Context of Practice Lecture : The History of Type (Production and Distribution)

Comic Sans: Satan's Typeface

'The written word endures, the spoken word disappears…'

-Neil Postman

Typography is a modernist's obsession. In it's most basic form, it is a form of illustration, the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form. Type is what language looks like and typefaces are a visual format for language. The art of typography is not just in the letter forms themselves but also in the way they encode meaning through pace, intonation and emphasis.

Typography has a significant chronology dating back more than 450 years, but in order to fully understand the chronology of type and the cultural shift from oral to written communication one must look all the way back to Ancient Mesopotamia in 3200BCE, an area of the middle east widely regarded as the cradle of Western Civilisation. Western scholars and occidentalists of the time adapted the pictorial Proto-Sinaitic script of the Mesopotamians, to form the foundation of western type.

The Mesopotamians pioneered in taking what was normally reserved as an oral tradition and made it a written one, a process that over time that was adopted by other cultures and forms the basis for western alphabets and written language. The development and acquisition of a durable visual  form of language was driven by the desire for trade and commerce and development still is today.

Typography and letterform has always been influenced by the technology of the time and a significant development came in 1450 when Johnannes Gutenberg created the woodblock printing press, giving birth to a range of new type faces. The creation of the printing press was motivated by the proliferation of organised religion and the desire of churches to print more Bibles.

The next major step in the evolution of type was in 1870, when William Foster introduced the Education Act, making education compulsory for all in the United Kingdom, when beforehand, education was a luxury for the privileged few. Education proliferated the need for printed word, as the printed word is key to the process of education, but it was the establishment of The Bauhaus in 1919 by  Walter Gropius and other early modernists that brought together the creative minds of the time with industry and commerce, birthing a design culture. The industrialisation of type further proliferated the
printed word and in 1957 Max Miedinger set out to design a new sans-serif typeface born out of the need to create a utilitarian, neutral typeface reflecting a modernist perspective. This is where Helvetica comes from. Helvetica reflects the consumer culture, industrialisation and commercialisation of the post-war world.

This lecture has given me a greater understanding of type and how to apply it effectively, the differences between modernist typefaces and the connotations each one holds.Typographical design is not an area I'm overly familiar with, so the lessons learned in this lecture should prove valuable should I work in a graphic style in the future for my animations. We touched upon the history of Swiss Typefaces, one of the staples of Modernist design philosophy, which I found to be interesting. While I think of myself as quite a figurative animator, I am open to more abstract ideas, Typographical animation being one of them. Even so, this lecture should prove useful in the future, especially on more commercial ventures.

Study Task 2: Reading and Understanding a Text: To What extent could contemporary animation be described as Postmodern?

The question I have chosen for this CoP task is...

To what extent could contemporary animation be described as Postmodern?

To better understand the topic I have been reading journals on the subject of modernity and postmodernity. For this task I have condensed part of a journal by Terry Barrett on this very topic titled 'Modernism and Postmodernism: An overview with art examples.'

Modernity and Postmodernity in art are best understood in relation to modernity and postmodernity in general cultural history. The age of modernity began with the Enlightenment and it was Isaac Newton that championed the belief that through science the world could be saved.  Rene Descartes and later, Immanuel Kant shaped the age intellectually, believing that through reason they could establish a foundation for universal truth. The major movements and events of modernity are democracy, capitalism, industrialization, science, belief in freedom of the individual and urbanization.

For postmodernism however, there is no unifying theory, as there are many contenders putting forth contentious ideas. Proponents of postmodernity symbolically date back to 1968, with the riots in Paris in which students demanded radical changes to what they perceived as an elitist European University system. Postmodernism is better described as anti-modernism, as it does not merely follow modernism but also challenges modernist assumptions and conventions. Postmodernists see modernity as the oppression of ‘peasants’ under ‘monarchies’, or in a more modern context, the oppression of workers under capitalist systems or the oppression of women in the social consciousness.  The postmodern argument is, in summary, the belief that modernity leads to social practices and institutions that legitimise domination and control by an elite few over the many.

I have also picked out five key quotes from the journal piece that I believe explain the subject. 

'Isaac Newton championed the belief that through science the world could be saved.'

'Political leaders of modernity also championed reason as a source of progress in social change, believing that with reason they could produce a just and egalitarian social order. Such beliefs fed the American and French democratic revolutions, the first and second world wars, and the thinking of many today'.

'Whereas modernity is influenced by the rationalism of Newton, Descartes, Kant and others, postmodernity is influenced by philosophers such as Fredrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidrigger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Dewey and more recently Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty, who are skeptical about the modernist belief that theory can mirror reality.'

'Karl Marx and Sigmund freud also undermined the modernist belief that reason is a source of truth  by identifying economic forces above the surface of society and the psychological forces below it that are not bound by reason, yet are powerful shapers of society and individuals.'

'Postmodernists stress that facts are simply interpretations, that truth is not absolute but merely the construct of individual groups, and that all knowledge is mediated by culture and language.'

Study Task 1: Animation Analysis Exercise

For this analysis I will be comparing and contrasting some of the themes and motifs present in two pieces of animation, Director Peter Folds' A Short Vision and Stan VanDerBeek's Science Friction. Though the two short films differ greatly in terms of form, genre and the way in which they use visual language, there is some thematic crossover and interesting parallels to be made.

