In another life, I was a wannabe luthier.

The intoxicating scent of Brazilian rosewood and Sitka spruce, the arcane and elegant tools and forms, the thrilling sensation of bringing an instrument to vibrating, singing life … ah well, turned out ’twas not to be.

I have built a couple of guitars, and fixed a whole bunch more, but the closest I ever came to becoming a Stradivarius of the six-string was spending an apprentice year in the terrific archtop-maker Tom Ribbecke’s workshop.

It was an amazing experience, and has deeply informed my life as a visual designer (more about that below), but why (you ask politely, as I continue what seems to be a random digression) am I bringing it up? Well, a good friend of mine happened upon the Mandolin Brothers in Staten Island, perhaps the finest purveyor of guitars in the country. He was knocked out by the joint, and — knowing I’d be interested — sent me a link.

Of course I knew about this place — Ribbecke had sold guitars through them, and so had most of the top-drawer luthiers I’d ever met. They seem to always have a spectacular inventory of handmade instruments, so I clicked straight through to the archtop section to see if I recognized anybody.

Well. Not only did I spot a few familiar names, but I ran across an instrument that I had actually worked on — and what an instrument!

Here’s the story:

J. R. Zeidler was one of the finest instrument makers I’ve ever met … a rough-edged Philly guy with visionary technical insights, exacting techniques, and an uncompromisingly personal aesthetic sense, he created some of the most uniquely stunning instruments that have ever graced this planet — and they sound as good as they look.

I got to meet the man only once, at the Healdsburg Guitar Festival. Zeidler came to an evening party at Ribbecke’s workshop. Whiskey was quaffed, war stories told, and I (the modest newbie) complimented him on his craft. He gave me advice about the importance of discovering your own style and sound, and then we argued about finishing techniques — “Hey Tom, your assistant is bustin’ my balls here!”

We shook hands. A great guy. Not much later J.R. got sick, and I never saw him again.

But I did get to participate in an incredible project inspired by both the man himself, and his (oh, the artisan life) lack of health insurance. That “project” is what I saw on the Mandolin Brothers website this morning.

The Zeidler Project:

Maybe I should just quote the “official” background.

“When fourteen of the world’s finest guitar makers decided to honor and support a colleague, they produced a unique and remarkable instrument — The Zeidler Project guitar. J. R. Zeidler was well known in the community of archtop makers. His instruments, and the man himself, were greatly respected by players and his peers.

When he was hospitalized with acute myelogenous leukemia, undergoing debilitating and expensive therapy, his fellow builders came together in support. They decided to make a collaborative guitar incorporating many of Zeidler’s touches and even using wood he chose.

The guitar will be sold to defray some of John’s medical expenses, and to help his family.”

The Zeidler Project was coordinated by the Canadian luthier, Linda Manzer. It was a spirited, bold project — never before had a group of so highly respected instrument makers attempted such collaboration.

Manzer said, “This was a chance for the archtop guitar building community to come together and focus all our skills on this one instrument to help our friend, John, and his family. These builders were just incredible to work with and we were all honored to be part of this truly unprecedented event. It was a very emotional and truly amazing experience. The end result is a guitar imbued with our collective spirit.”

The entire group, paying tribute to Zeidler’s style and preferences, worked out details of the design. The guitar traveled across the continent to the shop of every builder — each of them adding his or her own touch to it, then passing it to the next builder.

Ribbecke’s contribution involved the careful shaping of the gorgeously quilted maple back plate. My own was minimal, just helping to rough the thing out before Master Tom put his expert hands to work — but I felt honoured to play even the tiniest of roles in this historic project. Still do.

What the heck does any of this have to do with my current business?

Well … the success of a piece of visual work — just like a guitar — depends upon a careful accumulation of the smallest of details. Thus the importance of gently persuading every single element of a project to work together — in perfect harmony, as it were — can’t be exaggerated.

A millimeter too much or too little wood in the carved top plate of an archtop means the difference between an instrument that sings and a common plunker. Just so with a designed page or a drawing. A headline a few points too large, the wrong line weight, an ill-conceived colour choice …

Pay attention. Get it right.

