Becoming
By Alexander Towell | GDNMYR2 www.alexandertowell.gdnm.org www.experimentaljetset.gdnm.org
T-Shirt, this t shirt above is a design me and the group came up with to try and display the way in which The Jet Set experimental may display our names. A design idea that was originally taken from a t-shirt they produced displaying the names of the members of the Beatel’s. (see pg. )
THE HELVETICA DOCUMENTARY COVER ANALYSIS
Experimental Jetset
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Experimental Jet set Biography: The Experimental Jet set are a small independent graphic design studio based in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. The group is made up of three people: Marieke Stolk, Danny can den Dungen and Erwin Brinkers. The three of them all went to the arts academy “Gerrit Rietveld Academy” in 1997. The group mainly focus they’re attention to the art of print and to be honest more specifically the Print of the type face helvetica. Their statement on the subject of graphic design is “ We often describe graphic design as “turning language into objects”.” On the Jet set website their biography then goes on to talk about the design for they’re website in extreme detail this may say something about them as a group. They seem less concerned in filling us up with information about they’re lives and clients and more concerned with explaining their design. Over all the group seem to infuse the idea of the type face helvetica within everything they produce, in a sense they have branded the helvetica look. And are trying to push the way perceive and digest the helvetica type face. By introducing designs and shapes and graphics that incapsulate the feeling of helvetica.
The helvetica documentary is a documentary by the punk label turned director Gary Hustwit. He contacted the the experimental jet set towards the end of 2005 with the contract to put a piece of work together for the dvd cover. The jet set were contracted in to
By Alex Towell
ence. Again, one can object: but a pound of sugar is equal to itself. Neither is this true – all bodies change uninterruptedly in size, weight, colour, etc. They are never equal to themselves.” This text basically states that the letter A in never equal to another letter A. Not even to itself. The jet set felt asthough this statement really summed up the way the group felt about the type face helvetica. This is basically a statement that talks about type a lot like one would talk about color theory or the way when colors play of each other they result in different results. The jet set applied to they’re poster design by placing different forms of helvetica on a page playing bold against simple and so forth. In the poster the Jet set have claimed to mistakes fully on they’re own back in the right column the alphabet misses the letter “g” and “r”. They
state “It’s such a stupid mistake, and we are fully responisble for it. It shows how blind you can be while designing. It’s not that the letters “g” and “r” wouldn’t have fit on the poster; in fact, we could have easily make it all fit, by composing the whole right column like this: The1234 56789ab cdefghijk lmnopqr stuvwxyz of Mate rialist Dia lectics” In our groups eyes the Helvetica movie poster / dvd cover trys to simply and easily illustrate the simplicity and boldness of
the type face. The way it weighʼs its self against its self is always suiting to a modern piece of design. Jonathan Hoefler states “ And Helvetica maybe says everything, and that’s perhaps part of its appeal.” i agree with this when worries about what type face to use in a design scenario theyʼre is always helvetica to create simple yet elegant balanced layouts.
do 2 pieces ofwork a poster for print to be a fundraiser for the movie and a cover design to be printed on the DVD. The Jet Sset talk about the way they went about they’re design and what interested them in they’re journey into creating the pictures pictured above. They talk about a text by the
author leon Trotsky “The ABC of Materialist Dialetics”(1939) especially this quote in particular. “I will here attempt to sketch the substance of the problem in a very concise form. The Aristotelian logic of the simple syllogism starts from the proposition that ‘A’ is equal to ‘A’. This postulate is accepted as an axiom for a multitude of practical human actions and elementary generalisations. But in reality, ‘A’ is not equal to ‘A’. This is easy to prove if we observe these two letters under a lens – they are quite different from each other. But, one can object, the question is not of the size or the form of the letters, since they are only symbols for equal quantities; for instance, a pound of sugar. This objection is beside the point; in reality a pound of sugar is never equal to a pound of sugar – a more delicate scale always discloses a differ-
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104 / Le Cent Quatre By Adam Alexander
Design Problem/ Question
To develop their graphic identity and sign system. To design a graphic manual, a ‘charte graphique’, for other designers to work with. These would be for a hall that was to become the location of 104 (Le Cent Quatre), a new French cultural institute that would open its doors in October 2008. Situated in the 19th arrondissement, 104 is a very ambitious project, housing several exhibition spaces, theatre halls, concert venues, stores, and apartments for artists-in-residence.
Context
They said it was a very complicated construction: because of all kinds of reasons (legal, political, bureaucratic and cultural reasons), they were only allowed to work on the graphic manual, while other design studios would then be responsible for applying this
Graphic Identity
manual to all the different parts of the graphic identity (sign system, website, etc.).
