RD News

Norwegian travel documents given a minimal makeover

Oslo-based Neue Design Studio has won a competition to redesign Norway’s passports and ID cards, a month after graphics by Snøhetta were chosen for the country’s new bank notes.

“The designer must think first, work later.”

A must know designer Vast majority of his artwork can be appreceiated at the MoMA. By Aiga Page 05 / Times

A golden Age of design The Most Brilliant American fashion designer

There is an urgent need for communication based upon precision and clarity. This is the area in which Ladislav Sutnar excels.

Thanks to a convergence of creativity, technology and big money, the heyday of the field may finally be upon us”.

Christian Boer

designs typeface for readers with dyslexia

By Alice Gregory

Introducing Elizabeth Hawes: genius writer, wry cultural commentator, perverse humorist, gifted artist and truly modern thinker. You’ve never heard of her.

Page 20 / Inspiration

Although it looks like a traditional typeface, Dyslexie by Christian Boer is designed specifically for people with dyslexia – a neurological disorder that causes a disconnect between language and visual processing making it difficult for the brain to process text. Dyslexia is estimated to affect 10 per cent of the world’s population, according to UK charity Dyslexia Action. (continues in p. 12)

Japanese sweet ingredients as colour swatches Ingredients are displayed like fabric samples to help western readers recreate traditional Japanese sweets with common foods, in this cookbook by designer Moé Takemura.

rd news / Inspiration

Design in action This publication was issued by the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague in cooperation with the Argo publishing house to accompany the exhibition held at the Prague Castle, June - September, 2003.

The versatile talent of Ladislav Sutnar (1897 -1976) made him part of a whole group of modern European designers and architects who strove to bring quality in ordinary life. Inspired by the Bauhaus school, he lent truly modern design to articles of everyday use, publications, toys, architecture and exhibition installations, advanced professional schooling in graphics to the highest levels of the period and influenced in a major way the lifestyle of prewar Czechoslovakia’s burgeoning middle classes.

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The father and pioneer of information design

ladislav sutnar The professional Association for Design http://www.aiga.org/

His work and philosophy the watchword of today is ‘faster, faster’; produce faster, distribute faster, communicate faster.”

Visual Design in Action Sutnar’s brilliant structural systems for clarifying otherwise dense industrial data placed him in the pantheon of Modernist pioneers and made him one of the visionaries of what is today called “information design.”

Visual Design in Action is a snapshot of Sutnar’s American period (19391976), and includes graphics for Carr’s Department Store, advertisements for the Vera Neumann Company, identity for Addo-X, and other stunningly contemporary works.

He is best known for his total design concept for the Sweets Catalog Service and lesser known for introducing the parenthesis as a way to typographically distinguish the area code from the rest of a phone number. Visual Design in Action is a testament to the historical relevance of Modernism and the philosophical resonance of Sutnar’s focus on the functional beauty of total clarity. This reprint of Visual Design in Action (originally published in limited quantities in 1961) is as spot-on about the power of design and “design thinking” as it ever was.

Sutnar synthesized European avant-gardisms, which he said “provided the base for further extension of new design vocabulary and new design means,” into a functional commercial lexicon that eschewed formalistic rules or art for art’s sake. While he modified aspects of the New Typography, he did not compromise its integrity in the same way that elements of Swiss Neue Grafik became mediocre through mindless usage over time. “He made Constructivism playful and used geometry to create the dynamics of organization,” says Noel Martin, who was a member of Sutnar’s small circle of friends in the late 1950s.

Consistency reigned within an established framework, such as limited type and color choices as well as strict layout

preferences, but within those parameters a variety of options existed in relation to different kinds of projects, including catalogs, books, magazines, and exhibitions.

Although Sutnar’s spoken English was fettered by a heavy Czech accent and marred by grammatical deficiencies, he was nevertheless a prolific writer who articulated his professional standards in essays and books that were both philosophical and practical. Visual Design in Action argues for future advances in graphic design and defines design in relation to a variety of dynamic methodologies.

Sutnar’s difficulties with spoken English as a second language do much to explain why his design was so straightforward. Indeed, information of the kind presented in the Seet’s catalogs, which included every-

thing from plumbing supplies to hydroelectric generators, were the equivalent of second or even third languages to many of its users. So if verbal or written language could not efficiently communicate or mediate information in the age of mass production, then, Sutnar reasoned, visual language needed to be more direct.

One of his favorite comments was: “Without efficient typography, a jet plane pilot cannot read his instrument panel fast enough to survive. So new means had to come to meet the quickening tempo of industry. Graphic design was forced to develop higher standards of performance to speed up the transmission of information. And the watchword of today is ‘faster, faster’; produce faster, distribute faster, communicate faster.”

visual language needed to be more direct.

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allon Shoener 24

“The lack of discipline in our present-day ur has produced a visual condition, character and chaos. There is an urgent need for comm precision and clarity. This is the area in wh

RD news / Inspiration

Perhaps the most significant of Sutnar’s innovations was the use of spreads. He was one of the first designers to design double spreads rather than single pages. A casual perusal of Sutnar’s designs for everything from catalogues to brochures form 1941 on, with the logical exception of covers, reveals a preponderance of spreads, on which his signature navigational devices force the viewer to go from one level of information to the next. Through spreads, Sutnar was able to inject visual excitement into even the most routine material without impinging upon accessibility.

For almost twenty years Sutnar had an arrangement whereby he worked for Sweet’s in the morning and did freelance in the afternoon. At first he worked out of a small studio; next he opened an office near Wall Street originally called Sutnar, Flint and Hall. Flint sold ads to newspapers, and Thelma Hall, whom Sutnar had met at Sweet’s, ran the studio. After a year Flint left, so the office was moved and renamed Sutnar + Hall. Sutnar relied on Hall for

everything. While he set the style, he would explain it to the board people.

Philip Pearlstein, the realist painter, was Sutnar’s assistant for many years. He remembers that Sutnar loved taking things apart to find the right organizing structure and reconstruct it. In this sense he referred to himself as a Constructivist.

One of Sutnar’s favorite organizational tropes was precise indexing to both avoid misunderstanding and limit unnecessary reading time. By using small images his indices were akin to a visual Dewey Decimal system. However, even though the goal was to save time, Sutnar often introduced design ideas to engender “visual interest”—such as italics as body text—that were initially difficult to navigate, and therefore time consuming. Sutnar also had the desire to introduce aesthetics into everyday life. “If the catalogue looked good, the user might think about why it looked good,” reports Pearlstein, “which in addition to being utopian idealism was also a snobbishness on his part.”

Ilustration: Fernanda Capetillo

Sutnar’s innovations A snob designer Sutnar was a snob when it came to design.

Like other pioneer Modernists, he believed that he had the right answers and everyone else was wrong. His fundamental thesis is found in these words: Radoslav Sutnar recalls that his father came on strong: “Some clients loved him; others thought he was crazy. In fact, people in the United States were often skeptical of the radical ideas he proposed. He was just so methodical, he had to do things his own way. When he hit it right, it was a thousand percent; when he did it wrong, it was curiously crude.”

While the term “crude” doesn’t jive with the meticulous typography that was Sutnar’s recognized trademark, judging from the evidence in his archive at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York, he did produce a large amount of aesthetically questionable material. Whether it was the result of too many compromises or just poor judgment, there is a curious pattern to his crudity. It usually occurred when he used excessively large type or oversimplified an information graphic. Even so, his most flawed work was on a higher plane than most.

As he once wrote, “Design is evaluated as a process culminating in an entity which intensifies comprehension,” and clients benefited from his unswerving commitment to this idea. In addition to the Bell System program, which was only partially instituted, he developed Modern systems

rban industrial environment rized by clutter, confusion mmunication based upon hich Ladislav Sutnar excels.”

for a variety of businesses, most notably advertising and identity campaign for Vera scarves (which despite the mass market appeal of the product, were masterpieces of Constructivist sophistication); graphic and environmental systems for Carr’s shopping plaza in New Jersey (for whom he developed a lexicon of icons, pictographs and glyphs which were the quintessential application of rapid identifiers and symbols); and identity, advertisements and exhibitions for Addo-X, a Swedish business machine company that was competing with Olivetti in the United States. The Addo-X identity was predicated on geometric forms and is rooted in graphics that are beguilingly simple and unmistakably unique (a bold sans serif iconographic X exhibited power that could be likened to the cross and swastika).

“Good visual design is serious in purpose. ts aim is not to attain popular success by going back to the nostalgia of the past, or by sinking to the infantile level of a mythical public taste. It aspires to uplift the public to an expert design level. To inspire improvement and progress demands that the designer perform to the fullest limits of his ability.

The designer must think first, work later.”

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JOY ART Through the 1960s commissions disappeared.

Disheartened by the lack of interest in his work, he turned his attention to painting what he called “joy-art,” essentially a collection of geometrically constructed nudes that resembled, though in fact prefigured, paintings

by Tom Wesselman. In the late ‘60s and early ‘70s he continued to haunt the New York Art Director’s Club, where a younger generation was relatively oblivious to his achievements. In the mid-seventies he was diagnosed with cancer and died in 1976.

The great depression In the 1930s American industry made an attempt to introduce strict design systems to business, but the Great Depression demanded that the focus turn to retooling factories and improving products, which spawned a new breed of professional:

the industrial designer.

In Europe, the prototypical industrial designer had already established himself, and the graphic design arm of the Modern movement was already concerned with access to information as a function of making the world a better place. The mission to modernize antiquated aspects of European life led directly to efficient communications expressed through typographic purity. Sutnar led the charge in Czechoslovakia years before emigrating to the United States.

It is said that Löndberg-Holm was the other half of Sutnar’s brain when it came to information. They were the Rogers and Hammerstein of information design. Together they composed and wrote Catalog Design (1944) andCatalog Design Progress (1950). Löndberg-Holm introduced a variety of systematic departures in catalog design, while Sutnar fine-tuned those models to show how complex information could be organized and retrieved.

Sweet’s Catalog Service was a facilitator for countless trade and manufacturing publications that were collected in huge binders and distributed to businesses throughout the United States. Before Sutnar began its major redesign around 1941, the only organizational device was the overall binder.

