Untitled

I’ve been experimenting with a spot John Stezaker-style collage recently. All about finding, matching, corrupting shapes. Rather pleased with how this one turned out.

Collage

I've spent an unsavoury chunk of this year unable to loiter in the book shops and charity shops of York; my eyes and fingers starved of the vital printed inspiration that feeds my own work. Frustrated, I've redirected this attention towards my own bookshelves, revisiting a personal library too often taken for granted. Unfortunately, reading and looking isn't enough for all that pent-up poring-over energy. No, I've taken to cutting things up.

Restlessly keen to pounce upon any passing creative bandwagon, I've found myself working the recent resurgence of collage into my book design. I've been cutting and pasting for real for a change and it's incredibly satisfying. If a little destructive.

I'm enjoying getting back in touch with material. I design physical products, but my part in the process usually takes place entirely under glass. Sometimes I don't get to actually feel my work until months later. And it's an odd thing to complain about, but working on screen, one is spoilt by too much power; everything can be changed, everything can be undone. There are no limits. I feel like a drone pilot attacking an image from afar with complete impunity, rather than getting up close and working with it.

With collage, the joy comes with sourcing and selecting the material; tackling the constraints and the qualities of the material; being steered in an unexpected direction by the size or quality or texture of the images you've found. Finding new contexts and juxtapositions for images divorced of meaning. You have to make decisions and you have to commit to them. It all feels so much more definite.

Delving deeper and messilier into this medium, I've discovered practical considerations that I'd always taken for granted. A shameless banal inquisitor, my instincts drive me to hunt down and pester my favourite collagists to get some insight into their techniques. Where do you source materials? How do you organise them? Do you use scissors or a knife? What form of adhesive do you use? Do you work entirely by hand, or do you finish off digitally? Do you photograph or scan the finished piece? (It turns out his is a particularly big one, as the same piece of work can look enormously different depending upon how you finally capture it.)

Fortunately, this interrogation has mostly been done for me thanks to recent collections of contemporary collage artists, such as DR. ME's Cut That Out and Rebeka Elizegi's Collage by Women, joining various other monographs and collections on my bookshelves. Part of the enjoyment of wandering down a new creative path is the study of it – while I litter my desk with shards of paper and my fingers with paper cuts, I'm learning about a whole new world.

So why is collage having a moment? Is it a response to to the proliferation of digital forms? An embrace of the opening up of public access archives, ripe for plundering? A technique that lends itself to social media's creation-as-performance environment? The natural resting state of twenty-first century's fragmented culture? Or is it popular with art directors right now simply because … it's popular with art directors right now? Probably all of the above, plus a hundred other reasons.

The big question for me: how do I resist cannibalising these books? Is there a limit to collaging collages of collages? No, before I make any more cuts, I must amass some new old source material. Those shops are calling me. I want some books that I don't want so that I can destroy them and make books with them and … I really need to get out more.

24 May 2020

Occasional short posts with bits of news, always about things you’re doing, you’re are making. Okay to mention Meanwhile and Creative Review. No clickbaity things, you’re not trying to be Kotkke or Swissmiss or anything. This is a site for and about you. No need to keep posting things just for the sake of it – the images and experiments are more vital than words. Of course, try to keep to more than three or four lines, just so these posts don’t get lost amongst all the others.

Images: 700px wide plus 200 px (100 on each side) #f7f7f7

Preminger: An Autobiography

Otto Preminger talking to Roger Ebert about his memoirs in 1977: “You know you are really missing the best part of the book. The cover. It was designed by Saul Bass, who came to me and said, ‘Otto, do you mind if we run the back of your head on the front of the book, and the front of your head on the back? You know you really look much better from behind.’” I’d never seen this Bass design before, but I love the simplicity and wit of it – especially the way both images are framed to favour the back of his head, making the face-on shot weirdly cropped. Trying to think of other books that use the reverse angle of the cover on the back, but coming up blank.

