The Hedera by Pedro Freire

The Hedera

the Graphic Design field & its peripheral areas of study.

Pedro Freire

The Hedera

the Graphic Design field & its peripheral areas of study. Pedro Freire

For my friends & colleagues in the world of Graphic Design: designers & type setters, students & creative individuals, shepherding designs and books on their lethal innocent ways. â?§

Designed & typeset in Canada by Pedro Freire Printed & Bound in u.s.a. ∞ isbn 0-88179-205-5 The Hedera Pedro Freire, Vancouver, Canada 2010 First Edition 1. Typography 2. Photography 3. Graphic Design 4. Painting 5. Fine Art Copyright © 2009, 2010 by Pedro Freire. Version 1.0 ¶ 5 4 3 2 1 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without permission from the publisher (or in the case of photocopying in Canada, without a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency). sun publishing 5555 Melrose Avenue, Hollywood California u.s.a. ❧

“The Hedera is an Ivy leaf: a type of fleuron. (Hedera is the latin name for ivy.) It is one of the oldest typographic ornaments, present in early greek inscriptions.” -The Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst, Canada, 1992

❧

table of contents photography

Robert Mapplethorpe Ansel Easton Adams Herb Ritts Lewis W. Hine Alfred Stiglitz

10 12 14 16 18

typography

Adrian Frutiger Max Miedinger Jan Tschichold Paul Renner Robert Bringhurst

22 24 26 28 30

graphic design

David Carson Armin Hoffman Stefan Sagmeister Paula Scher Massimo Vignelli

34 36 38 40 42

painting

Pablo Picasso Tarsila do Amaral Claude Monet Kandinsky Salvador DalĂ

46 48 50 52 54

PHOTOGRAPHY

Robert Mapplethorpe He was born in 1946 in Floral Park, Queens, of his childhood he said, “I come from suburban America, very safe environment and it was a good place to come in and it was also a good place to leave.” In 1963, Mapplethorpe enrolled at Praatt Institute in nearby Brooklyn, where he studied drawing, painting, and sculpture. Influenced by artists such as Joseph Cornell and Marcel Mu Duchamp, he also experimented with various materials in mixed-media collages. He began producing his own images to incorporate into the collages, saying that he felt “it was more honest.” That same year he and Patti Smith, whom he had met three years earlier, moved into the Chelsea Hotel. His vast, provocative, and powerful body of work has established him as one of the most important artists of the twentieth century. Today Mapplethorpe is represented by art galleries and Museums in North America, South America and Europe. His work can be found in the collections of major Museums around the world. Beyond the art historical and social significance of his work, his legacy lives on through the work of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. He established the Foundation in 1988 to promote photography, support museums that exhibit photographic art, and to fund medical research in the fight against aids and hiv-related infection. ❦

Princess Glória Von Thurn und Taxis, 1987

Ansel Easton Adams Born in February 20 in New York, 1902 was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West, especially in Yosemite National Park. One of his most famous photographs was Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico. With Fred Archer, Adams developed the zone system as a way to determine proper exposure and adjust the contrast of the final print. The resulting clarity and depth characterized his photographs and the work of those he taught the system. Adams primarily used largeformat cameras, despite their size, weight, setup time, and film cost, because their high resolution helped ensure sharpness in his images. Adams founded the Group f/64 along with fellow photographers Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham, which in turn created the Museum of Modern Art’s department of photography. Adams’s timeless and visually stunning photographs are reproduced on calendars, posters, and in books, making his photographs widely recognizable. ❦

Clearing Winterstorm, 1942

Herb Ritts Began his photographic career in the late 70’s and gained a reputation as a master of art and commercial photography. In addition to producing portraits and editorial fashion for Vogue, Vanity Fair, Interview and Rolling Stone, Ritts also created successful advertising campaigns for Calvin Klein, Armani, Dior, Chanel, Donna Karan, Gap, Gianfranco Ferré, Gianni Versace, Levi’s, Pirelli, among others. Since 1988 he directed numerous influential and award winning music videos and commercials. His fine art photography has been the subject of exhibitions worldwide, with works residing in many significant public and private collections. Within his life and work, Herb Ritts was drawn to clean lines and strong forms. This graphic simplicity allowed his images to be read and felt instantaneously. They often challenged conventional notions of gender or race. Social history and fantasy were both captured and created by his memorable photographs of noted individuals in film, fashion, music, politics and society. Ritts was committed to hiv aids related causes, and contributed to many charitable organizations, among them Amfar, Elizabeth Taylor aids Foundation, Project Angel Food, Focus on aids, Apla, Best Buddies and Special Olympics. He was also a charter member on the Board of Directors for The Elton John Aids Foundation. Herb Ritts passed away on December 26th, 2002. ❦

