This review of Ffffound was originally published on SpeakUp. Thanks to Mr. Vit for the edits and feedback.

Graphic design might not work in the white cube, but it flourishes on a white background. A new mutated strain of design blog has evolved: the random-curated-other-peoples’-images-white-background site, or RCOPIWS. Sites like Manystuff, Monoscope, Your Daily Awesome, and VVORK (among countless others) all offer designers and design afficianados a constant flood of typographic morsels, interesting photos, arresting new art, and the like. One such site sets itself apart, notably, from the other RCOPIWSes: the collaborative image-bookmarking site ffffound.com — allegedly, but unconfirmed, initiated by online fiend Yugo Nakamura.

I started using ffffound last week, and it’s quite a fascinating place, really. The idea is that you bookmark images. Yup, that’s pretty much it. Like flickr, your account on ffffound consists primarily of a series of images, presented in chronological order with regards to their post date. Unlike flickr, which is geared towards sharing personal photographs, ffffound users share images they find anywhere on the web.

The layout ffffound employs looks simple, but the bookmarking technique is eyebrow-raisingly sophisticated: The site furnishes you with a bookmarklet which will highlight all of the images on a page with a blue border. You click the one you want, and it is then replaced by an amusing graphic that says “FFFFOUND!” in amphetaminic chalkboardesqe handwriting.

Steps 1 (click the bookmarklet) and 2 (click the image you want) for bookmarking to ffffound.

Ffffounds’ bookmarklet only highlights images that are within a predetermined range of scales; this prevents you from accedentally posting 5-pixel-square site navigation images. The whole bookmarking process is remarkably unobtrusive, because you aren’t whisked back to ffffound, and you can keep using the site you are on.

All of the stuff you post ends up on your page. Each image has three other images associated with it, randomly, chosen from the images you (and anyone else who has posted that image, as identified by a hash of the URL) has already posted. This results in a constant churn of new visual shit, both for users of the site and for casual browsers. At the time of writing, ffffound is awash with designy stuff: type samples, color studies, abstract form, diagrammatic architectural illustrations, crazy visualizations, posters, photographs of old equipment… I have not witnessed such a collaborative confluence of design-oriented material in one place.

A sampling of images from ffffound.

At first brush, ffffound’s paradigm looks to be based on your typical “Web 2.0” socially-networked navelgazery, because ffffound users have “favorite users” and “followers”. There are a lot of key differences however… You can’t tag anything, you can’t comment on anything, or write testimonials about people. You don’t even control the social network; you gather “fans”, or become one yourself, based on who bookmarks images that someone else bookmarked before you.

Furthermore, there is no RESTful API, no XML, no JSON, no pingbacks… Aside from pretty vanilla RSS syndication, ffffound offers none of the oft-vaunted programmatic interfaces that characterize “Web 2.0” sites. It’s reassuring to note, however, that the lack of these things is not an impediment to the site. It is closed and one can only join by an invitation from existing users (who can only invite three people), and therefore self-curating — I would imagine that the quality of the images in general (which right now is pretty fucking high, at least if you’re a type-nerd, designer-face like me) would degrade rapidly if anyone could join. That’s not a very democratic statement, I know; but design plus democracy equals drop shadows and other X-TREME photoshop filters, and the lack of ‘democracy’ in the case of ffffound is in line with its stealth anti-Web 2.0 ethos.

That’s not to say I don’t enjoy a bit of blogging and tagging myself. Really, being able to tag and comment and manage and share and reorganize your thingies, alongside other peoples’ thingies, in all sorts of ways in a coherent and intuitive fashion, et cetera, is why flickr and its ilk are at once both excellent resources and useful tools. But your flickr account is YOUR SHIT, specifically, implicitly, as indicated by its integrated creative commons licensing and general nomenclature (e.g., images you upload are specifically labeled “your photos”). Ffffound, on the other hand, is implicitly SOMEONE ELSE’S SHIT, which is a verrrry sensitive issue, even with all the happy-go-lucky “sharing” rhetoric that characterizes “Web 2.0” discussions. Ffffound goes out of its way to remind you of this: All images are headlined with the title of the page from which they are “quoted” (as ffffound has it), with links back to their sources. Ffffound’s lack of other typical user controls allows it to maintain that crucial distinction: By removing your voice, ffffound does exactly what it claims to do, which is grant you the capacity to bookmark images.

The de-emphasis of the user’s voice has a very interesting effect on ffffound’s content. User voice is such a cornerstone of “Web 2.0” malarkey, where many business models are variants of the idea that you, the user, shoot your mouth off so someone else can get AdSense money. As such, the action ffffound affords you is the ability to sycophantically declare that you like something, by bookmarking it. These things then get posted to your account, and if other people like them, they voice their approval in kind. You can’t really use ffffound to hate things, or otherwise. Contrastingly, I frequently use del.icio.us to hate things (note the comment by ‘fishea’ on this link); del.icio.us remains gorgeously minimal, but your tags and comments combine with the links you post to provide people looking at your account page with a general composite viewport into your tastes.

