Book "Swiss graphic design" What is typography?

The new set of rules to replace the conventions of traditional typography were laid down between 1923 and 1928, mainly by artist, and chiefly in Germany. As we have noticed, although they owned something to the graphic excesses of the Futurists and the Dadaists, their concern was with function rather than aesthetics. The first significant statement was by EI Lissitzky, whose "Topography of Typography" appeared in Schwitter's Merz magazine in July 1923. It is a series of declamatory assertions of first principles, beginning "In communicating, the printed word is seen, not heard" Lissitzky was followed a few months later by Moholy Nagy. His essay " The New Typography", was published at the Bauhaus. Both statements give priority to photographic illustration and a more dynamic typography. Moholy-Nagy echoes Lissitzky's reminder that typography is a visual medium, that "words on the printed page are taken in by seeing them, not hearing them"  And wheres the New Typography later took the opposite view, restricting choice, he says that "we use all typefaces, type sizes, geometric forms, colours,etc..."  Moholy-Nagy's attitude to graphic design became visionary. By 1925 he was writing, "The printer's work is part of the foundation on which the NEW world will be built." He concluded that this new world would find its expression by means of "typophoto". And typophoto is another name for what became the central medium of Graphic design.

"Typography is a visual medium, that "words on the printed page are taken in by seeing them, not hearing them."

I thought Typography "The word" have possibility to hear and tell to the reader. When I found some typography on the street , even the word have the same meaning, but different typography, I could hear different sound from the word. Why designer chose this font? What was the background of the designer? What is the meaning of this word? 

also It is said that "Both statements give priority to photographic illustration and a more dynamic typography." 

Word=visual imagine=photographic, illustration, dynamic typography=typophoto ??

"Word" which is one of the communication tool can be visual imagine rather than for reading??

What is typography? What is photographic? What do these are able to tell?

All typeface which are attractive for me are swiss typeface. But still I can’t explain what is Swiss typeface?

First, I googled swiss typeface characteristics. It comes out International typographic design which is also called Swiss style.

“International Typographic Design begins with a mathematical grid. These grids are considered to be the “most legible and harmonious means for structuring information.” Using a grid for design makes creating a hierarchy for the content much easier. Grids are flexible, consistent and easy to follow. They are clear-cut and work well with ratios . In addition to the grid, Swiss Style usually involves an asymmetrical layout, sans serif typefaces and the favoring of photography over illustrations.

The movement’s innovators combined elements of other artistic trends to create the beauty and simplicity of the Swiss Style that we know today. Elements from Bauhaus, De Stijl and The new typography are sprinkled throughout the works of Ersnt Keller, Max Bill, Josef-Müller Brakmann and Armin Hofmann—i.e., the pioneers of Swiss Style.

Appreciating Swiss Style means appreciating the typefaces that started it all. Those grid systems wouldn’t be anything without the classic sans serif typeface that so seamlessly folds into Swiss Style. Those who taught Swiss Style argued that design should focus on the content and not decorative extras. By stripping away the embellishments, Swiss Style eliminates distractions for the viewer and allows the information-heavy design to be read and studied rather than merely seen and admired. Because of this, the typefaces chosen to represent Swiss Style are those that really hone in one the movement’s key principles” Bau haus, Univers, Helvetica, Akzidenz-Grotesk."

The typefaces chosen to represent Swiss style which eliminates distractions for the viewer and allows the information heavy design to be read and studies rather than merely seen and admired.

Swiss typeface is more visual imagine. It is not only font, text, but part of design, visual imagine.

Helvetica regular bold black condensed, compact

Helvetica bold, black

Helvetica regular bold black condensed, compact

Helvetica

Helvetica’s characters always have horizontal or vertical stroke endings, never slanted or diagonal. This gives the typeface a more contemporary and sleeker look than perhaps older and sophisticated typefaces such as Goudy Old Style. Helvetica is also noted for its fantastic use of white space between characters. Designers and companies utilize Helvetica because it’s a “safe” font to fall back on. Its neutrality is very adaptable to use for a wide array of different projects. Commercial companies use Helvetica on their company’s logos, advertisements, and marketing materials to capture consumer’s attention all while staying simple. Another cool fact about Helvetica is that it is easily readable when it is in motion. 

