Walker Publishing Filed to Design · Part of Solidarity in Unraveling Worlds

Cover variations of the Multiple Realities: Experimental Art in the Eastern Bloc, 1960s–1980s catalogue. Image courtesy Žiga Testen.

Multiple Realities Book Design Notes

by Žiga Testen

Acid Communism

When Mark Owens approached me with this commission, I was listening to a Spotify playlist titled “Mark Fisher’s Top 20 Greatest Jungle Records.” I have no idea how or why I found it, but I was listening to it while running. It’s quite a rough playlist, and at the time I was running to forget. The late Mark Fisher’s writing became crucial for me in my mid-20s. I loved how he could write about Jungle and capitalism, depression and loss, in the same text. I could relate to the loss of the/a future. Growing up in socialism and then transitioning into capitalism for what seemed like forever, I think I’m still waiting for “proper” capitalism to arrive. From early on, both Mark and I wanted Fisher’s “Acid Communism” to manifest itself in publication design.

Later, when I first read Pavel Pyś’s curatorial statements and saw his selection of artists, it all made more sense: the inclusion of experimental electronic art, their communities and collectives, all working and creating (as Pavel writes) “in varying places at different speeds and with different levels of vigour,” as if they existed in different parallel realities or streams of time, none of them resembling the eventual future. The premise resonated with us. We took Fisher as a spiritual guide to help determine the key design decisions of this book, like how he disliked the Arctic Monkeys for their uncontextualized retro-ness and preferred Burial, sensing an embodied and unsuperficial connection to recent rave and techno history. Burial’s discography is almost like a wake for ’90s rave culture in itself, anyway. We tried to design a book that would feel like it was a future that didn’t arrive, yet also wasn’t retro or nostalgic. I had no idea what it’d look like, but if Arctic Monkeys are the ubiquitous historical typeface, like Helvetica, then what would the Burial typeface equivalent be? It was a strange design process and idea, but it also wasn’t an obvious or straightforward curatorial angle, either.

So, Not Helvetica Then

I presume whenever one thinks of ’60s and ’70s art practices, at least in terms of typefaces, Helvetica or other neo-grotesques come up. I personally have a troubled relationship with Helvetica. For me it still carries all the connotations of, as Richard Hollis put it, “continental sophistication” in the Anglo-European design world, but too often without the actual konstruktive gebrauchsgrafik philosophy to back it up. The way it arrived in Yugoslavia also carried the connotations of the “progressive West,” although it was less focused on Continental sophistication and more about Western liberal values, as well as abstraction, and vague ideas of democracy, freedom of speech, etc. We toyed around with the idea of a neo-grotesque for a little bit, but eventually opted for what felt like a definite parallel reality—Evert Bloemsma’s Balance typeface. I’ve long been a fan, but rarely found a good moment to introduce it into a design. 

Bloemsma continued the lineage Roger Excoffon started with his Antique Olive typeface. He created a parallel world, similar to the TV series Counterpart, where scientists in Cold War–era East Germany experiment to create two parallel identical Earths, but the two Earths quickly diverge and develop in different ways. Antique Olive was technically doing everything a neo-grotesque was supposed to do: it was legible and readable and had a consistent DNA across its many weights, but it didn’t feel neutral or unassuming the way Helvetica was beginning to feel, mainly due to its repeated use. Antique Olive just had too much character. Its reverse stroke contrast (the horizontal strokes are heavier as opposed to the vertical—usually the other way around) makes it feel slightly strange and alienating to anyone used to a Helvetica-like sans or any typeface utilizing the Latin alphabet—after all, the “natural” contrast is a direct descendant of the calligraphic pen and its angled tip. French typographers continued Excoffon’s project to an extent, with revivals and interpretations in the Francophone world, but in the ’90s Bloemsma picked up the torch from a Dutch perspective and created this masterpiece called Balance. It felt as though the tunnel under the United Nations agency in Berlin from Counterpart had opened, where you could enter a parallel Earth in which Antique Olive and Balance existed as a popular alternative to the neo-grotesques. Like socialism, there is nothing else quite like Balance out there. But that also made it a perfect choice for this book, for a future that never arrived.

