Critical Mass
Compiled by Ian Lynam + Idea magazine

An inquiry into contemporary critical practices in graphic design featuring:
Mark Owens, Zak Kyes, Jon Sueda, Brian Roettinger, Daniel Eatock, Scott Ponik, Michael Worthington, Yasmin Khan, Metahaven

Subterranean Modernism: A Critical Retrospective
By Randy Nakamura + Ian Lynam

On the Uselessness of Design Criticism
by Randy Nakamura

You can pick up a copy here.

New feature for Idea Magazine issue #340 called Forms of Practice, interviewing young designers.

An excerpt:

Toward a new form of practice

A number of young designers in Europe and America are attempting to develop their own paths in exploring graphic design through innovative small-scale practices. Many of the designers featured here were born in the 1970s and 1980s, coming of age in commercial practice in the digital environment. The majority of those featured operate within the sphere of graphic design production from the approach of a more personal practice, inflecting their work with nuanced, idiosyncratic conceptual and formal approaches.

While widely varied due to cultural context and social/environmental differences, all have a kinship in unique approaches to developing formal options for clients. The use of the word “option” as applied here is perhaps the most relevant key point for the latest wave of graphic design from abroad- perhaps the “solution” as an end result of graphic design as a process is a dead methodology. What are instead offered are graphic “options” in lieu of “solutions”- inquiries answered with inquiries, questions answered with questions. The work featured offers playful, tentative answers instead of cold, hard end results.

This issue of Idea comes with a bonus satellite publication containing interviews with all of the designers and design studios featured in English and Japanese.

Foreword for a new book from Sandu Media called Mini Graphics, an exploration of small-scale graphic design projects.

An excerpt:

Go small.

This tide shift in the technology and tools of graphic design and reprographics over the past decade is hugely important. Graphic design is an evolutionary process, and while it seems to move slowly to practitioners, it moves infinitely faster than other communication practices. These changes are both immediate and gradual, and they affect many aspects of graphic design- from process to product. Most immediately noticeable is how technology affects the final product. As evinced by the work in this book, graphics are no longer simplistic, unified brand signifiers rendered by previous generations. Designers today use broader palettes of color, form, space, and sheer methodology to achieve their results.

I have a number of projects featured in the book, including the identity design for my own design studio and identity projects for a handful of clients and collaborators.

I wrote a 10,000 word essay called “Heft, Gravy, and Swing: The Life and Times of Oswald Cooper” for the latest issue of Idea. The essay serves as the definitive biography of the Chicago type and lettering designer, famed for his Cooper Black typeface.

The essay is the result of a long-dreamed of trip to Chicago to sift through Cooper’s original drawings, scarce writings, and working papers. Copiously illustrated with proofs of Cooper’s work, unpublished typefaces, and photographs of rare design work, his legacy is brought into contemporary focus. New biographical information about Cooper, his work, and his associates is discussed within.

An excerpt:

Bertsch & Cooper was a visionary commercial art service. They were one of the first shops in Chicago that offered to create layouts, compose artwork, and typeset text all under one roof. They continually added staff, resulting in a scattershot assortment of illustrators, draftsmen, and compositors peppered throughout the same building in a variety of rooms. At their first location, Bertsch was famous for his “inter-office communication system” which consisted of yelling upstairs and down from the inner balcony of the building to professional associates. Cooper was ensconced in the “bull pen”- a room with a half dozen or so other commercial artists scratching away at the jobs of the day. Cooper was renowned for his “filing system”- a towering, dusty, haphazardly curved pile of layouts, proofs, notes, and other assorted papers that loomed over his desk, each day’s ephemera separated by a newspaper from that date.

This pile grew in relation with Bertsch & Cooper’s increasing roster of clients, which included a number of local Chicago businesses including doctors’ offices, legal firms, coffee shops, and banks, New York’s Marchbanks Press, the department store Marshall Fields, Strathmore Papers, Red Book Magazine, American Printer Magazine, and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Cooper’s distinctive lettering can be found on a series of public service announcements for the United States government’s Food Administration, exhorting the public to eat less and conserve rations during World War One.

The article was jointly designed by myself and the Shirai Design Office, the esteemed designers of Idea.

On occasion, I write little reviews for CNNGo, CNN’s Asian Culture portal. None have made it to the main site in full form, due to the intentionally cheeky and unprofessional nature of the writing. A sample quartet of these posts are provided here for your entertainment.

Wakadaisho

Wakadaisho hosts a collection of vintage skateboard clothing, most exemplary being original Zorlac and Dogtown apparel. Occupying a musty retail space in Shimokitazawa, it’s a time warp for aging skaters.

