Digital Resistances - Digital Culture - page 154

transparent communication, as legitimated by allusions to contem-
porary French philosophy. In some senses it was more closely related
to Punk's release of energies, than to the profound and difficult
project of Deconstruction. This said, Poststructuralism and Decon-
struction allied with a Punk sensibility offered powerful and
liberating paradigms for graphic designers. In the early ' s interest

in Poststructuralist approaches to design was revived at Cranbrook,
through the enthusiasm of students such as Jeffery Keedy, later head
of graphics at CalArts. This coincided with the development of the
Apple Macintosh, which offered designers unprecedented power
and potential. The Macintosh had been designed with visual com-
puting in mind, and enabled the development of much visual and
graphic design software. Though the Macintosh did not determine
the rise of deconstructionist graphic design, which, as we have seen,
preceded it by some years, it did greatly enable it, and assured its
rapid success as a style.
In

80

publisher/editor/art director Rudy VanderLans and typo-
grapher Zuzana Licko started a graphic-design magazine called
Emigré , taking advantage of the ease of production offered by the
Macintosh. Emigré rapidly gained a reputation for innovative and
radical design. In particular it investigated the possibilities of type
design using font design software. The experimentation exemplified
by Emigré was paralleled by developments elsewhere. The Nether-
lands Studio Dumbar, founded in

1984

, undertook similar experi-
ments, which its founder, Gert Dumbar, continued in his position
as head of graphic design at the Royal College of Art in London in
the

1977

, both The Face magazine and its designer
Neville Brody gained a reputation for innovation and playfulness
in design, as did groups such as Why Not Associates,

1980 s. Also in the uk

VO, and
designers such as RCA graduate Jonathan Barnbrook. Perhaps the
most spectacular and difficult example of such design was that
produced by David Carson, first for the short-lived surfing magazine
Beach Culture , and then for the more mainstream (or at least more

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