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TYPO

Innhold

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MARIAN BANTJES •

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CLAUDE GARAMOND •

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Interview

STEFAN SAGMEISTER •

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Background of

Influences

KAREL MARTENS •

Profile

TYPO | November 2012

obody would describe Canadian illustrator/designer Marian Bantjes as an overnight success, but her career trajectory over the past five or so years has been positively meteoric compared to her first twenty years of professional practice. Marian Bantjes has achieved international prominence as an individual with a recognisable personal signature that shines through all her work, from intensely commercial work for brands anxious to capture the decorative Zeitgeist, to equally intense personal gestures; from collaborations (with Stefan Sagmeister, Pentagram and other celebrated designers) to commissions for magazine and time-consuming pro bono projects. Marian Bantjes was born in 1963, and grew up in the town of Saskatchewan. She dropped out of art school after a year and in 1983 ‘fell in’ to a job with book publisher Hartley & Marks, where she did general jobs and helped with paste-up at its typesetting sibling, TypeWorks. An aptitude for computer typesetting (on XyWrite) slowly developed into an understanding of typography and design. In 1994, she co-founded Digitopolis in Vancouver, and the design practice grew quickly, producing mainly print-based work. But after eight or so years of this, Bantjes dropped out once more. Her partner bought her out, while retaining her on contract for a further year. In July 2003, Bantjes struck out on her own, moving to an isolated property on Bowen Island, in Howe Sound off Vancouver. Such a radical change of practice and lifestyle had a cost: after surviving for a year on savings Bantjes was obliged to take out a loan. She sent out posters to editors, writers, designers, potential clients, collaborators and cheerleaders,

and spent time on the Speak Up blog (underconsideration. com), where she was made an Author in November 2003. Eventually, the first paid commissions trickled in. She describes her self-promotional Poster #1 as the turning point,both aesthetically, because it encapsulated the direction she wanted to go in, and in terms of recognition: it caught the attention of designers and art directors (see a detail of it on the back cover of Eye no. 58 vol. 15, Winter 2005). Since that time she has made work for clients such as Saks Fifth Avenue, Wired, The New York Times, Wallpaper*, Seed, FontShop, Houghton-Mifflin, Knopf Books, Young & Rubicam / Chicago, and in collaboration with designers and art directors such as Sagmeister Inc, Michael Bierut / Pentagram, Winterhouse, Bruce Mau Design and Rick Valicenti. She has also designed a typeface, Restraint, which won a Type Directors’ Club award in 2008, and not-for-profit projects including posters for the educational charity Design Ignites Change. You can read ‘Surface to space’, her feature article about origami, in Eye no. 67 vol. 17. She is currently taking a year away from commissioned work to complete a book of illuminated essays for Thames & Hudson.Several of her pieces are part of the permanent collection of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (Smithsonian), New York, and she became a member of the AGI in September 2008.

The

of Marian Bantjes

TYPO | November 2012

CLAUDE GARAMOND THE INTERVIEW

IDEALS,PASSIONS AND EXCITEMENT

Type design cannot be completed by anyone. It takes a rare breed to sit tirelessly in front of drawings of counters, bridges, shoulders, and punctuation. The complete system of ABC and 123 amounts to a visual communication that is at onetime complex, but when utilized taken for granted. Typographers make language visible. Form is content. Here, Claude Garamond shares some of his ideals, passions, and excitement.

