6
issue 12/07/2012 The Magazine of the Type Directors Club.
Tipo Page 2
Tipo Page 3
4 8 10 14
Calculating a Freelance Rate Shel Perkins
Deconstruction & Graphic Design: History Meets Theory Ellen Lupton
The Story Of Preputua Tiffany Wardle
French type foundries in the twentieth century Alice Savoie
The Type Directors Club, Suite 44, level 9, 60 East Street, Melbourne Victoria 3001.
Telephone
9876 5000
Fax
9876 5002
Email:
director@tdc.com.au
Website:
www.tdc.com.au
Board of Directors 2005-2006 Chairman Daniel Pravin
President
James Montgomery
Terminal Design Inc. Vice President Greg Maxwell
MaxwellFonts Secretary-Treasurer Alex W. Whitehead
AWVC Directors at Large James F. Barnam James F. Barnam Design Brian Diecken The Diecken Group Nina Drobayashi Foote Cone Belding Susan L. Mitchell Farrar, Strauss & Gibbons Charles Rix Charles Rix & Associates Diego Vanderbilt
MJM Creative Services, Inc. Carol Walkett Hadassah
Executive Director Carol Walker
Tipo The Newsletter of the Type Directors Club Editors Diego Vainesman and Carol Walker
Designer
Diego Vainesman
Contributors Yvonne Dietrich Martin Solomon Daniel Pravin Alex Donaldson Carter Williamson Alexia McKnight
Tipo Page 4
Professional Practice
Tipo Page 5
Calculating a Freelance Rate By Shel Perkins
Many designers spend part of their careers as freelancers-it’s a great way to
depreciation to the list, rather than the full purchase price)
gain experience, build relationships, and develop a diverse portfolio. Some
Labor expenses
independant designers work directly with business clients, submitting fee proposals for specific projects. However, others prefer to work behind the scenes as an additional resource for established creative ?rms. If you are one of these people, how should you go about calculating a fair price for your services? Most design Firms and agencies cope with temporary increases in their workload by bringing in outside designers on a subcontractor basis. A freelancer with very specific skills is brought in to help with a particular phase or aspect of a project, and the freelancer is usually paid a negotiated hourly rate (and reimbursed for any necessary project materials). The rate you receive will be a gross amount-that is to say that no taxes will be withheld. As a self-employed worker, you are responsible for all of your own taxes and business expenses. For that reason, it’s important to calculate an hourly rate that is based on your own situation. The process is not complicated. Just follow these simple steps:
Add up your expenses
Start by adding up all of your annual business expenses. If you’ve been freelancing for a couple of years, this is easy-just look at “Schedule A” from your last year’s tax return. However, if you’re new to freelancing, you’ll need to prepare a worksheet with estimated amounts. Do some research to make the estimates as realistic as possible and be sure to include a reasonable salary for yourself-one that honestly reflects your skills and your level of experience. (As a reference, look at the annual survey of design salaries published by the American institute of graphic arts.) A complete list of your annual business expenses will look something like this:
General expenses
• Office rent and utilities (if you work from a home office, these will be prorated amounts) • Office telephone and internet access • Office supplies • Liability insurance • Advertising and marketing expenses • Business travel and client entertainment • Legal and accounting services • Business taxes and licenses • Depreciation (if you purchased any furniture, fixtures, or equipment during the year, add just one years worth of
• Salary (this must be a competitive wage that is adequate to cover your personal expenses such as home rent or mortgage-the portion that does not relate to your home office-food and clothing, personal travel, and recreation) • Health insurance • Other employee benefits • Employer taxes
Estimate your billable hours
The next step involves estimating how many billable hours you might be able to produce during the year. No matter how diligent you are, you can’t be billable every waking moment. Out of a full-time work schedule, most designers range between 50 and 80 percent billable. Here’s a format for estimating your potential for billable hours: Why is this example on the low end of the scale? In a large firm, staff designers have the potential to produce lots of billable hours because other employees are there to take care of nonbillable tasks such as marketing. As an entrepreneur, however, you’ll be doing everything yourself. New business development activities may take up a significant portion of your time, particularly when you are first starting out.
Know your break-even rate
At this point in the process, you know how much money is needed each year to keep your business afloat and you know how many hours are available to produce that money. The next step is simply to divide the total expenses by the total billable hours available. This gives you a break-even rate, meaning that you have to charge at least that much per hour in order to keep the doors open.
