Wim Crouwel - Helvetica Movie

Dutch graphic designer Wim Crouwel talking in the Helvetica movie about using grids as a way of creating letterforms when designing typefaces. This is something I myself have been exploring (mainly using crazy geometric grids).

Dorsch Gallery identity

The following article/blog post has been taken from the Creative Review website, it was posted by Gavin Lucas, 29 March 2010. The blog post talks about the new identity/look for the US based art gallery, Dorsch. Designed by Bellamy Studio, the identity incorporates 3 overlooked fonts, Arial (regular and bold), Times (regular and italic), and Courier New (regular and bold). I personally thought you should only use no more than two fonts in a single design but Bellamy Studio shows exactly how you can intelligently put three fonts together that most designers would shy away from using.

While we haven't seen many sites that makes use of the @font-face CSS rule (which allows web designers to design sites using any font they want – providing they get the right licence), we've just seen an identity for a Miami art gallery that embraces three of the very typefaces that soon web designers won't have to rely on…

Bellamy Studio was asked by Dorsch Gallery to work with its exisiting logo (consisting of five blocks) and devise a new graphic identity system. The studio thus created a brand guidelines document for the gallery explaining how to (and how not to) use a set of three typefaces and logotype in the production of various documents such as letters, posters, promotional postcards and magazine ads. The gallery itself will apply these as it sees fit to its website in the coming weeks. The posters shown here are the first to be created by the gallery using its new brand guidelines...

The typefaces used in the identity are all web-safe system fonts that perhaps get overlooked by designers because of their ubiquity: Arial (regular and bold), Times (regular and italic), and Courier New (regular and bold). The identity also utilises a circular graphic device, lending posters for the gallery a clean, modernist look.

"The point is that this new identity is totally versatile and recognisable in its simplicity," explains Bellamy Studio's Andrew Bellamy. "The gallery had no consistency at all to their previous designs, each one was different so there was no brand recognition. With this new identity, an image can be in the circle, the circle can be an overlay solid on a full bleed image, the circle itself can be a photograph of a circle etc – it doesn't matter because the format and circle are consistent enough to keep the identity clear without becoming boring."

La Lorraine Typeface

La Lorraine is a font designed by French designer Philippe Apeloig. Along with Apeloig's other font Aleph, this has been given the motion graphic treatment. The reason why I am drawn to it is because of the simplicity of the design yet with many lines making up a single letter it is quite complex. You could imagine these designs becoming an interesting alternative to the fonts used on electric boards at railway stations.

^ visit website to see animation

ABF, Association des bibliothécaires de France

Philippe Apeloig's type design for the Association des bibliothécaires de France. I wish I knew what the ABF actually was unfortunately I don't speak French. Having said that, what I can comprehend is the application of type design for a range of mediums such as posters and brochures. Apeloig's work is something I can relate to when producing my own designs. He applies font design in an intelligent and creative way that attracts ones eye to the product (eg posters and brochures) but doesn't detract from the message or information given.

The Ecofriendly Font

The following article has been taken from The Guardian's website. The article discuses a font called Ecofont that aims to save the usage of ink without compromising design. Having read the article I believe there needs to be an increase in the design of fonts that take into consideration wider issues such as the effect of ink on the environment.

The following article was Posted by Tristan Parker, Monday 22 December 2008:

The ecofriendly font that saves on ink

Sometimes, life's simplest innovations can turn out to be the most useful: cats' eyes on roads, Post-it Notes, Velcro – the sorts of things that cause a sigh of frustration for not having thought of it yourself.

Embracing blissful simplicity as a creative aide, Dutch communications company Spranq have designed a new environmentally friendly font, that looks like this:

The Ecofont saves on printing ink by … well, using less of it. Letters in the freely downloadable typeface contain multiple small circular holes, meaning that each letter requires less ink to be printed. As the designers put it: "After Dutch holey cheese, there now is a Dutch font with holes as well." Quite.

Though rather striking, the typeface is wholly readable (no pun intended) and is, apparently, most effective at nine or 10 point. It's also sans serif, because, of course, the little flourishes on serif fonts will use up more ink when being printed.

