The author is partly right on the right that it was a cultural response to war.
Here's a relevant excerpt from the book Dutch Graphic Design, A century of innovation. (2006. P. 76-81).
"De Stijl was one of many critical intellectual responses to the calamity of World War I. [...] This aim was implicit in De Stijl's first manifesto, published in 1918:
'There is an old and a new awareness of time. The old is based on the individual. The new is based on the universal. The struggle of the individual against the universal is manifesting itself in the World War as well as in contemporary art.... The war is destroying the old world with its contents; the dominance of the individual in every sector.'
In 1921 a similar sentiment followed in the fourth volume of De Stijl:
'For Europe there is no longer any way out. Centralization and property, spiritual and material individualism was the foundation of the old Europe. In that it has caged itself. It is falling to pieces. We observe this calmly. We would not want to help even if we could. We do not want to extend the life of this old prostitute.'
De Stijl advocated an idealistic goal to liberate art from nonessential and outdated qualities such as subject matter, naturalism, subjectivity, and decoration. Its diverse advocates rejected outright what they saw as the sentimentalism and degeneration of the nineteenth century. They expressed a desire for a new rational art that better suited the modern world, a 'collective impersonal style.... destined, they felt, for adoption by architects and designers of the machine age." They were not, however, a 'lost generation'; instead they enthusiastically espoused a new industry-based culture. In order to meet the needs of a new epoch, the members of De Stijl advocated a revision of old understandings of beauty which had been based solely on craft. They realized that twentieth-century technology could be utilized to create a union of art and industry. In October 1917 Van Doesburg wrote in the first issue of De Stijl:
'It is the endeavor of this small magazine to make a contribution toward the development of a new consciousness of beauty. It desires to make modern man receptive to what is new in the plastic arts. It desires, as opposed to anarchy and confusion, the 'modern baroque, to establish a mature style based on pure relationship of the spirit of the age and expressive means. It desires to combine in itself contemporary ideas on the new plasticity, which, although fundamentally the same, developed independently from one another.'"
Similar thoughts were shared in most artistic and other cultural movements of the time. However, how this managed to be so successful is rarely analysed. My hypothesis is this: these kinds of anti-ornament movements were advocated by both socialist and capitalists. For socialists mass-produced functional goods meant that everyone could have equal amounts of decent quality stuff. For capitalists it meant the opportunity to increase the surplus value of goods when productive time wasn't "wasted" on inefficient ornamentation.
For both—socialists and capitalists—ornamentation was an obstacle. They wanted a complete cultural shift, where by devaluing tradition, craft and ornamentation, people could br untied from their locality like their home, village, town etc., and thus much easier relocated to new industrial areas (like big cities). Mass produced goods meant that you could move and simply buy fresh new things (because they were cheap). It also meant that you weren't attached to your things (like you would if you spent time on crafting them yourself), so it didn't matter if they were beautiful, they just had to work.
Are there any digital tools that would replicate the workflow of drawing with ruler and compass? I've tried dozens of different apps but none of them get it quite right. Here's my wishlist:
Compass:
— Set a radius and "lock" it in place.
— Move the origin of the compass anywhere, without having to set the radius again.
— Press down to draw an arc (CW or CCW), starting and ending anywhere along the radius.
— Ability to snap to other lines and intersections.
— Hotkey to draw in increments, like 10°, 20°, 30°, 45°
etc.
— Ability to draw the arcs as guides to aid in geometric construcion.
Ruler:
— Change the angle of the ruler
— Move the ruler without having to set the angle again
— Press down to draw a line, starting and ending anywhere along the ruler.
— Ability to snap to other lines and intersections.
— Hotkey to rotate in increments of 10°, 20°, 30°, 45° etc.
— Ability to draw the lines as guides to aid in geometric construcion.
Krita's "Assistant Tool" somewhat does this. You can define (infinite or finite) rulers, and circles (as a special case of ellipses, press Ctrl when choosing the third control point to get a circle). When drawing with the "Freehand Brush Tool", choose "Snap to Assistants" to draw along the defined assistants.
> Self-hosting with a dynamic IP seems difficult if not impossible
You just need something on your network that monitors your IP and updates your DNS when your home IP changes. "Dynamic DNS Update Client" yields results in Google that will be a good start to understanding.
> There are some dynamic DNS services but that kinda defeats the self-hosted part.
No, selfhosting at home doesn't mean you have to host a public DNS server. You will definitely need some external DNS pointing to your home network. There are multiple free providers.
You will still need a static IP for SMTP. Dynamic IP assignment and NAT traversal are the largest hurdles to self-hosting reliably. DNS updates are great, but then you're still relying on a large centralized DNS provider. You can host nameservers yourself, but then you're back to the Static IP issue.
Self hosting SMTP servers is downright impossible these days.
The big Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and others "fight spam" / competition
by black listing little known SMTP servers.
