magazine by Julie Ra

a BRILLIANT

TYPOGRAPHY magazine

J U L I E R AU S T E I N N O R G E S K R E AT I V E FA G K S O L E 0 7 / 1 1 / 2 0 1 2

INTRODUCTION This magazine present four different type designers: Karel Martens, Claude Garamond, Stefan Sagmeister and Marian Bantjes. The focus is on their brilliant type design, their lives and their inspiration. Text lended form wikipedia.com. Enjoy

INTRODUCTION

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CONTENT Page 3-4 Page 5-6 Page 7-8 Page 9-10 Page 11-12

D E S I G N I N G

W I T H

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A KR A R M T “ N U M B E R S

Karel Martens is a Dutch designer and teacher. After training at the school of art in Arnhem, he has worked as a freelance graphic designer, specializing in typography. Alongside this, he has always made free (non-commissioned) graphic and threedimensional work. Martens design work ranges widely, from postage stamps, to books, to signs on buildings. All of this work is documented and celebrated in the books Karel Martens: drukwerk / printed matter and Karel Martens: counterprint. - Martens has taught graphic design since 1977. His very first appointment was at the school of art at Arnhem (until 1994). He was then attached to the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (1994–9). From 1997 he has been a

a visiting lecturer in the graphic design department at the School of Art, Yale University. In that year, together with Wigger Bierma, he started a pioneering school of postgraduate education within the ArtEZ, Arnhem – the Werkplaats Typografie – where Martens still teaches. Karel Martens with Jaap van Triest and Robin Kinross vhe work of Karel Martens occupies an intriguing place in the present European art-and-design landscape. Martens can be placed in the tradition o f Dutch modernism – in the line of figures such as Piet Zwart, H.N. Werk-

man, Willem Sandberg. Yet he maintains some distance from the main developments of our time: from both the practices of routinized modernism and of the facile reactions against this. tions in a wide range of design commissions signs.

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AREL E RTNS

Garamond

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CLAUDE GARAMOND is a typeface that is widely used today. The namesake of that typeface was equally as popular as the typeface is now

when he was around. Starting out as an apprentice punch cutter Claude Garamond quickly made a name for himself in the typography industry.

T E R P R E S S

Even though the typeface named for Claude Garamond is not actually based on a design of his own it shows how much of an influence he was. He has his typefaces, typefaces named after him and typeface based on his original typefaces. As a major influence during the 16th century and continued influence all the way to today Claude Garamond has had a major influence in typography and design. Claude Garamond was born in Paris, France around 1480 or 1490. Rather quickly Garamond entered the industry of typography. He started out as an apprentice punch cutter and printer. Working for Antoine Augereau he specialized in type design as well as punching cutting and printing. His most influential mentor though was Geoffrey Tory. After about a ten years of Tory Garamondâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first font came out. Having been approached by a fellow printer and scholar Robert Estienne to cut types Garamond developed a Roman style font that was first published in Paraphrasis

in Elegantiarum Libros Laurentii Vallae by Erasmus. Following the type De Aetna by Aldus Manutius Claude Garamond changed and tweaked it to fit the needs of his commissioner and his own personal tastes. King Francois I saw the typeface and liked it enough to commission a personal typeface. The commission of a typeface from King Francois I signified Claude Garamondâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s move from talented designer to hugely popular talented designer. The king asked for a Greek influence type. In 1540 Garamond produced the typeface Grec Du Roi for the King that was exclusively used for the printing of Greek books by Robert Estienne. From this point on Garamond started to work on original typefaces sans commissions and started publishing independently as well. Working by himself from the year 1545 and on Garamond was independently designing and publishing new typefaces. With the new development of the modern paperback book demand for slimmer typefaces arose. New printing methods were being developed that allowed for smaller books. With smaller books smaller type was needed but it still had to be readable. Italic fonts

were the solution that many designers saw to this new format. Italics could be condensed and the design of italics lent itself to slimmer letters which took up less space. Garamond was one of the first to design an italic typeface. While he did not start the trends he used in his design (slanted uppercase letters as well as lowercase letters), his designs were so important that they would later influence many other typefaces of that nature with the same characteristics. Garamondâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s new designs were published in his first book Pia et Religiosa Meditatio by David Chambellan. The typefaces in the book were exclusively designed by Garamond. The publishing of his first book started his personal business. He from this point started to sell his typefaces. He was the first person to start a type foundry. In 1530 he started his business of developing and creating typefaces and then selling them to printers. While being a pioneer in the typeface selling business he was not very successful and ended up at the end of his life with little

The French National Printing Office picked a typeface that had been used by the 17th century Royal Printing Office. The typeface they picked, while at the time was under the name of another designer at the time, was later identified to be the work of Garamond. Cardinal Richelieu had supervised the Royal Printing

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Garamond’s typeface revival was huge.

Office and had name the font Caracteres de l’Universite which he used to print his own writings. The French National Printing Office named the actual font creator as Garamond. With this renaming the revival of “Claude Garamond’s” typeface began. Christopher Plantin was major buyer of Garamond’s work and contributed individually to the revival but the real revival happed around the time of World War I. Type foundries all over the world started producing their own versions of his typefaces. Different versions of his typeface were being produced by every major foundry around the world. The problem that arose was the typeface that was now Claude Garamond’s namesake was not even created by him. The 16th century was the height of Claude Garamond’s career and seeing that he died in that century he could not have been the designer.

