Towards the end of 2000, we were asked by Rudy Vanderlans to guest-edit and design issue 57 of Emigre. We decided to dedicate that issue completely to the subject of storage formats; around that time, we were quite fascinated by that theme.
In 1999, we designed a line of ten t-shirts for Dutch fashion label SoGenes, shirts featuring drawn silhouettes of formats like the compact disc, the 12'' LP and the 8'' video cassette (see SoGenes / Personal Formats). In that same period, we were working on a project for Droog Design that also involved formats. In short, Droog Design asked us if we wanted to come up with a proposal for a piece of furniture; we came up with a design for a storage cabinet that could hold all possible formats, a cabinet that would also function as a monument for obsolete formats. Droog Design rejected the idea, but we still felt it was a subject that needed further exploration.

What fascinated (and still fascinates) us about formats is the whole ‘dialectical materialistic’ dimension of the subject: the way content is shaped by formats, and formats are shaped by content. In an interview we gave in 2007 to French graphic design magazine Ink, we described it as follows:

We’re really interested in this continuous interaction between form and content: Form determining content determining form determining content etc. It’s a continues flow, and in the ideal situation, you can’t really distinguish between form and content; they constantly change place.
A good example is the LP, the 12'' vinyl gramophone record. The standard LP can only contain 45 minutes of music, so most albums by rock bands are approximately 45 minutes long. This is a very good illustration of the way in which a given format (in this case, the LP) can determine the length of an artwork (in this case, the rock album) in a very direct, physical way. Very similar to the way in which the format of the column determines the style of writing. In fact, many artists have played deliberately with this format. (For example, a lot of Brian Eno’s ambient compositions have exactly the length of one side of an LP, the maximum amount of music).
But at the other hand, the length of the standard CD is 75 minutes, because those who developed the CD wanted to make sure that Beethoven’s Nine could fit on it. So here you see the reverse process: the capacity of a format being determined by the length of an artwork. And that’s exactly what we find fascinating: this constant interaction between form and content, between humans and their physical environment, between the material base and the superstructure.

In 2000, we realized formats were slowly disappearing. There once was a time when every format contained its own specific data, while nowadays the CD-rom format is capable of containing all data, and even the CD-rom is slowly disappearing. So when Rudy asked us to design/edit an issue of Emigre, we decided to turn the issue into a monument to obsolete formats, and named the project ‘Lost Formats Preservation Society’.

We designed Emigre 57 towards the end of 2000, and it was published in the beginning of 2001 (to read the full story, go to Emigre 57). Although we thought we did a good job, the magazine wasn’t received very well at all; in fact, many readers cancelled their subscriptions after the magazine was sent to them.
Four years later, in 2004, we put some of the material (that we collected while we were designing Emigre 57) online, on our website, and this collection of material turned out to be more successful than that issue of Emigre ever was. We received many reactions, suggestions and comments. So when we relaunched our site in 2008, we decided to feature the material again. And that’s where we are now.

A few quick remarks. First of all, we like to thank everybody who mailed us their suggestions over the last years. We haven’t had the time yet to actually add these suggested formats to the collection, but we will do soon. (We will then also compile a thank list, mentioning all those people who suggested formats to us).

Secondly, we received some reactions from people asking why the formats are represented as having all the same size. The answer of this can be found in the magazine. The shapes we show above were part of a typographic section of six pages, a ‘memorial wall’ of lost formats, displaying the shapes almost as a font, as a typeface. That’s why all the shapes have the same size. Elsewhere in the magazine, we included a section featuring line-drawings of all the formats in real size; so the difference in size was made apparent in that section. These two sections complemented each other: the first section showed the shapes, the second section showed the sizes. The shapes that we show above are coming from that first section; in other words, they are not related to each other proportionally, they all have the same size. That’s part of their charm, we think.

Enjoy the list.