Typo Magazine

TYPO 01 SAGMEISTER/ MARTENS GARAMOND/BANTJES

PREFACE Typo is a typographic magazine published annually by the NKF Editorial. The magazine focuses on the world of typography around us, and the designers who create it. This magazine is created for the people in the business but it will also inspire and teach groups within the design community that take typography in use. Many can say that typography is taken for granted and we think that the work of typograpy in underrated. Is a lot of work and thought behind only a single letter. Typography is an entirely separate subject and it should be defined accordingly.

We want to put lights on typography and the hard-working designers behind it, we think they should get the credits they deserve.

the TYPO crew

All text and intervues by Peter Bil’ak.

Design and print by Sissel Pettersen.

Fonts: Baskerville: Bold/Regular.

TeX Gaye Adventor: Bold/Regular.

Colours: Pantone 115 CP and Black.

Produced by and for Norges Kreative Fagskole. Š All rignts reserved SP Designs

CONTENT s.03

STEFAN SAGMEISTER

s.05

CLAUDE GARAMOND

s.07

KAREL MARTENS

s.09

MARIAN BANTJES

stefan sagmsister

3

/ experimental typography

Born in Austria in 1962, Stefan Sagmeister was originally on a path to become an engineer. After shifting his course in life towards design he studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna andd was accepted at the Pratt Institute in New York on a Fullbright Scholarship after that. He first started working professionally in the field for Leo Burnett, in their Hong Kong office in 1991. After a short stint there he began working with Tibor Kalman at his studio M&Co. It wasn’t long after that that Tibor announced he was closing the doors on M&Co, in 1993, and Sagmeister formed Sagmeister, Inc. He has been there ever since. His studio is very small in size and he works only with clients that appeal to him. He astonished the design community in 2000 when he closed the doors on his studio and took a year off for personal reflection. When he came back he published his first book, Made You Look. Thoroughly convinced that the reflection process was important in his continued creativity he has toured the design circuit giving many lectures and presentations about his personal success. He continues to operate his studio where he works for clients from a wide range of industries including fashion and music. Stefan Sagmeister (born 1962 in Bregenz, Austria) is a New York-based graphic designer and typographer. He has his own design firm—Sagmeister & Walsh Inc.—in New York City. 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 with Leo Burnett’s Hong Kong Design Group. In 1993, he returned to New York to work with Tibor Kalman’s M&Co design company. 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. He is the author of the design monograph “Made You Look” which was published by Booth-Clibborn editions. Solo shows on Sagmeister, Inc.’s work have been mounted in Zurich, Vienna, New York, Berlin, Japan, Osaka, Prague, Cologne, and Seoul. He teaches in the graduate department of the School of Visual Arts in New York and has been appointed as the Frank Stanton Chair at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York. His motto is “Design that needed guts from the creator and still carries the ghost of these guts in the final execution.” Sagmeister goes on a year-long sabbatical around every seven years, where he does not take work from clients. STEFAN SAGMEISTER (1962-) is among today’s most important graphic designers. Born in Austria, he now lives and works in New York. His long-standing collaborators include the AIGA and musicians, David Byrne and Lou Reed. When Stefan Sagmeister was invited to design the poster for an AIGA lecture he was giving on the campus at Cranbrook near Detroit, he asked his assistant to carve the details on to his torso with an X-acto knife and photographed the result. Sunning himself on a beach the following summer, Sagmeister noticed traces of the poster text rising in pink as his flesh tanned. Now a graphic icon of the 1990s, that 1999 AIGA Detroit poster typifies Stefan Sagmeister’s style. Striking to the point of sensationalism and humorous but in such an unsettling way that it’s nearly, but not quite unacceptable, his work mixes sexuality with wit and a whiff of the sinister. Sagmeister’s technique is often simple to the point of banality: from slashing D-I-Y text into his own skin for the AIGA Detroit poster, to spelling out words with roughly cut strips of white cloth for a 1999 brochure for his girlfriend, the fashion designer, Anni Kuan. The strength of his work lies in his ability to conceptualise: to come up with potent, original, stunningly appropriate ideas. Born in Bregenz, a quiet town in the Austrian Alps, in 1962, Sagmeister studied engineering after high school, but switched to graphic design after working on illustrations and lay-outs for Alphorn, a left-wing magazine. The first of his D-I-Y graphic exercises was a poster publicising Alphorn’s Anarchy issue for which he persuaded fellow students to lie down in the playground in the shape of the letter A and photographed them from the school roof. At 19, Sagmeister moved to Vienna hoping to study graphics at the city’s prestigious University of Applied Arts. After his first application was rejected – “just about everybody was better at drawing than I was” – he enrolled in a private art school and was accepted on his second attempt. Through his sister’s boyfriend, the rock musician, Alexander Goebel, Sagmeister was introduced to the Schauspielhaus theatre group and designed posters for them as part of the Gruppe Gut collective. Many of the posters parodied traditionally twee theatrical imagery and offset it with roughly printed text in the grungey typefaces of punk albums and 1970s anarchist graphics. In 1987, Sagmeister won a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Here humour emerged as the dominant theme in his work. When a girlfriend asked him to design business cards which would cost no more than $1 each, Sagmeister printed them on dollar bills. And when a friend from Austria came to visit, having voiced concern that New York women would ignore him, Sagmeister postered the walls of his neighbourhood with a picture of his friend under the words “Dear Girls! Please be nice to Reini”. After three years in the US, Sagmeister returned to Austria for compulsory military service. As a conscientious objector, he was allowed to do community work in a refugee centre outside Vienna. He stayed in Austria working as a graphic designer before moving to Hong Kong in 1991 to join the advertising agency, Leo Burnett. “They asked if I would be interested in being a typographer, “ he later told the author, Peter Hall. “So I made up a high number and said I would do it for that.” When the agency was invited to design a poster for the 1992 4As advertising awards ceremony, Sagmeister depicted a traditional Cantonese image featuring four bare male bottoms. Some ad agencies boycotted the awards in protest and the Hong Kong newspapers received numerous letters of complaint. Sagmeister’s favourite said: “Who’s the asshole who designed this poster?” By spring 1993, he had tired of Hong Kong. Sagmeister spent a couple of months working from a Sri Lankan beach hut before going back to New York.

