January 14, 2001 | Layer 1/4


Max Bruinsma
http://www.xs4all.nl/~maxb

Max Bruinsma has an impressive CV - one that is too extensive to recount here. His brief biography is a good pointer though, and it's online on his site - here.

I first came across Max's name through the work he did during his tenure as the Editor of eye magazine. As someone recently introduced to wallpaper*, and the wide world of aesthetics, eye magazine seemed a titanic leap toward the kind of publication I would be interested in participating in, as well as subscribing to. There seemed to be an almost mythical world of intelligence and cultural convergence actually physically embedded within the pages of the magazine, and each essay and profile conspired to construct this living edifice to informed and incisive thinking - something I had never seen in a magazine before. The editorials were far-reaching in their implications, and yet not at the expense of making specific and keen commentary. There was a sense of the tone being in transition as well, a strong sense of a need to broaden the field of commentary, and take into account different communication strategies and mediums. Whilst that has given way to a more political beast under the current editor, eye still remains by far the most comprehensive and self-assured critical index of design in print today.

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Max has been writing about design in its various forms and contexts for some 15 odd years, and his site is an anthology of work that discusses every conceivable element of how design is culturally relevant as well as theoretically rich. From essays on the screen, the Web and typography in motion, to studies of other designers, institutions, conferences and design movements; it provides an engaging, relevant and intelligent point of reference for different opinions on design in a multitude of its forms.

Max has contributed to a broad range of design publications, and also notably to a number of books that in a definite sense continue a thread that is most clearly evoked in the Lectori Salutem of his site - that of opening up dialogues between different social and cultural networks. He wrote an introduction for the new ... magazine {dot dot dot} (a publication that introduces itself by asking "why another graphic design magazine?") an exegetical text for the recently released "Benzin: New Swiss Graphic Design", and a brief review of a particularly interesting design in the outstanding "IF/THEN" book published by the Netherlands Institute.

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Amongst the plethora of texts on his site are:

an intriguing analysis of the significance of the GUI interface, recounted in a book by Steven Johnson:

"the invention of the desktop metaphor as graphic instead of command based interface with the inconceivable intricacies of electronic dataprocessing is arguably 'the single most important design decision of the past half century'"


a cultural review of the incremental importance of the computer:

"The computer annihilates the difference between texts, images, sounds, moving and still. The forms that appear on the screen disappear at a mouse click. This instability of anything stacked in a computer has its paradoxical counterpart in the idea of total and constant availability of everything. With an exponentially growing Internet of linked computers, the metaphor of the 'Endless Library' that comprises everything that has ever been written or thought or imagined becomes a hardly virtual reality";

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and an eerily familiar line of argument about corporate websites (written, I might add, in 1997):

"Set aside whether there is any need to access everything from one tangled heap of layered interfaces, the question of how one would be able to choose any of the myriad links, without at least a vague idea of where the road will lead to, remains. A lot of corporate websites nowadays work this way, by baffling the visitor with a stupefying amount of hot catchwords, technical fireworks and slogans about how great it all is, without giving any concise clue about the real content of the site."


Whilst this summary overview leads into some of the themes discussed and deconstructed within the site, nothing short of a thorough reading can begin to excite the deeply connected mesh of ideas that underlie his work. What I personally find so enriching about the site is the way in which it relates to broader conceptual and cultural issues through the focus of design itself. It is a reassuring reminder of just how pivotal communication design is and how important the Web will become in its role as a new medium.

Review by Stanley WW

http://www.xs4all.nl/~maxb