Deconstruction

“Theory” and “graphic design” have always been a problematic union. Perhaps because graphic design is often approached more intuitively than intellectually, theory is rarely an explicit part of design practice. When theory does emerge as a topic among designers, it often serves to name a new style, a current stock of mannerisms. A conspicuous example of this surfacing of theory is the circulation of “deconstruction” with the graphic design community.

The term “deconstruction” was coined by the philosopher Jacques Derrida in his book Of Grammatology, published in France in 1967 and translated into English in 1976. Deconstruction became a banner for advanced thought in American literary studies, scandalizing departments of English and French across the country.

A work of design can be called “deconstruction” when it exposes and transforms the established rules of writing, interrupting the sacred “inside” of content with the profane “outside” of form. Modernist typography has long engaged in such structural games from the calligrammes of Apollinaire, to the experiments with simultaneous overlapping texts produced within the “New Typography” of the 1970s and ‘80s. Such self-conscious explorations of language and design within the context of Modernism are matched by numerous developments within the “vernacular” field of commercial publishing, which since the nineteenth century has expanded the limits of classical book typography to meet the needs of advertising and popular media. The early nineteenth-century display face called Italian deliberately inverted the anatomical part so the “modern” letterforms that had been formalized in the late eighteenth century. The neoclassical fonts of Didot and Bodoni epitomized the tendency to view typography as a system of abstract relationships – thick and think, serif and stem, vertical and horizontal. The designer of Italian turned the serfs inside out, demonstrating that the forms of letters are not bound by the authority of divine proportions, but are open to endless manipulation.

Within the context of philosophy and literary theory, deconstruction is just one question among many that emerged out of the body of critical ideas known as post-structuralism. Barthes’ theory of “mythology” looks at how images validate key beliefs in modern culture – such as “progress” or “individualism” – making ideologically loaded concepts seem like natural and inevitable truths.

Post-Modernism and New Wave Typography

• Grand narrative - A "myth" or faith-based statement that encompasses how we got here, why we are here and how we should live. "Storytelling in the interest of the powerful." - Drucher
• Post-Modernism was marked by a rejection of totalizing, essentialist, and foundationalist concepts. "Reality" was fragmented, diverse, tenuous and culture-specific, more so than structuralism did.
  
• Myths legitimize themselves by weaving beliefs together that defines culture.
• Postmodernism examines various cultural codes that govern our understanding of ourselves, our place; and all our procedures that are socially, culturally or politically motivated.
• A confluence of external forces created a cacophony of new images and lifestyles being represented and depicted within graphic design.
• Communities of option and belief readers identified with each other through style — graphic, music, fashion; a new pluralism emerged from the "ME" generation.
• Graphic novels and edgy adult literature formed a sort of hybrid -- interest in artist books and menageries of alternative publications to shock while disregarding standards of decency.
• There seemed to be two factions of designers, during this period, especially in the times of Milton Glaser with Push Pin Studios in the 1960s. New designers could turn their back on stale, corporate design — and since it was corporations that were supporting the Vietnam war, these designers believed that corporate design was fascism.
  
• Postmodernism was not a style, but a group of approaches motivated by some common understandings, not all of which will necessarily be shared by ever practitioner. It wasn't a theory, but a set of theoretical positions, which have at their core a self-reflexive awareness of the tentativeness, the slipperiness, the ambiguity, and complex interrelations of culture and meaning.
• Rejections of the International style began in Basel through the teaching of Wolfgang Weingart. Young designers seemed to be pardoying their modern teachers. Weigart rejected the right angle -- he believe in intuitive design and the richness of visual effect.
• New Wave Typography — Weingart advocated complete freedom and richness, using different arrangements for type; something textured and more fragmented than some of his Swiss counterparts. The inventory of this New Wave thinking included wide letter spacing, bold stair-stepped rules, rule lines punctuating space, diagonal type, mixing typefaces or weight changes within words, and type reversed from a series of bars.
• Willi Kuntz — Controlled quality; rectangular Swiss-inspired images were boring and would no longer suffice in corporate design. Everything was more architectonic, relating the shape of the text boxes and creating a more visually dynamic composition.
• SEGD - Typographic strategies close to architecture. It was a very short step from New Wave Typography and into space — it was something to experience, not just to look at.
• April Grieman, Rosmarie Tissi, and Siegfried Odermatt each have their own contribution to Postmodernism.
  

