Nevolution

#Sworcery

I’m usually not one to brag, or claim my old school badge over any one else, but I knew about the brilliant and fascinating and luscious game Sword & Sworcery before you did. How? A rather lengthy post called This is  a Public Health Issue I did on the marvelous call to arms video Design Reboot by SuperBrothers some time back. Not that the video mentioned that a game was on the way, but I had an inkling that something more would come of it. After waiting two excruciating years, with the trickle of cryptic email updates only making the wait that much harder, the final result was a far more beautiful, intelligent and witty experiment than I could have hoped for. 

I suppose the inevitable spoiler alert should be announced at this point. I’ll presume you’ve either played it, or don’t intend on doing so. On the other hand, hopefully you’ll read this then feel compelled to go out and play it. In which case we’re in a bit of a bind. But as Catch 22’s go, this is not a serious paradox we’re dealing with here. So go download it, activate the megatome, wait for the bright and dark moons and bring happiness to the woodfolk. So know that I’ve written this on the presumption that you have played it, or aren't going to.

I’ve never been a fan of the point and click puzzle game. I don’t really have the patience for a game that requires smarts, and while this means I’ve missed out on a large amount of games, I’m fine with that. I don’t see the point in moving through a story and being rewarded for figuring out arcane inventory juggling tricks. Sworcery, while it employ’s this trope, doesn’t have particularly hard puzzles although I’ll embarrassingly admit I had to look up a walkthrough a few times just to get the ball rolling. There’s only a few different puzzles to figure out, and once the basic pattern has been established, it’s not too hard to work them out. While I’ve read the odd critique of the simple and repetitive nature of the game, it was a big bons for lazy old me. I didn’t come to this game expecting to think hard, instead, Sworcery must be looked at as an experience. As an argument for a mode of gaming that plays itself out, slowly, through time. I’ll get to that argument in a bit, but first I must kneel down on the altar of worship as many before me have done: 

This game is totally awesomesauce.

The aesthetic is awesome. The animation is awesome. The sound design is awesome. The soundtrack is awesome. Hell, despite a few complaints, the puzzles are awesome. The mythic storyline, might not be awesome, but that’s kinda the point. It taps into many other gaming storyline tropes and bundles it up into a story that we’re all familiar with, makes you realise it’s not that important, and only then does it reveal it’s awesomeness to you. Even the writing is awesome. I spent half the game with a dry smile on my face, nodding with approval and feeling included in almsot all the jokes. Did I mention it looks awesome? Every pixel is where it should be, with those that feel out of place are out of place for a reason. There’s something to be said for Craig’s 21st century rustic minimalism illustrative look. It’s just such a joy to be immersed in it, as oppoosed to his illustrations or even his animations. Even the marketing of the game was a stroke of awesome.  The whole thing ties together into the sauciest little package you’ll come across on your phone for some time.

All of the details in this saucebottle work with each other; nothing is there without a reason. Where details you once overlooked become important, you begin to wander how all of the other visual elements would be part of another puzzle. By the standards of any other game, the landscape isn’t very large, but they pack a lot into each scene. And while there’s lots of walking, you’re walking past some gosh darn beautiful scenery. Everything becomes revealed over time, and the whole landscape eventually sings with the songs of the sylvan sprites.  The soundtrack, apart from being an absolute joy to hear, works rather intuitively with the narrative as it unfolds. On another note, this is how it should be done. This is how you create things that matter. That count. That people are willing to put in more money than they should. How you get people to tell their friends. How you sell music. Not that every album should play an integral role in an indie game, but that care was taken to have an affordable album, with proceeds going directly to the musician. With a record that treats the printed object with the aura print deserves.

But I digress. If you want a far more eloquent review of this game, Killscreen has you covered. Not only is their use of words far better than mine, but they're much more aware of how this game is so brilliant compared to all other games that have come before it. I'm not a game historian, or theorist. It's not my thing. I like games, lots, but games have to have a fairly high bar for me to want to play them. For want of better words, I need my games to have a theory behind it for me to want to play it. I need intellect in my games. I need them to teach me something about the world to take something away from it. 

 

I'm here to talk about how Sword and Sworcery stacks up against that metric. How it stacks up to it's own metric. For all his words about Less Talk, More Rock, Craig has a put plenty of talk behind this game. Which brings us back to the start of this post. Two years ago he made a nice little video illustrating some of Jonathon Blow's call to arms about the state of video games.

You can start to see the ways in which this thinking greatly influenced many of the more intriguing mechanics of Sworcery. Blow looks at the the way in which the rules games dictate their philosophical and political outlook. He's mostly looking at World of Warcraft as a symbol of all that is wrong in gaming:

It doesn't really matter if you're smart or adept at trying to get ahead in a system because what really matters is how much time you sink in... It also says that you don't really need to do anything exceptional because to feel good, to be rewarded, all you need to do is run the treadmill like everyone else

When I looked at the Design Reboot video, I used it as a way to lead into some thoughts on conspicuous consumption and evolutionary psychology, mostly as a result of runaway signalling. I'd previously gone to see a talk by Geoffrey Miller, author of the book Spent: Sex, Evolution and the Secrets of Consumerism, and tried to show the connection between these ideas and gaming. On conspicuous consumption, I wrote that

Conspicuous consumption arises from human instincts for showing off our intelligence, personality traits, and moral virtues to family, friends, and mates. Consumerism is not a matter of 'materialism', but of runaway signalling, status display, and socially validated narcissism.

Most of the symptoms of conspicuous consumption can be neatly explained through this particular subset of evolutionary psychology. It's in this area that some games attempt to prove their worthiness to the player as well. It also neatly sums up everything that's wrong with poorly considered elements of Gamification. As an aside, I'm working on a post that compares gamification and quantification, but that's to come later. I continued

This abuse of runaway signalling is exactly Blow's argument. Without these scheduled rewards, is there any worthwhile gameplay left? Without a power up, gold coins, a bigger gun or more narrative, does the game fall below a threshold of playability, of interest? It's these empty rewards that keep most players hooked, the mistaken impression of a fitness indicator.

