It’s like no other magazine on design: Dot Dot Dot. A generation of designers has grown up with it. After ten years and twenty issues, the current editors (Stuart Bailey and David Reinfurt) have decided to call it quits. A summing up.
In its ultimate issue, Dot Dot Dot 20 ‘tries – finally – to be as direct as possible about what it’s come to stand for and what it thinks it’s gonna do about it’. This proposal is articulated most clearly in a sentence from editor Stuart Bailey’s closing statement entitled ‘Final Words’: ‘This directness can be achieved only directly by glancing, bouncing, and by refusing to accept the paralysis that this contradiction suggests.’
This riddle offers quite a representative summary. Over its ten-year-lifespan, Dot Dot Dot [DDD] seemed to specialise in viewing and approaching graphic design culture from the (critical) margins. It mostly did this by incorporating other subjects (art, literature, music etc.) and a set of personal obsessions that more pertained to the subject of graphic design.
Right off the cuff, it is interesting to note that this relatively small-edition magazine achieved a strong following in the field of graphic design, most obviously witnessed by increasingly enigmatic subject matter and the featuring of student works on display in the graduation shows of graphic design departments. And meanwhile, surfing alongside, a noticeable growth in independent publishing practice by graphic designers, resulting in necessary alterations to status quo distribution models.
Fused with this aforementioned technique of indirectness, later issues of DDD developed a strong penchant for self-reflection, revolving around ideas, images and processes associated with the ‘mirror’ and the ‘attempt’, and often employing the form of the ‘open letter’ to essentially describe itself. These became similar methods with associated formal outcomes. You might even say, methods with an associated formal language. Although because of a persistent repetition over succeeding issues, it became quite demanding to follow the development of these ideas. At worst, DDD felt/looked/read like it was more busy navel-gazing. The almost impenetrable non-fiction story The Middle of Nowhere, reproduced over eight issues of DDD, is quite representative of this.
Because the setting and writing suggest a cool intimacy – also seeking intimate engagement – it is only a subjective reading that can occur. While busy placing itself at a distance to the subject of graphic design it was – increasingly and loosely – forgetting, or failing, to notice the subject itself. Usually in favour of its own reflection. My point is that this type of rhetoric can become hypnotic, endless and soporific. Think of the ‘I’m doing this right now’ status integrated into social networking media. It’s not clear how constructive this is. But maybe these 'self-reflexivities' introduce a new-ish set of ideas into the designing process? Design that isn't afraid to doubt and fail in public – is this the ultimate transparency?
Combined with a trans-Atlantic crossing (by cofounder and co-editor-in-chief Stuart Bailey), a change in editorship (Peter Bilak left as co-founder-editor around issue 13 in 2006, and was succeeded by David Reinfurt) and the founding of a new collaboration called Dexter Sinister, DDD made a conscious break from a Dutch arts funding system that had partly supported previous issues. By doing this, DDD created for itself a unique circumstance for a serial publication. Much like an artist, it had to be confident that welcoming cultural institutions would act as an engaged ‘host’ to the production of an issue (work). For example, the entire editing, design, production and printing of issue 15 (2007) took place over a 2-week residency at the Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève, Switzerland. Subsequent issues explored various content-capturing formats, including live presentations and exhibitions.
For me, DDD was most thought provoking and exciting when it was staring graphic design directly in the face, through the visible development of the typeface in successive issues, for example. Or, to co-opt an idea of typographer, publisher and critic Robin Kinross – when the product itself became 'articulate'. Not that these engagements describe an intention to ‘replace’ the content or the writing, but instead come together as collaborators, a defined relationship with material and form being a way willing graphic designers might begin to consider the idea of 'writing'.
Frustrations related to the describing of graphic design are not unfamiliar over its written and recorded critical history. Partly a creative subject, it actually seems quite preoccupied by constant and new definitions of itself. In terms of the limits of most of its physical productions, graphic design is (still) related to the knowledge of – and engagement with – a protective masonic-like trade called offset printing. Even if the tools of graphic design and publishing have become more egalitarian these days, it is only quite recently that the obstacles of self-publishing truly appear to be easily surmountable (print on demand, blogs etc.).
This is not to say that 'Everyone is a Designer', nor probably wishes to be. This anaemic statement already mitigates the idea that the subject can be practised in thoughtful or intellectual ways. But instead, this might suggest that the borders of graphic design, as a profession, are expanding to encompass more fundamental or structural concerns that relate directly to civil (cultural) society. Subjects like linguistics, sociology, planning, literature, computer programming, education, history etc. might be considered within the vocabulary of the future 'specialist' graphic designer. The upshot of this is perhaps hinted at within the pages of DDD.
I would propose not simply more design criticism, but instead the notion of design criticism being more specific, focussed and engaged, building on the work of a few still surviving publishers of serials focussed on graphic design (and its more immediate borders) and that are independent, attentive, invaluable, curious, spirited and constructive: The University of Reading's Typography Papers (Hyphen Press), Rhode Island School of Design's Visible Language and also The National Grid, Baseline Magazine, etc.
David Bennewith is a graphic designer, Amsterdam
Dexter Sinister (Stuart Bailey & David Reinfurt, ed.), Dot Dot Dot #20, The Hague/New York, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-9794654-5-1
Dexter Sinister's new magazine titled Bulletins of The Serving Library will be available in february.
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