By Oded Ezer | 29/07/2010
European modernism's monopoly in Israeli design has finally been broken. Graphic designer and typographer Oded Ezer takes a close look at the spectrum of styles that have slowly filtered through into the new visual language in Israel: Jewish typography, geometric patterns, Doron Edut- Pratt, 2006
Muslim calligraphy, Art Nouveau and Japanese Minimalism
In recent years, there has been a dramatic rise in the quality and importance of graphic design in Israel, as can be seen in the many conferences that have been held here lately on the subject of design and Hebrew typography and in the increase in the number of websites and portals on the Internet dealing with design. This new situation is a direct response to the growing interest in graphic design, typography and illustration in Israel. Mention should, of course, be made here of the Israel Community of Designers, a professional group established in 2004 whose goals are to promote design and to represent the professional community of designers vis-à-vis government agencies and private industry. Some of the examples presented here are from the organization's first exhibition, “Designed in Israel 07,” which was held in Tel Aviv in January 2007.
Israel's leading graphic designers are influenced by a wide range of styles – from Art Nouveau to Arab art and from Japanese minimalism to the new wave of the 1980s and they take a little from every style. They have abandoned 20th-century modernist European principles – including those of the German Bauhaus movement and those of Russian Constructivism, both of which styles have until recently dominated graphic design in Israel – and they are now freely adopting not only the techniques of pre-modernist movements but also elements from Jewish typography, geographic patterns, Muslim calligraphy, compositions and painted boards from the Far East, even chaotic ornamental shapes. From all these influences, a new style has been born here – homogeneous in its eclecticism and different from the style of graphic design that has dominated Israeli design until recently.
The first few years of the new millennium are witnessing the emergence of the first generation of Israeli designers for whom
Israel's existence is a rock-solid reality. This is the first generation of Israeli designers that is not investing most of its energies in trying to survive and it is searching for new visual languages that can reflect Israel's reality rather than obscuring it. This is an new generation that, contrary to the views that have been widespread from the 1960s up until recently, sees no problem in drawing its inspiration from visual sources expressing Jewish life in the Diaspora and even from Jewish religious sources.
The Eternal and the Digital
The CD cover that Nati Ohayon and Dan Megrelishvili designed for Muki (2005) bears the singer's portrait, which is composed of Hebrew letters adorned with tags, the same kind of letters that traditionally appeared in Jewish prayerbooks. The two young designers wanted to “show respect for the Hebrew language” and thought that the best way of doing so would be to use old-style Hebrew lettering. Alongside the portrait, they designed a more “fashionable” logo, reminiscent of the British typographical style of the 1980s.
While font designer Yanek Yontef used Hebrew manuscripts dating back to 14th-century Europe as the source of inspiration for the logo he designed for his website, designer and illustrator Guy Sagee borrowed Hebrew letters shaped in Art Nouveau style for the titles of the advertisements of the Israeli Center for Digital Art. In this act of borrowing, Sagee merged the theme of eternity with a contemporary digital medium and used a multi-lingual text in Hebrew, Arabic and English.
In her book, The Urban Dialogue Concept (2006), which presents personal and at times sentimental interpretations of Tel Aviv and Berlin, Inbal Baron blends a Hebrew font belonging to the Frank Reuhlia category (homage that I paid in 2004 to the Frank Reuhl font designed by Raphael Frank in 1908 – O.E.) with the neo-Gothic Fette Fraktur font issued by the C.E. Weber foundry in Germany in 1875. A strong aroma of early 20th-century Jugendstil, strongly reminiscent of Ephraim Moshe Lilien and Aubrey Beardsley, emerges from the CD cover of Al Hamishmeret (Standing Guard, 2006) that Doron Edut designed for veteran Israeli rock singers Rami Fortis and Berry Sakharof. Using simple clip art elements, Edut created intuitive, bizarre silhouettes of animals and parts of insects alongside a text in Frank Reuhl font.
The legitimation given to the use of Arab cultural and visual elements has increased recently, partly due to the growth in the political clout of Jews of Middle Eastern origin in the late 1970s. The European foundations that dominated during the first decades of Israeli statehood have been enriched by patterns, colors and compositions characteristic of traditional Muslim designs. In a series of posters (Build-Rebuild-Resist, 2006) that Sagee designed and which were intended to mobilize support for the activities of the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions (ICAHD), Palestinian laborers portrayed in the typical style of Soviet propaganda against a background of Muslim patterns replace the myth of the Zionist builders of the young Jewish state. The innovativeness of these posters is particularly noticeble when we recall that political protest posters produced in Israel in the 1970s and 1980s, such as those by David Tartakover, used a European graphic language although they were dealing with disasters in the Middle East.
A genuine effort to create a local style blending Middle Eastern elements with Polish/French design techniques (expressing the influence of both Henryk Tomaszewski and Gerard Paris-Clavel) can be seen in the work done by Ofer Kahana in the context of the
Parrhesia project – where a group of political activists, visual artists, and industrial and graphic designers collaborated with groups championing human rights and social change in order to obtain equal rights for Palestinians and economic and social justice in Israeli society. In his work, Black Stain (2005), Kahana employs a coffee stain against the background of an Islamic pattern (made according to a Palestinian handbook on architectural patterns) in order to portray the riots of October 2000, when the Israel Police killed 13 Israeli Arabs.
A courageous and constantly inquiring nature
The immigration of young Russians to Israel in recent years has introduced a new ornamental, even sentimental, esthetics that runs counter to the Russian Constructivism of the early 20th century that has influenced Israeli design to the present day. In her design for the jacket of Romeo and Juliet: The Biochemistry of Love (2004), Tatyana Luxembourg uses the romantic mid-19th-century Drogolin font for the main title and Yontef's Me'argen font (which is the Hebrew version of the ITC Officina® Sans font created by Eric Spiekermann and Ole Schaefer) for the subtitles. Alongside these fonts she blends analytic, detailed, pseudo-scientific illustrations that clearly show her love for the giclee technique and for traditional Russian textile patterns; her aim here is to express the various themes appearing in her surprising version of William Shakespeare's well-known tale.
Finally, we cannot ignore the impact of the Internet, which has become the supplier of techniques and styles for modern design in Israel. Examples of this impact can be seen in the book jackets (2005) created by designer Yaron Shin, who calls himself Jewboy. His sources are not only freestyle street art but also ukiyo-e printing techniques, old Japanese wrapping paper, technical illustrations, and the designs of contemporary Scandinavian albums, which express, in his view, a cold sex appeal. Although he chose the Haim font, a non-tagged font that clearly shows the Bauhaus influence and which was designed by Yaakov Chaim Levit in 1933, as the starting-point for the titles of the books he designed, Jewboy replaces the “objective” nature of these letters with a naïve, even childish, message by pulling on their contour lines with a pencil to create a 3D-like effect.
While the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, Israel's oldest school of design and one of the country's two most influential educational institutions in the field (the second is the Shenkar College of Engineering and Design in Ramat Gan), continues to adhere to a conservative line that buttresses both the status of 20th-century modern European design and strengthens its influence on graphic design in Israel, small, almost unnoticeable, changes are taking place in the local visual language. Young designers, displaying a courageous and inquiring nature, are not afraid to use diverse, emotional, intuitive designs that are rich in content and which reflect the designers' visual and cultural milieu.
Oded Ezer designs images, newspapers, magazines and fonts
