An Icon across the City

It’s kind of like rounding up a group of guys to paint their faces and chests before the big game… except this time the Statue of Liberty is invited. Walking all across the city this weekend, I’ve run into at least a couple of the Statue of Liberty replicas scattered across Manhattan to generate citywide buzz for the upcoming All-Star Game (to be held at Yankee Stadium on July 15). The replicas are each 8.5 feet tall and painted in a different set of team colors. The 42 statues include: “each of the 30 Major League Baseball clubs, the Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Giants, the American League, the National League, four All-Star statues and statues commemorating the final season of Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium, an additional version for the host Yankees, and one to be determined to be painted by the artist as a surprise.” It’s only fitting that the MLB has given a makeover to an icon as American as the Statue of Liberty to complement a sport as American as baseball, but I highly doubt even the biggest baseball fans are hunting over the city to find them all.

Farewell Polaroids

In one of AIGA’s most recent articles in Voice (“an online publication for the discussion of design matters, featuring insightful interviews, engaging essays and thoughtful criticism”), Phil Patton addresses the announcement this past February that Polaroid will be closing its U.S. factories that are making instant film. He traces the history of different models of older Polaroid cameras and some famous uses of Polaroid photography by artists and in movies in the past. I agree with his assertion that Polaroid cameras were momentous in democratizing photography. Now that everyone can photograph, is everyone also a “photographer”? It really is unbelievable to think about how certain technological advancements from the last decade (e.g. digital cameras, cell phone cameras, online photo sharing sites, Facebook, blogs, and online photo printing sites) even make disposable cameras and the notion of 1-hour photo development in your local Walgreen's seem obsolete.

So while many are up in arms about the expiration of older Polaroid cameras, I have to ask: is it the actual camera you’re going to miss or are you more importantly going to miss what Polaroids represent? I think most can agree that it is what Polaroids represent, namely the potential immediacy of a print. Today, with digital cameras and features like viewfinders, can’t we get that same immediacy? We no longer have to wait for hours or days just to see if a picture came out. We can make sure that the moment we’re capturing is exactly how we want it to be remembered. So if both digital cameras and Polaroids have this immediacy, perhaps it is the authenticity and lack of control that will be missed. Polaroids are produced with the conception that they will not be reproduced or altered – what you see is what was really there. The result is a one-of-a-kind object. The same cannot be said for digital photography.

Polaroid has always struggled to redefine its brand in the eyes of a consumer as a technologically-forward brand that can do more than create great prints. And maybe retiring the instant film is Polaroid’s way of saying that it belongs in the digital world that many consumers and artists have already embraced. This fall, according to a New York Times article, Polaroid expects to bring to market a hand-size, battery-powered printer that produces color snapshots in about 30 seconds. I’m curious whether any of the Polaroid loyalists will actually fork over the $150.

http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/gone-in-sixty-seconds
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/technology/13novel.html

Roy Lichtenstein: Girls

Yesterday, I stopped by the Gagosian Gallery (Madison Avenue near 77th Street) to check out their exhibit (which closes June 28th) “Roy Lichtenstein: Girls.” The show consisted of a small selection of Lichtenstein’s paintings of women, which he took directly from newspaper advertisements and comic books in the post-war era. It’s amazing how he elevated the status of mass-produced, everyday art by using paint, putting it on canvas and bringing it into galleries and museums. Also, it is incredible how his Pop Art paintings are still relevant in our increasingly technological age. For example, looking at his Benday Dots and how he sometimes uses red and blue dots together to give the illusion of purple from far away reminds of how CMYK process colors work with printers today. Here is an example from a work in the exhibit, along with the poster from the exhibit.

http://www.gagosian.com/

Follow-Up to the Museum Mile Festival Post

From the article "10 Things Museums Won't Tell You" in the July 2008 issue of SmartMoney:

Bruce Altshuler, director of New York University's program in museum studies, says it's becoming more difficult to find that quiet, contemplative experience people associate with a museum trip. "Many museums are too crowded to provide a certain kind of aesthetic experience," he says. At special exhibitions in particular, it's often so packed that it's hard to see what's on display, leading frustrated visitors to skip parts of the exhibit. Large crowds also lead to safety and security issues. Museums are especially concerned about having to evacuate visitors quickly in the event of an emergency, says Steve Keller, who runs a Florida-based security firm that specializes in museums.

Process?

