Cirignani spring sp

An exploration of the history, usage and terminology of type as used in the graphic arts

Nikki Cirignani typographical portfolio Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising Spring 2015

“No other design discipline requires so much learning and training as fontography, and by no other aspect can amateurs be so easily distinguished from professionals. To be font literate, a designer has to study the history and the principles of font design.“ Dmitry Kirsanov

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Nikki Cirignani

Graphic design / spring 2015

I

am an 18 year old graphic design student at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising. When it comes to typography, I am especially drawn to script, distressed, and reverse styles. I find contrast very attractive and elegant in almost any design. In the future, I hope to find a place in the entertainment industry - doing work along the lines of cover art and photo manipulation.

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table of contents

6 Logo Design 8 Character Studies 12 Poster Design 14 Identity 16 Ubiquitous Type 20 Sketchbook 22 Newsletter 24 Pop! Project 34 Typographical Terms

Logo Design

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Ampersand

museum of modern typography

Personal Logo

graphic design

Character Studies

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CHARACTER STUDIES | THE LETTER A

most common vowel sounds in ancient languages of the western hemisphere. Other sources argue against this thought to be the basis of the one we use today.)

No one also knows why the ‘A’ looks the way it does, but we can construct a fairly logical chain of events.

Some say the Phoenicians chose the head of an ox to represent the ‘A’ sound (for the Phoenicians, this was the alphabet.

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bol. In fact, by the time it reached the Greeks in about 400 BC, it looked more like our modern ‘k’ than an ‘A’. a horizontal stroke and the letter looked almost as it does today.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

CHARACTER STUDIES | THE LETTER Z

About the Font In typography, a slab serif (also called mechanistic, square serif or Egyptian) typeface is a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs. Serif terminals may be either blunt and angular (Rockwell), or rounded (Courier).

What letter is used most rarely in English?

Poor lonely z finishes up the alphabet at number 26. The final letter, z’s history includes a time when it was so infrequently used that it was removed altogether.

The Greek zeta is the origin of the humble z. The Phoenician glyph zayin, meaning “weapon,” had a long vertical line capped at both ends with shorter horizontal lines and looked very much like a modern capital I. By the time it evolved into the Greek zeta the top and bottom lines had become elongated and the vertical line slanted, connecting to the horizontal lines at the top right and the bottom left.

Around 300 BC, the Roman Censor Appius Claudius Caecus removed z from the alphabet.

His justification was that z had become archaic: the pronunciation of /z/ had become /r/ by a process called rhotacism, rendering the letter z useless. At the same time that z was removed, g was added, but that’s another story.

Two hundred years later, z was reintroduced to the Latin alphabet but used only in words

taken from Greek. Because of its absence and reintroduction, zeta is one of the only two letters to enter the Latin alphabet directly from Greek and not Etruscan.

Z was not always the final letter of the modern English alphabet, although it has always been in the 26th position. For years the & symbol (now known as the ampersand) was the final, pronounced “and” but recited with the Latin “per se,” meaning “by itself.”

The position and pronunciation eventually ran together, with “X, Y, Z, and per se and” becoming “X, Y, Z, ampersand.”

Z is the most rarely used letter in the alphabet; however, American English uses it more often than British English. Early English did not have a z but used s for both voiced and unvoiced sibilants. Words in English that originated as loan words from French and Latin are more likely to be spelled with a z than an s. Also, American standardization modified /z/ suffixes to more accurately reflect their pronunciation, changing –ise and –isation to –ize and –ization.

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CHARACTER STUDIES | THE LETTER M

About the Font

Decorative fonts are typically used for titles and headlines and for small amounts of text in large sizes such as in greeting cards or posters. Some decorative type is hand drawn or may be created from digital type that has been manipulated in a font editor or graphics program to suit a specific purpose such as a newsletter nameplate or a logo.

Historians tell us that our current M started out as the Egyptian hieroglyph for “owl.”

Over thousands of years, this simple line drawing was further distilled into the hieratic symbol for the ‘em’ sound. Eventually, the great-grandparent of our M looked a bit like a handwritten ‘m’ balanced on the tip of one stroke.