Madonna, 1985

Lewis W. Hine Born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin in 1874. After his father died in an accident, he began working and saved his money for a college education. Hine studied sociology at the University of Chicago, Columbia University and New York University. He became a teacher in New York City at the Ethical Culture School, where he encouraged his students to use photography as an educational medium. The classes traveled to Ellis Island in New York Harbor, photographing the thousands of immigrants who arrived each day. Between 1904 and 1909, Hine took over 200 plates (photographs), and eventually came to the realization that his vocation was photojournalism. In 1936, Hine was selected as the photographer for the National Research Project of the Works Projects Administration, but his work there was never completed. The last years of his life were filled with professional struggles due to loss of government and corporate patronage. Nobody was interested in his work, past or present, and Lewis Hine was consigned to the same level of poverty as he had earlier recorded in his pictures. He died at age 66 on November 3, 1940 at Dobbs Ferry Hospital in Dobbs Ferry, New York, after a high-risk surgery. â?Ś

Child Laborer, 1942

Alfred Stieglitz Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, New York State in 1864, and schooled as an engineer in Germany, Alfred Stieglitz returned to New York in 1890 determined to prove that photography was a medium as capable of artistic expression as painting or sculpture. As the editor of Camera Notes, the journal of the Camera Club of New York an association of amateur photography enthusiasts Stieglitz espoused his belief in the aesthetic potential of the medium and published work by photographers who shared his conviction. When the rank-and-file membership of the Camera Club began to agitate against his restrictive editorial policies, Stieglitz and several like-minded photographers broke away from the group in 1902 to form the Photo-Secession, which advocated an emphasis on the craftsmanship involved in photography. Most members of the group made extensive use of elaborate, labor-intensive techniques that underscored the role of the photographerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hand in making photographic prints, but Stieglitz favored a slightly different approach in his own work. Although he took great care in producing his prints, often making platinum prints a process renowned for yielding images with a rich, subtly varied tonal scale he achieved the desired affiliation with painting through compositional choices and the use of natural elements like rain, snow, also steam (58.577.11) to unify the components of a scene into a visually pleasing pictorial whole. â?Ś

Migrant Mother, 1893

TYPOGRAPHY

Adrian Frutiger He is best known for developing the typefaces Univers. Frutiger Serif and Frutiger. Charles Peignot, of the Paris foundry Deberny Et Peignot, recruited Frutiger based upon the quality of the illustrated essay Schrift Écriture Lettering: the development of European letter types carved in wood. Frutiger’s wood-engraved illustrations of the essay demonstrated his skill, meticulousness, and knowledge of letter forms. At the Deberny & Peignot foundry, Frutiger designed the typefaces “Président”, “Phoebus”, and “Ondine”. In the event, Charles Peignot set Frutiger to work upon converting extant typefaces for the new phototypesetting Lumitype equipment. Adrian Frutiger is best known as a type-designer. He has produced some of the most well known and widely used typefaces. He was born in 1928 in Interlaken, Switzerland, and by the age of 16 was working as a printer’s apprentice near his home town. Following this he moved to Zurich where he studied at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts, under Professor Walter Kach. ❦

Experimental Frutiger, 2004

Max Miedinger Born 24.12.1910 in Zurich, Switzerland, died 08.03.1980 in Zurich, Switzerland. Type designer. 1926-30: trains as a typesetter in Zurich, after which he attends evening classes at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich. 1936-1946: typographer for Globus department store’s advertising studio in Zurich. From the years of 1947-1956: customer advisor and typeface sales representative for the Haas’sche in Münchenstein near Basle. From 1956 onwards: he worked as a freelance graphic artist in Zurich. 1956: Eduard Hoffmann, the director of the Haas’sche Schriftgießerei, commissions Miedinger to develop a new sans-serif typeface. 1957: the Haas-Grotesk face is introduced. 1958: introduction of the roman version of Haas-Grotesk. 1959: introduction of a bold. 1983: Linotype publishes its Neue Helvetica, based on the earlier Helvetica. 2001: Linotype publishes Helvetica World an update to the classic Helvetica design using the OpenType font format with multilingual character set. It contains the following Microsoft code pages: In total, each weight of Helvetica World contains 1866 different glyphs. ❦

