Thinking for
a Living™

Making Cents

In September 2008 Sagmeister Inc. participated in Droog Event 2: Urban Play. The public art installation consisted of 250.000 eurocents placed on the floor, covering more than 300sqm on a square in Amsterdam. The coins spelled out the sentence “Obsessions make my life worse and my work better”. The piece is part of the series Things I have learned in my life so far by Stefan Sagmeister.

Illustrative Zurich

From October 17th to October 26th Illustrative’s 4th forum of graphic arts will take place in the Zurich Messehallen. Conceived in 2006 by Pascal Johanssen and Katja Kleiss in Berlin, Illustrative is an annual forum, and the only one of it’s kind worldwide to present the latest inclinations which run the gamut of illustrative and graphic art in one exhibition.

The main exhibition features over 400 works by 35 artists and gives an international overview which represents the various facets of illustrative art. The exhibit features well-known artists such as German illustrators Olaf Hajek and Martin Haake, Spanish comic-artist Jorge Fabian Gonzalez Varela, American illustrators Eric Sandberg, Vincent Hui and Edwin Ushiro, as well as Japanese Artist Yoh Nagao.

Hot Rods and Hairy Beasts

Hot Rods, Hula Girls, Hairy Beasts, Himalayan Head Hunters and the Holy Bible are just some of the subjects under discussion by illustrators Linzie Hunter, Rod Hunt, Nishant Choksi and Allan Sanders. No subject is too small for this group of seasoned professional illustrators and adventurers. With clients spanning the world of advertising, publishing, design and editorial this band of battle scarred buccaneers are prepared for the eventuality of just about anything.

Hot Rods and Hairy Beasts is showing at the Coningsby Gallery beginning today until Saturday, October 4th 2008.

Attitude (Altitude) Adjustment

Excuse the absence of posts over this past weekend but we do try to experience more than just design and blogging in our lives. We’re back, safe and sound and more inspired than ever. Don’t forget to unplug yourself from the computer every once in a while. If you can’t see the forest for the trees, go visit a forest!

Frank 2.0

Friendly neighborhood designer, TFAL™ author and all-around good guy Frank Chimero has updated his site. Watch and learn.

Typographreaks

A merry band of typeface provocateurs is styling down to the letter. Find out more about House Industries in Issue 129 of Fast Company.

Font or Typeface?

There’s a great post and discussion on FontFeed by Yves Peters that explains the importance of speaking the same language when using typographic terms. Since these terms have evolved over time and seen several transitions in technology they tend to be interpreted in varying ways.

Dangerous Curves

“In Dangerous Curves I have attempted to show both emerging and expert designers how, in an age of computer-dominated design, the designer can turn to their very own hands for both inspiration and solution. The only way to create a logotype that is truly unique is for the designer to transcend the limitations of the available fonts and typefaces on the market. Dangerous Curves provides a roadmap for that very worthy endeavor.”

Synth Eastwood

Synth Eastwood is back with a new brief entitled Cycles. Cycles will take place on Friday the 24th of October in FilmBase, The Button Factory, Meeting House Square and Temple Bar in Dublin. The deadline for all submissions is Monday the 13th of October. All forms of work welcome. See the Synth Eastwood site for submission guidelines.

Maison Martin Margiela

In October 2008, Maison Martin Margiela celebrates its 20th anniversary. For this occasion, the Modemuseum Provincie Antwerpen presents a unique retrospective of his work. Conceived in close collaboration with Maison Martin Margiela, the exhibition takes place from September 12, 2008 through February 8, 2009. More images are available at A Shaded View.

Via Tyler Askew.

Graphic Design on the Radio

We highly recommend listening to this broadcast entitled A Layperson’s Guide to Graphic Design by Adrian Shaughnessy which aired as part of the London-based radio station Resonance FM’s Free University of the Airwaves. Shaughnessy had 30 minutes to introduce graphic design to a non-professional audience. You can read an edited version of the transcript at Design Observer.

Also, be sure to check out Graphic Design on the Radio which was a series of one-hour shows broadcast in the Summer of 2007 on Resonance FM. The programs featured interviews with leading graphic designers who talked about their work while playing music that inspired or influenced their work.

