an exploration into typography
DESCRIPTION
USC Typography OneTRANSCRIPT
An Exploration into Typography
Anthologyof
Type Designersand
DESIGNERSThat Have Made
an
IMPACTon
TYPE
Edited by Jacob Roth
Published by Roski Design Press, 2015
An E
xploration intoTypography
Typographersand
Designers
CHAPTER ONE
House IndustriesWRITTEN BY HANNAH CHI
House Industries is an internationally known prolific type foundry and
design studio based in Yorklyn, Delaware. The company was created
on March 1st, 1993 when Andy Cruz and Rich Boat quit their jobs and
set up Brand Design Co., Inc. in the space rom of Rich’s apartment
in Wilmington, Delaware. Despite its garage startup, the company has
manifested into making a considerable impact on the world of design
as its fonts are widely spread throughout billboards, greeting cards,
consumer product logos, and mainstream media—a few which include
VH1’s Best Week Ever, Mission Impossible, Nickelodeon’s TV Land,
Anne Taylor garment bags, Lucky Charms, and etc.
Behind the apparent success of House Industries is a team of
impassioned House artists who have mastered a large cross-section of
design disciplines that acts as an infrastructure for the mesh of cultural,
musical and graphic elements within in the mastered typography.
From early forays into distressed digital alphabets to sophisticated
type and lettering systems, House Industries’ work transcends graphic
conventions and reaches out to a broad audience.
Within the realm of House Industries’ broad clientele is a wide variety
of an unconscious House aesthetic of the studio’s ‘blue-collared’
designers. As House designers draw from an exposure of areas in the
American sub-cultural phenomena of unsophisticated yet incredibly
formative graphic design, despite the big names of their clients, House
designers ultimately create their own projects of design and illustration.
Each House Industries project attempts to administer a component of
an art history lesson of sorts by using their font collections to provide
an opportunity to draw attention to the impactful and under-appreciated
art genres that were a huge influence to the designer’s during their
impressionable years. The consistent element of art history embedded
into the House aesthetics has inevitably created a style that audiences
identify House Industries with.
In accordance, because of the twentieth century metal type inspiration
and the diverse references to popular cultural imagery, invariably,
“retro” is always brought up when discussing House’s work. Regardless
of the indifferent categorization of House aesthetics being “retro,” as the
term is thoughtlessly used to describe anything that from the past few
decades, House designers focus solely in the craft of everything they
do. House Industries finds creating artwork by traditional means to be
more direct and efficient so ultimately, the hands-on approach preserves
the characteristic production techniques while drawing from personal
interests, which gives a unique flavor of making the House Aesthetic
one of a kind.
Jessica Hische WRITTEN BY WINNIE QUAN
Jessica Hische is a Pennsylvania-born, award-winning letterer,
illustrator, and graphic designer. Known for her ‘Daily Drop Cap’
project, ‘Should I Work for Free’ flowchart, and beautiful type design
and lettering skills, Hische is currently based in San Francisco and
works alongside friend and designer Erik Marinovich. While she’s not
in her studio space creating and working on designs, she can be found
traveling the world attending and speaking at conferences, finding ways
to help others do what they love.
Having worked for wonderful clients such as Wes Anderson, American
Express, and Penguin Books, Hische continues to work independently
from her studio, designing for advertising, books, weddings, branding,
and companies, while still finding time to work on fun side projects for
herself. One of her biggest projects included designing book covers for
a 26-book classics series with Penguin Books; each with an elegantly-
designed letter that pertained to a classic author, and another working
with Wes Anderson to create film titles for Moonrise Kingdom. Hische
is also greatly acclaimed, having been listed in Forbes’ Top 30 Under
30 in art and design twice, nominated as GDUSA’s person to watch in
2011, and featured in many major design and illustration publications.
She is greatly admired and respected by those in her industry and
lettering-aficionados.
Her hand-lettering skills have been carefully practiced and refined
for years, mainly using the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator to develop a
general skeleton and adding decorations and ornamentations later on.
While Hische’s work for her clients is incredibly expansive and ample,
her style is a common element in all of her lettering and illustrations;
her work can be described as both whimsical and sophisticated, as she
finds inspiration everywhere she goes and through all the wonderful
people she meets around the world. “Just when you think you figured it
out, you find some better way of doing things. The key is to always keep
trying to be better.”
