Issuu

FOUNDER AND EDITORIAL DIRECTOR

Perrin: Heya, it’s issue #01, and we’re making a big splash by going Invisible. So savvy, right? At least if no one notices us on the newsstand, we can say we planned it that way. Your beloved editors will talk more about why, out of all our brilliant ideas for a theme, we went with this one. But more importantly, why’d we go with a magazine at all when we can publish to our hearts’ content online (going long and strong at eyeondesign.aiga.org since 2014)? As the oldest and largest association for design, AIGA has a long history of print. But in the 1990s we sort of stopped the presses when funding for Steve Heller’s AIGA Journal dried up. Now the Eye on Design team has blundered its way into enough of a budget to publish a new kind of design magazine for a new era of design reader. Created as a companion to the daily stories we publish online, this tri-annual magazine format gives us the breathing room to dive deep into one specific theme, covered in a wide range of ways.

SENIOR EDITOR

Meg: Scattered as we are across countries and time zones, the first chance we got to talk face to face about this magazine was after slipping away from the 2017 AIGA Design Conference in October. Initially we wondered if Invisible was counter-intuitive for a magazine about design, a profession that makes systems, entities, and messages visible. But the more we discussed it, the more it revealed itself to be a perfect framework for thinking about some of the industry’s most important issues today—those of representation, identity, attribution, and security.

MANAGING EDITOR

Liz: That idea extends to our digital lives, where unseen lines of code power the way we experience the world, be it through communication tools, surveillance efforts, or the software we use to create beautiful designs. In this issue we peel back the layers, and look at code and data as creative media.

SENIOR EDITOR

Emily: And we wanted to hear from the unsung heroes of the industry—the ones who quietly keep it ticking over, but don’t find their names on flashy decks, portfolios, or conference schedules. We find out what they get up to, giving credit where credit’s due.

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

Maddy: But sometimes, we also realized, it’s better not to be seen at all. In a time of pervasive governmental and corporate spying, it’s becoming harder and harder to maintain our privacy, and remain unseen. So we’re celebrating the designers finding innovative solutions for keeping our data securely hidden.

DESIGNER

Tala: So here it is: In your hands you hold the polished results of months of editorial and design planning—from tentative flat plans to proofread mockups to an end design rendered brilliantly by our guest designer, Maziyar Pahlevan.

EDITORS’ LETTER

DESIGNER’S LETTER

SIDEWALK TALK

14 GREETINGS FROM THE INVISIBLE BORDERLANDS Could antiquated spy techniques be the securest form of communication in the age of digital surveillance? BY MADELEINE MORLEY 32 BEHIND EVERY GREAT DESIGNER A set builder, studio chef, and masseur to font engineers step into the limelight BY EMILY GOSLING 44 DATA DESIGN IN 3 ACTS Three designers on how to find, access, and evaluate data (and your own biases) BY MARGARET ANDERSEN 52 ON SEEING AND BEING SEEN As one designer goes blind, another emerges from under his shadow BY MEG MILLER 64

COMIC BY ANTOINE COSSÉ

72 BAUHAUS MEETS BINARY How an MIT research group turned computer code into a modern design medium BY LIZ STINSON 84 PORTFOLIO The history of digital art and design informs the work of artists today who view the computer as a material, tool, and collaborator BY MARGARET RHODES

CODE BREAK!

90 HOW NOT TO BE SEEN A fucking didactic educational .PDF file (an homage to Hito Steyerl) BY TALA SAFIÉ 96

RESURRECT THE REJECTS

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DESIGN HISTORY ISN’T REPEATING ITSELF — SO WHY IS THE WAY WE TEACH IT?

116 A CONVERSATION WITH ALEXANDRA BELL 120 GETTING RID OF THE GRID Needed then deleted, even the strictest design devotees want to keep their system-building weapon a secret BY LUC BENYON 128

PHOTOS BY NATE LEWIS

136 DESIGNING A MORE PERFECT UNION The best road for underrepresented workers to march down might be the one less traveled WORDS BY PERRIN DRUMM ILLUSTRATIONS BY ERIK CARTER 150

LOVE LETTER

156

DELAYED GRATIFICATION

Table of Contents

GREETINGS FROM THE INVISIBLE BORDERLANDS

BY MADELEINE MORLEY

Could antiquated spy techniques be the securest form of communication in the age of digital surveillance?

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THE KANDINSKY COLLECTIVE, AKSIOMA, LJUBLJANA, 2017. PHOTO: JURE GOŠIČ

There is a hidden message in this article. Read on for the code; the cleverest of you might just be able to uncover it. These days, securing and breaching is the territory of cyber security engineers, data-savvy cryptologists, and anonymous hacktivists. Secret messages written in invisible ink and coordinates snuck into crossword puzzles belong to the wrinkled pages of espionage novels, just as dusty and the stuff-of-stories as a magnifying glass-wielding detective in a trench coat. The CIA, at least, deems these techniques to be obsolete: In 2013, it declassified WWI recipes for invisible ink and other covert weaponry, apparently deciding it had more complex crypto-codes to crack. Our story begins in 2015, far away from the impenetrable CIA headquarters, in a small, open café in Rotterdam. It’s morning, and graphic designer Amy Suo Wu sits and scrolls attentively through a newspaper article detailing those innocuous, declassified recipes. The designer, activist, and visual communications teacher at the Willem de Kooning Academy is committed to reclaiming the overlooked and near forgotten, discovering potential in technologies deemed out-of-date. She sees them as forms of resistance to the exponential rate of technological change and relentless cycle of capitalist production, always demanding new throwaway things to replace old throwaway things. In 2006, the Netherlands’ rich history of graphic design drew her to the city of Rotterdam from Sydney, Australia, where she emigrated to from the small town of Shantou in China with her artist parents at the age of six. In the neighborhood café, Wu sits with a pencil in her hand and takes notes on the obsolete form of communication. Perhaps she writes, “Invisible ink from bodily fluids like blood, saliva, sweat, and urine are developed by heat. Prisoners of war used these organic inks to communicate, often writing about their conditions in captivity. Possession of ingredients is not proof of guilt.”—and wonders if such obsolete ink might be used productively today.