Methods
They focused on the idea that 104, as a project, is never finished, always evolving, eternally ‘under construction’. So they created a sign system that would refer to the concept of the ‘work-in-progress’. They became interested in the concept of scaffolding. A scaffold (in French, ‘échafaudage’, in Dutch ‘stellage’ or ‘steiger’) is a structure that automatically refers to ‘work-in-progress’; it is immediately associated with construction sites, and the activity of building in general. They realized that a sign system based on the idea of scaffolding would be a constant reminder of the continuous cycle of building, demolishing and rebuilding. There plan was to create a sort of modular system of street furniture, a family of abstract forms referring to billboards, benches, traffic signs, pavilions and kiosks.
So basically, there idea was that the use of these shapes that revered to a street would reinforce the idea of Le Cent Quatre as a street in itself, a fully functional street. By placing street furniture in there, or better said a sign system referring to street furniture, Le Cent Quatre would become a street, or a model of a street. They created a logo to give the whole project a identy. The logo consists of three elements: a line, a circle, and a triangle. Together, these three elements form a stylized ’104′. They liked the idea of these geometric forms as ‘building blocks’, as ‘bricks’. They developed a full logo system, in different weights, and also versions containing the text in full: ‘Le Cent Quatre’. They had to add ‘Etablissment Artistique de la Ville de Paris’ to the logo because of thr city council wanting it. The typeface they used, in the 104 graphic identity as a whole, is Futura. As can be seen below, they replaced, in the standard Futura alphabet, both the letter ‘A’ and number ’4′ for a triangle, and the number ’0′ for a round ‘O’, to sort of reinforce the link between the logo and the typeface: They chose Futura for several reasons. First of all, Futura is a geometric typeface, so it fits very well with
there logo. And secondly, it’s a typical early-industrial typeface, referring very much to the transition from the 19th century to the 20th century. So in that sense, it works very well within the context of a passage, an arcade. What experimental jetset didn’t like about this assignment is that they weren’t allowed to design everything themselves. They were told they would be creating an underlying graphic identity, for other designers to work with. They managed in the end to design some printed designs things for the project in the end, which consisted of a t-shirt and bag, both designed for La Traversée; a couple of button badges, designed for various occasions; a New Year’s card (basically an A3-sized miniposter, to be folded to an A5-format); the frontcover of an A4-sized brochure and two A5-sized invitation cards.
Coming Soon Arnhem We Are The World Graphic Identity By Alex Towell
In 2007 Experimental Jet Set where asked to formulate a visual identity for a fashion story that would open its doors that same year, under the constraint of time the group had to act fast. They were also required to work along side other artists more specifically Event Architecture. Their work hard to coincide with the
Arnhem being the name of the city in which the shop was located. Thanks to the simplicity of the logo design it was an easy fix and along with the newly created font easy to print up quickly. The new Coming Soon Arnhem logo was created and printed on a manner of press related materials.
Graphic Text/ Image By Aimee Quirke
Problem /Question
Architecture Firmʼs vision. Their vision consisted of a very geometric, almost Super studio like grid, a grid that would divide the store into modular blocks. The experimental jet set out to bring the architectural design into the design and formulate a visual identity that would interpret the architecture of the store. The name the jet set had to formulate the brand around was “coming soon”. Initially they were asked to begin designing a logo that could also function without these words and read by itself. They began by breaking down some of these words coming soon and began replacing some of the letters with these geometric forms. Turning some of the boring letters from the words Coming Soon into a geometric forms, by doing this the reader replaces the forms with the letters. Creating a design that allows the user to interpret the logo and replace the forms with the corresponding letters to spell the associated letters within the words coming soon. Along with creating a brand logo to do with the shop and its architecture the brand also needed a typeface to emboss all their print with. They labelled these new type faces CS BETA BOLD, and CS, BETA LIGHT. After all this work another change of plans came through the door and the experimental jet had to change their designs slightly. The shop would now be called “Coming Soon: Arnhem”
After looking at the way the Experimental Jet Set approached the assignment it is clear that a good place to start with any brand is a type face just because of its versatility of use and its ability to make anything it is applied to look unique. I also noted the way they went about their logo design the approach of using common knowledge association and its ability to create another versatile piece of design is another good practice to look at. I love the simplicity of the work that has been created here and its ability to draw an illustration of a piece of architecture and encompass the values of the architecture into its brand.
