While the origin of the dessert is unclear, the first recorded version of the recipe can be found in the publication “Tramping and Trailing with the Girl Scouts” of 1927.*

Baked. S’more. Bars. Make your own.

Ingenuity has been a tradition of mine since July 2008. Fresh outta my sophomore year of high school, I hung out downtown all day with three musician friends, playing with exhibits and watching performances. The part that amazed me most, awesome stuff to experience and witness aside, was the fact that major blocks of downtown Cleveland were shut down for a huge under-twenty-dollar block party. I was leisurely walking around the busiest intersections of CLE with hundreds of other people marveling at dances, inventions, carnival food, graffiti, and light & sound spectacles in unison. The city felt so alive. I knew what I was doing the following July.

2009, the start of my senior year of high school, brought something even better downtown. The public “Bridge Party” ended around midnight Saturday on a crisp late September evening. My date and I left my Homecoming dance after an hour for better plans – to the subway level of the Detroit-Superior bridge! This was, I believe, formally called the Cleveland Bridge Project presented by IngenuityFest. It remains my most-loved Ingenuity memory: we watched a documentary on why Cleveland should be loved, a drama performance, DJs spinning electronica, walked past fine art vendors, obnoxious installations, and a bunch of cool lit up shit, above water. Under a bridge. Not in use. Accessible through catacombs via the basement of an Ohio City Italian restaurant. SO COOL.

When I learned Ingenuity 2010 was moved strictly to the bridge location, I was stoked. The previous year was an exhilarating late-night half-mile-walk of wonder, so to have this Ingenuity tradition continue, and continue to be free?! Amazing! Fall 2010′s Ingenuity was the perfect blend of the accessibility of the summer block party and the underground vibe of the bridge project.

Saturday night, I snuck down for a few hours with Kent friends to see Cloud Nothings and gaze at the astounding creative ventures set up for the city’s viewing pleasure. For free. I recall hanging out at The Avengers set a few weeks ago around 1am, talking to a man who made note of how much he loved not only the money coming into the city because of the move filming, but seeing the city to geek out be proud of what’s going on in their town. And this guy was originally from California.

That’s my favourite part of IngenuityFest. Running into old friends, meeting new people, recognizing faces you’ve never been introduced to but have seen around, all while walking along a lit-up lower level of a major bridge that only opens up a handful of times a year. I like Cleveland and I love when Cleveland comes together.

Art Nouveau, the French term for “new art” (ironically, the French decided to use the English phrase in their country), was a movement made of all the new styles in European and American nineteenth century art. As a broad umbrella term, it encompasses a plethora of styles and artists, meaning some parts of Art Nouveau are “more Art Nouveau” than others. An important facet of the new art movement was the notion that the styles of art could be used universally, “applied in all situations” (43). An illustration style for posters – the most common application – would simply be limited to posters; Parisian Metro subway stations could also be redecorated in the Art Nouveau manner. The Art Nouveau style was a departure from the heavily realistic modeled style of European art sine the Renaissance. An interest in Japanese woodblock prints generated a style called Japonisme, but in a grander scheme of things, brought life to two-dimensional “floating” art with thick contour lines, fluid strokes, and flat colour. The organic form and symbolic sensualism were keys to Art Nouveau. Handdrawn type styles and illustrations featured “the lives and leisure of young women” in an ethereal, dreamlike, fluidly rhythmic manner (53). Illustrations of young women were appealingly sexual, but never pornographic. Some of the art was very decorative, like Mucha or Livemont, while others were centered around the “bold simplicity” of the Japonisme style (46), or, plainly, more conservative with less of the classic modern sense European adventurism. Type was often hand-rendered to match the fluidity of the the poster illustrations, but vast improvements in typesetting took place during this time. The linotype and monotype machines gave designers more control in less time. Sans-serif or grotesque faces (Franklin Gothic) emerged.

French, American, and English artists like Jules Cheret, Leonetto Cappeillo, Privat Livemont, Eugene Grasset, Theophile Steinlen, Pierre Bonnard, Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, William Bradley, Edward Penfield, Aubrey Beardsley, Arthur Liberty, the Beggarstaffs, and Alphonse Mucha all had distinct styles that different enormously from one another, even though they were all creating their art around the same time (late 19th-century) and were all in the Art Nouveau style. Some of these artists moved to France from nations like Italy and Czechoslovakia in the 80s and 90s, likely to create a name for themselves in the art world since the new movements had begun to flourish. France was undeniably the center of Art Nouveau: American artists were not “confident enough in their own skills to innate new styles” (52). Work from wealthy US-based clients was sent to European outlets before American designers realized they could replicate, and improve upon, the French style. Advertising agencies in the U.S. emerged at this time, illustrating the importance of art and communication in the growing consumer world. In other parts of Europe, like Glasgow, Vienna, Berlin, Munich, and Dresden, Art Nouveau took a different turn for the   ”Gesamtkunstwerk” – a “total work of art”. Art was theoretic, symbolic, abstract, heavily Japonisme, and typography focused on serif and blackletter styles. The Scottish “Four” used heavy linear style with asymmetry, abandoning the French decadence, adding mystery to its simplicity. Austrian Werkstatte artists used geometric language to elegantly show rhythmic patterns. The Expressionist movement with artists like Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka in Austria took root here, using feeling rather than literal sight to illustrate ideas. Before the rise of Art Nouveau poster illustrations, flyers and posters were “designed” by the printing companies to simply communicate information. Art Nouveau meant that poster design could be an activity of the fine arts, by artists, not just a mechanical process.

