We often have the pleasure of entertaining visitors to the Design Studio. However, this is the first time–to our knowledge–that said visitors sent thank you cards composed of deconstructed Walker print ephemera:

Thank you Margot Harrington of Pitch Design Union and Chad Kouri of The Post family !!

Gigantic poster / tape drawing (I think) designed by Inva Cota and Golnaz Esmaili (thanks commenter) for Andrew Blauvelt’s workshop at Yale.
Yeah I see the resemblance.

01 Magazine highlights Letterheady, an all-letterhead-all-the-time Tumblr blog. A few samples from the arts and culture submissions.

Above:

Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Ray Charles

Ozzy Osbourne, Guerrilla Girls, art collector Harry “Hunk” Anderson

Roy Lichtenstein, Saul Bass, Paul Rand

WijNu Experimental Theatre Group, MoUvEmEnT DADA, Frank Zappa

Frank Lloyd Wright

I’ve been digging through a lot of online image libraries recently, and thought I might post a few of them up here. The New York Public Library runs a Digital Gallery featuring over 700,000 images of photos, maps, scientific illustrations, illuminated manuscripts, and whatnot. Above is a selection from a great series of astronomical illustrations by Eteinne Leopold Trouvelot.

The library also offers online exhibitions populated with their digital assets, such as Heavens Above: Art and Actuality, an exhibition presenting Trouvelot’s images next to contemporary NASA generated imagery.

This has been posted everywhere, so I thought I’d post it again: Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewing Julian Assange of Wikileaks on e-Flux. Interspersed throughout the interview are samples from Metahaven’s hypothetical identity for Wikileaks. The second part of the interview will feature Assange responding to artists, including Ai Weiwei and Metahaven, asking him questions by video.

Also, Metahaven will be presenting their new project FaceState, an exploration into the intersection of social media and government, in the Walker’s upcoming graphic design show, Graphic Design: Now In Production later this year.

The DEATH of X led me to make X.  I found that the DEATH
was not that of the form of X; the DEATH was/is in the heads of most
people who attempt to X.

The X is a mirror of the world.
The world is falling apart.

Red Line or Gift to a Tree

Meg and Sam Shiffler   December 2010

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4qxud20xg8[/youtube]

Matthew Carter, widely considered to be “the most significant designer of type in America”, was recently named as one of the MacArthur Fellows for 2010. Here’s a little Walker history for you—what follows is an entry on Matthew Carter from our 2005 Permanent Collection catalogue:

Matthew Carter
British, b. 1937

Commissions
Walker typeface (1994–1995)

Exhibitions
Graphic Design in America: A Visual Language History (1989; catalogue, tour)
Walker Design Now (1996)

Since its inception, the Walker Art Center has embraced design not only as a programming activity but also as an important element in forming its public image. The Walker helped invent the modernist institutional identity for museums, which favored sans-serif typefaces, generous white space, and a grid system to arrange words and images. This style had dominated its graphic identity for more than thirty years.

In the early 1990s, the Walker sought to more openly reflect its multidisciplinary programs and culturally diverse audiences. In this spirit of self-examination and shifting demographics, Matthew Carter was commissioned to design a new typeface to mirror the changing institution. His forty-five years of experience in creating typefaces in all major technologies—from metal to photographic to digital—would be invaluable in the realization of the commission. Then–Design Director Laurie Haycock Makela formulated a concept that would guide the development of the typeface: “We began with the idea that a type-face could be an identity—a font rather than a logo—that would run through the system like blood.”1 The prospective design would also be diverse and flexible enough to reflect the variety of the institution’s activities. Taken together, these two ideas would serve to dis­mantle the Walker’s monolithic, modernist identity and would focus attention on the potential of language for graphic expression.

The resulting design, entitled Walker, is a variable typeface whose ultimate look and feel is determined by the designer. Walker is intended for headline purposes and thus exists as an all caps alphabet. In its base form it is a bold sans serif, a style that provides an important link to the institution’s previous typographic palettes. Describing its basic structure, Carter states, “I think of [it] rather like store window mannequins with good bone structure on which to hang many different kinds of clothing.”2 What distinguishes Walker from any other font are its “snap-on” serifs. By using various computer keystroke commands, the designer can choose among five different types of serifs to attach to any character.
In addition, horizontal rules can be placed above and below letters to underline and/or “overline” text—a feature, like a clothesline, from which letters can be hung.3 To realize the technical innovation of the snap-on serifs, Carter employed a strategy similar to one he developed for Devanagari, a typeface used for Hindi text that allows dependent vowels to be typeset in the correct location of a letterform with simple keystrokes.4

The Walker typeface provides a distinctive look that affords great variability in its composition. Conceptually, it represents a revision of modernist typography insofar as it focuses attention on the space between letters, words, and lines of text. The result, however, is not so much about voids as it is about spanning them, as designer Moira Cullen notes: “In Walker the serifs are the ultimate connectors, the antithesis in type of a modernist apartheid. Each character holds its own frame, but an inspired or decisive stroke can will the letterform to nuzzle its neighbour or extend an arm or leg across the white divide.”5

Andrew Blauvelt

Notes
1. Quoted in Moira Cullen, “The Space Between the Letters,” Eye 5, no. 19 (Winter 1995): 73.
2. Quoted in ibid., 74.
3. Margaret Re, Typographically Speaking: The Art of Matthew Carter (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003), 26.
4. Ibid., 26–27.
5. Cullen, “The Space Between the Letters,” 75.