Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Massimo Vignelli

Massimo Vignelli was an Italian designer whose work ranged from package design to furniture magazines to public signage. Vignelli helped co-find Vignelli Associates. His partner was his wife Lella. Massimo's style was focused towards simplicity through geometric forms. He worked with many high profile companies, for example, IBM, Bloomingdale’s and American Airlines. He made a huge impact on the world of design in many ways, and will always be remembered for the amazing work he did.



Saturday, September 5, 2015

Herb Lubalin

Herb Lubalin is known to most people as the creator to the font Avant Garde and Avant Garde Magazine. He also did a lot more, like being a part of the founding of the International typeface corporation. Throughout his life he was constantly searching for something new and innovative, this made him one of the most successful people of his time.


http://www.designishistory.com/1960/herb-lubalin/

Emil Ruder

Emil Ruder was famous for being a typographer and graphic designer. Ruder was born in Switzerland. He was a major part of the establishment of the design style known as Swiss Design. He valued the importance of san-serif fonts.He favored asymmetrical compositions and believed having negative space was very important. Ruder’s style has changed the face of web design and his use of the grid is emulated by many.

Paul Rand

Paul Rand was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1914. His career started with him working a part time position creating a syndicate that supplies graphics to various newspapers and magazines. Rand worked a lot over the years at establishing a name for himself as a designer. He not only had a talent for logo design but also one for page design. He worked a lot with magazines doing editorial layouts. He will always be known for his work with corporate identities, some of his work with these companies are still in use today.
www.paulrand.com

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

Adrian Frutier


Adrian Frutier was born to his parents in Unterseen, Canton of Bern in 1928. He was interested in type from a young age when he started experimenting with scripts and putting a style to handwriting. He explored what you could do with cursive because that was the style he had to formally write in his swiss school. He was especially interested in sculpture which his parents and teacher didnt approve of and instead pushed him into the world of print. His first job in the business was working as a compositor to a printer in Interlaken. Later he went on to study at the Kunstgewerbeschule School of applied arts. Later he went to Paris and started working as a typeface designer and artistic manager at Deberny & Peignot. He started creating fonts often now some were Phoebus, Ondine and Meridien. His work designing the font Univers put his foot in the door to establishing and international position as a typeface designer. This font was created for metal and film in 1957 and is a sans-serif font. Adrian went on to develop and refine his very own typefaces to include more weights and italics to add variety to his work.

Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Jan Tschichold

   Most people would say that Jan Tschichold was one of the major influences to 20th century typography. He was known as a book designer, teacher, and much more. Jan began his life in typography when his father who was a sign writer, introduced him to calligraphy. Having calligraphic training so early in life set Jan apart from others typographers at the time. Sadly his parents shot down his dream of becoming an artist and encouraged him to become an illustration teacher instead. He only taught for about 3 years until he decided to pursue calligraphy studies instead. He studied a wide range of creative practices, which he was already very good at without studying. When he began to stand out from the rest in school, his teachers took noticed and offered him a position to teach his first script class. 
   As the years went on Jan became interested in all types of fonts and started collecting fonts done by others as inspiration. The years to follow Jan pushed the envelope by designing new creative ways to layout text and images on a page. In 1928 one of his most successful works was published, it is called The New Typography. It was a book of modern graphic design layout and was used for years to come. The Nazis disapproval of Tschicholds work later pushed him to leave Germany and move his family to Switzerland. He did a lot of great work in switzerland before moving to London in 1946 with a job offer to work for Allen Lane of Penguin Books. He worked with Penguin for years helping redesign the covers of books and doing a lot of great work for them. He returned to Switzerland later to continue his works with fonts and developed his own font called Sabon. 

   Jan Tschicold did many great things in his lifetime. He helped pave the way for sans serif fonts to become popular and helped modernize clean design layouts and strengthened the design of penguin books. This amazing man will go down in history for his influential work.