EYE ON DESIGN

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EYE ON DESIGN

In a time when crypto-makers and crypto-breakers are playing an unending game of tag, finding DIY ways to protect your information feels near impossible, unless you personally have a cryptologist’s technical expertise. The big brother of today doesn’t so much want to watch you as sell you; the fact that companies mine our social lives for valuable information has become so commonplace as to be largely ignored. And since most platforms are free, giving away personal information has at times felt like a small price to pay in return for communicating instantly across the globe. The wool’s been pulled over our eyes, though, as the daily activities of hundreds of millions of people has become a form of value production that’s not reciprocated with wages. Disconnecting doesn’t feel like an option, since it means rejecting your networked community and the quickness we’ve become accustomed to. Partial disconnection could be a means to circumvent surveillance— at least for a moment. That’s what draws Wu to half-forgotten, analog forms of communication like invisible ink; she sees in them an accessible way to resist always-on culture, while still maintaining the conversations and community that we crave. She’s conducted years of research into the field of analog steganography—the art of hiding a message within a seemingly ordinary one, and the extraction of its secrets—as a means to develop secure and accessible communication methods in a time of pervasive corporate and governmental spying. Could methods like invisible ink actually be one of the few secure forms of communication in the age of digital surveillance? “Looking at the invisible ink recipes, I wondered whether resorting to paper and ink was a smart option,” says Wu as we speak over the distorted buzz of Google Hangouts, four years after her initial breakthrough reading the newspaper in the Rotterdam café. Not only could notes written in invisible ink—dipped in nitrate, soda, and starch as soldiers’ handkerchiefs once were—communicate in a literally invisible way, but their very categorization as “obsolete” designates them as harmless. No one thinks to test for invisible ink anymore— and we all know that the best hiding places are the least expected ones.

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SEEING WHAT’S BEEN THERE ALL ALONG Ovid’s advice to young women in first century Rome who were watched closely by their parents: “A letter too is safe and escapes the eye, when written in new milk / Touch it with coal-dust, and you will read.” The classical poet recommends hiding these love notes between the sole of your foot and the heel of your shoe. After the Pearl Harbor attack during WWII, U.S. intelligence formed a counter-steganography censorship organization dedicated to destroying suspicious material. Suspect items banned or destroyed when in the hands of the postal service included: crossword puzzles, chess games, student grades, stamps with numbers on them, and children’s handscrawled Christmas lists. The numbers might designate a key in an “nth letter code.” “Authority cannot control what they cannot see,” writes Wu in her publication The Tactics and Poetics of Invisibility: A toolkit of analogue steganography, due to be published in 2018. In it, she details recipes and methodologies for circumventing digital surveillance, dreaming up ways to combine disregarded antiquated techniques with digital platforms to form useful, intuitive hybrids. After spending time presenting at CryptoParty gatherings in Rotterdam in 2015—a community event that teaches the basics of internet privacy to anyone interested—Wu is all too aware of how encryption software asks too much of people with average computer skills, which is why she’s turned to analog and digital mixes. Her text, written just as much for the graphic designer as the everyperson, follows in the footsteps of centuries of manuals, dictionaries, and cookbooks recounting homespun recipes for secret communication that anyone could follow. Wu herself cites the 1558 guide Natural Magick by Italian scholar Giambattista della Porta as an important resource. The book includes useful chapters such as “How you may write in an egg,” and recipes so that “letters may appear upon crystal by strewing on of fine dust.” There are also grisly steps informing one how to “shut up letters in living creatures.”

EYE ON DESIGN

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“You could use anything to create a grille,” says Wu during our Google Hangout. “A piece of paper; a scrap of plastic; a cereal box; a sheet of uncooked lasagna that you later cook and eat.” Perhaps you could even use a page in a magazine…

Reading Wu’s findings, and discovering that I can mix invisible ink with items in my own pantry, I stir lemon juice and water together in a bowl, and with the thin end of a Q-tip, write a missive to my partner on a stickynote and put it on the fridge. Only by holding it to a hot bulb will its message be developed and revealed: “Oh no, we’re out of lemons.” As I wash the lemon pulp from my hands, I wonder how practical Wu’s solutions are in our current era of surveillance. Are analog forms like invisible ink a nostalgic kind of information obfuscation, especially when few letters are still written by hand on paper? Or are these recipes prompts, a method that Wu uses to teach others about the importance of privacy? I turn to the chapters in the toolkit where Wu explores how analog methods might be updated and combined with other kinds of media. First she explains that the fundamental principle of steganography, analog or digital, is a combination of three moments: think of a door, a key, and the reveal when the door opens. There’s what’s called the “cover object,” which is innocently out in the open for anyone to see, as well as the not-so-innocent key, or the code embedding a message into the cover object. It might be a password, or a place, or a series of numbers, or a piece of cardboard dotted with holes. To reveal the secret message, you’ll need the cover object and the all-important key: When combined, you can see what’s been there all along. The techniques that Wu revives mostly stem from her own designled experiments and media art projects; for example, she’s experimented with filling a printer’s ink cartridges with invisible ink, an interesting attempt at entering steganographic inks into the realm of reproduction. She publishes her research so that others can grow upon and add to her ideas, finding new contexts and functions for recipes old and new. The toolkit is a manual: just as useful to the censored artist as it is to the community activist or a pair of star-crossed lovers whose parents have access to their social media accounts.

