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Form, Function, and Fonts: Eric Gill’s Branding Type

Rachel Schneider — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 06:03:09 +0000

Eric Gill’s illustrated 1931 The Four Gospels of the Lord Jesus Christ According to the Authorized Version of King James I may be the most beautiful text in the Harry Ransom Center’s King James Bible exhibition. Gill, who was a graphic designer, a sculptor, and a firm Catholic, melded his minimalist design aesthetics with Catholic art’s gilded tradition to make what the Library of Congress calls “a modern homage to the tradition of illuminated text.” Gill’s black and white figures, however, dance around the elegant typeface to create a Catholicism aesthetically rebranded for the twentieth century: sparse but still striking.

(Slightly NSFW after the break.)

Image Credit: Wandering the Dream Space

The rationale for Gill’s design choices can perhaps be understood in his Essay on Typography, which was first published the same year as the Four Gospels:

It is now clearly understood that modern building must not rely upon ornament, it must rely simply upon grandeur, that is integrity and size. There are things which can be measured; with these alone can the modern architect, employing the modern workman, concern himself. Of beauty there need be no lack, for the beautiful is that which pleases being seen, and those things are pleasing when seen which are as nearly perfect as may be in their adaptation to function. Such is the beauty of bones, of beetles, of well-built railway arches, of factory chimneys (when they have the sense to leave out the ornamental frills at the top), of the new concrete bridge across the Rhine at Cologne, of plain brick walls. (8-9)

Reading this against the Gospels, what strikes me is Gill’s interest in form and function. He writes here that beauty comes not from ornament but from forms adapted best to function—thus, why “plain brick walls” may be beautiful, but perhaps not jewel-encrusted objet d’art. Typography, however, has different functions than a chimney. As Christopher Micklethwait has previously discussed on viz, graphic design concerns itself with typography, layout, and chromatics. The New Typography, represented by Jan Tschichold as well as Eric Gill, concerned itself with clarity instead of beauty. If text’s designed function is clarity and legibility, Gill’s designs do not get in the way of reading—in fact, they enhance and draw attention to text as his characters sometimes seem to perch over the letters. The iconographic figures resonate with a medieval religious tradition, but the design avoids being overly florid.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

This illustration is particularly interesting as the major figure’s alignment with the downstroke of the N draws our attention to the word—both the one on the page and The Word of the Gospels. Also running parallel is the squiggly line of the snake, climbing towards the innocent Adam and Eve, who almost seem to greet the fall awaiting them. In this way, Gill’s design highlights the function of the text: to bring the reader to a greater appreciation of Christianity.

Image Credit: Wandering the Dream Space

However, Gill’s designs are not without art. As a Catholic in the mode of Hilaire Belloc, Gill’s designs also provide an interpretive gloss. The starkness of Jesus being taken from the cross invokes not the Second Vatican Council but a much more medieval tradition. It also doesn’t seem coincidental that Gill’s famous Gill Sans typeface has effectively served to brand other organizations, like Penguin Books’ famous paperback designs.

Image Credit: William Wu Books

Gill Sans also has power as a nationalistic British brand, as the BBC has used Gill Sans in its logo since 1997.

Image Credit: The BBC

Martin Lambie-Nairn, the designer responsible for the new logo, redesigned the BBC logo not only because the slanted letters used previously did not transfer well to pixels, but because “by choosing a typeface that has stood the test of time, we avoid the trap of going down a modish route that might look outdated in several years’ time.” As a brand that attempts to be associated with solidity and seeks the trust of its viewers, it seems a good choice on the BBC’s part. However, it leaves me to wonder how the University of Texas at Austin's and the Harry Ransom Center’s type brands them.

