28/04/08 – Excerpts from, and notes on, John Maeda’s The Laws of Simplicity: Design, Technology, Business, Life (2006). For more information visit the website.
Simplicity = Sanity
Technology has made our lives more full, yet at the same time we’ve become uncomfortably “full.”
“[...] to understand the meaning of life as a humanist technologist.” (iii)
-simplicity is a growth industry (pp. iv, 11, and 45)
“I originally conceived of this book as a sort of simplicity 101, to give readers an understanding of the foundation of simplicity as it relates to design, technology, business, and life. But now I see that a foundation can wait [...], and [...] a framework will suffice [...].” (v)
“There are three flavors of simplicity discussed here, where the successive set of three Laws (1 to 3, 4 to 6, 7 to 9) correspond to increasingly complicated conditions of simplicity: basic, intermediate, and deep.” (vi) (more…)
13/04/08 – Excerpts from Alan Bartram’s Futurist Typography and the Liberated Text published 2005 by Yale University Press:
Introduction
“The Italian Futurist poet-typographers were literary people, as were the very different Russian artists; and, just as for the 1960s protest designers, content came first and created form. Aesthetics merely refined the design.” (7)
“An ability to use a computer makes no one a typographer, and provides no substitute for the fiery imagination adn visual sensibility possessed by Marinetti. His ‘new array of type’ transformed the very grammar and syntax of the sentence, created a unique poetry, a new mode of communication.” (8)
“[...]at least one noteable precendent, the original 1897 version of Stephane Mallarme’s Un Coup de des. And, about the same time Marinetti’s work was published, Apollinaire was experimenting with his calligrammes.” (ibid.) (more…)
Excerpts from Josef Muller-Brockmann’s Grid Systems in Graphic Design: A Visual Communication Manual for Graphic Designers, Typographers and Three Dimensional Designers first published in 1981:
Foreword
Modern typography is based primarily on the theories and principles of design evolved in the 20′s and 30′s of our century. It was Mallarmé and Rimbaud in the 19th century and Apollinaire in the early 20th century who paved the way to a new understanding of the possibilities inherent in typography and who, released from conventional prejudices and fetters, created through their experiments the basis for the pioneer achievements of the theoreticians and practitioners that followed. (7)
The principle of the grid system presented in this book was developed and used in Switzerland after World War II. (ibid.)
But there was no publication that showed how the grid was constructed and applied, let alone how the design of the grid system was to be learned. This book is an attempt to close the gap. (8) (more…)