Anonymous

Anonymous Issue 1

“For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.”

Virginia Woolf

Zuzana Licko­—6 April Greiman—17

Jessica Hische—24 Sibylle Hagman—32

The Underground Matriarchy—42 The Graphics Glass Ceiling—52

C ontents CONTENTS

Book Reviews—60 Typeface Reviews—68 Events—74

The Last Page—78

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Mothers: MOTHERS: Zuzana ZUZANA Licko LICKO

Written by Rhonda Rubinstein Creative Director, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco

8 As one of the first type designers to exploit the potential of the Apple Macintosh in its pre-designer days, Zuzana Licko transformed the pixel from low-resolution imitation to high-style original. Her early Emigre fonts not only revolutionised digital typography but also opened up the market for the smaller foundries whose quarter-page ads populate today’s design magazines.

She has designed more than two dozen typeface families and oversees the Emigre foundry, which currently offers 300 or so typefaces by the likes of Barry Deck, Jonathan Barnbrook, Frank Heine and Rodrigo Cavazos.

Born in Czechoslovakia, Licko (pronounced Litchko) emigrated to the US with her family as a schoolgirl. She studied architecture, photography and computer programming before taking a degree in graphic communications at the University of California at Berkeley. When Rudy VanderLans, her partner, launched Emigre, she began to contribute fonts to the fledgling ‘magazine that ignores boundaries’. Rather than replicate (on a dot matrix printer) typographic forms already adapted from calligraphy, lead and photosetting, Licko used public domain software to create bitmap fonts. Emperor, Emigre and Oakland appeared in the magazine and were soon advertised for sale when VanderLans and Licko co-founded the Emigre foundry.

Emigre’s development reflected the evolution of digital technology while questioning original ideas of legibility and layout. Licko’s highly structured typefaces complimented VanderLans’ organic compositions. The ‘Emigre aesthetic’ lay at the heart of a once-controversial battle on the American design scene, pitting them against Modernists such as Massimo Vignelli, who referred to the new typography as ‘garbage’. The debate did little to slow the popularisation of the Emigre fonts,

which by the late 1980s had moved beyond alternative pop cult status into the mainstream (The New York Times, ABC and Nike). The graphic design establishment has since recognised Licko and VanderLans with a 1994 Chrysler Award, the 1997 AIGA gold medal and the 1998 Charles Nypels Award for Innovation in Typography.

Licko’s intellectual approach to type creation continued to find inspiration in the production of technology. In 1986 she created Citizen, which approximated the smoother bitmap printing of the new laser printers. Base-9 and Base-12 originated as screen fonts for Emigre’s website in 1995, and then evolved with a companion printer font. As Emigre began publishing more design theory, Licko developed more ‘classical’ fonts; her designs Mrs Eaves and Filosofia were based respectively on Baskerville and Bodoni. And with Emigre’s latest music-oriented incarnation, Licko and VanderLans have found yet another format in which the publication can continue to be a testing ground and type specimen for Emigre typefaces.

Rhonda Rubinstein spoke to Zuzana Licko about this apparently ideal setup for a type designer and questioned the courteous but curiously reticent designer on a variety of other type matters, all (via email) in 9pt Monaco.

“For me, it’s like the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography: I know it when I see it.”

Rhonda Rubinstein: Do you have a maxim?

Zuzana Licko: I’ve never thought about having a maxim . . . it might be: ‘Question the obvious’.

RR: And what typeface would it be set in?

ZL: That would depend on the context, of course.

But for general print reproduction I would pick the last one I’ve finished, as I’m still trying to get better acquainted with the most recent designs.

RR:What is your greatest accomplishment?

ZL: That I was able to design functional and desirable typefaces without mastering calligraphy, which I was taught was impossible.

RR: Your greatest regret?

ZL: Sometimes I wish my career was more involved with disciplines that generate tangible items, like designing textiles, clothing, or shoes. I find it hard to find good-looking shoes that are comfortable. I often pick up a comfortable shoe and think, if they had just done this or that differently, I’d wear it.

RR: After becoming well known for designing radical fonts, you became interested in more traditional ones.

Why? ZL: My interest in reviving the classics (which began in 1995) was sparked by two factors: the sophistication of personal computer technology, and Emigre’s shift towards theory and the subsequent need for text faces to set large bodies of text. Each design gives me the opportunity to study details of classic faces that I’d never fully appreciate or notice through casual usage.

For example, working on my Bodoni revival, Filosofia, allowed me to better understand this classic. This kind of scrutiny, in turn, has given me ideas for faces that are not strict revivals, such as Tarzana and Solex.

RR: How do you judge good typeface design?

ZL: It depends on the intended usage, and what criteria you define as being important: longevity of usage, intensity of usage, influence on other designers, etc. It takes the perspective of time to determine which typefaces remain classics, which become icons, and which fade away. Moreover, these perceptions also change, and it is the constant changing of these perceptions that drives our desire for new typeface solutions. In addition, new technologies and environments present new problems for the designer to address. The most successful experimental typeface designs are often

those that address the possibilities or limitations of a yet uncharted technology.

RR: But we live and make decisions in the moment without the benefit of a time-lapse perspective. You must have opinions on typeface designs, and criteria for determining whether you want to undertake a particular design.

ZL: For me it’s like the Supreme Court’s definition of pornography: ‘I know it when I see it.’ I don’t have a preconceived idea about what constitutes a good typeface design. It can be a font created by LettError’s random technology, an old classic such as Bodoni, or a new classic such as Matthew Carter’s Verdana. It has to contain some originality, something that makes you think, ‘Hmm, I hadn’t thought about that,’ but originality in itself is not enough.

RR: Your father, a biomathematician who enabled your early computer access, was your first client, with the commission of a Greek alphabet for his personal use. What other people, events and/or things have influenced you most?

ZL: There were at least two important events: meeting Rudy VanderLans, and meeting the Macintosh. The Macintosh was unveiled at the time I graduated. It was a relatively crude tool back then, so established designers looked upon it as a cute novelty. But to me it seemed as wondrously uncharted as my fledgling design career. It was a fortunate coincidence; I’m sure that being free of preconceived notions regarding typeface design helped me to explore this medium to the fullest. It’s interesting how the gradual sophistication of my type design abilities has been matched by advances in the Apple Macintosh’s capabilities, so it has continued to be the ideal tool for me. When I started building Macintosh bitmap fonts in 1984, it was a purely experimental endeavour. I didn’t have a client for these fonts, neither did I plan to start a type foundry. It was Emigre magazine that opened up these options. Rudy had started it (with two Dutch artists) as a showcase for émigré artists. Issue 3 was the turning point for my typeface experiments and for Emigre, as it was typeset entirely using my first low-res fonts. We had a lot of inquiries about the availability of these typefaces that no one had seen before. It was the start of Emigre Fonts.

For a while this turned me into a typesetter. Many of the designers who wanted to use my typefaces did not have a Macintosh, so I was selling typesetting with

12 my fonts. As it turned out, the magazine provided me with a reason to continue developing these fonts, as well as a means to promote them. In turn, these unusual type designs contributed to the magazine’s unique character, while also providing an efficient means of typesetting. Using the Macintosh not only cut costs but added a level of design control that otherwise would have been mediated through an outside typesetting service.

RR: Can you describe your working methods?

ZL: While I work primarily on screen, sometimes I begin with rough thumbnail sketches, to give me an idea of the proportions or a detail of a character.

Then I try out shapes and serif details directly in the Fontographer drawing window. The only hand drawing I do is on laser printouts, to mark areas that need adjustment, or to sketch alternate forms. Then I eyeball the corrections on screen. At any given time, I have several designs sitting on the back burner.

Sometimes I put a design away when I hit a stumbling block, and it may take months or even years to resolve some of these design problems.

RR: You recently re-released your original bitmap fonts (Emperor, Universal, Oakland and Emigre) from 1985 as the Lo-Res family. What was it like revisiting these typefaces fifteen years later?

ZL: It was interesting to see how much font and page-layout technologies have changed, and how font-making software has improved. The reasons for the re-release were mostly technical, to accommodate new possibilities or new restrictions. For example, when I originally released these fonts, the use of point sizes was limited to a basic set, usually 9, 10, 12, 14, 18 and 24 point. This was quite limiting because each size group of bitmap designs is on a different grid structure, which relates to its resolution; the number in each Lo-Res font name indicates the number of pixels in its body, or ppem (‘pixels per em’). Once the point size restriction was lifted, I was able to fine-tune the grid resolutions so that the capitals are in alignment when the resolutions are scaled to the same size. At the same time, I added the euro symbol, and made the font outlines compatible with recent technologies such as Flash. We also renamed the fonts under one family name, which made more sense within the context of our font library. I wouldn’t be surprised if we have to make additional updates after another fifteen years. We’re already gearing up for OpenType. This format (developed

by Adobe and Microsoft) makes it possible to incorporate advanced typographic features into PostScript and TrueType fonts.

RR: In the 1980s your typefaces were criticised as being either ugly or hard to read. How do you look back on those reactions?

ZL: The establishment’s negative reaction towards new forms and technologies is natural. So if this work eventually becomes accepted, it’s a compliment in hindsight, because it means the work was truly innovative.

RR: Which is your most popular typeface?

ZL: To judge from the volume of sales and usage, it’s RR: What have been the most shocking or delightful Mrs Eaves, my Baskerville revival. I see it everywhere: uses of your typefaces? magazines, book covers, even the junk mail with my ZL: Billboard use can be shocking because you have electric bill! so little time to react as you’re driving by (Was that Base-9 I just saw?). I often cringe when these huge RR: How would you explain its success? letters are tracked so tightly that their counters can’t ZL: I think Mrs Eaves was a mix of enough tradition breathe – as tends to be the case on billboards. This with a slight updated twist. It’s familiar enough to is particularly problematic with typefaces such as be friendly, yet different enough to be interesting.

