TYPOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE

— Jean-François Porchez

“You cannot understand typography and typefaces without knowledge and you can’t

keep that knowledge for only yourself. Type design is a cultural act, not just a few lines of

data in the corner of a hard disk.”

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05. 07. 09. 11. 13.

05.

typo magazine

- Stefa

n s

ag

meist

er// nr. 10 2012

Born in 1962, Bregenz, Austria. Stefan Sagmeister studied graphic design at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. In 1987 he moved to New York to attended pratt institute on a fulbright scholarship. He then returned to Austria in 1990 for community service as an alternative to obligatory military conscription. At the age 29, he attained a job with Leo Burnett in Hong Kong. In 1993 he returned to New York to work for the hungarian graphic designer Tibor Kalman at M&Co. When the studio closed the same year, Sagmeister opened his own office ‘‘Sagmeister Inc’’. In 1994 he was nominated for a Grammy Award for his album cover - ‘‘H. P. Zinker Mountains of Madness’’.

In the following years he designed album packaging for artists such as David Byrne, Lou Reed and the Rolling Stones. In 1996 Sagmeister began developed posters for AIGA-American Institue of Graphic Arts. He took a ‘‘year out’’ in 1999, closing his studio to commercial work and concentrating on his own experimental projects. In 2001 released the book ‘‘Made You Look (another self-indulgent design monograph)’’. In 2005 he won a Grammy award as art director of the ‘‘Once in a Lifetime’’ talking heads boxed set packaging. Currently among many projects sagmeister continues his work on ‘‘20 things in my life I have learned so far.’’ -a series of typographic pieces inspired by the work of his grandfather that he began in 2004. Every five years Sagmeister takes a year off from work to experiment with typography. He believes that design is a story and an artistic experiment.

His goal was to design music graphics, but only for music he liked. To have the freedom to do so, Sagmeister decided to follow

Stefan Sagmeister To use a word like “legend” in connection with Stefan Sagmeister is

not so far away exaggeration. It’s not just that this Austrian designer has

received almost every major international design awards.

Kalman’s advice by keeping his company small with a team of three: himself, a designer (since 1996, the Icelander, Hjalti Karlsson) and an intern. Sagmeister Inc’s first project was its own business card, which came in an acrylic slipcase. When the card is inside the case, all you see is an S in a circle. Once outside, the company’s name and contract details appear. The second commission came from Sagmeister’s brother, Martin who was opening Blue, a chain of jeans stores in Austria. Sagmeister devised an identity consisting of the word blue in black type on an orange background.

As well as these music projects, Sagmeister still took on other commercial commissions and pro bono cultural projects, such as his AIGA lecture posters. The obscenely elongated wagging tongues of 1996’s Fresh Dialogue talks series in New York and a Headless Chicken strutting across a field for 1997’s biennial conference in New Orleans culminated in the drama of Sagmeister’s scarred, knife-slashed torso for 1999’s deceptively blandly titled, AIGA Detroit.

In June 2000, Sagmeister decided to treat himself to a long-promised year off to concentrate on experimental projects and a book Sagmeister, sub-titled Made You Look with the sub-sub-title Another self-indulgent design monograph (practically everything we have ever designed including the bad stuff.) The worst of the “bad stuff” was a 1996 series of CD-Rom covers for a subsidiary of the Viacom entertainment group. “Don’t take on any more bad jobs,” Sagmeister scolded himself in his diary. “I have done enough bullshit lately, I just have to make time for something better. Something good.”

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7

typo magazine

- karel m

art

ens

// nr. 10 2012

Karel Martens is a Dutch designer and teacher. After training at the school of art in Arnhem, he has worked as a freelance graphic designer, specializing in typography. Alongside this, he has always made graphic and three-dimensional work. His design work ranges widely, from postage stamps, to books, to signs on buildings. Karel Martens earliest works were his book covers for an Arnhem based publishing house. They exhibit simple, clean swiss typography, an emphasis on legibility, and the use of repeated simple geometric shapes. His later covers begin to experiment with imagery. However this is kept very minimal and simple. All this work is documented and celebrated.

