Skip to main content
Loading Explore guides…
Language as Human Experience · Acedra
Home
Explore
Literature
Language as Human Experience
Sign in to save
Chat
If YouTube asks you to sign in, open the video on YouTube.
Watch on YouTube
Reload player
Transcript
70 segments
Copy
Hide video
0:06
language and letter forms have taken us over we can no longer not see a red octagon with a white border and consider the impulse that its suggestion is anything other than stop language and its visual components of geometric shapes that make up our alphabet have become one of our senses quite possibly our six something so intrinsically a part of our Human Experience like sight smell or touch that our experience of being human is quite literally defined by language's everpresent
0:49
suggestibility be it seen read spoken or heard language has become a prosthetic technology something literally attached to our reasoning ways quite simply we need to read we've been conditioned to spell into meaning as The Wheel of Fortune and Scrabble continually remind us we've even attached numeric values to letter forms as in how much is an L Worth or would you like to buy a vowel
1:33
whether read thought spoken or heard we have developed an instinctual need to converse both to ourselves and to others this conversation does not exist without language the novelist William Burrows suggested that language itself might just be a virus one that we can no longer even recognize as such because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with its human host language an infectious agent we try not to catch so much as it catches us like the common cold or the comma
2:20
itself it is language and letter form and sign that allows for the passing on of hard one experience it is language that allows us to see then also repair it is the translation of word and symbol into communication that allows us to
2:43
love you have been asked to come up with a logo for a new restaurant in Chicago unfortunately the owners don't yet have a name with which to Brand their new restaurant they tell you a few things about the cuisine the food will be part Spanish with equal parts French and Mediterranean with a wine list from the same region they tell you there will only be long communal tables to seat eight and that guests will have to sit with each other the client says you need to work with the chef and with the
3:20
architect who describes the interior as looking like a sauna lined with cedar and with a wall of green glass bottle stacked vertically in the back and then the client says with all that to go on can you come up with a name for the new restaurant and finally your eight years of French lessons from the fifth grade on come in handy and you mentioned to the client that the word with in French is a you set the four simple lowercase letters in a bold sand serif and then to
3:59
add a sense of emphasis you draw a heavy box underneath the business card you print with an image of the cedar walls and then you diecut the black box off its front face you Echo the horizontal cedar planks of the Interior on the front face of the menu with horizontal lines that seem to cancel out the menu items themselves leaving just the name of the restaurant bold and intact and then you pen a concise poem with which every guest check is delivered with these words here with you
4:39
over there a restaurant called
4:46
a [Applause] thanks I feel like I just did a pop song now for my next number as a designer you've looked at the European caves of Lasco and Chau where images are scratched rubbed drawn and sprayed onto floors walls caverns and corridors pictures that Vex their dark environment with that Wy sense of vision and prophecy that is either human wish fulfillment experiential projection or literal description we will never know whether these pictures are pleading or praying describing or
5:36
recording scientific dating methods have established a nearly uncontestable age of many of these drawings going back 30,000 plus years but what's important to note in these images is that these images convey an experience of the physical world through lines and marks the lowest common denominator of graphic notations notations which strangely might not be too disimilar to the lines and marks we use to navigate and Corral our everyday activities these dots and lines were
6:18
found in southern France at a cave called Neo placed approximately 16600 ft from the mouth of the cave these visual notations of line and rounded form suggest not only human presence but human reasoning as well what could possibly account for the seemingly stray arrangement of some of the dots when compared to the highly rigid and formal arrangement of others like these 14 black dots executed in two neatly stacked rows of seven each similarly these four horizontal lines so equally
7:01
spaced both apart and in length that they go the Mind into the realm of mathematics and numeric accounting these images imply that human expression needs and has needed for thousands of years a pallet of graphic marks lines and dots to denote the urgency of observation of awareness of Consciousness itself but what started off as Grunts and snarls has evolved and codified itself into nouns verbs and the Chicago Manual of style we have created extraordinarily complex alphabets and we have split
7:50
typographic hairs in differentiating Ariel from helvetica we have created varying seraps like the Shar Jagged points of engravers Gothic versus the blunt slabs of Clarendon we've created compositional tricks with strict rules for aligning letters and ways for distinguishing what is and isn't what we mean to say we've created letter forms that wreak money and finance we've produced type faces that suggest the era in which they were drawn and faces whose appearance are unmistakable from the
