TYPO MAGAZINE

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What do We have here?This is TYPO, a magazine relased yearly to feature some of the most influential and renowned Graphic Designers and their Artform. The artwork in this magazine are adaptations and interpretations of the named famous designers, and are designed by the Graphic Design student Patrick Huertas.

GRAPHIC DESIGN: Patrick Huertas /// ARICLES IN CRONOLOGICAL ORDER: Emily Heyward, Peter Bilak, Simon Loxley, Marian Bantjes

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01STEFAN

SAGMEISTERPAGE 4-5

03CLAUDE

GARAMONDPAGE 8-9

04MARIANBANTJES

PAGE 10-11

02KAREL

MARTENSPAGE 6-7

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STEFAN SAGMEISTER

STEFAN SAGMEISTERMost companies equate success with growth; like waistlines in ancient times, size becomes an indication of prosperity. But Sagmeister believes that remaining small has been the key to retaining his integrity as a designer and making ideas happen. He explains, “The conventional wisdom in our business is that you have to grow and keep moving to survive. We never grew, always stayed tiny, and it serves us very well over the years, allowing us to pick and choose projects, and keeping our financial independence from our clients. We actually have a rather good track record, because we do select projects carefully. Most of our ideas don’t eat dust but glimpse the light of day because we find it much more helpful to spend some serious time and effort before we start working on a project,

rather than suffer through it afterwards.”

So many viewers are left untouched by those machine-like visuals out there - a more

human approach seemed a smart alternative.

This lean and nimble business philosophy likely contributes to Sagmeister’s courage to buck trends and move his company in the opposite direction of where design is shifting. As he tells us, “In the early nineties, when the modernism revival started and many designers opted for cold, slick design, it seemed a natural reaction for us to go the other way. My feeling was that so many viewers are left untouched by those machine-like visuals out there; that a more human approach seemed a smart alternative.” But even visionaries need a little process in

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STEFAN SAGMEISTER

their lives, and Sagmeister Inc. is not above simple procedures for staying organized:

“We d on’t procrastinate, and generally start working on a project right away. We keep time

sheets and flow charts.”

In addition to citing a fascinating range of outside influences, Sagmeister proves that sometimes the best ideas are generated from a source very close to home - ourselves. In his case, it was his own journal that spawned his latest success, proving that professionals should not shy away from the highly personal. He tells us, “By far the most interesting project I have been involved in the last years is a series of typographic works that came out of a list

I found in my diary under the title, ‘Things I have learned in my life so far.’ Every one of these pieces was published, and so far they have appeared as French and Portuguese billboards, a Japanese annual report, on German TV, in Austrian magazines, as a New York direct mailer, and an American poster campaign. The series was influenced by my grandfather (who was educated in sign painting, and I grew up with many of his pieces of wisdom around the house), by American artist Jenny Holzer, as well as the rustic wooden signs available in tourist stores all over my hometown of Bregenz in Austria.”

For our sake, we hope Sagmeister continues to share lessons from his unparalleled life.

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KAREL MARTENS

K A R E L M A R T E N S

The prolific founder of Werkplaats Typografie, Karel Martens focuses on the design of the Dutch architectural magazine OASE in his

1999 conversation with Peter Biľak.

In his work, Karel Martens embraces both freedom and order. He finds inspiration in the limitations of the profession and turns obstacles into challenges. OASE, a Dutch architectural journal, is an illustration of how designer can maneuver in the narrow field of graphic design production. OASE balances between book and a magazine and each new issue reinvents its forms to surprise its readers. Karel Martens gave OASE a clear direction and convinci-ngly makes a magazine that is both modest and luxurious, making one believe

that a low-budget publication is in fact a precious object to be collected. A grid became a fascinating element for Karel Martens. The most basic element in graphic design is given an active role that reflects the tone of the magazine. Karel is the founder of Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem. When did you start working on OASE magazine? The first issue that I did was in 1990. Before it was a magazine of a different format, A4 size. Did you suggested a new size? Yes. The magazine has quite a theoretical approach, so used this book format. Before was just loose papers, where students would hand their type-written essays. It looked very nice, I liked it, but it was a bit problematic to continue this way, so I decided to change it.

And the change was using a book format rather then using a conventional magazine format? There was a lot of text, and not so many images. It was easier to read in a new format.What is the size of the OASE magazine? It is related to the maximum size of the sheet? Yes, 24×17 cm it is the most economical size for the 50×70cm presses in the Netherlands. It is very economical, however, you cannot bleed on all sides. I have to adjust the design to this as well, so we move all the images up on the sheet.When you started working on OASE did you design a fixed grid for the future issues? For me the grid is an instrument that allows me to work with books. Very often it is a flexible

grid so I am not too constrained, I still have to take decisions about placing

text and images. Grid of the OASE No.28 (rotated 90 degrees) Has the

grid changed since the first issue? How was the grid evolving as the

magazine was growing up? Yes, The 6×2 mm grid changed.

