The Divide Between Type and Art

As Graphic Designers, our eyes are honed to dissection type and design. While typography remains a field of it’s own within Graphic Design, the integration of type and design comes hand in hand in many cases. One field we can see its prevalence in is music.

Starting with the Beatle’s “dropped T” Logo in 1963, which like most great works was discovered by accident, music albums have incorporated typographic elements into their artwork, and vice versa. This can be said for many genres, but it seems no more prevalent anywhere than in black metal album covers, where the type ranges from unreadable to offending as designers.

Averse Sefire

Aborted

Gutted

Dissection

This is only the tip of the iceberg that is the integration of art and typography in music, but shifting focus to a much more common field for us all is logo design. You can see more clearly than others the integration of artwork into the type. Thankfully for this portion of the blog, the focus of this field is readability. Integration is subtle, sometimes so much so it gets lost in the type.

Tour de France – The our in Tour becomes a man riding a bike

FedEx – Space between E and x makes an arrow

Goodwill- the Face makes the G

Covering this leaves me with one field I cannot ignore any further. While it isn’t a popular subject, Graffiti Art is the embodiment of outsider artwork and typography. For many people graffiti conjures images of curse words, gang signs, and badly drawn vulgar imagery, and while this is true in some cases, for the most part graffiti artists shape, distort, and create their own type in attempts of making a noticeable, readable, and aesthetically pleasing piece. This ranges from “hand styles” that look no more than a signature, to a 2-story mural that takes months to complete.

Bread & Bruiser – “Wicket” hand style

“Saber” – L.A. River piece

Tumblr's Amateur Type Graphics

With the help of the internet, we've become inundated with examples upon examples of graphic design and typography. The internet provides us with unlimited access to a completely free and virtually bottomless design reference library, meaning that you don't necessarily need to be a student at a design school to study it. It's also fairly easy for one to acquire Photoshop, along with Photoshop tutorials and do-it-yourself videos. These developments have led to a fascinating phenomenon: Non-designers are beginning to tackle type-driven graphics. 

Like many young nerdy people, I have a little bit of a Tumblr addiction. I spend a good deal of my free computer time scrolling through the blogosphere. Initially I thought of surfing Tumblr as a way to detox after finishing up a long day of design work, as its content is mostly bad hipster photography and screengrabs, gifs, and fanart of TV shows and movies, rather than menu layouts, posters about homelessness or articles about grids. However, I've begun to notice that design is becoming more and more prevalent amid the nerding-out and fangirling.  

I've included a few examples of type-based graphics I've come across on Tumblr. I dug a little into the original posters' blogs to make sure that, no, none of them are graphic designers or graphic design students. Obviously everybody making these graphics is interested in visual art in some capacity, or they wouldn't devote their time and thought to it. The majority of the people who made the graphics I'm posting are teenagers, between 15 and 17. That in and of itself is pretty interesting, because it means there are young people out there who are really paying attention. I've also got a musician, a historian and a few English majors thrown in there somewhere.

Kato, ebonhawking, 20, The Walking Dead

 Valentina, honeybeeblaine, 17, Glee

Izzy, smokelock, 15, Sherlock

Valentina, honeybeeblaine, 17, Supernatural

Nadin, tardis-impala, Doctor Who

Rikke, mydearchevy, 28, Historian, Supernatural

Juliana, jonhwatsons, Sherlock

 Kaity, singlikeamonkey, "currently in college," Musician, Doctor Who

Noelle, accioloki, Les Miserables

Katie, rumplestiltskin, 16, Harry Potter "sometimes I try and photoshop..."

Justine, caulfields, 17, Sherlock "I have an abusive relationship with photoshop."

Isa, samwiseg, 18, The Hobbit

And here's a compilation of many, many, MANY more!

Hangul

Often times in class we study the creation of letter forms and typefaces, but today I wanted to take a broader view of typography and explore the creation of an entire writing system. The writing system in particular that I wanted to talk about is the Korean alphabet, called Hangul. I've had a fascination with learning different languages my whole life and this year I began learning Korean. What interested me instantly when I started to learn Korean was that the alphabet was very uniquely designed. Hangul, created by King Sejong in 1444, is a featural alphabet, which is an alphabet wherein the shapes of the letters are not arbitrary, but encode phonological features of the phonemes they represent. Numerous linguists have praised Hangul, describing it as "remarkable", "the most perfect phonetic system devised", and "brilliant, so deliberately does it fit the language like a glove." Let's take a look at how it works:

Because of this unique and innovative design, Hangul is one of the most easy to learn alphabets in the world, which is why Korea has a nearly 100% literacy rate.

