III. Template as Happy Medium: Bulletins of The Serving Library

Dot Dot Dot was founded back in 2000 by myself, Peter Bil’ak, Jurgen X. Albrecht and Tom Unverzagt, though the last two left after the second issue. Rooted in graphic design, the journal was initially defined more by what it wasn’t than what it was, being neither particularly commercial, nor academic. Although the scope soon broadened to encompass the rest of the arts and later beyond, it always remained distinctly “from graphic design rather than about graphic design,” as the design critic Emily King once put it. 

In the beginning, when the majority of the contributors were graphic designers by trade, the idea was to encourage them to design as well as write their contributions in view of channelling a multiplicity of visual as well as verbal voices. This free-for-all didn’t last very long as the sort of productive symbiosis we had in mind never seemed to happen the way we’d imagined—and it turns out that graphic designers who write are far more precious about their layouts being edited than their writing. By the fourth issue we were instead designing the whole thing ourselves.

During these early years there was no fixed template to speak of—to the extent that Paul Elliman once summed up its sense of being stuck-together from disparate parts as “a kind of prosthetic aesthetics.” Perhaps under the spell of this phrase, the tenth issue took the idea to a logical conclusion, being a “best of” the first nine, with the original pages of twenty or so pieces stitched together Frankenstein-like to form a new whole.

This roughly coincided with David taking over from Peter as co-editor. After the maximal tenth issue, it seemed time to strip back the journal’s approach, most clearly marked by finally implementing a consistent template. Over time we’d become more interested in the words and less with their appearance, so standardizing the format, as most other periodicals would naturally do from the outset meant we could simply spend more time editing and less designing. The second half of Dot Dot Dot’s life therefore rarely broke from a two-column grid and two or three sizes of a single typeface. This relative stability was, however, immediately contradicted by commissioning Radim Peško to design a new, open-ended font that amalgamated the general demeanour of those we’d used so far, inspired by a couple of historical examples with triangular serifs.

A basic roman version of what was christened “Mitim” (after a project by artist and regular contributor Ryan Gander to introduce a new word into the English language) was ready for Dot Dot Dot 11. The idea was to develop this font from issue to issue, adding a new member of family each time. Six months later, Radim dispatched Mitim Alpha’s italic counterpart, Beta, and, as this first pair already felt more than enough for our Calvinist taste and temperament, they were used more or less exclusively until the final, twentieth issue five years later. While the obvious thing to do next would have been to introduce bolder, lighter, condensed, and compressed variants, we instead ordered a set of eccentric symbols and invited our most literary contributor, Louis Lüthi, to compile a series of historic glyphs together with Radim that we might put to use in subsequent issues. Duly assembled for issue 13, Mitim Gamma was a free-ranging set of symbols, some ubiquitous, some obscure, drawn from the histories of literature, comics, advertising, science, fine art, medicine, and more. From there, additional members of the family became increasingly eccentric, like mad uncles and distant cousins of the prodigal son. 

By the twentieth issue, we felt the journal had exhausted itself and so resolved to somehow “break” it. David and I asked another regular contributor, Angie Keefer, to join us in setting up a crowdfunded, not-for-profit project called The Serving Library—a continuation of the personnel and interests that made up the journal, only now to be dispatched predominantly via digital channels. The website www.servinglibrary.org became the “engine room” of the enterprise, set up to “serve” individual PDFs we called “Bulletins” in batches, then collected twice a year into a printed compendium, Bulletins of The Serving Library, that effectively picked up where Dot Dot Dot left off. We had also spent the last few years gathering and exhibiting a collection of the original material sources of items that had at some point appeared as illustrations in Dot Dot Dot. These three interrelated elements—the web archive, the printed journal, and the collection of objects—were and still are intended to coalesce into a single resource for teaching. But that’s another story.

Just as we’d taken the tenth issue of Dot Dot Dot as an occasion to reflect in order to find a way forward, so the transition to Bulletins of The Serving Library was an excuse to make some similarly destabilising changes. In terms of the writing, inviting Angie to be involved was partly a way to expand the journal’s range. She brought an easy fluency with a far broader set of interests including mathematics, science, psychology, and philosophy in a manner consistent with Dot Dot Dot’s contradictory humour. Regarding the design, we felt even further from the desire to (re)design the journal in any normal sense and so tried to let the technological switch determine the way it looked.

