Just a neat graphic I came accross...
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Bookman [update]
1) The Alphabet +characters:
Bookman:
(click me)
ITC Bookman:
2) Who designed it:
Bookman
Bookman: Old Style
ITC Bookman: Transitional
5) Information about the classification:
Old Style and Transitional classifications fall under the Serif and Slab Serif typefaces, respectively.
Old style type is generally considered "warm" or friendly, thanks to its origins in Renaissance humanism. The main characteristics of old style typefaces are low contrast with diagonal stress, and cove or "bracketed" serifs (serifs with a rounded join to the stem of the letter).
Transitional, a refinement of Old Style forms, this style forms the transition between Renaissance Old Style and Modern typefaces. With the change from the woodcut to copperplate engravings in the 17th Century, the lines of the letters became more fine and rich in contrast. The thick-to -thin relationships were exaggerated, and the brackets were lightened.
6) Fonts from these classifications:
Old Style: Bembo, Caslon, Garamond
Transitional: Baskerville, Caslon, Perpetua
7) what was happening in the world in the year the font was designed:
1858:
President James Buchanan asks Congress to admit Kansas as a slave state, even though it has voted against slavery. It does so, but Kansans reject the Lecompton constitution a third time, delaying statehood in order to prohibit slavery; Kansas does not become a state until 1861.
1975:
The last American troops leave Vietnam as North Vietnamese troops complete an invasion of South Vietnam and unite both countries under Communist rule. The final death toll of the war is roughly 1.3 million Vietnamese and more than 56,000 American lives. 8) name any other fonts by the designer:
Phemister: none
Benguiat:
Born in Brooklyn, Benguiat was the son of a display director at Bloomingdale’s who made his pens, brushes, and drafting sets available to his son at an early age. Benguiat’s innate design talent was demonstrated when he graduated from high school and successfully forged a photostat of his birth certificate, which he used to join the armed forces during World War II. The color-blind recruit then cheated on a vision test by memorizing the correct answers in advance, and Benguiat was accepted into the Air Corps.
When he returned to civilian life, Benguiat followed his first professional dream: to be a musician. He earned a degree in music from Brooklyn College and began to work professionally as a big band drummer. “I played with Stan Kenton and Woody Herman,” he recalls, “on what was then called ‘Swing Street’ in New York.”
Even a good drummer could be out of work more often than not, however, so when his parents emphatically suggested that he become some other kind of artist, Benguiat enrolled in the Workshop School with the intention of becoming an illustrator. His first break as a lettering artist was basically a fluke. “I was working at a studio doing photo touch-up. The person responsible for lettering got sick and the studio needed a lettering job done,” he recalls. “I said I could do it. I figured I could do anything, until somebody told me different. I did the job, and I’ve been drawing letters ever since.”
Ed Benguiat loves to draw letters. When he’s not creating a new typeface, he can usually be found working on a piece of hand-lettering or a logo design for one of his hundreds of clients. The addiction is pervasive: in restaurants he sketches new alphabets on napkins, in business meetings he doodles in Spencerian cursive, and his greeting cards are always hand-lettered works of art.
Benguiat (pronounced BEN-gat) has drawn more than six hundred typefaces, possibly more than any other type designer. His work includes faces for International Typeface Corporation, PhotoLettering Inc., and for corporate clients such as AT&T and The New York Times. Some of his designs are revivals of old metal faces; these include ITC Souvenir and ITC Bookman Others, like ITC Panache, are completely original. And long before sophisticated type manipulation software was available, Benguiat was creating new typefaces by “sampling” features of existing designs. ITC Tiffany and ITC Barcelona are both examples of his ability to take design traits from existing typefaces and meld them into a new design.
10) quote by designer:
“To me designing has never been a job or profession. It’s a way of life, like a priest or rabbi.”
Bookman:
(click me)ITC Bookman:
2) Who designed it:
Bookman
- Designer: Alexander Phemister
- birth: 1829
- death: 1894
- Designer: Ed Benguiat
- Birth: October 27, 1927
- Death: still alive
- Bookman:1858
- ITC Bookman: 1975
Bookman: Old Style
ITC Bookman: Transitional
5) Information about the classification:
Old Style and Transitional classifications fall under the Serif and Slab Serif typefaces, respectively.
Old style type is generally considered "warm" or friendly, thanks to its origins in Renaissance humanism. The main characteristics of old style typefaces are low contrast with diagonal stress, and cove or "bracketed" serifs (serifs with a rounded join to the stem of the letter).
