(Q.v.)

Last week, Ronald Shakespear of Diseño Shakespear, Buenos Aires, was in town, accompanied by his wife Elena.

Ronald is known for a rational and colourful wayfinding system for the Buenos Aires subway system (photos). I have quibbles with it – perhaps the choice of Frutiger leaves too many confusable character shapes, and the line colours are too hard to distinguish even by name – but it’s in another universe compared to what we have in Toronto.

On a lark, I sent along an E-mail before he arrived asking him if he would like to ride the subway for a while to get a glimpse at how the other half lives. He graciously accepted. Ronald and Elena would accompany me on a 2½-hour voyage from Wellesley to Yonge–Bloor to St. George to Sheppard–Yonge to Leslie. We dodged security cameras as we took umpteen noncommercial photographs of subway signage.

Many were the moments when I found myself alone 20 paces ahead of Ronald as he stood there and looked at everything. Ronald is much less interested in functionality than I am; he has more of an interest in affect and feeling. I took what notes I could of his observations, but to do justice to his expansive and impressionistic worldview would require notes that are much closer to verbatim than I have.

The first thing you notice about the name Ronald Shakespear is that it must be missing a letter on each half. No, it really is Ronald (not Ronaldo) and it really is Shakespear without a final E. I explained my decision, reached in exasperation long ago, to simply suspend disbelief about Argentinean names, which are never what you expect even if you expect the unexpected. (It is a pattern true all the way to the name of the sitting president of this Spanish-speaking South American nation, Néstor Kirchner, and the vice-president, Daniel Scioli.) Ronald’s great-great-grandfather, John Shakespear, emigrated from the U.K. to Argentina. “He was in charge of the railroads, of course.”

Three of Ronald and Elena’s five children are graphic designers. Note their echt-Argie names: Juan Shakespear, Lorenzo Shakespear, Bárbara Shakespear.

I thank Ronald and Elena for going on such a gruelling mission in a strange town. I don’t think even I understood just how momentous it all was. I had to have my esteemed colleague state the obvious for me: I had just had a dream come true – of riding the subway doing nothing but talking about signs.

I’d love to visit Buenos Aires, but, on two steaks a day, such a visit would leave me nothing to eat. [continue with: Shakespear takes the subway →]

The sun has completed a full circle around the earth and, once again, undead ghouls may walk the streets unfettered by the living. So too may an accuser of narcissism alight from steerage class and trod the alleyways of Muddy York, his studies and observations undifferentiated from the mob’s save for the salient concern of who might produce a visage in a looking-glass.

As night turns to day, the prerogatives of ghoul and accuser converge: Come to grips with his true nature and seek reconciliation with interlocutors, be they human or narcissist; or, the case unavailing, take care to alienate himself soundly from the Free City of Leslieville.

(Q.v.)

Kyle Cooper in Paul Rand: Modernist Design by Franc Nunoo-Quarcoo (no relation):

I heard Paul Rand’s voice approximately 18 months before I met him. That is to say, I heard Hugh Dubberly doing an impersonation of Peter Levine doing an impersonation of Paul Rand…. “You are doing that raised-pinky design,” Peter [said], in what I now know to be a slightly-more-accurate Rand dialect. […]

We wondered aloud if he had ever collaborated with another designer. “I would, but Jan Tschichold is dead,” he told us. We quickly familiarized ourselves with Jan Tschichold’s work, which was refined, and found a picture of him where his pinky was, in fact, raised.

So it seemed that it was OK to be decorative, and it was OK to be rigid; you just needed to do it brilliantly. It was clear to me that Rand was right in saying “An idea is only as good as its execution” and “Form is an idea.” Bad form, then, is a bad idea.