9/11, Icons and Printed Ephemera

On the 10th Anniver­sary of Sep­tem­ber 11th, it is a good time to reflect on the tragedy. There are those far more elo­quent than I am who can dis­cuss the polit­i­cal and soci­o­log­i­cal ram­i­fi­ca­tions, so I’ll pick up a thought from some­thing I read this great arti­cle in the Atlantic from Steve Heller about how mem­o­ra­bilia has become the sacred imagery of 9/11. As he said,

 We all must be hard­wired to col­lect memen­tos, good or bad, for pos­ter­ity, to be sure, but also as aides de mem­oire, lest our mem­o­ries fail us.”

I agree with this. Not just with 9/11 but for any major event we seem to be drawn to memo­ri­al­ize it though printed ephemera. It is inter­est­ing that the tran­sient ephemera of news­pa­per head­lines and fliers are saved in shoe boxes and scrap books, say­ing that this event was so impor­tant that we can’t leave it only to our mem­o­ries. These news­pa­per head­lines become a as sort of a per­sonal Trajan’s Col­umn or Bayeux Tapes­try that we keep to illus­trate and doc­u­ment our lives.

I do this as well; in my jour­nals I have pasted news­pa­per clip­pings of impor­tant events includ­ing the Space Shut­tle Colum­bia dis­as­ter, the death of Osama Bin Laden and 9/11. One pow­er­ful image that I have kept I’ll post below. For me this is the most elo­quent design I saw in any news­pa­per about 9/11. It is so sim­ple and per­fect, no hyper­bolic text is needed. Hav­ing the Twin Tow­ers lit­er­ally ripped out of a clear blue sky says more about the event to me than the New York Times’ cover. It was from Seattle’s great alter­na­tive paper, The Stranger. I wish I knew who the designer was, if any­one knows please let me know.

What I take from this is that as design­ers we need to remem­ber that things that we work on can, on occa­sion, take on an impor­tance far beyond their lit­eral mean­ing. Once our designs are released into the world, we don’t always know how they will be used; per­haps they may become a part of someone’s per­sonal nar­ra­tive. This should give us pride and another rea­son to do the best job we can pos­si­bly can.

2001: A Design Something Every Day Odyssey

I am a big fan of film­maker Stan­ley Kubrick (1928–1999), so you can imag­ine my excite­ment when I saw this post of great pro­mo­tional pic­tures from 2001: A Space Odyssey on the blog Stan­ley Kubrick — Deserv­ing of Wor­ship. A nice sen­ti­ment for one of the great­est film mak­ers we’ve ever seen.

Kubrick was great film­maker and a real artist. His films have been com­pletely digested by the cul­ture and have become a sort of visual short hand.. the mono­lith, Dr. Strangelove, Alex & his droogs… These arche­typal images have burned them selves in or col­lec­tive con­scious­ness like ghosted images on an old CRT mon­i­tor. The great Mar­garet Cho is aware of Kubrick’s iconic power (see here). His last­ing influ­ence  is the true mark of a genius and con­sum­mate craftsman.

In that  vein I designed this desk­top wall paper for my com­puter as apart of my Design Some­thing Every Day Project.

Design Some­thing Every Day 26 of 365

Here’s a few great Kubrick links and resources:

Stan­ley Kubrick: Inter­views (Con­ver­sa­tions With Film­mak­ers Series)
Ed. By Gene D. Phillips

This book includes the amaz­ing inter­view with Eric Nordern orig­i­nally pub­lished in Play­boy (Sep­tem­ber 1968). It has one of my all time favorite quotes, some­thing of a mantra for me:

The most ter­ri­fy­ing fact about the uni­verse is not that it is hos­tile but that it is indif­fer­ent; but if we can come to terms with this indif­fer­ence and accept the chal­lenges of life within the bound­aries of death — how­ever muta­ble man may be able to make them — our exis­tence as a species can have gen­uine mean­ing and ful­fill­ment. How­ever vast the dark­ness, we must sup­ply our own light.” — Stan­ley Kubrick

Some good Kubrick resources:

• The Kubrick Site — an Amaz­ing col­lec­tion for all things Kubrick
• The Offi­cial Warner Broth­ers Site for his films.
• Kubricks IMDB Site

Finally the trailer to 2001: A Space Odyssey, what inspired this post to begin with.