Rudy VanderLans interviews Chuck Byrne: Fellow Series
Interview with Chuck Byrne by Rudy VanderLans
An evening at Chuck Byrne’s house in Oakland is always a treat for a number of reasons. First and foremost, there’s the home-cooked food that Chuck and his wife Elizabeth prepare and serve, always accompanied by some of the finest wines that Northern California has to offer. Both are usually out of this world.
Second, the dinner guests are often a who’s who of Bay Area talent, including designers, photographers, architects, curators, scholars, librarians, writers, and artists of all kind, which is all you need to know about Chuck’s connectedness to the art scene of the Bay Area and beyond. Although Chuck says he doesn’t like the word connectedness, he just likes interesting people.
Third, Chuck is a master story teller. No dinner party goes by without a number of entertaining stories about the profession of graphic design, an area in which he has operated in just about every imaginable capacity for the past fifty or so years. The man has seen it all.
Finally, there’s something additionally nurturing about having dinner in a room featuring a wall to wall bookcase filled with books on design. Although my own personal favorite in that bookcase is a small, framed, vintage letterpress-printed card, that sits on a shelf in front of the books. I love to stare at it in between courses—it’s Jan Tschichold’s business card.
The following interview was conducted in January 2017. It covers quite some territory, but paradoxically only scratches the surface of what Chuck Byrne can tell you about his life in graphic design. To hear more, you’ll just have to hope for a dinner invitation.
Quite by accident after we moved here, I worked briefly in one of the first Mac-based studios in San Francisco. I had an agreement there that I didn’t have to use a computer. In the past, and before the Mac came along, I had been exposed to graphic computers and I didn’t like the experience. These were high-end, complicated, expensive machines that really didn’t seem workable for most graphic designers. So computers didn’t interest me much. But after three days in this studio, and watching a young woman work on a primitive, tiny-screen Mac, it became clear that the Macintosh would become ubiquitous in graphic design studios. A lot of things made this possible: The equipment was one-tenth the cost of previous computer equipment; it had a graphic user interface so there was no need to learn and key obscure keyboard commands; there were a large number of good typefaces becoming available; and the Mac could use Postscript to output art and type, which meant quality reproduction.
Many Bay Area people played big roles in helping the Macintosh become that indispensable tool for graphic designers. Not only were designers involved in the development of the Mac, but also in creating software for Adobe and other companies. Local designers like Clement Mok and Hugh Dubberly spent a lot of time traveling the country helping graphic designers understand what was happening and explaining how this tool could help them. Some of the very first events in the country dealing with the Mac and graphic design were undertaken by the SF AIGA.
It’s overly romantic perhaps, but after a few months in the Bay Area I felt this place was for graphic design something like what Paris was for art in the 1920s. There were already a number of great designers in San Francisco causing the city to challenge New York as a design center. And, there were a lot of exciting young designers appearing on the scene.
Innovative design was everywhere. There were free street magazines that were visually amazing. You would run into famous designers at “service bureaus,” businesses where you could get high-resolution output done from your Mac files. I can remember making a special trip to what was considered the best service bureau around to have films output from Mac files for the very first digital cover for PRINT magazine that I designed. For some reason all the guys running these service bureaus were from India. The man that ran this particular place found out what I was there for and thanked me profusely for choosing his shop “to do this important thing.” It was pretty funny.
And to top it all off, you had started Emigre magazine, which introduced a lot of groundbreaking design and design criticism, and ultimately influenced graphic design around the world.
Along with this was the astonishing activity in type design and production. There was the Adobe type group, headed by Sumner Stone and with expert guidance from people like Hermann Zapf, Erik Spiekermann, Rodger Black and Jack Stauffacher who were making historic typefaces available digitally and developing new ones. And Zuzana Licko and a few others here had begun to experiment with digital type design.
During this time we lived in Detroit, I did a lot of work for the Detroit Institute of Arts which included exhibition design as well as graphic design. Much of it consisted of big posters reproducing works of art. I learned a lot about color printing by doing these, but they were not particularly adventurous. It was more about getting the type to relate in some way to the image without interfering with it.