Discourse: Ellen Lupton's Deconstructivist Theory

Key concepts from Ellen Lupton's A Post-Mortem on Deconstruction?

• Deconstruction is part of a broader field of criticism known as “post-structuralism,” whose theorist have included Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, among others. Each of these writers has looked at modes of representation – from alphabetic writing to photojournalism – as culturally powerful technologies that transform and construct “reality”.
• The phrase “deconstruction” quickly became a cliché in design journalism, where it usually has described a style featuring fragmented shapes, extreme angles, and aggressively asymmetrical arrangements. This collection of formal devices was easily transferred from architecture to graphic design, where it named existing tendencies and catalyzed new ones. The labels “deconstructivism,” “deconstructionism,” and just plain “decon” have served to blanket the differences between a broad range of design practices and an equally broad range of theoretical ideas.
• Rather than viewing it as a style, you can view deconstructivism as a process – an act of questioning. In Derrida’s original theory, deconstruction asks a question: how does representation inhabit reality? How does the external appearance of a thing get inside its internal essence? How does the surface get under the skin? For example, the Western tradition has tended to value the internal mind as the sacred source of soul and intellect, while denouncing the body as an earthly, mechanical shell. Countering this view is the understanding that the conditions of bodily experience temper the way we think and act. A parallel question for graphic design is this: how does visual from get inside the “content” of writing? How has typography refused to be a passive, transparent vessel for written texts, developing as a system with its own structures and devices?
• The Western philosophical tradition has denigrated writing as an inferior, dead copy of the living, spoken word, when we speak, we draw on our inner consciousness, but when we write, our words are inert and abstract. The written word loses its connection to our inner selves. Language is set adrift.
• It has recently become unfashionable to compare language and design. In the fields of architecture and products, the paradigm of language is losing its luster as a theoretical model – we no longer think of buildings, tea pots, for fax machines as “communication” cultural messages, in the manner of post-Modern classicism or product semantics.
• For the design fields, “deconstruction” has been reduced to the name of a historical period rather than an ongoing way of approaching design. Derrida made a similar point in 1994, saying that deconstruction will never be over, because it describes a way of thinking about language that has always existed. For graphic design, deconstruction isn’t dead, either, because it’s not a style or movement, but a way of asking questions through our work. Critical form-making will always be part of design practice, whatever theoretical tools one might use to identify it.

Apollinaire’s Il Pleut is a perfect example of the juxtaposition of language and design – of typography and content. Like the other structural games calligrammes are often referred to, Il Pleut uses typography as an active picture rather than a passive frame, demonstrating only the beginning of the possibilities available for manipulating type to reflect language. Often graphic design can reveal cultural myths by using familiar symbols and styles in new ways, and Apollinaire does exactly that in this futurist, poetic, and exciting way.






Marinetti, another Futurist-classified poet, was a master in deconstruction — letting the words themselves build imagery both literally and figuratively; the letterforms and sentences themselves becoming the building blocks of his compositions. This 1913 work by Marinetti, Words of Liberty, is a perfect example of the theory of metalanguage, proposed by Roland Barthes. In his work, Elements of Semiology, he advanced the concept of the metalanguage — a systematized way of talking about concepts like meaning and grammar beyond the constraints of a traditional (first-order) language; in a metalanguage, symbols replace words and phrases. Insofar as one metalanguage is required for one explanation of first-order language, another may be required, so metalanguages may actually replace first-order languages. Barthes exposes how this structuralist system is regressive; orders of language rely upon a metalanguage by which it is explained, and therefore deconstruction itself is in danger of becoming a metalanguage, thus exposing all languages and discourse to scrutiny.


A work of design can be called “deconstruction” when it exposes and transforms the established rules of writing, interrupting the sacred “inside” of content with the profane “outside” of form. Weingart is the perfect example of this, using not only letterforms themselves but also nonobjective elements within his composition to distort the typographic content. Yet, the link between language and typography is so close that typography is, essentially, the frontier between languages and objects; languages and images. Typography turns language into a visible, tangible artifact, and in the process transforms it irrevocably.


While researching the link between the "inside" and "outside" form of content, George Orwell seemed to hold very similar views in his The Politics of English Language, speaking not of the link between typography and language but instead the written and spoken versions of English itself. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble; and what trouble does this necessarily include? Protecting one’s writing from staleness of imagery, and of course lack of precision. Both are marked by vague writing or perhaps, in some cases, sheer incompetence of modern English prose, as well as the use of dying metaphors. He concludes for us that verbal false limbs and pretentious diction are the downfall for our mangled language, and we, the ambitious struggling writers of the world, can unite against its seemingly inevitable destruction.

But let us look closer at Orwell’s reasoning for a moment; that if thought corrupts language than surely language can also corrupt thought. Although written nearly 60 years before our time, he shares this ideal with a modern behemoth of writing – Stephen King. King has already imparted a great secret to us about the nature of writing – that ideas come from nowhere, and that vocabulary is one of the first steps toward a novel which actually functions as it should. One should not begin writing from the abstract, trying to dictate with impressive words or alliterative sentences; one should have an idea in mind and then set about trying to convey that idea to an audience. Vague writing only begets vague understanding, which is not the vehicle in which your novel should be riding. I personally feel that this is a powerful parallel to language and typography — that the designer should have in mind what exactly they are trying to communicate before beginning their design, instead of taking text copy and moving it around, trying to design without a firm message at hand. This eventually will end in a vague, incomprehensible and garbled communication, one which has no place in today's world; unless of course you happen to be a self-proclaimed Dada-ist.

The New Advertising

Key People and Events:

• Paul Rand – Understood value of invented forms for both symbolic and communicative ends, through skillful analysis of the context. Tempered systematic design for modern American design.
• Systematic design – how to run businesses. Graphic design was the means, but there was a new practice that emerged where the corporations took over the design.
• Besides branding products with promises, identity systems became the means of making complex organizations seem like a single entity with distinct personas.
• Branding was seen as a major way to shape a reputation for quality and reliability through “brand promise”. This became the idea that the reputation for quality was carried through every aspect through the design program, from the environment where the products were sold to the design of the letterheads.
• Simplicity enables the viewer to interpret the context immediately. The form and essence of a message – as well as playful symbolism.
• Bradbury Thompson – “All visual forms carry history”. Essentially he was opening a door for future designers to work in the vernacular, using the untrained artists as models for his design.
• Ivan Chermayeff & Tom Geismar - “Early Design Office”. They were against the idea that there should be no humor and curiosity and visual riddles, no hand of the artist. Their designs were technically a form of cubism. They saw it as a way not to be so driven by product but more by the process.
• Design was not a clinical activity, it could be gestural and fun also. Sculptural as well as communication vehicles.
• Vignelli Associates – Unigrid system. They developed the standards for format sizes, typography, grid systems, paper specifications, and colors. They also realized tremendous economies in material and time. Very outspoken in the field of graphic design, adopting the processes of engineers.
• Designers embraced the ahistorical universalism of the international style that preferred abstract form over figurative references.
• Corporate design sees its zenith with American design for a global marketplace in the 70s and 80s, which happens because the Corporate world appropriates all the avant garde and cutting-edge ideas. This sets the stage for what will become a backlash against corporate design -- something which is still seen today, where this anti-corporate strategy seems useful. The idea of Corporate design has been debunked as too impersonal; the hand of the artist, the humanist aspect, has been distilled out of it. These cold shapes and messages have little to do with the consumer and even confuses them – what is this Corporation and what are they doing behind closed doors?
• Television is a new media that is just being explored. Not only for advertisement but also as a branding media. To understand what happened to Modernism you have to understand that this brief period of Pop Art – just like Art Nouveau –was a bridge between two distinct styles, in this case the movements of Modernism and Postmodernism.
  
