Half-Point Schmoller
“It was chiefly as a text designer that [Hans] Schmoller made his mark [at Penguin Books]. . . . It was a design based on sound principles and well-tried practices, although Schmoller, like [Jan] Tschichold before him, had to repeat the same insistent instructions about “optically even letterspacing” time after time. Schmoller gained a reputation for his fastidiousness and ability to notice minute variation of detail. He earned the nickname Half-Point Schmoller, ‘The only man who could distinguish between a Bembo full point and a Garamond full point at 200 paces’.”
—Phil Baines, from Penguin by Design: A Cover Story 1935-2005, 2005.
a continual weighing up of white and black
“The formal quality of everry piece of typography depends on the relationship between the printed and unprinted parts. To see only what is printed, to overlook the decisive contribution of the unprinted parts, is a sign of professional immaturity. The business of typography is a continual weighing up of white and black, which requires a thorough knowledge of the laws governing optical values.”
—Emil Ruder, from Typography as Communication and as Form, 1960; quoted in Swiss Graphic Design by Richard Hollis, 2006.
that smooth glittering devil
“The most expensive fabrics were silks, which had to be imported, mainly from Italy. . . . Lucifer’s prologue to Thomas Middleton’s play The Black Book (1604) talks of ‘that smooth glittering devil satin, and that old reveller velvet.’”
—Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England, 2005.
the masque
“Colour and light were crucial in the masque. [Frances] Bacon said that the colors to wear were those that ‘shew best by candlelight . . . white, carnation, and a kind of Sea-Water Greene, and Oes or Spangs.’. . . It is not clear how far a sustained system of colour symbolism, as described in late medieval manuals of heraldry, which associated colours with virtues and vices, existed in masque design. . . . Some colours, however, were constantly used and presumably “read” correctly—black for grief or melancholy; white for humility, hope and purity; red for courage; green for love and joy; blue stood for peace and honour, and was a courtly colour, as was carnation. The masque had elaborate and sophisticated lighting, both as part of the stage mechanics and as produced by the torch-bearers, which reflected off the costume with its gold and silver fringes, its sequins or spangles (what Bacon calls “Oes or Spangs”), the shining silk of dress and embroideries, floating gauzy veils and rich jewellery. The masquers’ main purpose was to look stunning and to dance well. . . .”
—Aileen Ribeiro, quoting Bacon’s Of Masques and Triumphs, 1597, in Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England, 2005.
your yellow
“DEVICE: ’Tis the Mode to express our fancie upon every occasion. . . . Shall I decipher my Colours to you now? Here is Azure and Peach: Azure is constant, and Peach is love; which signifies my constant Affection.
SISTER: This is very pretty.
DEVICE: Oh, it saves the trouble of writing. . . . [Y]our yellow is joy, because. . . .
LADY: Why, yellow, Sir, is Jealous.
DEVICE: No, your Lemon colour, a pale kind of yellow, is Jealous; your yellow is perfect joy. Your white is Death, your milke white innocence, your black mourning, your orange spitefull, your flesh colour lascivious, your maides blush envied, your red is defiance, your gold is avaritious, your straw plenty, your greene hope, your sea greene inconstant, your violet religious, your willow forsaken.”
—James Shirley, ridiculing Device’s ribbons in Captain Underwit, early 1640s; quoted in Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England by Aileen Ribeiro, 2005.
black dye
“Black became the image of the mercantile classes in the Dutch Republic, the financial centre of Europe in the first half of the seventeenth century, a fact that may have influenced Puritan sympathizers and the English middle classes to follow suit. . . . In fact, black dye was very expensive (it was difficult to achieve a durable colour). . . . Black was also essential for mourning wear in all classes, and because it was often the most expensive costume in a non-elite wardrobe, it doubled as “best” or Sunday wear as well. According to Marshall Smith’s The Art of Painting (1692), in art black was ‘the symbol of Grief, sorrow and Damnation. Yet denoteth Constancy, being the most durable Colour‘; the equivalent in precious stones was the diamond, which enabled such jewellery to be worn for mourning.”
—Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England, 2005.
into russet
“[Oliver] Cromwell famously preferred ‘a plain russet-coated captain that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that which you call a gentleman and is nothing else’; he put his soldiers into russet, a sturdy greyish or reddish-brown woolen cloth (the original homespun), which became a metaphor for godly simplicity, in the same way that wool and cotton were to be linked to “democracy” during the French Revolution.”
—Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England, 2005.
the origin of the modern spectacle
“On the boulevards two men are carrying some immense gilded letters in a handcart; the effect is so unexpected that everyone stops and looks. There is the origin of the modern spectacle. The shock of the surprise effect. To organize a spectacle based on these daily phenomena, the artists who want to distract the crowd must undergo a continual renewal. It is a hard profession, the hardest profession.”
—Fernand Leger, from the essay The Spectacle: Light, Color, Moving Image, Object-Spectacle, 1924, quoted in Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914-1939, edited by Christopher Wilk, 2006.
his Black Square
“When [Kazimir Malevich] first exhibited his Black Square in 1915, he placed it in the corner of a room, in the position that icons occupied in a traditional Russian Orthodox home. In this way he imbued his image with the transcendental qualities of the icon and indicated that it embodied a metaphysical truth.”
—Christina Lodder, the essay Searching for Utopia, from Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914-1939, edited by Christopher Wilk, 2006.
the square and the circle
“[Jan] Tschichold emphasized the basic geometric forms, the square and the circle, which the Russian painter Kasimir Malevich had seen as the ‘fundamental Suprematist elements’. Squares and circles appear in more than half the illustrations of Elementare Typographie; its first double-page spread is bordered by the eight pages of [El] Lissitzky’s Constructivist fairytale, The Story of Two Squares. Lissitzky, describing the upheavals at the time of the First World War, wrote, ‘Into this chaos came Suprematism, extolling the square as the very source of all creative expression.’ When [Theo] Van Doesburg proclaimed, ‘Already many people are using the square’, he was stating a fact. Hans Arp wrote that his wife, Sophie Taeuber, had “discovered” the square in 1916. In Switzerland after the First World War, when they saw the rectangles in foreign magazines such as De Stijl, they though it was ‘a joke, as if everyone who had drawn a square had been forced to yell with ecstasy and excitement’. True to the spirit of Dada, ‘We still decided to register our own squares at the Patent Office’.”
—Richard Hollis, Swiss Graphic Design: The Origins and Growth of an International Style, 1920-1965, 2006.