Forthcoming
Category: Typography
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Kurt Schwitters
Kurt Hermann Eduard Karl Julius Schwitters (1887 – 1948) was a German artist painter, sculptor, graphic designer, typographer and writer. He worked in several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, and what came to be known as installation art. He is most famous for his collages, called Merz Pictures.
Studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Hanover 1908-9 and at Dresden Academy 1909-14.
Influenced by Expressionism and Cubism 1917-18.
In 1918 created his own form of Dada in Hanover called ‘Merz’, using rubbish materials such as labels, bus tickets and bits of broken wood in his collages and constructions. Friendship with Arp, Hausmann and van Doesburg. Published the first edition of Anna Blume (a collection of poems and prose pieces) in 1919 and the magazine Merz 1923-32. First one-man exhibition at the Galerie Der Sturm, Berlin, 1920. Began in 1923 to build fantastic Merz constructions in his house in Hanover (the first ‘Merzbau’).
Spent the summers in Norway from 1931 and emigrated in 1937 to Lysaker near Oslo. Fled to England in 1940, spent seventeen months in internment camps, then lived 1941-5 in London. Moved in 1945 to Ambleside in the Lake District. In the last months of his life, he began a further Merz construction in an old barn at Langdale. Died at Kendal.
Colour and Collage
Ursonate Sound Poem
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Joseph Muller Brockman
Josef Müller-Brockmann (May 9, 1914 – August 30, 1996) was a Swiss graphic designer and teacher. He is recognised for his simple designs and his clean use of typography (notably Akzidenz-Grotesk), shapes and colours which inspire many graphic designers in the 21st century.
Each letter has its own personality …the forms of letters can create simultaneously both tension and nobility…The new typography differs from the old in that it is the first to try to develop the outward appearance from the function of the text…uses the background as an element of design which is on a par with other elements.
(Muller-Brockman)Work and books
Many of Müller-Brockmann’s works can be found in the online gallery “Blanka”
Müller-Brockman was author of several books on design and visual communication.
- The Graphic Artist and his Design Problems (Gestaltungsprobleme des Grafikers), Teufen, 1961
- A History of Visual Communication (Geschichte der visuellen Kommunikation), Niederteufen, 1971
- History of the Poster (Geschichte des Plakates), co-author Shizuko Yoshikawa, Zurich, 1971
- Grid Systems in Graphic Design (Rastersysteme für die visuelle Gestaltung), Niederteufen, 1981
- Graphic Design in IBM: Typography, Photography, Illustration, Paris, 1988
- Fotoplakate: Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, co-author Karl Wobmann, Aarau, 1989
- Mein Leben: Spielerischer Ernst und ernsthaftes Spiel (autobiography), Baden, 1994
Biography
Muller-Brockmann studied architecture, design and history of art at both the University and Kunstgewerbeschule in Zürich. In 1936 he opened his Zurich studio specialising in graphic design, exhibition design and photography. From 1951 he produced concert posters for theTonhalle in Zurich. In 1958 he became a founding editor of New Graphic Design along with R.P. Lohse, C. Vivarelli, and H. Neuburg. In 1966 he was appointed European design consultant to IBM.
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Neville Brody
Neville Brody (born 23 April 1957 in London) is an English graphic designer, typographer and art director. Influenced by Punk, Dada and Pop Art. He is the Head of the Communication Art & Design department at the Royal College of Art.
In 1988 Thames & Hudson published the first of two volumes about his work, which became the world’s best selling graphic design book. Combined sales now exceed 120,000. An accompanying exhibition of his work at the Victoria and Albert Museum attracted over 40,000 visitors before touring Europe and Japan.
Graphic Design
- The Face magazine: as Art Director produced revolutionary work that established his reputation (1981–1986)
- Arena magazine (1987–1990)
- partly responsible for instigating the FUSE project – the conference and quarterly forum for experimental typography and communications presenting an influential fusion between a magazine, graphics design and typeface design. Each pack includes a publication with articles relating to typography and surrounding subjects, four brand new fonts that are unique and revolutionary in some shape or form and four posters designed by the type designer usually using little more than their included font. The publication is approaching its 20th issue over a publishing period of over ten years. Three FUSE conferences have so far been held, in London, San Francisco and Berlin. The conferences bring together speakers from design, architecture, sound, film and interactive design and web.
