As the debate about the effects of technology on typography matures, the focus shifts healthily back to the value of the original ideas. Looking at the students’ work this year, especially entries to the UK’s D&AD competition, we find ourselves looking through the surface sheen, which the mac can provide, to the essence of successful design. The brief considered and answered, with technical skill of course, but with the essential ingredient – clarity and originality of thought.
Art in typography, type in art, provides more than its share of original thinking. From Rainer Stork’s textual images, to the concrete poetry in John Furnival’s article about words as images; from the type designs of G. G. Lange’s typefaces to the miniature graphic world of Spanish printer samples.
In Mikhail Anikst’s Russia the ability to develop ideas, even to practise graphic design at all, was limited by state intervention. Whilst in the freer world some fret about the dire consequences of the relaxation of typographic rules.
Apply new, free, graphic ideas to the latest developments and the possibilities in Malcolm Garret and Alasdair Scott’s article about multimedia emerge, and type in TV and video comes to life. We think you’ll find, in Baseline 18, a stimulating mix of art, craft, whizz-kiddery and, most important of all, original thinking. Ideas.
