Meet the new paper pushers

Amid the Flash animation and Photoshop tweaking, some design students are just looking for something to hold on to.

By Hugh Hart
Special to The Times

May 27, 2007

THEY'RE not Luddites. They stare at computer screens and text their friends and Web surf like most of their peers. But when it comes to crafting quirky graphic design, some L.A.-area college students with a passion for visual experimentation find that nothing beats old-fashioned hard copy. E-zines, Flash animation, motion graphics and Photoshop-tweaked Internet postings may be the wave of the future, but these campus-based creative types are flaunting their fondness for print this spring with an intriguing array of campus-based paper and ink publications.

Bruce Chan, a 22-year-old fifth-year architecture student who co-edits USC's semiannual arts journal Paláver, says, "It's not necessarily like we're going backwards or that we're anti-new media, but this magazine is a great way to make something permanent that we can basically keep forever and share with USC's creative community. I still have my issues that I bought freshman year that I can go back and look at."

Co-editor Victoria Vu, 22, adds, "Being architecture students surrounded by our peers, we're really obsessed with having physical printed matter, having something to look at and touch. Print is just more permanent and tangible."

The current Paláver incorporates poems, photographs and a flip-book effect of a naively drawn shark gobbling a swimmer. Like other student publications, including Squint (Otis), Mania Magazine (UC San Diego) and Totem (Caltech), Paláver encompasses widely varying levels of sophistication within a single issue. Showcasing work by passionate nonprofessionals is part of the point, says Chan. "We're all pretty much amateurs here."

Art Center College of Design's Fishwrap embodies a more elaborate approach to paper-based graphics. An insect-themed compendium embossed with a gold-toned bug-zapper icon and brimming with eye-popping images, Fishwrap 5 was cited in a recent Step Inside Design magazine showcase of student work and will be included this summer in Type Directors Club's 53rd awards exhibition in New York celebrating excellence in typography.

Within Fishwrap's pages, storyboards, graphic novel panels, doodles and blueprints of a termite tunnel sit cheek to jowl with a hand-lettered story about drunken nights in Orange County and mutilated text from the pages of Kafka's "Metamorphosis," wrapped inside a poster dubbed "Evolution of Man Part II: Science Over Copulation."

The mock-formal diagram is so densely crammed with pseudo-scholarly verbiage and anatomical illustrations that the computers containing its image files crashed. "The style is an admixture of the ornate flourishes of the Victorian era and family crests," says poster creator Ara Devejian, 25, one of Fishwrap's five student designers. "It's this grotesque rat's nest of flourishes in order to establish some illegit legitimacy."

Fishwrap editor Will Wright, who studied film at Art Center while spearheading the collaborative brainstorming sessions attended by classmates in the school's illustration, graphic design, photography and imaging, and liberal arts departments, graduated two years ago. Wright then spent much of 2006 persuading the school to provide the $15,000 needed to produce the fifth issue of the magazine, first published in 2001.

"We had to convince the administration that this project was worth investing in because there was this huge debate where some people were basically saying, 'Print is dead, let's focus on motion design or environmental graphics or Web design.' And we were trying to say, 'Look, there's still a place in everyone's heart for a well-designed book.' "

Technologies of the time

BOB STEIN, senior fellow at the Institute for the Future of the Book, a think tank funded by the MacArthur Foundation, says he's not particularly surprised that old-media showcases like Fishwrap still captivate some college students. "Publications that use text as a graphic element are quite dense in terms of visual complexity," he notes. "That just can't be reproduced on a computer, so if that's what you're interested in, paper and ink is where you really need to work."

At least for now. Stein predicts digital displays will catch up with paper within the next few decades. "We're going to have dynamic computer screens that feel an awful lot like foldable paper," he says. (Indeed, a Seattle newspaper last week announced plans to test an electronic version distributed on flexible LCD "paper" in 2009.) "It's not impossible to imagine paper computer screens so cheap you could buy them in rough parchment or smooth linen. At that point, I'd be very surprised if people would still want to do printed paper as opposed to dynamic paper."

