Book Project by christine yoo

typo an exploration into

graphy

ANTHOLOGY OF TYPE DESIGNERS AND DESIGNERS THAT HAVE MADE AN IMPACT ON TYPE edited by CHRISTINE YOO published by ROSKI DESIGN PRESS 2009

TYPOGRAPHERS AND DESIGNERS CHAPTER ONE

Doyald Young WRITTEN BY BEVERLY HARTONO

Doyald Young (1926-2011) was a graphic designer, typographer, educator, lecturer and author who specialized in the design of logotypes, corporate alphabets and typefaces. Young was known as the greatest designer of logotypes of todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s era. His understanding of the form of the letter, the arc of the curve and the subtleties of logotypes is unsurpassed in North America. Youngâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s past is truly a rags to riches story. He ran away home at 15 and never finished high school, working as a bellhop, an usher and a railroad brakeman. In 1946 he eventually landed in Los Angeles, where he started painting advertisements and words for shows. He studied at Frank Wiggins Trade School and at Art Center College of Design, where he started teaching in 1955 and becoming a mentor of typographers and graphic designers. He reintroduced classical design principles to designers at a time when inelegant lettering was popular, advocating a high level of craftsmanship. In 1985, after many years designing typefaces for corporations, Young began releasing commercial fonts. He is mostly known for creating elegant beautiful script typefaces that have a high level of craftsmanship. His designs include the Young Gallant, Young Baroque, Young Finesse, and ITC Eclat. The fluidity and perfection in his work of perfect letterforms drawn in pencil at a surprisingly small size is perfect. Young has also written and published a number of books, including Logotypes & Letterforms, The Art of the Letter and Dangerous Curves. Young had clients ranging from the Hilton Hotels, Disney, Mattel Toys, and Prudential Financial Group. His unmatched skills and dedication to design was well rewarded. He received one of the most coveted design

awards, the AIGA Medal. Other awards he received include the Inaugural Master of the School from Art Center College of Design and the AIGA Los Angeles Fellow in 2006. â&#x20AC;¨Youngâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lifetime work will remain to be celebrated by all who encounter it, shaping and benefiting the field of design. His legacy will continue to inspire typographers and graphic designers today.

Herb Lubalin WRITTEN BY ERIC LINNAUS

Herb Lubalin was a graphic designer that knew how to break the rules of typography; resulting in beautiful compositions that contained enormous amounts of meaning. His designs allowed typography to move forward and create new modes of clear communication. Lubalin has successfully created compositions that transport an idea from the designer’s mind to the readers’ eye. This was achieved by an understanding that letters were not just forms, but a means of embodying meaning. Lubalin was born on 1918 in New York. In high school, he showed no interests in typography or design. He then attended Cooper Union College, after completing a perfect score on the entrance exams. While in college, Lubalin entered the McCandlish outdoor poster competition for students and professionals. He received second place for his design for a Hires Root Beer Cap slogan. The poster was rendered in a bold san serif font in sentence case that said “It’s Tops.” However, the “o” was the company’s bottle cap. After graduating, Lubalin had a difficult time with employment. He was fired from his first job at a display firm for asking for a raise. He later worked at Reiss Advertising and finally moved to Sudler & Hennessey where he spent the next twenty years. Lubalin felt that he had become accomplished in graphics when he won his first New York Art Directors Club Gold Medal as the creative director of Sudler & Hennessey and a partner of its design organization SH&L. Lubalin’s most successful and best known work didn’t occur until he left Sudler & Hennessey to create his own design firm. In 1964, his firm Herb Lubalin, Inc. opened its doors. His firm changed names several times as he joined other on business ventures. The most successful

collaboration was when he joined Ernie Smith, Tom Carnase, and Roger Ferriter to create LSC, Inc. The firm changed names a few more times and several others were added. Lubalin and his team worked on notable projects such as redesigns for the Saturday Evening Post, designs for the US Air Mail stamps and the masthead for the magazine Mother & Child, which he felt was one of his best designs. It was during this period when Lubalin began his own design firm that his most provocative and radical work was created. Owning his own firm allowed him to experiment and push the edges of design. Three magazines that he worked on in collaboration with Ralph Ginzburg were the defining points of his provocative and best-known work. The first was Eros, which was a publication devoted to sexuality, erotica, and experimentation all in the spirit of the American mid 1960s counterculture. The magazine was in large format approximately 13 inches by 10 inches using varying papers, no advertisements, and all created with quality production. Only four issues were created before it was shut down by a lawsuit based on obscenity charges. The next publication was Fact, which continued a rebellious edge by publishing writersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; work that was too radical for mainstream media. The publication was the most minimalist publication for its time. Lubalin choose only one serif type family and one illustrator for each issue all printed in black and white. The publication also quickly came to an end due to lawsuits and controversy. Finally, Avant Garde was released six months later. The magazine was nearly completely dedicated to page layouts and graphic design created by Lubalin. He also created the logo which gained so much popularity that he later created the full typesetting known as ITC Avant Garde. In 1970, Lubalin, Aaron Burns, and Ed Rondthaler founded the very successful International Typeface Corporation or more often known ITC typography foundry. In addition, Lubalin created and ran the ITC

typographic magazine U&lc or Upper & lower case, which showcased type families, and other typographic experiments. He won many awards and lectured around the world. He taught as a visiting professor The Cooper Union, Cornell, and Syracuse universities. He passed away in 1981 at the age of sixty three. His work created a lasting impression on the typographic and design community that helped push design into the future.

