Typo

november 2012

CLAUDE GARAMOND • STEFAN SAGMEISTER • KAREL MARTENS • MARIAN BANTJES

Art director Tommy Larsen Office Kjøpmannsgate 65 7011 Trondheim Tlf.: 936 42 513 Distribution Norges Kreative Fagskole post@nkf.no Published by NKF

WHAT IS TYPOGRAPHY? claude garamond s.4

karel martens s.6

stefan sagmeister s.8

marian bantjes s.10

Typography is the art and technique of arranging type in order to make language visible. The arrangement of type involves the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading, adjusting the spaces between groups of letters and adjusting the space between pairs of letters. Type design is a closely related craft, which some consider distinct and others a part of typography; most typographers do not design typefaces, and some type designers do not consider themselves typographers.

In modern times, typography has been put into motion—in film, television and online broadcasts—to add emotion to mass communication.

Typography is performed by typesetters, compositors, typographers, graphic designers, art directors, comic book artists, graffiti artists, clerical workers, and anyone else who arranges type for a product.

Until the Digital Age, typography was a specialized occupation. Digitization opened up typography to new generations of visual designers and lay users, and it has been said that “typography is now something everybody does.”

THE FRENCH PUBLISHER

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CLAUDE GARAMOND

Born: Ca. 1490 Hometown: Paris, France

Claude Garamond cut types for the Parisian scholar-printer Robert Estienne in the first part of the sixteenth century.

Garamond refined his romans in later versions, adding his own concepts as he developed his skills as a punchcutter.

After his death in 1561, the Garamond punches made their way to the printing office of Christoph Plantin in Antwerp, where they were used by Plantin for many decades, and still exist in the PlantinMoretus museum.

Other Garamond punches went to the Frankfurt foundry of Egenolff-Berner, who issued a specimen in 1592 that became an important source of information about the Garamond types for later scholars and designers. In 1621, sixty years after Garamond’s death, the French printer Jean Jannon (1580-1635) issued a specimen of typefaces that had some characteristics similar to the Garamond designs, though his letters were more asymmetrical and irregular in slope and axis. Jannon’s types disappeared from use for about two hundred years, but were re-discovered in the French national printing office in 1825, when they were wrongly attributed to Claude Garamond.

Their true origin was not to be revealed until the 1927 research of Beatrice Warde.

In the early 1900s, Jannon’s types were used to print a history of printing in France, which brought new attention to French typography and the “Garamond” types.

This sparked the beginning of modern revivals; some based on the mistaken model from Jannon’s types, and others on the original Garamond types.

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Italics for Garamond fonts have sometimes been based on those cut by Robert Granjon (1513-1589), who worked for Plantin and whose types are also on the Egenolff-Berner specimen. Linotype has several versions of the Garamond typefaces. Though they vary in design and model of origin, they are all considered to be distinctive representations of French Renaissance style; easily recognizable by their elegance and readability.

Paris, Christmas Eve, 1534. As countless families delighted in the happy faces of their children, at the Place Maubert, 35-year-old Claude Garamond was experiencing the most terrible moment of his life. He was watching with tears in his eyes as his teacher, the printer Antoine Augereau was burnt at the stake, along with his books.

These were turbulent times, early in the French Renaissance, full of faith in intellectual thinking, in writing, in books and in humanism. The Bible was being printed in the vernacular for the first time, bills protesting against the Mass heralded the Reformation, Luther’s theses were circulating, and religious power struggles were on the horizon.

Augereau was accused of writing pamphlets which criticised the Catholic Church. But in fact he was a scapegoat, sacrificed in place of his client Margaret of Navarre, a sister of the king and enthusiastic supporter of Luther. The powerful theologians of the Sorbonne were simply too cowardly to take any action against the aristocratic publicist herself. The Paris street Grand-Rue Saint-Jacques was a gathering place for open-minded printers and publishers. One of these was Antoine Augereau, who held the opinion that new ideas needed new typefaces.

“LIKE “LIKEMUCH MUCHININLIFE LIFE ––DESIGNING DESIGNINGISISMAKING MAKINGCHOICES.” CHOICES.” - KAREL MARTENS

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KU N AI F IRC AET I LO N OMF AA R RT &T DEE SNI GSN The work of Dutch designer Karel Martens is rooted in materials rather than the ravishing image.

How to group text and images in ways that make sense? What size of type? How much space between the words, between the lines? What length of line?

