A little rewind: Peignot

On last week’s class, we were studying about 1930s and modernism, we mentioned an Ukranian-French poster and typeface designer and painter, Adolphe Mouron Cassandre. He lived between years 1901-1968 and was one of the most influential and succesful person of his times. He worked for many important clients such as the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits,the Dubonnet wine company, Harper’s Bazaar etc. and he was so succesful that he managed to start his own advertising company called Alliance Graphique. Besides all of his many successful poster designs which you can see below, Cassandre designed very successful typefaces named Bifur (1929), the sans serif Acier Noir (1935), and an all-purpose font called Peignot (1937).

This specific font called Peignot is the reason that i am pushing rewind in the history of visual communication design and making this post. Around the beginning of the semester, i had tried to use this font for an imaginary company’s logotype for a course and i was critisized. Our teacher, Onur Yazicigil told me that this was a very specifically and particularly designed typeface for another purpose and it has been overused for years, so that i should never ever use this font again . He also mentioned that the designer of the font suicided while working in his home to make me give up on the typeface .

So i decided to make a little research about Peignot, here is what i have found so far: Peignot is constructed sans-serif display typeface. It was commissioned by the French foundry Deberny & Peignot. The typeface is notable for not having a traditional lowercase, but in its place a “multi-case” combining traditional lowercase and small capital characters. The typeface achieved some popularity in poster and advertising publishing from its release through the late 1940s. Use of Peignot declined with the growth of the International Typographic Style which i mentioned in my previous post. This style was in favour of Akzidenz-Grotesk typefaces. Later, Peignot experienced a revival in the 1970s as the typeface used on The Mary Tyler Moore Show and the second season of That’s My Mama. While often classified as “decorative,” the face is a serious exploration of typographic form and legibility. It is now owned by Linotype Corp. and is distributed both by Linotype and by Adobe.

These are the places that Peignot is used around 70s and 80s:

• At 245 East 58th Street is an example of the Peignot font used for The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970-1977).

• The 1970s toy “Spirotot” used Peignot in its instruction manual.

• Behind the Camera: The Unauthorized Story of Charlie’s Angels used Peignot in their titles.

• Peignot was also the font used for the title graphics of ABC’s Movie of the Week from 1969-1975.

• The Viacom “Pinball” logo used Peignot.

• Gary Larson’s The Far Side and The Far Side Gallery

• “Magic Tree” car air-fresheners:

• The logo of Easy Living magazine.

• Universidade Estadual de Londrina.

• Radio Philippines Network

And here is an example of its usage from Turkey. It is a carpets company:

As you can see, it is very common in many different areas. While researching i found this article from the website of a brand communication agency called Falk Harrison, they made their employees to comment about fonts they hate the most. Steve Harrison says he hates Peignot. I will forward the writing from him as it is:

“I HATE Peignot. What a completely ugly face. I remember it was used in the credits for the old Mary Tyler Moore show – the one with Ted Knight, Valerie Harper and Ed Asner. What a perfect show – except for the credits and title sequences. Peignot is really an all cap font, so there’s two strikes against it at the get-go. Reading it is like getting an email from someone typed in all caps. IS THERE REALLY A REASON FOR ALL THIS SHOUTING?? So to soften this, you can mix smaller font sizes of the cap letters to stand in as lower case letters. Really? It’s a grab bag of ascenders and descenders in an all-cap font- like the “lower case” letters want to be capital letters when they grow up. And they do, right in the middle of a word. Ugh! Peignot, I HATE you.”

It makes more sense what Onur Yazicigil said to me before after this research and article . For the rest of the most hated fonts go to http://www.falkharrison.com/tag/anna/

Helvetica

The world has gone through two world wars and especially after the Second World War, a need for graphic design emerged. In America, designers were heading towards minimalism because of Bauhaus effect. In addition to this, a new style emerged called ‘the International Typographic Style’ which is also known as ‘the Swiss Style’. Many different places from all over the world accepted this style and applied it to many graphic design elements. The most marked characteristics of this style were typographic elements frequently used, sans serif typefaces such as Helvetica, common use of photography, asymmetric layouts and use of grid.

