IN TRO 2 typography portfolio
DON’T TAKE LIFE TOO SERIOUSLY. This is the note that sticks to my monitor and serves as the guiding theme of my portfolio. I love doodling, minimalism, handlettering, and bold sans-serifs, but how do I combine those?
1. Project brief: mind spinning, trying to stay focused long enough to listen to the directions 2. Brainstorming: doodles on the train ride home, waking up at 3 AM to write down an idea 3. Research: scower pinterest for ideas, two hours later: 6 related-pins deep 4. Rough draft: carefully place elements in organized grid, wow this is boring 5. Next round: ditch the grid and add a surprise, is there too much black and white? 6. Final: pray Dunbar likes it, great, the printer isn’t working
Here is a book of my journey through learning typography and I had fun doing it.
TABLE OF CONT ENTS 4 typography portfolio
// 2
LOGO & INTRO
// 4
TABLE OF CONTENTS
// 6
FONT BOOK
// 8
TYPOGRAPHICAL TERMS
// 10
CHARACTER STUDY A
// 12
CHARACTER STUDY J
// 14
CHARACTER STUDY M
// 16
CHARACTER STUDY O
// 18
CHARACTER STUDY WOODBLOCK
// 20
CHARACTER STUDY AMPERSAND
// 22
LOGO DESIGN: PERSONAL & MUSEUM
// 24
UBIQUITOUS TYPE
// 26
SKETCH BOOK
// 30
MUSEUM POSTER DESIGN
// 32
POP!
FO NTS USED 6 typography portfolio
GREYCLIFF CF FUTURA GILL SANS BOOKMAN OLD STYLE LUCIDA SANS TW CENT MT TIMES NEW ROMAN BLACKOAK ARIAL BODONI MT
EVERYDAY ARIAL ROUNDED MT BOLD BRITANNIC BOLD
BLENNY
HELVETICA NEUVE
TYPO GRAPH ICAL TERMS 8 8 typography portfolio typography portfolio
CHARACTER STUDIES //
A
No one knows why ‘A’ is the first letter of our alphabet. Some think it’s because this letter represents one of the most common vowel sounds in ancient languages of the western hemisphere. Other sources argue against this theory because there were no vowel sounds in the Phoenician language. (The Phoenician alphabet is generally thought to be the basis of the one we use today.)
Some say the Phoenicians chose the head of an ox to represent the ‘A’ sound (for the Phoenicians, this was actually a glottal stop). The ox was a common, important animal to the Phoenicians. It was their main power source for heavy work. Oxen plowed the fields, harvested crops, and hauled food to market. Some sources also claim that the ox was often the main course at meals. A symbol for the ox would have been an important communication tool for the Phoenicians. It somewhat naturally follows that an ox symbol would be the first letter of the alphabet.
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t: Fon his ut T Abo
The story of the Bookman Old Style™ font goes back over 150 years and begins in 1858 with the “Antique Old Style No. 7â€? by A. C. Phemister, a font which was copied repeatedly by many companies over the following decades. Although Bookman Oldstyle constantly gained in popularity over the following decades, and at the latest in the 1960s and 70s was a standard for almost every setter, its fame reached its high point from the mid-80s.
When Mark Simonson created a customer font on the basis of old Bookman forms some 20 years later, it occurred to him to revive the font. The aim of this undertaking was not simply to digitalise a historical version. He wanted to bring together the most beautiful variants of the font, redraw and refine its characters and, above all, collect the many swash variants and add more. Furthermore, the new font was also to benefit from a significantly expanded character set. Bookmania was born.
Bookman Old Style
CHARACTER STUDIES //
J
The letters I and J follow
When the I was adopted
the I represented both
each other in the alphabet
by the Greeks around
the vowel ‘i’ and the
and look a lot alike. So it
900 B.C., they used the
semivowel ‘y.’
comes as no surprise to
Eventually, somebody
discover that our ninth
must have grown tired
and tenth letters started
of using one letter to
out as the same character.
represent two sounds,
The Phoenician ancestor
and so an attempt was
to our present I was
made to differentiate
a sign called “yodh,”
them by lengthening the
meaning “hand.” The
I slightly to represent
original Phoenician
the semivowel. In the
symbol evolved over time
16th century, a lettering
into a zigzag shape that
artist decided that merely
was eventually adopted by the Greeks. The Phoenicians used it as a semivowel, as the ‘y’ in toy.
letter to represent the long ‘ee’ vowel sound. Then, in early Latin,
lengthening the letter was too subtle a change, and added a hook to the bottom of the J.
Lucida Sans The Lucida
The Lucida Font Family is an
Sans Font
extended family of fonts designed
Family features a strong clean style reminiscent of traditional Roman letterforms. It is one of the original “super families� and to this day it is still one of the largest font families. With its large x-height and open spacing the Lucida Sans font brings a human look to
by Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes in 1985. This family of fonts was designed specifically for medium and low-resolution digital printers and displays. The Lucida Sans Font is a family of the sans-serif variants of the Lucida Font Family designed to complement the Lucida Serif fonts. It includes Lucida Grande, Lucida Sans Typewriter and Lucida Sans Unicode.
the Lucida font family.