Michael BierutWRITTEN BY JOHN LUNA
The Ohio-born Michael Bierut is a highly awarded and famous graphic
designer that is attributed with the creation of designs ranging from
the environmental graphics for the New York Times building to the
development of a new brand strategy for the packaging of Saks Fifth
Avenue. However, his work does not only result from his ability to design
but also his identity as a designer. He describes the difference between
those who design and those who are designers. The designer is also a
participant in the design conversation and, as a designer; Bierut is a leader
in creating a design community. He has served as the national president
of the American Institute of Graphic Arts, acted as a senior critic at Yale
School of Art, and is a founding contributor for the Design Observer.
His works and didactic contributions have affected the language of
typography and the field of design overall. With his book, Seventy-Nine
Short Essays on Design, Bierut hopes to create a community for design
conversation, which, he comments, was fairly unavailable to a majority
of designs despite the universality of design in the world. He complains
that, in the 1970s, there was only really one, inaccessible, conference
for designers to attend and that paid subscriptions to publications tended
to be costly – creating a very isolated world of design. He grants insight
to the importance, especially due to the ubiquitous nature of design, of
the graphic and of the associated text. Mentions of his mistakes and
experiences during his design career inform him and allow him to offer
readers advice on spurring conversations about design and challenging
the established design normative. In Bierut’s essay published in the
Design Observer, he mentions that design is about making connections
between objects. Despite appearing to be an aggregation for essays on
design, he also comments on other topics such as politics or business. He
mentions, “Design is not everything. But design is about everything.”
Bierut praises design for always being about “something else.” These
connections allow designs to become a universal entity that has
driven Bierut’s inspirations. As a result of his contemporary advice on
breaking the design standard, Bierut has become a major, and powerful,
contributor to the entire design community.
Herman ZapfWRITTEN BY KEELY VEDANAYAGAM
Herman Zapf is a German type designer who was born in 1918 in
Nuremberg during the German revolution and is still alive today at
age 96! He is married to a fellow typeface designer, Gudrun Zapf von
Hesse. Zapf grew up with an interest in technical subjects; as a kid he
experimented with electricity and even built an alarm set for his house.
At a young age, Zapf was already getting involved with type, inventing
cipher-text alphabets to exchange secret messages with his brother.
He left school in 1933 with the ambition to pursue a career in electrical
engineering. However, Zapf was not able to attend the Ohm Technical
Institute in Nuremberg due to the new political regime in Germany at
the time, so he took up an apprenticeship position in lithography where
he worked for four years. During this time, Zapf attended an exhibition
in Nuremberg in honor of the late typographer Rudolf Koch. This
exhibition gave him his first interest in lettering and he began to teach
himself calligraphy. In 1938, he designed his first printed typeface, a
fraktur type called Gilgengart.
One year later, Zapf was conscripted into World War II and sent to help
reinforce the defensive line against France. Not used to the hard labor,
he developed heart trouble in a few weeks and was given a desk job,
writing camp records and sports certificates. Due to his heart trouble,
Zapf was dismissed early from his unit and shortly thereafter began
training as a cartographer. After his training, he traveled to Bordeaux
and became a staff member in the cartography unit where he drew maps
of Spain. Zapf enjoyed working in the cartography unit. His eyesight
was so excellent that he could write letters 1 millimeter in size without
using a magnifying glass – this skill probably prevented him from being
commissioned back into the army.
After the war had ended, Zapf was held by the French as a prisoner
of war. He was treated with respect because of his artwork and, due
to his poor health, was sent home only four weeks after the end of the
war. Post-war, Zapf taught calligraphy in Nuremberg before taking up a
position as artistic head of a print shop.
Later in his career, he spent time developing two famous typefaces,
Palatino and Optima. He then worked for a while in developing computer
typography programs before taking up professorship at the Rochester
Institute of Technology from 1977 to 1987. Today he is known as the
artist of several famous typefaces such as Palatino, Optima, Aldus,
Venture, and of course, Zapfino – his most recent typeface which was
released in 1998.
The Contemporary Wordsmith
CHAPTER THREE
Donald KnuthWRITTEN BY JACOB ROTH
Often when we think if new technology, we automatically think that
it will make our lives better. Sometimes this is true, but in the world
of typography new technologies actually made print quality worse.
