Grafik Magazine - By: Eric Gudmundson

November 2017 ISSUE

Typography Now

Interview with Michael Beirut

Do You Duotone?

In-depth look at a color trend

Clikety-Clack

Why A Typewriter Is A Symphony Of Sounds

The Art of Punk and the Punk Aesthetic

Some day all the adults will die!

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Random Musings

W

ANDER AROUND WIRED’S San Francisco headquarters on any given day and you’re likely to encounter quite a zoo: hoverboard-riding video shooters dodging be-goggled editors who are testing beta VR hardware; one of our favorite TV makers coming in for a meeting; security writers debating the latest cyberwar skirmish around the corner from a conference call with the founder of the Valley’s latest unicorn company; and dogs (10 of them, by my count).

But this time of year, the always lively view from my desk takes on an especially electric feel as we train our focus on a new horizon. So to give you a sense of what we’re gearing up to cover in 2017, I tapped the hive mind of writers and editors and pulled together a list of the big developments we expect to be following as the year unfolds.

There’s a lot to look forward to.

This years special edition issue has everyone talking about new and old topics in the design world. We met with Michael Beirut from the Design Observer to get his incite on where typography is heading.

Later I had our younger intern research the new retro color trend happening around the world in our in-depth look at what duo-tone can do for your designs.

One of my senior designers brought up the nostalgic feeling of old school printing and pre-press production and I decided we should do a piece on typewriters. The act of getting dirty and feeling really creative in the process just can't be shaken.

We did a throwback to the 80's in our in-depth look at graphic design and the punk rock aesthetic. I believe you will really love what we have worked hard to put together for you in this issue. Cheers! 

Gr@fik Magazine Special Edition 2017 | 3

Letter From The Editor

03

The Staff

06

Random musings about random stuff

Some people we thought were important

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08

Graphic Design

09

Photography

12

Typography

13

User–friendly Paul Rand

White lines

Dashboard type

Media

Confessions of a Frustrated Newsprint Lover

14

Typography Now

18

Do You Duotone?

22

Clikety-Clack

Why A Typewriter Is A Symphony Of Sounds

24

The Art of Punk and the Punk Aesthetic

Interview with Michael Beirut

In-depth look at a color trend

Some day all the adults will die!

Gr@fik Magazine Special Edition 2017 | 5

Andy Greenberg SENIOR WRITER @A_GREENBERG Erica Jewell (No Relation) DEPUTY MANAGER EDITOR @ERICAJEWLL Jay Darit EDITORIAL OPERATIONS MANAGER @JAYDAYHAY

Jason Kehe ASSOCIATE EDITOR @JKEHE

Scott Dadich EDITOR IN CHIEF @SDADICH

Your Mother SENIOR EDITOR (NEWS & OPINION) @IMTHEDEVIL

Chris Kohler EDITOR @KOBUNHEAT

Robert CAPPS HEAD OF EDITORIAL @ROBCAPPS

Brian Dustrud COPY CHIEF @DUSTRUD

Timothy Lessle CONTRIBUTING RESEARCHER @TELESE

Davey Alba (No Relation) STAFF WRITER @DAVETALBA

Jon J. Eilenberg SENIOR EDITOR (DIGITAL EDITIONS) @JJEILENBERG

Chelsea Leu (Lost Sister of Lucy) CONTRIBUTING RESEARCHER @CHELSEALEU

Michael Calore SENIOR EDITOR @SNACKFIGHT

Sarah Fallon (Lost Sister of Jimmy) SENIOR EDITOR @SARAHFALLON

Kevin McFarland STAFF WRITER @KM_MCFARLAND

Jennifer Chaussee ASSIATANT RESEARCH EDITOR @JCSHAUSSEE

Patrick Farrell (Cousin of Collin) SENIOR VIDEO PRODUCER @SPATRICKFARRELL

Cade Metz SENIOR WRITER @CADEMTZ

Alex Davies (It's Just a Front) SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR @ADAVIES47

Robbie Gonzalez SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR @RTGONZALEZ

Tim Moynihan STAFF WRITER @APEROBOT

Katelyn Davies EDITORIAL BUSINESS MANAGER @KATEDAVIES

John Gravois SENIOR EDITOR @JOHNGRAVOIS

Susan Murcko SENIOR EDITOR @SUSANMURCKO

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Not everything is about graphic design, but here are a few topics we thought are important Gr@fik Magazine Special Edition 2017 | 7

Graphic Design

User-Friendly Paul Rand Steven Heller Graphic Designer

P

aul Rand did not coin the term “user friendly.” He would have hated such trendy jargon. Yet he did, arguably, introduce the “friendly” concept, creating the first friendly computeruser packages that paved the way for human-centric digital age products. Rand probably would say my assertion was “for the birds”, but consider the following.

Decades before Apple introduced its Newtonian-inspired rainbowcolored logo, Rand helped develop IBM’s populist aura through commercial packages for Selectric typewriter starter packs, ink ribbons and type balls that were vibrantly festooned with multicolored stripes, pastel confetti and abstract flower blooms. Not your run-of-the-mill identity for a serious business machine manufacturer, these cheerfully designed boxes were gifts intended for IBM’s consumers from a company whose historic edict — “Good Design is Good Business” — continues to resonate.

