The Broadside, Tradition and Deconstruction
“Woven entirely with citations references echoes, cultural languages (what Language is not?) Antecedent and contemporary, which cut across and through in a vast stereophony…the metaphor of the Text is that of the network.” Image Music Text, Roland Barthes
Broadside- 1. A broadside is a large sheet of paper printed on one side only.[1] Historically, broadsides were posters, announcing events or proclamations, or simply advertisements. Today, many smaller printers and publishers do broadside printing as a fine art variant, with poems often being available as broadsides, intended to be framed and hung on the wall. The historical type of broadsides were temporary documents created for a specific purpose and intended to be thrown away. They were one of the most common forms of printed material between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly in Britain, Ireland and North America. They were often advertisements, but could also be used for news information or proclamations. It was also a very common format for printing the text of ballads 2. A broadside is the side of a ship; the battery of cannon on one side of a warship; or their simultaneous (or near simultaneous) fire in naval warfare.
We will begin this lesson with drawing page diagrams using the golden mean and the basic grid. Layouts using columns, including Gutenberg’s Bible page laid out, early news paper columns, modernist grids used by the Bauhaus, El Lissitzky’s constructivists use of asymmetry and sharp diagonals and postmodern and contemporary use of the minimalist grid and banal structure. Your choice of a phrase and image will be experimented with for two weeks in class trying out various formats of language unification, traditional design principles and modernist principles.
