Car Graphic

For the third graphic for information not included on my resume, I created this based on my car which I named Thumper awhile ago. In class we have critiqued the two previous graphics I have posted here. Our final project will combine five graphics, and these critiques have given me input that will help improve each graphic before the final presentation.

Didot Research

Didot is a Didone or Modern typeface. This classification is based upon the typefaces produced in the late 18^th and 19^th centuries in Italy. These are late neoclassical seriffed types and their name is a combination of the French printing family Didot and the Italian printer Bodoni of Parma. The typeface Bodoni by Giambattista Bodoni, also known as the “king” of the typographers or “printer to the kings” is seen as the highlight of the Didones. The monumental symmetrical build and the balanced proportions give the typeface a cool elegance. Legendary is Bodoni’s Manuale Tipografico, a handbook with 142 typefaces and pages of ornaments which his widow published in 1818 in a limited edition of 250 copies. The second volume includes numerous ornaments, Arabic, Greek, Russian, and Tibetan types, to name but a few. Bodoni was a perfectionist and he let his feel for proportion and quality come through in the design, the paper quality, and even in the composition of special ink in order to print in a deep, glossy black. When designing a letter Bodoni allowed for the thickening of the thin serifs when printing with metal type on paper, in combination with the spread of ink and the so-called impression in the paper. With the new techniques such as offset, which does not result in an impression, the thin parts of Bodoni often turn out too thin. Also, the contrast was adjusted for different sizes in metal type, which is not the case in most digital versions.  Other well-known typographers for this classification include Firmin Didot in France, Justus Erich Walbaum in Germany.

Didones are characterized by a pronounced contrast in weight between the vertical strokes and the horizontal hairlines. This serves to emphasize the vertical stress of the letters. These qualities allow for extended typeface families, incorporating a wide range of width and weights. This includes both extended ultra-bolds and condensed faces. The typefaces show a strong emphasis on the vertical stroke, sharp contrast, symmetry, and sharp transition to the straight serifs, which are as thin as the thin parts of the letter. The axis of the thick-thin contrast is vertical. Some typefaces have a great many variants, because it was very easy to adjust their thickness and width. Unlike the analytical, transitional period, Didones reflect the expressive ideals of Romanticism. The Didone style exaggerates key features of the earlier Transitionals. These exaggerated features include the fact that letters are drawn with vertical stress, and that there is extreme contrast.

            Francosi Ambroise Didot cut the first Didone typeface in 1781. His son was Firmin Didot. Firmin Didot developed and refined the trademark characteristics that have become associated with the family name, culminating in the Didot of 1800. This typeface has formed the basis of the genre. The typeface Didot diverged from pervious typefaces by abandoning the hand penned style in favor of a cleaner, more precise vertical stroke. The serifs also had almost no bracketing. The strong clear forms of this alphabet display objective, rational, characteristics and are representative of the time and philosophy of the Enlightenment which was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18^th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. Due to improvements in the printing process as well as paper and ink, the punch cutters of the Modern period were able to cut letterforms that previously would have been unthinkable. Didot greatly benefitted from these improved techniques.

            Didot’s of the twentieth century origin include the Linotype Didot. This was drawn by Adrian Frutiger in 1991. He based it upon the fonts cut by Firmin Didot between 1799 and 1811. Adrian Frutiger also studied the Didot types in La Henriade by Voltaire that was published in 1801. The upright and highly contrasted forms of Didot alphabets are representative of the modern genre. In reality they are quite similar to those designed by Bodoini around the same time in Italy. Characterized by a rigorous geometry and substantial bracketed serifs, Frutiger’s Linotype Didot family has twelve fonts and includes non-lining “Old Style” figures, a headline version, and an “open” display face and two fonts of ornaments. Today, the Didot typeface appears on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar. The “Foundry Daylight” version of Didot was commissioned and used by the broadcast network CBS for many years along side its famous “eye” logo.

