Methods of Cataloguing: Written Response

In this written response, I decide to research an article, ‘Fuck Content’, by Michael Rock in 2009. The title of the article attract me to do this catalogue. 

Overview：

Time of the post: 2009;

Total word count: 1,152;

Number of paragraphs: 14;

Number of Picture: 0;

Author: Michael Rock;

Publishing houses: Rizzoli International;

Category: Article;

Tags: Graphic Design, Philosophy, Storytelling, Typography, Design Education, Artistic Identity;

Names: Beatrice Warde, Paul Rand, Munari ,Leoni, Piet Zwart, Cassandre, Matter, Weingart, Greiman, Freidman, Jamie Reid, Hilton Kramer, Hitchcock;

Info related to years: 1962;

Key Sentence in paragraph:

• In Designer as Author I argued that we are insecure about the value of our work.

• Designer as Author was an attempt to recuperate the act of design itself as essentially linguistic—a vibrant, evocative language.

• The problem is one of content.

• The apotheosis of this notion, repeated ad nauseum (still!), is Beatrice Warde’s famous Crystal Goblet metaphor.

• This false dichotomy has circulated for so long that we have started to believe it ourselves.

• Back when Paul Rand wrote ‘There is no such thing as bad content, only bad form,’ I remember being intensely annoyed.

• We don’t believe shaping is enough.

• A director can be the esteemed auteur of a film he didn’t write, score, edit or shoot.

• Designers also trade in storytelling.

• The span of graphic design is not a history of concepts but of forms.

• At a 1962 conference at the Museum of Modern Art, conservative art critic Hilton Kramer denounced Pop Art as “indistinguishable from advertising art”

• Because the nature of the designed object is limited, individual objects are rarely substantial enough to contain fully rendered ideas.

• This deep connection to making also positions design in a modulating role between the user and the world.

• The trick is to find ways to speak through treatment, via a range of rhetorical devices— from the written to the visual to the operational.

Words/Sentences with “” :

“designer/authors” “There is no such thing as bad content, only bad form,” “indistinguishable from advertising art” “Pop Art does not tell us what it feels like to be living through the present moment of civilization. Its social effect is simply to reconcile us to a world of commodities, banalities and vulgarities.” “what it feels like to be living through the present moment of civilization,” “commodities, banalities and vulgarities.” “A movie is not what it is about, it’s how it is about it.”

In-text Reference:

I. Warde, B. (1955) The Crystal Goblet: Sixteen Essays on Typography. London: Sylvan Press.

II. Rand, P. (1985) A Designer’s Art. New Haven: Yale University Press.