bang up some pictures,’ says Jonny, ‘It’s that simple.’

Eye picks for Brighton Artists Open Houses 2012:

Artist Louise Bristow constructs intricate stage sets which she then paints from. Her subjects, which include a Polish Lotto kiosk and Brighton skateboard ramp (above), are extraordinary in their isolation and appear to be filled with stories.

The Old Market, Upper Market Street, Hove

Circus Kinetica (above) is a multi-disciplinary art collective that explores sound and movement by repurposing found objects as anything from jewelry to giant mechanical sculptures. You can discover their studio-cum-lair underneath a fabulous 1935 modernist apartment block.

The Boiler Room Studio, Embassy Court, Western Street, Hove

Jonny Hannah (HEART), famed among illustration circles for his vibrant paintings and linocuts, Hannah is also known as a maker of artists books and limited edition prints under the moniker ‘Cakes and Ale Press’.

Brighton Dome and 49 Hove Park Villas, Hove

Sean Sims (New Division), originally from Teesside, vector illustrator Sean Sims relocated to Brighton where he found a keen following for his pop-modern series of posters The Brighton Line.

14 Southdown Avenue, Brighton

Helen Musselwhite grew up just outside Brighton in Pycombe, and now spends her time crafting fine paper sculptures of flora and fauna that reference mid-century design, folk and ethnic art.

14 Southdown Avenue, Brighton

Maria Rivens creates fantastical collages (above) and silkscreen prints from a cornucopia of vintage ephemera. A prolific open-houser, she is exhibiting at 31 Sandgate Road; The Rock and Roll Boudoir, Flat 40, 9 Upper Drive; and at Out of the Box, a super exhibition of box art at Inkspot Press, Melbourne Street, Brighton.

Precious Murphy Paul Griffin aka Precious Murphy is inspired by ‘predictions of the future, robots, architecture, maps and art deco,’ and this comes across pretty clearly with his impressive ‘floor plan meets circuit board’ style of digital giclée prints (above).

The Rock and Roll Boudoir, Flat 40, 9 Upper Drive.

John Simpson is an exceptional draughtsman; working with monotype printmaking he draws energetic anthropomorphic creatures in oil-based ink on textured surfaces, with reference to folk tales and classical myths.

31 Sandgate Road, Brighton.

Peter James Field (Agency Rush) is an illustrator who recently published a book The Peter Andre Saliva Tree, featuring over 200 celebrities connected, via love affairs and marriages, to Peter Andre. Pictured is his beautifully drawn portrait Rainy Hove (above), but we hope your experience of Artists Open Houses isn’t like this.

MIY Workshop, 33 North Road, Brighton.

Website for Artists Open Houses (AOH).

See also ‘Batchelor’s mix’ on the Eye blog, Chloë King’s article about ‘Brighton Palermo Remix’ also at Brighton Festival from until 27 May 2012.

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It’s available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues. Eye 82 is out now – you can browse a visual sampler at Eye before you buy on Issuu.

Here are a few links that caught our attention over the past few weeks.

Paul Bommer’s faux tiles from his recent show. (See Paul’s illustrations to ‘7 forms of design enquiry’ in Eye 82.)

Easel.ly (currently in beta) aims to make attractive infographics online.

A new form of ‘vanity publishing’ – Tweetghetto is a slightly mad Italian project to turn Tweets into posters (below).

Above: Tweet-encrusted poster sent to Eye by Better Nouveau.

Marius Watz’s work on the world’s longest façade (350m) at the Taman Anggrek complex in Jakarta (thanks to Golan Levin for this link).

Photographer Martin Usborne has a Kickstarter project to make a photobook of Dogs in Cars (below). See Martin’s article, ‘Who (didn’t) let the dogs out’ on the Eye blog in October 2010.

Marius Watz’s work on the world’s longest façade (350m) at the Taman Anggrek complex in Jakarta (thanks to Golan Levin for this link).

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It’s available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues. Eye 82 is out now – you can browse a visual sampler at Eye before you buy on Issuu.

Interest in record sleeve art naturally gravitates towards the long-play albums that emerged the 1950s, writes Simon Robinson. However it is worth remembering that records were packaged, after a fashion, as soon as the 78 rpm disc was invented.

Rigid but brittle discs shipped in generic paper bags which afforded little or no protection, forcing shops to buy thicker plain card sleeves to protect their stock.

It didn’t take long for retailers to see these protective outer covers as an opportunity for advertising their shop. Local letterpress printers used whatever type they had to hand and perhaps a few engraved blocks supplied by the record companies or gramophone makers.

Struck by the very prosaic nature of the resulting covers I decided to pick up any relating to my locality while they could still be found in charity shops and antique centres.

Before long I had dozens from different Sheffield retailers, dating from the early twentieth century to the 1950s, when the 78rpm disc began to fade with the advent of the LP and 45rpm singles.

The sheer number of shops selling records was an eye-opener, with specialists vying against local suburban tobacconists stocking a box or two of the latest hits.

And whereas nearly all trace of these shops has now gone – literally in Sheffield’s case following the blitz and subsequent redevelopment – these mundane but functional sleeves survive to tell the story. Here are a few.

Simon Robinson is the founder of Easy on the Eye books, publishers of Covered – see ‘Getting away with murder’ on the Eye blog.

More at www.ST33.wordpress.com.

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It’s available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues. Eye 82 is out now – you can browse a visual sampler at Eye before you buy on Issuu.

The exhibition ‘Between Writing & Type: The Stencil Letter’, which opened in Antwerp on 19 April 2012, combines two aims, reports co-curator Eric Kindel. The first is to display artefacts gathered over the past ten or so years that document some of the history of stencil letters. The second is to introduce a series of new stencil fonts.

Top: Banner showing Couteau, Standing Type, Bery Tuscan.

The artefacts are mostly stencils of many kinds and configurations, together with stencil-making tools, patented stencilling devices, printed ephemera and more. A small catalogue accompanies the exhibition (see text).

Above: Punched and routed letters. Below: Patented stencilling devices.