There is a specific moment in time that Wakadaisho’s wares exemplify: the final days of skateboarding before hip-hop ran over it with a cultural truck. The clothing within the shop is a collection of late 80s skateboard brands- from the sanitary Powell Peralta skull-and—sword-laden imagery to Santa Cruz’s screaming hand imagery to the riskier edginess of Pushead’s stippled skating corpses for Zorlac. This shop is fraught with examples of a time when skateboarding was almost purely a punk rock pursuit, not urban swagger, oversized pantaloons, and Dr. Dre beats. The few skateboards that are within are fish-shaped, not the sanitized, ovoid wooden pills of today.

While much of this visual style has not aged gracefully, some elements have, and this shop is a resource for those interested in surveying the remnants of that time gone by- a time of pool skating, the birth of street skating, bad three chord music, and even worse attempts at creating a new genre of corporate-funded action sports-themed music, namely Thrasher Magazine’s brand of “Skate Rock”.

Along with the vintage skate gear is a sampling of vintage and retro blue jeans, Vision Street Wear sneakers circa 1987, contemporary skate backpacks, and tons of cell phone straps and keychains so integral to doing business in Japan.

Cafe Madu

“What with everyone carrying on about the greater Tokyo Burger Wars, one humble little chain of restaurants has singlehandedly beaten everyone to the punch by crafting the world’s finest BLT.”

I spent the bulk of last year’s Yokohama Triennale being hideously underwhelmed by the art within- the sole exception being Miranda July’s saucy installation in Yokohama’s Akarenga (Red Brick) warehouse complex. After checking that out, I found myself a wee bit peckish and decided to hit one of the restaurants nestled willy-nilly throughout the same warehouse.

Café Madu had a nice veranda, so I decided to give it a whirl. The English/Japanese menu had a fair amount of nice-looking offerings- the usual lunch sets with pasta, salad, and your choice of a beverage, but I eschewed those in favor of a BLT. Japanese BLTs tend to be made with thick Canadian bacon in lieu of North America’s crunchy, day-old normal bacon, making for a solid sandwich instead of a disposable snack.

What appeared before me minutes later was an inspiration- lightly grilled thick-cut bacon, fresh lettuce, a thin veneer of obviously handmade mayonnaise, and the tastiest white bread I’ve ever encountered, toasted to golden perfection. Eating that sandwich was a transcendental moment, it was so damned delicious. And it truly was a moment. I eat fast, frankly, but the sheer force of this sandwich brought about a primal state of ravenous, gleeful consumption rivaled only by sea salt butter caramel ice cream from Berthillon in Paris.

Café Madu’s BLT is the Reign In Blood-era Slayer of sandwiches. It hits you hard, fast, and unrelenting in its mission: to devastate your taste buds, leave your reeling, and just wanting more.

The Study Room

The Study Room is a science-themed shop for the curious child and his/her deep -pocketed parent(s). Young and old alike will be delighted by the broad range of scientific and pseudo-scientific buying opportunities within, guaranteed to be discarded within mere minutes by average children.

As a child, I was infinitely more interested in science fiction and it’s potentialities than any kind of hard science, with the exception being that of a possible future career as an astronaut. Being more of a dreamer than an egghead, those plans were laid to the side over time with a rich mélange of riding BMX bicycles, skateboarding, and listening to weird music taking prevalence over interstellar travel.

One girl that I went to school with was provided the opportunity of going to NASA’s Space Camp late in elementary school. To this day, I have never seen a human’s head become as swollen with self-pride as I saw that summer. This girl would lord her opportunity over us neighborhood kids’ heads all year, taking every opportunity leading up to and following her time at Space Camp to berate us with the details of the experience.

The following year, her folks hit a rough patch financially and in their marriage, and she was not able to go to Space Camp again. She was utterly devastated by her inability to float around in zero gravity, wear silver clothing, and feel so very, very special. This devastation led to her being pounced upon socially by the rest of the herd her age and resulted in daily tears on the school bus for months.

The Study Room’s pricey wares could have a similar effect upon your children, but they are very enticing nonetheless. Magnifying glasses, insect collection cages, skeleton replicas, geodes- all the ingredients for adolescent social leprosy are there for purchasing by the affluent parent with the desire to overcompensate.

Fruits Basket

This Shimokitazawa kids clothing and goods store has some of the best kids gear in Tokyo.