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CHARACTER STUDIES //
M
M
The name for the letter “M” is derived from the Phoenician Mem, via the Greek Mu, and the Semitic, meaning biblical, Mem was most likely used to represent water. The Egyptian word for water also began with that sound. The letter “M” represents the bilabial nasal consonant sound in the International Phonetic Alphabet and other modern languages. “M” is the thirteenth letter of the alphabet.
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M
Times New Roman
Times New Roman gets its name from the Times of London, the British newspaper. In 1929, the Times hired typographer Stanley Morison of Monotype, a British font foundry, to create a new text font. Morison led the project and su per vised Vic tor Lar dent, an advertising artist for the Times, who drew the letterforms. Because it was used in a daily news pa per, the new font quickly became popular among printers of the day. Decades since, typesetting devices have evolved, but Times New Roman has always been one of the first fonts available for each new device.
CHARACTER STUDIES //
O
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HISTORY
S
ome believe that our present O evolved from a Phoenician symbol; others vote for an even more ancient Egyptian heiroglyph as the
source. The most fanciful explanation, though, is offered by Rudyard Kipling in his Just So Stories. “How the Alphabet was Made” recounts how a Neolithic tribesman and his precocious daughter invent the alphabet by drawing pictures to represent sounds. After finishing the A and Y (inspired by the mouth and tail of a carp), the child, Taffy, asks her father to make another sound that she can translate into a picture.
Gill Sans is a sans-serif typeface designed by Eric Gill and released by the British branch of Monotype from 1928 onwards. Gill Sans takes inspiration from the calligrapher and lettering artist Edward Johnston’s 1916 “Underground Alphabet”, the corporate font of London Underground, now (although not at the time) most often simply called the “Johnston” typeface.
GILL SANS
CHARACTER STUDIES //
T
LETTER HISTORY
T
Let’s go back to around 1000 B.C. During this time, the Phoenicians and other Semitic tribes used a variety of crossed forms to represent the letter they called “taw.”This letter, one of the first recorded, served two purposes: it represented the ‘t’ sound, and it provided a mark for signing documents that could be used by those who could not write their names. When the Greeks adopted the taw for their alphabet ten centuries later, they altered it slightly until it looked pretty much like what our T looks like today.The Greeks called this letter “tau.”The tau was passed on, virtually unchanged, from the Greeks to the Etruscans, and finally to the Romans.
BLAC Darius Wells produced the first American wood type in 1828.
Phoenicians
Phoenicians
Greek
“WILD WES 18 typography portfolio
T!!
CKOAK Blackoak is an Adobe Originals typeface designed as a big, heavy Egyptienne-sytle slab-serif titling face by Joy Redick in 1990 for the Adobe Wood Type series. Blackoak is based on Antique Extended first shown as wood type by Edwin Allen in George Nesbitt’s 1838 First Premium Wood Types Cut by Machinery. While most wood type designs originated as foundry type, Nicolette Gray, in Nineteenth Century Ornamented Typefaces, stated her belief that this design originated as American wood type.
WOOD TYPE
One envisions this type used for the large, decorative posters that once filled the “Wild West” of America. Types from the Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection and the wood type collection of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC acted as primary sources of inspiration for this design.
ST OF AMERICA”
CHARACTER STUDIES //
Ampersand The shape of the character (&) predates the word ampersand by more than 1,500 years. In the first century, Roman scribes wrote in cursive, so when they wrote the Latin word et which means “and” they linked the e and t. Over time the combined letters came to signify the word “and” in English as well. Certain versions of the ampersand, like that in the font Caslon, clearly reveal the origin of the shape.
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LO GO DES IGN 2222 typography portfolio typography portfolio
UBIQU UBIQU ITOUS ITOUS TYPE TYPE 24 typography portfolio
Typography 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 something 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, how can one honestly write a rulebook? 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 travelers, 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-traveled 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 individually chosen points of departure. By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully and well. Letter forms 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. 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, or Renaissance Italy, typographers set for themselves. 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. 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 it is true that typographers’ 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. 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 delight, knowledge, & surprise.
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‘O’ TOWER
DECORATIVE
SERIF CITY
JELLO TYPE
SKE TCH BOOK 28 typography portfolio
GROOVY
BLOCK PARTY
CLASSY
CURVY
W
POS TER DE SIGN 30 typography portfolio
POP! POP! POP! 3232 typography typography portfolio portfolio
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volume seven in this issue: andy warhol shepard fairey larry rivers issue one visual project jasper johns
banksy
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volume seven volume seven volume seven pop! pop! in this this issue: issue: inin this issue: in this this issue: issue: in andy andy warhol warhol andy warhol andy warhol shepard fairey shepard fairey larry rivers larry rivers larry rivers larry rivers larry rivers larry rivers jasper johns jasper johns larry rivers larry rivers issue one larry rivers issue one issue one visual project visual project visual project visual project banksy banksy banksy
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