Aesthetically, while radically different they both retain prominent 1950s iconography, which is integral to the intended reading of both films. Fold's film plays with genre in order to subvert audience expectations, presenting us in the opening few minutes with what seems like your standard storybook setup, complete with a voice-over narration that wouldn't seem out of place in an episode of Jackanory. The director uses an inclusive visual aesthetic in order to communicate his message to a mass audience, foreshadowing the horrors of a potential nuclear war by staging it in the context of children's storybook.

VanDerBeek's film takes a different approach and is of another genre entirely, instead taking the form of an surrealist experimental cut-out animation with a deep ideologically charged subtext satirising the political climate of 1950s. Cold War escalation and the space race is depicted in VanDerBeek's film as a sort of, to put it in the crudest possible terms, international 'dick-measuring contest.' Phallic parallels can be drawn between the use of large skyscrapers and space rockets as measurements of power.

VanDerBeek draws parallels between the power-politics of the Cold War and attitudes towards gender in the 1950s (a time with a very male-dominated society) and perceived insecurities with masculinity. Though imagery is intentionally suggestive rather than concrete a lot of what I have taken away from viewing this film can be taken as my interpretation and not necessarily what the author intended. Nevertheless, from the opening few minutes of Science Friction VanDerBeek seems to equate the power plays between east and west to a strongman contest, where two countries are flexing at each other from afar, fueling each other's insecurities over their capability leading to an arms/space race. In a way this is played for laughs, but it serves as a perfect allergory for the mindset of the US and USSR during the height of cold war tensions.

A Short Vision also effectively plays upon the attitudes of the time, mainly the social paranoia of Americans in the 1950s. The audience is not explicitly told what the shape in the sky is at the beginning which plays upon the social and political uncertainties of the times. The intonation of the voice-over narration in A Short Vision seems catered to a younger audience, but the language used by the narrator at the beginning to describe the shape in the sky sets an unsettling tone, describing it as seeming 'small at first', but also 'big', as 'powerful' but 'noiseless'. These contradictory descriptives effectively create unease in the viewer and establish the dogma for the rest of the short film.

Everything seems designed as a contradiction. While the film is aesthetically pleasing to the eye and accessible for all ages, with the cut-out animation, storybook visuals and animal characters, yet the subject matter depicted is genuinely horrifying and graphic, disarming us to catch us off guard. By juxtaposing what is conventionally a universally accessible genre in visual language with shockingly graphic subject matter to get a point across, the audience is more likely to take away the message as intended by the director.

A Short Vision is a success. The film was shown on The Ed Sullivan Show back in 1956 and gained mass-media attention for it's shocking depiction of Nuclear Weapons being used on civilian populations just over a decade after the United States dropped the A-Bomb on cities in Japan, killing upwards of 250,000 civilians. Peter Fold's graphic depiction of a nuclear attack stood in stark contrast to the rest of the media's depiction at the time. In the 1950s the incredibly Conservative mass media was fiercely unquestioning of the sanitized narrative regarding the nuclear arms race being put forth by the elites running America, which is part of the reason it is so effective. The film uses a wide repertoire of visual language to subvert commonly accepted societial assumptions regarding the effects of nuclear weapons, making it both subversive and easily accessible for mass audience consumption.

VanDerBeek's film, while effectively communicating it's message to those literate in more abstract forms of visual language, fails to ignite meaningful conversation in it's audience compared to Folds' work, due to it's deliberately obtuse nature. But this is to be expected as both films were created with completely different audiences in mind. Folds' with the prime-time television audience in mind and VanDerBeek with the art world at the forefront of his.

Context of Practice Lecture: Visual Literacy- The Language of Design

'Life was much easier when Apple and Blackberry were just fruits.'

Visual communication, in it's simplest terms, is the process of sending and receiving messages and information using type and image. It is based on a level of shared understanding of signs, symbolic gestures and objects. For visual communication to work there must be a common tongue shared by creator and audience. Without an agreement as to what certain sign and symbols mean across a range of social and cultural contexts, Visual Communication cannot exist. These conventions are built from a foundation of universal and cultural symbols.

Images can be read and Visual Literacy is the ability to interpret, negotiate and construct meaning from information presented in the form of an image. Symbols are learned and manipulating them effects meaning. Depending on the cultural or societal context symbols have multiple interpretations, which is why its is important to clarify to prevent confusion. Being Visually Literate requires a certain level of awareness of the relationship between Visual Syntax and Visual Semantics.

Visual Syntax is the pictorial structure and visual organisation of elements within an image, representing the basic building blocks of an image and how we read it. Composition, framing, lighting etc, all of this has an effect on Visual Syntax.

Visual Semantics refers to the way an image fits into a cultural process of communication, including the relationship between form and meaning and the way meaning is created through different social and cultural ideas.

Semiotics is the study of signs and sign processes such as likeness, analogy, metaphor, signification, designation, indication and communication. Though the word is usually associated with linguistics, Semiotics also involves the study of non-linguistic sign systems.

Semiotics= Symbol, Sign, Signifier

Visual Synecdoche is a term applied when a part is used to represent the whole or vice versa.

Statue of Liberty > New York

London > Big Ben

A Visual Metonym is a symbolic image that is used to make reference to something with a more literal meaning.

Yellow Taxi > New York

A Visual Metaphor is used to transfer the meaning from one image to another.

Big Apple > New York