Herb Lubalin WRITTEN BY RACHELLE BAUTISTA-MEEKS

Herb Lubalin, 1918- May 24th, 1981, was an American graphic designer. A lot of history, at least in the graphic arts, had been written- and designed- by Herb Lubalin. And Lubalin has been recognized, awarded, written about, imitated and emulated for it. Coming to terms with Herb Lubalin’s work takes you quickly to the heart of a very big subject: the theory of meaning and how meaning is communicated- how an idea is moved from one mind to another. Not many have been able to do it better than Lubalin. While in high school, Lubalin showed no interest toward a graphics career other then for repeated renditions of some highly detailed nude drawings of Tarzan and Jane, which quickly earned him a reputation as a dirty young man. At age seventeen he entered Cooper Union after scoring 64th out of an acceptable 64 on the entrance examination in 1939. After graduation from The Cooper Union, Lubalin worked as a brilliant advertising art director, in the 1940’s with Reiss Advertising and then for twenty years with Sudler and Hennessey. Recipient of medal after medal, award after award and claims to have done nothing significant in the graphics world until 1962, when he was named Art Director of the Year by the National Society of Art Directors. Typography is the key. It is where you start with Lubalin and what you eventually come back to. However, “typography” is not a word Lubalin thought should be applied to his work. “What I do is not really typography, which I think of as an essentially mechanical means of putting characters down on a page. It’s designing with letters. Aaron Burns called it, ‘typographics’ and since you‘ve got to put a name on things to make them memorable, ‘typographics’ is as good a name for what I do as any.”

He designed startling Eros in the early 60’s, intellectually and visual astringent. The typeface Fact in the mid-60’s, lush and luscious Avant Garde late in the same decade, and founded U&Ic, an publication showcasing many of Lubalin’s designs, in 1973 and saw it flourish into the 80’s. And one of his last and greatest awards was in January 1981, when members, directors, friends and admirers gathered in the Great Hall of the New York Chamber of Commerce building to be with Lubalin as he accepted the 62nd AIGA medal. There’s hardly anyone better known and more highly regarded in the business. Lubalin’s receipt of AIGA’s highest honor was never a matter of “if,” only “when.”

Eric Gill WRITTEN BY JOYCE PAK

Eric Gill, a British artist and designer in the early 1900’s, was most known for skill in linear expression. His work was highly inspired by his strong convictions in Roman Catholicism. Gill was born in February 1882 in Brighton, Sussex, and moved to Chichester in 1897. He first studied in Chichester Technical and Art School, and then made his way to London to study architecture. However, he took night classes at Westminster Technical Institute and Central School of Arts and Crafts, studying stonecutting and calligraphy. This is where he found his true passions and what he eventually began to pursue.  He studied with Edward Johnston, the creator of the London Underground typeface, who became a great influence, and in 1903 he decided to become a stone mason, letter-cutter, and calligrapher. Under Johnston, his work became more pure and abstract, losing any extra and unnecessary details, now classified as neo-Byzantine and anti-naturalistic. His engravings were known for being radical, as he experimented with large white areas and other forms that distinguished him from other contemporary engravers.  He married Ethel Hester Moore in 1904 and moved to Ditchling, Sussex three years later, which later became a haven for Gill-inspired artists. His first successful sculpture was “Mother and Child” in 1912 and continued sculpting for various projects such as the Westminster Cathedral. He formed The Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic while he was there together with Hilary Peper and Desmond Chute, where he mentored many including David Jones. He preferred the traditional, direct chisel to stone method to stone carving as opposed to the popular use of machinery processes in that time. Gill didn’t create his first typeface until 1925, for Stanley Morison (whom he first met

in 1914), who was working for the Monotype Corporation. He then created Gill Sans in 1927-1930, which came from a template that was originally designed for London Underground. In 1929 Gill Sans was commissioned by Cecil Dandridge to be used on the London and North Eastern railway. This was followed by a burst of new typefaces including Golden Cockerel Press Type, Solus, Joanna, Aries, and more. Joanna was used to complete his book “An Essay on Typography”. Joanna was highly influenced by Robert Granjon, and holds a modernist After he moved to Buckinghamshire and set up a printing press and lettering workshop, he took on a few apprentices, including David Kindersley, John Skelton, and Donald Potter. Gill also incorporated a combination of his unorthodox Roman Catholic background and strong views of mortal sexuality into his artwork. He is now often seen as highly controversial. He sketched nudes and created stone sculptures in suggestive poses. Fiona MacCarthy uncovered his private life in her 1989 biography. which was filled with numerous accounts of sexual activity. He undertook many adulterous relationships during his marriage, which included his incestuous relations with his sister, sexual abuse of his two eldest daughters, and sexual actions with his dog. After the initial shock, there was a renewed interest in his artworks, which now remain as one of the strangest, however very modern and creative, influences in recent British artistic history.

Tobias Frere-Jones WRITTEN BY BEKAH STEIN

Tobias Frere-Jones is a type designer who creates fonts for retail, custom clients and experimental purposes. He has created over 500 fonts, most notably Interstate, Whitney, Archer and Gotham. Frere-Jones was born in 1970 in New York, and held an avid interest in fine art through his teenage years. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) where he graduated in 1992 with a BFA in Graphic Design. Frere-Jones went on to work as a Senior Designer at Font Bureau inc. in Boston, where he created Interstate and Poynter Oldstyle and Gothic, the firm’s most notable fonts. During this time Frere-Jones met Jonathon Hoefler while hunting for the same antique typography books. In 1999 he partnered up Hoefler to create their own type foundry called Hoefler & Frere-Jones. In 1996 Frere-Jones began teaching typeface design at Yale graduate program, which he continues to do. Hoefler & Frere-Jones collaborate to create custom fonts for a variety of needs. The foundry have created fonts for newspaper and magazines such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, Esquire, and Harper’s Bazaar. Hoefler & Frere-Jones have created fonts for institutions such as The Cooper-Hewitt Museum, The Whitney Museum, The American Institute of Graphic Arts Journal, and Neville Brody. Further clients include Martha Stewart Living, HewlettePackard, Nike and Pentagram. Frere-Jones’ typefaces span a large range stylistically- from traditional to grunge. He has said he draws his inspiration comes from a variety of sources including New York, music, philosophy, and city structures. In this way, Frere-Jones’ typefaces deal with existing typographical forms

