Graphic Designers: Compare and Contrast
1. Write a 3 paragraph essay, comparing 2 famous graphic designers listed below.
2. Pick 2 graphic design works, by each of the designers and compare and contrast their design styles.
3. Be sure to include samples of their designs in your comparisons
If the essay is not complete at the end of class, please hand in next class.
There are many famous graphic designers that have made their mark on the graphic design world. Many of them are responsible for designs that we see everyday. There are other famous graphic designers that we may not know by name, but pioneered the graphic design industry, turning many regular cartoonists into famous graphic designers.
The title of “graphic designer” is given to any person who creates a design buy putting together different shapes, images, art and typography to create a piece of their own. Graphic design is used in every industry. Graphic designers create advertisements, company logos, food labels, magazines, and all other publications.
There are many famous graphic designers that have pioneered the industry and have made a great mark on the design world. Here are 7 famous graphic designers and a few details about their work.
1. Giambattista Bodoni (1740 – 1813) was an Italian graphic designer. He was also an engraver, typographer, publisher and printer. His father and grandfather were both in the printmaking business in Italy, and after battling Malaria, he went to work in a printing house. He achieved a printing style that was aesthetically plain and unadorned. This is the very work he is known for in today’s age. The typeface (font) “Bodini,” was his creation.
2. Neville Brody (April 23, 1957) is an English graphic designer and typographer, who is most recognized for his work on “The Face” Magazine and “Arena” Magazine, in the 80’s and 90’s. He also designed album covers for popular music artists, including Depeche Mode. Neville Brody, along with his partner, Fwa Richards, launched their own design practice in 1994, called Research Studios. He is also a primary founding member of Fontworks. Brody is one of the most famous graphic designers of the 20th century and he is still very much a part of the graphic design industry.
3. David Carson (September 8, 1952) is known as the “Father of Grunge.” He is an American graphic designer who is most well known for his magazine design and experimental typography. David Carson has been called the “Most influential graphic designer of the 1990’s.” He is known all throughout the world for his typeface designs. He currently owns a studio in the US (California) and one in Zurich. He has won many awards in his time, and, like Neville Brody, is one of the most famous graphic designers around today.
4. Jonathan Ive (February, 1967) is an English designer and is the principal designer behind the iMac, MacBook, iPod, iPad, and iPhone. He is the Senior Vice-President of Industrial Design at Apple Inc. He is one of the most famous graphic designers of the 21st century. Among other awards and recognition, Fortune Magazine named Jonathan Ive “World’s Smartest Designer” in 2010.
5. Paul Rand (August 15, 1914-November 26, 1996) was a graphic designer best known for his corporate logo designs, including logos for companies such as UPS, IBM, Enron, ABC, and Westinghouse. Paul Rand had a unique ability to “sell” his abilities to large corporations, and educate them in the merit of graphic design. Paul Rand’s designs were often called simplistic, but he argued that designs did not need to be “esoteric to be original or exciting.” Rand also taught design at Yale University.
6. Milton Glaser (born June 26, 1929) is a graphic designer best known for his “I Love New York” logo. He also founded New York Magazine in 1968 with partner Clay Felker. He designs a wide variety of things, from book jackets, soup cans, album covers, magazine illustrations and advertisements. He was honored by President Barrack Obama in 2009, and was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
7. Alexey Brodovitch (1898-1971) was a Russian graphic designer who was most famous for his art direction of Harper’s Bazaar fashion magazine from 1938-1958. His career began as he was photographing the ballet. During the nights and weekends away from the ballet, he began to sketch designs for textiles, china, and jewelry. He built up an impressive portfolio and by the time his work at the ballet was through. He went on to do freelance work, while working for Athelia’, and eventually opened his own studio, L.’Atelier A.B. He later went on to teach at the University of the Arts in Pennsylvania.
2. Pick 2 graphic design works, by each of the designers and compare and contrast their design styles.
3. Be sure to include samples of their designs in your comparisons
If the essay is not complete at the end of class, please hand in next class.
There are many famous graphic designers that have made their mark on the graphic design world. Many of them are responsible for designs that we see everyday. There are other famous graphic designers that we may not know by name, but pioneered the graphic design industry, turning many regular cartoonists into famous graphic designers.
The title of “graphic designer” is given to any person who creates a design buy putting together different shapes, images, art and typography to create a piece of their own. Graphic design is used in every industry. Graphic designers create advertisements, company logos, food labels, magazines, and all other publications.
There are many famous graphic designers that have pioneered the industry and have made a great mark on the design world. Here are 7 famous graphic designers and a few details about their work.