Transitional, a refinement of Old Style forms, this style forms the transition between Renaissance Old Style and Modern typefaces. With the change from the woodcut to copperplate engravings in the 17th Century, the lines of the letters became more fine and rich in contrast. The thick-to -thin relationships were exaggerated, and the brackets were lightened.
6) Fonts from these classifications:
Old Style: Bembo, Caslon, Garamond
Transitional: Baskerville, Caslon, Perpetua
7) what was happening in the world in the year the font was designed:
1858:
President James Buchanan asks Congress to admit Kansas as a slave state, even though it has voted against slavery. It does so, but Kansans reject the Lecompton constitution a third time, delaying statehood in order to prohibit slavery; Kansas does not become a state until 1861.
Upstart Republican Abraham Lincoln runs for the Senate in Illinois against incumbent Democrat Stephen Douglas, who supported the ill-fated Kansas-Nebraska Act. The Lincoln-Douglas debates are a forum in which the Republican anti-slavery position gets fleshed out and which also launch Lincoln into national political prominence.
Slaves are sold at extremely high prices thanks to the strong demand for cotton, and Southerners start to talk about re-opening the slave trade. James Hammond, Democratic senator from South Carolina, says, "You dare not make war upon cotton! No power on earth dares make war upon it. Cotton is king."
Texas socialist community La Reunion, founded according to the principles of Charles Fourier, is disbanded; its residents go off to live in Dallas instead. As the United States plunges toward civil war to finally resolve the contradiction of slavery, politics looks more important than utopian idealism.
A bomb intended to kill Napoleon III and his wife, Eugenie, kills 10 bystanders and wounds 150 but does not touch the ruling couple. Two Italian radicals are executed for the crime.
A 14-year-old asthmatic French schoolgirl, Bernadette, has 18 visions of a lady dressed in white with a blue sash. A chapel at Lourdes is erected to the vision, thought to be the Virgin Mary, and miracles are reputed to take place at the site.
Berlin doctor Rudolf Virchow isolates the cell, and calls it the basic unit of all life.
Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux start working on New York City's Central Park.
1975:
The last American troops leave Vietnam as North Vietnamese troops complete an invasion of South Vietnam and unite both countries under Communist rule. The final death toll of the war is roughly 1.3 million Vietnamese and more than 56,000 American lives.
China holds its Fourth National People's Congress to adopt a new national constitution and give the Central Committee Chairman, Mao Zedong, direct control of the military.
The Cambodian Khmer Rouge, led by Communist Pol Pot, defeats Lon Nol's government and institutes a reign of terror.
Microsoft is in business in Seattle, Washington. The computer software company is founded by Paul Allen, age 22, and Bill Gates, age 19 and a Harvard drop-out.
King Faisal of Saudi Arabia is assassinated by his nephew, who is shortly beheaded. Faisal's brother assumes power, continuing moderate policies in OPEC.
Discos reign over the dancing scene, as people do ``The Hustle'' and groove to The Bee Gees and Donna Summer.
36 nations agree to the Helsinki Accords, which outlines the policy for détente between East and West.
Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi is convicted of electoral fraud. Despite calls for her resignation, Gandhi stays in office, suppressing civil liberties yet instituting some agricultural reforms.
Civil war erupts in Lebanon.
Space is getting to be a friendly place; American and Soviet astronauts exchange neighborly visits when Apollo 18 and Soyuz 19 join in an orbital linkup.
Phemister: none
Benguiat:
- ITC Barcelona
- ITC Benguiat
- Benguiat Frisky
- ITC Benguiat Gothic
- ITC Bookman
- ITC Caslon No. 224
- ITC Edwardian Script
- ITC Garamond Handtooled
- ITC Modern No. 216
- ITC Panache
- ITC Tiffany
Born in Brooklyn, Benguiat was the son of a display director at Bloomingdale’s who made his pens, brushes, and drafting sets available to his son at an early age. Benguiat’s innate design talent was demonstrated when he graduated from high school and successfully forged a photostat of his birth certificate, which he used to join the armed forces during World War II. The color-blind recruit then cheated on a vision test by memorizing the correct answers in advance, and Benguiat was accepted into the Air Corps.
When he returned to civilian life, Benguiat followed his first professional dream: to be a musician. He earned a degree in music from Brooklyn College and began to work professionally as a big band drummer. “I played with Stan Kenton and Woody Herman,” he recalls, “on what was then called ‘Swing Street’ in New York.”
