just rambling

A lookback at THE LASALLE SHOW ‘10

This was my first year attending graduate showcases of graphic design students. My first visit was to NAFA’s Be A Good Creative, which was disappointing. It didn’t help that my designer friend had warned me beforehand that local graduation shows were a waste of time. So, I didn’t expect too much when I visited THE LASALLE SHOW ‘10 for the graduates of LASALLE College of the Arts. And, I’m glad I did. To be fair, LASALLE seems to have a much wider pool of graphic design students judging by the number of exhibits. Their Design Communication certificates, which you can specialise in Advertising Communication, Graphic Communication and Image & Communication, begin from diploma level and go up to a Master of Arts in Design.

The show left me with the impression that LASALLE graphic design graduates were educated with an approach to graphic design that was more conceptual than mere ’styling’. Their Diploma level students worked on real-world problems, such as designing way-finding systems for People’s Park Complex and Toa Payoh bus interchange, and advertising concepts for National Museum Singapore and Yellow Pages. Their graduates’ work brought that to another level by tackling the issues of graphic design’s application in the real world.

A project that literally stood out (left) was Richard Phua’s White Ink, a series of visuals that shows the negative spaces that one usually doesn’t “see”, but is all around us. One thing he did was to print a book of newspaper pages on transparencies. This eliminated the white space and made you realise how difficult reading is without white space! Unfortunately, Richard’s website hardly says anything (actually, nothing).

Stella Clarissa’s Dyslexia: I See Words Differently (right) introduces graphic design to investigate a community’s specific problem — reading. Even as graphic designers constantly argue about legibility issues, we often forget that the argument is based on the vision of a normal person. Her work inserts this community’s concern to nudge graphic design towards a more inclusive form of communication.

The Papercy Project (left), by Benjamin Koh, brings alive the medium of paper in a series of posters that are just beautiful and interactive. As part of this project, he created an astronomy calendar and posters that celebrate a origami typeface and the year of biodiversity. In an era where it’s so easy to do design digitally, it’s great to still see graphic designers showing the beauty of what a pair of hands can do.

While the graduates works showed the possibilities of graphic design, LASALLE’s Masters students used it as an intellectual tool to understand our culture. Aditi Bhari’s Impressions of a City: Singapore created a visually exciting book of what shapes this country. He’s managed to appropriate images of our everyday visual culture and matched them with observations from some of Singapore’s best intellectual minds. I’ll love to get hold of the book!

Finally, Sanchita Jain’s Decoding Culture combines graphic design with intervention in public spaces as a kind of experiment to pin down India’s culture. She created a series of public signs that are beautiful, hilarious and sometimes puzzling (as viewed from a different culture) and put them up in India to see how people react. This was all cut into a short film. She actually created similar signs for Singapore, but unfortunately she did not have time to conduct a similar experiment here. Although, I wonder if she might get into trouble if she carried out such a Situationist act here.

And that’s my take on THE LASALLE SHOW ‘10. In a way, it’s restored my belief that students’ work can be exciting and great. Plus, it was only a year ago when I was a student, so I can totally understand how comments, both good and bad, can shape the journey ahead!

Designing Singapore Neutrality

The fragility of Singapore’s multi-racial society is a very big part of the national ideology. Having to pay the utmost sensitivity to the four official languages here — English, Mandarin, Malay and Tamil — how has that affected design?

Public signage is one very good indicator of this because it’s meant to be read by all so how it is designed is a good gauge of how we handle this issue.

A common way of handling this issue in design is to reference a ‘foreign’ element instead. In 1969, Minister of Foreign Affairs S. Rajaratnam explained to The Straits Times why Singapore was celebrating the 150th anniversary of modern Singapore with Raffles as the founding father.:

“In a multi-racial society at this stage of evolution, we could be inviting trouble were the founder to be selected from either the Chinese, Malay or Indians… by choosing Raffles, an Englishman, we have chosen a neutral person least likely to excite racial passions.”

