Emigre and 8v0: The Legibility Wars - Spencer's Lecture

Within Spencer's lecture we firstly recapped on the previous lectures which was about the brief histories of Animation and graphic Design. Also the claims of expanded practice in Animation and Graphic Design. The point of this lecture is partly to try and address the big debate in Graphic Design around legibility and in communication about how things are clear, but there is also a post-modern thing that pushes against this and questions the idea that the communication for it to communicate it has to have a strong legibility. Its about the power of Graphic Materials itself.

One of the publications that foregrounds this is the Emigre Magazine that ran from 1984 to 2004 and foregrounded this issue with communication and legibility, modernism and postmodernism that was done in a provoking format. It had a massive influence, both stylistics within Graphic Design because it also meant design criticism and design theory that designed a visual war. Lots of arguments about legibility and communication came through the Emigre magazine.

Also within this lecture we will also be looking at another publication in comparison to this called 8VO or the Octavo, these had similar concerns but from more apposing in the debate. Emigre was one of the first publications to arise out of the purely digital publication techniques. It was one of the first digital Graphic Design publications. It existed through different types of formats from Large Prints to small hand paperbacks and Music CD's that changed a lot over the course of the publication to keep this up to date.

The Emigre was a collaborative project that was founded by a Dutch, Editor and Designer known as Rudy Vanderlans and Zuzana Licko who is a Czech founder and Typeface Designer. Emigre was also one of the first type foundries that also started to digitally distribute there resources, as they did this lots of other publications started to look very similar to the Emigre. this then had a massive influence and became the face of publishing generally. It was originally published in San Francisco in the USA. The founders original idea was to publish and focus on in between-ness, it was used to showcase work of the Emigre's that are the writers, the designers, artists who live, or had lived outside of their country of origin. Lots of qualities came out of in between-ness:

• Technologically Engaged
• Critically Engaged 
• Transformative Graphic Language
• Exploratory and evolving visual language 
• Hard to pin-down style

They were also the first people to use the Apple Macintosh, they exploited the quirks and possibilities of the software to produce new annotative design language. We then moved onto look at critics that have spoken about the Emigre magazine. The first one we looked at was Massimo Vignelli who was Neo Modernist designer that talked about Emigre as an abberation of culture and an national clamity. also Stephan Heller who is an middle ground - design journalist said that the Emigre is like a blip in the continuum and the cult of ugly, like its an anti art, trash ethics starts to appear around this publication. The final critic we looked at was David Carson who is a post modernist designer who is a commercially successful designer, he initially champions there work, but then starts to condemn it because there distributing there fonts so it starts to saturate culture within that period of time. His phrase is "Don't confuse legibility and communication" this means don't equate them with the same thing.

We then started to look at the Allies of the Emigre such as Stephan McCarthy who is an Author and Writer. He says that despite digital context it can be mapped into the tradition of William Morris. we then looked at Gill Sans who named his typefaces after people that were very close to him, as he was influenced by personal qualities. The voice of a new generation of Graphic Designer; postmodern, deconstructed and experimental.

In 1988 Vaughan Oliver (4AD) issues devoted to album covers that was very similar to the likes of Tim Burton that was very poetic. Oliver started with a part of the Human (Human Body)/ Human Cultural Artifacts that had a poetic surrealist style. We were shown some examples of the emigre magazine spread, from this I found that there were lots of different combinations that were very board and disrupted. Once we had been shown this we then looked at the Cranbrook design and the Cranbrook Academy of Art that was a collaboration with Jeffery Keedy, Lorraine Wild, Ed Fella, Andrew Blauvelt and Katherine McCoy. Jeffery Keedy, Lorraine Wild and Ed Fella were all linked to the Cal Arts that also became part of the fold. The Cranbrook's design became famous  and notrious for it's style and approach.

We also looked at some of the work which was shown in the Walker Art Gallery which was rebrand for exhibition design. These were 'Snap On' Serifs, Vertical striping patterns and morphs and Combination instructions for designers. The content that came from the Cranbrook's design was:

• Interviews
• Profiles 
• Reprints 
• Lengthy Essays packaging in design
• Letters to the Editor (Dear Emigre).

The last part that we did was talk about Octavo and how there was a link between them and Emigre which has a more modernist lead, where there is a more experimental modernist approach that has some Swiss punk that flowed through both Emigre and Octavo. The designs layout of Octavo were resolved as full-scale mock-ups using dummy typesetting, acetate, paint and so on - trying to get as close as possible to appearance of the final printed work. 

I found that this lecture was very interesting as I feel that I learnt quite a lot from the lecture that I didn't know about.