As a Pratt Institute student, his dream had been to work at M&Co, the late Tibor Kalman’s graphics studio. Sagmeister bombarded Kalman with calls and finally persuaded him to sponsor his green card application. Four years later on his return from Hong Kong, the green card came through. His first project for M&Co was an invitation for a Gay and Lesbian Taskforce Gala for which he designed a prettily packaged box of fresh fruit. Cue a logistical nightmare as M&Co’s staff struggled to stop the fruit rotting in the heat of a sweltering New York summer. A few months later, Tibor Kalman announced that he was closing the studio to move to Rome, and Sagmeister set up on his own. His goal was to design music graphics, but only for music he liked. To have the freedom to do so, Sagmeister decided to follow Kalman’s advice by keeping his company small with a team of three: himself, a designer (since 1996, the Icelander, Hjalti Karlsson) and an intern. Sagmeister Inc’s first project was its own business card, which came in an acrylic slipcase. When the card is inside the case, all you see is an S in a circle. Once outside, the company’s name and contract details appear. The second commission came from Sagmeister’s brother, Martin who was opening Blue, a chain of jeans stores in Austria. Sagmeister devised an identity consisting of the word blue in black type on an orange background.

As none of the record labels he approached seemed interested in his work, Sagmeister seized the chance to design a CD cover for a friend’s album, H.P. Zinker’s Mountains of Madness. Many of his contemporaries felt that music graphics had become less interesting once their old canvas, the vinyl LP cover, had shrunk to the dimensions of a CD, but Sagmeister saw the CD as a toy with which he could tantalise consumers. Having spotted a schoolgirl on the subway reading a maths text book through a red plastic filter, he placed his CD cover inside a red-tinted plastic case. Replicating the optical illusion of his business card, the complete packaging shows a close-up of a placid man’s face, but once the CD cover is slipped out from the red plastic, the man’s face appears furious in shades of red, white and green. Mountains of Madness won Sagmeister the first of his four Grammy nominations.Invited by Lou Reed to design his 1996 album Set the Twilight Reeling, Sagmeister inserted an indigo portrait of Reed in an indigo-tinted plastic CD case. When the paler coloured cover is removed, Reed literally emerges from the twilight. The following year, Sagmeister depicted David Byrne as a plastic GI Joe-style doll on the cover of Feelings. One of his trickiest assignments was for the Rollings Stones’ 1997 Bridges to Babylon album and tour. Sagmeister struggled to persuade the band’s management to accept his motif of a lion inspired by an Assyrian sculpture in the British Museum. Also the astrological sign of the Rolling Stones’ lead singer, Mick Jagger (a Leo), the lion doubled as an easily reproducible motif for tour merchandise.