In this post i especially want to focus on Helvetica which is a typeface developed by Max Miedinger with Edüard Hoffmann in 1957 for the Haas Type Foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland. Haas’ director Hoffmann commissioned Miedinger, a former employee and freelance designer, to draw an updated sans-serif typeface to add to their line. The result was called Neue Haas Grotesk, but its name was later changed to Helvetica, derived from Helvetia, the Latin name for Switzerland, when Haas’ German parent companies Stempel and Linotype began marketing the font internationally in 1961.

Soon many advertising agencies started to sell this new design style to their clients. Helvetica quickly appeared in corporate logos, signage for transportation systems, fine art prints, and myriad other uses worldwide.

There is a beautiful documentary about this beautiful typeface and its common use in urban spaces in major cities. It is made by Gary Hustwit in 2007.

Bauhaus

Bauhaus is a school founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany in 1919. The German term Bauhaus basically means ‘Architecture House’. It was a modern art school combining architecture, visual arts, sculpture and decorative arts in one place. The Bauhaus style would prove to be exceptionally influential in the 20th century and was characterized by simple, geometric forms. The most important components of the Bauhaus are industrial and product design. Their most important motto was ‘Form follows function.’

One additional interesting aspect of the Bauhaus movement was that  they were not teaching history because everything was supposed to be designed and created according to first principles rather than by following past movements.

Bauhaus was also politically engaged, promoting a rational, socialist vision of society, resulting in its being closed by the Nazis in 1933. As a result, many of the teachers and students emigrated to the United States and it showed its influence there between 1937 and 1938.

The illustration below is made by Benedikt Luft as a part of a poster series explaining history of visual communication. It shows influential people of Bauhaus.

A portrait of Kandinsky by Santiago Crescimone.

Modern Times

In the 18th and 19th century, a lot of major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology occured  in the world. It began in Brittany and spreaded through Western Europe, North America, Japan, and eventually the world. Steam power, mechanisation industries, development in iron-making techniques, new roads and railways. As a social impact of all these new things, ordinary working people found increased opportunities for employment in the new mills and factories, but these were often under strict working conditions with long hours of labour dominated by a pace set by machines. In order to reflect those times better, i wanted to share a scene from a movie from Charlie Chaplin. It is called Modern Times.

It is a 1936 comedy film that has his iconic Little Tramp character struggling to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film is a comment on the desperate employment and fiscal conditions many people faced during the Great Depression, conditions created, in Chaplin’s view, by the efficiencies of modern industrialization.

Michelangelo Buonarrotti and the Sistine Chapel

After the Late Middle Ages, a cultural movement which started a humanist faith in classical scholarship led to the search for ancient texts that would increase current scientific knowledge. This movement was called as Renaissance and showed its effect from 14th to 17th century in all over europe. However, it first occured in Italy. So i want to talk a little bit about the great High Renaissance artist, Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564), commonly known as Michelangelo.

He was a painter, sculptor, architect, poet, and engineer who made a great influence on the development of Western art. He is famous for his sculptures, frescos, architectural creations, ideas and thoughts.

Among many works of him, The Sistine Chapel has a special place for me and it is one of the places i want to visit the most. He was commissioned to paint the 12 Apostles against a starry sky, but lobbied for a different and more complex scheme, representing creation, the Downfall of Man and the Promise of Salvation through the prophets and Genealogy of Christ. The work is part of a larger scheme of decoration within the chapel which represents much of the doctrine of the Catholic Church. The composition eventually contained over 300 figures and it took 4 years to complete the ceiling of the chapel, and he worked in very difficult conditions. Many times, he tried to give up and run away. However, the result was one of the most influential works in fresco in the history of Western art.

