Dutch + British 20th Century Type Designers
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“An electrician isn’t an opinion former, but a graphic designer is. My argument is that all graphic designers hold high levels of responsibility in society. We take invisible ideas and make them tangible. That’s our job”.
- Wim Crouwel
Diverse Methods and tools for Type Design
The Grid + Free Form organic Wim Crouwel and Neville Brody’s style as type designers are similar because they both experiemnt, work by hand, and later shift to using technology. Their style as type designers are different because Crouwel is a Dutch grid-perfectionist and Brody is a British free-form designer: Crouwel thought the computer was a tool and Brody thought the computer wasn’t any faster then design by hand. Crouwel is a Dutch-modernist whereas Brody is a British post-modernist and neo-modernist. In the 1950s Crouwel did most of his work (still working) and Neville Brody was most popular with his work in the late 1980s, and early 1990s and still is working today in 2013.
Wim Crouwel Modernist, Type Designer, Graphic Designer, Grid Systems, The Netherlands, Machine Age, Dutch
Wim Crouwel was born in 1928 in Groningen, Netherlands. He is a dutch graphic designer and typographer. He is strictly about grid systems and sans-serifs. First heavily influenced by architecture, Crouwel worked for an industrial designer for five years. Crouwel was influenced by Swiss design and The New Typography (Jan Tschichold). Throughout the years his medium for typography and design has been letterpress printing, offset printing, silk screen, and digital type.
In the graphic design world in the 1950’s Crouwel used photo-lithography and offset printing which was an alternative to letterpress. Offset gave the possiblities to work with nonstandard paper sizes and printing inks. It is what made us move towards black and white and colour photography. This is when designers discovered the graphic and communications of photography in print. By the 1960s, letterpress printing was becoming popular in the Dutch printing world. Letterpress was one of the techniques Crouwel used to generate word and image. When silk-screen became popular it gave designers playground in which they could experiement with large planes of unusual colours on diverse materials in small editions. In 1952, we find one of his earliest
typographic designs at his own wedding, which is a asymmetical work. He combined a script typeface with softer form of the New Typography. The New Typography was introduced by Jan Tschichold to the Netherlands by a book he wrote called Typographische Gestaltung, which was before the second World War. It was a book about contemporary typography in post-war Holland. In 1952, he found work with the Endererg firm in Amsterdam. They were contractors for exhibition and advertising projects. One project they did was the Alle Hens aan dek (All Hands on Deck) exhibition. This was important for Crouwel because he discovered Akzidenz Grotesk. Crouwel developed a keener eye for letters and letter shapes more then he might have if he stuck only with letter press and book typography at this point. Most of his posters continued along the lines of The New Typography and Dutch representatives, who included Willem Sandberg, Dick Elffers, and Otto Treumann. The posters also showed his influence of his friends in Switzerland. In an 1961 interview Crouwel explains, “We need to move on to a completely different form of
letter, a letter that operates from a single fundamental form, which can be optically narrowed, thickened, italicized, and so on as needed. With such a standarized letter, where the idea of lower and upper case is completely eradicated, you would achieve a much page as elements of the formthat you want to achieve. The text becomes much more of an image in its own right (14).�
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It seems as though Crouwel was very much into the new. That he wants to stay on top of whats going on. Just like today with people who always want the lastest Apple mobile device. more restful visual page to begin with, which is especially important because of the pace to which people now live and read. But stop and think of what more you could do with it, how you could use letters and
Neville Brody British Free-form Graphic designer, art director, type designer, Post Modernist, and Neo-Modernist
In 1976, Brody started a three-year BA course at the London College of Printing. His tutors thought his work was “uncommercial”. In 1977, punk rock started to have a major role in London. This is what Brody thought provided the catalyst he needed. “Brody’s designs did not go down well; at one stage he was nearly thrown out for putting the Queen’s head sideways on a postage stamp design (6).” During the time that Neville Brody was starting out, from 1977 to 1979, many groups were experimenting with film and video alongside music. Brody was very much interested in imagery and using type in a similar way. He worked with making collages and montages. Finding things like a stone, a tram ticket, a pretty leg, an insect which were to inspire direct feeling. During the late 1970s Punk revealed industrial and social decay through inconography and use of xeroxes. The xerox machine was a form of communcation with results that were rough and quickly put together as Punk’s style of clothing.
