Good News exhibition, HBKsaar
On Tuesday, July 6, Lorenz Schirmer, Atilla Korap, and I made the two-hour drive to Saarbrücken, a small city on Germany’s border with France. We formed something of a “Linotype delegation” to an exhibition opening at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Saar. The exhibition, entitled Good News, showed a semester’s worth of student work from a class of the same name offered by BHK Saar guest professor Alessio Leonardi. Alessio has done a lot of work for Linotype over the past two decades, so attending his event was the least that we could do to show our support!
In Alessio’s class—if I understand correctly—students were tasked with creating one drawing a day. The topics would come from news stories. The work shown in the exhibition was primarily posters, although there were process books on a table, too.
Mahendra Patel lecture in Mainz
On Friday, June 25, I drove to Mainz with Otmar Hoefer and Atilla Korap, two Linotype colleagues. We made the short trip from our Bad Homburg office to hear a lecture from this year’s Gutenberg Prize winner, Mahendra Patel.The 18th Gutenberg Prize recipient, Mahendra Patel is the first designer from India to receive this award. The official presentation of the award took place on Saturday, June 26, in Mainz’s city hall. But Otmar, Atilla, and I were not present for that.
The lecture given by Mahendra Patel in the Gutenberg Museum on the night before the award ceremony was not about his typefaces, but about some of the results of various letter design workshops that he has conducted with students at schools in different countries over the past several decades. Mahendra Patel spoke in English, and his speech was summarized and translated into German by Tanja Huckenbeck.
Side Notes
As a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, I have to put on my RISD hat now and again. Today is one of those days. For what seems like ages, I’ve bothered with a school here in Germany. Specificially, I have been irked by their most-recent rebranding. Today, I saw the school’s name one time too many, so I decided to finally blog about it. What I think was formerly the Design Department of the Fachhochschule Köln has been calling itself the Köln International School of Design for a few years. They also use the abbreviation KISD. I don’t know how long the Rhode Island School of Design has been using been using the acronym “RISD,” it must be at least 60 years by now. The current seal of the Rhode Island School of Design, which features the RISD acronym in a script letter, was designed by John Howard Benson, the noted American calligrapher, stone-carver, and RISD Professor from 1931-56. No matter how you shake it, the Köln International School Design has more than one naming problem… the English word for Köln is Cologne, so even in their title they mix two languages. Adapting the KISD acronym strikes me as a rather cheap dig. Sure, every college everywhere wants to compete with the industry leaders. But it is the students, the professors, the resources, and the work that make an institution great. Copying the name of a successful school from another country just isn’t going to take you anywhere.
Typeface design in Germany during the twentieth century was a field populated by giants. Arguably, in no century before, and in no country elsewhere, were so many designers creating so many quality typefaces for the printing, communication, journalism, and advertising industries. The facts of Germany’s turbulent twentieth century history played large roles in many German designer’s lives and careers. Today, via Ivo Gabrowitsch’s Twitter stream, I learned that Karl-Heinz Lange (1929–2010) passed away a week ago. Although most of Karl-Heinz Lange’s career was spent designing and teaching in the former East Germany, he remained active well-into his “retirement.” Over the past several years, he worked with Ole Schäfer at primetype to re-release three of the typefaces he developed for VEB Typoart as OpenType fonts. As late as 2007, he was still teaching, most recently at the Fachhochschule Magdeburg-Stendal. Last year, coinciding with his 80th birthday, he presented at the August Typostammtisch in Berlin. He had announced that this would be his final lecture, so that he could have more time in his old age to spend on other things. The crowd that came to hear him filled the room to capacity; for many in the audience, it was standing-room-only. At the time, I sincerely hoped that he wouldn’t keep this promise; I hoped that that he would return to more design conferences and future Typostammtisches and hold additional lectures, and perhaps bring more typefaces with him, too. I will miss him.
There is a fair amount of information online about Karl-Heinz Lange and his work. The best article that I know of is in English, at PingMag, in an article about the VEB Typoart. Ivo Gabrowitsch has written a moving tribute as well, which may be read in German or in English. There is a brief biography at primetype.com, with links to the new OpenType versions of his typefaces. The Typografie.info Typowiki also has a brief biography (in German). Ivo Gabrowitsch wrote a nice summary of the Lange lecture at the Berlin Typostammtisch on Fontwerk (in German), which also contains links to more images on Flickr. A few years ago, I purchased a copy of Lange’s 1965 Schrift: schreiben, zeichnen, konstruieren, schneiden, malen. Photos of this booklet may be found in an earlier TypeOff. post.
(more…)On his flickr-stream, Michael Bundscherer has posted a few photos from the 20 April 2010 Typografische Gesellschaft München event. Olaf Leu was the evening’s main speaker. He’s on a book tour, promoting Bilanz: Die ersten 20 Jahre im Beruf (1951–1970) [link for purchasing]. I was sort of the opening act, giving a 15-minute presentation of my Malabar typeface. Thanks again for everything, Munich!