Bump it up to a billing rate
However, you want your business to do more than just break even-you want it to produce a profit. To make sure that happens, you must decide on a target profit margin and build that margin into your billing rate. This is an important management decision for you. The typical profit margin varies by design discipline, but it is usually somewhere between 10 and 20 percent.
Look for industry comparisons
Now that you’ve calculated your personal billing rate, compare it to the rates that other freelancers use for similar work. Ask around within your community and check for recent surveys. A junior production specialist may bill for as little as $35 an hour, while a creative director may bill for $75 or more per hour, so it’s
Tipo Page 6 important to find comparative information that is a close match to your own skills. Most advertising agencies and design firms use lots of different freelancers. This means that they know what the typical rates are, although in conversations with you they may be tempted to understate them a bit as a negotiating strategy. If you are asking to be paid more than the going rate, you will need to explain why that is appropriate.
Stay competitive
You may want to adjust your own billing rate in response to the industry comparisons that you have found, but you should never sell your services at less than your break-even rate. If you are a freelancer with modest expenses but a high number of billable hours, then you may have the luxury of adjusting your billing rate upward. However, if you find that you need to adjust your rate downward in order to be competitive, then you need to go back over your calculations very carefully. As a businessperson, you must find ways to cut costs and/or increase your billable hours. You might also consider lowering your target profit margin, but you should never eliminate it altogether. Finally, you should keep in mind that calculating an hourly rate is not a one-time process. You need to update your rate periodically because costs change, your skills change, and overall client demand changes. It’s a good idea to recalculate your standard rate once or twice each year to make sure it remains as current and competitive as possible.
May/June 2005
In the design profession, nearly all important projects are too large to be completed by just one person. Because of this, each creative firm strives to develop a culture that fosters effective teamwork. In many other professions, teams can be rather hierarchical, inflexible, and slow. This is especially true for corporate teams that are together for a number of years. Over time, they often become inwardly focused and bureaucratic. They suffer from turf battles and politics. Design teams, however, are quite different. They are brought together for a short period of time, usually just a few weeks or a few months to complete a single project. No two projects are identical, so the size and composition of each team varies. A cookie-cutter approach will not work—most projects need different processes and tools. To accommodate this, design firms structure their resources like a network, making them scalable and flexible enough to allow multiple configurations. Design teams have fewer rules and a greater flow of information, both of which are important for rapid innovation. Design teams are externally oriented and focused on client needs. Because of this, the organizational structure for the team tends to be decentralized and organic rather than hierarchical and rigid. Having fewer layers and rules allows the group to be more adaptive to the external environment. Design teams also have an egalitarian nature that encourages self-management and regular participation in decision-making by all group members. Individuals who do well in this environment are those who are drawn to challenges and are strongly motivated by opportunities for personal and professional growth.
Getting the right mix of skills
When a new project is first being pitched, one of the most important aspects of advance planning is to determine the exact mix of skills that will be required for success. Smart planning includes lining up the appropriate resources and resolving any competing demands for their availability. Design of course is the magic ingredient in the mix, but other skills will be vitally important as well. The needs of a large project will span multiple
“
A complex problem will require a wide range of expertise from research, strategy, and content development to technology, engineering, and project management
disciplines. A complex problem will require a wide range of expertise—from research, strategy, and content development to technology, engineering, and project management. The ultimate success of the project will depend upon getting just the right mix of talent, technical skills, and industry experience. The exact size of each team is determined by the number of separate skill sets required. On a large project, there will be a core team that is augmented by other players on an as-needed basis. Many organizational experts advise that the most effective size for a problem-solving group is between five and seven people—core teams tend to be small. Other resources are called upon in a very targeted way. In design firms, the core team for a project will be composed primarily of employees. The firm makes an important business decision about which skills to have on staff. This defines its core competencies and enables it to meet the recurring needs within its category of services. Outside resources are used for temporary needs and to accommodate project variations. Keep in mind that key project skills can also be provided by the client organization. Good design firms work in close collaboration with clients, functioning more like a partner than a vendor. When other professionals are brought into a project, they may be freelancers or separate creative firms recruited on a subcontract basis. Within each of the many possible skill sets, there will also be people at different levels of experience, from senior down to entry level. Not everyone will be involved for the full duration of the project—some may be needed during one or two phases only. The full team must of course be large enough to accomplish the work—the project will be doomed if the overall
Tipo Page 7
A shared understanding of the process
Design teams need a common framework and shared language for working together. Effective collaboration requires a commitment to shared methodology, terminology, and milestones. The process will include open critiques with all members participating—the goal is to identify and develop the very best ideas from all sources.
