Typography DESTRUCTION OF 08 SYNTAX- IMAGINATION WITHOUT STRINGS by Filippo Tomasso Marinetti DISCOVERING TYPOGRAPHY NEW LIFE IN PRINT 18 by Jan Tschichold THE CRYSTAL GOBLET 26 by Beatrice Warde TOWARDS UNIVERSAL 32 TYPE by Herbert Bayer Edited and designed by Maria Belen Scaglia Created for Typographic Communicatiion Course Emily Carr University of Art and Design, spring semester 2012 Original Print, only edition Articles provided by Cleste Martin WHO IS FILIPPO TOMMASO MARINETTI, AND At a time when graphic design had yet WHY HE ‘S WORK to emerge as awfully defined commercial IS SO IMPORTANT. practice, the writings and experiments of the Italian Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) embodied a vigorous alternative set of possibilities for graphic communication. As a poet reacting against his Symbolist pre- decessors, Marinetti’s primary concern was with the free expres- sive potential of language, and his typographic researches were all conducted to this end (though the approach would later be applied to advertising by Fortunato Depero and others). Mari- netti was the self-publicizing author of the first Futurist hymn to speed, dynamism, war, and the end of tradition–published in Le Figaro newspaper in 1909—and between 1912 and 1914 he articulated his radical aesthetic agenda in a series of manifestos. This extract, with its section on “typographical revolution” is the most explicit in typographic terms. In the poems collected in his book Les mots en liberté futuristes (1919), Marinetti collaged letterforms and fragments into a state of violent agitation, with words moving at the velocity of the trains, planes, waves, and atoms that inspired the Futurists. Verbal language is dematerial- ized, even as its material aspects are elevated, while the sensibil- ity guiding these paper-bound explosions is cybernetic. —RICK POYNOR Les Mots De Liberte Futuristes. 1919. Photograph. Jan Tschichold: Mas- ter Typographer His Life, Work. Themes and Hudson. 25. Print.Filippo Tomasso Marinetti; example of futurists typography. 04 - FILIPPO TOMASSO MARINETTI TOMASSO - FILIPPO DESTRUCTION DESTRUCTION OF SYNTAX IMAGINATION STRINGS WITHOUT Words in Freedom Death in Words Casting aside every stupid formula and Fistfuls of essential words in no conven- Free verse once had countless reasons truth only a superior, more concentrated Analogy is nothing more than the all the confused verbalisms of the profes- tional order. Sole preoccupation of the for existing but now is destined to be and intense life than what we live from deep love that assembles distant, seem- sors, I now declare that lyricism is the narrator, to render every vibration of his replaced by words-in-freedom. day today, like the latter it is composed ingly diverse and hostile things. An exquisite faculty of intoxicating oneself being. The evolution of poetry and human of hyper-alive elements and moribund orchestral style, at once polychromatic, with life, of filling life with the inebria- If the mind of this gifted lyrical narra- sensibility has shown us the two incur- elements. polyphonic, and polymorphous, can tion of oneself. The faculty of changing tor is also populated by general ideas, he able defects of free verse. We ought not, therefore, to be too embrace the life of matter only by means into wine the muddy water of the life that will involuntarily bind up his sensations 1. Free verse fatally pushes the poet much preoccupied with these elements. of the most extensive analogies. swirls and engulfs us. The ability to color with the entire universe that he intuitive- towards facile sound effects, banal double But we should at all costs avoid rhetoric When, in my Battle of Tripoli, I com- the world with the unique colors of our ly knows. And in order to render the true meanings, monotonous cadences, a fool- and banalities telegraphically expressed. pared a trench bristling with bayonets to changeable selves. worth and dimensions of his lived life, he ish chiming, and an inevitable echo-play, By the imagination without strings I an orchestra, a machine gun to a femme Now suppose that a friend of yours will cast immense nets of analogy across internal and external. mean the absolute freedom of images or fatale, I intuitively introduced a large gifted with this faculty finds himself in a the world. In this way he will reveal the 2. Free verse artificially channels the analogies, expressed with unhampered part of the universe into a short episode zone of intense life (revolution, war, ship- analogical foundation of life, telegraphi- flow of lyric emotion between the high words and with no connecting strings of of African battle. wreck, earthquake, and so on) and starts cally, with the same economical speed walls of syntax and the weirs of gram- syntax and with no punctuation. right away to tell you his impressions. Do that the telegraph imposes on reporters mar. The free intuitive inspiration