the space between

figure 180

In Design Observer, last fall, Michael Bierut posted a piece titled The Figure/Ground Relationship and it made me think about Rudolf Arnheim. The piece hit home because of the amount of important class time I’ve given to students about the relevance of the in-between spaces.

I’d also like to credit, Professor Roy Behrens for piquing my interest in Arnhiem. Thanks also to Paul Hanaoka for his “inkblot” animated short completed in the motion graphics class last spring.

The following is one of Arnheim’s insights:

Painters take care to verify the shape of interstices by forcing their eyes to reverse the spontaneous figure-ground effect. This requires training, because the naïve observer sees such areas as shapeless parts of the underlying ground. He pays no attention to them, and finds it difficult and unnatural to do so. When individuals being tested were asked to copy the pattern of Figure 180 as accurately as possible, many reproduced the shape and size of the crosses and squares quite well but entirely neglected the fact that the inner edges of the squares lie on the same lines as the outer edges of the crosses. The relations were not seen as a part of a pattern. Even in the Rorschach ink blots, in which figure-ground reversal is facilitated by structural ambiguity, positive use of the interstices is said to suggest a diagnosis of negativism, stubbornness, doubt, suspiciousness, or even paranoid trends. The artist controls such areas in order to assure the unity of the work on the frontal plane and also to enhance the subtle interplay between the positive figures and the negative, half-hidden shapes, which, within their limits, contribute to the expression of the total composition.

Passage from the chapter on “Space” in Art and Visual Perception, a Psychology of the Creative Eye. Pages 190–192. Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954 / Fourth Printing 1964.

animation courtesy of Paul Hanaoka

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Dordt Alumni in Design: Laryn Kragt Bakker

I graduated from Dordt in 1998, double majoring in art (graphic design) and computer science. I am currently Senior Designer at CEDC (The Center for Educational Design and Communication), based in Washington D.C., and I’ve been on the team here since 2003. Our tagline is “Social Justice by Design” because we are a non-profit that serves other non-profits in a number of ways, including through communications services such as web development, print design and logo/identity work.

The web was still quite new while I was a student, and the fields of graphic design and computer science didn’t cross in the classroom except in independent study. Since then, developments in the online world have exploded and there are a lot more ways to integrate the two.

I am an open source enthusiast, and over the last seven years I have expanded our web toolbox to include two robust and powerful content management systems (Drupal and Joomla). This allows us to design and build websites for our partners and give them easy access to add and edit their own content without having to deal with (and potentially mess up) the design of the site.

We also work on logo development and print design with our partners, creating everything from annual reports and brochures to posters and newspaper advertisements. One of the benefits of working for a small organization is that I generally get to be involved in the projects from start to finish, from the initial meetings with our partners through concept development, design and completion.

I also do some personal projects and some freelance design for entities that don’t fall under CEDC’s mission. I recently painted an original illustration for the cover and designed the cover and interior for my novel (Clutching Dust and Stars), which was recently published by *culture is not optional.

When you design, you have been hired to communicate something specific; you aren’t just creating art for art’s sake. I remember leaving Dordt with my degree in hand and being unsure where it would take me since I had no desire to head off to a traditional design firm and hawk Coca Cola or SUVs. I wanted to be sure that my energy was being spent and my skills being used in ways that were beneficial to others. I am grateful to have landed at CEDC and to be able to partner with such a variety of groups that are doing important work in areas of social justice, advocacy and education.

See the images below for a few examples of projects I’ve designed (and developed, in the case of websites). Click the images to go to a more detailed description of the project.

Clutching Dust and Stars. The cover of my novel, recently published by *culture is not optional, with an original illustration and design.

Avaaz.org: Hello, Kiddies. A “Hello Kitty” parody advertisement for Avaaz.org which ran full page in all editions of the Financial Times worldwide to call out the leaders who are blocking progress on the climate change issue.

Education for Justice. A member-based website with lesson plans and educational resources about Catholic Social Teaching.

CLINIC Legal. A member-based website designed to enhance and expand delivery of legal services to indigent and low-income immigrants.