When the production of OASE changed, and now we are doing it fully in-

house, the grid changed. Now it is made completely on

the Macintosh and this offers much more opportunities to play

with columns, type and the margins.I spent some time looking at OASE

trying to follow the internal structure of the magazine. I had an impression that

the grid is changing with every issue, as well

as paper and typefaces. But those changes are so subtle that you don’t see them from issue to issue, you need to see a series them to compare the first one and the latest one and only then can one see the changes. That’s true. As basic typefaces I am trying to stick with Monotype Grotesque and Janson, but there are exceptions. The grid is also changing when the format is changing [an issue on poetry and architecture has a different size]. The grid, and the division of the grid, depends on the complexity of the issue. The last two issues are bilingual, so I had to adapt the grid to accommodate more text. We are now doing an issue of OASE [issue 49] and we made the Dutch and the English text equal. This requires a change in grid too. Did you add more pages when OASE became bilingual? No, and that was the problem. The editor wanted

to have the English translation, and asked me to put it in the back of the magazine. However, for me it was a nice opportunity to combine both languages, but they did not offer me more pages. The type was getting smaller and smaller.

So there is twice as much text now, but the same amount of pages? [laughs] ...exactly...

It seems that you turn all the technical constrains and limitations to an advantage, and there is no visible aesthetic compromise in OASE, all the issues work well with all these limitations. Limitations are an important thing in design in general because they offer solutions.

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CLAUDE GARAMOND

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CLAUDE GARAMOND

CLAUDEGARAMOND

Looking at the pre-19th-century typefaces that are still in widespread use today is a little like visiting a modern re-creation of an Anglo-Saxon village. If you ignore the aircraft passing overhead you can easily imagine yourself back in the first millennium. But however absorbed the inhabitants seem in their daily tasks, you know that at the end of the day they will take off their coarsely woven garments, slip into some Lycra, and head home, probably picking up a takeaway and video en route. However convincing it all looks, in reality it’s an elaborate fake.

And that’s just how it is in the world of type. You may think you’re working with actual letter forms drawn in the 16th century, but they’re actually a 20th-century re-creation based on the originals, or what were thought to be the originals. It can get confusing. Plantin was based on a face cut by the French type designer Robert Granjon (working 1545-88); the printer Christopher Plantin himself never used the original source type. Janson, designed in 1937, is named after a Dutchman, Anton Janson, who had nothing to do with the face at all; the design was inspired by the work of the Hungarian Nicholas Kis (1650-1702). The various versions of Baskerville are all 20th-century work; the earliest one was not even based directly on Baskerville’s type, but on what came to be known later as Fry’s Baskerville, a piece of 18th-century intellectual piracy.

In 1924 George Jones designed a face for the Linotype company which he called Granjon, but the design he used as inspiration turned out to be the work of Robert Granjon’s fellow countryman and contemporary Claude Garamond (c. 1500-61). And the typefaces that bear Garamond’s name — well, as the saying goes, fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy ride … .Garamond had long been regarded as one of the type designers par excellence of the century that followed Gutenberg’s invention of movable type. Using Aldus Manutius’s roman type as his inspiration,

Garamond had cut his first letters for a 1530 edition of Erasmus. It was so well regarded that the French king Francois I commissioned Garamond to design an exclusive face, the Grecs du Roi. Although Garamond’s typefaces were very popular during his lifetime and much copied, as for many of the early type designers the work didn’t bring him much financial reward. When he died, his widow was forced to sell his punches, and his typefaces were scattered throughout Europe. Garamond the typeface gradually dropped out of sight, to disappear for nearly two centuries.In the 19th century the French National Printing Office, looking for a typeface to call its own, took a liking to the one that had been used by the 17th-century Royal Printing Office, operating under the supervision of Cardinal Richelieu (1). Richelieu called his type the Caractères de l’Université, and used it to print, among other things, his own written works. The 19th-century office pronounced the face to be the work of Claude Garamond, and the Garamond revival began.

But it was only after the First World War that the bandwagon really picked up momentum. Suddenly every type foundry started producing its own version of Garamond. American Type Founders (ATF) were first, and then in 1921 Frederic Goudy offered his interpretation, Garamont. Monotype in England brought out theirs in 1924, and Linotype replied with Granjon. There were yet more versions on the market by the onset of the Second World War, most notably Stempel Garamond by the German foundry of that name.