PEAK UP: We’re all really big fans of your work. Thanks. There are just so many damn typefaces, it’s good to see some of mine appreciated in light of the plurality. What’s it like designing a typeface? Exciting. I love words. I like sentences even more. When they all come together in a paragraph, that’s the greatest. And to me, making the material that goes into words, sentences, and paragraphs, well... it’s exciting. Exciting. That’s good. I am glad to hear that type design is exciting to somebody. And, you’re a rare breed, Claude. It can be a laborious activity, even painful. But, you know that better than I. Type is something I’m passionate about. I love letters. I love the unity and variety that’s created. The drawing is especially exciting. And what about drawing the letters? How do you arrive at the letters? Well, I just draw them all, and try to make the family look... like it’s all related. There’s got to be cohesion. Unity is very important. So what you’re saying is you can not have an ‘a’ look like a ‘t.’ There is definitely a fine line between unity and variety. Exactly. What happens when one letter does look like another? Wow, I didn’t expect these kinds of questions. You’re not making this easy, but in truth, that never happens. Well, I take that back. Sometimes... sometimes I make a ‘p’ really look like a ‘q,’ and I don’t mean just flip-flopping the ‘p.’ That’s far too easy. It’s hard to explain, but in the end, I can’t really treat the letters like that. I can’t abuse them. So when I toy around like that, it’s just for me. You see, typography serves a purpose, nd in a sense, so do I. I create an alphabet that represents the letters of our Roman system. I can’t play games like making one letter look like another, as much as I’d like to. Typography is not expression. Typography is utility. That’s a very noble way to put it. It really really is. Your typefaces are so different from the others out there. They’re traditional. I should qualify that. I don’t mean traditional in the upper case ‘T’ sense, like the period between Old Style and Modern during the 1700s. Kind of blobby appearance your face has. You’ve left behind some memory of the metal technology. Even some of the memory of the carved Roman letters and humanistic writing styles of the scribes. I think you’re confusing Traditional with the Transitional period.

Oh. But, you’re absolutely correct about the quality of my letters. They quote the past. They’re about the past. There are a lot of faces out there that don’t give a care in the world about the old traditions. How do you compare them to yours? Well, I’m sure they all have their intentions. They all have a reason for not being so... how did you call it? Blobby. They’re not too blobby. In fact, there’s even more contrast between the thicks and thins. I was never comfortable with pushing the envelope like that. It almost makes me uncomfortable thinking about it all. Baskerville and Bodoni... they’re wild. Claude, tell us, on page three of Arithmetica by Oronce Fine (published by Simon de Colines in Paris) why did you choose to set the heading material in so many variations. You have bold caps, then Roman caps, then smaller Roman caps. Why so much fussing? Ah. Copernicus and I were discussing this the other day. Simply put, I told him, “I like to play with the type.” That’s too much.(Laughter) Look, I really believe that design,especially typographic page design,is about the details. And you have to play, to a degree, in order to arrive at details. If I set the whole page, centered and in one size and weight... then what? I’d be doing some cheap Microsoft Word document. You know? It’s so static. Kind of like Tschichold. Right. From his Penguin days. Whatever. I can never keep track of that man. Where does Claude Garamond go next? What’s your next challenge? I’m fascinated by Apple’s new operating system, OSX. My production assistant told me that it has a radical new way of structuring type families, and even rendering them on screen. I hear it’s all 96dpi. I have to do some more investigation. Chances are, I may have Paul,my production assistant,do the research for me. I can’t blame you. Technology sucks up so much time. God, ain’t that the truth. Claude, thanks so much for sharing a little bit of yourself. For those of you not familiar with Claude’s work, his Old Style typefaces are available in various sizes and weights: light, book, bold, and ultra (each with an italic). Yeah, each has an italic, but let’s not forget the condensed versions.

TYPO | November 2012

giving advice, for dispersing morsels of wisdom, packa ibor Kalman was the single most influential person in my ged in rough language later known as Tiborisms: “The most designy life and my one and only design hero. difficult thing when running a design company is not to grow” 15 years ago, as a student in NYC, I called him every he told me when I opened my own little studio. “Just don’t go and week for half a year and I got to know the M&Co receptionist spend the money they pay you or you are going to be the really well. When he finally agreed to see me it turned out I had whore of the ad agencies for the rest of your life” was his parta sketch in my portfolio rather similar in concept and execution ing sentence when I moved to Hong Kong to open up a design then an idea M&Co was just working on: He rushed to show studio for Leo Burnett. These insights were also the reason me the prototype out of fear I’d say later he stole it out of my why M&Co. got so much press, journalists could just call him and he portfolio. I was so flattered. When I finally started working there would supply the entire structure for a story and some fantastic 5 years later I discovered it was, more than anything else, his quote s to boot. He was always happy and ready to jump from incredible salesmanship that set his studio apart from all the one field to another, corporate design, products, city planning, others. There were probably a number of people around who music video, documentary movies, children books, maga zine were as smart as Tibor (and there were certainly a lot who were editing were all treated under the mantra “you shoul d do everybetter at designing), but nobody else could sell these concepts thing twice, the first time you don’t know what you’re doing, the without any changes, get those ideas with almost no alterations secon d time you do, the third time its boring”. out into the hands of the public. Nobody else was as passion He did good work containing good ideas for good people. ate. As a boss he had no qualms about upsetting his clients or his employees (I remember his reaction to a logo I had worked on for weeks and was very proud of: “Stefan, this is terrible, just terrible, I am so disappointed”). His big heart was shining through nevertheless. He had the guts to risk everything, I witnessed a very large architecture project where he and M&Co had collaborated with a famous architect and had spent a years worth of work: He was willing to walk away on the question of who will present to the client. Tibor had an uncanny knack for

