During the last quarter of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first century, electronic and computer technology advanced at an extraordinary pace, transforming many areas of human activity. Graphic design was irrevocably changed by digital computer hardware and software and the explosive growth of the Internet. Many years earlier, the Industrial Revolution had begun fragmenting the process of creating and printing graphic communications into a series of specialized steps. After phototype became prevalent during the 1960s, skilled specialists included graphic designers, who created page layouts; typesetters, who operated text and display typesetting equipment; production artists, who pasted all of the elements into position on boards; camera operators, who made photographic negatives of the pasteups, art, and photographs; strippers, who assembled these negatives together; platemakers, who prepared the printing plates; and press operators, who ran the printing presses. By the 1990s, digital technology enabled one person operating a desktop computer to control most—or even all—of these functions. New photo-optical printing machines used computer-controlled lasers to photosensitize printing drums, making short-run and even individualized full-color press sheets possible.
In spite of strong initial resistance by many designers, this new technology improved rapidly, inviting widespread acceptance. Computer users were empowered by greater control over the design and production process. Digital technology and advanced software also expanded the creative potential of graphic design by making possible unprecedented manipulation of color, form, space, and imagery.
The growth of cable and satellite television in the last quarter of the twentieth century expanded the number of broadcast channels, inspired creative and technical advances in broadcast and motion graphics, and paved the way for consumers to embrace the power and flexibility of the Internet. The rapid development of the Internet and the World Wide Web during the 1990s transformed the way people communicate and access information, generating a revolution surpassing even Gutenberg’s in its magnitude. By the early twenty-first century, many people had become dependent on the Internet for access to information and entertainment. This technological development has continued to have widespread social, cultural, and economic implications. Technology has transformed the era of corporate communications for mass audiences into a period of decentralized media offering near-limitless options for individuals. Computer graphics experimentation explored electronic techniques while churning through modern and postmodern design ideas, retro revivals, and eccentric work to create a period of pluralism and diversity in design.
The origins of computer-aided graphic design
The digital revolution came to the desktop of individual graphic designers as a result of affordable yet powerful hardware and software created primarily by three companies during the 1980s: Apple Computer developed the Macintosh computer; Adobe Systems invented the PostScript programming language underlying page-layout software and electronically generated typography; and Aldus created PageMaker, an early software application using PostScript to design pages on the computer screen.
Apple Computer’s 1984 introduction of the first-generation Macintosh computer, based on technology pioneered in its Lisa computer, foretold a graphic revolution. The Macintosh displayed bitmapped graphics; that is, its screen presented information as dots called pixels, with 72 dots per inch (dpi) on a black-and-white screen. Its interface with the user was achieved via a desktop device, called a mouse, whose movement controlled a pointer on the screen. By placing the pointer on an on-screen icon and clicking a button on the mouse, the user was able to control the computer intuitively and focus on creative work rather than machine operation or computer programming.
The first mouse, a small wooden box on steel wheels, was invented by scientist Douglas C. Engelbart (1925–2013) in the 1960s at the federal government’s Augmentation Research Center. It was called an “x-y position indicator for a display system” in the patent. A colleague dubbed Engelbart’s little position-indicator device “the mouse,” and the name stuck. The mouse made computers accessible through intuitive processes rather than tedious mathematical coding and empowered thousands of people, from accountants and writers to artists and designers, to use computers.
Engelbart has been lauded as a visionary whose early innovations humanized computers by making their technology more accessible. Decades ago his research foreshadowed electronic mail systems, icon- and window-based computer operating systems, the Internet, networking software allowing several users to work on a document at the same time, and videoconferencing.
Apple released software applications for word processing, drawing, and painting. Early bitmapped fonts (Fig. 24–1) were designed by Susan Kare (b. 1954), then of the Apple Computer design department. The matrix of dots in these early fonts controlled letterform design.
Adobe Systems’ PostScript page description language enabled printers to output text, images, and graphic elements, and determine their placement on the page. PostScript fonts are not simply made up of bitmapped dots; rather, they are stored as graphical commands and data. Type characters are generated as outlines that are then filled in as solid forms. The curved lines of the characters are formed of Bézier splines. Named after the French mathematician Pierre Bézier (1910–99), who invented them, these are mathematically generated nonuniform curves (in contrast to curves with uniform curvature, called arcs) defined by four control points. Bézier curves can create complex shapes with smooth endpoints, making them particularly useful for creating letterforms (Fig. 24–2) and computer graphics.
In 1985, Apple Computer introduced its first laser printer, whose 300-dpi output of PostScript fonts enabled its typographic proofs to more closely duplicate typesetting. A controversy about resolution quality ended after the arrival of 600-dpi laser printers and high-resolution image-setters such as the Linotron, capable of either 1,270- or 2,540-dpi output.
Page-layout programs made possible by PostScript permitted the design of complete pages on the screen. In 1984, a thirty-six-year-old former newspaper editor named Paul Brainerd (b. 1947) formed a company called Aldus (after the fifteenth-century printer Aldus Manutius) to develop software enabling newspapers to produce advertisements more efficiently. In July 1985 Aldus introduced PageMaker software for the Macintosh computer. PageMaker could alter type size, font, and column dimensions. It integrated text type with other elements, such as scans of pictures, ruled lines, headlines, and borders. A desktop metaphor enabled the user to create elements on the computer screen and then position these on the page in a manner similar to the traditional way elements are prepared and pasted into position for offset printing. Brainerd coined the term desktop publishing for this new method.
Desktop publishing saved significant amounts of time and money in preparing pages for printing. Procedures including layout, typesetting, making position photostats, and pasting elements into position were all combined into a seamless electronic process. A comparison can be made to George Eastman’s invention of the Kodak camera. Just as photography was wrested from the exclusive use of specialists and made available to the general public in the 1880s, typography left the exclusive domain of professionals and became accessible to a larger sphere of people in the 1980s.
Earlier digital hardware included digital typesetting systems; powerful electronic image processors such as Scitex systems, which electronically scanned images and permitted extensive editing; and Quantel Video and Graphic Paintboxes, which permitted precise color control and allowed images to be overlapped, combined, and altered. The LightSpeed system was a sophisticated early page-layout machine. All of these systems were very expensive and rarely available to designers for experimentation; the profound significance of Macintosh computers and software stems from their broad accessibility to individual graphic designers and laypersons.
By 1990, the color-capable Macintosh II computer and improved software had spurred a technological and creative revolution in graphic design as radical as the fifteenth-century shift from hand-lettered manuscript books to Gutenberg’s movable type. An unprecedented expansion of design education and professional activity produced a larger field with vast numbers of trained practitioners. The number of individual designers and firms producing fine work rose exponentially, yet digital technology also enabled untrained and marginally trained practitioners to enter the field.
Pioneers of digital graphic design
By providing designers with new processes and capabilities, new technology often enabled them to create unprecedented images and forms. While many designers rejected digital technology during its infancy and derided those designers who chose to explore it, many others embraced it as an innovative tool capable of expanding the scope of the field of graphic design as well as the very nature of the design process. Using a computer as a design tool enabled one to make and correct mistakes. Color, texture, images, and typography could be stretched, bent, made transparent, layered, and combined in unprecedented ways. Early pioneers who embraced the new technology and explored its creative potential include Los Angeles designer April Greiman (b. 1948), Emigre magazine designer/editor Rudy VanderLans (b. 1955), and typeface designer Zuzana Licko (b. 1961).
Greiman explored the visual properties of bitmapped fonts, the layering and overlapping of computer-screen information, the synthesis of video and print, and the tactile patterns and shapes made possible by the new technology. In her first graphic design using Macintosh output (Fig. 24–3), bitmapped type and computer-generated textures were photostatted to a large size and pasted up through conventional typesetting.
When asked to design an issue of Design Quarterly magazine for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Greiman created a single-sheet magazine with a 61 by 183 centimeter digital collage executed entirely on the Macintosh computer (Fig. 24–4). She explored capturing images from video and digitizing them, layering images in space, and integrating words and pictures into a single computer file.
As computers and their software became more powerful, a new spatial elasticity became possible in typography and imagery. In 1988, Greiman expressed an obligation to “take on the challenge of continuing forward toward a new landscape of communications. To use these tools to imitate what we already know and think is a pity.” In addition to using the new technology to make decisions about type and layout, she said, “I think there has to be another layer applied here. And that’s about ideas.”
After arriving in the United States in 1981, Rudy VanderLans began to edit, design, and publish a magazine called Emigre in 1984. Joining him were two Dutch friends whom he had known at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at The Hague and who were, at that time, also living in San Francisco. With the creation and publication of Emigre, they originally intended to present their unpublished works alongside the creative works of others. The journal’s name was selected because its founders believed that exposure to various cultures, as well as living in different cultural environments, has had a significant impact on creative work. VanderLans used typewriter type and copier images in the first issue and low-resolution Macintosh type for subsequent issues. An experimental magazine with a print run of seven thousand copies became a lightning rod for controversy, outraging many design professionals while captivating those who embraced computer technology’s sense of infinite possibility for reinvigorating and redefining graphic design. Emigre’s experimental approach helped define and demonstrate the capabilities of this new technology, both in its editorial design and by presenting work that was often too experimental for other design publications (Figs. 24–5 and 24–6). After sixty-nine issues Emigre came to a close in 2005, its last number aptly titled “The End.”