EYE ON DESIGN

For anyone needing to communicate in a way that’s undetectable, Wu recommends using a twenty-first century version of the Cardan grille. First developed by the French polymath Girolamo Cardano in 1550, the grille is a method of communicating secrets using a framework made of cardboard with holes cut into it. How the grille works is perhaps best explained with an anecdote: One morning in 2016, all of Wu’s closest friends and collaborators woke up to find a strange email in their inbox. “Greetings from the invisible borderlands,” the subject heading enigmatically read. Wu sent a postcard in the mail to each of the interested email recipients, a bright orange and blue greeting card that was in fact the grille (a.k.a the key). Instructions were detailed in Wu’s email: “1. find and cut out 5 blue blocks. 2. resize your browser to the size of the postcard. 3. visit the url provided on the postcard. 4. place the postcard over the browser and the message should appear.” Those who managed to get there—finding themselves on Google Maps street view overlooking a neon sign in a nighttime New York City—finished the sentence and emailed its secret contents back to Wu. The bright colors of the postcard chimed with the sign’s own lights, a little hint that you were close to the reveal. “You could use anything to create a grille,” says Wu during our Google chat. “A piece of paper, a scrap of plastic, a cereal box, a sheet of uncooked lasagna that you later cook and eat.” Perhaps you could even use a page in a magazine…. “By using two separate communication channels, the Postal Service and the internet, the work maneuvers within the ‘invisible borderlands’— the uncharted cracks between online and offline communication Greetings from the Invisible Borderlands

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infrastructures,” says Wu. It’s here, wedged between the on and off, between the everywhere and the nowhere, that we can speak most freely and—for the first time in a long time—we can speak in silence.

READING BETWEEN THE LINES Nü shu translates to “woman’s writing” from Chinese. Nüshu is a writing system created and used exclusively by women in a remote part of China. Traditional, patriarchal Chinese culture forbade girls formal education, so Nüshu was developed in secrecy over hundreds of years in the Jiangyong county of Hunan Province. Some of its characters are taken from Chinese, though most are invented, rendered in a more cursive, thinner form than the more square-shaped Chinese characters. Nüshu is read right to left, not top to bottom. During the summer of 2017, Wu was hanging blankets on washing lines in Beijing’s hutongs, residential alleyways lined with siheyuans, the traditional courtyard residences. “Maybe it’s because of my design education, but I always see blank areas in a city as potential communication vehicles,” she says. “I’m always considering how I might use something as a placard, a poster, a billboard.” She’d been invited to Beijing for an artist-in-residency program at a gallery called I: project space, where she spent three months developing “The New Nüshu.” This meant publishing zines explaining the history of Nüshu and running collaborative workshops inventing new writing systems, as well as tracing the evolution of Chinese characters to their pictorial roots. Wu also hung washing during her time in Beijing. Lots and lots of it. “Within the hutongs, blankets can be read as a transgressional object migrating between the public and private sphere,” writes Wu in one of the many zines published during her stay. “They’re also a mundane household item that moves inside and outside of the confines of the house without raising any alarm bells. In this way, the blanket is a perfect cover, literally speaking, but also as an unsuspecting agent that can smuggle and ‘air out’ private information into the public.”

EYE ON DESIGN

After reading stories about the “slave quilt code”—with which African American slaves may have navigated the Underground Railroad in the mid-1800s by following directions woven into blankets hanging from windows—Wu saw potential to interpret the tactic as a covert publishing platform. She designed and printed blankets detailing her own research at I: project space, and strung them innocuously across neighborhood lines. And as washing and quilting is traditionally women’s work, Wu imagined a scenario where a decorative, unassuming quilt blowing in the wind and “airing out the dirt” might be used by women talk to one another in the community—invisibly, but for everyone to see. This idea is one that Wu strung out during her time as resident in Beijing, most provocatively and effectively in a self-styled “walking zine” called Thunderclap. This steganographic design utilizes unsuspicious fashion accessories to distribute the anarchist writings of a largely forgotten Chinese feminist to passers-by on busy streets. He-Yin Zhen (or He “Thunderclap”) was deemed radical and dangerous when she published during the early 1900s—the last decade of the Qing dynasty— and her texts were gradually erased from historical records. By printing slogans from Zhen’s forgotten texts in their English translation onto fashion accessories, like funky patches you’d find in a dollar bin and billowing black and white ribbons, Wu created yet another Trojan Horse, another migrating, guileless decoration deemed just as frivolous and harmless as the patterns on a humble quilt.