Through my recently gained experience designing several logos during my internship, I have learned that developing the perfect mark for a brand can be quite laborious. The smallest tweak of a point in Illustrator can make the biggest difference in a design, as it can change the entire feeling that a shape evokes, as well as how the icon interacts with the negative space and typography around it.

Regardless of the type of company for which a logo (or really any other piece) is designed, the emphasis is always on the final product. Designers present polished, complete solutions in hope that their clients will accept the proposal with only minor revisions. Do clients always pay for the journey that leads to the final product? What if designs don’t always have a bounty of type studies, multiple file versions, or series of scratchy thumbnail sketches that help the final version come to fruition? What if a designer can get it right on the first try?

Many other forms of art, including painting, sculpture, drawing, are process-based, and viewers can detect and appreciate the process even when presented with the final product, but this really isn’t the case for design. Come the final presentation, designers (figuratively) throw all their preliminary work out the window because only the solution matters. Only the final logo is used on the business card to be seen by all.

As designers (or designers-to-be), do we need to resort to more handmade forms of fine art in order to truly appreciate the process of what we are designing? What about design prevents the natural process of art-making from making itself known? In her book, Make it Bigger, Paula Scher, a current principal at Pentagram (and one of my design heroes), claims that “the act of designing is more ephemeral; it is an intuitive process informed by external forces that direct the intuition. Whereas a solution can be explained, the process that created it can never adequately be understood.” And Paula is probably right.

I wholeheartedly believe that the first solutions for a design can actually be the best. Why? Because over time, the first attempt is really the 150^th attempt or the 1000^th attempt, and each time we sit down to design, we learn from our experience. And until we can hand that experience over to the client for review, we’ll have to continue to grapple with what exactly qualifies the “process” of design.

A great Paula Scher video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdzzVeIdwpQ

Bringing Art to the Masses

On Tuesday, June 3, New York City held its 30th annual Museum Mile Festival, an event where all museums along the mile provide free access to the public for one evening. Between 6 and 9pm, 23 blocks on 5th Avenue between 82nd and 105th street were car-free and replaced with live bands, entertainment (e.g. balloon artists), and tons of chalk for sidewalk art. In theory, the event is a huge success for bringing many forms of art to public eyes, many of which have not had the opportunity to ever step into these museums on the Upper East Side.

The first festival, held in June 1978, was an “instant success” for exposing New Yorkers and visitors to the arts and forming new museum audiences. Total attendance records over the years have surpassed one million visitors, and the influx of people was no exception this year. Nine museums participated in the festival, but I only had the opportunity to visit two in the allotted time and before I was completely exhausted and sick of the crowds.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibit Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy explores the symbolic and metaphorical associations that inspire superhero creators and fashion designers to introduce similar types of “bodies” through their work. These include the graphic body (Superman, Spiderman), the patriotic body (Captain America, Wonder Woman), the virile body (the Hulk), the paradoxical body (Catwoman), the armored body (Batman, Iron Man), the aerodynamic body (The Flash), the mutant body (X-Men), and the postmodern body (Ghost Rider, the Punisher). I thought that the design of the exhibit was spectacular; the categorization of the work had a nice flow and I especially loved the iconic superhero typography on the white glossed walls. My biggest issue was how the Metropolitan Museum of Art handled its crowd; it was really like a herd of cattle moving from caption to caption accompanied by the frequent proclamation: “No photographs!”

The Cooper-Hewitt decided to handle its crowd by designating a specific flow of traffic through the museum. While I understood their intention to keep everyone moving in the same direction so that the most number of people could be let into the museum to see the work, I felt hustled to the point where I decided to just breeze through the exhibit and watch the glassblowing in the museum’s courtyard instead. GlassLab is “an innovative program of The Corning Museum of Glass that pairs its master glassmakers with some of the most creative minds working in design today.” Here are some pictures I took while one of the designs came to life:

Overall, the weather was beautiful and it was great be accompanied by so many different faces to enjoy art in the city, but I couldn’t help but feel like the success of the event was hindered by its time limit. Why not make a whole afternoon out of it instead of just three hours? Why just once a year? If the city can coordinate these types of events more frequently, perhaps the museum traffic would be more manageable. Unlike the 1970s when the festival began, we live in a technological age. We can bring masterpieces into our classrooms and living rooms by jumping on the internet. We should be raising the bar of the festival’s purpose from mere exposure to the arts to teaching the masses how to appreciate and understand the arts—something that surely cannot be done in just one evening.

