Chip Kidd, during a tedious discussion of why there are so few superstar wymmynz graphic designers:

As a gay person I could ask the same thing – where are the “famous” gay graphic designers? (There are more today, but historically next to none.) Except I don’t particularly care. At all.

The most famous gay graphic designer raises a question about gay graphic designers, then vitiates the same question. Apparently it’s been decided: “We” are a non-issue. Nothing like being written out of history by your own kind.

I look back now on our conversation and I feel even more handled than I did then.

So enduring, it’s identifiable even on an unlit neon sign that’s missing a letter.

I continue to read every plausible book on graphic design and typography in the Toronto Public Library and to request others via interlibrary loan, for which I submit up to 30 requests at a time. One book obtained latterly is Cipe Pineles: A Life of Design by Martha Scottford.

The book is useful in at least finally giving me a credible pronunciation for the first name of this storied 20th-century designer (“Seepee”), mentioned in countless books I’ve read since I was a teenager. This book is, however, fiendishly difficult to read, as it is typeset in spindly PostScript Bodoni on coated stock. Scottford was taking Pineles’s fondness for Bodoni a bit far. (It’s a typical mistake of design books, which are often the hardest to read because the books’ designers try to impose some unrelated graphic ideology on text and reader.)

On the basis of the work shown in the book, Pineles (1908–1991) must be one of the leading American graphic designers. She was certainly more consistent than someone like Paul Rand – read enough books about him and you wonder why there was quite so much fuss. Pinele started out almost immediately at the top, doing art direction for Condé Nast magazines. She could really draw, and pretty much had no choice but to do so in that pre-mechanized era. Scottford shows a few hand-drawn magazine comps that end up looking almost exactly the same in finished form. (The illustrations are so small they barely work as such, but at that level of reduction the comps and the final layouts are sometimes hard to tell apart.)

I thought there was much too much made of Pineles as a Leading Woman in Graphic Design, Which We All Know Is a Sexist Phallocracy. Pineles was never prevented from working and was eventually named art director of various magazines. She taught hundreds of design students. It’s true that special dispensation had to be made to induct her into the all-male Art Directors Club, but her work had never been seriously impeded and such dispensation actually was made – in 1948, long enough in the past to make the discussion strictly historical and not a cautionary tale for the present day.

The era may have been more sexist, but then as now, there is nothing intrinsic in graphic design that favours males or females. Anyone concerned with the distribution of sexes in the field today has to look at other factors, which, if anything, are likely to discourage boys from pursuing something deemed decorative, frilly, and useless by the tough guys they hang out with. (What remains inexplicable is the near-total absence of inverts from graphic design. It is amazing how many straight males join up.)

Pineles was design royalty in another way: Her first husband, William Golden, was an esteemed designer in his own right and created the CBS eye. (An endnote reads: “Golden was inspired by a Pennsylvania Dutch bitch certificate he saw in an issue of Brodovitch’s Portfolio.”) Golden died of a heart attack that, as Scottford describes it, should have been identified within hours of onset and could have been treated. Pineles’s second husband, Will Burtin, was also a designer.

(In fact, if you want to get upset over something, how about the fact that Wikipedia has a giant article on Golden but nothing on Pineles or Burtin?)

Pineles had two children, through adoption and Burtin’s blended family; daughter Carol moved to Toronto. They would have much cause to be proud of their parents.

UPDATE, 2007.01.26: I have here Nine Pioneers of American Graphic Design by R. Roger Remington and Barbara Hodik. There’s a full chapter on William Golden and another on Will Burtin. Both chapters mention that the men in question were married to Ciple Pineles. The Burtin chapter states that he “met and formed friendships with William Golden and his wife, Cipe Pineles,” then, much later, tells us “he married [in 1961] the designer Cipe Pineles, widow of William Golden.”

The foreword to the book muses about the other pioneers who could have been included, all of them men. This is a sexist history of graphic design if you were ever looking for one.

Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks (perverse official orthography: BOBOS* in Paradise) is a bit padded at times, but at other times had me in tears. (Don’t you find that books seem funnier when you’re out in public and you have to stifle your laughter?)

• The members of the educated elite find they must change their entire attitude first toward money itself. When they were poor students, money was a solid. It came in a chunk with every payche[que], and they would gradually chip little bits off to pay the bills. They could sort of feel how much money they had in their bank account, the way you can feel a pile of change in your pocket.

  But as they became more affluent, money turned into a liquid. It flows into the bank account in a prodigious stream. And it flows out just as quickly. The earner is reduced to spectator status and is vaguely horrified by how quickly the money is flowing through….

  The big money stream is another aptitude test. Far from being a source of corruption, money turns into a sign of mastery. It begins to seem deserved, natural. So even former student radicals begin to twist the old left-wing slogan so that it becomes: From each according to his abilities, to each according to his abilities.
  [p. 38]

  Or you could be me, the only person I know who can wait three to five months for a four-digit paycheque.

• In fact, the very phrase “sport-utility vehicle” is testimony to the new way Bobos think about tools. Not long ago sport was the opposite of utility. You either played or you worked. But the information-age keyboard jockeys who traffic in concepts and images all day like to dabble in physical labo[u]r during their leisure time.
  [p. 86]

• Have you ever had an argument, or, say, two continuous years of arguments, that a dishwasher in a two-person household in which one person never does dishes and the other refuses to do so on principle could not be considered a luxury?

