In/Print: Issue 3, The History of the Present

In/Print is the in-house journal of Dublin School of Creative Arts, Dublin Institute of Technology. Published in 2015, the third issue focuses upon two key figures of contemporary French thought, Jacques Rancière and Bernard Stiegler. The core texts are an original translation of a 1996 essay by Rancière, entitled ‘The Concept of Anachronism and the Historian’s Truth,’ and an extract of an interview with Stiegler, conducted by the Aesthetics Seminar Group in DIT in December 2013.

Entitled ‘The History of the Present’ the design of this issue reflects the challenges to accepted concepts of time and histories as being either continuous or homogenous as presented in the texts. Hence, the design draws on traditional Palestinian embroidery patterns—representing a contestation to monolithic histories by positing the idea that the enactment of tradition in the everyday evades the circumscription of the historically constituted event. Following this, the narrative of the design moves into an interpretation of Islamic geometric pattern that reflects the origins of western mathematics and the measurement of time, whilst accommodating and foregrounding a representation of anachronism and deconstruction.

A key objective of the design of this journal is the positioning of its visual content in an integral relationship to the text. The application of best practice in editorial design to the discrete area of the academic journal, in a way that directly engages with the textual content is, as of yet, an unexplored area of rich material for design research as a form of praxis and discourse that investigates and explicates theory through its visualisation.

  The journal is printed in five spot colours. The body text has been typeset in Minion Pro designed by Robert Slimbach with footnotes in Univers, designed by Adrian Frutiger. Herman Zapf designed Zapf Dingbats, which is used on the cover—each glyph arranged to create a map of the constellations as they were visible in the night sky during the date of publication, June 2015. The illustrations are by Clare Bell and Brenda Dermody.