Reading Assignment #12

The Digital Present

Resurgent Idealism

  • it was believed that technology would lead towards a better world and designers became caught up in the frenzy about the speculations of social changes that were about to come.
  • "digitopia"
Wired Magazine

  • embraced the belief that a technological utopia was coming
  • Louis Rossetto & John Plunkett
  • "mind grenade" (editors notes)
  • Marshall McLuhan
  • Johan Vipper - Swedish expat designer
  • immaterial world of cyberspace
  • 1995- Me Company - Nike posters
  • 1986 - 2009: the Designers Republic - densely layered kinetic compositions that overwhelm the viewer's eyes
  • work/buy/consume/die "brain aided design"
Designing the Web 1.0: Beginnings

  • 1995 - Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer brings design to the world wide web
  • it is necessary for a design firm to have the manpower to have a way to produce and integrate designs for every considerable platform
  • the early web was a chaotic visual environment filled with amateure design
  • most dominate tech companies have embraced an updated version of the International Style
  • Times New Roman font used everywhere - universal availability


First Wave Motion and Interactivity: Flash 2000 - 2010

  • Web 2.0 - multimedia interactivity
  • avoidance of "rich media" sites due to consumers with lack of high-speed internet access
  • most tech companies could not see the future - "nobody want to watch a video on the internet"
  • Quicktime, Shockwave Player, Flash
  • By 2010, Flash had been installed on over 90% of desktop computers in the world and 75% of internet videos were available through the plug in
  • F.R.U.I.T. 
Viral Advertising

Animated Graphics for Film and Television

  • animation was being created long before the digital revolution
  • Kyle Cooper - film title sequences: Se7en, Spiderman 2002, Destiny: Taken King
  • A Series of Unfortunate Events - Jamie Calabri
  • 2001 - Troika Design Group in LA: SportsCenter (ESPN), Mad Men title sequence, broadcast titles for The Deadliest Catch
The End of the Flash Era

  • Joshua Davis set up online community in 2009 to help designers navigate Flash
  • "Hype Framework" - Flash was becoming so complex that it was killing creativity
  • iPhone released in 2007, iPad tablet in 2010 
  • "Thoughts on Flash" - a letter from Steve Jobs explains why Apple left Flash plug-in on its mobile devices (used too much memory and battery power)
  • HTML5, CSS, and Javascript rapidly replaced Flash
  • Flash will no longer be distributed or updated after 2020
The Multifaceted Digital World: Stories, Experiences, and Interfaces

  • Richard Wurman 1984 started TED Conferences - graphic designers learn about transformations in graphic design over the recent years
    • identity created by Kyle Cooper and Jakob Trollback
  • Interactive museum experience. Jake Barton
    • use of stylus/pens on screens to engate viewer
  • 2011 - MIT branding by Pentagram
  • 2014 - Media Lab digital brand (Michael Bierut)

Big Data

  • poor visual communication can have severe consequences (Challenger)
  • Fathom Information Design - Boston. Partners with Thompson Ruters in 2013.
    • shaped dynamic power in modern China
  • collecting and analysing data has become an essential part of a designers understanding of their own work
  • the illusion of understanding of and control over our lives and our bodies


Contemporary Digital Type

  • the sheer volume of new digital type designs can be difficult to track
  • work of dubious quality competing side by side with the most terrific typefaces of all time
  • 1986 - Aytsys's Fontographer
  • 1987 - Adobe Illustrator
  • FontLab, Postscript language, TrueType (vector graphics) - 1998
  • 2000 - OpenType
  • RoboFont (used with Python)
  • Glyphs - no programming skills required

Digital Crystal Goblets

  • don't ask "How should it look?" but ask "What must it do?"
  • 1991 - Erik Spiekermann creates FF Meta (humanist sans serif)
    • founded FontShop in 1988 with his wife
  • 1990 - Dutch designer Martin Majoor creates FF Scala
  • 2018 - Carol Twombly and Robert Slimbach make Myriad designed to be "a totally invisible type of letter"
Comic Sans and Papyrus (could be considered somewhat of a beta noir in the typography community)

Experimental and Conceptual Type 

  • Nevil Brody
  • flipper fonts. Erik van Blokland - Kosmik typeface - 1993
  • 1991- Mark Andersen - Not Caslon typeface
  • 1995 - Walker typeface - Matthew Carter
  • Jonathan Hoefler - 1996 - Fetish No. 338 typeface
  • Paul Elliman uses found objects to create Found Font which he continues to add to this day.
  • 2008 - Nikola Djurek - Brioni typeface
  • 2010 - David Keshavjee and Julien Tavelli - Template Woodcut typeface
  • 2012 - Karl Nawrot & Radim Pesko - Lyno typeface
Lessons From Type at Moma - type that had been carelessly transformed into a digital commodity was able to insinuate itself even into one of the bastions of design history (editing and fixing Franklin Gothic for their logo)