Design

Between 1970 and 1980, the Detroit Printing Co-op, spearheaded by Fredy and Lorraine Perlman, was responsible for the first English translation of Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle, printed journals like SDS' Radical America, ultra-left books by their in-house press, Black & Red, and countless posters, pamphlets, and books printed by high school students, black radicals, labor organizers, and anarchists who made use of the freely available facilities at the Co-op.

Fredy Perlman was not a printer or a designer by training, but was deeply engaged in the ideas, issues, processes, and materiality of printing. While at the Detroit Printing Co-op, he rethought the possibilities of prit by experimenting with overprinting, collage techniques, and different kinds of papers. Behind the calls to action and class consciousness written in his publications, there was an innate sense of the politics of design, experimentation, and pride of craft.

"The Detroit Printing Co-op" is a timely exploration of the history, output, and legacy of this unique enterprise, and serves as a testament to the power of printing, publishing, design, and distribution.

A New Program for Graphic Design is the first communication-design textbook expressly of and for the 21st century. Three courses—Typography, Gestalt and Interface—provide the foundation of this book.

Through a series of in-depth historical case studies (from Benjamin Franklin to the Macintosh computer) and assignments that progressively build in complexity, A New Program for Graphic Design serves as a practical guide both for designers and for undergraduate students coming from a range of other disciplines.

Synthesizing the pragmatic with the experimental, and drawing on the work of Max Bill, Beatrice Warde, Muriel Cooper and Stewart Brand (among many others), it builds upon mid-to-late 20th-century pedagogical models to convey contemporary design principles in an understandable form for students of all levels—treating graphic design as a liberal art that informs the dissemination of knowledge across all disciplines. For those seeking to understand and shape our increasingly networked world of information, this guide to visual literacy is an indispensable tool.

David Reinfurt (born 1971), a graphic designer, writer and educator, reestablished the Typography Studio at Princeton University and introduced the study of graphic design. Previously, he held positions at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Rhode Island School of Design and Yale University School of Art. As a cofounder of O-R-G inc. (2000), Dexter Sinister (2006) and the Serving Library (2012), Reinfurt has been involved in several studios that have reimagined graphic design, publishing and archiving in the 21st century. He was the lead designer for the New York City MTA Metrocard vending machine interface, still in use today. His work is included in the collections of the Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum of American Art, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and the Museum of Modern Art. He is the co-author of Muriel Cooper (MIT Press, 2017), a book about the pioneering designer.

Phylactère est une revue annuelle à voix multiples, née du désir d’explorer l’écriture de l’oralité et les possibilités de retranscription de performance, à travers des visions authentiques, subjectives et spontanées. Donnant la parole à des amateur·ice·s, artiste·s, designer·s et penseur·se·s, la revue Phylactère regroupe des écrits de transition, assumant tous les glissements entre un script, l’action réalisée et sa traduction, avec une attention extrême et aventureuse pour la manière dont les contextes, gestes, émotions et espaces sont mis en jeu lors de cette retranscription.

Initiée par Roxanne Maillet et Auriane Preud’homme à l’invitation de Camille Videcoq lors de la résidence Entrée Principale (Marseille), Phylactère conjugue pratique graphique et éditoriale et démarche curatoriale en intégrant au processus de publication l’organisation de différents événements. 

Pour son deuxième numéro, Phylactère prend pour titre l’onomatopée Oh là là !

Avec les contributions de : Anne Lise Le Gac, Benoît Le Boulicaut, Camille Videcoq, Cecil Serres, Claudia Pagès, Considered to be Allies (Margaux Parillaud & Mie Frederikke Fischer Christensen), Ghita Skali, Giuliana Zefferi, Lauren Tortil, Loreto Martínez Troncoso, Louise Hervé & Clovis Maillet, Mona Gérardin-Laverge, Nygel Panasco, pauline l. boulba, Sarah Browne, Susie Green (with Kim Coleman, Simon Bayliss & Rory Pilgrim), Tahnee, L’autre and Tiziana La Melia.