- designing record covers for artists such as Cabaret Voltaire and Depeche Mode.
- created the company Research Studios in 1994 produces and publishes experimental multi-media works by young artists. The company also completed a visual identity project for the famous Paris contemporary art exhibition Nuit Blanche in 2006.
- 2007 launched a new look for the champagne brand Dom Pérignon in February 2007, having been appointed in 2004 to help the brand with its strategy and repositioning.
Typography
He was a founding member of Fontworks in London and designed a number of notable typefaces for them:
- 2006 the updated font for the Times newspaper, Times Modern – the first new font at the newspaper since it introduced Times New Roman in 1932. The typeface shares many visual similarities with Mercury designed by Jonathan Hoefler.
- New Deal as used in publicity material and titles for the film Public Enemies and
- Industria.
1990 he also founded the FontFont typeface library together with Erik Spiekermann.
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Robert Massin
Robert Massin is a French graphic designer, art director and typographer who is notable for his innovative experimentation with expressive forms of typographic composition. Massin stopped using his first name in the 1950s.
Work
Notable books designed by Massin:
- Exercices de style, by Raymond Queneau, Gallimard, 1963. A book of 99 retellings of the same story, each presented different graphically.
- La Cantatrice chauve, by Eugène Ionesco, Gallimard, 1964. (translated asThe Bald Prima Donna or The Bald Soprano). The book presented the dialogue of a single play through hundreds of pages of innovative graphic compositions. Different characters took on different typefaces. He used mixtures of typefaces and new compositional methods to present dialogue, he also formally manipulated dialogue by stretching and bending. He used black pages to capture silence on stage.
- Délire à deux, by Eugène Ionesco, Gallimard, 1966.
- Conversation-sinfonietta, by Jean Tardieu, Gallimard, 1966.
- Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel, by Jean Cocteau, Hoëbeke, begun in 1966 and published in 1994.
Notable books written by Massin:
La Lettre et l’Image, Gallimard, 1970.
Biography
(Wikipedia)
Massin was born in 1925 in Bourdinière-Saint-Loup, a commune in the Eure-et-Loir department in north-central France. He began working as a designer following World War II. Massin’s immediate influence in the 1950s was innovative French book designer Pierre Faucheux. Faucheux emphasized the idea that each new book should be a new object determined by type choice, proportion and déroulement, the development of a visual concept over several pages. Faucheux also emphasized the idea that the choice of typeface should have some relationship to the meaning of the text. These ideas are apparent in much of Massin’s most famous work. For over twenty years Massin acted as art director of Éditions Gallimard, one of the leading French publishers of books.
Writing in Eye magazine in a review of a book on Massin, Jan Middendorp credited La Cantatrice and La Lettre et l’Image as follows: “These two masterpieces of typographic eccentricity became hot items among designers and art directors on both sides of the Atlantic, and were especially influential in America, where they helped trigger the post-functionalist approach of graphic design that eventually culminated in the eclecticism of the late 1980s and 1990s.”
A 2007 major monograph of his work, Massin, written by Laetitia Wolff and published by Phaidon, was the first Massin monograph to appear in English.
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Massimo Vignelli
Massimo Vignelli (1931 – 2014) was an Italian designer who worked firmly within the Modernist tradition. He focused on simplicity through the use of basic geometric forms in all his work. He worked in a number of areas ranging from package design through houseware design and furniture design to public signage and showroom design. He was the co-founder of Vignelli Associates, with his wife, Lella.
If you can design one thing, you can design everything
Corporate and public design
His clients at Vignelli Associates included high-profile companies such as IBM, Knoll, Bloomingdale’s and American Airlines (which forced him to incorporate the eagle, Massimo was always quick to point out).
- New York City Subway signage and the 1970s–80s map of the system. Contrary to news reports. This became a landmark in Modernist information design and Vignelli regarded the map as one of his best creations. In 2011 he updated this for an online-only version and described it as a “diagram”, not a map, to reflect its abstract design without surface-level features such as streets and parks.
