Apr 1, 2011 | Book Covers, New Work, Recent Posts
Recently I had the challenging experience of working on cover designs for David Brooks' new book The Social Animal. The book does not fit into any neat genre categories, and this is the hardest kind of book to create an image identity for. Although the book features a man and woman who meet, fall in love and go through life together it is not a romance. Nor is it a straight sociology book, although it concerns the intersection of mind-science and social reality; nor is it a self-help book, although it focuses on success in life and how people achieve it. David Brooks' reputation is not particularly "sexy" but this was not a dry book, and the cover needed to have emotional warmth and popular appeal that could reach a broader audience than the readers of the New York Times editorial page.
Hmmmmm……
Random House sent me the last idea they had developed, showing a man and woman in silhouette facing each other at a table, with the title in formal script typography. The direction was fairly open: do something different, better, that somehow captures this non-genre-genre. Figures, but maybe not figures exactly. Make it look smart, but not intellectual. And come up with something in 24 hours. I love this kind of assignment. It's a little bit like gambling, as your chances of winning the round are very low. The house is stacked with a whole lot of ambiguity and the hidden sword of author approval. There is nothing to lose and so I try to have fun and push for really creative solutions.
I explored several more versions than you see here, but these were the basic directions and styles. I tried a contemporary pop-culture face motif that would speak to the emotions, with warm-lovey-colors, and also a more sophisticated look using my variation on the universal symbols for man and woman to suggest courtship without the schmaltz. The signage motif seemed appropriate for a book that talked about paths to success through life and methods of emotional navigation. There is also a certain chilliness in the universal symbols that expressed the archetypal form of Brooks' characters, who are not meant to be taken seriously as characters in a novel. In the mix was an organic brush-drawn figure icon which, when multiplied, suggested the bigger mass of society. Although none of my solutions were chosen a variation on the idea of multiple figures became the final cover by Beck Stvan and Ruby Levesque. The solutions below use my own hand lettering, painted backgrounds, illustration and photography. Existing fonts are used in some solutions.
All cover designs © Iskra Design
Feb 6, 2011 | Current Affairs, Experimental Lettering, Lettering & Design: Essays, Recent Posts |
I had never heard of Taylor Mali or Ronnie Bruce, until their creative marriage of text and spoken word came my way in the form of this tremendous piece on Vimeo. Ronnie Bruce claims he knew nothing about typography when he created the animated type for Mali's poem "Totally like whatever, you know?" for a class two years ago. If this is the case then it is a rare example of ignorance leading to elegance. Ronnie, please, do more! Taylor Mali I discovered, is famous to everyone but me, and I am just catching up.
Click here to see the video
The poem itself is a critique of the "valley-speak" language epidemic among those between 2 years old and now reaching into the 40's. It is easy to make fun of the shallow upward arcing phrasing of the "please like me no matter what I say" generation. But it becomes a serious cultural problem when the generation expands upward and people show no sign of growing out of it. In contrast, I think of the street protestors in Egypt demanding removal of their president. I hear no equivocation, no need to be liked. How differently it would play if the crowds spoke in the tone of the entitled American forever-20-something: "Hey Hosni, could you like sort of step aside? Hey like so we could have maybe more equal distribution of resources, water, food, jobs, not that we really care that much?" (Of course that brings up the other question, can language supress revolution? What if they gave a revolution but the populace, so accustomed to a different kind of language, had no idea how to add an exclamation point to their demands?)
And yet, as one critic on Vimeo noted, recognizing the fallibility of one's own opinions is an important and often missing piece of contemporary dialogue. Extremists on all sides shout loudly and with no admission of gray zones, introspection or ambiguity. The tone set by ideology never allows for actual exchange of world views or what we think of as conversation. We seem to have lost the middle zone of thoughtful and considered opinion, delivered in the kind of tone of voice that takes responsibility and asks for the same in return. This voice doesn't ask for praise or try through the sleight of hand of syntax to avoid conflict, it asks for connection.
Taylor's poem takes on this issue beautifully. Although it is sly and bitingly funny, it works as far more than entertainment: it is a call to linguistic arms. Interestingly, when I read the poem in its simple "print" version it did not hold up as a work of art. It is Taylor's timing and twists of tone, amplified by the intuitive typography, which bring it alive. The message is dramatized by the tension between the authoritative believability embedded in "set type" and the helplessly noncomittal voiceover. The text moves from simple declarative sans serif, which continually undermines itself by turning upside down, sliding sideways or flirtatiously winking, to a more stately serif font as it makes its final point:
"I entreat, I implore you, I exhort you, I challenge you: To speak with conviction."
Jan 22, 2011 | Current Affairs, Lettering & Design: Essays
A few years ago an architect friend was contemplating what he might do with the rest of his life if he had ultimate freedom. Retire? Take up watercolor? Get his collected client sketches published in a leather-bound coffee-table book? Or no, he said, he thought he would go to China and build office parks. I recoiled in horror. In my mind’s eye the silk scroll of China had become one vast dystopian field of concrete boxes with bulldozers at the gate of each remaining village and in place of calligraphic clouds a swaddling fog of pollution. And he wanted to play there?
Last Sunday in the New York Times I read about a version of China that makes me consider my friend’s aspiration in a new light. The affluent class has developed an appetite for beautiful and adventurous architecture— and they are hiring American architects. They are also giving them almost complete design freedom, and this is what most interested me as an artist and designer. How exactly do you function creatively on such a huge platform — with no guidelines? Seattle architect Stuart Silk’s experience was quite revealing.
“A lot of emotions went through my head,” Mr. Silk says. “Disbelief was one of them. Then the anxiety that comes along with the responsibility to do something without direction. But ultimately it was very freeing and intellectually exciting.”