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money and little typefaces left. Claude Garamond died in 1561. He had at one time entertained financial success but by the end of his life he barely owned any of his typefaces. He had been the first designer to create typefaces and sell thembut for him the business ventures did not end up working out favorably for him. After his death his widow was forced to sell what little typefaces he still owned as well as some of the punches he still had. As a result his typefaces and punches were distributed around Europe. With the scattering of his typefaces after his death Garamond’s fonts fell out of use for some time. With the decline in the use of his typefaces only the general idea of what characteristics they contained were remembered. The foggy memory of his typefaces that resulted from their decline in popularity is what

caused the confusion about his namesake typeface. For almost two centuries Garamond’s typefaces were out of use and out of the public eye even though they had had great success while he was alive. The 19th century brought in the revival of his typefaces due to private buyers and foundry revivals. The beginning of the revival started with a French printing office looking for a typeface to be exclusively theirs.

GARAMOND WAS ONE OF THE FIRST TO DESIGN AN ITALIC TYPEFACE.

EXPERIMENTAL TYPOGRAPHY THEME 3

When Stefan Sagmeister was invited to design the poster for an AIGA lecture he was giving on the campus at Cranbrook near Detroit, he asked his assistant to carve the details on to his torso with an X-acto knife and photographed the result. Sunning himself on a beach the following summer, Sagmeister noticed traces of the poster text rising in pink as his flesh tanned. Now a graphic icon of the 1990s, that 1999 AIGA Detroit poster typifies Stefan Sagmeister’s style. Striking to the point of sensationalism and humorous but in such an unsettling way that it’s nearly, but not quite unacceptable, his work mixes sexuality with wit and a whiff of the sinister. Sagmeister’s technique is often

At 19, Sagmeister moved to Vienna hoping to study graphics at the city’s prestigious University of Applied Arts. After his first application was rejected – “just about everybody was better at drawing than I was” – he enrolled in a private art school and was accepted on his second attempt.

In 1987, Sagmeister won a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Here humour emerged as the dominant theme in his work. When a girlfriend asked him to design business cards which would cost no more than $1 each, Sagmeister printed them on dollar bills. And when a friend from Austria came to visit, having voiced concern that New York women would ignore him, Sagmeister postered the walls of his neighbourhood with a picture of his friend under the words “Dear Girls! Please be nice to Reini”. After three years in the US, Sagmeister returned to Austria for compulsory military service. As a conscientious objector, he was allowed to do community work in a refugee centre outside Vienna.

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STEFAN SAGMEISTER (1962-) is among today’s most important graphic designers. Born in Austria, he now lives and works in New York. His longstanding collaborators include the AIGA and musicians, David Byrne and Lou Reed.

simple to the point of banality from slashing D-I-Y text into his own skin for the AIGA Detroit poster, to spelling out words with roughly cut strips of white cloth for a 1999 brochure for his girlfriend, the fashion designer, Anni Kuan. The strength of his work lies in his ability to conceptualise: to come up with potent, original, stunningly appropriate ideas. Born in Bregenz, a quiet town in the Austrian Alps, in 1962, Sagmeister studied engineering after high school, but switched to graphic design after working on illustrations and lay-outs for Alphorn, a left-wing magazine. The first of his D-I-Y graphic exercises was a poster publicising Alphorn’s Anarchy issue for which he persuaded fellow students to lie down in the playground in the shape of the letter A and photographed them from the school roof.

Through his sister’s boyfriend, the rock musician, Alexander Goebel, Sagmeister was introduced to the Schauspielhaus theatre group and designed posters for them as part of the Gruppe Gut collective. Many of the posters parodied traditionally twee theatrical imagery and offset it with roughly printed text in the grungey typefaces of punk albums and 1970s anarchist graphics.

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Bantjes is a designer, typographer, writer and illustrator working internationally from her base on a small island off the west coast of Canada, near Vancouver. She is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI), and regularly speaks about her work and thoughts at conferences and events worldwide. jects, Marian’s work has an underlying structure and formality that frames its organic, fluid nature. It is these combinations and juxtapositions that draw the interest of such a wide variety of designers and typographers, from experienced formalists to young students. Among her international clients, she counts Saks Fifth Avenue, Penguin Books, GRANTA, Wallpaper*, The Guardian, WIRED, Stefan Sagmeister, Winterhouse (Bill Drenttel & Jessica Helfand), Maharam, Ogilvy & Mather Chicago, Young & Rubicam Chicago, Random House, Houghton Mifflin, Print Magazine, GQ Italia, and The New York Times, among others from Europe, Australia and America.

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She started working as a book typesetter in 1984 and opened her own design firm in 1994 employing up to 12 people. In 2003, she left all of that behind to begin an experiment in following love instead of money, by doing work that was highly personal, obsessive and sometimes just plain weird. At the same time she began writing for the design weblog “Speak Up”, and her cheeky but thoughtful articles soon gained her recognition in the blogosphere. Through this twopronged approach, Marian caught the attention of designers and Art Directors across North America. arian’s art and design crosses boundaries of time, style and technology. She is known for her detailed and lovingly precise vector art, her obsessive hand work, her patterning and ornament. Often hired to create custom type for magazines, advertising and special pro-

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Marian

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