How does one prove the Earth is round?

In February of 1966, during an acid trip on a rooftop in San Francisco, Stewart Brand began contemplating the curvature of the Earth. The horizon sloped away from him on either side, buildings refused to stand parallel, and the flat-earth fallacy became viscerally apparent. He was determined to broadcast this feeling, and called for a solution (in the form of a button), demanding, “Why haven’t we seen a photo of the whole earth?” This paranoia-tinged aphorism would lead to the creation of the Whole Earth Catalogue, a highly influential counterculture magazine that described the tools necessary to maintain a sustainable existence.

Two and a half years later, Apollo 8 astronaut William A. Anders captured what has been called “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken,”  an image of the Earth rising from behind the horizon of the moon.(A) Known as “Earthrise,” this photo was taken in a moment of unscripted curiosity, offering not only a view of ourselves, but a view of ourselves from the alien perspective of another world. What started with a serendipitous snapshot, and possibly an LSD trip before that, has become the driving mission of NASA’s Earth Observatory (E.O.) today.

(A)

Exploring the Earth Observatory’s website may be the closest thing to holding a mirror up to the entire world; in the depths of this massive archive, vividly colored and hyper-sharpened satellite imagery portray melting arctic glaciers bumping up against shots of urban expansion next to hurricane data and deforestation patterns. These high-resolution files are precisely annotated and provided free to the public, intended primarily for educational usage. Some images, though, have become ubiquitous in our visual landscape, appearing in commercials, artworks, book covers, billboards, and even the background of your favorite touch-screen phones.

Robert Simmon is the art director of the Earth Observatory, and works for Science Systems and Applications, Inc. under contract to NASA. He and his team are responsible for creating these images, which are often composites of astronaut photography and satellite sensory data. In this interview, Robert discusses true vs. false color, accurate vs. effective data, and the art of designing an image to match what people expect versus designing an image that will change their minds.

*********

TASK — We are interested in the mission of the Earth Observatory, how these images get used in unexpected ways in culture at large, the E.O.’s relationship to the legacy of Earth imagery from space, and even a little about the design process of creating these images.

Robert Simmon — There are a few different missions for the Earth Observatory. The first is simply to make people aware that NASA looks at the Earth (we’re not just astronauts and Mars missions). We’ve also tried to create a site that’s an authoritative source for information about climate change and the environment. Our stories are reviewed by experts, we base the information on peer-reviewed research, etc. We intentionally present a broad overview of remote sensing and Earth science, as a counterpoint to the traditional mission and instrument-based focus of NASA public outreach. Many of our images present the possibility for new interpretations relevant to debates in popular culture, and I personally try to make a “soft sell” instead of beating people over the head with a certain perspective. I present them with something of a neutral tone, hoping that our audience will draw its own conclusions.

(B)

Since our imagery is predominantly free, it gets picked up and used all over the place. Some images are especially contagious, such as the image of cities at night.(B) I’ve seen this image on magazine covers, newspapers, annual reports, web sites, and elsewhere. I was even on a radio morning talk show once to settle a dispute over whether or not the image was a photograph (it’s not, of course). The second most popular are some of the global renderings.(C) I’ve seen these on ads in bus stops, concert venues, and the default boot screen for the iPhone. With both images, I was simply trying to make an image that lines up with our expectations of what the Earth would look like from space. My design process is very much trying to get out of the way of the data. Inspired principally by Edward Tufte, I try to create graphics as close to 100% data as possible. So a lot of my time is spent removing elements (grid lines, shadows, gradients, etc.) from the default designs of Excel. I’m also very careful about color, both in natural- or true-color satellite imagery (images composed of the red, green, and blue wavelengths of visible light), and in maps of data. Our eyes and brains think certain things should look a certain way (clouds should be white, water blue, sand yellow, etc.) so I often need to correct imagery manually. With maps, most of the default color choices, including the very common “rainbow palette,” actually distort relationships between data. Unfortunately, many scientists are used to a certain presentation, so it takes a lot of convincing to get them to approve a change. A side benefit is that many of the more accurate palettes are easier on the eyes, so they invite closer inspection, rather than a cursory overview. I’m also convinced that a very clean, consistent, and polished design is more believable than a disordered and cluttered one, so I spend a lot of time revising designs until they’re just right.

(C)

TASK — When you said that you often try to make a “soft sell,” were you referring to issues such as climate change and environmental abuse?

RS — Yes. It’s a reflection of NASA’s role in setting climate change policy: NASA is not recommending a specific government action, but collecting data and performing analyses so policy leaders can make informed decisions. A good example is our climate change site and Q & A. We try to let the data speak for themselves.

TASK — You seem to suggest that the reason the Cities at Night image and the Blue Marble image are so popular is because they are designed to match our expectations of what they should look like. I would suggest that the fact that they are beautiful goes a long way as well, but this idea of dealing with pre-conceived notions ties in closely with ideas of Mundane Science Fiction, such as the “consensus future” — a mediocre version of what we tend to agree the future will look like (think Star Trek). Do you differentiate between these expectation-meeting images and other more abstract images that might show the data more accurately?

RS — I think this is an answer to a broader question than what you asked, but “confirmation bias” obviously effects how we interpret imagery. Recently, a climate change “skeptic” (denialist or contrarian are better labels) made his point by selecting a series of NASA images that confirm his preconceptions, even though they are at odds with quantitative analyses of the same data. You can see the discussions here. When dealing with images of data, there’s often a tension between people’s expectations — snow should be white, warm things are red — and accurate/effective representations of data. This is complicated by the expectations of the scientists that I work with, who often have been analyzing data for a decade or more, and are used to a specific presentation. So I have to weigh preconceptions, representational accuracy, and aesthetics, all of which influence the ability of people to interpret a figure.

TASK — The Cities at Night page reveals that Japanese cities appear to glow a bluer-green than other cities of the world and I can’t help but want to draw cultural conclusions from that fact, beyond the use of mercury versus sodium vapor lights …

RS — The difference in lighting types is likely a technological and historical accident, not a cultural difference. But culture absolutely influences the Earth’s surface. For example, the damage created by deforestation and farming practices in Bolivia creates a beautiful patchwork quilt pattern.(D)

(D)

TASK — How easy is it for the layperson to interpret true photographs versus manipulated images of the Earth?

RS — Photographs are usually the easiest type of imagery to understand. Compare these images. An oblique photograph from the International Space Station (E) versus a nadir (looking straight down) photograph from the Space Shuttle (F) versus this radar image.(G) The more abstract, the more difficult to interpret. (I tried to find a topographic map of Everest, but they all have hill shading and other visual cues, so they’re easier to interpret than a pure contour or color-coded map.)

(E)(F)(G)

TASK — I’m very curious about this caption I noticed on several images: “The image has also been sharpened using the sensor’s panchromatic band.” Could you explain how this sharpening process works, and what the “panchromatic band” is? As a print designer, I’m used to sharpening through Photoshop, based on aesthetic and printing criteria. Your process sounds like there is another level of data-accuracy embedded in the sharpening process.

RS — Signal to noise ratio is a critical limiting factor in satellite imaging: the Earth’s surface is a few hundred miles away from the sensor, and there’s a thick layer of atmosphere mucking things up in between. To increase the signal, instrument designers often include a high-resolution panchromatic band, which uses a range of wavelengths (often blue through near-infrared [slightly longer wavelengths than red], although some of the newer instruments use just visible wavelengths) to gather more photons without having to build a bigger telescope. The discrete bands (red, green, blue, etc.) on a sensor have a narrow spectral range, but collect light (more appropriately electromagnetic radiation) over a wide area. For example, Landsat has a 15 meter per pixel panchromatic band, and 30 meter per pixel individual bands (red, green, blue, near infrared, and two shortwave infrared) plus a 90 meter per pixel thermal infrared band. The visualizer (me) then combines the individual channels into an RGB composite. If I need better resolution to show small features, I need to add in the panchromatic band: hence “panchromatic sharpening.” One way to do this is to do tonal correction and color balancing on an image, and then convert to L*a*b in Photoshop. Then I would load the panchromatic band and adjust the tonal range to the pan-band to match the luminance channel of the RGB composite. Resample the RGB image to match the resolution of the pan-band, and then copy the pan-band into the luminance channel.

