What does typography mean to you? Blank was created in November 2014 as an experience in typography. After creating a typographic installation answering the question ‘What is typography?’. I was inspired to create a typographic magazine featuring an article on the installation itself. Blank will serve as an up-to-date reference for all things typography from installations, studies, and expert interviews. Typography is our current lives is often unappreciated. Blank brings light to this unfortunate state of affairs, allowing just a tiny shift in focus from pop culture, to design. With monthly columns, and feature articles, Blank provides information and inspiration to amateur typographers and typographic experts alike. Imagine a world without typography? To do so is nearly impossible. If typography were to cease existing with tomorrow’s sunrise, how would we as a society go on? How would we find our way if even the letters on a compass no longer meant anything? To avoid typography is to avoid being. With Blank, typography is brought once again to life and light. Blank will answer the question: ‘What does typography mean to us?’. Sincerely, Chelsea Reppin Editor-in-Chief
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John. D. Berry
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I. In September design felt impotent and frivolous. There is nothing inherent in our profession that forces us to support worthy causes, to promote good things, to avoid visual pollution. There might be such a responsibility in us as people. In August, when thinking about my reasons for being alive, for getting out of bed in the morning, I would have written the following down.
HOW GOOD IS GOOD? Stefan Sagmeister Born in Austria. After having worked at M&Co. in New York and at the Hong Kong office of the advertising agency Leo Burnett, he formed the New York–based Sagmeister Inc. in 1993. He has designed graphics and packaging for mainly cultural clients. In 2001, BoothClibborn published a book on Stefan Sagmeister’s work Sagmeister: Made you Look.
HOW TO BE GOOD? Well, does help by definition have to be selfless? Am I allowed to get something out of myself? If I do help, am I permitted to have fun while doing so? I read an interview with an art director in England discussing his award winning campaign ad campaign for an association for the blind, featuring a striking image of a guide dog with human eyes stripped in. He mentioned that he knew that a picture of a cute puppy would have raised more donations for the association, but was more interested in winning awards. He had no problems with this attitude.
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1. STRIVE FOR HAPPINESS 2. DON’T HURT ANYBODY 3. HELP OTHERS ACHIEVE THE SAME Now I would change that priority: 1. HELP OTHERS 2. DON’T HURT ANYBODY 3. STRIVE FOR HAPPINESS
The Good vs. The Bad
When GE gives 10 million to the WTC victim families, is it ok for them to look good for doing so? Or, a more extreme case: Is it ok for Philip Morris to go and give 60 million to help out various charities and then spend another 108 million promoting this good deed in magazine ads? If you are homeless and you just got a hot meal from St. Johns in Brooklyn, one of the organizations the money went to, you don’t really give a shit if the people who gave it to you tout their own horn afterwards. Even though it really is a ridiculous case, isn’t it still preferable to blowing the entire 168 million on a regular ad budget?
Winter Sorbeck, design teacher and fictional main character in Chip Kidd’s new novel The Cheese Monkeys, says at one point: Uncle Sam is Commercial Art, the American Flag is graphic design. Commercial Art makes you BUY things, graphic Design GIVES you ideas. If I’m able to do that, to give ideas, that WOULD be a good reason to get out of bed in the morning.
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Type In History
The above billboard from the 60s is almost like a stage set. It also comes alive through light, dimensionality and reality. Those below from 1932-36 are more artful. They are winners of the Outdoor Advertising competitions that held display in high regard. Billboards may have a bad rap as littering the roadside and cityscape, but they are indigenous to the popular culture of this nation.
THE BILLBOARD EXTRAVAGANCE Steven Heller Steven Heller is the co-chair of the SVA MFA Designer /Designer as Author + Entrepreneur program, writes frequently for Wired and Design Observer. He is also the author of over 170 books on design and visual culture. He received the 1999 AIGA Medal and is the 2011 recipient of the Smithsonian National Design Award.
Billboards are a uniquely American form of advertising. Sure, there are roadside advertisements in Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, etc. But in the U.S. they are bigger, bolder and more expensive. Billboard design is big business. It is also, as Douglas Leigh called the electronic billboards in Times Square, “spectacular.�
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III. Perhaps best known for what he calls his “typographic design fiction projects,” including “Typosperma,” which was part of MoMA’s 2008 “Design and the Elastic Mind” exhibition, and the design of The New American Haggadah, Ezer mostly earns his living by licensing his original typefaces through his HebrewTypography foundry. When he’s not designing marketable typefaces, he’s a kind of typographic mad scientist, giving letterforms wings and legs, amputating their parts or surgically attaching them to his own face and body.
ODED EZER: MAD TYPOGRAPHIC SCIENTIST Ellen Shapiro Ellen Shapiro is a graphic designer, author, critic and researcher as well as a recognised authority on design profession matters: service provision (buyers) and service delivery (providers). She is the Principal of Shapiro Design Associates, Inc. and a specialist in logos and identity programs, marketing communications, periodicals and educational materials.
The iconoclastic Israeli graphic designer, typographer and type designer Oded Ezer is in residence on the East Coast for two months, lecturing and teaching a class called “Type Follows Emotion, Personal Typographic Exploration” at Rhode Island School of Design.
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^ TypoGod Do we love type enough to worship it? God shaped Adam from a lump of clay, and Ezer shapes graven images for idol-worship from Hebrew and Latin letters.
Experts In Type
Last Tuesday evening, while the RSID class members were busy brainstorming the curative potential of letter forms, Ezer took a quick trip down to New York City to speak to members of AIGA/ NY at the apt venue of MAD, the Museum of Arts and Design on Columbus Circle. Here are some of the ideas he put forth and projects he showed:
Biotypography letter ‘pei’—sprout translucent wings and grow legs. Above, Ezer mates letterforms and biological systems to create new typographical phenomena, Hebrew and Latin typo-ants.
Typosperma Type begets more type. Undertaking a process that involved hiring a scientific consultant and commissioning three-dimensional wire-frame visualizations, Ezer creates half human sperm–half letters, with serifs. “The three imaginary creatures—‘a,’ ‘p,’ and ‘s’—in the poster above are cloned sperms,” he says. “Typographic information has been implanted into their DNA.”
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Trends In Type
Paul Shaw Paul Shaw has a BA in American Studies from Reed College and both an MA and MPhil in American History from Columbia University. Trained as an historian, he has spent the past thirty years as a graphic designer specializing in letterforms. At the same time he has continued to research and write design history. He has received scholarships and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Smithsonian Institution, the Printing Historical Society, and the Book Club of California. In 2002 he was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.
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