The Phoenicians called the letter mem. It’s easy to see that the Phoenician mem is based on the Egyptian hieratic symbol, and that it’s the forerunner of the thirteenth letter of our alphabet. The mem looked much like our twobumped lowercase ‘m’ with an added tail at the end.

The Greek mu evolved from the Phoenician mem. The Greeks further simplified the letter and, in the process, converted the soft, round shapes into angular strokes.

The Etruscans and then the Romans adopted the Greek form, but neither made substantial changes to the shape or proportions of the character. Sometime in the third or fourth century A.D. the rounded lowercase ‘m’ began to appear, but it was almost lost in later centuries. In medieval writing, it became common practice to place a stroke over the preceding letter instead of writing the ‘m’ (probably because ‘m’ is one of the more timeconsuming letters to write).

The Romans also pressed the M and six other letters – I, X, V, L, C, and D – into double-duty as their numerals, and gave M the honor of standing in for the highest value, 1,000.

—Allan Haley

Poster Design

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Explorations of Typography with

June 20th 2015 8PM 5905 Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90036

Ed Benguiat is an American typographer. He has crafted over 600 typefaces. These include Tiffany, Bookman, Panache, Edwardian Script, Benguiat, and Benguiat Gothic. Other notable examples of Benguiat’s work are the logotypes for Playboy, the original Planet of the Apes film, and Super Fly.

Identity

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27 Pheasant Lane Aliso Viejo, CA 929656

Ubiquitous Type

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T

ypography makes at least two kinds of sense, if it makes any sense at all. It makes visual sense and historical sense. The visual side of typography is always on display, and materials for the study of its visual form are many and widespread. The history of letterforms and their usage is visible too, to those with access to manuscripts, inscriptions and old books, but from others it is largely hidden.

This book has therefore grown into some-thing more than a short manual of typographic etiquette. It is the fruit of a lot of long walks in the wilderness of letters: in part a pocket field guide to the living wonders that are found there, and in part a meditation on the ecological principles, survival techniques, and ethics that apply. The principles of typography as I understand them are not a set of dead conventions but the tribal customs of the magic forest, where ancient voices speak from all directions and new ones move to unremembered forms.

One question, nevertheless, has been often in my mind.

When all right-thinking human beings are struggling to remember that other men and women are free to be different, and free to become more different still, how can one honestly write a rulebook? What reason and authority exist for these commandments, suggestions, and instructions? Surely typographers, like others, ought to be at liberty to follow or to blaze the trails they choose.

Typography thrives as a shared concern - and there are no paths at all where there are no shared desires and directions.

A typographer determined to forge new routes must move, like other solitary travellers, through uninhabited country and against the grain of the land, crossing common thoroughfares in the silence before dawn. The subject of this book is not typographic solitude, but the old, well- travelled roads at the core of the tradition: paths that each of us is free to follow or not, and to enter and leave when we choose - if only we know the paths are there and have a sense of where they lead.

That freedom is denied us if the tradition is concealed or left for dead. Originality is everywhere, but much originality is blocked if the way back to earlier discoveries is cut or overgrown. If you use this book as a guide, by all means leave the road when you wish. That is precisely the use of a road: to reach individu- ally chosen points of departure. By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately, and well. That is one of the ends for which they exist.

UbiqUitoUs type

A report on public typography

The presence of typography both good and bad, can be seen everywhere.

“Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence.�

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Letterforms change constantly, yet differ very little, because they are alive. The principles of typographic clarity have also scarcely altered since the second half of the fifteenth century, when the first books were printed in roman type. Indeed, most of the principles of legibility and design explored in this book were known and used by Egyptian scribes writing hieratic script with reed pens on papyrus in 1000 B.C. Samples of their work sit now in museums in Cairo, London and New York, still lively, subtle, and perfectly legible thirty centuries after they were made.

Writing systems vary, but a good page is not hard to learn to recognize, whether it comes from Tang Dynasty China, The Egyptian New Kingdom typographers set for themselves than with the mutable or Renaissance Italy.

The principles that unite these distant schools of design are based on the structure and scale of the human body - the eye, the hand, and the forearm in particular - and on the invisible but no less real, no less demanding, no less sensuous anatomy of the human mind.