In 1987 VanderLans left his newspaper design job and formed a partnership, Emigre Graphics, with designer Zuzana Licko, whose educational background included computer- programming courses. Dissatisfied with the limited fonts available for the early Macintosh, Licko used a public-domain character-generation software called FontEditor to create digital typefaces. Her first fonts were initially designed for low-resolution technology (Fig. 24–7) and then later converted to companion high-resolution versions as font-design software and printer resolution improved. Licko recalls the unpleasant experience of a college calligraphy class in which she was forced to write with her right hand despite being left-handed; she references this experience as a source of seminal inspiration for her original approaches to font design and complete departure from calligraphy, the traditional basis for conventional fonts.
In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, many art school and university design education programs became important centers for redefining graphic design through theoretical discourse and experimentation with computer technology. At Michigan’s Cranbrook Academy of Art, graphic designer Katherine McCoy (b. 1945) cochaired the design department with her husband, product designer Michael McCoy (b. 1944), from 1971 until 1995, and it became a magnet for people interested in pushing the boundaries of design. Cranbrook has since continued to emphasize experimentation while rejecting a uniform philosophy or methodology. The faculty believes students should find their own directions while interacting with others engaged in similar searches. McCoy likened Cranbrook to “a tribal community, intense and immersive,” where she functioned as “a parade director and referee.”
During McCoy’s twenty-four years at Cranbrook, the program evolved from a rational, systematic approach to design problem solving influenced by the International Typographic Style, to an approach that questioned the expressive limits of this style, in which complexity and layering, vernacular and premodern forms, and the validity of normative rules and conventions were explored. In 1989, McCoy designed a poster (Fig. 24–8) that challenged norms of college recruiting materials and demonstrated a complexity of form and meaning. Breaking away from prevailing notions of simple, reductive communications, McCoy overlaid different levels of visual and verbal messages, requiring her audience to decipher them.
Edward Fella (b. 1939), a Detroit graphic designer with whom McCoy worked at the Designers & Partners studio before her appointment at Cranbrook, was a major force within the program. After serving as a frequent Cranbrook guest critic for many years, Fella attended the academy’s graduate program from 1985 to 1987 and then accepted a California teaching position. With roots in American vernacular design and early modernist typography, Fella’s experimental work became a major influence on a generation of designers. From 1983 until 1991, Fella contributed graphics to the Detroit Focus Gallery and produced flyers (Fig. 24–9) whose typography and lettering challenged the reader in the same way advanced art in the gallery challenged the viewer. He explored entropy, the disintegration of form from repeated copying, and an unbounded range of techniques, from found typography, scribbles, and brush writing to typesetting, rubdown letters, public-domain clip art, and stencils. Echoing futurism, Fella investigated the aesthetic potential of invented letterforms, irregular spatial intervals, eccentric characters, personal glyphs, and vernacular imagery. He combined these materials with great compositional skill and often attached asides, notes, and addenda to the primary message (Fig. 24–10). Fella wryly observed, “Deconstruction is a way of exposing the glue that holds together Western culture.”
By the mid-1990s, the complexity of form, theoretical concerns, and computer manipulations found in the work of early pioneers made their way into the mainstream of graphic communications.
Revitalizing editorial design
During the early 1990s, accelerating progress in computers, software, and output devices enabled graphic designers to achieve results virtually identical to those of conventional working methods, for the promise of seamless on-screen color graphics had been fulfilled. While designers explored the unprecedented possibilities of computers and graphics software, at the same time a renewed interest in handmade and expressionist lettering and images was growing.
QuarkXPress, another page-design application, enabled designers to place elements on a page in increments of one hundred-thousandth of an inch and to kern type in intervals of one twenty-thousandth of an em (a horizontal measurement equivalent to the width of the letter m). Adobe Photoshop, an application initially developed for electronic photographic retouching, enabled unprecedented image manipulation and creation.
New developments migrated from individual exploration and design education to the mainstream as editorial designers for specialized magazines applied computer experimentation to their pages. David Carson (b. 1956), a sociology graduate from San Diego State University and a former professional surfer and schoolteacher, turned to editorial design in the 1980s. Carson eschewed grid formats, information hierarchy, and consistent layout or typographic patterns; instead, he chose to explore the expressive possibilities of each subject (Fig. 24–11) and each page or spread, rejecting conventional notions of typographic syntax and imagery. As art director and designer for Transworld Skateboarding (1983–87), Musician (1988), Beach Culture (1989–91), Surfer (1991–92), and Ray Gun (1992–96), Carson flouted design conventions. His revolutionary layouts included page numbers set in large display type, and normally diminutive picture captions enlarged into prominent design elements. Carson often letterspaced his article titles erratically across images or arranged them in expressive rather than normative sequences. He also required his reader to decipher his message by slicing away parts of letters. Carson’s text type often challenged the fundamental criteria for legibility. He explored reverse leading, extreme forced justification, text columns jammed together with no gutter, text columns the width of a page (and, on at least one occasion, a double-page spread), text with minimal value contrast between type and the image or color underneath, and text columns set in curved or irregular shapes (Fig. 24–12). White display type placed over text covered some of the words, but the text could still be understood. Writing and subject matter receive Carson’s careful attention, for his designs emerge from the meaning of the words, or comment on the subject, as he seeks to bring the layout into harmony.
Unconventional treatment of images included “unnatural” cropping to express content. Although Carson was viewed as the epitome of the computer revolution, Ray Gun 14 (Fig. 24–13) was the first magazine he sent to the printer as electronic files. Before that he had generated elements by computer, then prepared camera-ready art on boards.
Carson became quite controversial during the early 1990s. While he served as powerful inspiration for many young designers, he angered many others who believed he was crossing the line between order and chaos. Carson’s typography was decried and denounced, but as he and others pushed their work to the edge of illegibility, designers discovered that many readers were more resilient than they had previously assumed, noting that messages could often be read and understood under less than ideal circumstances. Film and video techniques informed Carson’s magazine designs, for the hierarchical and regularized structure of page design in his work yielded to a shifting, kinetic spatial environment where type and image overlap, fade, and blur. Disparate visual and verbal elements jostle and collide in space the way sound and image bump and shove in film and video. Carson consciously made his pages cinematic by letting articles and headlines flow from spread to spread and by wrapping pictures around the edge of the page onto the other side.
During Carson’s tenure as art director of Ray Gun magazine, he provided a rare open forum for major illustrators and photographers, introducing new artists and turning a half-dozen pages over to readers’ illustrations for song lyrics. This populist gesture recurred as zines, self-published personal magazines using desktop-publishing software and cheap printing or copier reproduction, began appearing in magazine racks. Carson left Ray Gun in 1996 and applied his approach to print and other media communications for mass-media advertisers such as Coca-Cola and Nike. He believes one should not mistake legibility for communication, because while many highly legible traditional printed messages offer little visual appeal to readers, more expressionist designs can attract and engage them.
After art-directing Texas Monthly and Regardie’s, Fred Woodward (b. 1953) became art director of the semimonthly rock-and-roll magazine Rolling Stone in 1987; Gail Anderson (b. 1962) became deputy art director later that year. As intuitive designers, Woodward and Anderson tried to match typefaces and images to the content. Rolling Stone’s tradition of editorial and graphic excellence (see Fig. 19–43) dated to its 1967 inception, so pressure to compete with this legacy prevailed. A turning point occurred when Woodward reinstated the “Oxford rules” (a term for multiple-line thick-and-thin borders) found in the magazine’s earlier periods. He felt these borders gave him great license, almost as though anything he put within them would look like Rolling Stone.
The magazine had a PhotoTypositor and hundreds of typefaces; Woodward added to this stock and made audacious typography a hallmark of his work. A breakthrough design (Fig. 24–14) used large-scale type and a full-page photograph to make a strong visual statement about singer Sinead O’Connor. This layout changed the look and feel of Rolling Stone, for Woodward felt challenged to build on it. Text pages were punctuated by expansive double-page opening spreads juxtaposing full-page portraits opposite title pages dominated by display type; frequently these had little or no text. Content was expressed through unexpected selection, scale, and placement of type.
Although the magazine converted to Macintosh computers in the early 1990s, Woodward sought for the publication a handmade quality. Rolling Stone used a wide range of fonts, freely exploiting not only digital manipulation but calligraphy, hand-lettering, found type, and graphic entropy achieved by running type through a copier many times. Saying that he preferred never to use a typeface more than once, Woodward expressed an interest in dynamic change and in creating a publication that constantly reinvented its design in response to content. Figure 24–15 demonstrates how the typeface, its treatment, the color palette, and the image all emerged from associations and interactions with the article topic.
Computer software allowed designers to control type interactively by changing the scale, color, and overlapping of forms until a dynamic equilibrium was achieved. The software gave illustrators and photographers the latitude and openness to achieve their finest work.
In the mid-1990s, as the U.S. economy recovered from a devastating recession, a new cultural paradigm was emerging: personal computers and the Internet were launching the information age. The magazine that would give voice to, and act as a virtual roadmap of, the new “digital generation” was Wired. Its design team, John Plunkett (b. 1952) and Barbara Kuhr (b. 1954), principals of Plunkett + Kuhr located in Park City, Utah, envisioned a magazine that would do for the emerging information highway what Rolling Stone had done for rock and roll a generation earlier: define it, explain it, and make it indispensible to the magazine’s readers.