Image Credit: The Harry Ransom Center

The Harry Ransom Center’s classic logo not only conveys a certain stylish solidity but also includes its windows and its materials as a design element alongside the font. By putting Gill’s lettering not only in its exhibitions but also on their windows, the Harry Ransom Center nods to Gill’s design legacy and its value for research institutions today.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Wandering Christians and Illustration in the Biblical Tradition

Rachel Schneider — Wed, 28 Mar 2012 18:27:48 +0000

Image Credit: Posters 555

All those who wander are not lost—in fact, wandering is sometimes the point. I did a little of this while touring the Harry Ransom Center’s new exhibit on The King James Bible: Its History and Influences. I particularly enjoyed examining the numerous visuals on display: exquisite Jacob Lawrence and William Blake illustrations, colorful posters for The Ten Commandments and David and Bathsheba, and patterns for Robert DeNiro’s Biblical tattoos in Cape Fear. While some might oppose word and image, the Harry Ransom Center’s combination of both in a single exhibit highlights illustration’s importance within the King James Bible and the wider biblical tradition. Visual illustrations, which once served to transmit biblical stories before widespread literacy or vernacular bibles, work hand in hand with the Bible’s narrative techniques—specifically, Jesus’s parables in the Gospels. In this post, I’d like to briefly consider how one major biblically-inspired text—John Bunyan’s novel Pilgrim’s Progress—incorporates visual illustration to complement its narrative parable, and how tropes of wandering in particular reoccur in both kinds of illustration.

Image Credit: Strawdogs

The image above (of which a slightly larger version is available here) is a frontispiece for the 1833 edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress, to which is prefixed the Life of the Author, with a Key to the Allegory, and a Critique on its Beauties. The Pilgrim’s Progress, an allegory originally printed in 1678, tells the story of Christian, a man who leaves home for a journey to the Celestial City. On the way there, he gets waylaid in variously places—mostly famously, Vanity Fair. According to the University of Texas’s library catalog entry for the book, the frontispiece was tipped in, which means that the illustration was a loose page incorporated into a bound volume. The image, called “Plan of the road from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City,” was originally published by George Virtue, who made his reputation producing illustrated books. While frontispieces generally depict specific incidents or characters from the text (like the frontispiece to Gulliver’s Travels, which presents Lemuel Gulliver to his readers), the “Plan” does not merely serve as précis for the text. This picture, like the Key to the Allegory and the Critique on its Beauties, glosses the Progress’ meaning.

The “Plan of the road” presents a visual representation of Christian’s path to salvation. It shows all of his stops along the way, including the Slough of Despond and the Hill of Difficulty. Yet the illustrator does not draw the path as a straight line—he instead illustrates it as a spiral. But here, the spiral’s direction moves inward, not outward. As Christian wanders in his journey, even at moments when he feels lost, he continually draws closer to his intended destination. Bunyan’s allegory and the accompanying illustration suggest that all Christians approach salvation, even if they stray off the preferred path. This message appears several times in the Bible, specifically in Luke 15 where Jesus recounts the parables of the lost sheep and the prodigal son.

As recorded in the King James Bible, the prodigal son leaves his father’s house and “waste[s] his substance in riotous living. When he is in need, however, he remembers his father’s beneficence:

“I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants. And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. … the father said to his servants, Bring forth the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet: And bring hither the fatted calf, and kill it; and let us eat, and be merry: For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found. And they began to be merry.” (Luke 15:18-24)

When the Pharisees object to Jesus’s communion with sinners, he uses this parable to illustrate the message that God accepts those who return to him, even if they might spend all before then. God’s compassion celebrates the return of the wasteful son: “he was lost, and is found.” This language, transformed by a late eighteenth-century poet into a famous English hymn, directly sets the two states in relation—being lost doesn’t mean you can become found. While the King James Bible contains no visual illustrations, embedded in the text are images in words that have the same effect. Jesus argues his meaning through recourse to illustrations, just like the owner of this copy of Pilgrim’s Progress.