through historical photos. He says, “The typefaces for The Wall Street Journal and The Whitney Museum were outright new constructions, but both meant to acknowledge what had existed before them.” Interstate was inspired by traditional US highway signage Highway Gothic, and can be seen on the U.S. Census. The sans-serif typeface Gotham, which was originally commissioned for GQ in 2000, was particularly created through the study of the past vernacular lettering. Gotham was inspired by Manhattan more mundane, hidden aspects, such as the old Port Authority Bus Terminal. Wide usage of the font includes adoption by President Barack Obama for his presidential election campaign. Another example of Frere-Jones’ inspirational sources is the typeface Knockout, which was based on 19th-century circus posters. Other fonts were created for a specific functional need or style. The typefaces Surveyor, Archer, and MSL Gothic, which were all custom designed for Martha Stewart Living, took three years to create. FrereJones focused on textures, particularly terminals, to create six versions of roman and six versions italics. Another of his fonts for stylistic means is Vitesse, a racy slab sans serif with bold strokes at the ends of the letters. The Wall Street Journal commissioned Retina as a font that would be legible even at 5-point characters for their stock market pages. Hoefler & Jones’ work is critically acclaimed. It has been featured in Communication Arts, Page, Graphis, Time Magazine, How, ID, Page, and Print. Their work and is included in the permanent collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Tobias Frere-Jones is the first American who received the Gerrit Noordzij Award, presented by The Royal Academy of The Hague for his unique contributions to typography.

HISTORICAL LETTERS CHAPTER TWO

Adrian Frutiger WRITTEN BY PETER THAI

Adrian Frutiger is best known for being a type designer, who is one of the most influential typeface designers of the 20th century and has designed over thirty different typefaces.1 He was born on March 24, 1928 in Interlaken, Switzerland.1 Frutiger has produced many wellknown and widely used typefaces. For example, one of which is named after him, the font “Frutiger”. Amongst the other fonts that he designed are President, Phoebus, Ondine, Univers, and many more. Frutiger has spent almost his entire life dedicated to learning and studying typefaces. When he was young, Frutiger learned various handwriting methods and with his father’s influence, became interested in print and sculpture. 2 In later years, this would help Frutiger in designing various forms of letters by paying close attention to the different angles in sculptures.1 At the age of sixteen, Frutiger worked as a printer’s apprentice near Interlaken. 3 Afterward, he moved to Zurich and spent most his time studying at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts following the Professor, Walter Kach. 2 Adrian Frutiger also spent a large portion of his career working for companies such as IBM and other type manufacturing companies such as Linotype and Westiform. 1 Eventually, Frutiger moved to Paris where he worked at the Deberny & Peignot type foundry. 2 Here he helped the foundry move classic typefaces that were used with traditional printing methods to the newer phototypesetting techniques. It was during this period when Frutiger started to design his own typefaces, a few of which became very significant, and earned him his status as a great type designer. Throughout his career, Frutiger has also produced a number of books

- Type, Sign, Symbol (1980), Signs and Symbols: Their Design and Meaning (1989), Forms and Counterforms (1999), The Univers (1999), and many others. 1 As for his interest in type, Adrian Frutiger states, “Everything started from the day when I visited a German typesetter. I saw how he placed letters upside down next to each other with unparalleled skill and that how one can express his knowledge with twenty-six letters. In different Latin languages one can speak about everything, legible to all. That’s how I wrote my first sentence by the method Gutenberg had invented whom I had not even heard of in high school”.1 The two fonts that really catch my eyes from Adrian Frutiger’s many designed typefaces are Univers and Frutiger. The beauty of these two fonts is that they are both sans serif typefaces. The designs of these two fonts are very minimal. There are limited strokes and curves in the design of the fonts, and appear to be very rigid. I really like the way the kerning works on both these fonts, in such way that these two fonts are very similar. Although upon closer look, the Frutiger font is kern slightly closer to each other than when it is compared to the Univers font. Both these fonts are simple and beautiful in a way that when it is used as text body, would be an easy and pleasurable reading for the human eye.

Giambattista Bodoni WRITTEN BY Renae DiBartolomeo

Giambattista Bodoni (1740-1813) was an Italian printer whose typography is regarded as one of the most refined typeface designs even today. Bodoni left home as a boy to become an apprentice for the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith in Rome, Italy. By 1768 he became the official printer for the Royal Press of the Duke of Parma. His early works were influenced by the type designer, John Garamond, as well as other Old-Style typefaces that used a decorative design. His later works, however, imitated that of Francois Didot, taking on a more cleanly modern typographical appeal. His most famous work, titled the Manuale Tipografico, contains his collection of over 140 Roman and Italic typefaces, as well as Greek, Hebrew, Russian, and other alphabets. The manual was published by his wife after his death in 1818 and has become the standard for many typographers imitating his works. In 1790, he designed a typeface entitled Bodoni that led to his eventual fame. The duke commissioned him to take on his personal projects. With his new freedom and wealth, Bodoni spent endless hours perfecting his typography into eloquent art form. He had a specific design for every application from books to royal announcements. No longer were the letters merely for communication, but they had taken on elements of design to analyzed and appreciated by the readers. To Bodoni, beautiful type encompassed four principles: uniformity of design, sharpness and neatness, good taste, and charm. Bodoniâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s font integrates these four principles in their entirety. Upon studying the Bodoni typeface as an art form, there is a harmonious balance between clean design and aristocratic flare, resulting in a gestalt

