David Reinfurt (½ of Dexter Sinister, ¼ of the Serving Library and 1/1 of ORG) has released a “Pre-Program” ePub to his “New Program for Graphic Design” book. On this ePub, you’ll find all 18 hours of video that served as a basis for the book. They are a compressed version of three semesters of David’s teaching at Princeton University, structured in the chapters T-Y-P-O-G-R-A-P-H-Y, G-E-S-T-A-L-T and I-N-T-E-R-F-A-C-E. Ready for you to airplay on your 📺 or to watch on your 📱.
💰 It’s really really worth the 20 bucks, so get a copy here.

Don’t post black squares. Take it to the streets, or at least donate to people who do, such as Black Lives Matter. How did we get here? John Oliver talks about the connections between white supremacy and the histories of policing. Sad and depressing, but now is time for action.
✊🏾 Listen to John

What’s the worst mistake you can do as a graphic designer? A typo on the cover? Wrong dates on the poster? Architecture obviously is a much more complex field, and the range of errors involved reaches completely different dimensions. Watch All Fall Down, a fascinating 30 minutes documentary about how a calculation mistake by an engineer for the Citigroup skyscraper was discovered by a student, just shortly before the whole building (and, in theory, among with it several other ins Manhattan) could have collapsed during hurricane season. Uff, feels nice to work in InDesign.
👀 Watch All Fall Down
👂 Listen to Structural Integrity

There’s no such thing as a free lunch, but on June 19th, 4pm CEST, there will be a free launch: Finale20.ch — the digital equivalent of the thesis show of our department Design and Art — will be online and we’re all very excited about how it will look like, feel like, click like, be like! For now, set a bookmark, a timer and a reminder and make sure to tune in again towards the end of the month!
🔖 Bookmark www.finale20.ch

What’s the thing with 🪑chairs? Do we really need another one? It’s basic design apparently hasn’t change much since Egyptian times. Pictured above is a replica of a chair that belonged to Queen Hetepheres who lived around 2400 B.C. However, since the industrial revolution, hundreds and thousands of designers, engineers, architects etc. have made attempts to come up with new chairs and the recent history of sitting furniture is as much a history of design as it is a history of production. The Vitra design museum in Basel has released the 90 minutes film Chair Times about key pieces of their chair collection. No suspense here, but it bares some interesting details and is definitely worth watching. Happy weekend everyone.
👀 Watch Chair Times here

Who’s the master of suspense? Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, of course. But he also was and I guess still is the undisputed champion of form. That’s a widespread opinion, one which was shared by a young François Truffaut, who visited his hero in order to interview and question him for roughly 50 hours about the mechanisms and design inventions behind his 50 feature films. It’s such an amazing document, download below and read asap!
⬇️ hitchcock-truffaut.pdf

It’s been eight weeks. Our libraries finally open today but at the same time we’re still supposed to stay home as much as we can. What to do? Dig into the vast archives of online libraries such as Monoskop, a wiki for the arts, media and humanities. Why not start with a Frutiger-classic that is otherwise not so easy to come by? Type Sign Symbol is a document that explores the whole bandwidth of this exceptional designer, both in terms of his thinking and his work. A chapter on Optical Character Recognition OCR is followed by applied work at international airports, which then is followed by Christianity-inspired esoteric works, intended for murals in sacral spaces. Also, in case you wondered where Laurenz Brunner’s symbol for Source Type stems from? Yes, exactly from that book.
👀 Read Type Sign Symbol here

In the context of the ongoing series of lectures called GK-Talks at the HKB Bern, we would have had the pleasure to welcome Silvio Lorusso for a presentation around his book Entreprecariat tonight. Silvio is a writer, artist and designer living in Rotterdam, NL, whose works focusses on the cultures and rhetorical regimes embedded in techno-social systems. Instead of seeing him live in the auditorium of our dearly missed F11, you can still follow up on his ideas by watching him talk on YouTube. Not the same, but that will have to do for the moment!
👂 Listen to Silvio, straight outta Ljubljana

The one pharmaceutic company that will come up with a 🦠 COVID-19 💉vaccine will hit the jackpot. From a design perspective, affairs in the pharmaceutical industry 🏭 have been more interesting in the last century. Corporate Diversity, Schweizer 🇨🇭 Grafik und Werbung für Geigy™ 1940 – 1970 shows a fascinating exchange between Basel designers and teachers such as Emil Ruder and Armin Hofmann, the Basel School of Design and the then pharmaceutical global player Geigy™. Since libraries 📚 will still be closed for a week, please help yourself with a scan of this amazing book (for pedagogical purposes only).
👀 corporate-diversity.pdf

The film 🎥 The Last Days of Metal Type 🎥 from 1957 offers perhaps the most comprehensive historical footage on the process of metal typefounding. In 2015, Massey & Sheridan Colleges in 🇨🇦 restored the 🎞 and added narration by the legendary Matthew Carter, one of the only living 🔠 designers to work in metal, film, and digital type. It’s fascinating to observe how painstakingly elaborate and time-consuming it was to produce one single letter in one single size, and how much craftsmanship was required in this process. Times have changed quite a bit since then, and maybe in type design more so than in many other fields.
👀 Watch The Last Days of Metal Type here