Typography was never considered the main focus of documents or advertising until the Bauhaus modern art movement when Typographist Jan Tschichold decided to create a new font removed of any previous superfluous serif or detail.
Upon being inspired by the Bauhaus works Jan decided to create his own font with ideals on what a good font should be, in 1928 he created The New Typography. This font soon became popular not only with people within the movement but more widely with books, magazines and advertising.
As the type movement grew alongside modern art Herbert Bayer created the font Universal in 1925. This font was created with mass production in mind being cheap to print while being legible. This was the first modern font to feature only lowercase letters. The singular set of alphabet kept prices of printing down while functioning on multiple levels as a font.
"Why should we write and print in two separate alphabets? We do not speak a capital A and a small a."
"Why should we write and print in two separate alphabets? We do not speak a capital A and a small a."
Type started to be used in posters and typo-photos to give new meaning using type as a creative outlet. Walter Dexel created posters using type in a style which created imagery purely through type and design, using the shapes or styles of letters to provoke images of objects or a visual aspect never before seen from fonts.
A few years later this idea was explored by Max Burchartz creating a poster using shape and type to give the impression of classical music through the shape, lines and movement of the image overall. There are no photographs or clear cut representations of music so any influence is given through an abstract idea rather than visual factors such as photos or illustration.
Many years later this new artistic form of type made appearance in film. Historically films often shows type in a very basic
header footer fashion, once the title rolled and when the film read 'Fin'. It was only used in later years as a method to set a tone of a movie. The most well known example would be the North by Northwest opening title by Saul Bass.
North by Northwest opening
North by Northwest opening
We have come a long way with fonts and the use of type is becoming more creatively free. With more people creating personal typefaces than ever before. There's no standards or structures so people are free to explore their ideas for fonts and ideas more so now than ever. It is becoming more and more popular with indie culture and the uprise in small businesses and fanzines.
Type - How hard can it be?
For an activity we were given 10
simplified shapes of which Josef Albers used to create a full type alphabet.
This activity made me question how easy it is for us to create letters from
basic shapes as our mind feels the need to make connections with shape and
type. I would also say that the process was more difficult to create some more
'complex' letters with such a limited set of shapes to work with. The most
important discovery was working out the process for the four intimately linked
letters " d, b, q and p " all being variations of each other to some degree.
This was the best starting point for the alphabet as a result.
These are some other ideas I came up
with:
When compared to the original below the concept
was similar however I produced results distinct from this example.
When looking at this type I
question its form. The type is supposed to be a new clean graphic however as
individual letters the type fails to be as clear as it should be to fit the
Bauhaus form follows function formula. "prettiness without readability
serves neither author or reader." I feel that this type works more as a
collective piece of graphic design due to this unclear individuality to specific
letters making it a misconceived response to the Bauhaus form in image only, forgoing the core principals of the style. From a
practical standpoint however this type would be quick and easy to manufacture.
