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Letters Eye 64
In praise of Day-Glo
From Suzanne Perkins
I came across Eric Kindel’s article on fluorescent inks (Eye no. 60 vol. 15) on the Eye website. I am a graphic designer, and the T. Thorne Baker mentioned in the piece was my grandfather.
My mum developed the Dane & Co trademark. As a child in the late 1940s I was aware of Day-Glo long before it was more widely known, as I had a golly made for me with a yellow Day-Glo bow tie.
In the 1950s it was a Ted fashion, and therefore wild, to wear Day-Glo socks and we girls wore one green and one pink each. In the 1960s Day-Glo was used for trippy posters, which were sold in a special part of the shop, lit by ‘Black Light’ (UV light). When I became art director of The Women’s Press in 1978, the ink was well out of fashion, cheapened by use for closing-down sales, but I deliberately used Day-Glo pink as one of the corporate colours to signify transgressive womanhood, not realising that Schiaparelli had done almost the same thing with her Shocking Pink. The launch included five very literary books against a sea of Day-Glo pink in the window of Hatchards in Piccadilly. In those days it had to be screen-printed.
I still adore Day-Glo, find it restful to look at (especially the pink), and plan my work schedule for the week on Day-Glo paper.
London
Tschichold review revisited
From Richard B. Doubleday
While it is never enjoyable to see one’s work denigrated in print, the harsh fact is, when you publish your work, you make yourself vulnerable to criticism. Therefore, when I read the first line of Phil Baines’s review (Eye no. 62 vol. 16) of my book, Jan Tschichold, Designer: The Penguin Years, which stated, ‘It gives me no pleasure to say that this is a truly dreadful book’, the only thing to do was to take a deep breath and continue reading the criticisms that were sure to follow.
While some of Baines’s criticisms were certainly justified – for instance, I take responsibility for my too-many typographical errors – several of his comments were misleading and often inaccurate. For the sake of brevity, I will not enumerate every instance. A representative example, however, is Baines’s criticism of my ‘bold claim’ that the book’s design is ‘based on Tschichold’s Penguin Composition Rules.’ Anyone reading this statement would be led to believe that the book’s design looked like an unsuccessful attempt to mirror the look of a Penguin Classic. In actuality, my ‘bold claim’ notes that the book is set in Sabon (a typeface designed by Tschichold) and that ‘most of the formatting and typographical conventions used in this work are those recommended by this master typographer.’ While Baines is free to formulate and share his opinions about the merits of the book and its design, he should refrain from disingenuous claims in support of such opinions.
Baines’s major gripe with my book seems to be my characterisation of the significance of Tschichold’s contribution to Penguin Books and to British publishing. Clearly, Baines believes that Tschichold’s impact was minor. I disagree. Penguin had begun publishing paperbacks in 1935, and until Tschichold’s arrival in 1947, it had yet to mandate high-quality design standards for its books. His demand for consistency and superior design, and his successful management of the varied departments involved in the production process brought about significant change to the mass-market publishing industry. The Penguin Composition Rules, as well as Tschichold’s many other efforts at Penguin, were more than a mere ‘rediscovery’ of design standards. The fact that a designer of his calibre involved himself in and took seriously the tasks usually reserved for printers and production assistants was revolutionary.
Tschichold’s task at Penguin was not a romantic one, and his refinements were subtle in many ways, but they were nonetheless revolutionary. As the tone and substance of his writing clearly indicate, Baines fails to appreciate this kind of subtlety.
Jamaica Plain, Mass., US
Posterity or doom
From Malcolm Frost
Either it’s all about posterity or it’s doom alone that counts. What do we leave behind us? For whom, to whom, and to what purpose? Recently, four great designers – Ruari McLean, Germano Facetti, Alan Fletcher and Philip Thompson – have left the mortal realm. The efforts of these four will endure for generations.
Yet our industry is being systematically infiltrated and debased by academics, critics, curators, PR people, middle-men and account executives. Courses in peripheral subjects such as cultural and media studies and the history of design are all over-subscribed. Inevitably, what counts in this world of the production-line MA is the soft, patronising notion of giving the public what ‘educated’ people, think is appropriate, safe and interesting.
London recently hosted a series of exhibitions exploring the oeuvres of three titans of graphic design – Otl Aicher (Eye 63), Alan Fletcher and Hans Schleger. In view of our changing industry, everyone engaged in design must seriously ask themselves what can we show and tell about ourselves. But, as these shows demonstrate, the message sometimes gets scrambled in the ambitious machinations of curators, exhibition designers and book publishers. Otl Aicher’s posters for the Munich Olympics were exhibited in a boutique furniture store in a space so narrow you’d be hard pushed to swing a dormouse. Alan Fletcher’s show at the Design Museum ended in a panorama of art tosh (miles of shaky line drawings and crummy jokes) that someone presumably thought the public could relate to. Finally, at the Hans Schleger exhibition at the V&A, a piece of lazy and / or ignorant curatorship debased the maestro’s work for Finmar. From a mark originally designed in three different weights to match a type range, only two versions were displayed on a 5m high panel.
Designers and typographers have been battered from pillar to post by rapidly evolving technology, the mistrust of clients, and by people who can’t make anything but claim expertise in everything. We must stand up with moral certainty and cut out the expanding ranks of middlemen. Their agenda is set by book-learning and exam-passing, not by working, problem-solving and conviction.
London
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