Back in 2001, I bought a copy of Kurt Weidemann’s massive (and massively-awesome) Wo der Buchstabe das Wort führt: Ansichten über Schrift und Typographie for 56 Marks. That was only about $25 at the time; the dollar had yet to fall against the Euro. Shortly, thereafter, I moved back to the United States. I shipped this book, and about 20 others, to my parent’s house in Baltimore with Deutsche Post. The super-retarded Deutsche Post Päckchen boxes that they sell in the post office broke apart somewhere bewteen Germany and the American coast, and only four book ever made it to their destination. I tried to file a complaint with Deutsche Post, but Deutsche Post refused to pay for the replacement of any of the books, claiming that the damage had been caused by the United States Postal Service. Of course, the USPS blamed the accident on the Germans. I never got any money from either of them. Today I see that the cheapest copies of Wo der Buchstabe das Wort führt sell for 85 euros, well over $100. New York investors should ignore mortgages, and start buying German design books instead.
Over at Thomas Kunz’s blog, ABCdarium, is an interview with Gerard Unger. Thomas regularly interviews typeface designers for his site, and the post are always interesting. He even interviewed me several months ago. But to date, I think that the interview with Gerard is probably the shortest of all Thomas’s interviews. In fact, it may be the shortest Gerard Unger interview yet published. Still, it is worth a read! The text is in German.
Over at the ShoType English-language blog is an article about an MATD alumna’s visit to Japan. Nice little summary of non-Latin typeface design at Reading, from an outsider’s point of view.
Ivo Gabrowitsch and Christoph Koeberlin, both of FSI FontShop International in Berlin, simultaneously published “best fonts of 2009″ lists on their respective blogs this morning. The text on both sites is in German, but type samples are for everyone! Each list is fabulous in its own right, but since I read Ivo’s list first, he gets the primary link. A great summary, Ivo gives a sort of “Top 10,” or at least I like to think about it that way, since it would mean that fellow MATD-alum Michael Hochleitner’s Ingeborg is the best font of the year! Christoph’s list, however, really is most excellent. And that isn’t because it has 12 items instead of 10, or because my Malabar is on it. Simply put, Christoph’s list is just so much closer to my own typographic taste! It’s got Libelle, and Gerrit Noordzij’s Burgundica, which is simply the most divine among the many new blackletters. Nara—from Typotheque—is there, too. Finally, the way that Christoph shows off the type in the graphics on his site is really good. I mean, it is a kind of my-awful-looking-website-is-crying-with-bitter-envy good. Great job, Christoph! And Ivo, too.
A year ago, on October 17, 2009, I posted my personal recipe for happiness. On Saturday, I am finally moving to Berlin. So how is my post-MATD Reading master plan coming along?
DB Mobility BahnCard 100iPhone 3G 8GBMove to Berlin- Get a dog
- Achieve personal bliss
What a difference a year makes! I’m already on my second DB Mobility BahnCard 100. As you can see, I have yet to achieve personal bliss. But I’m working on it. I’ve penciled in my potential dog-getting date for sometime in February or March 2010.
Back in 2001–2002, while I was finishing up my BFA at RISD, I spent a semester abroad at the Fachhochschule Wiesbaden, a large-ish University of Applied Sciences in Wiesbaden, Germany. The German-language blog Design Tagebuch (design diary) reports that this university has gotten a new name: the institution is now going to be know as the Hochschule RheinMain. Total bullocks! While I think that the new school logo is an improvement (the old logo looked like the US state of Texas with a hat on it), I find the name “Hochschule RheinMain” rather pompous.
In Germany’s Rhein–Main region, there are already several Hochschulen (universities). If we limit the number to only include state-run schools, we will find two in Mainz and several in Frankfurt, as well as the state of Hessen’s official art academy in Offenbach. And three more to be found in Darmstadt! Many of these universities have larger student bodies than the old Fachhochschule Wiesbaden did. Plus, while Wiesbaden may be the official political capital of the state of Hessen, the center of the Rhein–Main region—as well as the cultural and financial hub of the area—is Frankfurt. So if any Hochschule in the Rhein–Main area should rename itself the “Hochschule RheinMain,” perhaps it should have been the FH Frankfurt, and not the FH Wiesbaden.
Back in 2004, the annual ATypI conference was hosted in Prague. The local Museum of Decorative Arts was hosting a show at the same time: E-A-T, a selection of contemporary Czech and Slovak type design. Several tremendous designs caught my eye, and I wrote up a review of the exhibition for Typotheque. I always remembered one specific design in the back of my mind, too…
Adriq, the first PostScript typeface produced in Czechoslovakia, was designed at the Prague Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design by Andrej Krátky in 1988. Drawing severe, narrow calligraphic letterforms that all sport an almost wedge-shaped serif style, Krátky developed this dynamic, constructed type family. In addition to the Roman, Adriq has both a Kursive style (an upright italic), as well as an Italic.
Typotheque has just announced that Adriq has finally been completed and released under the name Nara. Nikola Djurek and Peter Bilak are credited on the site as having helped finish everything up. Fantastic work!