When we moved to Cincinnati in 1978, I opened a studio named Colophon and the work got more adventuresome. We began doing large-size, four-color posters using strong, concept-driven, staged-color photography. Other designers were doing this kind of work then. It was there that I was introduced to the Hennegan Company printers. Besides being great printers, they supported design and were adventurous. Technically, some of the things my studio did would not have been possible without them.
My type education was based on hand-set metal type. You could move it around just about any way you wanted. One of the reasons I was attracted to the computer and computer software was that you had so much more freedom to experiment and move type around, try new things without mocking-up or spending a fortune at the typesetters. The computer very much reminded me of working with movable type.
I’ve been working on the “Teaching Poetry” series of little books for twelve years. The text is from a lecture given every year and underwritten by a good friend of ours. The typographic problem to solve was how to insinuate the sound, or better, the rhythm of a speaker giving a talk that contains, without interruption, the reading of poems. In the initial booklet that we published I was pretty happy with the relationship of the text to the quoted poems. The lecture and the subsequent little book were a success, and it turned into a yearly event. The thing I realized when doing the second book was that the attributes of the poems for this talk were different from the first. Poets write poems of different line lengths and line arrangements that have to be dealt with. The problem to solve in a series like this is how to deal with inconsistencies consistently. In a certain sense it’s a classic problem of typographic “discipline,” the relationship of the parts to the whole.
For the last couple of years I’ve also been working on a large fine art photography book where the typography has to be disciplined, but with more complicated variations and at times a strong relationship to the images. It looks quite different from the little Teaching Poetry books.
I had a great drawing teacher by the name of Carl Holty who would say, “If your hand doesn't hurt when you’re finished, you’re not doing it right.” The same is true with typography. If your mind isn’t tired when you’re finished, you’re not doing it right.
The point of the article was that the process of graphic design has much in common with concepts that are associated with the philosophical and critical methods of Deconstruction—the relationship between text, image and meaning.
At the same time, by the 1990s, the Macintosh computer had become powerful enough to more freely explore these visual relationships between text, image and meaning. This was certainly not a new area. Moholy Nagy explored the subject. I’ve always thought Moholy would have been the ideal person to help graphic designers understand the potential of computer technology.
Computers, deconstruction, freedom to explore, the connections all seemed so obvious to me. But boy did I get a bunch of crap about that article from reviewers, designers and scholars alike. Anyway, it’s still being reprinted and is on many design school reading lists. It must have had something going for it.
Writing for PRINT in the late ’80s and ’90s was exciting. I was writing along with Steve Heller, Phil Meggs, and a little later Mike Dooley and other good writers. The magazine won the National Magazine Award a couple of times. That was a big deal. Along with Emigre and Eye magazine it was a great period for design journalism.
I recommend work to museums that I think fits the institution’s criteria and interests, and, most importantly, needs to be preserved. I believe this activity started for me when I took you and Zuzana Licko to meet Jack Stauffacher in the late ’90s. Jack was in his seventies at the time. While we were at his shop, he started digging up some of his experimental work that had not been seen in decades. These were beautiful letterpress prints done with large wood type on his Vandercook press. The emphasis of this work was on the creation of interesting counter spaces and activating the entire space of the page.
You then suggested that I write an article about this work for Emigre magazine, which I did, and it became a big hit, introducing Jack to a new, young audience of graphic designers. Some time later it crossed my mind that the then-curator of Architecture and Design at SFMoMA, Aaron Betsky, whom I knew from the University of Cincinnati, might be interested in Jack’s work. He came to Jack’s studio and looked at a few prints, turned to me with a huge smile on his face and said, “Tell me what I need to know about these.” Within a few months SFMoMA was the proud owner of a suite of Stauffacher typographic monoprints.
Since then SFMOMA has expanded its collection of Jack’s work considerably. My goal was to preserve this work for the future, and make it available for the public to enjoy. Jack’s work was first introduced to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for the 2012 California Design exhibit by a former student of his, SB Master, who has a firm in San Francisco. I helped gather the work for that show and a few years later helped select work for a one-man exhibit of Jack’s work at LACMA which then became part of the permanent collection.
