Notes on Potus
Jul. 20th, 2006 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusPOTUS Typographicus is an article by Steve Heller at VOICE: The AIGA Journal of Design (where Steve also happens to be my editor). It's about how terrible the 
White House's graphic design is. "While his handlers would never allow the leader of the free world to go out in public wearing a rayon leisure suit and white bucks, they nonetheless use clownish shareware typefaces with hokey beveled edges and cheesy drop shadows to represent his ideas," Steve writes.
He goes on to condemn "typographic transgressions... malfeasance... signs set in garish types with clichéd graphic gimmickry derived from overused Photoshop filters... the use of Roman-like faux intaglio and engraved letterforms to give an air of authority and truth."
Heller treats the administration's design style as a series of errors, warning Karl Rove that "he’d better get his ascenders in gear if his White House minions plan to continue placing banners and digital backdrops above, behind, and below the President while he’s making those key speeches... it is not unreasonable to expect that the most powerful nation on earth could afford more sophisticated typography."
My interest in "the politics of texture" would suggest another approach. I'd argue that the "good design" Steve is advocating (and his use of the word "malfeasance" suggests he sees it as something like a series of professional regulations or standards) will never be adopted by this right wing populist administration because what Steve and I would call good design would be seen by Rove and Bush and Cheney as liberal design. They'll keep giving us "bad" design because it's populist. This regime's distrust of design professionals maps to their distrust of the "liberal media". Just as they see "the liberal media" as biased, infused with the values of sophisticated left- and right-coast urbanites who characteristically vote Democrat, so they see designers as incarnating the same values. Visual bias, we could call it.
It wouldn't be appropriate for a populist right wing government to appeal to people who drive Volvos and read the New York Times Book Review section. In fact, this regime wants to alienate those people, and reject their aesthetic standards. If those people love austere good design, then, damn it, this regime will use drop shadow.
There's a witty little animated film by Cheshire Dave Beckerman about the Roman-like "faux intaglio and engraved letterforms" Heller mentions. It's called Etched in Stone, and I recommend you go and watch it right now. It's about the use of Trajan on movie posters, and tells us that Trajan is a font derived from the inscription at the base of a victory column erected by the Roman emperor Trajan. (Metallic Trajan captions also punctuate the trailer for the film "The Prestige", in which David Bowie plays Nicola Tesla.)
The meaning of Trajan in the contemporary US seems fairly unambiguous to me. Trajan makes an implicit metaphor between the imperial power of ancient Rome and the imperial power of contemporary America. Whether it's made to look as if it were chiselled, or whether the letters are themselves made of metal, it suggests sharp implements, which conjure both the image of monumental permanence and the image of martial hardness -- the two basic meanings of Trajan's column itself. Pure Trajan suggests "right wing"; Trajan with drop shadow, metallic glints or lurid colors suggests "populist". Put them together and you get: "right wing populist". You don't have to spell it out in text; the message is there in the texture.
Here's another insight into the "populist" part of that. In the comments section below "Potus Typographicus" there's an interesting remark from a former employee of a federal agency. "I was actually told to NOT make projects look good," he writes, "lest people assume that a lot of time and/or money had been spent on them. At first, I tried to offer alternatives and suggestions. But they wanted what they wanted and didn't feel that we designers were professionals with any valuable expertise to offer."
Last night I watched a documentary on Arte about Berlin-Germania, Hitler's renamed, remodeled imperial capital. The style he and Speer chose for this triumphalist city was one of ascetic neo-classicism, a Graeco-Roman-Egyptian "forever architecture" of monumental dimensions, organized around new East-West and North-South axes. All diversity was to be expunged from the city, which would henceforth express monolithic and permanent imperial power.
Today, one of the sites of the Nazi buildings which were built (the Nazis didn't expect to have Germania finished before the mid-60s) is occupied by Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie, a light, transparent Modernist building, a cube of glass. The Nazis would have hated its lightness and clarity the way the Bush administration seem to hate clear, clean Franklin Gothic or Helvetica layouts. They'd already forced Mies to close down the Bauhaus, a den, in their view, of socialists, communists, Jews and progressives. They rejected Mies' Modernist style as "un-German". I'm trying to imagine a parallel world where the Nazis build a Modernist Germania of light articulated glass curtain architecture, but it's almost impossible, just as it's almost impossible to imagine the Bush administration producing a banner or a publication I'd actually admire and want to hang on my wall.
But although I'm saying there is an inherent politics of form, I'm too much of a cultural relativist to say that there are objective correspondences between certain forms and styles and certain political ideologies. Sure, martial and metallic forms and mean-looking eagles grabbing globes do lend themselves to fascism, for obvious reasons. But, as a cultural relativist, and above all as a structuralist and a follower of Saussure, with his idea that the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary, I have to say that my inability to imagine a Nazi city with Miesian glass walls is just that; a failure of imagination. It could have happened. Maybe.
There is no such thing as bad design or good design, the cultural relativist has to conclude, just their design and our design. The downside of that is that we lose the illusion that our taste has universal validity, or is inherently better than anyone else's. The upside is that we stop trying to preach and teach -- meaning, we become a little less imperialistic, perhaps. (Or do we become more imperialistic, and simply say "Our way is better because we have more power than you... and because we say so"?)
There's another upside. If there is a politics inherent in texture, we don't have to leave the realm of aesthetics to be doing something political. Simply working according to our idea of good taste is already waving a banner, proclaiming the values we espouse. Or, as Godard said, "it's not a question of making a political film, but of making a film politically".
White House's graphic design is. "While his handlers would never allow the leader of the free world to go out in public wearing a rayon leisure suit and white bucks, they nonetheless use clownish shareware typefaces with hokey beveled edges and cheesy drop shadows to represent his ideas," Steve writes. He goes on to condemn "typographic transgressions... malfeasance... signs set in garish types with clichéd graphic gimmickry derived from overused Photoshop filters... the use of Roman-like faux intaglio and engraved letterforms to give an air of authority and truth."
Heller treats the administration's design style as a series of errors, warning Karl Rove that "he’d better get his ascenders in gear if his White House minions plan to continue placing banners and digital backdrops above, behind, and below the President while he’s making those key speeches... it is not unreasonable to expect that the most powerful nation on earth could afford more sophisticated typography."
My interest in "the politics of texture" would suggest another approach. I'd argue that the "good design" Steve is advocating (and his use of the word "malfeasance" suggests he sees it as something like a series of professional regulations or standards) will never be adopted by this right wing populist administration because what Steve and I would call good design would be seen by Rove and Bush and Cheney as liberal design. They'll keep giving us "bad" design because it's populist. This regime's distrust of design professionals maps to their distrust of the "liberal media". Just as they see "the liberal media" as biased, infused with the values of sophisticated left- and right-coast urbanites who characteristically vote Democrat, so they see designers as incarnating the same values. Visual bias, we could call it.
It wouldn't be appropriate for a populist right wing government to appeal to people who drive Volvos and read the New York Times Book Review section. In fact, this regime wants to alienate those people, and reject their aesthetic standards. If those people love austere good design, then, damn it, this regime will use drop shadow.
There's a witty little animated film by Cheshire Dave Beckerman about the Roman-like "faux intaglio and engraved letterforms" Heller mentions. It's called Etched in Stone, and I recommend you go and watch it right now. It's about the use of Trajan on movie posters, and tells us that Trajan is a font derived from the inscription at the base of a victory column erected by the Roman emperor Trajan. (Metallic Trajan captions also punctuate the trailer for the film "The Prestige", in which David Bowie plays Nicola Tesla.)
The meaning of Trajan in the contemporary US seems fairly unambiguous to me. Trajan makes an implicit metaphor between the imperial power of ancient Rome and the imperial power of contemporary America. Whether it's made to look as if it were chiselled, or whether the letters are themselves made of metal, it suggests sharp implements, which conjure both the image of monumental permanence and the image of martial hardness -- the two basic meanings of Trajan's column itself. Pure Trajan suggests "right wing"; Trajan with drop shadow, metallic glints or lurid colors suggests "populist". Put them together and you get: "right wing populist". You don't have to spell it out in text; the message is there in the texture.Here's another insight into the "populist" part of that. In the comments section below "Potus Typographicus" there's an interesting remark from a former employee of a federal agency. "I was actually told to NOT make projects look good," he writes, "lest people assume that a lot of time and/or money had been spent on them. At first, I tried to offer alternatives and suggestions. But they wanted what they wanted and didn't feel that we designers were professionals with any valuable expertise to offer."
Last night I watched a documentary on Arte about Berlin-Germania, Hitler's renamed, remodeled imperial capital. The style he and Speer chose for this triumphalist city was one of ascetic neo-classicism, a Graeco-Roman-Egyptian "forever architecture" of monumental dimensions, organized around new East-West and North-South axes. All diversity was to be expunged from the city, which would henceforth express monolithic and permanent imperial power.
