| The following text was conceived
and written for a workshop at the Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht, department
of design. The assignment for the participants, given by project tutor
Armand Mevis, was to explore the (im)possibilities and materials and contexts
of design in relation to printing. The results were collected in an offset
printed booklet, The designer's terms. The title and the cover design
were taken from a small book of printer's terms in four languages, with
schematic drawings of printing processes and examples of type families.
The book, aptly titled The printer's terms, was written by Rudolf
Hostettler and designed by Tschichold. The cover of its 1969 edition was
adapted for this publication with 'designer's' printed over 'printer's',
to symbolize Armand Mevis' question: 'What is the relation between designers
and the printing process, and what implications does this have for the
meaning of print?'
I was charmed by the careful beauty
of the original booklet, and, when asked to write an introduction, proposed
to take a choice of pages from the booklet and use (or peruse) them as
templates for my text. The result, a hybrid of essay, copywriting and free
association, as designed by Zeina Maasri, re-inserted the written-to-fit
passages back into the original page lay-out, keeping the illustrations
and caption lines as they were. Other passages were typeset by Maasri in
a bitmapped letter on blank pages.
Since the essence of this project
is the close connection between form and content, the text is reproduced
here (as jpegs) in the form it appeared in The designer's terms,
partly inserted into the old lay-out. Click on the text or image in the
pages for next page. |