Typo Square by jyeon0903

November 2018 First Edition

noun [c] /ˈtīpō-skwer/ : rendezvous made for typographers

t ee

m ally

d an

inn

are

ati

sig nc

pg6

om m

ity re

typ

qu a

ch o

ut to

fel lo

the

d fol

,u ve i t a

de sig n

ers

ua sq

tc ge

e op

e ac

e rd

sig

rs ne

professional or aspiring

t in

typography square.

inspirational and motivational

rea

how typography is utilized to reflect culture in branding

tu vir

co nn ec

CULTURAL BRANDING

ts rtis a d an

HERB LUBALIN behind-the-scene of Avant-Garde typeface creation pg24

TYPE GLOSSARY

typographic terms A to Z with crossword puzzle pg40

Welcome to the first edtion of Typo Square, your new favorite typographic magazine capturing, interpreting and introducing the fast-changing global graphic design trends to you from the design capital of the world, NYC. Design is a visual communication, not only an aesthetic expression, which requires continuous creative and systematic thinking. It is all about intentional designing while keeping it look aesthetically pleasing, which requires a lot of practice and process. As our magazine name suggests, we aim to create an open space for both aspiring and professional typograhers, where they can constantly share and discuss designs by virtually meeting through typo square. Typo Square is a community for designers all over the world. Typo Square is impeccably packed with special, exciting and thrilling contents curated by our editors. We hope you find the first edition of Typo Square enterntaining and useful. Please join us on our online community on www.typosquare.com or download our App from App Store or Google Play to share your thoughts, criticisms and suggestions for the topics you would like us to cover in our next editions. Take your time and enjoy unfolding Typo Square!

SINCERELY, JUYEON KANG,

EDITORIAL

DEAR READER,

Cultural Branding

Editorial

Contents

Noteworthy Books and Links

Typeface History: Gill Sans

Typographer Portrait: Herb Lubalin

2 4 Typography in Fashion

Type Glossary A to Z

Typo Square Website and App Visual 2

32 40 44

CONTENTS Cultural Branding pg6

Typographer Portrait: Herb Lubalin pg24

Typo Square Website and App Visual pg44

BOOKS Highsimth, Cyrus

Inside Paragraphs: Typographic Fundamentals

Hochuli, Jost

Detail in Typography Hyphen Press London 2008

Font Bureau 2012

Ruder, Emil

Typographie: A Manual of Design Verlag Niggli AG; 7th Revised Version Sulgren 2001

Santa Maria, Jason

On Web Typography A Book Apart 2014

The New Typography University of California Press; 1 edition Berkeley 2006

Bringhust, Robert

The Elements of Typographic Style Hartley and Marks Publishers 2013

Craig, James

Designing with Type: The Essential Guide to Typography Watson-Guptill Publications New York 2006

Tschichold, Jan

Kinross, Robin

Modern Typography Hyphen Press 2nd edition 2004

NOTE

LINKS Type Directos Club tdc.org Typographica typographica.org Designing with Type designingwithtype.com Thinking with Type thinkingwithtype.com Font in Use fontsinuse.com l Love Typography

ilovetypography.com

What The Font? new.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont Font Shop fontshop.com Paul shaw paulshawletterdesign.com

EWORTHY

Typography is more than just written words â&#x20AC;&#x201D; it is the key component of graphic design that contributes to the overall aestheic, value and meaning of visual communication

CULTU BRAN

URAL NDING

Times Square NYC, taken by James Maverick, date unknown pinterest.com

CULTURAL BRANDING

A DIVERSE CITY With almost 200 languages spoken, 40 per cent of the New York Cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s population was born outside of the United States. According to the US Census Bureau report, the immigrants make up the majority of the residents in some neighborhoods of NYC.

Statue of Liberty, taken by unknown, date unknown pinterest.com

Chinatown NYC, taken by Michael Hsu, 2015 nycgo.com

New York is becoming a more and more ethnically diverse and dynamic city with increasing numbers of New Yorkers with immigrant background. There is an abundant variety of restaurants, bars, grocery stores and salons with different themes of ethnicity and culture all around New York City. One of the most prominent ways that these stores show their identity is through typography in their banners and menu, which the customers get their initial impressions of the stores from. statistics from New York City Population, www.nyc.gov

Zen6, 328 E 6th St, NYC Japanese restaurant, taken by Juyeon Kang, November 2018

Chow House, 181 Bleecker St, NYC Chinese restaurant, taken by Juyeon Kang, November 2018