The continuation with Dot Dot Dot was marked by keeping the same B5 format, halfway between book and magazine, but the new digital bias led us to adapt the Bulletins layout on the basis of PDFs being read on a phone. Unlike an e-reader or website, where the size of text may be changed and lines reflowed relative to the width of a device or browser window, the PDF is a definitively fixed format. We settled on a single column with a relatively large type size in order to be as legible as possible on the then-smallest iPhone, yet not overly large on an iPad or laptop screen. And because, again for the sake of convenience and expedience, we would use the same PDF files to make the printed journal, when poured into Dot Dot Dot format this single column of larger-than-average type on a printed page looked markedly medium, distinctly bigger-than-expected without quite straying into the territory of “large print.” Otherwise put, the typography was designed to be bang in the middle of all channels in order to be as readable as possible on as many devices as possible.

Next, just as the Bulletins’ single-column non-grid was even more rudimentary than its predecessor, we began casting around for a typeface that would reflect this degree-zero design in the same way Mitim had mirrored the stripped-back approach of Dot Dot Dot. David and I had long been interested in a project called Metafont by Donald Knuth, the man behind the TeX typesetting system used for The First/Last Newspaper. Knuth originally conceived Metafont in the late 1970s as a component aspect of TeX, a program that generated the typefaces to be configured by the master application. He was interested in developing not a single font or a family of fonts, but a set of “meta” parameters that could be tweaked to generate an endless number of letterforms, and ended up developing Metafont as a discrete piece of software too. 

In early 2010, around the time we were setting up The Serving Library, we started developing an updated version of Metafont based on what scant information we could find about the original work. The aim was to write a program that would generate endless PostScript fonts (the standard contemporary protocol) using Knuth’s original parameters. These paramaters more or less map onto the usual aspects of typeface design: Weight (more or less bold), Slant (the fundamental quality of italic), Curliness (the more decorative aspect) and Superness (less easy to define, but a kind of relative angularity), plus a fifth para-parameter, Pen, which is best thought of as the shape of the “nib” of the “writing implement” that draws the skeleton letterforms based on the combined parameters. 

So, one instance of the potentially infinite number of MetaFonts might have the values of (imagine twiddling the knobs on a mixing desk) Weight = 26, Slant = 0.3, Superness = 0.7, Curliness = 20, and look a certain way, distinct from another version with different values. We were already developing and using our update of the software, which we named Meta-The-Difference-Between-The-Two-Font, for a couple of other projects when it suddenly seemed ideal for The Serving Library too. One curious aspect of MetaFont is that when all values are set to zero, no font exists. As such, there is no “standard roman” version to speak of, only a set of values that may look to our eyes more average than other, more eccentric ones. And so in order to match the “medium” credo of the Bulletins’ design so far, we generated a version that seemed the most vanilla to our eyes, eventually settling on Weight = 100, Slant = 0, Superness = 0.75 and Curliness = 0 as sufficiently middling. From this point, MTDBT2F was used exclusively to typeset Serving Library material, including variations with different values as and when required, to distinguish quotations or other distinct types of text, for instance. We also wrote about it extensively in two of the early Bulletins (here and here).

We’d always been interested in publishing as a subject matter in and of itself, and often addressed it indirectly through the manner in which the journal was published rather than directly writing about it. And so, to flag some of the similarities and differences between digital and physical formats, such as the relatively adjustable nature of the online Bulletins versus the relative fixity of their print equivalent, we included a discreet time stamp in the bottom left corner of each page marking the date and time it was last output to PDF. This would register the near-invisible discrepancy between digital and physical versions if, say, entire bulletins or single pages were amended after having been sent to print. We also put an equivalent, live time stamp in the corner of the website that linked to a record of each time an individual Bulletin was downloaded, along with the downloader’s server address.

Although the Bulletins were ostensibly far less “graphic” than Dot Dot Dot, each one was fronted with a full-page image that served as a thumbnail icon on the website. And the fact that all the PDFs were collated unchanged into the printed issue meant they would have to start on a recto and end on a verso, even if the last page was blank. This emphasized the sense of the journal being a dossier of discrete parts that could effectively run in any order.

Another change from the knockabout nature of Dot Dot Dot was to base each issue on a theme—the inaugural one being Time. We had recently come across the word TIME set in metal above a huge digital flip-clock behind the concierge’s desk in the lobby of the Chrysler Building. David took photo of it at 6:03pm one evening, which, thanks to the peculiar light distortion of a rough iPhone image, seemed to show some kind of furnace burning behind the sign, like a Midtown gateway to heaven or hell. It ended up on the cover of the first issue along with an in-out optical illusion “book spread” that became The Serving Library’s symbol, and this happenstance cover design became the template for the rest, each with a found word or words that in some (often very loose) sense pointed to the general theme, embedded in a photograph taken on a phone. The following issue on Pedagogy, for instance, shows the sign on the ornate door of the Registrar’s Office in Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s seminal building for the Glasgow School of Art; on the next, a magnifying glass in the hand of type designer Matthew Carter zooms in on the MoMA logo for an issue on Typography that doubled as a catalog for an exhibition at the museum itself; and so on.