This game doesn't rely on forcing you to interact with it so you gain a bigger sword. It makes you want to interact with it to experience the world. You never get any power ups, you're sword doesn't get bigger, you gain no extra artifacts at the expense of fiddling around with inventory. The only objects that you gain allow you to interact with the world on different levels. The use of a magic mushrooms is a master stroke. Something we've all joked about, but here it makes sense. Not just as a game mechanic, but how it's appropriate to the woodland setting. Sure, you can restore your health, but I'd argue that this is a necessary element in all games where it's appropriate to do so. Sure, life is precious, but not so precious as to be detrimental to gameplay. More on that in a bit. So if "the rules of a game, the kind of interactions that a game puts you into is the meaning of life for that game" then what is the meaning of life for this game? 

Well, what are the rules of this game? Sure, it plays around with archetypes of classic games from our childhood, but it mixes them together to make a statement about itself, through the mechanics and the gameplay. You only have the chance to walk around and point to explore. There are puzzles for you to figure out, puzzles that make you pay attention to the environment. You get a chance to look beyond the normal scope of the environment. But there's also lots and lots of walking. You get lots of time to look at the environment. Everything reacts. Sure, these are only minor interactions; the water splashes, the trees rustle. But it's enough to make you aware that this environment is real. You get to go to sleep and enter a different world. A world in which the rules of the game remain mostly the same, but it has a different vibe to it. And there's a boar that dances and sings like Brent from The Office. It's also a place in which you get the final components needed to push the game into the final act. And there's this book that you need to open every now and again to find out about backstory, but also because it's interesting, but also to prod you into the vague general direction you need to go. It's a nice use of text as backstory. A method that doesn't detract from the gameplay, it's a separate component.

Oh, and you need to kinda pray to the environment, to tinker around with the sworcery component. The flip side to this is the sword fighting. Sure, it plays around with Punch Out, but it also forces you to wait for the right moment, to be patient for the right time to strike, so you have to pay keen attention to the enemy, and remember how this battle works out. And there's some seriously bad ass synth when your facing off against unknowable geometry  (a nice little touch of Platonic realms thrown in for good measure).

But the way they use the phone's capabilities is also interesting as well. Sure, there's a bit of ticking off all the boxes that this thing is capable of, but it very rarely feels tacked on. It feels like an exploration of what this thing is capable of. You could almost hand this to someone and they would know everything that is possible about the machine, save for the gps sensor. Those there's lots of exploration here. Tapping, swiping, sliding, rotating. Even using it as a communication device. Patience also figures heavily in this game. Patience to walk around from place to place. Patience to look around. And patience to wait for the moon cycles. Sure, you obviously went to the moon grotto, or tinkered around with the dates on your settings. This also adds another layer of awareness into the game. Making you aware of the lunar cycles is a pretty broad stroke; the idea that a game could introduce such a slow pace is critical to how the game operates. It's a game that engrosses you into the world but but makes you aware of your own as well. And it does this another way by tinkering around with twitter.

So this backstory, the archetypes, the mythic narrative, the generic gameplay mechanics that tie back into the days of videogame yore; they all tie into wanting to make something that wasn't reliant on these mechanics, just about making something that's interesting. In a way, we've all played this game before. We all know how to play this game, as it's been part of our childhood, and we know the story already. 

If I knew more about Jungian theory I could delve into it a bit more, so I'll just quote Craig from a Gamercamp keynote he gave when previewing the game. 

Carl Jung wrote this crazy book... [with] illustrations by Carl Jung of a dude slaying a dragon and magical trees in the forest.... And Jung's a psychologist who talks a lot about archetypes and how we all have the same drives and the same imaginings no matter where we are in the world. There's something about that and the genre of sword and sorcery that fits. No matter where we are, no matter how sophisticated we are how, we still just love the idea of a magical sword and going into a dark cave to fight a dragon. So that's the concept right there: Carl Jung and Conan the Barbarian. 

You don't need to look into this too much to realise that Jung's big red book is the megatome, which is a nice little nod. But this triple play of archetypes and mythic narratives all that jazz is a really nice way for moving beyond all that stuff and just focusing on polishing all the details and letting the experience speak for itself. 

All of the little tricks of using the possibilities of iOS help reinforce the way in which this exploration occurs. It's not just about tinkering with this world, but about exploring what these machines are capable of. And I get the sense that the team making this were exploring it as well. This all adds up to these many layers of exploration, and experience for experience sake. 

The scene in which we get to sit by the fire with Jim Guthrie, as he plays his music, made me stop fidgeting, forget about the game, and just watch the scenery. Lord knows how it was done, but it was the most enjoyable little bit of videogame scenery I've had the pleasure of enjoying. The first time I've just sat in a game, and watched, despite there being nothing else going on. It helps that the song And We Got Older, is a hauntingly beautiful piece of music. That scene just really gets to the heart of the game as something to be experienced, despite the trimmings of mechanics and gameplay and interaction.

This game provides lots of nutritious food. It's food that you want to eat. That you want to savour. Not because there's a whole host of extrinsic rewards waiting for you if you do and forcing you to keep on going. The whole game is filled with these times when you force yourself to slow down, settle in and let the whole thing wash over you. And its a really refreshing feeling to play with something because I genuinely wanted to. It rewards exploration, not through all of these little points, or stars or a bigger sword. Unless you've got some pretty badass algorithms underlying your game, how do you manage to quantify exploration? You don't, you let it speak for itself as something worthwhile doing unto itself. 

As an antidote to leveling up, the way that I lost my health over time, that I became weaker with each battle, made me rely more on my skill than on any silly piece of armour or potion. It was when I realised this, that I understod the magic of the game. Many other games have created an environment where life is precious, Passage being one of them. And while Passage makes you feel sad, really sad about the loss of life, it's the sole purpose of the game. A fantastic and beautiful and smart game, but it operates at a smaller scale than Sworcery and focuses solely on this (touching) message.