Today, one of the sites of the Nazi buildings which were built (the Nazis didn't expect to have Germania finished before the mid-60s) is occupied by Mies van der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie, a light, transparent Modernist building, a cube of glass. The Nazis would have hated its lightness and clarity the way the Bush administration seem to hate clear, clean Franklin Gothic or Helvetica layouts. They'd already forced Mies to close down the Bauhaus, a den, in their view, of socialists, communists, Jews and progressives. They rejected Mies' Modernist style as "un-German". I'm trying to imagine a parallel world where the Nazis build a Modernist Germania of light articulated glass curtain architecture, but it's almost impossible, just as it's almost impossible to imagine the Bush administration producing a banner or a publication I'd actually admire and want to hang on my wall.But although I'm saying there is an inherent politics of form, I'm too much of a cultural relativist to say that there are objective correspondences between certain forms and styles and certain political ideologies. Sure, martial and metallic forms and mean-looking eagles grabbing globes do lend themselves to fascism, for obvious reasons. But, as a cultural relativist, and above all as a structuralist and a follower of Saussure, with his idea that the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary, I have to say that my inability to imagine a Nazi city with Miesian glass walls is just that; a failure of imagination. It could have happened. Maybe.
There is no such thing as bad design or good design, the cultural relativist has to conclude, just their design and our design. The downside of that is that we lose the illusion that our taste has universal validity, or is inherently better than anyone else's. The upside is that we stop trying to preach and teach -- meaning, we become a little less imperialistic, perhaps. (Or do we become more imperialistic, and simply say "Our way is better because we have more power than you... and because we say so"?)
There's another upside. If there is a politics inherent in texture, we don't have to leave the realm of aesthetics to be doing something political. Simply working according to our idea of good taste is already waving a banner, proclaiming the values we espouse. Or, as Godard said, "it's not a question of making a political film, but of making a film politically".
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What font says ROI?
Date: 2006-07-19 09:16 pm (UTC)I get the same issues here at my dayjob (in a financial institution)-- I have to justify the incidental good design on my documents by proving, or persuading, that the time invested will produce a return on investment, some measurable increase in efficiency/productivity/customer retention/etc., something which is almost impossible to do.
Of course, it happens with content as well. Respectable spelling/punctuation/grammar/structure are seen here as externals, really, possibly frivolous ones at that. There's a shameful disrespect towards customers, who are assumed not to know (or notice)the difference. I always say, "Nobody may notice if it's right, but the quality customers will notice if it's wrong."
However, again, much like the Bush administration, it appears not to be the quality of our audience, but the raw quantity that seems to count, alas.
Re: What font says ROI?
Date: 2006-07-19 09:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-19 09:34 pm (UTC)Re: What font says ROI?
Date: 2006-07-19 09:37 pm (UTC)But to further draw out my comparison with grammar and spelling (and to a certain extent, writing style), shall we honor errors there, too, as hidden intentions (shades of Eno)? Is a misspelled word a mistake, or is it a secret code?
It's not always both.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-19 09:39 pm (UTC)The Fox News website (http://www.foxnews.com/) is a design disaster, with all its gaudy action-film futurism and loud colors. The other news channels, I've noticed, have all started competing with Fox for the Tacky Market. Maybe because (and I hope) the educated in the US have all gone overseas for their news.
gross.
They've started using unconcealed southern accents too, as opposed to the standard "middle america" accents, undoubtedly to make us feel all "homey" while we're watching the news.
"We're gonna tell ya the news now..."
I wonder if this sort of populism is associated everywhere with a decline in presentation. See anything from Poland lately?
Re: What font says ROI?
Date: 2006-07-19 09:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-19 09:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-19 09:46 pm (UTC)maybe a "bad design" or "good design" label could be made for something less cognizant or lucidly executed vs. something that has utter clarity in and of itself and also what it is trying to communicate to its audience. maybe.
mcdonalds has utter clarity. i love the industrial design of their metallic kitchens. i also love the fact that mcdonald's french fries taste pretty much the same across the globe. i love their communication design down to the font and layout. it screams artificiality, bad health, and early death...and it does it in a beautiful, clearly-articulated, and well-branded way.
i don't have an example of bad design. i have to agree w/ you, it is all relative.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-19 09:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-19 09:52 pm (UTC)Re: What font says ROI?
Date: 2006-07-19 10:03 pm (UTC)But for me to bring that up is automatically, at first, seen as me being artsy and irrelevant, as though to choose a font were a matter of pleasure alone, of texture, not a matter of substance.