In the book “The Graphic Language of Neville Brody,” it states that by the late 1980s, “design” was considered a dirty word. It symbolized the superficiality of cosmetic solutions which showed problems. An example of what Brody thinks of design, “Design is no different form art, or chairs for that matter. As a means of communication, it cannot remain neutral. At the root of it, design is a language just as French and German are languages (10).” He says that going to college was very important for him so that he could understand the process of design. Brody states that he hated type and that it was frustrating for him. He thought it was a boring field to work in, explaining that he feel into the trap of treating type in the same way everyone else did at that time. During an interview he was asked if he was aware of typographic traditions. He said during college he didn’t study it. But because he missed that training during college he feels as though he isn’t a true typographer. When he started working for the magazine “The Face” he didn’t have an understanding of the traditions but he did have an admiration for the typography of the Dadaists, Futurism, and Rodchenko. In Brody’s opinion, he thinks there are only
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so many variations that you can get from grid systems. Here we can see a big difference
between Crouwel and Brody. Another example of how Crouwel is more
structured and Brody is more loose with the way he thinks about process of typography. Grid systems to Crouwel are a method to bring structure into your work. He stated that, “Aesthetically, it could be better if I didn’t stick to my grid. But the grid was number one for me. So I never let myself go for aesthetic reason and sometimes that was difficult.”
“A design should have some tension and some expression in itself. I like to compare it with the lines on a football field. It is a strict grid. In this grid you play a game and these can be nice games or very boring games�.
- Wim Crouwel
20th Century Influences + Cultural Differences Wim Crouwel was influenced by Swiss design and Brody was mainly influenced by the British punk scene. Being influenced by the Swiss, Crouwel wanted to get his hands on Akzidenz Grotesk typeface. He was intrigued by it and wanted to use it in an exhibition. Akzidenz Grotesk came in big wooden boxes with rubber stamps of the typeface. “They stamped the letters and we sawed them out of plywood... I’ve known the Swiss since then (9).” This was when Crouwel discovered Swiss typography and graphic design.
When he wanted to use it in his exhibition he had to cut out the letters in plywood and glue them on the walls all by hand. He wanted to find out more about this typeface and went to the printers to find out. They didn’t have it, it wasn’t available in Holland. All they had to offer him was Futura and one other sans-serif typeface. So to use Akzidenz Grotesk, he bought Swiss newspapers and cut out the letters gluing them in place to then photograph and use as artwork. Brody was not only influenced by the Punk scene and Futurism, but also influenced he says by Herbert Spencer’s “Pioneers of Modern Typography” and work done by the magazine “Campo Graphico” (Italy, 1930s). He liked the experimentation of “Campo Graphico” in print medium’s context. “His work normalised typography in much the same way as David Bowie normalised ‘new wave’ to a great number of people, and although within the music buisness Bowie never had to live with the rules, with typography today we are still living with Tschichold’s rules... (9)” When Brody was working at “The Face” he started using
Letraset, which is typefaces on plastic sheets which are transferred to a design layout on an illustration board, before a final photo stat is produced. He said he wanted more immediate control of what letters looked like. He used Letraset for all his headlines. He figured out that he could manipulate Letraset and easily combine letterforms from different type families and alphabets. Once he was confident in using Letraset and figured out how he wanted to use it, he realised that this became a creative process rather than a mechanical one. He combined elements like hand-drawn signs and symbols into the letters and sometimes replacing the letters altogether. Brody states that once you become a slave to technology, you’ve lost. What he means by slave is the belief in the truth of technology. Technology is a tool, it is not the content. In the magazine The Face, Brody used typefaces Helvetica and Futura for text setting. He said he used them when he felt that sans-serif type expressed the sense of the subject. To Brody, Futura in geometric terms is unequalled and unfavorable because of its small “x” height and few words to a line.
Helvetica is elegant to him and he chooses it over Univers which he finds to be the coldest typeface because its so mechanical. Brody uses typefaces that have gone against the grain of contemporary fashion. He has used Helvetica with Arena in The Face magazine to create as he puts it, “a desperate wild style without rythme or reason where designers throw something at a wall, using devices not because they understand them but because someone else has thrown something at a wall. It’s become an extremely mannered use of type (35).”
Neville Brody’s Typefaces 1980s - 1990s
Arcadia ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ FF Dirty 1
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ FF Dirty 1 Bold FF Dirty 2 FF Dirty 5 FF Dirty 6.2 FF Dirty 4
FF Dome A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
FF Harlem
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ FF Harlem FF Harlem FF Harlem
Art Deco
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Industria
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z Industria Industria
Industria
Insignia ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Insignia
Tokyo 1 ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Tokyo 1 solid
Tokyo 2 Tokyo 2 Solid
Typeface 4.1
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Typeface 4.2 Typeface 6 Typeface 7
Geometric
“I used to think computers were just tools. Because my initial response to the computer was that if a job can be done by hand, then you don’t need a machine to do it. Then I realised that it doesn’t affect the way you think about your work, just the way that you can do it. As a labour saving device it doesn’t save any time at all. It means you’ve got more time to try out more options, more time to do things you wouldn’t have been able to do before. So you don’t work any less. You work just as much, if not more. There’s more stuff happening all the time. And now we’ve got the bloody Internet to deal with.”