The Didot family was active as designers for about 100 years in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They were printers, inventors, and intellectuals. Around 1800 the Didot family owned the most important print shop and font foundry in France. Pierre Didot was the printer. He published documents with the typefaces of his brother Firmin Didot. Firmin Didot was the typeface designer. The family’s paper manufactory was located at Essones, a ton thirty kilometers southeast of Paris near Corbeil which had notable paper factories. The printing company still exists today under the name Firmin Didot, Societe Nouvelle. Firmin Didot was born in 1764 in Paris, France. He died in 1836 in Mensil-sur-I’Estree, France. He was a punch cutter, type founder, printer, publisher, and author. He studied classical languages. In 1783 he was granted a patent for his developments in the field of stereotype printing. Adrian Frutiger’s Didot is a sensitive interpretation of the French Modern Face Didot by Firmin Didot.

            Adrian Frutiger has produced some of the most well-known and widely used typefaces. He was born in 1928 in Interlaken, Switzerland. He was the son of a weaver. As a boy he experimented with invented scripts and stylized handwriting in negative reaction to the formal cursive penmanship then required by Swiss schools. His early interest in sculpture was discouraged by his father and by his secondary school teachers; they encouraged him to work in printing. By the age of sixteen he was working as a printer’s apprentice near his hometown. Following this he moved to Zurich where he studied at the Zurich School of Arts and Crafts. After his education in Zurich Frutiger moved to Paris where he worked at the Deberny & Peignot type foundry.

Adrian Frutiger’s first, commercial typeface was President, a set of tilting capital letters with small, bracketed serifs released in 1954. A calligraphic, informal, script face Ondine was also released in 1954. In 1955 Meridien, a glyphic, old-style, serif text face was released. The typeface shows inspiration by Nicholas Jenson, and in the Meridien type, Frutiger’s ideas of letter construction, unity, and organic forms are first expressed together. In 1956 he designed the first of three slab-serif typefaces, Egyptienne on the Clarendon model. In the early 1970’s the RATP, the public authority of Paris, asked him to examine the Paris Metro signage. He created a Univers font variation, a set of capitals and numbers specifically for white-on-dark-blue backgrounds in poor light. The success of this modern, yet human, typeface, spurred the French airport authority’s commissioning a “way-finding signage” alphabet for the new Charles de Gaulle International Airport in the Roissy suburb of Paris. This commission required a typeface both legible from afar and from an angle. Frutiger considered adapting Univers, but decided it was dated as too sixties.  The resultant typeface is an amalgamation of Univers tempered with organic influences of the Gill Sans, a humanist sans-serif typeface by Eric Gill, and Edward Johnston’s type for the London Transport, and Roger Excoffon’s Antique Colive. Originally titled Roissy, the typeface was renamed Frutiger when the Mergenthaler Linotype Company released it for public use in 1976. Frutiger’s 1984 typeface Versailles is an old-style serif text with capitals like those in the earlier President. In Versailles the serifs are small and glyphic. In 1988 Frutiger completed Avenir, inspired by Futura, with structural likeness to the neo-grotesques. Avenir has a full series of unified weights. In 1991 he finished Vectora, a design influenced by Morris Fuller Benton’s typefaces Franklin Gothic and News Gothic. The resultant face has a tall x-height and is legible in small point sizes. He created Linotype Didot in 1991. In the late 1990’s Frutiger began collaborating on refining and expanding the Univers, Frutiger, and Avenir in addressing hinting for screen display. Univers was reissued with sixty-three variations. Frutiger was reissues as Frutiger Next with true italic and additional weights. Collaborating with Linotype designer Akira Kobayashi, Frutiger expanded the Avenir font family with lightweights, heavy weights, and a condensed version that were released as the Avenir Next font.

Throughout his career he has produced a number of books, and today his typefaces are readily available from a number of different foundries. His books include Type, Sign, Symbol (1980), Signs and Symbols: Their Design and Meaning (1989), The International Type Book (1990), Geometry of Feelings (1998), The Development of Western Type Carved in Wood Plates (1999), Forms and Counterforms (1999), Life Cycle (1999), The Univers (1999), and Symbols and Signs: Explorations (1999). In the course of his career, Adrian Frutiger developed more than one hundred and seventy typefaces. Many of them have become our reading habits. Since 1992 Adrian Frutiger has again lived in Switzerland.

Bibliography

“Adrian Frutiger, Typophile.” Typophile: Celebrating 11 Years of Typographic

Collaboration. Web. 26 October 2011. <http://typophile.com/node/12118>

Cheng, Karen. Designing Type. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2005. Print.

“Firmin Didot – Font Designer of Linotype Didot.” Download Fonts from Classic to Cool –

Linotype.com. Web. 26 October 2011. <http://www.linotype.com/370/firmindidot.html>

Hill, Will, and Christopher Perfect. The Complete Typographer: A Manual for Designing

 with Type. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Person Prentice Hall, 2005. Print.

Graphic 2: Where You've Been, Where You Are, and Some Other Interesting Facts About Your Life So Far

My Closet

For Project 2 in Visc 204 we were first given the assignment to document the contents of our closets. This is what I created:

Infographics Websites

For our infographics project in Visc 204, we were required to look at these websites:

www.edwardtufte.com

www.coolinfographics.com

www.good.is

Photos Inspired by the Artist Miranda July

1. Recreate the snapshot given. 

2. Take a picture of the sun. 

3. Take a picture of strangers holding hands. 

4. Take a flash photo under your bed. 

5. Climb to the top of a tree and take a picture of the view.

6. Make a video of someone dancing. 

Food Truck

I have completed my O-Ah Gourmet S'mores Food Truck for Visc 204. View it here:
http://www.behance.net/gallery/O-Ah-Gourmet-Smores/2327338 

Classification of Type

Old Style: 1475
-Wedge Shaped Serifs
-More Upright Stress
-Horizontal Crossbar
-Greater Thick-Thin Contrast
Examples: Bembo, Garamond, Plantino, Sabon, Albertina

Transitional: 1750
-More severe, business like, and sharper
-First types that were really designed
-Axis of thick-thin contrast is almost vertical or slopes slightly left
-Bare serifs only a little or not rounded at bottom
-Top Serifs of lower-case letters are roof shaped
Examples: Baskerville, Concorde, Fournier, Perpetua, Caslon Old Face

Modern: 1775
-Strong emphasis on vertical stroke
-Sharp Contrasts
-Symmetry and sharp transition to the straight serifs
-Serifs are as thin as thin parts of the letter
Examples: Didot, Bodoni, Walbaum, Linotype Centennial, Walbaun

Slab-Serif: 1800's
-Only a slight thick-thin contrast
-Heavy rectangular serifs are as thick as the letters
-Serifs are the defining characteristic
-Differences in subdivision most visible in lowercase letters
Examples: Antique, First Clarendon, Beton, Memphis, Serifa

Sans-Serif: 1920's
Humanist 
-No Serifs
-Line widths visually equal
-More distinguishing forms than other sans-serifs
Examples: Gill Sans, Profile, Frutiger, Scala Sans, Myriad

Grotesk (and Gothic)
-Axis of the rounding is vertical
-Ascender height is usually equal to the capital height
-Narrow, vertical, construction of the letters
-Capital Angular
Examples: Akzidenz Grotesk, Helvetica, Franklin Gothic, Vectora, Bell Gothic

Geometric
-Line thicknesses only visually and minimally corrected
-Axis of the rounding is vertical
-Letters seem to be drawn using ruler and compass
Examples: Futura, Avant Garde, Eurostile, Erbar, Nevzeit Grotesk

Didot

Having completed animating our weather compositions using Flash, we are now moving on to a project about font in Typography. The font I have been assigned is Didot. Didot is a serif font. It falls under the classification of modern, or Didone, roman style. This font was originally designed by Firmin Didot in Paris in 1783. Adrian Frutiger designed this font for digital technology in 1992. This is called the Linotype Didot family. This font is one of the greatest for book work, and the delicate lines that make up each letter are good for display uses. A fun fact related to this font is that the "Foundry Daylight" version was commissioned and used by CBS with its logo (the eye).

Didot