Lead Magazine by Taylor

Ed Benguiat

a man of letters

a type house

Divided

Stefan Sagmeister talks about

The HAPPY FILM 30 under 30

Top Young Designers to Look Out For

under

TOP YOUNG GRAPHIC DESIGNERS TO WATCH FOR

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A spinosaurus crafted out of the letters of the typeface, OCR-STD.

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A quote by Dan Avidan made into a poster celebrating CMYK and color overlap.

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Driven by her love of the Bauhaus and minimalist design with limited color palettes, Taylor Schumacher’s work features loud color schemes and eye-catching graphics. Her work is meant to be “simply complex,” taking elaborate themes and breaking them down into just a few strokes and colors. Her background in physics and mathematics deeply influences her designs which incorporate geometric shapes and algorithms. But, perhaps her biggest impacting factor of all, her love for the color pink dominates almost all of her work.

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Taylor Schumacher

type tips

TYPOGRAPHIC FAUX PAS

Avoid bad punctuation and type crimes at your new job, who needs that type of attention?

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Two spaces between sentences. Dumb quotes instead of smart quotes. Dumb apostrophe instead of smart apostrophe. Failing to tuck periods/commas inside quote marks. Failing to kern display type. Using a hyphen instead of an en dash. Using two hyphens instead of an em dash. Too many consecutive hyphens. Large amounts of body text in uppercase letters. Large amounts of reversed type. Using process colors for body text. Underlining titles instead of italicizing them. Failing to eliminate widows.

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orn in Brooklyn, New York, Edward Benguiat got acquainted with design and showcard lettering when he was nine years old. His father was display director at Bloomingdale’s and he had all the drawing tools a little boy could want. Edward would play with his father’s pens, brushes, and drafting sets, and learned about sign painting, showcard and speedball lettering. Ed received the usual education. During World War II, he wasn’t old enough to enter the armed service, so with a forged photostat of his birth certificate, he enlisted in the Army. After his stint in the Air Corps he traded his airplane control stick for drumsticks and continued the burgeoning percussionist career he had started before the war.

At the School of Visual Arts—where about thirty years ago Silas Rhodes gave him a job—Ed compares graphic design and typography to the rhythm and balance of a musical composition. While playing on 52nd Street, Ed made use of the G.I. Bill and enrolled at the Workshop School of Advertising Art. He wanted to draw nudes like some of the well-known illustrators. His drawing teacher advised him to quit. Benguiat persisted. His first job as an illustrator was as a cleavage retoucher for a movie magazine. “You might think I was adding to the bust. No way! I was taking the

“I do not think of type as something that should be readable. It should be beautiful.”

Ed became established as a talented progressive Jazz musician under the name Eddie Benart, and played with numerous big bands such as Stan Kenton, Claude Thornhill and Woody Herman, but preferred the New York gigs on 52nd Street, particularly at The Three Deuces. “It kept me in town; going on the road with big bands was a drag, and tough.” During that time a Metronome magazine poll picked Ed as the number three sideman/drummer in America.

cleavage away,” he said, indicating the reaction of the motion picture industry to the crackdown on obscenity in movies. It was obvious that Ed couldn’t draw too well, so he went in the direction of layout, design, typography, and calligraphy. He became Paul Standard’s prodigy. Once out of

school, Ed established an impressive career as a designer and art director at a number of large and small publishing houses, studios, and ad agencies. Opening his own firm did not take too long. Enter Photo-Lettering Inc. and Ed Ronthaler. They saved Ed’s life financially by making him art director.

Founded in 1971 by designers Herb Lubalin, Aaron Burns, and Ed Ronthaler, ITC was formed to market type to the industry. Lubalin and Burns contacted Benguiat, whose first ITC project was working on Souvenir. Originally a singleweight face designed by Morris Fuller Benton in the 1920s, Benguiat redrew it with additional weights and italics. Now, Souvenir is the face everybody loves to hate. It was lTC’s best seller, and Ed did a beautiful job. It’s not his fault it’s become a cliché. Ed became a partner with Lubalin in the development of U&lc, lTC’s award-winning magazine,

One way or another, just about everyone in the graphic community has had some contact with Ed. He’s a neighborhood guy. Admittedly, most know him as the guy who sat in his cramped, cluttered office on 45th Street that had just enough room to swing his pen or brush. Benguiat’s impact on the type community involves more than just design. He played a critical role in establishing The International Typeface Corporation, the first independent licensing company for type designers. Ed and ITC jump-started the type industry in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