The basic problems of typography do no change, just as human beings go on reproducing themselves in similarly sized and constrained bodies. One could write the history of typography from 1450 on as a struggle between texts and designers, whose whims and vanities have often led them to butchery, indifference, ego-driven overemphasis and profligacy.

Now there are about 20 years’ worth of Arnhem students, a few from each class, who engage with typography as a serious, life-absorbing activity, concerned with making texts accessible without the interposition of a designer ego. The starting point is always: is this text worth publishing anyway? Talk to Verberne and you may see him ironically wiping the dirty café table with some pretentious piece of graphic design. Talk to Martens, and you will find him throwing things down – even work that bears his name – with the comment “another superfluous book”.

Any discussion of decent treatment of text and Dutch typography should start with a salute Karel Martens stopped working for the SUN to the matchless and apparently endless in 1981. His fiery editor Boekraad left a little stream of book typographers who work later, and in 1986 was launched as a critic and for publishing houses. Among the older theorist of graphic design with a remarkgeneration are Wim Mol, Harry Sierably through and penetrating essay on the man, Alje Olthof, Karel Treebus, Joost SUN and Martens. Since then Martens van de Woestijne. has worked in the cultural sector: stamps BORN: 12.07.1939 Then there are a few typograand booklets for the PTT, exhibition HOMETOWN: ROTTERDAM, HOLLAND phers now in middle age who have catalogues, and books, but without any worked across the range of tasks, startconsistent engagement with a publishing ing out as grid-obeying Modernists and house. Until he became the designer of the maturing into a typography that respects architectural journal Oase. and uses traditional values, but which explores and risks, while adhering to the meaning Oase had been an undistinguished saddle-stitched of texts and images. Among the first names that come A4 production. Its editors were preparing for a new phase to mind are Kees Nieuwenhuijzen, Walter Nikkels and Karel under a new publisher – the SUN, which by now, like all Martens. Within the Netherlands, these designers have some reputation; successful left-radical houses, is publishing a more general, less outside they are more or less unknown. Martens might be cited as an exemplary political list. Martens was approached, with the assumption that he instance of someone whose work is rooted, not interested in fashion – and fresh. would not want the job himself, but perhaps could find a student. Martens, who has always taken architectural theory as one source of guidance for his work, decided he There is a thesis to be written about graphic designers and the socialist publishers wanted to take it on. As the story implies, the work is not well paid, and the journal of Europe at that time. In Britain, the radical left, in particular in its more intellectual is produced by a group of people in their spare time. But already, after a handful of manifestations, had since the mid-1960s used some of the best designers (Robin Fior, issues, something remarkable has been created, recognised in this year’s Werkman Ken Garland, Derek Birdsall, Jerry Cinamon). And just when Martens was working Prize award to Martens. Once again he has a public arena in which to work out his for the SUN, Pluto Press, once the publishing arm of International Socialism, had typography.

Richard Hollis as its de facto art director. Indeed, the paths of Hollis and Martens run closely parallel, especially in the turn from dry geometry to a richer, more flexA few designers have stood against the reduction to image. In Martens’ typography, ible, but still clearly Modernist approach. we find the power and resonance of a deep commitment to material. His preference A more demanding thesis still would look at the use of typographic indenta- is for materials that are a bit rough, not too perfect; if they wear visibly through tion to articulate text, in relation to social and political change, as deployed in the use, well, that is what happens in life. You will not find any heavy varnishing on typography of Martens and Hollis, 1965 to 1993. his covers, unless, as with Oase 33, it is there as an ironic comment on that issue’s special them: the metropolis. Take the simplest case, of a single sheet of paper for a In 1977 Martens began to teach part time at the school of art at Arnhem. He is letterheading. Printing some of the text on the reverse side, so it shows through to still there (two days a week), and this has helped to keep him and a family afloat, the front, provides another means of coding information as well as demonstrating supplementing the poorly paid but otherwise rewarding work he does. His teach- that the sheet is a three-dimensional thing in the world. ing has helped to consolidate what one might now speak of as a school of “Arnhem typography”. Before him, Jan Vermeulen, Kees Kelfkens and Alexander Verberne had helped to establish a serious interest in typography at the school.

KAREL MARTENS

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-Stefan sagmeister 8

Stefan Sagmeister Born: 08.12.1962 Hometown: Bergenz, Austria www.sagmeister.com

STEFAN SAGMEISTER (1962-) is among today’s most important graphic designers. Born in Austria, he now lives and works in New York. His long-standing collaborators include the AIGA and musicians, David Byrne and Lou Reed.

