The Type FactoryThe Urbis, Manchester19/06/09 - 24/07/09

3£

WELCOMEto The Type Factory, an exhibition to

increase your awareness of Typography.

Typography is not just the art of arranging characters, it is more than that. It is about

communication and knowledge. Typography creates words, and words create meaning.

The Type Factory is an exhibition space concentrating on the art of Typography. It aims to make you realise how important typography

is in your everyday lives and how lost you would be without it. The exhibition also provides talks

and sessions that offer tutorials, help, and a general education of typography.

THE EXHIBITIONSTAGE ONE

To know typography you need to know the history. The first

section is based on the origins and development of typography, and through to the first applications,

and printing techniques.

STAGE TWOThe second section concentrates

on key people involved in typography and the typefaces they created that are still used today. It will also show you printing

techniques up to the modern era and early experimental typography.

THE EXHIBITIONSTAGE ONE

To know typography you need to know the history. The first

section is based on the origins and development of typography, and through to the first applications,

and printing techniques.

STAGE TWOThe second section concentrates

on key people involved in typography and the typefaces they created that are still used today. It will also show you printing

techniques up to the modern era and early experimental typography.

STAGE THREEThis section will focus on the modern era of typography. As well as type as function, it will show you how type has been transformed into an art form.

STAGE FOURThe future of typography is an exciting prospect. This are will

show you our predictions of what typography has in-store for the

future. There is an area where you can share your ideas of what you

believe the future holds.

TYPE CHARACTERSFive of the most influential people in Typography

Jan Tschichold

Jan Tschichold (1902 - 1974) was a Swiss typographer, book designer, teacher and

writer. Tschichold was the son of a provincial signwriter, and he was trained in calligraphy. This artisan background and calligraphic training set him apart from almost all other noted typographers of the time, since they had inevitably trained in architecture or the fine arts. Tschichold converted to Modernist design principles in 1923 after visiting the first Weimar Bauhaus exhibition. He became a leading advocate of Modernist design: first with an influential 1925 magazine supplement; then a 1927 personal exhibition; then with his most noted work Die Neue Typographie. This book was a manifesto of modern design, in which he condemned all fonts but sans-serif (called ‘Grotesk’ in Germany). He also favoured non-centered design (e.g., on title pages), and codified many other Modernist design rules. He advocated the use of standardised paper sizes for all printed matter, and made some of the first clear explanations of the effective use of different sizes and weights of type in order to quickly and easily convey information. This book was followed with a series of practical manuals on the principles of Modernist typography which had a wide influence among ordinary workers and printers in Germany. Yet, despite his visits to England just before the war, only about four articles by Tschichold had been translated into English by 1945. Although Die Neue Typographie remains a classic, Tschichold slowly abandoned his rigid beliefs from around 1932 onwards (e.g. his Saskia typeface of 1932, and his acceptance of classical Roman typefaces for body-type) as he moved back towards Classicism in print design. He later condemned Die Neue Typographie as too extreme. He also went so far

as to condemn Modernist design in general as being authoritarian and inherently fascistic. Between 1947-1949 Tschichold lived in England where he oversaw the redesign of 500 paperbacks published by Penguin Books, leaving them with a standardised set of typographic rules, the Penguin Composition Rules. Although he gave Penguin’s books (particularly the Pelican range) a unified look and enforced many of the typographic practices that are taken for granted today, he allowed the nature of each work to dictate its look, with varied covers and title pages. In working for a firm that made cheap mass-market paperbacks, he was following a line of work - in cheap popular culture forms (e.g. film posters) - that he had always pursued during his career. His abandonment of Modernist principles meant that, even though he was living in Switzerland after the war, he was not at the centre of the post-war Swiss International Typographic Style. Between 1926 and 1929, he designed a “universal alphabet” to clean up the few multigraphs and non-phonetic spellings in the German language. For example, he devised brand new characters to replace the multigraphs ‘ch’ and ‘sch’. His intentions were to change the spelling by systematically replacing ‘eu’ with ‘oi’, ‘w’ with ‘v’, and ‘z’ with ‘ts’. Long vowels were indicated by a macron below them, though the umlaut was still above. The alphabet was presented in one typeface, which was sans-serif and without capital letters.

Typefaces Tschichold designed include:- Transit- Saskia- Zeus- Sabon

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Typeface shown: Sabon

Paul Renner (1878 – 1956) was a German typeface designer, most notably of Futura.