Base 9 and Citizen that need more breathing space Due to its relatively wide proportions, as compared than narrower ones. It makes me wonder how such with the original Baskerville, it’s useful for giving billboard designs come about. presence to small amounts of text such as poetry, Oddly, some of the most pleasing uses have been or for elegant headlines and for use in print ads. It those that I didn’t recognise right away to be my makes the reader slow down a bit and contemplate typefaces. This sometimes happens in books where the message. the typography and the typeface are so well blended in a traditional sense that the idiosyncrasies (which RR: How did you come to work with VanderLans? my typefaces tend to have) are downplayed.

ZL: We met at the University of California at Berkeley

“If this WORK work “IF THIS becomes ACCEPTED, accepted, BECOMES it’s in IT’S a A compliment COMPLIMENT IN hindsight, because HINDSIGHT, BECAUSE it it WAS was IT means MEANS IT truly innovative.”

TRULY INNOVATIVE.”

where I was an undergraduate and Rudy was a graduate of programming – another field that women generally student in photography. This was in 1982-83. After seldom enter, though maybe this will change. The college we both did all sorts of design-related odd field of type design is more open to women than it jobs. There wasn’t any direction. Then, in 1984 the ever has been.

Macintosh was introduced, we bought one, and everything started to fall into place. We both really RR: How is your personal style and philosophy (such enjoyed this machine. It forced us to question as your commitment to recycling) reflected in your everything we had learnt about design. We both work? How do you see the designer’s responsibility enjoyed that process of exploration, of how far you in these times? could push the limits. Rudy is more intuitive; I’m more ZL: To live in harmony with our environment, we will methodical. Yin and yang. It seemed to click, and need to treat all life and material as precious. There still does. can be no ‘waste’ because there is no black hole on this planet for its disposal, and storing it ultimately RR: How do you naviagate your partnership with degrades the quality of life. The key to getting rid Rudy when the tradition of design partnerships of waste is to rethink the way we use materials. For often means that the woman gets less recognition? example, a container shouldn’t become waste as soon ZL: Rudy and I are both very detail-oriented and as it’s emptied. Next, we need to realise that what we hands-on. This makes it difficult for us to work do at home and at work are connected. together. I’m not a great collaborator and neither is At home I can wash out an empty container out, then he. It’s one reason why I switched my studies from re-use or recycle it. At work, I can take the effort architecture to graphics. I realised that having to to design a container that is more easily re-usable compromise with so many outside opinions wouldn’t and recyclable. But neither action will be nearly allow me the kind of creative freedom I desired. I’m no half as effective as when I do both. This is a very diplomat! Our Emigre collaboration works because we simple example, but I think you get the idea. It each control a distinct part of the equation. I control could be the choice of disk packaging or the paper my typeface designs, Rudy controls the magazine, we choose for a catalogue, or any other carrier of and Emigre is the symbiosis. product or information. Whenever possible we print A bigger problem for me is that type designers in the Emigre type catalogues on 100 per cent recycled general are under-recognised. For example, it often paper, which contains 50 per cent post-consumer happens that a graphic designer takes full credit for waste, and the paper is processed chlorine free. We a logo, even when most of its character came from print 60,000 of these catalogues each year, so the the typeface. Even other designers tend to forget that choice of paper makes a significant difference. In there is a high level of creativity in typeface design. addition, we avoid marcoating and other treatments So it’s not so much a problem of being a woman in that make the print work less recyclable. a man’s world, it’s being a type designer in a world that gives little recognition to this art form, and I find RR: You’ve written that the catalyst for Hypnopaedia this disillusioning. patterns was the lack of copyright for typeface designs (the patterns were created by the rotation of a single RR: You named your Baskerville revival after Sarah letterform from the Emigre library). Are you actively Eaves, who became Baskerville’s wife and finished involved in such legal issues? printing the volumes he left incomplete on his death. ZL: We address them in the Emigre catalogue and Is the typographic world as male-dominated as it magazine. We do our best to stay informed about appears from the outside? changing font technologies and to help establish fair ZL: The history of type design is rooted in the use usage standards. It’s something I’d rather not have of heavy machinery and lead founding, which have to spend time on, but it’s a necessity for keeping our traditionally not been considered women’s work. business in business. Typefaces are made by people Today, the discipline is available to any artist who who rely on sales in order to continue investing in the embraces computer technology, but it is one of the development of new designs. We try to convey this more technical specialities within visual design. A message in a variety of ways, and the Hypnopaedia type designer does benefit from an understanding design turned out to be a visual example of the basic

16 issue involved. One problem is that people find it hard to distinguish between the ornamental design of letterforms and the alphabetic characters that they represent. As a result there is no US copyright protection for letterform designs, because they are seen as purely utilitarian. By rotating the letter s, taking them out of context and turning them into textures, the Hypnopaedia patterns allow us to make this distinction and appreciate letter shapes on another level, abstracted from their function as characters.

RR: What other type designers do you think are doing interesting work now?

ZL: Much of the interesting type design work these days is being done by individuals. This is a testament to PC technology, which has made the independent type industry possible by decentralising the design of typefaces and production of fonts. This has greatly increased the choice of typefaces, since it no longer requires a committee of corporate executives to approve investment in the development of a typeface.

However, the next phase of sophistication, OpenType, may once again take the manufacture of type beyond the reach of independent type designers.

The complexities of designing huge character sets are extremely time-consuming, with diminishing returns (as few of the additional characters may be used by the average user).

RR: Are there specific type designers who you think are doing particularly innovative work?

ZL: Too many to list here, and too many to overlook, which would just get me into a heap of trouble. But every typeface that we’ve licensed for the Emigre library is designed by someone who I feel is doing very innovative work. I’m impressed and amazed by other people’s work all the time. That’s how we end up licensing other people’s designs.

RR: Increasingly, information is being accessed primarily onscreen in websites, kiosks and signage.

In addition, the screens are getting smaller as cell phones, watches and control panels carry more information. How do you see typography evolving to meet this challenge?

ZL: The presentation of information on digital devices will change profoundly once the resolution of the displays (LCDS or otherwise) quadruples. At that point, screen displays will be able to show just about any design that can be printed. With the

present display resolutions the typography and the organisation of information needs to be very clean and efficient in order to maximise the use of every pixel. I don’t think we’re making the best use of the current technologies: too often it seems that the design of the screen information was hacked together by someone on the product design team, almost as an afterthought.

Professional type designers, typographers, graphic designers and information designers are getting left out of the equation because the manufacturers don’t recognise the importance of the visual interface.

RR: What do you think is the most important thing you have learnt?

ZL: That nothing is permanent, yet there is much value in the reincarnation of classics. [END]

MOTHERS: M others: APRIL April GREIMAN Greiman

Written by Leon Whiteson Architecture and Design Critic, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles

18 April Greiman is a thinker and artist, whose transmedia projects, innovative ideas and projects, and hybrid-based approach, have been influential worldwide over the last 30 years. Her explorations of image, word and color as objects in time and space are grounded in her singular fusion of art and technology. Greiman has been instrumental in the acceptance and use of advanced technology in the arts and the design process since the early 1980s. Here, we look back at an interview from her heyday when her innovative and experimental work was causing controversy.

When designer April Greiman’s poster “Does It Make Sense” appeared in fall 1986, it was alternately hailed as a radical advance in the art of poster design and condemned as pornographic, self indulgent and inappropriate. A life-size, nude fold-out of herself, digitised into an array of computer pixels—the microscopic spots of light that make up computer images—”Does It Make Sense” displays Greiman’s naked body adorned with the graffiti of scientific symbols and photographs of exploding supernova.

A brontosaurus, reproduced from a TV image, roams the figure’s groin. A hand holding a crystal ball sprouts from her head. A printed border exhorts the viewer to “dance, make sounds, feel, don’t worry, be happy.” Commissioned for the Minneapolis Walker Art Center Design Quarterly, the poster epitomises Greiman’s innovative bridge between art and technology.She describes her style, which epitomises the 1980s California New Wave in graphic design, as an experiment in creating ‘hybrid imagery.’

“At the heart of the concept of hybrid imagery is a recognition that, in inventing new technologies, we reinvent ourselves,” Greiman explained. “In the end, we can never be sure of who is creating who.”

A slender woman of 40, with finely modelled

features and a shock of hennaed, punk-cut hair, Greiman bubbles with enthusiasm and ambition.

“I consider myself blessed to be working at this extraordinary time of innovation,” she said. “All our ideas, all our techniques are in the melting pot. Who knows what will happen next?”

Greiman has won international awards for her graphic designs. She was featured in the 1987 Pacific Wave Exhibition in Venice, Italy. She was chosen as one of six designers in an international poster design show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Her 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games poster of running legs silhouetted against a square of bright blue sky was the most memorable of 16 posters commissioned by the Olympic Organizing Committee.

“April Greiman’s work is literally explosive,” famed New York designer Massimo Vignelli wrote in the introduction to the 1985 book, ‘Seven Graphic Designers.’ “By far one of the most daring and meaningfully experimental designers in the world, her work is extremely intellectual and emotional at the same time.” Though trained as a graphic designer at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Allgemeine Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel, Switzerland, Greiman is unhappy with the title of ‘graphic designer.’

“You can’t help breaking the rules if you want to stay alive.”

“Traditional graphic design, whether of the loose, American kind or disciplined, Swiss manner, is more concerned with the nature of the printing process than it is with visual and philosophical ideas.