“THUNDERCLAP,” 2017. PHOTO: AMY SU WU

Greetings from the Invisible Borderlands

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And what did the final message say? There’s only one way to find out, and that’s to crack the code on p.18

“A lot of people visiting Beijing notice that high-street clothing is riddled with English text, often in bold Helvetica or Arial reminiscent of a brand like Supreme,” says Wu. With this in mind, she designed her fashionable patches and ribbons. Underneath English translations of Zhen essay titles, she included a QR code that would take the interested party to the entire Chinese version of the text—uploaded to a private, European server developed by her former professor at the Willem de Kooning Academy to bypass Chinese censors. Other Helvetica tees camouflage the English text when worn out in the city, and Wu explains that the QR code is also ubiquitous in China, unlike in the West. “Homeless people don’t write on signs, but instead hold up QR codes so that you can pay straight into their bank accounts,” she explains. According to Wu, the QR code “has become a ‘habitualized’ mode of information access, and as a result its pervasive visual presence inadvertently provides an inconspicuous cover.” Wu tells me one last story from during her time in China, explaining how a queer, feminist arts collective called Q-Space wanted to run a lesbian sex–position live-drawing event, but no gallery would host the exhibition out of fear of the censors. “I came up with a solution,” she says. “Artists would use invisible ink to create the images, and then we’d give all the gallery-goers the key to viewing them. The drawings wouldn’t even need to stay in the gallery that way: We could hang them everywhere, even on the streets.” With her covert hacks, Wu’s not invested in communicating to everyone, just to the few who cannot speak freely. It’s visual communication for the underdog.

EYE ON DESIGN

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THE KANDINSKY COLLECTIVE, AKSIOMA, LJUBLJANA, 2017. PHOTO: JANEZ JANÅ A

A MESSAGE FROM TOMORROW Militant jihadists have been reported to run pornographic websites as a cover for hidden communication, with secret messages woven into porn images, almost like Morse code. Rumor has it that during WWII, the artist Wassily Kandinsky was recruited by British Intelligence Services to smuggle secret communication— in the same manner as flag signs—by encoding them into his abstract, symbolic artworks. Wu kneels on a checkerboard floor, wearing a brightly colored, tailored jacket of yellow, orange, and blue—almost like a human Rubik’s cube. She wields a hairdryer in one hand, and has a bottle of some kind of liquid in the other. It’s 2017 and she’s at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Ljubljana, Slovenia at her first solo exhibition, though the sign on the wall says it’s 2018. It also says that the show is put on by the world famous Kandinsky Collective—though no one in the room has ever heard of them. This is where it all culminates. The Kandinsky Collective is a piece of speculative fiction written and designed by Wu; it draws together all the threads of her research into analog steganography, privacy, surveillance, and the instrumentalization of art and graphic design in activism. Set in the near future when privacy has become a crime, Wu’s story is that this exhibition is, in fact, a staged one: Activists posing as a contemporary art collective are smuggling their secret messages into works and circulating them using the art market. What’s displayed on the wall is actually an underground communication channel, hidden in plain sight, and the audience has got to decode it. The people invited here discover grilles, hairdryers, and chemicals to activate invisible inks, along with other instructions. Spraying at the show’s introduction text, its true message appears in browning handscrawled letters, informing all that a widespread resistance has arisen and this is a part of it. As audience members warm up artwork tags, codes appear, explaining that the abstract symbols hanging on a mobile

EYE ON DESIGN

actually designate letters, and that work that repeats the word “miracle” across it actually says something else completely. One secret word is encoded into each of the six “artworks” on the wall. Read together, they spell out one important sentence. “It was wild,” Wu recalls. “When the real purpose was revealed, the atmosphere completely changed.” Wu is not the detective in the trench coat, nor the cryptologist running in an endless hamster wheel, trying to keep up with new software and technologies produced at ever-greater rates in the name of innovation. She’s a different kind of hybrid: a patchwork of artist, storybook spy, media researcher, activist, hacktivist, and classic graphic designer. In “championing the obsolete,” Wu’s experiments teach people about security, access, and privacy, past and present, allowing for cyber security issues to become understandable, accessible, and even less frightening, especially for those who are most marginalized and without much of a voice. Perhaps what is most interesting and pertinent about Wu, though, is how she turns the themes of privacy away from the knotty, difficult, and alienating, into something strangely enjoyable—a puzzle, a game of escape the room. As new-media theorist Florian Cramer notes in an essay on The Kandinsky Collective: “Fun with steganography bears genuine political potential because it could be a working counternarrative to the way corporate apps and hardware gadgets—from Facebook’s social networks to Google’s Gmail and the Android smartphone operating system—make their users trade in privacy for enjoyable user experiences.” Wu appreciates the importance, politically and personally, of working things out and passing on secrets, so that some things can be kept a mystery.

