AIGA

I enjoyed the show at the AIGI center, although I believe most of it was over my head. There is the beginnings of understanding a discipline where things that were once invisible or undifferentiated now start to collect meaning. Still, awareness of nuance in typography is not the same as actually seeing it on the page and for most of the work in the exhibition I could only guess at the depth presented. For example, I'm sure Strathmore paper is does its job excellently, but I am not sure how that is shown, or really, what the effect the paper has at all. 

Another example is this letter from a person, possibly a client, to the typeface designer, specifying how certain letters should be changed. I thought this letter was really fascinating, that the writer is using a clunky ink pen to specify changes to the subtle lines and curves of the letter. Also, I can tell a difference between the r and the r and the g and the g, and most definitely between the y and the y -   but what the difference is, and how to describe it, is out of my range. 

Two other works that I found fascinating were the first cover of the magazine fact: and Errol Morris' book, A Wilderness of Error. Both use the composition of type and image on the page to specifically relate to the presented content. 

For fact: 3/4 of the cover consists of quotations, short ones, listed right after one another without even a line break. Each quotation is a negative endorsement of Time magazine and the names listed are well known and from a broad swath of culture, academics and politics. These quotations are grouped together rather than separated (such as on the cover of a book) because they act en masse, the collected voice rejects Time magazine. These are voices who we can assume fact: expects its viewers to respect, and we can imagine many more due to the justified alignment. Together, these negative endorsements act as an endorsement, or a promotion of fact: magazine. 

I feel a connection to the cover of Wilderness of Error. I spent about two weeks engrossed in the book for part of which I was traveling through northern Italy alone. It was a strange back-and-forth, reading about the injustices done to Jeffery MacDonald while sitting next to a Venetian canal. But I couldn't put the book down, it is full of incredible details, hundreds of pages of transcribed interviews fitted together, just like a floor plan, to reveal the whole scope of mistakes, manipulations and ill-treatment. 

That is why I think the cover is effective. At first it looks kind of thrown-together, the floor plan graphic is behind the title and author, the subtitle is reduced to a hokey type-writer typeface. But just like the case against MacDonald, the cover slowly reveals its devices. The floor plan design is both obscured and overwhelming, it shows that this large book is focused on a very small space. The typewritten subtitle also relates to the extensive transcribed interviews within the book, which in size 10 font, make a long book considerably longer.