And, at least, according to Elliot Earls, it is our fault. “Emigre magazine is dead,” he writes in his contribution to the final collection of Letters to the Editor in Emigre’s tombstone (or issue 69), “and the blogs have killed you.”
Much of the writing in Emigre does not simply poke, it probes, hard, until it bleeds and then pours vinegar on the wound. Mr. Earls pontificates further, “The discourse was stolen not by a few visionaries with commitment and courage, but by the great leveling wheels of the internet.” His autopsy further reveals that “Emigre magazine suffered a sort of ‘death by a thousand cuts (blogs),’ and for this I’m deeply saddened. More power,” signed, Elliot Earls.
The biggest question now that Emigre magazine has been officially pronounced dead is What’s Next? “What or who,” asks Andrew Blauvelt “will occupy the place that Emigre leaves?” Katherine McCoy hints, not optimistically, at blogs, “Perhaps blogs are filling Emigre’s role as places for alternative voices. But their long-term contribution remains to be seen, since they are missing key elements of Emigre.” Upon reading I wonder what those key elements are. “At this point,” McCoy writes “blog writing is a fairly ephemeral form of publishing, preserved only as long as someone maintains the server.” Suddenly, an anthology — or putting a down payment for our own server — does not sound like a bad idea. McCoy is also wary about the lack of a traditional editor, specially the lack of an editor as astute as Rudy VanderLans, “While many celebrate the spontaneity and grassroots democracy of blog dialogues, the vision of an enlightened editor is a rare things — and a great publishing tradition.” Michael Dooley also expresses a tinge of disappointment, “Since the dust has settled, everyone now engages in relatively mundane blog chats about branding and such.”
In his review of Emigre 69, and own good-bye, Rick Poynor leaves his initial foray into blogs with this: “Design blogs generate a lot of noise and they sure do love their own hype, but nothing produced in this area has so far equaled the concentrated documentary achievement and design culture transforming impact of Emigre and if you doubt this, just go and look at the magazine. Emigre had a clearly defined purpose.”
One thing is clear: Emigre = Good, Blogs = Bad. What is not explicitly clear, and something I find a tad incongruent with Emigre’s finger-pointing tradition, is that everyone simply addresses the problem as “blogs”. Now, I may sound self-absorbed (or delusional) in the second half of this paragraph and from hereon, but there are only two major design blogs that could potentially fit in this design discourse doomsday equation: Speak Up and Design Observer. I doubt that Poynor would call his fellow Founding Writers lovers of their own hype; I also don’t think Earls would call anyone on Design Observer a coward or uncommitted; and since we outnumber Design Observer in “mundane blog chats about branding” I’m positive Dooley is referring to Speak Up. So, guess what? The shoe fits. We killed Emigre.
Nonsense.
Emigre died of natural causes. If anything, Speak Up provided an amplifier in their last days. Steve Heller — whose “Cult of the Ugly” ghosts may finally be put to sleep after being woken one last time with a bucket of cold water in this final number — in his Dear Emigre warns Rudy about what the reaction would have been to his article, “…had there been a blogosphere back then just imagine what the volume of posts would be like.” With issue 64, Rant, Emigre turned to its final iteration as a pocketbook. After being distributed, free of charge, to over 35,000 people, only 2,000 people subscribed with the release of Rant and a $28 subscription. I assume, only a fraction read it. On May of 2004, former Speak Up author, Sam Potts (who two issues later wrote a piece for Emigre) led an inquisitive discussion on the writing that appeared on Rant. This is what Heller warned Rudy about. The discussion is perhaps one of my all-time favorites and I can’t help but feel that it generated much needed buzz in Emigre’s final days. Allow me one final bout of self-absorption: Speak Up was somehow mentioned or included in the last five numbers of Emigre. We were at their bedside. Earls might think we were putting poison in their IV.