 The history of Helvetica

The history of Helvetica ties into two design movements that we have analyzed in class, modernism and post modernism. Modernism was an era from about the 1920’s to 1970’s where the motive was to shift from art nouveau and fancy decorations to more simplistic designs. The purpose of modernism was to be more functional rather than form. In context of Helvetica, it functions to present information as clearly as possible and “shouldn’t be expressive”. On the other hand, post modernism is a recent response to the modernism movement. It rejects any kind of restraints and embraces a freer flowing and form in typography and illustration. Post modernism is a switch back to a more “expressive” style of typography where artists such as David Carson and Paula Sche become very creative with their work. In Helvetica, the typography is reflective of the modernism movement and receives full support from designers and typographers such as Michael Bierut and Wim Crowel. 

Helvetica's characters

plain and simple, legible, clear, elegant, slim, curving letters bold outline, rounded, contour, shaded and “good for everything”. 

From these characters, Helvetica supposedly has no character. Helvetica opposed to be part of visual imagine, design...?

Helvetica in everywhere all over the world. A typeface becomes a star, one that supposedly has no character, that is neutral, almost laissez-faire, and so ubiquitous as to be virtually invisible. Half a century after Helvetica is birth, It is possible to see exactly how much Helvetica really was a child of its time. 

is neutral, almost laissez-faire, and so ubiquitous as to be virtually invisible.

Typesetting Techniques and their effect on Typeface design Helvetica

Hot Type in Manual Typesetting

In the hot type system, typography's possibilities were largely deter mined by the "solid" material: metal. The design of letterforms and their weight and width was, however, unrestricted. Each type size was cut separately: a 9-point a did not look the same enlarged to a 36  point a; it was bolder, and had larger inner counters. The x-height was also slight increased in favor of better legibility. At the same time, the larger sizes of type could be drawn with more detail and contrast. A unique feature of Helvetica was that characters had almost no "flesh", or blankspace, on either side of the letter, meaning they could be set very closely together.

Picture 1: A unique feature of Helvetica was that the characters had almost no "flash", or blank space, on they could be set very closely.

Phototypesetting

With the introduction of phototypesetting in the 1960s, typefaces literally lost their weight. Different point sizes could now be derived from a single negative imagine at any desired enlargement. It was also possible to modify the posture of letters, i, e, to create slanted or expanded version, or to change the spacing, to make it tighter for instance.

In digital phototypefacesetting, also called filmsetting, the image of the letter no longer took the form of a negative, but consisted of raster lines or pixels, stored digitally and exposed to film using a cathode ray tube. The cast lead typefaces of different manufacturer's fonts. Having Helvetica in the type library was an important selling point, which, because Linotype was not eager to license the typeface to its competitor, led to the typeface being copied again and again by other manufacture.

Picture 2,3: Exposure and development processes also influenced letterforms and their stroke weight. "Sharp" exposure of the font made the letters form too light; overexposure, on the other hand, resulted in blurred or deformed shapes. The outer corners of characters had to be designed with exaggerated points, and the angled connections between strokes cut deeper to counteract overexposure.

As phototypefacesetting began replacing hot metal type in the mid-1960s, a technology that had been in use for over five hundreds years came to an end. Instead of metal type and typesetting matrices, large, square, glass negatives, the size of the palm of a hand, bearing eighty-eight characters of a single typeface, were now appearing at Linotype.

Layout Typefaces

Until the 1980's, working with type was largely the business of printers and typesetters. Designers could only work on their layouts using hand-drawn or pasted-down letters. The New haas Grotesk typeface loose-leaf system containing dummy texts in various point sizes and leadings was a great timesaver therefore-and an effective marketing tool. The popular transfer letters of the 1970's such as Letraset's varied selection, constituted a first step toward the more democratic use of type. These provided an affordable and very professional-looking method for setting small quantities of text. Symbols, graphic elements, patterns, screened textures, and many decorative display faces were available. The letter opened the market to graphic designers for new, short-lived type designs.

Picture4: Designing with dry transfer letters might also be seen as a modern form of manual typesetting. Letter by letter, words are manually conveyed from a transfer sheet to the desired background.

Desk Publishing

Typefaces had become accessible and affordable. The font were initially installed in PostScript laser printers, and Helvetica was one of four typefaces to be included. In 1985, Apple installed in into the Macintosh system software, and its circulation accelerated at an amazing rate. Despite these advanced, the design and production of typefaces remained in the hands of a small number of specialized designers and type manufactures or type. This changed with the introduction of user-friendly typeface design programs such as Fontographer, which made it possible for everyone to generate new computer fonts.

Picture5 : The forms of the characters are stored as mathematical configurations that can be enlarged or reduced at will; they only converted to bitmaps at the relevant resolution when output. In general, today only one drawing is used for all of the font sizes. Only a few font manufacturers offer different cuts for body text and display sizes.

New Font Formats

Given a typeface like Helvetica, which has had to adjust to such varied challenge as Linotype's duplexed matrices, Monotype's systems of units, exposure compensation in phototypesetting and bitmap regularization, versions have emerged that are very different from the original. Converting the typeface into a new font format sometimes meant eliminating earlier improvements. In the most recent revisions by Linotype, Helvetica Standard and World, the spacing had been adjusted, new kerning tables tables have been developed, and the legibility on monitors optimized. International companies today need typefaces that readily available characters, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and the Arabic versions, plus various decorative and mathematical symbols have been added to the family. All this in a single font per style containing 1,866 characters.

From Movie Helvetica critic of Helvetica

Experimental Jetset

For us, modernism does have a more subversive side. We think that the whole image of modernism as something that is primarily concerned with functionalism, utilitarianism, that's something that emerged much later, that's a sort of a late-modernist thing. We think the early-modernist movements, like Dadaism, Futurism, Surrealism, all had their more subversive sides and their more, how do you call it, dialectical sides, so they went against something. [cut]
It's not that we are against the experimentation that people like David Carson and Emigré and Fuse, that Neville Brody did. We think what we do is a sort of an extension of that. 
All that hunting to the next typeface every time, it took a lot of energy, and we can still remember that, as students, we were really disappointed, because you wanted to use a certain typeface and then you saw somebody else had used it, and then you couldn't use it because you wanted to be original. And with Helvetica this whole problem is non-existent because everybody's using it 
A lot of people see the way a young generation of designers uses a typeface such as Helvetica as a more superficial way, as a sort of appropriation of a style. We would very much disagree with that. All three of us grew up in the '70s in the Netherlands which was dominated by the last moments of late Modernism. A lot of people think you sort of study it from books and then copy it or something, but we would really say that it's almost in our blood. 
It's also funny because a lot of people connect Helvetica with the dangers of globalization and standardization. We're not afraid for that quality at all, because we just know that everybody can put a twist on it. We think you can put as much nationality in the kerning of a typeface as in the typeface itself, and we think the way people like Crouwel use Helvetica is typically Dutch. That's why we're never really impressed with the argument that Helvetica is a sort of global monster.

Poster of movie Helvetica  

Russian Constructivism

Rossian Constractivism posited an entirely new relationship between the artist and society. This radical reassessment of artistic activity was a direct response to the experience of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and of the ensuing Civil War. The far-reaching and utopian aspiration which inspired those artists who adhered to Constructivism were embodied in works like Tatlin's Monument to the Third International, but despite the great interest and enthusiasm generated at different times for such works and ideas in the West, precise knowledge of these has remained elusive. In Western literature Constructivism has been portrayed as a movement primarily concerned with aesthetics. Ever since the West first became aware of the artistic developments of post-revolutionary Russian in 1922, at the Erste Russische Kunstausstellung in Berlin, it has viewed Russian Constructivism has been portrayed as a movement primarily concerned with aesthetics. Ever since the West first bacame aware of the artistic developments of post-revolutionary Russian in 1922, at the Erste Russische Kunstausstellung in Berlin, it has viewed Russian Constructivism pre-eminently as an art movement. In reality it was something much wider: an approach to working with materials, within a certain conception of their potential as active participants in the Process of social and political transformation. 