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and the creation of new typefaces such as Tiffany, Benguiat, Benguiat Gothic, Korinna, Panache, Modern No. 216, Bookman, Caslon No. 225, Barcelona, Avant Garde Condensed, and many more. This added to the more than 400 faces he’d already created for Photo-Lettering. With Herb Lubalin Ed eventually became vice president of ITC until its sale to Esselte Ltd. Ed continues to design faces for lTC, including, most recently, Edwardian Script. He is also known for his designs or redesigns of the logotypes for Esquire, The New York Times, McCall’s, Reader’s Digest, Photography, Look, Sports Illustrated, The Star Ledger, The San Diego Tribune, Garamond

AT&T, A&E, Estée Lauder, U&lc…the list goes on and on. You name it, he’s done it. Benguiat has a beef. It’s that too many young designers substitute technology for talent. “Too many people think that they’ve got a Mac and they can draw a logo or a typeface. You have to learn to draw first. The computer won’t do it for you”. Although he laments that student designers show more interest in learning the computer than mastering the art of designing letterforms, Benguiat is growing optimistic about the technology behind computer-assisted type design.

Professor Benguiat is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and a past president of the Type Directors Club. In 1990, he received the gold medal for excellence from the New York Type Directors Club, and won the prestigious Fredric W. Goudy Award. Benguiat continues a busy lecture and exhibit circuit that takes him to Paris, Berlin, Brazil, Slovenia, London, Chicago, Washington, and New York, where he is an instructor at The School of Visual Arts. In 1995, SVA honored him with Teacher of the Year.

America’s most prolific typographer and lettering artist, Benguiat has crafted over 600 typeface designs; here are just a few of his gems.

Bradley Hand Ed Script

Ed Gothic

ITC Modern No. 216

ITC Caslon 224

Ed Roman ITC Garamond Hand

TYPEFACES OR FONTS? SOME NEW DESIGNS WITH AN OLD TWIST

MONOSPACED FONT

A monospaced font, also called a fxed-pitch width or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space. This contrasts to variable-width fonts, where the letters differ in size to one another. The frst monospaced typefaces were designed for typewriters, which could only move the same distance forward with each letter typed.

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LEAD by taylor schumacher

Inspired by art deco and de stijl themes, the LEAD typeface directly references Piet Mondrianâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s geometric, gridlike paintings.

ransom note

UNICASE FONT

my monospace unicase typeface

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A unicase font is one that has no case, the glyps from upper and lower case are combined to form one alphabet. It is believed that all alphabets were once unicase. Bradbury Thompson’s plan for simplifying and improving our alphabet was, “Alphabet 26”, his project to combine upper and lowercase letters into one consistent set of letters, eradicated most of the lowercases, except for a, e, m and n.

RANSOM NOTE by daniel schumacher Ransom Note is an unrefined typeface made to emulate the harshness of a ransom note made from magazine scraps.

by daniel schumacher

MODERN CLASSIC MY MONOCASE UNICASE Typeface AND font MODERN CLASSIC by savannah spinelli Modern Classic is inspired by her love of art nouveau.

ABbCDEFGHIJKLM NOPQRSTtUVWXYZ 0123456789 “.,!?~'” By Savannah Spinelli

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THE HAPPY FIL M:

ATCHING DESIGNER STEFAN Sagmeister’s autobiographical documentary, The Happy Film, will not leave you significantly happier afterward. But the fast-paced, painfully honest, stressfully contemplative movie, co-directed with Ben Nabors and the late Hillman Curtis, will trigger rushes of insight, empathy and voyeuristic pleasure. In the film, Sagmeister—the prominent graphic designer known for what I’d call environmental performance typography and whose work appears in museums like MoMA—sets out to analyze, define and capture happiness as a concept, emotion

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and commodity. But he spends most of the film, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last month, showing how interpersonal minefields, notably his inability to find and stay in love, impede his ability to achieve happiness. From this discordance emerges a highly entertaining confessional that is as much a reality show as experimental art piece. The Happy Film started as part of a conceptual design project that includes “The Happy Show,” a museum-exhibition-cum-carnival-midway. Its global tour has attracted more than 350,000 people. But while the exhibit encourages visitors to reflect on their own happiness, the film is in-

The opening title card to The Happy Film gives the dismal film a false impression of colorful fun.

