Stephen Farrell

Visual Communication Department
Faculty

Background

Stephen Farrell is a graphic designer, typographer and collaborative writer. With Steve Tomasula, he recently released the imagetext novel, VAS: An Opera in Flatland (University of Chicago Press, 2004). The book has received seven major design awards, capturing AIGA’s highest honor, selection into its 50 Best Books of 2003, and a silver medal from D&AD, Europe’s most prestigious communications competition. In the book New Media, Joe Amato writes that ‘VAS is likely to become one of the seminal print works to explore conjunctions of fictional and nonfictional narrative and image.’

Stephen has been featured in over 50 books and journals internationally including American Book Review, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Emigre, Typegraphics, Design Culture Now, Metropolis, eye (UK) and Wired. He has exhibited his work most recently at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, at the Art Directors Club of New York and as The Volgare Project, a collection of multimedia essays, music and type design investigating his interests in lineage, connoisseurship and the relationship of writing to keystroking. Other typefaces Farrell has designed, including Flexure and Missive, are currently licensed through the digital foundry, T-26. His numerous honors include a National Design Award nomination in Communications from the Smithsonian, and his books are housed in permanent collections of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, Denver Museum, Newberry Library and Princeton’s Fine Book Archives.

Personal statement

Simply put, I write stories and explore critical ideas with design. I’m interested in taking traditional literary forms, the short story, the novel, the critical essay, and remaking these forms to include the methodologies, the vocabularies—the possibilities—of design. In the literary realm, writing and design are usually two distinct, non-overlapping activities. Most of the book pages designers labor over could be characterized as non-places. These book pages, although skillfully crafted, work tremendously hard to transport the reader to a transparent realm of language, dissolving the spatial and material aspects of the page. A lot of the work that I do pushes against this transparency and manages the flow of reading in different ways. My work still acknowledges that reading is about flow, and that one of design’s chief objectives is to manage and facilitate this flow. However, the strategies I use—the way I manipulate flow, arrange and organize texts, and employ a spatial approach to the page not unlike staging in theater —often encourage both linear and non-linear movement. Simultaneous stories may interweave, images and information graphics may interject. How this spatial, imagetext experience collides or coincides with the linearity of reading is of prime interest to me.

Current Interests

My current projects include the book Clinkity Clank, researched, written and designed with Gökhan Ersan and exploring the influence of US technological aid in transforming the cultural experience in Turkey after WWII.

I am also working on TOC, a collaborative multimedia novel that weaves multiple story lines into a meditation about the interrelation of time and narrative. Like other experimental novels, TOC incorporates its materials as part of the story; unlike other experimental novels, time itself is one of these materials: we are using the DVD medium to bring writing into a new realm, where gaming, film and literature will converge to form a hybrid experience.

Experience at SAIC

As in much of my own studio work, I encourage both graduate and undergraduate students to give themselves over to a methodology of research x play. This alchemical equation is often neglected in the frantic pace of the design profession, but for me, it is essential and one of the great pleasures of our artform.

I try to teach design approaches to our students that seduce and surprise, that reward their curiosity as well as their rigor, that challenge our students’ abilities to digest and structure unfamilar material with clarity, and challenge their capacity to be entertaining—to be unapologetically seductive themselves—and to take risks: Whimsy blends with focused and systematic process; writing and research blend with design into a hybrid activity. The classroom is our laboratory, and here we turn novel intersections around and test their potentials for uncovering or deepening experience, as with a story told through the trail of crafted documents, or a graft of a narrative onto a field of study seemingly unrelated. In each case, students fashion meaning out of the strange or incongruous, prodding connections that push against cliché while learning how to play.

Take an Object
Do something to it
Do something else to it
“     “     “     “     “     “     “     “     “

                                   —Jasper Johns