Image Credit: The Blake Archive

What this exhibit highlights for me is that while there is a rich tradition of images in the biblical tradition—as the exhibition carefully demonstrates with hieroglyphic Bibles and frontispieces like the “Plan,” the King James Bible appears within the rise of a hard-line Protestant movement, in which particularly strict sects like the Puritans interpreted the Bible’s commandment against worshipping false idols as critiquing practices of visual representation. Eamon Duffy’s excellent histories The Stripping of the Altars and The Voices of Morebath record how the Henrician Reformation removed artistic aspects of worship—including altar pieces and stained-glass windows—from churches to implement Protestantism. Duffy’s work explains how worshippers adapted Catholic traditions to new religious dictates which threatened communal forms of worship like feast days. While the Bible embeds illustration within its text, it has often been perversely read as against the visual. Perhaps what the Harry Ransom Center’s exhibit shows best is that binaries of word and image collapse into each other—while images of word are not processed by the brain in the same way, both kinds of illustration carry powerful rhetorical effects.

The opinions expressed herein are solely those of viz. blog, and are not the product of the Harry Ransom Center.

Storytelling in Motion: Jacob Lawrence's "The First Book of Moses, Called Genesis. The King James Version."

Ty Alyea — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Lawrence, no. 1: ("In the Beginning--All was Void") Image From: Bill Hdoges Gallery

Replete with bright flashes of color, the "Genesis" series of Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), currently on display on the back wall of the Harry Ransom Center's King James Bible exhibition, pulled me in like a tractor beam from across the room. It is perhaps only appropriate, then, that the subject of this series is an enthralling spectacle of storytelling and creation.Though Lawrence is perhaps best known for his "Migration Series," a sixty-panel retelling of the African-Americans' migration across the United States, Lawrence's comparatively short (8 panel) portrayal of the narration of Genesis deserves attention for its ability to express a powerful sense of motion in a single place.

Lawrence, no. 2 "(And God Created Day and the Night and God put Stars in the Sky")

Image from: Savannah College of Art and Design

As the Savannah College of Art and Design tells us, Lawrence based his paintings on his memory of Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr.'s sermons at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, New York. Throughout the sequence, we can see that while the setting remains the same, the preacher's sermon literally transports the parishoners around the room, and, seemingly through space as well. The world outside appears to totally change, filling in from the "Void" pictured above and yielding to a rich world of plenty.

Lawrence, no. 4 ("And God Said -- let the Earth bring Forth Grass, Trees, Fruits and Herbs") Image from: Savannah College of Art and Design

As we move through the images, we can see how the preacher's expressive motions remain at the front and center of the image, capturing a sense of direct inspiration from above and radiating from the text itself. The shifting colors of his cloak, the flower vase near him, and the room itself capture a feeling of constant transformation as well. We also notice gradual changes in the arrangement of the congregation. Enthralled by the story being told, we see the congregation shifting their seats, sometimes staring at the preacher, sometimes looking up to the heavens, and on other occassions looking out the window. The neighborhoods of Harlem were in fact a major influence for Lawrence's artistic motiffs and color schemes, and their arrays of clothing, frequently synchs up with the varieties of colors inside the church and outside the windows.

Lawrence, no. 5: ("And God created all the fowl of the air and the fishes of the sea") Image from: Savannah College of Art and Design

Another significant image that we can trace throughout the images is a small box filled with tools.

Lawrence: nos. 6 ("And God Created all the Beasts of the Earth") and 7 ("And God Created Man and Woman") Images from Savannah College of Art and Design

As the images progress, we see the box behind and next to the pews (visible at the very top in image 6 and at the rear of the pew in image 7). But in the final image (below), which places the entirety of the congregation near the window showing a completed creation, the box sits in front of the group of parishoners.

Lawrence, no. 8. ("The Creation was done--and all was good") Image from Savannah College of Art and Design

This shift, I suggest points to the passing of the torch from God to the people. With his work completed, it's time for people do their own work as they look at the feast of plentitutde and creation before them. In doing so, Lawrence demonstrates a legacy between the holy text, its mediator, with the community's sense of common purpose.