It’s serendipity. A good example would be how LACMA collected Sam Smidt’s work. I was at a meeting there and the discussion was about the influence of the Art Center School on graphic design. That led to a discussion of how important Lou Danziger and the work of his students was to the subject. I knew Sam Smidt and that he had been a student of Danziger’s from 1952 to ’54. No one at the meeting knew about Sam! So I gave them a brief description of his importance to Bay Area design and that particular period generally. Within a couple of years a group of Sam’s key posters had been assembled and acquired for the collection at LACMA.
By and large museums favor collecting posters. The curators know how to handle, store and present them. Preserving newer forms of media is a problem for museums, but they are facing up to it. MoMA is collecting digital typefaces, for instance, including a number of Emigre fonts!
There are a lot of designers and studios I have a great deal of respect for–often for very different reasons. In the process of interviewing different designers and writing about design over the years, I’ve learned you have to understand what designers are after to understand if they have succeeded.
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Rudy VanderLans used to design, edit and publish Emigre magazine. Together with his wife Zuzana Licko he runs the Emigre Fonts type foundry. VanderLans is currently at work on his next book of photographs titled Still Lifes, U.S.A., to be published by Gingko Press sometime in 2017.
An evening at Chuck Byrne’s house in Oakland is always a treat for a number of reasons. First and foremost, there’s the home-cooked food that Chuck and his wife Elizabeth prepare and serve, always accompanied by some of the finest wines that Northern California has to offer. Both are usually out of this world.
Second, the dinner guests are often a who’s who of Bay Area talent, including designers, photographers, architects, curators, scholars, librarians, writers, and artists of all kind, which is all you need to know about Chuck’s connectedness to the art scene of the Bay Area and beyond. Although Chuck says he doesn’t like the word connectedness, he just likes interesting people.
Third, Chuck is a master story teller. No dinner party goes by without a number of entertaining stories about the profession of graphic design, an area in which he has operated in just about every imaginable capacity for the past fifty or so years. The man has seen it all.
Finally, there’s something additionally nurturing about having dinner in a room featuring a wall to wall bookcase filled with books on design. Although my own personal favorite in that bookcase is a small, framed, vintage letterpress-printed card, that sits on a shelf in front of the books. I love to stare at it in between courses—it’s Jan Tschichold’s business card.
The following interview was conducted in January 2017. It covers quite some territory, but paradoxically only scratches the surface of what Chuck Byrne can tell you about his life in graphic design. To hear more, you’ll just have to hope for a dinner invitation.
RV:
You are one of those rare designers who took to the Macintosh very early on, at its inception. Actually that’s how we got to know each other, by sharing info on how to use this machine. This was probably in ’84 or ’85. You had quite a flourishing career before the Mac, using traditional production methods. What was it about this machine that interested you, while so many other designers rejected it?CB:
We first met when I came to interview you for the first big article PRINT magazine published on graphic designers using what was then called “desktop publishing” technology. The center for the development of this idea in terms of equipment and software was the Bay Area. But, it seemed that most designers here were afraid and/or puzzled by desktop publishing. I had seen Emigre magazine and was interested in your work and its relationship to the computer.RV:
Was the computer and all the activity surrounding it the reason why you moved here?CB:
In late 1984. Elizabeth and I moved here from Cincinnati where I had a studio and taught at the University of Cincinnati. But the move had nothing to do with the computer. She had been appointed head of the Environmental Design Library at UC Berkeley.Quite by accident after we moved here, I worked briefly in one of the first Mac-based studios in San Francisco. I had an agreement there that I didn’t have to use a computer. In the past, and before the Mac came along, I had been exposed to graphic computers and I didn’t like the experience. These were high-end, complicated, expensive machines that really didn’t seem workable for most graphic designers. So computers didn’t interest me much. But after three days in this studio, and watching a young woman work on a primitive, tiny-screen Mac, it became clear that the Macintosh would become ubiquitous in graphic design studios. A lot of things made this possible: The equipment was one-tenth the cost of previous computer equipment; it had a graphic user interface so there was no need to learn and key obscure keyboard commands; there were a large number of good typefaces becoming available; and the Mac could use Postscript to output art and type, which meant quality reproduction.