Typesetting was traditionally performed on printing presses where
metal stamps were meticulously and painstakingly arranged to achieve
the best product. Because the printing press was labor intensive and
required extensive training, publishers were excited about a new
technology, phototypesetting, which drastically reduced the time and
skill required to typeset books.
While the technology was initially limited to low quality publications
like newspapers and magazines, the price eventually forced the new
technology into more premium products like text books. Donald
Knuth, a professor of computer science at Stanford University, in 1978
received a gallery print of his second edition textbook. Compared to
the original version, he lamented, “The quality of typesetting was
abominable. It was a pain to read. You couldn’t look at this because they
had changed printing technology.” In retaliation, Mr. Knuth decided to
create a computer program to typeset his new book instead of using the
phototypesetting method he loathed.
Just like any self-respecting typography student would, Mr. Knuth
began his research by tracing out the letters from existing typefaces
onto paper. After many hours of studying the shapes he came to the
conclusion that the phototypesetting system failed because, whereas
letters were designed by human beings which something in mind for
them, the typesetting process had no way to capture the intelligence
or intentions of the type designer. Mr. Knuth decided that in order for
a computerized system to produce beautiful text, it must preserve the
past traditions of typesetters instead of throwing them out like current
technology had.
The systems Mr. Knuth developed changed typesetting from a problem
with metallurgy to a problem of mathematics. In contrast to previous
methods, his system does not rely on static characters but instead
digitally creates each character based on the parameters given such as
point size and weight. The advantage of using digitally created characters
is that each character is a perfect reproduction of the designer’s
intentions whether printed on paper or displayed on a computer screen.
Additionally, because text was represented in an abstract way inside a
computer, Mr. Knuth applied complex algorithms, such as automatic
river reduction, that where time and labor prohibitive on traditional
presses.
The typesetting systems that Mr. Knuth developed made great progress
towards digital publishing but the systems were not perfect. Specifically,
the system required many different commands to achieve the desired
results. While many academics were able to effectively use the system,
graphic artist publishers found the system difficult because they had
little computer experience. In the end, Mr. Knuth’s digital publish
system never gained much acceptance outside universities. All of his
work in not in vein, however, because many of the algorithms and
principals he pioneered are now integral parts of the most widely used
software packages.
ÉmigréWRITTEN BY JT WANG
Emigre was a magazine about “the global artist who juggles cultures,
travels between them, and who is fluent in the cultural symbols of the
world.” It was founded in 1984 in Berkeley, CA by wife and husband
Zuzanna Licko and Rudy VanderLans, who created the type foundry.
The word émigré, which often refers to a person who has “migrated
out” of of something, perfectly defines the foundry’s take on art and
design. Emigre resisted typical design rules that had existed during its
beginning and used its wild creations to offset long-accepted imbalances
between form and content.
The foundry was the first of its kind to create and distribute fonts made
for and by a computer, and their work was made possible the advent of
the Macintosh computer. Licko and VanderLans used the magazine to
explore and experiment with new and radical pieces that were created
by computers using bitmap design, dot matrix printing and vector-based
design, rather than by hand and letterpress. This wasWr a surprise to
the design community whose convention at the time placed a high
value on calligraphy; the norm was to create typestyles by hand before
manipulating them on the computer. However, for Zuzanna Licko, the
computer’s tools opened a variety of opportunities because she was
left-handed and thus had never been able to do calligraphy.Though
the pair of designers had not intended to break rules, Emigre started a
typographic rebellion as a result of their explorations of the new tools
and capabilities created by the computer.
Emigre’s radical design choices drew a great deal of attention from
designers and critics alike, and in the beginning, they faced severe
opposition. Some critics saw the creations as barbaric and described
Emigre’s postmodern design as “the degradation of culture” and “The
Cult of the Ugly.” However, after awhile, the arguments subsided
and Emigre grew to become an influential record label, merchandise
vendor, and journal for design dialogues, and since then, the foundry
has designed and licensed over 300 different typefaces from a variety
of artists.
Erik SpiekermannWRITTEN BY SARAH ANNE NAKAMURA
Erik Spiekermann is a German typographer and designer who started
his education at Berlin’s Free University studying art history. During
his stay at the university, he funded himself by running a letterpress
printing press in the basement of his house. He later went on to establish
FontShop, in 1988, the first mail-order distributor for digital fonts, with
his wife Joan. This later evolved into many other companies that strived
to publish and distribute fonts to artists and designers all over the world.
