Adrian Frutiger: One Of The Most Influential Typeface Designers

Leslie Slater is a handwriting enthuses who believes that the future of technology is crippling our art of writing and her strong evidence suggest that she might be on to something. The tone in opinion piece is pure and evidential, Leslie mention a substantial amount of studies and she really worry about good old fashion ink writing.

In 1436 Johannes Gutenberg invented the Printing Press, which had a major impact on both the Renaissance and printing today, however there other movable type systems invented before Gutenberg’s Printing

The influential typeface Helvetica, a neo-grotesque1 sans serif type design, came into being in the early 1950s - after the Second World War. The expectation of the designers, Edouard Hoffman and Max Miedinger was to create a neutral typeface that had great clarity, no intrinsic meaning in its form and could be used on a wide variety of signage to remake a new identity apart from the past (). Originally named as Neue Haas Grotesk, the typeface was changed to Helvetica in 1960. Today, Helvetica, as an aesthetics constant, although not perfect, mastered the quantum leap in 1957 from metal type to the digital age of word processing. Axel Langer, a curator of Islamic Near Eastern Art, mentioned it as ‘an impersonal typeface for today and tomorrow ().’

Throughout time, there have been countless artists, designers and typographers that had the opportunity to make a bold statement, invent the next best thing or to engrave their name in the design industry for all eternity. Although ordinary people don’t realize a good design when they see it, they know it has attracted them somehow and they feel the need to ask and wonder how it came to be. Without question, Eric Gill has note ably revolutionized the type world. Without him there would be no benchmark for humanist typefaces; without Gill, there would be no Gill Sans, the font that will consistently be seen as a crisp, clean and readable font; as all typefaces should be. Despite for his one notorious face, he has created 11 typefaces, wrote

“Typography is a servant-the servant of thought & language to which it gives visible existence.”

In his last chapter of “The World on Paper”, Olson proposes a revolutionary approach to the understanding of writing and speech, and how they are related, arguing with assumptions previously made in this academic discourse. He offers eight principles as an explanation of his proposal. The first four principles suggest that writing provides a model for speech and is being defined by people’s own scripts. The remaining principles address language as a set of models and explain how they help us to “learn how to cope with unexpressed” (p.265).

After researching one of my favorite typefaces I decided to do it on Paul Renner who has had an impact on typography. Paul Renner was a well-known typeface designer. He was born August 9, 1879 in Wernigerode, Germany and died April 25, 1956 in Hodingen, Germany. He was also a graphic artist, type designer, a typographer and a remarkable painter and teacher. One of his most popular typefaces he designed is called Futura. The Futura typeface was one of the most successful and most used type of the twentieth century. Renner attended a Gymnasium, a secondary school where he studied humanities. Students that studied Greek and Latin for nine years which was what Renner did provided students with a ticket to higher education. What he chose after

Graphic design set its first roots in Germany in 1455 with the introduction of the Blackletter typeface and Johannes Gutenberg’s Gutenberg Bible. Coined as the godfather of printing Gutenberg helped to spread Blackletter in popularity. With the advent of Martin Luther’s New Testament, however, a schism was created between those that chose to use

Louise Fili was born 1951 in Orange, New Jersey. She grew up in an Italian-American household and says that she “remembers carving letterforms into the wall above her bed at age three or four: Even then, she simply loved making letters.”(Danzico) Louise Fili developed her love of typography design while working in her college’s type shop. In high school, she taught herself calligraphy with a Speedball guide and an Osmiroid pen. Later she studied studio art at Skidmore College, but that’s where she discovered graphic design. “Her senior project was a hand-lettered Italian cookbook.”(Danzico) When she left Skidmor For New York City she finished her last semester at what is now called SVA(School of Visual Arts) She had a freelance assignment with Knopf where she started designing book and fell in love with it. Later she was hired as a senior designer by Herb Lubalin,

Cassandre then created the first Art Deco type in the world, Bifur. This completely new typeface evoked the principals of Art Deco, it was highly geometrical, built mainly by straight lines, with a strong emphasis on its verticality, and it combined really thick, bold lines with several ultra thin ones. The posters and the typestyle became a major hit and more typefaces started to pop up all over the world.

Alan Meeks was born in London, England in 1951. He graduated, and joined Graphic Systems as a trainee artist, typographer and typeface designer. In 1975 he joined Letraset as senior designer and was chiefly responsible along with Colin Brignall in making Letraset into a serious font foundry. After he started his career with “Graphic Systems” in the 1970’s as a lettering artist. (non digital in those days). “where he designed over 40 Typefaces whilst being in charge of all the artwork output of Letraset with a studio of ten artists and designers and an army of freelancers around the world.” (https://www.myfonts.com/person/Alan_Meeks/. ) The originaly typographic artwork that was produced at Letraset was done by stencil cutting; all the fonts

some of the works we look to today when we speak of the development of the typography and printing fields. An influence to other well-known typographers such as Bodoni and Didot and printers such as Benjamin Franklin, Baskervilles’ works met with hostility in the English Isles. Baskerville was more than a typographer; he was an artist, printer and stonecutter. He developed his own inks and papers, seeking the perfect surface and substances for many of his endeavors including printing and japanning.

Herb Lubalin was an American graphic designer, born in New York, March 17, 1918 and died March 17, 1981. He entered Cooper Union at age of 17 and he became entranced in the possibilities presented by typography (history graphic design). He practiced his considerable skills and attracted an array of designs when he worked with Sudler and Hennessey for 18 years. Lubalin had his own private studio in 1964 and this gave him the freedom to do a range of projects. Also, he created his first typeface called Pistilli Roman in1964. He worked for magazines published by Ralph Ginzburg: Eros, Fact, and Avant Garde (history graphic design). The International Typeface Corporation was a type manufacturer founded in New York in 1970 by Aaron Burns, Herb Lubalin, and Edward Rondthaler.

He also worked at freelance in London between 1972 up to 1979. He is a member of the German Design Council board and past president of the International Society of Typographic Designers (ISTD) and the International Institute for Information Design (IIID). He is also a professor at the University of the Arts in Bremen and he received an honorary doctorate from Pasadena Center of Art. As a typographer, he has made many accomplishments in his life such as being the founder of the following typefaces: FF Meta, ITC Officina, Lo-Type, FF Unit, Berliner Grotesk, FF Info and many more.

Sagmeister started out in the world of graphic design at the young age of fifteen, when he worked for Austrian magazine ‘Alphron’. He started out writing pieces for the magazine, but soon came to learn that he much preferred deciding on the layout in opposed to writing articles. It was also here that he discovered his love for hand-driven typography: