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Four centuries of typograohy and graphic design, from Claude Garamond to Marian Bantjes.

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Karel Martens Claude Garamond Stefan Sagmeister Marian Bantjes

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one of Karel Martens most enduring trend setting projects was his design for a series of dutch phone cards.

duTch typographic designer Karel Martens is one of the most influential and enduring designers alive in the Netherlands today. His body of work spans over 50 years and manages to maintain a freshness and timeless appeal. In 1996 he was awarded the Dr. H.A. Heineken Award— the top graphic design award in Holland. He is the founder of the Werkplaats Typografie, a post-graduate graphic design school in Arnhem, NL, as well as a lecturer at the Yale School of Graphic Design, and the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastrict, NL. Karel Martens work is often regarded as defining “dutch design� and many of the aesthetic and co ceptual characteristics he employs have been widely appropriated by the design community in NL and abroad.

karel Martens earliest works were his book covers for an Arnhem based publishing house. They exhibit simple, clean swiss typography, an emphasis on legibility, and the use of repeated simple geometric shapes.

The idea is simply the joy of seeing what happens with colors when they overlap in typography. The numbering system is derived from the dutch national anthem, where each word is coded into a series of numbers.

Karel M his later covers begin to experiment with imagery.

However this is kept very minimal and simple.

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karel Martens work is not especially relevant to motion typography. Play with color and the results of overlapping colored shapes may suggest some sort of dimensionality or motion, but still remain quite static.

in 1990 KM took over the design of the architectural journal: Oase. The magazines editor intended for KM to give the design as a project to students, but instead Martens used it as formal playground for experimentation with his own work.

This is where he first began his “monoprint” works inspired by “nul group” aesthetics.

The extreme formalism and emphasis on legibility does not display the narrative qualities necessary in time based media.

Martens Graphic designer

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The only parallels could be to the 60s work of Saul Bas — but this connection is merely aesthetic. (i.e. The high contrast simple geometric shapes and swiss modernist typography.)

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Garamond?

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When is a 16th-century typeface not a 16th-century typeface?

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.

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 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.

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. 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 18th-century intellectual piracy.

In the 19th century the French National Printing Office, looking for a typeface to call its own, took a liking to the one that had been used by the 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.

I n 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

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B ut it was only after the First World War that the bandwagon really picked up momentum. Suddenly every type foundry started producing its own version of Garamond. American Type Founders (ATF) were first, and then in 1921 Frederic Goudy offered his interpretation, Garamont. 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.

B ack at ATF, the company that had started the rush, Henry Lewis Bullen, librarian of the company’s formidable archive, had nagging 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.

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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. w hen 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. n ow 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.

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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 leftwing 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. i n 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. a s a Pratt Institute student, his dream had been to work at M&Co, the late Tibor Kalman’s graphics

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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. h is 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, H j a l t i 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.

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a s 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. i nViTed 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. a s 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, knifeslashed torso for 1999’s deceptively blandly titled, AIGA Detroit. i n June 2000, Sagmeister decided to treat himself to a long-promised year off to concentrate on experimental projects and a book Sagmeister, subtitled 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.”

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S R P I I N I N S P I e u

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n - Marian Bantjes

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A T I O NN R A TI O I mostly get my inspiration from things unrelated to what I do.

I nspiration can come from anywhere and at any time. There’s a difference between inspiration, influence, and reference. When I’m asked what inspires me, I think people expect the answer to be more about a particular reference. For instance, going to a book to see how a certain style looks, that’s reference material; going through books or magazines and picking up ideas, that’s influence.

For me, inspiration is a spark out of nowhere, a leap of the imagination, often from a surprising source.

I mostly get my inspiration from things unrelated to what I do. It’s that moment of juxtaposition when the familiar meets the unfamiliar, the known meets the unknown, and your brain has to connect these things. If we make these inspirational connections, we can create things that spark people’s imaginations.

I’m getting ideas all the time. They come from walking down the street, from watching a movie, from reading. I get a lot of sparks from reading. I’ll be reading an article and I’ll leap up and write something down. I have more ideas than I can execute. I keep a long “ideas” list that I categorize: film, clothing, graphics, and so on. These vary from grand ideas to little graphic things like “make something with sugar.” I used to keep my list of ideas in little notebooks and scraps of paper all over, but now I usually enter them into a text file on my computer.

Some of the ideas have been sitting there for years.

W hen I get a project, I usually have an idea right away or overnight. Sometimes if I’m desperate, I’ll hunt through my list for the idea. But it usually pops into my head from some kind of logical or illogical association.

I guess what I do is have this mental and physical storehouse full of thoughts, words, and materials— and I’m always adding to it. I have more ideas than I’ll be ever able to use.

I spend a lot of time thinking. It’s really helpful for me.

I was reading an article about the need for downtime and getting sleep. About how the time spent sitting around and staring at the sky is really important for people who need to be inspired, because they’re always scram­b l­ing for ideas. I’m what some would call kind of lazy. I like tojust sit and stare at the forest, and that’s when I get some of my best ideas.

My best ideas come from the way I live my life. If I feed my life, it will give me ideas when I need them.

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