Children begin speaking around 1 year old, testing the communication tools of the voice, lungs, mouth, and gesture. Communication lives solely in the body at this age. The senses are fully loaded with intake and expression, ‘language’ is emotional, gestural, and intuitive. They also begin to practice the language of marks—combining motor skills with tools and surfaces. This proto-writing has weak connections to oral language but a consistency in respect to arrangement and isolated lines.

The words ‘drawing’ and ‘writing’ are used by a verbal toddler to describe these marks. They’re working at developing a visual idea which they imply through spacial considerations—figure, ground, and an understanding that making a single mark creates an inside and an outside, thereby setting the stage for an understanding of deep visual communication strategies.

From the perspective of linguists and historians as well as the child, proto-writing is not a deficient representation of language, but a successful means of representing knowledge. This writing with weak connection to oral language attempts to transmit information from one individual to another, and for the child is successful and useful for the level and context of communication at hand.

Proto-writing introduces the possibility that a variety of techniques are available for coding information in effort to express experience or thought.

Pictography, or picture-writing is a form of proto-writing. Not attempting to record the sounds of words, the context of mark to mark is how the story is told by the pre-schooler. Within each context or page, a system approaches and may be easily repeated. The child-communicator defines space with enclosure, plays with scale, and controls distances between elements.

These pre-writing systems begin with images used as words, literally depicting something. But pictograms of this kind are limited—some physical objects are difficult to depict, and many words are concepts rather than objects. The edge between verbal, visual, and tactile expression expands as the child is encouraged to use the visual as another entrance into her everyday culture. ABOVE: ‘Me and you’

In word-writing, or logography, the object depicted is to be spoken aloud. ‘Characters’ hold both sound and idea and must be learned because they are specific to the author. ABOVE: ‘Open eyes watching’

Entering the world of symbols, children test combining pictures with concepts, testing the marriage of marks and mnemonics in abstraction. Symbols date to written language development before 4BC and come naturally as well to the 21st century child’s vocabulary of images—simple geometric forms with storytelling possibilities. ABOVE: ‘Family table’

Over time, individual pictograms become repeated, standardized, and perhaps abstracted. Complexity is added by context, sequence, and symbol relationships. Children naturally understand that a symbol is bound to a system-external referent and meaning is related to the object the symbol represents.

Symbols and mixed systems are joined with sound and speech to ultimately represent spoken communication, a type of rudimentary ‘reading’. ABOVE: ‘House’

ABOVE: ‘House that you have to guess which light switch turns on the light in the studio—you can only go up the stairs one time.’

Imitation encourages pre-writing, where symbols represent linguistic elements of sound. Children pretend to write their name over and over—mock letters become more conventional and real letters start to emerge. Now horizontal strings of letters are formed with an awareness that arrangement is necessary to make words, just like specific sounds need to be sequenced for understanding spoken language. ABOVE: ‘Cora’

Symbols are combined with signs of attempted writing, such as a signature repeatedly appearing in a certain position. ABOVE: Cora’s drawing of ‘Cora’, her signature above and her written ‘story’ at the bottom

When phonetic sound assumes priority in the writing system, incomplete (pre)writing becomes complete writing. Now the child tests the system by clustering, inverting, mirroring, and imitating scripts that replicate the writing of their culture.

In English, consonants (like Phoenician writing) are taught to be written first, then vowels (like the Greek addition) are added. Words are used as captions for images, emphasizing for the child that the story belongs in the words, in sound-symbols.

Writing was born out of the need to record the events of everyday life—throughout history, as well as for one child—we tell stories with standardized and systematized symbols and signs that we’ve connected to the sounds of language.

While Jack and Cora, now ten and twelve, have not entered into one writing system that is superior over any other used in the world today, they are now fluent in a graphic symbol system that developed in similar ways as their own skills and steps—from proto-writing to complete writing. Now they can communicate stories, feelings, and ideas to someone else, to themselves, over distances, and for later. Nuance, voice, form, and richness of the written word comes next.

Narrative is the proof of existence, writing is a social process. The successful process of standardization of complete writing systems means that humans can interact outside of conversation, body, and time.

WIth images and sound-symbols the child becomes the poet, the artist, writing down expression out of desire and necessity.

Architectural Failures

As architecture folk, a practitioner and a historian, we were interested in extending the idea of “fail again” to the built environment, and we began by being as literal-minded as possible.There are many ways for architecture to “fail” and some, like a structural failure, can be catastrophic, a matter of life and death.Other failures are less dire though still haptic and palpable, as when a building fails to accommodate the program or satisfy the function for which it was designed—a concert hall with poor acoustics or a parking garage with poor circulation.

For us, the most compelling form of architectural failure is also the least tangible, although it has been a disciplinary concern since the eighteenth century.Back then, as the canons of architectural authority were challenged by relativist aesthetics, theorists became preoccupied with the notion of caractère.As Germain Boffrand wrote in 1734, “Different buildings should, by their arrangement, their construction, and by the way in which they are decorated, proclaim their destination to the observer.”In other words, the building should express the character of its occupant and communicate its function.

“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.” Cool Hand Luke, 1967

It is a fundamental assumption of architecture that all buildings communicate, that through a particular configuration of form and space they impart or transmit various types of information.But how and what architecture communicates is not as simple as it seems because form and space are essentially abstractions, and deriving meaning from them, whether consciously or unconsciously, requires acute understanding at once primal and sophisticated, emotional and intellectual.And while a classical column is just as abstract as a modernist piloti in terms of derived meaning, in the 20^th century, in particular, architecture was accused of failing to communicate with its public.

Charles Jencks, post-modernism’s chief apologist, argued that metaphor, syntax, and semantics had collapsed in the architecture of the modern movement resulting in incomprehension and misunderstanding.What was especially troubling for Jencks was that the stripped and simplified surfaces of modernism had rendered buildings mute; they had become, in effect, dumb boxes. Only a return to sign and symbol could resuscitate a dying architecture and make buildings speak once more.

With apologies to Monty Python

A recurring bit from the first season of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, “How to Recognize Different Types of Trees from Quite a Long Way Away,” ironically demonstrates the limits of Jencks’ analysis of buildings.

Click here to view the video on you tube

Like the enigmatic narrator who keeps repeating the phrase “the larch,” Jencks refuses to acknowledge that signs and symbols are inherently unstable in their capacity to carry meaning and that meaning itself is frequently inscrutable.The ridiculous lessons of tree recognition are echoed in this slide show exploring the absurdities of architectural form and typology. It’s called “How to recognize different types of buildings from quite a long way away.”

Click here to view our slide show

Does a McMansion really communicate “house” more effectively or successfully than the Villa Savoye?Or is it just an old habit based, as Rudolph Wittkower observed in Architectural Principals in the Age of Humanism, on Andrea Palladio’s erroneous assumption that the temple front originated on ancient Roman houses?We’ve been living with that mistake for over five centuries now.

If it Quacks Like a Duck

When Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown famously distinguished the “duck” from the “decorated shed” they were attempting to clarify the ways in which architecture (mis)communicates.The building-as-duck was a kitsch variant of architecture parlante, or speaking architecture, itself an extreme manifestation of eighteenth century notions of caractère: a building shaped like a duck must have something to do with ducks; a building shaped like a donut must have something to do with donuts, etc.

For Venturi and Scott Brown this was highly problematic because it meant that meaning, which is notoriously dynamic with respect to program and function, was tied directly to form, which is notoriously static because of a building’s inherent, or at least perceived, permanence.If meaning changed and form didn’t then the building failed. It was, in essence, a duck that couldn’t quack, a duck that mooed or barked instead.To put it another way, the quack-as-communication is about as comprehensible as gibberish.How can you understand a donut-shaped building that sells beer?

