Type Hype - 3rd March 2011

(TypeHype)

MARCH, 2011

Today’s Schedule

Welcome

India represents the largest de-

08:30 - 09:15

Registration & Tea

09:15 - 09:40

Welcome Session/Opening

seamless picture of unity in di-

09:40 - 10:15

Keynote Speaker, Prof. G. V. Sreekumar

presents itself in such a dizzying,

10:15 - 10:45

Tea

gions, races and tongues. It is this

10:45 - 12:55

Session 1 {Moderator: Shri Sudarshan Dheer}

mocracy in the world with a versity. In this nation humanity

Mr. Rafael Vivanco Mr. T. Fikret Uçar Ms. Carole Charette Mr. Satya Rajpurohit (Young Vision Speaker)

creative burst of cultures and relivariety, which provides a breathtaking ensemble for experiences that is uniquely Indian. The diversity omnipresent in the cultures

(NAMASTE)

of this Nation can also be seen in the myriad scripts and languages

1:00 - 02:10

Lunch

02:10 - 04:10

Session 2 {Moderator: Prof. Mahendra C Patel}

Indian typography has a rich

munication in India, standardiza-

designs and Typography experi-

Ms. Sumantri Samarawickrama Mr. Mohammad Reza Abdolali Mr. Fang Chen Mr. Neelakash Kshetrimayum

history and a very prospective

tion issues of various Indian lan-

ments using multilingual scripts

future. The need to showcase,

guage scripts in digital media and

in nature are the primary subjects

preserve, explore and share these

workshops on calligraphy.

of presentation for this year’s

04:10 - 04:40

Tea

become increasingly important.

Every year, Typography Day is

tions by National, International

04:40 - 07:15

Session 3 {Prof. Ravi Poovaiah}

This field is booming with en-

expanding. This year, it is being

and Student speakers enriches

ergy and is at its explorative stage

organized at the National Insti-

this celebration of Typography. It

where the involvement of more

tute of Design, Ahmedabad in

further opens up myriad avenues

people will lead to better designs

collaboration with the Industrial

of knowledge exchange between

and research in this area. Also,

Design Centre (IDC) at the Indi-

students and the eminent speak-

because of the diversity in the

an Institute of Technology Bom-

ers from international countries

scripts and languages in India,

bay (IIT Bombay) with support

like England, Italy, Hong Kong,

people associated with typogra-

from India Design Association

Iran, U.S.A, Canada, Turkey and

phy and calligraphy face a large

(InDeAs). The event will include

Sri Lanka. For the first time 11

number of issues and challenges

a seminar devoted to addressing

different Workshops by eminent

and unique experiences while

issues faced by type designers,

typographers are being offered on

exploring this field that needs to

type users and type educators.

the third day which will help stu-

be shared and discussed. Typog-

The program will feature pres-

dents re-discover their love and

raphy Day thus gives us a broad

entations on the first two days

find newer meanings in expres-

platform to enrich this field with

followed by a day of workshops

sive typography.

more learning and explorations

dedicated to typography and cal-

through workshops, discussions,

ligraphy.

that India offers.

conference. Abstract Presenta-

rich scripts and languages have

Mr. Farzan Kermaninejad Ms. Pradnya Naik Ms. Noopur Datye Mr. Anand Kamdar (Student Speaker) Ms. Harshita Pande (Student Speaker) Mr. Ted Harrison (Industry Presentation)

Being celebrated as part of National Institute of Design’s Gold-

abstracts and presentations.

Team Typo welcomes the speakers, delegates, and all other guests of Typography Day 2011 to the city of Ahmedabad and to NID’s main campus here at Paldi. We look forward to three exciting days of talks, workshops, and opportunities to meet ‘friends of type’ from across the world.

