Research & Reasoning - Chapter 4 Font foundry case studies

Research & Reasoning - Chapter 4 Font foundry case studies

Based on the prologue of the essay a preliminary body of research was gathered before starting to write and inform arguments based around my essay question, doing this allowed me to gather a thorough body of research to extract the strongest quotes from to inform my own writing, include drop quotes, paraphrasing and to inform further reading and influence in the future for my extended practice. A color coding system helps me quickly extract what quotes are needed for what purpose in the essay so it allows me to maintain a consistent and good flow when writing my dissertation. 

Key

Orange informs my own writing. 

Blue for potential drop quotes and paraphrasing.

Black will inform further investigations into my extended practice module. 

Red is a rationale and reasoning of the quote.

4 - Font foundry case studies.

·      From physical to digital.

·      Ownership (what is ownership?) and value of something physical that has craftsmanship to the oversaturation of typefaces from budget and high end foundries. Ebooks audio books as a technological variation.

·      Critical analyze of a typeface from a traditional foundry with heritage and a typeface from a budget foundry like the designers foundry. 

·      Limitations of digital type.

·      Typography design software

·      Comparison between physical ownership of music (records) and its developed distribution to streaming with how type used to be physically owned but is now as easy to access as streamed music. Look into both piracy of software, type, music and how this feeds into how value is lost.

Thomson, M. (2015). Reputations Fres Smeijers. Eye 90. vol 23. P15.

My father was mechanic. Respect – for tools and for the material with which your work – is one thing I got from him. When the chisel is not sharp enough to do a certain job, even if it is just one cut, do not think you can get away with it. Sharpen the chisel properly and only then use it for what you wanted to do.

P16.

Without having a ‘style’, Smeijers’ types are recognisably immutably his. His individuality is the product of several factors: a deep conception of material and its history; a fluidity of drawn line; an engagement with technology; and a rebellious spirit. This shines through a collection of types that are reference points for the plasticity of type design and its close bonds with language and perception.

The formal material of type is the alphabet, but Smeijers’ conception of this is broader and deeper than that of many others, embracing the ways in which letters have been made across time, with pens, punches, casting, printing, pixels and myriad typesetting technologies. This conception informs every stroke of his work.

(Development of techniques using technologies)

P19.

Type design is an applied art – that is agreed. So where does the “art bit come in? There is an innovative aspect, a visual sensibility’ knowledge of use and its history’ a sense of craft. All this is necessary.

(Considering tradition and heritage even when using modern technologies)

P29.

A lot of badly designed fonts are good enough for a lot of purposes, so standards are falling. There are more good typefaces being released than twenty years ago, but compared to the amount of not-so-good or mediocre stuff, this number is not significant.

(Oversaturation of typefaces within a digital age with accessibility to technology)

Gill, E (2013). An essay on Typography. London: Penguin Group.

Chapter 1 – Time and Place

p1.

The conflict between industrialism & the ancient methods of handicraftsmen, which resulted in the muddle of the 19th century, is now coming to its term.

(Development of Mass production through industrialization, from craft to mass production and introduction to mass communication)

The handicrafts are not killed, & they cannot be quite killed because they meet an inherent, indestructible, permanent need in human nature.

(Craft, Respect of ownership from end user & Pride of making)

p3.

Even the small craftsman, in spite of the impossibility of competition with ‘big business’ and mass production, cannot be permanently put out of action, if only because the pen-knife is always with us and men will always want to make things to please themselves, tho’ only in there spare time.

(Ownership and quality of craft)

p4.

Mr Maritain, in his recent essay on Religion and Culture, says: ‘The modern world is spiritually dominated by the humanism of the Renaissance, the Protestant Re-formation and the Cartesian Reform’

(Religion and its impact on communication through a key period within the Renaissance and the development of communication through this period)

p14.

It is no longer permissible to design things with no reference but to our own pleasure, leaving it to engineers to design machines capable of making them; our business is now to design things, which are suitable for machines to make. And this is not to say that we accept the limitations of machinery as such.

p17.

Nowhere is there a perfectly humane civilization, but all who are not enthralled by industrialism desire its perfection. On the one hand is the dream of those who imagine a perfectly organized system of mass production; every article of use made to a good standard pattern; a perfected system of marketing and transport, whether Communist or Capitalist; the hours of labour, both for masters & men, reduced to a few hours a day, & a long leisure time devoted to amusement & love-making, even to the pursuit of the thing they call Art.

p20,

The hard and logical development of industrialism will impose, even upon its enemies, a very salutary hardness and logicality. Fancy lettering will be as distasteful to the artist as it will be to the engineer (maker) - in fact it is more than probable that it will be the artists who will give the lead. It has always been so. It is not the artist who is sentimental – it is the men of the business and the man of science. Even now there are few really logical & relentless alphabets of plain letters in common commercial use in this country, and they were designed by artists.

Chapter 2 – Lettering

p23.

Letters are signs for sounds. Signs for numbers and other things (like the sign for a dollar) may in practice be included, though they are not strictly letters (except as in Roman or Greek numerals & the letter signs use in Algebra)

Letters are not pictures or representations. They are more or less abstract forms.

p24.