Conception graphique : Auriane Preud'homme et Roxanne Maillet.

Graphic Design Is (…) Not Innocent questions ingrained approaches, values and assumptions of graphic design in globalized societies. The publication aims to initiate a dialogue between designers, scholars, critics and commissioners, who investigate responsibilities, potentials, politics, limits and risks of designing visual communication. How innocent is graphic design? Whom is it addressing, whom is it in/excluding? What does it bring about? When defining the role and impact of visual communication, what future questions lie ahead?

Contributors: Karo Akpokiere, Christian Bauer, David Bennewith, Friedrich von Borries, Clémentine Deliss, Sandra Doeller, Daniel Martin Feige, Feminist Internet, Annette Geiger, Matthias Görlich, Anna Lena von Helldorff, Martin Ludwig Hofmann, Jianping He, Kay Jun, Anoushka Khandwala, Francisco Laranjo, Degeng Li, Eva Linhart, Madoka Nishi, Ingo Offermanns, Offshore, Sophia Prinz, Konrad Renner (Knoth  & Renner), Conor Rigby (Feminist Internet), Isabel Seiffert (Offshore), In-ah Shin (Feminist Designer Social Club), Pierre Smolarski, Markus Weisbeck

Dutch graphic designer Karel Martens (born 1939) has been an influential figure in the visual culture of the Netherlands for many decades. Alongside his commissioned projects, Martens has maintained a commitment to this personal and iterative way of printing, which shows how creative practice often spans perceived disciplinary boundaries.

For each day of this elegant 2023 calendar, Martens has created a unique abstracted form to serve as a number—originally constructed using his signature method of printing letterpress monoprints from found metal forms, which are then digitized to comprise 365 compositions in total. The piece’s reference to the daily practice of art expresses Martens’ own approach as a designer and educator: “every day is a new day.”

This Press & Fold issue on Resistance presents conversations, propositions and imaginations of fashion and resistance outside of fashion’s industrial context. For protest and resistance to become effective, it depends on community to generate, support and further it: with this issue we think further on these ideas of protest, activism and resistance in and around fashion, and not only in terms of clothing, and how it is portrayed in (fashion) imagery, but also in terms of how fashion is structured and organized: is fashion only able to thrive within a capitalist structure, or are there other possibilities as well? What ideas, initiatives and structures can be developed for fashion to become inclusive and generous to all participants? What needs to be resisted and what needs to be embraced? In that sense this issue of Press & Fold, as well as the previous issues, is a world-building exercise, and wants to show what we can do without, and what we need to move fashion towards becoming a generous to all participants involved?

— Note from the publisher

4 poèmes-affiches, format A3, impriméx en risographie au studio Colorama (Berlin), sur papiers variés, tirage à 150 exemplaires

«GASOLINE, Apocalypse 1998», «the category is: phone sex», «zona nudista», «(fête) sentimental-e-s» : étés d'apocalypse, émojis banane, cruising transocéanique, SMS en short, sales coeurs, baraques à frissons et grand-huit sentimental... ces poèmes courent toustes ~ à genoux, à nu ou en solex ~ après la question du désir, après l'amour aussi, avec une tendre obsession

Design graphique signé Auriane Preud’homme, Enz@ Le Garrec, Roxanne Maillet & Martha Salimbeni, avec des dessins de Gaëlle Loth

A proposition opened up by Umashankar Manthravadi in his practice as an acoustic archaeologist, bringing together writers, choreographers, composers, actors, dancers, musicians, field recordists and sound, light, and graphic designers who engage and transform each other's work.

The life and work of Umashankar Manthravadi is a history of sound and technology through the second half of the 20th century. As a self-taught acoustic archaeologist, he has been building ambisonic microphones since the 1990s to measure the acoustic properties of premodern performance spaces.