One final, emphatically templated aspect that we carried through all the journals played out in the advertising pages at the back. In the early years of Dot Dot Dot, we were frustrated by both the amount of time spent trying to get designed adverts from such as type foundries and arts institutions, and the general ugliness of them once they eventually arrived. We instead returned to the minimal standards of old adverts in periodicals dictated by the restricted possibilities of metal type, offering whole pages only, each with a space for a large text up top (typically a name, tagline, or URL) and a couple of columns of smaller text below, all on the same grid as the rest of the journal. At first, they were further distinguished by a flat colour background chosen by the advertiser—including gold, silver and bronze during the 2004 Olympics—but later we further limited these backgrounds to different shades of grey and charged according to the percentage: the lighter, less legible ones were cheaper, and the darker, more legible ones more expensive. Partly due to the novelty, and I suspect also the convenience, this scheme proved popular and continues today; the only difference being that, since the Bulletins began, all the backgrounds have been white and the type instead greyscale, which makes the economy of legibility even more pronounced.

Due to ballooning shipping costs in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, we started to publish half the print run in the USA and half in Europe, both produced at cheap academic printing houses on the most basic paper stock, and perfect bound. This setup lasted five years before Sternberg withdrew due to declining sales, at least in part due to the individual Bulletins being freely downloadable from the website. Bookstores were also increasingly reluctant to stock the journal due its ambiguous status somewhere between book and magazine, as well as its free-ranging subject matter: they literally didn’t know where to place such a medium medium. In somewhat tongue-in-cheek response, we downscaled the printed version to half its former size to make it more obviously book-like, cheaper to ship and easier to store. And in yet another duplication of Dot Dot Dot, at our customary five-year point of reflection, the tenth Bulletins of The Serving Library become a best-of the previous nine, including all front and back covers along with tweet-length synopses of each of the hundred or so individual Bulletins published so far. All aspects of the original template remained unchanged in the new format, only downscaled to 50%. 

Three issues later, we made things easier on ourselves by publishing only once instead of twice a year, which precipitated another name change, to The Serving Library Annual, now to be published by Roma in Amsterdam. They weren’t keen on the recent shrunken format, and insisted instead on switching to a format bigger than the original—that most medium of mediums, A4. And contrary to Bulletins of the Serving Library’s extreme economy of means, they reverted back to something of Dot Dot Dot’s “object quality,” with exceptional care taken over materials, pre-press, printing, and binding. 

At the time of writing, the first four Annuals have been produced in this manner, with an adapted version of the original page template reconfigured to handle more text per page and a gradual loosening of the initial grid to accommodate more idiosyncratic material. The 2019–20 edition, for instance, was an English translation of an underpublished collection of the Italian polymath Bruno Munari’s writing, Codice Ovvio (‘Obvious Code’), in which his original page layouts were recreated at the centre of the larger Annual page with new marginalia from fans and commentators old and new. The most recent edition is a catalogue of our collection of objects, now numbering close to 100, released in parallel with a long-term installation of the collection at 019, an art institution based in Ghent, Belgium. 

In these various ways, the pronounced medium-ness of that rudimentary Bulletins template has slowly and happily shapeshifted into some other related form, two or three times at least.

Five years after the installation at Artists Space, its director Stefan Kalmár moved to London to take charge of the Institution of Contemporary Arts, an esteemed, sometimes controversial venue for vanguard art founded in 1948 and, since 1960, the unlikely resident of a neo-classical building down the road from Buckingham Palace on The Mall in the heart of the city. 75 years on, the ICA just about manages to sustain its radical reputation and run its progressive programme from the heart of the capital’s establishment. 

Soon after his appointment, Stefan invited David and myself to rethink the ICA’s identity, providing us with the unlikely opportunity to put some of the speculative thinking behind “Identity” into actual practice. What might an institution look like if there were no difference between how it operated on the inside and appeared on the outside? The ICA’s maverick position has always been a license to do things a bit differently to other art institutions, and so we spent the first six months considering an approach from scratch. 

A motif at the back of our minds was an image of what we’ve come to think of as “the hollows,” after an apparently throwaway term in a prescient essay from 2007 by design group Metahaven, White Night Before a Manifesto. According to Metahaven, the hollows is “the surface equivalent to the stock market crash … surface without surface, the exposure of the naked infrastructure or root level system language which precedes surface itself, surface without its effects.” We visualised this as the grey-and-white checkerboard image of transparency common to software such as Adobe’s Creative Suite and currently the default preview background of PNG-format logos.

