Under Ehses

Hanno Ehses studied under Otl Aicher. He taught at NSCAD for decades. Sixteen seats a year in the Honours Communication Design program, and for the ones paying attention, the framework that made a working life intelligible.

Classical Rhetoric, Applied to Design

Logos. Ethos. Pathos. Metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony. Chiasmus, anaphora, litotes. In Ehses’s hands, the classical figures were not decoration but the structure of persuasion: the inherited shapes that arguments take when they try to move a viewer from one position to another.

Applied to visual communication, the framework does something specific. Design stops being style. It becomes argument. Students who come up through it do not make pretty things; they make cases. They know which case they are making and why that case requires this figure and not another. The craft becomes legible to itself.

The Macbeth Posters

The document that did the work was not the illustrated handbook he later made with Ellen Lupton. That one I liked, and still do. It was the paper he wrote on his own: Design and Rhetoric: An Analysis of Theatre Posters, NSCAD’s Design Papers, letterpress-printed in house and rare even then. A theatre season put through the figures, one poster at a time.

Macbeth is the case that stays with me. One play, and Ehses works it through the figures the way a musician works a progression through keys: metaphor, then metonymy, then synecdoche. Each version argues a different reading of the same tragedy, each one defensible, none of them decoration. Watching a single text yield that many honest posters is what made the framework real to me. It was the argument for argument.

What It Becomes

Twenty years on, the framework has stopped being something I consult and become something I think in, a grammar running beneath a sentence. It doesn’t make the decisions faster or the work easier; it makes the reasons available. When a design is right, I can say which argument it is making and why it takes this figure and not another. Getting there is still the work.

A mentor does not give a student a style. A mentor gives a student an engine.

Ink · c. 2000