As well as these music projects, Sagmeister still took on other commercial commissions and pro bono cultural projects, such as his AIGA lecture posters. The obscenely elongated wagging tongues of 1996’s Fresh Dialogue talks series in New York and a Headless Chicken strutting across a field for 1997’s biennial conference in New Orleans culminated in the drama of Sagmeister’s scarred, knife-slashed torso for 1999’s deceptively blandly titled, AIGA Detroit. In June 2000, Sagmeister decided to treat himself to a long-promised year off to concentrate on experimental projects and a book Sagmeister, sub-titled Made You Look with the sub-sub-title Another self-indulgent design monograph (practically everything we have ever designed including the bad stuff.) The worst of the “bad stuff ” was a 1996 series of CD-Rom covers for a subsidiary of the Viacom entertainment group. “Don’t take on any more bad jobs,” Sagmeister scolded himself in his diary. “I have done enough bullshit lately, I just have to make time for something better. Something good.”Born in Austria in 1962, Stefan Sagmeister was originally on a path to become an engineer. After shifting his course in life towards design he studied at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna andd was accepted at the Pratt Institute in New York on a Fullbright Scholarship after that. He first started working professionally in the field for Leo Burnett, in their Hong Kong office in 1991. After a short stint there he began working with Tibor Kalman at his studio M&Co. It wasn’t long after that that Tibor announced he was closing the doors on M&Co, in 1993, and Sagmeister formed Sagmeister, Inc. He has been there ever since. His studio is very small in size and he works only with clients that appeal to him. He astonished the design community in 2000 when he closed the doors on his studio and took a year off for personal reflection. When he came back he published his first book, Made You Look. Thoroughly convinced that the reflection process was important in his continued creativity he has toured the design circuit giving many lectures and presentations about his personal success. He continues to operate his studio where he works for clients from a wide range of industries including fashion and music. Stefan Sagmeister (born 1962 in Bregenz, Austria) is a New Yorkbased graphic designer and typographer. He has his own design firm—Sagmeister & Walsh Inc.—in New York City. 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 with Leo Burnett’s Hong Kong Design Group. In 1993, he returned to New York to work with Tibor Kalman’s M&Co design company. 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. He is the author of the design monograph “Made You Look” which was published by Booth-Clibborn editions. Solo shows on Sagmeister, Inc.’s work have been mounted in Zurich, Vienna, New York, Berlin, Japan, Osaka, Prague, Cologne, and Seoul. He teaches in the graduate department of the School of Visual Arts in New York and has been appointed as the Frank Stanton Chair at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York. His motto is “Design that needed guts from the creator and still carries the ghost of these guts in the final execution.” Sagmeister goes on a year-long sabbatical around every seven years, where he does not take work from clients. STEFAN SAGMEISTER (1962-) is among today’s most important graphic designers. Born in Austria, he now lives and works in New York. His long-standing collaborators include the AIGA and musicians, David Byrne and Lou Reed. When Stefan Sagmeister was invited to design the poster for an AIGA lecture he was giving on the campus at Cranbrook near Detroit, he asked his assistant to carve the details on to his torso with an X-acto knife and photographed the result. Sunning himself on a beach the following summer, Sagmeister noticed traces of the poster text rising in pink as his flesh tanned. Now a graphic icon of the 1990s, that 1999 AIGA Detroit poster typifies Stefan Sagmeister’s style. Striking to the point of sensationalism and humorous but in such an unsettling way that it’s nearly, but not quite unacceptable, his work mixes sexuality with wit and a whiff of the sinister. Sagmeister’s technique is often simple to the point of banality: from slashing D-I-Y text into his own skin for the AIGA Detroit poster, to spelling out words with roughly cut strips of white cloth for a 1999 brochure for his girlfriend, the fashion designer, Anni Kuan. The strength of his work lies in his ability to conceptualise: to come up with potent, original, stunningly appropriate ideas. Born in Bregenz, a quiet town in the Austrian Alps, in 1962, Sagmeister studied engineering after high school, but switched to graphic design after working on illustrations and lay-outs for Alphorn, a left-wing magazine. The first of his D-I-Y graphic exercises was a poster publicising Alphorn’s Anarchy issue for which he persuaded fellow students to lie down in the playground in the shape of the letter A and photographed them from the school roof. At 19, Sagmeister moved to Vienna hoping to study graphics at the city’s prestigious University of Applied Arts. After his first application was rejected – “just about everybody was better at drawing than I was” – he enrolled in a private art school and was accepted on his second attempt. Through his sister’s boyfriend, the rock musician, Alexander Goebel, Sagmeister was introduced to the Schauspielhaus theatre group and designed posters for them as part of the Gruppe Gut collective. Many of the posters parodied traditionally twee theatrical imagery and offset it with roughly printed text in the grungey typefaces of punk albums and 1970s anarchist graphics. In 1987, Sagmeister won a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Here humour emerged as the dominant theme in his work. When a girlfriend asked him to design business cards which would cost no more than $1 each, Sagmeister printed them on dollar bills. And when a friend from Austria came to visit, having voiced concern that New York women would ignore him, Sagmeister postered the walls of his neighbourhood with a picture of his friend under the words “Dear Girls!

