Digital Lakes, Richard Who?, Com- Memorating the First World War
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Volume1, issue no.1, 2014 Clio50 Digital Lakes, Richard Who?, Com- memorating the First World War, The type- set of choice, A Por- tuguese in Barrow, Find the wall,The per- sistence of poverty, Could you manage a pudding? Lancaster University opened its doors to in Octo- ber 1964, with eight library staff, fourteen adminis- trative staff and forty-five academics, of whom thir- Helvetica, 1957 teen were professors. One of these last was Professor Austin Woolrych, the founding professor of the Department of History, designed to be the leading arts’ subject at this new university. While the univer- You see it everywhere: every day. It’s so common you probably don’t notice. sity and the new university movement of the early Aristotle Kallis unveils the typeface so ubiquitous it became a mundane 1960s reflected the optimism and promise of the age, Woolrych was a rather old-fashioned person, but a background. far from conventional academic. Clio50 apologises to Aristotle for this fancy font: pcs don’t do Helvetica. He had been a clerk in Harrods, and served Professor Woolrych died in 2004, but his Depart- very much a citizen of the world. Its spectacu- It leads a discreet life in all our desktops, throughout the war, being wounded at El Alamein; ment is still going strong, and so this year celebrates lar success is mystifying or infuriating to some its fiftieth year along with the University itself. To notebooks, and mobile devices. For decades he was a passionate walker and was still trekking and plainly obvious to others. Few typefaces across China and New Zealand in his eighties, and mark it, and to provide another way to tell those it has been the typeface of choice for many he continued to write his books in a painfully-neat both inside and outside the university what is hap- designers: posters and advertisements, have divided opinion so spectacularly. Some inky hand. His was the last hand-written book man- pening within its new (rather austere white) walls corporate logos, some of the most extensive swear by it and have used it in a near-exclu- uscript to be delivered to a publisher: the University (we moved buildings on campus two years ago) we signage systems. But it has also given mate- sive way; others hate it viscerally as the closest Library wanted to display it, but the publisher had have put together Clio50, a magazine of writings by rial existence to all sort of text documents, that graphic design will ever come to ‘totali- destroyed it. members of the History Department, University of tarianism’. Helvetica is the closest we have to a Lancaster. exchanged by hand and over the internet. Helvetica carries a Swiss passport but is universal popular language of modernism. It is In this issue Everyone’s favourite font ............... p.3 Locate that wall .............................. p.5 Digital Lakeland ............................. p.8 Shakespeare’s discourse on land ... p.11 The underclass in history .............. p.12 Commemorating War ................... p.13 The Portuguese sonnets of Barrow p.15 Afterword .... pudding ................... p.18 Clio50, Vol.1, issue no.1, 2014. All articles and artwork provided by staff within Lancaster University History Department, and any and all permissions have been secured. This edition has been edited by Sarah Barber. 2 Clio Clio 3 the Bauhaus of typography. opting for the adjective (‘Helvetica’ means To understand the birth and rise to ubiqui- ‘Swiss’) and focusing instead on the type- if not our digital one, to the point that we tinguished life, and with a fascinating story to ty of Helvetica one needs to search back for face’s lack of historical baggage - something have even stopped noticing it. When a New tell. It was never a rebel but it was revolution- its intellectual connections with the modern like a clears start in design, turning its back Yorker decided to have a Helvetica-free day, ary in its own quiet, unflashy way. Now, nearly movement that flourished in Europe in the on norms and legacies of the past. Some he found it impossible to perform even the six decades after its birth, it remains universal years between the two world wars. An interna- later accused it of being devoid of any char- simplest tasks and steps of his daily routine and always modern. One of its greatest rivals tional group of young and talented designers acter - boring, mechanical, without any - catching the Subway, wearing his favourite in the sixties was another typeface from Swit- sought to break with established tradition in aesthetic or historical value. And yet Hel- t-shirt, ordering food from the take-away zerland, equally functional, simple, and clean. every form of design and embrace the lan- vetica became so phenomenally successful - without