One thing the artefacts reveal is what shapes stencil letters. Tools and techniques figure prominently. So, too, does decoration, and its adaptation as stencil form. The stencil letter’s association with writing, drawing, engraving and type is also important. Artefacts include early stencil letters that replaced written and drawn letters in manuscripts, and stencils technically enhanced to produce well composed words and text. These help demonstrate the exhibition’s title: while stencil letters are clearly neither writing nor type, their origins, configurations and uses are usually located somewhere in between, and may reach a considerable distance in either direction.

Above: Decorated letters. Below: Decorated letters and surveyors’ stencils.

Below: Eighteenth-century numerals, nineteenth-century letters.

The new stencil fonts are the work of Fred Smeijers, Maurice Göldner and Pierre Pané-Farré, and they reveal several design strategies in operation.

One strategy is revival, as demonstrated by the Bery Roman and Bery Tuscan fonts. Both are based on stencil letters made by Jean Gabriel Bery in Paris in the 1780s.

Below: Bery Roman by Fred Smeijers.

Below: Bery Tuscan by Fred Smeijers, assisted by Pierre Pané-Farré.

Another is shaping with tools, thus Puncho, based on stencil punches, and Couteau, based on knife cuts (below).

Above: Puncho by Fred Smeijers. Below: Couteau by Pierre Pané-Farré.

And a third is the construction of stencil letters from limited elements, common perhaps to all the fonts.

Below: Orly Stencil by Pierre Pané-Farré.

Above: Standing Type by Maurice Göldner.

By way of the last strategy, the exhibition draws attention to a handy pedagogic dimension of stencil letters. Although stencil letters are not always constructed from limited elements, it is relatively easy to create them in this way (the extreme example is Josef Albers’s Schablonenschrift). The notion can be extended to the Latin script in general, in which recurring elements are prevalent. By identifying and cutting these elements as stencils, students new to designing letters can build up sets of letterforms with ease and a good degree of coherence.

Although a number of type designers and teachers have exploited this technique over the years and recently, it is usually traced to W. A. Dwiggins and his Falcon stencils (see Dwiggins’s WAD to RR: A Letter About Designing Type, Harvard College Library, 1940). This is where Smeijers first encountered it in the 1980s and it has since played an important part in his work and teaching. Smeijers, in turn, introduced the technique to his former students Göldner and Pané-Farré, who have used it to good effect.

Above: Letterform experiments with limited elements by Fred Smeijers.

The exhibition takes place in the Kades-Kaden project space (below) fronting the design company Catapult.

Since 2005, under the direction of Anton de Haan, Catapult has made this space available for a series of compact exhibitions, including those under the ‘Type an Sich’ moniker featuring well known type designers such as Unger, Porchez, Smeijers, Di Sciullo and most recently Matthew Carter.

In its assembly of artefacts, ‘Between Writing & Type’ presents episodes in the history of stencil letters, about which much is still to be discovered. The conjunction of artefacts and new stencil fonts illustrates the way historical material can inform present-day designing.

Below: Banner showing Greco Stencil.

‘Between Writing & Type: The Stencil Letter’ continues until 29 June 2012 at Catapult, Antwerp. Curated by Eric Kindel & Fred Smeijers. Fonts by OurType.

See also ‘Lettres à jour’, James Mosley’s enjoyable discussion of stencil lettering in France, and ‘Marked by time’, Eric Kindel’s article about stencil catalogues in Eye 40.

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It’s available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues. Eye 82 is out now – you can browse a visual sampler at Eye before you buy on Issuu.

The skip outside Brighton Town Hall isn’t rubbish, writes Chloë King. A yellow fluorescent tube highlights its edges, a wire fence surrounds it, and a notice pinned to the front reads, ‘What a time to invest public funded money in skips.’

It’s art, of course. The Skip (top and below) is part of David Batchelor’s ‘Brighton Palermo Remix’ exhibition, commissioned by the House visual arts festival, which runs in partnership with Brighton Festival from 6-27 May 2012.

With Batchelor as lead artist, this year’s House curator, Photoworks’ Celia Davies, has selected five artists that share Batchelor’s interest in ‘the overlooked and everyday’, to respond to the festival’s recurring theme of ‘domestic space’.

Below: David Batchelor, ‘Brighton Palermo Remix’ (detail), Regency Town House, Ground Floor.

The commissions are displayed as playful interventions in city centre locations, such as Brighton University, St Peter’s Church Gardens and outside the Town Hall (on private land). Which brings us back to David Batchelor.

Scots-born Batchelor is now based in London, where he finds many of the items he repurposes as sculptural installations. He’s a prolific artist and author of books on colour theory and Minimalism, among other things.

His most recent book, Found Monochromes (2010), comprises a collection of photographs of blank billboards and notices that he has been gathering since 1997. The photographs, eerie in their mundanity and exciting in their subtlety, are displayed as a slideshow in the basement of The Regency Town House on Brunswick Square in Hove, with the rest of his show.

The artworks have found a less controversial home in this venue, which is a brilliant space to show art in because it’s still being refurbished. The textures and tones of bare plaster help to bring David Batchelor’s illuminated installations down to earth.

Above: David Batchelor, Sickboy (detail), Regency Town House, Basement.

With ‘Brighton Palermo Remix’, Batchelor draws a connection between the two coastal towns: taking Palermo’s original street decorations – whitewashed timber frames and coloured lights – and transposing them into this unfinished interior setting in Brighton.

The scale is impressive. On the first floor a giant bauble of intersecting triangles (above) hangs delicately from a ceiling rose, as you walk round, it disappears into a sliver of light. On the ground floor a dark room is filled with the fuzzy warmth of coloured light, like a fairground ride designed for meditation.

Above: David Batchelor, ‘Brighton Palermo Remix’, Regency Town House, Ground Floor.

Batchelor’s Skip works because it’s familiar and funny, but it is also hard work because we have to have that old debate about public funded art. What makes most of ‘Brighton Palermo Remix’ so beautiful and valuable is that it brings the warm weather with it.