Even a good drummer could be out of work more often than not, however, so when his parents emphatically suggested that he become some other kind of artist, Benguiat enrolled in the Workshop School with the intention of becoming an illustrator. His first break as a lettering artist was basically a fluke. “I was working at a studio doing photo touch-up. The person responsible for lettering got sick and the studio needed a lettering job done,” he recalls. “I said I could do it. I figured I could do anything, until somebody told me different. I did the job, and I’ve been drawing letters ever since.”
Ed Benguiat loves to draw letters. When he’s not creating a new typeface, he can usually be found working on a piece of hand-lettering or a logo design for one of his hundreds of clients. The addiction is pervasive: in restaurants he sketches new alphabets on napkins, in business meetings he doodles in Spencerian cursive, and his greeting cards are always hand-lettered works of art.
Benguiat (pronounced BEN-gat) has drawn more than six hundred typefaces, possibly more than any other type designer. His work includes faces for International Typeface Corporation, PhotoLettering Inc., and for corporate clients such as AT&T and The New York Times. Some of his designs are revivals of old metal faces; these include ITC Souvenir and ITC Bookman Others, like ITC Panache, are completely original. And long before sophisticated type manipulation software was available, Benguiat was creating new typefaces by “sampling” features of existing designs. ITC Tiffany and ITC Barcelona are both examples of his ability to take design traits from existing typefaces and meld them into a new design.
10) quote by designer:
“To me designing has never been a job or profession. It’s a way of life, like a priest or rabbi.”
Define and give 3 examples of fonts that fit each classification listed below...
- Old Style: Old style type is generally considered "warm" or friendly, thanks to its origins in Renaissance humanism. The main characteristics of old style typefaces are low contrast with diagonal stress, and cove or "bracketed" serifs (serifs with a rounded join to the stem of the letter)
example: Bembo, Caslon, Garamond, Jenson, Palatino - Transitional: A refinement of Old Style forms, this style forms the transition between Renaissance Old Style and Modern typefaces. With the change from the woodcut to copperplate engravings in the 17th Century, the lines of the letters became more fine and rich in contrast. The thick-to -thin relationships were exaggerated, and the brackets were lightened.
examples: Baskerville, Caslon, Perpetua - Modern: Modern typefaces arose with the distribution of copper and steel engraving techniques in the 17th and 18th Century. The appearance is technical exact. Modern types are named Didone after Didot and Bodoni
examples: Bodoni, Bauer Bodoni, Walbaum - Slab Serif: At the beginning of the 19th Century typefaces for attracting attention were in demand for advertising, posters, flyers, business and private printed matters. Egyptian and Grotesque typefaces arose from Modern typefaces. The name Egyptian is derived from its use in a publication about booty from Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign.
examples: Serifa, Rockwell, Memphis Clarendon, New Century Schoolbook - Sans Serif:
Geometric
Sans-serif typefaces influenced by the Bauhaus movement and featuring circular or geometric letters, with little variation in stroke thickness. * Some sans-serif types are built around geometric forms. In Futura, designed by Paul Renner in 1927, the Os are perfect circles, and the peaks of the A and M are sharp triangles.
examples: Futura, Foilio, Gotham, Avant Garde
Humanist
Sans-serif typefaces with oval shapes and variations in stroke thickness to create a more graceful, human appearance. *Sans-serif typefaces became common in the twentieth century. Gill Sans, designed by Eric Gill in 1928, has humanist characteristics. Note the small, lilting counter in the letter a , and the calligraphic variations in line weight.
examples: Gill Sans, Meta, Frutiger
Grotesque or Grotesk
The first sans-serif designs developed in the 19th century, and considered grotesque by the English. *Helvetica, designed by Max Miedinger in 1957, is one of the world's most widely used typefaces. Its uniform, upright character makes it similar to transitional serif letters. These fonts are also referred to as "anonymous sans serif"examples: Akzidenz Grotesk, Franklin Gothic, Univers, Helvetica
- Script: Script typefaces often mimic handwriting techniques and like handwrting, script letterforms are infinately different and have been around since humans have put pen on paper. come in flowing and non-flowing forms
examples: Monotype Script, Bickham Script, Shelley - Grunge: a new breed of amalgamated, scratchy typefaces that came from the 80s and 90s. There is no clear definition, but these typefaces share a jarring aesthetic and philosophy that contrasts with the conventions of classic photography.
