Typeface is for more than books, signs and posters, as the Copenhagen-based Playtype (the more “fun” younger sibling of the Danish brand agency e-Types) shows, instilling their love for…
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Amsterdam designer Monique Goossens has made a typeface with strands of human hair.
Goossens’ Hair Typography is crafted by arranging bunches of hairs into the shapes of single letters. Each character has a dense centre and becomes increasingly sparse towards the edges.
“The shapes of the letters are created by forming the hairs into a legible character,” said Goossens. “The ends of the hairs create an organised chaos – an energetic play of lines, which form a haze around the shape.”
The script letters have fluid strokes and the designer compares the individual filaments to fine pen lines. Each letter has interwoven curling lines and can be made in a variety of weights.
Once the letters are formed, Goossens photographs the characters for reproduction. The designer told Dezeen that she hopes the font will be used for magazine or book covers, and individual commissions can be made directly from the designer.
Goossens studied interior design at Academie Artemis in Amsterdam, and photography and design at Design Academy Eindhoven. She currently teaches Interior Design and Visual Communication at Academie Artemis.
Other objects made of hair on Dezeen include a hairbrush, a lamp and a range of spectacle frames.
In other graphic design news, British graphic designer Peter Saville was named winner of this year’s London Design Medal and announced he is working on a new identity for Kanye West.
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Images are courtesy of the designer.
Here’s a full project description from Goossens:
Hair Typography
The hair letters consist of hundreds of hairs and give the impression of being fine pen drawings. The basic shape of the letters are created by forming the hairs into a legible character, during which I follow the natural characteristics of the hairs: curly, rounded corners, springiness.
To a great extent, it is the dynamic of the hairs which determines the shape of the letters. The ends of the hairs create an organized chaos, an energetic play of lines which forms a haze around the letter’s basic shape.
About Monique Goossens
Designer Monique Goossens studied at Academie Artemis in Amsterdam, graduating cum laude in Interior Design Styling in 2006. During her studies, she developed an interest in the relationship between design and photography which she went on to explore in depth during further study at the Design Academy in Eindhoven.
Monique Goossens’ work includes elements of both design and autonomous art. It often takes the form of staged images in which she challenges established concepts of function and material. In consequence, shifts occur at elementary level and result in a degree of estrangement. A refined appreciation of materials enhances this process, leading to beautiful and unexpected discoveries. Photographs of these scenes become the definitive works.
Monique’s work is playful, humorous, surprising. Her graphic work follows a similar process as she collates photographs into books and develops letter types using a range of materials.
Monique currently teaches Interior Prognoses at Academie Artemis.
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Monique Goossens appeared first on Dezeen.
1. Lightning Strikes in the Grand Canyon The majesty of the Grand Canyon is one of the greatest natural wonders in the US—and the world. Even the most pedestrian photographers can capture beautiful images of the two-billion-year-old geological work in progress. But when…
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Hundreds of cut-out paper letters tell the history of typefaces in this stop-motion animation by Canadian graphic designer Ben Barrett-Forrest.
Starting in the fifteenth century with Johannes Gutenberg’s Blackletter font, The History of Typography charts the major innovations in font design up to the present day.
Barrett-Forrest explains the variations between early serif fonts such as Caslon and Baskerville and how they evolved into modern sans serif fonts such as Futura and Helvetica.
Cutting out and animating the letters took Barrett-Forrest around 140 hours over a period of two months, on top of dozens of hours of research and post-production.
“It was fairly tedious cutting out almost 300 paper letters, especially the serif typefaces with their tiny spikes, but it soon became almost meditative,” says Barrett-Forrest.
“I feel that I have a much closer connection with each of the typefaces that I addressed, now that I have laboured to create each one.”
Originally from Whitehorse in the northern Canadian territory of Yukon, Barrett-Forrest is currently studying multimedia at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He also runs Forrest Media, a graphic design and media production company.
Other fonts on Dezeen include a typeface of impossible shapes inspired by artist M.C. Escher and graphic designer Neville Brody’s reworking of the Royal College of Art’s house font – see all fonts.
We recently featured an animation of the best-known buildings of 26 architects, one for each letter of the alphabet – see all animations.
The post The History of Typography by
Ben Barrett-Forrest appeared first on Dezeen.
Graphic designer David Pearson has censored the cover of George Orwell’s classic novel 1984 as part of his series of redesigned books for publisher Penguin.
Referencing the novel’s themes of totalitarianism and censorship, David Pearson debossed the title and author and covered them with black foiling.
Penguin’s Great Orwell series also includes Down and Out in Paris and London, whose cover by Pearson frames a Vorticist-style screenprint of the two cities by Paul Catherall.