The work of Karel Martens occupies an intriguing place in the present European art-and-design landscape. Martens can be placed in the tradition of Dutch modernism – in the line of figures such as Piet Zwart, H.N. Werkman, Willem Sandberg. Yet he maintains some distance from the main developments of our time: from both the practices of routinized modernism and of the facile reactions against this. His work is both personal and experimental. At the same time, it is publicly answerable. Over the now 50 years of his practice, Martens has been prolific as a designer of books. He has also made contributions in a wide range of design commissions, including stamps, coins, signs on buildings. Intimately connected with this design work has been his practice as an artist. This started with geometric and kinetic constructions, and was later developed in work with the very material

Dutch typographic designer Karel Martens is one of the most

influential and enduring designers alive in the Netherlands today. His

work spans over 50 years and manages to maintain a freshness and

timeless appeal.

Karel MartensKarel MartensKarel Martens

of paper; more recently he has been making relief prints from found industrial artefacts. This book looks for new ways to show and discuss the work of a designer and artist, and is offered in the same spirit of experiment and dialogue that characterizes the work it presents.

In the books Karel Martens: drukwerk /printed matter and Karel Martens: counterprint. Martens has taught graphic design since 1977. His first appointment was at the school of art at Arnhem (until 1994). He was then attached to the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht (1994–9). In 1996 he was awarded the Dr. H.A. HeinekenAward— the top graphic design award in Hol- land. He is the founder of theWerkplaatsTypografie, a post-graduate graphic design school inArnhem, NL, as well as a lecturer at theYale School of Graphic Design, and the JanVan EyckAcademy in Maastrict, NL. Karel Martens work is often regarded as defining “dutch de- sign” and many of the aesthetic and conceptual char- acteristics he employs have been widely appropriated by the design community in NL and abroad. One of Karel Martens most enduring trend setting projects was his design for a series of dutch phone cards. From 1997 he has been a visiting lecturer in the graphic design department at the School of Art, Yale University. In that year, together with Wigger Bierma, he started a pioneering school of postgraduate education within the ArtEZ, Arnhem – the Werkplaats Typografie – where he still teaches today.

9.

typo magazine

- cla

ude g

aramo

nd

// nr. 10 2012

Claude Garamond

et religiosa Meditatio of David Chambellan. As publisher, Claude Garamond relied on his creativity harnessed by reasoned discipline to produce superbly well crafted products. He modeled his book publishing style after the classic works of the Venetian printers who catered to the absolute elites of high society. He admired and emulated the works of Aldus Manutius. Garamond insisted on clarity in design, generous page margins, quality composition, paper and printing , which was always accentuated with superb binding.

Because of the soundness of Garamond’s designs his typefaces have historical staying power, and they are likely to remain the day-to-day tools of professional typographers, as long as wertern civilization survives. Reading a well set Garamond text page is almost effortless, a fact that has been well known to book designers for over 450 years.

Claude Garamond’s contribution to typography was vast, a true renaissance man. Creating perfection in the type that he crafted his life will live on through his contribution to typography.

Starting out as an apprentice punch cutter Claude Garamond quickly made a

name for himself in the typography industry. Even though the typeface named

for Claude Garamond is not actually based on a design of his own it shows how

much of an influence he was.

Born in Paris, France in 1490, Garamond started his career out as an apprentice for the Parisian punch-cutter and printer, Antoine Augereau in 1510 . It was during this early part of the 16th century that Garamond and his peers found that the typography industry required unique multi-talented people. This way they could produce fine books. Many of the printers during that time period were able to master all or most of the artistic and technical skills of book production from type design to bookbinding. Claude Garamond was first to specialize in type design, punch cutting, and type-founding in Paris as a service to many famous publishers.

After a decade of success with his types all over Europe, King Francois I of France demanded that Garamond produce a Greek typeface, which later became known as “Grecs du Roi”. The three fonts were modeled after the handwriting of Angelos Vergetios, and cut the largest size first, on a 16 point body. All three original sets of Royal Greek punches are preserved at the Imprimerie Nationale in Paris, France. In 1545 Garamond became his own publisher, featuring his own types including a new italic. His first book published was Pia

11.