And I guess it’s even more than that. My obsession with the making and playing of guitars has as much to do with my business as any of my hundreds of other interests and passions.

When an artist is confronted by the daily task of making “something out of nothing”, every experience that has ever been poured into the ol’ brain-hopper is called upon to fill that blank page or screen.Every moment becomes an ingredient in the creative stew, a whole life’s worth of experience transmuted into a pattern of ink or pixels, just like that.

Anyway.

The truth is, I was just delighted to be reminded of the existence of this wonderful guitar — and my own tiny contribution.

And as I learned just this morning, it’s actually still for sale — scroll down to the bottom of this page. For a paltry hundred grand you can take it home, but please call me if you do — I’ve still never played the thing!

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Well. Aren’t they all?

Ye-es, technically correct, but the categories that museums typically set for themselves are very, very narrow. Things called “art”, for example. Sometimes just paint-on-canvas sorts of things. Or carved-from-marble sorts of things. Or vacuum cleaners.

So, what to expect from this thing-room tucked away three stories above the hectic, graffitied streets of Berlin’s multi-kulti Kreuzberg neighborhood?

A well-lit, high-ceilinged room with beautiful wooden floors … and a whole lotta shelves.

This museum concerns itself with presenting a sort of mute cultural-historical narrative of Germany’s entire 20th century, from its beginning up to the present day.

The aforementioned shelves are stuffed with a stunningly diverse collection of manufactured objects. Not objets d’art, not objects ‘appropriated’ by an artist, but the kind of innocent every-day objects that you are surrounded with at this very moment.

Your computer. Your pencil. Your coffee cup. Each of these objects captures decisions made by an individual craftsman/designer, a moment in the history of human-created environment, and simultaneously expresses the essence of every “thing” designed and created before it. Ever.

That’s a lot of weight for a coffee cup to handle.

But this museum has the philosophical chops (and history of its own) to make it work.

The Museum der Dinge is the descendant and official archive of the Deutscher Werkbund, pr “German Work Federation”.

The Werkbund, an association of artists, architects, designers, and industrialists, was formed in 1907 with the express intent of overhauling the entire German landscape of mass-produced objects, “from sofa cushions to the building of cities”.

The fundamental plan was to rethink everything from an aesthetic viewpoint that took function, the essence of materials, and modern industrial manufacturing techniques as its muse.

You know the essential slogan of the Werkbund already: “Form follows function”. And yes, the world famous and extraordinarily influential Bauhaus design school in Weimar grew from these very roots in the early 1920s.

The tension between intelligent, form-follows-function design and the kitsch favoured by mass culture provides a formal structure for the museum.

It’s divided into two major sections. First, a long, high row of shelves runs along one wall, packed to bursting with items selected to reflect the manufactured world as it actually was — and you could easily spend half an hour just gazing at a single shelf! It’s a meticulously arranged riot, and the tastes, prejudices, and technological influences of the era burst from every piece.

This “world of objects” is arranged in chronological order, then further divided into subsets such as “body shapes,” “material/aluminum,” “post-War era,” and “East German household”.

The second section is composed of a series of free-standing cases running down the center of the long room. These are also arranged chronologically, but this time the objects represent opposing sides in a century-old argument.

Half of each case is filled with objects catering to contemporary popular taste, tending towards decoration and kitsch — to which the other side responds with elegantly clean-lined solutions from industrial and graphic designers sympathetic to the Werkbund’s ideas and ambitions.

But the best part is that you don’t need to know a THING about design history to enjoy this exhibition; on a purely surface level it’s just the coolest, best-organized thrift store you have ever seen.

Conclusions aren’t necessarily drawn, and there’s no predetermined narrative. You can just let the colors, shapes, forms and textures wash over you … or let your brain go to work on the innumerable jarring, inspiring and thought-provoking juxtapositions.

it’s a wonderful experience.
 