Please be nice to Reini”. After three years in the US, Sagmeister returned to Austria for compulsory military service. As a conscientious objector, he was allowed to do community work in a refugee centre outside Vienna. He stayed in Austria working as a graphic designer before moving to Hong Kong in 1991 to join the advertising agency, Leo Burnett. “They asked if I would be interested in being a typographer, “ he later told the author, Peter Hall. “So I made up a high number and said I would do it for that.” When the agency was invited to design a poster for the 1992 4As advertising awards ceremony, Sagmeister depicted a traditional Cantonese image featuring four bare male bottoms. Some ad agencies boycotted the awards in protest and the Hong Kong newspapers received numerous letters of complaint. Sagmeister’s favourite said: “Who’s the asshole who designed this poster?” By spring 1993, he had tired of Hong Kong.

Sagmeister spent a couple of months working from a Sri Lankan beach hut before going back to New York. As a Pratt Institute student, his dream had been to work at M&Co, the late Tibor Kalman’s graphics studio. Sagmeister bombarded Kalman with calls and finally persuaded him to sponsor his green card application. Four years later on his return from Hong Kong, the green card came through. His first project for M&Co was an invitation for a Gay and Lesbian Taskforce Gala for which he designed a prettily packaged box of fresh fruit. Cue a logistical nightmare as M&Co’s staff struggled to stop the fruit rotting in the heat of a sweltering New York summer. A few months later, Tibor Kalman announced that he was closing the studio to move to Rome, and Sagmeister set up on his own. His goal was to design music graphics, but only for music he liked. To have the freedom to do so, Sagmeister decided to follow Kalman’s advice by keeping his company small with a team of three: himself, a designer (since 1996, the Icelander, Hjalti Karlsson) and an intern. Sagmeister Inc’s first project was its own business card, which came in an acrylic slipcase.

When the card is inside the case, all you see is an S in a circle. Once outside, the company’s name and contract details appear. The second commission came from Sagmeister’s brother, Martin who was opening Blue, a chain of jeans stores in Austria. Sagmeister devised an identity consisting of the word blue in black type on an orange background.As none of the record labels he approached seemed interested in his work, Sagmeister seized the chance to design a CD cover for a friend’s album, H.P. Zinker’s Mountains of Madness. Many of his contemporaries felt that music graphics had become less interesting once their old canvas, the vinyl LP cover, had shrunk to the dimensions of a CD, but Sagmeister saw the CD as a toy with which he could tantalise consumers. Having spotted a schoolgirl on the subway reading a maths text book through a red plastic filter, he placed his CD cover inside a red-tinted plastic case. Replicating the optical illusion of his business card, the complete packaging shows a close-up of a placid man’s face, but once the CD cover is slipped out from the red plastic, the man’s face appears furious in shades of red, white and green.

