Graphic References

WAR IS OVER! (If You Want It)

Nick Sherman — Thu, 19 Dec 2019 01:39:00 +0000

Contributed by Nick Sherman

Original WAR IS OVER! postcard.

The War Is Over! campaign for peace was launched 50 years ago this week by Yoko Ono & John Lennon. On December 15, 1969, a series of billboards, leaflets, posters, newspaper ads, and radio announcements were released in 11 cities worldwide with a simple and immediate message: WAR IS OVER! IF YOU WANT IT.

At the end is usually a signature line, stating either “Happy Christmas from John & Yoko” or something more secular like “Love and Peace from John & Yoko” or, simply, “Love, John & Yoko”.

Yoko Ono conceived the basic idea for the poster, which was expanded into an international campaign, co-opting the techniques of advertising and political propaganda to promote peace. In a short video about the campaign, Lennon explains:

We decided to work for world peace. We do it by the advertising method. We believe that [in] today’s society advertising is the thing politicians use and commercial companies use, the Beatles used it, John & Yoko should use it. Our product is peace.

We’re selling it like soap, you know. And you’ve got to sell and sell until the housewife thinks “Oh, well there’s peace or war, that’s the two products.”

We specifically did the poster event around the world for Christmas to try and get at least one plug in for peace on earth at Christmas.

The design for the campaign is starkly simple. “WAR IS OVER!” is declared in bold, all-caps, sans-serif text, functioning as the attention-grabbing “second coming” headline bait. The smaller “IF YOU WANT IT” line then switches the focus back on the reader, employing Ono’s concept for empowering the viewer to finish the work.

John & Yoko at the Apple Records offices in Savile Row, December 1969. Note the French and German versions in the background.

Times Square, New York City, December 1969. The text on this billboard is not set with type, but uses non-typographic lettering that was presumably more practical to apply at such a large scale.

Source: digicoll.library.wisc.edu Silver Buckle Press Collection. License: Public Domain.

1912 type specimen of Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed from the American Type Founders Company.

Most implementations of the design are typeset with tightly-spaced, center-aligned Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed – a common typeface for newspapers throughout the 20th century that, along with the capitalization and exclamation point, gives “WAR IS OVER!” the intended feeling of a breaking news headline.

Many of the posters and billboards don’t use Franklin Gothic but employ other typefaces or even hand lettering that may have been more practical for larger formats while still roughly approximating the style. Deviations from Franklin Gothic are especially visible in the signature line at the bottom of some of the original posters, where the text seems to be rendered with hand-cut lettering.

Source: www.flickr.com Photo: Nick Sherman. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

Original WAR IS OVER! poster with letterforms that are similar but noticeably different from Franklin Gothic.

Source: www.flickr.com Photo: Nick Sherman. License: CC BY-NC-SA.

Detail of idiosyncratic lettering – presumably cut by hand – from an original WAR IS OVER! poster.

Original WAR IS OVER! postcards.

In an interview with Marshall McLuhan, Lennon mentions a shop in New York that perhaps did the original typesetting and/or chose Franklin Gothic, though it’s unclear how much detailed typographic direction was given by Ono & Lennon:

And it started up, there’s a place in New York, where you can have your own newspaper headline, you know. There’s a little shop somewhere in Times Square. And we were wondering how to, sort of like, get it in the newspapers as if it had happened, you know. And it developed from that.

To launch the campaign, a “Peace for Christmas” concert was held at London’s Lyceum Ballroom to benefit UNICEF, with a giant WAR IS OVER! banner hung across the stage and small handbills passed out to audience members.

The Peace for Christmas concert in London.

Times Square, New York, December 1978.

The campaign has carried on long beyond its original launch. In 1971 John & Yoko and the Plastic Ono Band released “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” which adapts the motto into a Christmas-themed peace anthem. Billboards and posters for the campaign continue to be posted, and the design has been translated to dozens of other languages (though not always in Franklin Gothic, especially for languages that don’t use the Latin script). A website for the cause offers graphics for people to print on their own, and promotes the #WARISOVER hashtag on Twitter and Instagram.

Translations of the WAR IS OVER! design.