CEDC.org. Our own website, which had been badly in need of redesign. I rebuilt it with a more colorful palette to represent the diversity of our partners and our projects. I also focused on Search Engine Optimization and we have definitely noticed an increase in our web traffic and digital inquiries.

*Laryn Kragt Bakker graduated from Dordt in 1998. He can be found online in a variety of places: his personal design site, his work blog, his informal blog, on Twitter, on Facebook, and LinkedIn.

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Otl Aicher and Inge Scholl-Aicher: developers of modern design

Otl Aicher was a principal team member that developed the Rotis® font family in the late 1980s.

We’ve just finished watching Sophie Scholl: The Final Days (2005) a film directed by Marc Rothemund and written by Fred Breinersdorfer (Zeitgeist Films). Although not the primary theme, the drama conveys characters that express, profoundly, a religious faith and life from a Christian perspective. For instance, Mrs. Scholl, Sophie’s mother, at the end of the trial reminds her that it’s about Jesus. In addition, the scene during the interrogation process, mentions the name of Otl (Otto) Aicher who, after World War II, became renowned as a very influential German graphic designer and husband of Inge Scholl, Sophie’s older sister.

Otl Aicher and Inge Scholl-Aicher, a husband-and-wife team, were instrumental founders, along with Max Bill, of the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm (HfG). The institution was linked, in spirit, to the educational philosophy of the Bauhaus. An interesting local connection is that one of the students from the HfG program, Peter Seitz, practiced design in the Twin Cities for many years; you can read more about him here and here.

The book, Ulm Design, The Morality of Objects, Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm 1953–1968, (edited by Herbert Lindinger, MIT Press, 1991) gives these biographies:

Inge Aicher
Neé Scholl, born in Ingersheim (Württenberg), 1917 [died in 1998 in the Allgäu]. After graduating from girls’ high school in Ulm, where her father was in private practice as an accountant, she trained in her father’s office as an assistant auditor. In her spare time she pursued an interest in music, art, literature, and—especially—philosophy and music, in the company of a group of friends and her brother and sister, Hans and Sophie. An initial enthusiasm for the Hitler Youth turned to a strong dislike.

The decisive event in her life was the fate of Hans and Sophie, who joined the White Rose student group in Munich in active resistance against the Nazi regime and were sentenced to death and executed in February 1943. With the rest of her family, Inge was held by the Gestapo for several months, and her youngest brother, who had been drafted to the Eastern Front, was shortly afterward posted missing.

In Ulm, after the end of the Nazi regime she founded the Volkshochschule, in the Martin-Luther-Kirche, as one of the first colleges in postwar Germany for adult education, in the conviction that democracy had no strong basis unless the citizens were basically well informed. She ran the Ulm Volkshochschule from 1946 through 1974.

In the late 1940s, building on her experience of working in adult education in a devastated city, Inge Scholl began to work with Otl Aicher and a number of friends, including Max Bill and Hans Werner Richter, toward the foundation of a Hochschule für Gestaltung (the Ulm School of Design). As the person responsible for this independent, privately run college, she set up the Scholl Foundation in memory of her siblings. The United States High Commissioner, John J. McCloy was impressed enough by her energy and sense of purpose to promise her a million marks on the condition that she match that sum from German sources.

The following quote is from Inge Scholl’s briefing papers for her interview with McCloy, 1950: “The young intellectuals of West Germany, who feel themselves responsible for the age in which they live and want to assume that responsibility—a numerically small group, but one that is important for he whole—will have a decisive influence for good or ill on the spiritual, economic, and political future.

Here the College sees a great task to be accomplished. It intends to be a point of crystallization for a younger generation of thinking people who now lack a precise goal, or who can see no way to achieve the goals they have, and to assume their responsibility in practical terms.”

In 1952 she married graphic designer Otl Aicher. That same year she published the book the White Rose about her siblings, Hans and Sophie, and the Munich resistance group to which they belonged.