The Secondary Typeface

Throughout our research and development, we considered a different direction for the main body typeface. Besides a classic neo-grotesque, a kind of typewriter typeface is closely associated with most Western and Eastern European art practices from that time. This is mostly and simply because typewriters were the main machines producing documents at the time, and since art was becoming more and more dematerialized, as well as being idea- and language-based,  “mechanical” writing of this type became the way to represent these kinds of practices. (There are myriad documents, transcripts, schematics, notes, etc., documenting the period; Eve Meltzer’s Systems We Have Loved offers a particularly great discussion.) Moreover, the typewriter also embodies the idea of state bureaucracy and power, and “aesthetics of administration” made a lot of sense considering the themes explored in Multiple Realities.

At the time, some of the most used typewriter typefaces were variations on the default IBM Standard or Selectric typefaces, such as Pica, Courier, or Elite. IBM Selectrics were common in Yugoslavia and Poland, yet I’m personally unsure about other Eastern European countries or the DDR. Either way, we didn’t want to go with something too obvious. For a while we were looking at typefaces that were designed for early machine-recognition devices and computers. As far as a display type goes, we eventually landed in a different place, although we did toy with the idea of using a typeface influenced by early digital technology. An OCR-like typeface made a lot of sense, a typeface whose form was a direct outcome of its technological background and purpose. Design studio Eurostandard just revealed an exciting interpretation of the OCR typeface, but it just wasn’t working for us as we made our tests. There was nothing wrong with it; it produced a smooth digital effect (kind of what the label says, really), and we wanted it to connote old typewriter documents. An in-between consensus was to use a version of IBM’s Polygo Elite, which looked computer-like enough in its design but was clearly still a typewriter typeface. So, Cornel Windlin’s Magda (an interpretation of Polygo Elite) became our secondary typeface. Balance, we decided, was perfect for the essays, and Magda would be used in a single size for all the file-folder-like plates sections and captions with chunky underlines instead of italics.

Finally, Display Typeface

Downtown New York writer Glenn O’Brien, one-time editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine, has a favorite line in the manifesto for his 1978 punk rock cable-access show Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party: “SOCIALISM begins with GOING OUT EVERY NIGHT.” O’Brien’s anarchic, underground take on the late-night talk show shares a kinship with the works collected in Multiple Realities, both in terms of its general Cold War temporality, as well as the way art and experimentation collide with mainstream media and systems of control. O’Brien’s idea of putting the “social” back in socialism resonates with the exhibition’s focus on underground forms of gathering and the way this makes room for other ways of being.

The public and/or social aspect was on our minds as we began looking for a display type that could anchor both the cover and section breaks in the catalogue and the exhibition design for Multiple Realities. The kind of public, non-commercial typography seen in the work of Bálint Szombathy and Slobodan Tišma, often created with off-the-shelf materials like black tape and stencils, had a raw, direct quality we were hoping to capture. There was also the whole world of Eastern bloc, agitprop typography found on banners, broadsides, and other more direct, public-facing modes of communication.

Again, we didn’t want the book or the exhibition to feel retro in any way, so it became ideal to find a typeface recently designed, or at least contemporary. Then came Animo from Prague-based Heavyweight Type Foundry, founded by Filip Matejicek and Jan Horcik. They had been teasing Animo’s release on Instagram, but it wasn’t commercially available yet, and it had a bold, industrial (proletarian?), vernacular quality inspired by the likes of auto repair and car hire signage. Jan generously provided us with some trial cuts to test with, and we found that Animo is actually a very robust, sophisticated type family with 11 styles, alternate characters, and even an outline version. Somewhat counterintuitively, we ended up typesetting the title of the show and the section titles in a mix of widths to give it a more regular, ersatz feel. In the end a fairly straight-looking word like “DIMENSIONS” is actually created from Normal, Condensed, and Semi Condensed letterforms. Pavel also gave us the titles with plural words in them—realities, spaces, dimensions, forms, futures—that all lent themselves naturally to repetition. Once the titles were ranged left, kerned, and stacked in nine-line columns, they then lived naturally on the page from early in the design process.