Easy, right?

The problem is that the panchromatic image usually contains near-infrared light. Vegetation is very, very dark in visible light (it’s converting sunlight into energy after all) but very, very reflective in the near infrared —as reflective as snow. Most pan-sharpened images have vegetation that looks seriously awry, so it’s back to the curves dialog to make adjustments. This method gets pretty good — but not perfect — results. Some software uses algorithms based on the specific wavelengths of each band to adjust the pan-sharpened image, but it still seems to take a lot of tinkering, so I don’t mess with it that often. (For example, most of the data in Google Earth is pan-sharpened, and none of it looks quite right). I prefer to stick with RGB imagery, and only do the pan sharpening when it’s absolutely necessary.

TASK — You mentioned that it was sometimes difficult to change the minds of scientists. Do you find that scientists have an easier time understanding the principle of “goodness of fit”?

RS — My entire design career has been at NASA, and my “clients” are scientists, writers, or public affairs staff. The scientists tend to be entrenched with a specific representation that they’ve worked with for years. I usually change their minds when an image becomes popular, or I can point to a scientific study that validates a method of presentation.

TASK — Some of the more abstract images, such as the patterns of deforestation or the fractal-like glaciers, are beautiful simply as compositions. Your primary goal with these images is to accurately present the data, but do you ever consider these compositions you create on a purely aesthetic level?

RS — I’m a bit obsessed with the aesthetics as a way to promote understanding. There’s reasonably good evidence that information that we find attractive is also more credible, so I think if I make beautiful imagery, people will understand it better. I also think people are more likely to take the time to study and learn from attractive images. I try to design on two levels: an instant understanding of the main point, plus a deeper level of understanding revealed on closer inspection. Beauty helps move people from a glancing view to longer study.

The images I make are not a form of personal expression, so I don’t consider what I’m doing to be art: it’s more engineering, which is my academic background. I use a set of rules derived from graphic design and visualization research (alignment, color choice, visual hierarchy, map projections, etc.) to determine each presentation. I guess that if I were an artist, my artistic statement might be “data are beautiful,” but that would be trite. When dealing with images such as these, self-expression can seem overrated. ✕

—

NOTES TO THE INTRO:

Brand/Fuller

Brand had previously attended a lecture by Buckminster Fuller who cited humanity’s belief in a flat, infinite world as the basis of our ignorant behavior. Fuller even coined a term to correct this error, “world-around” instead of “worldwide,” believing that thoughtless use of obsolete scientific terminology only impedes intuition. The modern Flat Earth Society, founded in 1956, still exists today and has made such claims as: the world is a disc, with the north pole at the center; the U.N. logo represents a flat-earth underground movement that almost elected FDR the president of the world; the moon-landing was a hoax based on an Arthur C. Clarke script. Clarke later wrote to NASA’s chief administrator, “Dear Sir, on checking my records, I see that I have never received payment for this work. Could you please look into this matter with some urgency? Otherwise you will be hearing from my solicitors, Messrs Geldsnatch, Geldsnatch and Blubberclutch.”

Proper Attribution

The earthrise photograph has been attributed to both William A. Anders and Frank Borman over the years, both having claimed credit. The general consensus suggests that Borman shot the first “Earthrise” photo in black and white, while Anders shot the more popular color version several seconds later.

“The Most Influential Environmental Photograph Ever Taken”

Galen Rowell, wilderness photographer and climber. The photo (NASA image AS8-14-2383) has been credited with jumpstarting the environmentalism movement and even prompting the creation of Earth Day. Later, Stewart Brand would say, “The photograph of the whole earth from space helped to generate a lot of behavior — the ecology movement, the sense of global politics, the rise of the global economy, and so on. I think all of those phenomena were, in some sense, given permission to occur by the photograph of the earth from space.”

Orientation

Anders shot the original earthrise image in relation to lunar orbit, with the horizon of the moon oriented vertically, and the earth to the left. As the image became popularized, it came to assume a more traditional perspective with the earth rising from a horizontal horizon. See above(A).

***the animated radar data at the top was not created by the E.O.

For nearly three decades, the Walker has been recruiting recent graduates and junior professionals to work as fellows in its design and visual arts departments. As full-time, full-fledged staff, fellows experience the entire scope of graphic design and curatorial work in a museum, while bringing with them fresh energy and new ideas. A number of Walker fellows have also gone on to prominent positions at museums and design firms around the world. As their time here draws to a close, the 2008-2009 group talks about what brought them here, what they’ve experienced, and what’s in store as they move on.

= Noa Segal =

Before coming to the Walker… Graphic design seemed to me to be a practice that allows an intellectual engagement with content and form, and yet exists on a very visual and practical level. My educational path went through music and photography, but I felt that my interest in images and text was not coming to its full expression. The Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, where I completed my studies, was a great school that encouraged students to develop an ability to analyze the given or self-initiated content, and from that to bring into their design a full range of interests and sources of inspiration.

Coming here was . . . Almost like starting all over, thinking about and practicing design in ways that I hadn’t before. Working in this kind of a multidisciplinary place really had an affect on me—collaborating with people working in other disciplines made me reconsider and redefine, repeatedly, my profession and my position within it. I realized that it is fascinating looking back on the phases of the different projects i worked on (i.e proofs) at the walker and be able to see the change and the development of my ability to work with images and text, react to the people i collaborate with and design towards shaping each piece to the point where it delivered their content successfully and reflected my ideas about it.
(fig.1 – 7, different stages of work; fig.8.-9, the final piece: working on film flayer for Queer Takes: weekend of screening at the Walker June 23-26)

(1)  (2)  (3)

(4)  (5)   (6)

(7)   (8)  (9)

Some of my favorite moments were . . . Feeling stuck, tired, uninspired—but being able to leave my desk and go inside the galleries, down to our amazing library, or to the cinema or the theater. Realizing that all of this amazing art is as close to me as my bed is to my shower—and it’s available to me every second of the day! Also, participating in discussions with the design staff that are deeply engaged, hearing how and what this studio would like to do in the future—great inspiring and educational moments that for sure I will try to carry on in my practice.

A belief i’ve developed . . . Is that design means always challenging yourself and trying new things, and that you can’t design without keeping a close relationship to the world surrounding us—culture, politics, nature, and so on.

= Mylinh Trieu Nguyen =

Design first sparked my interest when … I was studying in my dorm at UCLA and heard a student next door animating a cartoon airplane to the words of a John Denver song. It wasn’t what she was making, but more the idea of realizing it that captivated me. She was taking this vague idea in her head and making it into a tangible thing in the world. I wanted that ability.

I wanted to become a walker fellow because … I was questioning the importance of what I was producing. I expanded my practice into the contemporary art world, collaborating with friend and artist David Horvitz as ASDF. This in turn made me more encouraged about my role as a graphic designer, and led me to apply for the fellowship.