To create a graphic identity and sign system and catalogue for a group exhibition (that is held at the Dutch pavilion during Venice Biennial, with the intention to turn the exhibition into a clear and optimistic statement about multiculturalism in the Netherlands.
way that when opening the catalogue, the reader makes a movement from the biggest to the smallest part: from the earth as a planet, to the world as a group of countries, to one specific nation. On the front of the gatefold sleeve, a large inkblot is shown; an inkblot that, certainly in combination with the title, seems to represent a planet. When opening the gatefold sleeve, the centre spread shows a world map made up of inkblots. When removing the publication from the pocket of the sleeve, the frontside of the publication shows an inkblot in the shape of the Netherlands. In other words, in three steps the reader moves from the world as seen from space, to one particular country. (And since the map of the Netherlands itself also consists of inkblots, inkblots similar to the one shown on the cover of the gatefold sleeve, the
suggestion is that every country consists of different planets. Thus, there is a movement from the biggest to smallest, and back again to the biggest, in a continuous loop). The heart of the booklet is a 12-page section entitled ‘Rorschach Geography’. Since this section is placed exactly in the middle of the booklet, it can pulled out as a separate booklet. ‘Rorschach Geography’ shows the five native countries of the participating artists (respectively Mexico, Spain, Benin, and the Netherlands times two) as a series of Rorschach inkblots. As we explained before, by linking the notions of cartography and psycho-analysis, we wanted to suggest that the idea of nationality is most of all a psychological projection. It’s interesting how this section came about. Originally, the booklet was intended to contain a large, 12-page essay on multiculturalism. At the last moment, the curator rejected this text, which left them with 12 empty pages, one day before it was due at the printer. This is what they came up with instead: Another important part of the catalogue are the posters. Basically a set of five A2-sized posters, folded to A4, this section of the catalogue is the only part that contains full-colour printing.
Context
The ‘We Are The World’ catalogue consists of a gatefold cardboard sleeve (in its folded form approximately 22 x 31 cm), unfolding in two ‘pockets’. The first pocket contains an A4-sized booklet of 50 pages, featuring documentation about the participating artists, printed in black and white. The second pocket contains a set of five A2-sized posters (folded to A4), each one featuring a full-colour work by the artist on the frontside, and a black and white (self-)portrait of the artist on the backside. The gatefold catalogue as a whole is packaged in a transparent, plastic sleeve.
They designed the publication in such a
Methods
The exhibition intended to juxtapose different notions of cultural diversity, politics and art. At the same time, the Biennale itself is also a place where topics such as nationality and culture come together. So for this assignment, experimental jetset wanted to find a way to combine all these different elements, preferably in a tight and idiosyncratic graphic system. Thinking about ways to combine the notion of nationality and art, they arrived at the
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HELVETICA By Chrs Okia
HISTORY
Helvetica was developed in 1957 by Max Miedinger with Eduard Hoffmann at the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas type foundry) of Münchenstein,Switzerland. Haas set out to design a new sans-serif typeface that could compete with the successful Akzidenz-Grotesk in the Swiss market. its design was based on SchelterGrotesk and Haas’ Normal Grotesk. The aim of the new design was to create a neutral typeface that had great clarity, no intrinsic meaning in its form, and could be used on a wide variety of signage. In 1960, the typeface’s name was changed by Haas’ German parent company Stempel to Helvetica (derived from Confoederatio Helvetica, the Latin name for Switzerland) in order to make it more marketable internationally. It was initially suggested that the type be called ‘Helvetia’ which is the original Latin name for Switzerland. This was ignored by Eduard Hoffmann as he decided it wouldn’t be appropriate to name a type after a country. He then decided on ‘Helvetica’ as this meant ‘Swiss’ as opposed to ‘Switzerland’.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 0123456789 Helvetica Light
USAGE
Above and Below: Helvetica is used in all New York official subway signs. The font has become synonymous with the theme and style of the worlds most famous subway.
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz 0123456789 Helvetica Bold
Helvetica is among the most widely used sans-serif typefaces. Versions also exist for the following alphabets/scripts: Latin, Cyrillic, Hebrew,Greek, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Urdu, Khmer and Vietnamese. Chinese faces have been developed to complement Helvetica. Helvetica is a popular choice for com mercial wordmarks, including those for 3M, American Airlines, American Apparel, BMW, Jeep, Lufthansa, Microsoft, Mitsubishi Electric, Orange, Target, Toyota, Panasonic, Motorola, Kawasaki and Verizon Wireless. Apple Inc. has used Helvetica widely in Mac OS X (as default font for sans-serif/Swiss generic font family), iOS (previously iPhone OS), and the iPod. The iPhone 4 uses Neue Helvetica.