Móle, 5131, 57 Jane St, NYC Mexican restaurant, taken by Juyeon Kang, November 2018

Panchito’s, 105 Macdougal St, NYC Mexican restaurant, taken by Juyeon Kang, November 2018

CULTURAL BRANDING

TYPOGRAPHY AND BRANDING Effective typography is utilized to give the linguistics a written form and to function as a visual communicative tool that reflects its cultural environment. Branding here means of “endowing products and services with the power of a brand”. Typography communicates more than the written meaning; it introduces important layers of definition to a brand’s message and reflects different cultural understandings. With that in mind, the poor usage of typography in culturally specific branding weakens the power of the design. Typography is used differently when branding local brands, and most of the times it is expressing cultural identities intrinsic of each place. Typeface designs have always operated culturally, technologically and psychodynamically; they are constantly engaging in social interaction and have many semiotic implications in understanding how and why typefaces provide different tones to visual communications. Along with the typeface style, many local or global brands focus on the use of imagery to convey different cultural moods or qualities and engage the local audience. For instance, the mosts common elements of Japanese restaurant banners are wood, calligraphy, and the colors: red and white. Tamashii Ramen, 2905 Astoria, Broadway, NY Japanese restaurant, taken by Juyeon Kang, November 2018

Playa Bowls, 108 Macdougal St, NYC Acai bowl place, taken by Juyeon Kang, November 2018

Tropical Art, painted by Marta Oliveira, 2014, Brazil martaoli.com

Hello Saigon, 180 Bleecker St, NYC Vietnamese restaurant, taken by Juyeon Kang, November 2018

The Red Bridge, Oil on Canvas, painted by Nguyen Thanh Binh, date unknown, Vietnam artnet.com

TYPEFACE HISTORY Modern, Elegant

British Classic Futura

Gil San

Eric Gill, taken by Howard Coster, 1927 npg.org.uk

pictures caption

ll ns 13

TYPEFACE HISTORY: GILL SANS

“Gill Sans is a sans-serif typeface designed by Eric Gill and released by the British branch of Monotype from 1928 onwards.” Gill Sans is based on Edward Johnston’s 1916 “Underground Alphabet”, the corporate font of London Underground. Gill as a young artist had assisted Johnston in its early development stages. In 1926, Douglas Cleverdon, a young printer- publisher, opened a bookshop in Bristol, and Gill painted a fascia for the shop for him in sans-serif capitals. In addition, Gill sketched an alphabet for Cleverdon as a guide for him to use for future notices and announcements. By this time Gill had become a prominent stonemason, artist and creator of lettering in his own right and had begun to work on creating typeface designs. Gill was commissioned to develop his alphabet into a full metal type family by his friend Stanley Morison, an influential Monotype executive and historian of printing. Morison hoped

that it could be Monotype’s competitor to a wave of German sans-serif families in a new “geometric” style, which included Erbar, Futura and Kabel, all being launched to considerable attention in Germany during the late 1920s. Gill Sans was released in 1928 by Monotype, initially as a set of titling capitals that was quickly followed by a lower-case. Gill’s aim was to blend the influences of Johnston, classic serif typefaces and Roman inscriptions to create a design that looked both cleanly modern and classical at the same time. Marketed by Monotype as a design of “classic simplicity and real beauty”, it was intended as a display typeface that could be used for posters and advertisements, as well as for the text of documents that need to be clearly legible at small sizes or from a distance, such as book blurbs, timetables and price lists. Designed before setting documents entirely in sans-serif text was common, its standard weight is noticeably bolder than most modern body text fonts.

An immediate success, the year after its release the London and North Eastern Railway chose it for all its posters, timetables and publicity material. British Railways chose Gill Sans as the basis for its standard lettering when the railway companies were nationalised in 1948. Gill Sans also soon became used on the modernist, deliberately simple covers of Penguin books, and was sold up to very large sizes which were often used in British posters and notices of the period. Gill Sans was one of the dominant typefaces in British printing in the years following its release, and remains extremely popular: it has been described as “the British Helvetica” because of its lasting popularity in British design. Gill Sans has influenced many other typefaces, and helped to define a genre of sans-serif, known as the humanist style.

