print towards typography - Bodoni

Bodoni - Transitional Typeface


It is a series of serif typefaces following the ideas of John Baskerville, It was of increased stroke contrast and a more vertical, slightly condensed, upper case.

 Some characteristics of Bodoni include the square dot over the letter “i”, and a double storey “a”. The capital “Q’s” tail is centered under the figure, and the uppercase “J” has a slight hook. Also, there are two versions of the uppercase “R”, one with a straight tail and one with a curved tail.

While its closest and likeness is Didot and Baskerville they is slight differences (see below)





 Bodoni has been used for a wide variety of material, ranging from 18th century Italian books to 1960s periodicals. In the 21st century, the late manner versions continue to be used in advertising, while the early manner versions are occasionally used for fine book printing. However, this typeface is generally not suited for setting big bodies of text, as the verticality of the letter forms interferes with the text’s horizontal rhythm (we read left to right, but Bodoni leads our eyes up and down instead)

 

 
 

Here are some examples of the font. As you can see it's up there with the big names in fashion as well as a starring roll in the movie scene.

The characteristics of this font being the fact it takes the eye up and down as well as across makes it an easy choice for a classy type of project that calls for a more sophisticated style of work.  The unbracketed serifs and even geometric styling has made this a popular font seen in almost every kind of typesetting situation. The list does seem endless.

 

WHATS NOT TO LIKE ?

picasso linocut - thoughts

We were asked to review the prints by Picasso for part of our homework for Printmaking

Here is mine



Firstly I haven't looked at the name of this print or the others, nor the story behind them.

• I wanted to view it in terms of my own personal opinion
• I didn't want to be influenced by the meaning or terms behind it/them
• Its fun to guess, (usually I'm totally wrong)

The first thing I noticed was the woman's face seems to be drawn in a cubist style. She looks unhappy like she is tired and being weighed down by her clothes and jewels.

I like the colour (orche) and how in travels down through the image. It seems to have areas of bright yellow also. This seems like an under painting as it's not highlighting areas as such,
I do like how some of the underneath colours overlap or shine through. Im not sure if this was intended?




This one is interesting as a still life...For me these styles seem to have an tribal expressive nature about them. The contrast in colour I also enjoy. Something to consider in my own print is also an Analogous colour scheme, choosing one color to dominate, a second to support and the  third colour  used (along with black, white or gray) as an accent.
Surrealist and cubist and fauvism could all play maybe or identified and be connected...Almost like a mix of everything he has ever done! Compared to the photography style of Tom Davidson's work, I feel a more personal connection in the way the light/colour makes me feel when viewing Picasso's. While Tom's work looks very good it is very linear in landscape and difficult to say which deserves more appreciation. Tom for me, has a great ability to create light, shadow and detail but the free expression that Picasso's brings give in to a freedom I'd love to find within myself. Its not easy to let go of how you think something should look...and actual give yourself to something .....If that makes sense.



 



I'm not sure if it the colour, pattern that makes this print above to me look Spanish?



What a later found out about his linocuts surprised me in the facts that he was 80 when doing some linocuts and that he was the first to print from one block! The fact that every block was always printed individually from a number of blocks before I find a time consuming and complex wayof printing and can't believe a build up of printing hadn't been done before?

Facts

Picasso's linocuts were made by gouging out a sheet of linoleum which had been fused onto a harder block of wood.  (Linoleum, softer and lighter than wood, allowed Picasso to work more quickly than would have been possible by working from woodblocks alone.)  Using gouges, he would cut out the areas of his intended image that were to be absent of color (and therefore appear the color of the paper when printed).  The relief areas that remain would be inked, usually with a brayer.  Paper would be put on the inked linoleum block and pressure applied, after which the inked image is transferred to the paper.  If there were to be multiple colors, Picasso would create a separate linoleum block, each corresponding to a different color, each printed in succession.  This is how he worked since his first linocuts were created in 1958.