Ffffound, on the other hand, can only illustrate your particular sensibility in the arena of graphic awesomeness. Perhaps this is why so many of the images on ffffound are typographic: Images of type are the best way to directly say something within the confines of ffffound’s system. If I was getting a degree in “postmodern anthropology”, or somesuch, I would say that ffffound is like a “distributed digital Cabinet of Wonders”, or maybe a “data-driven Exquisite Corpse, fashioned into an endless möbius strip”… but no, I’m getting an MFA in graphic design, and at the end of the day, I’m here for the type. I would say to you that ffffound is quite an interesting gem, and I’d add that the exclusivity isn’t as off-putting as it might sound… I was happy with visiting the site before an invitation serendipitously came my way. Do have a look… at the very least, you might find some crazy color palette to rip off or otherwise inspire you. Indeed!

This piece will appear in the forthcoming June 2007 issue of 2+3D, in Polish translation, with an English summary. The book in question, Influences, is available here.

When Anna Gerber and Anja Lutz, of Shift!, presented Influences at a lecture at RISD last year, they focused on the unique database application they had concocted¹. At first brush, Influences wasn’t even a book, it was a wiki-esque compendium of design-oriented footnotes and citations. The content they went through ranged from the personal anecdotes of A- and B-list designers², to somewhat more rigorous explications³. Practicing designers, artists, and others who personally knew Anna and Anja had been doled out login credentials to their database, where they could expound on any design-related topic that they chose.

I was convinced that Influences was a website until halfway through the presentation, when Anna and Anja revealed that they had commissioned a tool that could transform the content of the entire database into an InDesign file, rendering a print version of the sites’ dynamic content with the click of a button. This, they described, was how they would produce Influences, the book, as the output of the database “would provide an excellent starting point” for such a project.

What they did not show was how the elaborate cross-linking of the all the database entries would be handled, but I assumed they would come up with a wonderful and marvelous typographic footnoting system, or some such thing. To me, this was the exciting kernel of such an ambitious project. How would such renowned and intelligent designers manage to condense and distill the dynamic power of a modern database system into a book?

How, indeed. Upon first perusing Influences in its final form, I was dismayed to see that nearly every page looked like the raw output of the transformation program Anna and Anja had demonstrated. It's a straightforward two-column layout, with room at the top for thumbnail images. Leafing through, I found only eight or so spreads within the 268-page primary “lexicon” that broke away from this format.

That would be fine, really, if the information in the book was of any use. It’s hard, I will grant, to translate hypertextual information into a legible print system⁴. But Influences fails at the task.

Terms that refer to other terms within Influences are underlined, and preceded with an arrow symbol (→). This makes →most of the text very →difficult to →scan, as you →might →imagine. Furthermore, the actual location of the referent information itself is left as an exercise to the reader; the links tell you to go elsewhere, but they don't tell you specifically where. (The book is alphabetized, which I suppose eases this kind of ad-hoc navigation.)

The linked items themselves are hardly consistent, as well. Consider an entry such as the one for “Grid Systems in Graphic Design”, on page 105. This entry contains seven link callouts, three of which are within a quote. The quotee in this case, one Nik Thoenen, is not himself an Influences referent, so neophyte designers such as myself have to look this Nik person up the old-fashioned way, using reference systems outside of Influences, like Google or Nexis⁵.

This leads me to wonder: is the whole thing a big in-joke? Only friends of the authors could contribute to the database, and the whole thing is impossible to even view online, at the time of writing. In fact, I only know about Influences’ data backend because I attended the lecture. Not only does the book fail to explain this rather critical aspect of its authorship in any way, it explains nothing about itself whatsoever. There is no introduction, no foreword, no “how to use this book” type thing. We are only offered some maddeningly vague, self-congratulatory bullshit that appears in the endpapers:

“Who’s Who” style books are quite the rage throughout most design disciplines. Alice Twemlow put one out last summer⁶ after surveying a broad range of contemporary practitioners. Phaidon has given us their mammoth Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture⁷, and the AIGA regularly pumps out annuals and compendiums that are equally at home on a designer’s shelf or a coffeetable in a Wallpaper* photoshoot. It is therefore hard to understand why Anna and Anja would painstakingly create a system that could set their work apart from the others — their database — and then subsequently use it so poorly. Perhaps they will eventually release the fruits of their contributors’ labors to the public, and create a resource that is truly “cumulative, but always in flux”, as the endpapers say. Until then, Influences will likely suffer a fate similar to Life Style⁸: largely unread by those who conspicuously display it on their bookshelves.