Piccadilly Circus London Underground sign at night, taken by David Coleman, 2009, England photoshelter.com

Gill Sans Bold Metal Type, date unknown, wikipedia.org

TYPEFACE HISTORY: GILL SANS

CHARACTERISTICS Gill Sans compared to other sans-serifs of the period. Gill Sans does not use the single-storey “g” or “a” used by many sans-serifs and is less monoline than Johnston. Its structure is influenced by traditional serif fonts such as Caslon rather than being strongly based on straight lines and circles as Futura is. The proportions of Gill Sans stem from monumental Roman capitals in the upper case, and traditional “oldstyle” serif letters in the lower. This gives Gill Sans a very different style of design to geometric sans-serifs like Futura, based on simple squares and

grandest and most important inscriptions.”While Gill Sans is not based on purely geometric principles to the extent of the geometric sans-serifs that had preceded it, some aspects of Gill Sans do have a geometric feel. The “O” is an almost perfect circle and the capital “M” is based on the proportions of a square with the middle strokes meeting at the centre; this was not inspired by Roman carving but is very similar to Johnston. But the influence of traditional serif letters is clear in the “two-storey” lower-case “a” and “g”, unlike that of Futura, and the “t” with its curve to bottom right and slanting cut at top left, unlike Futura’s which

serif fonts, several weights and releases of Gill Sans use ligatures to allow its expansive letter “f” to join up with or avoid colliding with following letters.

is simply formed from two straight lines. The lower-case “a” also narrows strikingly towards the top of its loop, a common feature of serif designs but rarer in sans-serifs.

... it takes a very ‘asystematic’ approach to type.Very characteristic of when it was designed and of when it was used.” (At this time the idea that sans-serif typefaces should form a consistent family, with glyph shapes as consistent as possible between all weights and sizes, had not fully developed: it was quite normal for families to vary as seemed appropriate for their weight until developments such as the groundbreaking release of Univers in 1957.

The basic letter shapes of Gill Sans do not look consistent across styles (or even in the metal type era all the sizes of the same style), especially in Extra Bold and Extra Condensed widths, while the Ultra Bold style is effectively a different design altogether and was originally marketed as such. Digital-period Monotype designer Dan Rhatigan, author of an article on Gill Sans’s development after Gill’s death, has commented: “Gill Sans grew organically

abcdefghijklm nopqrstuvwxyz circles, or realist or grotesque designs like Akzidenz-Grotesk, Helvetica and Univers influenced by nineteenth-century lettering styles. For example, compared to realist sans-serifs the “C” and “a” have a much less “folded up” structure, with wider apertures.The “a” and “g” in the roman or regular style are “double-storey” designs, rather than the “single-storey” forms used in handwriting and blackletter often found in grotesque and especially geometric sans-serifs. The upper-case of Gill Sans is partly modelled on Roman capitals like those found on the Column of Trajan. Edward Johnston had written that, “The Roman capitals have held the supreme place among letters for readableness and beauty. They are the best forms for the

Following the traditional serif model the italic has different letterforms from the roman, where many sans-serifs simply slant the letters in what is called an oblique style. This is clearest in the “a”, which becomes a “single storey” design similar to handwriting, and the lower-case “p”, which has a calligraphic tail on the left reminiscent of italics such as those cut by William Caslon in the eighteenth century. The italic “e” is more restrained, with a straight line on the underside of the bowl where serif fonts normally add a curve. Like most

Gill Sans tilted caps, Eric Gill, 1930 designweek.co.uk

TYPEFACE HISTORY: GILL SANS

Morison commissioned Gill to develop Gill Sans after they had begun to work together (often by post since Gill lived in Wales) on Gill’s serif design Perpetua from 1925 onwards; they had known each other since about 1913. Morison visited Cleverdon’s bookshop while in Bristol in 1927 where he saw and was impressed by Gill’s fascia and alphabet. Gill wrote that “it was as a consequence of seeing these letters” that Morison commissioned him to develop a sans-serif family. In the period during and after his closest collaboration with Johnston, Gill had intermittently worked on sans-serif letter designs, including an almost sans-serif capital design in an alphabet for sign-painters in the 1910s, some “absolutely legible-to-the-last-degree ... simple block letters” for Army and Navy Stores in 1925 and some capital letter signs around his home in Capely-ffin, Wales. Gill had greatly admired Johnston’s work on their Underground project, which he wrote had redeemed the sans-serif from its “nineteenth-century corruption” of extreme boldness. Johnston apparently had not tried to turn the alphabet (as it was then called) that he had designed into a commercial typeface project. He had tried to get involved in type design before starting work on Johnston Sans, but without success since the industry at the time mostly created designs in-house. Morison similarly respected the design of the Underground system, one of the first and most lasting uses of a standard lettering style as corporate branding (Gill had designed a set of serif letters for W.H. Smith), writing that it “conferred upon the lettering a sanction, civic and commercial, as had not been accorded to an alphabet since the time of Charlemagne”.

