Pretty Ugly: Visual Rebellion in Design

Aesthetic rampages by the trailblazers of tomorrow’s design.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The painting The Young Ladies of Avignon by Picasso was initially scorned but is now considered to be seminal to the development of both cubism and modern art. The dissonance and complex rhythm structures of Stravinsky’s ballet music The Rite of Spring caused a scandal when it premiered, but the composition now ranks among the most important musical works of the twentieth century.
While art was allowed to be ugly, design had to function. Although for hundreds of years new artistic styles were established through aesthetic upheaval, new trends in graphic design and visual communication were, until recently, variations on what was generally considered to be appealing. But in the last few years, those working in these creative disciplines started to rebel. Dada-esque graphics or unreadable typography began to be used as a way to claim a unique style advantage.
Pretty Ugly is a diverse collection of these recent aesthetic rampages not only in the fields of graphic design and visual communication, but also in product design, furniture design, art, and photography. The originators of this work consciously use unusual or negatively perceived forms, colors, and perspectives in an attempt to blaze new creative trails.
The variety of examples in Pretty Ugly makes clear that creative leadership in today’s design world is less a matter of skilled craft and more about mastering elements that give’s one’s work a unique visual identity. The elements shown here may still be considered by some to by ugly, but they are already influencing the vanguard of tomorrow’s design.
Pretty Ugly is edited by former Hort designer Martin Lorenz and his wife Lupi Asensio, who currently work together as Two Points.Net.

Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works

Erik Spiekermann

Frederic Goudy, American type designer, once said, “Anyone who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep.” To most people, this comment only adds to the perception that type inhabits a mysterious world with intricate terminology and elaborate rules; added to this are thouasands of type faces out there that all seem to look alike. Until now, Spiekerman and Ginger shepherd their decades of typograhpic experience into a unique and lively guidebook which shows that type is easy to use, easy to understand, and in the hands of a savvy user, a powerful communications tool. You need no previous knowledge of typography to enjoy Stop Stealing Sheep. It makes no difference what kind of computer you work on, what type of software you use, or what you do for a living, because as the authors show- type, good type -reaches across all boundaries, computer platforms, and professional distinctions.

Book Typography

Ari Rafaeli

This book examines the essential factors of a well designed book - attractive and suitable type, close spacing of words, reader-friendly format - and considers how maximum-quality typography (of books or of any text intended for continuous reading), consonant with traditional standards, can be achieved by users of present-day technology. Word-division, letter-space, punctuation, different styles of footnotes and endnotes, use of symbols and special characters, the niceties of dashes, treatment of quoted passages, folios and running heads, are studied with reference to renowned authorities, including the Cambridge and Oxford styles. The famous Monotype and Linotype book faces are surveyed in their historical contexts with remarks on the qualities of the current digital versions of them. This is a must-read for any typophile or student of type and typography.

What Is Reading For?

Robert Bringhurst

Reading could have a rich and interesting future, because it does have a rich and interesting past. But if no one remembers that past, it may not mean much to the future. This succinct and thoughtful essay is the text of a talk commissioned for a symposium entitled The Future of Reading which was held at RIT in June 2010. Written and designed by Robert Bringhurst, this limited edition is carefully crafted and letterpress printed. 450 copies, printed on Mohawk Ticonderoga paper.

Reading Letters: Designing for Legibility

Sofie Beier

This book will, on the one hand, help type designers create high legibility typefaces and, on the other hand, help graphic designers determine which is the optimal typeface for a given project. A must-have for type designers and graphic designers.

Draw it with your eyes closed: the art of the art assignment

Paper Monument

Silkscreen Basics: A Complete How-To Manual

shs

In essence, the method of silkscreening is simple: push ink through a stencil to create a reproducible image. However, with ingenuity, screen print artists can produce masterpieces using this simple, cost effective technique. Pairing instruction with inspiration, Silkscreen Basics provides a multifaceted view of screen printing, from its roots in ancient China to its place in a digital era, and is the perfect primer for anyone intrigued by this popular printing method. Far from a dry instructional manual, this book gives step-by-step instructions on how to create budget-friendly, successful screen prints at home and is dotted with friendly tips and quips accompanied by hundreds of photos, drawings, and prints. Also included are expert printers’ profiles and insights. Featured artists include Colin Jenkins, Erica Il Cane, and Helen Entwisle; collectives include Base V. in Sao Paulo, Flight 64 in Portland, OR, and SupaLife in Berlin; and studios include Bongout in Paris, Alexis Rom Estudio in Barcelona, and Dog Day Print in Berlin.

The Electric Information Age Book: Mcluhan/Agel/Fiore and the Experimental Paperback (Inventory Books)

Jeffrey Schnapp

The Electric Information Age Book explores the nine-year window of mass-market publishing in the sixties and seventies when formerly backstage players designers, graphic artists, editors stepped into the spotlight to produce a series of exceptional books. Aimed squarely at the young media-savvy consumers of the “Electronic Information Age,” these small, inexpensive paperbacks aimed to bring the ideas of contemporary thinkers like Marshall McLuhan, R. Buckminster Fuller, Herman Kahn, and Carl Sagan to the masses. Graphic designers such as Quentin Fiore (The Medium is the Massage, 1967) employed a variety of radical techniques verbal visual collages and other typographic pyrotechnics that were as important to the content as the text. The Electric Information Age Book is the first book-length history of this brief yet highly influential publishing phenomenon.