In later years he become more economical and ingenious, inventing the technique of printing multiple colors from a single linoleum block by printing the linocut, cutting out more of the block, inking it again and printing it a second time in a second color on the earlier printed single-color example, successively adding colors while continuing the process.

Phoenicians -typography history..

For my typography brief to print towards my first outcome along with my work on culture and beginning of a language, Sumerians, Egyptians etc ..



Canaanites - fearless sailors who for hundreds of years dominated the sea trade.

In many examples they said to be vigorous traders and sailors, but little is known about these people. Historians refer to them as Canaanites when talking about the culture before 1200 B.C. The Greeks called them the phoinikes, which means the "red people"—a name that became Phoenicians—after their word for a prized reddish purple cloth the Phoenicians exported.

Their writings, mostly on fragile papyrus, disintegrated—so that we now know the Phoenicians mainly by the biased reports of their enemies. Although the Phoenicians themselves reportedly had a rich literature, it was totally lost in antiquity. That's ironic, because the Phoenicians actually developed the modern alphabet and spread it through trade to their ports of call.

The reign ended after being defeated. Greece and Rome then used many of they key elements of their cultures. This led to a new way of writing. While the legacy of this new system spread many of the cities were destroyed and build over. Hence why little is left.

Standard weight and measure were passed down to the Greeks as well as the use of the alphabet. So the letter/symbol representing a sound continued. After some years the Greeks added vowels A,E,I,O,U by doing this made it closer to they spoken language and sounds.Also letters were given  names and they also adopted the right to left Phoenician direction of writing.

Later they experimented with lines that alternated first in one direction then the other. They had to alternate the direction in which the character faced. This style was called boustrophedon.

Finally they settled on writing left to right as it proved more natural (many being right handed)


Romans later (100BC ) adopted it, while changing it slightly it still looks similar to ours we use today.

See below

Interesting factor.....

Look up the adjective "purple" in a dictionary, and one of the first meanings you'll see is a distinction of royalty. The association of royalty with the color purple stems from the ancient reddish-purple dye made from the glands of murex mollusks. The most famous example of this dye is so-called Tyrian purple from the Phoenician homeland along the eastern coast of the Mediterranean.

Archaeologists today still find huge piles of murex shells near the ruins of ancient Phoenician settlements—usually downwind from where people lived, as heating sea creatures in salt water for days during dye extraction was bound to have been a smelly process.

Eventually, after the Punic Wars when Rome emerged victorious, the Roman state took over production of the purple dye, and under Emperor Nero the wearing of purple garments was restricted to the emperor alone. The color has remained popular for VIPs ever since.

Example of alphabets 

H & M typography

 H&M was working with a bespoke sans-serif typeface design called HM Ampersand – which was designed by Monotype.



The Swedish clothing brand – which is ranked as the second largest global clothing retailer – has over 3,000 shops in 61 countries around the world was in need of a custom typeface with a fashion expression for use in all contexts including advertising, editorial, catalogue, website, film, packaging, and in-store graphics.

It wanted to develop a fuller typographic language that it could use in a range of contexts around the world. The brand approached Monotype to commission a companion serif typeface. Toshi Omagari along with Monotype designed a new typeface that would contrast and complement the existing HM Ampersand design. .

Here I asked myself why if any would they need another design after the first one was already well established? My thinking was it was trying to fall in the same standardisation as maybe Vogue magazine or Elle..

I searched which company was ranked first to see it they was any connection or similarities in design!

 Ranked first is a company Inditex which has several brands – Zara, Pull&Bear, Massimo Dutti, Bershka, Stradivarius, Oysho, Zara Home and Uterqüe. However, in terms of annual revenue, Hennes & Mauritz (H&M) beat out Inditex by a few hundred million dollars in the most recent fiscal year for each company.

With the Inditex group all of the shop's have different typefaces so can't really be compared...What I did notice when researching was the difference in Zara and Zara Home.... Zara being a serif, which tells me goes with the ideal of fashion, high class and important. Whereas the Zara Home is a more softer, homely sans serif typeface.  This is something I'm becoming more aware of and will look into later.


