Even the most insignificant structure can illuminate, glow or blink out the significant one. Messages at Citizen’s Park are just not overstated but extremely expressed in multiple fields of vision (screens) that move appear and reappear with no apparent design. We are a manic culture, unsure of what we are saying, how we are saying it–in what context and to whom. The problem is entwined in our inabilities to communicate visually. We’ve lost our relationship to the essential design elements of visual communication (form, rhythm, scale, space, line and color) and we cover-up our inabilities with macho boldness, improper formatting, scale incompetencies and color theories of machines (web fiascos of indexable and assignable values). It is an utter mess. A recent trip to the Wilmington Blue Rocks stadium was a visual nightmare–sign upon sign stacked in the outfield. We couldn’t see the fence. How far did the ball travel. There was no beginning, nor end. However, head south on 95 to Aberdeen and you will see a subtler place, a throwback of sorts–a real ballpark, where the actual ball can be tracked by the fans to the outfielder, even over the fence. Plus a crabcake, I believe, beats dollar 3D glasses which were desperately hawked as “necessities” for fireworks at Judy Johnson field in Delaware. Fireworks weren’t enough without a lens I gather. Let’s layer another filter on our world we so desperately have lost touch with.

Maybe you can blame the full-scale removal of art from current American K-12 curricula, or the schizophrenic design of messages on screens– the multi-motion graphics of tv where text that does not move is not read, frankenstein graphic design on the web where everything is a quick fix plug-in, and the mediocrity of photography, where images have become candy.

Although machines, such as the computer have become better production tools, they have stunted the development of our understanding of design. We have access to millions of letterforms (fonts) and make our choice on what’s first available. We would rather specify a font than create one. Visual communication is caught in the flux of middle america, where bigger is better and everyone has home theatres to celebrate the doom–this apocalypse of visual design. Where are our hand-painted signs, and smart quotes? Ellen Lupton calls these “type crimes”, crimes against typography

Where are our bodies in this visual space? Detached. Dislocated. Delirious. Ludwig Wittgenstein said “the limits of our language are the limits of our mind”–let’s check what volume of space the brain occupies in the extreme cranium.e

http://sportscomplex.blogs.citypaper.net/blogs/mu/2008/06/10/angelo-cataldi-may-not-be-the-classy-individual-he-makes-himself-out-to-be/