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“Typefaces, or Fonts?”
ARTIST
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“Design is thinking made visual.”
SAUL SAUL BASS BASS H
e might be the single most accomplished graphic designer in history. Working in the mid 20th century, when the importance of graphic design was just on the upswing, Bass branded a staggering array of major corporations with his iconic, minimal designs. Bell, Kleenex, AT&T? All Bass. For about 50 years, if you were looking for a clean, thoughtful design that was made to last, this was the man you called. Logo design is not all Bass is known for. In fact, logos form the lesser part of Bass’ artistic legacy. Read on for a look at one of the most illustrious graphic design careers to date. Bass was born in 1920 in New York City, to Jewish immigrants. A creative child, he drew constantly. For college, he attended night classes at the Art Students League where he had the fortune of studying under GyÜrgy Kepes, a master of the functional Bauhaus aesthetic.
ARTIST
STORY In the 1940s, Bass left New York for California. He worked mostly for advertising until his first major break: a poster for the 1954 film, Carmen Jones. The filmmakers were so impressed by his poster work, they invited him to design the title credits as well. This turned out to be a game changing decision. Bass stepped up the sophistication of movie posters with his distinctive minimal style and he completely revolutionized the role of title credits in films. Traditionally, credits were static and drab. They were considered so unimportant, they would actually be projected onto the closed curtains which would only open for the first official scene of the movie. Bass, however, was committed to injecting life into these graphics, making them as much a part of the cinematic experience as anything else. Introducing his signature “kinetic type,” Bass’ letters dashed and moved across the screen and frequently incorporated images other than text.
Titles became a spectacle to be seen. Film reels with Bass credits were delivered to each of the movie theaters along with a note: “projectionist – pull curtain before titles.” Bass went on to create dozens of iconic film posters and title credits. His final projects before his death in 1996 were credits for four Martin Scorsese films: GOODFELLAS (1990), CAPE FEAR (1991), The Age of Innocence (1993) and CASINO (1995).
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“I do not think of type as something that should be readable. It should be beautiful.”
ED BENGUIAT ED BENGUIA
A man of letters E
d Benguiat is an American typographer. He has crafted over 600 typefaces including Tiffany, Bookman, Panache, Edwardian Script, and the self-titled typefaces Benguiat and Benguiat Gothic. He is also known for his designs or redesigns of the logotypes for Esquire, The New York Times, Coke, McCall’s, Ford, Reader’s Digest, Photography, Look, Sports Illustrated, The Star Ledger, The San Diego Tribune, AT&T, A&E, Estee Lauder, ... the list goes on and on. You name it, he’s done it. Other notable examples of Benguiat’s work are the logotypes for Playboy, the original Planet of the Apes film, and Super Fly. Benguiat grew up in Brooklyn, NY. He was once a very prominent jazz percussionist playing in several big bands with the likes of Stan Kenton and Woody Herman. In an interview Benguait stated this of his chosen career as a designer: “I’m really a musician, a jazz percussionist. One day I went to the musician’s union to pay dues and I saw all these old people who were playing bar mitzvahs and Greek weddings. It occurred to me that one day that’s going to be me, so I decided to become an illustrator.”
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THOMAS SARRA
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CAUTION NEW TYPE FACE
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TYPEFACES, TYPEFACE
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Clarissa Mendoz a
“What font is used on the Absolut Vodka
bottles”? It seems that just about everyone is using the word “font” when they are referring to a typeface. “Fonts” and “typefaces” are different things. Graphic designers choose typefaces for their projects but use fonts to create the finished art. Typefaces are designs like Baskerville, Gill Sans or Papyrus. Type designers create typefaces. Today they use software programs like Fontographer or Font Lab to create the individual letters. A few still draw the letters by hand and then scan them into a type design application. Fonts are the things that enable the printing of typefaces. Type foundries produce fonts. Some- times designers and foundries are one and the same, but creating a typeface and producing a font are two separate functions. A little history may help. John Baskerville created the typeface design that bears his name. Creating the design was a multi-stage process. First, he cut the letters (backwards) on the end of a steel rod. The completed letter is called a “punch.” Next, Baskerville took the punch and hammered it into a at piece of soft brass to make a mold of the letter. A combination of molten lead, zinc
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and antimony was then poured into the mold and the result was a piece of type the face of which was an exact copy of the punch. After Baskerville made punches for all the letters he would use and cast as many pieces of type as he thought he would need, he put the type into a typecase. The resulting collection of letters was a font of Baskerville type. Over the years, there have been hand-set fonts of Baskerville type, machine-set fonts, phototype fonts, and now digital fonts. Currently, there are TrueType and PostScript Type1 fonts of the Baskerville typeface. There are Latin 1 fonts of Baskerville used to set most of the languages in Western Europe and Greek and Cyrillic fonts that enable the setting of these languages. All these fonts are of the Baskerville typeface design. Maybe it’s OK for the folks that set the neighborhood church’s newsletter to call them fonts; but those of us who claim to be typographers and graphic designers should refer to our tools by the correct name. So, what font is used on the Absolut Vodka bottles? I don’t know. But I can tell you that the name “Absolut” is set in the typeface Futura Extra Bold Condensed.
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ONOSPACED FONT A monospaced font, also called a fxed-pitch width or non-proportional font, is a font whose letters and characters each occupy the same amount of horizontal space. This contrasts to variable-width fonts, where the letters differ in size to one another. The frst monospaced typefaces were designed for typewriters, which could only move the same distance forward with each letter typed.
CAUTION NEW TYPE FACE
Wet paint!
a bcdefgh U ijklmnopq rstuvwxyz o12. , : ; " " ! NICASE FONT A unicase font is one that has no case, the glyps from upper and lower case are combined to form one alphabet. It is believed that all alphabets were once unicase. Bradbury Thompson’s plan for simplifying and improving our alphabet was, “Alphabet 26”, his project to combine upper and lowercase letters into one consistent set of letters, eradicated most of the lowercases, except for a, e, m and n.