A practical guide for designers
A *New* Program for Graphic Design
By David Reinfurt
David Reinfurt is a graphic designer, writer and educator who introduced the study of graphic design at Princeton university. This book serves an a synethsis of his Princeton course covering Typography, Gestalt and Interface.
Thoughts from the Foreword
“Graphic design certainly informs everything I think about. Each word I type on a screen or scratch in a notebook is an embodied, material figure destigned to convey ideas to a future self or to a reader, known or unknow. Graphic design is the infastructure of history.”
“Give me twenty-six lead soldiers and I will conquer the world” — Benjamin Franklin
Typography
Beatrice Warde is a central figure in the history of typography. She was born in New York City in 1990 and from her job at the American Type Founders Company she started to communicate widely about why typography mattered. Her most quoted thoughts around the dignity of typography reads
“This is a printing office, crossroads of civilisation, refugre of all the arts against the ravages of time, armoury of fearless truth against whispering rumour, incessant trumpet of trade. From this place words may fly abroad not to perish on waves of sound, not to vary with the writer’s hand but fixed in the having been verified by proof. Friend you stand on sacred ground.”
On October 7th 1930 Warde delivered a speech called “Printing Should Be Invisible” with this being published as “The Crystal Gobley, or Printing Should Be Invisible”.
“Imagine you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favourite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it may be a deep, shimmering crimson in color. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a coinoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or another, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if your a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateaurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain”
What is Gestalt?
Gestalt psychologists emphasized that organisms perceive entire patterns or configurations, not merely individual components. The view is sometimes summarized using the adage, “the whole is more than the sum of its parts.”
Apple’s Beachball
“When Steve Jobs left Apple to set up NeXT Computer, Kare joined him to become the lead designer of the new software. The NeXT was a considerably more powerful computer with a more complicated interface. The simple watch cursor (for waiting) was discontinued and replaced with a rotating, spinning, gradate color wheel. This disk graphic was ungerously christined the “spinning beach ball of death” by users who worred that their system had frozen whenever the ominous yet colorful graphic appeared. Now, spinning beachballs have almost nothing to do with waiting, but this is the power of both context and repetition. It is now a recognisable graphic idea, a visual shorthand for waiting, invented out of thing air, and also only one of many possible answers”
Nizzoli’s Dividend
“Another product Nizzoli designed was the Lettera 22 typewriter. This small portable achine was a big hit for Olivetti. Almost all of the keys on its interface are round and blank. The corresponding letter or number is in the center of the circle…But one key is bright red and has no identifiying type on it. What key is that? Well, it is the carriage return… Olivetti liked to describe design as the cultural dividend of a product. A product existed, people used it, but then there is a little something extra, maybe joy or suprise or pleasure, and this extra is a gift, returned to society in which the product works.”