“Ideally, beauty and utility are mutually generative,” Rand wrote in his first monograph, Thoughts on Design (1947), which is being republished this week by Chronicle Books. It was an ideal made real at IBM, which enabled him to inject his Klee-Matisse-Picassoinspired graphic good vibrations into IBM’s product line. Rand’s zealous belief in the power of wit and play was an outgrowth of a childhood passion for comics, which in turn fed his impish side. “I always steered towards toward humorous things,” Rand once told me. “People who don’t have a sense of humor really have serious problems.”

Despite Rand’s often misinterpreted dogmatic adherence to a Modernist credo — the so-called “rightness of form” — and his total commitment to “Design is a way of life,” he had an incredible sense of humor. Moreover, he believed that design had trans-formative powers that in part, through wit, could positively appeal to the masses while also serving the client. “To design is to transform prose into poetry,” he wrote in Design Form and Chaos. Designing with joy was his means, resulting in a better relationship with the consumer.

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Yet it was IBM that benefited most from Rand’s compulsion for play, or as he called it “experimentation.” But the computer giant was not the first. In the 1940s, his covers for Direction magazine were inspiring. As chief art director at Weintraub advertising agency in New York, Rand challenged the antiquated Victorian conventions of cigar packaging through comic El Producto gift boxes and tins.

His handmade cartoon drawings, collages, photo-grams and other playful visual treats were Dada-esque approaches that also emerged in his book covers and jackets, and later in posters and children’s books.

Much of this playful abandon was intuitive. “Imagination begins with intuition, not the intellect,” he wrote in the self-effacingly titled From Lascaux to Brooklyn. But Rand often vacillated between crediting the subconscious and the conscious for his design smarts.

The creative spark lasts only a second, he insisted, refinement of any given visual idea could then take months. “I don’t think that play is done unwittingly,” he asserted in Graphic Wit (1991). “At any rate, one doesn’t dwell over whether it’s play or something more serious — one just does it.”

Whatever the reason or method, the IBM boxes are the roots — and represent the innocence — of user-friendliness. Considering their inviting simplicity, I wonder how Rand would package new digital products into something that makes the consumer feel they are getting something truly user-friendly. 

Photography

WhiteBlake lines Eskin Photographer

T

he things we do on smart phones are often so absorbing that they create a barrier between you and other people in your social space. When these “other people” are your parents, children, lovers, or friends, they will decry your attempts at selfisolation, condemn your inability to resist its glow, resent the intensity of your focus on the touchscreen. That resentment could be interpreted as an expression of jealousy. Although it looks like you are merely looking at a screen, you are, in fact, looking through it and interacting with other people who sent a message, posted a photograph, published an essay, developed your favorite game.

These other people are distant, and the connections are invisible.

On the subway, where the vast majority of other people are strangers, barriers have their virtues, and before pocket-sized touchscreen, the most effective form of urban insulation was a pair of headphones. The Sony Walkman and its imitators came with wired, foam-covered plastic earmuffs that carried an electric signal from a cassette, converted it into sound waves that travel through the middle ear, then encoded it again and fed the signal to the listener’s brain. Headphones make an individual on a crowded subway or a busy street into an island in the stream. They give the illusion of privacy and solitude in places where there is none, and make the city livable.

Subway photography can easily slip into public shaming, or a parallel to whining about the noisy people in the Amtrak quiet car. So it took me a while to notice that sharing ear buds can be a beautiful, intimate phenomenon. One input, two outputs bring a pair of individuals into a Cone of Silence, like Agent 86 and the Chief, only the shared secret is a pop song, or a bloody scene from Scarface (although sometimes the expressions you see betray less than complete alignment). Lovers do it, so do parents and children; even teenage boys do not fear getting close enough to share ear buds. 

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7 of the worst clients Top advice for dealing with nightmare clients from the editor-in-chief of Clients From Hell.

Who, What, Why?

1. The Prideful Client

Every designer has met – or will meet – at least one client from hell in their career. For some, it was a toe dipped into a lake of fire. For others, it was an impromptu cannonball.

The proud client thinks every suggestion is avant-garde, and every obstacle is someone else's fault. Treated with the same respect the client has for something that sticks to their shoe, designers are forced to carry the weight of the client's 'genius' as far as the next pay period.

Think of this advice as fireproof water wings: in theory, it's something for you to chuckle at, but the moment you find yourself wading into the inferno, it's indispensable.

First of all, humility may be seen as a virtue, but it's also a great way to be ignored or overlooked. Do not be afraid to share your insights in order to create something you can be proud of – but remember, nobody knows what the client needs better than the client.

That said, a client may not have their best interests in mind when they demand you design a logo complete with lens flare and their nine favorite colors. Push back, but if the client refuses to budge, produce the abomination and simply leave it out of your design portfolio.

2. The Envious Client The envious client sees something someone else has, and they're willing to take it – law and logic be damned. Inspiration comes from all sorts of sources for this client, but it's rarely accredited, and it's almost always in poor taste.

Never break the law for a client. Just don't. Though you can point the finger at your client or otherwise claim ignorance, the potential fallout rarely justifies the possible rewards.

Plus, you know: principles.

3. The Wrathful Client Prone to excess anger, the wrathful client preys on the meek with exaggerated claims and over-the-shoulder suggestions.