When Stefan Sagmeister was invited to design the poster for an AIGA lecture he was giving on the campus at Cranbrook near Detroit, he asked his assistant to carve the details on to his torso with an X-acto knife and photographed the result.

Sunning himself on a beach the following summer, Sagmeister noticed traces of the poster text rising in pink as his flesh tanned.

Now a graphic icon of the 1990s, that 1999 AIGA Detroit poster typifies Stefan Sagmeister’s style. Striking to the point of sensationalism and humorous but in such an unsettling way that it’s nearly, but not quite unacceptable, his work mixes sexuality with wit and a whiff of the sinister. Sagmeister’s technique is often simple to the point of banality: from slashing D-I-Y text into his own skin for the AIGA Detroit poster, to spelling out words with roughly cut strips of white cloth for a 1999 brochure for his girlfriend, the fashion designer, Anni Kuan. The strength of his work lies in his ability to conceptualise: to come up with potent, original, stunningly appropriate ideas.

Born in Bregenz, a quiet town in the Austrian Alps, in 1962, Sagmeister studied engineering after high school, but switched to graphic design after working on illustrations and lay-outs for Alphorn, a left-wing magazine. The first of his D-I-Y graphic exercises was a poster publicising Alphorn’s Anarchy issue for which he persuaded fellow students to lie down in the playground in the shape of the letter A and photographed them from the school roof.

At 19, Sagmeister moved to Vienna hoping to study graphics at the city’s prestigious University of Applied Arts. After his first application was rejected – “just about everybody was better at drawing than I was” – he enrolled in a private art school and was accepted on his second attempt. Through his sister’s boyfriend, the rock musician, Alexander Goebel, Sagmeister was introduced to the Schauspielhaus theatre group and designed posters for them as part of the Gruppe Gut collective. Many of the posters parodied traditionally twee theatrical imagery and offset it with roughly printed text in the grungey typefaces of punk albums and 1970s anarchist graphics.

In 1987, Sagmeister won a Fulbright scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. Here humour emerged as the dominant theme in his work.

When a girlfriend asked him to design business cards which would cost no more than $1 each, Sagmeister printed them on dollar bills.

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MARIAN BANTJES BORN: 29.08.1962 HOMETOWN: Saskatchewan, CANADA WWW.BANTJES.COM

Marian Bantjes on middle-of-the-night ideas, the trouble with Adobe Illustrator and designing for Ohio rock band The National.

Marian Bantjes was born in 1963, and grew up in Saskatchewan. She dropped out of art school after a year and in 1983 ‘fell in’ to a job with book publisher Hartley & Marks, where she did general jobs and helped with paste-up at its typesetting sibling, TypeWorks. An aptitude for computer typesetting (on XyWrite) slowly developed into an understanding of typography and design. In 1994, she co-founded Digitopolis in Vancouver, and the design practice grew quickly, producing mainly print-based work. But after eight or so years of this, Bantjes dropped out once more. Her partner bought her out, while retaining her on contract for a further year.

In July 2003, Bantjes struck out on her own, moving to an isolated property on Bowen Island, in Howe Sound off Vancouver. Such a radical change of practice and lifestyle had a cost: after surviving for a year on savings Bantjes was obliged to take out a loan. She sent out posters to editors, writers, designers, potential clients, collaborators and cheerleaders, and spent time on the Speak Up blog (underconsideration.com), where she was made an Author in November 2003.

Eventually, the first paid commissions trickled in. She describes her self-promotional Poster #1 as the turning point, both aesthetically, because it encapsulated the direction she wanted to go in, and in terms of recognition: it caught the attention of designers and art directors (see a detail of it on the back cover of Eye no. 58 vol.

15, Winter 2005).

Since that time she has made work for clients such as Saks Fifth Avenue, Wired, The New York Times, Wallpaper*, Seed, FontShop, Houghton-Mifflin, Knopf Books, Young & Rubicam / Chicago, and in collaboration with designers and art directors such as Sagmeister Inc, Michael Bierut / Pentagram, Winterhouse, Bruce Mau Design and Rick Valicenti. She has also designed a typeface, Restraint, which won a Type Directors’ Club award in 2008, and not-for-profit projects including posters for the educational charity Design Ignites Change. You can read ‘Surface to space’, her feature article about origami, in Eye no. 67 vol. 17.

She is currently taking a year away from commissioned work to complete a book of illuminated essays for Thames & Hudson. Several of her pieces are part of the permanent collection of the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum (Smithsonian), New York, and she became a member of the AGI (Alliance Graphique Internationale) in September 2008.

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