Löndberg-Holm had convinced Chauncey

Williams, the president of F.W. Dodge, to order an entire reevaluation, from the logo (which Sutnar transformed from a nineteenth-century swashed word, Sweets, to a bold “S” dropped out of a black circle), to the fundamental structure of the binder (including the introduction of tabular aids), to the redesign of individual catalogues (some of which were designed by Sweet’s in-house art department under Sutnar’s direction).

Together they introduced the three-way index system (by company name, production service and trade name) to facilitate information retrieval.

rd news / Typography

to design your own

typograpfy 4 Use your hands

By Jamie Clarke

Jamie Clarke of Type Worship explains how to get started in creating your own typography. fter many years as a graphic designer and type enthusiast, I decided to channel some of my passion into my own lettering and typography projects. After a while it seemed a natural evolution to try my hand at designing a typeface.

Much has been written about type design; especially on the history, drawing and technical complexities of creating typefaces (I’ve linked to some excellent resources at the bottom of this article). But where exactly do you begin? If you’re a designer or illustrator new to this discipline, what are the first practical steps, the common software and early considerations to get you going?

I had found some useful pieces of information but they were scattered across many sources and many were dated by technology. Undoubtedly the methodologies practiced are as unique and individual as the designers practising them. In any event, I had found it difficult to piece together the steps to get me

Start with a brief Designing a typeface can be a long journey so it’s prudent to have a clear vision of its purpose. You might begin with something purely self-expressive.

However, the usual practice is to create a typeface in response to a brief.

Developing your own brief will inevi-

making choices There are a number of early choices you need to consider. Will it be a serif or sans serif typeface? Will it be based on a writ-

Early pitfalls A couple of early pitfalls to avoid:

You might decide to start by digitizing your own handwriting, which can be a useful practice exercise. However,

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tably require research and reflection.

How will it be used: is it for a specific project or personal use only? Is there a problem you might solve? How might your typeface fit into a landscape alongside similar designs? What makes it unique?

The options are vast. Typefaces have been created, for example, specifically for academic texts, to provide better number systems for engineering documents or as a one-off for public lettering. Only when you know what your typeface will actually be used for can you really get started on the design. ing implement or be more geometric?

Will your design be a text face, comfortable at small sizes and suitable for long documents, or will it be a display face with an imaginative style, that works better a larger size?

Tip: It was suggested on the course that designing a sans serif typeface can be more challenging for beginners, because the features that provide these typefaces with their identity are much more subtle.

because handwriting is so individual, without much refinement your typeface could be restricted to personal use.

Don’t base your design on an existing typeface’s outlines. ‘Helvetica with wings’ is not going to produce a better typeface or help you develop your skills as a type designer. This should go without saying, but I’m told that typefaces like these are regularly submitted to foundries (unsuccessfully).

Much is written on how to draw letterforms, but even if you are a Bezier curve master, I’d advocate defining your letterforms by hand in the first instance. Articulating certain shapes via computer when establishing your design can be awkward and time consuming.

Try to create graceful shapes on paper for the first few characters before refining them digitally. Further characters can then be constructed on screen by matching key features, such as terminal endings and stroke widths. See over 100 type designer’s drawings in Typography Sketchbooks.

Tip: The hand naturally draws smoother, more accurate curves in a concave arc pivoted by the arm and wrist. To take advantage of this, keep turning your paper rather than adjusting your position or drawing against this pivot point.

5 Which type to start with Designing certain characters first can help set the style of your typeface and may be used to bring the other characters into harmony. Often called ‘control characters’, in a lowercase Latin typeface these would be the n and o, and in the uppercase, H and O are often used. On the Reading University course, we steadily added to these, building the word ‘adhesion’, which is used for testing the type’s basic proportions (though initially, it was ‘adhecion’ leaving the tricky s for later).

6 Moving to your computer There are a variety of ways to get your drawings onto the computer. Some advocate tracing programs, however I prefer manually tracing my drawings because I want full control over where the points on my curves go.

Most software requires a well-defined drawing to work with effectively, so when you’re happy with a sketched character, try outlining it with a fine tipped pen (to get a shape edge) and then fill in the shape with a marker.

Tip: You can then take a snap with your phone’s camera (these days most are of high enough quality), and send it to your computer.

7 Choosing your software Like myself, many designers from a graphic design background will naturally opt straight for Adobe Illustrator to start drawing their type. For drawing individual letterforms and experimenting, this is fine. However, it soon becomes obvious that this is simply not the right tool for creating a typeface. From the outset you will benefit from working in an environment that gets you thinking about letter spacing and word creation.

The software choice has opened up in the last few years on the Mac. The current industry standard seems to be FontLab Studio (Mac and Windows), but new software like Glyphs and Robofont are gaining more traction with type designers. The programs aren’t cheap, but Glyphs does have a ‘Mini’ version on the Mac App Store, with some functionality removed that beginners are unlikely to miss. Both also offer a 30-day free trail.

The other obvious advantage of these packages is that you can export your work in progress as a font.