When fighting comes into the mix, you don't get to rely on more armour or a stronger sword to beat the boss, but have to make considered moves, and be patient with each one. I'm guessing that great care went into this logic, and it adds to the meaning of the game via the rules imbued in it. That the levelling up must come from within the player, skill is not a matter of more loot, but of patience and smarts. As a side note, and due to my diligent research, it turns out that the original name of the game was to be Poopsock, and was to riff on the Design Reboot video, to be a pisstake on leveling up and RPGs and all that is wrong with games. It would have been a nice little exercise, a really smart and clever look at it, but the decision to turn it into something more serious makes it all the better for it. I managed to scrounge these images from another presentation he gave which show off the prototypes of this game. It's clever and funny and amusing and all that, but it wouldn't have had the heart of the final result. But I would like to play it. Nothing wrong with a meta game now and again.

Blow talks about, and Superbrothers make light of the typical WoW player, trapped in their own dark dungeon, alone and eating snacks. Sworcery brings you back into the social realm through the rather amusing use of connecting to twitter. Yes, it was annoying when my feed was littered with adventures by others who had the iPad version, but once I started playing, I couldn't help it. I wanted to be part of that same conversation. The twitter parlour trick doesn't feel foreign to the game. If all of the touching and swiping controls are to be explored, it seems natural that they use it as a communication device as well.

As a minor point to my argument, the use of twitter became a minor variation on the theme of conspicuous consumption. The way I wanted to show everybody that I was playing the game. That I was using it. At worst, it flooded my twitter feed. At best, I knew that there were others around me who were playing and enjoying this game, and you get to feel nice and warm knowing you're part of it. It wasn't an extrinsic force making me want to show off, I wasn't competing with others to show that I was playing it, but it was definitely conspicuous. This really comes to the heart of the runaway signaling I mentioned before. It toys with our desire to socialise, to feel connected, to be part of something bigger. But it also toys with our desire to want to show off. It's a trade off, but a nice one at that. This isn't a complaint, just an observation. What's most thrilling about the twitter aspect of the game, is how they managed to fit in every single textual narrative element into a tweetable text. Fitting some witty observation about my day into 140 characters is hard enough. Fitting in a story into a series of bites less than 140 just shows how much effort went into this experiment, and how much they cared about making it as enjoyable and polished as possible.

The ending, got me. It got me hard. I hadn't really felt much of a connection to the protagonist, mostly curiousity. The urgency of the dog barking near the end, the way I only had one life bar left, I realised that this was the end, of both the game and her life. As I ran away from the Gogolitic Mass, stopping only to vomit, I new the end was near, and it made me sad. Not tear jerkingly sad, but the grim awareness that the game, and her life, was about to end. It's hard to feel anything for a protagonist in a game, to feel anything resembling genuine emotion. Excitement, frustration and white knuckle fear come easily to games. The medium is well suited to this. But a sense of bitter sweet loss usually remains too nuanced for games. By making me feel compassion for my character is something I didn't expect until the game moved towards it's final act. Despite the more cerebral arguments put forward by the game, this becomes the final lesson. 

And they laid upon us hard labour

Normally an impossible task, I managed to bypass Pesach this year. Instead, I present a sequel to another Passover themed post from a few years back. The last one, The Shilo Hagaddah looked at a rather charmed Hagaddah that has been part of my family for some time. It's full of lovely expressive typography, whimsical illustration and a charmed use of a nice Didone. I've since come across a later edition with a complete redrawing and repositioning of the story of Moses, with a rather dark and depressing bent. The friendly illustrative style and depiction f smiling well behaved children is gone, replaced with nightmarish images of the oppression of the Jewish people throughout time. The Didone has been replaced with a hard and overprinted slab serif, commonly referred to as an Egyptian Serif. This supreme irony is not lost here, and surely the designers of this book surely felt a touch of amusement as they set these pages in a face called Cairo. Perhaps the use of an Egyptian serif was chosen as a typographic easter egg, an added layer of meaning for those of us who are typographically inclined.

The Holocaust features throughout the pages, the Illustrator using it as a way of imposing relevance by comparing atrocities. I'm not sure if this is the right way to go about visually exploring this particular story of slavery, but the note from the illustrator in the opening pages at least point to why this edition is so viscerally dark and depressing:

Jewish fate, which sways between suffering and redemption, has grown to mighty proportions. With increase in suffering, the longing for redemption and the certainty of its coming have gathered strength. 

This is an old Jewish book, one that speaks of such sorrow and hope. It now appears in contemporary dress, illustrated by one who himself has suffered the flames and escaped them. He was urged by the desire to vivify jewish experience, as it finds expression in the words and pictures of the Haggada.

One can't really fault someone who has gone through such suffering as wanting and needing an outlet for their memories. That aside, this book is a strange and depressing artifact full of rich illustrations of pain and suffering. 

Circular by The Letterbox

This really just goes to show that Stephen Banham is not only a master typographer but a master of the Australian vernacular. The Circular project is a series of 8 cast iron works placed along Main St in Point Cook that reference the history and community of the area. While they were produced with artist Christine Eid, it's Banham's work we're interested in. I've always been very fond of The Letterbox's output, whether it's the events, fonts or any of the design work that stream out of that studio. They always seem to reference a very special part of Australian design history, without verging into the domain of tacky Australiana. Every typographic detail is a considered reference to a historical element that nobody else can seem to get a handle on. I've tried, but every time I end up giving up and spending twenty minutes going over their body of work and realise it's been done before. And to a much higher level than I could have imagined. 

 

I thought I'd isolate the charming typography so it can be seen on it's own. Mostly to get a proper sense of how they work, how they stand up as pure typographic wit. I'm rather enamored of "A Safe Landing", as viewing it in white on a black bar seems, to me, as a way of reading it in the original. Dotted throughout Melbourne there are numerous examples of this style, always set in this manner. Look for a butchers sign in Sydney Rd, and Joe's Shoe Store in Hight Street. Always set the same way. And I'm sure Banham is well aware of this as well.

 

 

I've just noticed that a few of these act as mini board games, adding a tiny element of play into the street. Nothing too over the top, a simple use of dice rolling, but they show a desire to quietly improve the conviviality of the built environment. 

Speaking of small details, I'm pretty sure that's Jones I see in the numbering system for the Park image. A rather fine typeface if I do say so myself. 

Update: Coincidentally, I just came across this nice chat between Banham and Vince, designer of Jones.