In the meantime, Allison Dalton argues, the page still trumps the computer screen in forging a bond between reader and object. Dalton founded the 'zine Wash in 2001 as an outlet for students in her Otis College of Art and Design writing classes. Modeled on the limited-edition artists books popular in the '80s, Wash, on hiatus this year, celebrates the personalized 'zine culture Dalton experienced as a college student in the '90s.

"The students always wanted to put the pieces together by hand so the 'zine didn't look like it just came out of a laser printer," Dalton said. One year, fashion students sewed each booklet inside a paper bag. Another, covers were printed on a miniature silk screen press. "We didn't expect how incredibly irregular each print would be but loved it when it happened," says Dalton.

Wash booklets in 2005 were bound with raffia. Each one of last year's models, bound with black tape, opened to a rectangular street grid individually cut from the Thomas Guide to complement a back cover pocket stuffed with a cartoon map.

"As freeing as electronic information is," Dalton says, "there are a lot of restrictions in presentation — you can't really choose size or shape, you can't have a little pocket with a map, you can't choose texture — those things are really important."

Less important these days are the radical experiments in typography and page layout that once characterized cutting-edge publications. CalArts graphic design professor Louise Sandhaus co-chaired a March conference in Pasadena that gathered educators and professionals for seminars examining contemporary design issues.

In her view, student publications have moved beyond the distressed, fractured and occasionally illegible typography produced by emerging designers in the '90s. "There's no need to repeat that anymore," she says. "It's been done."

Further, Sandhaus notes, hard copy offers young designers a measure of comfort in the face of an intensely complicated media environment. "Print seems less overwhelming," she says. "The tactility of paper, the controllable scale, the thoughtfulness it takes to combine words and images — design students who are interested in sophisticated form-making are very attracted to all of that."

Choose your medium

NOT that design and art schools are the only colleges turning out graphics-intensive print publications. The current Caltech Undergraduate Research Journal, a semiannual anthology of scientific articles, departs from its more conventional incarnations thanks to an injection of visual ingenuity from its 22-year-old art director, Dan Forbes.

"Past issues of CURJ were kind of clean and very clinical," he explains. Instead of creating illustrations digitally in a computer, Forbes wanted to imbue the printed visuals with a physical presence. "To make it feel a little more tactile, everything was made by hand and then photographed to help bring out this human touch." To illustrate a study about mice treated with hallucinogens, Forbes effected a lava lamp-inspired hallucination by dropping neon-colored food dye in an aquarium. For a report on gorilla neural connections, he rigged a piece of plywood with maze-shaped wire and nailed photographs of primate brain scans into the board. "Doing it this way makes the visuals feel more authentic to me," Forges says.

Forbes earned a bachelor of fine arts degree in graphic design in April from Art Center, which annually selects a student from its ranks to serve as art director for CURJ. "It's not 100% perfect, so I'm losing a little bit of control, but that's fine with me," he says. "It leaves room for fun mistakes."

Lorraine Wild, a contributor to online magazine Design Observer and partner at the Los Angles-based Green Dragon Office design firm, points out that creative students in their 20s, unlike previous generations, can choose from an unprecedented array of media formats.

"Instead of print being the default, where you just use it because that's all you've got, there's a bit more consciousness about why you choose print and what it's good for," she says. "The tactility of a printed archive is very alluring and in some ways, almost more seductive now that there are all these other alternatives."

The appeal of a tangible physical product is not lost on Lesley Moon, a 25-year-old senior in UCLA's art department who co-edits the school's new journal Deixis. "There's a sense of remembering the physicality of the world when you pick up a book and read it as opposed to reading something on your computer screen," she says.

Deixis juxtaposes photographs, re-purposed documents, poems and essays. They include "New York City Museum of Complaint," featuring decades-old bureaucratic correspondence; messages spelled out with unspooled magnetic tape; text inscribed on photographic paper with a cyanide-dipped quill pen; and a letter from "Grandma" followed by a ones-and-zeroes computer code translation. "We wanted to look at the way these pieces function within a book," Moon explains.

Citing Roland Barthes' postmodern semiotics theories as a point of reference, she notes, "Our hope is that Deixis affords the reader a different kind of visual literacy that maybe isn't possible in virtual environments like MySpace."