This video explains his process of creating frescos very well:

And this one is a great movie about Michelangelo Buonarrotti and his times with the Sistine Chapel. Although it is a documentation movie about his life, you will never get bored from a second of it

From Manuscripts to Printing

While humanity was getting away from the Middle Ages very slowly, illuminated manuscripts were still being produced. However, together with these handwritten books, books which were printed also appeared. These books are called Incunabulas or Incunabulums. There are two types of these printed books: the block ones and the typographic ones. While block books were printed from a single carved wooden block for every page, typographic books were made with individual metal pieces of movable type on a printing press. Here are a few examples of Incunabulas from late 15th century:

Achieving all of these printing processes basically become real with the help of one key person’s name: Johannes Gutenberg. German craftsman and inventor who originated a method of printing from movable type that was used without important change until the 20th century. He made it possible to publish many copies of a single work at one time.

The followings are a few pages from Gutenberg Bible. It was printed in an edition of approximately 180 copies, was the first large-scale demonstration of the printing press as an instrument of cultural advancement.

An inspiration from Illuminated Manuscripts

While searching for illuminated books, i found this contemporary work. Amelia Jude did this designed book starting with the idea ‘What would have happened if Lil’ Wanye and his crew had been alive 2000 years ago.’ She created a manuscript book for the popular R&B star Lil’Wayne and put other stars as the people from religious stories. For example, Nicki Minaj is Mary Magdalene in the book and  Lil’ Kim is the Virgin Mary. I find this very creative and hilarious

You can check out from here:

http://www.behance.net/gallery/The-Bible-of-Weezus-F-Christ/2285702

A brief history on illuminated manuscripts

Illuminated manuscripts are manuscripts which writings and painted figures combine together. They can be like books or long rolls of parchments. This term was very common in Middle Ages which was an era coming after Greek and Roman antiquity. Human kind lived its darkest times in this period. There were lots of diseases and wars, the churches and monastries were very dominant among people. Because of this, the majority of these manuscripts are of a religious nature.

The scriptors were first planning the general layout of the page, then they went with sticks and ink on it. When the text was complete, they design beautiful figures within the page. As i mentioned before, the content was mostly about gospels, religious stories or the lives of saints. It was mostly common in Ireland, England, Germany and France at the time (12th and 13th century mostly).

To give an example, Book of Kells is the most famous one in manuscripts history. It was produced in Ireland, in A.D. 800. Here are a few pages of it:

Birth and Transformation of the Alphabet

In my last post, i talked about pictograms and ideograms and mentioned that Egyptians used these communication tools in their hieroglyphs in around 2000 B.C. The first seeds of the alphabets which mankind used in history appeared with these hieroglyphs. By 1600 B.C., the Phoenicians had developed symbols for spoken sounds, called phonograms. This is the reason that Phoenicians are generally credited as the founders of the alphabet, because they are the ones who developed the first true set of symbols representing spoken sounds. Around 1,000 B.C., the Phoenician alphabet was adapted by many other cultures including the Greeks, who developed the art of handwriting in several styles. The word “alphabet” comes from the first two Greek letters alpha and beta. Several hundred years later, the Romans used the Greek alphabet as the basis for the uppercase alphabet that we know today. Later, with the need of certain things,such as manuscripts, movable types and printing, the alphabet and typing developed. 

Over the past 5000 years, they evolved, linked to the rise and fall of
civilizations, different cultures adding their own distinct imprint on the
symbols of alphabet. Here is a primitive chart for this evolution:

Pictograms and Ideograms

When picture writing first began, the pictures represented the actual object they depicted. These were called pictograms or pictographs. For example, a picture of a sun within a family scene signified that the sun was part of that scene. Later, pictures started to represent some ideas, for example, if you saw a sun in a scene, it might symbolize not only the sun, but also concepts like daytime, warmth, or light. These were known as ideograms. It is commonly believed that pictograms appeared before ideograms. They were used by various ancient cultures all over the world since around 9000 BC and began to develop into logographic writing systems around 5000 BC. Pictograms are still in use as the main medium of written communication in some non-literate cultures in Africa, The Americas, and Oceania, and are often used as simple symbols in many daily area.

Egyptian hieroglyphics use both pictograms and ideograms.

First image is known as ‘no’, ‘non’ or ‘do not’. Second one communicates ‘non-smoking’ in the same way. These are examples of contemporary ideograms.

This is the most famous example of a contemporary pictogram which depicts and communicates ‘man’ and ‘woman’.