My high points and low points here involved … Being assigned my first big project. This daunting feeling overwhelmed me; it was nothing less than that. But through all of the trial and error, working with Andrew Blauvelt and spending countless evenings in the studio (crying), the Walker’s annual report is one of the most gratifying pieces I’ve made. Moving to Minneapolis itself was a test of emotional endurance. The change in geography and social dynamics made it hard at first, and often lonely. But you really develop strong relationships with the other fellows and the people you work with.

Moving on from the walker, i will be … attending Yale’s MFA program in graphic design, developing and expanding my current interests, garnering new ones, and, I hope, cultivating a clear and cohesive methodology. I also want to continue producing work under ASDF, travel, and experience life outside the realm of “work.”

http://www.mylinhtrieu.com/index.php?/ongoing/minnesota-nice

Ryan Waller
Slogan t-shirts? Police? In Providence there is a restaurant that has a menu item called “Andre the Giant has an omelette”. The ‘net?

VW
This is the Ryan Waller Show, anything goes. What about that World Trade Center logo?

RW
That ain’t me. Also, in advance, I’ve never watched porn at studio BUT I did catch someone watching it last night. Our lips are sealed.

VW
YIKES.

I remember seeing New College Beat show up at the Walker studio while I was there … what were your motivations behind that project?

RW
It was mostly to pay for school. I had been making smaller ‘zines called The New College Beat Supplements with no real intention to make a non-supplement until I got into Yale. It was a tough decision to say yes, because I was pretty in debt from my undergrad, but the same day I accepted was the day I contacted all my friends to help me with it. They all said yes (except for one NOT SAYING WHO = KEEP IT COOL). So that was the reason it was going to take shape. But it took shape from different places. The Hebrew from Yale heraldry was a place. Speed was another.

VW
And did it pay off? Or, do we need to plug where it can be purchased from?

RW
Well, no, I have some left. The idea was to sell 1,000 of the packs which had a poster and a t-shirt (and assorted vibes) sandwiched in. But I have more Beats than the packs, so there are still opportunities. These are all at the New College Beat site.

VW
And now the Walker Art Center bookshop.

RW
WAH!

VW
How often is the New College Beat published? When’s the next issue due out?

RW
It is pretty irregularly regular. The supplements were coming out at a biannual rate, and then the Beat was made just the once. I have some things I might make with it, but nothing set in motion. I might want to make the New College Beat into a house of publishing, and less about a magazine at some point. Or it may take off. The New College Beat might become a really successful magazine, both intellectually and financially.

VW
Ok, so then in thinking about your time here at Yale as BOOKENDS, what’s on the other side of the shelf?

RW
What a clever title.

VW
Totally stole it.

RW
What part of the shelf? Outside of the bookends?

VW
How about this: if NCB sits somewhere at the beginning of your time here, what would be something that sits closer to you exiting?

And you can’t say thesis.

RW
There are quite a few things whose spines will be the only thing to see the fluorescent light of day — those are book proposals and zines and papers that sit squarely in the center, all made in low quantities as examples and experiments. Hot Gun, a journal I made with Josh Stanley, would be the closest thing to getting picked off. That just came to studio, and it’s the first thing made in quantity to be out there, which we are beginning to figure out where there is. Hot Gun is a poetry journal, mostly criticism, of a contemporary sort. It’s definitely not for the meek.

VW
Can you talk about William Wordsworth and the Hot Gun model?

RW (EDITED ANSWER BY EDITOR/ANSWERER JOSH STANLEY)
Both are the mediations of patriarchy ON whatever is good, and the layering and entwining dialectic creates a simultaneous fix of incomplete realism and momentary certainty in the devastation of patriarchy through antirealism. On the one hand we see-through for a moment, on the other hand mediation is clogged up and analyzed by new mediation, before it restores its hegemony. Obviously what is crucial is that in our capitalist society no good image is possible. This is of course not to claim that ‘the good image’ exists in every other society, or indeed in any society RIGHT NOW. No clothes and shit, so devastation too.

VW
Anything else?

RW
Nope.

1. What music were you into before you became ELLEN LUPTON?

(1)  (2)  (3)

Aretha Franklin (1),  Donna Summer (2), and Barry White’s Love Unlimited Orchestra (3)

2. Who were your heroes before you became ELLEN LUPTON?

Edward Hopper, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Robert de Niro in Taxi Driver.

3. What were your obsessions before becoming ELLEN LUPTON?

Vintage clothes, “gourmet” cooking, and worrying about my weight.

4. What were your dreams before you became ELLEN LUPTON?

To be an artist

5. What were you reading before you became ELLEN LUPTON?

(1)

(2)

(3)

Kurt Vonnegut (1),  Erica Jong (2), and and VIVA magazine (3)

6. What did you use to collect before you became ELLEN LUPTON?

Books, toy frogs, and old rayon dresses.

7. Who were you before ELLEN LUPTON?

Urban post-bohemian teenager.

——-

Ellen Lupton’s prolific career spans the realms of design practice, education, criticism, and curating, and is specifically aimed at bringing design awareness to a broader audience. She is director of the Graphic Design MFA program at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, where she also serves as director of the Center for Design Thinking. As curator of contemporary design at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum since 1992, Lupton has organized numerous exhibitions, including the National Design Triennial (2000, 2003, 2006), Mechanical Brides: Women and Machines from Home to Office (1993), Mixing Messages: Graphic Design and Contemporary Culture (1996), Letters from the Avant-Garde (1996), Graphic Design in the Mechanical Age (1999), and Skin: Surface, Substance + Design (2002). In addition to the robust catalogues that accompany these shows, she has written and co-authored the best-selling books Thinking with Type (2004), D.I.Y.: Design It Yourself (2006), D.I.Y. Kids (2007), and most recently Graphic Design: The New Basics (2008). With J. Abbott Miller, Lupton’s essays on design and culture were published in Design Writing Research (1996). Her writing has been featured in magazines such as Print, Eye, I.D., and Metropolis. She has a regular column, “The El Word,” in Readymade magazine and her editorial illustrations have been published in the New York Times. Lupton is a 2007 recipient of the AIGA Gold Medal, the profession’s highest honor.

www.elupton.com

1. What music were you into before you became EXPERIMENTAL JETSET?

( 1) ( 2) ( 3)

( 4) ( 5) ( 6)

(7) ( 8) ( 9)

The Cramps(1) , Suicidal Tendencies(2),  The Zombies (3) , The Beatles (4),  The Specials(5),  Screamin’ Jay Hawkins (6), Prince (7),  Japan(8) , The Pixies (9).

2. Who were your heroes before you became EXPERIMENTAL JETSET?

(1) (2  ) (3) (4) (5)

Pushead (1), Savage Pencil (2),  Debbie Harry (3), Marlene Dietrich (4), Charlie Chaplin (5),  My friends .

3. What were your obsessions before becoming EXPERIMENTAL JETSET?
Drawing, reading, skateboarding, punk music; Horror; Drawing, reading, making mix-tapes.

4. What were your dreams before you became EXPERIMENTAL JETSET?
To become a comic artist; To open a bar; To become a tap-dancing architect.

5. What were you reading before you became EXPERIMENTAL JETSET?

(1) (2) (3)

(4) (5) (6)

Science fiction (mostly short stories by writers such as Ray Bradbury) (1),  Edgar Allen Poe (2) , Willem Elsschot (especially ‘Lijmen / Het Been’) (3),
Hanif Kureishi (4), Paul Auster (5), Harry Crews (6).

6. What did you use to collect before you became EXPERIMENTAL JETSET?
Comics, fanzines; Posters; Records.

7. Who were you before EXPERIMENTAL JETSET?

In no specific order:
Danny van den Dungen, Marieke Stolk, Erwin Brinkers.