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Q: If we’d been communicating in secret messages during our Google Hangout for the interview, what would have been the best way to do so? A: Generally speaking we could use code words or an invented language that we’ve already developed and established prior to our Google chat. This language, of course, can be a colorful combination of jargon, emoticons, netspeak, links to music, articles, etc. Remixing these ingredients can generate an abundance of obscured ways to send and receive messages depending on the conditions and specificities of each scenario. For example: Slang, underground terminology, or an innocent conversation that conveys special meaning because of facts known only to the speakers is considered “jargon code,” such as the one used by Syrian citizens to mask political content to evade surveillance and censorship. In her 2013 paper “Syria’s Arab Spring: Language Enrichment in the Midst of Revolution,” Nassima Neggaz, a doctoral student in Islamic studies at Georgetown University, shows how Syrians have developed and used codes over the past four decades to speak about taboo subjects under Assad’s oppressive dictatorship. These codes are shared within tight-knit groups of trusted people— relatives, close friends—and used behind closed doors, out of fear of neighborhood informers. Expressions such as “It is raining,” or “We are having a party,” might be used to indicate that a demonstration is going on. Gunfire from Syrian forces is described as “heavy rain.” If a person is “coming out of the hospital,” he or she is emerging from hiding. “Coordination” is the blanket term for revolutionary groups. Similarly, an argot is a secret language used to obscure language to prevent outsiders from understanding. According to Anna Tee, (author and artist, currently a Ph.D. candidate researching the proverbial

closet), since at least the sixteenth century, LGBTQ communities have created their own camouflaged languages, falling under the wider category of “lavender linguistics.” She writes, “The reasoning behind these creations is constant and common: the production of safer spaces of communication and contact between members of marginalized minoritarian groups who have traditionally been persecuted or faced legal punishment, or the threat of medical correction.” For example, Kaliarda is a Greek homosexual slang. In his book Kaliarda: An Etymological Dictionary of Greek Homosexual Slang, published in Athens in 1971, researcher Elias Petropoulos estimates that Kaliarda has about 5,000 words, 3,000 of which he included in his book. In the same vein, Polari was spoken by gay men and actors in England before 1967, when homosexuality was illegal. Social steganography is a term popularized in a 2010 article by Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd, which describes the coded language teens use online to prevent their parents from spying on them. She cited an example of a young girl posting lyrics to Monty Python’s “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” to keep her mother from knowing she broke up with her boyfriend and getting overly involved. In the Monty Python movie Life of Brian, people were about to be killed when they sang the song, and the girl’s friends who knew this reference contacted her independently.

EYE ON DESIGN

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ON SEEING AND BEING SEEN

BY MEG MILLER

As one designer goes blind, another emerges from under his shadow

ALVIN LUSTIG AND ELAINE LUSTIG COHEN. COURTESY: THE ESTATE OF ELAINE LUSTIG COHEN

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On Amazon, you can buy a new, hardbound copy of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof for $1,788.01. The play is one of Williams’ most famous, and allegedly his personal favorite. But the reason behind the price tag is more likely the cover than its contents; a milky galaxy wraps around the spine, and the monosyllabic words of the title stack up the center like a chimney. At a talk in 2013, Elaine Lustig Cohen, who was widowed by the book’s famous designer, Alvin Lustig, turned to Steven Heller, her interviewer on stage. Pausing to locate the cover in her memory, she said, “The jacket that you’re talking about for Tennessee Williams, that was very late. And that was a jacket that Alvin actually never saw.” Elaine wasn’t referring to the final jacket, published the year that Alvin died at just 40 years old. What she meant was that Alvin never saw the jacket at all: not the initial sketch, not the paste-up, nor any of the proofs. By the time Alvin was designing Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, he was virtually blind. The diabetes that had plagued him since childhood had damaged the capillaries behind his eyes, and for about two years before his death a thick veil of fog gradually obscured his vision. By the year 1954, he no longer sketched his designs

because he no longer saw them. Instead, he would verbally dictate what he imagined in his mind’s eye to Elaine and the assistants working at his design office. “He would tell us go down a pica and over three picas, and how high the type should be, and what the color should be,” said Elaine. Sometimes his reference points were past projects—“the beige that we used on such and such”—or the colors of furniture he’d picked out for interior jobs. In one particularly poetic instance, he described the shade of yellow he wanted to use as “the dominant yellow of Van Gogh’s sunflower.”

EYE ON DESIGN

COURTESY: THE ESTATE OF ELAINE LUSTIG COHEN

On Seeing and Being Seen

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Elaine became a visionary designer in her own right, and the selfappointed preservationist of Alvin’s legacy decades after he died in 1955. Before her death, Heller called Elaine “a living link between design’s modernist past and its continually changing present ” in an article honoring her for the AIGA Medal. She died a renowned designer and painter, and one of the very few mid-century women designers who are celebrated at the same caliber as their male contemporaries. However, it wasn’t until after Alvin that she was seen as a designer, or even considered herself one. Elaine got her first taste of a r t a s a t e e n a g e r, w h e n o n e day she stumbled upon Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in New York City. She had come into Manhattan from New Jersey for an orthodontist appointment. The exhibition was of Wassily Kandinsky’s work and the music piping through the gallery speakers was Johann Sebastian Bach, who also worked through fading vision. “I still remember walking in there,” she said in a 2009 oral history with arts journalist Grace Glueck. “I didn’t know what it was all about. I had no idea. It blew me away.”

