Visc 204 Owl Poster

For Project 1A in Visc 204 we used sixteen different categories of drawings to create a poster. My animal was an owl, and this is my final poster, which can also be viewed at www.behance.com/alliefields. We did this same project last year in BDS, but I really enjoyed the chance to do it again a year later, this time with an animal rather than a hand tool. I had a lot of fun exploring owls with each category, and I think I was able to complete my drawings in a much faster and successful manner than last year. My favorite categories were the behavioral characteristics, the one line, and the painterly. Drawing eyes for the behavioral characteristic really allowed me to gain some detail in my drawings I had not found in other categories. The one line drawings I did were fun because of their simplicity. I enjoyed the painterly category because I was able to really use black and white tones to capture the owl. Overall, I enjoyed creating this poster. I really wanted to use this poster as a method to showcase the work I had done with my drawings, and I feel I was successful in this aspect. I am looking forward to the next part of our project where I will really get to transform my drawings in a graphical sense for a food truck company!

Weather Compositions

I have completed my first project for Elements of Typography. You can view it here: http://www.behance.net/alliefields 

Font Designers

5 Living Font Designers:

1) Erik Spiekermann (1947-?)
Spiekrmann is a type and graphic designer from Berlin. After his commission for the Deutsche Bundespost was cancelled late in development he decided to start his own type company, FontShop. Meta was the first typeface designed under this company. Meta is an informal and youthful typeface best for informal documents. It has small capitals.

2) Hermann Zapf (1918-?)
Zaph designed the typeface Optima which became available starting in 1958. He has designed many typefaces, and he is also a well known calligrapher. Optima was inspired by fifteenth century Florentine inscriptional capitals. He also worked as the type director of D. Stempel AG in Frankfurt.

3) Hans Eduard Meier (1922-?)
Meier is the type designer of Syntax. It is a sans-serif font that relates to the Renaissance humanists. It would not be categorized with Swiss design. Meier designed Syntax in 1955 but it was only used in the market in 1968 for cast metal typesetting.

4) Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum
These two designers work for their company LettError. They designed the typefaces ErikRightHand and JustLeftHand based off their own handwriting. They also have designed 'readymades' like Trixie which is based off of a type writer letter.

5) Carol Twombly
Carol Twombly worked on the font Adobe Trajan. She studied incriptions on the pillar of the emperor Trajanus. It was built in 113 AD in Rome. She corrected the letters so that they could be digitalised. She also added punctuation marks to the letters. This typeface is only available in capitals in Bold and Regular.


5 Dead Font Designers:

1) Bruce Rogers (1870-1957)
Rogers was schooled as both a painter and illustrator. He was famous for being one of the designers for bibliophile books. He designed the typeface Centaur. He first drew it out in ink and the calligraphic influence can be seen.

2) Charles Nicolas Cochin (1715-1790)
Cochin was one of the best engravers of his time. He was an illustrator in the court of Louis XV. The Peignot type foundry rendered Cochin's lettering into a typeface in 1912. It was redesigned in 1977 by Matthew Carter. It is not a conventional type for body text, but it is very useful in a decorative manner.

3) Claude Garamond (c. 1510-1561)
Famous both in the past and present, Garamond is known for having cut Greek types for Robert Estinne in Paris. Garamond created some of the best types ever known during his life, and printers used them in Europe. Robert Slimbach based the roman of 1989 Adobe Garamond on some surviving material from his work.

4) Eric Gill (1882-1940)
Gill was a controversial figure. He named his typeface Joanna after his daughter Joan Gill. He was Catholic, socialist, a social critic, sculptor, and a type designer. Joanna has many unique characteristics. It has a narrow italic and the serifs are very angular.

5) Frank Hinman Pierpont (1860-1937)
Pierpont with his team at Monotype designed the typeface Rockwell. It is a slab-serif. He is well known for his technical improvements in the Monotype machine park. He also contributed to the revival typeface Plantin.

All designers were researched using the book Letter Fountain: The anatomy of type

Type Found Letters

In class today we were sent to search around campus for the word Type. Claire and I decided to use newspapers to create each letter. This is what we came up with:

Adrian Frutiger

Adrian Frutiger is a well known typeface designer of the twentieth century. His most well known typefaces are Univers and Frutiger. He introduced Univers in the mid-twentieth century. Bold weights did not come into play until the end of the nineteenth century, so Univers was unique in that was a tightly packaged type family with different weights of type. Today this is taken for granted in that we have come to expect bold and light counterparts along with a typeface. Univers was the first type family to use numbers to name the various weights associated with the typeface. Built around the Roman version, there were a total of twenty one variations when Frutiger released this typeface. Univers is unique in that it uses even strokes, as well as a large x-height. This greatly increases legibility when it is used in very large or very small forms. In 1997 Frutiger used the Linotype to expand this typeface. It then had sixty-three fonts, and the numbering system for these fonts required a third digit. 


The Univers grid was introduced in 1957 along with the typeface. The simplest explanation for this grid would be that it was used to show the different labels for the typefaces within Univers without actually writing out bold, heavy, light, and so on. The numbering system used by Frutiger went along with the Univers grid. Using numbers was a popular part of the Bauhaus movement. The first number refers to the character weight. The number 2 represents the thinnest weight, and goes to 9 as the thickest. The second number gives the character width. The number 3 is the widest with 9 being the most condensed. Odd numbers mean it is roma, while even numbers mean the typeface is italic. The following image shows an example of this grid system of labeling typefaces: