[ punc tu a tion]
30 MAY 2016
INFLUENTIAL DESIGNERS DAVID CARSON
Breaking All The Rules: one letter at a time. A Man of Letters Steven Heller talks with David Senior about THE ELECTRO-LIBRARY
Ed Benguait,
10
Typographic
• Thou shalt not use default kerning
Take your time to look at spacing between pairs of letters (kerning) and the spacing of the whole word (tracking).You have a lot of control (rather understandably) over kerning and tracking in InDesign.
• Thou shalt not overuse script fonts You definitely shouldn’t be even thinking about using a script font of any kind in body text. Just don’t do it – no-one will
• Thou shalt not use fake italics
Though it’s increasingly rare to find a font without an italic case, if you are using one don’t be tempted to skew the font to make it italic – it won’t look good. At all.
• Thou shalt not use all caps
Whilst capitals can look much slicker and, dare we say it, cooler in body copy, using all caps will turn your important body copy into an illegible mess.
read it.
• Thou shalt not place type over busy backgrounds
There’s nothing worse than not being able to read a message because the background is overpowering it.Yes, you may have a beautiful photo that needs to go in the background, but don’t hunt for a space to overlay your type: think about the treatment in a sensible manner.
• Thou shalt not use many many fonts
Although we all have access to thousands of free top-quality fonts to use in our design work, thanks to the likes of Google Fonts and services such as Font Squirrel, you don’t need to use them all at once.
• Thou shalt not fake small caps
Faking small caps never looks good – in fact, it looks downright ugly. So, if you’re looking to add a bit of variation to your headlines by using small caps, pick a font that has one.
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• Thou shalt not reverse type
Just like commandment 07, reversing type out of a dark colour (so using it white) does nothing for legibility. As this useful guide from UXmovement.com mentions: “You should avoid using white text on a dark background when displaying paragraph text to make it easier from them to read. Forcing users to fixate on the white text for a long time can strain the user’s eyes.”
• Thou shalt not combine serifs
Whatever you do, don’t use a serif for a headline and the body copy that follows. It will throw your typographic hierarchy all out of balance. In fact, try not to combine any fonts that are too similar. When using a serif for a headline, try a sans for body; when using a serif in your body copy, try a slab.
• Thou shalt not use long measures
What is measure? Simply put, it’s the length of a line of type or the width of a column, if you like. Too long or too short and your reader will have to fight to construct the sentences; it can be very distracting.
MAY 2016 http://www.creativebloq.com/typography/commandments-11410425
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ED BENGUIAT A Man of Letters By Alexandra Kilstein
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“Too many people think that they’ve got a Mac and they can draw a logo or a typeface. You have to learn to draw first. The computer won’t do it for you”.
B
orn in Brooklyn, New York, Edward Benguiat got acquainted with design and showcard lettering when he was nine years old. His father was display director at Bloomingdale’s and he had all the drawing tools a little boy could want. Edward would play with his father’s pens, brushes, and drafting sets, and learned about sign painting, showcard and speedball lettering. Ed received the usual education. During World War II,
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he wasn’t old enough to enter the armed service, so with a forged photostat of his birth certificate, he enlisted in the Army. After his stint in the Air Corps he traded his airplane control stick for drumsticks and continued the burgeoning percussionist career he had started before the war. Ed became established as a talented progressive Jazz musician under the name Eddie Benart, and played with numerous big bands such as Stan Kenton,
MAY 2016 http://adcglobal.org/hall-of-fame/edward-benguiat/
Claude Thornhill and Woody Herman, but preferred the New York gigs on 52nd Street, particularly at The Three Deuces. “It kept me in town; going on the road with big bands was a drag, and tough.” During that time a Metronome magazine poll picked Ed as the number three sideman/drummer in America. At the School of Visual Arts—where about thirty years ago Silas Rhodes gave him a job—Ed compares graphic design and typography to the rhythm and balance of a musical composition. While playing on 52nd Street, Ed made use of the G.I. Bill and enrolled at the Workshop School of Advertising Art. He wanted to draw nudes like some of the well-known illustrators. His drawing teacher advised him to quit. Benguiat persisted. His first job as an illustrator was as a cleavage retoucher for a movie magazine. “You might think I was adding to the bust. No way! I was taking the cleavage away,” he said, indicating the reaction of the motion picture industry to the crackdown on obscenity in movies. It was obvious that Ed couldn’t draw too well, so he went in the direction of layout, design, typography, and calligraphy. He became Paul Standard’s prodigy. Once out of school, Ed established an impressive career as a designer and art director at a number of large and small publishing houses, studios, and ad agencies. Opening his own firm did not take too long. Enter Photo-Lettering Inc. and Ed Ronthaler. They saved Ed’s life financially by making him art director. One way or another, just about everyone in the graphic community has had some contact with Ed. He’s a neighborhood guy. Admittedly, most know him as the guy who sat in his cramped, cluttered office on 45th Street that had just enough room to swing his pen or brush.
Benguiat Typefaces • ITC Bookman® • ITC Avant Garde Gothic™ • ITC Edwardian Script™ • ITC Modern No. 216 • ITC Benguiat® • Modern No. 20 • ITC Bauhaus™ • ITC Panache® • ITC Caslon No. 224 • ITC Barcelona™ • ITC Tiffany™ • PL Benguiat Frisky • ITC Benguiat Gothic • ITC Century Handtooled® • Souvenir® • Garamond Handtooled®
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BREAKING ALL He revolutionized the way we look at typography. By Alexandra Kilstein
AVID CARSON DAVID CARSON DAVID CARSON
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THE RULES D
avid Carson is an internationally acclaimed graphic designer who hit hard in the early nineties with Beach Culture and Ray Gunmagazines. His work was intuitive, daring, loose. He revolutionised the font game and turned traditional typographical design theory on its head. And by fusing sophisticated, conceptual ideas with child-like simplicity, he became an art star in a medium that’s generally considered background. His first book, with Lewis Blackwell, The End of Print, is the top-selling graphic design book of all time.Newsweek wrote that he “changed the public face of graphic design.” London-based Creative Review called him “the most famous graphic designer on the planet”. And David Byrne, Nine Inch Nails and Bush contracted his unique eye to design their wares, as did Pepsi, Toyota and Microsoft. chaos theory in Carson’s work, but somehow the chips or the cards or the drops of coffee fall in perfect disorder. Some years back he moved his business into a small studio on Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. A few yards down the road was a peculiar sign: it read ‘DRUNK But his visual work is only part of it. He lectures DRIVER’ in black, block text, with ‘CALL 911’ just internationally, and has garnered a cult following. below. Carson marvelled at it. When it came time He is a lifelong surfer and doting father. I met him to put up a sign of his own he copied the exact font, in 2001 when we worked together on Big Surf, an colour, shape and scale: ‘GRAPHIC DESIGNER NY-spawned single-issue magazine. His downtown CALL 457-5652’. studio was a mess. Never in my life had I seen so HUCK: You were a teacher before you were a many icons on a single computer screen. He seemed graphic designer. How did you make the shift? to be juggling fifty jobs. I was concerned about our David Carson: I was teaching my first year at a strange deadline, the precious art sent in by contributors that little cult religious school in Oregon. I had grades one lay scattered haphazardly about his floor, whether he through twelve all day, in one room. When they had a even cared. We were a couple of month’s late with question to ask they either raised an American flag or the issue, but of course it won design awards, and is a Christian flag, depending on what kind of question still talked about today. it was. Strange experience! Anyway, I got a postcard Which is to say that there is a lot of chance and announcing a two-week graphic design workshop
https://kingydesignhistory2012.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/carson-pepsi.jpg
Get an inside look at the man who took the rules of typography and flipped it on its head.
“the most famous graphic designer on the planet”
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http://www.theawl.com/2012/08/grunge-typography
during the summer, and it described what they would be studying. It was for high school seniors. I read the description and thought, ‘Wow, that’s a profession? You can be creative, have fun, make stuff and get paid?’ So I called and asked the school, University of Arizona in Tucson, if I could come, and they said, ‘Sure.’ I returned to Southern California when I was done teaching, where I had secured a job with Nancy Katin [Katin surf trunks]. I worked for a few weeks, not positive if I was really going to the graphic design workshop or not. Finally I told my boss, Nancy Katin, that I needed two weeks off in the middle of the summer to attend this workshop. She told me if I left for the workshop, I would not have a job when I returned. That made the decision a bit more difficult, but somehow I felt I had to try this graphic design thing. And I did. Luckily, I had a very cool, funny and good guy instructor, Jackson Boelts. It’s hard to say if I would have been as interested had I had a loser teacher. But at the end of those two weeks it was so clear to me: That’s what I wanted to do. In terms of work I would really say Beach Culture magazine, for a number of different reasons. It was the first time all my earlier training had a chance to come together. I had done Transworld Skateboarding, I had moved to the East Coast to do Musician and Billboard, and then after I got fired for the design
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MAY 2016
being too radical. I’d heard that Surfer Publications were talking about doing this more experimental magazine, and I flew out to California to interview for the job. Beach Culture was never intended to be a surf magazine. It was loosely hung on this idea that people at the beach also enjoy other things — it was an attitude. It was myself and the editor, Neil Feineman, in the back of the Surfer offices, literally in the warehouse, just doing our thing. I look back now and it was so pure. I was living with it around the clock. We did every issue like it was our last. I was so broke I was scrounging for gas or lunch money half the time, but it didn’t matter. We were experimenting. My thing had yet to take off at that time, but the issues still hold up well. They shut it down about a year before the whole street culture thing kicked in, which was a shame. And then much later the work I did for Nine Inch Nails, packaging and posters and everything. Trent Reznor was a really interesting person to work with. We hit it off, just a great working relationship. Just the idea that you could interpret somebody’s music and lyrics in a way that they’re happy with was really satisfying. I remember getting an email from Trent when we were done saying that he was really happy about the work. I put it up on my office wall. I’m also most proud of — I think it was within a year of each other — getting listed in The Encyclopedia
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