Spranq claims that the Ecofont will reduce ink use by up to 20% - not bad for something that was developed over "lots of late hours (and coffee)".

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about the font is the question it raises: why hasn't anybody thought of this before? It appears to be one of those blindingly obvious innovations that simply slipped under the radar all this time.

As it's now widely accepted that printing should be minimised, there seems little reason as to why most homes and workplaces couldn't switch some or all of their printing to the new typeface, thus saving themselves some cash and doing the environment a small favour.

Obviously, the font shouldn't be viewed as a licence to print more than you normally would, however economical it may be. In fact, Spranq actively encourages printing as little as possible and "hopes to increase environmental awareness" through the Ecofont.

All right – a new typeface isn't going to solve the planet's problems, granted (and it might not be the best choice to use in a cover letter for that dream job), but surely innovative thinking like this is a positive step in conservation on any scale? I'll leave it to you to decide: the Ecofont – example of everyday genius or waste of valuable thinking time?

Gothic Horror book covers

Coraline Bickford-Smith is a senior cover designer at Penguin Books. Coraline directed these cover designs (see below) called Gothic Horror. Like the pervious post the designs are more illustrative than typographic, however I am always interested (as a typographer) how type can work in a non intrusive way alongside detailed or strong imagery.

Boys' Adventure Book Covers

The Boys' Adventure book covers were designed under the art direction of Coralie Bickford-Smith. A range of illustrators including Mark Thomas and Stephen Raw worked on the set of covers for Penguin.

Although these designs are more illustrative than typographic, I feel compelled to point out the use of colour in relation to each individual book working as a set/range. Using warm and inviting block colour not only grabs you're attention but you're affection. Each illustration is intricately detailed so it needs something such as a warm green to shout about the design.

The story of O in design

The following article has been taken from The Guardian website. The article discusses the importance of the letter 'o' and how it is iconic when it appears in the titles of films on film posters.

The following article was posted by John Crace, Wednesday 17th March 2010:

The story of O in design

The letter O has always provided designers with a bit of fun, especially in posters, but there's more to the vowel than that, says John Crace

To lexicographers it's just the 15th letter of the English alphabet. To designers it's a perfect shape for treatment: a world, a ball, a ring, a sun, a moon, a clock, a compass, a face. It's not even just a letter; it's a number, too – if zero counts as a number. It's a solid sphere or an empty circle.

A circle is a universal symbol. Or possibly myth; Plato argued the perfect circle only existed as a Form, something that we understand but never see; a circle in the real world is always merely an imperfect interconnection of adjoining dots. There again, the artist Giotto was reputed to be able to draw a perfect circle freehand.

The letter O first appears in the ancient Semitic languages of about 1000BC as the fricative consonant ain (eye). Some time later the Greeks morphed it into a vowel, and from there it slid seamlessly into the Roman alphabet. "It came to Britain around the 6th or 7th century when the Romans standardised Old English," says David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at the University of Wales. Yet even Crystal can't explain O's enduring popularity as an iconographic symbol. "Like the letter X it's one of the few letters that retains its shape in upper case and lower case and that, too, has multiple meanings," he suggests.

You'll see that none of the designs pictured here uses the same symbolic shorthand as Pauline Réage. There again, her Story of O, a minority-interest read of female sexual submission, is not to everyone's taste and the symbolic association of the O with the female genitalia no longer common currency – these days the O is more likely to be read as Objectification.

Curiously, this mutability is O's biggest problem. "It can mean so many things to different people," says Michael Johnson of johnsonbanks, one of the UK's leading design agencies, "that I rarely use it in my artwork. It's also a very self-contained, static shape, so it is quite limiting. It's what is adjacent to the O that signifies its meaning; Think of O2; it's the 2 that tells you the story."

Johnson also points out that the O is rarely the perfect circle of our imagination. Or Plato's perfect alphabet. "Only a couple of fonts make O a perfect circle as it makes the O look chubby on the page. Normally they are an oval. Check out your font. I bet it's an oval." He's right.