When Elaine met Alvin, she was nearly 21 and volunteering at an art gallery in Beverly Hills. He was 12 years her senior and already an established designer, famous for his designs for the New Classics book series from publisher New Directions. In her first year of marriage, Elaine taught art at a public school in L.A., but found it a drag to leave the apartmentslash-office that she and Alvin shared on Sunset B oulevard— full of high-profile clients and interesting conversation—to go to a classroom of 14-year-olds. So she quit. She helped run the office, where she later executed Alvin’s verbal instructions. Around age 27, Elaine became the only person who knew how long her husband had to live. The doctor told her first, and she told Alvin when keeping it to herself became unbearable. “The last year was the most difficult, as you can imagine,” she told Glueck. “He was impossible. I was impossible. He didn’t want to be helped, but he had to be helped.” Still, Elaine was devoted, describing herself once as Alvin’s “blind disciple.” As his eyesight worsene d, Elaine’s tasks went from purely administrative to doing the physical labor of design at the time; she learned how to order type, make

EYE ON DESIGN

a mechanical, make paste-ups, design a page in a book , and specify it. Later on she would drive Alvin up to Yale to teach, and would pass the time by sitting in the back of Josef Albers’ classes, listening in on his lectures. When Alvin’s rapidly degenerating eyesight could no longer be kept a secret, the couple threw a cocktail party for their friends and clients to break the news. Nobody seemed to doubt that the confident, well-known designer could complete their commissions blind. “[We announced] that he was losing his sight and that he was going to continue to design,” Elaine described. “Everybody said,

‘Of course. Fine.’” The architect Philip Johnson even gave him a new project: the signage for the Seagram Building in New York.

PHOTO: MAYA DEREN

On Seeing and Being Seen

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Alvin was a skilled illusionist from the beginning. In high school he became a magician, teaching himself design by making the promotional posters for his shows. He was bored in class—far smarter than his peers—so his teachers let him skip class to tour other schools performing magic tricks. Then one teacher, whom he later described as “enlightened,” introduced him to modern art, which had a profound impact on him. “This art hit a fresh eye, unencumbered by any ideas of what art was or should be, and found an immediate sympathetic response,” Alvin wrote in a 1953 issue of the AIGA Journal. “This ability to ‘see’ freshly, unencumbered by preconceived verbal, literary, or moral ideas, is the first step in responding to most modern art.” As a professional designer, Alvin trained his eye on books: His work played a major role in elevating the book jacket from something purely promotional to a vehicle for artistic expression. His own style of jacket design was constantly evolving, from photographic and pictorial imagery to eclectic typographic compositions, to total abstraction, and, later, to the simpler geometric forms that he produced while blind. From 1945 to 1952, his designs for

the New Classics series rejected the popular commercial styles of the time for a system of abstract symbols in the vein of Paul Klee and Joan Miró. For Noonday and Meridian Books, he took a quieter, more Swiss approach to a series of academic paperbacks. The publisher, Arthur Cohen, who would later become E laine’s second h u s b a n d , c re d i t e d A l v i n w i t h opening his eyes to the importance of design. “A young publisher such as myself was characteristically prejudiced and blind,” he said. Until meeting with the designer, he felt that the text was “all important,” and that the physical book was a much lesser issue. Although Alvin is most famous for his jackets, his approach toward design was holistic, and his talents were incredibly wide-ranging. In his 20s, he studied under Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin East, before becoming frustrated with the lack of freedom and running away in the middle of the night. In L.A. he was friends with the Eameses and Richard Neutra, and often took on architectural and industrial design projects alongside his graphics work. His office in New York worked on book covers, museum catalogs, magazine design, identity design, as well as architectural, furniture

EYE ON DESIGN

and fabric design projects, too. In the late 1940s he even designed a helicopter for the aerospace company Rotoron. “I always think of Alvin as a visionary,” Elaine has said. “He saw himself as using design to do everything with; to change everything in the world.” E laine has described Alvin as clever and playful in private, but in the public eye he was reserved and distinguished, serious about his craft and aware of his talent. A l v i n h a d a l ways a s c r i b e d to the Bauhaus idea of design as a curative force, but once he knew that he was dying, his ambitions verged on messianic. His ability to think in both two and three dimensions no doubt helped him d rea m up c o mp osi t ions even without the benefit of sight. His confidence in his ability to master any design discipline, coupled with his near-religious conviction that visual communication could solve the world’s problems, drove him to continue working when he easily could have stopped. In his final years, as his health eroded and vision dimmed, Alvin designed the inaugural Industrial Design magazines, numerous New Directions and Meridian covers, the interiors of several apartments, On Seeing and Being Seen

a Lightolier showroom, and an identity for the Girl Scouts, among other things. At the end of his life, he planned to travel to Israel, believing that his skills could positively impact the country. He’s rumored to have felt Christ-like; he believed that he had a sense of power and responsibility as a designer. As his abilities began to fade, Elaine’s sharpened. She learned the technical aspects of design out of necessity, becoming the invisible hands carrying out Alvin’s vision. But when it came to the actual design process—the creative direction, the conception of images and forms—it was all Alvin, up until the end. As was common at the time, Alvin was the only person in the office who designed. Of course, if your boss is blind, there are certain liberties; I va n C h e r m a ye f f, w h o b r i e f l y worked as one of Alvin’s assistants, once told the designer Art Chantry that Alvin wasn’ t such a good colorist, so he would secretly tweak the palette. “Who knows whether we did what he wanted, I don’t know, but we did it,” Elaine admitted. “I was learning more, but still I wasn’t designing. Not really. I was one of the office slaves.”

