I expect good typography. I read the design annuals, stare at the images. The styles and the work change and I know what to expect. On occasion I am impressed with perfection. It doesn’t happen often; that’s what makes it special. My experience and understanding of the subject have prepared me to encounter it. I like to put myself in the designer’s shoes, and I kid myself ‘Yes, that’s what I would have done, given the time.’ New fashions come along, challenging the values of the old; I sit up and question whether or not these pieces are good. But all, in time becomes subsumed and absorbed, re-establishing what is called the norm. And so it goes on.
But what I cannot prepare myself for is the uncompromisingly bad. Not mundane, dull or tepid, but bad. It is inspiring in its insularity, in its unwillingness to aspire to mediocrity. How could they have even thought of doing that? What thought processes were involved, if any, to arrive at that? I am not able to understand how to think in such a way; and as a designer brought up to understand the value of thinking laterally, literately and loftily, I am extremely impressed. You are warned about bad things from the cradle to the grave. They have an attraction, an air of forbidden fruit. I have caught my students doing bad things in the studio, and I have confiscated the offending items. I have seen appalling designs and recorded them; I delight in visual torture.
But why?
In failure the human spirit is revealed; a wound in others which we feel ourselves. Success ultimately leaves me cold. When confronted with perfection there is nothing for me to do but gaze and admire, but then this perfection begins to give me a sense of detachment. It is exquisite; but I can’t retain it, I get bored and walk away. I find that I am always intrigued by things of a more tentative nature, of perfection not quite achieved. There I spy the warmth of humanity. I am inclined to agree with Somerset Maugham in thinking that perfection can be a trifle dull.
In Britain, heroic failure is something we feel more at home with than success. It is a national characteristic that sets us apart. It is an alien characteristic to make mention of things positive. ‘How are you?’ – ‘I’m good.’ In Britain you’re ‘not bad’, and any mention of any success is boasting, which is negative. Others can boast for you, but you may not. To be a sudden success is OK – you didn’t expect it; but a continued success is not.
We learn more from failure than from success. It shapes us and collectively gives us experience and character. So to learn typography well, all we need then is a manifesto of bad type. In it would be outlined a set of rules which, when adhered to, would ensure typographic disaster. And through this failure we would begin to learn. And the more we failed the more we would learn. We could become a nation of typographic genii through a litany of design atrocities.
What we need is a manifesto, set diagonally and vertically, all script caps with soft shadows, outlined and underlined, with poor punctuation and hundreds of hyphens, stretched to the edge and cropped at the sides, printed in yellow on day-glo paper, trimmed badly and poorly presented. An example for all to see and none to emulate. With this in their hands the designers of tomorrow will not look back; we give them the chance to fail abjectly and completely; they’re all in the typographic gutter and some of them are looking at their scars.
The illustrations that accompany the rules range from a group of students who produced responses on the theme of ‘A Bad Type Manifesto’ to ex-students whose gloriously sub-standard work was conveniently ‘confiscated’; from the many unsung heroes, many of them enthusiastic amateurs (many of them not considering themselves to be in any way designers at all, but just wishing to get the job done), to professionals who should have been told. We raise our hats to them all; and, seeing as they’re not here, we’ll laugh at them.
Nigel Bents is a senior lecturer at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London as well as a lecturer at Kingston School of Art and Design where his experiences of heroic failure continue to inform and inspire him. His long association with the Paupers Press in Hoxton has resulted in a range of artists’ publications in the collections of major museums – this lecture is to be accompanied by another.