(…) If you want to know something else about beauty, what precisely it is, look at a history of art. You will see that every age has had its ideal Venus (or Apollo), and that all these Venuses or Apollos put together and compared out of the context of their periods are nothing less than a family of monsters.
(…) ‘The basic teaching error of the academy was that of directing its attention toward genius rather than the average.’ (Bauhaus)
(…) the designer is therefore the artist of today, not because he is a genius but because he works in such a way as to re-establish contact between art and the public, because he has the humility and ability to respond to whatever demand is made of him
by the society in which he lives, because he knows the job, and the ways and means of solving each problem of design. And finally because he responds to the human needs of his time, and helps people to solve certain problems without stylistic preconceptions or false notions of artistic dignity derived from the schism of the arts.
(…) Research design is concerned with experiments of both plastic and visual structures in two or more dimensions. It tries out the possibilities of combining two or more dimensions, attempts to clarify images and methods in the technological field, and carries out research into images on film.
(…) Design came into being in 1919, when Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus at Weimar. Part of the prospectus of this school reads:
‘ We know that only the technical means of artistic achievement can be taught, not art itself. The function of art has in the past been given a formal importance which has served it from our daily life; but art is always present when apeople lives sincerely and healthily
‘Our job is therefore to invent a new system of education that may lead — by wayof a new kinf od specialized teaching of science and technology — to a complete knowledge of human needs and a universal awareness of them
‘ Thus our task is to make a new kind of artist, a creator capable of understanding every kind of need: not because he is a prodigy, but because h eknows how to approach human needs according to a precise method. We wish to make him conscious of his creative power, not scared of new facts, and independent of formulas in his own work.’
(…) What Gropius wrote is still valid. This first school of design did tend to make a new kind of artist, an artist useful to society because he helps society to recover its balance, and not to lurch between a false world to live one’s material life in and an ideal world to takemoral refuge in.
(…) Actually, typefaces and racing bikes are very much alike. Both are ideas as well as machines, and neither should be burdened with excess drag or baggage. Pictures of pumping feet will not make the type go faster, any more than smoke trails, pictures of rocket ships or imitation lightning bolts tied to the frame will improve the speedof the bike
(…) The easiest way to think of cosines is to imagine yourself walking counterclockwise around a circle. This circle is centered on the X and Y axis, and has a radius of 1. Radius is the length from the center of the circle to the edge. A cosine of the angle in respect to the positive horizontal axis (aka, the length in our case because we are on a unit circle (radius = 1)) is our position on the X axis as we walk around the circle if we started at X = 1. We must also remember that the length around a circle with a radius of 1 is 2pi. So, cos(0) is 1, because we haven’t gone anywhere; we are still standing at the beginning, at X = 1, cos(pi) is -1, because we have travelled halfway around the circle to X = 1, and cos(2pi) is 1, because since we have travelled all the way around our circle, we have ended up back at the beginning (Figure 1).
* ‘On Compression’ was originally produced for A couple thousand short films about Glenn Gould, edited by Steven Bode (London: Film & Video Umbrella, 2008), and typeset using TEX.
These standardised DDD ads are sold per % of the greyscale background—the higher the contrast the higher the price. In regular issues, this range from €200/$300/£175 for white text on 10% black (i.e., lowest contrast), rising exponentially to €1100/$1750/£850 for 100% black (i.e., highest contrast).
In line with the rest of this particular issue, however, here the conceits is inverted.
Contact
(…) When something goes wrong, t can usually be traced back to the beginning, from the acceptance of false premises. Hence on the one hand the importance of questions, and on the other, of the resourcefulness of attitude that prompts them.
(…) The identification of such limits, and the turning of them to constructive account, goes hand in hand with an analysis of use, of performance.
(…) By such analytical procedures it is possible to dismantle an object which may have lost its reason for existence, and to reconstruct it in new terms. The object as such may disappear if its meaning is better seen in some more, selective or more comprehensive arrangement of parts – ‘parts’ being here the purposes served. Thus, for instance, wardrobes disappear into storage walls – conceptually, but not on the retail market, which remains object-fixated although tending to respond to appearances.
(…) see them first through half-closed eyes just as boxes with perforated holes; then gradually allow the subtlety of detailing, material, and proportion, to establish itself. In typography such matters are taken for granted. Letter forms are finely distinguished and letter-spacing of capitals is still practised, though by no means invariably.
(…) The case for analytical technique – or the simplest order – rests on the premise that you should find out what you are doing, or what what you should be doing, before considering how to do it; and that this degree of foresight is normal to the role and situation of a designer. Such a claim is not unreasonnable.
* consider what has to be done before to engage with the task