In the sixty-seventh short story by Rudy VanderLans, he writes about Speak Up, “It’s difficult to compete against daily short opinion pieces and the instant replies in which logo redesigns of large corporations receive the most attention. The fury reminds me of the heyday of Emigre, except we occasionally challenged the status quo, while the Speak Up crowd wants to maintain it as best as they can.” Poynor, again talking of “blogs”, adds “No one, so far, has used the medium to stake out an urgent critical position comparable to Keedy’s or Blauvelt’s in the pages of Emigre in the 1990s. Nor have blogs proved to be the medium for exploring new design aesthetics.”
Somehow it has become implied that blogs should indeed fill the void left by Emigre and surely Speak Up is not stepping up to the task by not exploring new design aesthetics, by not challenging the status quo, by not being an actual printed thing that can be championed in a bookshelf and, above all, by being unedited — although I could potentially take offense at that. Well, here is where the shoe drops: Speak Up is not, nor it wants to be Emigre. Especially not with all these deficiencies — and how could we even be charged of killing Emigre if, in the eye of the beholder, we are not armed with nary a stone against its Goliath-sized contribution to design history?
Again, nonsense.
Emigre was born in a time when all the above qualities were desperately needed. When design needed to veer off topic and off road and it needed a rugged vehicle for the stodgy road ahead. In those days, apparently, New York was a scary place where design decisions were made on behalf of the nation and the profession. New York has changed, and so has the world and our profession. Design has been let loose, in California, in Seattle, Austin, Tijuana. Design aesthetics have been discovered, copied and swallowed by mainstream. Design has become more than ever — to the hefty annoyance of many of Emigre’s contributors and editor — commerce’s peanut butter to its sweet, sticky jelly. That is why branding discussions ignite readers so much. This is what design is now and what schools, publications and the marketplace have molded it into. For every designer concerned with theory, linguistics, the environment, activism, there are over a dozen designers ready to rebrand AT&T. The best that Speak Up has to offer — and its mission — is to provide a forum where the realities of the working designer in the professional world can be met face forward. And through this discussion, hopefully, designers can be better prepared to do their job. This is something that Emigre can’t — and I bet doesn’t want to — provide today. So, yeah, “blogs” can’t do what Emigre did. Because we live in a different time. The old guard which Emigre so dutifully confronted are not the enemies of the younger generation. We are a breed of Emigre’s revolutionary aesthetics and sensibilities crossed with awe and respect for the tradition and the work of the people that forged this profession as we know it. We have little to rebel against because, despite our constant complaints, we have it good. We know where our profession is headed and we know it in part thanks to Emigre. Early on Rudy may have mentioned to me (or in one of his intros) that Speak Up is not challenging the status quo, and I have to admit that every day I wonder how I can challenge this quo full of status. The thing is, I personally don’t have any beef with it, and five years into the two thousands I have yet to find anyone in our field challenging it. Not even Emigre. It had the ammunition but no real target after Rant.
So, thank you, but we will pass on handling that torch in need of some handing down. It seems more of a burden than an honor.
I wish it were blogs that killed Emigre, then we wouldn’t have to face the fact that Emigre may not be needed anymore in this uneventful profession in which we practice today. While reading Emigre 69, I longed for having been born a few decades earlier and to have been part of what seem like tumultuous and good times in graphic design where opinions mattered and actually shaped the profession. Nonetheless, this — this moment, this blog, this discussion, this imminent redesign of the AT&T logo — is the reality we live in and I’m glad as hell to be part of it and see what becomes of it in all its unedited and server-dependent behavior.
Dear Emigre,
Thank you.
And sorry for that death stuff.
i do have to agree that blogs are a tad overhyped, though i still frequent several dozens of them on a daily basis for random, and mostly trivial, information.
Emigre will be missed. it was, in my opinion, the best published source for critical writings on design. the smartest and most diverse in subject.
it still blows my mind that it (presumbly) is over. what the hell am i suppose to read now??? (aside from Speak Up of course)
On Nov.17.2005 at 01:34 AM