David Batchelor’s Brighton Palermo Remix, House Festival 2012, Brighton UK, until 27 May 2012.

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It’s available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues. Eye 82 is out now – you can browse a visual sampler at Eye before you buy on Issuu.

Though I missed the UK premiere* of Einstein on the Beach by Robert Wilson and Philip Glass (36 years after its first performance in New York City), reports John L. Walters, the performance I witnessed ran flawlessly without a break, clocking in around four hours 20 minutes, and earning a standing ovation from the packed house.

Top and below: photographs of Barbican Theatre production of Einstein on the Beach © Lucie Jansch, 2012.

Clocks, or time, could be said to be an overarching preoccupation of Einstein on the Beach. Performers wear big wristwatches; clock faces descend, ascend and mutate (above); and the cast members chant number sequences as part of Glass’s relentless, hypnotic score for a large onstage chorus and a small instrumental ensemble. Both sound and visuals force us to change our perception of time: the show comprises a series of slowly metamorphosing tableaux rather than a sequence of dramatic scenes: there’s no plot, and the libretto (by several writers, including Einstein’s choreographer Lucinda Childs) is of varying relevance. Some of the words are a kind of audio ‘lorem ipsum’ that fleshes out Wilson’s artfully constructed space-time.

Things change – slowly – all the time, as they do when you watch a seascape or a digital installation. There are the details of small, rapid gestures and exaggerated expressions on the faces of the performers, plus the lighting and the flat images (a train, and in the final scene a bus, above) that trundle on and off stage at a glacial pace. Much of it feels like early Modernism, with a dash of German expressionism. The colour scheme – mainly black, white, red and multiple shades of grey – might have come straight from the Bauhaus show upstairs. (The make-up and props wouldn’t have been too out of place at the celebrated Dessau ‘Metal Party’.)

Lucinda Childs’ choreography in the two dance sections are in complete contrast to the intense, fidgety movements of the white-faced performers in the two ‘Trial’ scenes. The dancers’ skipping movements, light and fleet, add air to the dense machinery of Glass’s hurdy-gurdy-like orchestration of voice, woodwinds, organ and violin.

In the most abstract section, known as ‘Bed’, we’re presented with a single graphic image: a solid rectangle, white out of black. This thick horizontal typographic rule moves through 90 degrees into a vertical position, like an kinetic Dan Flavin light sculpture. Then the solo organ in the pit is joined by mezzo-soprano Hai-Ting Chinn, who adds her voice to the solo organ, and the white obelisk rises slowly until it is out of sight.

Einstein on the Beach is a spectacle. The setting, the theatre auditorium, the operatic scale, the intensity of Glass’s additive and cyclical melodic patterns, like fractal five-finger exercises, all require us to look. And to keep looking and listening for a very long time. Kurt Munkacsi’s amplified sound design, still controversial within classical music circles, is a crucial part of Glass’s unstoppable sonic assault, rhythmic, intense and rock-like without using any rhythm section instruments.

This approach is at its most extreme in the ‘Spaceship’ section, a cacophonous matrix of voices, movement, colour and full tilt playing from the (now) onstage ensemble. A grid of flashing lights creates random patterns and glyphs, and transparent elevators (containing writhing captives) glide horizontally and vertically (above).

Then a screen descends, and violinist Antoine Silverman, a shock-headed Einstein figure (above), is isolated against an indigo curtain while a tiny model spaceship creeps slowly up a wire.

The screen shoots up again. And then another drops down to show a quasi-scientific diagram of an ‘Atomic Explosion’ (below), with laconic captions such as ‘Sand is fused into glass’.

The demands that Einstein on the Beach makes upon an audience (to behold a spectacle rather than follow a story) may be a reason why even sympathetic music critics feel irritated by its sprawling contents. If it is an opera, it is one for which there is little precedent or parallel.

The Barbican production’s adoption of its original design and staging has been regarded as ‘dated’ in some quarters. In conventional opera, the director and designer often impose fresh visual concepts or moods upon an existing work with a pre-existing musical and dramatic character – The Magic Flute, say, or Jenůfa. By contrast, Einstein on the Beach is best approached as a work defined by Wilson’s visual and dramatic framework from the beginning.

Stanley Kubrick, (in conversation with sci-fi writer Brian Aldiss) once said, ‘… forget about narrative … all you need for a movie are six or eight non-submersible units.’ (2001, based upon a short story, is a good example of this.) Similarly, much instrumental music works in this way – nobody expects Coltrane’s A Love Supreme or Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms to tell much of a story, even though both have explicit, easily graspable structures. Pop hits often hang on such moments: a drum fill, a catchy hook, a singer’s scream.

So you can enjoy Einstein on the Beach as a predominantly visual work that packs dancing, spoken word, acting, singing, mime and music into the time-based structure of film or music theatre. Even though its ambitions might have been as an operatic gesamtkunstwerk, its reality may lie closer to the world of installation and performance art. Many experimental musicians of Glass’s time (including Steve Reich and Gavin Bryars) found their original audiences in galleries and art colleges rather than music venues.

But Einstein is also much more than Wilson’s vision, because it benefits from an unusually close and effective degree of collaboration with composer and choreographer. ‘We put together the opera the way an architect would build a building,’ wrote Wilson. ‘The structure of the music was completely interwoven with the stage action and with the lighting. Everything was all of a piece.’

Einstein on the Beach didn’t just spring from a few downtown lunches – it emerged from a lively international scene of experimental, transdisciplinary work that dispensed with conventional barriers between crafts and genres, and subverted technology (however crude) to its own ends. It is now possible to appreciate Einstein in the 21st-century context of code-based multimedia, where technology allows artists to combine sound, vision and movement with a freedom and virtuosity hardly dreamed of at that time.

Yet much of what we see and hear is constrained by small screens and loudspeakers. Perhaps the Barbican show will encourage suceeding generations of makers and producers to think big. Despite its age, Einstein on the Beach – decades before the great work made by UVA, Karsten Schmidt, Ryoji Ikeda and Universal Everything – provides a lesson in making powerful, affecting multimedia in its creators’ own terms.