As with Artists Space some ten years previously, Stefan embarked on a project to return the building’s interior to its original, skeletal modernist architecture as designed by Jane Drew in the 1960s. The first main programme under his tenure was titled In formation, a cross-disciplinary series of installations, films, talks, and other live events that collectively attempted to explore the ICA’s role as a civic institution in 2017. This sense of curatorial reconstruction dovetailed with our intention to work out aspects of the identity on the fly, incrementally trying things out as and when required in advance of committing to any particular identity template for as long as possible, perhaps even indefinitely. For In formation we commissioned a signwriter to gradually paint the developing programme on the walls of the downstairs gallery, and printed a set of weekly programme notes in-house to trial a few typefaces, colours, and image styles. We continued this approach of being publicly under construction for the first major exhibition, of the American artist Seth Price’s audio-visual work, by developing a trial website at dev.ica.art that ran parallel to the existing one at www.ica.art.

Another point of reference here was Towards a Lexicon of Usership, a modest 2014 publication by the Canadian philosopher Stephen Wright that argues for an arts practice founded on a “1:1 scale” relationship between work-as-proposition (= art) and work-as-utility (= design) without prioritising one or the other.

 

Wright’s “double ontology” seemed to sum up the collected thinking behind the thought-piece “Identity” and its eventual application at the ICA: something that wasn’t exactly an artwork that informed a speculative working model. By the time the website was ready for us to make the full switch, a year or so after our appointment, we had tested in situ more or less everything that we had in mind, which evolved into the following DNA: 

1) The parallel, equivalent use of the full name Institute of Contemporary Arts and its acronym ICA, spelled-out to emphasise the plural arts in a place that had recently become more immediately synonymous with its singular allusion to contemporary art, despite the fact that a daily film programme had long been running on two in-house cinemas, and that for long periods of its past the ICA had been one of the city’s leading venues for alternative music and a number of seminal talks. Similarly, various typefaces were to be used more or less interchangeably, with a principal serif (Computer Modern, one of the early fonts generated by Metafont and commonly used in TeX) and a principal sans-serif (Standard Grotesque, with the same proportions as Computer Modern and a similarly neutral character), along with a bunch of wilder fonts for the four main lines of programming, Exhibitions, Films, Talks & Learning, Live, and since the pandemic, Digital—a selection based on being as visually distinct from each other as possible, especially on small screens.

2) The frequent use of “digital primary colours” red, green and blue (RGB), often on a light grey background, with occasional gold, silver, and bronze used for more prestigious (= money-related) situations such as communication with Friends or Donors. The idea, in the beginning at least, was to avoid print and work exclusively in digital media for all ICA communications going forward. This, coupled with the fact that the prior ICA identity had been predominantly black-and-white, led us to emphasise the shift from “subtractive” CMYK to “additive” RGB as the dominant colour system. The light grey was more accidental, initially one of many test backgrounds on the website that we realised was particularly useful given that both black and white text were equally readable (for most viewers), and so allowed for greater typographic articulation: white could be used to indicate links within an otherwise black text, for instance. They grey backdrop also makes images “pop” more immediately, as if backlit on a lightbox. Over time it has become a consistent fifth colour after RGB and their combined white. Red, Green, and Blue also ended up naming the ICA’s three levels of Membership.

3) A logo derived from a poster-catalogue designed by the artist Richard Hamilton to accompany an exhibition he curated around the work of James Joyce in 1950. Hamilton printed the abbreviation from wood type, which explains the slightly clunky spacing, and in the following decades there have been countless ways of typesetting or illustrating the acronym that trace technical and stylistic trends of the various eras, from early traditional letterpress typography in the 1950s, through hand-drawn geometric forms in the 1960s and 1970s, the colder, rational influence of computers in the 1980s and 1990s, and on to a slicker, more innocuous corporate sheen in the 2000s. Hamilton’s acronym was never conceived as a logo per se; it was a one-off for that particular piece of print and never repeated until we revived it, effectively dating from a time before logos, or at least before their widespread adoption as the de facto public face of all institutions today. This full-circle return to the ICA’s origins was at once a general nod to its storied history and a particular tribute to one of its earliest acolytes. We also enjoyed the idea that the slow circulation of the Hamilton anecdote would itself comprise part of the identity. It is usually rendered in white (i.e., the sum of R+G+B) and, where possible, located in the bottom right-hand corner of whatever medium, more akin to a publishing imprint or watermark.