1. Giambattista Bodoni (1740 – 1813) was an Italian graphic designer. He was also an engraver, typographer, publisher and printer. His father and grandfather were both in the printmaking business in Italy, and after battling Malaria, he went to work in a printing house. He achieved a printing style that was aesthetically plain and unadorned. This is the very work he is known for in today’s age. The typeface (font) “Bodini,” was his creation.
2. Neville Brody (April 23, 1957) is an English graphic designer and typographer, who is most recognized for his work on “The Face” Magazine and “Arena” Magazine, in the 80’s and 90’s. He also designed album covers for popular music artists, including Depeche Mode. Neville Brody, along with his partner, Fwa Richards, launched their own design practice in 1994, called Research Studios. He is also a primary founding member of Fontworks. Brody is one of the most famous graphic designers of the 20th century and he is still very much a part of the graphic design industry.
3. David Carson (September 8, 1952) is known as the “Father of Grunge.” He is an American graphic designer who is most well known for his magazine design and experimental typography. David Carson has been called the “Most influential graphic designer of the 1990’s.” He is known all throughout the world for his typeface designs. He currently owns a studio in the US (California) and one in Zurich. He has won many awards in his time, and, like Neville Brody, is one of the most famous graphic designers around today.
4. Jonathan Ive (February, 1967) is an English designer and is the principal designer behind the iMac, MacBook, iPod, iPad, and iPhone. He is the Senior Vice-President of Industrial Design at Apple Inc. He is one of the most famous graphic designers of the 21st century. Among other awards and recognition, Fortune Magazine named Jonathan Ive “World’s Smartest Designer” in 2010.
5. Paul Rand (August 15, 1914-November 26, 1996) was a graphic designer best known for his corporate logo designs, including logos for companies such as UPS, IBM, Enron, ABC, and Westinghouse. Paul Rand had a unique ability to “sell” his abilities to large corporations, and educate them in the merit of graphic design. Paul Rand’s designs were often called simplistic, but he argued that designs did not need to be “esoteric to be original or exciting.” Rand also taught design at Yale University.
6. Milton Glaser (born June 26, 1929) is a graphic designer best known for his “I Love New York” logo. He also founded New York Magazine in 1968 with partner Clay Felker. He designs a wide variety of things, from book jackets, soup cans, album covers, magazine illustrations and advertisements. He was honored by President Barrack Obama in 2009, and was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
7. Alexey Brodovitch (1898-1971) was a Russian graphic designer who was most famous for his art direction of Harper’s Bazaar fashion magazine from 1938-1958. His career began as he was photographing the ballet. During the nights and weekends away from the ballet, he began to sketch designs for textiles, china, and jewelry. He built up an impressive portfolio and by the time his work at the ballet was through. He went on to do freelance work, while working for Athelia’, and eventually opened his own studio, L.’Atelier A.B. He later went on to teach at the University of the Arts in Pennsylvania.
29 principles for making great font combinations
1. After reading the 29 principles below, choose 1 display font and 1 text font, and write a paragraph explaining, your reasons for putting those fonts together.
2. Use Adobe illustrator.
3. Your Heading should sit as type on a path.
4. Your paragraph should set as text in an area, or box.
5. Be Creative. Play with shapes and sizes.
6. Add color, anywhere.
When it comes to making font combinations, there are principles and methods, but no absolutes. You can’t apply all the principles or ideas listed here at the same time. Just peruse this list of ideas and see what strikes you as interesting, and then pursue creating your own interesting typeface pairs
In no particular order of importance…
1. Combine a serif and a sans serif to give “contrast” and not “concord”. The farther apart the typeface styles are, as a generic but not infallible guideline, the more luck you’ll have. Fonts that are too similar look bad together. Go for concord or contrast but avoid the murky middle ground where all you end up with conflict. Put Garamond and Sabon together to see what “murky” means. Or try Helvetica and Univers together, which is just as bad.
2. Don’t choose two serifs or two sans serifs to create a combination, unless they are radically different in some way.
3. Avoid choosing typefaces from the same categories, like Script or Slabs. You won’t get enough contrast, and will end up with conflict. For instance, Clarendon and Rockwell together is not a good thing at all.
4. Get enough difference in point size between the various fonts to make contrast.
5. Assign distinct roles to each font and commit to them without variance.
6. Try finding fonts from different categories that have similar x-heights and glyph widths. For instance, Futura with Times New Roman just doesn’t work that well because there is too much contrast between x-heights and widths, but in this case, mostly widths. However, if you are going to work with a condensed font, you can overcome this problem because now you’ve gone for an extreme contrast.