All photographs copyright Lucie Jansch, 2012, courtesy of Barbican Centre press office.

*The UK premiere did not go smoothly. Some of the onstage mechanisms (moving gantries and glass boxes) did not work and there was an unplanned interval. (A post-show altercation between a critic and a snap-happy Bianca Jagger prompted much online chatter.)

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It’s available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues. Eye 82 is out now – you can browse a visual sampler at Eye before you buy on Issuu.

Tomorrow sees the opening of a new joint exhibition by painter Wanda Garland and designer/photographer Ken Garland, who met in London, 60 years ago, at what was then Central School of Arts & Crafts. It’s the first time they have ever exhibited their work together. Wanda’s show is called ‘Thameside reflexions’, and depicts London’s river between Vauxhall and the Thames Barrier. Ken’s is entitled ‘Looking closer’, a collection of ambiguous photographic displayed without captions.

Top: Wanda Garland, Mudlarks, 2012. Below: photograph by Ken Garland, 2007.

Above: Wanda Garland: South Bank I, 2012. Below: photograph by Ken Garland 2007.

The show will continue at the William Road Gallery, John McAslan + Partners, 7–9 William Rd, London NW1 3ER until 24 May 2012.

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It’s available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues. Eye 82 is out now – you can browse a visual sampler at Eye before you buy on Issuu.

In ‘Lost in flatlands’ in Eye 80, as part of our special ‘20 years of change’ section, Gerry Leonidas asked: ‘Will the next generation of page layout programs give us back our sense of space?’

The first page layout applications threw the constraints of older typesetting environments out the window. All of a sudden, layered compositions, tints and gradients, and wild type choices at 360 degrees of orientation were easily possible. Yet page layout applications still build documents on an imaginary canvas, an arbitrary ‘pasteboard’ where stuff is dropped on. The pasteboard holds a sheet of paper that is always perfectly flat, and imitates no material properties. But is not the exploration of materiality, of the experience of handling an object, a prerequisite to decisions on layout? The thickness, flexibility or transparency of the paper, the depth of the spine and the curvature of a page all matter.

The main tools of a designer are visual hierarchy, sequence, proportion, proximity and association. In other words, space – around and between elements. Typefaces and all the dark bits follow. So placing two-dimensional objects on a flat, uniform, disembodied surface flips the perception of space during the design process. Instead of a positive value, explicitly marked as an element of the composition, space becomes the leftover of systems that handle boxes where the dark bits flow in. Object-orientated applications such as Quark and InDesign have proved very bad at helping the designer capture proximity, sequence and hierarchy: the underlying space is the same at the centre of the page and near the edge, and the structural relationships between different elements are very difficult to translate into visual rules.

The boundaries of objects behave the same whether the frame contains text, image or other elements. And the visual edges become subservient to structural ones. (Is the right margin of a left-aligned paragraph really the edge of the box that contains it?)

The shallow angles that result from thrashing out ideas with pencil or moving bits of paper on a sheet are very difficult to replicate on screen: placing at an angle is not the same as rotating something that always starts out straight.

Furthermore, working on a near-vertical screen, with pretty wild zooming capabilities, focuses attention to the line-level details, and disguises the compositional decisions at the level of the spread. The misconception that what is on the screen is a truthful representation of print reality is all too easy to swallow. There is something to be said about looking at things at 1:1 scale, and at the same angle as your readers.

For design educators, instilling in students a healthy dose of critical attitude towards their tools, and making them ask at every opportunity ‘How is this machine translating my intentions?’ should be a priority.

The most interesting developments in typographic design happen in two areas: one on screen and one in print. Onscreen, data-rich applications, aggregators and magazines on tablets are defining new paradigms for navigating texts.

Is anybody willing to wager against the next competitor to InDesign being an online service, a Web-based page layout application? For starters, it would probably do away with palettes. (Palettes are evil.) And it would enable better cross-platform publishing. But it might also give us the opportunity to recover our sense of space.

Gerry Leonidas is senior lecturer in typography at the University of Reading.

POSTSCRIPT: Gerry’s parenthetical remark that ‘palettes are evil’ prompted several responses on Twitter; he subsequently explained this view in a post on Typenotes.

You can browse a visual sampler of Eye 80 (above) at Eye before you buy on Issuu. Image at top of post is a detail from the cover, taken from generative illustration by Field for GF Smith’s promotional packs of digital paper. Design: SEA, 2011.

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It’s available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues. Eye 82 is out now.

‘The alternative weekly newspapers of the United States are a hotbed of creative cover design,’ writes Robert Newman in Eye 82. ‘The historical descendants of the underground papers of the 1960s, these papers are tabloid-sized and distributed free in cities big and small across the country. Ranging from giants such as the 200,000-circulation Village Voice to smaller papers such as Vermont’s Seven Days (circulation 35,000), these ‘altweeklies’ are produced fast and cheap, often with an art department of one, and on a very limited budget. And although many covers use glossy stock, the majority of papers are printed on newsprint.’

Here are a few images from the six-page feature, illustrated with fourteen covers, in Eye 82.

Top: detail from cover of Riverfront Times, April 2010. Art director: Tom Carlson. Illustration by Patrick Faricy, for a story about animal rights. Below: cover of Dallas Observer, 18 June 2009. Art direction and illustration: Alexander Flores and CSA Images.

‘This is gonzo graphic design, sometimes brilliant, sometimes ragged, but always filled with passion, energy and originality,’ writes Newman (also on Tumblr and Twitter as Newmanology). ‘The covers, reflecting the rich, diverse content and progressive politics within, are explosive and poster-like, filled with provocative headlines and typography and in-your-face illustration.’

You can read the full article, ‘Shock tactics’ online, and in the current issue of the magazine, Eye 82.

Below left: Oil Spill cover, The Stranger, 10 June 2010. Art director: Aaron Huffman. Illustrator: Aaron Bagley.