4) A set of well-known optical illusions, such as the Duck-Rabbit, Impossible Triangle, or Reversible Stairs. The idea was to put these images to work as visual headers for categories that didn’t otherwise have any obvious title or unifying theme. As many of these illusions have an “either/or” aspect, in the sense that the Duck-Rabbit is both Duck and Rabbit, they are fundamentally difficult to pin down and, as such, usefully ambiguous—as optical allusions. They also have the benefit of being free-floating, freely signifying icons that don’t really belong to anyone, surely doing the rounds in the public domain long before intellectual property or copyright laws were dreamed up. The Impossible Triangle, for instance, has been widely used as a symbol, most visibly in recent years by Palace Skateboards. But precisely because the triangle seems so ubiquitous as to resist being trademarked, it seemed more interesting to go ahead and also use it. Moreover, in another wink to the ICA’s past, the triangle was in fact devised and popularised in the 1950s by the psychologist uncle (Lionel) and mathematician nephew (Roger) of one of the Institute’s founders, Roland Penrose, and hence more properly known as the Penrose Triangle, described by Roger as “impossibility in its purest form.”

5) An emphasis on the non-hierarchical, parallel programming of the ICA’s five main strands of activity, again to emphasise the multiple arts while acknowledging the fact that they run at very different speeds. In a typical season, there are anything up to eight different films playing in the cinemas every day, maybe one talk or learning event a week, one live event a month, and a daily exhibition that runs for around three months. A useful visual metaphor here was a motorway, with vehicles moving at different velocities along its various lanes, enacted most prominently on the website. The earliest version very literally involved four vertical programme channels on the homepage, which soon proved problematic given the dominance of films and so was quickly reworked first into a scrollable calendar, and latterly into a daily set of highlights. But it dictated other formats too, such as a set of four adjacent portrait monitors in the lobby, each dedicated to one strand of programming.

6) An attempt to set up the various communication channels so as to be equally useful for staff on the inside and public on the outside of the institution, via what we thought of as a “Janus interface.” The ICA has long been an infamously chaotic place to work, and has doubtless retained a certain energy and unpredictability because of it. In ancient Roman religion and myth, Janus is the god of beginnings, gates, transitions, time, duality, doorways, passages, frames, and endings, and as such is usually depicted with two faces looking in opposite directions. Like the parallel programming, this idea had greatest traction on the website, initially based on a scrollable calendar interface that functioned more like a dedicated app than an overarching website. The Janus aspect points back—and forward—to Stephen Wright’s 1:1 notion of usership, as well as to the triangular text at the end of “Identity,” in view of presenting the ICA as close as possible to how it really is. Whether such an aim is desirable—and whether we came anywhere close to achieving it—is debatable, but that was the big idea at least.

What does all this have to do with templates? Well, naturally there are countless design templates involved in establishing and maintaining the identity of such an institution: Word templates for letters, funding applications, board reports, and job descriptions; InDesign templates for leaflets, booklets, programme notes, membership cards, and cinema holding slides; PowerPoint templates for presentations; and many, many more. But one of the most pervasive influences on such an identity these days, especially one with a mandate to avoid print where possible, are the myriad given templates provided by whatever software is required to circulate via digital media. These are likely to be commercial Content Management Systems used to run websites, along with the platforms required for email marketing, social media, streaming, selling merchandise, e-readers, and so on.

But there is a big difference between this software and their print equivalents. Any file created in, say, InDesign will open with a whole raft of predetermined settings (from general page formats down to the nuances of hyphenation), but they can generally be changed if you know what you’re doing and where to look. While certain aspects of the software for digital platforms can be similarly controlled and expanded, the restrictions are far more prevalent and influential—and for good reason, because the ways in which they are required to operate are determined not only by the sender but also by the receiver. Moreover, the received format is determined not by a single technical factor but a number of factors in combination, from the nature of the device on which it is viewed (desktop computer, laptop, tablet, phone, watch) to the software via which it is received (browser, email, social media), which are themselves determined by both centralized, general settings, and local, personal preferences.

All this is necessary and desirable in order that texts and images can scale to different device and interface widths as opposed to, for example, the fixed format of those Bulletins PDFs. But it means a great deal of redundancy has to be built into what is being sent in order to survive being pushed and pulled through the unpredictable complex of settings and preferences on the other end, while retaining some semblance of what was intended. What is called for, then, is a “fluid” or perhaps “redundant” template, explicitly designed to allow for these slippages.

There is a diagram by information theorist Claude Shannon, in a 1953 film by designers Charles and Ray Eames called A Communications Primer, which is designed to model “noise” in any communication process.