Mountains of Madness won Sagmeister the first of his four Grammy nominations.Invited by Lou Reed to design his 1996 album Set the Twilight Reeling, Sagmeister inserted an indigo portrait of Reed in an indigo-tinted plastic CD case. When the paler coloured cover is removed, Reed literally emerges from the twilight. The following year, Sagmeister depicted David Byrne as a plastic GI Joe-style doll on the cover of Feelings. One of his trickiest assignments was for the Rollings Stones’ 1997 Bridges to Babylon album and tour. Sagmeister struggled to persuade the band’s management to accept his motif of a lion inspired by an Assyrian sculpture in the British Museum. Also the astrological sign of the Rolling Stones’ lead singer, Mick Jagger (a Leo), the lion doubled as an easily reproducible motif for tour merchandise. As well as these music projects, Sagmeister still took on other commercial commissions and pro bono cultural projects, such as his AIGA lecture posters. The obscenely elongated wagging tongues of 1996’s Fresh Dialogue talks series in New York and a Headless Chicken strutting across a field for 1997’s biennial conference in New Orleans culminated in the drama of Sagmeister’s scarred, knife-slashed torso for 1999’s deceptively blandly titled, AIGA Detroit. In June 2000, Sagmeister decided to treat himself to a long-promised year off to concentrate on experimental projects and a book Sagmeister, sub-titled Made You Look with the sub-sub-title Another self-indulgent design monograph (practically everything we have ever designed including the bad stuff.) The worst of the “bad stuff ” was a 1996 series of CD-Rom covers for a subsidiary of the Viacom entertainment group. “Don’t take on any more bad jobs,” Sagmeister scolded himself in his diary. “I have done enough bullshit lately, I just have to make time for something better. Something good.” he vas alvays a pusher who wanted to take things to the next level. and so he did and is still doing. an probobly will do alhis life.de, the company’s name and contract details appear. The second commission came from Sagmeister’s brother, Martin who was opening Blue, a chain of jeans stores in Austria. Sagmeister devised an identity consisting of the word blue in black type on an orange background.As none of the record labels he approached seemed interested in his work, Sagmeister seized the chance to design a CD cover for a friend’s album, H.P. Zinker’s Mountains of Madness. Many of his contemporaries felt that music graphics had become less interesting once their old canvas, the vinyl LP cover, had shrunk to the dimensions of a CD, but Sagmeister saw the CD as a toy with which he could tantalise consumers. Having spotted a schoolgirl on the subway reading a maths text book through a red plastic filter, he placed his CD cover inside a red-tinted plastic case. Replicating the optical illusion of his business card, the complete packaging shows a close-up of a placid man’s face, but once the CD cover is slipped out from the red plastic, the man’s face appears furious in shades of red, white and green. Mountains of Madness won Sagmeister the first of his four Grammy nominations.Invited by Lou Reed to design his 1996 album Set the Twilight Reeling, Sagmeister inserted an indigo portrait of Reed in an indigo-tinted plastic CD case. When the paler coloured cover is removed, Reed literally emerges from the twilight. The following year, Sagmeister depicted David Byrne as a plastic GI Joe-style doll on the cover of Feelings. One of his trickiest assignments was for the Rollings Stones’ 1997 Bridges to Babylon album and tour. Sagmeister struggled to persuade the band’s management to accept his motif of a lion inspired by an Assyrian sculpture in the British Museum. Also the astrological sign of the Rolling Stones’ lead singer, Mick Jagger (a Leo), the lion doubled as an easily reproducible motif for tour merchandise. As well as these music projects, Sagmeister still took on other commercial commissions and pro bono cultural projects, such as his AIGA lecture posters. The obscenely elongated wagging tongues of 1996’s Fresh Dialogue talks series in New York and a Headless Chicken strutting across a field for 1997’s biennial conference in New Orleans culminated in the drama of Sagmeister’s scarred, knife-slashed torso for 1999’s deceptively blandly titled, AIGA Detroit. In June 2000, Sagmeister decided to treat himself to a longpromised year off to concentrate on experimental projects and a book Sagmeister, sub-titled Made You Look with the sub-sub-title Another self-indulgent design monograph (practically everything we have ever designed including the bad stuff.) The worst of the “bad stuff ” was a 1996 series of CD-Rom covers for a subsidiary of the Viacom entertainment group. “Don’t take on any more bad jobs,” Sagmeister scolded himself in his diary. “I , and so on and so on.”

karel martens

/ typography in shape

When did you start working on OASE magazine? The first issue that I did was in 1990. Before it was a magazine of a different format, A4 size. Did you suggested a new size?