Constructivist-designed objects had not entered into mass production and the Contructivist's attempts to engage directly in industry had been only partially successful. With the impossibility of working in industry the Constructivist artist lowered his sights to more practical problems such as the small-scale, well-defined design task, and in particular to typographical, poster and exhibition design, which fitted more neatly into traditional artistic categories, and which were less affected by the pressures of material scarcities. The term "Constructivist graphic design" seems to be somewhat contradictory. Constructivism was primarily concerned with three-dimensional utilitarian structures. Although two-dimensional experiments did have a place in laboratory world, and during the Civil War Constructivist artists had directly engaged in work on agitational posters, slogans and penels, such activity was essentially incidental to the main tasks of Constructivism, this type of activity bacame one of the dominant areas of practical work for many Constructivist during the second half of the 1920. within these defined and limited areas of work, the photograph and particularly photomontage became an increasingly important feature  of solutions to design tasks.

Alexander Rodchenko

Rodchenko's images combine the experience of a non-objective painter, of an inventor of three-dimensional compositions and of a designer of objects for everyday use. They are influenced by the achievements of cinema and Constructivism, and shaped by such innovations as photo-journalism and the development of photographic techniques. Through his work Rodchenko clearly demonstrated that photo art has its own visual language, upholding the opinion that photography does not have to reduce the texture of painting or the compositional scheme, or to imitate canonical genres such as the portrait, Landscape or still life. Rodchenko's photo-art came into existence as a result  of the daring combination of various genres, dynamic composition, clarity of optical outline, a true documentary approach, and seizing the opportunity to instantly capture the sensations of modern man. Photography for Rodchenko meant the possibility to create really contemporary art, to show the world through "morning eyes" as the writer Victor Shklovsky.

Rodchenko transformed documentary photography into art. In a simple and direct way he took pictures of his mother, his wife, his friends, and acquaintances. He tried to be honest in his reportage photography, avoiding, on the whole world, staging. He saw the rich creative potential of the photographic medium, noticing how light penetrates transparent objects, how the camera and its lenses themselves determine form and, when making a photogram (made without a camera, using light-sensitive paper), how shadows arrange themselves. He intentionally stressed perspective and depth by choosing a particular angle, and  developed the principle of shooting from high and low points, which in Russian became known as "Rodchenko's angle"

One of Rodchenko's article, written in 1934, was called "Photography is an Art". All his life he strove to prove this. For Rodchenko art is synonymous with a miracle. Miraculous is the inexplicable nature of art. He writes that photography is full of miracles of visual form, combining the subtlest details with varied planes, contrasts of perspective, colour and form, miracles in conveying movement.

Rodchenko-Photomontage-

Rodchenko often included newspaper clippings, postcard fragments and stamps in his early collages of 1918-22. Black or coloured tickets or rectangles, positioned at right angles, created a fixed constructive scheme, uniting the motley and varied in terms of texture printed materials.

The satirical effect of the "Printed Material for Criticism" was based on juxtaposing elevated or official texts, on the one hand, with something very banal and commonplace, on the other. Names and titles of articles, magazines, artistic groups were mixed with ads recommending digestion pills or hair remedies. The resulting impression was not just a collection of texts, but an absolutely new meaning born out of the paradoxical combination. These collages were based on Constructive principles of compositional layout; diagonally placed materials, linear schemes, criss-cross reading. Rodchenko dictates the sequence of reading by using graphic accents as compositional links between lines, as well as positioning the texts beneath each other in various layers. In this way, the lines that run along the bottom layer serve as a background for the inscriptions that are placed on top and are therefore read last. It is important to keep this in mind, because photomontage also consists of several levels, devoting special space to separate shots and space for the montage itself,as certain images are glued over others.