Art Nouveau and the Arts and Crafts were coincident in setting (both time and location), but not in reason. While they were both movements that looked toward bettering the future of art, Art Nouveau was purely aesthetic. The Arts and Crafts movement was started by social reformers who wanted an improved society and lifestyle; Art Nouveau desired a departure from the past and an advocation of organic, natural, ethereal elements.

Johannes Gutenberg was not the first person to use a press or movable type, but his work in the mid-1400s was revolutionary. Using his background in gold smithing and metal work, he abandoned wood and used lead, antimony, and tin to create variable-width molds of hundreds of characters (in fact, hundreds more characters than are included modern font). This style of type is now considered a font called Textura, based on the appearance of the texture of a page filled with black letterforms. Gutenberg’s design rendered hand-written and block-printed vellum codices books of the past.

The advent of the vernacular in the late Middle Ages paired with the new printing technology propelled the advancement of culture and society in Europe. During the time of the Italian Renaissance, so the populace grew more educated and literate year by year in parallel with the increased accessibility of books. The later Reformation and Scientific Revolution ware fueled by the fact that the written word could be spread so far so quickly by movable type printing.

Once printing had a strong foundation in production, the advancement of typography took place. Type went from a heavy, gothic, blackletter style to a Humanist “handwriting” style in the 1460s and 70s. It did not take long after the rise of the press for improvements to be made toward the legibility of the printed word. Based on Carolingian cursive rooted in calligraphy, the littera antique typefaces were newer than their gothic predecessors but based on script of the past. Humanist type (like Centaur) was used for humanist literature; educational and professional texts were set in the traditional blackletter. From Humanist type developed Old Style type (like Garamond) was delicately crafted to be more refined than Humanist faces. Old Style letters are more vertical in bowls, high in contrast of thickness, and often italic, something that had not existed before this time. Near the end of the 17th and start of the 18th centuries, type moved again forward to the Transitional period (like Baskerville), a time when tradition was cast as inferior to new, enlightened ideas: type grew to be fully vertically perpendicular with horizontal serifs and extended contrast in thickness. The point system for measuring type was established during this era, an improvement from the picas that came before.

The nineteenth century and the Industrial Revolution pushed the typography world even further. Print media as it is known today saw its inception in the Industrial Revolution thanks to huge upsurge in technology and society as Europe and North America moved to a consumer culture. Mass production of goods meant type had to be very functional for commercial needs. Modern typefaces (like Bodoni) have extreme contrast, abrupt ultra-thin serifs, and complete vertical and horizontal axes. Type faces had to be readable for mass production and interesting for flashy advertising. Slab-serif (or the exploitative nickname, Egyptian) type (like Clarendon) with less contrast and squared-off serifs were invented to fulfill this need. Poster, newspaper, and packaging design became important as the consumer society became more prevalent. Display typefaces caught the eye of readers by being illustrative, extra heavy, or outlined. A blend of function and aesthetics propelled these changes in typography: new typefaces and styles had a specific purpose, but their design was based on ensuring a pleasing look for consumers. From this came the rise in popularity of sans-serif type in the early twentieth century. Before the Roman times of Trajan, all type based on Phoenician alphabet was sans-serif type! Sans-serif type (like Helvetica) has a large x-height, no variation in thickness, and of course, no serifs. The post-modern sans-serifs are used in body copy on the web and mostly as display in printed materials. Sans-serif type is interchangeably called “grotesque” because at first, it was used so seldom because the world was accustomed to serifs on all fonts. All type before sans-serifs were products of function, but sans-serif type was an experimentation in new lettering where form was most important. Type designs after the initial shock of dropping serifs were often created to improve upon existing sans-serif fonts in readability and practicality.

Beds of rock in approximately 10000 BCE were ornamented with picto- and logograms called petroglyphs. These symbols were thought to be used as a form of “pre-written” communication – showing geography, distance, and other religious and cultural significances. While one can argue the lasting power, importance, and morality of rock incisions by Neolithic people compared to the spray paint vandalism of an artistic youngster, each set of markings prove similar in that they are symbolic language.

Symbolic language exists today just as it did in ancient civilizations: to communicate. In a world of over six thousand spoken languages, simplicity and clarity is paramount when one’s message needs to be reached to the widest audience possible. Ideograms (illustrative symbols representing ideas) like arabic numerals, play/pause/stop buttons, street signage, etc., are used worldwide because they are understood worldwide. The directives must be succinct and legible to be read and understood by people of all ages of all backgrounds. There is no room for superfluous decoration when it comes to highway designations, airport way-finding, and behavioral and geographic warnings and instructions. Even the WYSIWYG editing buttons when creating a BlackBoard post are the same in Parma, Ohio as they are in Parma, Italy. These ideograms are universal in context, so no matter what language you speak, you can recognize the shape and comprehend the meaning of the symbol.

Even the smallest everyday examples of modern symbols, like keyboards and remote controls or cardboard boxes and plastic bottles or washing and drying instructions on clothing, hold the same value as Egyptian hieroglyphics of the past. In fact, Matt the post-modern vandal’s tagging spree was not unlike the Sumerian cuneiform writing system. All of the above use written illustrative examples to convey a concept, idea, object, location, event, or sound. Symbolic language will never lose importance.
Below is an example of a “hobo code” designed by a British magazine that focuses on helping the homeless in London. It encourages people to understand and replicate a language of ideograms to communicate ideas to others who would benefit from the knowledge.