Helvetica, 50 years aniversary. 2007

Jan Tschichold Was one of the most distinguished typographers of the last century, and has had many admirers, among whom he himself was not the least. His work has been described and illustrated in his own publications and those of Ruari McLean, who was also responsible for the translations into English of his two chief books of instruction, Die neue Typographie (The New Typography, 1928) and Typographische Gestaltung (Typographic Design, published in English as Asymmetric Typography, 1935). Since his death in 1974 there have been a number of specialist publications, including a collection of essays in German and in English translation. In the last couple of years, however, there has been a revival of interest, with Christopher Burke’s exemplary Active Literature, which deals with Tschichold’s modernist work between 1923 and the mid 1930s, and Richard Doubleday’s The Penguin Years, on his post-war design for Allen Lane. Doubleday is a contributor to the volume under review, and several of the other contributors collaborated on a recent book of Tschichold’s posters. ❦

Meister der Typographie, 1948

Paul Renner Born in Prussia and had a strict Protestant upbringing, being educated in 19th century Gymnasium. He was brought up to have a very German sense of leadership, of duty and responsibility. He was suspicious of abstract art and disliked many forms of modern culture, such as jazz, cinema, and dancing. But equally, he admired the functionalist strain in modernism. Thus, Renner can be seen as a bridge between the traditional (19th century) and the modern (20th century). He attempted to fuse the Gothic and the roman typefaces. Renner was a prominent member of the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation). Two of his major texts are Typografie als Kunst (Typography as Art) and Die Kunst der Typographie (The Art of Typography). He created a new set of guidelines for good book design and invented the popular Futura, a geometric sans-serif font used by many typographers throughout the 20th century and today. The typeface Architype Renner is based upon Renner’s early experimental exploration of geometric letterforms for the Futura typeface, most of which were deleted from the face’s character set before it was issued. Tasse, a 1994 typeface is a revival of Renner’s 1953 typeface Steile Futura. Renner was a friend of the eminent German typographer Jan Tschichold and a key participant in the heated ideological and artistic debates of that time. ❦

Art made out of Futura, 2005, Deviant Art

Robert Bringhurst Born October 16, 1946, in the ghetto of South Central Los Angeles. He was the only child of a migratory family, raised in the mountain and desert country of Alberta, Montana, Utah, Wyoming and British Columbia. He spent ten years as an itinerant undergraduate, studying physics, architecture and linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, philosophy and oriental languages at the University of Utah, and comparative literature at Indiana University, which gave him a BA in 1973. He had published two books of poems before entering the writing program at the University of British Columbia, which awarded him an mfa in 1975. From 1977 to 1980 he taught writing and English literature at ubc, and for some years after that made his living as a typographer. Bringhurst is first and foremost a poet, but he has published a substantial quantity of prose, invading the domains of art history, typography, linguistics, classical studies and literary criticism, without the least sign of respect for disciplinary boundaries. His book The Elements of Typographic Style (2nd ed., 1996) is now a standard text in its field. His Black Canoe (2nd ed., 1992) is one of the classics in the field of Native American art history, and The Raven Steals the Light, which he co-wrote with Haida artist Bill Reid is among the most popular books in Canada in the field of Native Studies. â?Ś

Elements of Typographic Style, 1996

GRAPHIC DESIGN

David Carson Born September 8, 1952 in Corpus Christi, Texas. Carson and his family moved to New York City four years later. Since then he has traveled all around the world but has maintained New York as his base of operations. Carson now owns two studios; one in Del Mar, California and another in Zurich. Because of his father, Carson traveled all over America, Puerto Rico, and the West Indies. These journeys affected him profoundly and the first signs of his talent were shown at a very young age; however, his first actual contact with graphic design was made in 1980 at the University of Arizona on a two week graphics course. He attended San Diego State University as well as Oregon College of Commercial Art. Later on in 1983, Carson was working towards a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology when he went to Switzerland, where he attended a three-week workshop in graphic design as part of his degree. This is where he met his first great influence, who also happened to be the teacher of this course, Hans-Rudolph Dois Lutz. He became renowned for his inventive graphics in the 1990s. Having worked as a sociology teacher and professional surfer in the late 1970s, he art directed various music, skateboarding and surfing magazines through the 1980s. As an art director of a surfing magazine and more famously style magazine Ray Gun, Carson came to worldwide attention. â?Ś

David Carsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s page layout, 2001