 

 

Lovebytes - Generative systems

The Lovebytes case study will take a greater focus in reflecting on systems in nature as a means of generating form. These systems do not directly copy the machinations of evolution but reference a simplified model that is appropriate for design. This process is less concerned with creating species that reproduce, but with using variable parameters as a means of creating a large population of possibilities which can then be refined. The process can be seen as growing a seed, capable of responding to various factors but with a predetermined approximation of the finished design in sight.

Blauvelt proposes that instead of working iteratively or through variable means, Relational Design is focused on using generative means as a method and process in which to produce form. While this is true of the Lovebytes identity, the use of iteration is still part of the designers method. By working iteratively with generative means, the design works in a method similar to evolution by natural selection. Through the use of algorithms to create a vast amount of possibilities, parameters can be used to alter the ‘genes’ of the design and can act to save time when creating populations of logos. In looking at this new method of creating designed objects, I will illustrate that previous 20th century means of critique can not be applied to these designs, and will instead apply a new theory of objects to the finished design product. The aim of the design was to create an empathy with technology; this empathy can only be achieved by subverting the role of technology and making it docile and approachable. The symbolic nature of this logo used systems of evolution as a means of iterating towards the final product.

The parametric logo system designed for the 2007 Lovebytes Arts and Digital Media Festival is an example of using a generative process as a means of creating form. The theme for the festival was ‘Process’ focusing on the “creative and technical processes involved in making art with computers and digital systems.”1 The art director Matt Pyke and designer and coder Karsten Schmidt created an identity system capable of creating of generating over 20,000 unique designs. By responding to the brief to create an “empathy with technology” they worked with the idea of “simple, warm, soft technology.”2 The finished result was a simple representation of the brief: cute and furry monsters. These monsters were used in the promotional material of the festival, appearing on posters, the festival planner, the website and on postcards advertising the festival. This algorithm used the various parameters needed to create the creatures and forced them to interact with each other to create the animals. 

These monsters have a range of emotions that create a connection with the viewer. By using a variety of parameters – length and colour of hair, head shape and colour, eyes and names – the designers created a species of monsters that responded to the need to create an empathy with technology.

The artist Patricia Piccinini deals with similar themes in her work, creating lifelike creatures that hover between the harmless and the monstrous. By making the artworks as realistic as possible viewers are confronted with the ethical ramifications of scientific progress. For Siren Mole: Exallocephalla Parthenopa she placed two mole like creatures into the Wombat Enclosure at the Melbourne Zoo. By placing the creatures into a place of authority the audience believed that this monstrosity were alive; questioning their relationship to this hideous creature. While Piccinini probes questions about biotechnology and hybridised life forms, her aim is for the audience to have an empathic relationship with her artworks. The aim of the festival was to provoke questions about our relationship to technology, by creating creatures capable of portraying emotion. By subverting technology and making it docile and approachable, the designers created an identity system capable of provoking empathy. 

In order to provide a richer empathic relationship with the viewer they created names for the creatures through simple programmatic rules. Beginning with a consonant-vowel-consonant structure, they then applied a few more filters to create variety while avoiding chaotic strings of letters. Some  One ruleset created ‘female’ names by ending them in either ‘i’ or ‘a’, another used a repetition of letters in order to simulate familiar naming conventions. Schmidt has admitted that some of these rules unintentionally enforce white-eurocentric naming conventions, perhaps under different rulesets a more globalised naming system could be achieved. 

This generative approach challenges the role of the designer, who designs the ‘seed’ which spawns these designs automatically within parameters such as hair colour, hair length, head shape and name. 3

The concept of the designed ‘seed’ was expanded by Matt Pyke in an exhibition of his works entitled Designing Seeds. The exhibition showcased a range of his client based works which responded to the idea of “the process of designing seeds and environments for them to grow”.4 This process of autonomy questions and challenges the role of the designer and ideas of authorship. According to Galanter, we have moved away from the focus on the author or reader to a generative system that constructs form. This system need not be solely constructed by a group of networked people, can also be read as the algorithm: the complex feedback process between all parameters that the designer included in the seed. This lack of authorship is an “explicit externalisation of the artist’s decision making process” that “repeatedly finds the artists as a spectator of his own work.”5

The Designing Seeds exhibition showcased examples from Universal Everything’s portfolio that used the ‘seed’ metaphor as a means of generating work. All of these designs could not be replicated as each output was a result of computer code. One design used a generative system to mimic draped fabrics seen in Baroque sculpture for the V&A Museum. Another example made for the car company Audi simulated a wind tunnel, in which the wind was made visible in the form of particles which left a trace as they were blown over the surface of an invisible car, making the shape of the car visible by showing the collision between particles. Similar to the Lovebytes identity was an advertisement for Nokia advertised at Heathrow Airport. It also consists of a multitude of characters created through different defining parameters with an emphasis on different body shapes. In making a comparison to the Lovebytes identity, the multiplicity of each design operate in contrast to each other. The Nokia advertisement involved presenting a group of creatures on the screen at the same time whereas the Lovebytes identity kept each monster as an individual. They were never seen as a community or collective species of creatures, only as an individual, singular creature.

Perhaps a method in which to further explore the multiplicity of Lovebytes creatures is evident in Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production. Written at time when photography and cinema were beginning to show signs of maturity as mediums the distinction between original artworks to those reproduced mechanically creates an aura in artworks produced by hand. The use of generative algorithms to create artworks question this aura, as they are neither created directly by hand, nor are they copies. The Lovebytes identity as well as this new medium questions the nature of the aura. Has the aura become more enriched, because no two artworks are the same? Or does it further remove the aura because they have all sprouted from the same seed? This new method of creating and critiquing art sits uncomfortably between both questions. If there is no reproducibility, mechanical or otherwise, then what do we make of the genuine article, if there is one at all?