Yes. The magazine has quite a theoretical approach, so used this book format. Before was just loose papers, where students would hand their type-written essays. It looked very nice, I liked it, but it was a bit problematic to continue this way, so I decided to change it. And the change was using a book format rather then using a conventional magazine format?

There was a lot of text, and not so many images. It was easier to read in a new format. What is the size of the OASE magaDid you add more pages when OASE became bilinzine? It is related to the maximum size of the sheet? gual? No, and that was the problem. The editor wanted to Yes, 24×17 cm it is the most economical size for the 50×70cm have the English translation, and asked me to put it in the back presses in the Netherlands. It is very economical, however, you of the magazine. However, for me it was a nice opportunity to cannot bleed on all sides. I have to adjust the design to this as combine both languages, but they did not offer me more pages. well, so we move all the images up on the sheet. When you The type was getting smaller and smaller. So there is twice as much text now, but the same amount of pages? started working on OASE did you design a fixed grid [laughs] ...exactly... It seems that you turn all the technical confor the future issues? For me the grid is an instrument that strains and limitations to an advantage, and there is no visible allows me to work with books. Very often it is a flexible grid so aesthetic compromise in OASE, all the issues work well with I am not too constrained, I still have to take decisions about all these limitations. Limitations are an important thing in deplacing text and images. Has the grid changed since the sign in general because they offer solutions. You seem to almost first issue? How was the grid evolving as the magazine enjoy those limitations. It’s not that I would ask for them, but I was growing up? Yes, The 6×2 mm grid changed. When am always trying to find my space when working on a project. the production of OASE changed, and now we are doing it There are not so many limitations as in the past, I feel more fully in-house, the grid changed. Now it is made completely on flexible, and it is easier. OASE is a very low-budget publication, the Macintosh and this offers much more opportunities to play and I know that if I change the paper, I will probable be able to with columns, type and the margins. I spent some time looking at OASE trying to follow the internal structure of the magazine. add one more colour on the cover, or if I reduce the size I could I had an impression that the grid is changing with every issue, add more pages. For me, from the beginning, it was important to as well as paper and typefaces. But those changes are so realise that it is always the same audience that reads OASE, and subtle that you don’t see them from issue to issue, you they don’t really want to have always the same magazine with need to see a series them to compare the first one and just a different cover. So its the same thing with a different look. the latest one and only then can one see the changes.

Tekst: Peter Bil’ak That’s true. As basic typefaces I am trying to stick with Monotype Grotesque and Janson, but there are exceptions. The grid is also changing when the format is changing [an issue on poetry and architecture has a different size]. The grid, and the division of the grid, depends on the complexity of the issue. The last two issues are bilingual, so I had to adapt the grid to accommodate more text.

We are now doing an issue of OASE [issue 49] and we made the Dutch and the English text equal. This requires a change in grid too. This is why we design in a grid all the time. organicee things.

3 2 1..

5

One of the worlds best graphic designers reveals his secrets from his career. We shoot som quiestions at him to reveal the “bang” in his work.

.. shoot

KAREL MARTENS takst: PETER BIL’AK

garamond

/ classic

THE MAN WHO STARTED IT ALL One of the moste known types in the world was made by Claude Garamond, an publisher from France. His work has influenced the whole world even after his death.

Tekst: Peter Bil’ak

Claude Garamond (ca. 1490 – 1561) was a French publisher. He was one of the leading type designers of his time, and is credited with the introduction of the apostrophe, the cedilla to the French language. Several contemporary typefaces, including those currently known as Garamond, Granjon, and Sabon, reflect his influence. Garamond was an apprentice of Simon de Colines; later, he was an assistant to Geoffroy Tory, whose interests in humanist typography and the ancient Greek capital letterforms, or majuscules, may have informed Garamond’s later work.

Garamond came to prominence in 1541, when three of his Greek typefaces (e.g. the Grecs du roi (1541) were requested for a royally-ordered book series by Robert Estienne. Garamond based these types on the handwriting of Angelo Vergecio, the King’s Librarian at Fontainebleau, as well as that of his ten-year-old pupil, Henri Estienne. According to Arthur Tilley, the resulting books are “among the most finished specimens of typography that exist.” Shortly after, Garamond

7

created the Roman types for which he would most be remembered, his influence spread rapidly throughout and beyond France during the 1540s. Garamond’s name was originally rendered as “Garamont”, but following the standardization of French spelling, the terminal ‘d’ became customary and stuck.