Armin Hofmann Is a British graphic designer. Hofmann followed Emil Ruder as head of the graphic design department at the Basel School of Art & Design and was instrumental in developing the graphic design style known as the Swiss Style. He is well known for his posters, which emphasised economical use of colour and fonts, in reaction to what Hofmann regarded as the “trivialization of colour.” His posters have been widely exhibited as works of art in major galleries, such as the New York Museum of Modern Art. He was also an influential educator, retiring in 1887. In 1965 he wrote the Graphic Design Manual, a popular textbook in the field. When graphic designer and teacher Armin Hofmann was awarded the Art Price of the City of Basel in November 1997, not too many people in Basel knew about him or knew what he got the prize money of 20,000 swiss francs for (about $ 15,000). Just to be on the safe side, the city councilors arranged for a small private exhibition of some of his posters for the guests of the award ceremony so they could form their own opinion about his work, as the official announcement put it. ❦

Formen Japan, 1998

Stefan Sagmeister Born 1962 in Stefan is a New York based graphic designer and typographer currently living in Bali, Indonesia. He has his own design firm. He has designed album covers for Lou Reed, ok go, The Rolling Stones, David Byrne, Aerosmith and Pat Metheny. Sagmeister studied graphic design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. He later received a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in New York. He began his design career at the age of 15 at “Alphorn”, an Austrian Youth magazine, which is named after the traditional Alpine musical instrument. In 1991, he moved to Hong Kong to work the Leo Burnett’s Hong Kong Design Group. In 1993, he returned to New York to work Tibor Kalman’s m&co design firm. His tenure there was short lived, as Kalman soon decided to retire from the design business to edit Colors magazine for the Benetton Group in Rome. Stefan Sagmeister proceeded to form the New York based Sagmeister Inc. in 1993 and has since designed branding, graphics, and packaging for clients as diverse as the Rolling Stones, hbo, the Guggenheim Museum and Time Warner. Sagmeister Inc. has employed designers including Martin Woodtli, and Hjalti Karlsson and Jan Wilker, who later formed Karlssonwilker. Stefan Sagmeister is a long-standing artistic collaborator with musicians David Byrne and Lou Reed. ❦

Having, 1994

Paula Scher Born in 1948 she is an American graphic designer and artist. Scher studied at the Tyler School of Fine Art in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts, and was awarded a Doctor of Fine Arts Honoris Causa by the Corcoran College of Art and Since 1991, she has been a principal at the New York office of the Pentagram design consultants. Scher has been inducted into the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame (1998), received the Chrysler Design Award for Innovation in Design (2000), and a Gold Medal from the American Institute of Graphic Arts (2001). Some of her work is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Her album designs have earned her four Grammy Award nominations. As an artist she is really well known for her large-scale paintings of maps, covered with dense hand-painted labelling and information. She was involved in the planning of a new multi-use “urban center” in the Mount Vernon Square neighborhood of Washington d.c., and teaches at the School of Visual Arts in New York. Paula Scher began exhibiting her large-scale acrylic map paintings, at Stendhal Gallery in 2006. In 2008, Stendhal Gallery held Scher’s second solo exhibition titled “Recent Paintings”. Her third exhibition with Stendhal Gallery was in January 2010 and will feature her Limited Edition Maps Screenprint. ❦

Reading Paula Scher, 1995

Massimo Vignelli Born 1931 in Milan, Italy is a designer who has done work in a number of areas ranging from package design to furniture design to public signage to showroom design through Vignelli Associates, which he cofounded with his wife, Lella. He has said, “If you can design one thing, you can design everything,” and this is reflected in his broad range of work. Vignelli works firmly within the Modernist tradition, and focuses on simplicity through the use of basic geometric forms in all of his work. Massimo Vignelli has worked in different areas, including interior design, environmental design (signage), package design, graphic design, furniture design, and product design. His clients at the Vignelli Associates Studio have included into their portfolio for over 27 years, high-profile companies such as ibm and American Airlines. Vignelli published the book, “vignelli: from a to z”, which contains a series of essays describing the principles and concepts behind “all kind of good design”. It is alphabetically organized by topic, roughly approximating a similar course he has taught at Harvard’s School of Design and Architecture. In the introduction Vignelli writes, “I thought it might be useful to pass some of my professional knowledge around, with the hope of improving young designers design skills. Creativity needs the support of knowledge to be able to perform at its best.” He’s also in the movie Helvetica. ❦