Though I’ve done every kind of graphic commission, from billboards to menus, I chafe at the limitations of the designation.“I want everything I do to be somehow a first, so I always try to open things out and rethink the subject from the ground up. Maybe that’s why so many conventional graphic designers object to the way I play fast and loose with all the media, from photography and TV through computers and laser printing technologies.”

Greiman’s \2000 square foot loft in a converted Lincoln Heights brewery mirrors her iconoclasm.

The high, white space houses drawing boards and a host of Macintosh personal computers. A full-size billboard design printed on vinyl looks down upon movable work stations for up to seven associates. The conference room is furnished with futons and a TV. A huge window looks towards the downtown towers that symbolize the restless contemporary world Greiman finds so stimulating.

“Greiman’s ideas are outstanding,” said Barton Myers, who commissioned Greiman to develop tile and brickwork patterns for the Cerritos Community Arts Center. “Her feeling for colour, fused with her innovative patterning designs, is unique.”

“April hit Los Angeles at exactly the right time,” Hodgetts said. “The design community in the city was in transition in the early 1980s. Ideas were popping, and all the barriers between disciplines were down.

Fashion, restaurant design, graphics, photography and fine art were tossed into the blender. The results were often stunning, and April’s work was among the very best.” In 1980, Greiman designed the menus, logo, mailers, advertisements, dinner plates and some of the interior for the now-defunct China Club restaurant on Third Street. China Club, with its striking Greiman bar mirror and airbrush mural by Peter Sato, was an exercise in total “environmental” design.

Despite its achievements and experiments— or perhaps because of them—the early 1980s were a rough time in Greiman’s life.“There was a lot of criticism,” she recalled. “The people­­—mainly other designers—who were threatened by my innovations were the most bitter. But these criticisms, by forcing me to articulate my ideas, only served to sharpen my style.” In the intensely competitive Angeleno design community, Greiman’s colleagues are wary

of openly criticising her style. Off the record, several complained about her “reckless mix-up of media,” “obsession with technology at the expense of design values,” and “queen bee attitude.” Conventional designers often objected to including Greiman in their professional group shows. Her work cut across the lines that traditionally demarcate fine and commercial art in a way that upset many colleagues. “It all became too exhausting,” Greiman said. “But you can’t help breaking rules, if you want to stay alive.”

Greiman’s working methods are complex. The design of the MOMA poster, for example, involves a series of steps to create the “layering” that she seeks to add resonance to her designs. “Normally the digital pixels are invisible to the viewer,” Greiman explained. “But when you bring them into focus, you see that each one is different and fascinating in shape and colour. This is what I mean when I say that we invent the technology and it reinvents the way we see.”

The final stage in the poster design is the manipulation of the discovered textures and colors into an image that communicates an immediate yet complex message. When complete, it reads both as an art image and as a source of information. “Just when people think they have April pegged, she’s off on some new journey,” said husband Eric Martin.

“She is utterly unpredictable, as hybrid as her imagery and completely personal. What other designer would use a nude image of themselves on a poster issued by a major art museum magazine?”

“Am I the artist of the graphic design industry, or am I the designer of the fine arts world?” asked Greiman rhetorically. “I think of myself as a problem solver first and foremost. From that impulse all the rest follows.” [END]

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Daughters: DAUGHTERS: Jessica JESSICA Hische HISCHE

Written by Brian Jaramillo, Creative Officer, FanGram, Santa Monica

26 At the age of 28, Jessica Hische has a remarkably prolific career; she is known for her gorgeously elaborate custom lettering and illustration for clients like Target, Barnes & Noble Classics, and National Public Radio.

Jessica has been named an ACD Young Gun and a Forbes 30 Under 30 in Art & Design, and today we sat down with her and half a dozen cupcakes at her studio, Title Case, in San Francisco, to pick her brain.

“The work you do while you procrastinate is probably the work you should be doing for the rest of your life.” — Jessica Hische For Jessica Hische, that work—the work she should be doing for the rest of her life—is making letters.In 2009, Jessica Hische was unstoppable.

She began 2009 as a senior designer at Louise Fili’s acclaimed design studio and went full-time freelance in September; she completed illustrations for a variety of top publications; did tons of amazing lettering, including the new Louise Fili identity; released her first font, Buttermilk, a big success; began selling letterpressed posters; and started a site, Daily Drop Cap, which now gets 2,000 visitors a day.

All this a little more than three years after graduating from Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art. “Jessica has a can-do approach to everything,” Fili says. “For her, nothing is insurmountable.”

In 2006, Hische was living and working in Philadelphia, teaching a few classes, and establishing freelance contacts. She made a promo to send out for the holidays—the Twelve Days of Christmas, each day illustrated on its own postcard. She sent the promo to 250 magazine and agency ADs, and

also to “a few people I thought were awesome,” she says, “including Louise Fili, Christoph Niemann and a couple others.”

Fili was the only one who responded. She asked Hische to come to New York ASAP. “I had no idea it was for a job interview,” says Hische, who turns 26 in April. “I thought she just wanted to see what the youth of today were doing or something. At the end of the day, she offered me a job and I had to drop everything and move to New York in two weeks.”

Early on at Fili’s studio, Hische showed great potential and proved herself with every new piece.

She moved quickly from junior designer to a senior design position, and worked well with Fili, who became her mentor.

“Louise is a true art director,” Hische says. “Her employees (usually just two, a senior designer and a junior designer) are her hands and she is the brain so anything that comes out of the office is fabricated by one of her designers and conceptually developed

by Louise.”

Hische crafted logos and designed books, and put in countless hours behind the computer,

“Jessica has a can-do approach to everything.”

tweaking beziers, making bowls and tails curve just right. Fili has a large collection of type specimens, and Hische often spent an entire day working with letters—inspired by the fanciful specimens from past eras and traditions.

“Anyone can be a good letterer,” she says. “I was able to become so good at lettering because I drew it literally all day, every day, for three years. I would go to work for Louise and draw type all day, then I would go home and work on freelance work or personal projects until 1 or 2 a.m.”

That breakneck schedule was the main reason she wanted to go 100 percent freelance. But leaving Fili’s studio was difficult.

“She has been the biggest influence on my career and work and I still talk to her often,” says Hische. “When I was working for her I was always really impressed with ways she ran the business or how she treated people and clients…she would always be doing nice things for us (her employees) like bringing in pastries for ‘inspiration’ (when I was working on a book about patisseries) and celebrating our birthdays, cooking us lunch on occasion, etc. I hope that when I am a boss, I can be so down-to-earth and thoughtful to my employees.”

Before going freelance, Hische had planned ahead, figured out a budget, and got encouragement from her rep, Frank Sturges, and a blessing from Fili. She went full-time freelance last September, and so far, so good. Hische just hired an intern to help her handle her increasing volume of orders from her online shop.

BJ: What has been the biggest singular influence on your work?

JH: I have parents that encouraged me and allowed me to explore my passions from a very early age. I knew plenty of kids growing up that were artistic but were pushed toward more ‘practical’ careers and not toward what they actually loved to do. without this encouragement early on, I might have never ended up pursuing my passions.

appropriate type for projects…I’m a real believer in hiring specialists for what they do best. I wouldn’t expect someone to come to me to design a corporate website, it’s not what I specialize in. I think if you understand what you are best at, and know to hire out when you need to, that is design at its best.”

BJ: Clients who come to you know they’ll be getting letterforms built from scratch, typically. What is it that attracted you to creating Custom Letters?

JH: Having complete control with how everything looks and feels. There is a humanity that comes across in lettering that you don’t always get with fonts. You can see the personality in the slight imperfections. It’s the same way that if you take type and print it out and scan it back in. There is a warmth that you get that isn’t there without going through the replication process. Most of the type that I draw, I draw because there isn’t a font that is close enough to what I want. Sometimes I do use fonts in conjunction with lettering if the font is right.

BJ: You released your first font, Buttermilk, last year.

What was the process like of getting it fontified and ready for release?

JH: I had started out as just drawing the alphabet in Illustrator because I had a few characters drawn already. I originally drew the type as a part of a logo presentation that was rejected. I really just made it into a font because I was excited to learn about FontLab. I drew everything in illustrator and then copied the characters into FontLab (I know you type designers are cringing right now). It took me about two months, on and off, to finish kerning it and whatnot, and when it was done, I contacted both Veer and MyFonts about selling it through their sites.

MyFonts responded, and I started selling it a month or so later.

BJ: Are you considering releasing more fonts?

JH: Hopefully! Type design is a very involved and tedious process. You forget about all of the accent characters, punctuation, etc. that are essential to a BJ: Do you think an ability to make letterforms is a well-made font. I still feel like a novice in FontLab… necessary skill for designer today? so, yes, I definitely plan to do more fonts in the JH: I think it is a misconception that custom lettering future, it’s just been hard to find the time to focus it is a skill designers should want or need to learn. on type design with my freelance work.

I know plenty of designers that are great with type, but terrible at drawing letterforms and don’t really BJ: You’re a perfectionist with your letters and your have a desire to learn. This is why fonts exist, for illustrations. When did you realize this? designers who are great with type and can pick JH: One of the main reasons I started doing lettering

30 is because I felt that fonts weren’t quite right with achieve digitally. I also love the finality of it—when design projects I was working on in school. I knew it’s printed, you can’t open up the file and fuss with that it wouldn’t feel perfect unless the lettering and it, endlessly replacing and upgrading the images the image and the design all matched perfectly. From like you can for a web project. ‘The ink never dries on the beginning I worked toward making things as the web’ is something I heard said once and there’s good as I could and as my skills developed, I could something really nice about being able to truly make them better and better. Everything you put into conclude a project and move on to something new. the world is representative of you, and I would never want someone to see that one piece that I slacked on BJ: Can you recall the time when you first really and think that it was the best I could do. noticed letters?

