5 Poster Designers

Armin Hofmann
Armin Hofmann is a swiss graphic designer. He began his career in 1947 as a teacher at the Allegemeine Gewerbeschile Basel School of Art and Crafts at the age of 26. He is well known for his posters, which emphasized economical use of color and fonts.  Hofmann's posters have been widely exihibited as works of art in major galleries, such as the New York Museum of Modern Art. In 1965 he wrote the Graphic Design Manual and he played a great role in developing the graphic design style known as the swiss style. Armin Hoffman's dedication to visual resolution represented a larger vision of civilized society and behind the artistic beauty of his designs hid a conviction about social issues and cultural values. His work is described as being primarily based on the fundamentals of graphic form, point, shape, and line and fluently shows a simplicity, abstraction, and complexity simultaneously.

http://www.designishistory.com/1940/armin-hofmann/
http://www.famousgraphicdesigners.org/armin-hofmann

Gerwin Schmidt
Gerwin Schmidt was born in Munich in 1966. Starting in 1990, for two years he studied communication design at Kassel University. After he was done at Kassel, until 1997 he studied visual communication and painting at design university HfG Karlsruhe.  He was also a freelance designer there, and also in Cologne and Munich. From 1998 until 2014 he did graphic design for Revolver magazine for cinema. -- Although I couldn't find a lot about him other than time periods that he did different things, I still chose him for his amazing poster designs which stood out from a lot of the others!

http://2015.agi-congress.com/speakers/gerwin-schmidt

Leonardo Sonnoli
Leonardo Sonnoli is an Italian designer and is known as one of the greatest of the contemporary international level. For more than a decade he has been the creative director of the associated Dolcini of Pesaro managing the graphic design aspect. His practice ranges from the design of visual identity for both private and public companies to the communication for cultural events, book design, and even exhibition display. He has also done work with the New York Times and art direction of Electa Art Publishing House in collaboration with Paolo Tassinari. He is also a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and even is the president of the Italian Chapter.

http://www.sonnoli.com/?page_id=2

Paula Scher
Paula Scher is an American graphic designer, painter and art teacher and also the first female principal at pentagram which she was apart of since 1991. When she was younger she had no idea what design was. She wanted to be an artist and designed publicity poster for her high school for prom and other events. Scher considers the first thing she fully designed was a children's book she wrote called The Brownstone. She started her career in the 1970s and that was when her approach to typography was very influential. Steer has produced identities and packaging for many clients like The New York Times Magazine, Target, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart and so many more. In 1998 Paula Scher was named to the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame and a year later she received the Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design. Her work is in permanent collections in the Museum of Modern Art and also the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.

http://www.aiga.org/medalist-paulascher/
http://www.fastcodesign.com/3043997/graphic-designer-paula-scher-i-figured-out-every-identity-ive-ever-done-in-a-taxicab


Werner Jeker
Werner Jeker is a Swiss Graphic Designer, Illustrator, and a teacher. Like Leonardo Sonnoli, he is also a member of AGI since 1989. In 1983 he started working and collaborating with industrial designers Antoine Cahen and Claude Frossard working both with industrial and graphic design.

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Jeker

Pentagram's Abbott Miller Reading Summary

The reading shows how Abbott Miller, an american graphic designer and writer, thinks and feels about design. It seems in the beginning of the reading Miller is somewhat against logos, even though his book Design and Content includes plenty. Logos to him seems to take away from the narrative that design can provide. He talks about how graphic design has changed immensely through the years but has also leaned more towards on the term "branding" and has become so important in graphic design. It has become, in Miller's eyes, repetitive in a way that it can sometimes take over what the actual design and personality is about. The word "brand" has taken over individual aspects of design, which I would definitely agree with.

The interview in the reading also showed how collaborative Miller is when working on ideas. He would rather be social about design and talk it over then work by himself and being single minded. I feel some graphic designers should try doing this a little more and have Miller's same mindset. In another interview question, Miller was asked which he liked better, exhibitions, book design, or app design. He said he loves exhibitions but not the fact that they only last about a month. He is more into book design for the reason that books aren't just something that is there for a month at a time, but can be around for decades.

Reading: Thinking With Type // Letter, Grid, and Text.

1) The advantages of multiple column grid is that it provides more flexibility when formatting for publications that have a complex hierarchy or that have integrated text and illustrations. The more columns you create, the more flexible the grid.

2) Characters that would be optimal for a line length would mostly depend on how wide the columns were made.


3) A baseline grid is used in design to serve as an anchor to nearly all layout elements to a common rhythm.

4) There are a few reasons to have justified and ragged text in typography. With justified text, it keeps edges even on both the left and right sides of the columns. It makes an efficient use of space and a clean, compact shape on the page. With ragged text, it respects the flow of the language instead of following the law of the typical box. Ragged text can be considered good and bad- it is good when the edges are consistently ragged, and bad when some edges are straight and some are not.

5) A typographic river is gaps appearing to run down a paragraph of text due to a coincidental alignment of spaces.

6) A hang line is a horizontal reference point dividing a page. A hang line is used for example, when a body of text can hang from a common line and an area across can be reserved for images, etc.

7) Type Color is the weight of the text.

8) Typeface with a taller x-height have a heavier color and with shorter x-height, a lighter color.

9) Some ways to indicate a new paragraph is by indenting and outdenting with line breaks, extra space inside a line without line breaks, and symbols. Avoid indenting the very first line of a body text.

Jeff Wall Presentation

http://issuu.com/jennahammond/docs/jw_petcha_kutcha/1

6 Designers

Fred Woodard:

Fred Woodard played an important role in the design industry. He was best known for his legendary work in the Rolling Stone Magazine, where he had been working for 14 years. He worked with typography and photography in the Rolling Stone and changed it for the better. The positioning of groups of words, or letters created an emotion or expression.

Woodard was an influential designer not only because of being president of society of publication Design and the youngest member in the NY art director Hall of fame, but was also nominated for 8 National Magazine awards, including general excellence, design, photography, and photo portfolio.

http://www.csun.edu/~pjd77408/DrD/Art461/LecturesAll/Lectures/PublicationDesign/DigitalTimes/Fred-Woodward.html

https://salahsultan.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/salah-sultan-biography-of-fred-woodward.pdf

Gail Anderson:

Gail Anderson's importance in the design world was also by working for the Rolling Stone Magazine from 1987 to 2002 as a designer, deputy art director, and senior art director. She was also the designer at the Boston Globe Sunday Magazine and Vintage Books. She has received awards from major design organizations included society of publication designers, the American Institute of Graphic Arts, and the Art Directors Club. Lastly, she was the recipient of the 2008 lifetime achievement medal from the AIGA and has lectured about design at organizations and conferences around the world.

http://www.gailycurl.com/Rolling-Stone

Tibor Kalman:

In the mid- 1980s two names changed graphic design Macintosh and Tibor. Kalman died in 1999 of lymphoma. He was very influential and defined good design as "unexpected and untried." He believed it should be used to increase public awareness of a variety of social issues. He even had his own design firm M&Co which started in 1979 selling conventional "Design by the Pound" to banks and department stores. He had his own magazine, colors, which he became editor-in-chief and rejected fashion magazine cliches in favor of sociopolitical issues. It was the first magazine for the global village Tibor announced. 

http://www.aiga.org/medalist-tiborkalman/

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/05/05/arts/tibor-kalman-bad-boy-of-graphic-design-49-dies.html?pagewanted=all

Alexi Brodovitch: 

Remembered as the art director of Harper's Bazaar for nearly a quarter of a century. He played a crucial role in introducing into the US a radically simplified "modern" graphic design style forged in Europe in the 1920s from an amalgam of vanguard movements in art and design. He took an active role in conceiving and commissioning all forms of graphic art and he specialized in discovering and showcasing young and unknown talent. Throughout his career, he continued to teach. He was inspiring though sometimes harsh and unrelenting.

http://www.aiga.org/medalist-alexeybrodovitch/

Neville Brody:

According to Fontfont.com. Brody is perhaps the best known designer of his generation. He spent 3 years studying at the London college of printing where his work , which was quite experimental in nature, was met with unfavorable criticism because the school generally taught traditional printing methods. He was the art director for the Face magazine where he worked from 1980 to 1993. Brody was also a major contributor to FUSE and was an avid user of the computer as a design tool during its developmental stages. He has designed several popular typefaces including Arcadia, Industria, Insignia, FF blur, FF pop, FF gothic, and FF Harlem.

http://www.identifont.com/show?16X

http://www.designishistory.com/1980/neville-brody/

https://www.fontfont.com/designers/neville-brody

David Carson:

