We love typography, summer time, and SVA!
Final Type Specimen Posters
The final type specimen posters are a solid proof that great typography skills is all about patience and refining your letterforms. Looking back at how these typefaces began and where they ended up today, it’s rewarding to see everyone’s progress. Great job all around.
What did you learn about creating a typeface?
What would you do differently?
Amazing stop-motion music video made with typography.
Ever think about where your favorite fonts are derived from? Bram Pitoyo, a self proclaimed “type nerd”, tells us about the secret history of fonts.
With the final type specimen sheets being due on Tuesday, here are a few notes to consider from Thursday’s crit:
- Ask a friend to look over your typeface to help you identify inconsistencies. Every letter, number and punctuation needs to be cohesive and feel like a seamless continuation of the typeface family.
- You may want to consider offering several versions of specific letters. For example, maybe your typeface offers 3 versions of the capital “A”: one standard, one slightly flourished, and one highly decorative (like a drop cap).
- How will you name your typeface? A name can leave a strong impression, so choose wisely.
- Be ready to tell your story that talks about the meaning, inspiration, process, etc., of your typeface. A personal narrative will always make your presentation engaging and compelling.
- Document your progress!
Good luck! See you tue!
The personal display typefaces are due next week. Many of you are making real progress, and successfully resolving details of proportion and contrast in your work. Chaska’s hand-embroidered script is impressive! I’m excited to see everyone’s final typefaces.
Few things to keep in mind:
- Sketch by hand! (not on the computer)
- Work on a grid. Look at the previous post “Anatomy of Type” to see how to set up a grid.
- Once the final typeface is finished, how will you photograph the final piece? Will you digitize your typeface?
- Remember to document your progress and efforts!
Thanks to Jamie for the in-class documentation photos!
Thread type by graphic designer and recent MFA Cranbrook graduate, Elle Kim
The Daily Drop Cap is an ongoing project by typographer and illustrator Jessica Hische. Each day, a new hand-crafted decorative initial cap will be posted for your enjoyment and for the beautification of blog posts everywhere.
Doyald Young is recognized as one of the modern masters of the lettering arts. Since the mid-1950s, Young has designed logotypes, corporate alphabets and typefaces all by hand lettering. Young still begins each job in the same manner he learned from his mentor, Joe Gibbey—with an HB pencil on tracing paper. “Depending on how long the logo is, I usually make a rough sketch about 1½- to 2-inches wide, sometimes smaller,” says Young.“I draw the letters in skeleton form to see how the word looks. Often, I’ll explore different character shapes and proportions and try to make the logo a distinctive shape.”
While drawing letters with a pencil first—rather than constructing them on screen—may seem old school to many young designers, the process allows Young to quickly try many solutions to the design problem. “A rough sketch of a logo takes only a minute or so to do,” he says, although he cautions that in-depth knowledge of different type styles is critical to the process.
In 2009 AIGA awarded Young the prestigious AIGA Medal for “for demonstrating the power of a lifelong love of the craft of calligraphy, type and graphic design, for his contributions as an author and for his dedication as an educator.”
To learn more about him, here a some of the best articles I found online:
STEP: Doyald Young, Master of Dangerous Curves
By Allan Haley
The master lettering artist’s path to prominence leads to Dangerous Curves.
AIGA 2009: Medalist Doyald Young
By Marian Bantjes
How do you get to be one of the greats of graphic design? If Doyald Young is the example, start with a well-rounded education in life, study with the masters, pay homage to your mentors, work hard, work long and, practice, man, practice.
Letter Cult Interview with Doyald Young
If Matthew Carter is the greatest living type designer, and Hermann Zapf the greatest living calligrapher, Young completes the trinity as the greatest living designer of logotypes.
You can say, “I love you,” in Helvetica. And you can say it with Helvetica Extra Light if you want to be really fancy. Or you can say it with the Extra Bold if it’s really intensive and passionate, you know, and it might work.
— Massimo Vignelli, from Helvetica
Massimo Vignelli only uses 12 typefaces, and claims that for design to work, ‘twelve typefaces is enough’. He says type is like a piano, the more you use them, the better you get at it. Vignelli is an exceptional designer, he’s also considered the ‘grandfather of modernism’. Most of his work’s beauty and simplicity can be attributed to the self-imposed type palette of twelve typefaces.
So here is a list of the twelve typefaces that you’ll ever need, according to Vignelli’s view:
THE CLASSICS
Caslon
Baskerville
Bodoni
THE SLAB SERIF
Clarendon
THE GROTESQUE
Akzidenz Grotesk
THE GEOMETRIC SANS SERIF
Futura
Gotham
THE NEO-GROTESQUE
Helvetica
THE HUMANIST SANS
Scala Sans
Frutiger
Meta
THE COMPREHENSIVE & UNIFIED SUPER-FAMILY
Thesis
There are undoubtedly many professionals in our field who share Vignelli’s views, but for me, although I understand limiting your type choices to achieve beauty in simplicity, I believe having such a limiting number of typefaces simply cannot work with the current demands of design—the technological progress in visual communication requires differentiation and a wider option for legible type for web, digital billboards, and now even hand-held mobile devices.
What are your thoughts?
Today’s exercise was to use transform letterforms using tracing paper, pencil and your imagination. To understand the complexity and small details of typefaces, this seemingly simple exercise gets your hand used to drawing the shapes and curves, thicks and thins of letterforms that will help you create your own typeface.
The results are magical! Look at these beautiful examples that were done in only 1 hour. Always keep in mind that the principles of basic design applies equally to typography, so focus on proportion, scale, contrast, balance and unity.
There is no better self-teaching method in typeface design than to spend time tracing letterforms from existing typefaces. It’s important to learn the rules before you break them!
Archer, Verdana, Bookman, Garamond, Futura oh my!
Thank you for the wonderful presentations in today’s Type Stories. From newspapers, to movies, to structural infographics, your presentations were wonderful, creative, engaging, and very informative!
Here are some highlights I gathered from our stellar presenters:
- Futura was Stanley Kubrick’s favorite typeface
- Tahoma is the condensed version of Verdana
- Bookman, which was originally designed in the 1800’s, was revived as Bookman ITC in 1975 by SVA faculty Ed Benguiat, who also created the popular Bookman Swash
- In 2009, IKEA dropped Futura, their signature typeface of over 50 years, and replaced it by Verdana typeface in an effort to be able to use the same font in all countries, including Asian countries