During this time, he worked at MetaDesign, a global design consultancy.
He currently holds an honorary professorship at the Academy of Arts in
Bremen as a board member of German Design Council.
As an established designer, he has written many books such as Stop
Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works and redesigned the
magazine The Economist, a publication based in London. Through out
his career, he has created many commercial typefaces such as Berliner
Grotest, Lo-Type, ITC Officina Sans, FF Govan, and FF Meta Serif.
Spiekermann had achieved many milestones in his career, one of them
being a Honorary Doctorship for his contribution to design in April of
2006 from Art Center College of Design. He later collaborated with
designer Christian Schwartz where they successfully designed the
Deutsche Bahn family typeface. This won them the Gold Medal at
the German Federal Design Prize in 2006. The following year, he was
elected into the European Design Awards Hall of Fame.
Erik Spiekermann has the opportunity to participate in First Things
First 2000 Manifesto, a collaboration of a group of international
graphic designers in 1999 that followed the publication of First
Things First Manifesto in 1964. The goal was to generate discussion
about the education and press exposure in the design profession. Erik
Spiekermann was one of the thirty-three designers to sign the manifesto
with the concerns of “free design” and the right to take a stand on who
and what they are designing for.
Modern Masters
CHAPTER FOUR
Herb Lubalin: Meaning MattersWRITTEN BY DAWN LEE
Recognized for his unique contributions to the world of design, Herb
Lubalin is one of the most successful and foremost American graphic
designers and typographers of the twentieth century. Although he is
colorblind and started working back in the day when designers utilized
drawing boards and workstations, Lubalin’s design is still perceived
as futuristic and innovative. As the creative mind behind the culture-
shocking magazines of the 20th century, including Eros, Fact, Avant
Garde, and U&IC, the designer introduced a fresh and groundbreaking
style to his audience. In fact, his logotype for Avant Garde magazine
was so high in demand that he later released the complete set of the font
called, “ITC Avant Garde.”
The expressive typography of “ITC Avant Garde” is reflective of Herb
Lubalin’s vision in his design. The form of the tight, all-majuscule, and
sans-serif typography is slanted to the right, as if headed towards the
future and embracing the futuristic context of its existence. By giving
the letterforms the shape and voice of the meaning of the word “Avant
Garde” itself, Lubalin manipulated the form into an inseparable part of
the word’s meaning.
Herb Lubalin was a designer who constantly sought for ways to create
typographic innovations. His wildly illustrative typography is a result
of his imagination and insight, combined with his talent. His inventive
typographic designs go beyond the twenty-six alphabet characters; by
bringing a new aesthetic that emphasizes the shock of meaning to the
world of design, publishing and advertisement, Lubalin has changed the
course and constraints of design for those who were to follow. Lubalin’s
typography is significant because it is a representation of how an idea
is conveyed from one to another—how meaning is communicated
through its form. The designer’s ability to incorporate sensitivity and
meaning into his typography has profoundly influenced young designers
and continues to inspire those who desire to push the boundaries of
contemporary design.
Ed BenguiatWRITTEN BY ALBERT MONTGOMERY
Ed Benguiat is a scrapper - Ex-military, musician, Illustrator, typography.
Supposedly,after walking into the musician’s union one day saw other
older musicians, who played wedding receptions and bar mitzvahs.
He was like “screw this I want tobe an Illustrator!” Fortunately for
Benguiat, his father was a lead illustrator for a New York department
store so he was around those type of tools, influence, and opportunity,
since the age of nine.