The publication An Archaeology of Listening accompanies the exhibition A Slightly Curving Place at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2020, and together they respond to the proposition in Manthravadi's practice that we can't just look for theaters in landscapes of the past—we must listen for them. Including scripts, scores, conversations, and essays, the publication considers its own format in relation to the notion of writing as the first sound-recording device.
This book was conceived in relation to the programme Coming to Know, accompanying the exhibition A Slightly Curving Place at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in 2020. It is the first in a series of volumes titled An Archaeology of Listening.

Umashankar Manthravadi is an Indian self-taught acoustic archaeologist, sound technician, sound recordist, journalist and poet. In the early 1980s, Manthravadi helped set up and maintain one of the world's largest ethnomusicology archives, Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology (ARCE) in Gurgaon. As part of the artist collective Umashankar and the Earchaeologists (with Lawrence Abu Hamdan and Nida Ghouse) he investigates how sound can influence our understanding of ancient and contemporary sites. He developed ambisonic technology to document the acoustic properties of archaeological sites in India, examining in particular social forms and their actualization in performance and sound.

Making Space is a pioneering work first published in 1984 which challenges us to look at how the built environment impacts on women's lives. It exposes the sexist assumptions on gender and sexuality that have a fundamental impact on the way buildings are designed and our cities are planned.

Written collaboratively by the feminist collective Matrix, tthe book provide a full blown critique of the patriarchal built environment both in the home and in public space, and outline alternative forms of practice that are still relevant today. Making Space remains a path breaking book pointing to possibilities of a feminist future.

Some authors worked for the London-based Matrix Feminist Architect's collective, an architectural practice set up in 1980 seeking to establish a feminist approach to design. They worked on design projects—such as community, children and women's centres. Others were engaged in building work, teaching and research.

The new edition comes with a new introduction examining the context, process and legacy of Making Space written by leading feminists in architecture.

Design classics, the dates of which ranged from the beginnings of the previous century to the start of the current one, were scattered throughout the room, their very definite shapes offset against the off-white, off-modern walls. I allowed my gaze to flit from one piece of furniture to the next, and as I mentally joined the dots between them I unwittingly re-wrote their history according to thematic as opposed to chronological concerns. I wondered if perhaps I were simply seeing my own flat ‘in the expanded field’, each element repositioned by some new and typically rabid curator eager to facilitate the production of their own dense texts...

Part metafiction, part design criticism, with a touch of armchair psychoanalysis, Objektophiliabegins in London in 2014, where a nameless design critic and her partner X reside in a decrepit but Grade II listed tower block. It ends some months later among the fin de siècle wonders of Vienna in an echo of the successive encounters of Schnitzler’s La Ronde. Possessed by the ruins of social housing and its accompanying ideologies, but nonetheless in possession of those ruins’ original brushed-steel light-fittings, the critic soon discovers that her craving for these and similarly ‘undemanding things’ has usurped her more conventional—or fleshly—desires.

‘Susan Finlay’s deft, subtle work examines the psychic texture of life through our relation to things... objects of all kinds, from Filet-O-Fish sandwiches to high art, Le Creuset cookware, bicycle baskets and purpose-built, modern flats. Objektophiliais witty and brisk and devastating all at the same time.’ 
–> Chris Kraus

Susan Finlay is a writer and artist.  She is the author of three poetry pamphets: Indole, 2019, The Unruly Glove, the Green Bum and the Sickly Trickle(2018), and Sex and the City 2 (2017), and two previous novels: Our Lady of Everything(Serpent’s Tail, 2019), and Arriviste (Five Lines in the Sand, 2007).  Most (but not all) of her work relates to psychoanalysis, magic, and the decorative arts.  She lives in the UK and Berlin.  

