Blue Pencil no. 33—The Phaidon Archive of Graphic Design: D entries

D [1910–1919]
D001
Oxo | unknown | packaging graphics | Oxo | 1910
[Helena Michaelson]
images: 5
text: 4
apparatus: 4

Is the front image of an Oxo tin small because it is reproduced at real size? The caption does not say. There are also no dates for two of the three images on the back of the card. Image no. 3 is 1957 or later, based on Michaelson’s text which says that foil wrapped cubes of Oxo did not appear until that year.

Michaelson describes the lettering of Oxo as “slightly quirky” but makes no attempt to divine its origins. I see the influence of Dudley Hardy’s poster lettering.

D002
Opel | Hans Rudi Erdt | poster | Hollerbaum & Schmidt | 1911
[Simon Bell]
images: 5
text: 3
apparatus: 4

This is another example of a disconnect between the text and the images or between the author and the Phaidon editors. The front shows a poster for Opel by Erdt done in 1911. It is not familiar. On the back is the famous one the artist did for Opel the same year, captioned as an “alternative poster”. Bell writes, “…this poster achieves its effect through deceptively simple means…. The product itself is essentially invisible—no car is shown and there are no demands or exhortations….” Yet, in the poster on the front there is clearly a car visible, just to the left of the driver’s coat collar. Contrary to expectations, Bell’s text is about the poster on the back—as it should be. Unfortunately, he never discusses the poster on the front, the differences between the two, and why the better-known poster on the back is considered an alternative design. Instead, nearly half of his text is devoted to a summary of the sachplakat style of poster.

• Bell initially misidentifies the man in the posters as a chauffeur, though later he correctly refers to him as the driver.
• Some of the differences between the posters are: the front poster not only has a car pictured, but behind it are a row of pennants. The driver is wearing a tight-fitting cap that, along with the pennants, suggest he is a racer. In the back poster the driver is wearing a taller cap with a brim and insignia on it. The word “Opel” in the front poster is in caps and small caps while on the back it is in upper-and-lowercase. The colors are different. The front poster has a gray background while the driver, car, pennants and company name are in black and shades of orange, tan and beige. The back poster has a dark turquoise background and the other colors are tan, beige and black.

D003
Insel-Bücherei | Anton Kippenberg and Gotthard de Beauclair | book cover | Insel Verlag | 1912
[Frederico Duarte]
images: 1
text: 3
apparatus: 0

This is a very misleading entry in the Archive. The date in the title block is 1912 but none of the images are from that year and the inclusion of Gotthard de Beauclair as designer makes little sense since he was only five years old at that time. Duarte says that the first book in the series was Die Welise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke by Rainer Maria Rilke but its cover—with title label set in fraktur—is not shown. The nine covers (one on the front and eight on the back), whose numbers range from 165 to 1208, date from 1954 to 2000—though this information is not included in the entry since there are no captions. Duarte describes the labels as set in “the same Gothic typeface” though the images contradict him with only one set in fraktur and the other eight set in roman faces, including the sans serif Kabel. But this is not Duarte’s fault since he is apparently discussing the Insel-Bücherei as the looked from 1915 to the end of World War II.

Duarte, however, does not explain why both Kippenberg and de Beauclair are listed as designers. He only says, “The unique series of attractive and collectable volumes was distinguished by its internal illustrations [not shown here], and the decorative hardcover bindings created by Kippenberg and Gotthard de Beauclair, Insel Verlag’s artistic director.” While Kippenberg was one of the co-founders of Die Insel Verlag, de Beauclair did not join the company until 1928 and did not become its artistic director until 1952.

D004
Edel-Grotesk | Wagner & Schmidt | typeface | self-commissioned | 1912–1914
[Jason Tselentis]
images: 2
text: 3
apparatus: 5