The Happy Film, Stefan Sagmeister, 2016

finitely more personal; documentary filmmakers often are characters in their own films, but they’re rarely so candid. Sagmeister’s project captures his signature chutzpah, sure, but hinges on an intensely personal search for love and happiness that provides poignant insights into his struggle to make lasting personal commitments beyond his professional life. Sagmeister derives happiness from upending the status quo with his work. He once gained 30 pounds in one month to document, through daily photographs, what a strict diet of junk food does to an otherwise fit body. In one of his more eccentric pieces, Sagmeister used a razor blade to carve

details from one of his many design lectures into his torso, and used a photograph of his scabs in a promotional poster. The Happy Film is like carving into his inner self. He is both investigator and the investigated. And though the movie meant to be autobiographical, “I did not see a lot of things coming during the shooting,” Sagmeister says. The Happy Film, consequently, is not quite the film Sagmeister set out to make. While he always intended it to be somewhat introspective (or rather exhibitionist), he did not anticipate the pain that befell him during production. “It started out as a design project with me in rather fine mood,” he says. “Then my Mum died. Our co-di-

The Happy Show (2013) Stefan Sagmeister uses gumball machines to rate people’s happiness for the day. rector died. Relationships fell apart.” It sounds like a maelstrom of sorrow, but “I don’t think it is ultimately a sad story,” Sagmeister says. “It’s about what a mess life really is.” And all captured on film, to boot. The Happy Film is divided into three sections, each following Sagmeister for one month as he pursues happiness along one of three paths: Meditation. Talk therapy. Prescription drug therapy. The beautifully photographed meditation scenes are in large part set in Bali, where, after various failed attempts to reach nirvana, Sagmeister falls in love with a former student. Happiness at last.

But the relationship quickly deteriorates and sadness sets in. The therapy section records him in sessions with a psychotherapist who questions his ability to commit, despite his recently ending an 11-year relationship. This leads him to renew a relationship with a long-lost love in Austria. That relationship fails too, and depression ensues.

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In the drug section, a pharmacological therapist monitors his intake of mood elevators. “I love pharma,” he notes in the film. Ignoring a warning against making radical life changes until his meds stabilize, Sagmeister immediately falls for and becomes engaged to a woman who allows him to document the rise and fall of their relationship. Those scenes are among the film’s most emotionally taxing and uncomfortable to watch. Happiness is when love hits hard and sadness, invariably, follows. Sagmeister has made a name for himself creating unexpected and uncomfortable designs, and he is fearless in allowing the camera to record everyone and everything. “I had gotten and followed the advice from a very wise (and excellent) film maker to shoot everything and edit later,” he says, recalling, among others, bedroom scenes he left on the cutting room floor. What was essential to the story, and what would spill out, into oversharing, he says, “was on my mind a lot.” The Happy Film is not a motivational speaker’s

CREATIVE DIRECTION: Stefan Sagmeister, ART DIRECTION / DESIGN: Jessica Walsh DESIGN: Verena Michelitsch, Jordan Amer, Simon Egli, Martin Gnadt, Santiago Carrasquilla & Esther Li

guide to wonders of happiness, and that’s not what I wanted to see. It is about one artist’s search for bliss and the quagmires it led to. But there is resolution, so to speak. Sagmeister told me that, for him, happiness divisible into three types. The first is short-term happiness—a moment of bliss, possibly lasting only seconds. The second is mid-term happiness—well-being and satisfaction lasting hours or days. And the third, long-term happiness, is finding what you are good for in life, a state that can endure for years. Throughout the filming Sagmeister maintained daily rating lists of his own happiness and it all comes down to this: “All periods of 10 (out of 10) days had something to do with falling in love, all periods of 1 out of 10 days were connected with a relationship ending. Falling in love in my case were connected to the [first and second forms of happiness], work related to [the second and third] type.” Makes sense to me.

Long ago, Sagmeister, whose motto was “Style=Fart,” replaced style with attitude. His designs are rooted in disorienting images and self-defining aphorisms. With apparent ease, Sagmeister morphs—as tricksters are wont to do—taking on various skins, from graphic designer to conceptual typographer to performance artist. When the mood strikes, he returns to being a designer, and a completely new cycle of transformation commences. http://www.aiga.org/medalist-stefan-sagmeister

article from https://www.wired.com/2016/05/happy-film-famed-designer-stefan-sagmeisters-wild-unsettling-pursuit-bliss/