Never afraid to exploit a weakness for the win, this client requires the designer to hold on to their scruples tightly. Client solutions are what most sane people would refer to as a last resort, and their reaction to problems is similar to how baking soda reacts to vinegar: there's a lot of destruction left in their wake.

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4. The Slothful Client The slothful client always wants to take the easy route.

They refuse to do their due diligence and live up to their end of the contract. Crucial files and feedback often arrive late, if at all. If the slothful client simply took the time to learn or listen, they'd find their life free from their otherwise small and self-imposed problems.

A slothful client omits their own responsibilities. The best way to deal with them is to introduce consequences to their dereliction of duty.

For example, if your client is unable to get you resources before a milestone, make sure they know the deadline will have to be pushed back as a result.

5. The Avaricious Client Less worried about the next pound than they are about losing the one in their pocket, the greedy client isn't afraid to coast on lax attitudes and unpaid invoices. Quality is never a concern for this client. In fact, the cheaper, the better – anything to make the client's bottom line bolder.

Along with contracts, billing clients on time and notifying them about non-payment should be standard practice. Start by confirming a client has received your invoice. After the payment period passes – I suggest 15 days or so – follow up. The first reminder should be friendly; the second one should remind them about late-payment fees.

6. The Gluttonous Client Whereas a revision or two is a perfectly reasonable expectation, the gluttonous client is always hungry for more. Overwhelming your inbox with ideas, demands for updates, and unreasonable requests – like the logo in fourteen different palettes by this time yesterday – this client's zeal for instant gratification means they often ignore their own ignorance before asking for 'just one more thing'.

Instead of jumping the moment a client calls on you, take the considered approach. A designer who bends over backwards to accommodate minor revisions and tiny tweaks sets a standard the client is all too happy to keep. Don't respond to every email the moment it arrives in your inbox; communicate a set number of revisions.

7. The Lustful Client Lustful clients crave some sizzle with their service.

Everything's an innuendo, and nothing is off limits from their hungry gaze. It's not all sex, though; anything can be the object of their over the top or out of line desire.

There are a lot of ways lustful clients can make you uncomfortable; it can be their use of an outdated term, their lack of respect for your personal space, or an outright ignorant attitude. Only you can determine when it's worth pursuing a problem out of principle.

There are a lot of potential (and often personal) factors to consider Gr@fik Magazine Special Edition 2017 | 11

Typography

Dashboard Type Michael Beirut Graphic Designer

C

omputer users are zealously proprietary about the fonts they use for their everyday HMIs (human machine interfaces).

However, this same attachment to one or another style seems to exclude the increasing number of HMIs on automobile dashboards. Although the most legible typeface can mean the difference between concentration and distraction and what that implies, most drivers simply accept what comes standard with the vehicle they buy or rent, as if bequeathed from above. But that will soon change. Since 2011, Monotype Imaging Inc. and MIT’s AgeLab have been collaborating on a study “to prove to customers and the [automobile] industry that typeface design can make a difference—that using typefaces that are conducive to glance-based reading could have an impact on driver distraction,” says Monotype’s London-based legibility director, Dr. Nadine Chahine.

With a PhD in eye-motion studies, Chahine, a specialist at designing Arabic fonts derived from Western type families, has been focusing her eyes on legibility for new digital platforms.

Working with AgeLab colleagues, Dr. Jonathan Dobres, Ph.D, a Research Scientist in cognitive psychology and Dr. Bryan Reimer, Ph.D, Research Scientist and Associate Director of The New England University Transportation Center at MIT, they have made exhaustive analyses and issued a white paper titled, “Utilizing Psychophysical Techniques to Investigate the Effects of Age, Typeface Design, Sizes, and Display Polarity on Glance Legibility,” which they hope will make designers and engineers more aware of a growing perceptual concern. While not bedtime reading, it is filled with fascinating data about our current screen-based behavioral concerns.

MIT’s AgeLab is ideal to conduct these studies because of its multidisciplinary approach in researching issues affecting people of all ages with their team of around thirty members including social scientists, psychologists, engineers, and computer scientists. They also grasp the fact that design (and design comprehension) “intersects with nearly all projects we undertake” Dobres says, pointing out that AgeLab developed the uniquely designed AGNES (Age Gain Now Empathy System), a wearable suit that modifies the user’s posture and flexibility to mimic the effects of old age, which has been used to help representatives from CVS “live the experience” of shopping in their stores as an older person.

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Many of AgeLab’s investigations stress driving behavior in both a simulator and on real highways. “In most cases, we are interested in how the driver incorporates the use of a voice system, smart phone, or wearable device into the demands of driving, and what effects this might have on vehicle control, driver behavior, and even their physiological response to the stress,” Dobres adds.

“More broadly, we are interested in how both younger and older drivers manage their attention while on-road.”

Although experimental psychologists have explored legibility and reading for nearly as long as the field of psychology has existed, studies of reading in enforced glance scenarios, such as in-vehicle screens and smart phones, are in the early stages. Much of the pre-existing research on glance legibility can be found in other automotive research, notably the legibility of road signs and license plates. “If we are looking at the overall history of legibility studies (answering questions like how fast can one read, how far can a stimulus be, how small to be read and at what distance, how fast can one spell check, how fast can one identify a letter etc.),” says Chahine, “there’s been interesting work done in various methods but it is not sufficient to answer all the questions of how typography influences reading under the various reading scenarios.”