In Today’s Edition Timeless Typographers ADRIAN FRUTIGER

en Jubilee celebrations, Typogra-

ence is ‘Typography and Expres-

phy Day 2011 hopes to add value

and was hosted by the Industrial

sion’. An exciting range of work-

to India’s rich field of Typogra-

Design Centre at IIT Bombay as

shops and presentations has been

phy and Calligraphy and unravel

part of their golden jubilee cel-

lined up for Typography Day

new domains of explorations and

ebrations. It included workshops

2011. Research activities in Ex-

learning in this field.

and presentations on challenges

pressive Typography, Typography

faced during multilingual com-

as expression of local contextual

Fun Stuff

Article

CROSSWORD

Spotted !

TYPE COMIC TYPE TRIVIA

What is

The theme of this year’s conferTypography Day started in 2008

Student Projects PRASHANT COAKLEY SUNIL SAMUEL

Map LOST?

? Type Hype is the daily journal for Typography Day 2011, International Seminar and Workshops on ‘Typography and Expression’. See you every morning till the 5

th

of March.

Timeless Typographers

ADRIAN FRUTIGER

“A letter follows the same canons of beauty as a face: a beautiful letter is in perfect proportion. The bar of a 't' placed too high, the curve of an 'a' too low, are as jarring as a long nose or a short chin.”

As you stand before the gates of India’s most prestigious design institute you are greeted by the word mark of NID, one of the many brilliant creations of the famous typographer and typeface designer Adrian Frutiger.

His career of 66 years spans the hot metal, phototypesetting, and digital typesetting eras.

A Swiss national born in Unterseen near Interlaken in the year 1928, Adrian Frutiger, left compulsory school at the age of 16 to serve an apprenticeship as a compositor at Schäfli, a printer in Interlaken. From 1948 to 1951 he studied sculpture and graphic design at the Kunstgewerbeschule

(school of applied arts) in Zurich.

In 1952, Frutiger left for Paris to become artistic director for the type foundry Deberny & Peignot.

While Meridien (1955) was his first commercially released type, the great breakthrough came two years later with the widely popular Univers type family. This reticent typeface is, today, one of the most commonly used standard typefaces. In 1962 Adrian Frutiger joined André Gürtler and Bruno Pfäffli in establishing a graphic design studio in Arcueil, a suburb of Paris. The seeds of

the Frutiger type family were conceived in 1968, when the future Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Paris needed way-finding signs that could be read easily from different angles.

This font, named Roissy, was later slightly adapted for print use and, as ‘Frutiger’, became widely popular. The monospace font OCR-B, designed in 1968 to meet the standards of the European Computer Manufacturer’s Association, became the worldwide standard for ‘Optical Character Recognition’ for electronic devices in 1973.

Frutiger has recently worked on revisions of

a number of his typefaces with Linotype. Such collaborations have resulted in Frutiger Next and Avenir Next, which have included refined forms and true italics. Frutiger has also undertaken many offbeat endeavours. The Linotype Project “Type before Gutenberg” resulted in such faces as Herculanum and the robust Rusticana. His more recent works include, Westside, a decorative wild-west slab serif, and Frutiger Stones, which is a perfect blend of technology and human perception of shapes and images.

Adrian Frutiger has never been interested in type for its own sake.

He is driven by the urge to develop the best possible legibility. “If you remember the shape of your spoon at lunch, it has to be the wrong shape. The spoon and the letter are tools; one to take food

from the bowl, the other to take information off the page. When it is a good design, the reader has to feel comfortable because the letter is both banal and beautiful.”

Over the years and complementing his typographical work, he has created many works of art.

His style is defined by a linguistic minimalism based on abstract, contemporary symbols.

Till today Adrian Frutiger has developed more than one hundred and seventy typefaces, many of which have become standard fonts. He has received several prestigious awards. His typefaces are readily available from the type foundries Linotype and Monotype. They are in daily use, and practically shape our reading habits.

Bibliography Adrian Frutiger,19 February 2011, http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Adrian_Frutiger Adrian Frutiger, 19 February Signage at the Paris Airport

2011,http://www.linotype. com/793/adrianfrutigertraces.html Adrian Frutiger, 19 February 2011,http://www.identifont.com/show?110

Milestones

Swar

Samples of Univers and Frutiger in use

Crossword

Letters are things, not pictures of things Eric Gill

ACROSS 1. Name of Peter Bilak’s company in Netherlands. (10)

the majority of the characters in a typeface rest. (8)

6. Another term for letterspacing used to denote the average space between characters in a block of text. (8)

16. Script of Brahmans, also used

by King Ashoka for his inscriptions on stones and pillars. (6)

7. Type larger than that of the body text, used for headlines and display. (7, 4) 10. Earliest script in India has been derived from here. (5, 6) 12. Gibberish used to take the place of real text for layout purposes. (8) 13. A person who writes on Indian manuscripts and decides the layouts. (7)

18. A unit of measure in typography which is equivalent to 72 inches in the Post-script era. (5) 20. Term for evenly aligned text also synonymous to the sound of the WC. (5) 21. Modern movable type, along with the mechanical printing press, was invented in mid-15th century Europe by this German goldsmith. (9) 23. A unit of measure that is approximately one-sixth of an inch. (4)

24. A common unit of measurement in typography. One_____ has a width of 12 points. (2) 25. Script of clerks written from right to left created in 3rd Century B.C. (10) 26. A scalable type technology synonymous to the Hindi term ‘Satya’. (4, 4)

unit in a written language derived from the Greek etymology.

(8) Grapheme 30. ________dings is a True Type dingbat font developed in 1997 and included in all versions of Microsoft Windows since that time.

DOWN 2. Script of Mohenjo Daro and Harappa is also known as this.

(5, 6) 3. Referred to as a Modern typeface designed by a noted Italian typographer. (6) 4. A paragraph-ending line that falls at the beginning of the following page/column, thus separated from the remainder of the text. (5)

vertical margin of a block of type also synonymous to the term ‘________ to riches’. (4) 6. Manuscripts of Jaina canonical texts were written on sheets of palm-leaves also known as ________. (8)

8. Creator of the NOKIA font.

(11) ing pages or columns of printed text in editorial design. (6) 11. Creator of Avenir font in 1988 and wordmark for the National Institute of Design. (6, 8) 12. An individual mark on a written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written.

(5) 13. A Corporation founded in U.S. in 1886, famous as world’s leading manufacturers of book and newspaper typesetting equipment. (8) 14. Adjustment of horizontal space between pairs of characters

to create a perception of uniformity; critical where large typefaces are used, as in headlines. (7) 17. Classic American typeface designed by Linn Boyd Benton in 1894 for a magazine printer. (7) 19, Cross platform fonts that can contain character sets of thousands of gylphs, allowing for typography in any language. (4,4) 22. Person credited with drawing the first italic typeface. (6) 28. Helvetica is a _________-serif font. (4)

newsletter for Typography Day 2011. (4)

“A great typeface is not a collection of beautiful letters, but a beautiful collection of letters”.

The Story of the Street Painter Every time one thinks of India’s visual culture, one’s mind is filled with a rich and vibrant gallery of images. India’s visual language is made by the vast and indigenous vocabulary of urban street graphics found all over the country.

These street graphics are carefully crafted by artists with regional variations in style and techniques.

These graphics and the entire visual vocabulary are each special in their own way but together they form a vast rang of elements which build a unique visual language. It is appalling that hardly

Spotted !

any documentation of this art has been done to preserve this rich culture and help it trickle down the generations. The world hence remains oblivious to this art of street graphics.

Due to the lack of awareness and our ability to appreciate this rich and indigenous art, we have slowly lost it. The art of painting street graphics and even cinematic posters by hand has lost importance over the years and is now being rapidly wiped out. In the opinion of the artists themselves, “Earlier there was no other way of

doing these things. But as technology progressed, we had no knowledge of the newer technology and our work lessened over the years. This art has been a tradition and we had got used to it.”

After the introduction of the flex printing technology, jobs could be done faster and cheaper, which were also photographically more real. But the kind of work that can be done by the painter cannot be done by flex printing. Due to the advent of this faster and cheaper technology, not only did the painter’s loose their jobs but people forgot the worth of an art and the effort the artists put into creating such an art work of that sort, that makes our country’s visual culture rich.

