Plain talk is like water, and good prose is like a fermentation – whether it be sparkling light wine or a rich old burgundy, much of its making was left to nature. But poetry is that much more artificial thing, a sublimation of essences, which requires special equipment, skill – and the kindling of fire.

…from the article “The Rabbi of Book Design: An Interview with Scott-Martin Kosofsky” on the AIGA website.

“But books (and print in general) have lost their pride of place. Book publishers, a group nearly always behind the curve, have failed to grasp that their online counterparts spend a lot of time and money concentrating on User Experience, while they remain unfamiliar with the concept. It wasn’t always that way, but when the professionalism and discipline that was demanded by metal type fell away, things got worse and worse, especially typographically. That transition period is long over, though you don’t see much evidence of it in trade books, because editors are usually clueless about graphic possibilities; they never know what’s possible and what isn’t (or what’s expensive and what isn’t).”

I read this article posted on the AIGA website yesterday, and the last few paragraphs really resonated with me. It was written by a collector of ‘notgeld’, or fake money printed in Germany after WWII. The country was so poor different towns and cities printed their own money to use as currency until the economy turned around. Instead of just slapping a design together, great care was taken with each design and made beautiful. Some of the designs are sorrowful and poignant, some hopeful, some humorous. Even in the midst of a horrible situation.

“Notgeld lifts the curtain on an historical past and on a craftsmanship that to a great extent has disappeared. The care and love that went into these little masterworks should be a salve to our sensitivities bruised by the visual chaos and disorder of present day America—increasingly a third-world culture, artistically speaking.

Why do our postage stamps no longer honor George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, but Donald Duck and Batman, Bob Hope and Howdy Doody? And why are they no longer engraved, which formerly signified and honored their status as official government documents, no less official than our paper currency? (Well, in 2005 there was an engraved stamp honoring Greta Garbo. But that was engraved in Sweden, reissued by us.)

Whatever happened to the classic bottle of Bayer aspirin? It was once a model of sobriety and simplicity. Now it’s a grab bag of jarring colors, intended to jump right off the Duane Reade shelf into your shopping cart. Happily, they left the pills alone. But why not? The stuff has already been bought.

Why are most electrical outlets installed crooked?

Why are hand-lettered signs rendered as if it was enough to merely convey a message with no regard for it appearance? The other day I saw a sign announcing a “Moveing [sic] Sale,” its verbal illiteracy matched only by the visual illiteracy of letter forms indifferently sized and spaced. Regarding verbal illiteracy, what can one expect when only one out of six Americans even reads books, and most Americans don’t even pick one up (telephone directories and Maltin’s guide to video movies excepted). If the sign “Open for Business” is crudely lettered, what does that say about the business? Or us? The poet Antonio Machado pleaded, “Slowly now, nice neat letters / the point is to do things well / not just to do them.”

For those of us who mourn the loss of craftsmanship—or for those of us who simply admire beautiful graphics—notgeld is a wonderful and surprisingly inexpensive source of pleasure and instruction.”

read the full article

This past week I read a book called “Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators” by William Stolzenburg. It discusses the idea of natural habitats being affected all the way down to the microscopic level because of the removal of large predators, such as whales, wolves, mountain lions, and bears. It was a fascinating glimpse into the research that has been done over the last 80 years, documenting the consequences of removing just a few predators from the food chain. But what I found most striking was in the epilogue- an idea, while produced to describe a new generation of conservation ecologists, could be applied to any field.

Marine biologist Daniel Pauly coined the term “shifting-baseline syndrome”. It describes a phenomenon where “the world as first seen by the child becomes his lifelong standard of excellence, mindless of the fact that he is admiring the ruins of his parents. Generation to generation, the natural world decays, the ratchet of perception tightens.” Pauly specifically was referring to the buildup of bacteria-laden slime in the oceans, accepted by 20-somethings in the science fields because for them, it has always been there…when two generations previously it didn’t exist. But I wonder if this syndrome isn’t applicable to the arts, to politics, to personal values, and any other number of disciplines/subjects. And if such a phenomenon does exist, how does one go about changing it? The modern public isn’t much interested in learning about history or how actions and decisions have had ripples of impact and caused chain reactions that no one ever expected. How can this generation be inspired to have a curiosity not just about the present, but about the past and how it relates to the future? Is such an inspiration even possible?