Back at ATF, the company that had started the rush, Henry Lewis Bullen (2), librarian of the company’s formidable archive, had nagging doubts about his company’s product. One day, as recalled by his assistant Paul Beaujon, he declared: “You know, this is definitely not a sixteenth century type … I have never found a sixteenth century book which contains this face.

Anyone who discovers where this thing comes from will make a great reputation.” (3)

Beaujon wrote an article about the Garamond faces for The Fleuron, an English typographical journal. The pages had been proofed and the presses were ready to roll when Beaujon, visiting the North Library of the British Museum to check some dates, happened to glance at one of the items in the Bagford Collection of title pages. And there was the source type for all the 20th-century Garamonds.

Except that this typeface wasn’t by Garamond at all. It was the work of another Frenchman, Jean Jannon (1580-1658), a 17th-century printer and punch-cutter. As a printer he was unremarkable, but as a designer and punch-cutter he was unparalleled, cutting the smallest type ever seen, an italic and roman of a size less than what would now be 5pt. Frequently in trouble with the authorities for his Protestant beliefs, Jannon had eventually found work at the Calvinist Academy at Sedan, in northern France.

Cardinal Richelieu’s early years of office under Louis XIII were spent in a power struggle with the Huguenots, the French Protestants. An effective way of hastening their eventual submission was to remove their means of spreading information, and the government paid the academy a visit. Among the items confiscated in the raid was Jannon’s type. Although Richelieu took exception to Jannon’s religious affiliations, however, he liked his typography so much that his face is the house style for the Royal Printing Office.Following a swift trip to the Mazarine Library in Paris to compare impressions with their Jannon specimen book, Beaujon’s original feature was pulled in favor of a new one revealing the true source of the “Garamond” faces. It was hailed as a masterly piece of research, and the Monotype Corporation of England offered him the job of editing their in-house magazines. But the twist was that Beaujon, like the Garamond typefaces, was not at all what he appeared to be.

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MARIAN BANTJES

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MARIAN BANTJES

MARIAN BANTJESI have many regrets. Too many. Mostly they are related to time. As I see all the things I have to do and want to do, and feel all the inadequacies of who I am and what I know, I weigh that against the time I have, which makes me want to go back and steal a few years—just a few—from my past.

I deeply regret not going to university or college because I very much wish I had a solid knowledge of art and design history and theory. But instead, I traveled, and I worked as a typesetter—which combined to make an excellent, but informal, education. Who is to say, really, which would have been better?

I regret spending 10 years as a book typesetter, instead of maybe five or six—I feel like I learned most of what I was going to in the first six years. But on the other hand, I do re-member making some egregious mistakes when Quark first came out, in the year before I left. Maybe I needed that extra time, just to be slapped away from fucking with the type just because I could. And can you ever really spend too long working with type? Not really.

Every day I get an email from someone who has been touched or inspired by a piece of mine. It’s more valuable than laser-cut gold foil stamping on velvet-flocked paper.

I regret the years I spent as a graphic designer, complaining about clients and churning out the posters, brochures and identities. But I learned so much, and the things you learn the hard way are often the most valuable. And if I hadn’t worn myself out to the very end, if I hadn’t completely wrung that side of my career dry, down to the last drop, perhaps I never would have made the leap to where I am now. Sometimes you just have to pass through the fire.

“I regret not being more engaged or aware through all my years as a designer. When I finally lifted my head up and looked around I had decades to catch up on and I’m still

so ignorant and so far behind. There is no upside to this.”

Some favorite projects include (left) a cover for The Guardian’s G2 and poster for the Academy for Educational Development. But I will never regret walking away from my design business and starting something new. I wish I had done it sooner—but maybe I couldn’t have done it sooner. I was 40, and maybe I needed to be 40. Maybe I needed to have the experience, both good and bad, piled up in my past to push me forward. Maybe it’s a little like playing the blues: 20- and 30-year olds can do a lot of things, but they can’t really play the blues. Maybe it was like that. I’ve been well rewarded for my efforts. Every day I get an email from someone who has been touched or inspired by a piece of mine. It’s more valuable than laser-cut gold foil stamping on velvet-flocked paper. And if the extra years of feeling the blues are what it took, it was worth it.

GRAPHIC DESIGN: Patrick Huertas /// ARICLES IN CRONOLOGICAL ORDER: Emily Heyward, Peter Bilak, Simon Loxley, Marian Bantjes