“Sans-serif typefaces such as Futura and DIN Engschrift rose to popularity during the period of the Bauhaus (1919–33), favoured by leading designers for their modern design and utility. The lesser-known Edel-Grotesk face also percolated throughout Europe at this time, and designers used it with great frequency until it disappeared into obscurity with the rise of phototypesetting and digitization,” says Tselentis. Given this history, why is Edel-Grotesk in the Archive when other, more influential typefaces are not? This question becomes more urgent given the quality of the images and text. Although the title block dates Edel-Grotesk to 1912–1914 all of the images are from the 1960s and none are of the original design. Instead, we have Edel-Grotesk Fett, Edel-Grotesk Mager, Edel-Grotesk Halbfett and Edel-Grotesk condensed bold. Tselentis writes, “Under the leadership of Ludwig Wagner, Wagner & Schmidt designed the Edel-Grotesk matrices betweem 1912 and 1914, but as they also manufactured matrices for other foundries, it is unclear how Edel-Grotesk factors into the design and distribution of various almost identical sans-serif fonts of this era. As far back as 1907, the C.E. Weber foundry produced the remarkably similar Aurora-Grotesk in Stuttgart, and some sources have credited Wagner & Schmidt with its creation.” The uncertain story of Edel-Grotesk continues: “In 1921 the brothers Ludwig and Johannes Wagner, and Johannes’s brother-in-law Willy Jahr, established the Norddeutsche Schriftgießerei (North German Type Foundry) in Berlin, and in 1927 they made the savvy business decision to cast Edel-Grotesk.” Thus, we have multiple dates for the creation of Edel-Grotesk and even some doubt as to whether or not it is an original design or a copy of Aurora. (For more on Edel-Grotesk’s tangled origins see Indra Kupferschmid’s 2007 contribution on Typophile. She dates the design to c. 1900.)

What is the relationship between Wagner & Schmidt and Norddeutsche Schriftgießerei? Why is Edel-Grotesk described as self-commissioned? Such a designation could apply to any typeface from a 19th or 20th c. typefoundry.

D005
Olympic Rings | Pierre Frédy, Baron de Coubertin | logo | International Olympic Committee | 1913
[Riikka Kuittinen]
images: 4
text: 4
apparatus: 4

Wikipedia cites a text from August 1912 in which de Coubertin describes his design of the Olympic rings. Overall, Kuittinen’s text is good. It includes descriptions of two of the four images on the back, posters for the 1928 Winter Olympics in St. Moritz and the 1996 Paralympics in Atlanta. Unfortunately, a lighthearted poster she describes with the Olympic rings skiing down a snowy hill goes unshown—as does the ingenious integration of the rings with the ABC logo and the 1968 Mexico City Olympics logo.

D006
Crossword Puzzle | Arthur Wynne | information design | New York World | 1913
[Amoret Tanner]
images: 4
text:
apparatus: 4

Does the crossword puzzle truly constitute information design? I suspect it is included in the Archive because it has become a visual trope used by designers. Tanner alludes to this use in his text, though no examples are shown. The only images are the original crossword puzzle by Wynne on the front and an unidentified modern puzzle on the back. Despite Tanner’s text there is no showing of puzzles from The Times of London or Dell Books. One off-shoot of the crossword puzzle that he does not mention is Scrabble.

Tanner’s last sentence was surely accurate when he wrote it, but the delay in publishing the Archive makes it sound odd: “The crossword puzzle, that curious teasing grid that is a standard feature of newspapers and magazines around the world, has yet to reach its centenary.”

D007
Lacerba | Giovanni Papini and Ardengo Soffici | magazine and newspaper | Attilio Vallecchi | 1913–1915
[Chris Brown]
images: 4
text: 4
apparatus: 5

Brown describes Lacerba as having an “uneasy relationship with the Milanese Futurists”, yet Stephen Eskilson says the magazine was repeatedly insulting them prior to its switch of allegiance in March 1913. He discusses the concept of parole in libertà without ever mentioning F.T. Marinetti, its creator; and ignores the publication  in Lacerba of “L’antitradizione futurista: manifesto=sintesi” by Guillaume Apollinaire. However, Brown makes an excellent point about the use of photoengraving as the method used by the Futurists to reproduce their “striking, non-linear compositions”.

Image no. 2 on the back (the front page of the January 1913 issue of Lacerba) has the masthead cropped at left.