The whole province of genuineness is beyond technological (and of course not only technological) reproduction. But while in relation to manual production (the product of which is usually branded a forgery of the original) the genuine article keeps its full authority, in relation to reproduction to by technological means that is not the case.6

If the solution has not been found with Benjamin, we need to move away from attempting to find an aura. There is a material and immaterial difference between the algorithm and the printed or realised object. Bruce Sterling and his theory of the spime can illuminate the difference for this new paradigm shift. While his definition of the spime has centred around material objects, it can to some extent be applied to the printed Lovebytes identity. So far, the spime is a theoretical product, as the construction of these devices is not yet completely possible with the technology of today. The spime is a new class of physical object, one that is not a product of industrial processes but is part of the Internet of Things. They are objects – wine bottles, tennis rackets, chairs, shoes, any output of industrial design – that are trackable and searchable within their physical confines and contain the history of the product. These objects exist as files on the internet, and only become material when needed through advanced production techniques. They exist in the network and only become material when needed. “Spimes are manufactured objects whose informational support is so extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system.”7 In discounting the application of the term to consumer products, we can see that the theory of the spime can be applied to the Lovebytes logo. These creatures do not exist accept for their material reality, whether that be a printed postcard or an image on the website. “Spimes begin and end as data, because they’re virtual objects first and actual objects second.”8 The immateriality of the parametric and generative instructions never provide for the logo to exist except as a result of material output. 

The form of this identity is a result of the process in which it was generated. Both Galanter and Blauvelt position Modernism as concerning itself with visual language. For Blauvelt, Postmodernism was concerned with the semiotic meaning behind form, Galanter sees this as exhibiting anti–formal tendencies. Both see a rejection of form in the search for meaning. Blauvelt views our current period as focusing on Pragmatics as the dominant philosophy, illustrating an emphasis on a process of constant becoming. This is similar to Galanter who sees our contemporary period as being occupied with realised form as a result of process. Differing from the Modernist maxim of truth to materials, Galanter views Complexism as focused on a truth to process. The process is what should become revealed in the form. By approaching art from a truth to materials perspective, modernists viewed this as bringing a purity to their works. Viewing the canvas as a flat plane – not as a window capable of perspective – painting could express its true power. The designers of the Lovebytes identity have stayed true to their materials: code. With a festival theme of ‘process’, Schmidt and Pyke have successfully illustrated how such an ethereal term can be made concrete. This truth to process is a materialising method, in moving away from the designed object, to the designed process. 

By applying the notion of evolution, complexity and generative processes to this or any other form of generative design or art is to enter into a metaphor of natural systems that do not apply verbatim. Systems of evolution require natural selection by reproduction: the Lovebytes creatures are not reproducing and passing on their genes to the next generation. There is no selective pressures to be gained and passed on. Evolution is not a teleological process; species merely respond to pressures that are immediate at the time, with no goal in sight, and adapt to them. Design on the other hand is a problem solving process with clear goals that need to be met. In this case there was an aesthetic need to respond to the brief in the creation of empathy with the viewer by using cute and furry creatures as the means to achieve this. 

Artists typically have a vague to specific notion of what the desired result is, and then designs an evolutionary system to explore that aesthetic space. In doing so the design of the genetic representation is of meta–significance because it will constrain the space of all possible evolutionary paths.9

Galanter has devised a series of definitions in regard to how generative art remains as merely a metaphor for evolution. He defines these four levels of emergent complexity as Fixed Parameters, Extensible Parameters, Direct Mechanical and Reproductive Mechanical. The use of the seed metaphor as well as the Lovebytes identity reside in the level of Fixed Mechanical:

Fixed Parameters offer the simplest kind of genetic representation. For example, in a system for creating drawings of insects there would be a gene for head size, another for body colour, another for leg length, and so on. Such a system will always draw six legs, and so it will never draw a spider. A fixed parametric evolutionary system is always constrained.10

The parameters described here correspond with those of the Lovebytes creatures: the use of an insect metaphor can easily be transferred to our monsters. These fixed constraints ensure that the creatures exist in a region of optimality, instead of looking like a spider. Working up the chain of complexity towards Direct Mechanical would result in a minor lack of control in the hands of the designer. If the creatures had enough parameters to make them look like a different breed or species of furry empathic creatures, perhaps with different emotions, they would still reside in the same genetic domain. There would be no genes for the creation of creatures with legs, wings or the unexpected and nonsensical result of a chair. Galanter’s final complaint that generative systems should be as open ended as possible can only be taken so far as design works in the realm of the representational and the artificial. If this design were to create a true example of Reproductive Mechanical then the designer would have created artificial life. The aim of generative design is not to create designs that beget more designs, passing on elements to their offspring without the involvement of the designer. It is only with the designer’s eye is information transmitted from one generation to the next. 

The iterative process is what allows each generation of Lovebytes creatures to progress towards the goal of a refined design. The selective pressures applied to the designer from each generation to the next act as the environment in which the species adapts to. As can be seen in the three stages applied by Schmidt and Pyke, there was a refinement process that used the various genes of the species to adapt to the next stage. By using a parametric method to create the creatures, they were able to quickly delve into the search space of possibilities in order to find the species deemed most fit. 

Population thinking has switched the slogan of Darwinism from survival of the fittest to evolution as an automatic search process, it automatically searches the space of possibility 11

Schmidt has discussed how the large amounts of initial attributes had to be restrained to ensure that the final visual result did not encroach on aesthetics, sentiments or practicality. Some of these parameters, such as eye shape or size, were removed through the iterative process to allow the animals to allow a stronger feeling of empathy. Other elements relating to body size and shape had to be removed to allow the creatures to exist within a usable and plausible limit. They would “limit the number of possible outcomes or alternatively explode that ‘search space’ beyond our control”.12 This small variable limit needs to result in an optimal “region of interest” that could be used in the final design.13 This ‘region of interest’ can only be achieved with a very simplified evolutionary metaphor, these creatures did not need to reproduce, nor did they need to react to the environment. If any of the animals looked completely different they would have been useless, requiring him to spend a large amount of time deleting individual creatures. They all needed to look within the same confines of each other, to have a family likeness to ensure that the branding remained consistent across all 20,000 animals.