In 1621, sixty years after Garamond’s death, the French printer Jean Jannon (1580–1635) created a type specimen with very similar attributes, though his letterforms were more asymmetrical, and had a slightly different slope and axis. Jannon’s typefaces were lost for more than a century before their rediscovery at the National Printing Office of France in 1825, when they were wrongly attributed to Garamond. It was not until 1927, over 100 years later, that Jannon’s “Garamond” typefaces were correctly credited to him on the basis of scholarly research by Beatrice Warde. In the early 20th century, Jannon’s types were used to produce a history of French printing, which brought new attention to

French typography and to the “Garamond” type style.

Modern revival of Claude Garamond’s typography which ensued was thus inadvertently modeled on Jannon’s outstanding work.

Looking at the pre-19th-century typefaces that are still in widespread use today is a little like visiting a modern re-creation of an Anglo-Saxon village. If you ignore the aircraft passing overhead you can easily imagine yourself back in the first millennium. But however absorbed the inhabitants seem in their daily tasks, you know that at the end of the day they will take off their coarsely woven garments, slip into some Lycra, and head home, probably picking up a takeaway and video en route. However convincing it all looks, in reality it’s an elaborate fake. And that’s just how it is in the world of type. You may think you’re working with actual letter forms drawn in the 16th century, but they’re actually a 20th-century re-creation based on the originals, or what were thought to be the originals.

classic/garamond

THE FONT • Closely related to the work of a later punch-cutter.

• Some unique characteristics in his letters are the small bowl of the a and the small eye of the e.

• Garamond is considered to be among the most legible and readable serif typefaces for use in print.

died, his widow was forced to sell his punches, and his typefaces were scattered throughout Europe. Garamond the typeface gradually dropped out of sight, to disappear for nearly two centuries.

It can get confusing. Plantin was based on a face cut by the French type designer Robert Granjon (working 1545-88); the printer Christopher Plantin himself never used the original source type. Janson, designed in 1937, is named after a Dutchman, Anton Janson, who had nothing to do with the face at all; the design was inspired by the work of the Hungarian, Nicholas Kis (1650-1702). The various versions of Baskerville are all 20th-century work; the earliest one was not even based directly on Baskerville’s type, but on what came to be known later as Fry’s Baskerville, a piece of 18thcentury intellectual piracy.

In 1924 George Jones designed a face for the Linotype company which he called Granjon, but the design he used as inspiration turned out to be the work of Robert Granjon’s fellow countryman and contemporary Claude Garamond (c. 1500-61). And the typefaces that bear Garamond’s name — well, as the saying goes, fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride … .

Garamond had long been regarded as one of the type designers par excellence of the century that followed Gutenberg’s invention of movable type. Using Aldus Manutius’s roman type as his inspiration, Garamond had cut his first letters for a 1530 edition of Erasmus.

It was so well regarded that the French king Francois I commissioned Garamond to design an exclusive face, the Grecs du Roi. Although Garamond’s typefaces were very popular during his lifetime and much copied, as for many of the early type designers the work didn’t bring him much financial reward. When he

In the 19th century the French Printing Office, looking for a typeface to call its own, took a liking to the one that had been used by 17th-century Royal Printing Office, operating under the supervision of Cardinal Richelieu. Richelieu called his type the Caractères de l’Université, and used it to print, among other things, his own written works. The 19th-century office pronounced the face to be the work of Claude Garamond, and the Garamond revival began. But it was after the First World War that the bandwagon really picked up.

Suddenly every type foundry started producing its own version of Garamond. American Type Founders were first, and then in 1921 Fred Goudy offered his interpretation. Monotype in England brought out theirs in 1924, and Linotype replied with Granjon. There were yet more versions on the market by the onset of the Second World War, most notably Stempel Garamond by the German foundry of that name. Back at ATF, the company that had started the rush, Henry L. Bullen, librarian of the company’s formidable archive, had doubts about his company’s product. One day, as recalled by his assistant Paul Beaujon, he declared: “You know, this is definitely not a sixteenth century type … I have never found a sixteenth century book which contains this face. Anyone who discovers where this thing comes from will make a great reputation.”