aesthetically pleasing to the eye. The hairline serifs are straight and neat, but the differing stroke weights allow for almost calligraphy-like curves. The juxtaposition of thick and delicate strokes creates a bold, yet still graceful typeface, giving each letter depth and creating shapes of negative space that are as alluring as the letter itself. This is especially represented in the capital W with its overlapping strokes, made up of two V’s linking serifs like 2 Venetian waltzers holding hands with perfect pose and posture. The same uniformity of design can be seen in other letterforms such as the capital C, G, and Q, which share the same straight stress body type as the O. The capital I can be proportionately placed into the backbone of letters such as E, F, and H, and the P into the R. The lower case b and d, and the p and q are mirror images of each other. The capital J which seems to stand alone with its lower ascent and rounded head matches the rounded heads of the lower case letter, tying the two cases together. As for charm, the lower case g’s little ear and elegant closed loop has enough charm and good taste for the whole alphabet itself, not to say that the other letters are lacking in these characteristics. This sophisticated typography of Bodoni, not only graced the paper of the royal print, but also earned the privilege of being used in Homer’s Illiad and the writing of Horace and Virgil. Bodoni was given the title “King of typographers, and typographer of kings.” His works continue to stand alone today as classic art forms amidst a sea of other typefaces.

Hermann Zapf WRITTEN BY Yun Hsiung

Herman Zapf was born on November 8, 1918 in Nuremberg, German Empire. Zapf is best known as a German typeface designer. He currently lives in Darmstadt, Germany. Zapf’s work, which includes Palatino and Optima, has been widely copied and used against his will. While in school, Zapf has a lot of interests in technical subjects. At an early age, Zapf got involved with type by inventing cipher text alphabets to exchange secret messages with his brother. Zapf was introduced to typography through his apprenticeships. His teachers noticed Zapf’s skill in drawing and suggested he become a lithographer. However, due to new political difficulties, he had a hard time finding an apprenticeship even though his work was highly complimented. After numerous attempts to find a position as a lithographer, he interviewed with the last company in the telephone directory. The company did not need lithographer but did not ask him any political questions and offered him a position as a retoucher. This was during the era of the Third Reich, where his family suffered under the newly established regime. After Zapf finishing his apprenticeship, he left for Frankfurt. He spent most of his time at “Werkstatt Haus zum Fürsteneck” working in typography and writing songbooks. In 1938, Zapf came into contact with type foundries through print historian Gustav Mori. He designed his first printed typeface for the foundries, a fraktur type called Gilgengart. Fraktur type is script face created in a calligraphic hand and emulates characteristics of “blackletter”, with many angles and small glyphs. Zapf designed types for various stages of printing technology – hot metal composition, phototypesetting, and digital typography for use in desktop

publishing. Two most famous and known typefaces are Palatino and Optima that were designed in 1948 and 1952, respectively. Palatino is an old style serif typeface with careful attention to detail. It was designed in conjunction with August Rosenberger and initially released in 1948 by the Linotype foundry. Palatino was named after 16th century Italian writing master Giambattista Palatino. Optima is a humanist sans-serif typeface designed between 1952 and 1955 for the D. Stempel AG foundry, Frankurt, Germany. Optima was released by Stempel in 1958 by the Linotype foundry as well. Zapf has been working on typography in computer programs since the 1960s. His ideas were considered primitive which was not taken seriously in Germany. Because he had no success in Germany, Zapf went to the United States. He was invited to speak at Harvard University about his ideas in computerized typesetting in 1964. The University of Texas, Austin was also interested in Zapf and offered him a professorship, but he rejected due to his wife opposing to move to the state. He is stilling living and married to the type designer and lettering artist Gudrun Zapf von Hess.

Jan Tschichold WRITTEN BY CODY BOEGER

Considered one of the most influential typographers of the 20th century, Jan Tschichold (1902-1974) has made an everlasting impact on the international design community. Throughout his modernist and classical explorations of design principles and typographic theory, his work pays tribute to centuries historical art and design while producing truly unique concepts. Tschichold’s mastery of the design practice included his proficiency across multiple fields including writing, typography, teaching, and print design. Best known for his typeface “Sabon,” Tschichold significant contributions to the industry also include his design manifesto titled “Die Neue Typographie” and his redesign of hundreds of paperbacks published by Penguin Books. Born in 1902 in Leipzig, Germany, the designer’s influence began at an early age through his father’s profession as a calligrapher. As a child he was exposed to multiple classical influences and grew up wanting to be an artist. However, his aspirations were quickly squandered as his parents considered the profession to be too unstable. As a compromise, Tschichold begin his schooling to become a drawing teacher. Three years into his track of becoming a teacher, his continued fascination with calligraphy and ornamental script design drove his move to become a typeface designer. In his studies he quickly took up engraving, woodcutting and bookbinding as his explored all avenues of the trade. After years to studying the complex elements of classical type design, Tschichold underwent a major transformation at the age of 21 after attending a Bauhaus Exhibition in Weimar. With its stripped-down fundamentals and clean, ridged lines, the new style quickly sparked