JH: I think the first time I really noticed letterforms BJ: What was your inspiration for Daily Drop Cap and was when I was learning cursive writing in elemenwhat kind of response have you gotten? tary school. I loved the banners with perfectly drawn JH: I really wanted to challenge myself to do some- letters above the chalkboard. In fourth grade, and thing every day or every week after I left my day job. beyond, I did a lot of doodling with letterforms…Of When I was working a day job, and doing freelance, course I was also the go-to person to draw people’s I just didn’t have any time for personal projects so names on their notebooks in graffiti-esque writing.

I wanted to take advantage of my new freedom. I originally wanted to do an alphabet per week but BJ: What other lettering artists inspire you? realized this was a bit ambitious after the freelance JH: Letterers: Marian Bantjes and any letterer who started to clog up my calendar, so I settled on a letter does things by hand (I’m a computery type nerd per day. The response has been amazing. I get so so handskills impress me to no end), pretty much many Google alerts of people blogging about it or everyone in the LetterCult LetterMakers list. Type implementing it into their site. In the first month, the Designers: H&FJ, Alejandro Paul, Mark Simonson. site had 90,000 visitors and it’s been holding steady at 60,000 per month since (which doesn’t count RSS BJ: What’s next for you? feed subscribers).

JH: I’d like to expand the Daily Drop Cap project into products, so I think that’s what’s next on the horizon.

DB: Which project have you been most satisfied I also started a bit of a sub-company called Unofficial with so far?

Business Co. through which I’ll be releasing notepads JH: Every project that I work on gives me satisfaction of the Day-Ruining Invoice I created a little bit ago. in new ways. when I worked on the titles for wes Other than that, more book covers, lettering, adverts anderson’s moonrise kingdom, I was so proud and and letterpress. [END] excited about the end result and just so happy to be able to be a part of something so big. That said, I didn’t have as much authorship with that project as I do with other smaller projects (when you work with someone like wes, he has a vision and it’s your job to carry it out), so all the work I take on helps to create a balance of satisfaction.

DB: What’s the thing you enjoy most about working in print?

JH: There’s so much I love about seeing my work in print. It’s magical to be able to run your fingers over the printed texture of something you created digitally, especially when special printing techniques are used. There’s something that happens in the translation from digital to print that just adds an extra layer of specialness that is really hard to

“Its “IT’S magical MAGICAL to be TO BE able ABLE to your TO run RUN YOUR fingers over FINGERS OVER the THE printed PRINTED texture of TEXTURE OF something SOMETHING you created YOU CREATED digitally .”

DIGITALLY.”

DAUGHTERS: Dau ghters: SIBYLLE Sib ylle HAGMANN Hagmann

Written by Jan Middendorp, Professor, Kunsthochschule Berlin WeiĂ&#x;ensee, Berlin

34 Swiss-born Sibylle Hagmann came to California in the 1990s to continue her graphic design studies at CalArts. With teachers like Jeffery Keedy and Ed Fella, the school was the perfect counterpoint to her Bauhaus-infused, functionalist Basel education. Hagmann’s contrasting influences have resulted in a unique body of work. As a type designer she has created a small but distinguished collection of typefaces that mix an adventurous spirit with a thoughtful and precise way of working. Here we talk to her about her background, her influences and what makes her tick.

JM: Sibylle, you’re Swiss but you’re based in Houston.

How does a designer with a Bachelor’s from Basel end up in Texas?

SH: After I graduated from the Basel School of Design in 1989 and had been working for a couple of years as a designer in Swiss studios and agencies, I was lucky to have the chance to continue my studies in California at CalArts (California Institute of the Arts).

The Basel ideology had a profound impact on me. The core curriculum was still focused on Modernism and the Bauhaus: Asymmetrical compositions, sans-serif type, line art, and muted color palettes were the core ingredients. I highly valued the formal education I received there, but sensed that in other parts of the world graphic design had been evolving.

At some point I came across Emigre Magazine and, in an attempt to rebel against the modernist “overdrive” I was in, became very interested in the discussions about design and typography that were happening in that magazine. Richard Feurer was one of a few designers in Switzerland who were part of a post-modernist wave; he contributed to Emigre magazine #14 and later I worked with him at Eclat.

The CalArts faculty, Jeffery Keedy, Lorraine Wild and Ed Fella also contributed to Emigre’s content. Keedy Sans was an often-discussed face and my biggest

hope was that I would learn how to draw type from “Mr. Keedy” (as he was usually referred to).

My move to Texas was a consequence of academic offers — one in St. Louis and one in Houston. I favored Houston for the city’s size and international character.

Looking back on my first few months there, I was most impressed by the size of the roaches and the number of churches. Houston is the fourth largest US city and offers a broad cultural spectrum from world-class art to the annual 20 days’ Rodeo. So, all fronts are covered.

JM: You studied at the Basel School of Design at the end of the 1980s. Probably the school’s most famous teacher was Wolfgang Weingart, who has a personal and rather subversive take on Swiss typography. How did the school influence you?

SH: My education at the Basel School of Design and its ideology had a much bigger immediate influence on my work than Wolfgang Weingart’s typography.

In fact, the students from the “Grafik Fachklasse” (professional graphic curriculum) had relatively little contact with Wolfgang Weingart. I remember one or more sessions with him when he introduced us to letterpress printing, and worked with us on typesetting exercises.

One day, he surprised us by presenting a Macintosh to us. He entered the typesetting workshop with it, put it on a table, gathered us around and declared that this tool would be our future. I can’t remember the ensuing discussion, except that we seem to have accepted that this was what we would be dealing with. Computers had just been introduced in the graphic profession and the training at Basel was then also predominantly off-computer. The focus was on craftsmanship and the involvement of the eye and hand. Looking back, it was the drawing classes — and we had lots of those — that taught me to look closely. Wolfgang Weingart’s work was was already edisned while I was there, and I rediscovered when I started teaching typography in the US. His typographic compositions (like for example his 1970s covers forTypografische Monatsblätter/Swiss Typographic Magazine), typify my appreciation for superior typography: choreographed negative space, hierarchical play, experimentation and challenging of convention. His take on modern Swiss typography was ahead of its time, amplified by an extraordinary feel for detail and craftsmanship. Only later did I understand the connection between his introducing the Mac to us as students, and his search for novel ways to exploit technological evolution.

JM: While studying and working in the US, did you stand out because of your Swiss education?

SH: I think so. I’ve always felt that any potential employer or graduate program were interested in my Swiss background, and in particular my time at the Basel School. Armin Hofmann and Emil Ruder were responsible for the School having gained a reputation by the mid ’50s. Hofmann had teaching engagements in the USA and other places in the world. Hofmann, Ruder and Kurt Hauert developed the Advanced Class for Graphic Design in 1968.

The post-graduate program was a course favored by many young US designers. I’ve met many of them over the years. Some of them carry on with the teaching they received at Basel and extend it to their students.

Continuing my studies at CalArts reminds me today of a lab experiment. I threw myself from one extreme into another. Adjusting to that “post-postmodernist” environment has been very challenging, but also highly rewarding.

JM: What kind of jobs did you do once you graduated from Basel?

SH: After finishing my studies at Basel I worked for a

couple of years in several Swiss studios and branding agencies. One of them was Zintzmeyer & Lux (now part of Interbrand) where I met Hans Eduard Meier, the designer of Syntax and many other typefaces.

When Jörg Zintzmeyer was appointed to design the new Swiss bank notes in 1989, he commissioned Mr. Meier to design a custom sans serif for the notes. The banknotes were produced in what we employees referred to as the “bunker”, a secure room in the basement of the agency where the design of the bank notes was developed. Mr. Meier occasionally came to the agency and worked outside of the inaccessible space, and I was lucky enough to be able to look over his shoulder. That was the first time I observed a type designer working on digital type in Fontographer. I became interested in the detailed process and got hooked on the idea of designing type.

JM: What prompted you to go all the way and make a complete type family?

SH: I started sketching Cholla, my first complete type family, at the end of my final year at CalArts.

After graduation I kept working on the family in my spare time and during vacations. In the meantime Denise Gonzales Crisp, a classmate from CalArts, became the design director at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. She was on the lookout for an unpublished typeface that could be employed for the school’s annual catalog and knew that I had the font in the works. In hindsight, her interest in my experiments probably contributed quite a bit to me carrying on and developing a type family that originally included 12 fonts. At the time OpenType had not found its way to font users yet. The required character sets of 256 glyphs were achievable, relatively speaking.

JM: What factors determine your choice about what kind of typeface to work on?

SH: The most important factors are its conceptual potential and possibilities for end use. The shaping of form and the experience of form are very personal things, but letterforms as an agreed shape are well defined. Designing type is to interpret a preexisting system, to work within a well-defined set of restrictions. Differences appear in the details that create stylistic variances. I’m interested in exploring things like the structure of a family beyond the standard interpolation of weights; an example of that would be subtle variations of letterform details, such as the ‘g’ descenders in the Cholla family that vary

38 slightly in each weight. The Odile family, inspired by the unpublished type Charter by W.A. Dwiggins, explores how stroke and curve might vary in intensity and yet still be coherent within an atypical family structure. Axia deals with the constraints involved in maintaining consistent line lengths across different weights. I adjusted the weights by hand and eye without interpolation tools. The accompanying Axia Stencil challenges ideas about non-digital letter drawing by playing with the bridges and the gaps that are, after all, superfluous in digital type.

JM: You’ve released only a handful of type families since 1999, when Cholla came out at Emigre. I assume you have good reasons for taking your time. Have you ever felt envious of type designers who churn out one or more families each year?