Going further, Venturi and Scott Brown argued that some ducks failed to quack right from the start, especially in late modernism when heroic form-making eclipsed what they saw as a wrong-headed but sincere allegiance to form-follows-function. Though Le Corbusier’s Ronchamp is utterly beautiful and immensely moving, its abstraction renders metaphor all but useless. It is surely no accident that Corb wrote about “the ineffable” just as the building was completed; it is, literally, unspeakable. From a Venturi/Scott Brown p.o.v. the chapel doesn’t quack.

Though they conceptualized the duck in the early 1970s, and doctrinaire postmodernism has come and gone, things haven’t changed all that much in the past few decades. In fact, ducks have continued to breed like, well, rabbits.

Hadid’s Fire Station in Vitra and Gehry’s IAC in Manhattan don’t quack much either, despite some expressionistic flair that nods, respectively, to program and context. But what to do when the Fire Station houses furniture instead of tense, muscular firemen? And what happens when there are no more tall ships on the Hudson to remind us why a speculative office building on the river looks sort of like sails full of wind?

Almost All Right?

When they defined the decorated shed as “architecture as shelter with symbols on it,” Venturi and Scott Brown meant to offer a deliberately populist solution to modernist architecture’s communication breakdown.They thought they were making the dumb box speak and giving architecture its voice back.But in so doing, they muddled the notion of architecture as the purposeful manipulation of form and space and surface.In the decorated shed, form and space are neutral and only the surface is charged with intention and meaning.3-D is inconsequential; only 2-D matters; architecture takes a back seat to graphic design.

Whether the decorated shed is a Wal-Mart or a MoMA, graphics are required for effective communication.But if graphics are what is making a building-as-decorated shed speak, isn’t the architecture still failing to communicate?

Dead Duck

If duck buildings fail because their capacity to communicate is predicated upon obsolete or abstract form and decorated shed buildings fail because their capacity to communicate relies on surface rather than space, architecture as architecture would seem to find itself in an increasingly tenuous position with respect to the culture at large.Buildings may shelter us as humans, but they fail, in a Heideggerian sense, to house our humanity.

Still, it is too depressing to relinquish all hope for architectural recuperation.And since Fail Again challenged us to examine design failures for evidence of progress then, of necessity, we must continue to interrogate the antithetical architectural failures of duck and shed in order to mediate their spatial/surface extremes.

Michael Graves’ Portland Building achieved instant notoriety as a post-modern decorated shed par excellent:a dull box of standard-issue government office floor plates done up in cartoonish, pseudo-historical drag.But around those fancy facades, lingered a faint whiff of the barnyard.With its pedestal-like base and over-scaled indifference to its site, the building is more than a little ducky.Indeed, in proclaiming “I am a monument,” it very nearly quacks.

But really, who cares?The Portland Building is nearly three decades old and its polemics are as dead as Philip Johnson. In fact, that is precisely why we should care: now that the ideological fires have died out, we can look at the Portland Building and realize that in his throw-away combination of duck and shed Michael Graves improbably pointed a way forward.

Or maybe there was just something in the smoggy air of the late 70s–after all, while Graves was playing with his pastels in Princeton, Rem Koolhaas (with help from Zoe Zenghelis) was wandering the streets of delirious New York looking for the architectural future in the commercial past of Coney Island and Times Square.

And what did Rem discover?That fantasy, desire, and the unconscious are important characters in the performance of architecture.That mutations, mongrels, and hybrids are far more interesting than formal neutrality and typological purity.That exploring the tension between space and surface is far more productive than complaining about the failures of their strict opposition.

Design Tools

In the past few decades the productive tension between 2D design and 3D design has yielded a new critical dimension in contemporary architecture, one that most decidedly represents progress founded on earlier failures.While the theoretical and practical investigations that followed postmodernism’s attack on architecture’s supposed communication breakdown are partly responsible, so, too, are more recent technological advances.

In addition to obvious design developments like CAD and 3D modeling software,LED skins and digital projections, laser etching and silk screening, and CNC milling and casting have given architects communication tools far more sophisticated than the signage/surfaces of an earlier generation of decorated sheds.

In the 1990s Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron designed several highly-refined buildings that demonstrated how to effectively deploy these new tools for communicating in architecture.In eastern France, medicinal herbs screened onto polycarbonate panels speak of a Ricola cough drop factory; in eastern Germany, old master paintings and newspaper photographs imprinted in concrete speak of a technical school library.

In 2003, for a cultural center located in birth place of flamenco in southern Spain, they proposed a series of perforated concrete screens that were, appropriately, half Gypsy and half Arabic.The architects called these “an iconographical topography,” but they were also a glamorous flourish, a 21st-century algomrithmic adaptation of 1960s Edward Durell Stone.

Either way, in their dynamic arabesques the concrete screens recall the decorative motifs of Moorish architecture as surely as they conjure images of pulsating flamenco dancers decked out in batas de cola and mantones.

In all three buildings, the cool clarity of Swiss diplomacy has replaced the loudness of Las Vegas populism, though not without wit and humor. And while these buildings have an affinity with the decorated shed, they are better understood by what we call the graphic box.

Too Graphic

In the decorated shed communication is extrinsic and applied, like an embellishment or ornament; in the graphic box it is intrinsic and more difficult to separate from the materiality of the building. In the decorated shed that which communicates is ON the building; in the graphic box, it is OF the building.

The graphic box is graphic not only in its relation to graphic design–though this is obvious and important–but in its ability to be vivid, explicit, and unequivocal. If the decorated shed is a one-liner, the graphic box is a money shot.

In Herzog and de Meuron’s recent work, boxes have given way to programmed, though not programmatic, form-making.The 2005 Allianz Arena in Munich is an uber-modern, uber-functional coliseum that emanates glowing color–red, blue, or white–depending on which of three home football teams is playing that night.

This building says “sports stadium” in a language as ancient as the Romans and as contemporary as the World Cup. And in speaking an unabashedly architectural language, this building just might lay to rest, once and for all, the surface vs. space communication canard.

The duck is dead. The shed is dead.

Long live graphic architecture.

[Our ruminations on graphic architecture are continued in How to Look at Buildings from Quite Close Up]

]]> http://designinquiry.net/failagain/1343/failings-in-architecture-pt-1/feed/ 0 http://designinquiry.net/failagain/1340/designed-to-accommodate-change-failed-systems-of-change/ http://designinquiry.net/failagain/1340/designed-to-accommodate-change-failed-systems-of-change/#comments Sat, 26 Mar 2011 14:28:38 +0000 Ann McDonald http://designinquiry.angelisagirlsname.com/?p=131 ]]>

Our everyday, built environment is full of typographic failures, many a consequence of system failures. Sign systems which are accessible to small businesses through minimal effort or cost, often fail to offer adequate flexibility and ease of maintenance. These systems and templates—designed specifically to accommodate change—are strained by constantly shifting communication needs. The cost of goods and services and hours of operation, seemingly simple facts, are often accompanied by narratives and contingencies that mirror nuanced human and business activities. The resulting system failures and workarounds are only marginally communication failures, as key information is imparted regardless of the typographic and system failures. Examining evidence of these failures exposes a rich, accumulated visual history of past states, suggesting that our present state is uncertain at best.

This essay focuses on failures in the display of prices and hours, but evidence of the struggle to cope with constant message change is found throughout the built environment.

Methods employed to accommodate changing messages have evolved through the years as new technologies have developed. These strategies include surface paint and repaint, rotate and flip mechanisms, tracks and inserts, rearrangeable individual letter systems, mechanical fasteners, write and erase surfaces, adhesives, vinyl letters, and various digital and screen-based delivery methods.