A large amount of material about the development of Gill Sans survives in Monotype’s archives and in Gill’s papers. While the capitals (which were prepared first) resemble Johnston quite closely, the archives document Gill (and the drawing office team at Monotype’s works in Salfords Surrey, who developed a final precise design and spacing) grappling with the challenge of creating a viable humanist sans-serif lower-case as well as an italic, which Johnston’s design did not have. Gill’s first draft proposed many slanting cuts on the ends of ascenders and descenders, looking less like Johnston than the released version did. Early art for the italic looked very different, with less of a slope and swash capitals. The final version did not use the calligraphic italic “g” Gill preferred in his serif designs Perpetua and Joanna, instead using a standard “double-storey” “g”. In the regular or roman style of Gill Sans, some letters were simplified from Johnston, with diamond dots becoming round and the lower-case “L” becoming a simple line, but the “a” became more complex with a curving tail in most versions and sizes. In addition, the design was simply refined in general, for example by making the horizontals slightly narrower than verticals so that they do not appear unbalanced, a standard technique in font design which Johnston had not used. The “R” with its widely splayed leg is Gill’s preferred design, unlike that of Johnston; historian James Mosley has suggested that this may be inspired by an Italian Renaissance carving in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Particular areas of thought during the design process were the “a” (several versions and sizes in the hot metal era had a straight

Aa Aa Aa Aa Aa Aa From top to bottom, light, light italic, regular, italic, semibold and semibold italic, 150pt.

TYPEFACE HISTORY: GILL SANS

ABCDEFGHI JKLMNOPQR STUV W XYZ 12 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 *‘’“”_&@• ©†˚$#%§˜ {}[]()<>/\.‚; – – —…!?’”’¶ 20

tail like Johnston’s or a mildly curving tail) and the “b”, “d”, “p” and “q”, where some versions (and sizes, since the same weight would not be identical at every size) had stroke ends visible and others did not. Rhatigan has commented that Monotype’s archives contain “enough material for a book just about the ‘b’, ‘d’, ‘p’, and ‘q’ of Gill Sans”. The titling capitals of Gill Sans were first unveiled at a printing conference in 1928; it was also shown in a specimen issued in the Fleuron magazine edited by Morison. While initial response was partly appreciative, it was still considered dubious by some ultra-conservative printers who saw all sans-serif type as modern and unsound; one called it “typographical Bolshevism”. Sans-serifs were still regarded as vulgar and commercial by purists in this

period: Johnston’s pupil Graily Hewitt privately commented of them that:

“In Johnston I have lost confidence. Despite all he did for us ... he has undone too much by forsaking his standard of the Roman alphabet, giving the world, without safeguard or explanation, his block letters which disfigure our modern life. His prestige has obscured their vulgarity and commercialism.”

Gill Sans’ technical production followed Monotype’s standard method of the period. The characters were drawn on paper in large plan diagrams by the experienced drawing office team, led and trained by American engineer Frank Hinman Pierpont and Fritz Steltzer, both of whom Monotype had recruited from the German printing industry. The drawing staff who executed the design was disproportionately female and in many cases recruited from the local area and the nearby Reigate art school; they worked out many aspects of the final drawings including adaptations of the letters to different sizes and the spacing. The diagrams were then used as a plan for machining metal punches by pantograph to stamp matrices, which would be loaded into a casting machine to cast type. It was Monotype’s standard practice at the

time to first engrave a limited number of characters and print proofs (some of which survive) from them to test overall balance of colour and spacing on the page, before completing the remaining characters. Walter Tracy, Rhatigan and Gill’s biographer Malcolm Yorke have written that the drawing office’s work has not been fully appreciated;Yorke described Gill as “tactless” in his claims that the design was “as much as possible mathematically measurable ... as little reliance as possible should be placed on the sensibility of the draughtsmen and others concerned in its machine facture”.

