i mean you know is inspired by the fractured speech patterns of some of my college students in the early eighties, and the human struggle it represents — the struggle most people have communicating the richness of interior life and experience. It is also a look at the varied relationships people have to their “work.”
This book is not to be confused with Lucy Lippard’s, I Say/You Mean, which came at about the same time, or with the much more recent tv sitcom Like You Know
One university librarian called me up after receiving a copy of i mean you know, concerned that some of the pages were mistakingly overprinted. I assured her it was no accident, and calmly explained that those few densely layered pages were analogous to the sound of five or six or seven people talking at the same time. Maybe I used the phrase psycho-acoustic translation, a favorite of mine at the time — I can’t say for sure. The librarian respectfully thanked me and hung up the phone.
Some five to ten years later a layered approach to typography started showing up as a “style” in car commercials and other sometimes wholly inappropriate works of graphic design.
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