“The Written Word: Designer as Mediator” originally appeared in Rethinking Design: The AIGA 50 Books Catalog, 1997.
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Johanna Drucker is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies at the University of Virginia where she is professor in the department of English and director of media studies. She has published and lectured extensively on topics related to the history of typography, artists’ books, and visual art. Her books include Theorizing Modernism, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, The Alphabetic Labyrinth, The Century of Artists’ Books, and her collected essays, Figuring the Word. Her work as a book artist and experimental, visual poet has been exhibited and collected in special collections in libraries and museums including the Getty Center for the Humanities, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Marvin and Ruth Sackner Archive of Visual and Concrete Poetry, the New York Public Library, Houghton Library at Harvard University, and many others.
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Paul Elliman is an assistant professor in the Yale School of Art, and a project tutor at the Jan Van Eyck Academy, in the Netherlands. Much of his work is collaborative and includes a dance performance with British choreographer Rosemary Butcher, visual material with cycling activists Critical Mass, and projects with other kinds of designers including architects and product designers. His work is included in the British Arts Council traveling collection “Lost and Found: critical voices in contemporary British design.”
A version of “E Pluribus Unum” was first published in Eye33.
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Kenneth FitzGerald’s writing on design has appeared in Emigre and Eye magazines. He is producer of the magazine The News of the Whirled, which has been honored by AIGA/MN and included in the ACD 100 Show. Other self-published works are in The Museum of Modern Art/Franklin Furnace/Artist Book collection. As an educator, he has taught graphic design and design history at the University of Minnesota Duluth and in the Foundation program at Montserrat College of Art.
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Colette Gaiter teaches at the New Media Institute at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities’ School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She previously taught at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Her interactive multimedia work encourages viewers to experience paradox and ambiguity as natural parts of human existence in a complex world. “SPACE | R A C E,” an interactive CD ROM about the 1960s U.S. Civil Rights Movement and space program, and other interactive multimedia computer installations have been exhibited widely. She is the recipient of several grants and fellowships, including the McKnight Visual Arts Fellowship.
The images in this book are from “Modern Life Stories,” a folio of prints.
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Jessica Helfand is partner with William Drenttel in Jessica Helfand | William Drenttel, a design consultancy that concentrates on editorial design and the development of new models for old and new media. Clients include: Newsweek, Business Week, Lingua Franca, America OnLine, and Champion International Corporation. Helfand is media columnist for Eye magazine, a contributing editor of ID, and the author of Six (+2) Essays on Design and New Media. She is visiting lecturer in graphic design at Yale University School of Art.
“Electronic Typography: The New Visual Language” was first published in the May/June 1994 issue of Print.
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Steven Heller is art director of the New York Times Book Review and co-chair of the School of Visual Arts MFA/Design program. He is the author of over seventy books on graphic design, illustration, and political art including The Swastika: A Symbol Beyond Redemption, Sex Appeal: The Art of Allure in Advertising and Graphic Design,and Letterforms: Bawdy, Bad, and Beautiful. He is the recipient of the 1999 AIGA Medal.
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Ellen Lupton is a curator, writer, and graphic designer. As curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, she has organized a series of major books and exhibitions, including Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age: Selections from the Merrill C. Berman Collection, Mixing Messages: Graphic Design in Contemporary Culture, The Avant-Garde Letterhead, Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office, National Design Triennial: Design Culture Now. She is co-chair of the graphic design department at the Maryland Institute, College of Art in Baltimore with J. Abbott Miller.
“Visual Syntax” originally appeared in the book The ABC of [circle square triangle]: The Bauhaus and Design Theory.
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Hrant Papazian is obsessed with functionality but is equally infatuated with shape, symbolism and language. An Armenian native of Lebanon, his view of written communication was formed at the crossroads of three competing visual cultures. He is dedicated to exploring the untrodden avenues to pragmatic solutions; his lack of formal education in graphic design tends to make this easier. As a multimedia designer at UCLA, Hrant creates online educational software, but his true love is the black-and-white, but colorful world of non-Latin type design. He has received commissions from Agfa, Unitype, and the Narod Cultural Institute. His typefaces include Linotype Maral, Roupen, and Arasan (which was selected for inclusion in the Big Crit ’99 awards). He also spends much time dissecting the Latin alphabet, tapping into the essence of this most popular writing system.
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Rolf F. Rehe is director of Design Research International, a firm specializing in newspaper and online design. He has worked with newspapers and news organizations in thirty-five countries and has redesigned some sixty newspapers. His work has won national and international awards. A frequent contributor to professional publications, he lectures and conducts workshops on typography and news design. Rehe is the author of Typography: how to make it most legible and Typography and design for newspapers. Rehe was trained as typographer in Germany and studied psychology, graphic design, and journalism at Indiana University, where he earned a Master of Arts degree. He taught typography at the Herron School of Art for ten years.