Rapidly changing economic conditions have sparked fuel price swings, repeated markdowns and reduced hours. Added to the usual seasonal price and hour changes, these recent conditions have pushed sign systems to a failure point that was noticed by national news media.

Mechanical devices and systems, designed to accommodate change, break down for many reasons, including a lack of end user motivation to maintain as designed. Often parts and letterforms needed to maintain these systems must be stored and then retrieved for later use. There are also limitations imposed by the number of available letterforms provided or even the number of digits allowed. Adhesive based systems often fail because removal appears to be difficult, either requiring a time consuming process or a lack of appropriate solvents. This results in defunct information requiring masking or layering, an everyday palimpsest that exposes failed efforts to remove or hide past states.

Modifying individual prices, route numbers, or directional arrows involves a limited typographic structure, where one number or direction is replaced by another. Hours of business, on the other hand, require more complex typographic structures. There are template signs available that simplify the communication to an ‘open’ or ‘closed’ state or a dial or clock which is spun to indicate the time when staff will return. There are many templates available to aid in the display of a detailed list of hours. These templates reduce the communication to a simple fill-in-the blank of open and close hours in a predetermined seven-day structure. This is a default condition, which at first glance, seems fail-safe and easy to use. A closer observation of the actual use of these signs shows much more nuanced communication needs. In some cases the repetition of the same hours day after day leads to a texture that actually obscures the intended message. In other cases multiple open and close times within a single day are squeezed into the predetermined spaces. Marking the closed days presents a quandary and additional notes are frequently added to explain extenuating circumstances and provide contact information.

The failure of the templates to anticipate the communication of seasonal hours, holiday weekends, vacations and other contingencies, typically prompt additional signs to amend the base store hours. Some businesses choose to explicitly communicate uncertainty and variance through their signs. Many of the observed failures appear to stem from an acceptance of casual notes and visible fixes as a means of communicating a local, non-corporate enterprise.

Digital signs offer the promise to ameliorate many of the failures and limitations of changeable mechanical and adhesive systems. LED screens, installed as part of city or corporate sign systems, offer easily updated transportation route numbers and gas prices. Fluid grids of pixels offer the potential for instant updates and reduced failure rates with the exception of malfunctions that expose underlying code, an absence of data, or system shutdown.

But readily accessible and affordable digital signs displayed by small businesses present a different set of potential failures. These signs typically offer small screen size, limited typographic choices and preprogrammed transitions. The ill considered parsing of messages into endlessly repeating loops often result in a failure to communicate clearly without a time investment by viewer to piece together the fractured message. Additional options including stock images and transitions can easily be used in ways that obscure basic hours and prices, adding complexity to the messages conveyed.

Despite promised seamlessness, each new technology has limitations evidenced in failure and expedient workarounds. Future delivery of everyday information will likely be through RIFD (Radio Frequency Identification), allowing cell phone users to receive hours and prices based on their proximity to a business. The design and distribution of systems and default templates used in everyday communcation is a fertile area for designers wanting to make an impact on typographic failure.

Documentation of ship’s names dates back to Egyptian times when pharaohs had highly ornamented vessels named for them. In general, the names glorified some aspect of the pharaoh’s persona, prowess, or reign. The names did not appear on the vessels, but were found in writings as early as 1500 BC.

Model boat from Tut's tomb

Later, the Greeks and Romans amassed substantial navy fleets in which all of the ships were named. The names were after mythological figures, attributes such as grace and beauty, ideals of power and victory, as well as animals and geography. Many ships had carved and painted ornament, though it is questionable whether those markings were naming devices for the ships or purely for decoration. Historian William Murray argues that by 480 BC names were appearing on warships as is stated in Themistocles Decree of 480 BC. In the few known examples, names were written in all capital letters, as is familiar in the chiseled letterforms of Greek and Roman public lettering.

From ancient times through the Renaissance, ships were primarily military or commercial. Their names were documented in various records but very few visual examples remain. Personal watercraft were not recorded so it is not known if they were named, and pleasure boats didn’t appear with any regularity until the early 17th century in Europe. On some of the royalty’s finest ships, names did appear on plaques attached to the transom (back) of the ship. The typography was presented in centered capital letters, or occasionally, script typefaces.

Boat naming has a continuous history following from those earliest ships. Tracing styles from Europe, and then England, affords the best genealogy for American ship names. Traditions such as using feminine names and very straightforward capital letters were carried over to the Colonies and followed. Names were purely functional and typographic experimentation didn’t exist. It wasn’t until pleasure craft truly blossomed in the early 1900’s that the typographic style of boat names started to exercise any creativity. A small exception was the paddleboats of the late 1880’s. Following the style of broadsheets and the ornamental woodcut type of advertisements, paddleboat names could be found in Fat Face or extended serif type paired with drop shadows and outlines. These names were actually fun.

Escort in a painting by James Edward Butterworth in the mid-1880's (courtesy of Mariners' Museum)

The majority of boat names were painted directly on the hull of the boat either by the boat owner or a sign painter. For the most part the names were utilitarian, a simple naming device for identification. Working (commercial) boats had the name on both sides of the bow (front), along with a registration number, and also on the transom (back). Personal pleasure craft typically positioned the name on the transom only. In all, the lettering was traditional, meaning it was in all capital letters in either a serif or sans serif typestyle.

Edith and Defiance from 1911 (courtesy of Cline Library)

Pleasure boats were the domain of the wealthy and Cornelius Vanderbilt is credited with commissioning the first motor yacht named North Star. Yacht clubs for sailors were established as early as the 1830’s and those racing yachts favored names associated with the natural elements and the challenges of competition. A list of American yacht names for motor and sail was started in 1881, The American Yacht List, which revealed that feminine names such as Margaret and Alice were most common. A few uncharacteristic names listed were As You Like It and Skeidaddle, along with 5 boats named Truant. Go crazy.

Wayfarer has some letterspacing issues (courtesy of Mariners' Museum)

Handpainted and gold-leafed (lettered by Lisa Hutchinson)

Names and lettering styles were surprisingly conventional throughout the first two thirds of the 20th century regardless of the boat size or means of power. The historical utility of the name overrode the ability to see other design possibilities. Even as innovative commercial signage, company logos, and other forms of communication design flourished, boat names and lettering followed tradition. Sign painters lettered in the styles of Garamond, Bodoni, Caslon and block sans serifs, in a centered alignment. One could consider this a failure of creativity but that wouldn’t exactly be fair. Letterers, although working within narrow typographic parameters, found ways to add nuances and detail to the names, just with smaller moves. Their understanding of “good typography” created well spaced, evenly proportioned and well rendered names. And occasionally some good ligatures, flourishes or drawn elements too.

A breakthrough did come from two different places in the post WWII era—technology and economic prosperity. The 1960’s brought fiberglas technology to boating, which by the 1980’s dominated boat construction, and forever changed the way boaters thought about their boats. And in the 1980’s, traditionally hand lettered boat names were challenged by a new technology—vinyl cut letters. Both technologies, while initially resisted, eventually won out for their ease, durability, and innovation. The 1980’s also enjoyed an economic boom typified by a huge surge in boat ownership. This confluence encouraged more personal and inventive names and typographic solutions, whether you enjoy their zaniness or not. The emphasis on corporate identity in professional design, along with a greater awareness of design by the public, trickled down to boat owners interested in branding their possessions. And sign painters who embraced technology delighted in the greater creativity afforded by it, as well as by the acceptance of looser naming conventions.

Handpainted

Handpainted

Early vinyl (designed by Carla Christopher)

Currently, boating in the US is a 70 billion dollar industry including over 18 million boats. No small numbers for successes, failures or allure.