Perhaps the subtext of that is that choices themselves are frills...monolithic, inalterable (read: chosen by a level of hierarchy above one's own) style indicates substance.
Re: What font says ROI?
Date: 2006-07-19 10:13 pm (UTC)It's true. I had a discussion with family members one and two generations older and it gradually emerged that they actually liked bad design, inane settings in a continual pop-up nightmare making them feel important each time they clicked "no" or "yes", maybe like when I was a child I built spaceships to be as confusing and overwhelming as possible. I suggest that there are still people looking for that kind of remoteness and ostranyenye in digital products.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-19 10:16 pm (UTC)(I have traces of a "Great Lakes area" accent, though.)
I wonder where this "people who know things are bad" idea came from in America. I'll have to reread de Tocqueville. The students are another front in the waved-fist war against the ever-present yet invisible "elitists". Surely it's not helping our country much.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-19 10:19 pm (UTC)Design populism
Date: 2006-07-19 10:22 pm (UTC)http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/07/071406.html#
POTUS Typographicus was heavy with a kind of critical attitude that seems motivated by this nauseating design elitism I've encountered elsewhere in professional designers. I understand that some of that feeling was also motived by partisan political opinions with which I can certainly sympathize, and it did appear in a trade journal after all -- but even in context it puts me off.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-19 10:23 pm (UTC)some links:
http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/03/04/the-role-of-anti-marketing-design/
http://www.thinkvitamin.com/features/design/the-myspace-problem
http://bokardo.com/archives/on-why-ugly-design-works/
Re: What font says ROI?
Date: 2006-07-19 10:23 pm (UTC)In other words, I think it's dangerous passing off cultural / personal / subjective / quality stuff as functional / universal / objective / quantity stuff.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-19 10:33 pm (UTC)"Maybe MySpace is kicking blogging’s behind because most blogs are simply too pretty! Ugly is authentic..."
When I decided to delete my MySpace page, it was because it looked ugly. Only later did I find out that Rupert Murdoch owned MySpace.
I've also been on a campaign against "authenticity" for years!
Re: Design populism
Date: 2006-07-19 10:41 pm (UTC)design that honours the content, vs. self-parody
Date: 2006-07-19 10:58 pm (UTC)I disagree that it's all about "their design" vs. "our design." The point of so-called 'good' design is to get out of the way, to honour the content, to draw attention to the important things. Al Gore's slideshow about global warming, for example, is very well-designed to communicate the content, and not draw attention to itself. So-called minimal, fancy, coastal, liberal design is really more engineering-like in its aims, achieving its objective with the least amount of materials and energy.
Contrast this with the tendency of non-designers to "overdo" everything. I can't count the number of times I've seen content-free PowerPoint that spins, dazzles, has 11 fonts in 34 colours...
Going back to architecture and my favourite, interior spaces, how many times have we seen these uptight, emotionally constipated houses (on any number of surprise-redecorating TV shows) where people are afraid of calm, quiet, "Japanized" spaces, and instinctively seek to fill their small modern rooms with disproportionately tall, parody-Chippendale furniture; wallpaper and upholstery louder than the Knebworth Festival; tiles that are way too big for small bathrooms; and generally cluttered with bric-a-brac they can't bring themselves to throw away?
It's not ornate in a good way (like the Baroque, or Art Nouveau, or Hundertwasser): it's busy, overbearing, demanding, bullying design.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-19 11:03 pm (UTC)We come up, here, against the real problem: marketing is based on populism, whereas art is based on distinction. In other words, marketing is based on what's common, art on what's uncommon.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-19 11:09 pm (UTC)but
ugly=authentic
therefore:
momus is against ugliness
QED!
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-19 11:09 pm (UTC)"The public wants what the public gets."
Re: design that honours the content, vs. self-parody
Date: 2006-07-19 11:12 pm (UTC)I don't believe we can talk about efficiency as a proxy for taste, as you seem to do when you make this formula about "achieving its objective with the least amount of materials and energy". In the end, everything has a style, and whether we like something or don't like it is all about the cultural connotations of a style, not its "efficiency".
Re: What font says ROI?
Date: 2006-07-19 11:13 pm (UTC)It's something that actually frustrates me about the Mac OS X, because the lack of ability to turn things off is a conscious design decision, and it feels as though they're going out of their way to prevent the user from disrupting their carefully crafted branding.
To me, it's no different than if they prevented you from using any headphones other than the trademark white earbuds.