p'A'per clip

Very impressed by Oded Ezer's work in general and this work with 3D typography in particular, I decided to experiment with 3D typography myself. It was quite simple really.... I took 2 paperclips and folded them into the letter 'A' in plan view. It was the elevations that were interesting......

 

The Icons of Design - The 20th Century (Prestel)

I picked up this book to see if I could find a co-relation or a pattern in the evolution of 'good' design in the 20th Century. Or even to get familiar with what was considered 'good' in the first place!

The foreword of the book drew analogies between Christian icons and Design (in general) icons. I was amused to see myself agreeing with some of the analogies :

"... there is a clear and structured interaction between the believer and the icon..."

The common theme, according to me,  in the visual appearance of 'good' design was plain ol' simplicity! There might have been complex mechanisms and ideas driving the structure and the creation of the product, but, visually, they were brilliantly simple. 

Simply brilliant!

The Power of Posters - Margaret Timmers

Aubrey Beardsley

What I picked up from the library shelf as a simple browsing book, turned out to be quite an interesting read. It has a fantastic collection of posters along with stories, trivia and a little bit about the social climate which may have lead to a particular design. A definite leaf through - especially if you are interested in poster design.




On the left is a poster that folded up as the program as well Loved the use of colours and the 'dots'. Also loved the story behind it. apparently it was one of the first posters where the image had absolutely NOTHING to do with the content of the play. It had caused quite a furor in those days.


Came across a really interesting quote regarding this poster :
Some gazed at it in awe while others jeered at it, but that in its power to provoke attention, it had succeeded as advertisement
-Charles Hiatt

E. McKnight Kauffer

Another one that I absolutely loved was a poster design by E McKnight Kauffer for a traveling exhibition arranged by the circulation Department of the V&A in 1973. I could not get an image of the poster, but I did manage to get an image of something similar, that I think is very cleverly executed.

Just a really strong poster with a very strong grid. The grid being defined by placement of text, inversion of colour and use of colour 

Split Personalities

Being intrigued by the person that was Eric Gill, I decided to take a closer look at all the fonts that were designed by him. I thought his serif fonts were quite fantastic. From the quietly confident Perpetua, to the attention seeker - the Floriated Caps; I think Gill instilled strong personalities in his letter forms. 

Perpetua | Joanna | Gill Floriated Capitals

I thought it would be an amusing study to mix these 'personalities' and see what resulted from them. I decided to dissect the letters in half and then mix and match them to each other. What was really interesting to note, and what I learnt from this experiment, is that some important element of the letters always matched up to each other. It could be that the top of the cross bar aligned, or the peak coincided. These subtleties would not have been apparent by just looking at the letterforms in isolation.

Floriated Caps vs Jubilee

Perpetua vs Joanna

Joanna vs Floriated Caps

Jubilee vs Perpetua

Superhero Gill S

I had a lot of fun with this one. I made little placards of letters on trace paper so that I could overlay the different kinds and decide for myself which was the most interesting overlay. Came up with some really fun stuff which led to creation of completely new letters which I hope to use someday when I write my superhero Gill comic strip :-)

Analyze that : Getting somewhere

The various analysis diagrams got me addicted! I decided to keep going with the family of Gill Sans a bit more since there were both similarities and differences to map out. And the more I analyzed, the more I knew I was getting somewhere. Had no idea where yet, but was sure it was somewhere!

This exercise finally led me to a much better understanding of how a font family worked. What were those intrinsic qualities that made a letterform a part of a 'family' and what elements could be changed in it to make it either 'bold' or 'italic' without losing its essence.

Now I was analyzing with a wee bit more understanding.....