Canada’s federal government uses Helvetica as its identifying typeface, with three variants being used in its corporate identity program, and encourages its use in all federal agencies and websites. CNN used Helvetica as its main font for much of its history; they recently switched to Univers. The NBA on TNT used Helvetica from 2002–05; NBA on ABC used the font during the 2003-04 NBA season. CBS Sports programs have been using Helvetica since 2006, particularly during its broadcasts of the NCAA Men’s Division I Basketball Tournament and the NFL. The U.S. adaptation of The Office uses Helvetica in its graphics.
FONTSTRUCT Fontstruct is a website/ web app that has been devised to assist the viewer in the act of creating font’s which as you can tell from my previous attempts is no easy feat. The users are invited into building their own personalized lettering built upon a grid system and constructed out of a library of shapes the app presents to the user. After completion the font can be downloads as a True Type font of .ttf and is them compatible with any windows or mac font. You can also link the font you create into your html using an embedded code, this way the font is hosted on the font struct server. The whole idea is really neat and i look forward to seeing where the creators take it. Fontstruct is created by Font shop, which emerged in 2010. FontShop is an online company of sorts that dedicate they’re time and efforts towards the creation of font’s and the management of fonts, i.e the distribution and money. The history of FontShop is rather more extensive dating back to 1989, when Erik and Joan Spiekermann signed a contract with leading type foundries, purchasing fonts. These were sold out of a small office. FontShop became the first independent seller of digital type in the world. Today, they have gone digital and offer an enormous number of fonts to customers. This is the first time i have seen a font creation website i know that sites already exists that let users choose an existing font and download it. However, it is hard to find a tool that makes it easy to actually build a new font. Fontstruct does just that and makes the process simpler with a grid and geometric shape tools that give users total freedom. If you go onto the website features a video that helps depict how the application works. The site uses a bright yellow, grey and black color scheme that looks eye-catching while enticing new users to explore. A handful of navigational tabs help users discover the Fontstructor, personally created fonts, the community gallery, site blog and support. The editing tools available make it difficult to not build an original, stylish font on Fontstruct. A new user can click on the white “Sign in” link at the top, right hand corner of the website. This takes the user to the login form which includes a blue “Sign Up Now” link at the bottom. The form is kept short, requesting only a username, email address and password. The user must check the bottom terms of use check box to continue. Two other check boxes are also available to sign the user up for Fontstruct news updates and new and free font updates from FontShop. I can see any creative individual really getting a kick out of Fontstruct. Users can visit the site and see what they can build and share with the community. Users who are in need of a font can create one to their specifications and download it for free. There are many potential uses and endless customization options when using Fontstruct.
PRACTICAL Design Project
MADE IN SWITZERLAND
For the practical part of the becoming brief i was not sure what direction to take the brief in. Having looked at all off experimental jet sets work i realized that what they primarily do is find new and innovative ways of displaying printed media. The Experimental Jet-sets library of work s both experimental and vast and can be found on their website (www.experimentaljetset.org). As noted early in this work, completed by my self and my group, their most famous work is comprised of work primarily encompassing the font and theme of helvetica although not always. Through my research these ideas have remained at the forefront of my mind as the focus and direction of the work my group looked into throughout this project. This was not the first time i met helvetica however before this i did not understand it as well. For my practical brief, of which the direction was founded by the Jet sets love for typography, I went on my way to trying to get my head around making a font. As well as creating a few experimental font layouts of my own. I made a really awesome discovery while i was on this quest and would really like to share it with you in the upcoming paragraphs.
STAEDTLER HB
INTRO
PRACTICAL
For the becoming brief practical assignment i began by sketching, you can find these sketches up on my blog (www.alexandertowell.gdnm.org). There are 3 font’s i created within those books, handwritten, circle, and a graphite inspired ornate typography. The one that I finalized on, is partially due to time and after refinement the one that showed the best results was the circle font. I found that with the ornate font, the work took ages and didn’t have a good finish. And handwritten was completed after the circle font during another of the briefs and i have not ad time to finish the line work on the computer. But even with all that said the circle font in my eyes is still the best. I began experimenting with the negative space produced by the circles as i created the font
by using other colors as a back drop. You can make out smarties or sweats in one of the final posters below. This added a certain childlike element to the work. Its simple and the paths were easily achieved. This project has really helped me begin to understand how complicated type faces really can be to achieve. Hopefully you enjoy looking at them as much as me.