To cope up with the competition and barely manage to survive various painters as have reacted

to the situation differently. Some have given up and shifted to other professions whereas some still continue to paint out of their passion for the art and not only for money. Many continue to follow tradition and some end up taking other part time jobs such as driving auto rickshaws, selling a pan,etc. To be able to earn a good livelihood, some of them have found ways within their professional interest such as cutting radium stickers for auto rickshaw mudguards, number plates,etc alongside painting. Many of them took up printing as a profession but did not enjoy it as much as painting but continued for the sake of earning enough money.

Some of them believe, 'The profession will rise again and the value of the painter will increase as their number are a diminishing fact.'

Another opinion states that, western influence has led to the removal of Indian traditional art from the lines of the commoner and placed it on a special pedestal. This has caused a lot discrimination between street painters and artists. The artists who were once looked up to are now being ignored because of which they have to work on the roadside by

selling their work for a livelihood and are respected less than before.

This piece of writing is an appeal to all, who are reading it to give a thought to the problem of this rapidly diminishing art which forms a strong and rich part of the Indian visual culture.

Having learnt about the Ol chiki script by chance during his second year, Prashant Coakley, a graphic design alumnus from NID, decided to take it up as his diploma project. While enabling him to do something related to his place and his roots, this project gave him an opportunity to explore Typography in relation with culture and literacy.

The Ol Chiki script derived in early 1920s

by Pt. Raghunath Murmu to properly write Santhali, belongs to the Austro-Asiatic language family, under the Munda Language group which is listed among the most endangered ones The importance of this language lies among the Santhali tribe, who live in the eastern part of India and parts of Bangladesh and Nepal. Santhali speakers have been using Devanagari, Oriya, Bengali and Latin scripts which belong to a different language family i.e. Indo-European. As a lot of its spoken word cannot be written in these scripts, they are at times, either misspelled, discarded or replaced by words from other languages, thus corrupting the language. All these languages are based in close geographical proximity of each other. Mixing of languages mixes cultures and there is a possibility that dominant culture will spread over the weaker culture i.e. Santhali tribe here.

In retrospect, Prashant feels that this project gave him a wider perspective in learning how language and scripts can be revived. This project was sponsored by The IdeaWorks, New Delhi where he continued to work after his graduation. The research process can be followed at prashantcoakley. blogspot.com.

TYPE DESIGN FOR OL CHIKI SCRIPT Prashant Coakley Guide: Immanuel Suresh, 2009 Sponsored by The IdeaWorks, New Delhi

It is designed in regular weight and is named ‘Badomtolia’ after the place where the inventor of Ol Chiki script, Pt. Raghunath Murmu started working on the script.

The eight schedule of the Constitution of 2004 incorporated Santhali as an official language with Ol Chiki as its official script.

Prashant felt a strong calling to work for the Santhal community that wants to write in its mother tongue and promote it as the original script of the Santhali language. Under the guidance

Featured Student Projects Today virtually everybody is using a cell phone. Sunil Samuel, a graphic design alumnus from NID, felt that the communication would revolve a lot around typography as the first and secondary level of information.

With constant technological advancement, Sunil foresaw a clear possibility of something like a PDA cum laptop which would demand a typeface that would address cross platform issues and resolutions in addition to other technological aspects. Currently, there is hardly any consistency in the way the screen and the print typeface of the same family look.

Being a graphic designer with a strong bent towards typography, he felt the need of a typeface that addresses these issues seamlessly and took it up as his classroom project.

Under the guidance of Tarun Deep Girdher and Dr Vinod Vidwans, Sunil undertook the task of studying and analyzing typographic details of typefaces in various cell phones. He observed that for on screen typography, the wider the character the more readable it is and that a lighter weight is preferable for a typeface for optimum readability on screen. He began to explore and design characters for typefaces that would use minimum screen

of Mr. Immanuel Suresh, he began learning the alphabets of Ol Chiki and worked with Kitta to get a basic understanding of form and strokes. He looked into the revival and reuse of Hebrew as a language and base for a culture and also visited and met people in Jharkand to collect information about Santhali culture and traditions.