typo magazine

- Maria

n b

antjes

// nr. 10 2012

Bantjes started working in the field of visual communication in 1983 and worked as a book typesetter from 1984–1994. She became well known as a talented graphic designer from 1994–2003, when she was a partner and senior designer at Digitopolis in Vancouver, BC, Canada, where she created identity and communication designs for a wide range of corporate, education and arts organizations. In 2003 Marian left her firm and “strategic design” behind to embark on the work that she has since become internationally known for. Describing herself as a Graphic Artist, working primarily with custom type and ornament, Bantjes’ highly personal, obsessive and sometimes strange graphic work has brought her international recognition and fame as a world-class visual designer. Bantjes is known for her detailed and lovingly precise vector art, obsessive hand work, patterning and highly ornamental style. Stefan Sagmeister calls Bantjes “one of the most innovative typographers working today,” and Noreen Morioka calls Bantjes “the Doyald Young of her generation.” In 2005 Bantjes was named one of 25 up-and-coming Designers to Watch (STEP Magazine, January 2005). Bantjes’ clients include Pentagram, Stefan Sagmeister, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bruce Mau Design, Young & Rubicam Chicago, Anni Kuan, Houghton Mifflin, Print Magazine, Wallpaper* , WIRED, The Guardian (UK), The New York Times, among others. She has

Marian Bantjes was born in 1963 and is a Canadian designer, artist, illustrator,

typographer and writer.

also worked on design materials for AIGA, TypeCon 2007, and the Society of Graphic Designers of Canada (GDC). Her work has been featured in STEP, étapes (Paris), Azure, Matrix (Quebec) Tupigrafia (Brazil) and Print, Fontshop’s Font 004, and Eye magazine. She has written the design book “I wonder”, which was dubbed one of the 13 best design books of 2010 by Fastcode design. Bantjes has been honored with numerous awards and her work is now part of the permanent collection at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. Bantjes is an accomplished writer on the subjects of typography and design, and is a regular contributor to the popular design website Speak Up. Bantjes is frequently invited to sit on design award juries and speak at design conferences and design schools around the world. She teaches typography at Emily Carr Institute in Vancouver . Bantjes says “throwing your individuality into a project is heresy” but she has built a career doing just that, as her signature style is unmistakable. From 2002–2006 Bantjes served as the Communications VP of the Society of Graphic Designers in British Columbia. She was also the Chair and Creative Director of the 2006 Graphex Canadian design awards. In 2008 Bantjes was invited back to serve as a judge for ‘Graphex 2008 Canadian National Design Awards’. Bantjes lives and works internationally from her base on Bowen Island off the west coast of Canada, near Vancouver, BC.

Marian Bantjes

13.

typo magazine

- paula

scher

// nr. 10 2012

Scher has been a principal in the New York office of the distinguished international design consultancy Pentagram since 1991. She began her career as an art director in the 1970s and early ‘80s, when her eclectic approach to typography became highly influential. In the mid-1990s her landmark identity for The Public Theater fused high and low into a wholly new symbology for cultural institutions, and her recent architectural collaborations have re-imagined the urban landscape as a dynamic environment of dimensional graphic design. Her graphic identities for Citibank and Tiffany & Co. have become case studies for the contemporary regeneration of classic American brands.

Scher has developed identities, packaging for a broad range of clients that includes, among others, The New York Times Magazine, Perry Ellis, Bloomberg, Target, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, the New 42nd Street, the New York Botanical Garden, and The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. In 1996 Scher’s widely imitated identity for the Public Theater won the coveted Beacon Award for integrated corporate design strategy. She serves on the board of The Public Theater, and is a frequent design contributor to The New York Times, GQ and other publications.

For more than three decades Paula Scher has been at the forefront of graphic design.

Iconic, smart and unabashedly populist, her images have entered into the American

vernacular.

In 1998 Scher was named to the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, and in 2000 she received the prestigious Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design. In 2001 she received the profession’s highest honor, the AIGA Medal, in recognition of her distinguished achievements and contributions to the field. She is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale. Her work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, New York; the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich; the Denver Art Museum; and the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.

Scher holds a BFA from the Tyler School of Art and a Doctor of Fine Arts Honoris Causa from the Corcoran College of Art and Design. She has lectured and exhibited all over the world, and her teaching career includes over two decades at the School of Visual Arts, along with positions at the Cooper Union, Yale University and the Tyler School of Art. She has authored numerous articles on design-related subjects for the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design, PRINT, Graphis and other publications, and in 2002 Princeton Architectural Press published her career monograph Make It Bigger.

Paula Scher