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Mr. L U T Z. H A N S - Rudolph Lutz, who teaches at the Zurich design school, has spent the last 15 years (since he fell in love with a "this end up" symbol while in Edmonton, Canada) putting together a book called Die Hieroglyphen von Heute Grafik Auf Verpackungen Fur den Transport. It is a volume as thick as the Manhattan phone book on pictures Lutz has found on cardboard cartons used for shipping. It is the Moby-Dick of vernacular style. "I don't like the way the professional scene makes pictograms," Lutz says. He complains about the reductive tendency in professionally designed symbols. "You can say the same thing in very different ways," he points out as he shows us page after page of symbols used to mean fragile: hundreds of cracked wine glasses and cracked eggs, drawn in hundreds of differrent ways. "Lutz's fascination with these vernacular images is a way of rebelling against the sterility that we offhandedly refer to as Swiss. This amazing, obsessive, wonderful collection of icons is a revolt against design. "This is design not dominated by marketing," says Lutz. "There's no commercial interest in this." -- from Volume 1, issue 2 of 26 magazine, 1990, produced by Agfa Compugraphic Division, Agfa Corporation, Wilmington MA. This issue was never actually published, but Agfa sent me the uncut signatures because I asked them to. So, essentially, their entire editorial team put this issue together for an audience of one: me. I remain highly appreciative. (Sadly, Herr Lutz died in 1998. He was a beloved designer, and has influenced my life considerably. David Carson, the founding art director of RayGun magazine, was also a huge fan. (interview with Carson at ~mu/carson.html)) |