‘On one hand. Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks you’re back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides… Now I’ve written the whole thing, for Christ’s sake give me a drink.’
– Medieval monks
Research ‘Story Told’
There’s an urban legend that people who live in cities recognise more logos than bird species. This raised the question based on this week’s lectures from Stuart as to if a city is awash with logo’s already, do we really need to brand them further?
Does branding a city just confirm the idea that capitalism sees everything as a product? This idea is certainly questioned through Woolf Ollins New York City branding, is the branding for the denizens of the city or a branding exercise designed to reinforce the NYC brand globally? When examing the case study, the answer is provided by those who commissioned the work, NYC & Company, NYC Big Events and NYC Marketing. Should the residents of NYC have been asked if they wanted their city branded, or whether it needed a brand considering its already iconic status? A question of responsibility also lies with Woolgf Ollins and whether they should have questioned the logic of such an exercise.
After all, branding began literally as a weapon of torture, intended to dehumanize the persona and turn them into objects of sale. While the torture aspect has been removed, the approach still rings true, that everything branded is for sale and as designers, we should question the moral ethics that get asked of us when we approach branding especially around defining a brand and/ or typographic system for a city. After all, how can you approach a city design with uniformity when a city is composed of many cultures, languages and ways of communicating?
Further Thought 1:
The best-known city brand I perhaps the “I Love New York’ logo designed by Milton Glaser. He saw his logo design as a form of socially engaged design that helped improve the city that he loved so dearly. When asked about hi slogo he said: ‘ I have to say when you do something that really feel is useful when you have a positive social effect-it makes you feel great.’
(Ref: Kidd, An interview with Milton Glaser)
Further Thought 2:
Branding cities went hand in hand with gentrification, a process of wealthier people infiltrating and displacing lower-income residents in lower in income areas.
The bible of city branding is The Rise of the Creative Class by Richard Florida, in which he proposes that cities should focus on attracting creatives. In his view, creative people attract businesses, which in turn leads to economic growth. His work was the foundation for policies of identification and city branding since the 2000s.
(Ref: Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, New York Basic Books)
Design Development
Moving back to Dublin, I’ve been fascinated by the placenameplates and utility service ironworks that is a hangover of pre-independent Ireland and litter the street of the old Georgian Quarter with glimpses of their former glories.
The typography and intricate patterns found a glimpse to a time when a more uniform approach was established when constructing and developing the cityscape and provide a connection to the belief that Dublin was the second city of the empire after London. These older street signs eschew the need for Gaelic translations are found in later signage and instead root themselves in an industrial sans serif grotesque which still feels contemporary to this day.
While Grotesques are not the first sans serifs, but the first to be popularized and to use lowercase letters with a Latin alphabet. The first sans serif was cut in 1748 by the foundry of William Caslon for the Oxford University Press and later developed the Caslon grotesque which was used quite often in newspaper headlines, posters, and brochures of the time.
William Thorowgood designed a heavy-weight sans serif soon after in 1832. The style was named “Seven Line Grotesque” and marks when the word grotesque was adopted for the early sans serif. The Seven Line Grotesque was used exclusively for headlines and titles, while body text was still typeset using classic roman serif type and this influence across popular media no doubt then had an impact on architects, city planners and Steelwork foundries who were commissioned to produce the street signs of the day across England and Ireland.
This rare glimpse of Grotesque typefaces of the past which are littered around Dublin provides inspiration and a starting point for me to explore the creation of visual identity for Dublin. Beyond the place names, further, later contemporary examples can be found on the pathways that have undergone recent refurbishments indicating Dublin city councils desire to create a more uniform approach towards street namepaltes.
(Ref: https://cuffestreet.blogspot.com/2017/07/signs-for-improvement.html)
In addition, the place nameplates, to other typographic examples proved influential in my approach to developing identity, both rooted in the historical trade routes of The Dublin-London sailing route and the canal locks of the Grand Canal. Researching, I was reminded of Bian Dixons note in Word and Place in Irish Typography that states ‘First, it will be argued that mass- transportation necessitates the designation of place through signage systems. ‘
In addition to the inspiration drawn from above, I spent time in a rare and vintage bookstore exploring colours and letterforms from Irish literature. Whilst researching it dawned on me that it was the 100 Year celebration since the publication of Ulysses by James Joyce. It made me think that while Dublin lacks a visual identity, it has a literary identity that is more recognisable than any transient logo or typeface and that this literary identity could provide a potential solution for the application of my brand identity.
Development
I listened to how Fiona Banner takes influence from objects, place, material and form to create unique letterforms that communicate a vision and bastardisation of styles and behaviours of fonts she’s previously worked with. Taking this as a starting point, I then discussed with the typographer Bobby Tannam (just complete the Meta digital watch typeface) the necessity of and waste involved in the generation of new type solutions that could easily be answered by digging into the past and revisiting letterforms already established in the public sphere such as those found on the Georgian place nameplates. Again I was reminded of how capitalism had taken control of Graphic Design and driven designers in our obsessions with constant production to constantly seek new solutions instead of looking towards the past.
I then questioned Stuart’s challenge to build an experimental typeface and instead focus on reusing, tweaking and refining found letterforms.
I then started to sketch out the letterforms with a pencil and play around with details and kerning on paper. Confident in what I wanted to achieve, I pushed forward though I also looked at the potential of how the final identity could be incorporated into a flexible design system. This was quickly discounted as I started to form some final ideas on how I would see the application of the letterforms and revisited the idea of incorporating these letterforms in a way that celebrated 100 Years of Ulysses by James Joyce
Whilst happy with the final letterforms, I wanted to round the corners to give them a more unique feel, something suggested by me on the wall by Wes,– ‘iron, wrought and permanent’. I took the final letters back into illustrator and rounded the cores which gave them the final feel I was looking for.
Final Outcome
Having settled on the letterforms, I was left with the question of does this represent the Dublin that I am trying to communicate. On its own, it achieves the desire to translate the found letterforms and clearly felt look a Dublin typeface while as Wes said pointing towards a new Ireland. This was achieved by eschewing any experimental graphical styling and instead relying on more sustainable and less exploitive practices in developing the letterforms.
On its own, I would have been happy with the outcome, but I also wanted to pay homage to Ulsysess and looked towards a form that would help me communicate the identity of Dublin. I settled on a book cover and developed a playful illustration and typographic style to enforce the contemporary nature of the items we live in and avoid a pastiched approach to editorial design, something that I took away from Frauke Stegmann’s wonderful presentation. In addition, having spent time exploring the bookstore above, I observed the wonderful array of colours that influenced book design 100 years ago and looked to establish a similar colour palette in the final design. The illustration is a redrawn of Leopold Bloom, the central hero contained within Ulysess.
(Ref: https://www.bloomsandbarnacles.com/blog/2020/02/19/who-was-the-real-leopold-bloom)
References
Kidd, An interview with Milton Glaser
Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class, New York Basic Books
https://cuffestreet.blogspot.com/2017/07/signs-for-improvement.html
Dixon, B: Word and place in Irish typography.