aside —
I continue to post comments to seminarians’ blog posts, sometimes a day or two (or even more) after a post might originally have been made.
on Tuesday 17 November,
Nate’s Amendments posters prompted consideration of the order in which things are encountered/seen.
If in a codex book, the designer/author/maker has some (but not total) control over what is seen first, what next.
If things are deployed out in the world, and if there is sufficient stylistic or other similarity or other identifying marks among them, the encounters might (will) be random. Say, if six items are in the world, the order in which they are seen can not be predicted; nor can we assume that all six will be seen.
This is a feature/opportunity, not a glitch/failure.
We also discussed beauty and its role in (1) attracting attention and, perhaps (2) signaling that something is worth attention.
I (John) maintained that ugliness can achieve the same end, always, of course, depending. All designed objects (and situations) exist in relation to other designed (and undesigned) objects and situations. Everything is relative — to other things, time, the particulars of the encounter, personal histories and biases and needs and expectations...
—
writing / markmaking / asemic writing
Rowan read some of their writing under way, for their knee, belly and foot casts. The reading sounded smooth, eloquent; perhaps the delivery was smoother than the writing, if it were stammered across the surface of page or plaster-cloth.
The writing surface/landscape is definitely not an ordinary sheet of 8.5x11 paper, ruled or not. It is not flat, and it has imperfections/texture etc. The writing might want to reflect and even be guided, to some degree, by its surface terrain. Think of writing as perambulation, or walking.
detail of dustjacket design, Peter Handke, Mein Jahr in der Niemandsbucht / Ein Märchen aus den neuen Zeiten (Surhkamp Verlag, 1994); American edition My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay (New York, 1998, minus the subtitle A fairy tale from the new times.
discussion of this cover, and the role of working memory in reading, at this Design Stories blog post from 2010.
Think too of different kinds of marks, including asemic writing (that is, writing without semantic meaning, containing no identifiable words with dictionary senses).
Perhaps also relevant are crossed letters (cross-writing), encountered in the nineteenth century (and presumably before and since, and evidently most used by women writers), as a means of economizing on paper. Here is an example, from wikipedia :
From Caroline Weston to Deborah Weston; Friday, March 3, 1837
During class, I pointed to this photograph (here cropped and rotated -90º) of a Beethoven manuscript, spoiled by ink —
“Beethoven’s manuscripts exhibited in Berlin. They think this one was burnt by a candle & he put it out with ink - the only liquid to hand.”
source (@e_sparrows at twitter)
—
Talmudic commentaries; polyglot bibles
Pertinent (?) to Adam’s post of sketched layouts, inspired/suggested by a commentary-encrusted page from the Talmud, are images from the Complutensian Polyglot Bible, at archive.org. One is shown below.
my comment to Adam’s post —
Can the frames contain asemic writing, as well as readable text?
There is something performative about these layout drafts — as if the framing/layout were as, or more important than, anything that might be said in those surrounding "boxes."
This relates to the bower nest / bower box idea: the frame is what matters, the interior, beside the point (or only secondary).
5 Takeaways From EoD’s Ecology + Design Panel Discussions
At the AIGA Design Conference, we covered eco-conscious design practices, visual sustainability, design beyond capitalism + more
Margaret Andersen
AIGA Eye on Design (November 11, 2020)
No comments:
Post a Comment