The Failure May Seem Obvious

Now, in contemporary boat lettering and graphics a DIY culture exists alongside the professional letterer’s craft. In a healthy percentage of DIY boat names a failure is plainly evident: poor typographic choices, bad letterspacing, unimaginative solutions, or even worse, overly imaginative solutions. A trained designer can spot a DIY name from a dock away. Some are just groaners, and others are appallingly bad. But many of these failures shouldn’t entirely be blamed on the DIYer.

Web-based online boat graphics software available to consumers has as many good features as bad. The software limits creativity in some areas and offers bad typographic options in others. Limitations such as having to design the name and hailing port separately makes the boat owner think of them as distinct elements instead of a single unit, which doesn’t afford compositional integration. Other software functions give too much flexibility allowing for letterforms to be distorted in unacceptable ways. Wacky, ill-proportioned type, “slanted” type, and type poorly positioned along arcs are the most common offenders. Because the options are there, boat owners will try them, like them and use them.

Typography snob that I am, at first these “type crimes” (to borrow Ellen Lupton’s term) were deliciously troubling. I was always on deck looking for the next bad example to document for my photo archive. The archive grew really fast, sometimes exponentially, just at a single marina. There was a certain delight to their failure. But once I examined the DIY culture in boat graphics more closely, I understood that it wasn’t simply bad taste, and that there were patterns to some of the “crimes.”

There is a fear (and failure) by designers to encourage good typography for all. To paraphrase Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich, “typography is the only aspect of design that is truly a designer’s.” Which means that it is the only element of communication design for which we can prove our knowledge and expertise. To use a boating analogy, anyone can tie a knot, but a proper sailor’s knot surpasses a landlubbers in both function and style. The difference is, you can buy a book that teaches knot tying, but up until recently, designers held the secrets of typography pretty close. In our open source culture, typography and design shouldn’t be held close anymore. We shouldn’t be afraid to reveal what is behind the letterform. The time for gloating, or disappointment, in what the general public does and understands about typography is over.

In my experience, boat owners and novice sign shop operators are interested in learning about type and would like to have good tools to use. In the same way that other industries, especially photography, have developed “pro-sumer” cameras, scanners and Photoshop-like software, designers and typographers should lend their expertise in a variety of ways. One of the most simple is to work with developers of software and type tools. Imagine if Microsoft Word and PowerPoint actually promoted good typography by the way the tools were used and the menu choices available. Software with good customization and creative options could elevate understanding, instead of standing in its way. Imagine if boat graphics software had well designed artwork instead of cheesy clip art. Or, if the customer was able to make their own graphics from a high-quality kit of parts. We’d see a lot more floating typographic beauty.

This is in part a failure at the educational level. Training prospective designers for practice is expected, but what if that practice includes more emphasis on making typography accessible instead of being in control of it? Not enough design programs are emphasizing typography as an area of expertise that can be parlayed into engineering, science or technology. Yet.

The Allure May Seem Unfathomable

Current boat names range from traditional to kitsch and from cerebral to sometimes embarrassingly personal. And that’s just the name itself. The design of names has a narrower range often somewhere between acceptable and awful, with a few beauties occasionally. My experience while showing boat name images to designers is to get belly laughs and groans. So what makes them alluring?

If you step away from the formal typography and design decisions for a moment and start to focus on boat names as mini-brands, all of the sudden, they get even more interesting. When you know that the name is a memorial to a lost family member, or conversely, the name is unabashed self-glorification (or TMI), it opens up a whole new look at contemporary culture. It also begs the question, why so many double entendres and braggarts?

Owner is a doctor specializing in erectile dysfunction

A few statistics can help tell the story. In a 2005 Sports Illustrated online survey 22% of boaters said that coming up with a name for their boat was harder than naming their children or pets. And according to Boating World’s Top Ten Boat Names, Aquaholic and Seas the Day have been consistent winners since 2002. Why? As was evident from the brief history, naming is not new. People name all sorts of personal possessions including their computer hard drives. Take for instance vanity license plates for cars. They have been available since the late 1950’s and common since the 1980’s, and there is a certain level of ingenuity or creativity involved in delivering that message clearly through text.

What makes boat names different is the visual manifestation of the name. Presumably, with a boat name you can convey whatever you wish, there are far fewer limitations than a license plate or a commercial logo. Yet interestingly, you don’t see as many names in which the design is overwhelmingly inventive or as personal as it could be. There is a moving line between customization, personal expression, and the notion of originality. Online software can give the feeling of personal expression (or even originality for some folks) when in fact it is offering limited customization easily replicated by another user. A good professional letterer has the imagination and tools to create original work, although customers requesting that type of solution don’t come along as often as you’d expect. And now with three-dimensional illuminated boat signage on megayachts the fascination with technology can override the typographic ingenuity. Having said all of that, there are some beautifully executed names in all categories.

Tradition does play a role in the design if you consider that it’s taken roughly 3000 years to get to this level of creativity. For some boat owners, name identification is still the primary goal, just as it has always been. And for others there are connotations associated with certain boat sizes and styles that are perpetuated through the design. Sailors are known to be more traditional and cerebral, while power boaters, especially those with smaller sized boats are described as goofy, fun-loving or egotistical. As a possession, a boat does make a statement about the person.

In our blogging, twittering, social networking culture, boat names as personal mini-brands could be more expressive in a “check me out” kind of way. Perhaps they’re not because, being adhered to a transom, they’re more permanent than fleeting? Or, because more boat owners are baby boomers than millennials? Or because boat names integrate text and images? The next generation of boat owners could be the ones to break with tradition, and personally I’m curious to see if they will.

So…there is allure in finding really good names. There is allure in knowing the stories behind those names. There is allure in appreciating vernacular typography for the cultural snapshot it provides. And of course as designers, there is the presumption we could create something more alluring, just given the chance.

Dan Clowes, detail from Art School Confidential

This essay originally appeared on DesignObserver.

Like the canary in the coal mine, there’s much that can be learned from careful observation of design school culture today. In education, students can easily be grouped into one of two categories: the Sentient and the Bag of Meat. The Bag of Meat, dead from the neck up leads Thoreau’s “life of quiet desperation” and is the embodiment of consumerist attitudes towards learning. The Bag of Meat is deceptively quick with an excuse, stupefyingly slow with an answer, and terminally late to accept responsibility for the content and the character of their education. Life is filled with Bags of Meat. And though, by my estimation, and corroborated by the musings of Thoreau and Nietzsche, they comprise the vast majority of students, they are not our concern.

It is the Sentient student with whom we are concerned.

In most cases, design education takes place within the larger context of this thing called “art school.” Art school culture is a unique subculture within American education. In Art School Confidential, Dan Clowes claims to “blow the lid off a million-dollar racket” whereby Clowes carefully exposes art school as a cabal of snake oil salesmen, has-beens and hirsute poseurs. Well, I’m calling bullshit.

Just as the smash hit films, Superbad, Knocked-up and She’s Out of My League, resonate deeply in American culture because they portray a re-balanced universe of pathetic couch-squatting, disempowered male losers [1] who magically win the affection of overachieving super-females, Art School Confidential resonates deeply with all of those sleep-walkingBags of Meat, who see any knowledge beyond their immediate intellectual grasp as illegitimate. Art School Confidential is a mirror that legitimizes ones’ intellectual, spiritual and physical laziness. Like the law of gravity, there are simple immutable physical laws that govern the universe. [2] Chief among these laws is: knowledge is power. This simple inescapable truth undergirds what Sentient students in real art schools are working so hard to achieve. These students strive to achieve agency and real power through knowledge. Knowledge begets power. Power begets a higher level of self-determination. Self-determination begets a better life.