If you try to do it from a VPS, they have usually blocked entire
segments of the companies IPs. (Because someone, a lot of someones
came before you)
There are good reasons to right spam.
But the efforts of the biggie names are forcing people to use their services.
(Its free after all right)
You have to rely on a registrar for your domain name anyway. For everything else, a cheap VPS with a static IP is easy to manage and can delegate to your homeserver behind the scenes. The VPS also can be easily replaced by a different one when needed just by managing the DNS entries.
I tried this two decades ago. We just had broadband for the first time and I installed some web service application on my Windows PC. My ISP had what appeared to be a static IP so I manually set up a free DNS service with that IP. The experiment didn't last long enough for the IP to change but I did learn it did because long after I took the service down, my domain was pointing to someone else's IP.
It what I now realise was a bad idea, I was writing code by web server code using C with CGI. I was supposed to use Perl, but I didn't want to spend time learning that as I already knew C.
The best way I've found to get around the DNS problem is to take a cheap VPS (I use Hetzner) and run a reverse proxy like Caddy. Then you VPN that VPS to the machine at your house.
Good eye! I can't remember what was my initial inspiration (could have been the one you linked), but there is also a very similiar character in Pitman's typewriter manual (1893) which is featured in Barrie Tullett's Typewriter Art: A Modern Anthology.
Any complex combination or arrangement of fleurons or other type ornament is not really possible with any contemporary word processor for one good reason: type is not set by hand anymore. Precise but free placement of glyphs is tedious if not impossible. It would require a whole new paradigm of setting type, one that would be based on modularity and strict typographic measurement system. A digital letterpress system if you will. The closest we've had that digitally was probably textmode and ASCII art.
I think that would be ideal. The 'killer' feature would be: Handcraft a set of control characters, like the letters in "handglove" and then let AI generate the rest. Designing a typeface is fun, until you need to add support for multiple languages and need to make 800+ characters. Or, maybe there is a nice (open source) font, that is unfortunately missing some characters you really need: let AI generate them.
Here's a relevant excerpt from the book Dutch Graphic Design, A century of innovation. (2006. P. 76-81).
"De Stijl was one of many critical intellectual responses to the calamity of World War I. [...] This aim was implicit in De Stijl's first manifesto, published in 1918:
'There is an old and a new awareness of time. The old is based on the individual. The new is based on the universal. The struggle of the individual against the universal is manifesting itself in the World War as well as in contemporary art.... The war is destroying the old world with its contents; the dominance of the individual in every sector.'
In 1921 a similar sentiment followed in the fourth volume of De Stijl:
'For Europe there is no longer any way out. Centralization and property, spiritual and material individualism was the foundation of the old Europe. In that it has caged itself. It is falling to pieces. We observe this calmly. We would not want to help even if we could. We do not want to extend the life of this old prostitute.'
De Stijl advocated an idealistic goal to liberate art from nonessential and outdated qualities such as subject matter, naturalism, subjectivity, and decoration. Its diverse advocates rejected outright what they saw as the sentimentalism and degeneration of the nineteenth century. They expressed a desire for a new rational art that better suited the modern world, a 'collective impersonal style.... destined, they felt, for adoption by architects and designers of the machine age." They were not, however, a 'lost generation'; instead they enthusiastically espoused a new industry-based culture. In order to meet the needs of a new epoch, the members of De Stijl advocated a revision of old understandings of beauty which had been based solely on craft. They realized that twentieth-century technology could be utilized to create a union of art and industry. In October 1917 Van Doesburg wrote in the first issue of De Stijl:
'It is the endeavor of this small magazine to make a contribution toward the development of a new consciousness of beauty. It desires to make modern man receptive to what is new in the plastic arts. It desires, as opposed to anarchy and confusion, the 'modern baroque, to establish a mature style based on pure relationship of the spirit of the age and expressive means. It desires to combine in itself contemporary ideas on the new plasticity, which, although fundamentally the same, developed independently from one another.'"
Similar thoughts were shared in most artistic and other cultural movements of the time. However, how this managed to be so successful is rarely analysed. My hypothesis is this: these kinds of anti-ornament movements were advocated by both socialist and capitalists. For socialists mass-produced functional goods meant that everyone could have equal amounts of decent quality stuff. For capitalists it meant the opportunity to increase the surplus value of goods when productive time wasn't "wasted" on inefficient ornamentation.
For both—socialists and capitalists—ornamentation was an obstacle. They wanted a complete cultural shift, where by devaluing tradition, craft and ornamentation, people could br untied from their locality like their home, village, town etc., and thus much easier relocated to new industrial areas (like big cities). Mass produced goods meant that you could move and simply buy fresh new things (because they were cheap). It also meant that you weren't attached to your things (like you would if you spent time on crafting them yourself), so it didn't matter if they were beautiful, they just had to work.