“Each of Mr. Silk’s nine designs [for villas in the range of $7.5 to $15 million] was required to be distinct, but no stylistic guidelines materialized. For the first time in his career, he wasn’t an architect interpreting a client’s tastes and personality, but an artist facing a blank canvas. “It opened up a part of my brain that hadn’t been exercised in a while,” he said.
“Mr. Silk visited the Suzhou gardens, west of Shanghai, where he encountered signs interpreting the landscapes; they were written in poetic language. That prompted the idea of writing story lines from which each villa design could bud. His narrative for one home, called Bending Paths, begins in a meditative vein:
“Like rings from a stone dropped into a pond,” he wrote, “curving walls create a journey and define space.”
Although the design process depicted here concerns architecture it applies to the universal question of any artist or creator confronting a blank page. How do you go from emptiness and the unsettling feeling that all decisions are arbitrary to decisions that feel fated, necessary, and right? If narrative is the solution, where do stories come from? How do you find an authentic launching point?
In non client-driven work I sometimes have no idea what the story is and unbridled anxiety or some other powerful emotion itself becomes the driving force and the ‘plot.’ Once my Japanese calligraphy teacher gave me a set of characters to work with and refused to tell me what they meant. When I brought the work in she exclaimed that it was the best calligraphy I had ever done — and indeed I agreed with her. I had felt completely inspired by the characters and assumed I was writing something with great spiritual meaning. Then she told me what it meant: “Autumn Sports Festival.” You mean, I asked her incredulously, football season??? Surely this can’t be. At which point she described in lyrical detail Autumn in Japan: the radiant skies, the leaves, the children’s games played in the temples, a palpable and magical sense of spiritual and physical exhilaration —all of which I experienced a few months later in September on my first trip to Japan. Indeed I had followed a story in my work, even if I was guided by an unconscious understanding of its essence rather than its plot.
I appreciate the candor of Stuart Silk in speaking about his process and for showing the importance of narrative in finding a direction and path. If it’s effective in designing a fifteen million dollar villa then surely it will transform my next wordmark project.
Jan 7, 2011 | Recent Posts
© 2011 Iskra Johnson cellphone photo
The first Wednesday in January the airwaves teemed with cold rain, falling blackbirds, stunned bats, biblical floods, the apocalypse of the bumblebee and, courtesy of Amy Goodman, a special on the health hazards of solitary confinement. It seemed like a perfect evening to check in for Silent Reading at the Sorrento Hotel. What better antidote to the Really Terrible News than the Fireside Room, with Chopin on the grand piano, and the civilized whispers of page-turning multitudes?
It was sitting room only, and I got the last seat, a simple gray silk stripe. I coveted my neighbors’ chairs, tall Alice in Wonderland affairs of pink and burgundy brocade proportioned such that the reader’s head becomes about the size of a lower case p. For reading, the sitting situation is very important. It becomes the boundary edge of the world into which you attempt to sink, the perimeter of focus. This evening's immediate situation included five other women and a glossy wooden table on which perched several ruby Manhattans and a teapot. The dreamy and smiling brunette read Celine, the luminous blonde boned up on the taxonomy of thalides, the extremely silent woman read Northwest Poetry Review, and the resolutely humorless girl with glasses read White Like Me. I read a story about a woman who kills a bear to save her husband, and my companion, the writer Jennifer Manlowe, brooded over her missing knitting. As she had crossed the street to the Sorrento her yarn fell from her bag and a fast-moving truck caught it, pulling needles and unfinished sweater-neck far down the highway. After the requisite period of mourning she accepted a temporary loan of Tinkers by Paul Harding.
It really is a very peculiar thing to do, to read silently with others on purpose in public outside of a library or an institution of higher learning. Everyone looked good, and you don’t usually think about this under fluorescent lights, you just want to leave as soon as possible or lay your head into the middle of the book and go to sleep. In strategizing over the future of the book, perhaps we should consider the usefulness of mood lighting and the elixir of vanity. A person just looks better reading a book than they do with blue computer haze reflecting on their face. The books themselves look better in the Fireside room than they do pretty much anywhere else. As a designer of custom typography for book jackets I’d say looks do matter. I am not entirely sure about the Chopin, inspite of the beauty of Kyle O'Quin's playing. I am someone who jumps up if classical music is playing and turns it off at the crescendos. I like serious silence, with maybe wind or birds. Later in the year I’ll write about silent reading in the garden, assuming the birds go back up in the sky and enough bumblebees come by to pollinate hope. If anyone launches new Silent Reading events, in Staten Island steak houses or Burien noodle shops or even on long elevator rides, please send pictures and invite the rest of us.
© Jennifer Manlowe cellphone photo
Dec 8, 2010 | Current Affairs, New Work, Recent Posts
According to David Brooks' column today, "People remember information that is hard to master. In a study for Cognition, Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel Oppenheimer and Erikka Vaughan found that information in hard-to-read fonts was better remembered than information transmitted in easier fonts."
So all these years spent tweaking obstructionist serifs and micromanaging kerning and becalming exuberant flourishes is for naught? Hear me, oh legibility squad, thee who sit on committees critiquing expressive letterforms and who delight in bringing down your iron fist upon the calligrapher's wrist, what if God really is in the complexity? What if the cereal box that can't be read from the milk aisle afterall but requires a closer view is the one we recall and reach for? Or the tangled romance cover with s's commingled like Medusa's curls, what if that's the one we send someone to the Fred Meyer to buy secretly just before midnight?
I never thought David Brooks, with whom I disagree on almost everything, would inspire me to art. But here you go, "Legibility, Rest in Peace." Unretouched brush calligraphy done with one of those brushes that has such a fugitive ink that if I don't scan it right now it will vanish tomorrow.
© 2010 Iskra Johnson
Designer, calligrapher, lettering artist. 
