featuring
jonathan barnbrook An interview with the type legend into how he goes about creating some of his most inuential and expressive typefaces, and an insight into Jonathan’s beliefs as a designer and a bit of advice for young designers looking to break into the world of type design.
helsinki film festival Eye catching poster and brand design by Catalan designer Pol for CinemaissĂ, a Helsinki-based Latin American film festival.
contents
type events 2016
type map
jonathan barnbrook interview
modern fonthouses
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
new & noteworthy type
featured work
historic type methods
favourite fonts
manchester ‘M’
new & noteworthy type
Blenny Blenny Spike Spondike www.daltonmaag.com This fabulously curvaceous, fat face display font was conceptualized by Dalton Maag font developer, Spike Spondike and introduced to their library in 2014. Soft, voluptuous curves and a retro feel make it suitable for branding, bold headlines, or product labels. Having worked with Thai and after a trip to Bangkok, Spike connected the diversity of shapes in the Thai script with the design of Blenny.
airplane Airplane Kady Jesko www.kadyje.com Inspired by the famous jet era of 1960’s, this font is perfect for retro designs with its long stems and familiarity “Mad Men” style advertising typefaces. Designed by Google Designer Kady Jesko, she has taken inspiration from her fondness of travelling for this neat eye catching piece.
FEBRUARY
TYPE TALKS- WORDS IN STONE BIRMINGHAM, ENGLAND Letter Designer and Carver John Nielson Leads a talk about Britain’s rich lettercarving traditions and the effect this has on modern typography.
APRIL
OFFSET 2016 DUBLIN, IRELAND With a variety of Designers, Typographers and Illustrators showcasing there work, Offset 2016 looks to be one of the biggest of the year.
MAY
TYPO BEYOND DESIGN BERLIN, GERMANY With an array of big name type designers speaking, the 2016 Typo talks looks to be a must-see for Typographers alike, with exclusive discounts for students too.
Next year looks to be an exciting year for typography. Here are some of the events we think look the most interesting in the first half of the year.
JULY
TYPOGRAPHY & COMMUNICATION CONFERENCE THESSALONIKI, GREECE A series of workshops, discussions and exhibitions at this years ICTVC conference with the theme of “Discussing priorities | Developing a field”
in type
featured
This is Catalan designer Pol’s identity for Cinemaissí, a Helsinkibased Latin American film festival that caught our eye, with simple lines of colour against a black backdrop. Its limited colour palette and bold typography makes it adaptable but instantly recognisable across a variety of different colourways, with the line elements extracted for different applications such as on coffee cups and bags.
“The festival needed an upgrade that would support the curation and quality of the film selection and at the same time connect with the Finnish target
type design
around the world Canada
Ray Larabie Superclarendon
United Kingdom Matthew Carter Verdana
USA
Morris Fuller Benton Franklin Gothic
Brazil
Eduardo Recife Pastelaria
Argentina Alejandro Isla
France
Claude Garamond Garamond
Netherlands Lucas de Groot Calibri
South Africa
Margaret Calvert Transport
Germany
Hermann Zapf Palatino
India
Switzerland Italy Adrian Frutiger Avenir
R.K. Joshi Tunga
Giambattista Bodoni Bodoni
historic type methods We take a look back at traditional printing methods, exploring how it used to be done before digital techniques came into play. When Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press in the 15th century, his goal was to bring books to the common people. In the decades just preceding the 1440s, printing of any kind required craftsmen to carve entire pages of text into wood blocks.
could be used to form words for one page of print, then taken apart and re-ordered to create the next. While this method was a significant improvement on woodblock page printing, the wooden letters did not print with clarity, so Gutenberg began working with metal type instead.
columns on each page, and consisted of two volumes that totaled 1,282 pages — a task that took a staff of 20 and two to three years (between 1452 and 1454/1455) to complete. One hundred eighty copies were made of this Bible, and 48 copies can still be found in museums today.
Once the text was carved, the space around the letters had to be whittled away so the text was the only surface that would touch the page. The blocks would then be inked and paper placed on top, and rubbing the paper onto the wood would create an impression. Each page required its own wooden block, which was a time-consuming and difficult process. However, wood-block printing did allow books to be copied more easily than the earlier method of transcribing by hand.
The metal type included individual capital and lowercase letters, as well as punctuation symbols; these characters’ reverse impressions (or “mirror images”) were cast in steel. Letters and symbols could then be assembled on a wooden forme to create entire pages of text, complete with spacers and lead rules for legibility. In order to transfer these impressions from forme to page, Gutenberg used a lacquer-like ink he created himself out of soot, walnut oil and turpentine.
For the next 350 years, Gutenberg’s press was used to print with virtually no changes to the design.