D008
Plantin | F.H. Pierpont, after Christopher Plantin | typeface | Monotype Corporation | 1913
[Simon Bell]
images: 2
text: 3
apparatus: 2

Plantin is not based on a typeface designed by Christopher Plantin (however indirectly), but on Robert Granjon’s Second Pica Roman (1569). This is made clear by Bell in his text—“Monotype’s cutting was based on a font originally acquired after Plantin’s death, but never used by him.”–yet the title block, under designer, says “F.H. Pierpont, after Christopher Plantin”. (As for Pierpont, Brigitte Schuster argues that Max Steltzer deserves credit for the design more than he does. See her 2010 KABK thesis, Monotype Plantin—A Digital Revival, p. 16.) Bell rightly points out that Plantin was intended for printing on coated text but fails to explain why. Its dark weight and chunky serifs were designed to compensate for the loss of ink squash in such papers as well as with machine-made uncoated papers. (Bell includes uncoated papers in his text, but leaves out the crucial descriptor “machine made”.) His text is insufficient in other areas. He overlooks the long descender version of the face issued by Monotype for book use; says nothing about the well-known mistaken a in the typeface—caused by Pierpont following a sample of 1905 setting of Granjon’s type with a wrong fount in it; and, is silent on its supposed role as the model for Times New Roman. Instead, Bell concludes his text with promotional boilerplate that seems to come straight from Monotype Corporation literature: “The weights of the roman, bold and light variants are intelligently graded and create an integrity that helps to solve complex typographic problems without resorting to clumsy font mixes. Plantin Light is an excellent choice for the discerning  poetry designer: its discreet capitals avoid unpleasant emphasis of the left-hand edge of text, while its tight set reduces turnover lines, thus helping to maintain a poem’s overall shape on the page.”

The images are not very imaginatively chosen. The front image and image no. 1 on the back are both undated specimen sheets from Monotype while image no. 2 on the back is the title page of the Complete Poetry and Selected Prose of John Donne (Nonesuch Press, 1929) set in Plantin.  There is no comparison to Granjon’s type or any example of it used in text.

D009
Zang Tumb Tumb | Filippo Marinetti | book | Edizioni Futuriste di ‘Poesia’ | 1914
[Alison Barnes]
images: 5
text: 3
apparatus: 4

The front image of the cover of Zang Tumb Tumb is essential. The three images on the back are a 1912 photo of Marinetti with Umberto Boccioni, the Futurist sculptor, in Paris 1912 (no. 1); and pages 105 and 120 from the book. The latter are not fully captioned.

Barnes is wrong about Zang Tumb Tumb “ushering in significant changes in the design and technology of the printed page”. This is a standard view that privileges the avant-garde as breaking the barriers of letterpress printing layouts. But this had already been done decades earlier by adherents of the Artistic Printing movement in England and America. As early as 1870 with the publication of Harpel’s Typograph printers had curved type, angled it, mixed styles and sizes. They did not scatter type randomly nor did they treat texts as images but they assaulted the classical page long before the Futurists and the Dadaists. See The Handy Book of Artistic Printing by Doug Clouse and Angela Voulangas (2009)  and The Rise and Fall of the Printers’ International Specimen Exchange by Matthew Young (2012).

Barnes has things backwards when she declares: “This typographic revolution also led to a change of process in the print industry in the use of photo-engraving to create page layouts.” This method was indeed different from that of the Artistic printers who laboriously set type using bent rules, special quads and other aids. But it was not new with Marinetti and the Futurists. Designers in the 1890s were availing themselves of the method. It was taught as part of the curriculum at the Frank Holme School of Illustration in Chicago which both W.A. Dwiggins and Oswald Cooper attended. And the two of them were applying it in their commercial work prior to 1914 as evidenced by surviving mechanicals.

Barnes’ conclusion focusing on the impact of the “Apple Mac” giving designers “the typographic freedom to explore the expressive possibilities of the printed page in new ways” skips over the offset and phototypesetting revolutions which did the same thing in the 1960s. See especially the work of Massin (e.g. La Cantatrice Chauve in the 1964 Gallimard edition; I026) as well as the work of Fluxus.

Although Zang Tumb Tumb contains two of Marinetti’s manifesti, there are no quotations from him in the text by Barnes.

D010
Centaur | Bruce Rogers | typeface | Metropolitan Museum of Art | 1914
[Michael Kelly]
images: 3
text: 3
apparatus: 2

Kelly’s description of Centaur as having a “modest contrast of strokes” is wholly wrong. What distinguishes Centaur from other Jenson revivals is its strong stroke contrast and its sharp serifs and other terminals. He also says that it is widely seen as the best interpretation of Jenson’s type which is debatable. It is often considered to be the best type derived from Jenson but not the best or most accurate interpretation. The latter honor goes to Robert Slimbach’s Adobe Jenson, a type only rarely used.

