n°43 — Speaking by Images. Author:  Alexandra Midal & Thierry Chancogne

n°43 — Speaking by Images. Author: Alexandra Midal & Thierry Chancogne

In 1925 László Moholy-Nagy stated that “The illiterate of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph.” To claim that film and photography will soon replace words, and that those who do not know how to capture images will be the illiterate of tomorrow, underscores the properties of transmission by images, and images in movement. Can they replace usual spoken and written language, able to communicate and deliver ideas in an autonomous manner? Is the prevalence of speech insurmountable? Can associations of images produce theory?

Without worrying about translations, can sequential images soundly allow one to communicate meaning and forge an invisible yet efficient connection between designers and spectators, and between a thinking and an audience? To what extent can non-textual methods generate a universal language, or even an Esperanto?

n°30 — Types of types: the typographic specimen by Lineto. Author: Olivier Lebrun

Author: Olivier Lebrun
special issue: 68 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK + Pantone on cover

03th March 2021

ISBN: 979-10-95991-18-2
ISSN: 2558-2062

Author: Olivier Lebrun
special issue: 68 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK + Pantone on cover

03th March 2021

ISBN: 979-10-95991-18-2
ISSN: 2558-2062

For Lineto (https://lineto.com) the Specimen plays out through forms and formats in order to promote the foundry’s typefaces: books, posters, envelopes, pamphlets, letter transfers, print ads, and video clips as well as inflatable structures and bootlegs of logotypes. When Reala published LL Biff in 2000, the specimen employed graffiti culture and its modes of distribution, along with a combination of two references: “Medium is the message”*, “Style is the message”**. For Lineto the citation is a form that allows them to distribute their typographic catalogue while promoting diverse cultural fields: “Ignorance of your own culture is not considered cool!”***

* — Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1964

** — Tony Silver and Henri Chalfant, Style Wars, 1983

*** — Print ad for Lineto published in Dot Dot Dot #16, 2008 that cites The Residents, Duck Stab Poster, 1978

16 — A reproduction: what El Lissitzkzy wants. Author: James Langdon

Author: James Langdon
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK+1PMS
7th November 2019
ISBN: 979-10-95991-15-1
ISSN: 2558-2062

I am rarely convinced when I see graphic design that was originally printed in two inks reproduced in four- colour process. Before the advent of commercial colour offset printing, the elementary colours of printing — from Gutenberg to Tschichold — were black and red. In the early twentieth century, black and red were used by graphic designers not to attempt to recreate the spectrum of colours that appear to the human eye, but as graphic forces in themselves. To make a distinction. To create dynamism. To embody ideology on the page. In particular, the combination of black and red on white paper has become synonymous with Suprematism and revolutionary Russian graphic design.

A contemporary imaging workflow can enable extraordinary reproductions of these historical aesthetics. A high- resolution digital photograph of an original black and red printed book from the 1920s can be processed using a colour profile to calibrate its appearance across design, colour correction in computer software, proofing, and printing. This workflow can ultimately achieve a beautiful and precise image of that graphic artefact as it looks today, down to small details of its patination, its discoloration by exposure to sunlight, and the many more other subtleties that define it as an archival object.

But such a reproduction exhibits a strange technical anachronism. What about the constraints that originally shaped the design of that bookk — the implicit connection between the two colours of its graphics and the architecture of the one- or two-colour printing press on which it was printed? Are they not important? Can they even be reproduced?

I compare printed reproductions of the proud black and red cover of the book ‘Die Kunstismen’ (1925), designed by Russian artist and designer El Lissitzky. Published between 1967 and 2017, these images treat the material characteristics of the original book’s colour in different ways, appealing to contradictory notions of fidelity.

n°02 — A technical platform: Colorlibrary.ch by Maximage. Author: Manon Bruet

Author: Manon Bruet.
8th November 2017
ISBN: 979-10-95991-04-5
ISSN: 2558-2062

The Workflow research project, run by Tatiana Rhis, Guy Meldem, and Julien Tavelli and David Keshavjee (Maximage) at the Écal, is interested in current technologies of the printed object. It consists of a series of experiences that attempt to circumvent currently available production technologies, provoking coincidences and accidents with the goal of obtaining new outcomes.

More than simply questioning the possible circumvention of tools, Workflow explores technicality, modes of functioning, and flaws. In this way, the programme pursues the field of experimentation opened up by the Swiss studio Maximage since 2008. In the context of their degree project at the Écal, Julien Tavelli and David Keshavjee already combined manual and digital techniques so as to develop their own production tools, and notably their own printing methods. From their experiments have emerged, among other things, the Programme typeface, and the Les impressions magiques publication, that appears today as a manifest object of their approach.

One of the first results of the Workflow programme has been the creation of a series of colorimetric profiles that allows the conversion of digital images for printing with one, two, three, four, or five accompanying colors, whether they are basic (CMYK), pastels, fluorescent, or metallic.

The work on these profiles has two aims. It serves to increase the awareness of students at the Écal with regard to the management and theory of color, but it also allows, for the first time, the automation of operations and settings that have until now been done on a case-by-case basis through the manual use of image-editing software and CAD.

Advocating an “innovative” and “professional” solution for the treatment of color, the Écal and the Workflow programme launched the website colorlibrary.ch in 2016 and offered the profiles for sale. The platform appears as an online library that presents a large variety of profiles with different colorful combinations. The different profiles are displayed on screen, applied to images by Iranian photographer Shirana Shahbazi; they seem to replay the codes of Photoshop type images–from the butterfly to the eye, the still life to the waterfall.

Beginning with an analysis of the structure of this platform, the aesthetic and terminological languages that it summons, and their limits, we will open a number of fields of investigation, more widely linked to the question of the tools and modes of production of images.