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1. ben,

   21/03/2010 at 13:34

   I’m assum­ing you have seen the film Helvetica as sim­il­ar issues are dis­cussed. In par­tic­u­lar I believe Erik Spiekermann was quite vocal about how he con­sidered the typeface Helvetica to be tyr­an­nic­al and “ubi­quit­ous” work­ing to exclude all oth­er pos­sib­il­it­ies. I think he even invoked fas­cism too. Paula Scher, who also fea­tured in the film was also mak­ing sim­il­ar asser­tions: that Helvetica and cer­tain strands of mod­ern­ism where/are aligned with “bad” cor­por­a­tions and government. 

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2. Eleanor,

   21/03/2010 at 14:20

   I per­son­ally don’t find mod­ern­ism author­it­ari­an but maybe that’s because I have been edu­cated in and worked in a peri­od where mod­ern­ism is but one of a styles for a design­er to choose from rather than some sort of doc­trine that must be obeyed. In that sense it is under­stand­able why in the 1980s and 1990s design­ers rebelled so much against mod­ernsim by seem­ing to break as many rules (par­tic­u­larly typo­graph­ic ones) as they could find. However because that had all pretty much settled down before I was even taught any­thing about design I don’t really relate to that peri­od of decon­struc­tion and post­mod­ern­ism because I did­n’t exper­i­ence it. To me it is again just a style. 

   On a dif­fer­ent note I have come across the com­ments about Helvetica, that you quote, myself. Became aware of the Leslie Savan art­icle through Rick Poynor’s com­ments in the extras of the Helvetica film. In try­ing to look up the art­icle I came across this art­icle about Helvetica and the New York Subway:
   http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/the-mostly-true-story-of-helvetica-and-the-new-york-city-subway?pff=2
   The art­icle is really long and you have to go some­way through it before it men­tions Helvetica in rela­tion to what Leslie Savan was say­ing but does give a lot of background.
   Another area you could look at is cor­por­ate America’s rela­tion­ship to Modernism in the 1960s. Did the influ­ence of Modernism in cor­por­ate iden­tity design at the time con­trib­ute to the view of cor­por­a­tions being authoritarian?
   Maybe the ideas behind Modernism were well meant but it’s meth­ods were mis­placed in the same respect as some Modernist architecture.

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3. Ben,

   21/03/2010 at 15:34

   Collecting the links for a First things First post a Norwegian design pro­fess­or, Jan Michl, cropped up. He has an essay on his web­site about mod­ern­ism and edu­ca­tion. You might be inter­ested as he’s def­in­itely got a strong pos­i­tion on the sub­ject. However, I get the impres­sion in both this piece and his one on First things First that he sees some­thing of con­spir­acy by a cabal of design gurus and edu­cat­ors and strong polit­ic­al ideo­logy at work. Personally, I don’t have much time for con­spir­acy the­or­ies or indeed net­works of ves­ted interests act­ing as one glob­ally to main­tain their position.

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4. tomlongmate,

   21/03/2010 at 21:21

   Thanks for your com­ments folks.

   Eleanor, it seems you share the same views as Jan Michl: 

   “We should then see, and teach also the stu­dents to see, the mod­ern­ist aes­thet­ic for what it is: a strik­ingly nov­el and highly invent­ive con­tri­bu­tion to the styl­ist­ic plur­al­ism of the mod­ern time. ”

   I would argue that one of the main themes of mod­ern­ist design is the semant­ic present­a­tion of text, and as such per­haps can­not be con­sidered a style in itself. For example, pri­or to ‘The New Typography’, it was com­mon­place for text on a prin­ted page to be aligned cent­rally, adher­ing to the accep­ted notions of beauty at the time. Tschichold (can any­one ever spell that right first time?) argues that as Western Europeans we read from left to right, and that cent­rally aligned text is super­fi­cial, hence form fol­lows func­tion (I’ll get my coat)..

   If we use a ration­al, hier­archy-based mod­ern­ist approach as a style, are we not impli­citly endors­ing it as a philosophy?

   I am inter­ested in invest­ig­at­ing the sys­tem­at­ic approaches of mod­ern­ism, such as Karl Gerstners ‘pro­grammes as solu­tions’, in which he cre­ates a mod­u­lar sys­tem for gen­er­at­ing typo­grams, based on a defined list of para­met­ers, Muller-Brockmann’s grids, and Le Corbusiers ‘Modulor’. I want to look at these in rela­tion to rule-based gen­er­at­ive design sys­tems, and would be inter­ested to hear of any sim­il­ar approaches that any­one is aware of, as well as get­ting people’s opin­ions of the use­ful­ness of such sys­tems, and wheth­er they stim­u­late or null creativity…

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5. Ben,

   21/03/2010 at 22:05

   I’ve just spent far to much time read­ing very in depth work by some of the archi­tects that Jan Michl men­tions in his text. They are aligned with an organ­isa­tion ded­ic­ated to chal­len­ging the suprem­acy of “mod­ern­ism” in archi­tec­ture through philo­soph­ic­al and sci­entif­ic argu­ment. I believe the dis­cus­sion in archi­tec­ture mir­rors the ones in Graphic Design as sim­il­ar philo­sophies under­pin oppos­ing positions. 

   There words may be all very worthy (cer­tainly a strain on the eyes) but I find myself much more in sym­pathy with your com­ment above Tom regard­ing the present­a­tion of text. A semant­ic approach to typo­graphy does­n’t make one rule out the use of decon­struc­ted or “tra­di­tion­al” meth­ods of design for appro­pri­ate con­texts but con­versely it does­n’t rule them in as val­id when cer­tain ends are required in cre­at­ing broad “uni­ver­sal” understanding…

   I think that last state­ment def­in­itely reveals some­thing about my thinking…

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6. Ben,

   23/03/2010 at 10:28

   I’m really warm­ing to your sub­ject mat­ter Tom. You might find this Guardian blog post and its responses inter­est­ing. It touches on the con­nec­tion between typeface choice and dif­fer­ent polit­ic­al per­sua­sions and quotes a book crit­ic, quot­ing and author who links Die neue Typographie, which I asso­ci­ate with mod­ern­ism, with the Nazis. Personally i don’t think the two mixed…

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7. Rebecca Lee,

   23/03/2010 at 21:54

   Here is that emotion/type site that I mentioned:
   http://vimeo.com/7252722

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