Kelly calls Centaur “a well-kept secret” which is odd for a typeface so commonly celebrated and, at least in the world of private press printing, so often used. In the world of graphic design it has been more often praised than used—at least until the digital version released by Monotype in the 1990s. But Kelly fails to note that in that version Warde’s Arrighi has now been unfairly renamed Centaur Italic and that many sources thus describe it as Rogers’ work.

Kelly leaves out the Monotype Corporation, the company that made Centaur available for machine and he fails to describe Rogers’ method of designing Centaur which is important. He tracedover photographic enlargements of Jenson’s type with a broad-edged pen in the hopes of recovering the true forms of the metal letters hidden under their inked impressions.

The images are acceptable but not the best possible. There is no reproduction of the well-known ink drawings (with retouchings) of Centaur by Rogers. The page (image no. 1) from The Centaur (mistakenly dated as 1947 in the caption) should be larger so that the lowercase type can be properly seen. Image no. 2 is a specimen of 72 pt Centaur that has been ludicrously reduced to about the size of 18 pt type. The drawings of Centaur P and Q (image no. 3)—mislabeled as a type specimen—are excellent, though from I would have chosen letters that are more distinctive, both of Jenson and of Centaur, such as E, M or R. (Also, why does the Q have a long tail in the drawing but a short one in the specimen on the front? The answer is that the specimen on the front is of Centaur Titling not the regular Centaur type.)

D011
Blast | Wyndham Lewis | magazine and newspaper | self-commissioned | 1914–1915
[Will Hill]
images: 5
text: 3
apparatus: 5

Hill discusses Blast as a manifesto for Vorticism, but does not identify which issue the manifesto appears in. That has to be teased out by looking at the caption since the front image is of issue no. 2—the war number—while issue no. 1 is relegated to the back of the card. Also, Hill does not explain that Blast emerged as the vehicle for the Rebel Art Centre that was set up as a competing workshop against the Omega Workshops led by art historian Roger Fry. And that the manifesto was a riposte to F.T. Marinetti and the Futurists. See Wikipedia and the Museum of Modern Art website on this point. The full Vorticist manifesto can be found online.

• Hill describes Lewis as “the Anglo-American artist and writer” but he was born in Nova Scotia, Canada not the United States.
• “T.S. Elliott” should be “T.S. Eliot”

D012
Batavier Lijn, Rotterdam-Londen | Bart van der Leck | poster | Wm. H. Müller & Co. | 1916
[Line Hjorth Christensen]
images: 5
text: 4
apparatus: 2

The front image (the full poster) should be rotated to fit better on the sheet, though it is perfectly legible as is. The four images on the back, all sketches leading up to the poster, are wonderful. Unfortunately, their sequence (if known) is not identified. Presumably, the three on the right are in order vertically and the one on the left is the last version prior to the final design. But maybe not. The first one on the right (no. 2) has different coloration than the others but it also has an arrangement of the figures that is closest to the final design.

Christensen’s text entirely ignores these sketches. It also ignores what, to me, seems to be the central feature of this travel poster compared to other travel posters: that it shows both passengers and cargo. The sketches especially emphasize the idea of the ship carrying goods with several barrels in the foreground and a wall of boxes/crates in the background.

Christensen says that Wm. H. Müller & Co., the client, was not happy with van der Leck’s lettering and “pasted it over with new panels of text.” There is no image showing what these “censored” posters looked like.

D013
Neue Jugend | John Heartfield | magazine and newspaper | Malik Verlag | 1916–1917
[Helena Michaelson]
images: 4
text: 4
apparatus: 5

Why is Neue Jugend no. 2 (June 1917) on the front of the card and Neue Jugend no. 1 (May 1917) on the back rather than vice versa? Image no. 1 on the back, a photograph of the Erste Internationale Dada-Messe (First International Dada Fair) in 1920, is puzzling since Neue Jugend had ceased publication by then. But if one looks very closely, a copy of Neue Jugend no. 2 can be seen on one wall. Does that justify including the photograph?