SH: Most families I’ve released have been expanded, or re-released as bigger families. But it’s true, Axia would have beaten all records as it was distributed two years after Odile and Elido were published. For many years I couldn’t devote as much time to type design as I might have wished. Graphic design and type design were parallel practices; I’m a full time design educator, and I have a family, so planning my time wisely is key. In 2011 I finally decided to focus more exclusively on type design, but I needed some time to take the necessary steps in this direction. Being a microfoundry, our advertising budget is proportionally small. Anticipating that it would be difficult to draw attention to a micro-foundry and reach a wider audience, I decided to collaborate with font resellers like MyFonts.

As far as the churning out of typefaces is concerned, my studio’s infrastructure is modest in every sense. In my experience, it is hard to delegate type design and I like to think of myself as a quality-conscious designer.

Many steps in my design process are not automated. I sometimes find that typefaces whose design has been overly automated can lack some lifeblood.

Experimenting is a substantial part of my practice.

Innovative ideas mean more to me than producing similar-looking families, or close matches of already existing font designs. It sometimes happens that ideas form in the midst of an already advanced design. In these instances I don’t mind rebuilding everything from scratch to get it the way I want it to be. A good strategy for allowing time to slip through one’s hands, I know. But the good news is that new type will be coming.

JM: How important is teaching to you? And where do you start when you have so little time to teach relative newbies what type design is about?

SH: Teaching takes up a large amount of my time within a typical week, so as far as its level of importance is concerned, it is up there. Students should have every opportunity to explore and experiment.

Following this philosophy, I’m especially interested in bringing students to a point of experimentation they have never imagined being taken to.

I pursue this philosophy for workshops, although within a limited timeframe. The workshop in Munich, titled “Drawing Parallels,” is concerned with the contrast of working off-computer and large-scale vs. digitally in smaller scale. Participants will be encouraged to get their hands dirty and freely draw from existing glyph examples single large-scale letters to study proportion, stroke contrasts and counter spaces. Contrasting that, we will explore the modular design of letters. For a couple of years I’ve been using Fontstruct as one of the methods to introduce students to type design. It’s a great tool for novices to quickly understand the basic principles of type design, and hopefully it will work its charm again during the workshop.

JM: Years ago, you wrote an article about women in type design. There were very few active female type designers at the time, and you wrote that was in part due to the fact that there were hardly any role models.

Have things changed for the better?

SH: I think things have shifted a little for the better.

Digital type design has expanded greatly during the last few years and with that there are more female designers. Is it mostly due to the new educational programs that offer a degree in the discipline? I’m not sure — but it certainly helps.

It is still questionable whether the female members in these programs carry on working and continue to be active in the field beyond their educational years.

One of the biggest issues is that women tend to jump off a career path at some point due to, for example, raising a family. Speaking from my own experience, it is still rather challenging to unite all things under one umbrella. I do hope that the number of female type designers continues to grow since their work contributes to an increased level of diversity. [END]

3/5

The THE Under ground UNDERGROUND Matriarchy MATRIARCHY

Written by Ellen Lupton, Curator of Design, Cooper-Hewitt Museum, New York Laurie Haycock Makela, Design Director, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis

44 The role of women in graphic design is consistently marginalised or overlooked.

This dialogue, written across fax lines between New York and Minneapolis, in two distinct and personal voices, focuses on American women who have had a profound impact on the profession, not only through the projects which bear their own signatures, but through the creativity of others, women and men, working in their midst. They represent not a closed canon of matriarchs but an open set.

Laurie Haycock Makela: During a pivotal period in the mid 1980s, the insistence on something called ‘subjectivity’ forced an opening in the tight rightness of ‘good’ design. The radical efforts of renegade Modernists such as April Greiman, Sheila de Bretteville, Lorraine Wild and Katherine McCoy, however different from one another, added up to a powerful underground matriarchy that upended formal constraints and validated personal content and gesture. Ten years ago, ‘good’ design meant objectivity, obedience, cleanliness and correctness; into that impossible Modernist environment, these women placed subjectivity. Messy, permissive, full of idiosyncratic logic and essentially feminist in nature, subjectivity is at the heart of the explosive avant garde in American graphic design today.

Ellen Lupton: Important design emerges from contexts that encourage innovation and experiment.

Good design is not just the product of individuals graced with a miraculous talent – designers are stimulated by schools, clients, companies, studios, colleagues, competitors and other social networks.

The danger in developing an underground matriarchy is that we will replace the old boys’ network – which for so long has excluded women, younger designers and people working at the margins of the professional mainstream – with an equally exclusive new girls’ network, defined by its own personal ties and ideological biases. For me, to chart the family tree of an underground matriarchy is not to recast the traditional pantheon of individual genius with a new set of shining stars but to shift the focus of design journalism from the individual as creator ex nihilo to the individual as actor in a social context.

The word ‘matriarchy’ invokes ideas associated with feminine culture – gathering as opposed to hunting, cultivating as opposed to conquering, nurturing rather than self-promotion. These values are not strictly tied to sexual identity, but have

been linked in our society to women. As the design profession – and public life in general – becomes more inclusive, these values are increasingly shared by both sexes. Sheila de Bretteville, Muriel Cooper, Carol Devine Carson and Mildred Friedman have contributed to the evolution of contemporary design both by producing their own work and by creating contexts in which innovation can flourish.

LHM: When I was in high school, Sheila de Bretteville created a poster called ‘Taste and Style Aren’t Enough’ for the then-new CalArts in Valencia.

Its low-tech look was a deliberate commentary on the high-finish corporate aesthetic celebrated by most of her colleagues. In 1980 at the University of California at Berkeley, I was a student in her senior studio, where we were given projects in which design served only as a formal language for expressing personal values. De Bretteville’s encouragement of self-reflective subject matter connects the student to the content, and the content to the form. From the early 1970s she has consistently conveyed to her students the sense that their content is worthy, with the result that their forms resonate with personal choice. She has increased the value of plurality, interpretation and collaboration in design, values that inspire my current role as design director at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

EL: De Bretteville became chair of the graphic design programme at the Yale School of Art in 1990.

In addition to encouraging her students to draw on their own experiences, she believes that designers should interact with their audience and should consider the social consequences of their practice.

According to De Bretteville, producing design in collaboration with one’s audience is a feminist act, because it makes use of values of intimacy and co-operation associated with women’s culture. She and her students have studied the ways the media marginalises groups with certain sexual, ethnic,

“Producing design in collaboration with one’s audience is a feminist act.”

and class identities, and have produced projects with communities in New Haven, the harsh urban setting from which Yale has traditionally stood aloof as a bastion of privilege.

LHM: The success of her approach depends on keeping a distance from style-related design trends.

Her students shun competitions as irrelevant beauty pageants. She distrusts pure form-making without commitment to a larger issue.

But for some designers, the bigger issues can only be expressed in abstract, formal terms. April Greiman – often criticised for creating an ‘empty’ kind of beauty – wraps her talent around global themes: the overlapping of science, technology and spirituality. Greiman exhibited her Space Mats (designed with Jayme Odgers) at our design gallery at Berkeley at a time when I was doing a typographic poem about my menstrual cycle for an assignment for Sheila. The place mats were produced without a client, and captured an erotic and exotic hyper dimensional vision. Greiman found a glamorous, funhouse, Zen-like centre to the practice of design; she threw the Swiss grid on its back and lovingly fucked it with colour and wild imagery. This was a galactic brothel compared with a methodological aesthetic of corporate design.

To this day, Greiman will tell you she is not a feminist. But I believe her visual seductions are motivated by an emotional freedom undiscovered by her male colleagues at the time. Katherine McCoy has said that ‘the Modernist design paradigms of objective rationalism are typical of a male sensibility, safely disengaged from emotional involvement.’

Greiman’s work depicted volumes of passion; when that passion turned to technology, she gave the future a beautiful, sensual and bright new aesthetic.

EL: Greiman’s work is a personalised response to digital technology. As the progenitor of a distinctive signature style that has been widely imitated, she is a legendary star who has helped fuel – inadvertently or not – the cult of personality cherished by many graphic designers. Her work is an exquisite revision of the formal languages of Modernism; her approach to technology is often suggestive and metaphorical rather than structural, engaging the mythology of the machine rather than the revolutionary potential of electronic media.

A very different exploration of technology is found in the career of Muriel Cooper, who in 1975 founded the Visible Language Workshop, part of MIT’s Media Lab. While Cooper’s untimely death on

26 May 1994 is a profound loss to designers, her work will be carried forward by the institution she created and the people she inspired.

The VLW has treated digital typography not as a tool for designing printed graphics, but as a unique medium with its own properties and possibilities. Most graduate programmes concentrate on the making of complete, self-contained works: books, posters, installations and other objects whose ‘signature’ status is modelled on the products of painting, sculpture and photography departments.

The VLW’s focus has been different: Cooper worked to build an electronic language that will support the work of future designers, helping them to make complex, malleable documents in real time and three-dimensional space. Cooper gave concrete functions to such principles as layered information, simultaneous texts and typographic texture – visual structures that are familiar as expressive, personal gestures from the ‘New Typography’ of the 1970s and 1980s. While many designers working at the stylistic edges of contemporary typography have approached technology in terms of impressionistic imagery – the territory traditionally reserved for graphic design – Cooper aimed to restructure the language of design in four dimensions.