Modern Music and After

Paul Griffiths

Over three decades, Paul Griffiths’s survey has remained the definitive study of music since the Second World War; this fully revised and updated edition re-establishes Modern Music and After *as the preeminent introduction to the music of our time. The disruptions of the war, and the struggles of the ensuing peace, were reflected in the music of the time: in Pierre Boulez’s radical reformation of compositional technique and in John Cage’s development of zen music; in Milton Babbitt’s settling of the serial system and in Dmitry Shostakovich’s unsettling symphonies; in Karlheinz Stockhausen’s development of electronic music and in Luigi Nono’s pursuit of the universally human, in Iannis Xenakis’s view of music as sounding mathematics and in Luciano Berio’s consideration of it as language. The initiatives of these composers and their contemporaries opened prospects that haven’t yet stopped unfolding.
This constant expansion of musical thinking since 1945 has left us with no singular history of music; Griffiths’s study accordingly follows several different paths, showing how and why they converge and diverge. This new edition of *Modern Music and After discusses not only the music of the fifteen years that have passed since the previous edition, but also the recent explosion of scholarly interest in the latter half of the twentieth century. In particular, the book has been expanded to incorporate the variety of responses to the modernist impasse experienced by composers of the 1980s and 1990s. Griffiths then moves the book into the twenty-first century as he examines such highly influential composers as Helmut Lachenmann and Salvatore Sciarrino.

For its breadth, wealth of detail, and characteristic wit and clarity, the third edition of Modern Music and After is required reading for the student and the enquiring listener.

A Sweeper-Up After Artists: A Memoir

Irving Sandler

“A tale told with humor, passion and grace.”—Art in America

Frank O’Hara called him, in a memorable poem, “the balayeur des aristes,” the sweeper-up after artists. He has been a friend or acquaintance of virtually every important American artist of the postwar period, and his art criticism and books constitute the first and most comprehensive critical and historical account of this extraordinary period.

In the early 1950s, Irving Sandler, then a graduate student in American history, was awestruck by his first sight of Franz Kline’s painting Chief at MoMA. Graduate school gave way to being “New York schooled.” We see abstract expressionism give way to the new approach of Rauschenberg and Johns, and see that in turn succeeded by the pop and minimalist artists of the 1960s— Warhol and Lichtenstein, Stella and Judd. At every turn, there was Irving Sandler, intimately conversant with the art and the artists. 34 illustrations.

Wilhelm Sasnal

Julian Heynen

This companion catalog to an exhibition
of Wilhelm Sasnal, one of Poland s most
important contemporary artists, features
a wide selection of his paintings. Wilhelm Sasnal s art exemplifies a reaction to the fall of
Communism in Eastern Europe, with subject matter that draws
from day-to-day realities of Poland s citizens grappling with
their new capitalistic culture. The reception of his work has
resulted in Sasnal s pop-star status at home and a growing
reputation abroad. In this monograph nearly one hundred
color images capture the incredible diversity of Sasnal s work:
portraits of his family and friends; landscapes of his struggling
country; graphic illustrations, abstractions, and hyper-real
paintings. Seen together, his works suggest the overarching
themes of Poland s complex and dramatic history. By
combining the personal with the political, Sasnal has allowed
his art to speak to audiences from beyond his country s
geographic borders while remaining true to his own experience.

Society of the Spectacle

Guy DEBORD

The Das Kapital of the 20th century. An essential text, and the main theoretical work of the situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960’s up to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late 20th century. This is the original translation by Fredy Perlman, kept in print continuously for the last 30 years, keeping the flame alive when no-one else cared.

Allan Kaprow: A Bibliography

Allan Kaprow

This study catalogues and illustrates all of the artist’s books that Allan Kaprow published to accompany his happenings, from his first artist’s book in 1962 to his final anthology projects of the 1990s: a total of 35 books published over 40 years. Although Kaprow was the acknowledged pioneer of the happening from the 1950s on, he is less often recognized as a pioneer in the genre of artist’s books. Nonetheless, from the start Kaprow produced what he described as “activity booklets”—publications intended to function as tools to help people understand and experience such performances. He likened these booklets to “musical scores”: vehicles of opportunity rather than documents of past events. But the graphic layout of his books, the originality of their structure, the literary character of their texts and their aesthetic quality as objects elevates them from ostensibly practical scores to primary examples of first-generation book art.

Between the Sign & the Gaze

Herman Rapaport

A woman turns into a piece of furniture (Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest); a writer of children’s books takes photos of naked little girls (Lewis Carroll); Mont Blanc becomes the maternal breast (Shelley); Hamlet mistakes Ophelia for a phallus (Lacan’s Hamlet seminar); and mom turns out to have thermonuclear arms (Laurie Anderson’s United States). Reviewing the ways in which women have been fantasized in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Western culture, Herman Rapaport offers a series of brilliant insights into the concept of the fantasm in modern art.

No Longer Innocent: Book Art In America 1960-1980

Betty Bright

This important history of the artist’s book, a flourishing form which over the years has often been greeted with confusion by critics, collectors, historians, and artists, aims to spell out its role in contemporary art and to claim for it a vital and heretofore unacknowledged status since the blossoming of the artform in the 70s. Renowned scholar and curator Betty Bright takes an inclusive view of the varied field in order to redress its marginalization, identifying three distinct types: the fine press book, the deluxe book, and the bookwork. She covers crucial supporters of the form, like New York’s Center for Book Arts, Franklin Furnace, and the Visual Studies Workshop Press in Rochester, New York, as well as key organizations and figures in Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Bright examines how artist’s books have responded to specific movements, such as Pop, Fluxus, and Conceptualism, and how the book arts’ own mini-art world of the 70s was shaped by seminal exhibitions, fledgling nonprofit organizations, and collectors.