[.T.D.N.] Teaching Designers Network

Background:

Cities are awash in 'public lettering': street signs, newspaper mastheads, road signs, high-rise corporate logos, store/shop/ restaurant signs, engravings on buildings and monuments, etc. They are at once branding and promotional devices; names (of buildings); labels; locating devices; material and technological artifacts; pieces of graphic, typographic, and industrial design; architectural heritage; industrial detritus; personal and cultural narratives. They are also intricately linked to the dominant preoccupations of the city: high-rise logos, for example, eloquently describe the commercial, financial, civic, even religious priorities of a particular urban locale – especially at night. It is all the more surprising, given their sheer ubiquity, that signs and lettering have received relatively little coordinated attention – critical, creative, or otherwise.

City Quote

'Learning from Las Vegas'
Robert Venturi / Denise Scott Brown / Steven Izenour

'Vast Space in the Historical Tradition and at the A & P'

»… it is the highway signs through their sculptural forms or pictorial silhouettes, their particular positions in space, their inflected shapes, and their graphic meanings that identify and unify the megatexture. They make verbal and symbolic connections through space, communicating a complexity of meanings through hundreds of associations in few seconds from far away. … Architecture defines very little: The big sign and the little building is the rule of Route 66.«

(Quote by Robert Venturi / Denise Scott Brown / Steven Izenour: 'Learning from Las Vegas', MIT-Press, Massachusetts, 1977)

TDN-Project by Matt Soar

Matt Soar is an assistant professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University, Montréal. He teaches media/cultural studies and digital media production. Current projects include Brand Hype <www.brandhype.org> and Logo Cities <www.logocities.org>. Soar has twice juried Memefest: The International Festival of Radical Communication; he is a member of the AIGA, an associate editor of the journal Design & Culture, and a board member of DesignInquiry <www.designinquiry.net>. In October 2007 Soar will be a keynote speaker at the ICOGRADA World Design Congress in Havana, Cuba.

*»Culture Jamming«:
– to jam; squeeze and fix between two surfaces
– Adbusting: to bust an ad (advertisement)
www.adbusters.org

Free PDF-Downloads of TDN-Project 2008

Visit also:
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/12/12/news/brazil.php
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonydemarco/sets/72157600075508212/

Teaching Designers Network
http://tdn.freie-hochschule-freiburg.de/