(1)

Danny van den Dungen, Marieke Stolk, Erwin Brinkers with Wim Crowel

—-

Based in Amsterdam and founded in 1997 by Marieke Stolk, Erwin Brinkers, and Danny van den Dungen, Experimental Jetset has been consistently reinterpreting the implications of modernism, often from the perspective of a youth-based counterculture. The studio is perhaps best known to U.S. audiences from their appearance in the documentary Helvetica (2007), and their dogmatic use of that typeface has become a defining aspect of their work and has influenced new generations of graphic designers. Experimental Jetset’s iconic print work explores ways in which we are both shaped by and help shape our material environment. Projects for cultural clients include collaborations with the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, Purple Institute, Centre Pompidou, Colette, Dutch Post Group, Réunion des Musées Nationaux, Le Cent Quatre, De Theatercompagnie, and 2K/Gingham, which released their iconic John&Paul&Ringo&George T-shirt design. The studio’s work has been exhibited in galleries across the world, and in 2007 New York’s Museum of Modern Art acquired a large selection of their projects for inclusion in its permanent collection. Since 2000, members of Experimental Jetset have been teaching at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.

www.experimentaljetset.nl

While at Printed Matter’s New York Art Book Fair last fall, I was fortunate enough to catch David Reinfurt at the Dexter Sinister booth for a brief chat about the conception of DS and about a project they produced for a conference on contemporary artists’ books commissioned by the Art Libraries Society of New York.

(Photo by Jessica Williams)

On Dexter Sinister:

“It originally started out as a project for the Manifesta Six Biennial, which was supposed to be staged in Nicosia on the island of Cyprus. They took the money that would originally pay for a biennial and restaged it as a six month long art school. For that they asked Stuart Bailey and I to come up with a proposal for the graphic design of the book. We decided to do something a lot like the way they organized the exhibition itself, which was to take the money and resources of what would usually go into printing and distributing a catalogue and set up something that had a more direct relationship to what actually was needed at the time. If it’s a six month art school you don’t need to make a 296 page catalog and send it all over the world. Things were needed in much smaller numbers so we proposed to set up a printing workshop in the city of Nicosia and make all of the materials there in this kind of vitrine where we’d be working with borrowed printers or people from the school who are artists to make the publications just in the numbers that are needed. It was just our direct response to what was actually needed rather than printing 1,000 because that’s what an off-set printer could do.

We worked on that project for a year and a half in a store-front downtown in the old city. Everything was set up, but the project was canceled. Around the same time, we had found a space on the lower east side that we decided would be a good place to have a bookstore to sell some of the things we made. It was like a joke “Wouldn’t it be nice to have some presence for this project in New York…” but then when it was canceled, we just took a lot of the ideas and brought them to New York and just re-staged them in our space there. It sounds like everything was premeditated, but it wasn’t at all. It was just one kind of thing to the next. As soon as we had the underground storefront in New York, it didn’t make sense to do any printing there because it was so tiny. But a bookstore made sense, so we started running the space as a bookstore one day a week and the rest of the time as a studio.”

EVERY DAY THE URGE GROWS STRONGER TO GET A HOLD OF AN OBJECT AT VERY CLOSE RANGE BY WAY OF ITS LIKENESS, ITS REPRODUCTION:

“This project was done for the Arts Libraries conference at the MOMA which we spoke at also. They asked us to make a book for the conference which was on contemporary artists’ books. So we decided to make this, which is a collection of Portable Document Formats (PDFs) that are on our online library. We fit each of the PDFs onto 8-page signatures and produced them on a stencil printing machine.

Each of the Arts Librarians takes one of these sets, binds them, and puts it into their libraries. When we set up the online library we had this model in mind; that it would distribute and just push things out into the world and not necessarily circulate, lend or do something else. This was a nice project to do because it hits a few things we’re interested in, like the tension between the free thing online and the thing you hold in your hand, sealing it up and putting it into a library versus the ‘always, everywhere’ quality of a PDF.”

—

A vanguard among a recent wave of young designers whose practices blur the lines between the worlds of client-driven projects and critical investigation, David Reinfurt melds highly conceptual ideas with technological experimentation. After receiving his MFA in Graphic Design from Yale University in 1999 and working as an interaction designer at IDEO in San Francisco, he founded the studio O-R-G in New York, where his clients included the New York Times, AIGA NY, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Brill’s Content, and Dean Sakamoto Architects, among others. In 2006, with graphic designer Stuart Bailey, Reinfurt established Dexter Sinister, a small workshop/bookstore on the Lower East Side. Counter to the assembly line realities of today’s large-scale publishing, the studio’s process involves working on-demand, using inexpensive local machinery, considering alternate distribution strategies, and collapsing distinctions of editing, design, production, and distribution into one efficient activity. Dexter Sinister was featured at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève in Switzerland and the 2008 Whitney Biennial. Reinfurt has written for magazines such as the New York Times Magazine, Dot Dot Dot, Social Text, Visual Communications (UK), Modern Painter, Metropolis M, Idea Magazine (Japan), and Nozone Empire. He previously held a yearlong research affiliate position at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT and currently teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and the Rhode Island School of Design

David Reinfurt will be speaking at the Walker Art Center on Tuesday, March 17, 2009 as part of Avant la lettre: Insights 2009 Design Lecture Series.

Lectures:
March 24 Experimental Jetset, Amsterdam
March 31 Ellen Lupton, Baltimore

Series tickets: $70 ($48 AIGA/Walker members)
Individual event tickets: $20 ($15; $10 students)

For tickets: 612.375.7600 walkerart.org/tickets

Lectures will be webcast on channel.walkerart.org

1. What music were you into before you became PROCESS TYPE FOUNDRY?

Eric Olson: Coalesce, MC5, Converge, Fabric, The Faces and John Adams.
Nicole Dotin: I think I’m still listening to it.

2. Who were your heroes before you became PROCESS TYPE FOUNDRY?
Eric: I don’t have any heroes.
Nicole: I am inspired by the exceptional actions of others, but I don’t have any heroines.

3. What were your obsessions before becoming PROCESS TYPE FOUNDRY?
Eric: Fear I suppose. Mostly of speaking in public and driving through intersections.
Nicole: If I was obsessed with anything, it would have been perfection … and I still haven’t learned any better.

4. What were your dreams before you became PROCESS TYPE FOUNDRY?

Eric: To become a type designer.
Nicole: To find what fit.

5. What were you reading before you became PROCESS TYPE FOUNDRY?

Eric: Robin Kinross and Jonathan Franzen come to mind.

Nicole: A lot of American history at the time of the Revolution.

6. What did you use to collect before you became PROCESS TYPE FOUNDRY?
Eric: I don’t collect.
Nicole: I’ve never had a collector’s mentality for objects, but I’ve always collected skills because I’ve always loved to learn.

7. What were you before PROCESS TYPE FOUNDRY?
Eric: A teacher, freelance graphic designer, office temp and construction laborer.
Nicole: A typography teacher, graphic designer, web designer and seamstress/tailor.

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Process Type Foundry has quickly become one of the most sought-after type foundries in the United States. Founded in 2002 by Eric Olson, the company is known for its unique contemporary typefaces, extensive extended character sets, and custom commissioned work. Its early font releases included the rounded sans serif Bryant, the quirky modular FIG Script, and Locator & Locator Display, a type family designed to represent the Twin Cities. Klavika, released in 2004, has become the foundry’s most popular typeface to date, appearing in everything from the Facebook logo to NBC’s on-air graphics and magazines such as Blender and Architecture MN. Process Type Foundry has worked with clients such as the New York Times Magazine, Thomson-Reuters, and Chevrolet to strengthen their identities with custom type work, and in 2005 Olson engineered the Walker Art Center’s new graphic identity. The studio’s work has been featured in the book Metro Letters and in numerous magazines, including Eye, Nylon, PRINT, étapes, HOW, STEP, Metropolis, Task Newsletter, and CAP&Design. Prior to forming Process, Olson taught at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD) and was a design fellow at the University of Minnesota Design Institute and a graphic designer at the Walker. A principal in the company, Nicole Dotin received her MA in Typeface Design from the University of Reading, England, and previously taught at MCAD. In 2006 she joined Olson as the foundry’s second designer.

www.processtypefoundry.com

The Walker Art Center and AIGA Minnesota present Insights, which brings graphic designers from around the country and the world to the Twin Cities.