Carson was a High school teacher before becoming a designer. In 1989 he qualified as the 9th best surfer in the world. His interest in the world of surfing gave him the opportunities to experiment with design working on several different publications related to the profession. He redesigned Surfer magazine and art directed and designed it for the next 2 years before Raygun. It was Raygun where he gained the most recognition and was able to share his design style. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Carson_(graphic_designer)

http://www.designishistory.com/1980/david-carson/

Wednesday Oct. 28 Blog Homework

1) Small capitals are uppercase characters set at the same height/weight as lowercase letters used in running text to prevent capitalized words from appearing too large on the page. Also used in place of italics. Small caps draw attention more than regular capitals and are more aesthetically pleasing.
2) The original Futura design concept included small capitals. Dropped from original metal issue of the type and first offered digitally by Neufrille Digital under the Futura ND family.
3)Ligature is two or more letters joined together to form one character. Helped some practical typesetting problems. fi and ae. Futura does not have ligatures. The font is too geometric it would look very awkward. A font that does use ligatures is Mrs. Eaves.
5) The difference between a foot mark and apostrophes is footmarks are straight while apostrophes are curved.
6) Hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes are somewhat similar in appearance but different in length and meaning. Hyphens glue words together and notify the reader of two or more elements in a sentence that are linked. En dashes connect things that are related to each other in distance. Like may-september issue of a magazine. Em dashes are similar to parenthesis and are for additional thoughts to be added.

Futura: Font Info & Definitions/ Identifications

-Sans Serif
-Designer: Paul Renner
-Other Fonts Designed: Plak (1928), Futura Black (1929), Futura Light (1932), Ballade (1937), Renner Antiqua (1939), Steile Futura (1954)
-Classification: Geometric Sans Serif
-Family Members: Futura: Light, Light Oblique, Book, Book Oblique, Medium, Medium Oblique, Bold, Bold Oblique, Extra Bold, Extra Bold Oblique.





1) Modern
Define: Thin, straight serifs, a vertical axis, and sharp contrast (thick to thin strokes).
Examples: Aster, Didot, and Ellington.

2) Old Style
Define: Bracketed Serifs and slight weight differences between the thick and thin parts of the letters. Documented in use since early 1420s.
Examples: Garamond, Bembo, Jenson, and Palatino.

3)Transitional
Define: Similar to Old Style typefaces, they have higher contrast between the weights of thick and thin lines.
Examples: Times Roman, Baskerville, and Adriane Text.


Stoke Weight:
The degree of contrast between the thin and thick strokes in a typeface or the thickness of lines in a font character.

Stress/Axis:
-The diagonal, vertical, or horizontal thick to thin transition in the stroke of a letter.
-A typeface with uniform strokes has no apparent stress.
-Old Style fonts like Garamond show diagonal stress.
-Transitional fonts like Times New Roman show a much less pronounced diagonal stress.
-Modern fonts like Bodoni have strong Vertical Stress.

Small Caps:
Are shrunken versions of full size caps. They are designed to match the x-height of lowercase letters.

Lining Figures:
Take up uniform widths of space, helping the numbers to line up when arranged in columns.

Non-aligning Figures:
Have ascenders and descenders, like lowercase letters. Are proportional and has own set width.

Ligatures:
Two or more letters are joined as a single glyph.

Summarizing Type Measurement:
Type is measured in points. For example, a 10 point type measures from baseline to baseline 10 points. While the fonts are ALL 10 points, some may look bigger or smaller than others but take up some depth line to line.

Baseline:
The line which most letters sit and below which descenders extend.

X-Height:
Distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Usually the height of "x" in a font.

Cap Height:
Refers to the height of a capital letter above the baseline for a particular typeface. Specifically refers to the height of capital letters that are flat like "H" and "I".

Ascender:
Portion of a small letter that extends above the mean line of a font. If the part of a lower case letter is taller than the font's x-height.

Descender:
A portion of a letter that extends below the baseline of a font.

Arm:
A longer horizontal stroke at the top or bottom, like E, F, L, and T.

Leg: 
Short, descending part of a letter.

Tail:
A trailing outstroke as in j, k, y, J, and K.

Eye:
The eye refers to specifically to the enclosed space in the lowercase "e".

Apex:
A point at the top of a character where two strokes meet.

Crossbar:
Horizontal stroke in letters.

Counter:
Areas of negative space formed by straight or curved strokes.

Bowl:
A closed curved stroke.

Link:
Stroke that connects the top and bottom bowls of lowercase.

Ear:
Very short stroke at the top.

Loop:
Bottom of the two-string "g".