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COURTESY: THE ESTATE OF ELAINE LUSTIG COHEN

EYE ON DESIGN

J o h n s o n’s S e a g ra m B u i l d i n g signage was never completed by Alvin. It was done by Elaine, who took up the office’s unfinished commissions after Alvin died. “I did not even think whether I was capable [of designing]. It never crossed my mind. There were so many people telling me I could do it that I guess I just struggled through the beginning,” she said. T h e S e a g ra m p r o j e c t w a s mostly a matter of carrying out Alvin’s wayfinding vision for the famous New York building. But w h e n C o h e n a s ke d E l a i n e t o c o n t i n u e d e s i g n i n g t h e fo r t h coming titles for Meridian, it was a different situation: For the first time, she had complete creative control—a terrifying prospect, but one she was more than prepared for. “Of course, I was immediately prejudiced by everything I learned that Alvin prefered. It took me a while to really make my own evaluation of what I liked.” Elaine emerged from her late husband’s shadow with a distinctive style. Her design work is often sharp and serious, heavily concept-driven, but also bold, colorful, clever, and experimental. Her book jackets combined modern geometric and organic elements, and were influenced by movements like Constructivism On Seeing and Being Seen

and Dadaism. With Johnson’s help, she picked up more clients, among them the architects Eero Saarinen a n d Rich a rd Me ie r, a n d so on closed Alvin’s office to become one of the only women designers to run her own freelance business in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Like Alvin, she “worked on the edges,” as she termed it, forgoing the more lucrative advertising proje cts for b o ok c overs and museum catalogs. One of her best and longest clients was the Jewish Museum, which was at the center of New York’s avant-garde design scene at the time. Even while doing some of her biggest commissions—and much of the work she’s now famous for— Elaine still claimed to feel largely unseen, if not exactly bothered by it. “People say to me, ‘What was it like being a woman designer?’ I’d say, first of all, there were so few of us. The male designers couldn’t have cared less about me. They never talked to me. They never included me in anything, and I never thought about it. I just did my design.” After several years, E laine became bored of doing the same sort of design and shifted her focus to her art and Ex Libris, the rare artbook collection, gallery, and bookshop she ran with Cohen

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(whom she married nine months a f te r A l v i n’s d ea t h ) . H e r f i rs t husband never encouraged her to paint—“He always said painting was dead. That was one of his slogans. The other was calligraphy is dead”— but Arthur did. Elaine’s paintings and collages have been hung at reputable galleries, among them the Julie Saul gallery, where she held a show called “The Geometry of Seeing.” By the time she died in 2014, Elaine had produced a lifetime of artistic production sp anni n g s eve ral d isci p l ine s, despite her late start. And shortly before her death, she was finally recognized by the design community, though by that time she was focused solely on art. In addition to her own prodigious output,she also preserved and sustained Alvin’s legacy. Forgetting is also a kind of blindness, and E laine was vigilant ab out t he upkeep o f t he design world’s collective memory.

Elaine was 28 when Alvin passed away in 1955. When she gave Gleuck the oral history in 2009, she had every bit of the bravado that Alvin had when announcing to his clients that he would design blind. In the interview she looks back on her life with the confidence, clarity of thought, and generosity of someone whose artistic vision had evolved over a lifetime, and had strengthened with each new phase. She spoke like a woman who knew her worth. “I always say a really terrible thing,” Elaine told Gleuck. “I always say that either I would have remained this shy, unproductive person, or I would have grown up and divorced [Alvin] if he hadn’t died. I don’t know, because the person that I became would have never put up with what I was doing. But we’ll never know.” Whatever the case, Elaine was left with little choice but to start designing. After Alvin’s passing, there was only $400 left in their bank account. “When he died, the two people that called me immediately were Philip Johnson, who said, ‘Okay Elaine, you do it.’ The other person who called, because he was in love with me, was Arthur Cohen, and he said, ‘Okay. You do it. Do all the jackets. Finish this.’ “And me, I’m very practical. I said ‘Okay.’ And I did it.”

EYE ON DESIGN

COURTESY: THE ESTATE OF ELAINE LUSTIG COHEN

On Seeing and Being Seen

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EYE ON DESIGN

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Throughout the early 2000s, Processing started to spread as professors used the toolkit to teach a new generation of artists and designers how to code. While Processing became a foundational tool for creating expressive code, other toolkits began emerging in order to account for different programming languages and artistic needs. Zach Lieberman, a student of Levin’s at Parsons and co-founder of the School for Poetic Computation, developed openFrameworks, a tool based on C++. Meanwhile, in 2013 new media artist Lauren McCarthy created p5.js, a webfriendly continuation of Processing that runs on JavaScript. These tools have pushed the creative boundaries of what is made with code, and at the same time they’ve expanded the notion of who can create with code.

CASEY REAS, "RGB-056-006-080-823-715" (2015)

People * Lauren McCarthy: Artist | student at MIT | founder of p5.js | Assistant professor at UCLA * Zach Lieberman: Artist | co-Founder of School For Poetic Computation

Lauren McCarthy: Back in 2012, I’d heard this lecture by Zach Lieberman at Eyeo Festival. He was saying, “I know open source is mostly men right now, but if you’re a woman, you’re welcome, too.” It was the first time where I was like, oh, I’d like to sit at the table. It hadn’t gone through my mind before. Levin: The environments were put out there by Casey and Ben and Zach in order to democratize the creation of interactive graphical environments. It was an open invitation for anyone to make stuff with these tools, but there wasn’t an open enough invitation for anyone to contribute to the environment, to the tools. Zach Lieberman: I think it’s still a problem in that these tools tend to be made by a lot of white dudes. I think it’s really important to have a more inclusive and better community. These tools are trying to make it easy for people to get started and make things. We want more voices and more people at the table. Levin: The important thing Lauren did, in addition to creating a Javascript flavor of Processing, is that she also was keenly attuned to what one could call inadvertent omissions of approach in the open source the communities