Here is a link I thought was interesting where you can learn more about global writing systems: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2010/05/18/the-beauty-of-typography-writing-systems-and-calligraphy-of-the-world/

A L L  G R O W N  U P 
A  new  look  at  the animal  alphabet 

 

 

 

As designers we can all relate the visual language. Many can agree that we have been speaking that language for as long as we can remember. One of my earliest memories of being excited about design was the animal alphabet. Maybe some of you have forgotten how incredible it was seeing animals in the shape of letter forms! I wanted to take us all for a stroll down our own personal typographic histories. Part of being a designer is keeping our minds young and elastic. As serious as we take ourselves sometimes, we have to remember that not-so-deep down we remain those little kids EXCITED about seeing animals in the forms of letters. Nonetheless we are older now and I wanted to show grown-up typographic animals to inspire us to remember that in design anything can be — anything. Hope you are inspired!

 

This first collection is the majority of the alphabet illustrated by Casey Girard. She is a freelance designer from Massachusetts. She primarily focuses on illustration and her animal alphabet is by far her most famous collection of work. Here she molds every letter into the form of the animal or animals that start with the letterform. They are beautifully done in colored pencil and watercolor and feel very realistic. 

 

The second collection is by designer Dan Fleming from Melbourne Australia. Fleming illustrates each animal using type. Instate of the animal making the letter form, Fleming spells out each animal while illustrating the animal at the same time. I enjoyed his simple, yet smart decisions in creating these fun creatures!

Lastly, this poster done by the Nutmegaroo Design Studio integrates both image and type. Some letterforms are more animalistic than others, but mostly every letter shows part of the original letter and partly illustrated.

Presidential Typefaces

Presidential races are not only defined by the candidates they are also defined by the imagery and typography used.  One such campaign that is all still familiar to us are the Obama 2008 and 2012 campaigns.

Gotham

Gotham is the trademark font of the Obama campaign and now will be forever known as a presidential typeface. What I found interesting is how a typeface can take on more or a different meaning if it is used in a presidential race.

Whitney, Mercury

Mascot, Revolution Gothic

Also I found it interesting that in more current presidential races more typographical hierarchy is being used in advertising and campaigning. I think this is an interesting move in that although they are still political ads they can still be simple elegant and beautiful.

Franklin Gothic

Franklin Gothic, Futura

ITC Garamond

Franklin Gothic, Futura

Also in my research I came across these old buttons and I thought it was interesting how typography was used differently in the 1960's and the 1970's during elections. I also found the typography on this buttons to be much more iconic. All in all political typography can tell you a lot about the candidate and what they are trying to portray.

Here are some links I found to some other really great blog posts about the subject.

http://fontsinuse.com/tags/772/2012%20presidential%20campaign( Also great for looking up typefaces used on certain things )

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2008/01/27/what_font_says_change/

So You Want to Design a Typeface?

Type @ Cooper @ Titlecase from Matthew Wyne on Vimeo.


Matthew Wyne is a designer from San Francisco who decided to have a go at designing his first typeface at Cooper Union's rigorous type program in NYC. Although some typefaces have taken years to design and perfect (or lifetimes, considering some pre-computer type designers) Matt chose to design a typeface in just 6 weeks in Cooper's accelerated type design program.

This video is an in-depth look at the tedious but educating and rewarding process of diving into what it takes to design a typeface that's built for text size, not just display size. To quote Matt, "Everyone can design a display face, if you can design a typeface that can be set at 9pts for 250pgs, you know what your doing."

I personally learned a bunch just from watching this speech, although it's not a lecture by any means. Things like considering white space and black space of a form feel equal by optimizing letter spacing and adjusting stoke widths in letters like "O" in order to make them feel balanced and equally distributed.

Did you know that NYC has free libraries that host amazing type resources and original typeface specimens? I did not. Some highlighted libraries from Matt's speech are:

1. www.grolierclub.org
2. www.library.columbia.edu/indiv/butler.html
3. www.lubalincenter.cooper.edu/


Type design is alive and well today. More and more boutique foundries pop up each day with professionally designed and well considered font families. Many designer's are exploring their own typefaces and distributing and selling them on reputable font distributors such as myfonts.com. A good place to start reading about these creators, their font families and the though process behind the typeface is through MyFonts Rising Stars monthly Email.

Kinetic typography creates visual stories using typography in many ways. This is inspiring seeing type in motion rather than sitting still. They do these animations for songs and movies. This particular animation is about the movie zombie land, after seeing the movie I feel that this animation captures the feeling of this movie especially the opening seen. the use of texture, speed, color, shape, and size all describe the feeling you get from this movie without ever seeing a single seen from the movie.