Square Format, and Square in General

“Deviant formats: books that are needlessly large, needlessly wide and needlessly heavy. Books have to be handy. Books wider than the ratio 3:4 (quarto), especially square ones, are ugly and impractical.” (Jan Tschichold, Ten Common Mistakes in the Production of Books)

Disregarding what Tschichold said, there was definitely a moment when this book could have ended up being square. There were various reasons to consider this; the quantity of square books, particularly art catalogues from the ’60s and ’70s from Eastern Europe, is hard to ignore. We even considered further perforating the pages down to smaller squares to imitate acid-tab sheets. Our curator Pavel rightfully vetoed this, as it was perhaps too much of an obvious take on the “acid” in “Acid Communism.” Mark eventually vetoed the square format as well—it was a bit too unthinkable in 2023, even though I was sure we could pull it off. Yet since we were half committed to it already, we built a square modular grid, roughly starting with the size of the acid tab and scaling up from there, and then eventually decided to design the book in a square format but lengthen the format in height to a slightly more digestible portrait format so that most of the bottom margin would be always left blank. It was a conceptual and slightly irrational decision that made the design process much harder than it could have been, but it was also beginning to produce some interesting outcomes we would have otherwise not achieved.

General Layout Thoughts

The other two precedents at the Walker for this kind of project are the Hippie Modernism and International Pop exhibitions and publications—both incredible curatorial gestures, and the art and artists presented are all individually strong and exciting. At the same time, at least in their publication form (I haven’t personally seen the exhibitions), those Walker books were never my favorite ones—that would be Dante Carlos’s incredible Abraham Cruzvillegas: The Autoconstrucción Suites. This is not to say in any way that the designers and editors and curators did a bad job. There is just so much to do in these kinds of omnibus projects: essays and plates and many different kinds of works. And when you put it all together, it’s incredibly difficult to make it into more than the sum of its parts.

What good design does well is that it creates a platform, a form of viewpoint or prism, through which you can see something in a way you haven’t noticed before. Similar to Felice Varini’s paintings, you first see all these random yet beautiful bits and pieces, and then you find that one  “point of view” and it all comes together. I think this is how I still think of graphic design in many ways, and it’s probably a bit of an unfashionable opinion now, especially in the West, where the idea of “difference” is more important in light of politically crucial moves to “decenter, de-Westernise and internationalise contemporary art” and culture, as Pavel wrote. This point of view is also an imposition on the material, sometimes unwanted or uncalled for.

In our early freestyle sketches, we made conscious attempts to make a statement or a point of view with the layout. We looked at some unusual layouts from Eastern European art catalogues (Stano Filko came through strongly) that were perhaps more an outcome of chance rather than of deliberate design gestures, but at some point we steered back into the safety of a big institutional art catalogue approach. I was worried about this from the start, but working with the material as it started maxing out our hard drives, it was hard not to be impressed and amazed by the work itself, in all its varying forms of creation and documentation.

I felt our initial approach risked being a condescending move. Most of all, there were these two big shows at the Walker, Hippie Modernism and International Pop, presented in this playful and well-designed but still slightly authoritative manner (not in a bad way!), and now we were making a third one, for the first time in this series of Walker non-Western-centric overview shows, and we were treating all these works and artists in a discursive way, as if they were the raw materials for our design intervention. As someone from Eastern Europe, I was always a little uncomfortable when what was sometimes expected from me as a designer was to be “different” than my Western counterparts. It hasn’t played a huge part in what I do, but I’m naturally conscious of it, and I wanted to give all these artists the space and respect I think they and their work deserve, regardless of my intentions. The layout morphed from being loose and conceptual to more precise and detail-oriented. It became a series of small moves, of different tempos and rhythms and tracks, rather than one grander rhetorical gesture.