Footnotes:
1. Or, more likely, one that they had commissioned from a technically-minded subordinate. [back]

2. See the entries for “book reviews” and “grandmother” in Influences, on pages 33 and 102, respectively, for examples of this sort of thing. [back]

3. See “internal structures” in Influences, on page 122 (although as with content from Wikipedia and such sources, the veracity and rigor is debatable.) [back]

4. God knows, many have tried, including myself. In my own work, when I had to cite URLs, I used a special footnote symbol, with its own color, to denote a URL. I then listed the URL itself in the margin, and I reproduced a URL index at the end of the book, for maximum clarity.

... To be sure, that’s not the only way to do it. My goal was to give the reader the most information on the cite without disrupting the flow. [back]

5. As far as I could divine, Influences does not include any sort of system for citing references outside of itself. [back]

6. Twemlow, Alice: What is Graphic Design For? Rotovision SA, 2006. [back]

7. Phaidon Press (Editors): The Phaidon Atlas of Contemporary World Architecture. Phaidon, 2005. [back]

8. Mau, Bruce (Editor): Life Style. Phaidon, 2000. See previous WDC article here. [back]

If You can Make it Here…Then why make it anywhere else?
A new design annual portrays local prejudices at work.

They say that in New York, the world is at your fingertips. Drink your morning coffee from a Greek paper cup, buy dazzling chinoiserie and knock-offs in Chinatown, and eat an unforgettable meal at one of Second Avenue’s indistinguishable Indian restaurants: Walking through this city, I see a miniature version of the entire planet, a planet situated at the center of the universe.

Approximating my everyday experience is Typography 26, The 26th Annual of the Type Directors Club, released this month. The publication’s design is a tour of New York’s tribal artifacts: The cover features a posterized silk-screened image of a daily Chinese calendar, with pages torn off to reveal the 26th of the month. Endsheets include tightly cropped scans of ornate Indian and Chinese food packaging. Section dividers are close-ups of printed ephemera and food packaging in Arabic, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, Ethiopic, Greek, and Laotian, picked up from convenience stores and specialty shops. The exotic characters and dazzling printing remind me how fortunate I am to be living in such an international city, looking at a book with such an international view of typography, from such an internationally minded organization.

But the design also reveals something about the jury selections: A smorgasbord of New York ethnicities does not a worldwide cross-section of typography make. Indeed, the majority of the book’s entries come from New York—nearly double Germany’s 30-odd entries; German typographers double the wins from the United Kingdom and Japan. The remainder of Europe (sans Germany) and Asia tally 16 entries each. Australia and New Zealand garner three entries each. Africa has one, and both of South America’s come from Sao Paulo.

Could it just be that New York City is the center of the typographic universe, too? The overly tidy numbers suggest otherwise. Typography 26 was an exercise in filling quotas.

As much as annual competitions encourage achievement within the discipline, their sponsoring organizations depend on them for income. Submissions cost about $40 per entry; winners pay another $40 or so to appear in the book, and then that sum once more to have work hung in the accompanying exhibition. In addition, each entry form usually includes an area to join or renew yearly membership: $100, give or take.

Every organization has a budget goal in mind, and with it, a minimum number of winners its competition must name. Judges fill their quota of winners (hopefully with a meritocracy in mind). The chosen entries must maintain core membership while simultaneously encouraging entries from non-members. Striking this balance is of the highest importance. If the existing membership base feels marginalized, there will be fewer membership renewals and fewer entries next year, jeopardizing the future of the organization. Acknowledging international entrants is an easy way for an organization to expand its earning potential without alienating existing members.

As an aside, here’s how not to grow revenue: I remember one competition where, assisting in tallying scores, I was instructed to round up marks to hit target dollars. (The judges thought it unscrupulous. Perhaps not coincidently, the organization’s Executive Director has since been charged with grand larceny, to the tune of $150,000.)

The Type Directors Club does not suffer from a tarnished reputation. In fact, even though their number of winners increases annually, they receive complaints that their judges are too selective; unlike other competitions, judges are not allowed to enter work; and Carol Wahler, Executive Director of the TDC, informed me that more than half of next year’s Typography 27 winners are from outside the U.S., and that “there aren’t that many winners from New York.” While this is seemingly a step towards internationalism, I am more skeptical. The numbers tell a different story depending on point of view: Looking outward, this year’s winners were evenly split between the United States and abroad. Looking inward, they mostly came from New York.

Typography 26, is particularly unique, because it also reprints the first Type Directors Club catalog. In a time before annual budgets clouded judgment, it was okay for New Yorkers to claim all the winning entries. The contest pushed forward the discipline, and geographic identity just happened to be a telling coincidence.

As a designer living in New York, it’s easy to confuse diversity and internationalism. But Chinatown is not China: New York could not be what it is without the rest of the world. To celebrate the finest typography, the TDC’s jurors should have been instructed to possess a truly global vision—or better yet, a blind eye. In Typography 26, their suspiciously methodical attempt to de-emphasize local talent accomplished just the opposite.