Dan Clowes, detail from Art School Confidential

Clowes outlines two potential career paths for the art school kid. With this kind of pathetic attitude, what would you expect? It would seem far more productive to throw down with Busta Rhymes, “There never was a plan B.” Or to assimilate the kind of gangster-grind work ethic of 50 Cent. Come on kid, I’m gunna make something of myself “or die trying.” Clowes and Judd Apatow’s toxic ideology would have you believe that merit, meaning and success (yes, success) are the result of luck and the ability to talk a big game. Of course, verbal skills may be important, but I would posit the opposite. Merit, meaning and success are the result of the hustle, skill, knowledge, sweat and heart.

Jonah Hill (left) and 50 Cent (right)

The Heart of the Matter

Draw a conceptual line through art school, trace it down through design school, and then extend it out into life. The real issue, the heart of the matter, is all about “bliss.” Joseph Campbell’s much maligned and misinterpreted concept extrapolated from the Upanishads:

Now, I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, which is the great spiritual language of the world, there are three terms that represent the brink, the jumping-off place to the ocean of transcendence: sat-chit-ananda. The word “Sat” means being. “Chit” means consciousness. “Ananda” means bliss or rapture. I thought, “I don’t know whether my consciousness is proper consciousness or not; I don’t know whether what I know of my being is my proper being or not; but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being.” I think it worked. [4]

The real issue regarding life and work is the struggle. The struggle to transcend our own limitations. The arrow through the heart of the matter is the desire to achieve higher consciousness, greater power and meaning in life and work. This happens not through the anti-intellectualism, entitlement, sloth and the general existential malaise that pervades our culture. Disaffection, ennui and nihilism are for the weak. The pathetic characters populating Clowes’ art school landscape, and those they appeal to, are Thoreau’s great mass of men who “lead lives of quite desperation.” Campbell’s “bliss” is the eternal sunshine piercing the fog of this torpor. Bliss is the pathway that the Sentient struggles to remain on. Bliss, that feeling of being deeply at home in something, denies external pressure. It denies duty and expectation in favor of knowledge of self. It should have been a critical component of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. It is in fact, the primary mechanism enabling and leading to self actualization. It is akin to the Jesuit notion ofmagis, Latin for “the more.” Bliss enables and engenders magis. [5] In its simplest terms the concerns of everyday life appear to be at odds with Bliss and with self-actualization. [6] Yet this simply reflects a failure of imagination.

Apatow and Clowes are but two of a nearly infinite wellspring of sources, seducing the populace with the promise of short-cuts.They are pied pipers leading others down the primrose path of victimhood, they encourage the viewer to distrust fancy book learning and sweat equity. Go ahead park your ass on the couch all day and smoke some weed, somehow you’ll score a hot-chick with a great job. Oh, and if you don’t make it as a designer, blame your school: after all, those fancy polysyllabic words in those books were a con game anyway. Good luck with that and let me know how it works out.

Oh, by the way, next time you see Mr. Clowes do me a favor, and ask him how he likes working at the art supply store.

Notes:
1. Typically there is a corollary to every theorem, and in this case it’s important to understand the Jonah Hill Corollary. It is true that super-females will mate with men who appear to be disempowered couching, squatting losers. But there are two conditions that must be met in order to achieve the balance necessary to sustain this relationship. First, the aforementioned male must be hilariously funny. And second (and most importantly) the male must be fabulously wealthy. This wealth is reflection of drive, intellect, cunning, power, social capital or family connection. The problem with Apatowian films, and the reason why they resonate so deeply, is that they specifically leave this critical element out. They are specifically about the disempowered finding the short-cut, taking the easy way out, living the impossible dream. They buttress the viewer’s basest instincts and laziest impulse.

2. Most foundation studies courses contain a two-dimensional design component. This foundation usually deals with perceptual psychology, color theory and highly formalist issues. Form making can be traced back to simple principles dealing with the physical structure of the human eye and how that interfaces with perception. This is not some highfalutin city-slicker bullshit a beret-wearing intellectual made up. These issues have an evolutionary function and are tied to our survival as a species. Coming to a deeper understanding of these issues bolsters one’s ability to bring form-making under ones command — it gives one agency with regard to form. Ah, but obviously the art school snake-oil that Clowes is debunking refers to this thing called “Theory”: structuralism, post-structuralism, queer theory, post-colonial theory, linguistics, etc… The same issues are at play here but extend the conversation into what a work means. Struggling with Chomsky or de Saussures’ writings on the nature of language, as an example, do not make you a weaker artist. It makes you a stronger artist.

3. “I still say that you are overlooking the third type. I think you have bags of meat, robot sharks, and sentient beings. Robot sharks are quick with an excuse, like the bag of meat, but quick with an answer, like a sentient being. Robot sharks are aiming at a salary, but pretend to be concerned with meaning. They are the type that is most difficult to discern because the bag of meat has not, for the most part, the capacity to maintain the appearance of anything but a bag of meat; the sentient being cannot maintain deception for terribly long, because his conscience will not allow it; but the robot shark can mimic all the positive attributes of both when necessary. I think you could potentially acknowledge a third type and still make your concern the sentient being. However, as it is and as it will be misinterpreted regardless, the ultimate point of the essay does not REALLY hinge on these distinctions. The essence of your argument may be just as valuable for the bag of meat as the sentient being. But the design world is largely made up of robot sharks, so it may be a good provocative addition to include that type.” — Joshua Ray Stephens

4. Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, edited by Betty Sue Flowers. Doubleday, 1988, p. 120.

5. I plan to explore these ideas in much greater detail at DesignInquiry:JOY in June 2010.

6. At the risk of seriously undermining my position, our culture’s primary spiritual leader Deepak-Opra reminds us that we should love what we do, and the rest will take care of itself.

The process of organizing the styles of this period is complicated by the widespread pirating of type designs during the late 19th century. The pantograph, while fundamental to the mass production of wood type, also made it easy to copy a competitor’s wood type by using the type itself as a pattern, subtly modifying the resultant copies to sell as ‘originals.’ While copying created a great proliferation of wood type designs it facilitated the blurring of the distinct visual characteristics inherent to a particular style.

The two primary texts on the history of 19th century typography are Nicolete Gray’s Nineteenth Century Ornamented Typefaces first published in 1938 and Rob Roy Kelly’s American Wood Types 1828–1900 first published in 1969. Both Gray and Kelly constructed narratives that chronologically related type-form progression during the 19th century. They also defined the styles of this time period in different ways. Gray divided types based on the “essential nature of these type faces”[6] into three categories: Ornamented, Semi-ornamented and Plain Face. Plain Face was further divided into four families: Fat Face, Sans Serif, Egyptian and Clarendon.

Kelly believed the progression to be a series of derivations of three primary serif styles—Roman, Antique and Gothic—that showed “rather than a mass of unrelated designs…more of an evolutionary continuity to the development of styles than has been supposed.”[7]

The Rob Roy Kelly America Wood Type Collection is a comprehensive collection of wood type from the nineteenth century. It is comprised of nearly 150 faces of various sizes and styles, including examples of the most popular printing types in use between 1828 and 1910. To gain a comprehensive understanding of the actual composition of the collection, as the Design Curator of the Collection, I developed a systematic process to organize the collection for analysis. The fact that the Kelly Collection is a working study collection necessitated the organizing of the types into a pragmatic system that allowed for unencumbered accessibility and ease of navigation without excluding any of the comprehensive historical data.

