#contemporarytypography

Minimalist banner logo with abstract fabric symbol

Vince frost, a graphic designer from Brighton, is the founder and executive creative director of ‘Frost*collective’ in Sydney. Before moving to Sydney to start frost*collective he gained lots of design experience. Frost previously completed his design education in west Sussex college of design, became the youngest associate of Pentagram in 1889 and in 1994 formed his own consultancy, Frost Design, in London.  

Now Frost is a graphic designer who works across advertising, design, digital, environments and fashion. His work strategically uses striking typography among other elements such as photography to create innovative pieces. A lot of his work seems to focus around advertising and branding, doing work for the exhibition at the 11th architecture biennale in Venice, OzHarvest, the Sydney dance company and many more.

The photo above is Frost’s design for the Sydney Dance company. Here he has merged photography and typography together extremely well. The typography is playful and creates a nice frame for the photo of the dancer. Using only two colours was an effective choice as it gave him the opportunity to mix the words Sydney and Dance together, creating an eye-catching effect.

Sascha Lobe is most known for merging graphic design and architecture. He is the founder and lead creative director at L2M3 (1999) which focuses on signage, print, branding and identity projects. He is now also a partner in pentagrams London office.

Lobe specialises in special linguistics and three dimensional communication, working with big companies such as Hugo boss. His work is bold and creative. The architectural inspiration is clear in his work as, despite being playful, it is also structured. The typography in his pieces are refined but interesting as you can see in the photo bellow. 

Tschihold, compared to many of the other typographers I have researched, was living in a much more unstable time where something as simple as a poster could have dyer effects. After Hitler was elected and designers were required to register themselves with the ministry of culture, Tschichold gained a teaching post in Munich. After this both he and his wife were denounced as cultural bolshevists. Subsequently, in 1933, they were both arrested for scrutiny, due to soviet posters found in their flat, before escaping to Switzerland.  

Throughout his career Tschichold became a strong advocate for modernist design. His most important piece showing this ‘Die neue Typographie’ was a testimonial for his support. It was a book which reflected his opinion of application of different type faces and became quite influential. However, in a turn of events, he later condemned his own book for being too harsh and returned to a more classic approach. Overall, Tschichold was a very experienced designer with a lot of knowledge to give. Before his death he had even written a set of guidelines for penguin based on typographic and composition instructors for editors and compositors called the ‘penguin composition rules’.

Tshichold’s work reflects his life and experience. His work isn't playful or abstract compared to some of the things we see done with type in modern times and whilst a lot of his work does have a serious or corporate feel, Tshichold’s work was unique and interesting. An example of this is his film poster for the Phoebus-Palast cinema in Munich. The type is simple but is refined. The composition is interesting and the use of only two colours creates a pleasant and eye-catching contrast.

Astrid Stavro is an Italian graphic designer who is now based in London. Stavro has a BA (HONS) in graphic design from Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design and a long list of experience that includes being a contributing editor of ‘Elephant Magazine’. Stavro is also a member of ISTD and was an elected member of Alliance Graphiques International in 2010.  

Astrid Stavro studio is a small independent design consultancy. It was established in 2004 and is currently based in Majorca. They aim to offer high quality products to a select range of clients. The studio is described as having ‘an international reputation for appropriate and discerning editorial design with a strong emphasis on clean, distinctive and considered typography.’ . They work across lots of platforms and its main principles are clarity, simplicity and commitment to finding unique, tailormade solutions to each project.

Stavro’s work is clean and simple. It is creative but, in some ways, quite corporate. This can be seen in these postcard prints above from Stavro’s website. They were advertising a housing exhibition and are minimal but well thought out, with lots of block colours and clean shapes.

Again, the font is very simplistic and this is the same in many of stavro’s prints. There seems to be a pattern in stavro’s use of fonts in the way that they are all bold and a main focal point of the piece.

Paula Scher

An contemporary American Graphic Designer ,painter,author and Design educator.

Paula earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1970 she then began her careeras a layout artist for Random House.She then became an Art Director for Altantic records and then returned back to CBS where she remained as Art director for 8 years and produced as many as 150 albums each year.

Art Deco and Russian constructivism Inspired Paula Scher’s typography.She and fellow graduate Terry Kopple had founded Kopple and Scher in 1984 where they both produced many Identities,packaging,advertising and book jackets.Her work is familiar and is a style we see regularly on the high street.She has worked with Coca-Cola,Tiffany&Co also has done environmental designs and has recently created posters for the public theatre along with designing the iconic swatch poster modeled after Herbet Matter’s work.She uses techniques to get the crowd’s attention using juxtaposition of street typography and grafitti.

Her work is widely recognised and she is known as a celebrity achieving over 300 awards.Paula was the first female to be offered the principal position at the Pentagon she then expanded her expertise and became a design educator teaching at the school of Visual Arts for over 20 decades ,whilst in addition to teaching at prestigious art institutions including Cooper Union University of Yale and Tyler School of Art.

Adrian Frutiger                          Active 1950s-2015

A Swiss Typeface Designer who at the age of sixteen was encouraged by his father to focus on an apprenticeship of which he completed a four year apprenticeship as a compositor whilst attending classes in woodcuts and drawing and created paper silhouettes.He had a massive passion  for typography his whole life and started his career working for Deberney and Peignot which was a French foundry which dealt with linotype he would update typefaces and prepare them for photographic and digital  typesetting whilst designing and refining his own typefaces.

Adrian Frutiger created almost 30 typefaces and created the famous typeface Univers for the Charles De Gaulle airport.His first commercial typeface was president followed by Ondine and Meridian he also created a sans serif font called Concorde in italic and bold used for a parisian printing company Sofratype.

Louise Fili                    active 1975-current

An Italian American Graphic Designer  enthralled by the Italian culture.

Her love for design started at a young age where she had taught herself calligraphy and illuminated manuscripts of Bob Dylan to sell to her classmates  she  then attended Skidmore college studying studio art,interned at the Museum of Modern Art whilst finishing her studies at the school of Visual Arts.

She worked with Random House a book publishing business for 11Years then becoming an Art Director for Pantheon books where she designed upto 2000 book jackets each with their own unique design exploring historic typography combined with modern colours and compositions.

Louise Fili took her inspiration from her love of Italy, Modernism, Art Deco styles and the Italian posters created by A.M Cassandre,Jean Carlu and Lucian Bernhard.

She collaborated with her husband author Steven Heller and  also opened her own studio Louise Fili Ltd in 1989 specializing in restaurant identity  food packaging and books where she continues to create Italian inspired designs.

She has taught for over twenty years at the School of Visual Arts,New York university and cooper union she also visits Rome every summer to do a SVA  masters workshop and has achieved numerous medals in achievement awards.

her creation of three fonts Mardell, Montecanini and Marseille.

Marseille influenced by Art Deco with six weights

Montecanini is inspired by the early 1900s stile liberty posters.