Adrian Frutiger

Adrian Frutiger (born in 1928) is one of the most influential typeface designers of the all times. He has designed dozens of typefaces, among those are some of the most well known fonts such as Univers, Frutiger, Avenir and Didot. His typefaces have been used by some of the largest companies in the world. Among those are Swiss International Air Lines, Deutsche Bank, Apple, General Electircs and O2.





















http://lh6.ggpht.com/_HZ7LK8eP5VU/SEYtaOVTUtI/AAAAAAAABv8/wG5coTJTEDY/lecture_01_22.jpg

His typeface Avenir can be found everywhere in the city of Amsterdam. It was chosen as main corporate font. It appears everywhere, on websites, advertisements and building facades.












http://www.monotypeimaging.com/images/tds/frutiger/FRU-S1-Image.gif

Swiss International Air Lines uses Univers as a corporate font.












http://www.aisleone.net/wp-content/2008/02/swisslogo.jpg

Apple used Univers typeface on most of the keyboards until 2007.













http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/PowerBook_Univers_keycaps.jpg

Univers type has interesting history as well as there is a lot of information available about the font, i changed from Myriad to Univers typeface for the next assignment. Univers is based on old typeface called Akzidenz-Grotesk, which was foundation for Helvetica and Folio typefaces as well.

Myriad Typeface

For upcoming font assignment, i chose sans-serif typeface Myriad. It was developed by Adobe Systems and it is widely used, for example Apple Inc. has picked the font as their corporate corporate font. http://store1.adobe.com/type/browser/gifs/MYRP/C_MYRP-10005000.GIF

Typefaces around the World

Today while watching Chinese tv channel, i thought about typography. As a westerner i've never thought that there are many designers in Japan, China, Arabic countries etc., who do not use Roman alphabet. There are also huge number of Roman alphabetic typefaces, how about those other languages ? Is there Helvetica in Japanese, Arial in Arabic and so on... ?

After browsing dozens of websites i came up with several typafaces developed for alphabets other than Roman. I recall some typography posters, where designer has used mixture of different alphabetic writing systems.

This is multilingual Tanseek typeface, developed by Linotype GmbH.

http://image.linotype.com/cms/tanseek_fontsample02_d28423i3.gif

This chocolate package is an example of design, where both Arabic and Latin writing systems are used. What also makes such design interesting is the fact, that Arabic is read from right to left.

http://www.atrissi.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/elhema-arabisch-choc_262e7d.jpg

Western alphabet has usually 20 to 50 letters depending on language, how about Chinese ? I just wonder how Chinese typeface designers cope with thousands of characters ? As Chinese and Japanse is often written from top to bottom, i believe that gives more flexibility for designers to arrange text and keep it legible, because people have used to read the characters from top to bottom and side to side. In Latin alphabet based languages, text is always written from left to right, so when text is arranged from top to bottom, it is not natural for us and makes it more difficult to read.

www.monotype.com.hk has a large collection of Chinese typefaces. Do they really have to design thousands of characters ? Does someone know the answer for that question ? Please, share your knowledge, Cheers :-)

http://www.monotype.com.hk/image/Big5/CHei3_B.gif

Typography animation

This week we are covering animation, especially typography in motion. It is related to upcoming assignment 3, so it's good to practice now. We were given a task to make a typography animation with some basic camera movements such as pan, tilt, zoom in/out.
The exercise is based on short monologue or dialogue audio clip captured from a movie. I picked a 10 seconds donut monologue from Over the Hedge movie:
"Oh come on! You haven't even tried donuts yet! You wanna store fat? That is the way to store some fat! You'll be sweating through winter!"
Motion and scale should follow rhythm of the audio track. However, the audio clip is very short and pace of the speaker too fast to create more interesting animation. Therefore, i tried to stick with basic movement and keep it legible.





I found great collection of typography animations from Dezignus.com.

http://dezignus.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/kinetictypography.jpg

Click here to visit Dezignus.com.