The beat and tempo of the layout are particularly present in the plates sections. We almost never go quiet. The top of the page is almost always full and busy, mostly aligned to top, and we rarely skip a beat, but then the bottom margin moves a lot because we make these big contrasts between a large plate and a small one together on the same page, which opens up the already large margin at the bottom. Then we sometimes have these long sequences of monotonous beats, of showing a work in a series or sequence really large and over multiple pages with the exact same layout. You always worry about monotony in a book, but I thought the long beat patterns felt like those you hear in a good Jungle track—coming back to Fisher—that goes on for just a bit longer than they would in a pop song, almost to a point where you feel uncomfortable or almost bored, and then—Bam!—we switch the beat again and introduce a new layout with a few smaller plates.

There are only a few blank pages. We didn’t want them, but sometimes they happened. Again, featuring 100 artists, we were putting this book together over several months, not quite knowing where the material was ultimately going to land. As the hi-res images of a work or performance came in, they were often different to the positional images we were working with. I suppose we could have simply patched up those empty pages, but as it’s all so dense and relentless, we thought they were good, like a total silence in the middle of a track, before the beat starts again.

We made a lot of smaller conceptual design moves and gestures, but when it comes to the major part of the book—the plates and the artists’ work—we tried to keep a light touch and use the flow and rhythm of the image placements and the layout as that one unifying gesture or point of view.

Book Object

We explored two different directions for the object: a softcover and a hardcover. The International Pop catalogue was a chunky hardcover, and Hippie Modernism was a softcover. We wanted to make an unfinished in-between, like a book that was almost published but wasn’t, or an Arte Povera book object, or a weird hybrid between Harold Szeeman’s Documenta 5 folder and a proper book. An almost bureaucratic catalogue, not a consumer object or book.

The softcover was to have a vinyl-like cover, mounted on cardboard to make it feel stiffer than usual—a kind of half or more like one-quarter hardcover. Whenever I bring this up with printers, they say, “Oh, you mean the flexi-hardcover?” and I’m like “most definitely not.” I loathe that binding. It feels like something out of a novelty paper store. So, after a bit of back and forth with the infinitely patient Belgian printer Die Keure (thank you, Jeff and Robert!), we finally figured out what we were trying to do. We also ended up with the idea of adding drill holes for that file-folder idea to come through rhetorically. We ended up drilling and filling holes with the final hardcover version. We had text columns automatically flowing around the drill holes in the gutter while plate images and essay figures would sometimes be pierced by the holes, producing these strange text layouts, as well as a sense that the material had been collected at different times, annotated, and then gathered together. 

The hardcover option was more elaborate in its construction. It was to look half-finished, just before the case is mounted onto the book block and not yet properly lined. I also ran across these images of damaged library books where the case falls off the spine, likely due to the glue drying up. There is obviously the Swiss Brochure binding that does precisely this, yet without the cover falling off and producing an object that is still functional; but we wanted it to feel even more raw with other small details, such as leaving the inside of the case unlined. Die Keure made some prototypes and they looked beautiful, but we had to make some adjustments. Leaving the case hinges unlined looked strange, and before we knew it, there were dust and dirt piling up in the cracks of the dummy. The second prototype was fixed by a partial lining, but then disaster struck—due to the exposed case, the first page of the book block would get stuck on the cover canvas as you close the book.

After a funny discussion about customer satisfaction and expectations from a book about socialism in a capitalist consumerist economy, we had to line up the inside of the case to prevent damage to the book from basic handling. I’m still mourning the material quality of the initial prototype, but the final outcome still feels raw and modest, like a homemade volume constructed from whatever was at hand, rather than anything too precious or special.

Not ‘POP,’ Not Acid, But . . .?

