Type Specimen: Rosalie Sans - by Stefanie Mair

Rosalie Sans

Rosalie Sans designed by Stefanie Mair

Rosalie 60 pt

The Rosalie Typeface was created during a Visual Communication project in the Free University of Bolzano, after attending a calligraphy workshop with professional calligrapher Mag. Art. Eva PĂśll from Vienna, Austria. The students learned the traditional use of pen and ink and had to copy old−style handwritten antiqua text with proper technique. After the workshop we had to choose a classic typeface, which we could modify through changing the brush strokes.

14/16 pt

Typographic characteristics

Horizontal cuts−off

Candy Large aperture

Vertical stress

Vertical cuts−off

Strong contrast between the strokes Long descender

110 pt

Slight contrast between the strokes

Straight Apex

APPLE

Thick crossbar

100 pt

Horizontal cuts−off

UPPER CASE

ABCDEFG HIJKLM NOPQ RSTU VWX YZ 55/80 pt

lower case

abcdefg hijklm nopq rstu vwx yz 55/80 pt

Special letters & diacritical signs

Je n ai rien dire Na schön, ich hätte es wissen müssen!

48/50 pt

UPPER CASE Horizonzal cuts−off

Strong contrast between the thickness of the strokes Axis

Pointed corners

lower case

Strong con− trast between the thickness of the strokes Horizonzal cuts−off Axis

Slightly curved stroke Pointed corner

Rosalie Sans

12 pt

Rosalie Sans

14 pt

Rosalie Sans

18 pt

Rosalie Sans

24 pt

Rosalie Sans

30 pt

Rosalie Sans

36 pt

Rosalie Sans

Rosalie Sans

48 pt

60 pt

Typographic terms

axis

counter

link

loop

The scream

The Scream (1893) was painted at the end of the nineteenth century during a unique transitional period in art history, sometimes referred to as the fin de siècle. While artists were once interested in painting their subjects objectively since their success was often measured by their technical skill, by the end of the nineteenth century artists like Edvard Munch were starting to use art to express inner thoughts, feelings and emotions instead, often by painting with bright, ex− aggerated colors and simple sha− pes. Though reviled by critics and were considered too radical in their time, artists like Munch and even Vincent Van Gogh paved the way for Expressionism and the even more progressive modern art movements of the twentieth

24 pt

century. So what is the meaning and story behind The Scream? In what he referred to as his “soul painting,” Edvard Munch reveals an honest and perhaps even ugly glimpse of his inner troubles and feelings of anxiety, putting more importance on personal meaning than on technical skill or “beauty,” a traditional goal of art. According to Munch’s dia− ries, the idea and inspiration for The Scream was very autobi− ographical, with the modern art painting’s content closely based on a personal experience first recorded in an 1892 diary entry which Munch later adapted into The Scream painting and finally, in 1895, a poem.

14/14pt

Edvard Munch’s life was literally studded with misfortunes and family deaths. His mother died for tuberculosis when he was five, followed soon by his sister. Another sister was diagnosed with a serious mental illness, forcing her to live in a psychiatric institution, the father suffered manic−depressive disorders and his brother died a few months after getting married. Munch said: “I inherited two of mankind’s most frightful enemies,” he later wrote, “the heritage of consumption and insanity.”

There could be nothing joyful or positive in the art that Edvard Munch start− ed to produce from his early twenties. From early age, painting had been a way to be isolated from the sadness he perceived in the family. Growing up, Munch saw in artistic expression a way to represent anguish and despair like no one else had yet done: repreenting them as the only true protagonists of life. Impress− ing them on canvas as the only possible content of an art that intended to look into the eyes existece and human beings’ meanings. His art was not a form of ca−tharsis: according to Munch, in fact, nothing else existed in life. The original title that Munch gave his most iconic painting was The Scream of Nature. What he explained with his words above was the origin of the two interpretative theo− ries around this painting: it’s the human the onw who screams and the nature that writhes around its scream, or it is the nature the one screaming and the subject is overwhelmed, covering his ears for defense? Basically there is not much dif− ference between these two visions. The desperate cry of nature involves every single thing into the same anxiety. The human being and the landscape are one only thing: the red−blooded sunset, the fjords and the human figure follow the same wavy forms, the same loss of focus, the same dissolution of reality. They share the same condition: coming out of the condition of disgrace is impossible. And each individual is alone in his own despair: the human figures in the background of the painting look in another direction, their borders are defined, they don’t par− ticipate in the protagonist’s crisis, they show total indifference. Despair exists also for them. But it’s precisely what prevents the empathy between individuals.

Behind what would soon become the painting symbol of modern human condi− tion, there was a superior ambition: Munch’s intention was to describe the states of life through a series of works that would have to be exhibited one after the other, in what initially was named “Study for a Series: Love” and then, in 1918, it simply became The Frieze of Life. In Edvard Munch’s idea, the series had to be displayed on four dedicated walls. The first was Seeds of Love, where the origin of life draws from Christianity scenes, including Eye in Eye, The Kiss and Madonna.

12/14pt

Diacritical signs

Numerals

Faculty of Design and Art Free University of Bolzano − Bozen Typeface designed by Stefanie Mair WUP 18/ 19 Prof. Antonino Benincasa Gian Marco Favretto Maximilian Boiger Calligraphy Workshop by Mag. Art. Eva PĂśll Font created with Illustrator & Fontself