While designing the alphabets, the unique characteristics of the script were carefully noted to maintain its authenticity. Though initially Prashant decided to take a Humanist approach to the typeface, he figured that the vertical axis with weights of Old Style worked out best for the font. The complexity of forms made him chose a higher proportion for the script to make it readable in smaller size. To balance out the form and the counter form, he chose to reduce the weight of the script from conventional weights followed in Latin. While the ratio for Latin is 1:7, Ol Chiki works best in 1:9. It provided more space for the counter forms. After a lengthy process of exploring the letterforms, analyzing and digitizing them, the font ‘Badomtolio’

space, require minimum hinting and be legible even after antialiasing at the smallest size within the interface. In addition to exceptionally good quality of readability and legibility at smaller type sizes, he decided that the typeface should have the following characteristics aesthetically- cold or wintry, masculine and hip and trendy (with reference to future trends.) After exploring character styles of various themes and concepts, with the proportion of 1:2:1, he came up with four styles consisting of uppercase, lowercase and numerals, of generous

was born. Pt. Raghunath Murmu started working on the script.

Unlike other typefaces available for Ol Chiki script, ‘Badomtolia’ can be written at a smaller text size making it economical to use.

Prashant Coakley | Sunil Samuel x-height and wide counter forms to allow light through the letterforms. After testing the typefaces for screen resolutions and type sizes, and doing a user survey, SS Honey regular and SS Honey light emerged as the most preferred typeface among users and SS knight came a second close. SS Honey regular and SS Honey light were further tested on a variety of coloured backgrounds and their applications in different menus.

The behaviour of the typeface family in different items of the UI were also observed and analyzed.

Legibility wise, the lighter version

of honey worked well however finer issues like hinting still needed to be looked at, since the testing was only simulated. Looking back on the project, Sunil commented that while the process was not smooth sailing all along, nothing was more satisfying than seeing his typefaces come to life from the keyboard onto the screen as the fingers moved.

He is currently working as a User Experience Designer at Hewlett Packard IPG (imaging and printing group) R&D Hub, Bangalore.

ADDRESSING ON SCREEN TYPOGRAPHY: A TYPEFACE FOR MOBILE PHONE SCREENS Sunil Samuel Guide: Tarun Deep Girdher Project 2-Sem 4, 2007

Lost?

Type Hype Credits Printed and Published by Tarun Deep Girdher for Graphic Design discipline at National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad

Designed by Pragya Mishra and Vinu Chaitanya

Edited by Dhwani Shah and Mrinalini Sardar

Set in Warnock Pro & Din

Printed by Shirish Shah at NID Printing Labs, Paldi Ahmedabad-380007

Printed on JK Natural Shade Map Litho 80gsm

Printed on Roland Parva IIB, 1964 Vintage using CTP (PS Plates) Printed, gathered, folded at NID Printing Labs

Masthead Design by Akash Halankar Welcome note by Mrinalini Sardar and Dhwani Shah Write up on Adrian Frutiger compiled by Sujata Shidhaye

Crossword by Mrinalini Sardar and Natasha Taraporewala

Portrait of Adrian Fruitger

by Poshika Singh Write up on student projects compiled by Dhwani Shah Map by Siddharth Dasari

Street Painter Article by Asmina Shaikh and Surabhi Manchalwar

Typo quote Illustration by Abhisekh Behera Type Trivia by Abhisekh Behera Type comic by Reuben Dsilva

Spotted by Surabhi Manchalwar Swar by Pallavi and Dhwani

Disclaimer: Any part of this publication and/or opinions expressed therein remain solely those of the author(s) and people duly copyrighted for reference. No content of this publication or opinions expressed therein bear responsibility to hurt public sentiments. It is for academic purpose only. The purpose of this newsletter is just to evoke the unending love for typography.