We experimented with overprinting images in the initial sketches of the layout; this gave the effect that the images were overlapping. I’m not sure we quite knew what photographic poster effect we had in our head, but a dark version of the ’60s and ’70s solarization effect came through. It was like a fading memory we all once saw—spurred on when one thinks of  “hippie” or “acid”—yet in black-and-white to also allude to communism. It was similar to Rust in True Detective, when walking out of a particularly bleak shopping plaza, saying, “This place is like somebody’s memory of a town, and the memory is fading.” We had a memory of this image effect but couldn’t quite describe it, so we parked the idea for a while.

As the book progressed it became clearer that, despite Pavel’s best efforts to bring in as much diverse and new material, the nature of the material (photocopies, black-and-white documentation, etc.) were all looking monochrome and dull—which is the general idea many in the West have of Eastern Europe anyway. We returned to the black-and-white solarization effect but with intense flashes of color, evoking the spectrums and hues you see on acid.

These short visual intermezzos would act as section separators, each of them introducing a new thematic section. As the book and show are both split into four major thematic chapters, we always knew we needed a visual and/or physical device to separate them. But instead of just a single page or a DPS section opener, we decided for these extensive eight-page openers and section breaks, where we introduced intense color combinations.

We wanted the book to feel modest and unassuming from the outside, but inside there would be intense bursts of color. This infers the split between public and private spaces in socialism as described in one of the essays; gray and bleak on the outside for an external viewer, colorful and rich from the inside. This is where Sebastiaan Hanekroot comes in. He was taking care of most of the general lithography for this book already, but such a challenge was precisely up his alley. He researched ’70s solarization effects and color combinations and proposed a palette of colors to be used for the section separators.

There’s been much duotone printing in art publishing recently, especially since Maximage released their Color Combinations library profiles, yet we didn’t have a clear idea of what we wanted. What we imagined wasn’t like anything we’d seen recently. We had some references, but they also weren’t quite “it” and Sebastiaan had to keep experimenting based on prompts like “No, make it crazier, crazier, like more intense, more acid-like.” It turns out that some color combinations also work better than others in this technique: some inks actually work in overprint this way and some just don’t, and the image preparation for this kind of effect was trickier than we thought, and experimenting while on press with one of the best European book printers is probably not the best idea. We were nervous when we finally sent the first section to press in an intense neon-orange and green combination, as up to this point we still didn’t feel we had nailed the effect in the previous test prints.

The machine prep and warm up took ages, but the first sheets finally started to come out of the printer, and they looked just as we described them to Sebastiaan—insane. We tried taking some photos to send to Mark and Pavel in Minneapolis, but, as usual, like during an intense sunset, the iPhone sensors refused to believe what they were seeing. Sebastiaan and I were so happy that, while the printers prepared the rest of the sections, we woke up his sleeping Beagle and took it for a long walk around the Belgian industrial suburb where Die Keure is located.

The Cover

“The COVER, we always do the cover last . . . ,” wrote Linda van Deursen and Armand Mevis wrote (or was it Paul Elliman? It’s impossible to tell since he was the ghostwriter on that book) in their monograph Recollected Work (2005), and I’ve been living by this rule since I first ran across it. It just makes sense. You do it once all the key design decisions have been made for the internals. You know the material, you know what the book finally is as an object, and so the cover usually designs itself.

This one wasn’t too difficult, either. It needed a title on the cover, and Mark had designed the typographic treatments for the titles for the internal pages already. He chose to repeat some words in the titles to signify multiplicity and multiple realities, so the cover was already partly designed and guided by the internal pages.

I don’t think we made many versions or explored any particularly divergent directions. We just did it, and it made sense straight away. We ended up with three different cover colors, all kind of muted and bureaucratic; repetition with slight variation remained a motif. We also brought images onto the cover, but since it was already essentially designed and full, we stuck them as three different stickers on the shrink-wrap instead.

The cover is still in production as I write this. There are issues with the foil blocking. Fingers crossed it gets resolved soon. I haven’t seen it because it doesn’t exist yet, but it’s there as a pure potential in my mind. I hope the book eventually arrives. Like our future, it’s really beginning to run a bit late.▪︎

Learn more about the exhibition and get your own copy of the catalogue at the Walker Shop.