Appleby at Allington

Appleby at Allington by Michael Innes, designed by Crosby/Fletcher/Forbes in 1970. Quite possibly my favourite book cover of all time. It’s just perfect. At least I assume it is – despite taking pride of place on my bookshelves, I’ve never actually read it, so for all know it’s completely off. Still, what better way to judge a book than by its cover, right?

plan

collage

— mix of digital and physical collage
— primarily, but not exclusively, black and white images
— incorporate more collage into book designs
— try something every day, even if it’s a simple combination of two images
— end each day with clear desk, start the day with cutting board

material

— regular raids of flickr commons
— chop up grazia once we’re done with it
— when the world is open again, look for illustrated books in charity shops
— scans of paper textures as well as images

subjects

— portraits, lots of heads, faces, etc.
— newsy subjects
— films

site

— blog to be nothing but your own stuff
— no headings, just dates
— mostly one image per post, but occasionally a group of related images might work
— of course the dates may have to be actual headings, just to make them linkable
— occasional single-para news posts
— enough cover posts to make sure there’s always two or three on a twenty-long page
— no captions except on book cover posts

instagram

— replicate blog feed, with additional making-of images on each post, like the daily splice

twitter

— pretty much as-is, but change that profile pic

newsletter

— as is, but focus more on book design and artists

shop

— prints and originals
— possibly t-shirts, but maybe too naff, keep things simple and classy
— check what other people are selling for, but don’t go too cheap

about

— book designer? designer and artist? commercial artist?

promo

— a simple postcard(s) of one image to send to art directors

shopping list

— decent knife
— variety of grey background sheets from paperchase

habits

— stop redesigning your site ffs
— don’t stress over uniformity of images, style, etc.
— perfectly fine if backgrounds are different shades, textures, etc.
— website is stark and minimal; the artwork doesn’t have to be

Spectres of Fascism

Here’s my cover for Samir Gandesha’s Spectres of Fascism, published by Pluto Press. A fine excuse to deploy Jonathan Barnbrook’s contemporary blackface Bastard Spindly, designed in 1988. Some background from Barnbrook:

William Morris said ‘the more mechanical the process, the less direct should be imitation of natural forms’. This idea—that the tool should be acknowledged in the form of the design—directly influenced the development of Bastard’s letterforms. Bastard was digitally assembled using a modular system; whilst acknowledging the rhythm and drama of the historical blackletter form, this process transformed the typeface into something aligned with contemporary modes of production. Bastard draws upon a variety of typographic sources from the Gutenberg Bible to Albrecht Dürer’s geometric experiments.

Seriously though, is there a font with a better name than Bastard Spindly?

Cecil Touchon

PDP1017ct18 , 2019 PDP1042 , 2019 PDP1065 , 2019 Fusion 3713 , 2015 Fusion 3419 , 2013 PDP844ct17 , 2017 PDP1024 , 2018

Typographic abstractions of Cecil Touchon. Like Harland Miller fed through a cross-cut shredder. Would love to see this kind of approach adopted by type foundries alongside the usual pangrams and samplers. It really gets to the soul of a typeface; gives a sense of how the letterforms interact with each other and the space around them.

Walter Benjamin’s Writing Tips

I’m working on the cover for a book about philosopher Walter Benjamin, perhaps best known for The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (the most recent edition impeccably designed by David Pearson for Penguin’s Great Ideas series). Amongst the rest of my research, I came across his Writer's Technique in Thirteen Theses, from the 1928 book One-Way Street:

  1. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next.

  2. Talk about what you have written, by all means, but do not read from it while the work is in progress. Every gratification procured in this way will slacken your tempo. If this regime is followed, the growing desire to communicate will become in the end a motor for completion.

  3. In your working conditions avoid everyday mediocrity. Semi-relaxation, to a background of insipid sounds, is degrading. On the other hand, accompaniment by an etude or a cacophony of voices can become as significant for work as the perceptible silence of the night. If the latter sharpens the inner ear, the former acts as a touchstone for a diction ample enough to bury even the most wayward sounds.

  4. Avoid haphazard writing materials. A pedantic adherence to certain papers, pens, inks is beneficial. No luxury, but an abundance of these utensils is indispensable.

  5. Let no thought pass incognito, and keep your notebook as strictly as the authorities keep their register of aliens.

  6. Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.

  7. Never stop writing because you have run out of ideas. Literary honour requires that one break off only at an appointed moment (a mealtime, a meeting) or at the end of the work.

  8. Fill the lacunae of inspiration by tidily copying out what is already written. Intuition will awaken in the process.

  9. Nulla dies sine linea ['No day without a line'] — but there may well be weeks.

  10. Consider no work perfect over which you have not once sat from evening to broad daylight.

  11. Do not write the conclusion of a work in your familiar study. You would not find the necessary courage there.

  12. Stages of composition: idea — style — writing. The value of the fair copy is that in producing it you confine attention to calligraphy. The idea kills inspiration, style fetters the idea, writing pays off style.

  13. The work is the death mask of its conception.

It occurs to me that most of these could be applied to designing as well as writing. I particularly like the thought of an idea as an alien … for whom you’re making a death mask … or something. Hang on, let me read it again.