Potsdam, Zierfische

Yesterday I rode a bicycle to Potsdam with some friends, then came back to go to the Zierfische opening of the Buchstabenmuseum. Check out their website for the story of the sign. I also tested out the panorama feature on my little camera, which turned out pretty well. Hopefully you can click on them to see full size.

Tonight is the Lange Nacht der Museen. It's an evening where you buy a single ticket and can get bussed around to as many museums as you want until two a.m. I generally like doing one museum per day, taking my time, etc, but I might have to do this just for the sake of it. It also might be a good way to see some museums I wasn't planning on going to. We shall see.

By George, I may or may not have it.

In the search for a thesis topic, I might have finally come up with something while trying to fall asleep last night. In my sleepy haze it might have seemed way more brilliant than it actually is, but I like it at the moment, so I'm going to run with it.

Everything I've done and seen so far has made me ask a lot of questions. This is good. Now, many things I've come across are pushing me to ask more questions about signage (blogger is telling me signage is not a word; it is definitely a word) in Berlin. After watching a few Spiekermann interviews and reading some of his stuff, I've learned that he is the designer of the typeface and look of Deutsche Bahn (except the red DB logo, which I believe was designed by Weidemann). I also observed that the typeface of street signs in Berlin is an interesting mix of modern and old-fashioned elements; it is a sans serif type, yet uses versions of the old Esszet and z. Here are some examples:

Another observation I have is that the street names in Berlin have changed a LOT. Between the Kaiser, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, the occupation, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, DDR, BRD, reunification, and the continuing struggle for a solid national and city identity, place names in Berlin have been in an almost constant state of flux throughout history. So, the signs must have changed!

So, who has designed all of these different signs? Where have those signs gone? Do people care when the names change? Do they care when the signs change? If they don't care, do they even notice? Who decided all the names? Who decided on the typeface? How does the print through which geographic orientation is communicated affect the experience of orientation and identification with a given place?

Most importantly: a street or Platz name means nothing if it's not on a sign. Period. The design of the sign matters. Erik Spiekermann designed the current Bahn signs in the subway, but what else has happened in to the graphic design of signs in the history of Berlin's place-name-process?? I am making this question my mission for my last two weeks (along with continued museum visits...).

I also may or may not decide to connect this with Paris, which I know nothing about, but also has a super interesting history that I'm sure connects to street names and signs. This is something for another day, though.

So, today I went to the Märkisches Museum, the museum for Berlin history. Museums are generally only good for extremely introductory info, but I wanted to see what they had in the way of pictures of street corners, reproductions of old maps, and information on the history of different neighborhoods. It was a good start. There were tidbits about the development of the Kurfürstendamm, Wilhemstrasse, etc. I also found out the details about Stalin Allee: part of Frankfurter Allee was renamed Stalin Allee in 1949, then in 1961 renamed again, part Frankfurter Allee and part Karl-Marx-Allee. It's still that way now.

After the museum, I decided to go back to the Buchstabenmuseum to take some pictures to post. I have a lot, but here are the ones of the HAUP from the old Ostbahnhof and the RUNDFUNK from the DDR radio, along with a couple others that I forgot to identify but demonstrate the awesomeness of the museum:

(HAUP) (RUNDFUNK)

This stuff also all relates to my initial questions--somebody clearly cares about saving letters, but how about street signs with historical names and typefaces?

Then I scurried back to my apartment to start looking around the internet for stuff on the graphic design of street signs. I'm really bad at using the search engines on German libraries, but I did manage to find a book that is essentially a Lexikon of street names in Berlin, with a volume for each neighborhood. It was published in the mid-nineties, presumably to ease any place-name-freakout/identity crisis Berlin probably went through during that period. Who knows if it worked, but it briefly explains the names of streets since the beginning of Berlin. Some haven't changed since the 17th century, and others seem to have changed since the book was published in 1995. I want to go beyond what the names have been to what the signs looked like, but this is a great resource.

I also found an interesting essay about the politics of cartography called "Kartographie und Politik: Anmerkungen zum Stadtplan >>Berlin - Hauptstadt der DDR<<" Definitely interesting stuff. Plus, the footnotes pointed me to the Landesarchiv Berlin, where I should be able to look at a whole archive of maps. Maps are good, but still don't get me to where the signs went. I'm a little unsure of where to go on this one, but I found a news article about a German typographer who has taken an interest in/inspiration from old street signs in Berlin. Verena Gerlach lives in Berlin, and I'm going to try to get an interview with her. She seems to know her stuff when it comes to signage in Berlin. I'm still contemplating trying to interview Spiekermann. He's pretty high profile, but hey, it can't hurt to ask.