Many women today are excelling in the fields of interface design and electronic publishing, including Red Burns, Jessica Helfand, and Loretta Staples. While men are the visible mouthpieces and economic leaders of such companies are Voyager, Microsoft, Apple and Whittle Communications, women are playing important roles in crafting environments for the new design media. Perhaps ‘interface’ is an electronic counterpart to realms of culture that have traditionally been feminised – an interface, like a housewife or a secretary, provides a gracious, comfortable setting for the performances of others. Many tasks known as ‘women’s work’ in the twentieth-century office involve mediating technologies. From answering phones, transferring calls and taking messages to typing letters and making copies, female office workers have formed a human link between male managers and their machines. Women have served as extensions of communications equipment. The contemporary ideal of the user-friendly electronic environment reflects the continued desire to humanise technology.

LHM: An interface is also like a teacher. As co-chair of the Cranbrook Academy of Arts’s design programme, Katherine McCoy shepherded dozens of

48 students through the school’s now notorious formal experiments. In the mid 1980s she allowed some of the first debates about deconstruction to surface in critiques of graphic design. I use the word ‘allowed’ because though she may pursue a more conservative course in her own work, her critiques were a free zone for new thinking about design. She was willing to take the heat and the glory for staking out the unbeautiful aesthetic manifestations of literary deconstruction, or, if you will, postmodernism.

Women seemed particularly well equipped to grapple with the decentring of the time, or at least to be a centre for decentred thinking. McCoy found her students aggressively rejecting traditional approaches to visual communication and encouraged their private dialogues, their strange and cultish works. The intellectual comfort of the formal exercises that teach abstraction was abandoned at Cranbrook. This new turn in design education was psychoanalytic and difficult to control, but it was a perfect antidote to the depersonalised endpoint of Modernism that many young designers of the time experienced. Cranbrook became such a powerful cult because people came for refuge, and the McCoys ran a foster home for design addicts. They have recently decided to retire after twenty years, now that those weird Midwestern lab experiments have grown to be a powerful influence on international design trends.

EL: The exemplary matriarchs discussed so far have come from the academic world, a place where women have found visible, leading positions over the last twenty years. Perhaps the institutional support and clear structures for advancement that schools offer have made academic settings more penetrable by women than larg design studios, where vast numbers continue to hover in mid-level positions. The academic world can put designers in the ambiguous position of producing both marginal and official culture: marginal because academia provides a place outside commercial practice where experiment and opposition can be safely expressed, and official because schools are charged with articulating principles that young designers will take with them into the marketplace and which inform much of the professional community’s dialogue.

Carol Devine Carson has had a tremendous impact on contemporary design, working not from an academic post but from a major publishing house.

Arriving in New York from Nashville, Tennessee in 1973, she was an outsider to both the city’s design establishment and to the academic / Modernist vanguard.

Since she became art director at Alfred A. Knopf in 1987, she and her design staff have transformed bookstore shelves with their strange and sinister jackets. The principal designers in the Knopf Group have been with Carson from the beginning: Chip Kidd, Barbara de Wilde and Archie Ferguson. The fact that this amazingly productive team has stayed together for so long reflects the strength of the imprint’s management. Knopf has brought challenging graphics to a broad public – these are not esoteric art catalogues or posters for design events, but mainstream products displayed in shopping malls across the country.

Like colleges and universities, publishing houses are large, bureaucratic institutions with defined hierarchies; for most employees, the field’s cultural prestige is countered by relatively low wages.

According to Carson, the book business traditionally has made a place for women: ‘We have always done a lot of the real work in this industry. The difference in the past fifteen years is that it’s more common for women to be rewarded for the work they do.’

Before Carson’s arrival, director Bob Scudelari was corporate vice president of Random House and design administrator for all the company’s imprints, including Knopf and some dozen others. Carson became vice president, art director in charge of the Knopf Group in 1991, and now directly controls design within the imprint and supervises work at Pantheon and Vintage. In the old system, Scudelari was the chief spokesman and the art directors were kept relatively cloistered from editors and authors.

Now Carson has direct contact with these forces (as well as with the meddlesome marketing department), giving her more control over the process.

LHM: I was teaching at CalArts when Lorraine Wild arrived from Houston in 1985 as the new chair of the visual communications programme. Soon afterwards, two more Cranbrook graduates – Jeffrey Keedy and Edward Fella – joined the faculty. Within a year, the fires were set. The four of us taught a graduate seminar whose students included Barry Deck, Barbara Glauber and Somi Kim. Informed by theory and history, Wild set a tough standard for critiques that often mocked conventional notions of meta-perfection and problem-solving. The students’ critical skills developed within an authentic and radical contemporary art environment. The rigorous exchange between Cranbrook and CalArts and the emerging influence of Emigre magazine (and Zuzana Licko’s typefaces) all helped to create

“Women seem to spend more time underground.�

“MASCULINITY “Masculinity AND FEMININITY and femininity ARE are CULTURAL cultural CONSTRUCTIONS constructions HISTORICALLY historically TIED THE tied TO to the BIOLOGICAL biological DIFFERENCES differences BETWEEN between THE SEXES.” the sexes.”

a dizzying centrifugal force, a virtual supernova in design evolution.

In this extreme environment, Wild attempted to respond to brutally incongruous demands: in addition to directing the programme, she wrote articles, gave lectures, maintained international contacts, designed books and taught a design history course that inspired even the most informed.

Sharing an office with her for several years, I saw countless moments between a student’s tears and an emergency faculty meeting when she would look up with a pained smile and say, ‘Why are we doing this?’

The answer, of course, is that if we are to make a difference in the design field, we need to reinvent the setting for design education. For Wild, there was an element of disgust at what she had been exposed to in the New York studios, so she approached the CalArts programme with a furious intensity, which she has recently redirected towards creating ReVerb, through which she has launched a constructively angry response to the objectivity and patriarchy which pervaded her training. Her design work speaks for many cultural institutions of our time in fits of elegance and anarchy.

But men still dominate the profession – even at its most avant garde fringes. Women seem to spend more time underground, gaining recognition and regenerating the field in intangible ways. Simply put, the efforts of this matriarchy has made possible the kind of permissive, wild, personal and pluralistic form language that so many men are becoming famous for. As our ‘fathers’ stood at the front door, firmly protecting the rules of the house, our ‘mothers’ quietly unlocked the back door, freeing the children to act upon their natural impulse to personalise what they make.

EL: The Modernist design establishment has never been a solid edifice – it was always threatened from without by consumerism and mass culture and pressured from within by the vanguardist obsession with individualism and novelty. In recounting the rise of subjectivity in design, it is important to remember that men as well as women opened the back doors of the discipline. Wolfgang Weingart, Dan Friedman and Gert Dumbar fuelled the release of typographic form in the 1970s and 1980s, often working side by side with the matriarchs heralded here. The current fascination with radical people (male and female) continues a long line of avant garde confrontations led traditionally by men.

My primary identity is as a curator and writer, working for Cooper-Hewitt, National Museum of Design in New York. Because I am a curator first and a designer second, I feel obliged to look beyond my immediate circle of mentors. But I have ‘mothers’ too.

Mildred (Mickey) Friedman has been a role model and colleague. As design director at the Walker Art Center from 1970 to 1991 she set an international standard for exhibitions and publications. In 1989 she curated the first large-scale museum survey of graphic design in the US; while her strong vision provoked anger from designers, the exhibition did more to raise public knowledge of graphic design than any event in history.

LHM: In my first few months as design director at the Walker, I found that I had inherited amazing resources in the form of curators who enjoyed quality design and publishing and audiences who had started to expect design to be part of contemporary arts programming. These attitudes were encouraged

by Friedman during the twenty years that she edited Design Quarterly and produced exhibitions at the Walker, creating a place for educated dialogue about design when few existed.

‘Masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ are cultural constructions historically tied to the biological differences between the sexes. An important goal of feminism is to make the values traditionally linked to the world of women into values recognised across the social and sexual spectrum: to nurture, to include, to respond, to support, to enable. As the influence of women continues to grow in the coming decades, such skills may no longer be regarded as distinctly feminine or as the exceptional product of women’s achievement. Design competitions must begin to include new categories – such as lectures organised or given, exhibitions curated, curriculum planning and special research in areas such as cultural iconography. In this way, we will be in a better position to acknowledge all levels of accomplishment – from the surface of the page to the underground of the community. [END]

The graphics THE GRAPHICS gGLASS l a s s cCEILING eiling

Written by Natalie Kelter, Design Student, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham

54 In Michael Bierut’s recent article, he discusses the reasons why women may be some of the world’s best designers, but do not achieve celebrity status and become the best-known ones. In response, Anonymous talks to some of the most successful female designers in their field, about their opinions on this phenomenon and how being a women in the design industry has affected them.

Natalie Kelter: At what point did you decide to pursue a career in design and/or typography?

Sarah Hyndman: I do still consider myself to be a generalist graphic designer.

However, my current focus on typography began as a way to investigate the experience of graphic design from the type consumer’s point of view. I’ve found I’ve fallen down a ‘typographic rabbit hole’ in the process because it’s such an exciting area to explore.

Teal Triggs: My father was a graphic designer with his own studio as well as teaching at the University of Texas at Austin. So, art and design had a strong presence as I was growing up. I originally went to University as a music major, but quickly changed my mind after a Art History trip to Europe. In seeing some of the great art and design works in museums, I decided to switch majors and entered the Art Department as a graphic design/photography major.

NK: Why do you think that the graphic designers and typographers who’ve reached celebrity status are predominately male?

TT: We know there are also women operating at this international level, too. Paula Scher, for example is good at promoting her work and that of Pentagram.

However, many women designers are under confident.

But also many women make a decision that they would prefer to stay out of the limelight and get on with their work. The design press is also accountable in the celebrity equation as journalists will often take what they already know and not necessarily have the time to find out who the women are who deserve recognition for their work.

