Typographic Marks Unknown II: Ligatures & Blockquotes!

• September 21, 2010
  17 Comments // Typography

Much like the origins of the spoken word, those of the written are often forgotten.

And the marks that make up those words? Mostly never thought about. This can also be said of the question mark, the exclamation point, quote marks and the beautiful, beautiful ligature. Turns out their history is pretty interesting.

In September 08 I wrote an article on a small collection of typographic marks that had interesting histories, weren’t often seen in use or were often abused in their applications. It was a lot of fun and I wanted to give it another go.

But rather than have a look at a few of the lesser-known marks we use like I did with the previous article, I thought I’d go for the exact opposite — have a look at a couple of marks we all know about and use.

The Question Mark

Latin for question, quaestiō may be where the origin of the Question Mark can be found.

Whenever our Latin writing friends wanted to indicate a question or query, they would add quaestiō to the end of the sentence.

Lacking a sense of elegance, and not to mention taking up quite a bit of space, quaestiō was abbreviated to QO. This worked wonders for the scribes as their jobs became a little easier and they could produce texts quicker and have more space to work with.

But for some, QO seemed like a word with missing letters. To counter this, the O would be placed beneath the Q, rather than next to it — a clever little move that turned QO from an abbreviated word, to a glyph unto its self.

Being that this was now a sort of symbol that was always drawn by hand, the evolution of it to the question mark we know today is fairly evident (and pretty damn cool).

Borrowed from Wikipedia.

Good Designers Learn From History

• September 14, 2010
  17 Comments // Graphic Design

What a wasteful child I was, unaware of what graphic design history can give.

I foolishly thought of history as dusty facts and faded images. And only the foolish child thinks history doesn’t matter, that it’s irrelevant and inessential to growth.

I browsed Meggs’ History of Graphic Design sparingly, reading not much more than the captions.

Then a few designers kept catching my eye, so it was more reading — but no longer mere captions, but the illustrious body copy that Meggs gives us in search of understanding. Then it was everything I could get my hands on.

And something fantastic started to happen — I was becoming a better designer, producing work with greater reason, stronger justification and refined meaning.

Jan Tschichold is the designer who really kicked my interest in discovering beauty of image and theory in history

Graphic Design History Gives Us Theory

History is of as much importance as theory — they should be married in the classroom and honeymoon in the studio.

To truly understand and use a piece of theory properly, we need to know why it became worth knowing — in what conditions was it first developed and used, why was it successful and what was its original purpose and audience? Without this knowledge, how could we use it effectively?

Why your client is a shithead

• September 9, 2010
  22 Comments // Miscellaneous

Why is your client acting like a shithead?

More often than not, it’s our own fault. At least in the sense that we can fix it, therefore we can take responsibility.

Very, very few people are naturally painful. They don’t go home and tell their kids exactly how to play with their toys, tell their partners that they are taking too long to do whatever or that their dinner guests need to move their plates a little to the left and down an inch.

(Alright, so there might be some people like this, but they really are shitheads and there isn’t much we can do about that.)

They’re nice people, just getting through the day, trying to get their work done. They have a boss they work for, a family they love, a book they cry at and a movie they laugh through. They have their own stresses and worries and don’t want us to add to them.

They’re normal. I know, I know, a whacky thought. But they’re human and nothing more nor less.

So why is it that they treat us so poorly? What did we do to insult them? Why do they ridicule us and force us to think unnatural thoughts involving the tearing of flesh from limbs by the teeth of angered hounds?

Paula Scher, Herbert Matter & Swatch: Was it Plagiarism or Parody?

• September 7, 2010
  10 Comments // Creativity

After the flames of modernism became mere embers, the design community started to turn to something with more warmth.

People were after something comfortable — a song buried in memory.

So designers of the eighties began looking back to move forward.

Digging through the archives and history books, designers searched for visual languages which had more romance wrapped in their tones than that of the clean lines and bold type of modernism.

Philip B. Meggs, Meggs’ History of Graphic Design, 4th edn., pg 481.Should a designer sit down and find novelty in a historical style, they wouldn’t set out to copy any exact piece. They would learn the language it spoke and use its “vocabulary of forms and form relationships, reinventing and combining them in unexpected ways.”

Looking Back with Paula Scher

By the mid-eighties, Paula Scher had become known as a designer producing original and clever work that sometimes spoke with the tongue of the past, emulating style and feel in interesting and new ways.

Doing this, Scher and her business partner Terry Koppel put together a promotional booklet entitled Great Beginnings.

Compiling the opening paragraphs of well known novels, the booklet served as a great introduction to how one can reappropiate design styles long gone in fitting and interesting ways.

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The poster that got everyone thinking