From left to right, Gill Sans Comparative Drawings, Eric Gill, 1929 centerforbookarts.org Gill Sans detail sketch, Eric Gill, 1926 designweek.co.uk Gill Sans tilted caps, Eric Gill, 1930 designweek.co.uk Sketch of Gill Sans ‘g’, Eric Gill, 1926 designweek.co.uk An early test proof of Gill Sans Shadow No 3, Eric Gill, 1929 designweek.co.uk

TYPEFACE HISTORY: GILL SANS

Gill Sans in Penguin Books, penguinfirsteditions.com

USAGE First unveiled in a single uppercase weight in 1928, Gill Sans achieved national prominence almost immediately, when it was chosen the following year to become the standard typeface for the LNER railway system, soon appearing on every facet of the company’s identity, from metal locomotive nameplates and hand-painted station signage to printed restaurant car menus, timetables and advertising posters. The LNER promoted their rebranding by offering Gill (who was fascinated with railway engines) a footplate ride on the Flying Scotsman express service; he also painted for it a signboard in the style of Gill Sans, which survives in the collection of the St Bride Library. In 1949 the Railway Executive decided on standard types of signs to be used at all stations. Lettering was to use the Gill Sans typeface on a background of the regional colour. Gill Sans was also used in much of its printed output, very often in capitals-only settings for signage. Specially drawn variations were developed by the Railway Executive (part of the British Transport Commission) for signs in its manual for the use of signpainters painting large signs by hand. Other users included Penguin Books’ iconic paperback jacket designs from 1935 and British official mapping agency Ordnance Survey. It was also used by London Transport for documents which could not be practically set in Johnston. Paul Shaw, a historian of printing, has described it as a key element of the ‘Modernist classical’ style from the 1930s to the 1950s, that promoted clean, spare design, often with all-capitals and centred setting of headings.

Gill Sans remains popular, although a trend away from it towards grotesque and neo-grotesque typefaces took place around the 1950s and 1960s under the influence of continental and American design. Typefaces that became popular around this time included original early “grotesque” sans-serifs, as well as new and more elegant designs in the same style such as Helvetica and Univers. Mosley has commented that in 1960 “orders unexpectedly revived” for the old Monotype Grotesque design: “it represents, even more evocatively than Univers, the fresh revolutionary breeze that began to blow through typography in the early sixties.” He added in 2007 “its rather clumsy design seems to have been one of the chief attractions to iconoclastic designers tired of the ... prettiness of Gill Sans”. As an example of this trend, Jock Kinneir and Margaret Calvert’s corporate rebranding of BR as British Rail in 1965 introduced Helvetica and Univers for printed matter and the custom but very similar Rail Alphabet for signage, and abandoned the classical, all caps signage style with which Gill Sans is often associated. Kinneir and Calvert’s road signage redesign used a similar approach. Linotype and its designer Hermann Zapf, who had begun development on a planned Gill Sans competitor in 1955, first considered redrawing some letters to make it more like these fonts before abandoning the design project (now named “Magnus”) around 1962-3.

An additional development which reduced Gill Sans’ dominance was the arrival of phototypesetting, which allowed typefaces to be printed from photographs on film and (especially in display use – hot metal continued for some body text setting for longer) massively increased the range of typefaces that could cheaply be used. Dry transfers like Letraset had a similar effect for smaller projects; their sans-serif Compacta and Stephenson Blake’s Impact exemplified the design trends of the period by choosing dense, industrial designs. Of the period from the 1930s to 1950s, when he was growing up, James Mosley would later write: “The Monotype classics dominated the typographical landscape ... in Britain, at any rate, they were so ubiquitous that, while their excellent quality was undeniable, it was possible to be bored by them and to begin to rebel against the bland good taste that they represented. In fact we were already aware by 1960 that they might not be around to bore us for too long. The death of metal type ... seemed at last to be happening.”

Top Gill Sans usage in various media, typographyseoul.com

Bottom

Gill Sans metal type in 30pt, flickr.com

While extremely popular in Britain, and to a lesser extent in European printing, Gill Sans did not achieve popularity with American printers in the hot metal era, with most preferring gothic designs like Franklin Gothic and geometric designs like Futura and Monotype’s own Twentieth Century. Gill Sans therefore particularly achieved worldwide popularity after the close of the metal type era and in the phototypesetting and digital era, when it became a system font on Macintosh computers and Microsoft Office. The category of humanist sans-serif typefaces, which Gill Sans helped to define, saw great attention during the 1980s and 1990s, especially as a reaction against the overwhelming popularity of Helvetica and Univers in the 1960s and 1970s. It can be identified by a tendency to use ‘double-storey’ as and gs in the roman and “single-storey” as in italic, like serif fonts.