8:32
machine for which they were originally created but language and typography are more than words they have sounds slights forms which convey and forms which dissuade they have syntax and as anyone who has had the peculiar pleasure of having to learn English as a second language will attest they have rules with exception exceptions weird the verticals and horizontals strokes and curves that we use to communicate do so with an alarming versatility given their meager number
9:16
what separates the word free from the word flee both literally and conceptually is but the most barely discernable difference in stretch and Arc of the lower case r and the lowercase l a geometric difference that doesn't even have a place in our alphabet the difference between one man and an army of men is a single e it is amazing that we can multi multiply ourselves with a single vowel or that an arm has strength but an army has might an ear can hear and to blame is
9:57
lame sure this is the stuff that made Dr Seuss a household name but as in any relationship little things make a big difference whether it is simply the order of two words that have been switched to convey an adolescent beas and Butthead style warning or the simple exclusion of a single letter that creates an orchestral craft in the mind the structural possibilities of our letter forms create a rich field for both direct meaning as well as statements of artistic and poetic
10:42
ambiguity the words are there they will not be dissuaded nor deterred they will continue their plea their garish glow towards literacy received
11:00
it's the graphic designer's job to make these type of graphic decisions and you are knowingly or not surrounded by the surfit of their daily toil whether to make the typography of a sign red or blue can you as designer get away with just some elegant script on a sign or are the powers above you coming down with a Litany of legal mumbo jumbo that you need to incor inate leaving little room for illustration or charming typography or if when designing a no dog's alloud sign should you use the
11:39
silhouette of a German Shepherd a bulldog a Mastiff or can you get away with a poodle a terrier or a basset hound our private tastes and pathologies are perpetually making making themselves visible altering the landscape and addressing our attention these pictures be they logo or photo are but the end result of a set of business-minded decisions that more often than not are approved by someone with as little knowledge or interest in the history of visual form making or
12:22
typography as a drag queen might be in the history of say catapult design this is to say our man-made environments are dotted with pictographic photographic and linguistic signs and markers that purport to orient inform and organize Us in the best way possible while admitting that the human race in all its communal decisionmaking is still so invariably flawed that it allows the development and approval of logos like this
13:01
this logo uses a type face called remedy which for the Chicago Park District was used without any alterations to the individual letter forms themselves except for scale but what exactly is this typ face a remedy for the prevalence of Highly versatile type faces such as helvetica it staggers the mind that this logo could have been approved and adopted by one of the great cities in the United States to sign its glorious Park system this logo type is barely good enough for a kindergarten
13:45
fundraiser let alone for an urban park of worldclass renown examples of such ill-conceived logos and amateurish typography exist everywhere you look Chicago signs its great parks with drek and we greet our City's visitors with equal typographic and illustrational garbage often appropriately placed on garbage receptacles themselves even the logo for Chicago's Millennium Park is a poor attempt at visually interpreting the energy and graceful beauty of Chicago's $500 million
14:27
Jewel the MMP of the Park's logo are meant to suggest the abstract arcs and curves of Frank Gary's Bandshell but in reality these strokes and curves are barely expressive enough for the Chicago suburb of Mount Prospect which should probably just steal the MP logo so the Millennium Park can start
14:55
aresh the greatest design Casualty that has befallen Chicago's Park system is the slow disappearance and replacement of these signs inquiries regarding their history were fruitless so we must surmise that they were created in the Years following World War II when the air was thick with a Vogue for all things biomorphic as exemplified by Raymond Lo's Boomerang patterns Alexander calder's mobiles and Stables as well as the form-based signage system employed by our country's National
15:34
Forest the Chicago Park signs were cast in metal with the letters burnished and slightly raised off their green backgrounds incredibly durable over half a century later these signs show no sign of rust or ill age they've patina beautifully withstanding all the brutality that Chicago's hot summers and miserably cold Winters can thwart these signs are stately and responsibly demarcate place but about 15 years ago the powers that be thought it was time for an update and we now have these signs
16:19