Homage to Catalonia, an account of Orwell’s experiences during the Spanish Civil War, features a repeated cubist line drawing of a soldier.
Animal Farm’s cover is dominated by bold, cartoonish lettering in the style of an old movie poster, while Politics and the English Language uses a new font, Caslon Great Primer Rounded, which is inspired by a typeface created by Caslon & Catherwood in 1821.
We recently featured a font based on an impossible triangle and an alphabet of sculptural letters that can be read from four sides – see all fonts on Dezeen.
Other graphic design we’ve published lately includes stripy album artwork by British designer Peter Saville and a collection of recognisable products with their brand names removed – see all graphics on Dezeen.
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by David Pearson appeared first on Dezeen.
Dutch graphic designer Jacques Le Bailly has designed a typeface of impossible shapes inspired by the optical trickery of artist M.C. Escher (+ slideshow).
Jacques Le Bailly’s Macula font is based on the Penrose triangle, a shape that appears to have depth but would be impossible to reproduce in three dimensions.
Like the Penrose triangle and the mathematically inspired paintings of M.C. Escher, the typeface’s three-dimensional appearance could only exist as a flat image.
“To keep the typeface lively every single character, down to the punctuation and floating accents, needed to have two versions, as if looked at from two different viewpoints,” says Le Bailly.
“Often the simple letters were the most difficult, because they offered very few possibilities or starting points,” he added.
Some of the letters are less complex in order to create a more cohesive and attractive typeface, while the ampersand and the @ symbol have been given extra detailing to make them stand out.
The name macula refers to the part of the the eye that’s responsible for central vision, and was chosen by the designer because he suffers from a related defect in his right eye.
We’ve previously featured a font designed for the Royal College of Art by Neville Brody and Margaret Calvert and a font developed by Nokia to work in any language – see all font designs on Dezeen.
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Jacques Le Bailly appeared first on Dezeen.
Graphic designer Neville Brody has reworked the Royal College of Art’s house font by Margaret Calvert as part of the London institution’s rebrand.
The RCA asked Neville Brody, who made his name as art director of fashion magazines The Face and Arena and is now dean of communication at the college, to come up with a new identity for its buildings and press material.
Brody and his design office Research Studios worked with Henrik Kubel, a graphic designer who graduated from the RCA in 2000, to produce the Calvert Brody typeface as a “remixed” version of the college’s house font Calvert.
The Calvert font is by Margaret Calvert, the graphic designer best known for creating the UK’s road signage system in the 1960s and a former graphic design course director at the college.
“The idea is like bringing in a producer and doing a remix of music, so I remixed Margaret’s font,” Brody told Dezeen. “I’ve tried to make it both more classical by making it more exaggerated and thick and thin, and at the same time make it more industrial and contemporary, by bringing in the – hopefully interestingly – redrawn pieces plus the stencil.”
Calvert Brody will be used throughout the college’s buildings, either sprayed directly onto walls or laser-cut into metal, and will also appear in print and on screen.
“Hopefully we’ve come up with an interesting typeface that encapsulates a lot of different ideas about the Royal College, which is sort of robust but innovative; it’s slightly non-traditional but at the same time giving a nod to a very traditional source,” Brody added.
The designers were asked to reflect the college’s history as well its current reputation for innovative design and fine art practice, said Octavia Reeve, the RCA’s senior publishing manager, who led the rebrand with the designers.
“The typography is key to this,” she told Dezeen. ”It’s a great message that three generations of RCA graphic designers have collaborated on this essential new element of the RCA’s identity,” she added.
The rest of the RCA’s rebrand, also designed by Research Studios, launches on 1st January 2013 to coincide with the 175th anniversary of the founding of the college.
Dezeen previously published a movie with Neville Brody for the Design Museum’s Super Contemporary exhibition, in which he talks about the people, places and cultures that have defined his life in London.
Writer and broadcaster Andrew Marr recently warned that the Royal College of Art will end up as a “Chinese finishing school” unless the UK government does more to encourage young people to study art and design.
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The post Calvert Brody typeface by Margaret Calvert,
Neville Brody and Henrik Kubel appeared first on Dezeen.
Dezeen Wire: the all-caps text on New York’s street signs is being replaced by upper and lower case letters in a different font, called Clearview – New York Times.
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– New York Times appeared first on Dezeen.
Dezeen Wire: despite being one of the most significant scientific events of the past decade, the recent discovery of the Higgs boson particle was announced using Comic Sans, the most hated, informal typeface – HUH
The post “Higgs boson discovery announced
in Comic Sans” – HUH appeared first on Dezeen.
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