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The ups and downs of lowercase logos
LONDON
Italian design group
plays with typography for
an influential art show
BY ALICE RAWSTHORN
How many corporate symbols, logos,
brand identities or whatever else you
want to call them are you exposed to in a
typical day? Bearing in mind that ‘‘exposed
to’’ does not necessarily mean
that you will notice any of those images,
let alone remember them, just think of
how many symbols you see each time
you open the fridge, walk along a street,
read a newspaper, enter a store or go
online. A couple of hundred? Definitely.
Maybe even a few thousand.
You do not need to be a branding expert
to work out that with so many images
fighting for our attention it has become
increasingly difficult for any of
them to stand out, which made it all the
more surprising when I recently found
myself noticing an unusually distinctive
new symbol.
It is the logo, or series of logos, developed
by the Italian design group
Leftloft for the 13th edition of Documenta,
which opens Saturday in the
German city of Kassel, where it is held
every three years as one of the world’s
biggest and most influential art exhibitions.
What makes the new identity so
noticeable is not the decision to design it
in several different typefaces, which has
become a popular strategy in communications
design, but choosing to spell
dOCUMENTA like that, with a lowercase
‘‘d’’ followed by capital letters.
Usually I dislike such typographic
tricks, because they look silly and gimmicky.
Take the brand names of the electric
cars Ford’s Th!nk and Mitsubishi’s I
MiEV. If they are distinctive and memorable,
it is not for the right reasons, but
because they are irritatingly tricky to
pronounce and to write, whereas reversing
the usual order of letter cases in dOC-
UMENTA (13) looks rather intriguing.
One reason why it seems so striking is
its context within modern German culture.
Documenta dates back to 1955
when Arnold Bode, an artist and teacher,
organized an exhibition of modern international
art in his home town, Kassel,
as part of the effort to repair the damage
caused by World War II by fostering
empathy and understanding between
different nations. The first Documenta
was so successful that the exhibition became
a regular event, like another postwar
cultural initiative, albeit one intended
for a very different audience, the
Eurovision Song Contest.
Each subsequent edition of Documenta
has commissioned its own visual
identity, most of which have conformed
to the typographic style of solely using
lowercase letters, which originated at
the Bauhaus, the early 20th-century
German art and design school.
The catalyst for the Bauhaus’s love of
lowercase type was the charismatic
Hungarian artist and designer, Laszlo
Moholy-Nagy, who joined the school in
1923 and swiftly became one of its most
LEFTLOFT (ABOVE); NILS KLINGER (RIGHT); DACS 2012
Clockwise from left: A poster for the dOCUMENTA (13) show, the exhibition
hall in Kassel, Germany, and the cover of a 1928 edition of bauhaus magazine,
designed by Herbert Bayer, who developed the ‘‘universal lettering
system,’’ a set of characters in a clear, ascetic modern style.
inspiring teachers by encouraging his
students to challenge artistic convention
and to experiment with the thenemerging
media of photography and
film. Abandoning capitals, which were
associated with power, authority and
tradition, especially in Germany, where
every noun begins with one, seemed
suitably subversive. One Bauhaus student-turned-teacher,
Herbert Bayer, developed
the ‘‘universal lettering system,’’
a set of characters in a clear,
ascetic modern style. All of the letters
were lower case as were those in an alphabet
devised by another student who
went on to teach at the school, the artist
Josef Albers.
The Bauhaus continued to use capitals
in some instances, including the sign
outside its building in the city of Dessau.
But by the late 1920s, the school’s designers
often chose exclusively lowercase
lettering for its publications and invitations
to performances and parties,
as you can see in the wonderful
‘‘Bauhaus: Art as Life’’ exhibition, running
through Aug. 12 at the Barbican Art
Gallery in London.
The democratic spirit of lower case
script, free from hierarchical trappings,
had an obvious appeal to the avantgarde,
which adopted it as an emblem.