Freda Sack: Personal success/satisfaction doesn’t always equate to celebrity status. Although you may have hit a point – isn’t it really to do with the influences of popular culture and the media. I do

“I do tend to agree that certain types of men have a need for recognition.�

tend to agree that certain types of men have a need Professor Teal Triggs is an educator, historian and for recognition. writer whose research focuses primarily on design history, design research methods, self-publishing and NK: Have you faced any struggles in the design feminism. She is co-founder of the Women’s Design industry as a woman? + Research Unit, which was founded in 1994 to raise SH: I personally don’t feel I have faced struggles for awareness about women working in design. being a woman, but I often find I am in the minority as a woman especially in the world of public speaking. Sarah Hyndman is a graphic designer and educator My invitation is to other women to step up and have a who is curious about the psychology of typography. voice, we all have something valuable to contribute. She has worked in the design industry for nearly TT: Yes, I have. Early in my career I was told that I would 20 years, at agencies including Hill & Knowlton, not be hired a creative director of a magazine (despite Ammunition and Spin and she then set up her own being the best candidate) as the press checks would design company. She now spends much of her time need to happen late at night and in a rough part of running Type Tasting, an initiative she set up for her town where the printer was located. The publisher did interest in typography. not want to take the risk or responsibility for a woman doing this. I’ve never forgotten how that moment felt. Freda Sack is a British type designer and typographer, one of the principals of The Foundry type design NK: Do you have any female design role models? partnership. She was co-chair of the International FS: In no particular order: Margaret Calvert, Rosemarie Society of Typographic Designers with David Quay Tissi, Morag Myerscough, Marion Wesel-Henrion, Mary 1994–9 and ISTD Chair from 2000–4. Now as a V Mullin, Caroline Roberts, Clare Playne, Lucienne Fellow, past-president and board director of ISTD, Roberts, Pat Schleger (not necessarily all for their she is dedicated to promoting typography in all of design input but also for their support of design). its inspiring forms.

TT: Beatrice Warde is always at the top of my list!

NK: What kind of advice would you have for anyone wanting to pursue a career in type and design, who may feel intimidated by the perceived ‘strict rules’ and ‘boys club’ appearance of the profession?

SH: Find the thing you love to do, the thing that really inspires you, and then don’t worry about ‘rules’. There are experts who use complex language but I have personally found that the type world is generally welcoming of anybody who is enthusiastic. It also needs a few ‘rule-breakers’ to shake things up!

TT: Believe in yourself. [END]

4/5

Book BOOK Reviews REVIEWS

Written by Alice Rawsthorn OBE, Design Critic, New York Times International, London

62 Dutch-born Irma Boom is widely recognized as one of the world’s foremost book designers, and is the youngest person ever to receive the prestigious Gutenberg Prize for a body of work. Her books are distinguished by her experimental approach to formats and a willingness to take design risks; she incorporates the often overlooked edges of books into the overall design, is happy to challenge the assumption that a lengthy book requires an index or individual page numbers, and has produced an all-white book for Chanel that relies on embossing rather than ink to convey the content. Here we discuss her latest project ‘Boom’.

Imagine that you are one of the world’s best book designers — some say the best — and you have to design a book about your own work. How would you feel? Excited at having the freedom to do whatever you want? Daunted by that freedom? A bit of both? What sort of book would you come up with? Whatever you’re thinking, I’ll bet that it doesn’t involve squeezing 704 pages into a “baby” book that’s roughly the same size as a small box of matches. Yet that’s what the Dutch book designer Irma Boom did with the book she created to accompany an exhibition of her work, “Irma Boom: Biography in Books,” which runs until Oct. 3 at the University of Amsterdam Library.

To be precise, she packed those 704 pages into a book that’s 2 inches high, 1.5 inches wide and 1 inch thick or, if you prefer metric measurements, 5 cm, 4 cm and 2.5 cm respectively. She bound the result in a bright red cover with the word “Boom” printed on the front in, intentionally, clumsy white letters.

When I first saw “Boom,” I presumed that its (lack of) size was a wry commentary on any or all of the following: a) the trend to produce big, very blingy,

often badly designed books; b) the realization that, since the microchip’s invention, the size of an object no longer necessarily bears any relation to its power; or c) the threat posed by the kindle, iPad, and other electronic readers to the traditional books that Ms. Boom designs so beautifully.

Wrong, wrong and wrong. “A lot of people have asked me about those things, but I didn’t think of them,” said Ms. Boom, laughing. “The book is small because whenever I make a book, I start by making a tiny one. Usually I make five, six or seven for each book, as filters for my ideas and to help me to see the structure clearly. I have hundreds of those small books, and am so fond of them. I’ve always wanted to make one for publication, but no one has ever wanted to do it. And I thought, well, this time, I can.”

Size excepted, Ms. Boom, 49, has designed most of her books just as she has wanted. Typically, a book designer works with the text and images selected by the editor and art director, but Ms. Boom prefers to combine all three roles by deciding on

““WHEN When Ms. Boom MS. BOOM was TOLD told it WAS IT would TAKE take WOULD fourteen years FOURTEEN YEARS to make her TO MAKE HER chosen CHOSEN paper, PAPER, she invented SHE INVENTED her own.”

HER OWN.”

the book’s structure and choosing the themes and visual material herself. She then obsesses over every element — not just how the book will look, but how it will feel and smell — and invents ingenious ways of achieving the desired effects.

One of her books was printed on coffee filter paper. Another was scented to smell of soup. A monograph of the work of the Dutch artist Steven Aalders was made in the exact dimensions of one of his paintings. The page edges of a book on the American textile designer Sheila Hicks were hacked with a circular saw to evoke the fraying edges of her work. The title on the white linen cover of a history of the Dutch company SHV only becomes visible after frequent use. There are 2,136 pages in that book, but no page numbers, to encourage readers to dip in and out.

The page edges were trimmed to depict a field of tulips printed on them when read from left to right, and the words of a Dutch poem from right to left.

When Ms. Boom was told that it would take 14 years to make her chosen paper, she invented her own.

Her subjects can get hooked on her approach.

She worked for many years for De Appel, the contemporary art space in Amsterdam, and has had a long collaboration with the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas for whom she is now designing a book on Metabolism, the Japanese architectural movement.

He designed the lettering on the cover of “Boom” as her visual identity.

Another live project is a book on the work of the Dutch product designer Hella Jongerius, which Ms. Boom has organized according to the color of her objects.

“Irma has her own method of working,” Ms. Jongerius said. “Sometimes she’ll be silent for a few weeks, then she studies intensely, concentrating on every detail. She took my book under her wing and looked at the full picture to make a clear translation of my work, something that’s very difficult to do yourself.”

Back to “Boom,” which features images from 226 of the books she has designed since leaving art school in the Dutch city of Enschede in 1985. They appear in reverse chronological order, starting with the most recent, “Al Manakh Contd.,” a collaboration with Mr. Koolhaas, and ending with her first book, a 1986 guide to Dutch museums. Ms. Boom designed it for the government printing office in The Hague, where she worked for five years after graduating, before opening her own studio in Amsterdam.

She has included comments on some of the books, which are printed in Plantin, one of her favorite typefaces, which is (just) legible at 5.5 points, roughly half the size of conventional book type. In one comment, she describes the “Sheila Hicks” book as “a kind of manifesto for books.” A second dismisses a book on Mecanoo’s architecture as “a failure for all involved.”

In the book, Ms. Boom reminisces about how the driver dispatched to take her to Ferrari’s head quarters asked her to choose between “fast or slow.”

Duh! And she recounts how the American artist Robert Rauschenberg thought her treatment of one of his paintings was “lousy.”

“Of course, I included my mistakes,” she said.

“You learn so much from them, and they’re always my fault. I could always have said no.”

“Boom” isn’t among them. The first edition of 3,200 copies has almost sold out and Ms. Boom is now considering whether to print a second edition.

“I might make it a bit bigger,” she said. “Maybe one centimeter higher for every print run?” [END]

With the advent of the Macintosh computer and desktop publishing software in the 1980s, tasks once performed by others, such as typesetting and the creation of mechanicals, fell upon the designer. But what of the typesetter’s knowledge and craft? Ellen Lupton’s ‘Thinking with Type’ bridges the gap and informs the designer of all the typesetting rules they need to know, while being entertaining and interesting along the way.

Written for “anyone who regularly commits acts of visual communication”, as well as to support her courses in typography at Maryland Institute College of Art, designer, author and curator Ellen Lupton’s new handbook ‘Thinking with Type: A Critical Guide for Designers, Writers, Editors, & Students’ provides not only the how but also the why of basic typesetting practices for both print and screen, grounding this practical knowledge in a historical and theoretical context. Much care has gone into the creation of this third title in the Design Briefs series from Princeton Architectural Press, bringing the instruction of typography into the twenty-first century.

The book is organized into three main sections — Letter, Text and Grid —, each of which starts with a well-researched, thought-provoking essay. The article on Letter furnishes a brief overview of major trends in typeface design, from the fifteenth century to the present. The second essay discusses the evolution of text from linear page to non-linear screen.

The third piece presents the different ways in which grids have been used to organize typographic matter.

Each essay is followed by an amply-illustrated how-to section and exercises. And like any good educator, Lupton doesn’t just tell you typographic dos and don’ts, she shows you, with examples that are smart and humorous. The different typographic choices available to today’s computer-enabled designer are displayed, along with reasons to pick one over the other. An Appendix offers a crash course in editing and proofreading, as practiced today, and some excellent free advice to boot.

