dot-font: Dot-Dot-Dot Dis

John D. Berry

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dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro.  If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.

Eventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here.  You can find more from John at his website, https://johndberry.com.

The second issue of the new graphic-design magazine “…” (“Dot-dot-dot”) doesn’t live up to the promise of the first, but it’s worth seeking out regardless. And future issues would be worth reading even to see what the editors will do next.

“Dot-dot-dot” is a design magazine with attitude, and ideas. The partial screen above is from the “dot-dot-dot” Web site.

“Dot-dot-dot” isn’t like most design magazines. It’s published by a four-person editorial team based in several countries: Juergen Albrecht (Leipzig), Stuart Bailey (Amsterdam/London), Peter Bilak (from Slovakia, but based in The Hague), and Tom Unverzagt (Leipzig), with “editorial oversight and advice” from Robin Kinross and Richard Hollis in London. The magazine (a compact 165mm x 235mm, or six-and-a-half by nine-and-a-quarter inches) aims to upset a few apple carts and evinces a horror of coffee-table design books. In the first issue the editors described their aims as being “critical, flexible, international, portfolio-free, rigorous, [and] useful.”

Take No Prisoners

By “portfolio-free” they mean that they won’t present any of the sort of articles that are the bread and butter of most design magazines: laudatory articles about the wonderful work of some designer or other, showcasing that designer’s work in glossy photographs with explanatory text. Indeed, one of the most thoughtful articles in this issue, “The uses of failure,” by Robin Kinross, takes an article by Margaret Richardson (also a creativepro.com contributing editor) that I published in “U&lc” as an example of the genre. The article was a study of the Portland, Oregon, design firm Anstey-Healey. (He also quotes an excerpt about El Lissitzky from a design history by Philip B. Meggs as a parallel, or perhaps complementary, example.) There’s plenty of room for simply presenting good or interesting work, but Kinross is quite right that these are not critical articles. What he’d like to see is articles that convey the unruly roots and uncertain processes that lead to the finished work, rather than pieces that merely present the results.

 “Dot-dot-dot” sets out to embody a new editorial approach to magazines about design, explained in the partial screen from its Web site above.

Talking about this as “portfolios” comes from the practice of graphic designers presenting a portfolio of their work to potential clients or employers, and by extension from the all-too-common occurrence of speakers at design conferences who do nothing but present a “portfolio” of their own work: “I did this, and I did this, and then I did this…” This kind of conference talk gets dismissed as a “portfolio show.” While the audience at a design conference may actually be quite happy to hear well-known designers talk about their most successful work, it’s more interesting if the presentation makes some kind of cogent point.

Kinross’ article is the only one in the issue that addresses the supposed theme set by the editors: failure. Actually, he doesn’t write about specific failures; he cites the need for considering the real lives of people who create graphic design, and the conditions and circumstances—and failures—that lead them to the end points that we notice. He quotes his own mentor, Anthony Froshaug: “Why celebrate people in books if you cannot say what they did, and why, for what (and for how much)? I should not like to celebrate my death, laid out on a coffee-table.”

High Concept

Daniel Eatock, in an empty-looking pair of two-page spreads entitled “Call for entries… A feature article without content,” makes Kinross’ point about the predictable form of the design article in far fewer words—nothing but a few captions, in fact, in four pages of conventionally arranged blank rectangles representing the layout of a typical article (this piece, and those that follow, is not available for viewing on the magazine’s website). At first I thought this was a waste of space for the sake of a small joke, but in fact Eatock’s composition is right on target. Most of what he’s pinpointing is conventional rather than objectionable, but one of his captions gives away his own attitude toward it all: “Main text continued, racing forward, oversimplifying and eliminating most points designers discussed with writer.” In this context his concluding caption, about the “final word… ending article on a positive upbeat and friendly note,” seems quite sinister.

Jargon Generators

The other pretension that’s attacked in this issue is art-speak, or the jargon used by people in the contemporary art world—curators, critics, even the artists themselves. The lead article, by Robert Garnett, tells the tale of the London-based art collective BANK and its “FAX BAK” program of marking up invitations, flyers, and press releases they received from local art galleries as though they were student papers, and faxing them back to the senders. The examples shown of what the members of BANK actually wrote on the uninvited flyers vary from real criticism to heckling; they have a good eye for jargon, but too much of their commentary is just cheap shots. Garnett’s article starts off making a very good point about the nonsense spouted by pretentious members of the arts world (what he calls “curatorese”), but he falls into it himself, as soon as he starts talking seriously about using humor as a critical technique.

The trouble with this kind of writing is that too often the writer ends up just trying to show how clever he is—even when he thinks he’s criticizing such writing by others—rather than showing how clearly he can think and express himself.

The point is made better by two other pieces in this issue. Heather Lenz, in “Interview Game,” also responds to the art world’s jargon, but she does so by creating a deck of cards with interchangeable questions and answers taken from jargon she ran across in art magazines. She might have done better to ignore the jargon rather than spending so much time on it, but her card set both amuses and cuts to the point. Elsewhere, Erik van Blokland and Jonathan Hoefler generate an article that is pure jargon, perfectly content-free, using “filibuster scripts”—sort of like an automated version of Mad Libs. Of course the article goes on too long but is amusing all the same. (“Dark taupe photography offers insight into counter-problematic verticalisation in typography.”)

Form vs. Content

This issue of “Dot-dot-dot” contains a lot of material, but it’s not inviting to look at. From the badly spaced architect’s-handwriting font used for the editorial to the horrendous dot-matrix printout used for Paul Elliman and Michael Rock’s piece on “Designed screens,” too many pages of the magazine are simply hard to read. It’s all done to make you think, but generally what makes readers think is the text, not the way it’s presented. (It’s a conceit of graphic designers to believe that people are stimulated to intellectual rigor by difficult typesetting and layout.)

There’s good material buried in some of these articles. One of the best is Derek Birdsall on “Proportional representation,” where he explains very clearly (without jargon) the problem of trying to show a painter’s work in proportion, so that readers will have some idea of the relative sizes of different paintings rather than being lulled by the usual arbitrary formatting of an art book.

The weakest point of “Dot-dot-dot,” apart from some of the design itself, is a certain reflexive desire to smash icons just for the sake of smashing icons. It reads, at its worst, like a student paper. Peter Bilak writes, about the designed environment in the Netherlands: “When every single square centimetre of the landscape has been cultivated and every object is beautifully designed, then the natural reaction is to reject design.” Really? Why? Just to be contrary? Christopher Wilson writes about the brilliantly subversive work of Ernst Bettler in his early career, but then characterizes thirty years of later, less contentious work as a “disappointment,” just because it’s not a young man’s rebellion.

But independent voices are worth seeking out, and hearing. (This is my own “ending on a positive upbeat and friendly note,” which I suppose marks me out as a hopeless dinosaur.) I’d recommend being critical of this “critical… useful” magazine, but subscribing to it and reading it all the same.