Museum Mile Festival: http://www.museummilefestival.org/
Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy: http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId={5B98D8A0-AB67-4137-8F5E-873FDB82EE73}&HomePageLink=special_c3a
NYT Article about Glass Lab: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/arts/design/28glas.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Slideshow from GlassLab: http://blog.cooperhewitt.org/2008/05/28/slideshow-glasslab

Typography Tour

I've finally settled into New York, where I will be interning for a small graphic design firm on the Upper West Side. While I’ve visited New York countless times, this is the first time that I’ll actually be living here for an extended period. For the next few months, I have the opportunity to soak in all the amazing art and design at my fingertips. New York typography is especially interesting because there are so many pockets of New York with different cultures, past and present. After all, New York is considered “the world’s second home.”

Focusing on my particular interest in typography, I came across a website for the Type Directors Club (TDC), an international organization for “all people who are devoted to excellence in typography” through a variety of disciplines (advertising, communications, education, marketing, and publishing). In recent years (TDC has existed since 1946), TDC has led four original lettering tours of New York, led by typography specialists and covering areas like the Financial District, Civic Center, Tribeca, Midtown, Morningside Heights, Washington Heights, Inwood, Brooklyn Heights, and Park Slope. It’s quite fitting that with all the recent hype over Gotham (the typeface popularized by Obama’s campaign) that I was able to find a Google Earth itinerary (god bless technology) for the tour that Tobias Frere-Jones, the typeface’s creator, gave in conjunction with AIGA/NY this past fall.

I started by the Municipal Building, U.S. Court House and other government buildings and then proceeded through Chinatown, Little Italy, and the Lower East Side. Given that I had to serve as my own tour guide and just went by a map with no clue where or at what I was really supposed to be looking, it was a frustrating at times… but totally worth it. I could see how some of the letterforms inspired Gotham’s creation. It amazed me how the signs I was led to weren’t designed by graphic designers, as they would be today. Rather, they were architectural letterforms, designed by engineers or draftsmen, and legibility and durability were probably the most important aspects to consider in their design.

Here are some pictures that I took during my tour (didn't want to post all 60):

Here is some really interesting information courtesy of the Hoefler Type Foundry (Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones’ foundry) on the history of these letterforms and the inspiration of Gotham:

Like most American cities, New York is host to a number of mundane buildings whose facades exhibit a distinctively American form of sans serif. This kind of lettering occurs in many media: the same office buildings whose numbers are rendered in this style, in steel or cast bronze, often use this form of lettering for their engraved cornerstones as well. Cast iron plaques regularly feature this kind of lettering, as do countless painted signs and lithographed posters, many dating back as far as the Work Projects Administration of the 1930s. And judging by how often it appears in signs for car parks and liquor stores, this might well be the natural form once followed by neon-lit aluminum channel letters. Although there is nothing to suggest that the makers of these different kinds of signs ever consciously followed the same models, the consistency with which this style of letter appears in the American urban landscape suggests that these forms were once considered in some way elemental. But with the arrival of mechanical signmaking in the 1960s, these letters died out, completely vanishing from production.

Although designers have lived with this lettering for half a century, it has remarkably gone unrevived until now. In 2000, Tobias Frere-Jones undertook a study of building lettering in New York, starting with a charming but rarely examined sign for the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Though Frere-Jones wanted Gotham to exhibit the "mathematical reasoning of a draftsman" rather than the instincts of a type designer, he allowed Gotham to escape the grid wherever necessary, giving the design an affability usually missing from 'geometric' faces. Unlike the signage upon which it was based, Gotham includes a lowercase, an italic, a full range of weights, and a related condensed design.

In just the few months that have passed since the tour was given, some of the lettering from the original tour was already gone. For example, Gertel’s Bakery at 53 Hester Street was an empty lot. I witnessed firsthand these letterforms’ “inevitable race with the wrecking ball,” as the Hoefler Type Foundry referred to it, and my tour inspired me to go explore in these next few weeks, camera in hand, the other inspiring (yet expiring) lettering that New York City has to offer.

About the tour: http://www.typography.com/ask/showBlog.php?blogID=10
The origin of Gotham: http://www.typography.com/fonts/font_history.php?historyItemID=1&productLineID=100008
A NYT article on a previous letterforms tour led by Paul Shaw: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/23/arts/design/23type.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
The Type Directors Club website: http://www.tdc.org/index.html