As Bayer observed, modern life was too
fast and too exciting to waste valuable
time on stuffy formalities, such as differentiating
between different categories
of letters. Some businesses subsequently
incorporated lowercase
names in corporate identities, like the
American designer Paul Rand’s 1962 circular
logo for ABC Television, and his
Italian counterpart Giulio Cittato’s 1971
motif for the Coin retail group, but
mostly they were associated with cultural
initiatives like Documenta.
In the 1990s, however, lower case
script suddenly proliferated. The trigger
was the Internet, which, as the decade
went on, became synonymous with
progress and ingenuity. Regardless of
how tech-savvy — or otherwise — a
company was, it could, at least, look as if
it was destined for a dazzling future in
the digital era by sporting a logo in the
lowercase lettering used in Web site and
e-mail addresses. No wonder that when
the giant British oil group BP adopted a
brightly colored sunflower logo designed
by Landor Associates in 2001 to
try to persuade the world to forget about
all of the television news footage of dead
birds trapped in devastating oil spills,
and to think of it as a responsible, empathic
company, it plumped for lower
case initials. Other businesses did the
same, often for similar reasons.
No longer dashingly radical, lower
case lettering swiftly became a corporate
cliché, which is one reason Documenta
decided to do something different
in its latest visual identity. Leftloft’s
solution was to define a set of rules for
the logo of the new edition, which would
allow it to appear in any font, including
hand-written ones, as long as it was
printed in black and the name began
with a lowercase ‘‘d’’ followed by capitals
and the number ‘‘13’’ in parentheses.
As a result, every manifestation of
dOCUMENTA (13) can be given its own
emblem, whether it is a Web site, a book,
the principal exhibition in the Fridericianum
museum in Kassel, or one of the
smaller satellite projects in Kabul and
Cairo. And each of those symbols will be
instantly recognizable as belonging to
dOCUMENTA (13), unless, of course,
the same typographic ploy suddenly appears
in lots of other places too.
ONLINE: MORE ON DESIGN
Past columns and reviews from Alice
Rawsthorn. global.nytimes.com/arts
Deconstructing 2 rock legends
Who Is That Man? In Search of the Real Bob
Dylan. By David Dalton. 383 pages. Hyperion,
$26.99; Omnibus Press, £19.95.
Bruce Springsteen and the Promise of Rock
’n’ Roll. By Marc Dolan. 512 pages. W.W.
Norton & Company, $29.95; £19.99.
BY ROBIN FINN
Their mythologies precede them: Bob
Dylan, surreally hip and seemingly rootless.
Bruce Springsteen, the Everyman
with deep roots. One the antisocial poet
and precocious patriarch of the post-Guthrie
social protest anthem, the other a
BOOK REVIEW
record company designee for the future
of rock ’n’ roll post-Elvis; many thought
he might even, gasp, be the next Dylan.
Both grappled with the early hype that
destined them for American icon-dom.
Each outwitted the hype; each admired
the other. When the unwilling folkie
chameleon was inducted into rock’s Hall
of Fame in 1988, it was the earnest rocker
from New Jersey who gave the speech.
The times they aren’t a-changin’ so
radically that Mr. Dylan, at 71 a grandiose
granddad, and Mr. Springsteen, at
62 a gym-chiseled civic paragon, have
worn out their welcome with biographical
prospectors bent on extrapolating
shards of cultural and socioeconomic
relevance from the recesses of their respective
oeuvres. So, greetings from
the genre of fusion biography, where biographers
without a direct pipeline to
the focus of the investigation delve into
a rock legend with connect-the-dots fervor
driven by a personal agenda.
David Dalton’s is to make lucid the
chronic mutability of Mr. Dylan’s persona
and musicianship by alternately
insinuating himself into, and fantasizing
about, the goings-on in his subject’s
elastic and evasive mind. Unapologetic
about his reverence for Mr. Dylan, Mr.
Dalton brings his idol to earth with a
string of zingers like: ‘‘Dylan played
harmonica obnoxiously’’; ‘‘Everyone
turns into a parody of themselves in the
end; it’s just that with Dylan there are
so many selves out there.’’