Series tickets: $70 ($48 AIGA/Walker members)
Individual event tickets: $20 ($15; $10 students)

Lectures:
March 10 Process Type Foundry, Minneapolis
March 17 David Reinfurt, New York
March 24 Experimental Jetset, Amsterdam
March 31 Ellen Lupton, Baltimore

Tickets: 612.375.7600 walkerart.org/tickets

Please join us on Thursday, November 6, at 7 and 9 pm, for two screenings of Typeface. After the screening will be a conversation with its director, Justine Nagan; Bill Moran, St. Paul-based designer and letterpress guru who cowrote a book documenting Hamilton; and Greg Corrigan, designer and Hamilton technical director.

Typeface documents the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, the only such institution dedicated to the preservation, study, production, and printing of wood type. With 1.5 million pieces and more than 1,000 styles and sizes, the Hamilton’s is one of the premier wood-type collections in the world. The museum, however, is not just host to static holdings of preserved artifacts behind glass, but rather is an active educational center for letterpress workshops for designers and artists from across the Midwest and around the country, and a place where the last generation of skilled men and women who once created these intricate fonts—now in their seventies and eighties—can share their knowledge of this enduring craft.

In anticipation of this sneak preview, we interviewed Justine Nagan about the process of making Typeface.

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WALKER: How did you get involved with this film? Was your entry point the museum, the craft, or the people?

JUSTINE NAGAN: I’ve always had an interest in design and preservation, but my introduction to the museum was fairly random, and serendipitous! My husband Matt and I were coming back from a wedding in Door County and saw the sign for Two Rivers’ Ice cream sundaes… We stopped and stumbled on the museum.  Once inside we were just blown away by the collection and the space and I thought—this should be documented. After looking into it further, things clicked into place and it seemed the perfect collaboration for my first film.

W: Why make a film about an obsolete technology?

JN: I became fascinated with exploring the changing importance of analog technologies in our digital age. There is this theory that as we as a society sit at our computers all day, in the off hours, tactile and sensual experiences become all the more important. People are craving things with texture that they can hold in their hands—whether it’s knitting or playing guitar… Then there’s the whole nostalgia factor: LPs vs. ipod, film vs. video, letterpress vs. inkjet.

W: What kind of research did you do in preparation for the film?

JN: I reached out to people in the graphic design, letterpress, printing history and craft communities. I spent a lot of time on the internet. Paul Gehl at the Newberry was a wonderful resource.

W: Seeing as how you’re making a documentary about a museum which is already a very didactic source of information, how did you go about drawing the subtext out of the place?

JN: We use the museum as the locus and then follow several strands out from there. Through our cast of characters across the Midwest, all connected to the museum in some way, we are able to weave a thematic narrative that covers the various ideas we’re interested in. Among other things—how the value and purpose of older printing methods has changed as our society has transitioned into a digital age?  How is contemporary graphic art influenced by the history of the artform itself?  We try to raise questions about what to preserve, how to preserve it, and why it’s worth the effort.

W: Some obsolete technologies manage to take on a second life by addressing a different need or being adopted by a new (sub)culture in a different context. Do you think a revival or re-interpretation is inherent to any successful preservation movement?

N: I think evolution is key to preservation. Re-imagining and adapting technology, while maintaining the elements that made it interesting in the first place, ensures longevity of the medium. I think the new interest in letterpress and craft is sustainable. The current styles of letterpress may fade, only to be re-invented again by some future generation.

W: It’s hard to talk about your film’s potential impact in the design community without bringing up the immensely successful Helvetica — do you think Helvetica has opened any doors for your film, and how do you compare the two? Do you see them as complimentary films?

JN: I had been working on Typeface for years when Helvetica was released. At first, I was worried that they would compete, but then as soon as I saw Helvetica (and enjoyed it) I realized they were totally different works. I think Helvetica has shown what a voracious audience there is for films/discussions about type and design and that both films raise points about the prevalence and importance of type in society, but in the end they cover very different ground.

W: I was excited when I realized that Kartemquin Films, known for films such as Hoop Dreams and Stevie, was producing this. How is Kartemquin making this film differently than someone else would?

JN: Our films take a very long time to make—largely because we follow subjects over time and are invested in getting the story right. I think we worked to flesh out the documentary beyond just a film about type to be more of a discussion about the state of our culture in its current frenzied state. We try to show the opportunities and obstacles inherent in preserving a collection like Hamilton. I hope it resonates with audiences—both designers and laymen alike, and that it gets people thinking about how to take care of the things in their lives, jobs and communities that they value.

Nick Sherman

Photo: Justin Maconochie

In the exhibition Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes, which I co-curated last winter, the big box store figured prominently—a newer form of suburban retail that is undergoing change. While installing the exhibition, Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future, I happened to learn that Target had been planning a new specially designed store near Bloomfield Hills, a suburb of Detroit that is home to the famed Cranbrook campus, designed by Eero Saarinen’s equally famous architect father, Eilel, and the place where Eero grew up and established his world famous practice. I sat down with Jim Miller and Rich Varda to discuss this new store and its context of Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Andrew Blauvelt: Tell us about the design of your new Target store in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, which is home to Cranbrook, the educational community designed by Eliel Saarinen and where his son Eero lived and worked.

Jim Miller: When we first decided to bring Target to Bloomfield Hills and engaged the township, they had some very preconceived notions about what a retail store should look like. They referenced some upscale retail centers in their community, which we visited, but it was basically a lot of garden-variety retail design with upgraded materials. Given the location of this new store, we felt there was an opportunity to influence the direction of its design by going back and looking at Saarinen’s work. He was always mindful of this tension between community and the individual—how one influences the other. Given that Cranbrook is in their backyard, we felt it was natural to explore that context. If you look at Saarinen, especially with Eero, you see this tension between expressing the individual and expressing the community, for instance, at Yale with the Morse and Stiles dormitories. Yale just wanted institutional buildings, but he wanted individual housing to emerge, so that is what came out of that.

AB: At Yale, Saarinen also had a difficult preexisting context to deal with and a very irregular shaped site.

JM: Our site for the Bloomfield Hills store was also a difficult site—being a triangle, very tight and restrictive, affronting residents on two sides, and a major street on the third side—a transition of this really hard edge retail thoroughfare into this very upscale residential area.

AB: You’re also dealing with a broader kind of imaginary context in which everybody in the township knows the Cranbrook campus, its materials and its formal language—the way Eliel Saarinen played with the brickwork. At first glance it doesn’t look like the usual Target store at all. It almost looks like a civic building, perhaps a new library.

Rich Varda: Well, the large glass lobby is the most visible element in front of the building, which makes it look civic but it is entered from the other side from the parking field that is below the building.

JM: If you are familiar with Detroit, they have what is called the Michigan Left, which means you can’t just can’t turn in, you have to drive past the building and then return back to turn into the site. On an extremely busy road it gives the opportunity to help orient yourself to a single point of entry into this entire site, which we normally don’t like.

AB: Obviously, this is not the typical Target store. How about the larger context? Are these kinds of Target stores part of a general trend?

