Posts tagged ‘type’

So I went to listen to a lecture by Laurie Haycock at Cranbrook a few weeks ago, and it was definitely interesting, but quite beautiful.  Most of the lecture she talked about the work she and her husband (Scott P. Makela) made together, and it was a tragic love story (Scott passed away very suddenly and she has been a widow for about 14 years now). 

One of her Husband’s greatest accomplishments that she touched on was the typeface he created, called Dead History.  It is licensed by Emigre and is a combination of serif and sans-serif typefaces.  Scott used this typeface a lot in his pieces, and I think it’s very innovative and has a unique style to it that cannot be recreated. 

Laurie seemed to focus a lot more on her husband’s work than her own, so below is one of the pieces her husband worked on.  She said he was very obsessed with using the ‘twirl’ tool when designing thing (as evident in the picture) and it was very forward-thinking and dynamic in their time. 

Lastly, one of the projects that Laurie and Scott were most proud of seemed to be the typeface used in the opening of Fight Club that some of their students actually created.  I’ve never seen Laurie or her husband’s work before going to this lecture so it was nice that she mentioned something that has a much wider audience and received a lot of fame (since everyone has heard of Fight Club!). 

Overall the lecture was very emotional since she definitely focused on the connection between her and her husband and how that affected the art they created.. They were great partners in life and in art and I am glad I went to the lecture and got to experience that.  It also helped me to realize that I should break out of my shell and indulge myself more into my work to create something original and dynamic rather than something that will please everybody. 

So I had an amazing spring break… one of the things I had the opportunity to do was to go to Signal Return Letter Press in Downtown Detroit and make some postcards… Below are a few of the ones I played around with.  I really got a thrill out of doing this all by hand, and it definitely makes you appreciate the craft a lot more since it’s very time-consuming and tedious.  I loved making this post cards and I definitely am more interested in hand-setting type and printing things the old-fashioned way!  Hopefully I’ll get to go back soon and make some more 🙂

Here’s a really cool post I found on the Design Observer site.  It talks about this German Book from the 17th Century that basically is just a compilation of different calligraphy styles applied to the alphabet.  What’s truly amazing is that each page gets more and more ornate.  The time it took to make these is probably ridiculous, and I definitely don’t have a steady enough hand to do something like this so I definitely respect and admire it!  Take a look. 

I think it gets to a certain point where some of these are borderline-beyond-legible, but amazing to look at nonetheless! 

I stumbled upon an article on Eye Magazine.com that talks about Monotype’s typographical adviser, Stanley Morison, who published an article about newspaper design (that I didn’t get to fully read yet). 

The quote next to this picture states “This cover photograph, probably conceived by Beatrice Warde, is the likely cause of the misconception that there was a typeface called ‘Times Old Roman’ prior to October 1932.  Before that year’s redesign The Times had used a version of Monotype Modern, which was adapted from a typeface created by the Edinburgh foundry Miller & Richards.” 

I think it’s just a cool looking poster and comes up with the idea of an ‘Times Old Roman’, even thought it never existed, yet you can clearly see the difference between the two typefaces. 

For our final project we essentially had to pull material from this blog and organize it and design a booklet.  We could use InDesign to set our text but that was it; everything had to be in black and white and we had to use paste-up techniques to put it together and we could not design the book in InDesign and then print the pieces and then paste them together since that would be cheating (although I used double-sided tape to save myself from the mess of spray adhesive :P) Here are my final paste-up pages before they were photocopied and bound into my final book (pics up later)

This truly is a genius design in my opinion.  Combining images and the simple letterform of an ampersand to basically state the title of the film without using any photographic images is impressive.  If you took away ‘Coffee and cigarettes’ at the bottom, after spending some time looking at it, one would be able to recognize that there is a coffee cup in the bowl of the ampersand and that the end of it resembles the butt of a cigarette.  This design is very simplistic yet imaginative since you really have to look at the form to understand what is being presented to you.  Also, the fact that the ampersand was most likely not altered to fit the images into it (such as it wasn’t skewed or twisted, etc) also adds to the fascination and beauty of this piece.  Also the use of a beige-type of background reminds you of the effect a coffee stain would have on a white table, or how the cigarette paper burns as you smoke it.  There’s a feeling of simplicity and sophistication in this piece since it makes you feel like all you need is some coffee and cigarettes (:

For ‘Supplement’ I was trying to portray the idea that a supplement is extra information, and not quite necessary.  I wanted to letters to have a basic skeleton that people can see and immediately recognize it as that letter, but I wanted extra information to help build up the letter (but also isn’t necessary to understand what letter it is).  I wanted this to be pretty clean and crisp, and most importantly SIMPLE. 

For ‘Sluggish’ I was trying to get at the idea that it is slow-moving, un-caring, and lazy.  I wanted to letters to be moving apart from each other, going from fast (or normal) to slow, and extremely slow.  I also wanted to letters to have an organic feeling since the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word ‘Sluggish’ is an actual slug, so I wanted to be sure the letters didn’t seem to digital or edgy. 

Another great example of hand-drawn lettering.  Not only do I like this because it’s done manually, but it’s extremely expressive.  It’s use of a calming, cool color and the vines sprouting out from all over the letter contrast the mechanical designs inside of the letter itself.  The letter just seems to burst into life and breaks all the rules and barriers that a typical letter should have.  I think this is great inspiration to how Typography can be extremely expressive, and you can essentially make it whatever you want it to be.