In 1972 the family moved to Rotis in the Allgäu. Since 1978, Inge Aicher-Scholl has been active in the peace movement and supported the Easter March movement. In 1985 she was arrested for protesting and blocking the American military depot in Mutlangen.

Otl Aicher
Born Ulm, 1922 [died in 1991]. In 1946 he began studying sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Started his own graphic design studio in Ulm in 1947, in Munich in 1967, and at Rotis in the Allgäu in 1972. He grew to be skeptical of the Nazi Regime. He was a school friend of Werner Scholl, from autumn 1939 he came into closer contact with his brothers and sisters, there developed a friendship with the Scholl siblings. He tried to align his life by the standards of St. Augustine (Christian faith as a basis of knowledge). He refused to join the Hitler Youth and continually resisted conscription into the German army during the War.

Aicher’s work greatly influenced on the appearance of West Germany after the War and advocated the precise optical appearance and coherence and of German design and German companies in postwar restoration.

An initiator and founding member of the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG Ulm). In 1954–66, instructor in the department of visual communication. In 1956–59, Co-Rector. In 1962–64, Rector. He was a guest lecturer at Yale and in Rio de Janeiro.

Aicher is one of the pioneers of modern corporate design and developed graphic identities for firms such as Braun Electric and Lufthansa. From 1967 to 1972 he was in charge of design for the 1972 Munich Summer Olympic Games, for which he developed the internationally widespread system of pictograms. He founded, in 1984, the Institute for Analog Studies, Rotis and helped develop the Rotis®–font family

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“Shaping Things” by Bruce Sterling

This is a diminutive book size with a big title about the design of created objects and the environment by author and journalist, Bruce Sterling. Sterling’s science fiction works have received critical acclaim. The book is certainly worth a read. Shaping Things was published by MIT Press in 2005 and designed by Lorraine Wild and Stuart Smith of Green Dragon Office, Los Angeles.



Bill Moggridge, cofounder of IDEO, supplies a quote for the back cover by saying the book is, “a manifesto for the future of design, impeccably crafted by Bruce Sterling and enhanced by the delicately emphatic graphic design intelligence of Lorraine Wild… Shaping Things hovers between science fiction and design fact, pushing forward into the future and showing how design happens.”

In chapter four, “The Personal is Historical,” Sterling discusses the correlation of science fiction and design “reality”:

By no accident, American design and American science fiction both date to the 1920s. In the visionary work of say, Norman Bel Geddes, with his gargantuan transatlantic airliners and inhibited Hoover dams, it’s easy to spot a science-fictional sensibility that hasn’t yet been caged and tamed. In their youth, both design and science fiction centered unashamedly on wonder, speed, and spectacle.

Their deepest and more lasting commonality is their fierce love of gadgetry. Design loves the glamorized object; while science fiction loves rayguns, robots, time machines, and rocketships—imaginary objects whose one great unity is that you, the reader, are never going to own one. There is no danger of science fiction’s pet gadgets becoming obsolete and disenchanting you. The tide of wonder never ceases for technologies that remain fantasies.

Suppose, however, that you become genuinely interested in gadgets—not as symbols of wonder to be deployed as sci-fi stage props, but as actual, corporeal physical presences. It may dawn on you that you are surrounded by a manufactured environment. You may further come to understand that you are not living in a centrally planned society, where class distinctions and rationing declare who has access to the hardware. Instead, you are living in a gaudy, market-driven society whose material culture is highly unstable and radically contingent. You’re surrounded by gadgets. Who can tell you how to think about gadgets, what to say about them—what they mean, how that feels?

Science can’t do that. There’s no such scientific discipline as “Gadgetology”. If you want to write effectively about gadgets, you must come to terms with design. And it pays to make that effort of comprehension, because, in science fiction, as in any kind of fiction, it improves the work remarkably to have a coherent idea of what you’re talking about.” (pgs. 28, 29).