RV: We call them “unique stores.” And we have a unique store team, but most stores are modified in some way to better fit the community they are in, or to fit the retail center they are part of. Most stores are developed as part of a complex of buildings that is going to be a town center for the community or the neighborhood, and often the developer will develop a stylistic or material tone working with the community, and we work within that tone, or sometimes we help set that tone with the developer. Occasionally, we meet with the community directly, like Jim did on this store, and learn more about what they are about and what they are expecting and try to develop a statement that reflects those expectations.

Left to right: Andrew Blauvelt, Richard Varda, and Jim Miller; Photo: Cameron Wittig

AB: I imagine the reaction to this store is very favorable.

JM: It has been very favorable. It took nearly 18 months just to get to the point where the township was comfortable enough to allow us to go through the formal approval process, but once we got to that point they were very pleased. About two weeks ago I did get a call from the township supervisor who is the equivalent of a mayor and they had just got the signage up inside and the lights were coming on. He was just blown away.

It is a difficult thing to try to convey what the real building will look like through sketches and try to accurately represent the architecture and the materials. I think most people still don’t quite visually understand it in their minds. As much as we went through excruciating detail and explanation he said, “It still does not come across as the building comes across.”

RV: I think part of that is the because of the materials that Jim used on this design. The texture of materials, the contrast between the wood panels and the glass as compared to the rustic and substantive materials of the stone and how all of that affects the form of the building.

JM: Of course, Saarinen experimented with materials with the General Motors Tech Center and even with the IBM buildings in Rochester, Minnesota. We aren’t so much creating new materials, but we were applying materials much differently than normally would be found in retail.

RV: I think most people expect, because of their everyday experience, that retail architecture is the least expensive box you can have with some kind of pasted-on façade. It is very visible, but not a building of substance—a building of temporary qualities. It is certainly our objective at Target that not only are regular stores, but also modified and unique stores are buildings of substance—that the materiality, the form, and the function have been thought about and they all work together. It is not the least expensive possible box with a façade tacked onto it. I suppose to make a grandiose leap; Saarinen comes from that Finnish background that design should infuse every aspect of life. It is practically a national sport in Finland. It is fabulous to experience when you are there. Cranbrook represents that too. I think Target in a way has that same kind of spirit. The “Design for All” attitude asks why can’t good design infuse every aspect of life—from a Michael Graves toilet brush to utensils to furniture to buildings. That is what is expected as our brand, and our CEO supports that.

JM: Many times design is created and but too often it has absolutely nothing to do with people and their community. Eero Saarinen was really of his parent’s culture—of the Arts and Crafts, where design infused every aspect of the entire community.

AB: The Saarinens’ roots were in a culture where design was completely integrated.

JM: He totally integrated it. He naturally came out of that and knew how to bring that together. It is the same thing here. It is for the community and of the community.

AB: I think that is a really great point that when design and architecture is fully integrated into the largest context, which is the community, you do read it as substantive. Coming into town and setting up shop like an old Western storefront or using materials that break down in 20 years, or as long as it takes the plywood to rot. Then it is gone.

Your use of landscaping in this project also looks substantive. I recall Saarinen’s work on corporate campuses and how he basically started with a blank slate in most of these suburban locations and thus created his own context—designing not just the building, but natural environment.

JM: The landscaping requirements were extensive. Over-storied deciduous trees had to be significant. We normally use an inch and a half or two inch, but it was 4 inch. Evergreens specimens had to be a minimum of 14 feet tall. When they brought the landscape in and stockpiled it on the lot, it looked like a nursery. The shrubbery was already taller than myself.

RV: It is also laid out as an extension of the geometries and rhythms of the building similar to what Saarinen did with his corporate campuses—at least in the immediate vicinity of the buildings.

Photo: Justin Maconochie

AB: When you are working on these unique stores, given that the context is going to vary tremendously across the country, what are the aspects that you end up taking away that go into the library or the memory banks for the next project? Or do you feel like you find yourself starting from zero each time?

RV: We have definitely made an effort to document them, creating a kind of nomenclature of past examples. We have design guidelines handbook that we use that not only picks out the best examples, but also tries to understand if we are looking at a stylistic or regional vernacular. By doing so, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but we can improve upon it each time. Having that kind of vocabulary available helps when we go into discussions to negotiate our design with city staffs and neighborhood groups. We have a lot of material we can bring for discussion, and we have already gone through and we understand that we can afford that achieves our goals and their goals.

JM: Good design is a lot more complicated than it appears. In negotiating, when we go into communities, when we talk to design review boards, when we talk to planning commissions and trustees, the common ground is that they all shop. They all have some preconceived idea of what good design is in retail. It really is not that easy. We really have a way in which our guests have responded how we merchandise our store, and this was all truly the effect of the store plan. The store plan is kind of sacred because we really understand how that works, we really understand what our guests need, and how they shop. So when they come in and they ask us to put windows in here and there, it doesn’t quite work.

AB: And to clarify, this is the idea that if I go to the Target in Edina versus St. Louis Park, that I can find the laundry detergent because I know the basic store plan.

RV: Saarinen had a very careful understanding of the program, the functions, and the behavior of people in public buildings. We have studied the actions of people in our store environment extensively, and we understand shopping as well as other behaviors, including guest service, food service, checkout, and approaching the store from the parking lot. We try not to reinvent it all every time.

I will make another extreme comparison to Saarinen’s airports. When you are in an airport there are a lot of people moving through and toting their luggage around with them. But in our stores, everyone is pushing a shopping cart around with them, or pulling one—maybe with kids in it. That cart effects vertical circulation, whether parking garages can slope, and everything that the cart can bump into has to be thought through.

AB: The turning radius of the cart.

RV: The width of the carts crossing each other in an aisle is very important.

JM: One of our typical guests is a mom with children and to facilitate her needs and a two year old while negotiating the store. The signage, the way you find things, how the space is relayed so that it is easy so that it is almost intuitive we try to make it as intuitive for them to navigate through the store as possible. We are adding a complicated layer when we have a store on grade: it isn’t as easy as she gets out of the car and sees the entry. The condition in Bloomfield Hills is not quite the same, but the response has been favorable.

AB: It is interesting because at the Target in downtown Minneapolis the store is two stories. You have a similar situation where you are trying to brand something from the inside to the outside through a glass atrium. You have got the underground parking structure to deal with. How does the tight urban footprint fit into the Target store approach? Or do you generally just try to avoid it all together?

RV: We even have one now that is three levels of sales floors that replaced a department store that departed a very successful mall in Los Angeles and we wanted to make it work, but when you are taking shopping carts between floors you have to do it just right so that your guests will be happy to do it, so that they can travel all parts of the store.

AB: Right, it’s elevators or “Vermalators,” a kind of escalator for shopping carts.

RV: If you do anything wrong—all the way from getting into the parking, getting from your car into the store, and then getting back out with the cart to your car— it will affect your overall sales. That is a lot of dollars. So our attention to doing it correctly is one of our biggest research focuses. It is applied to every new store design.

AB: With the former department store example, does it become more of a department store, where the first floor is clothing, the second furniture, and so on?

RV: Actually, our three-level store was actually done like that. In that the first floor which is the main floor of the mall that it connects to is all apparel and soft lines. And it really looks like a department store when you come in. Then the middle floor is everyday products, like the market, the pharmacy, health and beauty and then the top floor are destination items, such as electronics and entertainment, which really pull people up there.

AB: Saarinen is extremely prolific in that he only practiced on his own for only 11 years. Although he practiced in so many typologies of architecture—college and corporate campuses, churches, airports—he did not as far as I know build any retail structures. It would be interesting to imagine how he would have handled a store design.