instead well what's changed well first the overall shape of the sign is now rectilinear or square instead of trapezoidal the colors have been updated from green and silver to the questionably urant Hues of purple red and cream we've gone from all caps to upper and lowercase letters and the name of the park is now in two lines instead of a single line one might ask what did the new design take from the old sign which had been so silently doing its business all this
16:56
time well the new sign added just the cheekiest nod to its predecessor's uniquely angled shape by adding a slanting red line to separate the background fields of purple and cream that's all 50 years of service and all you get is a red line and let's not even get started on how these new and improved signs are withstanding Chicago's climate just a decade plus into their residency
17:34
and since we're in the land of authoritative signage let's take this opportunity to point our attention to the most joyously wonderful sign in the entire city of Chicago most likely drawn in the 1960s the schneer proportions defy believability what with its supermodel ized waste the oversized chain is Illustrated with just the right amount of tension to it its final link turned red becoming the collar that barely restrains the Beloved pup from leaning into a single
18:17
stemmed six-petal flower that yearns away from the Curious canine the flowers pull to the right equal by the chains taught pull to the left the poor snower locked into a frozen moment of Desire yearning and
18:39
restraint this is what signage can do notice the designer commanding use of just two colors black for the dog and the chain and the flowers stem the use of red for the dog's collar the flower petals and the large apparently handdrawn typography below these graphic elements create a formal composition of circular absorption that our contemporary signs have at the behest of every impending lawsuit all but banished these signs began disappearing about 15 years ago and then with what
19:23
can only be referred to as a Divine or design intervention the Curious snower started making a comeback as newly printed signs started once again showing up all around Chicago's Parks yes the powers that be demanded that the uniquely drawn red letters of the previous sign be replaced with something more tough and demanding a close scrutiny of the snower and the flower itself shows not a single der derivation from the original so there is hope after all that another great and
20:04
favorite sign can yet make a
20:13
comeback you have adapted your interest in letter forms into a number of media this installation at the Brown Line mantro Station on Chicago's CTA uses 3177 illumin letter forms each 12 in tall stacked one at top the other initially the words spelled the names of the station's neighboring streets but you have broken each street name into two lines Mont on top of Rose Ash on top of land for example then to create further problems with immediate legibility there are no spaces between
20:52
any of the street names so a conventional left to right reading gives you Oak Herm waham veton veritable nonsense inspired by equal amounts of the graphic forms of crossword puzzles and suduku and the great Anonymous tille typography in New York City's Subway and by the formal geometry of Saul lt's white grid sculptures this permanent installation is a immediately identifiable it's language but simultaneously puzzling what does it say the aluminum letters also blur their
21:40
way around and into the train station's helvetica based wayfinding signage system partaking in the station's directional messaging albeit quite obliquely it's worth noting that the work is installed just beyond the Turn Style in a corridor a place of Passage not a place for waiting more a place for coming and going which further th thwarts a quick read especially if you hear a train approaching and need to race past the art to the platform
22:21
above so with merely 26 letters and 10 numerals plus a small caval of punctuation marks we invent the visual landscape of Our Lives transforming and rearranging this small kit of parts to yield the calendars we follow the time on our watches to which we obsess the holidays and events that Mark our lives and the notes in our pockets that keep it all together we make meaning when we speak when we listen when we write and when we recall all the endless activity of human reasoning
23:01
that is the foundation of Consciousness with the exception of the Zen master Among Us the parade of voices we listen to both silently and publicly remain in a constant state of receptivity and creation pulling language together to solve the ineffable to make ends meet and to figure out what's for dinner we think it we hear it we write it and so it
23:44
is you have been hired to create a new logo for art Chicago an annual exhibition of all things painting photography and sculpture in its Heyday at Navy Pier you could see a Picasso in the same line of sight as a murakami or a painting by Philip pearlstein next to a ridiculously pornographic sculpture by Jake and Dinos Chapman but as often happens the fair began to lose some of its star power eclipsed by other fairs in Miami and New York so the folks responsible for art
24:18
Chicago are putting a great deal of Hope on the newly minted logo and related gra graphic collateral that you have been commissioned to conceive after a few sleepless nights you finally decide that an ink blot a roar shock like drawing should become the visual icon that will announce the rebranded exhibition you produce 12 ink blots by randomly dropping black paint onto a sheet of paper and then mirror the composition by folding the paper pressing the image against
24:52