Still, whatever problems the O has, at least no one has tried to write it out of history. In a stunningly pointless exercise, in 1969 Georges Perec wrote an entire novel, A Void, without a single E. It's probably only a matter of time before O gets it in the neck. Ranges Are Nt The Nly Fruit, anyne?

Type Prints

The series of images below are part of a series of type experiments designed by Michael Chapman. The designs here and on his website appear much more linear than my own designs. The second typographic design explores the use of high impact colour which is something I am exploring within my own practice.

Bread&Butter Skincare

Typographer and illustrator Michael Chapman designed a custom typeface for Bread&Butter Skincare, a new range of mens care products. Chapman demonstrates how inventive type design can be applied to products that don't normally display this kind of design. Applying my own fonts or designing for commercially lead work like a range of mens care products has always seemed like a big no no to me. However having spoken to Michael personally and the realisation that I will eventually give in and do the occasional commercial design, it may not be such a bad thing judging by these designs.

In design terms, which manifesto gets your vote?

An article posted on the Guardian website on Wednesday 14 April 2010 contained a poll asking you to vote in design terms for the best manifesto given by Labor and the Conservatives. Personally I think both covers are disgustingly kitsch. The Labour Party manifesto looks like its trying to say the sun shines out of Gordon Brown's backside. The Tories haven't got it right ether opting for a boring serf typeface in uppercase. A proper graphic designer should have been given these jobs.

Off-topic post on typography and politics

Sticking with politics…

The following article was taken from the Guardian website posted by Michael Tomasky Thursday 12 November 2009. The article talks about the importance typography can have in relation to an election of government. Tomasky discusses the positive impact sans serif typefaces can have when sat next to serif fonts that can be perceived as old and dated.

Off-topic post on typography and politics

I was just reading this interesting post by John Holbo at Crooked Timber in which he describes a book review he wrote of a biography of a celebrated typographer whose name was new to me. Holbo quotes the man thus:

In the light of my present knowledge, it was a juvenile opinion to consider the sans serif as the most suitable or even the most contemporary typeface. A typeface has first to be legible, nay, readable, and a sans serif is certainly not the most legible typeface when set in quantity, let alone readable.

In time, typographical matters, in my eyes, took on a very different aspect, and to my astonishment I detected most shocking parallels between the teachings of Die neue Typographie and National Socialism and fascism. Obvious similarities consist in the ruthless restriction of typefaces, a parallel to Goebbel's infamous Gleichschaltung (enforced political conformity) and the more or less militaristic arrangement of lines.

Holbo then links to an older post he wrote about the poster for Obama's speech in the Tiergarten last year, showing a poster for the event. The post notes that a few right-wing bloggers tried to say at the time that it looked sort of fascist (a harbinger), but observes, correctly, that the type face used is in fact much more Bauhaus-ey and goes on to say that the Nazis banned Bauhaus typefaces like Futura as being a (unsurprisingly) "Jewish inventions." Nazis seem to have switched back and forth (bi-typographical, one might say), employing the strong sans serif in posters like this one but at other times relying on the well-known German-style script seen here.

The subject of typography and politics has long been an interesting one to me, and I've noted in recent elections in America that the Republicanshave gone relentlessly sans serif while Democrats tend toward the serif. See this Bush-Cheney sticker, for example, against this Kerry-Edwards. The same distinction repeated itself last year, although McCain-Palin's sans serif was far less aggressive than Bush-Cheney's, and the standard Obama-Biden serif sticker was a little less wimpy than Kerry's.

Is there typo-ideological consistency on your side of the pond?

Laser Type

Design studio Oscar & Ewan created this experimental typeface using a high powered laser pen and a couple of small mirrors. Spanish magazine NEO2 featured the type and offered a free download of photographic and vector versions. Oscar & Ewan demonstrate that you don't have to be limited to pen and paper when creating experimental fonts. The photographs below not only give a sense of how fun this would have been but also show how bouncing a laser beam off some mirrors can be quite tricky.