Tschichold’s curiosity in this new way approaching typographic design. Most notably, the designer’s growing affinity for non-script, sans serif typefaces became hallmark in his adaption and backing of modernist design principles. In the years following Tschichold’s visit to the Bauhaus Exhibition, his work as both a designer and author became heavily consumed by radical modernist theory as he became a leading advocate in the movement. In 1925 his first major publication in the magazine “Typographic News,” he expressed his extremist views of design theory an the article quickly created an uproar in the design community. Three years later Tschichold had created a full set in typographic rules and published his manual titled “Die Neue Typographie.” This work served as the first manual of typography for designers while also provoking the giving up of many long-established practices in traditional design. Tschichold’s strong belief in the need for an emphasis on function and clear communication became standard practice as his manifest continued to gain popularity. Lavish ornaments and outdated typefaces began to be replaced by san serif fonts with little or no identifiable features. Additionally, Tschichold push for typefaces with multiple weights such as light, semibold, bold, or condensed became common to maximize function and generate hierarchy. Throughout his professional career Tschichold continued to design a variety of works under his own strict guidelines and with the evolution of the Bauhaus movement. The growing power of the Nazi party in the early 1940s threatened his progressive design practices of asymmetrical design and non-ornamented style. After fleeing to Switzerland in fear in becoming imprisoned as an intellectual and a later move to London in the Post-War Era, his design continued to evolve through a relapse in his severe modernist principles and regained liking for symmetry. His work on numerous design manuals, book re-designs and personal shows

through the 50s and 60s illuminated Tschichold to fame as a visionary in the industry. His death in 1974 marked the end of an era of designers who cleared the way for a new wave of structured typography. However, Tschicholdâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s legacy continues with his powerful impact on design between ever-relevant manuals and typeface Sabon.

William Caslon WRITTEN BY JACK LI

A leading typographer of the 18th century, William Caslon produced typefaces that were used extensively throughout printed material of that time. His legacy still permeates the design environment of today’s type foundries and their typefaces. Born in Cradley, Worcestershire in 1692, Caslon started off as an apprentice working on the engraving of gun locks and barrels. He also had experience as a bookbinder’s tool cutter. This early training in metal-working immersed Caslon in the material culture of his time that consequently would open him up to the emerging world of printing. Setting up his practice in London, he was given the opportunity to meet William Bowyer, an English printer who would push Caslon to open up his start his own type foundry. His first experiment in creating typefaces was commissioned by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge to cast Arabic letters for the New Testament. These prints were created in hopes of bringing Christianity to England’s colonies in America. His design was an instant success and put him on the map as an innovative English typographer. Around 1720, Caslon started the Caslon foundry which would become a leading English type foundry of his time and the century that followed. At the time, England was slow at producing typefaces that were unique and instead relied on the many popular Dutch typefaces. Caslon’s typefaces were reminiscent of these Dutch Baroque typefaces but he created a new style that would differentiate his designs from those in circulation. Caslon’s typefaces stood out because of their delicate and exotic quality that differentiated themselves from the rather monotonous

Dutch versions. His work effectively released England’s dependence on Holland for typeface designs. Caslon’s work would eventually influence other typographers such as John Baskerville and started the proliferation of the type classifications Transitional and Modern. By 1735, his typefaces had spread all over Europe and its colonies, with its most prominent use as the typeface for the Declaration of Independence in America. Caslon designed many serif typefaces such as Caslon 540, Caslon Bold, Caslon Old Face, Big Caslon, and Caslon Open Face. Many of his typefaces are still used today, such as its ubiquitous use in The New Yorker magazine. His fonts are categorized by bracketed serifs, high contrast, short ascenders and descenders, moderate modulation of stroke, and robust texture. These characteristics created a new “exotic” style different from those of the Dutch Baroque designs but also had good legibility allowing it to become very popular for many printed English texts of the century. After Caslon’s death, his son William Caslon II took over the Caslon foundry and it survived as a family business until William Caslon IV sold it to Blake, Garnett & Co. After his demise, his typefaces became less popular and stopped being used but a revival of his designs occurred in 1840. Many of his designs today were revived and has become a popular font used by many designers looking for a serif typeface that was readable but had character.

Max Miedinger WRITTEN BY KEN MATSUI

Max Miedinger was Swiss born type designer, who is known primarily for his design of the typeface, Helvetica. Miedinger also created other typefaces such as Miedinger, Swiss 921, Monospace 821, and Swiss 721. Miedinger started his career in typography at an early age of 16, when he became an apprentice for Jacques Bollman. Ten years later, in 1936, Miedinger started to work as a typographer in the advertising department of Globus. In 1956, Eduard Hoffman, the director of Hass’sche SchriftgieBerei, asked Miedinger to create a new sans serif typeface that could compete with the popular sans serif typeface, Akzidenz Grotesk At the time, serif and script typefaces but they wanted a font that reflected the ideology of Swiss technology. This resulted in the creation of Neue Haas-Grotesk, which later changed its name to Helvetica, to appeal to an American audience. After the success of Helvetica, Miedinger designed a series of sans serif typefaces that had the same feel to Helvetica, such as Meidinger, Swiss 921, Monospace 821, and Swiss 721. Miedinger’s most famous typeface Helvetica was designed to reflect the cutting edge Swiss technology and the essence of the modernist movement. The typeface needed to be simple and clean, with no deep formal identity. As a result Helvetica became a typeface that was open to interpretation and was used in various purposes. The name change to Helvetica was a marketing move for the global market, as Neue HaasGrotesk was a difficult name to grasp. Interestingly, the word “Helvetica” is the Latin term for Switzerland. The influence of Miedinger can be seen worldwide. It can be seen in commercial logos like American Airlines, BMW, Panasonic, and Target, which use Helvetica as a part of their brand. Helvetica also inspired a

wide range of variant typefaces, such as Helvetica Light and Helvetica Compressed. Helvetica even became a title for the film discussing typography and graphic design. Max Miedinger, typographer, graphic artist, will forever be known and remembered for his timeless creation of Helvetica.