Tomorrow I am going on a bicycle adventure to Potsdam with some friends of Dave Oxnard's, so I probably won't make any progress on the research. The Buchstabenmuseum has an opening for a new exhibit in the evening, though, so I should have some pictures from both that and the Fahrradtour. Happy Weekend!

Schrift in Berlin, pt. 2: Im Kiez

From what I gather, "Kiez" is a Berlin slang term for neighborhood. In my attempt to sound cool, I named this section "In the neighborhood." This may or may not be a misuse, but I'm over it. These specimens come from my walk between the Humboldt library and my apartment on Tucholskystrasse. The dog at the end was just sitting in the window of a super fancy boutique!! They really took "how much is that doggy in the window" to heart! I think he deserves better than Helvetica, though!

History of typography vs. typography as history

As I've been reading about the history of typography, I see that the history of type fits into the history of Germany (and everywhere else) as evidence cultural and political trends. Like any other aspect of aesthetic culture, especially those that are so closely tied with perception bzw. consumerism bzw. politics, etc, typography has changed with various movements like Modernism, Expressionism, and Punk (yes, Punk is included in encyclopedias of typeface, CS). So, why is typeface just as or more important to history than art, music, photography, etc (in my opinion)? It might not be, but for the sake of argument, here's mine:

Type, as a subset of graphic design, is both art and communication. A lot of things are art and communication, but, in our society (I'm going to go ahead and be ethnocentric for a moment), almost everyone can read. Definitely everyone who has power can read. So, our perceptions of information like personal messages, advertisements, laws, etc. are all conveyed through type.

If you read the link I posted yesterday about the Eszet, or even some of it, you know that Germans take spelling very seriously. I think typography is particularly significant here because of the cultural meaning type and spelling have taken on throughout history. In the United States type has similar effects as far as how we perceive information, but I would argue that the historical/aesthetic significance is less. The fact that Germans still argue about the Rechtschreibreform (which stems from a debate over the extent to which Fraktur should still be a part of the German Roman alphabet!) is testament to the importance of type here in Germany. This is not to say it's not important other places; I always think back to the designer on the film Helvetica who said that she always equated the font Helvetica with the Vietnam War.

This is getting repetitive with my previous posts, but I'm working on how to fit all this into my academic life, so the repetition is helpful, please bear with me.

Even though I somewhat take issue with some of Weidemann's ideas, his book has a long section on "Schrift und Geschichte" that I need to revisit. Also, I think I'm going to try to set up some interviews. I need to pose some questions before people who know what they are talking about.

I checked out the Mauerpark today. Very cool, but I still don't really know what to say about graffiti. It's a subculture I find mysterious and daunted by. On the agenda for tomorrow: more Weidemann, Berlinische Galerie (maybe) and a trip back to the Buchstabenmuseum.

Also, I saw this on Schönhauser Allee and I found it interesting:

P.S. Double post day! Exciting!

The epic linkage of the blogosphere!

READ THIS

Is a picture really worth a thousand words?

I think I might have opened a can of worms I totally can't handle by bringing up graffiti, but, alas, it's still something to think about. Re: Cyrus questions about Die Dame I think I will work on tomorrow, hopefully in conjunction with a post about the results of the contest on Miss Mia.

I'm not going to attempt to say anything about what graffiti is or is not in general terms anymore, because there is so much that ranges every bit of any spectrum that can ever exist. But, I think it is safe to say that graffiti IS typography, just as much as any other written word is. At the same time, it seems to be self-conscious (or rather, the artist is self-conscious) about the medium, and therefore the Schrift itself tends to fall into categories just as much as mass advertisements, books, etc. I'm going to stop writing and starting quoting, because what other people say is probably more useful at this point. First, Dittmar on typography/graffiti:

"Nicht nur die Bedeutung der Worte selbst wird also mitgeteilt, sondern durch die Angestaltung der Schriftzeichen wird auch auf weitere Bedeutungen reflektiert. Die Schrift spiegelt dabei den Sinn, der abhängig vom jeweiligen zeitlichen, dringlichen oder personalen Kontext ist."