that Up to now writers have been restrict- ‘By the imagination you know what this lyric, excited friend and war correspondents in their swift addresses itself directly to the intuition ed to immediate analogies. For instance, without strings I mean of yours will instinctively do? reportings. This urgent laconism answers of the ideal reader finds itself imprisoned they have compared an animal with a the absolute freedom He will begin by brutally destroying not only to the la\vs of speed that govern and distributed like purified water for the man or with another animal, which is of images or analogies, the syntax of his speech. He wastes no us but also to the rapport of centuries be- nourishment of all fussy, restless intel- almost the same as a kind of photography. expressed with time in building sentences. Punctuation tween poet and audience. Between poet ligences. (They have compared, for example, a unhampered words and the right adjectives will mean noth- and audience, in fact, the same rapport When I speak of destroying the canals fox terrier to a very small thoroughbred. and with no connecting ing to him. He will despise subtleties and exists as between two old friends. They of syntax, I am neither categorical nor Others, more advanced, might compare strings of syntax and nuances of language. Breathlessly he will can make themselves understood with systematic. Traces of conventional syntax the same trembling fox terrier to a little with no punctuation’ assault your nerves with visual, auditory, half a word, a gesture, a glance. So the and even of true logical sentences will Morse Code machine. I, on the other olfactory sensations, just as they come poet’s imagination must weave together be found here and there in the words-in- hand, compare it with gurgling water. In to him. The rush of steam-emotion will distant things with no connecting strings, freedom of my unchained lyricism. This this there is an ever vaster gradation of burst the sentence’s steam pipe, the valves by means of essential free words. inequality in conciseness and freedom is analogies, there are ever deeper and more of punctuation, and the adjectival clamp. natural and inevitable. Since poetry is in solid affinities, however remote.) 1913 05 06 Semaphoric Adjective, Lighthouse-adjective or Death of the literary 1 atmosphere-adjective The infinitive Verb Molecular life and material my techni- Everywhere we tend to suppress the Here, too, my pronouncements are not cal manifesto opposed the obsessive I qualifying adjective because it presup- categorical. I maintain, however, that in Carra, Carlo. Sintesi Futurista Della that up to now the poets have described, poses an arrest in intuition, too minute a violent and dynamic lyricism the infini- Guerra. 1915. Photograph. Avant- sung, analyzed, and vomited up. To rid a definition of the noun. None of this tive verb might well be indispensable. Garde Page Design 1900-1950. New ourselves of this obsessive I, we must is categorical. I speak of a tendency. We Round as a wheel, like a wheel adaptable York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 2002. abandon the habit of humanizing nature must make use of the adjective as little to every car in the train of analogies, it 108. Print. by attributing human passions and preoc- as possible and in a manner completely constitutes the very speed of the style. cupations to animals, plants, water, stone, different from its use hitherto. One The infinitive in itself denies the and clouds. Instead we should express the should treat adjectives like railway signals existence of the sentence and prevents infinite smallness that surrounds us, the of style, employ them to mark the tempo, the style from slowing and stopping at imperceptible, the invisible, the agitation the retards and pauses along the way. So, a definite point. While the infinitive With words with freedom we will have: of atoms, the Brownian movements, all too, with analogies. As many as twenty is round and as mobile as a wheel, the the passionate hypotheses and all the do- of these semaphoric adjectives might ac- other moods and tenses of the verb are Images are not flowers to be chosen + Condensed Metaphors mains explored by the high-powered mi- cumulate in this way. either triangular, square, or oval. and picked with parsimony, as Voltaire + Telegraphic images croscope. To explain: I want to introduce What I call a semaphoric adjective, Onomatopeia and mathematical said. They are the very lifeblood of po- + Maximum Vibrations the infinite molecular life into poetry not lighthouse-adjective, or atmosphere-ad- symbols etry. Poetry should be an uninterrupted + Nodes of thought as a scientific document but as an intui- jective is the adjective apart from nouns, When I said that we must spit on sequence of new images, or it is mere + Closed or open fans of movement tive element. It should mix, in the work isolated in parentheses.