To this end, the collection has been organized stylistically around Kellyʼs three primary categories of Roman, Antique and Gothic. The system goes further by adding a secondary and tertiary set of described attributes. Secondary categories derived from the three primary styles are used to further differentiate the overall visual form. Roman is subdivided into Old Style and Fat Face; Antique is subdivided into Egyptian (unbracketed), Clarendon (bracketed) and Tuscan (semi-ornamented); Gothic is subdivided into Lineal (uniform), Modulated (non-uniform) and Tuscan (semi-ornamented). Three distinct sets of tertiary categories, derived from any of the primary or secondary styles, are used to describe specific visual attributes of the body, the terminals or the ornaments. Body attributes describe overall conditions of the type body, and are divided into Plain Face, Inverse, Light Weight, Condensed, Extended and Concave. In the second tertiary set, terminal attributes describe derivations of the serif or end stroke and are divided into Bi- or Tri-furcated, Pointed, Wedge, Bevel and Rounded. Finally, the third tertiary set describes ornamentation. Attributes of the ornament describe the nature of elements added to the basic type structure and are divided into Medial Ornament, Reverse, Streamer, Chromatic, Historiated, Outline, Tooled and Shaded.

Organizing in this manner instigated the creation of a visual matrix to better tabulate the stylistic composition of the collection. The matrix provides a convenient visual tool to determine what is present in the collection. As importantly, the matrix also shows clearly what is not represented in the collection. While the matrix was developed as a way to deal with existing types, it has also proved surprisingly useful as a tool for generating new forms. By combining a selection of characteristics from the matrix, it is possible to “assemble” a type with a unique set of attributes. A conceptual method for “programing” new type designs.

______________

[1] The Thibaudeau Classification system groups type into four general families, according to shape and serif character. The system was invented in 1921 by the French typographer Francis Thibaudeau, and was a major was influential on Maximilien Vox.

[2] Devised by Maximilien Vox in the 1930s and published in 1954, The Vox System was adopted in 1962 by the Association Typographique Internationale (ATypI). Originally a ten-part classification, Vox revised the system to a more compact nine-part scheme.

[3] Based on the Vox-ATypI system as adopted in Britian in 1967. The system was comprised of twelve classification categories and known as the British Standards Classification of Typefaces (BS 2961:1967).

[4] First published in A Manual of Comparative Typography by Benjamin Bauermeister in 1988, the initial version of the PANOSE system was comprised of seven classification categories and was based on visual parameters. It was revised in 1993 as a classification system based on actual measurement data taken from the typefaces.

[5] Catherine Dixon, “Describing typeforms: a designer’s response,” InfoDesign: Brazilian Journal of Information Design vol. 5, no. 2 (December 2008), http://www.infodesign.org.br/conteudo/artigos/308/ing/InfoDesign_v5_n2_2008_01_Dixon.pdf.

[6] Nicolete Gray, Nineteenth Century Ornamented Typefaces. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976), 5.

[7] Rob Roy Kelly, American Wood Type, 1828–1900: Notes on the Evolution of Decorated and Large Types and Comments on Related Trades of the Period. (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1969), 90.

Steven Heller: What was the impetus for launching DesignInquiry?

DesignInquiry: It came out of the Maine Summer Institute of Graphic Design, a kind of master-student summer class held at Maine College of Art, with visiting master-designers like Wolfgang Weingart, Rudolph de Harak, Lucille Tenazas, Douglass Scott, Dorothea Hofmann and Steff Geissbuhler.  In the 10th year, we realized we were having the most fun between the sessions when faculty overlapped at the supper table, when clashes and simpatico moments took root, and private conversations became wide ranging, not about individuals, but about directions and questions. Why couldn’t these moments be the event? We realized we had to start over. The whole thing had been based on an old, one way, structure. These are times of sharing – a child can teach a professor – so why not ask every participant to contribute? We had a great set of connections to begin with.

The first two years of DesignInquiry, 2004 and 2005, were still held at Maine College of Art, but after that we formed an independent non-profit organization and moved the event to Vinalhaven Island. Applications are invited in the Spring and about 24 people come along to explore a design-related topic over an intense week, this year in July. No one is paid for his or her contribution, what we have now is a group of people interested in design research in an unusual setting in a round-the-clock time frame, isolated from life’s typical interruptions.

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SH: What are the guidelines?

DI: We publicize the theme in advance (eg. Identity in the information age or, this year, typography and failure) and applicants are asked why they want to come and what they’ll contribute. Some people bring workshop methods they want to try out, or slide presentations based on initial research. During the week, a great deal of stuff is made, and the groundwork is laid for a subsequent publication of the “findings”. Each person brings something different to the table, both in terms of content and in terms of approach, and everyone presents their take on the subject; we use the term “present” loosely because it’s not as if anyone is presenting a major research paper in an academic conference setting – “share” might be a better word.

Other than a few people loosely providing a framework for the event, there’s a flat hierarchy that absolutely requires an investment on the part of all participants. The idea is to foster a highly social, sustained conversation about a pressing design issue or idea, sharing knowledge, side tracks and dead ends.

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SH: How are the themes decided upon?

DI: Gut-feeling, based on listening, reading, dreaming, sometimes anger, sometimes wonder. It’s where the personal and professional collide, in quick conversations after the event, or by thrashing out some themes on an online forum. At some point in this year’s deliberations it was suggested that we might choose a subject we all know about, like typography. Typography is like language, it’s always being corrupted, always failing to achieve standards, and in so doing it grows. So it’s an inquiry into typography and failure as a means of growth.

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SH: With design changing, in large part owing to technology but also to the shift in skills demanded of designers, how is DesignInquiry addressing the future of design?

DI: In some respects we feel like it’s impossible to put a group of designers together on an island for a week and not address the future of design. This group includes educators, students and practitioners, and each person faces “the future” presently in their own setting. We also try to catch the interest of people from outside design. One of the board members is Ron Botting, an actor, who taught us that there are roles for all: on stage, in the wings, or in the audience; and these roles may change and shift constantly. In previous years an architect, a psychoanalyst, a philosophy historian, and a photographer joined in.

But we also benefit greatly from being at a remove from the technological imperatives of design, which often tend to overshadow more considered, strategic reflections on creativity. Having no access to the Internet for a week is actually a blessing. (Besides which, there’s no shortage of other venues for drooling over new technologies.)

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SH: This is as close to we come to a design Think Tank. How do you move the ideas gleaned out of the tank and into the world?

DI: We are more a Design-experience-Tank — not really interested in ‘solving problems’ but in gaining awareness. Moving the ideas out happens by word of mouth, through the dispersion of each person back into their environment, through the network of connections made by participants, and through the book that’s made at the end of it all. The ’07 and’08 DesignInquiry journals are available to purchase or download on Lulu. There is also a documentary film of 2007, shot and edited by Mark Jamra, the typographer.

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SH: The design salon is not a new phenomenon, but the notion is picking up steam. Do you feel that this is the “anti-conference?”

DI: Rick Poynor’s recent http://designinquiry.net/failagain/87/neon-typography/ http://designinquiry.net/failagain/87/neon-typography/#comments Sun, 28 Dec 2008 04:46:25 +0000 Peter Hall http://failagain.designinquiry.net/?p=87 ]]> I’ve been fascinated with neon signs since I first arrived in the US in 1991: along with the twinkling skyline, it characterizes the excitement of the American city at night, but unlike the giant LCD billboard or the floodlit building, neon comes with a highly visible flipside, a kind of sadness in its daylit, dysfunctional state, that makes its nighttime persona burn brighter and with more intensity. There’s incredible pathos in this contradiction, between the backside of neon, with its blackened tubes, tangles of wires, transformers and then the unearthly glow of a rare gas charged at high voltage in sealed tinted glass , yielding a delicious array of colors: cobalt blue, hot pink, blood red and emerald green.

I think this pathos, coupled with the bombastic, persuasive, imaginative and desperate content of the signs’ messages, helps make neon typography a kind of urban poetry of yearning, yearning for something that is patently not there, which is the essence of advertising.

Neon is constantly promising and offering, in the sky, on windows, buildings, clouds, creating an illuminated textual overlay through which we consumers read the world. The effect of the neon textscape is to make the state of desiring a constant condition. What do I feel like? Burger or falafel? Falafel or burger?