I’ve hit the magical age where ever-increasing numbers of my friends are procreating, both in Japan and abroad. While all good and fine, it means that the number of gifts that I am obligated to purchase for first-time parents is on the increase. With luck, my roaming around the environs of Shimokita landed me in a few decent kids clothing and accoutrement stores, though Fruits Basket stands out from the crowd.

Sometimes you just need a little something special for your friends’ imminent progeny.

For example, my friend Mort works as a garbageman (http://thankyoume.blogspot.com/) in San Francisco. Mort’s got a big mouth, a lot of charisma, and he lives in a fairly terrible ghetto in Oakland. He’s one of the only white people on his block, and as his wife is white, I assumed (properly, it turns out) that their first child would also be white.

I found the perfect shirt at Fruits Basket for their incoming offspring: a onesie bearing this dubious slogan in 120 point Futura, “I am a black man”. Perfect when paired with a sleuthily stunning extra-small Shelock Holmes-style cap for baby at a reasonable ¥4000 for both.

Morton now receives regular beatdowns on America’s mean streets as his child looks on in vaguely racist clothing. You too can live the fantasy.

A look at the script lettering of Miura Kōhei (三浦滉平).

A look at an outstanding piece of contemporary Japanese graphic design.

I wrote this essay for the Brand New School monograph, edited by Michael Worthington. Apparently the book is on permanent hold, so why not throw the essay up here?

School Days

The Brand New School projects that resonate most strongly with me are their network identities, in particular the identities for Fuel and the International Music Feed (IMF). Both work off of a modular kit-of-parts that incorporates a dynamic range of illustrative and graphic styles that mesh without an easy solution.

The Fuel and IMF projects feature terrific type design/type choices that work well for display on-screen, and are appropriately loud without being stupid—a rarity in graphic design for youth-oriented broadcast identities.

IMF’s mixture of Jens Gehlhaar’s Pretension Project typefaces, IBM-inspired cathode ray faces, pixel fonts, and project-specific typefaces is an eclectic selection that references multiple points in type design history: e.g., Excoffon, Rand, Crouwel, and more.

Fuel’s set of three preexisting and two custom typefaces is a study in poised crudity: The typefaces are always set in caps with default tracking, encouraging the most brute and effective means of making a typeface communicate.

The illustrative aspects of the Fuel identity are novel, in particular the use of buttons/badges as add-on bits of messaging that look slick and pop without going overboard. The range of illustrations on said buttons is diverse and connotative without being too specific—”a little bit country and a little bit rock ‘n’ roll”.

IMF’s amazing mix of illustrations by Clarissa Tossin really stands out. The visual languages of topographic maps, sonograms, musical notation, circuitry, technology, and nationalities are all explored in a myriad of ways. The BNS team has combined these assorted styles in a rich and densely layered approach that looks like nothing else on the air, yet remains quite obviously its work.

Color is considered in each identity in unique ways. Fuel’s post-punk black, white, and magenta is forceful, while the secondary colors applied complement the identity in a sophisticated manner. IMF’s approach to Otl Aicher’s palette is irreverent, with the inclusion of an arbitrary hot pink for added visual impact being the icing on the cake.

On the negative side, the iconography deployed for each identity is the sole weak point of each. The icons look mushy and forced—a bit too detailed for on-screen use, and feeling a bit like they were done in a rush. These aspects make the individual identities rely on the rest of the scheme to do the heavy lifting. However, as a whole, the identities are so strong that they do so effortlessly.

Fuel’s paint and ink textures, marks, and distorted grit add an air of exhilaration to the identity. In particular, when these elements are used as masks and wipes, they add another level of visual subtlety unseen in other network identities of a similar bent, target-wise.

The IMF logo lockup is a great nod to the isometric constructions of Takenobu Igarashi. The Parco-inspired logo’s animated assembly in space with a few camera angle changes is a sight to behold. It strongly connotes the ’70s with its Archigrammatic color scheme; thick, black outline; and accompanying Gehlhaar-designed, Antique Olive-channeling wordmark. Yet, simultaneously, the logo feels very present in the here and now through the mix of references.

Brand New School’s work is indicative of the tide shift that is happening in American television, which is becoming more interesting, engaging, and intelligent. At the same time, television executives are reaching out to incisive and insightful creative companies to help convey their broadcast identities. If I were one of those executives, there is no one else in the United States I would turn to other than Brand New School.

Foreword for Chinese publisher Sandu Media’s book on playful typography, Type Player. The essay discusses indigenous lettering styles and typographic experimentation. The book also features a few pieces of my design work.

Interview with curator and fine artist Hanna Fusihara Aron for Néojaponisme.