7. Find some kind of relationship between the basic shapes. For instance, look to the letter O in upper and lower case. Round letter O’s and taller oval O’s, in general don’t seem to like each other when creating pairs.
8. Contrast the overall weight of the fonts. For instance, Didot and Rockwell look really bad together for many reasons, but one clearly because they both have a heavy presence and just look mad at each other on the same page.
9. Pay close attention to what makes your eyes dart around. If your eyes are unsettled, something is off.
10. Create different typographic colors. By color, I mean the overall tint a block of type has when you squint at it. If both of your type samples with different fonts blur to about the same color, try playing with font size, line spacing, kerning, or even substituting one font for a heavier or lighter one from the same typeface.
11. Look for clever ways to create contrast. Increase the leading or tracking of one face while decreasing the other and see what happens.
12. Don’t neglect the fact that using different fonts from the same typeface may also be perfectly suitable. You might do well with a Helvetica Black for a header and a Helvetica normal for your body.
13. Try using typefaces from the same historical period. This will take a little bit of leg work, but not much.
14. Don’t forget to consider how the italics of each typeface look. You might get a nice match with a bold / normal pair, but then discover that their respective italic fonts have a cat fight right in the middle of your composition. Don’t overlook this!
15. Fonts that are too disparate may not work at all with a large amount of copy, but might work in a logo or strictly minimal text setting.
16. Try your variations with larger and smaller amounts of text. Personalities multiply or get obscured with varying amounts of texts.
17. Study and learn the classic typefaces on their own. Print them out and stare at them at lunch. Once you know them pretty well, then think about how they work with other typefaces. You’ll know much more going in to solve your design problem.
18. Go for a neutral contrast where neither font overpowers the other, and they both are content to play different roles without usurping all the attention one way or another. This kind of neutral contrast allows the interior personality of each typeface to speak on it’s own.
19. Find a combination that you didn’t make that you like and study why it works. The answers for further combinations are likely in there for you to extrapolate. The entire web is at your disposal for this research.
20. Stick with high quality typefaces you know the names of. Many free or cheap typefaces are going to be missing important glyphs, and this will kick you later if you don’t take care of this up front.
21. Stick to two typefaces, but use the natural fonts within those typefaces. This would give you up to 8 fonts to work with: normal, bold, italic, and bold italic. You could possibly have a third very unique font used in a very limited way, such as in the header of a magazine or logo. But if you require 3 or more fonts to achieve your objective, you might be working too hard at it.
22. If you can’t put your finger on it, change something even if you are not sure what to change. Just change it. Keep moving, keep iterating. You’ll either find it, or change the font for something else.
23. Change the font sizes. At certain point sizes, a font pair might not agree at all, but at a different point size, everything falls into place.
24. Avoid mixing monospaced fonts with proportional fonts. Well, you can try it, but don’t say you weren’t warned. I can’t ever get combos from those styles to mix well to my eye. I want to like OCR-A with something, but OCR-A only seems to like itself with nothing.
25. Contrast a distinctive header sans with a neutral body serif. It’s easy to get a golden combination when following that recipe.
26. Don’t mix moods: work with complimentary ones. A light-hearted Gil Sans is not going to play well with an all-business Didot, at least not very easily. Either get two fonts in the same general mood, or get one with some personality and another with a neutral personality.
27. Look for similar proportions, out of the box, and then set the fonts in distinct roles.
28. Make it obvious. Typeface choices need to have clear distinctions in order for a document to be legible. If there is not enough contrast, the visual hierarchy breaks down, and the roles you assign to different fonts won’t be clear.
29. Break the rules. See what happens. There are no absolutes, and a clever designer can make just about any two typefaces combine to work to one degree or another.
2. Use Adobe illustrator.
3. Your Heading should sit as type on a path.
4. Your paragraph should set as text in an area, or box.
5. Be Creative. Play with shapes and sizes.
6. Add color, anywhere.
When it comes to making font combinations, there are principles and methods, but no absolutes. You can’t apply all the principles or ideas listed here at the same time. Just peruse this list of ideas and see what strikes you as interesting, and then pursue creating your own interesting typeface pairs
In no particular order of importance…
1. Combine a serif and a sans serif to give “contrast” and not “concord”. The farther apart the typeface styles are, as a generic but not infallible guideline, the more luck you’ll have. Fonts that are too similar look bad together. Go for concord or contrast but avoid the murky middle ground where all you end up with conflict. Put Garamond and Sabon together to see what “murky” means. Or try Helvetica and Univers together, which is just as bad.