In a similar vein, Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew explained in his 2000 memoirs, From Third World to First, why he recruited Gurkha policeman as sentries for his home:

“To have either Chinese policemen shooting Malays or Malay policemen shooting Chinese would have caused widespread repercussions. The Gurkhas on the other hand were neutral, besides having a reputation for total discipline and loyalty.”

This goes some way in explaining why our public signage is dominated by the English language.

It is one of the four official languages. It is the most neutral because none of the dominant races are tied to it. And, as an English-educated society, almost every Singaporean is suppose to know it.

Another way of handling the issue is to be fair to all the races: use all four official languages.

That seems to be the way older signs have been designed to handle this problem of communicating to the public. Based on my observations, newer signs often just use English and sometimes Chinese because it helps them reach out to the most people today. Besides having more languages in a sign is often costly because of the increased printing space. One of the few agencies that still consciously make use of all four languages is the MRT train system.

Another more recent phenomenon in the design of signs indicates how important tourists have become in our landscape.

Go figure where most of our tourists are coming from! Strange how we’re willing to spend money on making a place inviting to our tourists but not our older generation who may not understand English…

The two approaches to design public signages to solve the problem of public communication seem inadequate to me. The former favours an exclusive, even ‘foreign’, language while the latter is built on a legacy that can be costly and inefficient. This is where I think a pictorial language such as Isotype can be developed locally to be used with existing English signs.

Symbols could be designed to assist in public communication. In a way, they exist extensively for drivers here already, so why not built upon that and use it more extensively for public communication? It could prove to be a more neutral and effective than choosing the language of English alone, at least people who don’t know the language can recognise shapes.

See this city’s voice

I see voices in this city.

It’s an endless chatter wherever I walk. Just out of Orchard Road MRT station and the sight of WISMA ATRIA screaming greets my arrival to Singapore’s shopping district. And as I stroll down, boutiques like Mango, Louis Vutton purr out to me on one side while a Filipino-accent Lucky Plaza calls out across the road.

Like speech bubbles in a comic book, signs are the visible voices of the city. Whether it is the myriad signage adorning storefronts or the ubiquitous green reflective street signs that direct us with a state-like voice, each is set in a typeface, or font, reflecting their unique voice.

While a sign’s words tell us what it is, its typeface speaks. Typefaces are about form – a dressing that gives words extra meaning. Just think of it this way: imagine the street signs now set in Rotis Semi Sans were re-set with a typeface inspired by comic books like Comic Sans, would they say or even mean the same thing? If you’re lost in this city, will reading a street sign ‘Orchard Road’ in Comic Sans assure you that this was Singapore’s shopping district?

Typefaces have their roots in handwriting, which is unique to each one of us. They have since evolved from a style that imitated handwriting using quills and broad-nib pens to rigid-looking letters such as those with angular-heads and feet, known as slab serif that reflected the machine-like precision of the Industrial Revolution.

Today, digital typefaces come in all shapes and form but they can broadly be classified as serifs or sans serif. A good example of the former would be typefaces where the strokes of each letter has a slight projection like Times New Roman, the default font of every new Microsoft Word document until recently. The latter, as its name suggests, just means letters without the projections like Arial, another popular typeface in Word.

WHAT TYPE ARE YOU?
At the heart of typeface usage is the expression of the relationship between form and content. When Singapore Tourism Board (STB) wanted to brand the city as Uniquely Singapore, it commissioned a typeface to reflect the city as “The best of the modern world and rich cultures to deliver enriching experiences for the discerning visitor”, says its representative.

The result: “A melting pot… A bit of Chinese, a bit of Jawi, a bit of Tamil script and then everything in English,” describes Karen Huang, a designer who used to blog about typography in Singapore on Snog Blog.

But branding a city with a typeface is not unique to Singapore. In 2005, Norway built itself a visual identity of Norway-ness when it adopted Aeroportal, a typeface inspired by European, British and Scandinavian sensibilities that expresses “friendliness, simplicity and credibility” for its international communication.