The title block gives the date(s) of Neue Jugend as 1916 to 1917 but the first issue is dated 1917. “The final incarnation of the anti-war periodical Neue Jugend marked the beginning of John Heartfield’s career…. In 1916 Heartfield and his brother, the poet Weiland Herzfeld, took over the monthly magazine, Neue Jugend, running it for a year….” Michaelson implies that the original Neue Jugend was already anti-war when it was simply a school magazine that the brothers coopted as a vehicle for their anti-war sentiments. See the Dada Companion and International Dada Archive websites.

Michaelson writes, “However, the magazine quickly succumbed to censors. In May 1917… Heartfield resumed publication, radically changing the format and eradicating the staid-looking quarto magazine with justified print columns in favour of a larger scale based on American journals.” However, the cover of issue no. 2 (as shown on the front of the card) still has a four column format with justified setting. It is hard to tell if the format is larger since the captions provide no information on size. One thing that does appear to be different is the addition of sans serif as well as serif type for text. This goes unremarked by the author who comments on the “unconventional use of lowercase and capital letters” even though on the page shown here there is nothing out of the ordinary.

• Heartfield’s German name should be included in the title block.
• “monteur” should be italicized
• “George Grosz” should be “Georg Grosz” for the German part of his career which included his work with Neue Jugend.
• The Malik Verlag did not exist in 1916. It was established in early 1917.

D014
People’s Charity for German Prisoners of War and Civilian Internees | Ludwig Hohlwein | poster | German Government | 1916
[Chris Brown]
images: 5
text: 4
apparatus: 4

Brown provides a good summary of Hohlwein’s poster career, something which should have been in the entry on his 1908 poster for Confection Kehl (C018). Once again, here is where cross-referencing in the Archive is needed. The only complaint about Brown’s text is that he does not put these “emotive fund-raising posters” into context with other, well-known World War I posters—such as the recruitment posters with the pointing fingers of Lord Kitchener for England and Uncle Sam for the USA; or those of Bernhard for war bond drives; or the posters demonizing the enemy (e.g. “Destroy this Mad Brute—Enlist” )—none of which are included in the Archive.

Although the Volkspende poster is from 1916, the title block should have the more inclusive dates of 1914–1918 since Brown discusses it along with three other Hohlwein posters (the back side has posters for Rote Kreuz-Sammlung, Ludendorff-Spende für Kriegsbeschädigte and Ausstellung von Arbeiten der in der Schweiz internierten deutschen Kriegsgefangenen) produced during that time period.

• Brown makes no mention of Hohlwein’s sleight of hand in which the prisoner is simultaneously in front of and behind the stylized bars.
• It should be noted that the bottom line of text is set in type, Peter Behrens’ fraktur/antiqua hybrid Behrensschrift.

D015
De Stijl |Theo van Doesburg and Vilmos Huszár | magazine and newspaper | self-commissioned | 1917–1932
[Sony Devabhktuni]
images: 4
text: 4
apparatus: 5

Devabhaktuni  [the proper spelling of his name] calls the distinctive blocky masthead of De Stijl by Vilmos Huszar “one of the most influential examples of the De Stijl sensibility” and goes on to describe it in detail. Yet, the card has issue no. 12 of De Stijl (1924), which has the later masthead—set in grotesque type—by van Doesburg, on the front instead. Issue no. 1 (1917) of the magazine is not shown at all and the masthead from 1917 is relegated to the back of the card as image no. 1. Images no. 2 (De Stijl no. 2) and no. 3 (a postcard) also bear Huszar’s masthead while images nos. 4 and 5 have van Doesburg’s design.

“Despite such poor quality materials, the magazine’s influence was felt across Europe….” says Devabhaktuni. But his text is fixated on the Huszar masthead and its replacement in 1921 by the one designed by van Doesburg. The interior design/typography of the magazine is ignored. (One double page spread from De Stijl no. 11 (1921) is reproduced small on the back as image no. 4, but the caption says nothing about the content which is X-Beelden (1920), a Dadaist sound poem by I.K. Bonset, van Doesburg’s literary pseudonym.) Devabhaktuni may have ignored the interior design of De Stijl because it is boring—at least those of volumes 1–3 which can be viewed online. But if that is the case, then this entry should have been under Magazine Cover not Magazine and Newspaper.

• “Emerging out of World War I, the De Stijl movement….”—De Stijl magazine began publication in 1917 when the war was still raging.