Above right: Osama bin Laden cover, The Stranger, 4 May 2010. Art director: Aaron Huffman. Illustrator: Jim Blanchard. Huffman says: ‘The bullet was a last-minute addition because the original seemed too serious.’

Below: more altweekly covers (not shown in the Eye article).

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It’s available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues. Eye 82 is out now – you can browse a visual sampler at Eye before you buy on Issuu.

It is not often that entire books form the material, or part of the material, of works of art, but two of the nine pieces in ‘The Space Between’, curated by the writer Michael Bracewell, are made from complete books, writes Mark Thomson.

One is John Stezaker’s Tabula Rasa, in which a distorted rectangle has been added to a double spread image of mountaineers surveying the peak of Sgurr Alasdair, from a book entitled The Magic of Skye. The book lies open, seemingly implying that its revelation is temporary; that the work – its text – could be returned to obscurity by the simple act of its being closed.

The second work is Linder’s collage, W H Auden, with a flower on the poet’s photograph, its centre over his right eye. The portrait of Auden is on the jacket of a book, and so the third and fourth elements of the collage are the title, ‘W.H. Auden: a tribute edited by Stephen Spender’, on front and spine, and the book itself.

In both cases, it is not only the uppermost surface of the book or page that is under consideration but the entire text, as contained by the adjustments and contributions to the outer form. The presence of this entire text raises the question, what is the difference between the same image cut from the book, or unwrapped from its binding, and the work in this state?

In the case of Linder’s work, it is the fact that the book is about Auden, as well as that its cover depicts him, is part of the essence of the work. Would it be the same if the book were empty, or if its subject were British poetry in the twentieth century?

Equally, it is not implied that another spread of The Magic of Skye will present a similar intervention; the remaining text of the book is whole, and it is understood that while the selection of this particular spread as the vehicle of intervention is a component of the piece, so too is the remainder, as a whole.

The texts within assume a state of being that the usual preoccupation with the articulation of surface denies. The way the books are displayed – one under an acrylic box on a pedestal, the other fixed top and bottom to the wall– reinforces their unopenness, and the sense that each book’s unrevealed text has been silently assimilated into the overall substance of the work.

The Space Between, curated by Michael Bracewell Karsten Schubert, 5-8 Lower John Street, London W1F 9DR 26 April–18 May 2012

Eye, the international review of graphic design, is a quarterly journal you can read like a magazine and collect like a book. It’€™s available from all good design bookshops and at the online Eye shop, where you can order subscriptions, single issues and classic collections of themed back issues.

Venture outside the world of blogs and back-slapping designer conferences, writes Jessica Jenkins. Everyday academic life needs your voices. ‘Socialist Modernity through Design’ is a symposium to be held at the Royal College of Art on Tuesday 22 May 2012. The day-long event is open to all: writers, thinkers, practitioners and casual observers, whether academically cloistered or fully exposed to the real world.

Top and below: Anthropometrics experiments undertaken at the All Union Scientific Research Institute for Technical Aesthetics (VNIITE) in 1974.

Five postgraduate students of the Royal College of Art – Jessica Jenkins, Tom Cubbin, Rebecca Bell, Anda Boluza and Kasia Jezowska – destined to be one of the above on graduation, have put together a programme of international speakers to consider postwar Socialist Modernity in Eastern Europe.

Below: ‘Domestic Information Machine’, 1975, from Znanie-Sila [Knowledge Is Power], the Russian illustrated science magazine. Information (images, text or sound) can be ordered over the phone and delivered via TV signals into homes, and recorded while the user sleeps.

Speakers on design historical questions from Poland, Latvia, the former East Germany, Russia, the former Czechoslovakia and Estonia will discuss the way in which design contributed to complex processes of emerging Modernity in Central and Eastern Europe after 1945.

Topics discussed will include the domestication of socialism, the risks taken by architects in the surveillance society, and the accusations of commodity saturation in late-1970s Moscow. Presentations will be interleaved with sections of the film Design for Man and Society, never before shown in public and censored by the Soviets, which was intended to critique the saturation of the material environment.

Great people, great topics, and free wine! Full details: designingsocialistmodernity.blogspot.de. Registration deadline: 8 May 2012.

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It’s available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues. Eye 82 is out now – you can browse a visual sampler at Eye before you buy on Issuu.

The launch party for Jeremy Tankard’s new type family Fenland, at London’s Kemistry Gallery, was packed to capacity with gallery regulars and friends and colleagues of the designer, writes Alex Cameron. While busy private views in London galleries are not that unusual, what set this one apart was the atmosphere and the excited buzz of guests poking, pointing and poring over the results of Tankard’s labour.

The exhibition matter offered more than oversized specimen sheets, and there was a welcome lack of patronising posters suggesting how to use Fenland. The exhibition panels assumed that the viewer was interested, capable and engaged.

The success of the launch was partly due to good curatorial thinking, but more because the idea behind Fenland is also a critique of mainstream contemporary type design. The target in Tankard’s sights is the prevalence of the calligraphic metaphor: ‘We read printed text. We read shapes described by pixels. So what purpose does the pen have in their construction?’ he asks. In the weeks following the launch, considered reactions continued on type forums online. While there was overall praise for Tankard, Fenland had its share of detractors. Some questioned the legitimacy of Tankard’s rejection of the calligraphic metaphor as the only approach to type design, while others asked, ‘what’s the big deal?’ in response to his final letterforms. Both views are too one-sided. A more fruitful line of enquiry is to be found in conjoining both questions of idea and form. Tankard met this head-on through Fenland, .

Behind Fenland’s beautiful shapes lie anger and disappointment with much of contemporary type design, with its backward-looking type revivals, soft rounded sans and calligraphic rhetoric. ‘Fenland began as a way to find new shapes that didn’t rely on the usual method of structure,’ Tankard writes. ‘The constraints of what makes a text typeface work are still the same; these could include rhythm, pattern, texture and balance. As long as this is respected then how can a shape be constructed in a fresh way?’