For Marc Dolan, a professor at John
Jay College and the City University of
New York, the task is more academic
and humor harder to come by. This book
endeavors to get to the heart of its subject
by viewing Mr. Springsteen through
the economic, social, political, religious
and family turmoil that formed a musician
who found out early on how to make
his guitar talk but spent painful decades
refining what he needed to make it say.
His creative evolution and endurance
TONY DEJAK/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen at a benefit for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995.
as a populist American rock ’n’ roll hero
is, Mr. Dolan says, ‘‘a slantwise way of
telling the history of our times, how we
have come together and divided over the
last half-century, how we have changed
what we think of ourselves as a people.’’
Politics does not loom as large an informer
of Mr. Springsteen’s social conscience
as racially motivated social unrest.
The professor in Mr. Dolan
provides mini history lessons on the
Rodney King debacle that left Los
Angeles in flames (and left Mr. Springsteen
unnerved) and the shooting of
Amadou Diallo in New York City that
provoked Mr. Springsteen’s incendiary
‘‘American Skin.’’ Bruce, the future of
Western civilization may depend on
you, and Mr. Dolan doesn’t seem to
mind; he notes that even Barack
Obama jokingly remarked to his wife,
Michelle, at a campaign event that if he
couldn’t be Bruce Springsteen, the next
best thing was to become president.
And there is another reason they call
him ‘‘the Boss.’’ Just ask the E Street
Band how many times Mr. Springsteen
doled out pink slips in the glory days
(Mr. Dolan zeros in on the band’s personnel
issues and Mr. Springsteen’s
sporadic need to go it alone). But
they’re still performing ‘‘Born in the
U.S.A.’’ As Mr. Dolan suggests, because
he is a poet of inclusion, Mr. Springsteen
will always have an audience. And to a
performer, that guarantees relevance.
On to Mr. Dylan, who just collected a
Presidential Medal of Freedom from
Mr. Obama, the nation’s highest civilian
honor. Deconstructing the fabrications
of a serial self-mythologizer is an arguably
fraught enterprise. That goes double
if, like Mr. Dalton, you are quick to
confess that the man in the mirror (i.e.
yourself, the veteran author of more
than a dozen celebrity biographies)
happens to idolize the genius genie he
is trying not so much to yank from the
bottle as to transfer into a transparent
container. Or maybe this is Mr. Dalton’s
atonement for acting as the enabler behind
Steven Tyler’s best-selling ‘‘Does
the Noise in My Head Bother You?’’ If
we heard the noise, too, it would.
In ‘‘Who Is That Man?,’’ Mr. Dalton
wants to inveigle Mr. Dylan into removing
the shades and cowboy hat. He encourages
him to take ownership even of
the bittersweet message of ‘‘Blowin’ in
the Wind,’’ though he understands Mr.
Dylan’s irritation with Peter, Paul and
Mary for morphing it into a sugarcoated
pop hit, a hit, Mr. Dalton says,
that made Mr. Dylan his first million.
But if Bob wouldn’t knuckle under
and perform his famous protest song
for Pope John Paul II in Bologna in 1998
(it’s perversely consistent that the
same troubadour who walked off ‘‘The
Ed Sullivan Show’’ in 1963 had the
nerve to dis a request from a pope), the
odds aren’t good that he’s going to allow
a biographer microscopic access to his,
uh, brain waves. So Mr. Dalton goes
there without permission.
Becausehecopstothefactthathe’s
not going to succeed, his attempts at exposing,
debunking and celebrating the
essence of Robert Zimmerman’s Dylanness,
and vice versa, make for an intriguing,
often amusing, vision quest.
Mr. Dylan’s quirks, kinks and inscrutability
are fascinating fodder for endless
interpretations. Mr. Dalton is entitled to
his, and they’re the opposite of dull.
ONLINE: MORE ON BOOKS
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