Plunkett and Kuhr came to Wired, a San Francisco publication, via Paris, France, where they had met the magazine’s founding publisher, Louis Rossetto, in 1984. In 1991, Kuhr designed a color-xeroxed prototype for Wired, and after much searching for funding by Rossetto and his partner Jane Metcalf, Wired was born in 1994 (Fig. 24–16). Plunkett imagined the design problem as one of finding a way to use the convention of ink on paper “to report on this emerging, fluid, nonlinear, asynchronous, electronic world.”
The pulse of the information age was presented in a decidedly nonlinear fashion, with fluorescent and PMS inks used rarely, if ever, in magazine publishing. Electronic Word, an eight-page front-of-book section of news and products (Fig. 24–17), was often cited as difficult to read but was, in fact, a layered design meant to emulate the emerging visual nervous system of the Internet, with its often overlapping and simultaneous information streams. The design was decidedly influenced by Quentin Fiori’s 1967 design for Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Massage. Feature article designs, clearly postmodern, used a wide range of edgy fonts in headlines (Fig. 24–18). Wired’s designers soon ordered their own text font, Wiredbaum, designed by Matthew Carter (b. 1937), and based on the modern serif font Walbaum. There was no other magazine that looked like Wired. The timing was perfect; following close on the heels of the widespread introduction of the Internet, Wired’s machine-aesthetic design debut was an overnight success.
Kit Hinrichs (b. 1941), a “visual storyteller,” graduated from the Art Center College of Design in California in 1963 and worked in a variety of New York design offices for three years before becoming a design consultant. In 1972 he founded Hinrichs Design Associates, which focused on reinterpreting the annual report with a concentration on the character of particular companies. Four years later he began Jonson, Pedersen, Hinrichs & Shakery, a designers’ association situated on both the East and West Coasts of the United States. In 1986, he became a partner at Pentagram, and his organization became Pentagram’s San Francisco office.
His editorial work is informed by his appreciation for typefaces and their designers, including those practicing in the predigital and postdigital revolution. Having worked closely with printers throughout decades of changes in technology and advancement in the industry, he has a deep understanding of the possibilities of print media. His expertise in both typography and printing yields exceptional product in the field of editorial design. In 1995 he cofounded @issue: The Journal of Business and Design with the Corporate Design Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the role of design in business. The Corporate Design Foundation recognized the need for (and benefits of) integration of all areas of design—including identity, print design, web design, “new” media, product design, and architectural design—into brand and business strategy; @issue served as a major vehicle for promoting this vision. Hinrichs continues as its art director today (Fig. 24–19). His designs are distinguished by a keen understanding of the narrative and abundant interpretations on a theme; all covers of @issue, for example, explore and reinvent representation of the human face.
A graduate of the Cooper Union School of Art in New York, Abbott Miller (b. 1963), together with Ellen Lupton (b. 1963), began the multidisciplinary studio Design/Writing/Research in 1989. Initiating the concept of “designer as author,” they developed a procedure through which content and form evolved in tandem, with one enhancing the other. In 1999 Miller joined Pentagram’s New York office, where he heads a group working with books, magazines, and other editorial endeavors. His work on 2wice magazine, a biannual publication devoted to the visual and performing arts, further explores his dynamic union of form and the written word (Fig. 24–20).
Martin Venezky (b. 1957) earned his master’s degree at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1993, a time when the design industry—and graphic design education—had one foot in more traditional modes of production and one foot in the emerging digital technologies of the time. As mentioned earlier, Cranbrook’s graphic design department, under the direction of Katherine McCoy, emphasized invention and encouraged students to develop their own design philosophies and methodologies. Students often worked with both hand tools and digital materials, combining them in the creation of experimental work. Venezky’s Cranbrook education still informs his work today. He is intrigued by patterns, rhythm, and the structural qualities of letterforms; he often uses collage material, digital images, and altered or distorted type in his work, which skillfully combines handwork with technology. His most influential work includes designs for the Sundance Film Festival (Figs. 24–21 and 24–22), Reebok, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Chronicle Books, Princeton Architectural Press, and Blue Note Records.
Venezky has taught typography at the California College of Arts in San Francisco since 1993. In 1997, he established the San Francisco–based firm Appetite Engineers. In the same year, he was included in ID magazine’s list of most influential designers, and in 2001, a retrospective of his work was held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
The digital type foundry
Early digital type-design systems, such as the pre-PostScript Ikarus system used in the 1980s by typesetting machinery manufacturers, were very expensive. When font-design software for desktop computers—for example, Fontographer—became available, it enabled designers to design and market original typefaces as electronic files on computer disks, with significant reductions in the high cost of designing and distributing fonts. A virtual explosion in the release of new typefaces occurred in the 1990s, as large type vendors were joined by independent type manufacturers.
Adobe Systems became a prolific and influential digital type foundry. An early type family developed for its PostScript page-description language was Stone (Fig. 24–23), designed by Sumner Stone (b. 1945). Trained as both a calligrapher and a mathematician, Stone was type director of Adobe Systems before opening his own type foundry in 1990. The Stone family has three versions—serif, sans-serif, and informal—that share basic letterform proportions and structure. Each version has three roman and three italic fonts, for a total of eighteen typefaces in the family. At that time, reproduction quality of 300-dpi laser printers was a major factor for consideration in the type family’s character designs. Since the release of Stone, advances in technology have made possible the design of “superfamilies” of type, such as Stone’s Magma, which has forty-eight variants within the family.
In the past, when designers developed a typeface for a proprietary system such as Linotype or Monotype, they took the specific nature of the typesetting equipment into account. Contemporary typeface designers create fonts adaptable for use on many output devices, including low- and high-resolution display screens and inkjet and high-resolution printers, as well as output systems that do not yet exist. Moreover, the environment in which type is used has expanded dramatically, as individuals in many fields, not just designers and typesetters, make typographic decisions and create typeset documents.
Carol Twombly (b. 1959) and Robert Slimbach (b. 1956) emerged as outstanding staff typeface designers at Adobe, creating original designs and respected digital adaptations of classic typefaces. Twombly’s typefaces include three masterful families (Fig. 24–24) inspired by historical lettering. These were the first three display fonts in the Adobe Originals type program, a series of new designs created for digital technology. Charlemagne is freely based on the decorative capitals used as versals and titling in Carolingian-era illuminated manuscripts. Lithos was inspired by the monoline simplicity and even-textured economy of Greek stone inscriptions, but Twombly transformed these carved letters into a highly original family of five weights, each with inventive characters and a distinctive appearance. After its release, Lithos was adopted for on-screen graphics by the MTV cable-television channel and became wildly popular. The inscription on Trajan’s Column (see Fig. 2–17) has inspired numerous fonts, including Twombly’s typeface Trajan. Her font closely paraphrases the source, but the conversion from stone to a typeface required a less heavy N, a bolder S, and more prominent serifs.
A master calligrapher, Slimbach seeks inspiration from classical typefaces as he designs text faces for digital technology. He also creates vibrant fonts based on calligraphy and hand-lettering (Fig. 24–25). Extensive research and documentation combined with meticulous craft have resulted in typefaces fully faithful to the originals. Slimbach’s fonts are hailed for maintaining the spirit of the original while making adjustments and refinements appropriate to digital technology.
In 1992, Adobe released its first multiple-master typefaces. Two or more master designs combined to generate an extensive sequence of fonts. The master designs determined the range of fonts that could be generated through changes in a design axis. The design axis controlled weight, determined by stroke thickness and the resulting ratio of black form to white background; width, determined by making the letters wider (expanded) or narrower (condensed); style, in which visual attributes, ranging from no serifs to large serifs or wedge-shaped serifs to slab serifs, were altered; and optical size, involving subtle adjustments in proportion, weight, spacing, and contrast between thick and thin elements, optimizing legibility and design. The optical size axis was an important consideration. During the phototype era, one set of master characters was drawn for use in all sizes, even though small text characters needed sturdier serifs and heavier thin strokes than large display type sizes. Myriad, a two-axis sans serif (Fig. 24–26), was one of the first multiple-master fonts. Twombly and Slimbach executed the actual drawing and digitization over a two-year period.
Many cottage-industry type foundries vaulted into existence around the globe, owned and operated by independent designers and entrepreneurs who were empowered by the new technology to create and distribute their original typefaces. A rift arose between designers who believed the traditional values should be maintained and designers who advocated experimentation and even eccentricity. Quite often, this split formed along generational lines. Young designers were not trying to expand the range within existing categories of typefaces (for example, the way Univers extended the range of sans-serif types) (see Fig. 18–13) or create new decorative and novelty types; rather, they sought to invent totally new kinds of typefaces. These fonts could not be evaluated against proven typographic traditions.