CONTEMPORARY WORDSWMITH CHAPTER THREE

Susan Kare WRITTEN BY Precious Aiyeloja

In early 1980, the artist and graphic designer, Susan Kare received a phone call from a high school friend, Andy Hertzfeld. Hertzfeld was a part of the original Apple Macintosh development team and they needed an artist to help design the user interface graphics and fonts for a new computer: the Macintosh. Susan Kare began her career in the 70’s when she received a BA, summa cum laude, in Art from Mount Holyoke College in 1975 and received her M.A. and Ph.D from New York University in 1978. She then moved to San Francisco and worked for the Museum of Modern Art until receiving Andy’s phone call. Once at Apple Computer Inc., under the title Macintosh Artist, she designed many of the typefaces, icons, and original marketing material for the first Macintosh operating system. Her most recognizable typeface from her time at Apple is Chicago, seen in the classic Mac OS system fonts and the first four generations of the Apple iPod interface. Her icon designs from her early days at Apple range from the Monitor with a Mona Lisa smile, to the Lasso and Paint Bucket still seen today. Kare joined NeXT as creative designer and designed the buttons, icons, and screen images, such as the card deck for solitaire, for Microsoft’s Windows 3.0 in 1987. Kare’s work optimized clarity and simplicity even as palette resolution increased as computer technology became more refined. Believing just because you have a million colors does not mean you have to use all of them. When it came to icon design she stated, “I believe that good icons are more akin to road signs rather than illustrations, and ideally should

present an idea in a clear, concise, and memorable way.” Her current and past work continues to reflect this philosophy of simplicity and clarity in not only her icons but her typographic designs. Kare also credits Paul Rand and Saul Steinberg as her design gurus. Kare currently is the head of a digital design practice based in San Francisco, her clients ranging from Facebook to San Francisco Water and Power. Kare’s work “continued to be motivated by respect for, and empathy with, users of software.”

Susan Kare WRITTEN BY ALISON CHEN

Susan Kare is, according to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, “a pioneering and influential computer iconographer.” Best known for being the designer of the trash can icon for the original Macintosh computers, Kare has since revolutionized computer type to focus on clarity, simplicity, and legibility. Susan graduated from Mount Holyoke College and received MA and Ph.D. fine arts degrees from New York University. She began her career in 1983 designing the screen graphics and digital fonts for Macintosh computers using a minimalist grid of pixels. Using a process of depicting the strongest metaphors for certain functions, Kare transformed small grids of black and white pixels into a family of witty and personable symbols aimed to assist people in operating the computer. In addition to her iconography work, Kare also focused on developing a set of proportional typefaces for the screen that departed from the monospaced characters that previously had been found on typewriters and thus earlier computers. Kare’s work in icons and typography helped to counter the image of computers being harsh, cold typing machines and instead are catered to human usability. The success of Kare’s work was largely supported by Steve Jobs, whose attention to detail in design and graphics and adventurousness provided for a designer in uncharted territory like Kare to experiment. “Steve cared intensely about each letterform and font selection,” Kare recalls. “He had great insights about what stuff should look like, even at the pixel level.” With Jobs’ support, Kare designed many of the typefaces, icons, and original marketing material for the Macintosh operating system.

Remnants of her original iconography work can still be seen in elements such as the lasso, the grabber, and the paint bucket. Arising from her pixel graphics, Kare’s typography designs also remain strongly recognizable today. The Chicago typeface was the most prominent user interface typeface seen in the classic Mac OS and can also be seen in the first generation of iPods. Chicago became an integral part of Apple’s brand identity and was designed out of pixels so that it could remain legible while being made grey to indicate a disabled menu item by the removal of ovary other pixel, since at the time actual grey type was impossible to create on a black and white monitor. Kare’s other influential typefaces include Geneva and the original monospace Monaco. Kare’s graphic work emphasizes clarity, simplicity, and memorability. To Kare, computer graphics were equivalent to road signs rather than illustrations, and should be easily understood and not superfluously detailed. Even though millions of colors are available digitally, she believed that they should not be used in excess, and icons, once designed well, could be ubiquitous and used over and over. Not only was her work about efficiency and intuitiveness, Kare’s typographic work was the first to be motivated by an empathy for software users. Her innovative typefaces differ from machine dictated spacing and stunned themselves more to human interaction, giving personality to what would otherwise be uncaring office machines. With Apple as a pioneering company for user friendly software, Kare has contributed a large part to the imaginative software interface that has changed the way we view technology today.

Erik Spiekermann WRITTEN BY Candace Kao

German-born typographer and designer Erik Spiekermannâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work includes the design of contemporary font families that have found widespread usage in communication design in print and digital media alike such as Meta, Officina, Unit, and Info, as well as many writings on typography. In 2002, he authored the introductory typography guide Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works with editor and typographer E. M. Ginger. In 1989, he revolutionized the spread of digital type by starting FontShop, the first online font reseller, with his wife Joan and another prolific designer and typographer, Neville Brody. Since then, Spiekermannâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s commercial font faces have been produced through their in-house type foundry FontFont and distributed through FontShop. Although Spiekermann is based in Berlin, he has worked with a diverse list of clients and partners between Europe and San Francisco. He was born in 1947 and raised in Germany, where he studied English and art history at Free University in Berlin. After graduation, he worked in London for a period of time before starting the Berlin-based design firm MetaDesign in 1979. In 2001, he left the firm due to differences with the other partners and founded United Designers Networks. In 2009, UDN merged with Dutch firm Eden Design to form the multi-national firm EdenSpiekermann, where he currently serves as creative director and a managing partner. Spiekermann is highly vocal about his passion for and strong convictions about typography. He was interviewed in the 2007 film Helvetica, where he criticized the titular typefaceâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ubiquitous quality and compared its

usage to consuming fast food. In the same interview, he described his favorite letter, the lowercase “a”, as the means by which he identifies a typeface and openly criticized Microsoft’s commissioning of Arial as a Helvetica knock-off. Spiekermann’s approach to type design is directly influenced by his philosophy; Meta, one of his most widely used font families, was described as “The Helvetica of the 90s” for its ease of use in communication design. The font was originally a commission for the West German postal service, but Spiekermann converted it to a digital format and released it through FontShop in 1991 as FF Meta after the client declined to use it in favor of the Helvetica family. In fact, Meta had been designed - as Spiekermann was quoted in a monograph of MetaDesign’s work - to counter what he saw as Helvetica’s blandness and lack of character. Over the years, Spiekermann was won numerous awards for his work in the typographic field beginning with the Gerrit Noordzij Prize in 2003 from the Royal Academy of Art in the Netherlands, and most recently the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Design Award of the Federal Republic of Germany in 2011. Continuing to embrace the digital age, Spiekermann maintains an online presence and continues to publish his work and musings on typography through a variety of media. He currently maintains a regularly updated blog, SpiekerBlog, and a Twitter account.

