“I was not interested in a single result, but in the research. I was interested in process-oriented teaching…”- WOLFGANG WEINGART
Willi Kunz was one of the first people to introduce type to the UK from his hometown in Basel. He was best known for taking McLuhan’s typography and interpreting and adapting it.
Internationally known German Typographer and Graphic Designer Wolfgang Weingart was a student of Kunz. He studied in Merz Academy in Germany where he discovered his love for woodblock printing and type setting and later became an apprentice for Ruwe Printing where he first discovered the metal type and learned about swiss typography which became very inspirational to his work. In the1970’s he had started to play a large role in the development of typography by creating New Wave typography when studying at the Basel School Of Design. Weingart’s new typography included characteristics that he had been teaching including uneven letter spacing, different weights of type etc. He loved to create experimental pieces including using printing processes to create textures on chaotic looking but also playful posters. These posters became his most popular work, including the famous ‘Matterhorn’ poster.
Jan Tshichold was a german designer played an important role in the 20th century development of typography. He wanted to break away from structure and grid formats, such as asymmetrical typography and the use of sans-serif typefaces. His first work was published in Basel after he fled there in 1933 to escape the Nazis after they arrested him. In 1947, he started working for Penguin Books in London as their typographic designer. He created over 500 title pages for them and created the future for penguin paperback typography. A lot of his work was simplistic but effective hand rendered work that had its own structure.
Letter forms are divided into two groups; serif and sans-serif. Serif fonts have little tails or serifs on their letters that comes from the ink flowing after writing the letters. Sans-serif fonts don’t have those tails, they are more used for professional use in bodies of text.
To get an understanding of letter forms, our task one in class was to create a 3X3 grid of the same letter, demonstrating the letter in 9 different ways . I chose the letter W.
For Task two, we took one letter either uppercase or lowercase but added or subtracted material from it to change it’s characteristics:
https://www.figma.com/file/hTWK625JWrJOq3jSX9oXWr/week-3-task-1?t=phqzYKjMJ8pyprbF-1