B-Movies

I've always been a big fan of B-movies, therefore upcoming horror movie cover assignment is very interesting. What is a B-movie ? Characteristics of B-movies are low budget, poor special effects and they usually fall into horror, sci-fi, western or suspense genres. If i want to laugh while watching movie, B-movie is better choice than most comedies.

I've collected some B-movie posters and covers from the internet to show some of the common characteristics they share.

This is a good example of typical horror B-movie cover. A Monster, man and sexy woman, common elements of the 50's horror movie can be found from this cover. Black, red and yellow colors as well as wavy edged font are used in almost every cover of older horror movie. The 50's horror movies are also named in similar way; "Night of the...", "Attack of...", "...from space/black lagoon/beneath the sea".

http://img170.imageshack.us/img170/2171/nightofthebloodbeastalpyx6.jpg



















http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y250/PhotozOnline/Creature_Frm_The_Black_Lag.jpg















http://www.cinemasterpieces.com/ss10.jpg

Old horror movies are considered as comedies today. However, in the 50's people were truly frightened by those movies. Production of low budget b-movies is not limited in the 50's, there are numerous independent film makers today who keep the genre alive. Peter Jackson maybe best known of Lord of the ring trilogy, but b-movie fans praise his earlier films such as Bad Taste, Meet the feebles and Braindead. Father of Evil Dead saga Sam Raimi, is another significant film director who began his career making B-movies.


This is my B-movie cover exercise entirely based on images provided by lecturer Thierry Bernard.

Assignment 1 - Designer research

I picked George Lois as a designer for assignment 1. After checking information about several designer from the list i ended up to choose Mr.Lois, because of his extensive career as ad designer. It was easy to find articles about him, since he's one of the best known designers in the world. However, his style is often based on a single image to communicate his message, rather than complex use of typography and different graphics. Therefore, i spent long time to browse his works in order to find design that could be easily critically analyze based on design elements, principles, typography and Gestalt theory. Particularly, i struggled with the Tommy Hilfiger ad, because i didn't find many principles, elements and Gestalt theories that applies to it.

Here's my four page article about him.

Nokia Ad

Nokia ad class exercise. Yes, i know, lack of creativity...

Happy Halloween

This is Halloween card to my Japanese friend Tomoko. He was delighted to see his creepy face after digital manipulation. I blended only few images together, such as teeth from the Alien movie and the scars. The collage assignment will be more elaborate since it must be composed of at least 8 elements.

Carhartt layout

Focus of this exercise was to layout text in visually appealing way. I highlighted most important words of the text by using larger font size. Highlighted words are placed on black rectangles, which makes them more visible. I also used negative / positive elements, black text on white background and white text on black background. That makes reading the text more difficult, however the aim of this exercise was to create eye catching layout.

Carhartt - Basic shapes

These are my Carhartt titles made by using only basic shapes, such as circles, rectangles and triangles. I tried to use very simple shapes and at same time keep "Carhartt" text recognizable. Particularly the first two titles are hard to read. Therefore, i asked my friend to look at the titles and figure out the letters. He managed to read the titles quickly, so i concluded that they are not too abstract.

The Secret Sex Life of Plants

The objective of this exercise was to layout pictures and text based on some of the gestalt concepts. I found applying Gestalt theory to this exercise very difficult. However, i used "sliced" background image that is supposed to represent the closure concept. Partly hidden picture of a flower also refers to word "secret" in the topic.

The Moon and The Sun

Almost in every culture around the world the sun and moon have always been objects of worship. Especially, North- and South American indians have believed that the sun and moon have great powers that affect on everything from the nature to human life.

This pictures is based on ancient Aztec mythology. My plan was to sketch something similar.

(http://www.purplemoon.com/Stickers/sun-aztec.jpg)


This is my version, as you can see there are very few similarities. Maybe because my drawing skills are very limited.

What is Graphic design ?

The First exercise was to illustrate sentence "Graphic design is the business of making or choosing marks and arranging them on a surface to convey an idea" using only graphics. The task was challenging and the result is poor.