The simple but effective typographic format has inspired many similar designs – from Experimental Jetset’s Zang! Tumb Tumb and Lost & Found, to Malcolm Garrett’s “BREXIT IS OVER” cover for The New European (which they offer to download for DIY prints), to Homocats’ TRUMP IS OVER apparel.

It’s safe to say the WAR IS OVER! format has taken on a life of its own as a design meme, inspiring others to spread their own ideas to the world with simple, bold typography. ✌️

Yoko Ono & John Lennon holding an original WAR IS OVER! poster.

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

Neon Genesis Evangelion

Peiran Tan — Thu, 17 Oct 2019 23:13:00 +0000

Contributed by Peiran Tan

Created and directed by Hideaki Anno, Neon Genesis Evangelion (新世紀エヴァンゲリオン, often abbreviated as NGE or simply EVA) is a Japanese media franchise consisting of four main parts: a twenty-six-episode TV series (1995), two sets of film adaptations (1997 and 2007–), and a manga (1995–2013). Set in the postapocalyptic fortified city Tokyo-3, the series revolves around Shinji Ikari, a teenage boy recruited by his estranged father into a shadowy paramilitary organization known as NERV, for which he and other teenagers must pilot giant biomachines (“Evangelions”) to defeat incoming monsters (“Angels”) who threaten another apocalypse (“Impact”).

After starting out as a typical mechanical-robot (“mecha”) anime, Evangelion gradually evolved into an existentialist deconstruction of its own genre, immediately winning critical acclaim. Its sustained popularity through the years spawned a plethora of spinoff mangas, novel adaptations, games, advertisement tie-ins, and even pachinko gambling machines, leading it to permeate Japanese culture and eventually become a worldwide sensation. Many of its visual motifs became cultural lexicons, including its identity typeface: Matisse EB.

Matisse EB and the Original Evangelion

Evangelion was among the first anime to create a consistent typographic identity across its visual universe, from title cards to NERV’s user interfaces. Subcontractors usually painted anything type-related in an anime by hand, so it was a novel idea at the time for a director to use desktop typesetting to exert typographic control. Although sci-fi anime tended to use either sans serifs or hand lettering that mimicked sans serifs in 1995, Anno decided to buck that trend, choosing a display serif for stronger visual impact. After flipping through Fontworks’ specimen catalog, he personally selected the extra-bold (EB) weight of Matisse (マティス), a Mincho-style serif family.

Annotated printout of the L (Light) weight. Courtesy of Francis Chow.

Just as every mature metal type foundry in the West had to have a Garamond, Matisse was Fontworks’ answer to the Mincho genre for desktop typesetting. Since few computer typefaces existed at the time, completing the face quickly was paramount; stylistic exploration could come in later releases. Furthermore, because the typeface’s initial designer, Francis Chow, was working with inexperienced colleagues at the time, he wanted a direction simple enough for them to follow. A combination of haste and inexperience gave Matisse a plain look and feel, which turned out to make sense for Evangelion. The conservative skeletal construction restrained the characters’ personality so it wouldn’t compete with the animation; the extreme stroke contrast delivered the desired visual punch. Despite the fact that Matisse was drawn on the computer, many of its stroke corners were rounded, giving it a hand-drawn, fin-de-siècle quality.

The TV episodes’ opening sequence featured a mechanically compressed Matisse EB.

Matisse EB remained mechanically compressed when used in an episode, though less dramatically than in the title sequence.

In addition to a thorough graphic identity, Evangelion also pioneered a deep integration of typography as a part of animated storytelling—a technique soon to be imitated by later anime. Prime examples are the show’s title cards and flashing type-only frames mixed in with the animation. The title cards contain nothing but crude, black-and-white Matisse EB, and are often mechanically compressed to fit into interlocking compositions. This brutal treatment started as a hidden homage to the title cards in old Toho movies from the sixties and seventies, but soon became visually synonymous with Evangelion after the show first aired.

Japanese title card for Episode 1 (“Angel attack”).

Japanese title card for Episode 15 (“Lie and Silence”).

Japanese title cards, Episodes 1–26.