  Kitchens this big require strategizing. The architects brag about how brilliantly they have designed their kitchens into “work triangles” to minimize the number of steps [among], say, stove, dishwasher, and sink. In the old kitchens you didn’t need work triangles because taking steps was not a kitchen activity. You just turned around, and whatever you needed, there it was….

  The first thing you see, covering yards and yards of one wall, is an object that looks like a nickel-plated nuclear reactor but is really the stove…. Presiding over the nearby quadrants of the kitchen will be the refrigeration complex. The central theme of this section is that freezing isn’t cold enough….

  A capacious kitchen with durable appliances is a sign that you do your own chores, sharing the gritty reality of everyday life, just as Gandhi and Karl Marx would have wanted you to. It means you’ve got equipment with more power than all but six of the NATO nations…. It means that you have concentrated your spending power on where it matters, on the everyday places you and your family actually use. Spending on conspicuous display is evil, but it’s egalitarian to spend money on parts of the house that would previously have been used by the servants.
  [pp. 86–89]

• They retire afterward to the hotel bar for $7 martinis and are joined by a consultant from Deloitte & Touche and his wife, a partner at Winston & Strawn – a two-ampersand couple.
  [p. 178]

• She is suffering from Status-Income Disequilibrium, a malady that afflicts people with jobs that give them high status but only moderately high income…. All [their expenses leave] them about $2,500 a month for rent, food, books, laundry, and living expenses. It feels like they are utterly poor, and of course they are suffering from bracket amnesia; as soon as they reach one income bracket they forget what life was like in the lower brackets and so can’t imagine how it would be possible ever to return there….

  When an intellectual enters a room filled with financial predators, there will be a nagging doubt in the back of the mind: Do they really like me, or am I just another form of servant…? The sad fact is that the moneyed analysts… are plagued by the fear that, while they have achieved success, they have not achieved significance. They suffer from a reverse SID – their income is higher than their status. They have Income-Status Disequilibrium (ISD)….

  Furthermore, the intellectuals are, in effect, paid to be interesting…. At home, this sort of SID sufferer… will congratulate himself on choosing a profession that doesn’t offer the big financial rewards…. He does not mention to himself that, in fact, he lacks the quantitative skills it takes to be, say, an investment banker and that he is unable to focus on things that bore him, the way lawyers can. There was never any great opportunity to go into a more lucrative field, so there was never any real moment of deliberate sacrifice.
  [pp. 180–185]

  You can map this to other unchangeable characteristics, such as an inability not to call bullshit without so much as thinking twice.

• I was out at the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, recently, and everybody there was dressed for a glacier climb, with boots, rugged khaki pants, and carabiners around their belts with cellphones hanging down. It’s like going into a nightclub where everybody is constantly shoving their endurance cleavage in your face.
  [p. 211]

  Finally a place where I won’t feel underdressed! (If I can’t wear Carhartt contractor pants with multiple keitai pockets packed with necessary electronics, I don’t want to serve canapés to the guests at your revolution.)

Here we have one’s esteemed colleague David Michaelides of Swipe Books holding open a spread from the inexplicable German book of autotraced silhouettes of objects, Neubau Welt.

The purpose of the book seems to be exactly as it appears: To produce a book of autotraced silhouettes of objects. Surely every household requires an outline of a Citroën DS (q.v.; q.q.v.).

If you’re starting from scratch or are undertaking an Unfailed Redesign, your Web shop needs all the following to be considered au courant:

1. A homepage with valid HTML and a site with mostly-valid HTML (no goddamned tables). Really, you have to use HTML 4.01 Strict now
2. Custom 404 pages
3. An hCard, probably on the About or Contact pages, which you also need
4. A customized search-results page (I haven’t bothered)
5. A blog with RSS that most or everybody in the shop writes for
6. An update or What’s New page with RSS
7. Original research or code contributions
8. A Flickr account that is regularly updated
9. A trail of comments on other people’s sites and on Flickr, always linking back to the same page (I use joeclark.org/weblogs nine times out of ten)
10. Your own tag; it has to be easy to type and remember and must be unique
11. UserIDs on AccessifyForum, A List Apart, a few other sites

And ultimately:

• One or more articles at A List Apart
• Your own podcast (with transcripts)
• Your own book
• A trail of speaking engagements at all the right conferences
• Your own conference

Another in a series of postings on CBC captioning (also see the separate page on the topic)

The title of today’s posting harkens back to the early 1990s, a time when I had long since been online and you probably hadn’t. My Da Vinci’s Inquest of the era – the show I lived for – was of course Homicide, and I very much enjoyed the Usenet newsgroup discussing it. We were a really sharp lot, with no problems at all.

Except of course for the fact that the captioning on Homicide, by NCI, was atrocious. I kept complaining about it, mostly for posterity. (I knew these things would be archived forever, and lo has it come to pass.) One of my complaints had a tour de force of a subject line, if I do say so myself: “Homicide captioning atrocity update.”

That was ten years ago. Has anybody learned anything since?

Well, not on the sixth floor of Fort Dork. I continue to maintain notes about absent or incorrect or inadequate captioning on CBC Television and Newsworld. Both networks have a legal requirement to caption every second of the broadcast day save for glitches. But they aren’t. And, true to CBC nature, they’ve been total rat bastards about the whole thing. [continue with: CBC captioning atrocity update →]

(Q.v.; q.q.v.)