| >communication achieves acclaim because it fails to communicate I'm not sure that's the point. I think the MITP logo communicates plenty - just not the letters MITP. But then the MITP itself is redundant. Once you know a book is from MITP, you'll know it's from MITP whenever you see the logo. Meanwhile the logo includes a selection of visual puns and allusions - machine rhythms, digital precision and predictability, books on a shelf, book pages, and so on. It's not that modernism is ambiguous, it's that modernism has consistently tried to move past literal single-view single-meaning interpretations to condensed abstractions that suggest multiple views simultaneously. It's actually about implying and suggesting as much as possible with as little as possible. This is fine as far as it goes, but you now have a problem - instead of making a single straightforward statement that can be read by almost anyone who's literate, you're relying on a viewer's ability to read an abstraction in a way that makes sense of at least some of the same associations. If you do this properly, you've packed in a lot more information, at the cost of making it inaccessible to many viewers. It's now more visual haiku than plain talking, and it only works for some of the potential audience. What happens next is worse. You have a situation where less adept talents claim to be able to pack in meaning when really they don't. They produce a cargo cult knock-off of a successful design, they decorate it with explanations written in text in a supporting document to sell it, but they don't truly manage to include the allusions they claim to be including. This is where modernism stops working. You get something that's really just been converted back into a single-view statement or object in a naive and superficial way, and it completely fails to have the depth of a genuine rich abstraction. It looks minimal, but it's all surface and imitation with no creative compression. That's when the communication stops and you have something that's likely to be annoying and useless, and probably ugly too. |