The Art of Self-Promotion

Students at the London College of Communication who recently completed a year in the industry have produced an exhibition entitled Shameless, The Art of Self-Promotion as part of the London Design Festival to showcase their experiences from the year. The students have drawn together their newly found experiences, knowledge and understanding for this exhibition to emphasize a topic that was key to their own professional practice; the clever and sometimes desperate ways students find employment post university. The show will be at The Sassoon Gallery from September 18th through the 23rd.

Los Logos 4

Gestalten’s best-selling Logos series has documented and indicated design styles and trends in contemporary logo design worldwide. At 568 pages, Los Logos 4 provides an overview of current developments and advances in logo design. This authoritative compendium is the largest volume to date showcasing a collection of over 5,000 examples of stylistic approaches by designers from around the globe.

As a side note, two of the previews of Los Logos 4 on the Gestalten site show logos that our company submitted. With 568 pages to choose from, we were lucky that our work appears so many times there.

FF Meta Serif

It took three years and three designers to develop FF Meta® Serif. All through the ’90s, Erik Spiekermann made several attempts at designing a counterpart for his groundbreaking FF Meta®. Fans of Meta frequently asked him which serif face would best complement it. He recommended Swift™, Minion™, FF Clifford™, and others, until he realized that he should just buckle down and draw his own serif Meta. True to his principle of collaboration, Spiekermann enlisted the help of accomplished type designers Christian Schwartz and Kris Sowersby.

Via AisleOne.

Did You Ever Imagine...

Nagi Noda (1973-2008)

A moment of silence for Nagi Noda (野田 凪 Noda Nagi), the talented, eccentric and boundary-pushing artist, art director and fashion designer from Tokyo. Noda passed away this past Sunday, September 7, 2008, at the young age of 35 after surgical complications from injuries sustained in a traffic accident the previous year.

Why Man Creates

Why Man Creates is a series of explorations, episodes and comments on creativity by Saul Bass, a master of conceptual design. The film was the winner of an Academy Award and is one of the most highly regarded short films ever produced.

Humor, satire and irony are combined with serious questions about the creative process and how it comes into play for different individuals. A fascinating cornucopia of trenchant ideas and important truths, it is stimulating and enjoyable for a very broad spectrum of ages and interests.

Organized into eight major sections, the Edifice, Fooling Around, the Process, Judgement, a Parable, Digression, the Search, and the Mark, Why Man Creates is appropriate wherever creative problem-solving is the goal.

80 20 100

To celebrate the 80th birthday of Wim Crouwel and 20 years Nijhof & Lee, 100 works by Crouwel will be on display at VIVID gallery in Amsterdam from October 11 to November 23, 2008. The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue designed by David Quay.

Ed Rondthaler on Spelling

At 103 years of age, living legend Ed Rondthaler, the founder of Photo-Lettering, Inc., former president of the American Literacy Council and author of The Dictionary of Simplified American Spelling, has a few things to say about spelling in this short clip presented by House Industries.

The Storyteller's Art

The Storyteller’s Art, a forty-year retrospective of the design work of Kit Hinrichs, is now on show at the University Library Gallery at Sacramento State. The exhibition presents more than 200 pieces of his work and is up through November 15th.

Hinrichs will also give a lecture at the University Union’s Hinde Auditorium, Tuesday, October 7th from 4:00–6:00 p.m. He will discuss his unique approach to narrative design by presenting a series of case studies from his career.

Via the Pentagram blog.

A Brief History of Emil Ruder

To know where we’re going, we’ve got to understand where we’ve been. Lucky for you and me, we find ourselves in the midst of a historical design revival. Both students and veteran creatives alike appear to be making concerted efforts to blow the dust off our collective roots and discover how our craft came to be. Look around and you’ll notice an explosion of historically influenced design, typography and illustration. My own infatuation is with the International Typographic Style that emerged from Switzerland in the 1950’s.

Past examples of structured grid design and typography by Swiss masters such as Josef Müller-Brockmann continue to influence both print and interactive design to this day. However, after realizing there is no shortage of Müller-Brockmann fan clubs, I wanted to explore some of the other, maybe lesser-known founders of the International Typographic Style. My search led me to a typographer and designer by the name of Emil Ruder (1914-1970), who played a key part in the development and dissemination of the Swiss Style.

Born in Zurich, Ruder began his design education at the early age of fifteen when he took a compositor’s apprenticeship. By his late twenties Ruder began attending the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts where the principles of Bauhaus and Tschichold’s New Typography were taught, leaving an indelible impression on Ruder.

