Author: Justin Zhuang

A Nation Mourns: Going Grey for Lee Kuan Yew

A flag at half-mast at the Istana on March 23, 2015. BY MINISTRY OF COMMUNICATIONS AND INFORMATION / TERENCE TAN
A flag at half-mast at the Istana on March 23, 2015. BY MINISTRY OF COMMUNICATIONS AND INFORMATION / TERENCE TAN

Flying the state flag in half-mast is how countries have traditionally symbolised the passing of a national figure. Since Singapore’s founding prime minister Lee Kuan Yew died on Monday, state flags on all government buildings have flown at half-mast, an act no different to when other Singaporean leaders—including Ong Teng Cheong (2002), Wee Kim Wee (2005), Goh Keng Swee (2010) and Toh Chin Chye (2012)—passed on.

But this time around, there was also mourning online. Not only was a website Remembering Lee Kuan Yew set up within hours, many government organizations also turned to “greying” or “blackening” their typically colorful websites and logos on their social media accounts.

While not every organization did so—indicating it probably wasn’t a coordinated whole-of-government directive—all of them referred to the Remembering Lee Kuan Yew campaign in some way.

The Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth did not grey or blacken their digital presence, but did refer to the passing of Lee Kuan Yew.
The Ministry of Culture, Community and Youth did not grey or blacken their digital presence, but did refer to the passing of Lee Kuan Yew.

Could this become a new digital tradition in how states mourn? As governments expand their digital presence to stay relevant to citizens, new practices like this come to play. For one, the government building is not the main medium of interaction between the state and its citizens. Particularly today, it’s often websites, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts that are the communication channels citizens hear from, which makes the logo akin to the flag on the mast of a building for the online audience.

In reaction to the digital mourning, many Facebook users interacted liked the change in logos and even commented with condolences. In contrast, it’s harder to imagine someone saluting the state flag in half-mast today.

In one non-government case, the media organisation ChannelNewsAsia was even slammed for making the change a day late. While a logo was once seen as static and fixed, there is almost an assumption that it will morph with the times—just as what AirAsia did when its airplane crashed last last year or how Google does almost daily to commemorate anniversaries.

ChannelNewsAsia-LKY

Graphic Means Documentary Recalls the Days When Design was Made by Hand

Getting fingers burnt by hot wax was once all in a day’s work for a graphic designer. Before the computer came along, designers used a tool known as a waxer to coat a paper with the hot adhesive before sticking it on a page layout in a manual process known as the paste-up. No doubt designers are only too happy to leave this and other labor-intensive production methods in the past, but for those who still get misty-eyed over rapidographs and Diatype machines, the new documentary, Graphic Means, promises to take you back to the days before desktop publishing and the digital revolution of the late ’80s.

➜ Read the rest at AIGA’s Eye on Design

Designing the Modern Movement: The Pioneers of Nikolaus Pevsner

Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-1983) and the first page of his 1936 book Pioneers of the Modern Movement
Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-1983) and the first page of his 1936 book Pioneers of the Modern Movement

The high regard for modern architecture and design today is arguably the work of Pioneers of Modern Design. Originally published in 1936 as Pioneers of the Modern Movement, this book by the late art historian Nikolaus Pevsner laid the foundation for the recognition of “modern design” by lining up a progressive historical narrative to explain the state of design after World War I. The German scholar attributed the history of modern design to individual architects, designers and their works, starting from William Morris of the Arts and Crafts movement to the “machine aesthetic” of Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus. Modern architecture and design, as Pevsner saw it, was the inevitable product of the Arts and Crafts movement, Art Noveau, and the emergence of steel as a building material.

As Pevsner noted in the foreword of the book’s inaugural edition, his book was the “first to be published” on the subject. Close to eight decades later, Pioneers of Modern Design has been reprinted countless times, and in 2005, Yale University Press even saw fit to revise and expand what it called “one of the most widely read books on modern design.”

Since Pevsner's book was republished by MoMA in 1949 as Pioneers of Modern Design it has become one of the most read design history books. Note how the covers have moved from focusing on modern buildings to Art Noveau details—a hint of how the book has evolved in the eyes of its publishers over the decades?
Since Pevsner’s book was republished by MoMA in 1949 as Pioneers of Modern Design it has become one of the most read design history books. Note how the covers have moved from focusing on modern buildings to Art Noveau details—a hint of how the book has evolved in the eyes of its publishers over the decades?

Pevsner’s book would not have become so significant a book had a second edition not been published in 1949 thanks to the support of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. It was here that the title of the book was changed to Pioneers of Modern Design. This framed Pevsner’s narrative of design history as “more ongoing, more fluid” and ultimately aided the museum’s own efforts to “cultivate an American breed of modernism” notes academic Irene Sunwoo in her paper Whose Design? MoMA and Pevsner’s Pioneers (2010). Retracing the history of the book’s second edition, Sunwoo explains that MoMA found Pevsner’s interdisciplinary approach to architecture and design aligned with what it was doing, and the museum’s then curators Philip Johnson and Edgar Kaufmann Jr. worked closely with Pevsner on revising and updating the text.

When this second edition of Pioneers sold more copies in its first six months than the first edition had over a five-year period, the idea of “modern architecture and design” was born in the public’s mind and they could visit its temple in MoMA. Design history’s preoccupation with emplacing and refusing modernism is all due to Pevsner’s book notes design critic Guy Julier. “The representation of design has been dominated by the achievements of individuals in the first place; second, by the aesthetics and ideology of modernism; and third, via specific objects of a certain type,” he wrote in The Culture of Design (2007). This sums up the narrative and structure of Pevsner’s book, which has become the archetype of libraries of monographs and historical tomes on the zeitgeist of “modern architecture and design” today.

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Written for Karen Stein’s The Design Book class at D-Crit.