• No longer confined to a static image, pioneers of motion graphics used timing and sequence in tandem with graphic forms, typography, and photographic image.
• Saul Bass – Designed from motion pictures to design programs as well as famous corporate identities. Essentially developed a new cinematic language.
• Visual statements used simple images, talked intelligently to their audience, and focused on the benefits of a projduct. No longer just a photo of a product, the viewer had to dig down and see the big idea about what the company was or stood for.
• Conceptual strategies for typography were unified with photography by locking text or display tightly into the photographic image.
• George Lois' most innovative concepts grew from his ability to understand and respond to the people and events of his era. Staying in touch with his times was vital. He made a point to challenge, shock, and provoke the audience – even going as far as to undercut established values.
• Leo Burnett isolated individualism; an overriding theme of the 60s era, by creating myths and stereotypes. Message and image are inseparable within the layout. Opportunity and responsibility intermix – products of a complex system of representation. Lived experiences are replaced by symbolic expression of ideas.

The Search for a Universal Language

Key lecture points:

• The idea that was carried through De Stijl, and ultimately the Bauhaus, was that if you understood the basic elements of form, there must be a universal language. This search for a universal language actually focused in on a particular movemnt that is now pervasive throughout graphic design -- the origins of Information Design.
• Designers align with the notion of engineering - objective, rational, systematic, and programmatic. This becomes a belief system of values for a new post-war world that comes to rely on electronic information management.
• Rudolph Modley was one of the most distinguised pupils of Otto Neurath and is known for his large and comprehensive dictionaires and handbooks of symbols.
• The isotype sets the strategy for isotype design. From this point on, design systems become a pervasive metaphor for design -- the idea of systematic thinking. This came from Behrens, but it's precisely at this moment that you graphic design put its arms around this idea.
• Ladislay Sutnar (Czech) defined information design for a generation of designers at mid-century. He used bleeds extensively with a visual coding system of number, words, and rules. He layed out how someone should design for large catalog-like information; repetitive structures with subtle differences need a system of stripes and bars and other elements to create a structure which allows the complex information to be easily understood.
• Modernism and the NY School -- The flight from Hitler and Fascism created the greatest transitional migration of intellectual and creative talent in history.
• American design was reflected in its culture -- egalitarian with capitalistic attitudes and values. American design was pragmatic, intuitive, and informal.
• Lester Beal literally took on European Modernism and tried to do something with it. He used constructivist layouts and used American fonts -- because there were no modernist fonts. America wasn't interested in modernism so he was forced to use type from the nineteenth century.
• Paul Rand, unlike Beal, was very sophisticated and cultured; aware of exhibitions and, ultimately, traveled in the right circles. He got the right clients and lots of literary magazines allowed him to design a real new aesthetic for modernism -- the idea that it's not about pure form, it's the idea of message-making. "Smart" design; making the unfamiliar familiar.
• Alexey Brodovitch taught editorial designers how to use photography effectively, making it the dominant tool in editorial layout -- introducing techniques like full-bleed photoraphy, sans serif type, as well as white space and asymmetrical layouts.
• The International Style / Swiss Design. The origins of the Swiss grid was actually catalyzed by the need to set multiple languages in a document or book. Early Swiss design saw the designer as a conduit or facilitator for delivering important information with clarity and relevancy.

The idea of a universal language is so powerful; a true pictorial system which transcends the barriers created by different countries and dialects and even rivalries between nations to create a true and clearly understood language. McLuhan's idea of a "global village" is a wonderful one -- and its something which I believe is very close to being acheived, especially with the technologies available to the human race at this moment. If a universal language was ever perfected, we would no longer be held by the fear of visiting a different country simply because we cannot speak in their tongue -- because we could find what we need, when we need it, based on a system of comprehensible isotypes.