Typography for Illustrators

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Final critique for Inventive Alphabet integrated into new posters.

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Final posters incorporating Inventive Alphabets into new work.

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Type in the environment–a photography assignment on the streets of Providence.

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Sketchbooks after our lectures on the brief history of typography.

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Yes, let's.

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Animated Illustration + Type!

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British Modern: Graphic Design Between Wars

Steven Heller and Louise Fili

1998

Korwin Briggs

Britain was more reluctant than most countries to accept new trends in design in the beginning of the twentieth century. Russian communists were dripping with modernism, and even France and Germany were taking steps in that direction as they tried to pick themselves up after World War 1, but Britain stubbornly stuck to 19th century views of ornamentation over functionality. Even the US, which one teacher told me basically slept through the art deco movement, was ahead of England. When, in the later 20's and 30's, British Modernism finally hit on a larger scale, around 1927-8, designers had already been able to watch its evolution in other settings. Theirs was a more conservative and legible variant on the style, which continued toward the austere in the 30's as British Institutions continued where Bauhaus had left off (Bauhaus was closed by artless Nazis in 1933).

For our purposes, British modernism is worth looking at mainly because it was all in English, and so we can easily read and apply the typographical ideas developed there.

It is in this period that Typefaces like Maximilian, Neuland, and Semisat were born, and lettering was more and more often put swerved, curved, and/or skewed, putting to death the "timeworn tenet of maintaining central axis composition." (15) These typefaces were specifically mentioned by the book, but actually seem less like those used on the designs in the book than Futura does.

Type design of the period was largely sans serif and of similar line-weights throughout. We see the emergence of extremely geometric designs, with circular O's and sharp corners on N's and W's. Their often-skewed placement would often increase the dynamism of pieces already full of large, flat shapes that seemed to move at wild angles.

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Wayne White Paintings

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I was introduced to Wayne White very young in age without ever knowing his face. I knew him from my enjoyment of such classic kid television shows like Pew Wee’s Playhouse, Shining Time Station, and Beakman’s World, all of which he did the set designs for.  This pass weekend circumstance finally revealed the face behind the worlds I enjoyed as a child. Wayne White was a guest speaker at the convention I attended this pass weekend in New York. There he talked about his life’s world thus far. Accompanied by his trusted banjo, he danced and sang his way through his life, and work. It was here that I was introduced to Wayne White fine art work, where he paints elaborate and beautiful landscapes, then paints big as the landscapes he has created, in white paint,  “SUGAR TITS” right in the middle of his beautiful landscape. Wayne White’s work repeats this method over and over again, for countless pages of his self-titled book I purchased after hearing him speak. While Wayne is not a graphic designer or typographer by far, he uses type in the way I that is illustrative and while composed. The type he uses in his artwork is both the subject as while of the work, as well as, an integrated element of the composition. He does this by rendering his giant type in one-point perspective to reinforce the dimensionality of the spaces his messages exist in.  Wayne also uses the elements of his vast country landscape to integrate type into his paintings.  For example, he will hide elements of his type behind trees, bushes, animals, and buildings. As Wayne’s work has progressed over the years, he has started to abstract his fonts and reconstructing them into illegible amalgamated letterforms. While Wayne’s work is not about the formal qualities of type and its presentation, I feel like as illustrators, we can take elements of how he uses type as an integrated element within his paintings, and apply it to our work as illustrators.

Will Smith