Asking such questions should be integral to the design process, but the market seems to tell another story. Fenland, in this respect, is something of an antidote. Tankard says, ‘a fundamental question … deserves more than a cosmetic answer’.

For an insight into Tankard’s design process and early sketches of Fenland, see Birth of a Typeface. More information at Tankard’s own website, typography.net. Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It’s available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues. Eye 82 is out now – you can browse a visual sampler at Eye before you buy on Issuu.

The Wellcome Collection asks: ‘not what brains do for us, but what we have done to brains’, writes Rosie Walters. ‘Brains’, the London gallery’s new showstopper, takes visitors on a whirlwind tour of the role of the brain in culture and society, from 5000-year-old skulls to contemporary art from artists such as Katherine Dowson and Helen Pynor. The exhibition’s tagline is ‘the mind as matter’ and it shows not only the physical matter – there are plenty of actual brains floating around – but also how we relate to the most complicated organ in the body.

Calum Storrie’s design for the exhibition carves up the Wellcome’s huge space (which can sometimes swallow up shows) into manageable corridors, which combined with Lucienne Roberts’ clear signposting leads the viewer through four sections: measuring / classifying; mapping / modelling; cutting / treating; and giving / taking. Storrie says that when coming up with the concept he thought about the idea of ‘slices’. He wanted to create a single route through the exhibition, but one from which viewers could also break and deviate to make their own path through the objects.

To create the opening lettering – brightly coloured letters suspended like specimens in transparent blocks (above) – Roberts and her colleagues visited the Royal College of Surgeons and found out how real specimen jars are put together. They were particularly interested in the glycerin and water solution, whose refractive index makes specimens appear unsupported, creating the illusion of multiple objects. The team worked with Capital Models to make the letters, using slices of Perspex suspended in the same glycerin and water solution in bespoke acrylic boxes.

Roberts’ scientific approach is also seen in the exhibition literature (above), which references the idea of classification – clear diagrams, leader lines and labelling, with added flair through the use of fluorescent ink on the mainly black and grey exhibition guide. She chose Bureau Grotesque because it ‘clearly draws on the design of nineteenth-century grotesques and was initially developed by David Berlow in 1989 from original Stephenson, Blake specimens’ (see ‘Sense of place’, Eye 58). Although decorative and interesting, the graphic design of Brains does not detract from the complexity of the objects it labels, but enhances and – along with Storrie’s architecture – gently guides the viewer through the maze of artefacts, including movie posters (below) and engravings.

Above: Trepanning being performed. (Image: Wellcome Library, London, via Wellcome Images.)

In typical Wellcome style, the exhibition is curated to bring together historical, social and artistic commentary on ‘the mind as matter’ and explores everything from the murky depths of Nazi attitudes to mental illnesses, to new medical holographic imaging techniques that allow viewers to look at the moving brain in 3D without wearing glasses, and photographer Ania Dabrowska’s moving portraits (including Albert Webb, below) and interviews with people who have chosen to leave their brains to science.

This is not a show for the squeamish, and from almost every angle the viewer is subjected to photos of fresh brains extracted from steaming corpses, videos of them being frozen and sliced like pastrami, plus jars of floating brains (above), that could be enough to make the most seasoned gore fan feel queasy. However the show is extremely interesting, if complex – a little like the organ behind the show.

Below: slices of Einstein’s brain. Wellcome Library, London. © Wellcome Images.

Brains: The mind as matter From 29 March to 17 June 2012 Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, NW1 2BE, UK.

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It’s available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues. Eye 82 is out now – you can browse a visual sampler at Eye before you buy on Issuu.

Ryoji Ikeda’s work quivers somewhere between electronic music, digital art, installation and performance, writes John L. Walters. He uses raw materials – both visual and sonic – that seem plucked from the innermost depths of contemporary gadgetry: tiny clicks and flashes that are amplified to colossal proportions.

Using giant screens and huge speaker systems, Ikeda gives these hidden elements something approaching the scale and monumentality of industrial manufacturing processes. Though he uses raw electronic tones rather than samples, the noise he pumps into galleries, halls and clubs can attain the grandeur of throbbing factories or clanking shipyards. The resulting performance is part musique concrète, part minimalist DJ set. And though Ikeda’s work can seem austere, the total effect is often surprisingly emotional.

His latest audiovisual work at the Berlin gallery MUMA (aka Kraftwerk, above) is entitled data.anatomy [civic]. This twelve-minute video, projected though multiple screens and speakers, takes as its starting point the digital data generated during a car’s design and development processes, All the visual content in data.anatomy is derived from immensely detailed CAD files and wireframes used in the design of a new Honda Civic car. The manufacturer, unsurprisingly, has invested a lot of time and money in Ikeda’s paean to its industry, and it flew 25 international journalists to Berlin for the private view last week.

Organised into three ‘movements’, Ikeda’s data.anatomy presented us first with a data landscape, almost like a night sky (above). Then followed a busy matrix of rapidly changing diagrams and chattering machine texts (top). Finally, we were treated to a balletic arrangement of rotating and panning wireframes (below).

The sound element, unlike other Ikeda works, functions more as an attractive and moody underscore, with a repeated high note that pulses like a sonar and gets under the listener’s skin. In conversation after the opening, Ikeda cheerfully scorned any intellectual or technical pretension: ‘I didn’t study music or art or mathematics. I’m from the street!’ He made the piece with an assistant and four programmers.

Mitsuru Kariya, the Civic’s project leader (based in Tochigi in Japan), seemed genuinely moved by the installation, which he saw for the first time at the private view. ‘Every part of it is familiar,’ he said, noting that it also brought to mind the faces of all the different people he had known on the design team. The development process took place over four years and involved up to 30 designers and technicians. Kariya claimed modestly to have found himself thinking ‘I could have done that better’, when his old sketches flashed across data.anatomy’s multiple screens.