This passage from Sterling made me think about the nature of things (realities) connected with a philosophy of art. One of the original faculty members of Dordt College, Professor Nick Van Til, once offered this definition of understanding art when he said:

Susanne K. Langer, a philosopher with a special interest in aesthetics, defines art as “the creation of forms symbolic of feeling.”1 Calvin Seerveld, while maintaining the emphasis on symbol, modifies and expands the definition to read, “Art is the symbolic objectification of certain meaning aspects of a thing, according to the law of coherence.”2 I would further modify the definition by substituting the word “reality” for a “thing.” That would eliminate the possible impression that the symbolization has to be limited to a tangible or ponderable entity. Art is more a symbolization of mood, feeling, and idea, though “thing” in it broadest sense, as opposed to “nothing” might be appropriate.

In response, or reaction, to this definition I prefer the word “thing” because I believe it’s a word that alludes to both tangibility and feeling expressed in an artifact.

The art historian James Elkins suggests in his book, Why Art Cannot Be Taught: a handbook for art students (2001) that an area of common ground for both fine art students and design students is to study, together, the nature of objects and things.3

I think so too, but, how about you?

Footnotes
1. Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form, Charles Scribner, NY, 1953, p. 40.
2. Calvin Seerveld, A Christian Critique of Art, The Association for Reformed Scientific Studies, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, 1964, p. 39.
3. James Elkins, Why Art Cannot Be Taught…, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2001, p. 83.

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marian bantjes

THE PURSUIT OF DESIGN: MARIAN BANTJES Editor’s note: We thought you might find this video clip interesting, but, perhaps you have seen it. Anyway here it is.

A portrait of world-renowned designer, illustrator and typographer Marian Bantjes during her appearance at the recent Design Matters Live event presented by Adobe and the AIGA. Marian shares her love for the design community and the importance of staying connected, even while working from her idyllic rural home studio. She speaks about her transition from a more traditional design career path to a much more personally fulfilling mix of work. Marian has an obvious love for what she does, sharing some of the inspiration for her recent projects as diverse as hand-drawn valentines to the type treatment for the “Want It!” campaign at Saks Fifth Avenue. Marian’s insights in this portrait are important for anyone who cares passionately about design and respects the craft of the artist.

Credits: Producer: Rachel Talbot Associate Producer/Sound Engineer: Matthew Hendershot Editor: Lance Edmands Assistant Editor: Hei-Man Yu Camera: Michael Coleman Additional Camera: Michael Tucker, Rachel Talbot Design Matters Live poster: Marion Bantjes Animation: Colin Yu Music: Music Box Design Matters Theme: RJD2

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Dordt Alumni in Design: Jamin Ver Velde

An example of Jamin Ver Velde's forté for Dordt College’s graphic identity and sports promotion.

We recently invited Jamin Ver Velde to be our monthly featured alumni and we appreciate that he took time to send this piece to us. In addition to being the graphic designer on staff at Dordt, Jamin has helped advise students working on Signet, which is Dordt's yearbook. In addition, in 2008, he along with Jamey Schiebout were symposium presenters at Dordt — in an event affiliated with an alumni graphic design exhibition — Editor.

After graduating from Dordt in 1999, I eventually followed Jamey Schiebout (see September alumni post in DC AIGA) in the newspaper business, unknowingly filling his exact position after he moved on. For me, also, it proved to a very appropriate place to get a good start in the graphic design world. Within the weekly routine there was enough variety, creativity, and standard to keep me hungry for more. I was given a lot of latitude in the creative process because of the nature of the industry. Working for the media necessitated the ability to work under non-flexible deadlines and, therefore, minimal approval process. More often than not, the time crunch proved to be more of a stimulus for creativity rather than a hurdle. I was fortunate to work for a rare breed of small town newspaper that valued creative design.

After two and half years in the newspaper industry, I moved into my current full time position at Dordt College working for the Advancement Office in the public relations and marketing sector. After being told that I needed to come on board as soon as possible, I caught up on the work within three days. This was certainly a new (and confusing) situation for me. I sought out more ways to use my interests for the benefit of the college. I saw a need for a much better photo archive and prompted the office to purchase a couple of cameras to enhance the graphic materials while also serving to document the college’s history. I made a very conscious effort to unify the brand identity of all the Dordt materials. I’ve always been a big believer that repetition breed’s familiarity which breed’s trust, so priority number one was to standardize the representation of the Dordt logo.