By 1990, Emigre Fonts began receiving many idiosyncratic and novel fonts from outside designers. Licko and VanderLans recognized the inherent formal inventiveness and originality of many of these submissions and began to license and distribute the designs. Often these fonts proved extremely controversial (Fig. 24–27), even as they were rapidly adopted and extensively used in major advertising campaigns and publication designs. Later in the decade Licko designed two significant revivals: Mrs Eaves, an exemplary interpretation of John Baskerville’s eighteenth-century transitional fonts (see Figs. 8–14 through 8–18), and Filosofia, which captures the spirit of modern-style fonts (see Figs. 8–23 and 8–24) while actually resolving some of the legibility issues inherent in the eighteenth-century originals.
The digital type foundry decentralized and democratized the creation, distribution, and use of type fonts. In the 1990s access to typography increased, and experimental and novelty typefaces proliferated. Excellent and mediocre versions of traditional typefaces were released, and the glut of new designs included unprecedented innovations along with ill-conceived and poorly crafted fonts.
From 1955 until 1957, London-born Matthew Carter (b. 1937) learned to cut punches for metal type by hand at the type foundry of the Enschedé printing house in the Netherlands. Over many decades, Carter has continued to design scores of typefaces as typographic technology has evolved from metal type to phototype and digital type. Regarded by many to be the most important type designer of modern time, his work is used daily by millions of people.
In 1960 Carter visited New York, where he was greatly inspired by the advanced, inventive typography of Herb Lubalin and others in the New York graphic design world. Upon returning to London, he produced a number of sans-serif faces with Alan Fletcher, Colin Forbes, and Bob Gill.
During an association with Linotype from 1965 to 1981, Carter’s designs included the ubiquitous Bell Centennial (1978), created for early high-speed digital and cathode-ray tube (CRT) technology. It was designed for outstanding legibility in telephone directories using small type on coarse newsprint. After cofounding and directing the type-design activities of the Bitstream digital foundry from 1981 to 1992, Carter formed Carter & Cone Type of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Carter has the ability to combine classic qualities with modern aesthetics and produces outstanding fonts that make profound references to earlier models (Fig. 24–28). Galliard, designed for Mergenthaler Linotype in 1978 and issued in four weights with italics, is a masterful adaptation of a sixteenth-century design by Robert Granjon. Mantinia is a titling face inspired by painted and engraved capital letters by the Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna. Sophia is an original display typeface inspired by hybrid alphabets of capitals, Greek letterforms, and uncials from sixth-century Constantinople; it contains ten joining characters that fuse with other letters to form ligatures. While there are many twentieth-century revivals of William Caslon’s text types, his vigorous and somewhat eccentric display types had not been redesigned for digital typesetting until Carter released his Big Caslon CC.
Matthew Carter’s typeface Walker (Fig. 24–29), designed for the Minneapolis-based Walker Art Center, provides a striking example of expanding typographic possibilities. Sturdy sans-serif capitals have a series of five add-on serifs Carter called “snap-on (née Deputy) serifs,” which can be attached at will to the vertical strokes of each letter; further, these are available in a variety of widths. Carter also designed a series of ruled lines running over, under, or both over and under the letters, linking their forms into a dynamic unity. Of the basic letterforms, Carter said, “I think of them rather like store window mannequins with good bone structure on which to hang many different kinds of clothing.” Ligatures and alternate characters complete a character set, allowing the Walker Art Center to modulate forms to suit the message at hand.
In 2004 Carter designed Yale, a signage typeface for Yale University, and refined the identity typeface for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Yale was inspired by a Venetian typeface that first appeared in Pietro Bembo’s De Aetna, published by Aldus Manutius in 1495–96. Although it was initially designed for signage, the new version now includes roman and bold italic fonts appropriate for print and the web. The new typeface is indicative of Yale University’s deep-rooted commitment to fine typography, while contributing to Yale’s contemporary graphic identity (Figs. 24–30, 24–31, and 24–32). In September 2010 Matthew Carter made history by being the first type designer to be awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, commonly known as a “genius grant.”
Typeface design has long been an integral component to graphic design curricula in Europe, most notably at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, and the University of Reading in England. Gerard Unger (b. 1942) studied graphic design, typography, and type design from 1963 to 1967 at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. A freelance designer since 1975, he is currently a visiting professor at the University of Reading’s Department of Typography and Graphic Communication. He also taught at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy until January 2007. In September 2006 he was appointed professor of typography at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, a position he held until 2012.
Unger’s graphic design work includes stamps, coins, magazines, newspapers, books, corporate identity, and many typefaces. In 1984, at a relatively early stage in his career, he was awarded the prestigious H. N. Werkman Prize for his typographic work, especially for his digital type designs and for his monumental contribution in reconciling technology and typographic culture (Fig. 24–33).
Frank Blokland (b. 1959), one of the many students of the brilliant designer, type and book typographic theorist, and teacher Gerrit Noordzij (b. 1931), studied graphic and typographic design at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague from 1978 until 1982. Blokland lucidly expressed his ideas on typography with this statement: “Typography means more than bringing order to the passing on of information; it means elevating to the sublime the mold in which the process of passing on is cast.” During the 1980s Blokland was responsible for the lettering on important Dutch monuments, including the Westerkerk in Amsterdam. Following years of groundwork, he established the Dutch Type Library (DTL) in 1990, currently the largest producer and publisher of digital typefaces in the Netherlands. Soon afterward, he directed the development of dtl FontMaster, a set of utilities for professional font production developed by dtl and URW++. Blokland’s numerous typeface designs include dtl Documenta, dtl Documenta Sans, dtl Haarlemmer (based on drawings by Jan van Krimpen), dtl Haarlemmer Sans, and dtl Romulus (also based on Van Krimpen originals) (Fig. 24–34). When Noordzij retired from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1987, Blokland was the first of his former students chosen to succeed him. As senior lecturer, Blokland now teaches writing, letter and type design, and font production in the graphic design department.
Petr van Blokland (b. 1956) and Erik van Blokland (b. 1967) also studied under Noordzij at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. After graduation, Petr van Blokland worked for Total Design (now Total Identity) in Amsterdam and Studio Dumbar in The Hague. Since 1980 he has been designer and partner in Buro Petr van Blokland + Claudia Mens in Delft. A brilliant addition to the Noordzij legacy, he has taught at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts since 1988 (Fig. 24–35). Erik van Blokland first collaborated with his classmate Just van Rossum (b. 1966) under the name LettError in Berlin. After experimenting with computer-aided type design, they designed Beowolf, released by FontShop in July 1990. Erik Van Blokland now lives in The Hague, working in type, illustration, magazine, corporate, interactive, and web design.
Lacking formal training in what would later be his chosen profession of type design, Erik Spiekermann (b. 1947) studied English and history of art in Berlin. His type designs include FF Meta, FF MetaSerif, ITC Officina, FF Govan, FF Info, FF Unit, LoType, Berliner Grotesk, and many corporate typefaces. In 1979 he established MetaDesign, the largest German design firm, which now has offices in Berlin, London, and San Francisco. Corporate clients have included Audi, Skoda, Volkswagen, Lexus, and Heidelberg Printing. In addition, there have been signage projects for the Berlin transit system and the Düsseldorf airport. In 1988 he founded FontShop, a firm specializing in creating and distributing electronic fonts. Spiekermann left MetaDesign in 2001 and is currently a partner in Edenspiekermann, which has Berlin, Amsterdam, London, and San Francisco offices. His font family for Nokia was released in 2002, and in the following year the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at The Hague presented him with the Gerrit Noordzij Award. In 2007 he was appointed to the board of directors at Microsoft, where he is currently director of fonts.
Ralph Oliver du Carrois (b. 1975), a Berlin-based graphic, product, and type designer, graduated in 2004 from the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung (State College of Design) in Karlsruhe. Beginning in 2000, he worked for different companies or agencies before founding the Berlin studio Seite4 in 2003, focusing mainly on corporate and type design. In 2008 he collaborated with Erik Spiekermann and Erik van Blokland on the design of the Axel type family for FontShop (Fig. 24–36).
Jonathan Hoefler’s (b. 1970) work includes highly original typeface designs for Rolling Stone, Harper’s Bazaar, the New York Times Magazine, Sports Illustrated, and Esquire. In 1989 he began the Hoefler Type Foundry; when he became a partner of Tobias Frere-Jones (b. 1970) in 1999, the Hoefler Type Foundry was transformed into Hoefler & Frere-Jones. Tobias Frere-Jones, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, worked for the Boston-based firm Font Bureau for seven years. In 1996 he joined the faculty at the Yale University graduate graphic design program, where he continues to teach typeface design today. The designer of over five hundred typefaces, Frere-Jones was the first American to be awarded the Gerrit Noordzij Prize by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts at The Hague for his role in type design and type education (Fig. 24–37).
The advances in digital type design have allowed for the mechanization, stylization, and standardization of traditionally handwritten letterforms and calligraphy. In recent years, there has been great interest in the design of font families that include not only characters from the Roman alphabet, but from Cyrillic, Greek, and Arabic alphabets as well.
Nadine Chahine (b. 1978) graduated from the American University of Beirut with a degree in graphic design, and during her studies there she became interested in Arabic typography. In 2003 she received a master’s degree in typeface design from the University of Reading, where she studied under Gerard Unger and the renowned French type designer Jean-François Porchez (b. 1964). While studying there, she concentrated on congruous relationships between Latin and Arabic scripts. Today she works at Linotype GmbH in Germany, designing custom Arabic fonts for international clients. Her typefaces include Koufiya (a dual-script font family, Latin and Arabic) (Fig. 24–38), Arabic versions of Latin typefaces, such as Frutiger Arabic (Fig. 24–39), Neue Helvetica Arabic (Fig. 24–40), and Palatino Arabic, as well as new Arabic fonts, including Janna and Badiya.