The time-span covered by the collection runs right up to the present day, but the early half of the century attracted most of my attention — particularly the graphic design.

I was delighted to see that my hero Lucian Bernhard, ground-breaking developer of the sachplakat poster style and innovative type designer, is particularly well represented.

And because we’re in Berlin and talking about history, the subject of National Socialism is unavoidable … and here it is, expressed in a kind of embarrassing kitsch that apparently even made the monster on Voßstrasse squirm.

 
When I mentioned how much I’d enjoyed my couple of hours there, the first thing the smiling guy behind the counter said was “Great — would you mind mentioning it to other people?”

No one I know in Berlin seems to have heard of it, and worse, my explanations of its wonderfulness just haven’t seemed to penetrate: “Uh-huh, sounds interesting …” and then a change of subject.

I hope these photos are a little more effective.

If you’re in Berlin for a day or two, do yourself a favour. They’re open Friday – Monday from 12 -7pm, and it’ll cost you 4 € to get in. Guided tours are available if you’re lucky enough to speak German, but if not — no worries. These objects speak quite clearly on their own.

Guerrilla artist/graphic designer Shepard Fairey is world famous (um, notorious) for papering the alleys, underpasses and abandoned storefronts of the world with starkly powerful images limned in black, white and red. I still remember the first “André the Giant Has a Posse” sticker I ever saw, somewhere in the San Francisco Mission District in 1989 — and the invisible question mark that immediately popped out of my head.

Shepard is one of contradictory characters who makes graffiti art because he has to, because it’s turned into a nice living, but also to change the world. He fell in love with Obama at first word, and contacted the campaign: Could he please give the candidate the André the Giant treatment?

(Shepard: “He didn’t want the Farakhan endorsement, maybe he didn’t want the Shepard Fairey endorsement either …”)

Silence from Obama … then a quiet yes.

Fairey papered Philly, then put a short run of the posters up on his website for sale: $40 apiece, using the profits to buy (somewhat ironically) legal street advertising space. A copy autographed by Obama is now hanging on Fairey’s wall, they’re now selling on eBay for $1500 and up, and the story has hit the national media like the proverbial hurricane.

Any graphic designer making the front pages gets a smile from me.

Attaboy, Shepard.

“Does this guy have some kind of cult?”

We’d just seated ourselves in the packed auditorium, and my colleague was eyeing the dozens of glazed-eyed autograph-seekers lined up for their moment with Edward Tufte. His seminar “Presenting Data and Information” had sold out well in advance, and the place was quietly buzzing with conversation and — my colleague had it right — a kind of excitedly cultish devotion.

I’d never seen the man in person, and didn’t even know how to pronounce his name: Tuft? Tuff-ta? Tuff-tee? Whatever — the main draw for me was the little cardboard suitcase containing all four of Tufte’s info-design works. All four!

Tufte is an avuncular, earnestly likable fellow with bushy white eyebrows appropriate for guru or academic. Academic he is, having taught at both Princeton and Yale, and guru as well — from the publication of his brilliant first book “Envisioning Information” back in 1990, his exalted master status was almost assured.

Master of what? Well … it’s really all there in the title of that first book. Tufte is all about techniques for portraying piles of complex data in visual form. Charts, diagrams, maps, tables, guides, directories … the “flatland” world of cognitive art.

The first half of the day-long seminar was much the more practically useful to me, and I’ll save you the 4-figure price tag by summarizing Tufte’s approach in a single line, slightly paraphrased. Ready?

To clarify or simplify, add detail. Pare away that which does not communicate, but do whatever it takes to visually communicate what you need to explain.

People interact with complex data all the time — the stock pages, the sports section — and the misguided notion that simplifying data by reducing it, removing important bits which might be confusing — simply reduces the amount of information available. The thing that makes this most appealing to me personally — apart from the fact that it works — is that it assumes that people aren’t idiots. Our eye-brain interface in incredibly powerful, capable of apprehending and processing hundreds of gigabytes of visual information in a single glance. There is no confusing information, my friends. only poorly designed graphics.

