Gene Federico’s discourse on the Love of Apples,an exercise to see how
close he could touch slugs of type without using a razor blade. “I wanted to
try something where I used metal type in extreme ways without having to
cut it—without cutting up proofs or playing with stats,” explained Federico.
“For some time I had known that if you stacked title gothics they would
have a different look than traditional types. So the whole book was based
on that simple idea.”
The designers’ motivations for solving the problem of filling
sixteen pages were different, but each followed his own muse, not a client’s.
Beall, who was coming to the end of his career as a designer of corporate
identity, was interested in returning to his early inspirations, which
borrowed from dada and surrealism. His “essay” was concerned with the
tension between typographic precision and a free-form environment.
Lubalin, who was beginning to have influence on contemporary typography
with visual puns and type-pictures, was attempting to bust through the
confines of hot metal (which he would later do with phototype).
Brownjohn Chermayeff Geismar, which had been doing conceptual design
in a modern idiom since the late 1950 s and was about to split up, leaving
Robert Brownjohn on his own, was seeking the nexus of art and design.
“Ours was impossible typesetting and useless prose,” added Chermayeff.
“But it was also an attempt to use typography as paint, and to explore
relationships that were based on texture not language. We were doing no
less than what David Carson is doing today. However, for us to be
completely irresponsible required a sympathy with language.” In addition to
overlapping and layering through intricate film processes that were made
into engravings, this typeplay mixed numbers with letterforms to make
words. For Federico, an advertising art director with a special interest in
type,Love of Appleswas an excuse for a poetic polemic about nature’s
beauty being radically altered, as is exemplified by the line: “When we, in
business, industrial America, began to get smart about apples, we packaged
them and packaged them and packaged them until the apple itself became
the package,” which he illustrated with a photograph of an apple with a
string tied around it.
About U.S.is one of modern American design’s most important
artifacts, both as a chronicle of the end of hot metal and as a clarion of
impending photo composition. It is also one of the first public displays of
conceptual and expressionistic typeplay that would alter advertising and
editorial practice in the 1960 s and usher in the method (or style) of design
known as the Big Idea—noted for witty copywriting wed to smart
conceptual typography, illustration, and photography.About U.S.is a
snapshot of the moment when type first talked.
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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