For those of us not in the automotive industry the flickering diagrams had an almost retro ‘graph paper’ aesthetic, and the rapidly changing texts reminded me of Rob Lord’s electronic book animations for the BBC version of Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy (see Eye 42) and Tron. You could criticise data.anatomy (or enjoy it) as ‘infoporn’, too: there’s far too much detail to take in as the audience wallows in a huge audiovisual bath.

Compared to Ikeda’s other pieces, data.anatomy is softer, less confrontational, possibly more accessible. It could be viewed as high-tech commercial art direction. Ikeda has taken the time-worn ‘the solution lies in the problem’ approach advocated by designers such as John McConnell.

In common with many examples of design and advertising, data.anatomy is impressive at both conceptual and technical levels, using a degree of screen resolution that he hasn’t been able to use before (three Projectiondesign F32 projectors at WUXGA resolution, with up to 8000 lumens of brightness and a contrast ratio of 7500:1). But data.anatomy isn’t a TV commercial, nor is it a piece of ‘art’ in the sense of earlier Ikeda works such as data.tron or C4I.

Yet there’s something about new digital work, often sponsored by or closely linked to big companies, that seems to slip away from the old categories of art, design and advertising. Digital can’t really be ‘pure’, so resists categorisation. We’ve recently seen some very interesting, hard-to-pigeonhole work from designers such as Field (see ‘10,000 one offs’ in Eye 80), Karsten Schmidt (see interview in Eye 74) and Matt Pyke (see ‘Super – computer – romantics’ on the Eye blog). Johnny Hardstaff argued in ‘Dreams can come true’ (Eye 80) that such new designer-client relationships were the way forward:

‘Clients are learning to recognise left-field creativity and, delicately, buy into it. Where once they might have tried to shape it, they are often now becoming sponsors, remote patrons even, and thus empowering designers to say more in very different ways with far less external control and censorship.’

Ikeda’s data.anatomy almost fits into Hardstaff’s definition, even if Honda could hardly be described as a ‘remote patron’. The piece, which fits well within the mixed bag of Ikeda’s body of work, is still more ‘branded’ than, say, Michael Nyman’s double concerto for Mazda.

But taking Johnny Hardstaff’s optimistic line, I hope that the relative success of data.anatomy encourages some other big companies to venture into this exciting area of digital work, which is full of talented practitioners. And that they will resist the temptation to control and brand things too much: Ikeda and his producers, Forma, know their stuff in the way that Mitsuru Kariya knows every detail of his new Honda Civic.

Ryoji Ikeda, Data.anatomy MUMA (Kraftwerk), Köpenicker Straße 59, 10179 Berlin, Germany Until 1 May 2012

See a short extract on Vimeo.

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It’s available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues. Eye 82 is out now – you can browse a visual sampler at Eye before you buy on Issuu.

Form follows function. The oft-quoted, much misunderstood dictum associated with the Bauhaus finds few better expressions than the chess set designed by the workshop master Josef Hartwig in 1922, writes Alex Cameron.

Developed from the elementary forms – triangle, square and circle – using stained limewood, Hartwig’s design is testimony to the beauty of economy and the power of human-centred design.

London visitors can see it at the Barbican from next Thursday (3 May 2012) as part of the exhibition Bauhaus: Art as Life.

While he may not be one of the better-known figures of the School, Hartwig played an important role in reconstituting the basic craft training programmes at the Bauhaus – regarded as an ‘indispensible foundation for all artistic creation’ by its founder Walter Gropius.

The significance of Hartwig’s appointment in 1921 as leader of the wood-carving and sculpture workshop was clear to his colleague and collaborator Joost Schmidt. The designer of the advertising and packaging of the chess set, Schmidt later said that previously ‘everything was jumbled up in a murky chaos in which it was not yet possible to see what kind of “Bauhaus reality” would come out of it.’ One such ‘Bauhaus reality’ was the redesign of the chess piece. The figurative designs of most chess sets allude to the old world order of pre-capitalist societies and are often based on peculiar national characteristics – king and queen (originally a man, the ‘adviser to the king’), knight, bishop (the fool in France and standard bearer in Italy), rook and pawn (soldier, citizen).

Hartwig’s abstract pieces represent the essence of the game by pointing to the unique method of moves they make on the chessboard.

The square shape of the rook implies its movement back and forth, left and right. The bishop’s diagonal cross and the L-shaped faces of the knight suggest their respective moves, while the queen’s spherical head represents her ability to travel in any direction. Like much of the design of the Modern Movement, Hartwig’s chess set championed a new set of standards for design based on technological innovation, economy of materials and aesthetics. Hartwig’s chess set is a triumph of Modern design.

Bauhaus: Art as Life

Barbican Art Gallery, Barbican Centre, UK 3 May > 12 August 2012 Produced in co-operation with Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin / Museum für Gestaltung, Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau and Klassik Stiftung Weimar; co-curated by Barbican curators Catherine Ince and Lydia Yee; and designed by architects Carmody Groarke, working in collaboration with graphic designers A Practice For Everyday Life (APFEL).

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It’s available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues. Eye 82 is out now – you can browse a visual sampler at Eye before you buy on Issuu.

Here are some more examples of Eric Gill’s sketches for the Gill Sans family, courtesy of the Monotype archive, and currently on display at GF Smith’s ‘Beauty in the making’ exhibition in London (23-27 April 2012, see ‘Look this way’ on the Eye blog).

Top: Test proofs of Gill Sans Titling (1929) and Extra Heavy Condensed Titling (1933), with Gill’s corrections.

Gill’s original artwork needed to be redrawn by Monotype to suit the needs of its manufacturing and casting processes. Once trial characters were printed from metal type, proofs were sent back to Gill. Here you can see a mix of white and black paint used by Gill to adjust the shapes, as well as his annotations in pencil.

Above and below: Original drawings by Eric Gill for Gill Sans family, made between 1928 and 1933.

Gill Sans was the first of Eric Gill’s typefaces to be released by Monotype. The design was inspired by the lettering Gill produced for the shopfront of Douglas Cleverdon’s bookshop in Bristol in 1926. Gill Sans Titling (Series 231) was released by Monotype in 1928.