RV:
So you showed up in the Bay Area at the exact right time and caught the bug?CB:
Yes, and at the time I had also just begun writing for PRINT magazine. I convinced the editors that the magazine had to publish an article about the low-cost computer revolution and how it was going to impact graphic design. When the Macintosh and the early software programs came along, they were promoted as a way for laymen to become graphic designers. Obviously, this was upsetting to most professional graphic designers. The article tried to convince designers that the computer didn’t mean the end of the graphic design profession, but rather that it could be a tolerable and perhaps even interesting change. Ironically, many graphic designers at the time fought the introduction of the computer. So it wasn’t all peaches and cream, but within a few years the computer became the primary tool for graphic design production. And now, computers are as ubiquitous as white walls in a studio.Many Bay Area people played big roles in helping the Macintosh become that indispensable tool for graphic designers. Not only were designers involved in the development of the Mac, but also in creating software for Adobe and other companies. Local designers like Clement Mok and Hugh Dubberly spent a lot of time traveling the country helping graphic designers understand what was happening and explaining how this tool could help them. Some of the very first events in the country dealing with the Mac and graphic design were undertaken by the SF AIGA.
It’s overly romantic perhaps, but after a few months in the Bay Area I felt this place was for graphic design something like what Paris was for art in the 1920s. There were already a number of great designers in San Francisco causing the city to challenge New York as a design center. And, there were a lot of exciting young designers appearing on the scene.
Innovative design was everywhere. There were free street magazines that were visually amazing. You would run into famous designers at “service bureaus,” businesses where you could get high-resolution output done from your Mac files. I can remember making a special trip to what was considered the best service bureau around to have films output from Mac files for the very first digital cover for PRINT magazine that I designed. For some reason all the guys running these service bureaus were from India. The man that ran this particular place found out what I was there for and thanked me profusely for choosing his shop “to do this important thing.” It was pretty funny.
And to top it all off, you had started Emigre magazine, which introduced a lot of groundbreaking design and design criticism, and ultimately influenced graphic design around the world.
Along with this was the astonishing activity in type design and production. There was the Adobe type group, headed by Sumner Stone and with expert guidance from people like Hermann Zapf, Erik Spiekermann, Rodger Black and Jack Stauffacher who were making historic typefaces available digitally and developing new ones. And Zuzana Licko and a few others here had begun to experiment with digital type design.
RV:
Yes, this was a golden age of design. And the Bay Area was ground zero.CB:
Yes, ground zero for design and technology. There was an almost daily supply of new developments from Silicon Valley that impacted graphic design and printing. Some days it seemed like the business section of the newspaper was totally devoted to graphic design and printing. And then—the Internet! Internet technology, although not invented here, was developed here in the Bay Area, and changed graphic design systemically.RV:
Let’s get to your work. I look at your early work, before the Mac, and it is very much of its time in terms of typeface and image use, and layout. When you look at it now, how would you critique your early work?CB:
In the 1960s and ’70s my type was dark and heavy-handed. Much of the work I did then was about layout and not about concept. I worked on a lot of utilitarian projects with no budgets to speak of. That kind of project teaches you about organizing information, and some of it can lead to interesting visual design.During this time we lived in Detroit, I did a lot of work for the Detroit Institute of Arts which included exhibition design as well as graphic design. Much of it consisted of big posters reproducing works of art. I learned a lot about color printing by doing these, but they were not particularly adventurous. It was more about getting the type to relate in some way to the image without interfering with it.
When we moved to Cincinnati in 1978, I opened a studio named Colophon and the work got more adventuresome. We began doing large-size, four-color posters using strong, concept-driven, staged-color photography. Other designers were doing this kind of work then. It was there that I was introduced to the Hennegan Company printers. Besides being great printers, they supported design and were adventurous. Technically, some of the things my studio did would not have been possible without them.
RV:
Typographically, some of that early work really pushes the production tools of the time, meaning it was very work intensive and tricky to do I imagine.CB:
Interesting you should notice that aspect. Before the studio computer you had to work with straightforward Linotype or photo type repros. If you wanted to manipulate the type, you had to cut type repros apart and move the type around by hand. It was a lot of work but it was also freeing in a way. Once the type was cut apart you could constantly move it around, run it at an angle or vertically, do whatever you wanted to. But it had to appear with the precision the typesetting machines generated.My type education was based on hand-set metal type. You could move it around just about any way you wanted. One of the reasons I was attracted to the computer and computer software was that you had so much more freedom to experiment and move type around, try new things without mocking-up or spending a fortune at the typesetters. The computer very much reminded me of working with movable type.