Les diagrammes, cartes et visualisations de données ont conquis le domaine de la recherche en arts, lettres et sciences humaines. Pour certains chercheurs, ces formes graphiques consistent à exploiter des données quantitatives jusqu’ici délaissées, pour d’autres, elles offrent la possibilité d’explorer les relations discrètes qu’entretiennent des corpus hétérogènes. Mais sur quels fondements épistémologiques reposent ces opérations techniques et intellectuelles ? Dans le cadre de la production du savoir et de son interprétation en régime numérique, est-il possible de dépasser le simple effet d’affichage des données, certes bluffant au premier abord, et d’envisager autrement les interfaces et les logiciels ?

Considérée aujourd’hui comme l’une des plus importantes théoriciennes des humanités numériques, Johanna Drucker livre dans cet ouvrage, spécialement rédigé pour la collection, une alternative aux formes dominantes de la visualisation de l’information. Héritière de la tradition humaniste, elle propose une approche qui réhabilite l’idée d’un sujet situé et incarné qui expérimente et conceptualise les connaissances par le prisme de la représentation graphique.

Originally published in 2010, ‘On the Self-Reflexive Page’ is part artist’s book and part essay, part literary excavation and part typographical miscellany. For this second incarnation of Louis Lüthi’s anthology of thematically arranged pages, the original material has been significantly expanded and revised. Like its predecessor, the new version proposes a typology of nonverbal elements found in novels, short stories, and essays. In each of the pages reproduced here, the prose is interrupted by one of these nonverbal elements, from black or blank pages, drawings or collages, photographs or film stills, to fragments of text or visual poems that are distinct from a conventional page layout.

This publication contains a collection of patterns designed by Dutch graphic designer Karel Martens. Although Martens is widely recognised for his specialisation in typography, the dozens of full-page patterns shown here are devoid of any text, allowing the sequence to become a mesmerising pattern in itself. Designed by Martens & Martens.

The second issue of the Cahiers du centre national du graphisme (National Graphic Design Center) is about typography, observed through artistic, cultural, societal, or technical approaches, with a focus on the work of the font designer Jean-François Rey and his exhibition "Typography and comics" at le Signe, centre national du graphisme, by the curator Jean-Noël Lafargue.

LSD 2 opens on history of art and graphic design with the text by Catherine Guiral, the question of "free" fonts studied by Frank Adebiaye, but also publishes an essai on research in the French language of inclusive, not -binary, post-binary or even genderfuck typography practices, by Caroline Dath ° Camille Circlude.

With texts by Frank Adebiaye, Caroline Dath ° Camille Circlude, Catherine Guiral, Jean-Noël Lafargue, Jean-François Rey. 

Graphic design: officeabc.
Published in October 2021
 
Bilingual edition (English / French)
13 x 19 cm (softcover)
224 pages (20 color & 42 b/w ill.)

Design Dedication makes a plea for adaptive mentalities within design pedagogy, with a non-normative approach to design practices. It explores an attitude in and towards design education that is socially engaged, politically aware, generous in approach, lyrical in tone, experimental in form and collaborative in practice. How can we talk about and bring out the political that’s inherent in the work that design students are doing? How to work on specific urgencies that are rooted in experience and narration? What are the underlying values of such a pedagogy? What kind of practices are developed in the context? How can an institute support and safeguard this? 

Design Dedication explores these approaches through statements from within and reaches out to design students, designers, artists, and teachers who are open to questioning their own practices and reformulating values in design dedication for a yet unpredictable, but surely dedicated tomorrow.

Contributors: Hannes Bernard, Michèle Champagne, Rana Ghavami, Anja Groten, Agata Jaworska, Anastasia Kubrak, Sherida Kuffour, Gui Machiavelli, Daniel van der Velden, Annelys de Vet and many others.

Capitalism could not exist without the coins, notes, documents, graphics, interfaces, branding and advertisements; artefacts that have been (partly) created by graphic designers. Even anti-consumerist strategies such as social design and speculative design are being appropriated within capitalist societies to serve economic growth. It seems that design is locked in a system of exploitation and profit, a cycle that fosters inequality and the depletion of natural resources. 