Ed Fella WRITTEN BY JULIA VANN

Ed Fella is an artist and designer, working predominantly in typography. Fella’s designs are distinct, where one could remember his type treatments as bright, calligraphic rainbow strokes, playful geometric forms, and intricate linear renderings of objects that morph into pictographic and typographic messages. Fella’s work beholds personality, emphasizing the true nature, signature style, and originality of what a designer is meant to have. His style celebrates and challenges modern typography, and holds an iconic mark within the core of design history. Rooting back to his childhood, Ed Fella was seemingly bound to be a successful designer. Born in Detroit, he attended the local magnet school. At Cass Technical High School, Fella heavily studied lettering, illustration, and other commercial-art-based techniques. His talent and keen attention to detail led him to an apprenticeship straight out of his high school graduation. His experience in the small design firm provided him with exposure to Motor City’s advertising industry. He worked in this industry for almost thirty years, however, his personal style that boasts with creativity cannot be ignored. Fella’s most notable portfolio emphasizes a curiosity and exploration for mixed media. His work mostly relates to collage, where he incorporates mechanical material with intricate drawings and hand-rendered letter forms. The result: an epic environment of whimsical compositions. From a typography standpoint, Fella is a pure innovator. For instance, his experimentation lead him to deconstructing lines of copy, modifying typefaces, and rearranging them. He was doing all of this before Adobe figure out kearning with digital fonts. Fella worked mainly as a freelance designer where the boom of the alternative arts scene in the late 1970’s

allowed his work to thrive in the public eye. His typography emerged on posters and catalogues for numerous art organizations, gaining a popularized identity through mass production. After his long time creating commercial designs, Fella attended the MFA program at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1985. This boosted his success, being recognized as a pioneer to postmodern graphic design. Since his time at Cranbrook, Fellaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s recent work has been displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2007, Fella was awarded the AIGA medal in recognition for his achievements in design. Fellaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s designs may not meet a certain technical design standard, but rather fearlessly break the rules and recreate creativity standards. Fellaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s versatility within style, mixed media, and innovation in typography is simply one of a kind.

Jessica Hische WRITTEN BY CHRISTINE YOO

As a teenager, Jessica Hische knew that she wanted to pursue art as something more than a hobby. She transferred high schools so that she could take more art classes, and eventually wound up at Tyler School of Art, Temple University, where she earned her BFA in Graphic Design. Although her initial aspirations leaned more towards painting and or sculpting, Jessica discovered in her elective design class that she loved type design, and solving visual problems through design. As a broke college student, Jessica began to hand-render type in order to not waste money on font purchases. This is where her love for hand drawn type all began, and now most of her work includes some kind of custom, hand lettering. Her passion for typography bloomed so much that she now has “Type” tattooed on her left tricep. It was also in college that Jessica’s career as a designer, illustrator, and typographer began. While attending school in Philadelphia, she gained experience interning for Quirk Books, SK Design Works, and Headcase Design. After graduation, she worked on book projects at Headcase as a full time freelance employee. Then, for two and a half years, she worked as a Senior Designer at Louise Fili Ltd. while continuing freelance illustration and lettering at night. In September 2009, she left Louise to fully engage in freelance work, and since then has worked with clients like Target, Wes Anderson, McSweeney’s, The Boston Globe, and Tiffany & Co. In addition to the many major design publications that have featured Jessica’s work – some of which include How Magazine, Print Magazine, Communication Arts, American Illustration, and the Society of Illustrators – Jessica has

receive great honor as an ADC Young Gun, and as a “30 Under 30” in art and design by Forbes Magazine. She also serves on the Type Directors Club Board of Directors. For lettering, Jessica has a set way of working: she first starts off with pencil sketches, then moves on to Adobe Illustrator without tracing the initial sketch. Rather than utilizing fancy tools and equipment, she mostly relies on the pen tool, and either a track pad or a mouse. Other than her talented friends, Jessica’s inspirations include Marian Bantjes and Christoph Neimann. Some of her favorite type faces are Brandon Grotesque, Pluto, and Sweet Sans. Currently, Jessica is working on personal projects as well as freelance work in both San Francisco and Brooklyn, and is travelling the world with speaking engagements.

DESIGN

VS. TYPOGRAPHY CHAPTER FOUR

Stefan Sagmeister WRITTEN BY Kara-Leigh Huse

Stefan Sagmeister is an Austrian born graphic designer that has pushed limits in the art and design world. His work is humorous, but in an unsettling and unacceptable way. He combines sexuality with dark and sinister qualities to create designs that often have a hand rendered quality. His work has also gained quite a bit of controversy and attention around many of these unsettling designs. Including a poster he designed for the 4As advertising awards, in which a diptych of four hand drawn men were shown calling for entries for the awards, the subsequently dropping their trousers, revealing their bare bottoms for the 4As. His most famous poster was for an AIGA lecture in Michigan in 1994, in which he could not decide how to design the poster. The result was asking an assistant to carve Sagmeister’s body with the information of the lecture with an exacto knife, and then photographing it. This gained much attention and admiration from the art and design world. The idea being so innovative, sinister, and humorous that it is still his most infamous design. He also worked closely with the music industry designing album covers for the Rolling Stones, David Byrne, and the Talking Heads box set. Sagmeister pushed the limits in the typography world with his book “Things I Have Learned In My Life So Far.” This book, which had 15 different covers, included 20 maxims in different settings and with different materials. His installations of these maxims included mediums such as 10,000 bananas and tin piping in a pool. This book was part of his experimental year in 2000, in which he stopped taking “bad” jobs and created work for himself. Stefan Sagmeister has done design work for many famous clients, as

