Studio notes

Design for a new edition of Wolfgang Streeck’s How Will Capitalism End?, published by the wonderful folks at Verso.

It’s always pleasing when a job comes along and you realise you have absolutely the perfect research material on your bookshelf that has just been waiting for its moment in the sun. This week I’ve been absolutely battering Alistair Hall’s excellent London Street Signs for a thing; and subsequently drawing upon the sign-inspired type from Keith Bate’s foundry K-Type. 

John Self recently bloosked this passage from Kurt Vonnegut’s 1997 novel Timequake, which feels exceedingly relevant to the current state of creative affairs:

“People capable of liking some paintings or prints or whatever can rarely do so without knowing something about the artist. Again, the situation is social rather than scientific. Any work of art is half of a conversation between two human beings, and it helps a lot to know who is talking at you. Does he or she have a reputation for seriousness, for religiosity, for suffering, for concupiscence, for rebellion, for sincerity, for jokes? There are virtually no respected paintings made by persons about whom we know zilch. We can even surmise quite a bit about the lives of whoever did the paintings in the caverns underneath Lascaux, France. I dare to suggest that no picture can attract serious attention without a particular sort of human being attached to it in the viewer’s mind. If you are unwilling to claim credit for your pictures, and to say why you hoped others might find them worth examining, there goes the ball game. Pictures are famous for their humanness, and not for their pictureness.”

There’s a tattoo and/or cross stitch sampler for you. Humanness not pictureness.