Beaujon wrote an article about the Garamond faces for The Fleuron, an English typographical journal. The pages had been proofed and the presses were ready to roll when Beaujon, visiting the North Library of the British Museum to check some dates, happened to glance at one of the items in the Bagford Collection of title pages. And there was the source type for all the 20th-century Garamonds.

Except that this typeface wasn’t by Garamond at all.

It was the work of another Frenchman, Jean Jannon (1580-1658), a 17th-century printer and punch-cutter.

As a printer he was unremarkable, but as a designer

and punch-cutter he was unparalleled, cutting the smallest type ever seen, an italic and roman of a size less than what would now be 5pt. Frequently in trouble with the authorities for his Protestant beliefs, Jannon had eventually found work at the Calvinist Academy at Sedan, in northern France.

Cardinal Richelieu’s early years of office under Louis XIII were spent in a power struggle with the Huguenots, the French Protestants. An effective way of hastening their eventual submission was to remove their means of spreading information, and the government paid the academy a visit. Among the items confiscated in the raid was Jannon’s type. Although Richelieu took exception to Jannon’s religious affiliations, however, he liked his typography so much that his face is the house style for the Royal Printing Office.

Following a swift trip to the Mazarine Library in Paris to compare impressions with their Jannon specimen book, Beaujon’s original feature was pulled in favor of a new one revealing the true source of the “Garamond” faces. It was hailed as a masterly piece of research, and the Monotype Corporation of England offered him the job of editing their in-house magazines. But the twist was that Beaujon, like the Garamond typefaces, was not at all what he appeared to be.

Because of the soundness of Garamond’s designs his typefaces have historical staying power, and they are likely to remain the day-to-day tools of professional typographers, as long as wertern civilization survives.

Reading a well set Garamond text page is almost effortless, a fact that has been well known to book designers for over 450 years.

Claude Garamond’s contribution to typography was vast, a true renaissance man. Creating perfection in the type that he crafted his life will live on through his contribution to typography.

marian bantjes

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/ dekorativ typografi

dekorativ typografi

Marian Bantjes is one of the world’s most renowned graphic designers with a focus on typography. She can create order out of chaos, and out of all this chaos, send an message, if you look closely.

Tekst: Peter Bil’ak

Marian Bantjes is a designer, typographer, illustrator and writer who, born in Canada in 1963, spent the first half of her career as a book typesetter. She left the field of book typography to join the Canadian design studio Digitopolis in 1994, she flourished as a graphic designer there until 2003. She left the firm to pursue her own interests and style of work that she had become internationally recognized for. In the years since she has worked for Pentagram, Stefan Sagmeister, AIGA, The Guardian and The New York Times, among others.

Her unique style of typography and illustration includes extremely detailed letterforms and ornaments and has been featured in design publications all over the globe. Her work is also in the permanent collection of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. She has released her own typeface, entitled Restraint and is set to release a book in October of 2010 entitled I Wonder. Marian Bantjes is a designer, typographer, writer and illustrator working internationally from her base on a small island off the west coast of Canada, near Vancouver. She is a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI), and regularly speaks about her work and thoughts at conferences and events worldwide.

She started working as a book typesetter in 1984 and opened her own design firm in 1994 employing up to 12 people. In 2003, she left all of that behind to begin an experiment in following love instead of money, by doing work that was highly personal, obsessive and sometimes just plain weird. At the same time she began writing for the design weblog “Speak Up”, and her cheeky but thoughtful articles soon gained her recognition in the blogosphere.

Through this two-pronged approach, Marian caught the attention of designers and Art Directors across North America.

Marian’s art and design crosses boundaries of time, style and technology. She is known for her detailed and lovingly precise vector art, her obsessive hand work, her patterning and ornament. Often hired to create custom type for magazines, advertising and special projects, Marian’s work has an underlying structure and formality that frames its organic, fluid nature. It is these combinations and juxtapositions that draw the interest of such a wide variety of designers and typographers, from experienced formalists to young students.

/ marian bantjes

ISSUE NR.1, 2012 €15 / £ 9,9 / US$ 15 WWW. TYPO.COM