Typographically speaking, it is quite an extraordinary mechanical—not digital–mutation of the printed letterform.  I talked to some neon sign makers in Austin, and the technique is unchanged since the 1930s.

EGANI school, NYC, 1930s (photo Edward Seise, from Stern)

It struck me that the whole neon medium is characterized by a kind of typographical failure, or at least, compromise. First, the fact that discreet letterforms are not a very practical solution when you’re bending glass, at least at small scale; it is generally more economical and efficient to make an entire word out a single glass tube, in sections up to eight feet long per transformer (which is as much gas as the transformer can charge up). But as most designers and even design critics know, making display type using script fonts is a short cut to illegibility, particularly if in the production your letterforms are going to bleed excessively. So while the glass tubes require continuity, the glow of light, the bleed, requires separation to make it readable. The solution is to paint the tube black in the connecting sections, so that the letters appear discrete. Legibility is achieved by simply painting out parts of the letters, rather like tweaking your newly designed typeface by applying correcting fluid to the stems, serifs and ligatures.

Georges Claude (left), 1926. Photo: Harlingue-Viollet (Stern)

The inventor of neon signs, the French chemist Georges Claude, was actually seeking to make cheap oxygen for hospitals and welding equipment, by the fractional distillation of liquid air, a process invented a few years before him. When you distill air to get oxygen you also get large amounts of leftover rare gases like neon, xenon, krypton and argon, and Claude’s breakthrough was to develop a reliable method of sealing the gases in glass tubes and bombarding them with electricity to create a light source. The idea was inspired by Moore’s Lamp, an invention of the American Daniel McFarlan Moore, a former Edison employee, who thought Edison’s incandescent lamps were “too small, too hot and too red”. Seeking to create light without heat, as the glowworm does, Moore put carbon dioxide and nitrogen in tubes and ran a current through them. Claude did the same thing with rare gases, discovering that by coating the inside of the glass he could increase the range of his basic colors (neon glows red when charged, argon glows greyish blue: coat the neon tube white and you get pink, coat it yellow and you get orange, add mercury and it glows brighter, or turns blue at temperatures below 30 degrees, causing certain neon lights to function as unintentional thermometers.) 99 percent of neon lights contain neon or argon.

Claude called his invention, which he was quick to patent and commercialize, a “living flame”. But in the very core of neon lighting is this idea of desire: light is created by bombarding, or exciting the molecules of a rare or noble gas. Perhaps that’s why adult boutiques and strip clubs choose neon.

top: Packard sign, LA, 1923. (Federal Sign & Signal Corporation) Bottom: mid-1920s neon. (QRS Sign Corporation, LA) Source: Stern

The very first neon sign in the US was for the Packard car dealership in LA, sold by Claude Neon for $24000, in 1923. The sign is apparently still functional. Images of the Packard and a mid-1920s drugstore sign in Denver show how the neon crudely accents the more adept typography of the sign maker, functioning as a relief element. The Packard sign reportedly annoyed local police for causing drivers to stop and gawk. And therein lies the key to neon’s sudden proliferation in the US: in a car culture, information needs to be quickly and processed by the brain, both by day and by night.

Fremont St, Las Vegas 1948. Photo: Manis Collection, University of Nevada-Las Vegas Library.

Nowhere is this more dramatically illustrated than in Las Vegas, which as Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steven Izenour argued in their seminal postmodern work Learning From Las Vegas, exemplifies an architecture of communication over space, an architecture of persuasion, to the point that without the signs, there’d be no town. Venturi & Co’s efforts to re-evaluate Vegas through audacious comparison with the Roman piazza, needs little introduction. Vegas, they argued, simply functions at a different scale and speed and rate of change to Rome, it just traded processional arches for billboards and its mosaic for flashing neon:
“The mechanical movement of neon lights is quicker than mosaic glitter, which depends on the passage of the sun and the pace of the observer; and the intensity of light on the Strip as well as  the tempo of its movement is greater to accommodate the greater spaces, greater speeds and greater impacts that our technology permits and our sensibilities respond to.”[Learning fron Las Vegas, 116]

Golden Nugget 1950 (Hermon Boernge & YESCO) 1988 (Ad-Art)

Venturi, Izenour & Scott Brown purposely archly refrained from overt moral judgment in their architectural appreciation of Vegas, confining their analysis of the Golden Nugget casino, for example, to its transformation from “decorated shed with big signs” in the 1950s to “all sign” with “hardly any building” visible in the 1960s—evidence of the high speed one-upmanship that drove the city’s skyline into fantastical realms. But an analysis of neon typography could not go without a discussion of its associations with gambling, sleaze and a kind of environmental insensitivity.

Mushroom clouds over Vegas, 1950s. (Photo Las Vegas News Bureau)

Named “The Meadows” reportedly by the first foreigner to discover it, Rafael Rivera, Vegas was a Mormon settlement in the 1850s that became a railroad town in the early 1900s famous for its gambling clubs, liquor stores and “fancy houses” of ill repute on Block 16. The town suffered a crisis after the Hoover Dam was completed in the late 1930s, briefly diminishing its visitor numbers with the dispersion of dam workers, but was rescued by the gambling kingpins of Southern California, who opened the Pioneer, El Rancho and Last Frontier in 1942, followed by Bugsy Siegel, the New York mobster in 1946 with the Flamingo. 10 million tourists visited in 1953, apparently untroubled by the Atomic Energy Commission’s surface nuclear tests in the nearby desert.

Stardust Pylon 1968 (photo: Ad-Art)

With its transformers increasing voltage to as much as 15,000 volts per tube, neon signs are know for their audible buzz, a buzz that also recalls the buzz sought by compulsive gamblers, who, according to one anthropological study, play not to win but to achieve a dissociative subjective state they call “the zone” where the boundary between the player and machine dissolves. The worst thing that can happen is to be intruded upon. Along these lines, casinos were named and designed after exotic, dissociative “escapes” from present day reality – the pre-and post-World War Two references to Wild West frontier towns gave way to Sputnik-era, space age escape (as with this 1958 sign designed by Kermit Wayne), Barbary Coast treasure, Sahara oases, mirages, the circus and El Dorado, empire of the legendary golden king in Colombia. The promise of wealth is often present in the casino’s adopted mythology, but it is often the job of the architecture, the windowless casino interior, and the neon sign, to suggest that those who enter will be taken somewhere else, somewhere out of themselves.

But while Vegas casinos were outdoing each other to construct the largest and tallest neon signs–Stardust’s was 188 feet, the Dunes 180 feet, the Frontier 184 feet—the rest of the country was not so enamored with the Sin City associations. The ongoing suburbanization of America, with middle classes and businesses leaving urban centers and their buzzing signs in states of disrepair, meant that sputtering, arcing and burnt out neon signs were seen as symbols of crime and urban decay. Local governments passed ordinances restricting or outright prohibiting the use of exposed neon, many of which are still in place. Businesses increasingly turned to more weatherproof, typographically versatile and respectable plastic box signs illuminated from within by fluorescent light. One conspiracy theory has it that the petrochemical giants actually peddled this image of neon as sleazy, in order to promote their “clean” plastic light boxes. Contrary to popular opinion, neon is a more energy efficient light source than incandescent light, and not far off the efficiency of fluorescents, which are basically the same thing, argon gas excited in a slightly larger tube requiring less energy.

I think it is the visceral, tangible nature of neon and its mechanical inflexibility that makes it so interesting, typographically. This Austin sign caught my eye because of the quirky typeface with those strange little connectors linking the little circles to the perimeter outline neon. According to Todd Sanders, a local vintage sign designer, those are actually unintentional: the block out paint has just worn off.

