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Influential Designers
Alexey Brodovitch Ed Benguiat, A man of letters Stevem Heller talks with David senior about THE ELECTRO-LIBRARY MAY 2016
10 Avoid bad punctuation and type-crimes at your new job, who needs that type of attention?
TYPE TIPS
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1) Legibility
Typeographic Faux Pas
• IBETYOUCAN’TREADTHIS
2) Readability
• I wish it was summer.
3) Pairing typefaces
• The cow jumped over the moon- The cow jumped over the moon
4) Large amounts of bodytext in uppercase letters.
• IT BECOMES REALLY DIFFICULT TO READ AND GET’S ANNOYING.
5) Don’t basterdize type • I d o n’ t
e ven want to re ad t his.
6) Incorrectly abbreviating AM and PM.
• am and pm • a.m. and p.m.
7) Failing to use or create fractions.
• Bad: 1/2 • Good: ½
8) Underlining titles instead of italicizing them.
• Bad: The Giver • Good: The Giver
9) Failing to use accent marks.
• Bad: No esta aqui • Good: No está aquí.
10) Failing to tuck periods/commas inside quotes marks.
• Bad: “I love animals”, she said. • Good: “I love animals,” she said.
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Lettering artist and type designer
HEROES
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Ed Benguiat A Man of Letters
E
d 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. Ed became established as a talented progressive Jazz musician uparticularly 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. 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 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 first job as an illustrator was as a cleavage retoucher for a movie magazine of design, typography, and calligraphy. He became Paul Standard’s prodigy.
http://alchetron.com/Ed-Benguiat-169948-W
“
Ed established career as a designer and art director at a number of large 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. 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. Ed became a partner with Lubalin in the development of U&lc, lTC’s
award-winning magazine, 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
American’s most prolific typographer and lettering artist. Benguiat has crafted over 600 typeface designs, here are just a few of his gems... • • • • • • • • • •
Buffalo Spencerian Eames Studio Lettering Showcard Stunt United Ed Benguiat Burbank Coop Scrawl
• • • • • • • • • •
Velo Serif Smidgen Neutraface Girard Blaktur Luxury Paperback Las Vegas Bullet Artist Proof
http://likesuccess.com/author/ed-benguiat https://www.google.com/search?q=ed+benguiat&espv=2&biw=927&bih=937&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjvgPeO4c_MAhVLPCYKHf0GAQ0Q_ AUIBigB#tbm=isch&q=ed+benguiat+logos&imgrc=qmGSYP6fIR3mgM%3A
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Te ac he r
es ig ne ra nd
Alexey Brodovitch Ph
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By: Madison Duignan
Alexey Brodovitch is remembered as the art director of Harper’s Bazaar for nearly a quarter of a century.
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http://indexgrafik.fr/alexey-brodovitch/
Leslie Gill, Richard Avedon and Hiro are among the other photographers whose work Brodovitch nurtured during his long career.
“
Fascinated with photography, he fostered the development of an expressionistic, almost primal style of picture-taking that became the dominant style of photographic practice in the 1950s.”
http://www.iconofgraphics.com/alexey-brodovitch/
A
lexey Brodovitch is remembered today as the art director of Harper’s Bazaar for nearly a quarter of a century. But the volatile Russian emigré’s influence was much broader and more complex than his long tenure at a fashion magazine might suggest. He played a crucial role in introducing into the United States a radically simplified, “modern” graphic design style forged in Europe in the 1920s from an amalgam of vanguard movements in art and design. Through his teaching,
he created a generation of designers sympathetic to his belief in the primacy of visual freshness and immediacy. In addition, Brodovitch is virtually the model for the modern magazine art director. He did not simply arrange photographs, illustrations and type on the page; he took an active role in conceiving and commissioning all forms of graphic art, and he specialized in discovering and showcasing young and unknown talent. His first assistant in New York was a very young Irving Penn.
So great was his impact on the editorial image of Harper’s Bazaar that he achieved celebrity status; the film Funny Face, for example, which starred Fred Astaire as a photographer much like Avedon, named its art-director. Despite his professional achievements and public success, however, Brodovitch was never a happy man. Born in Russia in 1898 of moderately wellto-do parents, he deferred his goal of attending the Imperial Art Academy to fight in the Czarist army, first against the Austro-Hungarian May 2016 | Tab | 23
Empire and then against the Bolsheviks. In defeat, he fled Russia with his family and future wife and, in 1920, settled in Paris. There, despite the burden of exile, he prospered; in 1924 his poster design for an artists’ ball won first prize, and in 1925 he won medals for fabric, jewelry and display design at the International Exhibition of Decorative Arts (the landmark “Art Deco” exposition). Soon he was in great demand, designing restaurant décor, posters and department store advertisements.
H
e came to the United States in 1930 to start a department of advertising (later known as the Philadelphia College of Art). There he trained students in the fundamentals of European design, while embarking on numerous freelance illustration assignments in Philadelphia and New York. In 1934 Carmel Snow, the new editor of Harper’s Bazaar, saw his design work and immediately hired him to be its art director. It was the beginning of a collaboration that was to revolutionize both fashion and magazine design, and that catapulted Bazaar past its arch-rival, Vogue. At Harper’s Bazaar, where he was art director from 1934 to 1958, Brodovitch used the work of such European artists as Man Ray, Salvador Dali, and A.M.
Cassandre, as well as photographers Bill Brandt, Brasai, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. He was the first to give assignments to emigré photographers Lisette Model and Robert Frank. Starting with a splashy, sometimes overly self-conscious style largely borrowed from his early counterpart at Vogue, Dr. M.F. Agha (AIGA medalist, 1957), he gradually refined his page layouts to the point of utter simplicity. By the 1950’s, white space was the hallmark of the Brodovitch style. Models in Parisian gowns and American sports clothes “floated” on the page, surrounded by white backgrounds, while headlines and type took on an ethereal presence. At his best, Brodovitch was able to create an illusion of elegance from the merest hint of materiality. Clothes were presented not as
pieces of fabric cut in singular ways, but as signs of a fashionable life. Today Brodovitch’s legacy is remarkably rich. His layouts remain models of graphic intelligence and inspiration, even if seldom imitated, and the artists, photographers and designers whose careers he influenced continue to shape graphic design in the image of his ideals.
“A good picture must be a completely individual expression which intrigues the viewer and forces him to think. ” -Alexey Brodovich
http://graphicdesign.cias.rit.edu/alexey/
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