{"id":2180,"date":"2007-07-19T01:06:42","date_gmt":"2007-07-19T00:06:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=2180"},"modified":"2013-07-12T02:01:15","modified_gmt":"2013-07-12T01:01:15","slug":"design-as-virus-victorian-borders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2007\/07\/19\/design-as-virus-victorian-borders\/","title":{"rendered":"Design as virus 1: Victorian borders"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/07\/bookplate.jpg\" alt=\"bookplate.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s nothing new about drawing attention to the viral nature of design, whether in the repeated use of motifs and styles or the way in which typefaces breed and proliferate; Jonathan Barnbrook alludes to this process directly by calling his font house <a href=\"http:\/\/www.virusfonts.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Virus<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>The plate above comes from a Victorian book I bought several years ago, <em>The Pictorial Cabinet of Marvels<\/em>, a reasonably lavish volume for children concerning places and things of interest around the world. Since I like playing with excessive Victorian flourishes now and then I&#8217;m always on the look out for new examples and the border here immediately caught my eye. I have a decent selection of clip art books from Dover and Pepin containing this kind of thing but nothing quite like this particular design. When I was putting the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/decalcomania\/damnation.html\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Damnation and A Day<\/em><\/a> album together for Cradle of Filth I took one of the corner pieces as a starting point for a border design I used on the front and back of the booklet and the tray.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/decalcomania\/damncov.html\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/07\/damncov.jpg\" alt=\"damncov.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The poor old Xaverian Brothers of Manchester&#8217;s Catholic Collegiate Institute would no doubt be mortified to see part of their prize bookplate being used to decorate such a blasphemous artefact. The album was released by Sony Music in 2003 so this little border motif has travelled the world by now. I seem to recall sending the record company the border design separated from the artwork so they could make up some posters.<\/p>\n<p>And so we come to what I&#8217;m assuming is its latest manifestation, a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.arthurmag.com\/magpie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/07\/tee-pee-manifest-destiny-ad.jpg\" target=\"_blank\">poster design for <em>Manifest Destiny<\/em><\/a>, a Los Angeles music event organised by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.teepeerecords.com\/\" target=\"_blank\">Tee Pee Records<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.arthurmag.com\/magpie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/07\/tee-pee-manifest-destiny-ad.jpg\" target=\"_blank\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-content\/uploads\/2007\/07\/tee-pee.jpg\" alt=\"tee-pee.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I say \u201cassuming\u201d since I&#8217;ve no idea whether this example is from my design or not. <span style=\"text-decoration: line-through;\">But it seems a safe bet seeing as the original is from such an obscure source.<\/span> Not that I mind if it is, of course. I can&#8217;t very well complain when I swiped the thing in the first place, now can I?<\/p>\n<p><strong>Update:<\/strong> Tee Pee designer Sarah MacKinnon writes to say her Victorian motif is from one of Dover&#8217;s clip art books. Now I know that I wouldn&#8217;t mind finding the book for my own collection. This makes the occurrence of the original more unusual, at least from my point of view, since it&#8217;s the only time I&#8217;ve spotted one of these reprinted elements in its period setting.<\/p>\n<p>Previously on { feuilleton }<br \/>\n\u2022 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2007\/07\/07\/masonic-fonts-and-the-designers-dark-materials\/\">Masonic fonts and the designer&#8217;s dark materials<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s nothing new about drawing attention to the viral nature of design, whether in the repeated use of motifs and styles or the way in which typefaces breed and proliferate; Jonathan Barnbrook alludes to this process directly by calling his font house Virus. The plate above comes from a Victorian book I bought several years &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2007\/07\/19\/design-as-virus-victorian-borders\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Design as virus 1: Victorian borders&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[42,4,3,31,23],"tags":[462,982,517],"class_list":["post-2180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-design","category-music","category-religion","category-work","tag-cradle-of-filth","tag-jonathan-barnbrook","tag-manchester"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-za","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2180","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2180"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2180\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2180"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2180"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2180"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}