The decline of neon has made it a ripe subject for a kind of cult status: the famous neon boneyard of the Young Electric Sign Company in Vegas was never an official tourist attraction but was picked over and photographed by thousands of visitors intrigued by the idea of the detritus of a fickle consumer culture. YESCO’s founder Thomas Young had begun keeping old, broken and obsolete signs in the company’s back yard as a source of spare parts that proved invaluable during world war two. As the pace of change required ever bigger and better signs, the boneyard grew into a destination, full of what one director described as “carnage of hype”. Scenes from Mars Attacks! and Vegas Vacation were shot there.

The boneyard proved a fruitful resource for Las Vegas residents who began to realize that there was a certain nostalgic value in the city’s short, luminous history. In the late 1990s, the city signed an agreement with YESCO to launch a campaign to restore and reinstall around the city some of the more impressive signs and call the collection a Neon Museum. The first signs went up at the end of the decade, a curious collection of advertisements for absent attractions. The Flame restaurant sign, rescued from the roof of an early 1960s diner long since demolished, features a long, swooping pink arrow pointing to a void where food was once served. The Fifth Street liquor sign shows a disembodied red hand puring a green bottle of pink liquid into a floating blue martini glass, but the thirsty will be unrewarded by snooping around the sign. The Chief Hotel Court sign originally installed around 1940 can now be found on the northeast corner of Fremont Street and 4th Street, where tourists gather to watch a newer more sanitary computer controlled light show projected on the underside of a steel canopy.

Neon today struggles to shrug off the stain of history, but remains fairly ubiquitous as a component of a lighting designer’s palette. It has an unmatched ability to delineate architectural features, even mediocre ones, at night.

Somehow it lacks the exuberance today of, say, the 1953 Flamingo champagne tower, with its filigree of neon bubbles wrapping an 80 foot cylindrical tower by architects Pereira and Luckman, topped by six foot neon letters. It served no other programmatic purpose than to be looked at, and was thus the first “spectacular” on the Strip. (Design: YESCO)

The nostalgia factor, and neon’s associations with a sexier, sleazier motoring age has played a part in its predominance in Austin’s nightscape, where the city prides itself on a certain liberal quirkiness and willingness to host the itinerant rock and roll community. Because glass tubes are fragile and not easy to ship, it is quite common to find neon sign makers operating as small shops, each with their own quirks and methods. Of the four neon sign shops I contacted, however, only one was operated by a glass bender; the others farm out that task, which is a serious craft learned over years. The old skills are not passed on, because the master benders from neon’s heyday all happened to die during the neon slump. Austin-based Todd Sanders, who apprenticed as a bender, found it tricky and time-consuming, and now subcontracts the task, focusing instead on drawing the signs, and overseeing production. Sanders sometimes restores signs from the 1930s that, he says, reveal incredibly tight workmanship, with smooth bends unachievable by today’s benders.

John Hayward in his Austin neon shop.

John Hayward  trained as a commercial artist in Portland Oregon then took up neon bending in the 1980s. He’s recently downscaled, seems to be hurting for business and doesn’t own a bending facility, but he does it at a nephew’s facility. Hawyward stresses a good drawing: once the glass is bent, there’s no going back: the thickness of the glass changes when it is hot, meaning that the uniformed manufactured surface cannot be reinstated.

Star Bar, Austin 2008. (Photo: Peter Hall)

Both Sanders and Hayward cited the cardinal rule of neon signs: legibility. Because of the night time glow, the line produced is a lot thicker than the one you draw, and the most common mistake is for sign makers to design a sign with the tubes too close together making it illegible at night. Because of the public’s familiarity with fonts, it is common for a customer to request a neon version of a logotype, or to request a relatively intricate serif typeface. Hayward’s response is usually “there’s only one.” Typefaces can be approximated by painting them and then using a line of neon to accent them, the most elegant method, as used in the 1920s Drugs sign. A more spectacular method is to use double sided neon, as with the Bar sign, but this often leads to blurry legibility.

Tight bends require the tube bender to blow short puffs of air through the glass to increase airpressure and stop the tube closing up. Kinks and wobbles sometimes appear, which, depending on the craftsman, require a new tube or can be passed off as flourishes, the bender knowing that few examine a neon sign close up.

Sanders and Hayward both agree that computers can’t letterspace for signs but have a difference of opinion over Helvetica, which Hayward uses as the basis for many of his signs and Sanders avoids like the plague, calling it “devoid of any soul” and lacking the right spacing for neon.

Sanders’ specialty is making entirely new designs that look as though they’ve been around for years, which, he says “lends heritage to your company” and which he ships mostly to companies in big cities like Chicago and LA. Doc’s Motor Works, a burger and beer joint in Austin that opened a couple of years ago, is sited in a former garage, with rolling garage doors and outdoor tables on asphalt to match. Sanders made a sign on the garage theme that even appears to reuse an old sign, turning “body and garage” by day into “bar and grill” by night with neon overlay. For inspiration he studies and collects obsessively sign painters’ magazines and books like the “Speedball” books of the 1930s and 1940s, and the still-published “Signs of the Times” magazine (established 1906) where he finds pleasing cuts of Gothic (his preferred default neon typeface) and practical advice from the master sign painters on what light colors go together and diagrams of the most common mistakes in drawing letterforms.

But it would be wrong to imagine that neon is now limited to a kind of neoclassical existence, reviving its past glories in brilliant crafted evocations. The post war denigration of neon was paralleled by–and probably was even a contributing factor to–the art world’s embrace of it. Neon’s color, glow, textual applications, ability to simultaneously outline and make ephemeral, and its lowbrow, commercial connotations all helped make it an attractive medium to conceptual artists in the 1960s and 1970s.  Mario Merz’s Unreal City of 1968, which draws from those qualities to suggest something fleetingly human within the technological standardization of contemporary life. Bruce Nauman’s 1983 work “Life Death Knows Doesn’t Know” uses the bombastic qualities of neon and the animated flashing on and off of words possible with transformer switches to make seemingly contradictory pronouncements.

Litebrite backlit neon. (Photo: http://www.litebriteneon.com/)

The New York-based Lite Brite Neon Studio started up ten years ago and has turned into a significant force for custom neon for artists and high end retail. To reverse the idea that design feeds off art, consider this Lite Brite technique of painting the tubes so that they only glow at the back, a brilliant riff on the black-out method that Lite Brite did for Burberry’s in London. A New York artist Glenn Ligon saw the technique and used it to make “Negro Sunshine” in 2006, using a Gertrude Stein phrase to explore the subjects of pop culture and African American identity. Then DKNY approached Lite Brite to use the same technique. Lite Brite’s founder Matt Dilling considers neon to be a fairly young medium, in a healthy state with plenty of possibilities.

So in conclusion I had planned to describe neon typography as a character, an actor who embodies three kinds of failure that all contribute to its poetic richness in the urban landscape: first a semantic failure to live up to its own promise of escape, since as an advertising medium it must always make unachievable promises.

Second a failure to rid itself of the stigma of decay and waste; despite its inherent magical qualities and versatility it has been irreversibly tainted by associations with sleaze, sin and crime, or at least, gambling.

And third, its technical failure to achieve the virtuosity of its successors, fluorescents under plastic and LED, which trumps neon for versatility.

But Matt Dilling had a slightly different conclusion that I like better, since it spoke to the same impulse that made me want to show this photo I took of some performance artists practicing on the Williamsburg waterfront in the late 1990s. Dillion was attracted to neon in much the same way that insects are attracted to light, he says. He noted that the first electric light spectaculars came to the US at the same time as Eastern Mysticism, at the Columbian Exposition in the late 19th century. “It has a nice place in history” he said of neon, “it’s attached to all the good things: religious iconography, sex and food, to believing in something larger.” So underlying all of this is a fascination with the spectacle, and a fundamental desire to dance with light.