While this parametric method of designing challenges the role of the designer–as–author, power is exerted in the editing stage. Choosing which attributes of the species are more suited to the finished product gives the designer the ability to refine from a vast array of options. The second iteration is very close to the finished product, only a few adjustments are needed to refine the species to it’s final stage. The traits of hair colour, hair type and body shape are much closer to the finished product than their parents. Some ideas, as mentioned, were bred out before they reached the planning stage, allowing for a simpler generative process. The idea of the designer as author emerged as a response to the Deconstructionist attitudes of Postmodernism. If meaning was taken away form the author’s hands and placed in the hands of the reader, then the designer acted as an intermediary by altering the form and thus content. Relational design moves beyond this approach, by proclaiming that the role of the designer is now as an editor, acting as a valve to refine the large flows of information that is endemic to our contemporary culture. Applying this reasoning to this case study, the designers needed to restrict and restrain the large flow of possible permutations created by the vast amount of species that could have been created for the festival. Only by finding the optimal region of interest did they create a range of creatures capable of creating empathy with the viewer. 

The methodology of creation for this case study revolves around the idea of the seed. In stating that it questions the authoritative role of the designer, Pyke and Schmidt argue that designers are concerned with the minutia of the finished product. The use of a seed metaphor opens up broad possibilities for creating large populations of designed objects, all with the same minute differences that are typical of a single species. However, by using terminology taken from natural systems, the question of appropriateness must be asked. Why this system and not others? Why a simplified version of natural processes and not a more comprehensive one? Why use an approach that need not be applied to the field of design? The answer to all of these questions must be a pragmatic one: because they work. The generative approach is informed by systems of evolution, but does not copy them completely. Design is concerned with the artificial world not the natural one. Yet these allusions serve to create designs that are not just novel and interesting, but are able to create 21st century methods of responding to 20th century questions. The parametric approach is capable of creating vast amounts of singular objects that cannot be reflected on by old notions of authenticity and reproduction. The new approach is not a mechanical one, but uses biological metaphors in the creation of new design objects that respond and relate to the needs of the our contemporary period. We are moving away from the old approach of viewing things as material objects towards viewing things as a result of immaterial processes. If this remains to be true, then the Lovebytes identity system will be remembered as one of the first species to recognise this shift. 

 

1. Schmidt, Karsten Lovebytes 2007 generative ident toxi.in.process.  
2. ibid
3. Lovebytes 2007 / Generative Branding Universal Everything 
4. ibid
5. Solaas, Leonardo. Whitelaw, Mitchell. Watz, Marius. Levine, Jeremy. Generative Practice: The State of the Art Digimag
6. Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. (Pengun Books. St Ives. 1936) 
7. Sterling, Bruce. Shaping Things, (MIT Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2005)
8. ibid
9. Galanter, Philip. Complexism and the Role of Evolutionary Art 
10. ibid
11. Delanda, Manuel Deleuze and the Use of the Genetic Algorithm in Architecture YouTube: Columbia University  
12. Schmidt ibid
13. ibid 

Network - Twin Cities

The typographic system Twin Cities is a family of typefaces that exists as a result of the networked society that shapes our current cultural and social era. This new era posits a change away from the mechanic and electronic logic of yesteryear, towards a worldview that realises all forms of identity are a result of connections to neighbours in the network. It represents a shift in moving away from using semantic values as a marker of design, using the context of the broader environment as a means of justifying the alteration of form. In departing from a focus on historical styles that has become dominant in recent typographic trends, Twin Cities approaches the concept of identity from another angle. This consists of using the elements of the natural environment to symbolise create a connection with the urban geography.

The typeface acts as a dynamic weather vane, updated every five minutes to reflect the temperature or wind strength of the area in which the data is taken. Through the use of several typefaces the design illustrates the diversity of cities and in doing so it is taking part in a shift in which cities need to portray themselves through non specific means. The typographers who designed this device are aware of the historical differences in type styles, specifically how they relate to attitudes about hierarchy, the collapse of order and non–linear means of creating structure. By standing at the vanguard of typography they are able to use emerging technologies to create works that could not have been possible using simpler techniques. These are not for novelty’s sake, but are a response to the needs of the designer and the client. 

The Twin Cities typographic system designed by typographers Just Rossum and Erik Blokland from LettError is a dynamic design for the twin cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis. It treats various external factors such as wind strength and the temperature of the cities as a means of generating form. It is a family of fonts that cover a wide variety of styles including a sans serif, sans, rounded sans as well as many other whimsical fonts. It was commissioned as part of a competition to explore the relationship between typography and cities. Out of the six entrants invited to the competition, their entry was the winner based on their response to the brief.

While this typeface can be used in common design software (Adobe Illustrator, InDesign et. al) it is similar to the Casa de Musica Logo Generator and also exists in the form of a tailored software program. This program takes the form of a special web applet allowing it to take live data from the National Weather Service Forecast Office in realtime; the wind strength or temperature affecting the overall form of the typeface throughout the day. Aside from existing as a living pulse of the city’s weather, the designer can choose to input parameters along the program’s predetermined axis of variability. While this is a novel use of typography, I will be focusing on the contextual network–oriented meteorological component of the design.

The typeface consists of ten different fonts: Formal, Gothic, Sans, Poster Sans, Casual, Round, BitRound, Weird Round, Weird and Loony. These ten can be viewed as inhabiting three distinct typographic dimensions – Serif/Formal, Round/Informal and Alternate/Weird. They begun with a two dimensional map of four quadrants and then expanded this into a three dimensional cube of eight quadrants to allow for a finer granularity between fonts. By beginning with a simple and “sturdy low contrast sans serif design with subtle curves and rounded edges” they were able to extend the basic shape of the fonts to create the rest of the family.1 The cube allowed them to extrapolate the vast array of characters that would be able to bridge the differences between styles. The X axis is formality, the Y axis is informality and the Z Axis is weirdness, giving the designers the ability to “need a glyph that’s close to (0.56, 0.33 0.92)’’ to ensure smooth transitions between each of the styles.2 The temperature used by the system ranges from -10˚F to 100˚F (12.2˚C – 37.8˚C), the coldest using the Serif/Formal typographic values and the hottest using the Round/Informal values; the Alternate/Weird Axis is not used for the temperature component of the identity. This allows for a gradient of options depending on the temperature at the time by including a mixture of fonts in the same line of text. By creating such a comprehensive system they were able to respond to the wide variety of possible external factors and contexts. 