The scenarios for the digital space addressed through this study include “lexical decision” or yes/no task where a person is shown either a word, or as Dobres explains, a pseudo word (a set of letters that is pronounceable but is not a word, like “shough”), and asks them to determine whether what they were shown was a valid word or not. “The difficulty of the task depends on how long the word/pseudo word is displayed on the screen.” 

Media

Confessions of a Frustrated Newsprint Lover

Scott Henderson Graphic Designer

I

give up. I’ve held on devotedly to newsprint as long as humanly possible but I recently reached the point where my loyalty gave way to expedience.

It came after spending a week in Paris with The International New York Times, a handsome extension of the domestic NYT with the perk of comics. It is also printed on finer newsprint than the NYT, smooth to the touch, which makes a delightful crinkling noise as the pages are folded. Oh, yes — it is larger, too — like the size that the original once was. What could be better?

It couldn’t be worse, experientially speaking.

I’ve gotten so used to the domestic product once its width became incrementally reduced, that I’ve forgotten the skill necessary to fold a broadsheet. And even if I could master it all over again, the world has gotten more crowded and the available public space needed to open and fold the International edition has shrunk considerably. The INYTis not made for tiny Parisian café tables. And I’m not made for the INYT.

Opening and trying to refold the paper is like attempting to unfold one of those canvas retro beach chairs that you might see in a Jacques Tati film. Picture Monsieur Hulot wrestling with the INYT and you know who wins. It is not pretty. And it is humiliating.

True, folding challenges are a small price to pay for the joy and privilege of handling that beautifully massive collection of paper pages. But the embarrassment of incompetence in public is not worth the psychic cost. I am still scarred by the Parisian sitting to the left of me, daintily turning the pages of his smaller Le Figaro.

And then there is that American lout in the corner, snickering with his more manageable USA Today. I’m ten times the standard newspaper reader, and reading ten times the newspaper. And feeling self-conscious about folding ineptitude.

So, call me a coward! A traitor! A wussy liberal! I’ve had all the disgrace I can stomach. I quit! A bientôt printed INYT, and bonjour app. Oversized broadsheets be damned. There is strength in tablets. 

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Leading a revolution in graphic design

I

know in my heart that graphic design is important. Sometimes the fate of nations depend on it, sometimes it’s the missing link between a soft drink brand and Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, sometimes it just makes you happy. But I also know that the ingredients used by graphic designers — colors, shapes, typefaces — are fundamentally mysterious. What do they mean? How do they work? Why does one work better than another? What criteria should we use to choose?

This ambiguity can be maddening, especially to clients, who in desperation will invoke anecdotes and folk wisdom to help control an otherwise rudderless process.

I’ve been told in meetings that triangles

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— to take one example — are the “most energetic” (or the “most aggressive”?) shape. I’ve been asked if it’s true that white means death in Japan. Or is it black? Or red? Or China?

To tell you the truth, I’ve always appreciated this ambiguity. Like other experienced designers, I appear to navigate this miasma of hearsay with confidence. For the truth is that in our field, to quote screenwriter William Goldman, “Nobody knows anything.”

Black can be ominous or elegant. Triangles can be trendy or timeless. And typefaces? Hmm! Typefaces can be...anything you want them to be, right? There are many reasons to pick any one typefaces, all of them more or less arbitrary.

"Simplicity, wit, and good typography"

So imagine a client demands that text be set in “the most credible typeface.” I would probably hide a smile and say there’s no such thing. But there is such a thing, says Errol Morris.

Several weeks ago, Morris, the Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker and author, posted a simple quiz in his New York Times Opinionated blog. Ostensibly, the object of the quiz was to determine if the reader was an optimist or a pessimist. You read a short introduction about the likely hood of an asteroid hitting the earth, and then an indented passage from a book by David Deutch, The Beginning of Infinity, in which he claims “we live in an era of unprecedented safety” and will likely be able to defend ourselves against such an impact.

Morris then asked the reader to agree or disagree with the truth of that claim, and to indicate the degree of confidence the reader had in his or her conclusion.

The result, supposedly, was to determine how many of us are optimists (finding Deutch’s statement to be true) versus how many are pessimists But it was all a trick. Morris was actually testing something completely different: the effect of fonts on truth. “Or to be precise,” as he points out in his follow-up post today (part 1, part 2), “the effect on credulity. Are there certain fonts that compel a belief that the sentences they are written in are true?”

To find out, he had a colleague, Benjamin Merman, create a program that changed the font of the indented David Deutch passage each time the article was first opened. Each person taking the quiz would read the passage in one of six randomly assigned fonts: Baskerville, Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica, Comic Sans, or Trebuchet. So the test had nothing to do, really, with optimist or pessimism. Instead, it was meant to find out if setting the passage in one typeface or another would lead people to believe it more.

Now, if you’re like me, you already know what the least trustworthy typeface is, right? It’s got to be Comic Sans: goofy, unloved, mocked Comic Sans. And it turns out we’re right. According to Morris, people seem to be consciously aware of Comic Sans: it was in the news as recently as a few weeks ago, when it caused a minor dust-up in the midst of the announcement of the discovery of the Higgs-Boson particle. This awareness seems to engender, in Morris’s words, “contempt and summary dismissal.”