- Neville Brody
Digital Age New Technological Experiences In 1991, Neville Brody along side Jon Wozencroft ignited the magazine FUSE. They said it was the new forum for typography. Its been more then a decade since the last issue and it returns with FUSE 1-20 in 2012. It is a deluxe box set of 18 out of print issues in a book that are designed by Brody along with 2 never before published issues, posters, and an online library of 24 fonts.
Brody designed a typeface in 2009 called New Deal for the Public Enembies movie title. It was specifically made for this movie and is not to be used for anything other then the movie.
FF Blur Even though Brody used a lot of typefaces that were not his for “The Face”, he created many typefaces of his own. One of the many typefaces he designed is FF Blur. FF Blur was created in 1991, and wasn’t a readable typeface. Brody made FF Blur by going into Photoshop using a grotesque typeface and bluring it with the blur filter three times. This created light, medium and bold. FF Blur became one of the most popular typefaces in the early 1990s and has remained popular to this date. Around the same time the second volume of “A Graphic Language of Neville Brody” came out with FF Blur on the cover.
In present time, Brody created a typeface called New Deal in 2009. It was commissioned by director Michael Mann for his film Public Enemies. Brody states that Michael Mann wanted a font that evoked the Depression era since his movie was set in the 1930s. Brody got inspiration from publicity posters for Roosevelt’s New Deal, which gave economic relief after the 1929 Wall Street collapse. The design is a very contructivist, Soviet, communist style. This typeface was created only for the movie Public Enemies and isn’t available for public use. Other typefaces that Brody created include, Arcadia, FF Autorace, FF Dirty 1 through 7.2, FF Dome, FF Gothic, FF Harlem, Industria, Insignia, FF Meta Subnormal, FF Pop, FF Tokyo, FF Typeface 4, 6, and 7, FF Tyson, and FF World. Brody was very much into geometric sans-serifs, and Art Deco display faces.
In 1963, Wim Crouwel closed his one-man studio and opened up Total Design in Amsterdam with designers, Frisco Kramer, Benno Wissing, Paul and Dick Schwarz. It was open until 1980. At Total Design, their objective was primarily text and image. Like Brody, Crouwel and his team of designers used image for drawing characters and letters, creating word images, making numbers understandable, designing signposting, visualizing processes and intentions, and so on. They worked with letters and creating trademarks or logs as well. But in contrast to Brody, modular systems or grids played a major role at Total Design. In 1965, Crouwel saw the fist results produced by the Hell Digiset phototypesetter. The is a digital system grid system. The dots are arranged logically in a grid. He thought that typefaces had failed to evolve along with technical advancements. This motivated him to create a new font that would not suffer such technical shortcomings. This led to him creating New Alphabet. Crouwel points out that New Alphabet wasn’t designed for book typography. The New Alphabet was his first complete alphabet. It included numbers and three widths. It was all lowercase letter, and capitals could be indicated by a line above the letter. Crouwel’s father made the technical drawings. “Wim Crouwel’s New Alphabet had now become an alphabet that symbolized the primeval age of the computer, but he nonetheless continued to see it in print (19).”
Wim Crouwel’s Typefaces 1980s - 1990s
New Alphabet ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Foundry Gridnik ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ Foundry Gridnik Foundry Gridnik Foundry Gridnik
Architype Fodor ABcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz Stedelijk ABcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
The New Alphabet went threw many stages before it was finished. First it had rounded corners, but Crouwel ended up switching to diagonal corners. He created a story about how it was made and thought the text should all be typeset in that typeface. Digital outputting wasn’t available in Holland yet. So he had to do it all by hand. So he asked Mecanorma (the rub-down lettering system) to produce sheets of his typeface. His father glued all the columns of type by hand. Gerard Unger who worked at Total Design with Crouwel said that New Alphabet wasn’t readable. So he designed a typeface with the same straight lines but now it was better and more readable. At the end of the 1990s, The Foundry came to Crouwel and asked if they could digitize his typefaces. Crouwel was flattered and agreed. He worked with David Quay of The Foundry to digitize his typefaces. Crouwel explains that David did all the work. He knew nothing about making typefaces in the digital way and didn’t know the software programs. They sat next to each other and made a bolder typeface and thinner version of Gridnik. All the typefaces Wim Crouwel designed were, New Alphabet, Gridnik, Architype Fodor, Architype Ingenieur, and Architype Vierkant. But some of these typefaces are display only. Crouwel was strictly a sans-serif type of type designer.