RV:
Your more recent work looks very different from your earlier work. For instance, when I look at the ongoing series of booklets that you design for the annual Judith Lee Stronach Memorial Lectures on the Teaching of Poetry for UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, these are beautiful exercises in typographic restraint and sheer elegance. Where do your natural typographic tendencies lie, in the earlier or later work?CB:
Again, I think this comes from my education. In the early 1970s I attended the University of Louisville, which had a design program that was taught by Robert J. Doherty. He had been at RISD and then in the first graduate class in design at Yale, where he studied with Herbert Matter, Alvin Eisenman and the other great people there. His own graphic design work was a mix of traditional fine press and modern typography. He had no trouble with his students exploring different approaches to their work. In fact, the very first time I met him and asked for career advice on which area of design to go into, he told me, “Why limit yourself?” and turned around and walked off. Doherty was a huge influence on my concept of what design is. He is now in his nineties.I’ve been working on the “Teaching Poetry” series of little books for twelve years. The text is from a lecture given every year and underwritten by a good friend of ours. The typographic problem to solve was how to insinuate the sound, or better, the rhythm of a speaker giving a talk that contains, without interruption, the reading of poems. In the initial booklet that we published I was pretty happy with the relationship of the text to the quoted poems. The lecture and the subsequent little book were a success, and it turned into a yearly event. The thing I realized when doing the second book was that the attributes of the poems for this talk were different from the first. Poets write poems of different line lengths and line arrangements that have to be dealt with. The problem to solve in a series like this is how to deal with inconsistencies consistently. In a certain sense it’s a classic problem of typographic “discipline,” the relationship of the parts to the whole.
For the last couple of years I’ve also been working on a large fine art photography book where the typography has to be disciplined, but with more complicated variations and at times a strong relationship to the images. It looks quite different from the little Teaching Poetry books.
I had a great drawing teacher by the name of Carl Holty who would say, “If your hand doesn't hurt when you’re finished, you’re not doing it right.” The same is true with typography. If your mind isn’t tired when you’re finished, you’re not doing it right.
RV:
Right, the more simplified the typography, the more perfect it needs to be, the harder it gets.CB:
For sure.RV:
But are you doing that kind of work now because you’re more attracted to that, and you’re seeking it out, or is it because the more flashy, experimental stuff, like the Hennegan work, no longer comes around?CB:
After a few years in the Bay Area I took an Associate Professorship at CCA, and afterward taught at San Jose State University. At the same time, I was writing a lot for design magazines. Suddenly you have a very different reputation for who you are and what you do. I continued to do experimental work, but it was mostly small posters. Projects like the Hennegan promotion books and large posters for museums can’t be done without a staff. There were opportunities, but I had decided after closing my studio in Cincinnati that I didn’t want to have a staff again. I like working with other designers, but I didn’t like the responsibility of heading a studio. All of my work here has been as a one-man studio and comes by referral.RV:
You wrote a lengthy, in-depth article on post-modernism for Print in 1990, perhaps the first article Print ever published about that topic. It was very timely, and it’s been often quoted, referenced and reprinted. How did this come about?CB:
You’re referring to an article first titled “Brave New World: Understanding Deconstruction.” I hated the first part of that title, which the editors came up with. Since then I’ve shortened the title to “Understanding Deconstruction.” It took a year to do. Much of its success is due to Martha Witte, who worked in my studio and was a former student from the University of Cincinnati. She did the heavy research, and Carol Stevens, my editor at PRINT, made it readable.The point of the article was that the process of graphic design has much in common with concepts that are associated with the philosophical and critical methods of Deconstruction—the relationship between text, image and meaning.
At the same time, by the 1990s, the Macintosh computer had become powerful enough to more freely explore these visual relationships between text, image and meaning. This was certainly not a new area. Moholy Nagy explored the subject. I’ve always thought Moholy would have been the ideal person to help graphic designers understand the potential of computer technology.