Rodchenko-Modernism in Photography-

Rodchenko was looking for unexpected angles and perspective in photography in much the same way as Western European and American masters were also doing. He was even accused of plagiarism. In 1928 Soviet Photo magazine published an article called "An Illustrated Letter to the Editor". By comparing Rodchenko's angle shots of pine trees, houses with balconies, boats, etc. with similar works by Albert Renger-Patzsch, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and others, the author wanted to convinced the public that Rodchenko was not doing something original, but simply imitating bourgeois formalists."Foreign photographers should be ashamed to use the achievements of Soviet photographers for their imperialist purpose; moreover, to present them as their own,"mockingly wrote the author, who signed the Illustrated Letter" as Photographer. (Picture2)

Picture 2 "Soviet photo"magazine accusing Rodchenko of plagiarism

Rodchenko-How to Show Photography-

 During the period when he was experimenting with angle shots, Rodchenko limited himself with making printed of moderate size, gluing them, separately or in small groups, on standard sheets of thin grey card board, with narrow background, equalizing the scale and the proportion of the images. The prints were usually placed not in the centre of the sheet, but shifted upward, downwards, to the right, etc... the compositions were moving. When Rodchenko was working on a photography show, be it of his own photographs or those of others- as was the case, for example, with the exhibition of the Masters of Soviet Art(1935)-he grouped them in accordance with their themes or their formal-compositional characteristics. Rodchenko is always focued on creating a series. This is particularly true of the cycles that were commissioned by different newspapers, magazines and publishers of photo album.(Picture3)

Picture3 "The Jump 1932"

Typography 

Words is one of the communication tool, visual language. also a picture is worth a thousand words. If word and picture which are visual imagine both together, It is worth of ten thousand or more words.

 =which means, the typographic design(including typophoto) is really important to tell to viewer, what it wants to tell.

The typefaces chosen to represent design which eliminates distractions for the viewer and allows the information heavy design to be read and studies rather than merely seen and admired.

For example1.  Helvetica and International typographic design.

International typographic design tell that information between members of society. and provide solution to the viewer. Therefore designers supposed be objective and reliable transmitter. Design supposed to be clear to tell solution to the viewer. Helvetica supposedly has no character supposedly has no character, that is neutral, almost laissez-faire, and so ubiquitous. As to be virtually invisible. Character keeps good balance between solution and design.

For example2. Bauhaus typographic design

Bauhaus design which is minimal looking clearly lead to the solution.

"Form is a "diagram of forces" Bauhaus layout was not only horizontal and vertical, but angled, wrapped around objects. also Typography supposed to be practical for the use of the whole of society because It tells something. part of visual language.

Photography

"Photography is an art as a visual language because it has its very own system of expression means, different from any other art"

Rodchenko clearly demonstrated that this theory "photo art has its own visual language"

Rodchenko's photo-art came into existence as a result of a true documentary approach, and seizing the opportunity to instantly capture the sensations of modern man. And also his photography meant the possibility to create really contemporary art, to show the world. He writes that photography is full of miracles of visual form, combining the subtlest details with varied planes, contrasts of perspective, colour and form, miracles in conveying movement. Also general impression of his photography is formed through a sum of different materials and a combination of points of view.

What is typography? What is photography? What is typophoto?

Typography is the communication of ideas through printed design. and one of the most fundamental elements of visual communication that is able to deliver the message in a very precise, clear way. 

Photography is the visual representation of the thing seen. 

Typophoto is the most precise visual communication.

A list of references CSM library

bauhaus NEWS stimmen zur gegenwart

the bauhaus #itsalldesign

The Bauhaus ideal

Bauhaus and Bauhaus people

Modernism designing a new world V&A

Helvetica forever

Helvetica and the New York City Subway System

Movie Helvetica

Swiss Graphic Design

How to design a Typeface

30 Essential Typefaces for a lifetime

Rookledge's classic international

Russian Contructivism

 Rodchenko

Alexander Rodchenko: Revolution in Photography