RV: Right, it is tragic what was missed because he did die at a relatively young age for architects. He could have easily had another 25 years in his practice.

JM: They used to say that architecture is an old man’s career. By the time you assimilate all of this knowledge and experience, when you reach the zenith of your career, is the age when he passed away—at age 51. But he had an amazing number of projects.

Photo: Justin Maconochie

AB: Saarinen’s approach to the idea of branding was, I think, really a head of his time in terms of doing major corporate buildings from John Deere, to IBM, to General Motors to TWA. There is a famous photograph we have in the exhibition of “Black Rock,” the CBS headquarters in New York and on the top of it he puts the famous CBS logo. He certainly never shied away from the corporate embrace.

RV: It is interesting that his in terms of branding, he really cared about the idea that how does this building solution emerge out of everything in relationship to it. Not just the nature of the community or the program itself, but rather the idea of what the activity is, for example, the TWA terminal and the expression of flight and the glamour of air travel. And then his corporate headquarters are about the business and the activities of a headquarters and how should architecture reflect that kind of disciplined thinking. What a contrast to the iconic names of architecture today. I think they have allowed too much success to happen simply by creating architectural signatures, which can be repeated from place to place with minor modification. Without really thinking through how this solution is correct and admitting the fact that if you do each solution based on the nature of its location and you might not have a visible signature for yourself, which makes it harder for you to create your own brand as an architect. Saarinen reflects a very interesting testament about values as an architect.

JM: This particular store is a result of the dialogue with the township and was not so much about branding this building for Target. Because at the same time I was also working with a store outside of Boston, the same concept raised up, but it is truly a building branded for Target. The aesthetic is 180 degrees, it is metal panel and precast panel and a very clean very simple, very straight forward but in its own right, a very compelling design. This was a store about branding the community. It was personifying that aspect of community.

RV: At Target everyone understands what we call our Best Company Ever goals and objectives and they are really four things we always think about: how to be best in our community, how to be best for our guests, how to be best for our team members, and how to be best for our shareholders. So they are all balanced together and that means a lot about the people in the buildings and the people living around the buildings.

AB: It seems like this particular store is a win-win. A big win for the community to get the kind of store architecture that they desire at the same time.

JM: We hope so.

RV: We are counting on that.

AB: How do you innovate within the same retail typology and with an in-house team? Because it is different when you are moving from one type of building to another, one day it is hospitals and the next day it is an airport.

RV: One of our areas of innovation, that is the least visible, are circulation issues for stores that are not on grade or are multileveled and within larger complexes. Vertical transportation issues of materials as well as people are extremely complicated. We have a store that recently opened in Brooklyn that is on the second and third level of a three-story retail center that we built and developed. The loading dock is on grade, part of the stock room is below grade, part of the stock room is above the store, part of the stock room is at store level. There is also a 500-car parking garage. It gets incredibly complex and if you don’t have the right innovative solution, it isn’t going to succeed financially in the long run.

JM: One of the things that are different then say private practice is that with Target stores the rules are very rigorous and fairly rigid because we know what works. But on the other hand, because we know those so well, we can explore other areas. We can be much more efficient by really expanding design innovation by knowing the constraints.

RV: I am the Senior Vice President for store design. Store design in-house at Target is almost 300 people. They are equally divided between architecture, engineering, and store planning. I don’t think any of our competitors have a group of that size. They rely upon outside consultants almost exclusively.

We just got an award an hour go from Xcel Energy for being energy partners on five different stores. We will receive large rebates for what was achieved on those stores, and that is different, I think. The Design for All philosophy can then be part of our culture as an internal team and every team member understands it and applies it as Jim has to this store.

JM: It brings a real clarity when you have 299 other people that are speaking the same language.

AB: There must be such incredible efficiency here. I have an in house design team and there is shorthand that happens and it is not like you’re constantly re-interpreting everything.

RV: On our corporate website there is an area for Target acronyms that is 32 pages long.

JM: Don’t test us on that.

AB: Don’t worry, I won’t. What would be your ideal test store if you could have a test store? It sounds like you are more of a learning culture – learning from every project.

RV: We do tests all the time.

JM: I’ve always tried to see the store as a non-building, you come in and you feel like you are part of an exterior environment. I would love to see glass where we typically put stock, and store where we put stock—with everything open to this glass box on the outside. So it really blurs that line between inside and outside, but I think I just broke every rule, so that it would probably NEVER happen.

RV: You are free to sketch it all you want too.

AB: What makes Target’s support of the Walker and MIA’s joint presentation of the Saarinen exhibition so meaningful?

JM: There is certainly a design-for-all attitude in Saarinen’s work that we support. Everyone deserves good design. It can be accessible; it doesn’t need to be this kind of upper echelon, out-of-reach thing. I always refer back to my freshman year in college; in architecture school we had to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book talks about how you can put all these parts together, which are meaningless, but if you put them together in a fashion that makes sense, they do have meaning. I think people can understand that.

RV: There was an old department store system of merchandising called “Good, Better, Best,” where department stores would relegate good design to the best. Meaning, you would pay more to get good design. Our attitude at Target is not to divide items. Design can go anywhere. The good, the better, and the best may all be in a number of options and in the quality of the overall product. Design should be there at all levels.

AB: I think that is what Saarinen was trying to get at as well, in trying to impart the experience of good design to the public. The United States is a vast and diverse country. When you go to Finland or Japan, these countries are smaller and the culture more homogenous and it is easier to transmit those values. So it is really important to have that conversation coming from a major retailer.

On a recent weekend afternoon Kyle Blue (former Walker Design Fellow) and I had a nice little iChat conversation about Dwell’s (somewhat) recent redesign. Here are the highlights:

Chad: How many people are on the design team, and how did you become design director?

Kyle: There are four designers including myself. I worked at Dwell for two years as a senior designer under the founding creative director Jeanette Hodge Abbink and then at Apple for a stint before returning to Dwell in this position. I was hired back by Sam Grawe, Dwell’s editor-in-chief. Sam has been here from the beginning and we worked together before I went to Apple. He was a Senior Editor at the time. (Side note: Kyle recently hired Ryan Nelson, a current Walker Fellow, as a senior designer at Dwell.)

Was redesigning the magazine part of what enticed you back to Dwell?

We discussed the prospect of a redesign, but it wasn’t stipulated in a contract or anything formal like that. It was something the company was considering. Sam and I were happy to take on the challenge and to bring our experiences to the table in a fresh way.

It appears to be an editorial as well as visual redesign. How long did the entire process take and how closely did you work with the editorial department?

We began brainstorming the project in March 2007 at a creative retreat in Sea Ranch. We spent a lot of time looking at how we tell stories and what we do best and what we don’t do well at all. The whole team–edit, photo, and design–considered everything from the voice to the image to the whole structure of the page. We wanted to enrich the reader experience with things like more residences, more resources, and information graphics. Both My House and Off The Grid are good examples of these changes.

So that was March of 07 and the launch of the redesign was with the February 08 issue. Not quite a year?

The redesign took about 8 months. A lot of long days and late nights, completely fueled by pizza. Thankfully the logo mark is solid and we didn’t have to start completely from scratch. This was a particularly difficult project to accomplish while adhering to producing the normal 10 issues a year. It was a very busy schedule.

What were some of the guiding principles, design wise, that were set out for the magazine with the redesign?

One thing to note here is that Dwell has always had a structure that has worked well with a variety of content. Going forward we really wanted to create a system that allowed us the same flexibility, but with richer organization. Our goal was to evolve the design and to restructure sections of the magazine that needed to change due to how the magazine has evolved over the years. By this I mean, sections have come and gone, stories have gotten longer, and some things needed refocusing. This was an opportunity to bring a fresh design perspective to the magazine that has changed considerably over its 7 year lifetime.