And good riddance, say I and countless other graphic designers.

But what about the other side of the equation? Is there a font that inclines us to believe that a sentence that’s set in it is true?

After analyzing the research, Morris says the answer is yes. And that typeface is Baskerville.

To Morris’s surprise, the results of the test showed a clear difference between the performance of Baskerville and other fonts — not just Baskerville and Comic Sans (no contest); or Baskerville and Trebuchet or Helvetica (a clear serif versus sans distinction); but even Baskerville and Georgia (a lovely, and arguably even more legible serif by Matthew Carter). Compared to versions in the other typefaces, the passage set in Baskerville had both the

highest rate of agreement and the lowest rate of disagreement. This led Morris to the inevitable conclusion: Baskerville is the typeface of truth.

John Baskerville loved typography, and it’s believed that he lost his fortune in pursuit of it, sinking all the money he had into designing and printing complete editions of the works of Virgil and Milton, not to mention the Bible. He was an avowed anti-religionists but had a deep and abiding faith in typography. “Having been an early admirer of the beauty of Letters,” he wrote in his introduction to Paradise Lost, “I became insensibly desirous of contributing to the perfection of them.” The typeface we today call Baskerville is based on the fonts he developed in the mid-eighteenth century at his foundry for his private presses.

Ironically, a skeptic has created the typeface most likely to induce credulity.

“We have entered a new, unexpected landscape,” Errol Morris writes at the conclusion of his article. “Truth is not font dependent, but a font can subtly influence us to believe that a sentence is true. Could it swing an election? Induce us to buy a new dinette set? Change some of our most deeply held and cherished beliefs?”

Whether or not a typeface can do any or all of those things, I do agree the landscape has changed. Once upon a time, regular people didn’t even know the names of typefaces.

Then, with the invention of the personal computer, people started learning. They had their opinions and they had their favorites. But until now, type was a still matter of taste.

Going forward, if someone wants to tell the truth, he or she will know exactly what typeface to use. Of course, the truth is the truth no matter what typeface it’s in. How long before people realize that Baskerville is even more useful if you want to lie?  Gr@fik Magazine Special Edition 2017 | 15

13 amazing Facts about graphic design!

What Graphic Designers Do

Graphic designers create visual concepts, using computer software or by hand, to communicate ideas that inspire, inform, and captivate consumers. They develop the overall layout and production design for various applications such as for advertisements, brochures, magazines, and corporate reports.

1. There will be an increase in demand for graphic designers over the next decade.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there will be a 13% increase demand for graphic designers by 2020. As new businesses start up and more and more commerce becomes dependent on the Internet, graphic designers will play an increasingly crucial role in commerce.

2. The highest 10% of salary earners within this industry earned over $77,000.

3. According to Salary. com, the median salary for a graphic designer in the United States is $45,704.

4. The manufacturing industry hires the most graphic designers globally, accounting for 14% of all full time positions within the graphic design industry.

5. Claude Garamond, the publisher and legendary type designer after whom Garamond font was named died of poverty at age 81. Talk about artists being paid poorly, huh?

6. Peretz Rosenbaum was the brainchild behind the IBM logo, the old UPS logo, and many other corporate identities. Don’t be surprised; Peretz Rosenbaum is the birth name of Paul Rand.

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7. Georgia typeface designed

by Matthew Carter, was named after a tabloid headline reading “Alien heads found in Georgia.�

Alien heads found in Georgia

8. The Nike swoosh was created by Carolyn Davidson. She designed the icon as a college student back in 1971, and was paid only $35.

9. The worlds first website (as we know them today) was launched in 1992.

10. 1980 was the time, when first computer based graphic design tools came into light.

11. There is an expected 16% decline.

There is an expected 16% decline in the employment of graphic designers in what used to be normally strong fields of newspapers, periodicals, and directory assistance books, accounting for the slow growth prospects of this industry.

12. Almost 25% of all graphic designers are self-employed.

13. Graphic design began with Sumerian pictographs and Egyptian Hieroglyphics during 2500 BC to 1400 BC

The truth about 2500 bc

Gr@fik Magazine Special Edition 2017 | 17

Duotone Color: Tips & Examples for This Vibrant Trend

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T

hanks to Spotify, duotone is growing in popularity almost daily. The effect, which uses a pair of colors over a photo is striking, fun and vibrant. It’s also quite trendy, with new sites changing to a duotone format almost daily. Here are a few ways to make the most of this hot design technique.

What is Duotone?

First, a little primer: Duotone is the use of two colors.

The name and technique comes from printing presses. Duotone prints are made in two shades of the same color or with black and one tint. The process uses two color plates made with the screen set at different angles.

The two-color concept is big. Pan-tone named a pair as Color of the Year, minimalism had designers thinking about limited palettes and duotones are visually interesting and fairly easy to create. You can create the effect using Adobe Photoshop and a two-color gradient or a tool such as Colofilter.css to apply it in the code.

But what likely helped duotone off the ground the most is usage by Spotify. Duotone color schemes are used in the music playing app and for various promotional micro-sites. Duotone adds a unique design element to images from artists that are well-known and widely-used.

The technique that was once a print staple has found new life online, and is a trend that we are likely to see a lot more of in the months to come.