Lettering is for us the Roman alphabet and the Roman alphabet is lettering.

The English language is done in Roman letters, and these letters may be said to have reached a permanent type about the first century A.D.

Fourteen hundred years after the cutting of the Trajan inscription the tablet in Henry VII’s chapel was inscribed, and no Roman would have found any difficulty in reading the letters.

(Basic outline of development of lettering and communication)

p25.

But, although the Roman alphabet has remained essentially unchanged through the centuries, customs & habits of work have changed a great deal. In the time of the Romans, say A. D 100, when a man said the word ‘letters’ it is probable that he immediately thought of the kind of letters he was accustomed to seeing on public inscriptions.

Although all sorts of other kind of lettering existed (on wax tablets, on papyrus) the most common kind of formal lettering was the inscription in stone.

Letters are such and such forms; therefor, whatever tools & materials we have to use, we must make these forms as well as the tools and material will allow.

(Limitations of type design)

p25-27.

This is not to deny that tools and materials have had a very great influence on letterforms. But that influence has been secondary, and for the most part it has been exerted without the craftman’s conscious intention.

(Impact of new technologies even back then on the influence of type design)

  

p30.

The point that chiefly concerns me is that, with whatever tools or materials or economic circumstance (that is hurry & expense), the artist, the letter-maker, has always thought of himself as making existing forms, & not inventing new ones.

(Takes influence from past practices just develops them in better ways to aid communication and embrace technologies and change to develop better made typography)

p34.

Again they did not invent new forms, but formalized and adapted existing forms to the exigencies of typefounding and printing.

(Develop the way type is created for the introduction of mass communication and efficient communication of language)

p36.

The ninteeth century developed machinery, & machine makers are now able to supply accurate, though mechanical. Imitations of the type faces of the pre-commercial era.

Hult, R. (2015). Monetizing And Preserving Digital Art. Elephant. Issue 23. P17.

Ebooks

Similair to apps but with a less steep censorship barrier on the iTunes store, artworks can be packaged as digital ‘artist’s books’ in the e.pub file format. This format hems closely to html5 and can include video, animation, pics or just text, allowing for a wide range of visual languages and easy distribution on online stores such as iTunes or Amazon.

P18.

Printing

There remains the option of finding ways to translate the digital works into the physical world and selling them either as photos or 3D-printed objects. 

Monotype. 2015. Company. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.monotype.com/company/. [Accessed 01 December 15].

We are the company behind type. Our fonts and technologies bring the worlds words to the page and screen.

Monotype. 2015. Technology. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.monotype.com/technology/. [Accessed 01 December 15].

Font technology makes text look as sharp in pixels as it does on paper.

Davis, M (2012). Graphic Design in Context - Graphic Design Theory. London: Thames & Hudson.

Chapter 7 – A new paradigm designing experiences, not objects

p210

Social networking sites, such as Facebook, incorporate the older media of writing and photography and turn participant’s into content. Any individuals page is less significant than the fact millions of people are willing to broadcast personal information to strangers, that letters and the telephone are no longer satisfying as the only ways to stay connected to friends at a distance, and that online relationships can be formed more quickly and with fewer social constraints than those made in person.

(How technology turns something physical and meaningful into generic communications, how the web has expanded communication possibilities)

One of McLuhans most controversial ideas was his description of hot and cool media, which refers to our sensory experiences with differing levels of message definition under various technologies. He described radio and film as hot media because they were clearer and more information-rich than other media of his time (they had high-quality sound, clear visuals, and so on).

They therefore required little sensory participation by the listener or viewer for completion of the message. Political cartoons and television, according to McLuhan, are low-definition and cool because they require more of our involvement.

Openshaw, J. (2015). Touched Screens. Elephant. Issue 23.

P184.

Its easy to get tangled up in technology when discussing ‘Post-Internet’ creativity. The term itself invokes ideas of screens, servers, clouds and bots, and perhaps overshadows the human agents and physical infrastructures caught up in this sticky web. It hints at things happening online, and so contains the impossibility of something ever being offline: as if the ‘virtual’ is opposed to the ‘real’, or the physical or the digital.

The average person in the UK spends upwards of nine hours a day looking at screens, while the web now absorbs around half of our waking attention.

We approach our physical environment with new expectations of malleable form, responsive surfaces and connected behaviour. The rise of technological production processes such as 3D printing and generative design only accelerates the process of slippage and cross contamination between digital and physical forms.

P185.

The future of music market may be iTunes and Spotify, but vinyl is also growing 69 per cent year on year. Streaming films online may have never been so popular, but immersive theatre events are also breaking box-office records. Innovative websites may be putting contemporary art online, but they cannot replace the experience of physically standing in the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.

(Physical ownership maybe coming back)

Barnes, P. (2015). James Mosley A Life in Objects. Eye 90. vol 23. P64.

During the age of letterpress both production and product were physical. As type historian Harry Carter said: ‘Type is something that you can pick up and hold in your hand.’

Leonidas, G. (2015). Beyond Latin. Eye 90. vol 23. P81.

As digital tools liberate type design from arcane limitations, more people become free to communicate using there own alphabets and languages.

p86-88

(Universal and switchable typographic systems to work across multiple languages to bring in cultural versatility.)