New Art /

Massin

John D. Berry, writing on the Creative Pro website, had this to say about celebrated French designer and typographer, Massin: ‘His interpretation of Ionesco’s absurdist play [The Bald Soprano] was ground-breaking: Using a playful collage of posterized black and white photographs of the actors in silhouette, surrounded by sprays and cascades of type in varying sizes and styles (without benefit of cartoonish effects like word balloons), he created a juxtaposition of type and image in book form that became a classic of expressive typography’. We caught up with Massin while he was in New York last week and asked him for his thoughts on the impact that computers have had on designers and graphic design in general: ‘The responsibility does not fall on the computer, it is the person who uses it. In my opinion, computers have brought extraordinary possibilities, facilitating creativity and specifically enabling designers to do it faster. So I personally can’t complain about computers, which has helped me greatly. The only problem with computers is that it makes everyone do the same thing with the same softwares, so they do contribute to standardizing creation. But hopefully good designers can avoid this phenomenon’. Typography sadly appears to be a lost art form. Do you agree and, if so, what can be done to reverse this trend? ‘The multiplication of typefaces online does not bother me. On the contrary, the only problem is that the fonts tend to be created from the same family (Elzevir) whereas Didot-inspired types are much more limited as typographers do not want to take any risks recreating them because of the difficulty of reproducing serif quality and letter weight (TRANSL: les pleins et déliés). You can notice today that font weight is generally increased, and tends to be bold and fatter’. What would you consider to be your iconic piece of work, and what do you recall about the process behind its creation? ‘Pierrot Lunaire is my most current work, and I think it will become iconic, as much as my Bald Soprano from Ionesco’s play (1964). Pierrot based it on an atonal music piece composed by Arnold Schönberg (1912), which I started in 1966 by hand, and which I have developed in six different versions since 2001 since I have started using the computer. All my latest work treat the relationship and translation between human voice and typography’. Are you still excited by good design? ‘Of course! Good graphic design today is everywhere, in America as much as in Iran (despite mullahs), China or Japan, although it is not as known in these countries’.

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