International Journal of Film and Media Arts

2025-01-22

On the Consideration of a Black Grid

Silas Munro — 2024-12-30

From the funky, fresh Black modernism of the Johnson Publishing Company’s headquarters designed by John Warren Moutoussamy with Arthur Elrod and William Raiser to the expressive graffitied grids of Adam Pedelton’s monumental canvases in black and white, there lives a wide-ranging matrix of possibilities for what I consider to be a Black Grid. As a queer Black artist, designer, and design historian, living and working in conditions of a triple consciousness of overlapping marginalization, I have been in countless situations throughout my career, surrounded by a sea of practices and pedagogies that don’t represent me, my lived experience, or that of kindred spirits. As a result, I have committed to redirecting and centering art and design BIPOC (Black Indigenous People of Color) voices and scholarship in making, writing, and education as a transformational process. To that end, I enact poetic research, which seeks to find lineages from biological ancestors, antecedents in art and design, and chosen family.

Publishing is Sharing Enthusiasm

Tereza Bettinardi — 2024-12-30

Tereza Bettinardi is a renowned Brazilian graphic designer celebrated for her expertise in editorial design and typography. With a career spanning over a decade, she has worked on diverse projects, from designing award-winning books to crafting visual identities for cultural institutions. Her work is recognized for its clean aesthetics, thoughtful use of type, and commitment to accessibility and inclusivity in design. Tereza is also an active educator, sharing her knowledge through workshops and lectures, inspiring the next generation of designers.

Typographic Design as Visual Historiography and Racial Formation

Chris Lee — 2024-12-30

This paper maps the theoretical and methodological dimensions of an on-going project called 1882–1982–2019 which entails the design of a “chop suey” typeface and specimen book. The project experiments with typography’s indexical affordances and capacity for historical narration. The typeface is not optimized for legibility, but is rather developed for unpacking critical questions surrounding the relationship between labor, design, craft, quality, value, and race. While most of these notions would not be out of place in discourses of typography, the latter term — race — is seldom given serious attention in the field.

The typographic (or, type) specimen is taken up as a genre of commercial writing that invests letterforms with significance and value. It is framed by a synthesis of scholarly work from a variety of fields including performance studies, whiteness studies, and Asian-American studies, and the history of illustration. This idiosyncratic composition of reference points strives towards a more radical resonance. That is, 1882–1982–2019 is rooted in an examination of the historical persistence of the anti-Asian tropes as one constitutive element in the construction of normative, white-supremacist ideas around labor, craft, and value. It explores how the language and attitudes of such tropes are resonant in typographic discourse, pedagogy, and practice.

A primary methodological vehicle — endemic to type design — entails the mining of archival sources for letterforms. These are extracted from a variety of historical documents ranging from late-19th century political cartoons to contemporary popular media, and digitized. Artificial intelligence image generators like Dall-E and Midjourney are also applied to generate typographic form to stage a further examination of the performativity of contemporary typographic labor.
This project opens critical questions about the disciplinary aims of typographic history, implicates it in racial discourses, and challenges normative, ostensibly de-racialized, processes of valorization in typography.

Nancy Cunard and The Hours Press. Parallax – A Skewered Angle on the History of Publishing

Ane Thon Knutsen — 2024-12-30

This study aims to explore the artistic and cultural contributions of Nancy Cunard, a printer, publisher, and designer from the inter-war modernist era, with a focus on her work as a letterpress printer and her connection to Virginia Woolf. The research investigates how Cunard’s printing practice was influenced by Woolf’s pioneering efforts in setting up The Hogarth Press in 1917 and how Cunard, like Woolf, challenged established hierarchies and norms within the publishing industry, setting up her own The Hours Press in 1927.
The study also delves into the collaborative relationship between Woolf and Cunard, particularly in relation to the publication of Cunard’s poem Parallax, which Woolf typeset and published. It highlights the shared themes of their works, addressing the aftermath of World War I and the Spanish Flu, and challenges the notion that Cunard’s poem was merely a pale imitation of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The research sheds light on the misogynistic devaluation of women’s contributions within the publishing industry.

Cunard’s memoirs, entitled These Were the Hours, serve as a comprehensive account of her involvement in printing and publishing. She sought to create aesthetically pleasing books while disregarding conventions, embracing experimentation, and following her own aesthetic instincts. Cunard’s printing practice reflected a punk-ish aesthetic, featuring rough bindings, expressive covers, and typographical and visual playfulness.

In conclusion, this study aims to bring recognition to Nancy Cunard’s often-overlooked artistic contributions and shed light on the historical significance of her printing practice. By examining Cunard’s work through the lens of graphic design and letterpress printing, the research contributes to a broader understanding of self-publishing history and its impact on contemporary artist books. The study highlights the parallel struggles faced by Woolf and Cunard within a patriarchal system and underscores the enduring relevance of their unconventional approaches to printing and publishing.

The Written Word in the Design of Learning Spaces: Workshop A Rede

Marta Guerra Belo — 2024-12-30

This article presents and reflects on the work developed in the Workshop A Rede of the Picnic educational project, part of the 7^th Other Delli Week, an event for students of the communication design degree programme at DELLI - Design Lusófona Lisboa. This project proposed exploring the learning space as an informal and communitarian environment, transporting the school out of doors through the structure of a picnic. The workshop dealt with the design of natural space through the concepts of appropriation, protection, relationship and communication, in the relationship between the suspended fabric, the written word and poetry. The team explored the word (its construction, rhythm and meaning), typography (experimental work on letter design) and their relationship with support, material, and space, to create a poetic structure with six suspended fabrics. The article is divided into four sections: a brief overview of the Picnic educational project; a theoretical framework; a description of the activities; and finally, a reflection on the work process and results. The text is guided by visual references that frame the project and photographs collected during its preparation and final installation. This article was developed especially for the Typography Meeting 13 – Other Typographic Worlds, framed in the topics Art, Language and Typography, Text as Image and Image as Text, and Pedagogy and Methods in the Teaching of Type Design.

International Journal of Film and Media Arts

Table of Contents

On the Consideration of a Black Grid

Publishing is Sharing Enthusiasm

Typographic Design as Visual Historiography and Racial Formation

Nancy Cunard and The Hours Press. Parallax – A Skewered Angle on the History of Publishing

The Written Word in the Design of Learning Spaces: Workshop A Rede