- Washington Metro signage and wayfinding system – the Map was designed by Lance Wyman and Bill Cannan.
Film and documentary - Helvetica, with filmmaker Gary Hustwit
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Jan Tschichold
Jan Tschichold (1902- 1974) was a typographer, book designer, teacher and writer.
Modernism: Die neue Typographie
Tschichold became a convert to Modernist design principles in 1923 after visiting the first Weimar Bauhaus exhibition. He wrote an influential 1925 magazine supplement; then had a 1927 personal exhibition. The book ‘Die Neue Typographie’ was a manifesto of his theories of modern design and codified many other Modernist design rules:
- importance of machine composition
- use of standardised paper sizes for all printed matter
- effective use of sans serif (Grotesque) typefaces using different sizes and weights of type in order to quickly and easily convey information.
- non-centred design and asymmetrical placing of contrasting elements with flush left headlines of irregular lengths
- layouts based on horizontal and vertical underlying grids with spatial interval and empty spaces employed as design components.
He advocated the Van de Graaf canon based on proportions in medieval manuscripts and based on Golden Section used in book design to divide a page in pleasing proportions.
This book was followed with a series of practical manuals on the principles of Modernist typography which had a wide influence among ordinary workers and printers in Germany.Return to Classicism
Tschichold slowly abandoned his rigid beliefs from around 1932 onwards (e.g. his Saskia typeface of 1932, and his acceptance of classical Roman typefaces for body-type) as he moved back towards Classicism in print design. He later condemned Die neue Typographie as too extreme. He also went so far as to condemn Modernist design in general as being authoritarian and inherently fascistic. He now advocated:
- symmetrical typographic treatments as more appropriate for great works of literature.
- classical typefaces like Garamond, Janson, Baskerville and Bell because of legibility
- importance of grids underlying layout design.
Penguin Books
Between 1947–1949 Tschichold lived in England where he oversaw the redesign of 500 paperbacks published by Penguin Books, leaving them with a standardized set of typographic rules, the Penguin Composition Rules. Although he gave Penguin’s books (particularly the Pelican range) a unified look and enforced many of the typographic practices that are taken for granted today, he allowed the nature of each work to dictate its look, with varied covers and title pages. In working for a firm that made cheap mass-market paperbacks, he was following a line of work—in cheap popular culture forms (e.g. film posters)—that he had always pursued during his career.
Typefaces
His abandonment of Modernist principles meant that, even though he was living in Switzerland after the war, he was not at the centre of the post-war Swiss International Typographic Style. Unimpressed by the use of realist or neo-grotesque typefaces, which he saw as a revival of poorly-designed models, his survey of typefaces in advertising deliberately made no mention of such designs, save for a reference to ‘survivals from the nineteenth-century which have recently enjoyed a short-lived popularity.’
Sabon typeface 1967 is the best known.
Between 1926 and 1929, he designed a “universal alphabet” to clean up the few multigraphs and non-phonetic spellings in the German language. For example, he devised brand new characters to replace the multigraphs ch and sch. His intentions were to change the spelling by systematically replacing eu with oi, w with v, and z with ts. Long vowels were indicated by a macron below them, though the umlaut was still above. The alphabet was presented in one typeface, which was sans-serif and without capital letters.
Other typefaces: Transit (1931), Saskia (1931/1932) and Zeus (1931).Biography
(edited from Wikipedia)
Tschichold was the son of a provincial signwriter, and unlike most other typographers of his time, was trained in calligraphy. This may help explain why he never worked with handmade papers and custom fonts as many typographers did, preferring instead to use stock fonts on a careful choice from commercial paper stocks.
After the election of Hitler in Germany, all designers had to register with the Ministry of Culture, and all teaching posts were threatened for anyone who was sympathetic to communism. Soon after Tschichold had taken up a teaching post in Munich at the behest of Paul Renner, they both were denounced as “cultural Bolshevists”. Ten days after the Nazis surged to power in March 1933, Tschichold and his wife were arrested. During the arrest, Soviet posters were found in his flat, casting him under suspicion of collaboration with communists. All copies of Tschichold’s books were seized by the Gestapo “for the protection of the German people”. After six weeks a policeman somehow found him tickets for Switzerland, and he and his family managed to escape Nazi Germany in August 1933.