Further back in history, the Nazi Party imposed the blackletter typeface as its official “voice” for its propaganda materials. Also known as Gothic, the typeface is a counterpart to the same architectural style. It was a convenient nationalistic symbol for the Nazis as it claimed that German chauvinists had appropriated this style to represent Teutonic virtue during the late nineteenth century.

A TYPE OF SHARED CULTURE
But the Nazi’s had conveniently ignored the international origins of the Gothic style when they championed it as quintessentially German.

The contestable definition of typefaces shows that typography behaves as how people create them to be, says visual communications professor Yeoh Kok Cheow. It is no different from other social structures like race, sex and class. “Typography as a form of communication in which we express ourselves with, has become the gateway for visual and cultural markers,” he says.

So unlike STB’s choice of typeface, a designer like Chris Lee would beg to differ. “If there is a typeface I would give to Singapore it would be Gill Sans,” wrote the founder of local design firm Asylum when asked on a forum what typeface represented Singapore. Like this city, Gill Sans, actually popularly associated with all things British (see the British Broadcasting Companies’ logo), “is efficient, modern, safe and uninteresting”.

But it is not just what type of city Singapore is. Divya Manian, the founder of Flickr! group SingaporeType observes that most shop signage here use Helvetica or Rotis Serif. The former’s neutral look was popular with corporate types for but has since become popular culture when a film about it was made to commemorate its 50^th birthday in 2007. Rotis Serif is from the same family of typefaces that adorn our street signs and was the body text of our national newspaper, The Straits Times, before its recent redesign.

“Choice of type reflects, in a way, the openness and creativity of a society,” says the web designer. “I guess everyone in Singapore is trying to ‘play safe’ in general and that shows up in the typographic landscape too!”

But there could be a practical reason why such “predictable and dreary type prevail” in a tech-savvy city like Singapore says Prof Yeoh. “The most visible typefaces used are noticeably Helvetica or Arial as these are readily available in the computer program related to the processes of digital typesetting and reproductions.”

TYPE FUNCTIONS
Perhaps the most standardised and visible use of type in any city is found in its street signs. In August 2001, the Land Transport Authority (LTA) replaced Singapore’s old silver street signs with its current reflective green ones.

According to LTA, the typeface choice – Rotis Semi Sans – was made after it conducted several tests and found that the legibility of the new signs improved by 20 per cent in the day and 100 per cent at night as compared to the old ones.

While typographer Peter Williams agrees the current signs work better, he attributes it to the use of white words on a green background. Typographically speaking, he considers the signs a “failure”. The wide spacing between each letters, says the design editor for local tabloid my paper, makes people read the signs as individual letters instead of words. Huang also says that Rotis Semi Sans is too “delicate” such that the individual letters’ variation in strokes makes it hard to read from far.

When asked why the choice of typeface, LTA’s representative said Rotis Semi Sans was probably picked to replace the previous Interstate because it was also used on its corporate logo. “It’s as simple as that, don’t read so deeply into it,” he says.

Such ambivalence towards typography is not surprising. While a city’s choice and usage of typefaces may reflect its culture, Huang reminds us, “Ordinary people don’t care, that is what designers need to remember.” At most, people recognise basic differences in type categories, she says. For instance, a bride might ask for a script-like font for her wedding invite or a boss trying to tone down a harsh e-mail might use Comic Sans.

WHAT TYPE OF CITY
There is a visible lack of old typefaces in Singapore, says Huang. “I think it’s got to do with all our upgrading, retrofitting. As a result, it’s very hard to find old, non-digitized typefaces around.”

But this city’s voice is not just younger, it has become less diverse over the years. Reflecting the state’s policy, the English language dominates this city’s voice today. Only in older signage does one find the other national languages of Chinese, Malay and Tamil. In fact, the only time one finds all four together is either signage that warn us of “Danger” or those in MRT stations.

The recent chase for the tourist dollar revived today’s street signs in Chinese and Tamil that accompany the English ones in the respective ethnic enclaves here. This trend is most telling in the brown signage pointing to tourist attractions that also have Japanese on them – a good sign of where our tourists come from!