TYPOGRAPHER PORTRAI Herbert F. “Herb” Lubalin (March 17, 1918 – May 24, 1981) was an American graphic designer. He collaborated with Ralph Ginzburg on three of Ginzburg’s magazines: Eros, Fact, and Avant Garde, and was responsible for the creative visual beauty of these publications. He designed a typeface, ITC Avant Garde, for the last of these; this font could be described as a reproduction of art-deco, and is seen in logos created in the 1990s and 2000s.

HER LUB

Herb Lubalin, taken by Sahlan Simon Cherpitel, 1980, aiga.org

R IT

RB BALIN 25

TYPOGRAPHER PORTRAIT: HERB LUBALIN

EDUCATION AND EARLY CAREER Beards Book Cover, Herb Lubalin 1949, USA printmag.org

Fact Magazine, Herb Lubalin 1964, USA readymag.org

72 Lettering, Herb Lubalin 1971, USA humanbeing.co

Avant Garde Audi Fox Advertisement, Herb Lubalin, 1970s, USA aiga.org

Herb Lubalin entered Cooper Union at the age of seventeen, and quickly became entranced by the possibilities presented by typography as a communicative implement. Gertrude Snyder notes that during this period Lubalin was particularly struck by the differences in interpretation one could impose by changing from one typeface to another, always “fascinated by the look and sound of words (as he) expanded their message with typographic impact.” After graduating in 1939, Lubalin had a difficult time finding work; he was fired from his job at a display firm after requesting a two dollar raise on his weekly salary, up from a paltry eight (around USD100 in 2006 currency). Lubalin would eventually land at Reiss Advertising, and later worked for Sudler & Hennessey, where he practiced his considerable skills and attracted an array of design, typographic and photographic talent that included George Lois, Art Kane and John Pistilli. Pistilli Roman was Lubalin’s first typeface (1964), later comprising the logos of Lincoln Center, the Met and New York Philharmonic. Lubalin served with Sudler for nineteen years before leaving to start his own firm, Herb Lubalin, Inc., in 1964.

Herb Lubalin, taken for Graphic Designers in the USA part 1, 1971 aiga.org

TYPOGRAPHER PORTRAIT: HERB LUBALIN

PRIVATE PRACTICE

Eros Magazine and Fact Magazine

Lubalin’s private studio gave him the freedom to take on any number of wide-ranging projects, from poster and magazine design to packaging and identity solutions. It was here that the designer became best known, particularly for his work with a succession of magazines published by Ralph Ginzburg: Eros, Fact, and Avant Garde. Eros, (Spring 1962 to issue four 1963) which devoted itself to the beauty of the rising sense of sexuality and experimentation, particularly in the burgeoning counterculture, it was a quality production with no advertising and the large format (13 by 10 inches) made it look like a book rather than a quarterly magazine.

It was printed on different papers and the editorial design was some the greatest that Lubalin ever did. It quickly folded after an obscenity case brought by the US Postal Service. Ginzburg and Lubalin followed with Fact, largely founded in response to the treatment Eros received. This magazine’s inherent anti-establishment sentiment lent itself to outsider writers who could not be published in mainstream media; Fact managing editor Warren Boroson noted that “most American magazine, emulating the Reader’s Digest, wallow in sugar and everything nice; Fact has had the spice all to itself.”Rather than follow with a shocking design template for

the publication, Lubalin chose an elegant minimalist palette consisting of dynamic serifed typography balanced by high-quality illustrations. The magazine was printed on a budget, so Lubalin stuck with black and white printing on uncoated paper, as well as limiting himself to one or two typefaces and paying a single artist to handle all illustrations at bulk rate

Eros Magazine, Herb Lubalin, 1962, USA flickr.com

Eye Magazine, Herb Lubalin, 1960, USA flickr.com

TYPOGRAPHER PORTRAIT: HERB LUBALIN

U&lc Magazine, Herb Lubalin, 1974, USA flickr.com

Avant Garde Magazine Lubalin and Ginzburg again turned one magazine’s demise into the creation of another, releasing Avant Garde six months later. The creation of the magazine’s logogram proved difficult, largely due to the inherent difficulties presented by the incompatible letterform combinations in the title. Lubalin’s solution, one which sought to meet Ginzburg’s hope for an expression of “the advanced, the innovative, the creative,” consisted of tight-fitting letterform combinations to create a futuristic, instantly recognizable identity. The demand for a complete typesetting of the logo was extreme in the design community, so Lubalin released ITC Avant Garde from his International Typeface Corporation in 1970. Unfortunately, Lubalin quickly realized that Avant Garde was widely misunderstood and misused in poorly thought-out solutions, eventually becoming a stereotypical 1970s font due to over-