Digital imaging
The photograph lost its status as an undisputed documentation of visual reality when electronic imaging software allowed seamless and undetectable image manipulation. The boundaries between photography, illustration, and the fine arts began to disappear, along with those separating designer, illustrator, and photographer. However, access to image-manipulation systems was at first very expensive, and often designers were denied hands-on access; they could only direct technicians rather than actually work with the system themselves. Before the advent of the Macintosh computer, the creative potential of electronic technology was seldom explored, as artists and designers seldom had unregulated access to advanced technology; hourly rental fees for mainframe computers and video-editing facilities were often unaffordable. An MTV press kit cover (Fig. 24–41), designed by Pat Gorman of Manhattan Design, is a forerunner of the image invention made possible by digital computers.
Gorman created color variations of the MTV logo by exploring editing controls in a television studio. The studio engineer became so upset over her experimentation that he left her alone with the equipment, locking her in the studio so others would not view her audacious activities. Gorman referred to this design as the “bad television” logo because of its total contrast to the television industry’s insistence on “correct” color fidelity. Widely reproduced and appearing on the cover of Billboard magazine in 1983, this design at once illustrated the creative potential of electronic image manipulation.
In an image for Mead Paper Company, designer Woody Pirtle created a surreal book in which the pages opened to permit objects and figures to float out into an expansive sky (Fig. 24–42). Many photographs were digitized, silhouetted, and electronically combined into an electronic montage.
To create an advertisement for a health-care symposium (Fig. 24–43), April Greiman “built” a poster by combining digitized images—photographs of a flag and an eagle, an X-ray, and a drawing of the medical profession’s traditional caduceus symbol—with color shapes and gradations and a video clip of hands shot live into the Paintbox program. A wide variety of effects, including mosaic, fading, outline, overlap, and increasing and decreasing levels of transparency, enable complex iconography to evolve as an integrated and organic whole.
These uncommon electronic montages from the 1980s were harbingers of the revolution in image making, in which thousands of designers, illustrators, and photographers used desktop computers with drawing, painting, and image-manipulation software to create imagery. The potent merging of video and print technology unleashed new graphic possibilities. Optical disks, video capture-and-edit capabilities, and interactive print- and time-based media expanded graphic design activity further.
Interactive media, the Internet, and the World Wide Web
Interactive media are a combination of audio, visual, and cinematic communications, connected to form a coherent body of information. Unlike books or films, which present information in linear sequences, interactive media have nonlinear structures, allowing each viewer to pursue information along a personally chosen path. Interactive media are usually created by teams of professionals, including audiovisual specialists, writers, computer programmers, content specialists, directors, graphic designers, information architects, image-makers, and producers.
In contrast to printed communications that are finalized after they emerge from the printing press, interactive media programs are open-ended. Unlimited revisions are possible, and content can be continuously added or modified. VizAbility was an early interactive CD-ROM program that taught concepts relating to visual perception and helped users develop heightened visual awareness (Fig. 24–44). VizAbility was designed by MetaDesign San Francisco, an information-graphics firm then headed by Erik Spiekermann.
Computer communications took a major step forward with the development of the Internet, a vast network of linked computers. The Internet had its origins in the late 1960s, when scientists at the United States Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) established the ARPANET computer network so they could transfer data between sites working on similar research projects. Supercomputer sites around the United States were connected by the National Science Foundation (NSF) into NSFNET in 1986; this totally replaced ARPANET within two years. In 1991 the United States Congress passed legislation widening access in public schools, two-year colleges, and business organizations, generating a dramatic expansion of what was now called the Internet. By early 1997 over thirty million users in more than one hundred countries were linked into an electronic global community. By 2010 there were close to seven billion Internet users in the world, with more than 240 million in the United States alone.
The now omnipresent World Wide Web provides a means to easily organize and access the vast and ever-increasing content on the Internet, including text, images, sound, animation, and video. The web was first developed in 1990 by physicist Tim Berners-Lee at the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, Switzerland. Berners-Lee developed the three main building blocks of the web: the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), the HyperText Markup Language (HTML), and a specification for the “address” of every file on the web called the Uniform Resource Locator (URL). At first limited to the scientific community, the web started to take off in 1993, with the development of the graphical Mosaic browser at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) by a team including Marc Andreessen. Leaving NCSA, Andreessen cofounded Netscape Communications, which in late 1994 produced the first major commercial graphical browser, Netscape Navigator, causing the number of web users to mushroom. Web use continues to grow at an incredible rate to this day, as the web has become a ubiquitous tool of commerce, research, and expression for users and corporations around the world.
In the 1990s, the phrase information superhighway was used to express the global access to enormous amounts of information provided by the World Wide Web. In 1997, an estimated 150 million websites were online, and by 2010 there were close to twelve billion websites. The Internet represents an unprecedented advance in human communications. Its explosive growth through the late 1990s opened new horizons for graphic design by professionals and individuals using computers and Internet access to produce websites. A previously inconceivable decentralization of media communications had occurred.
The early years of website design posed significant constraints for graphic designers. A computer’s screen size and typographic defaults often reconfigured the intended page design until more sophisticated software-downloaded fonts were developed. Early in the Internet revolution, many feared a collapse of design standards due to the limitations of the HTML programming language and the widespread access to website design by individuals without design training. Nevertheless, in the infancy of the medium, many designers, including Jessica Helfand (b. 1960), whose distinctive web projects include the initial design for the Discovery Channel’s site, demonstrated that graphic designers can create identity, aid navigation, and bring dynamic visual interest to websites. The Discovery Channel website became an early pioneer of web design. The pages (Fig. 24–45) used geometric zoning to create areas for titles, subtitles, and a sidebar of information. Images were used as signifiers to direct viewers as they navigated the site. Opening screens for editorial features used arresting images and understated typography, in contrast to the strident jumble of competing small elements on many websites.
In 1976 architect and designer Richard Saul Wurman (b. 1935) coined the term information architecture and predicted it would become a new profession of individuals who made complex information understandable. Twenty years later this term became widely used to denote a process of analyzing complex information and giving it structure and order, enabling audiences to glean its essence in an efficient and agreeable manner.
Clement Mok (b. 1958), an Apple Computer creative director who left to open Clement Mok Designs in 1987 (renamed Studio Archetype in 1996), emerged as an early advocate of the graphic designer’s role in the rapidly changing world of interactive media. Mok realized that the digital revolution was merging commerce, technology, and design into a symbiotic entity (Fig. 24–46). Mok believed design should be defined not as an isolated entity, such as packaging or graphics added on to the product or service, but as an integral part of an organization’s overall vision and strategy.
Interactive media permitted small firms and individuals to efficiently communicate with audiences and market products or services. This was demonstrated by the first fontBoy interactive type catalogue (Fig. 24–47), designed by Bob Aufuldish (b. 1961). On the main holding screen, letterforms floated randomly in space. When a viewer passed the cursor over a letterform, its movement stopped and the font name appeared; double-clicking on the letter opened another screen that showed the entire font. Typefaces could be accessed from a menu page as well. Aufuldish also began a type foundry because he believed there was still room for experimentation and exploration in font design. He expressed interest in “a new typography waiting to happen—what I call baroque modernism for the new millennium—and I want to make and release type to inspire that new typography.”
Among other advanced techniques, Flash, XML, and JavaScript give designers the opportunity to make any website wholly distinctive. Interactive components, videos, and even games can be incorporated. Early on, April Greiman recognized the potential of the Internet as a new creative medium. She explored and developed new technologies in pursuit of a visual vocabulary that would enliven the virtual canvas. Greiman’s design for the RoTo Architects website exists as a dynamic extension of her unique vision (Fig. 24–48).
An emerging interactive design firm, Render Monkey was founded in 2006 by Amelle Stein and Sastry Appajosyula. Their work combines creative interface design with inventive programming, providing for fluid, streamlined navigation through multiple, complex layers of information. Their focus on the user experience extends to interactive solutions for mobile, online, and offline designs as well as architectural spaces. Render Monkey’s design for the exhibition Color Chart at the Museum of Modern Art allows users to interact with various interfaces for a customized approach to accessing dynamic content (Figs. 24–49 and 24–50).
The digital vanguard
Graphic design in the 1990s often incorporated the digital process in complex visual combinations of information architecture, media, technology, and culture. Erik Adigard (b. 1953) and Patricia McShane (b. 1953) of M.A.D. Design are two designers who have used the computer to explore the infinite possibilities of the digital process. Their frontispiece designs for Wired magazine built visual essays out of the cover stories. For “Money Is Just a Type of Information,” Adigard combined a collage of foreign currency designs with the verso design of the U.S.$1 banknote converted to red ink, financial and stock ticker data, vernacular images, and digital patterns and gradations to create a densely packed montage that comments on the effects of new technologies (Fig. 24–51). The work of Adigard and McShane exemplifies the development of the designer as illustrator working with what had, in just a few years, become powerful and revolutionary computer applications.
