Rick Poynor [Editor]: Eye no. 3. London: Wordsearch Ltd., Volume 1, Number 3, Winter 1990. Parallel text in English, German and French. Quarto. Letterpress scored photo illustrated wrappers. 88 pp. Articles and advertisements printed on multiple paper stocks. Essays illustrated with full color examples throughout, with design and typography of the highest order. Cover artwork: P. Scott Makela. Light wear overall, but a nearly fine copy.
9.25 x 11.75-inch quarterly Design journal with 88 pages of fully illustrated content. “Eye is the world’s most beautiful and collectable graphic design journal, published quarterly for professional designers, students and anyone interested in critical, informed writing about graphic design and visual culture.”
Contents:
Grapus was a collective of graphic artists, working together between 1970 and 1991, which sought to combine excellence of design with a social conscience, founded after the student movements of Paris in May 1968. Grapus sought to 'change life' by the twine dynamics of graphic arts and political action. The collective scorned the commercial advertising, and adhering to its founders idealistic principles, tried to bring culture to politics, and politics to culture.
The meaning behind Grapus's name was described by Pierre Bernard that it was functional-sounding, had vulgar overtones, and also had a “whiff of history to it,” referring to French revolutionary Gracchus Babuef. Another interpretation for the creation of the name Grapus, is it was a play on the words crapules staliniennes (Stalinist scum), was both a gesture of political allegiance and a sardonic provocation to potential critics.
The group was founded in France in 1970 by Pierre Bernard, who had studied with the Polish poster designer Henryk Tomaszewski; François Miehe; and Gérard Paris-Clavel, who had met during the student movement of May 1968 and were influenced by the subversive ideas and practices of the Situationist International. Alex Jordan and Jean-Paul Bachollet joined the group in 1975. After Miehe’s departure in 1978, the core of the group found its equilibrium.
In 1990, after receiving the French Grand prix national des arts graphiques, the collective faced a difficult ideological test when they had the opportunity to design the visual identity of the Louvre Museum. Bernard was in favor of taking the assignment, believing that design for cultural institutions could be a tool for social change. His partners wanted to design exclusively for social causes, found the Louvre to be elitist, and believed that taking the job would compromise their convictions. As a result, the collective decided to part ways in January 1991. Bernard, however, remains committed to a conception of design as a powerful tool for social commitment: “The dissemination of public graphic design to the most socially and/or culturally deprived, is one of the means to achieve the desired aims of community and social justice.“
Ken Garland ( a former student of Spencer's at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in the early 1950s) recalls “ ... at the age of 28, Herbert Spencer (1924 –2002) had moved from a two-year spell with London Typographic Designers to his own successful freelance practice; had travelled extensively in Europe, meeting many artists, designers and architects, among them Rudolf Hostettler, editor of Schweizer Graphische Mitteilungen, the typographer Max Caflisch and the sculptor / painter / graphic designer Max Bill; had launched Typographica, with the blessing and financial backing of Peter Gregory, chairman of Lund Humphries, the publishers and printers with whom he was to maintain a long and fruitful collaboration; and had recently had a book, Design in Business Printing, published by Sylvan Press. To the intense irritation of the traditionalist printing industry in Britain and the great joy of the younger generation of graphic designers, he was the uncompromising champion of asymmetric typography, of which his periodical and book were admirable examples. It is difficult, 50 years later, to estimate the effect of his views on such senior figures in British typographic design as Stanley Morison, who had declared in 1936 that the design of books ‘required an obedience to convention which is almost absolute’, and had not seen fit to amend that view in the intervening years. But there can be no doubt that Herbert Spencer led the campaign – it could almost be called a battle – to assert for English-speaking readers the principles and practices of the New Typography that had emerged in Germany in the late 1920s and were now firmly entrenched in postwar Europe, especially in Switzerland and the Netherlands.
“The paradox did not end there. At the same time as Spencer was championing, especially in his book, a new orthodoxy, he was pursuing a personal interest in Dada, Futurism and Surrealism, in concrete poetry, and in photographs of the odd, inconsequential and random imagery to be found in the street. In the pages of Typographica, especially the second series (1960-67), his own and others’ photography of such subjects appears alongside more sober assessments of typographic work – a true reflection of the contrast in his own work. Though his own photographic excursions had to be curtailed by pressure of work in his graphic design studio, new responsibilities in publishing (he took on the editorship of Lund Humphries’ Penrose Annual from 1964) and the assumption of a senior research fellowship at the Royal College of Art in 1966, that interest surfaced again in one of his last works, Without Words (1999), a privately distributed portfolio of 32 photographs printed on the occasion of his 75th birthday...”
8vo had a high-mindedness and purity that set it apart intellectually and aesthetically from both the commercial and 'style' wings of contemporary British graphics. Octavo was sternly opposed to typographic mediocrity, nostalgia, fashion, decoration, symmetry, centered type and the hated serif. It was for a semantically determined use of structure and the infinite possibilities of typographic experimentation. 'We take an international, modernist stance,' the first Octavo editorial concluded. 'This is necessary in England.'" -- Rick Poynor 8vo was Michael Burke, Mark Holt, Simon Johnson, and Hamish Muir at the time of this publication.
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