Ed Benguiat became a prolific lettering artist and became the typographic
design director at a company called Photo-Lettering, which failed by the
way. But Benguiat’s impact on the type community involves more than
just design. He played a critical role in establishing the International
Typeface Corporation, the first independent licensing company for
type designers. Ed jump-started the type industry in the late ‘60s and
early ‘70s.Eventually he became known for logo designs for Esquire,
The New York Times, Coke, McCall’s, Ford, Reader’s Digest, Sports
Illustrated, and Estee Lauder. He created new ITC typefaces such as
Bauhaus, Tiffany, Korinna, Panache, Modern No, 216, Bookman,
Caslon No. 225, Barcelona, and Avant Garde Condensed to name some
of them. At some point, “The Ed Benguiat Font Collection” came into
being, which is listed as a casual font family, named after the designer,
which includes not only five typefaces but a series of dingbats, or what
House Industries staff dubbed, during an interview, “bengbats.” This was
a collection of glyphs bases on his jazz percussion background. Benjuiat
laments that student designers now show more interest in learning the
computer rather than mastering the art of designing letterforms. “Too
many new designers substitute technology for talent, thinking they’ve
got a Mac and now they can draw a logo or a typeface. You have to learn
to draw first. The computer won’t do it for you.” He’s convinced that
showing a font in an A-B-C format is not the best way to sell it. You’ve
got to SEE IT in action, typographically arranged exactly the way the
designer had in mind. Each piece of designed typography should be, so
to speak, a beautiful work of art within itself. That’s what typographic
communication is all about, “Liberating the Letter!”
Ed FellaWRITTEN BY VICTORIA HORNG
Ed Fella was born in 1938. He grew up in Detroit Michigan and
studied at Cass Technical High School where he studied hand lettering,
illustration, and commercial art. After that he went into the graphic
design industry where he did a lot of work for automobiles. He then
went back to school and studied at Cranbrook Academy of Art where he
was able to experiment and explore art and design together.
Today, he is an extremely well recognized graphic designer, artist,
illustrator and educator. His work is very different from what we
usually expect from graphic design in our time, which is expected to
be clean and structural. His work breaks the rules. He deconstructs and
distorts letterforms, using various different shapes, forms, spaces, and
thicknesses. His hand lettering is an outburst of fun movement and
combinations of aspects belonging to different categories. Although at
first glance his work may look disorganized or too free, each part of it is
done extremely skillfully.
He combines serifs with san serifs, dingbats, scripts and much more.
Since he pushes so many boundaries of people’s common perceptions
of design, he is known as a controversial designer. Nevertheless, his
design has a great influence in the industry, is extremely well received,
and is followed by many people.
His way of mixing and matching, creating work that looks perhaps
crazy, very quirky, and extremely eccentric really changed how the
current generation of designers think and work today. In a world where
the definition, methods, and role of design are continuously changing
with the transformation of society and culture; his work helps us to
once again question what exactly defines good design by pushing the
boundaries of innovation and creativity, yet still creating work which
communicates and gives purpose.
Neville Brody WRITTEN BY KATHERINE VUONG
Neville Brody is perhaps one of the most popular graphic designers of his
generation. He studied graphic design at the London College of Printing
and first worked on record cover and magazine designs, establishing his
reputation as one of the world’s leading graphic designers. In particular,
his innovative artistic contribution to The Face brought his artistry to
another level. Brody also won much public acclaim through his ideas
on incorporating and combining typefaces into design. Later on he took
this a step further and began designing his own typefaces, thus opening
the way for the advent of digital type design.
He was one of the founding members of FontShop in London and
over time has designed 24 font families. A distinctly notable font is the
updated font Times Modern for the Times newspaper. In addition to
pouring himself into design, he was also partly responsible for starting
the FUSE project, holding conferences to bring together speakers from
design, architecture, sound, film and interactive design, and web.
What resonated with me more than his multiple decades of provoking
design and typographic work are his views on creativity and the future
of innovation. Brody believes that designers should take more risks
and help draw attention to social issues. He advises that with regards to
politics, young designers have to find their own platform. The point he
makes is that it’s more about being a conscious designer than anything
else. Some designers don’t think about the consequence of their work,
they are just motivated by money and making things look ‘nice’. Then
there’re others who are only interested in designing for other designers.
He hopes to teach by giving context and getting students to engage with
the idea that everything they do will somehow affect the society that
they live in.
He admits that for a time graphic design had lost its relevance with many
designers halting experimentation and simply conforming. Their work
became a case of style over substance. Brody that the main medium
holding designers back is the digital screen. Digital is becoming a utility.
A few decades ago when people first started thinking about the potential
of the internet, he expected much more innovation and experimentation
by now, and so he tries to push out from being boxed in in order to be
great and hopes the same from other designers.