Innovating on the media of animated storytelling, Evangelion also integrates type-only flashes. Back then, these black-and-white, split-second frames were Anno’s attempt at imprinting subliminal messages onto the viewer, but have since become Easter eggs for die-hard Evangelion fans as well as motion signatures for the entire franchise.

Instead of letting Western distributors translate episode titles themselves, the Evangelion staff decided to offer their own English episode titles. These are not direct translations, but rather alternatives or subtitles, often featuring biblical or philosophical references that might be difficult to integrate using Japanese. The English title cards feature a number of different typefaces, often tightly tracked and mechanically compressed. While most titles use Helvetica, the words “NEON GENESIS EVANGELION” are set in one of the bootleg versions of Century or Century Schoolbook that come with numerous Japanese fonts. The same seriffed font (or a similar one) is used in all caps for the titles in Episodes 5, 6, 7, and 23; and in sentence case in Episodes 9, 11, 15, and 25. The lowercase exhibits aggressively shortened descenders, a common feature implemented in Japanese fonts to fit Latin glyphs into the character bounding box. A horizontally squeezed Times is used in 12, 26 (“Take Care of Yourself”), and 26' (“I Need You”). 25' (“Love is Destructive”) appears to feature Matisse EB’s Latin glyphs.

English title cards for the 26-episode TV series and The End of Evangelion, which contains two parts: “Love is Destructive” (alternative to Episode 25) and “I Need You” (alternative to Episode 26).

Short flash frames in the post-credit Easter egg in Rebuild of Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance.

Established in title cards, this combination of Matisse EB and all-caps Helvetica soon bled into various aspects of Evangelion, most notably the HUD user interfaces in NERV. Although it would be possible to attribute the mechanical compression to technical limitations or typographic ignorance, its ubiquitous occurrence did evoke haste and, at times, despair—an emotional motif perfectly suited to a postapocalyptic story with existentialist themes.

The iconic “SOUND ONLY” monoliths use outlined Chicago for the numerals and all-caps Helvetica for text.

Source: evangelion.fandom.com License: CC BY-SA.

The shadowy cabal SEELE’s logotype is probably the only occurrence of a chancery serif (Bitstream’s Cataneo) in Evangelion.

If great storytelling made Evangelion popular among anime fans, it would soon become a fin-de-siècle social phenomenon, as a series of real-life episodes unfolded in the franchise’s production process. Budget difficulties, parents’ protest against the show’s graphic imagery, and Anno’s newfound interest in Freudian psychoanalysis all pushed the closing episodes’ visual direction from mainstream to experimental, filled with abstract animation, line drawings, flashbacks, and photographs. Told completely in a stream-of-consciousness style, the final episode “ended” without revealing an actual ending to the story, generating massive controversy on the internet. Feeling betrayed, confused, and angry, some fans made anonymous death threats to Anno in the form of letters and vandalized office façades.

Having managed to cobble together a sufficient budget, Anno was compelled to remake the series in response to fan dissatisfaction with the finale, resulting in two movies: Death & Rebirth and The End of Evangelion. While the former recaps most of the TV episodes, the latter offers a genuine end to the Evangelion story. In utter contrast to the congratulatory mood of the final TV episode, The End of Evangelion is as visually arresting as it is thematically forlorn: the viewer must witness a total meltdown of NERV and the gory deaths of the main characters, culminating in humanity’s extinction, for which the protagonist is directly responsible. As if to further his revenge against disgruntled fans, Anno even incorporated photographs of some of the death-threat letters he received into the movie’s montages. Having solidified its status as visual shorthand for Evangelion, Matisse—this time in its ultra-bold (UB) weight—flooded the movies’ background art and promotional materials with even more unabashed mechanical compression. Aided by the franchise’s boosted popularity, the font CD-ROMs even briefly became sought-after collector’s items.

Poster for Evangelion: Death & Rebirth. The English title features hand lettering that imitates ITC Avant Garde Gothic.

Poster for Evangelion: The End of Evangelion.

Evangelion: Death & Rebirth contains an intermission that separates “Death” and “Rebirth,” featuring mechanically stretched Matisse EB and compressed Helvetica.

Title card for The End of Evangelion.

Source: wiki.evageeks.org License: CC BY-SA.