Adigard designed the HotBot logo for the first commercial search engine with customized search features, launched by Wired Digital in 1996 (Fig. 24–52). The concentric Os were also navigation links. The typographic forms, ironically, have more in common with early twentieth-century typographic experiments, such as those of Russian constructivist Alexander Rodchenko, than with the new technologies the mark represents.
Having received an MFA in design and media arts at UCLA, Aaron Koblin (b. 1982) is a graphic designer concentrating on the visualization of data. He transforms social and infrastructural information to portray cultural developments and evolving patterns (Fig. 24–53). Koblin received the National Science Foundation’s first place award for science visualization, and his work is included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was the Abramowitz Artist in Residence at MIT in 2010 and is currently technology lead at Google’s Creative Lab.
Design for portable devices
The early 2000s saw the beginning of a revolution in the way people connect with information and communicate with each other. The introduction of mobile devices, primarily phones, that are connected to the Internet fueled this change. Over the course of a decade the technology of these devices became increasingly sophisticated and their use commonplace.
Design for mobile devices is critically linked to the development of mobile technology and the devices themselves. The introduction of highly responsive touch screens changed the way people interact with these devices and opened up new possibilities and challenges for designers. While these devices can easily render traditional web content within a browser screen, their full capabilities are best taken advantage of by applications, or apps, that are made specifically for them. The design and development of these apps has created entirely new fields in design centered on user experience.
Although there were predecessors, Apple’s iPhone brought touch-based computing to the mainstream market, and expanded it with the notebook-sized iPad a few years later. To date, all applications supported on these devices must be approved by Apple and meet their standards for quality, security, and usability. This closed ecosystem creates a holistic experience that consumers buy into, from desktop computer to smartphone. Designers must exceed these standards to create a marketable product, and the intense competition has driven refinements and innovations in the field.
Printed publications have found a new lease on life through mobile web and applications. The portable nature of devices makes them ideal platforms for periodicals targeting an audience on the move. Digital content can include audio and video clips, while interactive graphics play to the strengths of touch interfaces. For example, the New York Times has established a strong digital presence across channels including mobile web and targeted apps. The responsive nature of the website allows the same content and design to be displayed on devices ranging from a desktop screen to a phone by dynamically resizing and reorganizing the content according to a specific layout. The mobile applications are designed specifically for tablet and phone form factors, with navigation structures and layouts that play to their strengths. Video and audio clips are sized accordingly, both in aspect ratio for viewing as well as data size so that they can be downloaded over a cellular connection. The larger screen of the tablets allows for more interaction with dynamic graphs and other information graphics. A comments section, which debuted on the web, allows users to interact with each other and contribute to the conversation. The overall design of the apps is drawn strongly from the New York Times website, which itself is an extension of the printed publication, and forms another cornerstone supporting the entire visual language of the brand.
Since their initial release, smartphones have become almost ubiquitous in everyday life in most of the developed world. By replacing traditional mobile phones, smartphones opened up new methods of communication and expanded the audience for that dialogue. The combination of short-form messaging, photographs, and videos falls into the broad category of social media. While it was originally underestimated, Twitter expanded from a small base of users sharing the details of their day-to-day life to a global community that captures major events as they happen, from space missions to political uprisings. The interface is designed to operate intuitively, with common tasks readily available at all times while less frequently accessed areas of the app require more navigation. The minimalistic visual design draws from contemporary web practices, while the interface design stands as a measure against which many other apps are judged.
Apps also function as unique experiences in and of themselves. Thomson Reuters’ Wider Image app combines traditional static periodical content, pictures, and text with interactive information graphics (Figs. 24–54 and 24–55). The image-heavy layout draws from contemporary periodical design with large photos, smaller chunks of text, and large white spaces. Stories are told in a nonlinear fashion that encourages viewers to swipe and tap around the content to explore related information. Reuters pulls from its large news database to provide fresh content regularly, which keeps users engaged with the app.
The design of applications can change almost overnight, rendering today’s favored designs and patterns obsolete. Designers are engaged in a never-ending race to refine and differentiate their apps while keeping the visual aesthetic fresh and relevant. At the same time, the hardware giants are releasing completely new and innovative products into the marketplace. Touch-screen computers are frequently seen even in automobiles. Google is in the process of refining Google Glass, an eyeglass-mounted screen that can be used to take photos and videos and has a limited ability to browse the web. Both Google and Apple are in the process of releasing mainstream versions of wristwatch-style devices that contain small touch-screen interfaces, connect to the Internet and the user’s mobile phone, and are rumored to contain biometric sensors. The future of mobile technology is not limited to phones and tablet computers, but includes an entire ecosystem of web-enabled devices communicating and sharing information with each other. As these devices become more sophisticated, so too will the interfaces that allow users to engage with them, opening new possibilities in the field of app design.
Motion graphics and film titles
The language of graphic design was transformed by the integration of type and image with the time-based element of motion to create the new field known as motion graphics. Artists, painters, and filmmakers sought ways to animate objects, create “visual music,” and extend the art of storytelling with nonlinear film techniques borrowed from abstract cinema and animation, including painting and scratching directly on film stock and using stop-motion photography and computers to animate graphic and typographic elements.
The introduction of motion began with experiments in abstract film, animation, and avant-garde cinema. The early days of abstract film or “pure cinema” explored personal visions of film and animation in work produced by pioneers such as painter Viking Eggeling (Symphonie Diagonale, 1924) and German Dadaist painter Hans Richter (Rhythm 23, 1923), each photographing objects a single frame at a time.
Australian Len Lye’s motion experiments led him to scratch images directly on film to create kinetic animation (Tuslava, 1929). Scottish-born Canadian Norman McLaren conducted similar animation experiments painting in color on film stock (Fiddle-de-Dee, 1949). German-born painter Oskar Fischinger experimented with “visual sound,” making films of individual drawings (An Optical Poem, 1937), colored liquids, clay, and many other materials. He was hired by Walt Disney Productions to animate the J. S. Bach music sequence in Fantasia (1940). Inspired by Fischinger’s work, Texas-born Mary Ellen Bute photographed objects frame by frame to create animations as abstract “visual music” (Synchromy No. 2, 1935).
From the 1960s through the 1980s Stan Vanderbeeke (Science Friction, 1959) and Stan Brakhage (Dog Star Man, 1961–64; 23rd Psalm Branch, 1967) reinvigorated the medium of abstract film with techniques of stop-motion animation, painting and drawing directly on film, and use of multiple exposures of objects on film.
Modern feature film titles combining type and image in motion were first created by graphic designer Saul Bass for director Otto Preminger’s film Carmen Jones (1954) and The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). Many titles have followed, created by many designers and filmmakers who have transformed the way information is communicated.
Designer Maurice Binder (1925–91) created classic openings for James Bond films beginning with Dr. No (1962). He was succeeded, after his death, by Daniel Kleinman (b. 1955) for GoldenEye (1995). Animator and filmmaker Terry Gilliam (b. 1940) designed all of Monty Python’s opening credits as well as title sequences for some films he directed, including Brazil (1985). Richard and Robert Greenberg of R/Greenberg created titles for many films including Superman (1978).
Imaginary Forces was launched in 1996 by Kyle Cooper (b. 1962), Chip Houghton, and Peter Frankfurt (b. 1958). It rapidly entered the vanguard of film-title design by integrating graphic design, motion, and interactive media. Its staff consists of designers, art directors, animators, editors, writers, and producers.
Danny Yount (b. 1965), a self-taught designer, freelanced for Imaginary Forces in 2000. Today, he is one of the most influential title designers for film and television; he has designed and directed the opening sequences for many notable productions, including HBO’s Six Feet Under, for which he won an Emmy Award. As senior creative director at Prologue Films—a collective of designers, filmmakers, and artists—his focus has primarily been feature film main titles. His opening sequence for Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was described by the Hollywood Reporter as “a title sequence worthy of the late Saul Bass” (Fig. 24–56).
Typography and the built environment
Lisa Strausfeld (b. 1964) studied art history and computer science at Brown University. Later she received master’s degrees in architecture at Harvard University and in media arts and sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While at MIT she worked as a research assistant in the Visible Language Workshop of the Media Lab, where she explored and created new methods for presenting and interacting with complex data. Together with two MIT classmates, she founded Perspecta in 1996. Eventually sold to Excite@Home, Perspecta was a software company that developed sophisticated search and visual user interface technology for systematizing large collections of information. In 2002 Strausfield became a partner at Pentagram, where her work involves the interaction of actual and virtual space. Her group focuses on digital information design projects including software prototypes, websites, interpretive displays, and extensive media installations. Her training as an architect allows her to incorporate the presentation of information into physical surrounds, as in the large-scale dynamic media display in the corporate headquarters of Bloomberg LP (Fig. 24–57).
For over forty years, Paula Scher has been at the vanguard of graphic design. In recent years, her typography has spilled into the streets and onto buildings; requests for her typographic treatments in the built environment are steadily increasing. In 2005 she paired with Lisa Strausfeld on the design of the Bloomberg LP headquarters, incorporating large-scale typographic treatments throughout the interior spaces (Fig. 24–58). For the New 42nd Street Studios building in New York, she unabashedly applied giant words to doors, floors, ceilings, and walls (Fig. 24–59). In Newark, New Jersey, she painted the Lucent Technologies Center for Arts Education white and then placed words such as music, drama, and dance over the entire façade, communicating the energy and dynamism contained within (Fig. 24–60).