Following the success of the display face, a number of variants were added to the type family, including a roman and an italic (series 262, published in 1930), as well as an Ultra Bold (shown here, originally named ‘Double Elefans’ by Gill and published by Monotype in 1936). By the mid-1930s the Gill Sans family included more weights than any other typeface available at the time.

Below: original drawing with test proof in background.

See ‘Look this way’ on the Eye blog, with more images on Eye’s ‘Beauty in the making’ Flickr stream.

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It’s available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues. Eye 82 is out now – you can browse a visual sampler at Eye before you buy on Issuu.

Ah, Sunday. Day of sleeping in late, padding around the house in your jammies, and generally striving to do as little as possible in anticipation of another working week’s grind, writes John Moore Williams. But if you’re a type geek (variously known as a typochondriac, fontophile, or typenut), Sunday has now become a day to look forward to all week – with the rabidity of the most fervent American football fan.

Why? Because thanks to the Design Museum, it has become #FontSunday, an epic Twitter-driven event now heading toward its twelfth week, in which hordes of font fanatics post their typographic pics in response to a predefined theme. The reward? Eternal fame and glory on Twitter (which translates to perhaps fifteen seconds). Otherwise, it’s just the chance to revel in the joy of sharing, see some beautiful type, and have your own contribution acknowledged for its ‘awesomeness’.

The Design Museum’s Michael Czerwinski says, ‘We want to see innovative approaches and personal observations. As the weeks progress we are going to start setting tasks to get participants to do some specific designing to complement the usual stream of photos and found images.’

15 April’s #FontSunday fest focused on Friends of Type’s apt theme, ‘city type’, and brought an incredible flood of both environmental and handmade efforts ranging from rust-ravaged vintage signage to meticulously composed bundles of grass blades. The breadth of submissions proved a bit staggering for most involved, and certainly more so for Friends of Type themselves. But somehow they persisted to name three champions:

Tom Martin, a self-described freelance graphic / digital / motion designer and part-time MA student whose shot, from a visit to Berlin’s now defunct Tempelhof airport, captured both a fluid script and a rather more staid sans (below).

Jen Wood, a regular Renaissance woman (‘Dr Hauschka brand ambassador / occasional violinist / cake baker / coffee drinker’ according to her profile), who grabbed this effusion of colourful hand-painted type on an excursion to India (below).

And Quique Ollervides, an ‘acomodador de tintas y pixeles’ (which translates, very roughly, to ‘print and Web designer’ for the Spanish-challenged), who grabbed this energetic shot at a Mexican restaurant (below).

Which, not coincidentally, makes me very hungry right now.

S is for Swiss graphic design

The next week switched gears (slightly—Type Tuesday readers know how often Helvetica is used for urban signage) to focus on Switzerland’s graphic design legacy. This event’s partner was the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, tying in with their exhibition 100 Years of Swiss Graphic Design.

Here are a few (wholly subjective) highlights:

Helvetica on a composing stick, from the Museum für Gestaltung themselves (below).

From the Kunst und Gewerbe Museum in Hamburg, via Thomas Marzano (below).

Striking typography from MB+Co, Zurich, via Andy Tye (below).

To see just how energetic the event gets, head on over to Twitter and search the tag #FontSunday. Oh, and don’t forgot to tune in next week.

John Moore Williams is a professional copywriter and blogger, infrequently published poet, and amateur typographer. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It’s available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues. Eye 82 is out now – you can browse a visual sampler at Eye before you buy on Issuu.

‘Beauty in the Making’ is a five-day show (ending Friday 27 April 2012), held in a cavernous basement near Holborn tube, organised and sponsored by paper merchant GF Smith. And there’s plenty of paper to see and touch. The sign system, designed by MadeThought, is constructed from pallets of coloured paper: each top sheet is cut with stencil letters that reveal the sheet below.

Some sheets have a corner folded up to reveal more information: there’s a ‘folded corner’ aesthetic that’s also employed in the display unit captions. Various demonstrations and workshops show visitors the physical objects and processes that lie behind design on paper: trees, paper manufacture, dyes (below), envelope-making, small-scale letterpress printing, and so on.

The highlight (for Type Tuesday regulars), however, is a space (almost a secular nave) that houses glass-covered display cabinets that permit a glimpse into Monotype’s archive of type and type design.

There are a number of Eric Gill’s original drawings for Gill Sans, along with letters and notes, plus some fascinating glimpses into life at the company that once dominated the Surrey village of Salfords.

These include books, box files and archive photographs, including a picture of ‘the first machine gun made at the Monotype Works’, and correspondence about details in the design of Gill’s most famous type family (on which work continues at Monotype, whose UK operation is still based in Salfords).

There’s a slightly alarming papier mâché bust of Eric Gill (above), made by Ann Pillar, plus a few other 3D objects such as a matrix case for casting 12pt Gill Sans and Gill Sans italic in lead (below).

In contrast to recent London exhibitions that pack a huge amount into a small room (see Richard Hollis at Gallery Libby Sellers), ‘Beauty in the Making’ is a modest display in a very large (22,000 sq.ft.) space. However anyone interested in British type design will enjoy the chance to peer at the historic Monotype / Gill archive before the show closes on Friday.

23 > 27 April 2012Beauty in the making

A five-day exhibition / event curated by paper merchant GF Smith, in collaboration with Monotype, It’s Nice That and the British Council’s Architecture, Design and Fashion department (who have also contributed examples of touring work from British designers). Victoria House Basement, Unit 6, 37-63 Southampton Row, London WC1B 4DA Admission is free (and they throw in some free paper samples). Reserve tickets through Eventbrite.

Paper merchant GF Smith has an interesting history of working with graphic designers to make promotional material. See ‘Sampling the modern’ in Eye 72 and ‘10,000 one offs’ featured on the cover of Eye 80.

Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture. It’s available from all good design bookshops and online at the Eye shop, where you can buy subscriptions and single issues. Eye 82 is out now – you can browse a visual sampler at Eye before you buy on Issuu.