End credits for The End of Evangelion.

Rebuild of Evangelion and Matisse Pro EB

Convinced that Evangelion’s story should also adapt to its times, Anno decided to establish his own animation studio in 2006 so he could remake the entire series again. The result was Studio Khara (株式会社カラー) and the movie tetralogy Rebuild of Evangelion (ヱヴァンゲリヲン新劇場版); its first installment was released a year later. While the first movie largely follows the same plot as the 1995 TV series, significant deviation started cropping up at the end of the second movie, and the third entered a completely different plot line.

The original Matisse family was produced in desktop typesetting’s nascent days, its glyphs following the popular Japanese Industrial Standards (JIS), which prescribed what characters should look like. To conform to advances in type technology over the years, Rebuild of Evangelion uses Matisse Pro EB, which Fontworks reengineered to follow the Adobe-Japan standard. The font files were also delivered in OpenType, not the original OCF format. Following a new encoding standard meant that some characters would necessarily look different, so Fontworks kept the original versions as OpenType alternates.

Left: the original Matisse EB used in the 1995 TV series. Right: the updated Matisse Pro EB used in Rebuild of Evangelion.

Alternate glyphs can be accessed via Adobe Illustrator’s Glyphs panel.

Fontworks was officially credited as the font vendor in Evangelion 2.0’s end credits. (Fontworks appears just above HP.)

In both Japanese and English versions, mechanical compression officially became a celebrated identity element, used to produce a starker and more austere look for the films. The decision to use mechanical compression instead of commissioning a compressed-width variant is also confirmed by Evangelion’s official website, which loads the normal Matisse Pro EB and then uses the CSS transform property to achieve the compression effect.

Japanese title card for Evangelion 1.11: You Are (Not) Alone.

English title card.

Key art for Evangelion 1.0: You Are (Not) Alone.

Japanese title card for Evangelion 2.22: You Can (Not) Advance.

English title card.

Key poster for Evangelion 2.0: You Can (Not) Advance.

Japanese title card for Evangelion 3.33: You Can (Not) Redo.

English title card.

Key art for Evangelion 3.0: You Can (Not) Redo.

Matisse’s Latin counterparts received a facelift, too. Neue Helvetica now complements Matisse on the movies’ user interfaces, sometimes sporting its condensed variant.

Matisse Pro EB set alongside Neue Helvetica in regular and condensed widths. The middle image additionally features Eurostile Extended.

As the youngest typeface category, sans serifs have come to be associated with scientific and technological advancement. For example, Akzidenz-Grotesk often appears on Braun products under Dieter Rams’s direction, and Futura was chosen to represent humanity on the moon. Their unadorned letterforms conveyed the precision, progress, and optimism characteristic of mid-century modernism. Evangelion’s incorporation of Futura, Helvetica, and Eurostile in its visual world-building (especially when used for decorating Tokyo-3 and NERV) serves the opposite purpose, however. A last gasp after two presumably destroyed Tokyos, Tokyo-3 is a fortified underground city built to withstand giant monster attacks, its aboveground portion serving directly as a combat zone. Here, civic life gives way to heavy militarization. Civilization is on the brink of collapse, and humanity teeters on the edge of extinction. Futura and Eurostile do appear on objects in Evangelion that are as sophisticated and enormous as NASA rockets in real life—but while space exploration looks to the future with unending aspiration, Evangelion uses these typefaces to document the past and all of its unhealable trauma. In other words, the fact that typefaces like Eurostile and Futura are used in Evangelion as high-modernist signals offers an entry to a profound reflection on the collective human endeavor known as modernism by alluding to a world in which such endeavors were pushed to the limit, having already failed.

“VCCIFSS” set in Futura.

“RESCUE NERV” set in Eurostile.

“6th ANGEL: A.T. Field; extended” set in Helvetica; “Realtime Data Feed” set in Futura.

“R-08” set in Eurostile, including a stenciled version.

“KUROSHIO” set in Futura. The Kuroshio corporation appears wherever a logo is needed in Rebuild of Evangelion, from beer to books to military equipment. The name “Kuroshio” refers to the 1969 animated movie Flying Phantom Ship, whose key animation and design work were carried out by Anno’s former boss, Hayao Miyazaki.

The KUROSHIO logo set in Eurostile.

Evangelion and Matisse EB in the physical world

Since 2007, Anno has released three of the four planned Rebuild of Evangelion films, and the series has become a worldwide phenomenon. Capitalizing on its almost unparalleled cultural impact, Evangelion has spawned a huge official merchandise business, including electronics accessories, apparel, food, and even outdoor gear. Evangelion merch can also afford to reference a plethora of deeply embedded visual elements without showing entire drawings or scenes for context, the way many other anime need to do. Occupying center stage in these visual references, Matisse Pro EB has earned a couple of fond nicknames: “EVA Ultra Bold Mincho” or “EVA Ultra Bold Serif” (EVA 極太明朝体).

Sharp’s SH-06D mobile phone: NERV special edition, as it appeared in the Verge.

Men’s shirt from Radio EVA, Evangelion’s official fashion label. The fact that “Summer” is the only season not crossed out is an oblique reference to the earth having stopped spinning in the series, leaving Tokyo-3 in a permanent summer. The detail on the right shows Futura.

The now-famous title-card T-shirts.

The title cards’ iconic look is strong enough to stand alone as subway ads.

Assorted Evangelion CD and DVD packaging featuring Matisse EB.

Peiran Tan. License: CC BY-SA.

Although seldom appearing in the actual movies, ITC Avant Garde Gothic can be seen in some promotional materials, such as this special booklet accompanying the theatrical release of Evangelion 3.0. It is also the Latin typeface for Radio EVA’s identity.

Packaging for Evangelion 1.11 Blu-ray Discs. The English subtitle is set in all-caps Gill Sans.

Cross-merchandising between Evangelion and Schick Razor.

Cross-merchandising between Evangelion 3.0 and UCC Coffee.

Fans also use the Matisse fonts to express their affection, referencing Evangelion in unexpected places like self-storage lockers.

Public storage lockers at Sotokanda, Chiyoda City, Tokyo, decorated in the style of Evangelion title cards, with the text switched out.

Promoting Matisse EB as the “official font of Evangelion,” Fontworks also sells a special disc package containing the two versions of Matisse EB alongside a complimentary booklet. Note that Fontworks does not authorize this version of Matisse EB for commercial use—fan art only!

The fourth and final installment of Rebuild of Evangelion will land in theaters in the summer of 2020, to coincide with the Tokyo Olympics. A ten-minute teaser has already been released in Paris, Los Angeles, Shanghai, and various locations in Japan.

Director Hideaki Anno’s personal copy of the new movie script.

Japanese version of the teaser poster, featuring mechanically compressed Matisse EB.

English version of the teaser poster, featuring mechanically compressed Helvetica.

Japanese version of the key art.

English version of the key art.

The 1995 TV series and the two 1997 movies featured masterful direction, superb voice acting, and a form of visual storytelling that combined existentialism, Freudian psychoanalysis, teenage angst, and biblical references into a mind-boggling stew. And the series of real-life episodes that accompanied its production process made Evangelion not just a franchise, but also a historical event. For many anime fans born in the eighties and nineties, the word “Evangelion” evokes certain fond memories, as does seeing text set in mechanically compressed Matisse EB. For me personally, as a graphic designer, Evangelion epitomizes the best of both worlds: solid Japanese typography combined with a Swiss sensibility. The final installment of the Rebuild tetralogy will certainly be no exception. Before you see it, be sure to revisit the remastered classic twenty-six-episode TV series and the two 1997 movies on Netflix.

Peiran Tan is an interaction and graphic designer who obsesses over type in his spare time. He has a degree in graphic design from the University of Washington and is currently completing a master’s degree in Georgia Tech’s Human-Computer Interaction program. He would like to thank Francis Chow for shedding light on many of the technical aspects of Matisse’s production process.

