n°55 — Matrix font
End of 2025
more infos to come
n°55 — Matrix font
End of 2025
more infos to come
n°05 — An Instagram post: P/Pa/Para/Paradiso by jetset_experimental (July 1 2017). Author: Manon Bruet
Author: Manon Bruet.
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
20 December 2017
ISBN : 979-10-95991-05-2
ISSN : 2558-2062
Author: Manon Bruet.
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
20 December 2017
ISBN : 979-10-95991-05-2
ISSN : 2558-2062
On July 1st, 2017, just as I was about to begin research into the use of social networks by Graphic Designers, the Dutch studio Experimental Jetset posted a slideshow containing 7 images on Instagram. Entitled “P/Pa/Para/Paradiso” it presented, as a whole and in its details, their new posters for the Paradiso center for music and culture in Amsterdam. Apart from the obvious formal relationship with the Blow Up poster that they created in 2007 for the London Design Museum, this slideshow gives very few keys to read what seemed to be a new aspect of the center’s communication, something that Experimental Jetset had been working on since 1996.
Currently having over 1,500 likes and tens of comments, this post is where my article begins. An opportunity to investigate and review this collaboration, that over 20 years has taken various forms (flyers, programs, posters), along with the singular and radical practice of Experimental Jetset. And also the opportunity to provide a more theoretical view of the way that Graphic Design is shown and seen on different platforms, that have now become an integral part of the teaching and the evolution of the discipline.
n°26 — Production process: Print on Demand. Author: Manon Bruet
Author: Manon Bruet
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
4th November 2020
ISBN: 979-10-95991-17-5
ISSN: 2558-2062
Author: Manon Bruet
20 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
4th November 2020
ISBN: 979-10-95991-17-5
ISSN: 2558-2062
In 2008, English Graphic Designer James Goggin ran a two-day workshop with design students at the Hochschule Darmstadt in Germany. The object which resulted gradually took on the appearance of a photo album, a typeface specimen, and a color chart. On the cover, the phrase “Dear Lulu, Please try and print these line, color, pattern, format, texture and typography tests for us” is clearly addressed to the online print platform for which this book was proposed as a test.
Ten years later, the offer has become more diverse and the success of such online platforms is undeniable—indeed the phenomenon has spread well beyond the field of publishing. While some bemoan unfair competition for printers, others, professionals and amateurs, see in it a freedom to print and distribute relatively well finished objects at low cost.
The possibilities of these systems of production, are multiple but nonetheless limited, and this obviously raises the question of a possible standardization of forms and formats. However, when it comes to Print On Demand, it seems that the issue is not so much the materiality of an object (the choice of format, paper or a particular manufacture) but rather the actual existence of this object itself, outside of usual channels of production and distribution.
16 — A reproduction: what El Lissitzkzy wants. Author: James Langdon
Sold out — Only available with season 2 subscription
Author: James Langdon
12 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
+ 1 A2 poster, CMYK + 1PMS
7th November 2019
ISBN: 979-10-95991-15-1
ISSN: 2558-2062
Sold out — Only available with season 2 subscription
Author: James Langdon
12 pages, 21 × 29,7 cm, CMYK
+ 1 A2 poster, CMYK + 1PMS
7th November 2019
ISBN: 979-10-95991-15-1
ISSN: 2558-2062
I am rarely convinced when I see graphic design that was originally printed in two inks reproduced in four- colour process. Before the advent of commercial colour offset printing, the elementary colours of printing — from Gutenberg to Tschichold — were black and red. In the early twentieth century, black and red were used by graphic designers not to attempt to recreate the spectrum of colours that appear to the human eye, but as graphic forces in themselves. To make a distinction. To create dynamism. To embody ideology on the page. In particular, the combination of black and red on white paper has become synonymous with Suprematism and revolutionary Russian graphic design.
A contemporary imaging workflow can enable extraordinary reproductions of these historical aesthetics. A high- resolution digital photograph of an original black and red printed book from the 1920s can be processed using a colour profile to calibrate its appearance across design, colour correction in computer software, proofing, and printing. This workflow can ultimately achieve a beautiful and precise image of that graphic artefact as it looks today, down to small details of its patination, its discoloration by exposure to sunlight, and the many more other subtleties that define it as an archival object.
But such a reproduction exhibits a strange technical anachronism. What about the constraints that originally shaped the design of that bookk — the implicit connection between the two colours of its graphics and the architecture of the one- or two-colour printing press on which it was printed? Are they not important? Can they even be reproduced?
I compare printed reproductions of the proud black and red cover of the book ‘Die Kunstismen’ (1925), designed by Russian artist and designer El Lissitzky. Published between 1967 and 2017, these images treat the material characteristics of the original book’s colour in different ways, appealing to contradictory notions of fidelity.