well as experimental projects for himself and his own art practice. He definitely has his own sense of comical and dark style, which is reflected in his recognizable hand rendered typeface. Sagmeister has changed the design world and he will continue to evolve and challenge the design world. As for the future he states that, “…I can’t say that I am scared of anything regarding the future…not at all. I think that it’s going to be fine. Humanity adapts to all kinds of situations, and right now I think is a good time to be alive.”

Marian Bantjes WRITTEN BY SHELLEY XIA

Marian Bantjes, born in 1963, is a Canadian designer, typographer, writer, and illustrator who lives on a small island off the west coast of Canada, near Vancouver. From her island base, she works nationally and internationally with clients such as 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 South America. In addition, she has worked on design materials for AIGA, TypeCon 2007, and the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada (GDC). She is also a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI), and regularly speaks about her work at conferences and events worldwide. Marian started out as a book typesetter in 1984 and opened her own design firm in 1994. She became more prominently known as a talented graphic designer from 1994 – 2003, when she was a partner and senior designer at Digitopolis in Vancouver. At the time, she worked mainly with communication design for a wide range of corporate, education and arts organizations. In 2003, Marian sold and left the firm behind and embarked on work represents the style she is internationally known for today. Describing herself as a “Graphic Artist”, she began to concentrate on work that was highly personal, obsessive, and at times, strange. She simultaneously began writing for the design blog “Speak Up” and her quirky articles gained her recognition in the world of blogs and the Internet. Through

her art and writing, Marian caught the attention of designers and Art Directors across North America and beyond. Marian is known for her detailed and precise vector art, her amazingly obsessive handwork (often with unconventional materials such as pasta, jewels, metal, etc), and her baroque-esque patterning and ornament. Her combination and juxtaposition of these materials and designs draws the interest of a wide variety of designers and typographers. She is often commissioned to work on custom type for magazines and special projects and advertising. In 2010, she published her own design book â&#x20AC;&#x153;I Wonderâ&#x20AC;?, which was dubbed one of the 13 best design books of 2010 by Fastcode design. I urge everyone to check this book out because it is amazing and uniquely Marian Bantjes.

Vincent Connare WRITTEN BY JONALYN ABRAHAM

“If you love it, you don’t know much about typography and if you hate it, you really don’t know much about typography either and you should get another hobby.” – Vincent Connare Vincent Connare, born in 1960 in Boston, Massachusetts, is best known for the creation of the typefaces Comic Sans, Trebuchet MS, and Webdings. Connare, initially a painter, studied Fine Arts and Photography at the New York Institute of Technology in Manhattan. After graduating, he moved to Massachusetts and worked at a newspaper company as a photographic technician. In 1987, he moved on to work in the font-making industry at Afga/ Compugraphic until 1993. There, he became one of the first designers to learn the process of “TrueType hinting”, which is a method of defining which pixels create the most efficient bitmap shape when viewed at low resolutions. After 1993, he joined the Microsoft Corporation as a Typographic Engineer. There, he designed two typefaces that are still widely used today, Comic Sans and Trebuchet MS. Comic Sans is known for its cartoon-like quality and is therefore criticized worldwide. What most people do not know is that Connare had designed Comic Sans as a

typeface for Microsoft Bob, a program intended to be a user-friendly interface for Windows. Early screenshots of Microsoft Bob feature a cartoon dog named Rover using the typeface, Times New Roman, in its speech bubbles. Connare himself said that the font was designed for the communication of specific messages used for children as he received

Herb Lubalin WRITTEN BY ERIC LINNAUS

inspiration for the font by studying the typefaces used in comics such as Batman and Watchmen. However, it became so common that people began using it for other types of messages, signs, and even logos. Connare expected it to be used only by the Consumer Division applications and something that Microsoft would never put into their systems. Trebuchet MS, the other famous font Connare designed for Windows, did not gain as much popularity as Comic Sans, but also became part of the Microsoft Font Book. Trebuchet MS was specifically made for Internet Explorer 1.0. Inspiration for the font came from motorway signage in American and sans serif typefaces that he studied. Finally, in 1997, he designed the dingbat typeface, Webdings, as a version of Wingdings for the web. In 1999, he left Microsoft to obtain his Masters Degree in Type Design at the University of Reading in England, where he currently resides. While residing in London, he became part of the Richmond Baseball Club, where they have named a field after him. In 2001, he began working for Dalton Maag Ltd, a company that specializes in design for typefaces and logos. His most recent typeface is called “Magpie”, a serif font that he developed there. Connare describes Magpie as “transitional in classification and contemporary in design.” While Connare has reached an ill-fated fame because of Comic Sans, he has long moved past the widespread popularity (positive or negative) and continues to design new typefaces and publish his photographs.

oratory, music, dance, calligraphy - like anything that “ Like lends its grace to language - TYPOGRAPHY is an art that can be deliberately misused. It is a craft by which the meanings of a text, or its absence of meaning, can be clarified, honored, and shared, or knowingly disguised. This book exists to honor clarity.

”

- ROBERT BRINGHURST

“ A classic in its field ”

- LIBRARY JOURNAL

ISBN 0-38105-332-3 $29.95 US / $39.95 Canada

ROSKI DESIGN PRESS design theory