Yesterday’s designer was closely linked with the command-control vision of the engineer, but today’s designer is closer to the if-then approach of the programmer. It is this programmatic or social logic that holds sway in relational design...obsessed with processes and systems to generate designs, which do not follow the same linear, cybernetic logic of yesteryear. 3

The relational and contextual qualities of the Twin Cities system would not be able to operate without being connected to the internet. It is by being part of a network that it is able to mutate and transform in real time. Examples such as this illustrate how much influence the internet has in creating our network dominated culture. This flexible and feedback orientated societal structure is a new one, having replaced the older formal industrial era hierarchies. 

For Network Theorist Manuell Castells the network has become all invasive and paraphrases Marshall Mcluhan to make his point: “The Network is the Message”.4 This Network Culture has become the dominant paradigm of our time; not just composting the older machine oriented society of Modernism but also the electronic and digital based culture of Postmodernism. For Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism was a result of Late Capitalism, the commodity having become transformed into an abstract entity. Continuing on from Jameson and Castells, Architectural Theorist Kazys Varnelis recognises that the value of the commodity has become less about what has become abstracted but its position in the network. This notion of importance based on contextual relationships has importance for not just capital, but for individual identity as well. The singular subjective identity, once deemed so central to enlightenment values has now become subsumed into the network. Our identity is now composed of relations articulating where we sit in the network: “affirming one’s identity today means affirming the identity of others.”5 The identity of the Twin Cities now relies on affirming the identity and importance of the other non–formal and symbolic factors of place. The transferal of subjectivity was transferred to another node in the network: weather. 

The advertising campaign for the Nordkyn peninsula in Norway is another example of using external environmental factors to alter the form of a logo. Designed by Neue Design Studio, the logo takes weather statistics from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute to affect the shape and colour of the logo. To promote the area as a tourist destination the tag line Where Nature Rules is used to highlight the sublime qualities of the arctic area. Acting as a compass, the logo is distorted to reflect the wind strength and direction while the colour values are changed according to the temperature ranging from –25˚C to 25˚C. This is a logo that has a deep relationship to the area, where the nature rules over not just the peninsula, but to the logo as well. The tagline and weather details are adjacent to the logo, set in a clean and rational typeface appropriate for the Nordic locale. This dynamic identity reflects the local and immediate environment while being conscious of situating itself within the broader historical and cultural domain of Nordic design.

In representing a non urban area, the use of the weather as a means to generate and alter form has a closer semantic link to the logo than the Twin Cities typeface. While the typeface represents the diversity of urban life through the use of a multitude of possible forms and variations, it is the connection to the natural environment that informs the programmatic and contextual element of the identity. The city is an artificial environment, yet the values that affect the typeface are composed of natural phenomena. Perhaps different databases such as traffic speeds or population densities would provide a more cohesive means in which to connect to the urban environments of St. Pauls and Minneapolis. The differences between Twin Cities and the Nordkyn logo reflects the geographic scale both are attempting to represent. While a large area, the Nordkyn Peninsula is a monocultural area composed of a natural landscape; The Twin Cities are microcosms composed of the diversity of human culture. The difficulties in representing two cities, and the cultural diversities that lie within, is a harder task than referencing a broader culture with the deep historical connection it has to a country.

The competition was commissioned as an experiment to understand the relationship between urban identity and typography. This relationship is often fraught with problems. How can one consolidate the vast cultural attitudes of the residents of a city into a typeface, let alone the geographic, historic and architectural aspects as well. The creation of a new typeface poses new new problems: does one impose a specific ideal of the city by creating a typeface and expect it to respect all the factors that define the image of a city, let alone two. Typefaces that are now considered emblematic of cities, nations and cultures were not imposed by above, but allowed the passage of time to imbue the font with meaning. Johnston, the typeface used by Transport for London has become synonymous with the city of London becoming part of the urban fabric. The classical form of British modernity that underscores the form of Gill Sans is a result of the culture and training of the designer Eric Gill who contributed to the Johnston typeface. Another typeface which has come to represent a city, if not officially, is Gotham designed by Tobias Frere Jones. Taking cues from the lettering seen on the Port Authority building in New York he extrapolating the alphabet by finding similar examples throughout the city. Through this survey of the typographic environment of the city he was able to construct a typeface family that reflects the city’s character. In paying homage to the semantic relationship that Gotham has with New York, it was used on the Freedom Tower memorial stone on the site of the Twin Towers. 

The Twin Cities typographic system does not refer to the semantic or historic nature of the cities themselves, but to the vibrant and multicultural aspects of cities in general. They rejected the idea of using stylistic traits common to either city, deriding it as kitsch. Their proposal reflected on the heterogeneity of urban life: "To an extent our proposal is more about a city and diversity in general, rather than something specific from St. Paul and Minneapolis".6

The recent rebranding of Melbourne City is one such example where the representation of multicultural and vibrant city replaced concerns to represent specifics. Consisting of a geometric capital M, the inside of the logo has been used to present a diverse range of options and appearances. The internal system of triangles and angular facets allows the designers to create a multiplicity of options that can be used to present the diversity found in Melbourne. The different patterns and forms inside the logo allow for a multiplicity of options, but unlike the Twin Cities typeface they do not respond to any external factors. Instead the visual syntax is used to display semantic values or to illustrate differing organisational structures within the Melbourne brand. While the use of a dynamic and flexible identity system is a relatively new occurrence, it is not situated exclusively within the domain of the networked and the relational. 

Galanter refers to the three distinctions between Modernism, Postmodernism and Complexism as being distinguished by Hierarchy, Collapse and Connectionist Networks. We can further explore these three differences through the lens of typeface systems. The Univers typeface family designed by Adrian Frutiger in 1954 is one of the great type designs in the modernist tradition. The clear rational forms of the letters helped designers portray universalist messages, using it as a global language that could be exported around the world. The typeface should clearly speak the message contained in the text: the typography should be invisible so as to better service the text. The system in which it was presented is a result of the modernist mind. Organised along a grid system, it presented the hierarchy of the typeface in a clear and concise manner. Not just through the numbering system used to denote the range of faces but also through the rationalist grid. This clearly outlines the differing weights of the font; an informational tool used to visualise the hierarchy of the typographic system. 

Designed by Letterror in 1989, Beowolf is a typeface that become more distorted the more it is used. By using the Postscript technology that was new at the time, they were able to alter the underlying code of the typeface. Through programming, the designers were able to create a font that creates minor distortions each time a letter is used. The more often a specific character is used the more that character will become distorted. Throughout a sample of text, more commonly used letters like ‘e’, ‘s’ and ‘n’ would become extremely distorted and almost unreadable while less commonly used letters such as ‘q’ and ‘x’ would remain fairly coherent. The font never repeats itself as noise is added into the distortion process so that each character is never the same. It is this distortion that appeals to the postmodern fixation on random qualities, by collapsing hierarchies. To refer back to Galanter’s morphological metaphor, Univers is a crystalline structure while Beowolf is an undifferentiated gas. 

The Twin Cities typeface is situated in between these two oppositions. It has an underlying structure ranging from a soft rounded sans serif to a firm and rigid slab serif with all the gradients in between; as well as the loony and weird variations. There is no strict hierarchy involved in delineating the differences, these are a result of the parametric inputs responding to the designers preferences – or more importantly – the natural environment. The specimen sheet they provided does not work in the same way that a typical specimen sheet illustrates the range of weights or italics commonly seen in extended typeface families. Instead it is presented as a city map, comparing areas of an imagined city to the different sensibilities that each face portrays. This provides a semantic context to aid those needing to understand the various personalities of each font. As Dewey discusses in reference to language: “signs and symbols derive for their meaning upon the contextual situation in which they appear and are used.”7 The contextual situation for Twin Cities lies in not just the relationship between typeface and imagined urban neighbourhoods nor between the interplay between environment and text, but between the letters themselves. The non–hierarchic network structure of the typeface uses contextual alternates to create a smooth and readable result despite the various typographic styles contained within a single word or sentence.

Contextual alternates have become an important and defining typographic trend in recent years. This is a result of the new Opentype format which allows for 65,536 glyphs in a typeface, a vast improvement over the previously allowed 256. Type designer have been experimenting with the typographic form because of the increased amount of characters able to be embedded into one font. This experimentation has lead to typefaces that play with the idea of ligatures: letters that connect together to enhance readability. Up until the digitisation of typography, fonts were only able to include a small amount of ligatures, notably fi and fl. This allows the terminal of the f to not clash with the crossbar of the t or the ball of the i. Due to the increased range of possibilities allowed through opentype, a wider range of possibilities have been explored. One notable example is the Ed Benguiat family of fonts designed by House Industries in 2007. This family of casual typefaces use an extensive range of contextual ligatures and alternates in an attempt at mimicking the fluid forms of hand rendered typography, of which the typographer and letterer Ed Benguiat is famous for. These homages to mid–century modern lettering uses a vast amount of interlocking and connecting glyphs to create the illusion bespoke typography. The Ed Interlock typeface has a family of 1,400 ligatures allowing for an extremely varied and whimsical typeface. Ed Script uses a similar technique to create the illusion of authentic hand rendered lettering by ensuring that each character smoothly connects to those surrounding it in all but the most unreasonable of character combinations. The fluid forms of both of these typefaces use contextual alternates and respond to their immediate environment. 

While the characters in Twin Cities do not connect in the same manner that Ed Interlock and Ed Script do, the Twin Cities system takes this a conceptual step further by allowing for a wide variety of styles and typographic sensibilities to work together. By creating each font with the same weight, width and humanist form the varied forms are able to work in a harmonious and readable manner. The aim of this approach, is to be able to create a typeface where you can tell “a difference if you set a word at the beginning of the day vs the end of the day” while still maintaining the same level of readability and quality of design at all times.8

The question of whether or not the Twin Cities typeface can “effectively represent a city, or communicate what’s unique about a particular place” is best answered by the woman who commissioned the competition: “Maybe. Maybe not.”9 This answer depends on what quantifying factors are included in the question. As discussed, there are many ways of representing a city through a typeface. These can range from incorporating historic cultural elements of the specific location or by allowing the semantic relationship between the urban and typographic form to grow together. Twin Cities does neither. It takes a completely different approach, an approach that is dictated and informed by the changing culture we live in today. It does not respond to the city through formal or semantic dimensions, but through a broader meteorological connection. It represents the diversity of the city by portraying the multicultural fabric of the city through the various differing typographic styles, from a serious and cold formal slab serif, to a warm and friendly rounded sans serif, to a mixture of bizarre forms which have a passing resemblance to the typographic form. All of these work together using a well designed humanist base; a handy typographic metaphor for cosmopolitan city living. Despite all of these networked meanings, this typeface could represent any city. The fact is that it was made for the twin cities of St. Pauls and Minneapolis, and is thus able to represent them. This could only be possible because the project and designers are aware of the cultural and technological period in which they work. Not just in using advances in the construction of typographic artefacts as a means of creating variability but in understanding why and when to use them. As shown in their previous work, they are able to construe the defining qualities of the age into structural qualities of the work. The Twin Cities responds to the networked culture in which it resides by creating a structure not around hierarchy, or by ignoring or collapsing it, but by aligning the structural qualities in the network that it resides. If, as Blauvelt argues, that there are now different defining markers of this period, this project must be marked against the qualities and requirements of our age. Seen in this light, the answer to whether or not this typeface represents a specific locale the answer is not an indecisive “Maybe”, but a decisive yes.

 

 

1. Worthington, Michael. ed Littlejohn, Deborah. Metro Letters: A Typeface for the Twin Cities. (Design Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 2003) p184
2. ibid
3. Blauvelt, Andrew. Towards Relational Design
4. Castells, Manuel. The Internet Galaxy (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001) p1
5. Varnelis, Kazys. The Rise of Network Culture Networked Publics. 
6. Blokland, Erik Metro Letters: A Typeface for the Twin Cities (Design Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 2003) 91
7. Dewey, John. ‘Context and Thought’ University of California publications in philosophy, (Volume 12, Issue 3. 1931) p5
8. Blokland op cit
9. Abrams op cit