viz.

(Image credit: Harry Ransom Center)

The other day I was walking through the ongoing Norman Bel Geddes exhibition over at the Harry Ransom Center, and I spotted a photo of the designer with Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella. You wouldn’t believe my surprise. What in the world were Robinson and Campanella doing with Bel Geddes? Up until that point in the gallery, I’d seen absolutely nothing having to do with baseball. And I didn’t think I would. Bel Geddes aesthetic preoccupation with what on the surface appears to be simply aerodynamics suggests a version of the future that we’re still trying to attain, like Ahab and his whale. Whether our cities will ever look like his remains to be seen. Perhaps I’m missing the point a bit, and maybe much of Bel Geddes’ work represents aesthetic advertisements rather than specific blueprints. But one can’t deny that Bel Geddes’ designs intently seek the immediate, the sleek, and the fashionable. These are all preoccupations inherently at odds with the boredom of baseball.

A few weeks ago I caught an episode of Independent Lens on PBS about the font Helvetica.

In the undisputed manifesto of modern graphic design, The New Typography, author Jan Tschichold argues in vaguely Heideggerian terms that modernity requires a typeface consistent with its worldview. In fact, typeface has always been consistent, in his opinion, with the worldview of the civilization that used it, insofar as he sees that worldview as an expression of the relationship between with individual, the whole of society, and the technae they employ to shape and frame the world around them.

Then over the last week I caught sight of this pair of advertisements for the typeface Helvetica font featured on Ffffound.com.

http://viz.dwrl.utexas.edu/files/helvetica-ad.jpg alt="sexist helvetica ad" class="center" width="180">

Image from Ffffound.com.

Image from Ffffound.com.

The progressive deconstruction of Orientalism is catching up with information technology. Since 1996, the Arab Image Foundation, based in Lebanon, has been amassing a digital collection of photographs from the Arab world.