itself the resulting images are marvelously symmetrical and artfully abstract you then coin the phrase see what you want to see to go underneath the ink plot as the claring call that will find its way onto Street banners tickets print ads business cards signs and t-shirts with the approval of a visual campaign that smarts as both invitation and challenge you bask in a job well done and then a few days days later right before a full page ad is due to a prominent International art magazine you
25:34
get a panicked phone call from your client you can't use the ink plot she says in a voice stretched thin from nervous anxiety but you approved it you reply incredulously no she says we can use an ink blot we just can't use the ink blot you selected why not you ask because she says the one you selected looks like a woman lying on her back with her legs spread wide open
26:28
really this actually happened the things I have to
26:42
do every type face suggests an attitude an immediate recognizable look that purports to address a specific audience the classic type face gamand would be quite appropriate for an encyclopedia while a type face like black pearl is more appropriate for a heavy metal Rock poster the choice of type faces are virtually endless as this screenshot of a typical type Library just partial at that will attest it takes just a mouse click however to change something types set like this
27:18
light and elegant serif paragraph on your left into this dark and heavy sanss serif paragraph on your right that slight bit of design responsibility that simple visual shift was most infamously enacted by the designer David Carson who in the mid 1990s while designing for a music magazine called ray gun retypes set would he consider to be a boring interview with a fading rock star into the unreadable type face called zap dingbats a type face where each symbol
27:54
corresponds to a specific letter of the alphabet and then he had the audacity and Brilliance to actually send it to the
28:05
printer another designer tbbor cman created an early digital type face called religion that with brilliant secular logic consisted of only the letter G so no matter what you typed all you got was this
28:32
like typography spelling isn't what it once was in the rush to be first to not be late to meet our everpresent deadlines we're all typing fast and proof reading less relying on auto spell check is no guarantee that your sentences won't confuse here for here or there for there if spelling is anything it sure isn't experimental so when asked to consider a new logo for your favorite college radio station Northwestern universities 89.3 FM W Nur spelling becomes the
29:19
conceptual tool on which your proposed logo is hung you envision the station's moniker Chicago's sound experiment being retypes set into a new logo with a crazy alternate spelling you've selected a strong and legible type face called knockout whose letters are Compact and naturally comfortable together the logo reproduces perfectly at both large and small sizes the counters which are those closed negative spaces within certain letters these allow each word to read
29:57
even when printed on difficult and unforgiving substrates like newsprint or cotton like everything you do the proposed logo reads well in black and white but could just as successfully be printed in orange red blue green purple or even mauve and despite all this the student clientele can't appreciate the alternative spelling conceit and cannot see the proposed logo as anything other than an error despite their stated mission of being free form and open to experimentation another logo for the
30:51
trash so yes the words are misspelled but language is always in a state of trans transformation like a continental drift of ideas it's hard to believe that 20 years ago none of us ever uttered the word super in front of size or snail in front of male let alone would we have ever considered of putting three W's together and think it might sound like anything other than a stammer if we look at Old English we can see the evolutionary quality of spelling in in all its ever shifting over time
31:33
eyes became eyes great became great a city became a city and a beautiful piece of visual poetry only or onely became only the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary lists over 250,000 distinct words while the global language monitor a texas-based group that analyzes Trends in language use estimates that there are 988 th000 words currently being used within the English language and if that doesn't point to the viral like expansion of our language set consider
32:16
that the upcoming Third Edition of the OED has an estimated completion date of the Year 2037 owing to the fact that the book is adding 4,000 new words each year even our own City Chicago was originally spelled like this eventually losing its final vowel to become the city we today call home so perhaps the proposed logo for w was not too far-fetched after all
33:07
on occasion you've been known to use the space between each letter of a given word or the space between lines of text as the Cornerstone of a of a proposed design solution to announce the Poetry foundation's new $25 million building at Superior and Dearborn and to invite the public to come check it out you penned the phrase read it hear
33:37
it whatever I can't even say it that Gap in the last word that extra space creates a skip in the eye and mind the precise alignment of the letter forms suggests the message isn't random or a typographic mistake but intentional and persuasive the composition of this headline is a virtual instruction manual of the Poetry foundation's mission to spread the awareness of poetry and to announce to the public that there is now a permanent home a new venue available for such like verse that is termed