Designer Mayhem
CHAPTER FIVE
David Carson: Type Fanatic or Genius?WRITTEN BY TREVOR THORPE
Despite his indisputable influence in graphic design, David Carson
manages to be a controversial designer to this day. Compared to many
influential typographers, Carson does not come from any ordinary
formal art school background. Rather, into his mid-twenties, Carson
was a professional surfer in California. It was not until he was twenty-
six and enrolled in a short design course that exposed him to the
wonders of typography. This unorthodox entry into the field is quite
likely responsible for his unique impact. He experimented with type
in ways that other artists with more formal typography education did
not, manipulating text and throwing letters around that often rendered
them illegible. Hence, Carson’s most distinguished work was the source
of debate seeing that it destroyed much of the communicative value
of typography that many hold to be its primary purpose. However, at
this expense he enhances the expressionistic qualities of type before a
viewer even reads the text.
Carson has worked on a variety of publications over the course
of his career, and his first role as an art director was for Transworld
SKATEboarding in the 1980s. Over the course of his time there, he refined
and began to gain notoriety for his distinct style of design. The covers
he designed demonstrate early decisions to manipulate and combine
different typefaces, type sizes, and colors into individual headlines.
In doing so he successfully captures the youthful and countercultural
idealizations of skater culture. Similarly, his other work facilitates its
own messages through the messy layouts of text. He became the first
art director of Ray Gun, a surf and music magazine in 1992. Seeing that
the beginnings of this publication were rooted in Carson’s vision, it very
much had a distinct style, adding to the cutting-edge aesthetic that the
magazine embodied. His work in particular building elaborately chaotic
typographical designs for Ray Gun garnered him enough fame to be
featured in publications such as the New York Times.
After Ray Gun Carson went on to found his own design agency, David
Carson Design, which still operates today. As the head of the agency,
Carson revisited his passion for publications and created his own travel
magazine, Blue which circulated for three years. David Carson Design
has done work for companies with as high of profiles as NBC, American
Airlines, Pepsi Cola, and Toyota amongst many more. His agency has
maintained his unique aesthetic, with text all over the place and designs
with aesthetics reminiscent of collage. Carson relays the significance
of his upbringing and unique background to be a driving force in his
typographic work. Today, he largely lectures including appearing on a
TED Talk, and he emphasizes the importance of the individual voice,
and that each person’s own unique experiences should shape what he
or she produces. Ultimately, Carson’s work is admirable not only in
its own inventiveness, but also that it encourages peers and other type
designers to think about communication in new ways.
Vincent ConnareWRITTEN BY BRANDON SINGH
Comic Sans MS is one of the most polarizing typefaces in the design
community. Even people who aren’t designers have learned to dislike
the typeface. It’s almost a force of habit for most to despise Comic Sans.
While the typeface itself is relatively known by many, neither the man
behind the it nor the story of Comic Sans have been brought to light.
The history behind Comic Sans and its designer provides interesting
insight about the typeface and can perhaps enlighten many on a typeface
that they have grown to dislike.
Vincent Connare designed Comic Sans when he was working for
Microsoft in 1995. Connare is also the designer behind Trebuchet MS
as well as one of the designers behind Webdings. He began working
on Comic Sans in 1994 after seeing a beta version of Microsoft Bob, a
personal assistant software being developed by Microsoft in the ‘90s to
appeal to younger users. The software featured cartoon characters with
word balloons and messages set in Times New Roman. Connare found
the typeface to be inappropriate for the given context of the software, so
he started to design Comic Sans. As implied in the name, the typeface
was based on the lettering style in comic books that Connare had in his
office, namely The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen. He was careful
not to copy the lettering used, but instead pay close attention to the
shapes the letters made considering that comic letterforms were usually
manually written at the time.
Comic Sans wasn’t actually completed in time for the launch of Microsoft
Bob. A rough copy was made when Microsoft Bob was finished, but the
typeface was larger than Times New Roman, so it interfered with the
metrics of the program. While it was too late for Microsoft Bob, the
programmers of Microsoft 3D Movie Maker--which also used cartoon
characters and speech bubbles--began to use the font in their software.
Comic Sans was later included in the Windows 95 Plus! Pack and
then became a standard font for Windows 95. The typeface eventually
became one of the default fonts for Microsoft Publisher and Microsoft
Internet Explorer.
