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.

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

It’s Sunday and we all need to chill out! Why not chill out while listening to KLF’s chill out classic ”Chill Out”? — Sorry what, you have never heard of the KLF? The Kopyright Liberation Front a.k.a the Kings of Low Frequency had a couple of No. 1 chart hits in the 90ies, wrote a book about how to have a No. 1 hit the easy way, and made a loooot of 💰 money 💵 through their music. They also spent a looooot of 💰 in the most controversial ways, e.g. by burning GBP 1’000’000 in a fire 🔥 while filming 📹 it or by rewarding Rachel Whiteread with a dubious award of GBP 40’000 for ”worst artist of the year“, right after she’s won a Turner Prize of GBP 20’000 for ”best artist of the year“. These days, people don’t do that kind of crazy/funny stuff no more!
👂 Download ”Chill Out”
👀 Watch ”The K Foundation Burn a Million Quid“
🎧 Listen to “3 A.M. Eternal”
🤓 the-manual-how-to-have-a-number-one-the-easy-way.pdf

You are privileged. Just reading this sentence makes you part of the 85% of the 🌏🌍🌎 population that is literate, the 20% that understands 🇬🇧 English, and the 40% that has access to the 💻 internet. Visual communication is not an even playing field, but is dominated by the urban regions, primarily in the Northern hemisphere. The design of visual communication is shaped by the designers’ cultural and political bias. Designers themselves are often unaware of this. Ruben Pater’s book The Politics of Design shows the cultural and political bias of visual communication using visual examples.
👀 Watch Ruben’s Walker Art Center Lecture
🔘 Check out Ruben’s Website

Ok, so we all spend the majority of our ⏱ inside apartments or — if you’re lucky — houses, surrounded by things. This might as well be the best moment to dive into the book Arranging Things — A Rethoric of Object Placement, simply and beautifully written by Leonard Koren alongside equally charming paintings by Nathalie du Pasquier. Arranging Things considers the placement of objects in three-dimensional composition as a form of rhetoric: persuasive communication. In the 70ies, Koren published the now infamous magazine 💧 WET — The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing 🛀, perfectly archived here. Nathalie du Pasquier is a designer, sculptor and painter as well as one of the founding members of the Memphis movement. Should you not be familiar with her work, then A) shame on you and B) now is the time to catch up!
🔎 arranging-things.pdf