Computers, deconstruction, freedom to explore, the connections all seemed so obvious to me. But boy did I get a bunch of crap about that article from reviewers, designers and scholars alike. Anyway, it’s still being reprinted and is on many design school reading lists. It must have had something going for it.
RV:
What was the main complaint? Did it have anything to do with the fact that the ideas you wrote about didn’t relate directly to graphic design practice?CB:
Yes. To some designers at the time the whole idea of “theory” was, to put it lightly, not appreciated. In design, theory and history guide us every day whether we realize it or not. No matter what school you attend, it instills a theory in you. At its core, theory provides a framework for your approach to design. Many designers disclaim this and are firm believers in “intuition.” Intuition is mostly based on experience—it’s a complicated topic. Granted, the whole subject is complicated.RV:
If you were invited to write an article about design today, similarly timely, what would it be about?CB:
An article updating the influence of the computer on graphic design would be interesting. After all, it’s been 30 years. Time enough for reflection. Some things look identical to what was done then, and some don’t. New media, like web pages, have been developed and many look the same as printed pages with a similar purpose from 100 years ago.RV:
Are you saying that, in essence, the computer has had only a marginal influence on the look of design?CB:
It clearly has revolutionized the production of graphic work. But I don’t know if it’s brought about a new aesthetic. For a while it did, and then innovation seemed to fade. Occasionally, I think things are moving ahead again. Devices like cell phone screens are so small that they have forced design innovation. Some solutions are obvious, some are not.RV:
And why haven’t you written the article. Is writing no longer a part of your output?CB:
I do very little writing. Too much work. Too much research. When I wrote for PRINT and the AIGA Journal there were far fewer academic programs and design historians then there are now. Back then I was observing and pondering what I saw. That’s being an essayist. I’m not a historian.RV:
Are you being modest?CB:
No, I’m not a historian. Like most popular design writing, my writing was not up to scholarly standards. Again, I think of my writing as reporting, observing, commenting. While rewriting parts of “Understanding Deconstruction” I don’t know how many times, I got really frustrated with changing my mind about what I had written. I’d call my editor at PRINT who would listen to my rant for a while and then quietly say “writing is thinking” and then hang up.Writing for PRINT in the late ’80s and ’90s was exciting. I was writing along with Steve Heller, Phil Meggs, and a little later Mike Dooley and other good writers. The magazine won the National Magazine Award a couple of times. That was a big deal. Along with Emigre and Eye magazine it was a great period for design journalism.
RV:
Your interest in graphic design runs very wide and very deep. You’ve practiced, you’ve taught, you’ve lectured, and you’ve written. Which do you enjoy the most?CB:
Studying and teaching in a university setting has been the most important aspect of my career. Almost everything I do springs from that. I know it’s not for everyone who is interested in graphic design, but it’s an environment that exposes you to everything that influences graphic design: art, psychology, philosophy, science, writing, research, media, music, drama, business, etc.RV:
I like that idea of opening up design to all these outside influences that are readily available in a university setting. And I can see how that can inspire you as an experienced designer. As a design teacher is it difficult to instill in the students that same notion of how important those influences are?CB:
Yes!RV:
Is there sufficient time for that considering all the other basics that you have to teach them?CB:
At a certain level, you have to leave training behind and move on to education. The design profession is changing constantly. Graphic designers are now asked by clients to take responsibility for research and thinking and writing about basic human interaction and understanding. This requires exposure to a big world.RV:
You taught design for a long time. What was the most difficult thing about teaching graphic design?CB:
Off and on, it was nearly 40 years of teaching. For me the most difficult thing was not getting bored. Many good college and university teachers will tell you that teaching helps the teacher as much as the student. If the students are smart and prepared, you can present them with “problems,” subjects to which you personally may not have a solution. Watching them grapple with the assignment stimulates your own thinking. Students will ask for examples of successful solutions. I would always tell them that I don’t know of any. It’s exhilarating to see students gain confidence in their own ability to think and develop solutions that are thoughtful and beautiful.RV:
You’ve also been an ardent promoter of graphic design and an advisor to various art institutions. You have the ear of curators at LACMA and SFMOMA. What are your thoughts on the design collections that are being accumulated by these two institutions?CB:
Well, I’ve done graphic design and exhibit work for museums since the ’70s and have an idea of how they work and what their aims are. Believe it or not, graphic design has been a part of museum collections for a long time. It’s just been categorized differently. However, the concentrated introduction of contemporary graphic design is a new phenomenon. I think it corresponds to the increasing interest in design in general, and the amazing interest in “material culture” that museums have.I recommend work to museums that I think fits the institution’s criteria and interests, and, most importantly, needs to be preserved. I believe this activity started for me when I took you and Zuzana Licko to meet Jack Stauffacher in the late ’90s. Jack was in his seventies at the time. While we were at his shop, he started digging up some of his experimental work that had not been seen in decades. These were beautiful letterpress prints done with large wood type on his Vandercook press. The emphasis of this work was on the creation of interesting counter spaces and activating the entire space of the page.