The book is beautifully designed and finely illustrated. Carefully chosen graphics of historic and

contemporary works inform the text. Every surface has been used to communicate some aspect of type, and Lupton’s wit is evident throughout. Even the title page, a tightly rendered sketch that echoes the cover layout, seems to imply that thinking, or designing, with type is best done on paper, before one sits at the computer. Color is used subtly, not only to vary the page content and sections, but also to demarcate examples and reproductions. Relevant quotations are judiciously placed throughout the text — Lupton practices what she preaches, providing the reader with plenty of points of entry and exit on each page.

It’s hard to find something not to like about this volume. I suppose that some readers, wanting more, will find Thinking with Type too brief! It is meant to be a basic text. Nevertheless, the author covers a lot of ground in just 176 small (7 in. × 8.5 in.) pages. For those whose interest is piqued, there is an impressive bibliography at the end. Lupton has also created a companion website that includes much of the practical instruction from the book and adds a special section for educators. (The essays and examples of designers’ work are not on the website, but some additional didactic material not found in the book is included).

This is a recommendable guide, all the more so because of Lupton’s gifts as an educator and critic.

Her style is sophisticated yet approachable, and her analyses refuse to take anything for granted. By taking apart the oldest of typographic conventions, Lupton casts them in a new light, bridging the gap between type’s long-standing traditions and its newest, most up-to-date practices.[END]

Typeface TYPEFACE Reviews REVIEWS

Written by Victoria Rushton, Designer, The Font Bureau, Boston

Charcuterie

Eskorte

Charcuterie is not just one typeface, but ten, compromising 22 fonts. But that’s the point: what binds these fonts together is not being one family or even having a common structure, but rather their 1900–1930s sensibility and hand-lettered look.

This differs from most superfamilies, such as ITC Stone (Serif, Sans, Informal) or Thesis (TheSans, TheSerif, TheMix). Their members share a common structure and proportions. Sure, they work together wonderfully, but not in the same way, nor with the same degree of variety.

Some Charcuterie subfamilies are clearly based on the same outlines, such as Contrast and Filigree, or Engraved and Etched. More often, design elements echo across several subfamilies, such as the unique bowl shape of the cap ‘R’ and ‘P’ between the Sans, Flared and Serif subfamilies. But there is no single constant throughout, except the time period and the hand-lettered appearance — which was common in advertising and titling of the day.

There are many impressive things about the execution of the project: first-rate lettering; four of the 21 subfamilies have multiple weights to enable more and better combinations; the coordinated Frames, Ornaments and Catchwords fonts look great with the others.

I am particularly taken by how much dynamic range Worthington has injected into the subfamilies, from the relative formality of Charcuterie Engraved or Filigree to the quite casual Charcuterie Sans, from the extended Serif and Flared to the condensed Sans.

Certainly you could not combine elements correctly if you tried, but it is easy and natural to make combina­tions that work together successfully — although I can’t really imagine improving on the awesome promo ads shown here, designed by Joe Newton (former type director at Veer). While these days we tend to advise against combining many different styles in a document, it was common place in the century-ago period evoked by Charcuterie, and with this family, it looks great. Applied to a document, project, or identity, Charcuterie’s diverse fonts can work like a well coordinated color palette.

Eskorte is the debut release of Elena Schneider, a graphic designer, lettering artist, and typeface designer who currently commutes between Germany and Iceland. Schneider started the serif family three years ago while studying type­face design at the University of Reading. The outcome was released

by Rosetta in 2013.

The base of Eskorte is a contemporary and confident roman. It is clean and sets well but, luckily, has not been polished to boredom. There’s a lot of character here, as in the sharp cuts in the ‘a’, or the ‘g’ with its sassy ear. The ampersand reminds me of a kid proudly flexing his biceps.

The family spans four weights, and that’s more than enough for most purposes. Still, it’s a pity that the hefty Display cut included in Schneider’s MATD specimen has not yet been explored further. There’s hope for a future — separate — release, though: the style that borders on blackletter now appears on Schneider’s portfolio site as Paroli.

Because this is a Rosetta release, of course, Eskorte covers a wide array of languages. As well as the Latin, there is also a tantalizing-looking Arabic.

It was designed with Titus Nemeth of Nassim fame, and was awarded 1st prize for Arabic text typefaces in the 2013 Granshan Type Design Competition. At Reading, Schneider also embarked on an Armenian, but that branch has not yet been released.

I always rejoice when an outstanding stu­dent project finds its way onto the market. I applaud initiatives like TypeTogether’s recently announced Typeface Publishing Incentive Program, or Rosetta’s repeated support for promising multi script grad projects. Marhaban , welcome, Eskorte!

72 Magasin

Pique

To say that Magasin is not your average script font is stating the obvious. It is quirky and totally irreverent. It sits stock-straight upright and follows very few rules when it comes to connection between the letter­forms. You get a real sense of Mid-Century Modern and French perfume packaging, along with the echoes of Quirinus/Corvinus and Fluidum in its contrast and terminals.

But don’t confuse Laura Meseguer’s Magasin for a dusty script revival. It is rigorous and modern, por­tray­ing a fierce independence as it easily sets itself apart from all the script fonts being released right now, dancing to its own syncopated rhythm.

Anyone that is wdaring enough to use Magasin will find a useful amount of alternates, ligatures, and swashes that create captivating and playful word shapes. (If anything is missing, I’d say that Magasin could use more terminal forms.) I can imagine it deployed large in magazines and small on packaging. Don’t worry about the unorthodox letter shapes; instead, think of them as an asset, because they will make people look twice. Additionally, the proud x-height assists, along with the context, in making Magasin legible enough at text sizes.

If you want a taste of what is possible, check out the specimen Meseguer created, along with the article she wrote for I Love Typography. They clearly dem­on­strate the different things that are possible with this idiosyncratic typeface design.

Let’s stick with tradition here and introduce our subject with a dictionary definition. Pique must be named for “a feeling of irritation or resentment.”

Wait, no, that doesn’t work, except in the sense that I’m resentful I wasn’t the one who drew it. Nicole Dotin of Process Type did, and now we all have to settle for my being the one rambling about it at you.

I know, I know, but this is where we find ourselves.

Pique catches my eye among brush scripts for how effortlessly it is translated to a modular system.

As we know, it’s one (time-consuming) thing to make a brush script with as many alternates and ligatures as there are sinners in hell. It’s another to draw a face that eschews all the un-type-like things that make brush lettering great, like an uneven baseline, subtle variations, and gratuitous swashes, yet still retains its hand-written essence.

For having such uniform forms (the way, you know, a typeface does), Pique suggests bounce and sparkle. The exit strokes are elegant at the ends of words, as if they might not make an effort to glide into the next letter, yet the connections are graceful.

You don’t see very many casual scripts where two of the same letters following each other don’t look off. You’ve had that uncanny valley moment where you’re looking at a word that seems like real lettering, but then you see a double ‘f’ and you’re like: “Touché, typeface, you almost got me.” But nobody’s going to look at Pique and think, “That could really use an alternate f.” I find that such an admirable feat.

What I love about Pique is how it’s not trying to look like genuine brush lettering; it just takes its cues from the tool and neatly assembles a bulk of information into a framework with shapes that are repeated as much as a picket fence’s. Except that it’s a very exciting and animated picket fence. That metaphor falls apart, but the point is: although I love OpenType features that mimic the handmade, Pique makes me very excited to see what is possible for an energetic brush script when we restrain ourselves.

EVENTS Events

Type Talks: Freda Sack Words Amplified by Typography 6 November 2015: 1730-1930 Birmingham City University

A visual commentary on the ‘typographic link’ between designers and their audience observed, illustrated by The Foundry and relevant typefaces, complimented by quotes from typographic friends and heroes. Typography is our common language – that bond between the arrangement of letterforms on a page and the intended communication. All information is filtered through the medium of typography, curiously its structure allows endless variations in the expression of ideas and facts – the grid is fundamental; adhered to, or broken. Good design often appears effortless in the making, importantly it should be effortless in the using. As designers we need both skill and intelligence to transmit the writer’s words in such a way as to be easily, and correctly perceived. Effective design is the result of a process of simplification and refinement – essentially to make a connection, that ‘bridge’ or link between the reader and the writer.

Freda Sack has a passion for letterforms and enjoys ‘making things happen typographically’.

She studied typography at Maidstone College of Art, School of Printing. An increasing interest in the letterforms themselves led to her career as a type designer — working for various font manufacturers and involved with groundbreaking font technology. Freda co-founded The Foundry in 1990 with David Quay to develop their own range of typefaces. From 2001–2013 with her company Foundry Types, she managed The Foundry™ library, and continued with commissioned fonts. Now The Foundry™ typeface library is licensed exclusively by Monotype. Her bespoke typefaces include: WWF, NatWest Bank, Science Museum Cossette, Yellow Pages, Brunel UK railways, and Lisbon Metro. Currently Freda lives and works in central London. She is a UCA Board governor (University of the Creative Arts) and ISTD Board director (International Society of Typographic Designers).

5/5

78 “If you flick through the design history books, you’ll notice that pretty much all the ‘great designers’ have something in common. They’re men.” ­— Alice Rawsthorn In 2013, among full-time, year-round workers, women were paid 78 percent of what men were paid. Women face a pay gap in nearly every occupation, they are paid less than men in female-dominated, genderbalanced, and male-dominated occupations. Graphic design is well known for having a majority of female students, yet a majority of males in top tier roles, and those who achieve ‘celebrity’ design status.

‘Anonymous’ strives to bridge this gap, by showcasing the astounding work that women in design and typography are producing everyday, but may not be attracting attention. The magazine also highlights the restrictions placed on women in their profession, with a limited colour palette, and by never exceeding 78 pages, the way that women are restricted to 78% of the wages men receive.