use. Steven Heller, one of Lubalin’s fellow AIGA medalists, notes that the “excessive number of ligatures were misused by designers who had no understanding of how to employ these typographic forms,” further commenting that “Avant Garde was Lubalin’s signature, and in his hands it had character; in others’ it was a flawed Futura-esque face.” Regardless of ITC Avant Garde’s future uses, Lubalin’s original magazine logo was and remains highly influential in typographic design. Avant Garde (January 1968 to issue 14 summer 1971) also provided Lubalin with a large format of wide typographic experimentation; the page format was an almost square 11.25 by 10.75 inches bound in a cardboard cover, a physical quality that, coupled with Lubalin’s layouts, caught the attention of many in the New York design scene. Often, the magazine would employ full-page

typographic titles, which at the time was a largely new idea; in recent times, Rolling Stone art director Fred Woodward has used this method widely in his publication. Ginzburg, who held some experience as a photographer, gave Lubalin total control over the magazine’s look: “Herb brought a graphic impact. I never tried to overrule him, and almost never disagreed with him.” Other issues included a portfolio of Picasso’s oft-neglected erotic engravings, which Lubalin willingly combined with his own aesthetic, printing them in a variety of colors, in reverse, or on disconcerting backgrounds. Unfortunately, Avant Garde again caught the eye of censors after an issue featuring an alphabet spelled out by nude models; Ralph Ginzburg was sent to prison, and publication ceased with a still-growing circulation of 250,000.

U&lc Magazine

Lubalin spent the last ten years of his life working on a variety of projects, notably his typographic journal U&lc and the newly founded International Typographic Corporation. U&lc (short for Upper and lower case) served as both an advertisement for Lubalin’s designs and a further plane of typographic

experimentation; Steven Heller argues that U&lc was the first Emigre, or at least the template for its later successes, for this very combination of promotion and revolutionary change in type design. Heller further notes, “In U&lc, he tested just how far smashed and expressive lettering might be taken.

Under Lubalin’s tutelage, eclectic typography was firmly entrenched.” Lubalin enjoyed the freedom his magazine provided him; he was quoted as saying “Right now, I have what every designer wants and few have the good fortune to achieve. I’m my own client. Nobody tells me what to do.”

Typography is the unsung hero of fashion; it is one of the major design elements dictating how a brand can define it self as well as every garment it produces.

TYPOGRAPHY IN FASH

Y HION

Balenciaga Demna Gvasalia new collection, Balenciaga, 2018 fashionexpress.org

TYPOGRAPHY IN FASHION

From top to bottom

Fendi Fall 2018 collection, Fendi, 2018 thecut.com

Supreme x Louis Vuitton collection, Supreme, Louis Vuitton, 2017 thecut.com

D&G fall/winter 2011 collection, D&G, 2011 vogue.com

Fendi Fall 2017 Menswear Collection, Fendi, 2017 vogue.com

TYPOGRAPHY IN FASHION

BRAND LABELS The most prevailing and popular use of typography in fashion is in the labels of brands. The most popular trend of typography in brand labels have been modern and simple. It ignores massive statements or accompanying design and solely emphasizes the brand itself by putting weight on the name or logo of the brands. Examples include Supreme, Champion and StĂźssy.

From left to right Mens basic crew sweatshrit, StĂźssy stussy.com

Supreme beanie and hoodie, Supreme supremenewyork.com

Champion womens turtuleneck sweatshirt, Champion champion.com

BUBBLY FONTS The round, puffy bubble letters we are familiar with today is the invention of 70’s Bronx graffiti writer Phase 2 who created the bubble letter style of aerosol writing, also known as “softies”. The friendly, cartoonish bubble writing became more refined and it quickly found its way into the mainstream, getting repurposed for commercial graphics and packaging for products such as Hubba Bubba. The transition into fashion is also becoming more prevailing, especially as Stüssy collaborated with Sneeze in 2014. Stüssy stated that the bubble letters in their clothing are a “nod to the 90’s - classic and timeless”.

Graffiti #2, Phase 2, photo credit to Robert E. Mates and Paul Katz widewalls.ch

Hubba Bubba pineapple flavor gum wrapper, 1980s, UK flickr.com

SNEEZE x Stüssy crewneck white, Stüssy, 2014 stussy.com

TYPOGRAPHY IN FASHION

HAND WRITING One of the typography trends in fashion is loosely scrawled handwriting. It signifies to us a sense of freedom and defiance as it resembles graffiti. Graphically, the return to handwriting could be considered a protest but it expresses much more than what a digital typography does. The originality in various lengths of pen strokes, sizes, angles and pressures give meaning to the physical relationship between the writer and the words.