2. Don’t choose two serifs or two sans serifs to create a combination, unless they are radically different in some way.
3. Avoid choosing typefaces from the same categories, like Script or Slabs. You won’t get enough contrast, and will end up with conflict. For instance, Clarendon and Rockwell together is not a good thing at all.
4. Get enough difference in point size between the various fonts to make contrast.
5. Assign distinct roles to each font and commit to them without variance.
6. Try finding fonts from different categories that have similar x-heights and glyph widths. For instance, Futura with Times New Roman just doesn’t work that well because there is too much contrast between x-heights and widths, but in this case, mostly widths. However, if you are going to work with a condensed font, you can overcome this problem because now you’ve gone for an extreme contrast.
7. Find some kind of relationship between the basic shapes. For instance, look to the letter O in upper and lower case. Round letter O’s and taller oval O’s, in general don’t seem to like each other when creating pairs.
8. Contrast the overall weight of the fonts. For instance, Didot and Rockwell look really bad together for many reasons, but one clearly because they both have a heavy presence and just look mad at each other on the same page.
9. Pay close attention to what makes your eyes dart around. If your eyes are unsettled, something is off.
10. Create different typographic colors. By color, I mean the overall tint a block of type has when you squint at it. If both of your type samples with different fonts blur to about the same color, try playing with font size, line spacing, kerning, or even substituting one font for a heavier or lighter one from the same typeface.
11. Look for clever ways to create contrast. Increase the leading or tracking of one face while decreasing the other and see what happens.
12. Don’t neglect the fact that using different fonts from the same typeface may also be perfectly suitable. You might do well with a Helvetica Black for a header and a Helvetica normal for your body.
13. Try using typefaces from the same historical period. This will take a little bit of leg work, but not much.
14. Don’t forget to consider how the italics of each typeface look. You might get a nice match with a bold / normal pair, but then discover that their respective italic fonts have a cat fight right in the middle of your composition. Don’t overlook this!
15. Fonts that are too disparate may not work at all with a large amount of copy, but might work in a logo or strictly minimal text setting.
16. Try your variations with larger and smaller amounts of text. Personalities multiply or get obscured with varying amounts of texts.
17. Study and learn the classic typefaces on their own. Print them out and stare at them at lunch. Once you know them pretty well, then think about how they work with other typefaces. You’ll know much more going in to solve your design problem.
18. Go for a neutral contrast where neither font overpowers the other, and they both are content to play different roles without usurping all the attention one way or another. This kind of neutral contrast allows the interior personality of each typeface to speak on it’s own.
19. Find a combination that you didn’t make that you like and study why it works. The answers for further combinations are likely in there for you to extrapolate. The entire web is at your disposal for this research.
20. Stick with high quality typefaces you know the names of. Many free or cheap typefaces are going to be missing important glyphs, and this will kick you later if you don’t take care of this up front.
21. Stick to two typefaces, but use the natural fonts within those typefaces. This would give you up to 8 fonts to work with: normal, bold, italic, and bold italic. You could possibly have a third very unique font used in a very limited way, such as in the header of a magazine or logo. But if you require 3 or more fonts to achieve your objective, you might be working too hard at it.
22. If you can’t put your finger on it, change something even if you are not sure what to change. Just change it. Keep moving, keep iterating. You’ll either find it, or change the font for something else.
23. Change the font sizes. At certain point sizes, a font pair might not agree at all, but at a different point size, everything falls into place.
24. Avoid mixing monospaced fonts with proportional fonts. Well, you can try it, but don’t say you weren’t warned. I can’t ever get combos from those styles to mix well to my eye. I want to like OCR-A with something, but OCR-A only seems to like itself with nothing.
25. Contrast a distinctive header sans with a neutral body serif. It’s easy to get a golden combination when following that recipe.
26. Don’t mix moods: work with complimentary ones. A light-hearted Gil Sans is not going to play well with an all-business Didot, at least not very easily. Either get two fonts in the same general mood, or get one with some personality and another with a neutral personality.
27. Look for similar proportions, out of the box, and then set the fonts in distinct roles.
28. Make it obvious. Typeface choices need to have clear distinctions in order for a document to be legible. If there is not enough contrast, the visual hierarchy breaks down, and the roles you assign to different fonts won’t be clear.
29. Break the rules. See what happens. There are no absolutes, and a clever designer can make just about any two typefaces combine to work to one degree or another.