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

Cherry by Nico Walker (Alfred A. Knopf)

Florian Hardwig — Thu, 06 Jun 2019 17:00:00 +0000

Contributed by Florian Hardwig

The cover for Nico Walker’s debut novel Cherry was designed by Janet Hansen, senior designer at Alfred A. Knopf, with creative direction from Carol Devine Carson. It was chosen as one of the New York Times’ 12 Best Book Covers of 2018. To get to this superb result wasn’t exactly straightforward, though. Over on LitHub, Hansen recounts the process. “The Trouble With Designing a Book When Its Author is in Jail” is a fascinating and refreshingly candid story full of detours and dead ends, with a happy ending.

In this post, we’ll take a closer look at the type. Strictly speaking, it’s not even type. The title doesn’t use a font, and yet it’s written with prefabricated letters. Janet Hansen has tapped into an alternative format that used to be a common one from the 1950s to the 1970s: alphabet source books. The letters used for “CHERRY” stem from OP-Letter, a set of fat shaded capitals with a number of charmingly wonky details and inconsistencies. Walter Haettenschweiler, the Swiss letterform designer extraordinaire, drew them with a Rapidograph technical pen and named it after the OP Art movement [Swiss Type Design]. His piece of lettering was reproduced in the third volume of Lettera, published by Arthur Niggli in 1968.

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

OP-Letter as shown in Lettera 3 by Armin Haab and Walter Haettenschweiler (ed.). Teufen AR: Arthur Niggli, 1968, 2nd edition 1970.

The Lettera series was started by Armin Haab and Alex Stocker in 1954. Following Stocker’s premature death in the same year, Haab continued it together with Haettenschweiler, adding three more volumes until 1972. In addition to dry transfer lettering and the more expensive phototypesetting, alphabet copybooks were an accessible, low-cost letterform source in the pre-digital era. While the usual techniques involved tracing or photocopying, chopped up copies of Lettera books are sad proof that some users chose a less sustainable approach. (Hansen resorted to a scanner, of course.) The editors were well aware that their compendium books effectively served as a fount of letters. The introduction mentions that “every purchaser of LETTERA 3 is entitled to form words or texts for any purpose from the alphabets it contains.”

Photo: Florian Hardwig. License: CC BY-NC-ND.

Fat Albert, a – probably unauthorized – phototype adaptation of OP-Letter, as shown in The Complete Lettergraphics Library. Culver City: Lettergraphics International Ltd., 1976.

Despite the fact that this “EULA” prohibited any unauthorized reproduction, OP-Letter was copied by Lettergraphics in the US almost instantly and made into a film typeface dubbed Fat Albert. This version is distinguished by harmonized letter heights and a more even H. Shadows in C, F, R are different, and the missing P as well as numerals etc. were added. This film face also appears as Googie aka Fat Albert Square in Castcraft’s Encyclopedia (1978) and as Albert in 1970s catalogs by Typeshop and Fürst. Moderne Alphabets (Dover, 1999) has it under the alias Zippy. In the preface to Lettera 4 (1972), Armin Haab comments on the radical changes in the industry since the mid 1950s:

… a new industry appeared on the scene and began to distribute typefaces, old and new, in vast quantities. Photocomposition had arrived. Firms in this line mushroomed overnight, stole from LETTERA even the types we had designed ourselves, and sold them to anyone interested at so much per word. (For good or ill I had to ask these gentry to pay up!) – But the new trend had been set. The graphic designer was neither willing nor able to draw letters in accordance with consistent artistic principles. More and more graphic designers, advertising agencies, display managers and publishers came to depend on the faces proviced by photocomposing firms. Today their number is legion. They supply the market with display faces while the typefoundries produce mainly body type.

While the phototype knockoffs are all long gone and forgotten, the Lettera books are still around and, as with this case, continue to provide inspiration and unique letterforms for contemporary applications. Justice will prevail!

Shown below are some of the preliminary versions for the Cherry cover where Janet Hansen also used OP-Letter. See more steps from the journey to an award-winning cover in her walkthrough on LitHub.

After the cover designer ran into another dead end and the creative director suggested the job be given to a freelancer, Hansen drew new hope with this idea: “I quite liked it, as did everyone here at Knopf—the dual suggestion of the cherry of a cigarette and also a gun.”

The breakthrough? Almost. “A skull is a good symbol for the book, but the first execution felt too predictable. This is when it dawned on me that there was an important aspect of the novel that I wasn’t including in any of these jackets: the fact that it is uniquely American. I tried adding an American element.”

