#cogcnightshift

I took a walk through the Eastern Necropolis to take pictures for the Photo Safari challenge - it’s almost always quiet and seems a little abandoned. I thought finding shapes among old, chiselled stone and overgrown plant-life would be quite simple. 

It’s incredible how detailed some headstones are, making it difficult to find basic shapes. And it’s not surprising how unwilling nature was to make perfect patterns that fit the challenge. 

A few weeks ago, as I sat furiously searching for information on and examples of Swiss Style design, I realised that books in my living room had been Swiss-staring at me for years: 

“Good old Penguin classics!” I thought to myself, “Isn’t it incredible that for so many years I’ve enjoyed the basic and clear covers on these ubiquitous wonders?”

Well, today when writing up my findings on the works of Muir and McNeil, Jan Tschichold slapped me in the face. His name popped up as one of the many designers who wrote the book on typefaces (his is called Die Neue Typographie). 

But not only did he provide hard and fast rules for how type should look, the man also fathered a design seen around the world - printed on the canvas bags of the bibliophile - and probably magnetised to your auntie’s fridge!

I’ll forgive him the lack of apostrophe, he was clearly a genius, and it was Europe in the 1940′s - there was a lot going on.

REFERENCE:

Creating modular typography started off as a fun way to experiment with shapes (and dots and lines), but it soon became apparent that my imagination would need to stretch to continually come up with inventive ways to create. Jonathan Hoefler (Abstract, 2019) anecdotally talks about the creation of a font as “designing oxygen” - text is something that is already used everywhere, and already used by everyone. I understand this mentality, as after G I found myself experimenting more and recovering more from mistakes as I made them. It’s odd to reimagine symbols that I’ve been comfortably using for so many years, but the challenge is certainly refreshing!

REFERENCE

Hoefler, J. Netflix.com. (2017). Abstract: The Art of Design. [online] Available at: https://www.netflix.com/title/80057883