Interestingly enough, such inclusion of the typeface in other programs
was not what Connare had intended. Connare designed Comic Sans for
applications that were primarily targeted toward children, which was
what Microsoft Bob was at the time. It was the widespread inclusion
of the typeface in so many programs that allowed it to gain popularity
among people of all ages. Connare believes that people liked the font
because it was fun and simple. Apple even used Comic Sans as the
default font for Apple iCards when they were first released. Ironically,
this lead to wider use of the typeface, perhaps overuse of it in appropriate
situations, similar to the situation that lead to Comic Sans being created.
According to Connare, the main designer of Twitter said that the most
server space is used by complaints about airlines, Comic Sans, and
Justin Bieber--in that order.
Lawrence WeinerWRITTEN BY ANDREW HURLBUT
Lawrence Weiner was a leader of the Conceptual Art movement
of the 60s. Thus, in order to understand Weiner as an artist and
typographer one must understand the Conceptual Art movement as a
whole. Conceptualism, like its counterpart Minimalism, is more easily
described as a philosophy than as purely an artistic movement. As a
reaction of the Contemporary and High Modern art scene during its
time, Conceptualism was arguably born through Marcel Duchamp’s
works known as readymades. These readymades have made it possible
for the art world to expand its mind into accepting more conceptual
works such as the works of Lawrence Weiner.
Weiner is most well known for his typographic pieces. One of the initial
pieces that he made based in typography was his book “Statements”
which contained exactly that, statements, throughout the entire book.
Weiner’s work despite being made primarily in text has been described
as embodying every aspect and dimension of physical art. Weiner’s
most famous workers use a phrase or statement and typographically lay
them out onto a wall or site. Through his typography he was able to
transcend his art from a conceptual realm into a metaphysical one. One
other approach that Weiner uses is site-specificity to encapsulate the site
as a whole and adding his statement into the site thus creating a new
meaning for the site as a while.
Lawrence Weiner’s “Bits and Pieces” piece spells the line “bits and
pieces put together to present a semblance of a whole” on the side of
a building with a crevice going through the middle of the text. Weiner
uses crevice as a guide for his work by aligning some words to it and
more cleverly kerning evenly but also words are not obstructed by the
crevice. Other pieces he has made use this same method of combining
site and type to create a piece that is greater than each individually.
Comic Sans and HelveticaWRITTEN BY IVY LI
Comic Sans has been the most hated font of this era by designers, and
Helvetica, too, is receiving a rising controversial reaction from the
design community, and there are historical, technical, and subjective
reasons to account for the phenomenon.
First of all it is the exposure. Comic Sans is a casual, non-connecting
script font that was made by Vincent Connare for a very specific
situation—a friendly speech bubble for Windows 95. And it was then
carried out by Microsoft as one of the default fonts in its operating
system, and very soon it was largely celebrated by the public, and
reached its high time of misuse. It quickly appeared everywhere and on
any publications, as it seemed to draw more attention from the general
public in the pool of traditional fonts. The exposure resulted in backlash,
especially when they are used in inappropriate situations like formal
emails, legal documents and serious notifications. Helvetica, at the same
time, is used massively around the world as a professional Swiss font
since 1957, when first developed by Max Miedinger. It was so loved and
there is even a film for it. Its wide popularity makes it one of the most
used fonts in the entire planet, and several large companies have used it
for their brand identities.
These two fonts also have technical reasons for the controversial
reactions they are getting. Comic Sans has very poor kerning when
used as the body copy. And in terms of font design, it is constituted of
inconsistent edges and weird angles. Besides, it may not even be a good
comic font due to its awkward and unnatural strokes. However, it is often
praised for its legibility. Helvetica, despite that it is a professionally
designed sans serif typeface that follows design principles, has strokes
that are too ubiquitous that barely communicate to the contemporary
audience at all.
And sometimes we designers just hate popular things, especially
design related stuff that are mindlessly used by “the average people”.
When some fonts are used too much, they are perceived emotionally
different in the social context. Comic Sans would imply “bad taste” and
everyone knows immediately that you are not are well-trained designer.
Helvetica, on the other hand, means “tasteless” ‘’boring” and “playing
safe”. Partially due to these implications, Comic Sans and Helvetica are
generally not favored as much by contemporary designers.
Interestly, there is a revival of Comic Sans going on right now. The
Comic Sans Project includes some very impressive examples to use
Comic Sans the “right” way, which really emphasize its playfulness and
try to avoid some technical issues it may have. Overall, the conversation
around type showcases the awareness not only from within the design
community but also the general public, which is an achievement by
itself.