He was born in Prussia and had a strict Protestant upbringing, being educated in 19th century Gymnasium. He was brought up to have a very German sense of leadership, of duty and responsibility. He was suspicious of abstract art and disliked many forms of modern culture, such as jazz, cinema, and dancing. But equally, he admired the functionalist strain in modernism. Thus, Renner can be seen as a bridge between the traditional (19th Century) and the modern (20th Century). He attempted to fuse the Gothic and the roman typefaces. Renner was a prominent member of the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation). Two of his major texts are Typografie als Kunst (Typography as Art) and Die Kunst der Typographie (The Art of Typography). He created a new set of guidelines for good book design and invented the popular Futura, a geometric sans-serif font used by many typographers throughout the 20th century and up till the present. The typeface Architype Renner is based upon Renner’s early experimental exploration of geometric letterforms for the Futura typeface, most of which were deleted from the face’s character set before it was issued. Tasse, a1994 typeface is a revival of Renner’s 1953

typeface Steile Futura. Renner was a friend of the eminent German typographer Jan Tschichold and a key participant in the heated ideological and artistic debates of that time. Even before 1932, Renner made his opposition to the Nazis very clear, notably in his book Kultur-bolschewismus?. He was unable to find a German publisher, so it was published his Swiss friendEugen Rentsch. After the Nazis seized power in March 1933, he was arrested and dismissed from his post in Munich in 1933, and subsequently went into a period of internal exile. Soon after the book’s publication, it was withdrawn from the German book market, until a photo-mechanical reprint was issued by Stroemfeld Verlag, Frankfurt am Main/Basel, in 2003. The new edition included comments by Roland Reuss and Peter Staengle.

Typefaces Renner designed include:- Futura- Plak- Futura Black- Futura Light- Ballade- Renner Antiqua

Paul Renner

Typeface shown: Futura

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Herbert Bayer (1900 – 1985) was an Austrian graphic designer, painter, photographer,

and architect. Bayer apprenticed under the artist Georg Schmidthammer in Linz. Leaving the workshop to study at the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony, he became interested in Walter Gropius’s Bauhaus manifesto. After Bayer had studied for four years at the Bauhaus under such teachers as Wassily Kandinsky and László Moholy-Nagy, Gropius appointed Bayer director of printing and advertising. In the spirit of reductive minimalism, Bayer developed a crisp visual style and adopted use of all-lowercase, sans serif typefaces for most Bauhaus publications. Bayer is one of several typographers of the period including Kurt Schwitters and Jan Tschichold who experimented with the creation of a simplified more phonetic-based alphabet. Bayer designed the 1925 geometric sans-serif typeface called Universal, now issued in digital form as Bayer Universal. The design also inspired ITC Bauhaus and Architype Bayer, which bears comparison with the stylistically related typeface Architype Schwitters. In 1928, Bayer left the Bauhaus to become art director of Vogue magazine’s Berlin office. He remained in Germany far later than most other progressives, and did work for the Nazi Party. In 1936 he designed a brochure for the Deutschland

Ausstellung, an exhibition for tourists in Berlin during the 1936 Olympic Games - the brochure celebrated life in the Third Reich, and the authority of Hitler. However, in 1937, works of Bayer’s were included in the Nazi propaganda exhibition Degenerate Art, upon which he left Germany in 1938 to settle in New York City where he had a long and distinguished career in nearly every aspect of the graphic arts. In 1944 Bayer married Joella Syrara Haweis, the daughter of poet Mina Loy.In 1946 the Bayers relocated. Hired by industrialist and visionary Walter Paepcke, Bayer moved to Aspen, Colorado as Paepcke promoted skiing as a popular sport. Bayer’s architectural work in the town included co-designing the Aspen Institute and restoring the Wheeler Opera House, but his production of promotional posters identified skiing with wit, excitement, and glamour. Bayer would remain associated with Aspen until the mid-1970s. Bayer gave the Denver Art Museum a collection of around 8,000 of his works. In 1959, he designed his ‘fonetik alfabet’, a phonetic alphabet, for English. It was sans-serif and without capital letters. He had special symbols for the endings -ed, -ory, -ing, and -ion, as well as the digraphs ‘ch’, ‘sh’, and ‘ng’. An underline indicated the doubling of a consonant in traditional orthography.