One section that was problematic in the past was “In The Modern World.” It started as a perforated tear out, grew to a 5 page back of the book story, then as much as a 20 page front of book section. The feeling was that the old design had ceased to do a good job of presenting the products and content to our readers in a way that indicated what the purpose of the section was–to highlight new and noteworthy events, products, and furniture for that particular month. The section relies heavily on a range of disparate art, supplied photography of products, books, and exhibitions. With the new design we’ve approached this section as an insert within the magazine. We’ve deployed a unique grid and typographic styling that doesn’t appear elsewhere in the magazine as a way to differentiate it. The pages are subdivided into quadrants and each page can now hold anywhere from 1 to 4 items. The design is very flexible and capable of handling varying content in an organized and clear fashion.

I would say for the novice it might be considered a rather subtle shift overall. Since the bones stayed the same, it must have been more about the surface elements. What were some of the things that evolved, beside “In The Modern World?” Like typefaces, etc…

We’ve also changed the size of the magazine. We’ve trimmed a inch of the width, which meant all of the grids would need to change as well. The height remained the same which is especially nice–if you hang on to your past issues of Dwell, they will continue to look handsome on the shelf. The spine is now a color and all of the typographic details still align with the past issues. We’ve picked two new fonts: Greta and Avenir. We wanted fonts that had a bit more range to bring more variety to the pages, while maintaining a strong typographic foundation. Another shift worth mentioning is the treatment of both the Front of Book and Back of Book. In these sections the captions now fall along the bottom of the page and the primary font is Avenir. This helps to create a distinction from the Feature Well, which has unique typographic treatments (captions, fonts, etc).

I have always found Avenir to be a very “friendly” font. What kind of voice do you think it has brought to the magazine, and how did you come about using Greta?

We looked at a lot of fonts. This was really where the redesign began for the design team. Everyone pulled a number of fonts that they felt could work for the magazine. This was a fun process and a good opportunity for me to learn about my team. The team got behind Avenir because of the variety of weights and because the letterforms are clean and modern. Greta also allowed us a flexible typographic family. We were the first publication in the United States to adopt it. We worked with Peter Bil’ak to create a mono-spaced version for Dwell. It’s a nice complement to the other fonts and we use it primarily for captions and labeling in infographics.

I assume that your font choices helped to inform more decisions about the magazine? If the clean forms of Avenir felt sympathetic to the architecture was that the overall goal, clean and modern?

We always aim for clean and clear presentation. That sentiment has always been very authentic to Dwell. We strive to present the stories we are telling in the most compelling way. Avenir definitely speaks to that mission of the brand.

Switching gears back to the process, did you have to make a lot of adjustments based on feedback from the other departments?

At various points throughout the redesign, we would sit down with the publisher and editor-in-chief to discuss our goals. Once we landed on our fonts and grid structure, we set out to make sure all of the sections evolved to best accommodate the complimentary editorial changes in the right way. The Cover was definitely the most difficult part of the design to land on. We must have worked on this for 6 straight months… it was always happening in the background.

Did you have to think about advertisements at all when you were redesigning? I feel that a lot of companies have tried to copy the aesthetic of Dwell photography and therefore differentiating between what is content and what is not could be tricky.

One of the moves we made to create a distinction was moving the captions to the bottom of the page in the Front and Back of Book. Since they are always accompanied by a rule, it helps to identify the page as editorial. Another consideration is the amount of Right hand pages versus Left hand pages. Some of these moves allowed us to make improvements to the overall pacing of the magazine.

Since the sections have certain looks that stay the same from issue-to-issue the feature well has always been somewhere that changes with every issue. Since it is always evolving how did you go about rethinking the well?

Each issue of Dwell has a theme–Prefab, Sustainability, Small Spaces, and Color to name a few. We design the feature well in a way which explores the particular theme graphically. At times the decisions can be really subtle. For instance, with the Feb 08 issue “ Color” we chose light background tints for all of the facing pages (pink, blue, green, orange, yellow, and purple). We made sure not to duplicate any of the color pairings and linked the color of the captions to the background color. The grid changes from the Front and Back of Book, captions no longer run along the bottom of the page and the primary fonts are Greta and Greta Mono. We’ve also opened up the paragraph column widths throughout to indicate a longer read.

Are there any other magazines that you like out there, or think does a good job with content and design?

At the moment I am really into Fantastic Man, Tate Etc., and Esquire (UK).

I can understand the first two, having never seen Esquire (UK) what about it do you like?

The UK Esquire was recently redesigned so that may have something to do with my current affinity. It doesn’t feel like what you might expect from a gents magazine, and that is really refreshing. They created a custom title font and it is really quirky and I quite like that.

I understand you had a recent opportunity to talk with Eric Spiekermann about the redesign. Any interesting points come up in that conversation?

It was a really unique opportunity to sit down with Erik and review the new Dwell. He has long been a fan of the magazine and is a friend of our founder. There were some things that he liked and there were also some moments that he didn’t like. He thought the design was pretty busy at times and really doesn’t like the use of the Condensed Avenir. I learned from Erik that Frutiger never drew a Condensed version of Avenir. He didn’t like that we had used it so much in that first issue.

Ahhh… I can see his point about the condensed.

We were really starved for a variety of weights in the past so Erik will have to forgive us for using it.

Was there anything you really wanted to do with the redesign that was rejected?

Several covers! I really wanted to do a cover with a series of 3 images, built around the idea that we always cover 3 houses in our feature well (which explore the theme of each issue). The 3 images could also provide an overview of each issue, pulling from all stories, not just the features. The idea being that we present the variety of content that is essential to Dwell (shelter, design figures, and products). But that got killed.

I noticed there is little interaction between text and image. Is that a conscious decision?

Absolutely. Keeping the type out of the images really speaks to our approach, as well as to our method of production. Dwell is printed on a web press so at times registration is an issue. The less type we knock out of an image the fewer problems will arise. But, more importantly the photography is quite beautiful–it doesn’t need to be cluttered with type to get your attention!

Were there any other production issues that informed design decisions? The speed at which you have to produce each issue? etc…

What we’ve learned from printing definitely informed the final weight of Greta Mono. Since we commissioned Peter to produce this for Dwell as a caption font, which normally knocks out of images, the weight was important. We did several rounds to get this just right. We kept asking Peter to thicken it up a bit each time.

About how long does a single issue take?

It takes about 5 weeks for an issue of Dwell to make it through design, this includes production and image pre-press.

That’s pretty efficient. How many months in advance do you work?

Well it is the beginning of July and we are finishing the design of October. On Monday, while closing the design of October, we will start thinking about November. These issues will overlap for about two weeks.

Do you guys have production meetings daily with the entire magazine staff?

We meet as a group every Tuesday, where we review the progress of 3 issues at a time. Our studio space allows us to freely collaborate with each other and the edit team pretty organically.

Being four issues into the new look how is it all working for you? Is there anything in the new look of the magazine you want to redesign yet?

We’ve actually got five issues back from the press at this point. So far so good. I really like where we are, but the nature of working for a publication is that your are continually working on the next issue and evolving the product. We’re still tweaking things and learning as we go. It’s a great project to be a part of.

Is there anything I haven’t hit upon that you would like to discuss?

Yeah, I have to thank my extremely dedicated art team. Each and every one of them were vital to the redesign, and to the work we do daily. Brendan Callahan, Geoff Halber, Kathryn Hansen, Suzanne LaGasa, Dakota Keck, Kate Stone and the photo team.