To this I respond by saying that the same is true for all typeface. Graffiti might resemble pictures more closely than a book's typeface, but any type is chosen for a certain purpose. Part of what makes graffiti so interesting is the interplay between images and words. I suppose the same is true for any visual media.

In his book Wo der Buchstabe das Wort Führt, typographer Kurt Weidemann addresses graffiti in a different way, in the context of a discussion on "Das nachalphabetische Zeitalter," or, the post-alphabet age. On graffiti:

"Graffiti-Sprayer erfinden Zeichnen. Aber die besagen keine Wort mehr. Das Nachalphabet, das auf Zügen und Bahnhöfen, Wänden und Mauern, Über- und Unterführungen manchen Ärger und manche Schönheit offenbart, demonstriert den Ausdrucksbedarf der Wortlosen."

I'm not sure if I buy that graffiti-ers are "wortlos," but I like a point he makes about pictures vs. words later in the chapter in a caption to a picture of one of those emergency escape directionals in the seat-back pocket of an airplane:

"Mit der Weltweite des Verkehrs und des Handels in großem Umfang haben Schrift und Sprache ihre nationalen Grenzen und Kommunikationsschwierigkeiten aufgezeigt. Die Sprache der Bilder verschafft unmittelbares Verständnis und is auch für eine Gefahrensituation- harmloser als Worte es sein können. Das Bild hat nicht die Autorität des Wortes. [my italics]"

I can't decide how I feel about this! I definitely agree that a word can express something concrete, but how concrete is it? More so than pictures? In the context of the card in the seat-back pocket, pictures definitely serve to soften a potentially alarming idea, but does that idea apply to all things?

I've also noticed that in Germany road signs and things use pictures a lot more than in the US, z.B. road work signs here are all graphic instead of our huge orange ones that just say ROAD WORK. Maybe this is just another example of the Weltweite des Verkehrs Weidemann is talking about.

I think I need to think more about all this graffiti stuff (and read Herr Dr. Prof. Shahan's article) before trying to say any more. I seem to be winding myself into a confused knot.

Speaking of typography (when do I speak of anything else?), check out this clip of an interview with Erik Spiekermann. I keep hoping to run into him somewhere in Berlin, but this is unlikely.

I also went to the Deutsche Kinemathek museum today. It was pretty fun, especially the several-room shrine to Marlene Dietrich. The Germans wouldn't have it any other way.

Graffiti als Typographie?

First off, an answer to Herr Dr. Prof. Shahan's question about objectivity: no. As Spiekermann would tell you, even typeface can't be objective. Even those designers that attempt to achieve objectivity lose that goal in the process of trying to achieve it. But, a lot of people say that the best typeface is one you don't notice. Maybe that is the achievement of objectivity in visual representation? I still take issue with that because then you have to define "noticing." What do we notice without knowing we're noticing it? We read things graphically, so we must be noticing the typeface on some level.

Today I went down to look at the East Side Gallery. I liked it, but I sort of think that the art is predictably peace-loving and almost cheery in its post-unification-ness. It made me wish there were large sections of the wall still preserved with the original graffiti.

Which got me to thinking. I took a few pictures of graffiti in my little photo study of Alexanderplatz, because it seemed natural to include it. But, there isn't much talk of graffiti in the big books on Typographic eras, styles, and methods that I've been skimming through. This is mostly because graffiti artists aren't designers--at least in the traditional sense--who create images to sell products. But, graffiti is presumably trying to achieve something, whatever it may be, and it uses words--Schrift--to depict that whatever message. Typography doesn't seem like the right word because it implies the use of print, but in any case, graffiti is a definite form of Schrift with definite implications. I'm not sure what, yet, but I might start by taking more pictures, and reading this book:

Im Vorbeigehen: Graffiti, Tattoo, Tragetaschen: En-Passant-Medien von Jakob Dittmar.

I went back to Die Dame today as well, and found that the switch away from Fraktur happened in 1921, whereas for BIZ it never happened. Both were from the Ullstein publishing company. Clearly, design choices had to do with the audience (Berliner illustrierte Zeitung=everybody's magazine aka traditional German, Die Dame=high culture for the New Woman aka Modern, although still not in sans serif).

Tomorrow I think I'll go to the Museum for Film und Fernsehen, for fun, and read the Dittmar. Hopefully the sun comes out at some point!