As a Dominant Image The main visual for New Deal Design is striking thanks to a bold color choice and quirky, thanks to the fun imagery and color. Don’t be afraid to go outside your comfort when it comes to working with duotone images; it’s ok to pair hues that might not match. The goal is to create a visual that demands attention and includes plenty of contrast for the image to show through.

Here are a few tips for maximum impact:

The next big web design image trend is here, and it’s vibrant, colourful, and beautiful!

Source: https://designshack.net/articles/graphics/duotone-color-tips-examples-for-this-vibrant-trend/

•

Pick two contrasting colors or pair brand colors.

•

Select a photo with a focused image area. A landscape might be difficult to use.

•

Start with a high quality image. Blurry or poor images and duotone don’t mix.

•

Play up contrast.

•

Consider spaces for buttons or typography.

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Pick colors that reflect the mood of the photo.

And still be readable

As a Simple Color Palette

Duotone color choices won’t be as bright for this use and will likely appear more muted, but can serve a great purpose. Holm Marcher & Co. does this with a coral and blue duotone that is interesting and creates a highly readable backdrop for lettering. As an added bonus, navigational elements use shades of blue from the color palette to encourage moving around the site.

Duotone does not have to be complicated. Sometimes the most striking two-color projects are simple in nature.

As an Accent

Set a duotone image off with a colored border or mix and match color options with a scrolling slider or parallax effects.

Assurity Life Insurance uses a pair of reds and clean typography. The scroll includes a more halftone style as well. The colors are bright and engaging. Red is the kind of color that almost makes users look at it.

The trick here is that it is just simple enough to be effective.

The user is not overwhelmed with elements. The red draws you in so that the words on the screen become the focus. This type of duotone effect is almost made for websites that have a more formal look and feel because it allows use of a trend without feeling forced or overwhelming.

As a Way to Increase Readability Use duotone to act as a color stabilizer that gives the text plenty of space and contrast. A duotone color overlay can help “flatten” color variations in an image so that text can be placed using a single color almost anywhere on the image.

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While duotone effects lend themselves to large images, they can work in smaller places as well. Consider a duotone accent in the navigation, for secondary images or for specific types of content.

What’s nice about smaller areas of duotone is that you have a little more freedom to play if you are intimidated by the technique or aren’t quite sure how to make it work for you. When used in smaller spaces, it can be visually interesting to play with multiple color pairs for different elements in the design.

Consider duotone elements for card style elements, as an overlay for links for video or to emphasize calls to action. Duotone accents can also be effective tools for use in a minimal or black and white color scheme because of the color contrast they create.

As a Background

There’s nothing like a subtle duotone effect to create an interesting background image or pattern. This is an ideal use for brand colors or as a way to incorporate a trendy hue or technique into your design without a full-scale overhaul.

The graduated duotone background for Join Radio is perfection.

The color change is almost unnoticeable and blends seamlessly with other user interface elements in the design. There’s a simple animation moving through the colors that is soothing and has a water-like motion to it. The shift from light to dark follows natural eye and reading patterns that move from the top left of the homepage to the bottom right, where the user is further encourage to scroll and click.

Conclusion It’s hard to find a design technique that’s more fun to play with than color. Duotones are equally engaging for designers. The effect can spice up an overused image, add a fun element when one is lacking and just help engage users visually.

Plus, you the designer really get to experiment when using duotone effects. You can pair colors that you might not have imagined for a major impact or combine colors with subtle variations for a small element of surprise. Either way, creating this color effect almost always looks custom and can be fun to work with. 

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Clickety-Clack A typewriter is a symphony of sounds Adam Harrison Levy

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he act of writing is silent these days. In the past, the clicketyclack of manual typewriters (or the gun burst of an IBM Selectric) was the audible cue that work was being done: noise as proof of production. It was impossible to fake it on those metal machines: no email and no surfing, just the hard plain fact of fingers on keys.

A typewriter is a symphony of sounds: the zip of the paper as it feeds around the platen, the rat tat tat of the type bar (the metal stalks with their letter forms) striking the page, the shuddery thud when the shift bar levers the machine up and then drops it back down. And, of course, the cymbal-like ding that punctuates the end of a typed line and signals the rumbling progress of the roller as returns to its starting position.

Typewriter typing, as opposed to laptop typing, is a visceral act. Your hands get dirty (just like doing real work!). When the type bars tangle you have to reach inside the guts of the machine and straighten them out. Your fingers end up smudged with ink when you change the ribbon, become sticky with globs of White Out when you make

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a mistake. You ram the brush in anyway and everything gets worse: the messy slather of the White Out, the shedding hairs of the brush, the lumpy paper. Impatiently you start typing again. The type bar leaps forward smartly but then sinks illegibly into the mush.

The commercial typewriter was patented in 1869 and transformed the workplace, increasing the number of women behind the keyboard from four percent in 1874 to approximately seventyfive percent in 1900. The individuality of handwriting disappeared from official forms, memos, client letters, receipts, inquiries, bills of sale, court reports, and marriage licenses. The typewriter had industrialized writing.

Although typewriter technology was no match for the expressive power of the hand-drawn line, one can also use the keys to produce what has been called “typewriter art.� The first known example is a butterfly made from dashes, brackets, and asterisks made in England by a secretary named Flora Stacey and first published in 1898.

