a r t + c o m m e r c e
&
Neo Deco was designed by Alex Trochut, and built by HypeForType. Alex Trochut is a freelance graphic designer from Barcelona. He has created a variety of work for clients including Nike, Microsoft Zun, Cadbury’s, LG, The Guardian, British Airways, Fallon, Non-Format, and The Rolling Stones. With talent like Alex has there is no wonder he has one of the largest design followings around.
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 two-bumped 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 time-consuming 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
Generally speaking, there are no launch dates for the letters of our alphabet. For the most part they’ve come down to us through an evolutionary process, with shapes that developed slowly over a long period of time. The G, however, is an exception. In fact, our letter G made its official debut in 312 B.C. Of course, the story begins a bit earlier than that. The Phoenicians, and the other Semitic peoples of Syria, used a simple graphic for m that looked roughly like an upside-down V to represent the consonant ‘g’ sound (as in “go”). They named the for m gimel, which was the Phoenician word for camel. Some contend this was because the upside-down V looked like the hump of a camel. The Greeks borrowed the basic Phoenician for m and changed its name to gamma. They also made some dramatic changes to the letter’s appearance. At various times in ancient Greek history, the gamma looked like a one-sided arrow pointing up, an upside-down L, or a crescent moon. Throughout this time, however, the gamma always represented the same hard ‘g’ sound that it did for the Phoenicians.
ABOUT THE FONT The Bodoni™ font is a well-known serif typeface series that has had a long history of interpretations by many design houses. The various font styles begin with Bodoni’s original Didone modern font in the late 1700s through to ATF’s American
The Greek for m was adopted by the Etruscans and then by the Romans, where
Revival in the early
for many years it represented both the hard ‘k’ and ‘g’ sounds. This brings us
1900s and into the
to 312 B.C., when our modern G was for mally introduced into the refor med
digital age. The original
Latin alphabet. The G was created to eliminate the confusion caused by one
design had a bold look
letter representing two sounds. The basic shape, which now looked like our C,
with contrasting strokes
was used to represent the palatalized sounds ‘s’ and ‘c,’ and a little bar was
and an upper case that
added to create the letter G, which denoted the guttural stop ‘g.’
was a bit more
The G took its position as the seventh letter of our alphabet, replacing the
condensed then its
letter Z, which was considered super fluous for the writing of Latin. The ousted Z
stylish influence
took its place at the end of the line.
Baskerville®.
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.
ABOUT THE FONT The first geometric slabserif, Litho Antique, appears as a sport from the Inland Typefoundry of St. Louis in 1910, distributed from Inland and then ATF. The 1933 Monotype updating of Litho Antique was supervised by F.H. Pierpont from Connecticut. Rockwell was prepared as a competitor to Memphis, but Pierpont ignored the detailing of the contemporary European slabserifs in favor of the earlier American model.
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 letter forms 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 typo-graphic 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, typography but the old, welltravelled 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 pre- cisely the use of a road: to reach individually 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. 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
Ubiquitous Type: A
report
on
public
The presence of typography both good and bad, can be seen everywhere. By
Milton
Glaser
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,
“Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence.” 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.
Ty p o g r a p h y i n t h e s t r e e t s o f N e w Yo r k C i t y.
Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a tiny stage, of. 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.
CCSA Hosts:
Join our CCSA Club for a FREE Yoga class. Learn how yoga can help your physical & mental state. Open to all current students.
Join us for a high intensity, high energy, Latin inspired workout! Burn calories while having a blast! Thursday, January 23 6:30 p.m. - 7:30 p.m. Student Lounge
FIDM MODE™
Student Council Hosts:
Tuesday, January 21 111:15 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Room 425
Join Student Council for a fun intoductory pilates class. Open to all current students. Thursday, January 23 11:15 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. A332
Personal Counselors Workshop Come hear personal stories from two current students about overcoming depression. Learn tips & tools on how to help yourself & others. Thursday, January 23 11:15 a.m. - 12:00 p.m. Student Activities Rm. 425
(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/fitness activity, develope a consumer profile, & design a cotton rich garment that is functional & fashionable. $19,000 in scholarships will be awarded. Applicant deadline: January 23 to Suite 201E. For more info, contact tedwards@fidm.edu
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, January 22, in Student Activities Rm. 425, for $10 or $15 at the door. Thursday, Febuary 6 7:00 p.m. - 10:00 p.m. Vertigo Salon (penthouse of the Annex)
Start the New Year by being healthy. Join us for our annual health fair! Get services and info from: Vertigo Salon Evoke Yoga Los Anglese Atheletic Club Ralphs Target Pharmacy
TJ MAXX will be on campus Wednesday, January 22, recruiting for Assistant Managers in the Los Angeles area. Please sign up in the Career Center. SUNGLASS HUT will be on campus Thursday, January 23, recruiting for their new store at 7th & Figueroa. Please sign up in the Career Center.
Find us in the Student Lounge on Tuesday, January 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/fidmstufy.tours
nevis Bold
Woodcut
Helvetica Oblique
Oblique type (or slanted, sloped) is a form of type that slants slightly to the right, used in the same manner as italic type. Unlike italic type, however, it does not use different glyph shapes; it uses the same glyphs as roman type, except distorted.
Extra Grotesque
Grotesque is frequently used as a synonym with sans serif. At other times, it is used (along with "Neo-Grotesque", "Humanist", "Lineal", and "Geometric") to describe a particular style or subset of sans-serif typefaces. The first sans-serif typeface called grotesque was also the first sans-serif typeface containing actual lowercase letters.
Slab Serif
Slab Serif is a type of serif typeface characterized by thick, block-like serifs. Serif terminals may be either blunt and angular, or rounded. Slab serif typefaces generally have no bracket.
Cursive Standard
Zapf Dingbat
Stamp
Imprint MT Shadow Serif is a small line attached to the end of a stroke in a letter or symbol, such as when handwriting is separated into distinct units for a typewriter or typesetter.
Lucida Bright
Glyph is a hieroglyphic character or symbol; a pictograph.
Shadowed Germanica
Blackletter is an early, ornate, bold style of type, typically resembling Gothic.
Brushes
Kannada Sangam MD
Cursive is the in flowing strokes resembling handwriting.
Calligraphy Pen Baskerville
American Typewriter
Zapfino Wide Latin
Display Type is large or eye-catching type used for headings or advertisements.
Impact
Ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined as a single glyph.
Distressed Ransom Note
Georgia