Academia would continue to play a major role in Ruder’s life, though it would naturally evolve into the form of teacher rather than student. In 1947 he took a position as the typography instructor at the Schule für Gestaltung, Basel (Basel School of Design). Ruder, along with the great Armin Hofmann, developed a program structured on principles of objectivity in design. He broke away from the subjective, style-driven typography of the past and encouraged his students to be more concerned with precision, proportions and above all, the role of legibility and communication with type.

“Typography has one plain duty before it and that is to convey information in writing.”
-Emil Ruder

Ruder was also fond of asymmetry, a concept he found in Japanese texts on Zen philosophy and tea drinking. He arranged his layouts and typography with careful attention to counter, shape and white space. His projects “developed sensitivity to negative or unprinted spaces, including the spaces between and inside letterforms” (Meggs 325).

Hans Arp, Emil Ruder and Armin Hofmann at the Basel School of Design in 1961. Photo: Marguerite Arp-Hagenbach

To achieve the harmony and balance Ruder desired, he instructed his students on the use of mathematical grid structures and the selection of style-neutral, sans-serif typefaces developed in the early 50’s. For Ruder, the most notable of these typefaces were the twenty-one fonts named Univers created by his friend, Adrian Frutiger in 1954. Ruder and his students engaged in endless typographic and layout explorations with the vast array of weights in the Univers family.

“Emil Ruder saw my first specimens of Univers and was so delighted with them that he designed and published many works with this type in association with his Basle students.”
-Adrian Frutiger

By the mid 1960’s the school, and Ruder, were in high demand. Some determined would-be students waited up to three years to get in based on the very low acceptance rates. Ruder was known to only take on two or three students per year.

After more than 20 years of teaching, he compiled his concepts, expiriments and philosophies into a book titled, “Typographie.” Originally published in 1967, this masterpiece is considered by many to be the quintessential textbook on typography. You can see some great examples of spreads (along with a ton of other fantastic specimens) on insect54’s amazing Flickr photostream.

A page from Typographie. The phrase, “nach Mass” translates to, “made to measure” Photo: insect54

Ruder was also writer and editor for a popular trade publication of the time called, “Typografische Monatsblätter” (Typographic Monthly) published by the Printing and Paper Union of Switzerland. Printed in German, French and English, this journal, which covered topics such as printing techniques, illustration, typefaces and layout, helped to spread the principles of Swiss design on a global level. Once again, look to insect54’s collection of covers and spreads. I’d love to get my hands on copies of these.

In 1962, Ruder and typographer Aaron Burns (one of the three founders of ITC) founded the International Center for the Typographic Arts (ICTA) in New York. Unfortunately, there is little information available on the ICTA which has been listed as inactive since 1970.

It was Isaac Newton who wrote, “If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” I believe that long after he is gone, Emil Ruder continues to provide inspiration and guidance to a whole new generation of creatives who will ultimately design the future of communication.

Image Resources

1. International Typographic Style Flickr Group
2. insect54’s Flickr photostream
3. foundstudio.com.au Swiss Posters Flickr set

References

1. Meggs, Philip. A History of Graphic Design. 3rd ed. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1998.
2. Thomson, Ellen Mazur. The Origins of Graphic Design in America, 1870-1920. Yale University Press, 1997.
3. Devroye, Luc. ‘Type design in Switzerland.’ School of Computer Science, McGill University. 1 September 2008.
4. Linotype. ‘Linotype Font Feature – Adrian Frutiger Traces.’ 14 April 2008.
5. Desain Grafis Indonesia. ‘International Typographic Style.’
6. Wikipedia. Emil Ruder, Armin Hofmann and Adrian Frutiger

Shane Bzdok is an art director and designer at BBDK, Inc. From our home office in Santa Fe, New Mexico we collaborate with a network of graphic and product designers, programmers and photographers worldwide.

Specimen

Specimen will be showing at the Pôle graphisme Chaumont from September 10th to November 8th, 2008. The show consists of three exhibitions, all of which are dedicated to books and publishing, a theme initiated by Fanette Mellier.

Security Patterns

Sometimes called safety envelopes, tinted safety envelopes or security envelopes, the interiors of these envelopes are designed to protect the information within from prying eyes. Falling victim to paperless ATM banking, internet banking, automatic withdrawals, wire transfers, Pay-Pal and email, these envelopes are disappearing from our daily mail and therefore from our visual vocabulary.

Excerpt from the Tinted Safety Envelope Research Project.