Obligatory HxH reference, couldn’t resist.
Lupton’s article was graphic design 105 all over again.
I remember taking my first graphic design class at DePaul, two years back, and jesus christ was the class awkward. The professor was great, extremely knowledgeable about GD, but like Lupton, his obsession with the principles and philosophies of design barred him from formulating his own opinion on the subject — it’s kind of like a circle jerk of literature majors only capable of regurgitating what they’ve read — empty-headed academics.
Design principles aren’t meaningless; I’d say over 95% of the time, they’re there for a reason. But there’s always exceptions. Just like people are subjective on art, so too, do people vary in how they view design, especially when you consider cultures that are right-dominant, e.g. SEA, while western cultures and left-centric.
With that in mind, it’s interesting how in-depth the article goes into the nuances of letter spacing and symbols, which we never exercised in our class, only words, graphing, and arrangement (daggers and double dagger, really?).
Armed with the knowledge of typography, grids, paragraph variations, what if we took it to the next level by incorporating it in literature? Especially since there’s a NMS department at DePaul — how could you mesh NMS, typography, and ergodic literature together?
Danielewski’s books after House of Leaves didn’t do too well on the market. People say that some artists/writers reproduce the work that gave them initial success over and over again throughout their career. A common complaint was that his style became gimmicky and that he lost the initial force/vision that made House of Leaves so good. Maybe a new method of delivery, beyond print, would have made his repeated use of typography and design more refreshing.
In the early 00’s there were websites that were image maps with multiple choices, and a narrative would unfold as you’d click around. Some were very basic, just images that were linked to further ‘pages’ with some text. Others, that were created to advertise, could do more stuff. http://archive.hi-res.net/donniedarko/ http://www.trask-industries.com/#/home Maybe a massive, interactive website-novel could be revitalized by advanced e-readers?