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Katie Salen is an assistant professor of design at the University of Texas at Austin as well as the designer and editor of the design journal Zed. She spends an unhealthy amount of time playing Quake and collaborates on projects connecting design, theory, and popular culture.
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Mike Schmidt is a graphic designer, educator, filmmaker, curator, and budding screenwriter. He is an assistant professor of graphic design at The University of Memphis where he also serves as coordinator of graduate studies in the department of art. He teaches a wide range of courses from the experimental to the technical and historical at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Schmidt’s design for print and independent films consistently receive awards and recognition through screenings, exhibitions, competitions, and publications, including the UCDA’s top honor. His primary research and creative activities explore the ramifications of ideological biases for visual and verbal communicators from the mainstream and beyond.
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Steven Skaggs is professor of design at the Allen R. Hite Art Institute at the University of Louisville. He is the author of Logos: The Development of Visual Symbols. His articles on design theory and semiotics have appeared in a variety of publications including the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, Zed, The Journal of American Semiotics, and Letter Arts Review as well as chapters in Hi-Fives: A Trip To Semiotics and The Education of the Graphic Designer. His calligraphic art explores the tension between the visual and verbal word. It has been widely exhibited in the United States as well as in Italy, Canada, Switzerland, Israel, and East Germany. His work is part of the permanent collections of the Newberry Library and the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry. He is still following his dream of playing basketball in the NBA.
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David Small’s “Rethinking the Book” was adapted from his PhD dissertation of the same name. The dissertation chronicles his research on the display and manipulation of complex visual information at the MIT Media Laboratory. He began his studies of dynamic typography in three-dimensional landscapes as a student of Muriel Cooper, founder of the Visible Language Workshop and later joined the Aesthetics and Computation Group under the direction of John Maeda. The Talmud Project was featured in the National Design Triennial at the Cooper-Hewitt museum. His work has appeared in Newsweek, Scientific American, Print, Communication Arts,the Atlantic Monthly, ID magazine’s 42nd Annual Design Review and the book Information Architects. A typographic animation designed for the Brain Opera in collaboration with Yin Yin Wong premiered in New York’s Lincoln Center. He has designed interactive information environments for such companies as BMW, IBM, LEGO and Nike, Inc.
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James Souttar grew up in the sixties, was a teenager in the seventies, started working as a graphic designer in the eighties, and spent his journeyman years in the nineties. Thus, he survived Compacta Black, Bookman Swash, ITC Berkeley, Template Gothic, and now the Univers revival, yet somehow he has managed to remain an optimist. Most of his career has been spent working in corporate identity, some of it for the big London houses such as Wolff Olins, some of it as an independent. Corporations are the medieval courts of our time-mostly barbaric, but not without a desire to become civilized-and the corporate designer is little more than a jester. But there has to be hope for these organizations, for without it there's not much hope for the rest of us. To which end Souttar formed a business with his good friend Maziar Raien and other friends and colleagues to try to humanize this area of design. Looking to the new thinking emerging from the social and cognitive sciences, they want to bring ideas back into graphic design.
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Gunnar Swanson is a graphic designer, media designer, and the director of the multimedia program at California Lutheran University. Swanson has won over fifty awards and publications for trademark, publication, type, packaging, and graphic design from AIGA, Graphis, How,the American Corporate Identity series, and other graphic design organizations, books, and magazines. He has had over a dozen articles on graphic design subjects published by How, Design Issues, the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, Virginia Commonwealth University, and others. His writing is included in three graphic design anthologies, translated into Spanish, and published in Mexico. He was co-editor with Katie Salen of Zed.3.
“Clarety: Drinking from the Crystal Goblet” appeared in the first issue of Serif.“On the Democratization of Typography” was published in the Fall 1996 issue of the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design.
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Beatrice Warde (1900–1969) was born in the US but spent much of her life as a central figure of the British type world as a typographer, writer, editor, and scholar. She wrote and designed the Monotype broadsheet “This Is a Printing Office.”
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Stephanie Zelman followed her degree in philosophy/political theory with work as a graphic designer in Tokyo, another degree (this one in communication design), and the design and art direction of a range of conceptual projects in New York, Montreal, and Boston. Her passion for new ideas and concepts led her to found Uturn Design, a Boston design firm that manipulates words and images to create unexpected meanings.
“Looking into Space” was adapted from Zelman’s McGill University Masters Degree in Communications thesis.
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