P'unk Avenue Window

So, the tricky people that defined the word semantics thought they could keep things simple by limiting its definition to the study of the literal meaning of words, leaving the interpretation of figurative meaning up to the folks in pragmatics.

But who studies the contextual meaning of words? The hermenauts look at the whole text and more recently even concern themselves with multimedia, but they aren’t looking through the text. Linguists look at language in social context, but what about aesthetic context? We’ve all been told that the form is central to content and meaning, but what exactly is its effect?

There is a way to break down the aesthetic context of messages and to determine the stylistic etymology of various forms. Currently this is done in art criticism, but doesn’t share across the hallway to the language department.

As modern art purged formal content and started eating its own plasticity, new discourse emerged to contextualize the new functions of art. Painting about painting, the Hip-hop remix, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, all that stuff.

My point is this: since the terms “graphic design,” “graphic arts,” “visual communication” came into existence people rarely read/view/absorb undesigned texts. They are increasingly aware that they are viewing designed texts, they’ve seen the Helvetica documentary, they like this logo and hate this one.

How do we begin, then, to parse the meaning of the aesthetic context of all of this designed information? If I make a word red or bold or blurry it changes its interpretation and thus its meaning. Why red? Why bold? Why blurry?

Ironically, pictorial imagery and symbolism developed before language, maybe we just forgot to pay attention to red and bold and blurry while we absorbed everything via romantic longhand set in Caslon.

I have been working on-again, off-again on a pet project documenting typography/signage in the Italian Market (aka 9th Street Market) in Philadelphia for a while now. The market is about 50 feet from our studio.

My original intention was to create a book of this signage with a photo on the verso (left) page and a tracing of the letterforms on the recto (right) page. Something like below:

I had also wanted to invite type designers like Matthew Carter and other knowledgeable people to write commentary for the book. At one point, I mentioned this to Matthew after a lecture at UArts, and he gave me his card to follow up.

Since the Italian Market is considered to be one of America’s oldest outdoor markets, it allowed me to photograph a vast array of signage history in a very small area. Even a casual observer might notice that the signs range from the handmade to machine-made, from old to new.

The other night, while watching Helvetica, the movie, it occurred to me that Flickr would be a great way to get the photos up on the web and allow for commentary from everyone. The book could wait… or maybe never happen.

I found the set and uploaded them on our Flickr account last night.

This morning, I wake up and bang. One of them is featured on Philebrity. Yeah.

Just happy to dust them off and start the dialogue.