“While the last one is too smiley, the surprise element of it being secondary to the stars felt appropriate. Almost like the skull (and all of the darkness in the novel) came about as some naïve mistake.” For the final version (shown at the top of this post), the death’s head was toned down even more. Once detected, the effect is all the more powerful.

Watch Janet Hansen talk at the Typographics conference on June 14 about the power of simplicity in contemporary book cover design. Fonts In Use is a media partner of Typographics. See more work by speakers of the 2019 edition.

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use

The Old Man and the Sea (1958) movie posters

Florian Hardwig — Tue, 22 May 2018 14:13:23 +0000

Six words, all with three letters — how can you not take advantage of that? Bill Gold realized the typographic potential that lies in Hemingway’s title and arranged the words in a towering stack of Haas Profil. With their red bodies, yellow edges and black shades, the bold italic caps echo the dramatic sky depicted in Gustav Rehberger’s painting. Secondary information is presented above and below the title, in several cuts and sizes of Goudy Oldstyle, making the narrow column even taller. The verticality is further exaggerated in the original theatrical release poster with its extreme proportions (see below).

Massimo Vignelli’s A Few Basic Typefaces

Stephen Coles — Sat, 13 Aug 2016 13:01:00 +0000

Contributed by Stephen Coles

This Massimo Vignelli poster announces the School of Visual Arts’ “third in a series of exhibitions honoring the great visual communicators of our time.” The exhibition ran from February 22 to March 8, 1991 at the Visual Arts Museum. According to Vignelli:

The exhibition showed work that we had done over many years by using only four typefaces: Garamond, Bodoni, Century Expanded, and Helvetica. The aim of the exhibition was to show that a large variety of printed matter could be done with an economy of type with great results. In other words, is not the type but what you do with it that counts. — The Vignelli Canon, 2009–10

Vignelli’s six preferred typefaces, as shown in his 2009–10 monograph: Garamond, Bodoni, Century Expanded, Futura, Times, Helvetica.

Vignelli is famous (or infamous) among designers for sticking to a handful of typefaces and publicly poo-pooing all the new stuff that was sprouting in the early years of DTP. He expounds on his philosophy in Canon:

As I said, at the time, if all people doing desktop publishing were doctors we would all be dead! Typefaces experienced an incredible explosion. The computer allowed anybody to design new typefaces and that became one of the biggest visual pollution of all times. …

I still believe that most typefaces are designed for commercial reasons, just to make money or for identity purposes. In reality the number of good typefaces is rather limited and most of the new ones are elaborations on pre-existing faces. Personally, I can get along well with a half a dozen, to which I can add another half a dozen, but probably no more. Besides those already mentioned, I can add Optima, Futura, Univers (the most advanced design of the century since it comes in 59 variations of the same face), Caslon, Baskerville, and a few other modern cuts. As you can see my list is pretty basic but the great advantage is that it can assure better results. It is also true that in recent years the work of some talented type designers has produced some remarkable results to offset the lack of purpose and quality of most of the other typefaces.

Vignelli himself was partially responsible for creating a new typeface (well, technically a modern revival) just a few months before this SVA exhibition: WTC Our Bodoni. From its release specimen:

When Bert Di Pamphilis of the World Typeface Corporation, New York, asked us to design a new typeface, we told him that we do not believe in “new” typefaces, but that there was room for improvement on existing, classic typeface designs. We consider the ratio between upper- and lower-case Helvetica letters to be the best there is. We wanted to redesign Bodoni using a similar ratio between the cases, with short ascenders and descenders; and articulate the type in four weights: light, regular, medium, bold. We worked on this project with Tom Carnase, undoubtably one of the very best type designers in the world. We were quite pleased with the results of our efforts, and we plan to apply the same concept to a few other classic typefaces, such as Futura, Century and Garamond.

The exhibition poster, however, doesn’t use WTC Our Bodoni, opting instead for a more standard digital or phototype version of Bodoni, perhaps to reflect the work shown in the exhibition using older cuts of the typeface.

This post was originally published at Fonts In Use