confronting Helvetica. If he were Its name - Univers - spoke even more explicit- guage of simplicity, function, clarity, purity precisely because of its sheer simplicity and using an iPhone today, he would have had ly of the Swiss designers’ ambition to appeal to - a kind of design without (‘unnecessary’ as neutrality. It was legible and distinctive to switch it off: since the autumn of 2010, the widest possible international audience. The they saw them) adornments, freed from the (quickly adopted by New York for its over- Apple’s mobile handsets feature a digitised success of both these typefaces underlined the weight of history. Their inspiration came from haul of the Subway’s entire signage system). version of Helvetica as system font for the collective longing of the people for escape - a unique sense of opportunity - to innovate, It was bold and authoritative - hence its operating system. from the memories of the recent past, from the to develop international and universal forms appearance in the logos of so many world Ironically again, Helvetica has become a ghosts of nationalism, from the clouds of war, of communication, to rediscover simplicity in brands, from airlines to popular clothing kind of classic design in our days. It is histo- and from ‘history’ itself. design, unfettered by norms and legacies of chains. Above all, however, Helvetica had ry now - a typeface with a long and dis the past. this rare quality of never feeling out of The traumatic experience and consequenc- place in locations as varied (geographically, es of the Second World War cast the darkest culturally, historically) as New York, Italy, of shadows on this optimism; but it did not and Tokyo. weaken the aspiration that underpinned it. Helvetica expressed the desire to turn the As Europe started to come out of the post- page of history, shed the oppressive legacies Where’s the wall? war devastation in the 1950s, trying to look of the recent past, and start afresh. Its pop- Research takes Sarah Barber to some interesting (weird?, hairy?) places. to the future by turning its back to the pre- ularity peaked in the 1960s and early 1970s, The wall that graces the cover of this edition isn’t any old brick wall .... vious decades of bitter division and conflict, before younger designers came to the fore (but it is a metaphor). modernism emerged once again as the shared and rejected it as too severe, conservative, language of break with the past. History, it controlled and controlling. Some even now seemed to many, weighed too heavily on accused it of being the brand of corporate I love SU the collective shoulders of European nations. It capitalism - a typeface that lost its soul be- Well, yes, I do. But I have a love/hate relationship was the ghosts of this history that had plunged cause of its meteoric success. Yet, with the with South America’s least-known country. The the continent into two devastating world wars advent of the digital era, Helvetica acquired general population of the UK is now much more in less than four decades; and some believed a new lease of life. In the early 1990s Apple au fait with matters Surinamese than it has been that it would do it again soon. Suddenly, a Macintosh was the first personal computer for 350 years. I blame ‘Pointless’. There were sev- future without the shadow of history appeared to offer typographic choices that looked eral series when my knowledge of obscure parts blissfully promising. good on the screen - a revolutionary de- of the Caribbean stood me in good stead, but Ironically, Helvetica was very much a prod- parture from the dreary world of early now all manner of people happily shout ‘Surina- uct of a specific national context. It was born pixelised PC typography - and it chose the me’ and its capital ‘Paramaribo’ at the television, in Switzerland in the mid-1950s and expressed original Helvetica instead of its plagiarised though they still get their Guianas muddled up an explicitly Swiss attitude to design- simple, copy, Arial, used on PCs. Apple eventually with their Guineas. functional, unobtrusive, solid, dependable, lost out massively to Microsoft - and the Suriname is a fascinating country. Its history beautifully designed yet completely understat- digital reincarnation of Helvetica also lost means that it is the most ethnically diverse place ed. Max Miedinger, its chief designer, initially out to Arial and Times New Roman (for on earth. Several indigenous American peoples wanted to name it ‘Helvetia’ - the Latin name years the default typefaces of Microsoft were joined in the sixteenth century by European for Switzerland. He quickly changed his mind, Word). But Helvetica remained so en- adventurers in search of El Dorado. These in- trenched in our everyday visual life, 4 Clio Clio 5 which it was known as Fort Willoughby signs of people being shot in the back.