Ruedi Baur (b. 1956) received his graphic design education at the Zurich School of Applied Arts. After establishing Studio BBV in 1983, he began Intégral Concept in 1989. Intégral is now five self-regulating studios working together on cross-disciplinary assignments. Baur has also been involved with identity and information programs, wayfinding systems, exhibition design, and urban design in Paris, Zurich, and Berlin. From 1989 until 1994 he coordinated the design department at the National School of Fine Arts in Lyon, and in 1995 he was appointed professor of corporate design at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig, where he created the Interdisciplinary Design Institute in 1999. Recent work includes the integration of typography and architecture for many prominent institutions and enterprises, among them the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Cologne-Bonn airport, and the Esisar school at the Grenoble Institute of Technology (Fig. 24–61).
The Dutch graphic designer Karel Martens (b. 1939) was educated at the Academy of Fine Arts at Arnhem. Concentrating on typography, his work includes postage stamps, books, and signage. In the past several years he has also designed typographic façades for buildings throughout the Netherlands, including the Philharmonie concert hall in Haarlem and the Veenman Printers building in Ede (Fig. 24–62). Committed to design education, Martens taught at the Academy of Fine Arts at Arnhem from 1977 until 1994 and at the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht from 1994 until 1999. Since 1997 he has been a visiting lecturer in the postgraduate graphic design department at the Yale University School of Art. In the same year, he helped begin a pioneering school of postgraduate education called the Werkplaats Typografie (Typography Workshop) within the ArtEZ Institute for the Arts in Arnhem, where he continues to teach today.
New typographic expression
The use of text as signs or as visual form began as far back as 33 bce, when it was referred to as pattern poetry. The cubists, Dadaists, and futurists all explored word-images and shaped text. The work of Guillaume Apollinaire (see Figs. 13–18 and 13–19), who shaped text to illustrate ideas in his calligrammes and editorial pages, has been an inspiration for others seeking to use text to illustrate a story. These pieces challenge viewers to “see” text as images as well as something to be read.
Long before the arrival of the computer, artists and designers were liberating type from the page by turning it into expressionist signs. Futurist artist and designer Filippo Marinetti celebrated “words in freedom” in his Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature of 1912. The personal computer has enabled designers to freely stretch the limits of typographic form to create unbounded words or letters on the page. Shuichi Nogami (b. 1954) is a designer who creates posters using expressionist typographic forms. For a poster promoting an architect working with wood in Japan, the designer combined letterforms and stretched their shapes into a wooden sculpture floating in space (Fig. 24–63). Nogami often takes surprising letters and photographic images and combines, overlaps, merges, and stretches them into experimental letterforms that float as three-dimensional objects on the page. The designs of Shinnoske Sugisaki (b. 1953), both elegant and poetic, display a unique blend of Western and Japanese features (Fig. 24–64).
Among the leading figures in contemporary Swiss graphic design are Ralph Schraivogel (b. 1960) and Melchior Imboden (b. 1956). A graduate of the Zurich School of Design, Schraivogel established his own graphic design studio in 1982. He has developed posters for a wide range of institutions and cultural events, including Zurich’s Filmpodium, the Museum of Design Zurich, the Festival of African Films (CinemAfrica), and the Theatre am Neumarkt (Fig. 24–65). Imboden arranges elements of simple, geometric compositions through minimal and decisive use of color to create bold, visually arresting, and illusionistic typographical abstractions. His expressive work combines a penetrating and rhythmic use of space with abstraction, repetition, flat geometric planes of color, and experimental typography. Imboden has designed many posters, books, and catalogues for Swiss cultural institutions that have earned recognition at international exhibitions (Fig. 24–66).
Paula Scher draws upon historical models while transforming them into her own unique form of expression. Her posters for the Public Theater’s productions of Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk; Hamlet and Hair; and Twelfth Night and The Bacchae are refined and more expressive versions of nineteenth-century typographic posters combined with the playful spirit of Dada (Figs. 24–67, 24-68 and 24–69).
A graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art, Jennifer Morla (b. 1955) founded Morla Design in 1984. Since the studio’s founding, Morla has engaged in all facets of design, including branding, print, packaging, motion graphics, environmental design, and typography. She has won over three hundred awards of excellence and was admitted to the prestigious Alliance Graphique Internationale in 1998. She is known for her ability to combine wit and aesthetics with business pragmatics (Figs. 24–70 and 24–71). Her clients include Levi Strauss, Herman Miller, and AIGA, among many others. In addition to serving as Morla Design’s president and creative director, she also assumed the position of chief marketing officer for Design Within Reach in 2006. She has exhibited widely and her work is part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Denver Art Museum, and the Library of Congress. She teaches at the California College of the Arts and lectures internationally.
Thomas Wedell (b. 1949) and Nancy Skolos (b. 1955) met in 1975 as students at the Cranbrook Academy of Art. In late 1979 they located their practice Skolos, Wedell + Raynor, in Boston with a third partner, Kenneth Raynor, also from Cranbrook. The studio developed a visual vocabulary with a complexity of structure and color that echoed the spirit of their primarily high-tech and consumer electronics clients such as Digital Equipment Corporation and Boston Acoustics. The intense energy, vibrant color, and textures of their work deftly evoke the spirit of technology itself.
The studio’s work pushes the potential interactions between word and image. Their three-dimensional constructions are collaged back into two-dimensional space and reflect the influence of modern art, technology, and architecture. In the early 1990s Raynor left the studio, and Skolos and Wedell began teaching at the Rhode Island School of Design, where the emphasis on communication theory influenced their work with a more refined use of symbolism (Figs. 24–72, 24–73, 24–74, 24–75, 24–76 and 24–77).
Catherine Zask (b. 1961), one of the leading figures in contemporary French graphic design, has developed posters for numerous cultural events and institutions, including the University of Franche-Comté, Scam (Civil Society of Multimedia Artists), L’Hippodrome, the national theater of Douai, the French Ministry of Culture, Paris Diderot University, and Hermès International. She was educated at the Graduate School of Graphic Arts in Paris and has taught at the School of Visual Communication and at the School of Art in Besançon. Zask’s posters exhibit a fluid elegance and expressive style of both word and letter that are constructed by typographic forms converted into written symbols (Figs. 24–78 and 24–79). Her typographic forms and configuration of the writing is the distinguishing characteristic of her oeuvre. During her residency at the French Academy in Rome, Zask focused on shaping letterforms, tracings, doodles, the symbolism of words, and typographic signs of writing she calls Alfabetempo. This work forms the basis of her continuous experimentation with the assemblage and deconstruction of typography (Fig. 24–80). She has won many awards, including the 20th International Biennial of Graphic Design Brno in 2002, and she is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale (AGI).
Peter Bankov (b. 1969) is a designer who straddles two worlds, presently dividing his time between Moscow and Prague. His experimental body of work draws upon contemporary street art and galleries and is underpinned by his Slavic and European surroundings. Bankov is prolific and devotes serious effort to creating work that is innovative and unlike anything else (Fig. 24–81). The unique visual language built into the posters often combines hand drawing, coarse texture, vibrant colors, collage, photography, and layers with drawn digital elements resulting in highly expressive visual communication solutions (Figs. 24–82 and 24–83). Originally from Minsk, Belarus, Bankov began his career in Moscow with the founding of the artist’s book collective Neuch in 1993. He went on to form both the Design Depot Company, one of the largest graphic design studios in Moscow, and the well-known design magazine kAk, serving as its editor in chief. In 2014 Bankov published Peter Bankov: I Make Posters Every Day, a poster diary documenting his daily poster project exploring color forms. He has received numerous design awards, including the Platinum Award from Graphis Poster Annual and a Special Jury Award from the Golden Bee 11, Moscow International Biennial of Graphic Design in 2014.
Hans Dieter Reichert (b. 1959) studied graphic design and visual communication with Willi Fleckhaus at the Universities of Essen and Wuppertal in Germany. Following a brief period of design studies in Switzerland, he graduated from the London University of the Arts. He worked at BRS Premsela & Vonk with Guus Ros and at Total Design with Jelle van der Toorn Vrijthoff before returning to London to work at the London design company Banks & Miles for five years. In 1993, he launched his own company, HDr Visual Communication, in Kent, England, and in 1995 he cofounded Bradbourne Publishing. He is also publisher, editor, art director, and designer of the quarterly international typographic magazine baseline (Fig. 24–84). Book designs by HDr Visual Communication include Alexey Brodovitch, by Kerry William Purcell, Steven Heller’s 1999 monograph Paul Rand, and Merz to Emigre and Beyond, also by Heller.
John Warwicker (b. 1955) studied graphic design at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in London and received a master’s degree in visual communication with a focus on electronic interactive media from Birmingham Polytechnic. In 1991 he cofounded Tomato, a collective of artists, designers, musicians, and writers. Since its founding, Tomato has offered an interdisciplinary approach to the design of print, advertising, architecture, fashion, public installations, music, television, and film (Fig. 24–85). Today, Warwicker practices in both London and Melbourne, Australia. He has won numerous awards and in 2006 was made the first foreign member of the prestigious Tokyo Type Director’s Club. He also serves as advisor to the British Council’s European Design Board and is an adjunct professor of architecture and design at the University of Technology, Sydney.