I don’t like to call these principles universals, because they are largely unique to our species. Dogs and ants, for example, read and write by more chemical means. But the underlying principles of typography are, at any rate, stable enough to weather any number of human fashions and fads.

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a tiny stage, of type.

It is true that typographer’s tools are presently changing with considerable force and speed, but this is not a manual in the use of any particular typesetting system or medium.

I suppose that most readers of this book will set most of their type in digital form, using computers, but I have no preconceptions about which brands of computers, or which versions of which proprietary software, they may use. The essential elements of style have more to do with the goals the living, speaking hand - and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise.

Sketchbook

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Personal Logo Brainstorming

Character Studies

Newsletter

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News!

CCSA Hosts:

Yoga Workshop Join our CCSA Club for a FREE Yoga class. Learn how yoga can help your physical & mental state. Open to all current students.

Tuesday, January 21 11:15 a.m. - 12;00 p.m.

Room 425 Student Council Hosts

Pilates Class

Join Student Council for a fun introductory pilates class. Open to all current students.

Thursday, Jan. 23 11:15 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

A332

Zumba

Join us for a high intensity, high energy, Latin inspired workout! Burn calories while having a blast!

Thursday, Jan. 23 6:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m.

Just Design It

(Active Wear for Cotton) This unique competition allows participants to become actively acquainted with the benefits of cotton in active wear design. In teams of three, participants are challenged to research a sport or fitness activity, develop a consumer profile, and design a cotton rich garment that is functional and fashionable. $19,000 in scholarships will be awarded. Application deadline: January 23 to Suite 201E. For more information contact tedwards@fidm.edu or visit the Portal.

New Year, New You! Wellness Fair

Start the New Year by being healthy. Join us for our annual health fair!

Get services and info from: •Vertigo Salon •Evoke Yoga •Los Angeles Athletic Club •Ralphs •Target Pharmacy Wednesday, Jan. 22 11:15 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

Meditation Wrap up Student Activities’ Wellness Week with an afternoon meditation session. Lead

by Meditation sepcialist, Sonya Joseph. Leave feeling refreshed & clam for your weekend.

Friday, Jan. 24 11:15 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

FIDM MODE™ Magazine Launch Party The FIDM MODE™ Magazine presents the release of Fall/ Winter 2014 issue. Join us as we celebrate the launch with an exclusive party! Tickets will be sold starting Wednesday, Jan. 22, in Student Activities, Rm. 425, for $10.00 or $15.00 at the door.

Thursday, Feb. 6 7:00 p.m. – 10:00 p.m.

Vertigo Salon (penthouse of the Annex)

Personal Counselors Workshop

How to Save a Life Come hear personal stories from two current students about overcoming depression. Learn tips and tools on how to help yourself and others.

Thursday, Jan. 23 11:15 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.

Student Activities, Rm. 425

Celebrate Paris with us!

Find us in the Student Lounge on Tuesday, Jan.28, to learn about our 2014 Paris Summer Institute.

A trip you don’t want to miss!

To sign up, go to https://myfidm. fidm.edu. Click the “MY FIDM” link at the top of the page & select “ABOUT STUDY TOURS” in the navigation bar on the left. For questions, contact Sevana Dimijian at sdimijian@fidm.edu.

Also, find us on FACEBOOK @ facebook.com/fidmstudy.tours

Career Center

TJ MAXX will be on campus Wednesday, Jan. 22, recruiting for Assistant Managers in the Los Angeles area.

Please sign up in the Career Center.

SUNGLASS HUT will be on campus Thursday, Jan. 23, recruiting for their new store at 7th & Figueroa. Please sign up in the Career Center.

Pop! Project

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Week 1

Week 2

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Week 3

Week 4

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Week 5

Week 6

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Week 7

Week 8

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Week 9

Typographical Terms

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Fonts Used in Typographic Portfolio Times New Roman Aguafina Script Helvetica Neue Reina 12 Pro Ed Interlock Chalkduster Brush Script Leafy Glade Avenir Next Bebas Neue Rockwell Zapfino Ostrich Impact Arial