Gutenberg’s efforts to create an easier way of printing took an extensive amount of time and funding. It is believed that his first forays, between the 1430s and 1440s, were through his own version of woodblock printing, with individual, reusable letters carved into wood blocks instead of entire words or pages. This allowed for a movable type, where individual letters
Gutenberg’s printing press was called a “screw press” or handpress, and allowed ink to transfer evenly between the page and the forme. With this new way to print, Gutenberg could print books at a rate of approximately six pages per day. His most notable print job was a copy of the Bible, which was 42 lines of text in two
While the printing press itself changed very little over the next few centuries, the ability to print more quickly and efficiently gave rise to new ways of thinking. The publication of the Gutenberg Bible not only allowed the printed word to reach the common people, it also encouraged the spreading of information and ideas. The first English book was printed in 1473 in Bruges, Belgium, by William Caxton. His printing press and subsequent standardization of the English language are said to be the reason for the expansion of English vocabulary and introduction of inflection in writing.
Emigré Yes, that Emigré, the iconic, much-mourned design journal Emigré. Some colleges and universities become so preoccupied with teaching their students of the cultural significance of the journal that they neglect to mention that the entity lives on in online form, with an archive of articles from the journal, an excellent shop and large collection of fonts available for download. These are of a diverse nature, though one thing that seems to permeate much of the collection is the jaunty angles which adorn the fonts’ serifs.
Dalton Maag London-based Dalton Maag has been designing fonts and logos and “supporting and assisting people in deepening their typographic skills” since 1991. In that near-two decade period they have seen exciting growth but what makes them remarkable is their branching out into both Cairo and Brazil—endeavours to contribute to emerging visual and typographic cultures in each country’s continent. Through doing so, Dalton Maag’s resumé has expanded to take in the vast typographic expanses of both the Arabic alphabet and South American languages.
modern fonthouses A brief summary of some of the up and coming font houses that are paving the way for type design in 2015.
jonathan barnbrook The type legend talks about his design process.
Q — What is the process of producing a typeface?
Q — You seem to put a lot of emphasis on the name
A — I usually sketch things roughly in my notebook. These drawings are not very exact; the sketches come from either an idea or concept I have had or some interesting lettering I have seen. I then sit at the computer and refer to the drawing, it is very important that the drawing is ‘out of focus’ to get just the essence right, the computer does the refining. This means the first time I output something it looks terrible, the twentieth time it might look OK and then it sort of builds from there.
of a typeface, why is this?
Of course while you are doing this there all the intellectual process going on. One of the most important is how to subvert the history of typography within the drawing or concept. That may sound pretentious, but there are issues about making a letter look badly drawn, to give it a subversive edge or to reference a moment of typography history. If you don’t have these thoughts – about what exactly the critical position is of your work – then you are going to be fishing around much more trying to come up with something. I am not that interested in historical accuracy which might surprise some people, my fonts are about an emotional feeling you get from a time period or ideology. A synthesis of many different things defined by the time you are working in. Drawing a typeface is a very painful process, not just in the endless refining but also just the sheer amount of time it takes, you are talking many months for a text font, so it can be pretty daunting. My advice, just start with a few useful letters that you will use for a project and don’t get caught up in drawing a whole font unless its really, really necessary as it is not always the greatest use of your time.
A — It is very important, in the past a typeface would take years so it was almost a life’s work. Therefore people would often use their surname. There was also the ‘Letraset’ school of naming which was to name after a visual pun to do with the typeface. Technology has changed the time taken and access for producing typefaces so it can be done be individuals on a much quicker timescale. I suppose I see it as a cross between naming a pop song and a painting. The name can be throwaway; last for a moment, but it can also have many different layers. The name ‘Bastard’ for instance I thought about a lot. The typeface is a blackletter (or gothic) font. It has strong associations with Fascism. It would have been silly to ignore this, even though blackletter has a large place in the history of typography, most people would associate it with the Nazis so it was a chance to almost ‘laugh’ at that. But if you bother to look further into the name, you will know that there is a 14–15th Century form of blackletter called ‘Bastarda’ or that putting the ‘wrong font’ in a piece of letterpress setting is called
Q — How would you recommend that people learn about typography? A — Pressurise their tutors to teach it or go to the library and learn about it yourself, I do get quite annoyed with students who expect this kind of thing to be given to them, passive people are not good designers. The best designers will naturally learn anything and everything about a subject because they are interested in it. Your library may have useful books – the important thing is to stick at it – as your work will benefit because of it. If you’re not really interested you’re not going to explore the subject in any depth.
Q — Will I get rich by designing fonts? A — If you are lucky and design a font for a big corporation you will, but if you are interested in doing experimental work it is unlikely. I wouldn’t advise anybody to work in graphics just for the money.
What’s your favourite font? We ask some students their opinions...
James- Birmingham “Didot is fantastic, with its thin serifs and its high class feel”.
Sonam- Nepal “I love this bold font, I’m using it at the moment!”
Jamie- Cumbria “This font has a perfect mix of weights for a variety of uses, great web font, too!”
Callum- Blackburn “Just the perfect heading typeface, I use it far too much”.
Katie- Manchester “I’m using Garamond on everything at the moment...”
the manchester m The ‘M’ is Manchester’s brand signifier. The strands of colour represent the richness and diversity of the City and the individuals within it, existing in parallel. Where those strands intersect the City becomes a truly exciting place. The people original and modern — make Manchester.
It is used for national and international communications, when City partners from across Greater Manchester and the wider city-region are promoting themselves jointly under a ‘Manchester’ banner.