You then suggested that I write an article about this work for Emigre magazine, which I did, and it became a big hit, introducing Jack to a new, young audience of graphic designers. Some time later it crossed my mind that the then-curator of Architecture and Design at SFMoMA, Aaron Betsky, whom I knew from the University of Cincinnati, might be interested in Jack’s work. He came to Jack’s studio and looked at a few prints, turned to me with a huge smile on his face and said, “Tell me what I need to know about these.” Within a few months SFMoMA was the proud owner of a suite of Stauffacher typographic monoprints.
Since then SFMOMA has expanded its collection of Jack’s work considerably. My goal was to preserve this work for the future, and make it available for the public to enjoy. Jack’s work was first introduced to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for the 2012 California Design exhibit by a former student of his, SB Master, who has a firm in San Francisco. I helped gather the work for that show and a few years later helped select work for a one-man exhibit of Jack’s work at LACMA which then became part of the permanent collection.
RV:
I think these stories are very telling. They show how these design collections take shape in a rather happenstance way. That’s a worrisome thought. Aren’t museums supposed to have a finger on the pulse?CB:
Well, museums and curators learn about things in various ways. They are usually well versed in their specific subject area, but if they have responsibilities in other areas, like graphic design, it can be a puzzle. Also, for most all museum curators, graphic design is not their singular concern. When the subject of graphic design comes up, they ask around like anyone else would do.RV:
So it’s up to us, the design community, to push museums to pay attention?CB:
I’ve found that arranging a meeting with a curator and making a pitch about work is a waste of time. I keep an ear open for context, a situation where a designer’s work would contribute to a museum or curator’s aims.It’s serendipity. A good example would be how LACMA collected Sam Smidt’s work. I was at a meeting there and the discussion was about the influence of the Art Center School on graphic design. That led to a discussion of how important Lou Danziger and the work of his students was to the subject. I knew Sam Smidt and that he had been a student of Danziger’s from 1952 to ’54. No one at the meeting knew about Sam! So I gave them a brief description of his importance to Bay Area design and that particular period generally. Within a couple of years a group of Sam’s key posters had been assembled and acquired for the collection at LACMA.
By and large museums favor collecting posters. The curators know how to handle, store and present them. Preserving newer forms of media is a problem for museums, but they are facing up to it. MoMA is collecting digital typefaces, for instance, including a number of Emigre fonts!
RV:
Which graphic designers/design studios have consistently impressed you over the years? And, if you had a choice to pick one, dead or alive, to design your business card, who would it be?CB:
After knowing him for 30 years, I asked Jack Stauffacher to do a letterpress card for my wife Elizabeth and me. He knows as much about type and space as anyone I’ve met. It took me 29 of those years to build up the courage to ask him, and I’m thankful he did it.There are a lot of designers and studios I have a great deal of respect for–often for very different reasons. In the process of interviewing different designers and writing about design over the years, I’ve learned you have to understand what designers are after to understand if they have succeeded.
Rudy VanderLans used to design, edit and publish Emigre magazine. Together with his wife Zuzana Licko he runs the Emigre Fonts type foundry. VanderLans is currently at work on his next book of photographs titled Still Lifes, U.S.A., to be published by Gingko Press sometime in 2017.