20
15
10
All Ords
5
All Ords Accum Idx 20 Leaders Accum Index Aust Leaders Trust
0
1.7.09
30.9.09
31.12.09
31.3.10
30.6.10
200
150
100
All Profits
50
All Ords Accum Idx
20 Leaders Accum Index Aust Leaders Trust 0 1.7.07
30.6.08
30.6.09
30.6.10
team is too small to carry the load or if key skills are missing. However, as teams increase in size, they can suffer from less cohesion, more confusion, and escalating costs.
A job well done
To respect everyone’s schedule, keep it short and simple. In the meeting, state what has changed and what has been achieved. Be sure to recognize positive behaviors, results, and contributions, and include bad news, if there is any. This is a chance for the group to correct any miscommunications, clear the air if necessary, and refocus its energies. (However, the team leader will have to make a judgment call if a serious personal problem has come up with an individual team member. It may be best to remember the old adage about praising publicly and criticizing privately.) Input should be solicited from every team member and each should have an opportunity to contribute. At the end of the meeting, summarize the decisions that have been made and the follow-up actions that are needed. For each action item, identify the person responsible and the date when it must be completed. There must be personal accountability for results. Whenever possible, keep progress visible. Display the latest iterations of the creative work and any other important documentation such as research findings and brand strategy documents. Post charts that show the burn rate on budgets and updated schedules that remind everyone of important milestones and deadlines. There should be one central repository for project information. It could be an intranet site, but it’s more beneficial if the team has a shared physical space. Many industrial design firms set up a workroom where all of the materials related to a large project can be left spread out. All team meetings take place there. If the materials are confidential and must be protected when the team is away, the workroom will have a door that can be locked. Having a shared space enables the team to work in close physical proximity, which increases interaction and encourages camaraderie.
At the end of a project, the team delivers the completed work to the client or hands it off to a third party such as a printing company for implementation. As soon as that happens, all team resources are reassigned. This raises a very important psychological issue. To stay in business, each design firm must line up a constant stream of assignments. The master schedule is FULL TIME SCHEDULE kept very tight so that as soon as one ends, everyone is immediately shifted to the next. However, it can be frustrating LESS if there is never a moment’s pause to
52 WEEKS X 40 HOURS
savor what the team has accomplished VACATION 3 WEEKS X 40 HOURS together. This can damage staff morale SICK 8 DAYS X 8 HOURS and contribute to burnout. At the very least, the full team should have one HOLIDAYS 10 DAYS X 8 HOURS final meeting to conduct a postmortem review of the completed project. This is NEW BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT 50 WEEKS X 14 HOURS an opportunity to evaluate the finished TOTAL BILLABLE HOURS AVAILABLE work in light of its success criteria. It’s a chance to discuss what went well and what didn’t, and to learn from any failures. In a large firm, there should also be a way of sharing what you learn with the rest of the organization, so that you’re creating a culture of learning for the overall company. For staff members, there should also be a way to include feedback on team play in their performance evaluations. This encourages personal and professional growth.