Apart from two longer stays in England in 1937 (at the invitation of the Penrose Annual), and 1947–1949 (at the invitation of Ruari McLean, the British typographer, with whom he worked on the design of Penguin Books), Tschichold lived in Switzerland for the rest of his life. Jan Tschichold died in the hospital at Locarno in 1974.
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James Goggin
James Goggin is a Chicago-based British and/or Australian art director and graphic designer from London via Sydney, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Auckland, and Arnhem. Together with partner Shan James, he runs a design practice named Practise working with clients across Europe, Asia, Australasia, and North America. James has taught at design schools in Europe, Australasia, and the United States, including Werkplaats Typografie, Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne (ECAL), and at Rhode Island School of Design, where he is currently a visiting thesis critic. He frequently gives lectures and runs workshops around the world, and occasionally writes about art and design practice. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Chicago Design Archive, and he has been a member of Alliance Graphique Internationale since 2010.
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Ian Hamilton Finlay
Ian Hamilton Finlay, CBE (28 October 1925 – 27 March 2006) was a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener. Born in Nassau, Bahamas his family moved back to Scotland. At the age of 13, with the outbreak of the Second World War, he was evacuated to family in the countryside. He was educated at Dollar Academy, in Clackmannanshire and later Glasgow School of Art. In 1942, he joined the British Army. He died in 2006 in Edinburgh.
http://www.ianhamiltonfinlay.com
https://www.victoria-miro.com/
Wikipedia
Finlay’s work has been seen as austere, but also at times witty, or even darkly whimsical.
Poetry
At the end of the war, Finlay worked as a shepherd, before beginning to write short stories and poems, while living on Rousay, in Orkney. He published his first book, The Sea Bed and Other Stories, in 1958, with some of his plays broadcast on the BBC, and some stories featured in The Glasgow Herald.
His first collection of poetry, The Dancers Inherit the Party, was published in 1960 by Migrant Press with a second edition published in 1962.
In 1963, Finlay published Rapel, his first collection of concrete poetry (poetry in which the layout and typography of the words contributes to its overall effect), and it was as a concrete poet that he first gained wide renown. Much of this work was issued through his own Wild Hawthorn Press, in his magazine Poor. Old. Tired. Horse.
Finlay became notable as a poet, when reducing the monostich form to one word with his concrete poems in the 1960s. Repetition, imitation and tradition lay at the heart of Hamilton’s poetry, and exploring ‘ the juxtaposition of apparently opposite ideas’.
Art
Later, Finlay began to compose poems to be inscribed into stone, incorporating these sculptures into the natural environment. This kind of ‘poem-object’ features in the garden Little Sparta that he and Sue Finlay created together in the Pentland Hills near Edinburgh. The five-acre garden also includes more conventional sculptures and two garden temples.
Hamilton Finlay and George Oliver’s 1973 Arcadia screenprint uses camouflage in modern art to contrast leafy peace and military hardware. He continually revisited war themes and the concept of the Utopian Arcadia in his work. -
James Victore
Victore’s position comes across loud and direct with his statement,
‘Graphic Design is a club with big f***king spikes in, and I want to wield it.’
His interest in social and political agendas follows the same direction as Garland’s in orientating his work for more ‘useful’ objectives.
In 2005 the director David Hillman Curtis started making a series of short films recording artists, designers, illustrators, and architects talking about their ideas and process. One of these films featured the poster designer James Victore. Hillman said: I chose to film James because of his posters. I didn’t know him or much about him at the time, but I had seen a few of his pieces and had fallen in love with them. I also liked that he was doing work that was politically subversive at a time – the height of the Bush Administration’s popularity – when it seemed as if a lot of creative people were too discouraged to do so. James was very outspoken during the interview, using foul language and cussing out politicians. I kept this stuff in the film and lost Adobe as a sponsor because of it.