Within a year and a half at Dordt I had a full plate, so my focus turned from looking for more ways to help out to looking for which ways to help out. I concentrated more on adapting my position and skill-set to evolve as the needs evolved or thought it should evolve. I dabbled in web-related applications such as Flash and Dreamweaver, but realized my passion remained in logos, brand identity, and overall creative direction. My passion for this — inspired me to join forces with the webmaster at Dordt in a new part-time venture where we complemented each other extremely well. Moonlighting as Brand New Graphics, we started to take on side website jobs. I continued to also do print and logo design as well, but the demand for websites quickly took center stage for our business. Today, Brand New Graphics averages about three websites designed and developed every two months. Defining what our business is in one sentence I would say, “We are a creative branding agency built around website development for small to medium businesses.”

Here are two examples of websites designed by Brand New Graphics and indicate the range of clients they have served. Above is the “Timothy” website for Calvin Seminary and a website for the Ridge Golf Club, a public course.

As my career continues to evolve, I’ve been increasingly appreciative of a liberal arts education that recognizes the overlapping spheres of academia and knowledge. As a graphic designer and small (okay, very small) business co-owner I regularly draw upon business and marketing principles, psychological considerations, social situations, English and creative writing, public relations, and others. The older I get, the more I know I really don’t know. I truly cherish learning more every day, and still look forward to going to work every single day.

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Desirable Ornamentation

Frank Lloyd Wright with two of his key associates: Wesley Peters and Eugene Masselink. A set-up shot, but, I enjoy how Wright is holding his pencil as a pointer. Photograph published in House Beautiful, November 1955 (page 242).

Recently, I found these pictures and text in vintage issues of House Beautiful magazine and thought about the balance between twentieth century modernist design, which advocates the elimination of superfluous decoration and how Frank Lloyd Wright considered ornament desirable. Perhaps we can gain insight through this pictorial case history. Featured designers in this piece are Mr. Frank Lloyd Wright and Mr. Eugene Masselink, who after Wright’s death, was affiliated with Taliesin Associated Architects.

Wright’s skill with ornament shows best when he had the chance to elaborate the minor and less significant details of a house into a rich brocade of design. [The rug shown above] is a fine example. Wright designed this rug for one of his houses, which was based on the house’s circular floor plan. As result the rug design motif emphasizes the circle and portions of circles—not only vertically and horizontally but also in the third dimension. So the rug simply makes the structural pattern visibly apparent in yet another way.

Notice how, even though design is complex, it still “lies flat.” There is no circle lying on top of another—as solids—which would make you feel you might trip or stumble. They intersect, but do not overlap. Notice how circles finally curl around concrete.

A utilitarian feature, a folding screen (designed and painted by Masselink), is lifted above mere satisfaction of a need by its pattern of color and gold leaf. Note how the design is agreeably related to the rectangular character of the structure and to the scale of the brickwork and to the rug beyond it…. Rug and screen are ornamental features, which strengthen the quality and character of the house.

The ever-changing play of light and color in this mural executed for a house planned by Charles Montooth, architect with Taliesin Associates, and is a constant source of delight. It derives from the forms and colors of bougainvillea and also from the circular floor plan of the house. Even the horizontal joints of the concrete blocks are controlling guides. Mr. Masselink has, with clear and colored glass and gold leaf, accomplished a work, which echoes the materials and the curved structure of the house. At the same time it is also in harmony with the natural forms of the foliage with which it is seen in relationship. The mural points up and compliments the happy merger between nature and architecture…. Notice how the mural extending through the glass wall and into the court.

Copy taken from House Beautiful, “Wright Considered Ornament Desirable”, October 1959 by Elizabeth Gordon (pages 246-249).

The quality of change in the mural (designed and painted by Masselink) results from the warm nature of its basic material; the background is cypress wood. To this have been applied areas of gold leaf, spattered gold, brushed and sprayed-on colors. The theme is based on the flora and fauna of the building's site in Florida.

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