TYPO | November 2012

The work of Karel Martens occupies an intriguing place in the present European art-and-design landscape. His work is both personal and experimental. At the same time, it is publicly answerable. Over the now 50 years of his practice, Martens has been prolific as a designer of books.

iant of form KAREL MARTENS

arel Martens is a Dutch designer and teacher. After training at the school of art in Arnhem, he has worked as a freelance graphic designer, specializing in typography. Alongside this, he has always made non-commissioned graphic and three-dimensional work. His design work ranges widely, from postage stamps, to books, to signs on buildings. All this work is documented and celebrated in the books. Martens has taught graphic design since 1977. His first appointment was at the school of art at Arnhem (until 1994). He was then attached to the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (1994–9). From 1997 he has been a visiting lecturer in the graphic design department at the School of Art, Yale University.

In that year, together with Wigger Bierma, he started a pioneering school of postgraduate education within the ArtEZ, Arnhem, the Werkplaats Typografie, where he still teaches.The work of Karel Martens occupies an intriguing place in the present European art-and-design landscape. Martens can be placed in the tradition of Dutch modernism – in the line of figures such as Piet Zwart, H.N. Werkman, Willem Sandberg. Yet he maintains some distance from the main developments of our time: from both the practices of routinized modernism and of the facile reactions against this. His work is both personal and experimental. At the same time, it is publicly answerable. Over the now 50 years of his practice,

Martens has been prolific as a designer of books. He has also made contributions in a wide range of design commissions, including stamps, coins, signs on buildings. Intimately connected with this design work has been his practice as an artist. This started with geometric and kinetic constructions, and was later developed in work with the very material of paper; more recently he has been making relief prints from found industrial artefacts. This book looks for new ways to show and discuss the work of a designer and artist, and is offered in the same spirit of experiment and dialogue that characterizes the work it represents. The first edition of Printed matter was published on the occasion of the award to Karel

Martens of the Dr A.H. Heineken Prize for Art: it rapidly sold out and was reprinted. A second edition was published in 2001, with similar success. After that edition had gone out of print, copies became rare commodities. This third edition brings the survey of Martens’s work to 2010 (it thus marks fifty years of practice), and adds an interview with him. We do not intend to reprint or make further editions of the book.(For an outline history of the successive printings and editions of this work, see here.) WORK Throughout his career as a designer, Karel Martens has made artistic (uncommissioned) work. In his early days he used sheets of paper, cut to make reliefs. Then he began to make prints from Meccano, met-

al plates and washers, and other found objects. These prints were made in very small numbers, or were perhaps one-offs. They were studies in form and colour, done as experiments or intended as gifts to friends. The work was very much in the Dutch tradition of experimental printing (the artist H.N.Werkman is the great exemplar here). But Martens kept this work largely apart from his graphic design work. He has occasionally shown it in exhibitions, and some pieces were published in the book Karel Martens: printed matter / drukwerk. This is the first publi-cation devoted to Martens’s prints. It is made in association with the printer Lecturis, in Eindhoven, and is produced to the highest quality. Bound in

Chinese/Japanese fashion, like the first Martens book, it has a strong quality as an object. We are producing a limited number of copies (4,000) and will not reprint. The main text in the book is an essay by the English designer Paul Elliman: ‘The world as a printing surface’. Dutch critic and teacher Carel Kuitenbrouwer provides a short introduction. The book is designed by Hans Gremmen, under the supervision of Karel Martens, at the Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem.

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