behind openFrameworks and Processing. The ways in which these communities did not adequately address issues of diversity and inclusion. McCarthy: p5.js is a reinterpretation of Processing. It’s trying to take the initial goals of Processing and ask, what does that mean for today? It means using HTML, JavaScript, CSS, APIs, and mobile webcam—that kind of stuff. But also in 2013 when we were thinking about it, I was hearing all these conversations about how we can incorporate more diversity into these projects. Instead of trying to retrofit those ideas into a project, we wondered, can we try to build values of diversity and inclusion into the code from the getgo? We were making decisions in every moment, asking who are we privileging here? Who are we excluding? Who are we including? How do we make our message more explicit? Lieberman: Today we have better tools and better communities. It’s broadened in some ways. If you were doing this stuff 20 years ago, you needed to be at the MIT Media Lab or be in some place of academia, and now it’s really different. Bauhaus Meets Binary

At one point this stuff was new. It’s not new anymore. And I think that’s also really exciting. When the technology is new, a lot of what you’re doing is very formal; it’s about figuring it out. But as the medium establishes itself then it’s really more like artistic expression—what does code mean and how can we use it to tell really meaningful stories? I think we can make better work. Now that we know what the medium is, we can use it in a more expressive way.

ZACH LIEBERMAN, “DAILY SKETCHES” (2017)

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“You look around and it’s hard to find real full-time work anymore. How do people expect you to make it?” said Linda Borucki, a part-time worker for the past 13 years. Fellow part-timer Laura Piscotti put it more bluntly: “These companies all have a formula. They don’t take you on full-time. They don’t pay benefits. Then their profits go through the roof.” While both statements could easily have been made by designers working today, Borucki and Piscotti were members of the Teamsters union during the 1997 UPS strike, which went down as one of the most significant strikes in American history. It took place during the supposed economic boom of the Clinton administration, yet despite the president’s vow to help the working class, “he broke every major promise to the labor movement and regularly used his authority to prevent workers from striking.” From 1993 to 1995, more than 8.5 million people lost their jobs as a result of corporate downsizing and mergers. Clinton’s first secretary of labor, Robert Reich, later admitted the White House “collaborated [with] and responded to the business community.” Sure, there was a boom for Wall Street, but as Newsweek noted in 1996, “The public is scared as hell.” But they weren’t powerless. There was one large organization on the workers’ side that knew how to talk down corporate bullies and lobby in D.C. for legislative change. Recently David Weil, the former administrator for the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division under President Obama, noted some eerily similar economic trends. Today, a growing number of companies are cutting costs by using contract workers, whose rights to fair wages and overtime compensation are more likely to be violated than those of their full-time counterparts. Data from the Freelancers Union (which, confusingly, isn’t technically a union) indicates that this shift toward “alternative work arrangements” means that as many as 55 million people or one-third of the U.S. workforce is made up of freelancers and independent contractors. And we can expect it to increase to 50 percent in just two years. If that number seems high, consider that in 1996 two-thirds of UPS’ quickly expanding workforce was part-time, with a staggering 83 percent of new jobs going to part-timers. Meanwhile, UPS was reporting profits of over $1 billion, a company record it was expecting to beat in 1997. And yet its part-timers hadn’t seen a pay raise since the ’80s; wages were still hovering around $8/hour. There were other grievances,

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too, such as the lack of job security and a pension plan that UPS was threatening to dip into. By the summer of 1997, with union negotiations going nowhere, 185,000 Teamsters across the country decided to go on strike. For nearly three weeks, they hoisted picket signs painted with slogans like “UPS means Under-Paid Slaves” and “Part-time America won’t work.” Packages piled up in warehouses around the country, and other carriers couldn’t keep up with the overflow. Support from the media, the public, and other unions poured in. “The rally felt like being at a revival—a revival for the entire, long-beleaguered U.S. labor movement. . . . It was the biggest multi-racial strike in a generation that traversed what we now call the ‘Blue State–Red State’ divide,” according to Jacobin. After UPS lost approximately $800 million, it grudgingly agreed to create 10,000 full-time jobs, authorize the largest wage increase in the company’s history, offer protection against subcontracting union jobs, and promise to leave the full-time pension fund in tact. It was a huge, hardwon victory, but it didn’t exactly make life easier for the union. As he walked out of their final talks, the UPS chief negotiator whispered to the union leader, “You’re dead . . . and you will pay for this, you son of a bitch.” To be fair, many union negotiations are civil and handled by the book, but it’s the heated and dramatic conflicts that make history—and history has an uncanny way of repeating itself. Take our friends in the parcel and shipping industry. You think they’ve learned anything from the UPS strike? Amazon is currently being sued by contract drivers who want employee status, and FedEx just went through a round of similar lawsuits that cost it almost $250 million. Now that the gig economy is bringing issues like fair wages, benefits, and job security to a head across many industries, workers in every sector, from Teamsters to the tech industry, are making a case for better employment packages, and employers are finally starting to respond. Design, and any industry where designers work—media, advertising, publishing—is next in line. It’s not about quelling the demands of independent contractors while giving preferential treatment and heaps of benefits to full-timers and full-timers only. It’s not about fighting against the freelance business model, either. It’s not even always about fighting the unions—it’s about Designing a More Perfect Union

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Eye on Design magazine - Issue #01 "Invisible"