In an interview by Computer Arts Magazine, Neville Brody is asked if computers are just tools or something more. He responded, “I used to think computers were just tools. Because my initial response to the computer was that if a job can be done by hand, then you don’t need a machine to do it (creativebloq.com).” He realized the computer doesn’t affect the way you think about your work, but the way you can do it. He says that it doesn’t cut down on the time you spend but give you time to explore and try out more options.
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Brody says that the mistake people often make is thinking the computer is just a tool. He says that the computer is a new medium like television or cinema. “ It’s like when television first appeared - they looked like radios because that’s what people were used to. To him it seems that all new technologies can only be accepted if replicating old technology. For Wim Crouwel, he didn’t learn how to work the computer until 1993. But he was familiar with them from when he was the head of the computer department at the Delft school. To Crouwel the computer saved time. “In the earlier days, if I did a poster, it took me three days to draw the poster, to make the final artwork, to go to the printer and so on (77).” He explains now you can do it within an hour. Crouwel says that there are some negatives about the computer, because people think that just because they have access to these programs that it means that everyone is a designer. Ther is a lot of ugliness produced by the computer, but also a lot of very good stuff. To him the computer is a great tool and he can’t live without it.
Neville Brody and Wim Crouwel have numerous differences because of their different historical times and cultural backgrounds. But they also have some similarities in regards to their approach to graphic design and type design. Brody is very opinionated on typography, and how it should be used and how people use it. Talking about typefaces function and what exactly they should and shouldn’t be used for. Crouwel sticking to his grid system that he swears by, but also experimental and quite creative. Combining image, architecture and type all together with a lot of hard work and hand craft. Brody was skeptical of the computer at first, and then grew into it. But Crouwel was very excited when things started to become digital, wanting to explore the new medium, the new tool. Both are very influential to designers today. Today Brody is a teacher at the Royal College of Art teaching young students
about design. He says that art schools should be where new things happen. Crouwel is still designing today, but has slowed down on his design. Even though this is the case his typefaces and his sense of structure with the grid lives on and many designers are still using them today. His workhorse typefaces are still considered very usable and modern.
Colophon Designer Name: Bethany Jennings Images:
http://www.typetoken.net/icon/wim-crouwel-a-graphic-odyssey-retrospective-exhibition/
http://www.dezeen.com/2011/04/05/interview-wim-crouwel-at-the-design-museum/ http://www.theblanksheetproject.com/creative/1/neville_brody http://farm4.staticflickr.com/3577/3402242966_f462b8abd1.jpg http://ronanpadraigmoran.blogspot.com/2011_01_01_archive.html http://www.isit20.com/pic-apple-ii_12.html http://www.isuppli.com/Teardowns/Pages/All-in-One-and-More-Apple-iMac-Hardware- Analysis.aspx http://www.fmvmagazine.com/?p=7235 http://blog.reclone3d.com/2012/10/ http://www.diamondland.be/diamondnews/nanodiamond-computer-chips http://graafix.blogspot.com/2011/05/wallpapers-flag-of-netherlands.html
Typefaces: Foundry Gridnik, FF Dirty One, FF Dirty 1 Bold, FF Dirty 2, FF Dirty 5, FF Dirty 6.2, FF Dirty 4, Fodor, Arcadia, FF Dirty 1, FF Dome, FF Harlem, Industria, Insignia, Tokyo 1, Tokyo Solid, Tokyo 2, Tokyo 2 Solid, Typeface 4.1, Typeface 4.2, Typeface 6, Typeface 7
Project: Typographers Book Design Course: Typography 3 Faculty: Francheska Guerrero College: Corcoran College of Art + Design
Work Cited Wim Crouwel: David Quay and Kees Broos, Wim Crouwel - Alphabets, Amsterdam, BIS Publishers, 2003 Wim Crouwel: A Graphic Odyssey, BNN Inc, March 2011
Neville Brody: Wozencroft, Jon, The Graphic Language of Neville Brody, New York, Universe Publishing, 2001 http://www.100besttypefaces.com/index.php The Guardian, The guidelines: Neville Brodyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fave film fonts and opening sequences, the guardian.com, June 26, 2009 < http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2009/jun/27/neville-brodys-fave-film-fonts-openings > Cori Johnson, Neville Brody pushes the boundaries of type, typotalks.com, April 9, 2012 < http://typotalks.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2012/04/09/neville-brody-pushes-the-boundaries-of-type/ > Computer Arts, Classic Interview: Neville Brody, creativebloq.com, March 12, 2012, < http://www.creativebloq.com/classic-interview-neville-brody-3124210 >