Winter 2025

Ambiguity blues

A graphically illustrated art project reflects our uneasy relationship with the truth. Critique by Rick Poynor

One of the most crucial issues in graphic design is the relationship of form to content and designers know this better than anyone. Yet the question of how decisions made during the design process express and even amplify their subject, or fall short of doing that, is barely discussed outside the design studio and client meetings. Too often there is a tendency in public forums – most notably design awards – to celebrate design for its own sake without probing exactly how it serves the material it articulates. How can one even begin to attempt this inquiry without an understanding of the subject matter itself?

The more complex and nuanced the editorial and visual content, the greater the scope for interpretation through design. With a book titled Encyclopedia of the Uncertain: A Meditation on Doubt the possibilities multiply. The title alone raises a question: uncertainty, doubt – what kind of publication is this? Only the word ‘encyclopedia’ seems to offer anything to grasp. Can such an emphatic and clearly defined genre of educational book find much to say about the vacillations and irresolution suggested by doubt?

Top. From the Second World War to Vietnam, the United States Air Force used the Norden bombsight, left, to drop bombs accurately. The French analogue computer matched with the AI entry dates from 1949.
Right. Governor’s Palace, Uxmal, Mexico, photographed in 1935.

The book’s proportions – always a key design decision – embody this uncertainty. At 768 pages, the encyclopedia is a middleweight and yet the volume is enticingly small, measuring only 115 × 165 mm. In the hand, it feels hefty and sharp-cornered, like a brick of paper. The cover is a thin but pleasingly stiff board and the spine remains rigid when opened. Clearly it would have been possible to design the book more conventionally with fewer and bigger pages, but that would have normalised the volume and made it seem less distinctive.

The blue mood of the cover typography and scattered pictures continues inside, where every word and image is printed in the same colour. This restrictive decision, for such a complex set of components, has a unifying effect, endowing the subject’s ambiguities with another thread of certainty.

The caption for the antique dragons is given in untranslated Hungarian – other captions are in English. The source of this engraving appears to be Wikimedia Commons.

A diary text, in which Püschel speculates about her encyclopedia project, faces incongruous illustrations and a pointed quotation from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, via brainyquote.com: ‘Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.’

In a further divergence from the norm, the encyclopedia’s entries are not organised alphabetically, but nor are they completely random. They form twisting chains of dubious allusion and crackpot beliefs – one sequence runs: Ley Lines, Alignment, Pyramids, Geometry, Denver Airport, Illuminati, New World Order, Conspiracy Theory – leading the reader ever deeper into labyrinths of instability. Key words at the end of each subject point to related entries. Strict linear reading would make little sense here; instead, one leaps around the entries, making unpredictable discoveries and connections with every sally. The images, each given a pseudo-authoritative figure number, drift through the entries, untethered from the texts that inspired them, like a slideshow of weird graphic possibilities.

Apart from some short quotations from books, most of the texts were found on the internet, often rendering their status inherently uncertain. Are they reliable or suspect and how can we know? This is the global info-sphere we inhabit today, where many prefer to treat the ‘truth’ as something arbitrary that they happen to believe because it suits them, rather than as verifiable facts everyone must acknowledge. It’s a perturbing state of affairs that the deep fakery of AI, in its endless proliferating guises, can only make worse with our willing acquiescence. Encyclopedia of the Uncertain offers, as its subtitle says, a disquieting meditation on where we are and what we might, or might not, choose to do about it.

In keeping with this uncertainty, I leave the book’s origins until last. The project comes from a close collaboration between its Dutch author and editor, Anna Püschel, and the designer Carel Fransen, co-founder with Rob van Hoesel of The Eriskay Connection, an independent publishing house. Püschel is an artist and photographer. The doubts she faced in pursuing her ambition supplied the motivation for constructing the book.

Extracts from Püschel’s personal writing interrupt the entries and provide an involving portrait of her uncertainties. She proposes that the project is ultimately ‘a personal narrative, a story of an artistic coming of age.’ If we want to pigeonhole it, the encyclopedia could be classified as an artist’s book – with a lot of graphic design in it – but much of its resonance comes from the way it borrows and then destabilises the conventions of ordinary publishing (the first edition runs to 1000 copies). The book’s hybrid status makes it more than a curiosity, a strikingly idiosyncratic art project. It addresses a central dilemma of our time with uncompromising obsession because we have every reason to be filled with uncertainty.

Rick Poynor writer, Eye founder

First published in Eye no. 107 vol. 27, 2025

Encyclopedia of the Uncertain by Anna Püschel, published by The Eriskay Connection, 2024. Design by Carel Fransen. Images edited by Püschel and Fransen.

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