Gucci Life is Black Leather Clutch, Gucci gucci.com

Pleasures 2016 Spring/Summer Collection, Pleasures, 2016 pleasuresnow.com

COMME des GARĂ&#x2021;ONS Lewis Leather Rider Jacket, COMME des GARĂ&#x2021;ONS comme-des-garcons.com

For these reasons, it is no surprise that many street-fashion brands are utilizing hand-written typography in their brands. However, more and more high-end fashion brands are now also expressing their voice through hand-written typography. Perhaps hand-written typography delivers more emotions as words move from heart to hand.

TYPE GLOSSARY A to Z

ap height

sce nde r The part of lowercase letters (such as k, b, and d) that ascends above the x-height of the other lowercase letters in a face.

aseline The imaginary line on which the majority of the characters in a typeface rest.

A to

Type Glossary

escender The part of lowercase letters (such as y, p, and q) that descends below the baseline of the other lowercase letters in a font face. In some typefaces, the uppercase J and Q also descend below the baseline.

llipsis

A punctuation character consisting of three dots, or periods, in a row. It indicates that a word or phrase has been omitted.

anging Indent

lyph

The height from the baseline to the top of the uppercase letters in a font. This may or may not be the same as the height of ascenders.

ont One weight, width, and style of a typeface. Before scalable type, there was little distinction between the terms font, face, and family. Font and face still tend to be used interchangeably, although the term face is usually more correct.

The word glyph is used differently in different contexts. In the context of modern computer operating systems, it is often defined as a shape in a font that is used to represent a character code on screen or paper.

A document style in which the first line of a paragraph is aligned with the left margin, and the remaining lines are all indented an equal amount. This is sometimes referred to as outdenting. This is an effective style for displaying lists of information.

ustified erning

talic A slanting or script-like version of a face. The upright faces are often referred to as roman.

A block of text that has been spaced so that the text aligns on both the left and right margins. Justified text has a more formal appearance, but may be harder to read.

The adjustment of horizontal space between individual characters in a line of text. The objective of kerning is to create visually equal spaces between all letters so that the eye can move smoothly along the text.

eck igature Two or more letters tied together into a single letter. In some typefaces, character combinations such as fi and fl overlap, resulting in an unsightly shape. The fi and fl ligatures were designed to improve the appearance of these characters.

argin The white spaces around text blocks. Margins typically need to be created on the edges of a page, since most printers can’t print to the very edge. White space also makes a document look better and easier to read.

The small, usually curved connecting stroke between the upper bowl and lower loop in the double-story ‘g’.

A slanting version of a face. Oblique is similar to italic, but without the script quality of a true italic. The upright faces are usually referred to as roman.

int ua

blique

ica

A unit of measure that is approximately 1/6th of an inch. A pica is equal to 12 points. The traditional British and American pica is 0.166 inches. In PostScript printers, a pica is exactly 1/6th of an inch.

An antiquated sort or glyph, used to recreate the typographic flavor of a bygone age.

TYPE GLOSSARY A to Z

racking

aised Cap tyle

A design style in which the first capital letter of a paragraph is set in a large point size and aligned with the baseline of the first line of text. Compare to a drop cap.

One of the variations in appearance, such as italic and bold, that make up the faces in a type family.

ertex

eig

njustified Depending on alignment, this term refers to text which is set flush left, flush right, or centered

The average space between characters in a block of text. Sometimes also referred to as letter-spacing.

The outside point at the bottom or top of a character where two strokes meet

The relative darkness of the characters in the various typefaces within a type family. Weight is indicated by relative terms such as thin, light, bold, extra-bold, and black

ero-width

-height

og space A slanting version of a face. Oblique is similar to italic, but without the script quality of a true italic. The upright faces are usually referred to as roman

A Middle English letter (Ȝ) used mainly where modern English has gh or y.

A non-printing character used to indicate word boundaries to text processing systems when using scripts that do not use explicit spacing or after characters that are not followed by a visible space.

25 5 14

18 6

1 2 26

9 11 6

22 8 21

20 12 13 19 18

8 10

11 7

9 26

19 16 20

WEBSITE AND APP VISUAL

WEBSITE AND APP Beyond the magazine, our online interfaces are another rendezvous made for all artists and designers. Feel free to be our member to join the community!

however you unfold it.