 

 SO ENTER

The typeface HM Amperserif - which was developed in three different size variations allowing for versatility of use in all contexts from the smallest caption size to the largest headlines on billboards as well as use in digital media while still maintaining the recognisable geometry of the letterforms.



The development of HM Amperserif allowed the company to reduce the number of typefaces used for communication which would eliminate the cost and complexity of working with licensed typefaces. The character set was developed in multiple languages to cover H&M’s 60 markets.

So that really what it came down to I the end?  COST savings really surely not?

This is what they said

H&M’s position as an international brand, Monotype developed a multiple language character set that includes Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Thai and Arabic. The design team worked together closely to also develop Indic logos, for use in India, and Monotype actively updates the fonts with new currency signs and additional characters, as the business expands into new locations.

Expanding NEW LOCATIONS, defiantly about cost and investment to benefit its self......Think I'd buy shares now.....


 Kannada logo for H&M



  Devanagari logo for H&M

More information about the designers

Monotype is one of the world’s best-known providers of type-related products, technologies and expertise.  Having a library of over 20,000 typefaces, the product of the world's most celebrated and gifted type designers. They library includes some of the most famous and widely-used fonts, such as the Helvetica®, Univers® and Frutiger® typeface families.

Toshi Omagari studied typography and typeface design at Musashino Art University in Tokyo, where he graduated in 2008, and went on to obtain an MA in typeface design at University of Reading in 2011. A staff typeface designer at Monotype UK, he has been involved in many aspects of multilingual typography and font development, including work on various scripts including Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Mongolian.

The Studio -  combine marketing and design to help brands define their positions, create a unique voice and build sustainable value. Specialising in brand strategy, identity, packaging, digital design and retail environments, working with everything from small scale companies to global corporations.

Arabic descends Demotic?

Did the two descend from one another?
While looking into typography history I came across the Egyptian Demotic script, this reminded me or the Arabic script and I couldn't help but wonder if they was a link?

demotic script

arabic script

After researching many sites it does seem to be in agreeance that why they look similar in fact they is no real link between the two language.   The only thing that seems to make sense in my own mind is the natural evolution theory (see below)


From the site aqora
 Demotic evolved from Hieratic. Hieratic is closely related to hieroglyphs. (Hieratic looks like a simplified version of hieroglyphs. But Hieratic and hieroglyphs appear almost fully formed at around the same time, so it's hard to say that that is the case.) I believe all of those Egyptian writing systems died out by the 5th century AD, before the development of the modern Arabic alphabet.

They do have other things in common though. Both are written from right to left. Both are cursive, with lots of ligatures, meant to be written smoothly and quickly. Both were traditionally written in ink with a reed pen. All of these things influence how letters look, and would tend to make different systems written in similar ways look similar too. If you look at charts of the evolution of various scripts, you'll find that big changes in the appearance of letters happen when writing materials change. Convergent evolution affects writing systems too.  It's pretty fascinating.
In evolutionary biology, convergent evolution is the process whereby organisms not closely related (not monophyletic), independently evolve similar traits as a result of having to adapt to similar environments or ecological niches.

While all this may not be relevant to my brief as such it is something that got me asking questions enough to want answers. I will print this page into my book as well as the work I've already done on modern day Arabic font types...

Tarek Atrissi Design - At Tarek Atrissi Design, our passion for letters has translated into several high profile projects with a strong typographic flavour. Particularly in the field of Arabic Typography, where we have left a significant fingerprint on the typographic landscape in the Middle East.

STC Telecom Custom Typeface Design being of interest to me as a bilingual typeface!

  


The result was an exclusive new typeface developed for the Saudi Telecom, consisting of 4 weights both in Arabic and Latin. Both scripts were designed to match each other and use the same visual characteristics, without risking the legibility and authenticity of each script. Particular focus was placed on insuring that both the Arabic and Latin fonts read at a same visual size.

http://www.atrissi.com this site is very interesting and the designer behind it all has many awards.