examples: Dead History, Fallen Thyme, Laundromat 1967 - Monospaced: these typefaces derive typewriters, where all letters conform to a specific physical width,m resulting in letterforms that must expand or condense to amke the best use of the alloted space (example: wide "is" and tight "ms.").
examples: Courier, OCR A, Orator - Undeclared: "Is it a Serif? or is a Sans Serif?" contains two typefaces that have long baffled designers with their flared serifs attacged to san serif structures
examples: Optima and Copperplate Black
Representatives of Letterforms III
Underware is a graphic design studio which is specialized in designing and producing typefaces. These are often conventional in terms of legibility - yet functional, having concepts that seek for new visual, typographic and linguistic possibilities. These typefaces are published for retail sale or are custom designed. Underware was created from the multi-city studios of 3 students, Akeim Helmling, Bas Jacobs and Sami Kortemaki, devoted to typography, who met at The Hague in the Netherlands. The foundry creates elegant and quirky types and also create unique creations that include a type speciman that can only be seen within the comforts of a sauna due to the material and ink used. Underware also plays hose to a traveling radio show, TypeRadio, where they conduct one-on-one inteviews.
Representative of Letterforms II
Font Bureau, INC.
Font Bureau, Inc. was founded by Roger Black, a publication designer, and David Berlow, a type designer, in 1989 . Berlow spent his early years developing hand drawn letters at the New York office of Linotype in 1978 and became interested in digital typography when he joined Boston-based Bitstream. While Berlow was adapting to the new technologies of Adobe's Postscript and Apple's TrueType, Black was also taking advantage of the Macintosh. Berlow had been a seasoned art director of magazines such as Rollingstone and Newsweek, and started his own business the same year Font Bureau was established. Today the Bureau puts out more than 1500 typefaces, including an extensive and well-rounded collection of typefaces and type families from traditional serifs and dingbats.
a few examples:
Citadel
Constructa
Garamond FB
Representatives of Letterforms I
Emigre Fonts:
founded by Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko
Emigre is a digital type foundry and publisher of the design journal, Emigre magazine.
Based in Northern California, while Rudy was beginning his typeset magazine, his wife, Zuzana, was breaking ground on the Macintosh computer with emerging technology , and Emigre Fonts was born in 1986.
As part of a small group of believers, Emigre used the restrictions of low resolution output to create inventive new typeface designs and layouts. This earned them recognition early on as innovators in the field of graphic design.
As the Macintosh grew up, so did Emigre. Its library now houses over three hundred modern typeface designs licensed from designers around the world. And Emigre magazine, while a prime showcase for the use of Emigre fonts, has developed into a journal exploring graphic design in the widest sense of the term.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
time for a little catch up
Who is John Baskerville?
this is John Baskerville:
John Baskerville was a maste printer, stonecutter, letter designer and type founder. He was one of the great type designers of the 18th century in England. He began his work as printer and publisher in 1757 and in 1758 became printer to the University of Cambridge.
His type faces introduced the modern, pseudoclassical style, with level serifs and with emphasis on the contrast of light and heavy lines. This style influenced that of the Didot family in France and that of Bodini in Italy.
Books printed by Baskerville are typically large, with wide margins, made with excellent paper and ink. His masterpiece was a folio Bible, published in 1763. After his death, most of his types were purchased by Beaumarchais and were used in his 70-volume edition of Voltaire. The matrices, long lost, were rediscovered and in 1953 were presented to Cambridge Univ. Press. Among Baskerville's publications in the British Museum are Aesop's Fables
this is John Baskerville:
John Baskerville was a maste printer, stonecutter, letter designer and type founder. He was one of the great type designers of the 18th century in England. He began his work as printer and publisher in 1757 and in 1758 became printer to the University of Cambridge.
His type faces introduced the modern, pseudoclassical style, with level serifs and with emphasis on the contrast of light and heavy lines. This style influenced that of the Didot family in France and that of Bodini in Italy.
Books printed by Baskerville are typically large, with wide margins, made with excellent paper and ink. His masterpiece was a folio Bible, published in 1763. After his death, most of his types were purchased by Beaumarchais and were used in his 70-volume edition of Voltaire. The matrices, long lost, were rediscovered and in 1953 were presented to Cambridge Univ. Press. Among Baskerville's publications in the British Museum are Aesop's Fables
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