Week 1

 Grid Analysis Exercise

With Ellie, we analysed a book on Swedish design and came up with these specifications of the layout. We concluded that the grid had to be 12 columns as the copy spanned across half the page, thirds of the page and quarters. I'm still not that sure of modular grids at this stage though, and I don't easily recognise if a layout is using them or not.

Searching for the twentieth typeface

I began in the library, scouring through the latest Eye magazines as Fay recommended them as having lots of typeface advertisements, which they did. I found a lot that I like, but I think the catch will be how much they are and if they have been created within the last 10 years.

LL Blankenhorn is a family of three script fonts that emulate German lettering styles from the post-war era. It closely references the work of Fritz Blankenhorn (1921–2011) as in-house designer at Deutscher Bücherbund. His distinctive hand-lettering debuted beautifully on the cover of Max Frisch’s Homo Faber in 1957.

I really like this font, the hand drawn qualities of it speak to me but the font family costs $600.

Julien is a playful geometric display typeface loosely inspired by the early 20th century avant-garde. It is based on elementary shapes and includes multiple variants of each letter (over 1000 glyphs per style), as well as intelligent OpenType scripts that select glyphs to create the best word shapes. Julien is a unicase typeface in which upper case and lower case letters are mixed together.

The Julien Bold Mix is a font that I am super tempted to purchase regardless of this project as it is quite different from a lot of the standard typefaces we see. I like how it mixes upper and lower case, as it makes for a interesting visual, but this is definitely not a typeface to be chosen for readability!

Plotter is a massive type family that explores the world of technical drawings and architectural plans. Each subfamily reflects the characteristics of the various tools that inspired the project, tools from an age when technical diagrams were drawn and lettered by hand, and draftsmen needed a simple, efficient way to produce legible text that met established norms. Plotter has the simplified monolinear strokes with round terminals produced by technical pens, its letters reduced to their most basic stencilform elements: stems, arms, curves and diagonals.

We began the Obsidian project with two questions: can a decorated typeface pay homage to this tradition while being relevant to designers today, and what tools can we create to help us get there? Type design is still largely a manual art, and we felt the acute need for technical solutions to help us both explore our options through rapid prototyping, and execute successful ideas across the massive scale demanded by a contemporary typeface. Not content to be a set of decorated capitals, Obsidian would have 1,400 glyphs spanning both roman and italic styles, bringing its esprit to the most esoteric of punctuation marks and accents.

Other typefaces I wrote down to check out:

Heldane Display - Heldane & Sincerity/Irony

klim.co.nz

Inkwell Condensed - Hoefler & Co

typography.com

Empirica Headline Bold

frerejones.com

Colette - LuxTypo

Fenland

typography.net

My favourites so far are Julien and Obsidian, but Heldane is also lovely but not that out of the ordinary. I also like that klim is a New Zealand based type foundry.

Research into layout

It seems as though a lot of books and editorial design utilise one bright colour alongside a black and grey to show emphasis and bring some visual interest to the page without overdesigning. I included these two pages from an excerpt from an Eye edition where they discuss typefaces. The style reminded me of what we are doing for our book; discussing typefaces and showing examples of them.

This was an a5 booklet that folded out, found in the middle of an Eye magazine. I like the idea of this, you sort of stumble upon it and you can fully remove it from the book and open it out. Again, the designers have used a bright colour alongside a black and grey.

Research on typeface classifications

Scans from 'Encyclopaedia of Typefaces' by Jaspert, Berry and Johnson.

Scan from 'Type tells Tales' by Steven Heller and Gail Anderson.

Title: INTGRS

Design firm/agency: Dylan McDonough

Designer: Dylan McDonough

Year: 2014

I included this example of type as a much more expressive and visual thing because it inspired me for the design perhaps of the front cover, or maybe the twentieth typeface. I like how type can be used as a visual sometimes, while it says something too.

Research on sans serif and serif typeface pairing

Found in Eye magazine, a full page dedicated to Caslon.

Typewolf also ranks Calson as the most popular serif typeface.