viz. - typography

In Your (Type)Face: Part I

Jenn Shapland — Wed, 09 Apr 2014 19:16:23 +0000

I'm in the midst of the (long) process of building a digital magazine called Covered with Fur for Austin small press A Strange Object. This week I'm choosing typefaces, which, as one editor puts it, is a "vertigo-inducing" prospect, especially on the web. As I research and test various webfonts, I'm struck by a) how many exist, b) how many ugly and/or illegible fonts there are, and c) how little I know about type design and type designers in the digital age. I mean, I watched Helvetica, just like everyone else, but I don't put nearly enough thought into the people who design the typefaces I use regularly (which include, of late, Times, Helvetica Neue, occationally Didot, if I'm feeling fancy; I used to be strictly Garamond, but I grew out of that, thank God).

My first question: what typefaces, if any—old or new—are designed by women?

Image via Wikimedia Commons

Here's what I've found out. Several of the fonts in your word processor were likely designed in the 1990s by Carol Twombly, who created Trajan, Myriad, and Adobe Calson while working for Adobe Systems. The omnipresent Mrs Eaves, a "sensitive revival" of Baskerville for the screen, and Filosofia, a web version of Bodoni, were designed by Zuzana Licko in 1996. And perhaps most recognizably, Kris Holmes co-designed the Lucida system with Charles Bigelow. Today there are some extremely awesome lady type designers working on new fonts that often have a vintage appeal, like Veronika Burian and Laura Meseguer (whose kickass Magasin is pictured below).

If you're interested, you can read a great interview in which Yale School of Art's Director of Graphic Design (and first tenured female professor o_0) offers an answer to the question at the heart of my inquiry: "What does it mean to be a female designer in a mostly male institutional history and culture?" This question (plus my follow-up: "What does it mean that most typefaces, print and digital, that we read and type have been created by male type designers?") will guide my viz. series on contemporary typography.

Image via Laura Meseguer's artist portfolio

Though typography might seem fairly innocuous, the overlap between the age of advertising and the rise of digital media—plus the increasing amount of time spent in front of screens covered in type—means that how words and numbers look has huge implications. As Walter Ong has it, "Typography...made the word into a commodity." Making language visual and standardized (for most of print history, this process involved casting the letters themselves in lead, i.e. movable type, though today it means drawing them on graphic design software) makes it concrete—or concrete-seeming—and makes it harder to think of language as a fluid, dynamic, creative process wrought by use.

By removing words from the world of sound where they had first had their origin in active human interchange and relegating them definitively to visual surface, and by otherwise exploiting visual space for the management of knowledge, print encouraged human beings to think of their own interior conscious and unconscious resources as more and more thing-like, impersonal and religiously neutral. Print encouraged the mind to sense that its possessions were held in some sort of inert mental space.

If you're like me and you're just diving into the wide world of typeface design, here's an animated video primer that may be of use.

*Shoutout to Jake Cowan for having Ong ready to hand.

Type Directors Club

micklethwait — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 21:43:21 +0000

After putting together my own rudimentary bibliography on graphic design, an old acquaintance posted a link on Facebook to this bibliography of around 50 books on typography at the Type Directors Club.

Plenty of summer reading.

“The Girl Effect” typographic video

John Jones — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:55:37 +0000

Here’s another hybrid proposal argument / introductory video, the likes of which I think are perfect for rhetoric classrooms. It was produced by girleffect.org:

While it is certainly possible to disagree with parts of the argument here, I think this format is fascinating. This emerging genre of public discourse is something that rhetoric instructors should be teaching their students to create.

via Information Aesthetics

Obama's Design

LaurenMitchell — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 05:31:15 +0000

As far as design goes, Obama has already won the presidency according to this New York Times article.

Apparently continuity in design is crucial to a campaign in the same way that a consistent message is, and Obama has been out-doing McCain and Clinton at least in this arena. Branding expert Brian Collins says that “From the bold ‘change’ signs to their engaging Web site to their recognizable lapel pins, [the Obama campaign has] used a single-minded visual strategy to deliver their campaign’s message with greater consistency and, as a result, greater collective impact.” Obama is also able to send a coherent message via the multitude of different media sources that we’re using today. It doesn’t stop there though--even Obama’s font is hip.

He’s using Gotham, which is modeled after the font used on signs at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City. According to Collins, it has a “blunt, geometric simplicity” but also manages to be “warm.” I don’t know about all that, but it looks good to me.

I also found it interesting that he’s been able to personalize his brand through the use of state-specific buttons that fuse a state’s abbreviation letters with his familiar “O” symbol.

I agree with Collins in that it’s appropriate for a man who is clearly in tune with the power of rhetoric to also understand the power of visual rhetoric and design.

Making type taste good: Typographics

John Jones — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 17:39:15 +0000

This short film by Boca and Ryan Uhrich provides an introduction to typography while illustrating some of the possibilities of typographic videos.

via information aesthetics