CAPS LOCK uses clear language and striking visual examples to show how graphic design and capitalism are inextricably linked. The book contains many case studies of designed objects related to capitalist societies and cultures, and also examines how the education and professional practice of (graphic) designers supports the market economy and how design practice is caught within that very system.

The content of CAPS LOCK is structured in chapters with titles of professions that designers can occupy (such as Educator; Engineer, Hacker, Futurist, Activist, etc.). These titles respond to the importance of not just how designers make work, but also how they perform daily economic and social roles.

Ideas, utopian propositions and practical solutions for reinterpreting and reconnecting empathically with the world around us.

This book brings together ideas and projects that seek to define a new role for design based on empathy.

As a mediator of emotions and feelings, design is presented here as a practice that takes care as its main purpose. Designers adopt sensitive, diplomatic, sometimes therapeutic functions, with the aim of connecting us with one another but also with the world around us, with other species, with soil, water and even the universe. In this book, the reader will find new ideas, utopian propositions but also practical solutions for reinterpreting and reconnecting with the world around them. Taking food as a key medium of encounter, both between people and also with the more than human world, the designers featured in this book consciously operate in a multi-scalar realm – from the invisible microbial life that lives in our gut to the vast landscapes transformed by agricultural practices. Designs for more than one are those that take into consideration not just their immediate user or client but the many constituents inevitably impacted by any new object or action.

Edited by Mariana Pestana with Sumitra Upham and Billie Muraben.

With written contributions by Ekin Ozbicer, Mariana Pestana, Susan Lanzoni, Naz Şahin, Billie Muraben, Sumitra Upham, FRAUD, Luigi Coppola and Vivien Sansour and Pelin Tan, Aslıhan Demirtaş, Black Athena Collective, theOtherDada, TiriLab, Counterspace, Anna Puigjaner (MAIO) with Alina Abouelenin, Aslı Uludağ, Dele Adeyemo, Young Curators Group, Eylül Şenses, Ulya Soley, Nur Horsanalı, Studio Ossidiana, Orkan Telhan + elii, Ibiye Camp, Ben Thorp Brown, Paula Gaetano Adi, Meriem Bennani, Calum Bowden, Jawa El Khash, Emmy Bacharach, Alice dos Reis, Macedo Cannat, Future Anecdotes.

The Department of Speculative Facts connects two seemingly contradictory approaches: Speculation which attempts to think and act beyond existing knowledge and structures, and fact-checkers in search for a solid consensus on which our reality can be built. When stretching knowledge and speculating with fiction, what sense of responsibility is needed in times of democratized opinions and fake news? Learning from the other SF—Science Fiction—we think of speculation through facts, and facts through speculation, to situate truth culturally.

The backbone of this book is an e-mail exchange between two fact-checkers from the New York Times Magazine, which we handed over to artists to re-write, re-perform, and re-design. The publication includes the original letters, workshop scripts, as well as additional texts by philosophers, journalists, writers, and artists looking at new social contracts, with which we can anchor ourselves in the present.

Department of Speculative Facts is Lietje Bauwens, Quenton Miller, Karoline Świeżyński.

Contributions by Sepake Angiama, Lietje Bauwens (DoSF), Kate Briggs, Federico Campagna, Alex Carp & Jamie Fisher (NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE), Mette Edvardsen, Tristan Garcia, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Nicoline van Harskamp, Quenton Miller DoSF, Ingo Niermann, Michael Portnoy, Achal Prabhala with WIKIAFRICA, FACT FACTORIES, AFRICA CHECK, CHIMURENGA, Wolfgang Tillmans, Bob Trafford (FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE).

Design by Karoline Świeżyński

Critical publications dedicated to the analysis of Graphic Design are sadly few and far between today, particularly in France, but also in Europe as a whole.