2,080
100%
-120
-5%
-64
-3%
-80
-4%
-700
-34%
1,116
54%
Tipo Page 8
“
Deconstruction takes apart such oppositions by showing how the devalued, empty concept lives inside the valued, positive one
Tipo Page 9
Deconstruction & Graphic Design: History Meets Theory Since the surfacing of the term ‘deconstruction’ in design journalism in the mid- 1980s, the word has served to label architecture, graphic design, products, and fashion featuring chopped up, layered, and fragmented forms imbued with ambiguous futuristic overtones. This essay looks at the reception and use of deconstruction in the recent history of graphic design, where it has become the tag for yet another period We then consider the place of graphics within the theory of deconstruction, initiated in the work of philosopher Jacques Derrida. We argue that deconstruction is not a style or ‘attitude’ but rather a mode of questioning through and about the technologies, formal devices, social institutions, and founding metaphors of representation. Deconstruction belongs to both history and theory. It is embedded in recent visual and academic culture, but it describes a strategy of critical form- making which is performed across a range of artifacts and practices, both historical and contemporary. Jacques Derrida introduced the concept of ‘deconstruction’ in his book Of Grammatology, published in France in 1967 and translated into English in 1976. ‘Deconstruction’ became a banner for the advance guard in American literary studies in the 1970s and 80s, scandalizing departments of English, French, and comparative literature. Deconstruction rejected the project of modern criticism: to uncover the meaning of a literary work by studying the way its form and content communicate essential humanistic messages. Deconstruction, like critical strategies based on Marxism, feminism, semiotics, and anthropology, focuses not on the themes and imagery of its objects but rather on the linguistic and institutional systems that frame the production of texts. In Derrida’s theory, deconstruction asks how representation inhabits reality. How does the external image of things get inside their internal essence? How does the surface get under the skin? Western culture since Plato, Derrida argues, has been governed by such oppositions as reality/representation, inside/outside, original/copy, and mind/ body. The intellectual achievements of
the West – its science, art, philosophy, literature – have valued one side of these pairs over the other, allying one side with truth and the other with falsehood. For example, the Judeo-Christian tradition has conceived the body as an external shell for the inner soul, elevating the mind as the sacred source of thought and spirit, while denigrating the body as mere mechanics. In the realm of aesthetics, the original work of art traditionally has carried an aura of authenticity that its copy lacks, and the telling of a story or the taking of a photograph is viewed as a passive record of events.
‘Deconstruction’ takes apart such oppositions by showing how the devalued, empty concept lives inside the valued, positive one. The outside inhabits the inside. Consider, for example, the opposition between nature and culture. The idea of ‘nature’ depends on the idea of ‘culture’, and yet culture is part of nature. It’s a fantasy to conceive of the nonhuman environment as a pristine, innocent setting fenced off and protected from the products of human endeavor—cities, roads, farms, landfills. The style. fact that we have produced a concept of ‘nature’ in opposition to ‘culture’ is a symptom of our alienation from the ecological systems that civilization depletes and transforms. A crucial opposition for deconstruction is speech/writing. The Western philosophical tradition has denigrated writing as an inferior copy of the spoken word. Speech draws on interior consciousness, but writing is dead and abstract. The written word loses its connection to the inner self. Language is set adrift, untethered from the speaking subject. In the process of embodying language, writing steals its soul. Deconstruction views writing as an active rather than passive form of representation. Writing is not merely a bad copy, a faulty transcription, of the spoken word; writing, in fact, invades thought and speech, transforming the sacred realms of memory, knowledge, and spirit. Any memory system, in fact, is a form of writing, since it records thought for the purpose of future transmissions.
By Ellen Lupton
Tipo Page 10
French type foundries by Alice Savoie University of Reading, Department of Typography and Graphic Communication
Tipo Page 11
Causes and consequences of their demise
Tipo Page 12
rom 1500 to 1800, France played a key-role in the history of type design through the whole Western world. Garamond, Granjon, Fournier and Didot are a selection of the French Figures who played a major part in this history. However, the French contribution became much more sporadic in the twentieth century, and one can observe that French type designers are scarce on the contemporary international scene. In order to understand what led the country into this situation, this dissertation gives an overview of French type design in the twentieth century. This period saw great disruptions in the way type is designed and distributed; in order to understand the gradual weakening of the industry, it is important First to understand how the French designers and type-founders reacted to successive technological shifts. Therefore, attention is paid to the production of type, and the study especially focuses on the activity of the French foundries. The dissertation is divided into three chronological parts. The First chapter is dedicated to the period 1900-1950; it shows how French type founders dealt with the arrival of hot metal typesetting machines, and compares the ideas developing in France during this period to the ones spreading abroad. The second chapter focuses on the period following the Second World War; the initiatives undertaken to relaunch the production of typefaces in France during the 1950s and 1960s are analyzed, as well as the sudden demise of the French type foundries in the 1970s. The third part gives an overview of the French activity of type design from this demise onwards; it focuses especially on the establishment of a type design education, and on the influence of digital technologies and the world wide web on type design practice. This dissertation should not be considered an exhaustive review of the French output during the last century. It is an attempt to understand the evolution of French type design throughout this period by highlighting key-events and people. It has been conceived as a First step toward an understanding of the recent history of type design in France, and will hopefully lead to further research on the subject.