Marvin and Ruth Sackner, in their handsome book The Art of Typewriting, note that typewriter realism held sway with portraits and flowers until the 1920s and '30s, when the Constructionists seized on the geometrical potential in the form. Nicolas Werkman (below) made what look like pre-Mondrian Broadway Boogie Woogies in Holland.

At the same time, Pietro de Saga (the pseudonym for the female artist Steffi Kiesler) was producing austerely beautiful compositions (below) before she moved to America and became a librarian.

Tom Philips, a British artist whose work includes painting, film making, musical composition (including opera), printing, and drawing (he is also a major collector of African art objects) has pushed the form further. In 1966, on a wager from the American artist R. B. Kitaj, he bought a Victorian novel, A Human Document, by W. H. Mallock at an antiques store in London. Ever since, he has been transforming the original words (a page appears below) of the book through ink, paint, and typewriting, using a mixture of chance and skill. As a result new texts come into being, revealing a parallel universe of hidden meanings.

If typewriting has become a means for sophisticated art making, in film making it signifies hard hitting journalistic authenticity, most famously in the title sequence of All the President’s Men. The titles start with a plain beige screen that is then explosively ruptured by a “J” striking the page. “June 1, 1972” is

spelled out in maximum close-up and at top speed followed by a cut to footage of a triumphant Nixon entering Congress to rapturous applause after his Moscow summit. The foreshadowing is clear: the typewritten truth will take down the President.

It’s now possible to download an app called the Hanx Writer that transforms the screen of your iPad into a virtual typewriter, including the sound of the keys and the ding of the return carriage bell. It was created with the sponsorship of Tom Hanks, a self-professed typewriter connoisseur. The appeal of the app is partly visual (the industrial mid-century look of the typography and the vintage appeal of the carriage and keys), but it’s the re-creation of the sound of typing that seems to be its most compelling aspect. Hanks wrote an ode to the typewriter in the New York Times titled “I Am TOM. I Like to TYPE. Hear That?” In the hermetic world of the contemporary office, with most workers encased in their own private aural ecosystem, using the Hanx Writer would put the clickety-clack back into the writing soundscape, but it would probably be hard to hear with your Beats on. 

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The Art of Punk and the Punk Aesthetic Someday all the adults will die!

Rick Poynor

Ramones Los Angeles fan club mail-out, USA, 1977. Source: Punk: An Aesthetic (Rizzoli)

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or a musical and social movement that snarled in the face of authority and wasn’t averse to spitting at its friends, punk has received a great many shelf inches in the last 30 years respectfully devoted to histories, reassessments and eyewitness accounts.

Today, there is even an academic journal exclusively devoted to the pursuit of punk and post-punk studies, which has just published its second issue. There can’t be much left to say about the music, clothing, media outrage and legendary gigs, but the graphic expression of punk has received less critical attention. Now, within weeks of each other, two thick, illustrated volumes have appeared: Punk: An Aesthetic (Rizzoli) edited by Johan Kugelberg and Jon Savage, and The Art of Punk (Omnibus Press/Voyageur Press)

by Russ Bestley and Alex Ogg. Kugelberg and Savage have also 24 | Gr@fik Magazine Special Edition 2017

curated “Someday all the adults will die!”, an exhibition of punk posters, handbills, record covers and ’zines at the Hayward Gallery in London.

The books are nicely complementary, with fewer overlaps in what they show than one might expect. Both address British and American punk, with the Rizzoli survey leaning towards the US, and the Omnibus volume inclining towards the UK, while also showing a strong awareness of punk scenes in other countries. Anyone nursing a serious interest in this subject will need to buy or consult both titles. – 26

Ramones Los Angeles fan club mail-out, USA, 1977. Source: Punk: An Aesthetic (Rizzoli) Gr@fik Magazine Special Edition 2017 | 25

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he editors’ approaches are different, too. Kugelberg and Savage’s book is more of an album, with the images presented in art-book style on a plain white page (no objections here — it’s good to be able to see the work clearly without punk-inspired page layouts intruding). These are smart writers and Savage, author of England’s Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock, and Beyond, is a key participant in the era; his punk archive is now stored at Liverpool John Moores University. But neither author is a historian or critic of graphic art, design or visual culture. “The history of the punk aesthetic cannot be told, only shown,” claims Kugelberg, somewhat unpromisingly. Savage made punk collages with the artist Linder Sterling and he has some good observations about punk montage: “In the act of dismembering and reassembling the very images that were supposed to keep you down and ignorant, it was possible to counteract the violence of The Spectacle and to refashion the world around you.” He points to the visual influences of John Heartfield, Martin Sharp’s work at Oz magazine, the feminist artist Penny Slinger, the Beach Books 1960s pamphlets, and Dawn Ades’ Photo-montage (1976). I bought Ades’ trail-blazing study when

Anti, I Don’t Want to Die in Your War LP, New Underground, USA, 1982 26 | Gr@fik Magazine Special Edition 2017

it came out and would love to hear more: which punk image-makers were looking at the book and what did they get from it?

Bestley and Ogg write with a carefulness of phrasing and appearance of academic detachment that only partially masks the same devotion to punk as listeners and fans. Punk graphics was the subject of Bestley’s PhD and he curated the earlier exhibition “Hitsville UK: Punk in the Faraway Towns”; he is course director of the graphic design MA at the London College of Communication. Ogg is author of No More Heroes, a history of British punk, and an editor of the Punk & Post-Punk journal. “It is important to question the notion of a direct association between work by prominent early punk designers and the emergence of a radical new visual language of parody and agitprop,” they write. “To an extent, the techniques adopted by Jamie Reid, for instance, were already widely accepted as the natural languages of anger and protest.” Such a comment can only be addressed to readers who know nothing about the histories of graphic design and graphic protest. As Savage and Kugelberg point out in their exhibition intro,

The Desperate Bicycles, “Occupied Territory” 7-inch single, Refill, UK, 1978. Source: The Art of Punk punk’s precursors and putative influences include Dadaist collage, the Situationist International, the mail art movement, the graphics of counter-culture protest, and the 1960s underground press. I say “putative” because none of these connections is explored in depth and definitively established in their book.

It was valuable to revisit so many original pieces in the exhibition after looking at small reproductions in the two books because the show communicates the explosive energy and “messthetic” rawness of punk graphics with persuasive power. This was an art of expediency, making use of collage, cartoon drawings, hand-lettering, rub-down lettering, ransom-note lettering, stencils (Savage and Kugelberg include a fantastic display of used stencils made by Crass), rubber-stamping and black and white Xerox copying, as well as silkscreen and offset litho. Looking at the discordant profusion of examples in the books, I kept trying to single out less familiar pieces that were highly accomplished as “design” from the many pieces that are hugely expressive and exciting, but not original or well resolved when seen

in strictly graphic design terms. In the show, savoring scores of examples packed together at full size on the walls, those distinctions seemed irrelevant. These were raucous, vitality-filled transmissions from a turbulent graphic universe totally different in intention and effect from the smooth, orderly, design history-conscious parallel universe of professional design aesthetics, purposes and training. There didn’t necessarily have to be any points of contact or interchange between the two co-existing spheres But the question of the relationship between punk D.I.Y. design in its most basic or amateur forms and the later development of graphic design cannot be avoided for anyone who is both sensitive to punk’s impact and legacy (“the immediate implementation of D.I.Y. grassroots culture among the young” — Kugelberg) and committed to graphic design as a medium. Kugelberg and Savage say that the “anarchic upsurge in graphic creativity . . . revolutionized design,” a clear attempt to assert punk graphics’ significance beyond the punk subculture, yet this claim, too, can only be substantiated – 28 Gr@fik Magazine Special Edition 2017 | 27

Anarchy in the U.K. fanzine, UK, 1976. Photo: Ray Stevenson. Design: Jamie Reid. Source: Punk: An Aesthetic 28 | Gr@fik Magazine Special Edition 2017

The Desperate Bicycles, “Occupied Territory” 7-inch single, Refill, UK, 1978. Source: The Art of Punk by a lot more detailed research. (In my book No More Rules, I connected punk’s anti-design ethos to the late 1980s/early 1990s idea of “deconstruction” in graphic design.)

design and market it? How do you create a corporate idea?’ . . . It was a very distinct policy that things should have an instantly recognizable image.”

In the UK, the punk-related designers that had most influence in the early 1980s were a handful of individuals such as Malcolm Garrett, who had been formally educated as graphic designers (in his case at the University of Reading and Manchester Polytechnic), though designs mainstream was, in fact, slow to learn from and assimilate the lessons and styles of subcultural music designs new wave. In any case, the graphic sensibility of Garrett’s work for Buzz-cocks and Magazine, shown in The Art of Punk, has always seemed closer to “post-punk” graphic design than to what is commonly understood as punk — even allowing for Bestley and Ogg’s precautionary advice that “there is no one standard punk visual language” and that “a notion of a pure or authentic punk style is difficult to justify.”

There is an old slogan and rallying cry that insists, “Punk’s not dead.” Bestley and Ogg certainly believe that. Their book ends with examples of more recent punk design, though I find it hard to get excited by most of them in graphic terms. Punk might, as they say, have employed a fairly broad set of graphic conventions, but they remain as consistent and constrictive over time as those found in heavy metal. Kugelberg deduces from punk a more general lesson for today: “Form a band, start a blog, become an artist, a DJ, a guitar player, an editor.” No one can argue with that, though many might see it as a stretch to claim that, in 2012, these possibilities derive from punk’s mid-1970s example — unless, perhaps, one were to view punk prophetically as a form of science fiction. 

It is no accident, too, that the stencil-based graphic identity of Crass, one of the most highly politicized punk bands, is so well coordinated and trenchant. “Both Gee [Vaucher] and myself trained as graphic artists,” Crass co-founder Penny Rimbaud tells Bestley and Ogg. “Both of us prior to Crass had brought money into the house by doing book design and that sort of stuff. And part of training as a graphic artist wasn’t just learning type[setting], it was also thinking in terms of marketing; a lot of the projects at college were: ‘This is the product, how do you Gr@fik Magazine Special Edition 2017 | 29

Anarchy in the U.K. fanzine, UK, 1976. Photo: Ray Stevenson. Design: Jamie Reid. Source: Punk: An Aesthetic 30 | Gr@fik Magazine Special Edition 2017

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