Core77

I'm a huge fan of Rob Giampietro, having discovered him first through his piece entitled "On Memphis, Pattern, and MacPaint." Completely convinced that Memphis is coming back, I, of course, loved this.

Now, I want to point you to a new piece by Giampietro, entitled "Public Notice," which explores the unadorned informational poster, its contemporary expressions and the "issues that arise from working with language as a medium in art and design."

Here's an excerpt:

In her seminal 1970 essay on posters, Susan Sontag begins by making a distinction between the poster and the public notice. "Posters are simply not public notices," she writes. "Both posters and public notices address the person not as an individual, but as an unidentified member of the body politic. But the poster, as distinct from the public notice, presupposes the modern concept of the public--in which the members of a society are defined primarily as spectators or consumers. A public notice aims to inform or command. A poster aims to seduce, to exhort, to sell, to educate, to convince, to appeal." There are many tools in the poster designer's arsenal to create the appeal Sontag describes, and the very rise of the poster as a form is tied to the rise of a technology needed to produce this appeal: color lithography. Implicit in Sontag's argument, though, is a claim about the form of information itself. The information the public notice offers arrives pure, unvarnished, unadorned. The information the poster offers is designed, decorated, expressed. One's form is neutral and the other's is inflected. But is information ever formless? Can it ever be delivered without some influence from its carrier?

The public notice as an object presents us with a challenge: Where does seeing stop and reading start? Where does information end and design begin? As we witness the rise of a sober new Helvetica age, the public notice's flat language and style shows up more and more in contemporary design. Here's a look at some of that work, some earlier artistic predecessors, and some of the issues that arise from working with language as a medium in art and design.

Read the rest here, or just check out Giampietro's generally awesome and informative site.

Finally, I couldn't help but point to my own favorite public-notice-like thing, the bizarre rest stop polling systems seen all over New Mexico: