Book Review ( thinking with type, Ellen Lupton)

My Christmas reading this break was "thinking with type" by Ellen Lupton. Sad I know, but a pleasure to read and pick up some new information along the way, John Baskerville had a mistress, well I never!

Anyway, below are some thoughts on the book. I recommend a read if only to disagree with me.

Overall concept of the book.

Using history as a guide, Lupton shows how letters and texts can influence the way we see a piece of design and how we can improve readability by following some basic rules. 

The book is also very rich on examples. Fonts familiar to most designers – or anyone in the field – are presented and described throughout the pages.  

History or Design Book?

This book is for both the Historians and technicians amongst us. If you are not into history and want to get straight to the technical part you might want to skip the first few pages, but by doing this you’ll miss the best part of the book, like when the author explains the reason of the terms uppercase and lowercase. Historical fact or plain curiosity, at least it helps to make the reader more comfortable with the subject.

Conclusion

From letters to text, grid layout to html, Thinking with Type is a book that explains the use of typography in different media and for different audiences. This may not be the ultimate guide to using type, but it will give you a great start to thinking with type, and I bet, during the first job after you have read it, you will refer back to it at least once.

TYPE (typographic terms)

In this post, I will show the main terms used to describe specific shapes used in the characters formation and their surroundings. These terms will be repeated throughout the posts I will add to this blog so you can always used it as a reference.

Terms

Ascender: Part of the character that extends above the baseline.

Bar: Or Cross Bar, is a horizontal stroke that crosses a character.

Baseline: Line where the type sits.

Bowl: Curved stroke that makes the counter area.

Cap Height: Height of a capital letter.

Counter: White space inside a letter.

Descender: Part of the character that extends below the baseline.

Ear: Upper stroke of a lowercase g.

Link: Stroke connecting upper and lower parts of a letter, as in the lowercase g.

Loop: Lower portion of a lowercase g.

Serif: Short line that extends from the main stroke.

Spine: Curved stroke of the letter S.

Stress: Direction of thickening on the curved stroke of a letter.

Stroke: Or Stem, is the main stroke of the character.

Terminal: The end of a stroke that does not end in serif.

X- Height: Height of a lowercase letter without ascenders or descenders.

If you are not sure what to buy me for Christmas

Make design history with scissors and glue

Set to bring joy to even the most hardened of graphic designers, a new book from Gestalten provides an illustrated history of graphic design, complete with cut-out-and-keep designers (Messrs Rand, Tschichold, Bass and Carson, shown above)...

With an all-star cast, Graphic Design History for Rainy Days, takes the reader on a gentle tour of the subject, courtesy of a time-travelling grandfather and his enquiring grandson. The book is designed by Studio 3, the in-school design agency at the Graphic Design Department of Westerdals School of Communication in Oslo.

As the pair journey from the time of the industrial revolution, right up to Jessica Helfand's mid-90s design studio (above), they meet everyone from Max Bill and Wim Crouwel, to Neville Brody (below, doing the talking) and Paula Scher in between.

Graphic Design History for Rainy Days is a charming take on the medium and, as is the current vogue (see our own paper toys posts and the figure that comes free with the current issue of CR), the book even contains a selection of cut-out designers, your own Bauhaus diploma, and a miniature Apple Macintosh that can be assembled in about 10 minutes, shown above.

This is one for the Christmas list.

Published by Gestalten; £17.99. gestalten.com.

Oh and also...

Those Olympic posters: some alternatives

Earlier this month, 12 posters by leading artists for the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics were unveiled to a largely skeptical public. Given the same brief, Kingston University students have come up with their own versions

Over the current term, I have been doing some lecturing with the third year students on Kingston University's graphic design and photography courses. A couple of weeks ago, following the release of the 2012 Olympics artists posters, course director Rebecca Wright and I asked the students if they would like to respond to the same briefy given the artists. We asked them for a personal response to the idea of the London Olympics and the intersection between art and sport. Here are their responses.

Leanne Bentley and Ben West came up with this cheeky and somewhat damning response to the artists involved with the official series: DNF stands for Did Not Finish, the ultimate Olympic fail.

For her poster, Ran Park overlayed images of athletes performing various sports to create this beautiful composition.

A lot of the student responses were quite critical or dubious about the supposed benefits of the Games coming to London. Here Libby Wimble compares LOCOG's ambitions to those of a Stalinist Five Year Plan: presumably she feels they have as little basis in reality as each other. The background to the poster is made up of 250,000 tiny tractors.

Rosie Palmer and Helen Ferguson were also dubious, focusing on the terrorism threat

Tamara Elmallah was concerned about all the overcrowding the games will bring to the Tube, overlaying an image of spectators rendered in all the Olympic colours until it becomes a brown sludge of humanity

And Alice Tosey wants us all to 'mind the gap'

And Paul Chanthapanya points to the insidious nature of sponsorship at the Games

While Stephen Messham points out that suffering in the world will not go away just because the Games are in town

Others, though, chose a more positive view. Benji Roebuck and Clara Goodger created their poster from the word for 'hello' in the languages of competing nations, allowing the ink from one word to run into another suggesting the coming together of different nations at the Games.

Coming together is also the theme of Jo Hawkes' poster

And this cut paper piece by Fred North

Hannah Parker had a neat idea for a digital display in which segments would gradually appear over a period of time running up the opening of the Games until the image was completed

TYPE (type Categories)

Knowing the terms and characteristics of these groups can help you in the process of selecting the appropriate type for your project.

The number of type categories can vary according to the source, bibliography or point of view of the author. Here are 7 basic categories.

Old Style

The Old Style types are commonly used in the body of printed text due to its appearance and readability. They have serifs and are characterised by having a gentle transition between the thick and thin strokes and the stress is always diagonal.
Some examples of Old Style types are: Times New Roman, Palatino, Garamond and Centaur.

Modern

Modern typefaces have serifs and a strong vertical stress line. They display an elegant feeling. Its readability is not always great though due to the contrast between the strokes. Some examples of Modern types are: Bodoni, Didot and Onyx.

Slab Serif

Slab Serif types originated from the advertising business after the Industrial Revolution. The main characteristic of these types are the thick (slab) horizontal serifs. There is often very little, sometimes no, transition between the thin and thick strokes, and the stress is vertical (if any). It is very common to see this group of type being used on webdesign nowadays. Some examples of Slab Serif types are: Memphis, Clarendon and New Century Schoolbook.

Sans Serif

Sans serif types are the ones without serif (“sans” = french for “without”). They became popular when the Bauhaus school of design was formed. They have almost no transition between strokes and have a large x-height. Some examples of Sans Serif types are: Futura, Arial, Tahoma and Helvetica.

Grunge

These types, also called Distressed or Fringe, are distorted, trashy and heavily manipulated. Some examples of Grunge types are: Rapture, Fragile and Amoebia Rain.

Scripts

Script types are easy to spot – they resemble handwriting. Some examples of Script types are: Minstral, Snell and Poppl Exquisit.

Decorative

These types are created for a specific purpose of emphasise the content. They are also called Ornamented or Novelty. Some examples of Decorative types are:Circus, Gypsy Rose and Baileywick.

Neville Brody interview

NOVUM – MAKING OF COVER

The guys at Paperlux teamed up with Carolin Rauen & Max Kuehne to produce this brilliant graphic design publication. Novum.

What makes this design that special, is the amount of thought that obvious went into creating the various patterns on each publication. Each small triangle, has a different shade of colour which has an overall impact on the entire design. For me, this is one main aspect that I absolutely love!

The video has also been beautifully made. You really get an inside of what it would of been like throughout the process of this publication. I always find publication such as Novum, very exciting and fresh to look at. Not to mention, very inspirational.
Pictures below.

Babels Library (part 3)

It has been a while since I looked at this, but due to some interest from an outside source, I am back on it.

It is only halfway through, and I think it is a little fast still. I have to make it a little uncomfortable to listen too, to maintain the inaccessible theme. Once finished, it has to be recorded on an obsolete medium such as cassette tape, anyway, lets see how it goes.

2012 olympic posters

A host of British artists, including Bridget Riley, Tracey Emin, Martin Creed, Rachel Whiteread, and Bob and Roberta Smith, have designed posters to celebrate the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Any gold medal winners?
The posters were unveiled at Tate Britain in London along with the programme for the London 2012 Festival. The full list of contributing artists are Fiona Banner, Michael Craig-Martin, Martin Creed, Tracey Emin, Anthea Hamilton, Howard Hodgkin, Gary Hume, Sarah Morris, Chris Ofili, Bridget Riley, Bob and Roberta Smith, and Rachel Whiteread.

The images will go on show in a free exhibition as part of the London 2012 Festivalnext summer and they will also be used as part of a high profile campaign to promote the 2012 Games.

Posters (£7 each) will be available to buy from 3pm today via london2012.com/shop. Limited edition prints will also be for sale individually and as a boxed set from Counter Editions who can be emailed on london 2012@countereditions.com for more details.

In 1972, the organisers of the Munich Olympics ran a similar (and very successful) enterprise. Like these posters, artists were asked to respond to the idea of the games and celebrate them, not produce pieces of visual communications promoting the games per se. You can see the posters produced (by the likes of Josef Albers, David Hockney and Max Bill)  here

The genius of everyday things

Where would we be without the little heroes that underpin our everyday lives? Could you be bothered to brew leaf tea five times a day or fish the beans out of your morning coffee?