34:19
Concrete where a poem's intention and meaning is wrapped up not so much in its narrative but in its visual ity its compositional form in short in its design the proposed headline is a mashup of information and solicitation poetry masquerading as salesmanship with so much on the line however the ad campaign with the clever poetic headline gives the director of marketing at the Poetry Foundation cold feet and you are instructed to come up with something more straightforward
34:58
more direct more to the point something more like this and even though you produce some very nice responsibly communicative advertisements and even though the foundation's opening weekend is a soldout success you can't help but feel a bit forlorn about the more conceptually leaning headline that never had a chance at catching the Public's eyes and ears this anecdote points out the millions of conversations and eventual amendments that hide behind every message we see within our typographic
35:38
landscape be it billboard Buss side or Internet Banner ad most of the words we read and pictures we see have been filtered through a series of professional conversations that more often than not eliminate ambiguity and dissuade abstraction but be aware be aware of the literal and the obvious for their Embrace is the beginning of a visual hegemony which invariably leads to the widespread adoption of societal cliches like the retiree the baby the depressed teenager the doctor the happy
36:25
Shopper the lecturing
36:34
professional I'm glad somebody got
36:39
that your favorite musicians are two brothers from Chicago John and Frank naven who call themselves The Aluminum group with a male wispiness set to electronic pop their music is catchy and overtly aware of its place within the cannon of rock art and popular culture you are flattered that they have asked you to create the artwork for their new release entitled happiness the intentionally misspelled album is conceived as the first part of an upcoming Trilogy of
37:16
recordings so to illustrate the music you arrange a photo shoot of your best friends the brothers included individual portraits conventional head shot in front of an off-white background the catch is however you want each person photographed smiling for as long as humanly possible 1 minute four minutes 28 minutes your thought as the art director is that you could capture a fraction of a second where the grin would become uncontrollably strained stretched into is something other than Delight
38:00
something visually awkward that matched the intentional misspelling of the album's title your friends oblige and smile appropriately this is what friends are for though the finished photos reveal an almost manic quality they just don't go far enough in capturing what you had seen in your mind's eye in an effort to multiply the happiness you decide to digitally manipulate the photos adding additional noses eyes and mouths but as your initial efforts begin to look too symmetrical and too
38:41
controlled by the computer itself you decide to thwart the computer by attaching small pieces of duct tape to the underside of the computer mouse you of course do not tell your wife you've done this to her computer all of a sudden the cursor on the screen is jumping to life staggering and stuttering despite any way you try to control its reproducing rhythms mouths duplicate at random angles eyes multiply like those of some crazed mythical Beast earlobes dissolve into the backgrounds
39:22
and eyeballs go hyper into a psychedelic overall you have created
39:39
happiness the words are there perhaps graphic designers are just the auto mechanics of an Ever moving cultural vehicle tuning tweaking and replacing individual parts of a great big Grand machine manipulating the visual properties of an image and language based culture to create well more language-based culture as this Dietrich Wagner photo might suggest but since the world doesn't sit still neither does our marking and labeling of the spaces we inhabit on buses streets buildings computer screens
40:22
in magazines on cell phones and even on our own bodies written messages even the contradictory are constantly circulating and reconfiguring themselves into ever unique Arrangements our typographic compositions have become an environment in and of themselves not too dissimilar from the Cloudscape ever above us always a constant always in flux the writing is on the wall or rather on the walls there will always be those of us who refuse to read but the will to reason
41:03
through language and pictogram will continually remind us of our options and for those of us whose professional calling is entrenched in the domain of language in the manipulation indexing scaling and amplification of language be it our own or our clients for the designer of messages words are as necessary to us as water sleep or air language has indeed become a prosthetic device for our intellectual capacity to reason a device employed by each of us at every moment
41:43
till death do us part and perhaps even
41:52
after you are surrounded by words and pictures pies all around you all the time the words are there and here upon the surface of Your World suggesting a sense of place transforming the space between where you are what you see what you
42:21
know thank you [Applause] [Music] I
Here to help you learn
Sign in to keep a private conversation with your course tutor.
Ask me anything about the material…
Sign in to chat