Priscila Lena Farias / Anna Calvera Marcos da Costa ... - Blucher

Search for meaning: a study on the Cranbrook Academy of Art’s graphic design department
Figure 2. French Currents of the Letter: pages from essays 1, 5 and 8
The graphic format intended to reflect the reading and interpretation
of the text of the Issue. Katherine McCoy, in interview,
said that before this work they hadn’t had the influence of poststructuralism.
The design team realized that they needed to understand the
theories presented in the text to make a graphic interpretation,
Richard Kerr argues in interview that: “We all needed a “crash”
course in semiotics and specifically the French avante garde.
Daniel Libeskind gave us information for we better understand
the academic articles”(2011).
Katherine McCoy explains the concept of the project by quoting
the Issue introduction written by George H. Bauer:
“This is not the place to inscribe the story of the re-emergence
of letters, words and books as objects to be seen; nor would be
appropriate to bundle tidily the delirium of readings you see
before you. Transparency of the text gives way to opacity. Words
unseen, letters invisible, now magically appear before our eyes as
plastic object games. Language is once again visible. The tradition
is long, but marginal – at the edge. Here are gathered, quite
unscientifically and purposefully obsessional, French Currents of
the Letter” (Fig. 1).
The idea of making text into a concrete matter, in other words,
visible instead of invisible, could have a parallel relation with the
Derridean idea of Grammatology (Derrida 1976): to emphasize
written language over phonetics, adapting it to graphic design
and making it visible.
This project, by forcing the reader to pay attention to the text,
making it extremely graphic, breaking with some design/editorial
rules, brought something new.
Rick Poynor (2003) explains that:
As the reader proceeds through the eight essays, standard book
conventions are progressively undermined. The text columm
expands to fill the inner margins, interlinear space increases,
word spaces inflate until the text explode into particles, and
footnotes, usually confined to a subsidiary role, slide across into
the body of the text. The intention was to highlight the phisicality
of the printed word´s presentation and to establish new nonlinear
connections between words, opening the possibility of
alternative ways of reading. (Poynor 2005: 53)
The progression functions in a way that the first article of the
Issue is perfectly readable, but from then on the articles begin
to change, having the final (the 8th) a complete extreme, where
the spaces between words and the leading make the verbal content
looks like a spread out texture (fig. 2).
Richard Kerr, one of the students involved in the project, explained
in interview that they had envisioned a ninth progression,
where they would expand the words even more, just like
the graphic treatment presented in the Issue cover, enlarging,
for example, not only spaces between words, but between the
letter units. However the idea was abandoned.
The students also wrote a design statement to explain the graphic
strategy, that gave to the Issue complementary conceptual information,
showing how the students were engaged not only to
produce, but to argue. It shows a reflection about to the complexity
of the articles related to the graphic design solution. But even
with the extreme experiment of text and reading in the design,
Katherine McCoy explains in interview that:
We sent the design concept with the eight formats to the
Visible Language editor, Merald Wrolsted, for his review, and we
Design Frontiers: Territiories, Concepts, Technologies 74