Adopting an analytical and critical posture with regard to the forms and activities of Graphic Design, Sacha Léopold and François Havegeer established in 2017 a printed publication that deals with these practices. The publication works with eight authors (Lise Brosseau, Manon Bruet, Thierry Chancogne, Céline Chazalviel, Jérôme Dupeyrat, Catherine Guiral, Étienne Hervy and Sarah Vadé).

Critical publications dedicated to the analysis of Graphic Design are sadly few and far between today, particularly in France, but also in Europe as a whole.

Adopting an analytical and critical posture with regard to the forms and activities of Graphic Design, Sacha Léopold and François Havegeer established in 2017 a printed publication that deals with these practices. The publication works with eight authors (Lise Brosseau, Manon Bruet, Thierry Chancogne, Céline Chazalviel, Jérôme Dupeyrat, Catherine Guiral, Étienne Hervy and Sarah Vadé).

Borrowing Positions: Role-Playing Design & Architecture is a speculative book which reflects on the design- and architecture-centred LARPs (Live Action Role-Plays) organized by the Trojan Horse collective. The book is an exploration of Live Action Role-Play as a design and architecture research tool. By inviting the reader to try on different characters, switch roles and reconsider their everyday practices, the book explores issues such as identity, performativity, gender, colonialism, care responsibilities and fear in the context of architecture, design and urban planning.

The book consists of three parts: an overview of previous LARPs and their theoretical background; reflections (essays, visual essays and interviews) on LARP-related issues; and a practical (DIY) section – a step-by-step guide on how to organize your own design LARP.

Contributors to the book vary from architecture and design practitioners to performance artists working with role-play and fiction. The book will be of interest to anyone interested in inderdisciplinary practices in design and architecture.

This “black book” published by Het Nieuwe Instituut presents a layered, non-binary notion of darkness. Navigating through cosmic, automated, and seemingly invisible environments, it delves into what we do not generally get – or choose – to see. Moreover, the book explores the relation between the possibility of seeing and forms of oppression and emancipation. 

Contributions by the Academy for Urban Astronauts, Ramon Amaro, Danilo Correale, Jonathan Crary, Aldo van Eyck, Ludo Groen, Bregtje van der Haak, Saidiya Hartman, Marten Kuijpers, Momtaza Mehri, Melvin Moti, Lucy McRae, Johannes Schwartz, Dirk Sijmons, and Leanne Wijnsma.

Écrire comme être un chiton, c'est à dire de soi extraire la soie chitineuse. Les squames calcaires exsudés de son fragile : des miettes d'écailles et de spicules tapissent un devenir-mollusque. Au dedans mouolles mais affamé.es, brouteur.euses bestial.es à l'aube de grignotage ; il y a de quoi gratter !

avec les textes de Leo Go, moilesautresart, Marine Forestier, Suzette Haden Elgin, Ninoa André, Valentin Godard, Lucas Lazzarotto, GPT-3 soua la houlette de Guilluame Seyller; et les dessins de Patricia Lino Dias, Alix Penon.

What is artistic research? What is a research document? How do these relate to the making process, invention, and creativity? What exactly is expected of me? If you have ever asked yourself any of these questions, then this book is for you. Research For People Who (Think They) Would Rather Create addresses all relevant aspects that need to be considered during a research and documentation process, such as: finding the right topic and approach; formulating your research question; working out your methods; choosing one or more suitable writing styles; and considering the possible roles of visual, virtual, auditory, embodied, and spatial materials.

Research For People Who (Think They) Would Rather Create shows a multitude of examples from the field of art and design – each of which illustrates one specific aspect of developing a thesis, essay, paper, research document, or however else it may be referred to in your own setting. You can read this book from cover to cover, or you can immediately flip to those subjects which you find most relevant at any given moment. Ultimately, Research For People Who (Think They) Would Rather Create is an invitation to contribute – quite literally, with your own projects, examples, and questions – since the ultimate goal is to help you develop your own research.