Bosnia and Herzegovina émigré Mirko Ilic (b. 1956) has exploited the computer to design word-image pieces in book designs and op-ed pieces for the New York Times, where he has been a frequent contributor. He began as an editorial illustrator and designer and has worked as an editorial art director for Time magazine as well as the New York Times. Ilic is as adept at design as he is at illustration, and he uses both as devices of visual analogy to communicate ideas. In both his designs and illustrations, he uses the computer to develop an immediate and detailed style. In his book design for Elvis + Marilyn 2X Immortal, full pages of text are shaped as the iconographic signs +, 2, and X, the signs used in the title. This style is directly inspired by early twentieth-century text designs such as Apollinaire’s pages for sic magazine in 1917. Apollinaire shaped negative space and text painstakingly, using hand-set type. Ilic’s shaped text designs, which challenge the reader both to see text as image and to read it, would be impractical or impossible without the computer and the page-design applications available today (Fig. 24–86).
The Polish graphic designer Władysław Pluta (b. 1949) skillfully uses type to evoke the content of his designs. Humor, expressive color, and the attempt to play “intellectual games with the viewer” are all aspects of his work (Fig. 24–87). Devoted to graphic design education, Pluta is currently chair of the visual communication department of the Faculty of Industrial Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kraków, his alma mater.
It is clear from the work of Michael Bierut (b. 1957) and Helmut Schmid (b. 1942) that the International Typographic Style is both alive and thriving. Before becoming a partner in Pentagram’s New York office in 1990, Bierut worked for ten years at Vignelli Associates, eventually becoming vice president of graphic design (Fig. 24–88). Active in design education, Bierut serves as a senior critic in graphic design at the Yale School of Art.
Now a German citizen, the Austrian-born Schmid first apprenticed as a type compositor in Germany and then studied under Emil Ruder, Robert Buechler, and Kurt Hauert at the Basel School of Design in Switzerland. Since 1977, he has worked as a graphic designer in Osaka, Japan, where he produces packaging and brand identities for consumer products. A typographic master, he has written valuable essays on typography for international magazines, including tm (Switzerland), Idea (Japan), Graphic Design (Japan), Grafisk Revy (Sweden), Graphische Revue (Austria), and baseline (United Kingdom). His inspiring book The Road to Basel: Typographic Reflections by Students of the Typographer and Teacher Emil Ruder was published in German, English, and Japanese in 1997 and reprinted by Robundo Publishers, Tokyo, in 2004. Schmid’s design clearly reflects the teaching of Ruder, but he has given it an additional refinement that is totally his own (Fig. 24–89).
Experimental typography in the Netherlands remains on the cutting edge. Selecting a few designers to profile in this section was not only a difficult task—it was virtually impossible. The Netherlands has a design culture so rich and diverse that it warrants a separate volume.
A design studio that clearly stands out is Koeweiden-Postma, begun in Amsterdam by Jacques Koeweiden (b. 1957) and Paul Postma (b. 1958). The graphic design of Koeweiden-Postma is remarkably varied. Its work is influenced by global visual cultures, as in the interpretation of Islamic pattern and ornament for the identity and posters for Marhaba, an Islamic cultural center in Amsterdam (Fig. 24–90).
Max Kisman (b. 1953) started his own graphic design studio soon after graduating from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in 1977. During the mid-1980s, he applied digital technology to his graphic design for Vinyl and Language Technology magazines, posters for the Paradiso Theater in Amsterdam, and Red Cross stamps for the Dutch postal service. In 1986 he cofounded TYP/Typografisch Papier, a magazine devoted to typography and art. From 1989 until 1992 he lived in Barcelona, where he digitized many of his early typefaces for FontShop International in Berlin, before returning to the Netherlands, where he worked as a graphic designer and animator for vpro Television. In 1994 he became involved in graphic design for interactive media for vpro-Digital, a Dutch agency specializing in new media, and the online magazine HotWired in San Francisco, and in 1997 he began working for Wired Television and then as art director for Wired Digital, also in San Francisco. Kisman maintains his studio mkdsgn in Mill Valley, California, and founded Holland Fonts to market his own typeface designs in 2002. As shown in his poster celebrating the century-old legacy of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Kisman approaches his work with openness and wit (Fig. 24–91).
After working together since 1993, Nikki Gonnissen (b. 1967) and Thomas Widdershoven (b. 1960) founded the Amsterdam design firm Thonik in 2000. From its inception, Thonik has been at the vanguard of a new generation of Dutch graphic designers. Working simultaneously as designers, art directors, and conceptual and media artists, the firm has undertaken a steady stream of largely unrelated assignments, and not a single solution has fallen within the realm of the predictable. Gonnissen and Widdershoven are concerned with the world of ideas, and their uncompromising designs are not for easy consumption. As stated in a 2001 monograph on their work, “Thonik’s approach is a breath of fresh air. Intellectual but not intellectualized” (Fig. 24–92).
The studio of Niessen & de Vries was formed in 2006 by Richard Niessen (b. 1972) and Esther de Vries (b. 1974). Both graduates of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, they believe in close collaboration with clients and strive to produce work that is inventive and unique. They describe their typographic work as systematic, grid-like, readable, and usable. Their work is also rich and highly expressive, qualities achieved by the use of layers, vibrant colors, and texture (Fig. 24–93). Their clients include the Stedelijk Museum, PTT (the Dutch postal service), the Gemeente Museum, and the French railway SNCF, among many others. Besides their work for clients, they work on self-commissioned projects and run their own small publishing house.
Letterpress revival
In the midst of the technological revolution, designers using centuries-old techniques and processes are enjoying a renaissance, particularly those artisans concerned with preserving the art of letterpress printing. Alan Kitching (b. 1940), an eminent specialist and teacher of letterpress typographic design and printmaking, is internationally renowned for his innovative use of wood and metal letterforms. In typographic compositions, books, packaging, and monoprints, Kitching skillfully adapts type from the past for modern communication. He began his career as an apprentice compositor at the age of fourteen. In 1989 he founded the Typographic Workshop in Clerkenwell, London, for students and professionals, and in 1999 he formed a partnership with designer and teacher Celia Stothard (1949–2010) and moved the Typography Workshop and presses to Lambeth in South London. In 1992 Kitching set up letterpress workshops as a senior tutor of typography at the Royal College of Art and as a visiting professor at the University of the Arts in London (Figs. 24–94 and 24–95).
After graduating with a degree in printmaking from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1994, Brady Vest (b. 1972) founded Hammerpress with just one printing press and one cabinet of type. The shop now has an expansive collection of antique type, blocks, and presses, along with new, custom-engraved plates. Hammerpress incorporates not only type and block printing but also found art and original illustration into its work. The use of many layers of vivid inks and overlapping letters and ornaments also characterizes its prints.
Experimentation and play are integral to Hammerpress’s process. In his poster for the band Yo La Tengo (Fig. 24–96), Vest approached the project by throwing type onto the press bed while trying to visualize how it would look when broken into different colors. He then pulled type from the composition piece by piece, saving it for the second or third pass of color, while trying to maintain registration. Other experiments yield highly tactile results, such as the use of broken type in the poster for the band Explosions in the Sky (Fig. 24–97), designed by Vest and Robert Howsare (b. 1977). The work is unique, unexpected, and unconventional.
Founded by Charles and Herbert Hatch in April 1879 in Nashville, Tennessee, Hatch Show Print is one of the oldest continuously running letterpress shops in the United States. For well over one hundred years, Hatch has designed posters and handbills advertising entertainment of all forms, including state fairs, traveling circuses, sporting events, comedy troupes, movies, musicians, and concerts. In the 1940s, Hatch began designing posters for country music stars. Their association with Nashville’s music scene allowed them to work with musicians such as Hank Williams, Dolly Parton, and Elvis Presley. They have also worked with many rock musicians, including Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, R.E.M., and Radiohead.
Jim Sherraden (b. 1957), Hatch’s master printer and curator, joined the shop in 1984. He and the staff view Hatch as a working museum, maintaining the philosophy of “preservation through production.” While Hatch artisans still carve original images into basswood and maple blocks, Sherraden also takes plates and blocks from the archive and uses them in contemporary work. He does not introduce new typefaces, as he does not want to “pollute the integrity of the original archive.” Sherraden’s combination of vintage plates, blocks, and original movable type—often scratched, dented, or worn—has created an identifiable Hatch aesthetic. Now owned by the Country Music Hall of Fame, Hatch Show Print is synonymous with Nashville’s musical and cultural heritage (Figs. 24–98, 24–99, 24–100, 24–101, 24–102 and 24–103).
Today, access to personal computers and the Internet is nearly universal. This rapidly proliferating flow of text and images has become the chosen domain of the designer, an uncharted territory of exploration and possibility for professionals and amateurs alike. The widening of the design profession was ignited through not only the creation of new computer software and the Internet but also the expansion and increased quality of design education. New designers, with new ways of solving visual challenges, are rising up to meet the demands of an ever-changing field. At the same time, time-honored design theories and methods of production continue to inspire and spark innovation.