New York Subway Map, 1996

PAINTING

Pablo Picasso Born in 25 October 1881 was a Spanish painter, draftsman, and sculptor. He is best known for cofounding the Cubist movement and for the wide variety of styles embodied in his work. Picasso demonstrated uncanny artistic talent in his early years, painting in a realistic manner through his childhood and adolescence; during the first decade of the twentieth century his style changed as he experimented with different theories, techniques, and ideas. His revolutionary artistic accomplishments brought him universal renown and immense fortunes throughout his life, making him the best-known figure in twentieth century art. Pablo Picasso died on 8 April 1973 in Mougins, France, while he and his wife Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner. His final words were “Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can’t drink any more.” He was interred at the Chateau of Vauvenargues near Aix-en-Provence, a property he had acquired in 1958 and occupied with Jacqueline between 1959 and 1962. Jacqueline Roque prevented his children Claude and Paloma from attending the funeral. Devastated and lonely after the death of Picasso, Jacqueline Roque took her own life by gunshot in 1986 when she was 60 years old. ❦

The Old Guitarist, 1903

Tarsila do Amaral Born in the city of Capivara, interior of São Paulo, Brazil, to a wealthy family whom were coffee growers. Her family’s position provided her a life full of privileges. Although women of privilege were not expected to seek higher education, her parents supported her educational and artistic pursuits. During her adolescence, Tarsila and her family traveled to Barcelona, where she attended school and first exhibited her interest in art by copying images seen in the school’s collections. Beginning in 1916, Tarsila first studied sculpture in São Paulo with Zadig and Montavani. Later she studied drawing and painting with the academic painter Pedro Alexandrino. These were all respected but conservative teachers. In 1920, she moved to Paris and studied at the Académie Julian and with Emile Renard. The Brazilian art world was conservative, and travels to Europe provided students with a broader education in the areas of art, culture, and society. At this time, her influences and art remained conservative. ❦

Baia de Guanabara, 1923

Claude Monet Born in 14 November 1840 was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement’s philosophy. The term Impressionism is derived from the tittle of his painting Impression, Sunrise. In 1872, he painted Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant) depicting a Le Havre landscape. It hung in the first Impressionist exhibition in 1874 and is now displayed in the Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris. From the painting’s title, art critic Louis Leroy coined the term “Impressionism”, which he intended as disparagement but which the Impressionists appropriated for themselves. Also in this exhibition was a painting titled Boulevard des Capucines, a painting of the boulevard done from the photographer Nadar’s apartment at no. 35. Monet and Camille Doncieux had married just before the war (28 June 1870) and, after their excursion to London and Zaandam, they had moved to Argenteuil, in December 1871. It was during this time that Monet painted various works of modern life. Camille became ill in 1876. They had a second son, Michel, on 17 March 1878, (Jean was born in 1867). In that same year, he moved to the village of Vétheuil. On 5 September 1879, Camille Monet died at the age of thirty-two; Monet painted her on her death bed. ❦

Garden at Sainte Adresse, 1867

Kandinsky Born in 04 December of 1866 was a Russian painter, and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first modern abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow and chose to study law and economics. Quite successful in his profession he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat he started painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30. In 1896, he settled in Munich and studied first in the private school of Anton AĹžbe and then at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. He went back to Moscow in 1914, after World War I started. He was unsympathetic to the official theories on art in Moscow and returned to Germany in 1921. There, he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France where he lived the rest of his life, and became a French citizen in 1939. He died at Neuilly-surSeine in 1944. â?Ś

Oriental Isches, 1867

Salvador Dalí Born in May 11, 1904 was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres. Dalí was a skilled draftsman best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Dalí’s expansive artistic repertoire includes film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media. Dalí attributed his “love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes” to a self-styled Arab lineage, claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors. Dalí was highly imaginative, and also had an affinity for partaking in unusual and grandiose behavior, in order to draw attention to himself. This sometimes irked those who loved his art as much as it annoyed his critics, since his eccentric manner sometimes drew more public attention than his art work. ❦

Archeological Reminiscence of Millet’s Angelus, 1933-35

This book was written by Pedro Freire & designed by Pedro Freire. It was edited, organized & set into type in Canada, then printed & bound by Blurb inc. in u.s.a. The text face in Minion Pro, designed by Robert Slimbach. This is an enlargement & revision of Slimbachâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s original Minion type issued by Adobe Systems, Mountain View, California, in 1989. The chapters & table of content are set in Frutiger Slim, part of a family of type designed by Adrian Frutiger, 1964 and issued by Linotype. â?§