Maeda@Media vs. Life Style

Graphis, Mar/Apr 2001 by Coupland, Ken

Maeda@Media

By John Maeda

Rizzoli International, 2000

8-2/5" x 9",

480 pages, 960 illustrations

$75, hardcover

Life Style

By Bruce Mau

Phaidon Press, 2000

8-3/5" x 10"

624 pages, 1,250 illustrations

$70, hardcover

Reviewed by Ken Coupland

Continuing the contemporary trend in publishing to reinvent the designer as auteur, two high-profile graphic artists are currently enjoying mid-career retrospectives with a pair of heavyweight monographs. Interactive designer John Maeda, a one-time student and current professor at the MIT Media Lab, was recently voted one of the 21 Most Important People of the 21st Century by the bastions of culture, GO magazine. Bruce Mau, of course, is the Canadian print designer best known for S,M,L,XL, the massive tome he previously co-authored with renowned Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas. At first glance, these two new books are remarkably similar. Weighing in at a hefty couple of pounds apiece, they are both formidable productions. But in scope and effect, the books couldn't be more different.

In Maeda@Media, Maeda traces his autobiography through a succession of personal projects, offering opinions on digital design and its implications along the way. Maeda gets personal right up front, with a touching memoir of his family background and an unnerving account of his early brushes with discrimination (no Asian-he was once told-had any hope of getting into MIT). He then segues into a lengthy succession of formal exercises that he sets for himself and then solves.

Maeda begins his book with an oft-quoted-and highly debatable-axiom by the late Paul Rand: "Art is primarily a question of form, not of content." Rand, it is made clear elsewhere in the text, is Maeda's hero, and Maeda plainly would like us to believe that what he himself is doing is, somehow, art. Maeda has limited experience with corporate communications design, and he professes his distaste for the client/designer relationship. "Cutting-edge content," he sniffs, "is most easily created under situations where great physical distances separate the client and [that term again] the artist." Plainly, Maeda considers the role of the designer-- for-hire to be somehow beneath him.

But although Maeda is a conceptualist of sorts-whose art form is programming language-the work he produces never fully registers as art (not even in terms of Rand's problematic dictum). Despite its sometimes ingenious premises and painstaking execution, Maeda's design routinely fails to engage the eye (a good example: his desultory advertisements for Absolut Vodka). Deprived of any meaningful content or, for that matter, significant form, his "art," if that's what it is, doesn't deliver much of a punch.

In Life Style-the title's wordplay toys with one of the more egregious contemporary coinages-Mau, too, presents what is essentially a portfolio, interspersed with first-- person reminiscences, that chronologically tracks pretty much all of his major commissions. But Mau, unlike Maeda, would almost certainly say that art is primarily a question of content, not form-which puts him, as a form-giver, in an interesting position. He is, in fact, the quintessential information architect, to use a much-overused term, although one who struggles with its definition.

He's also, in many ways, despite his splashy graphics and transgressive subject matter, a staunch traditionalist. Orchestrating massive amounts of text as he has done in an extraordinary series of designs for the hip academic publisher Zone Books, Mau hews to a canonical style sheet (helpfully included here in its entirety) that wouldn't look out of place in a previous century. It's a reliable formula. By juxtaposing classic book design strategies with provocative imagery and bold display tactics, he makes what amounts to difficult reading accessible and even enjoyable.

Where Maeda's work is contemplative-- his imagery entirely self-generated-Mau has a broader agenda, a wider scope and an eclectic range of sources (he freely appropriates stock photos and manipulated computer imagery to make his points). Except for some minor missteps-Mau, with his vast print experience, apparently hasn't noticed that you can't run text into the gutter without sacrificing intelligibility-Life Style displays the work of a modernist master in control of his medium. When Mau quotes Man Ray to the effect that, "Style is merely the outside of content, and content the inside of style," you can see him wrestling the same issues that bedevil Maeda. But with all but a few exceptions, Maeda*Media loses the argument, inadvertently exposing its author as someone with plenty to show, but very little to say.

Ken Coupland writes about art, architecture, photography and graphic design, with a focus on the digital revolution, for an international roster of publications. A contributing editor for and regular contributor to Graphis magazine and Graphis Books, he has written and designed various Web-based works of fiction, and has curated several exhibitions devoted to digital art and design. In this issue Coupland reviews new retrospectives from John Maeda and Bruce Mau, and showcases the work of Factor Design.