Hidden Heroes: The Genius of Everyday Things is an innovative new exhibition giving the spotlight to the miniature marvels we couldn’t live without.

The featured inventions are presented alongside original sketches and drawings by their inventors, patent specifications and original advertisements. The exhibition reveals the efforts made to establish each product, as well sharing quirky titbits of information such as Napoleon’s role in the evolution of the tin can and the connection between a descending plane and bubble wrap.

'At a time when celebrity is king, it gives all of us at the Science Museum enormous satisfaction to celebrate the truly uncelebrated and shine a light on a group of outstanding inventions and inventors, revealing the supposedly mundane to be nothing short of remarkable.’  Dr Susan Mossman, materials science specialist at the Science Museum.

http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/visitmuseum/galleries/hidden_heroes.aspx

If I where an icon

5 minute exercise using Otl Aicher grid. 3rd year students giving very different ideas of what they would want their desktop icon to be. Some showing little imagination!

Win Crouwel

In 1963, he was one of the founders of the design studio Total Design (currently named Total Identity). From 1964 onwards, Crouwel was responsible for the design of the posters, catalogues and exhibitions of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. In 1967 he designed the typeface New Alphabet, a design that embraces the limitations of the cathode ray tube technology used by early data display screens and phototypesetting equipment and thus only contains horizontal and vertical strokes. Other typefaces from his hand are Fodor and Gridnik. In 1970 he designed the Dutch pavilion for Expo '70 (Osaka, Japan). A design of Crouwel that is well known in the Netherlands is that of the Number Postage Stamps for the Dutch PTT (in circulation from 1976–2002).

In the years Crouwel was working for Total Design, he designed many geometric wordmarks, one of which is the wordmark for the Rabobank, designed in 1973. The lettershapes have been influenced by the fact that the wordmark had to be used as a 3D light box. After the 3D application was finalized, the 2D design for print was adapted from it.

kylebean.co.uk

A Brighton based designer specialising in hand crafted models, set design and art direction. Since graduating in 2009, has worked across a variety of platforms including installations, window displays, editorial and advertising.

kylebean.co.uk

Rubbish poster

Pangrams for our time

A pangram (Greek: παν γράμμα, pan gramma, "every letter"), or holoalphabetic sentence, is a sentence using every letter of the alphabet at least once.

Modern takes on the 'Quick brown fox' type designer's pangram referencing the August riots are among the works on show at an exhibition of new projects from the Mill Co creative community

The three Modern Pangrams, which were written by Matt Gibbins and Eddy Hall, designed by Darren Hughes and art directed by Mike Hughes, add a modern flavour to the traditional type specimen (though, as RayMans has pointed out in the comments below, two of them appear to be missing the letter 'y').

They were created in response to a brief set by Mill Co for its second annual exhibition, put together in association with Monotype Imaging. Mill Co's community of illustrators, designers, writers, photographers, art directors and artists were given three Monotype fonts, Akko, Neue Haas Grotesk and Rotis II, and asked to do with them what they like – re-draw them, illustrate them, set them on fire, anything.

Around 30 artists responded and their work will appear at the exhibition which opens on October 14 at the Mill Co Project gallery space, Lime Wharf, Vyner St, London E2.

BT Vision rebranded by Man vs Machine and Proud Creative

BT Vision, the TV-on-demand service offered by BT to BT Total Broadband customers, has just undergone a graphic rehaul, courtesy of ManvsMachine in collaboration with Proud Creative.

Charged with developing a new identity package for the BT Vision service, Manvs Machine and Proud came up with the idea of creating a V-shaped portal that while representing the V of Vision is also a play button. This device can adapt different colours to represent the different genres of content available – and also adopt different behavioural traits in motion idents - it can float, bounce, skip and jump etc. Here are some of the idents created for the service, three of which (Bubbles, Paint, and Powder) were shot by photographer Jason Tozer:

"We developed the ‘portal’ as a multi-functional logo icon derived from the theory and principles of light refraction," says Mike Alderson, creative director at ManvsMachine. "It reinforces the ‘V’ of Vision, effortlessly becomes a play button synonymous with on-demand and acts as the window through which all content can be projected and represented."

While ManvsMachine worked on the filmed and animated idents, Proud Creative worked on the graphic design elements of BT Vision's new identity, including the logos, a typeface and colour palette for the identity.

Don't look in the pantone book for a red, go to the park.

They are at it again.

This time there is a theme. What makes you happy:)