If the state can make use of typefaces to build a tourist identity, can the rest of Singapore build community identity with type too? Imagine Punggol’s street signs set in a waterfront-inspired typeface, the industrial area of Tuas littered with signs in mechanical typefaces or the Arab Street quarters with a typeface created by the fusion of its emerging indie culture and historic Arab roots.

In 2002, the Design Institute of the University of Minnesota attempted to do that when it asked six teams to design a civic typeface to represent the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Pauls in the USA.

One of the teams was LettError, two Dutch designers who had never been to either city. As they put it, “How to make a typeface for a city I had never seen – or worse yet: how to make a typeface for any city?”

But that did not stop them from creating the winning entry Twin: an interactive typeface that keeps changing to real-world conditions such as temperature changes and traffic conditions.

As the designers explained: “It doesn’t force one particular style on a diverse group of people. Instead it becomes a machine with which each person can play with and find something that is appropriate.”

Indeed, that perhaps best reflects what typography is all about. Not only does it make the city’s voice more diverse and colouful, it gives each of us a unique voice to speak so that we can hear the voices of this city.

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This article was first published in Singapore Architect #251. You can download a PDF scan of the article here (2.6MB).

Type Heaven

A friend (thank you!) bought this for me from London. A 1948 edition of Eugene Ettenberg’s Type for books and advertising. I haven’t read it yet, but just browsing through it is enough to make me sit up at this godly hour to share the joy. More to come when I shell out time to read it, meanwhile, check these out…

and a type tree!

It’s always grey in TODAY

Halfway into the interview, Design Editor Edric Sng suddenly asks (one of many times) for my thoughts  on TODAY’s newspaper design and that is when I fumble. It took me a while, but I remembered another blog’s gripe about how “texty” TODAY looks.

It turns out that the paper is intentionally text-driven, or “grey” for a reason — advertisements. Two-thirds of the newspaper is made up of ads, so rather than compete with ads with colourful visuals that would cut text, Sng says, “It just comes down to the lesser of two evils.” Thus, being grey helps the news to stand out.

Ads play such a big role in this free newspaper’s design because that is its only source of revenue. This is why Sng laughs when he talks about ST’s news design constraints, “You think they have it hard? Nonsense!” he says. Moreover, the paper’s space constraints are further limited by its  tabloid-size, but Sng is clear that ads are why he gets paid.

Why TODAY is still in Times New Roman
When Sng led the three month long redesign of TODAY (he takes another swipe at ST for doing theirs in six) the one thing he was not allowed to change was the nameplate. As a fledgling newspaper, it could not afford to undo the branding work for a paper still trying to establish itself. That aside, everything went out of the door as Sng streamlined a paper too thin for too many different styles. He used just three colours of red, black and grey (business section was blue for marketing reasons) and two styles, one for daily and another for the weekend edition.

The redesign’s three guiding concerns were as follows: space constraints, making day-to-day design “idiot proof” and costs. Only two people led the redesign, Sng and his managing editor, and this he says led to a more coherent redesign than ST’s, which even had its nameplate’s typeface changed a day before launch. “We don’t believe in redesign by committee (like ST)… the problem is a lot of people don’t know what they are saying.” he says.

This lack of visual journalism knowledge here is one reason why Sng is considering lecturing when the opportunity arises. Education is how to improve newspaper design here, he says, especially since Singapore newspaper’s editors are mostly “dinosaurs” who only see journalism as text. Sng thinks at least 30 per cent of stories in today’s papers can be in alternative story formats like infographics, though it is the “hardest damm thing” to do too.

Another reason for the lack of innovation in newspaper design here is the lack of impetus with just two media companies. But though the odds seem stacked against improving things here, Sng has, and maybe, embodies the solution. After listening to my gripe about the situation, he says, “What’s the solution? Passion.”

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This concludes the two-part interview that  The Paginator had with Edric. Read his thoughts on the importance of text to the good design of a newspaper here.