1900-1950 : First signs of a decline The rise of the Peignot foundry
Nineteenth-century typography was dominated by two major movements in French type design: the Didot style, which had emerged during the Revolutionary period, remained popular throughout the nineteenth century; the Elzevier typefaces were widely used, as they illustrated the Romantic Movement’s desire to return to the humanistic letterforms of the Renaissance. The French printing industry was shared between these two trends until the end of the century. But in the 1890s, the Art Nouveau
movement started to spread in France, and a young man called Georges Peignot saw it as an opportunity to give French type design a new direction. Georges Peignot was the son of Gustave Peignot, who had bought a little foundry in Paris in the 1860s. During the following decades, Peignot diversified his activities and bought out other collections of typefaces, until the foundry had acquired a significant size by the beginning of the twentieth century. With the death of Gustave Peignot in 1899, his sons took on the direction of the form1, including Georges. In the late 1890s, Georges Peignot commissioned the artist Eugène Grasset to design a typeface. Named Grasset, it was released in 1897 by the Peignot foundry (fig.1). Very much a member of the artistic milieu, Georges Peignot commissioned a few years later another Art Nouveau artist, George Auriol, to design a series of typefaces: Auriol, Française Légère, Auriol Labeur (fig.2), Française Allongée, Auriol Champlevé and the Robur series appeared between 1901 and 1907. All these creations were ground breaking projects and saw great success at the time. They contributed to the expansion of the Peignot’s business, which became the major foundry and retained this position until its closure in 1974. In 1912, Georges Peignot instigated the creation of Cochin (fig.3). Again, Cochin became very popular among French typographers, and remained a best-seller even after the First World War.
Monotype and Linotype composing machines The success of the Peignot foundry seemed assured due to Georges Peignot’s creativity and artistic flair. But whereas the French type-founders were focusing on designing typefaces for hand setting, the real revolution came from abroad: the USA, England and Germany were offering new, mechanical processes of typesetting. As the historian René Ponot remarked, many systems for the rapid casting of type had been invented from the beginning of the 19th century, and some of them were French1. But the concept became commercially viable only in 1885 with the mechanising of punch-cutting and typesetting2. In 1886 Mergenthaler invented the Linotype casting machine, and one year later,
Tipo Page 13
“
The success of the Peignot foundry seemed assured due to Georges Peignot’s creativity and artistic flair
Tipo Page 14
“
I think a very nice fount can be made from these letters, but agree with you in thinking that several details must be altered before it can be passed, and certainly before I should like to see my name attached to it.
Eric Gill Wardle Essay
Tipo Page 15
The Story of Perpetua
By Tiffany Wardle Essay submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts in Theory and History of Typography and Graphic Communication, University of Reading, 2000
This essay relates the origins of the typeface Perpetua and Felicity italic which were designed by Eric Gill and produced by The Monotype Corporation.Although the type and the collaborators are well known, the story has had to be pieced together from a variety of sources—Gill’s and Morison’s own writings and biographical accounts.There are accounts similar to this, but none could be found that either takes this point of view, or goes into as great detail. In 1924, an essay directed towards the printers and type founders was calling for a new type for their time. Entitled ‘TowardsAn Ideal Type,’ Stanley Morison wrote it for the second volume of The Fleuron. In the closing statement there is an appeal for “some modern designer who knows his way along the old paths to fashion a fount of maximum homogeneity, that is to say, a type in which the uppercase, in spite of its much greater angularity and rigidity, accords with the great fellowship of colour and form with the rounder and more vivacious lowercase.” Two years later, in 1926, again Morison is requesting a “typography based not upon the needs and conventions of renaissance society but upon those of modern England.” Only two years previous had the Monotype Corporation assigned Stanley Morison as their TypographicalAdvisor. Once assigned he pursued what he later came to call his “programme of typographical design” with renewed vigour. For he had planned to “fuse the talents of a living designer of lettering with those of an expert engraver of punches and create a new type-design.” At this time, Morison already had an ‘artist’ in mind. From the beginning of his career, and indeed earlier, Eric Gill