A plethora of video and physical props supported his conclusions — the most noteworthy of which was an original 14th century edition of Euclid’s “Elements of Geometrie”, walked reverently around the hall by a white gloved underling. Who knew it was a pop-up book? Heavyweight names sprinkled throughout the presentation included Galileo, Dr. Richard Feynman, and T.S Eliot.

Although substantially less useful, the second half was alternately entertaining (a two hour rant about the Evils of PowerPoint, in which Bill Gates’ clunky slideware was implicated in nothing less than the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle), and dull (focused on techniques for giving corporate presentations, something that — thank the heavens — lies outside my bailiwick).

And in conclusion, apropos of nothing, really — a slideshow of Tufte’s garden of elegantly awkward metal sculptures, accompanied by chamber music.

I walked out of the seminar a bit dazed from the onslaught of information, but unconvinced that I’d learned anything I didn’t already know. But last night I was pondering the concept of “adding detail” to simplify or clarify, and realized that one of my current projects would benefit tremendously from this idea! A rack card for Roshambo Winery was suffering from a poorly drawn, confusing map inherited from a previous designer, and though the project was already scheduled to go to press, I realized I had to act. I split it up into multiple smaller maps, each associated with specific driving directions. The result? More detail, more complexity, but much more clarity.

I never did learn how to pronounce his last name.

The Kehlet Typewriter Company of Sacramento has finally thrown in the towel after a quarter-century in the business. It's the end of an era -- or perhaps, since this little shop opened at the tail-end of the Analog Age, the end of the end of an era.

I've walked past this storefront of jumbled office machines every morning for almost exactly a year, and until last month, the same thought inevitably drifted through my mind: "No kidding; still here?"

I haven't owned a typewriter for almost twenty years, and can think of scarcely a handful of people who even own one anymore. A twenty-something acquaintance clings to her ancient Remington as a fetish of poets past. Patrick Leigh Fermor, a favourite writer of mine just picked up a '51 Olivetti to expedite the writing of his final book of travel memoirs. He was grudgingly driven to mechanical means only by his advanced age (93) after decades of writing in longhand.

But though the rattling, banging, ink-smudging contraptions will likely retain a place in the hearts of a romantic rear-guard, the "closed" sign in the window of Kehlet's makes it official. (sigh)

One of the pleasures of strolling the streets of another city is the discovery of visual quirks native to that spot. Berlin is one of my favourite places to play this game. There are lots of examples in Germany’s densely layered Hauptstadt, and exhibit A can be seen just about everywhere — it’s the striking form of the esszett as it appears on the city’s street signs.

The esszett (or scharfes S) is a character unique to German — it’s the one resembling a weird-looking “B”. The simplified version of the story is that it represents a double “S” ligature, specifically between the now-extinct “long s” (which you’ve undoubtedly noticed and pronounced as an “f” when perusing the Declaration of Independence) with a standard “s”. The esszett is used throughout the German language, but this particular form of it caught my eye because of its ubiquitous presence in the word for street: “Straße”, or “Strasse”.

This typographic mark’s history is long and a bit complex. It’s been represented in any number of variations, from its calligraphic origins as ink scratched onto parchment, through blackletter at the dawn of European printing, then finally bursting onto the international stage from Germany as a modern, streamlined typographic style in the 1920s.

Berlin’s street signs date from that golden, modern, serif-less age, an era dedicated to linking form to function, to divorcing itself from an antiquated, overwrought past. Letterforms became clean of line, rational, and geometric. Thank goodness it was (and is!) impossible for designers of any era to extricate themselves completely from environment and cultural context … that sharp-edged blackletter style still managed to creep in, and it’s nowhere more apparent than in this emphatically angular esszett.

The street signs vary on the eastern and western sides of Berlin, thanks to the forty years that the city spent divided, and this particular incarnation of the character is more often seen in the western part of the city. Berliner type designer Verena Gerlach has made a study of street signage on both sides of the city — the resulting typefaces (Berlin West, Berlin East) are well worth a look, and are available from Fontshop.com.