Herbert Bayer

Typeface shown: Bauhaus(based on Bayers

Universal Typeface)

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Erik Spiekermann (1947 - ) is a German typographer and designer. He is a professor at

the University of the Arts Bremen. Spiekermann studied art history at Berlin’s Free University, funding himself by running a hot metal printing press in the basement of his house. Between 1972 and 1979 , he worked as a freelance graphic designer in London before returning to Berlin and founding MetaDesign with two partners. In 1989 he and his wife, Joan Spiekermann, started FontShop, the first mail-order distributor for digital fonts. FSI FontShop International followed and now publishes the FontFont range of typefaces. MetaDesign combined clean, teutonic-looking information design and complex corporate design systems for clients like BVG (Berlin Transit), Düsseldorf Airport, Audi, Volkswagen and Heidelberg Printing, amongst others. In 2001 Spiekermann left MetaDesign over policy disagreements and started UDN (United Designers Networks) with offices in Berlin, Londonand San Francisco. In April 2006, the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena awarded Spiekermann an Honorary

Doctorship for his contribution to design. His family of typefaces for Deutsche Bahn (German Railways), designed with Christian Schwartz, received a Gold Medal at the German Federal Design Prize in 2006, the highest suchaward in Germany. As of January 2007, UDN has been renamed SpiekermannPartners, and as of January 2009 it has been renamed EdenSpiekermann. Spiekermann co-authored Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works. He also participated in the creation of numerous corporate identities and other works, including redesigns of the publications The Economist and Reason.

Typefaces Spiekermann designed include:- Meta- Meta Serif- Officina- Govan- Info- Unit- Berliner Grotesk

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Typeface shown: Officina

Matthew Carter (1937 - ) is a type designer who’s career in type design has witnessed the

transition from physical metal type to digital type. Carter became a freelancer as well as the typographic advisor to Crosfield Electronics, distributors of Photon phototypesetting machines. Carter designed many typefaces for Mergenthaler Linotype as well. Under Linotype, Carter created well known typefaces such as the 100-year replacement typeface for Bell Telephone Company. In 1981, Carter and his colleague Mike Parker created Bitstream Inc. This digital type foundry is currently one of the largest suppliers of type. He left Bitstream in 1991 to form the Carter & Cone type foundry with Cherie Cone. Matthew Carter focuses on improving many typefaces’ readability. He designs specifically for Apple and Microsoft computers. Georgia and Verdana are two fonts that have been created primarily for viewing on computer monitors. Carter has designed type for magazines such as Time, The Washington Post, The New York Times, the Boston Globe, Wired, and Newsweek. He is a member of Alliance Graphique

Internationale (AGI), is a senior critic for Yale’s Graphic design program, has served as chairman of ATypI, and is an ex member of the board of directors of the Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA). Carter has won numerous awards for his significant contributions to typography and design, including an honoris causa Doctorate of Humane Letters from the Art Institute of Boston, an AIGA medal in 1995, and the 2005 SOTA Typography Award. A retrospective of his work, Typographically Speaking, The Art of Matthew Carter, was exhibited at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County in December 2002. In 2007, Carter designed a new variant of the typeface Georgia for use in the graphical user interface of the Bloomberg Terminal.

Typefaces Carter designed include:- Bell Centenial- Big Caslon- Georgia- Tahoma- Verdana

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Typeface shown: Verdana

MANCHESTERThe city is a type haven. Wherever you look there is

ignored typography, with its own character and story.

NEGLECTED TYPE

Typography is everywhere on your street. Often hidden by newer typographic techniques, old,

neglected type is still visible, but ignored too often. When you see type that has been washed away, cut in half, or allowed to fade, you are seeing a new graphic pattern with extra character. Whether it has grown old gracefully, or has been left to decay, it evokes a sense of past to when the type had more function than form. This gives it more character than any new, constantly churned out, typography can have. Newer typography on the street is predictable, less personal, and carries no spontaneity. The styles become monotonous as the high-street chains take over. This is not as powerful or original as the older styles, which have gradually begun to harmonise with their environment, transforming from bold bright signs, to rain smudged lettering bonded onto the building. But its not just old typography that has been neglected. There is a fascination of any type that has been taken to the limits of legibility. Graffiti on the walls of back alleys, signs half torn off walls, all carry their own character. It is almost as if the type has a personal agenda to leave its on mark in our environment.

You can help preserve this dying art by placing your Type Factory sticker near the work, taking a picture, and uploading it to the typefactory.com gallery. This ensures that it will no longer be forgotten lettering, but will live on long into the future.

THETYPELIBRARYBooks have the power of continuously passing on information and wisdom. In the digital age this is something we still take for granted. The Type Library holds hundreds of books for understanding, learning, or just the pleasure of typography.

THETYPEWORKSHOPThe Type Workshop is a presentation space where you can attend talks on typography, given by esteemed people in the field. They will also give tutorials, offer advice, and answer any questions you may have. See website for details.

THETYPECOUNTERThe Type Counter is a cafe/coffee bar offering light snacks and refreshments. It also houses a seating area where you can sit and discuss what you have seen.

FACILITIESAs well as the exhibition, The Type Factory provides learning resources, presentations,and refreshments.

www.typefactory.com