appears involved with lettering and writing. It has been noted that “as a child he was fond of drawing locomotives.” Even perhaps of more import is the fact “that his [drawings] concentrated on form rather than upon the engineering function,” and that “the lettering has been worked out in beautiful detail.” Indeed his parents recognised his skill and enrolled him at the Chichester Art School, and this was when Eric’s ‘madness’ for lettering began. With his growing interest in lettering, at the age of seventeen, he became apprenticed to W.H. Caroë, architect to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in Westminster. Shortly thereafter, he began carving letters in his spare time, and enrolled in the evening classes given by the master calligrapher Edward Johnston. It
was while in these classes that Gill received his first job, that of an inscription on stone. “So it was the lettering enthusiasm, begun in connection with engine names, and continued at the Art School at Chichester, which gave me the opportunity.” This enthusiasm would continue to grow through his work, as he became more involved with other people “who were professionally concerned with the production of printing types.” The style of Gill’s lettering, in his stone work and engravings, may have at first been much affected by the lettering classes under Johnston.This was noted by Paul Beaujon [Beatrice Warde], “his capitals, in this early manner, are those of a technically brilliant stone-cutter–who has been trained by a calligrapher.”This rapid transition, from calligraphic to epigraphic, could be attributed to the amount of work he was doing during this time. Not only was he still busy with the stone inscriptions, but he had begun to expand the media upon which he practised his lettering skills to include, among others, the fascia done for W.H. Smith in Paris; wood engraved book plates, commissioned and for friends; and both illustrations and entire alphabets for various presses. It was in 1914 from “an unusual drawing,” that his obvious interest in designing a type could be found. He had enlarged a setting of Old Style Long Primer and “drawn his own variations and adaptations to the letter-forms.” Morison and Gill had first met in 1913 when Morison was working for the Catholic Publishing House of Burnes & Oates, for whom Gill had been doing some small wood engravings. From Morison’s own appreciation for the alphabet, it seems likely that he had “admired [Gill’s] ability to engrave smaller letters on wood.” Possibly from Gerard Meynell, Morison had learned of the collaboration of Gill with Johnston in designing the Underground Alphabet. It was through Meynell that he must also have known of the alphabet drawn by Gill for the Westminster Press.
Tipo Page 16
Each of these titles also has a special handbound edition, with relevant ADGeorge Henson typographic ephemera. Publisher presents To order, get more information, and to join our mailing list to receive future prospectuses, please visit the website at www. HensonPublisher.com or call us 9577 1775
three new books for the discerning typographer.
Type & Typography:
Highlights from Matrix, the review for printers and bibliophiles, with introductions by John Randle and John D. Berry – 400 pages, designed by Jerry Kelly. $65, special edition (60 copies) $225, deluxe (10 copies) $500
The Well-Made Book:
Essays and Lectures by Daniel Berkeley Updike, edited & with an introduction by William S. Peterson – 408 pages, $55, special edition (40 copies) $220
Gudrun Zapf von Hesse:
Bindings, Handwritten Books, Typefaces, Examples of Lettering and Drawing, with an introduction by Professor Hans A. Halbey – 224 pages, designed by Hermann Zapf. $75, special edition (80 copies) $
Subscribe
There are four kinds of membership. All include the annual and newsletter. Please check one.
Mail the completed form with cheque made out to The Type Directors Club or credit card details to:
Regular members are actively engaged in the use or design of type as designers, production professionals, or type creators. Annual dues are $125.
To join the Type Directors Club, please complete this form and mail it with your payment.
The Type Directors Club,
On-line membership may be completed with a credit card at www.type.com.au
For more information, contact:
Carol Walker, Executive Director, Type Directors Club, 212 983 6042, director@tdc. com.au, www.tdc.com.au
Associate members have an interest in typography but are not professionally engaged in its use or creation. Annual fees are $100. Student members are currently enrolled in undergraduate or postgraduate studies in graphic design.Annual fees are $40. Sustaining members are businesses or individuals who contribute $300 or more annually.
Title First Name
My cheque is enclosed
Surname Company
Please charge my
Street Address
American Express Visa
Suburb State/Province Postcode
Mastercard
Country
Account number
Email Address
Expiration Date
Phone Fax
Business Phone
Signature: