After Mary Ann Bolger wrote a fairly favorable review of Graphic Design: A New History in Eye no. 66 (vol. 17, Autumn 2007), I wrote a letter to the magazine pointing out that it is “riddled with errors”, most of them relating to typefaces and typography. The letter was published in Eye no. 67 (vol. 17, Spring 2008) and led, several months later, to a response from Prof. Eskilson. He wanted to know what I meant by “riddled with errors” and asked me for a detailed list. To his credit, he said he wanted the list in order to improve any subsequent editions of his book. I gave it to him and hope that he (and his publisher) follow through. In the meantime, here is an amended version of that list.
Graphic Design: A New History
Stephen J. Eskilson
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007
Senior Managing Editor Richard Mason.
Graphic Design: A New History
Stephen J. Eskilson
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007
Senior Managing Editor Richard Mason.
p. 15 “Carolingian Minuscules” should be “Carolingian minuscules”
p. 16, fig. 6 “Claude Garamond, Garamond Typeface, 1540.”
[The image is of Garamond Classico by Franco Luin (1993).]
p. 17 “Anton Schönsperger” should be “Johannes Schönsperger the elder”
p. 20, fig. 9 above “William Caslon, Caslon Typeface, 1725.”
[The image is of Berthold Caslon Buch by Günter Gerhard Lange (1977).]
p. 20 “Caslon is a Transitional roman….”
[William Caslon’s types vary greatly from size to size. His text faces are generally described as Dutch Oldstyle, but his larger faces could reasonably be called Transitional (or, to follow German practice, Baroque).]
p. 21, fig. 10 “John Baskerville, Baskerville Roman (great primer), printed by John Baskerville, Birmingham, England, 1772. St. Bride’s Printing Library, London.”
[The image is of a digital version of Fry’s Baskerville cut by Isaac Moore in 1768. Why is St. Bride’s Printing Library listed as a source for a digital font?]
p. 21 “In 1750, Baskerville established a foundry in Birmingham and began promoting his eponymous type….”
[Baskerville never established a foundry nor did he sell his types—which did not bear his name until the 20th c.—commercially. Baskerville’s punches were probably cut by John Handy. The cutting seems to have occurred between 1750 and 1754.]
p. 21 “…the Didot Foundry, which was originally established in 1713 by François Didot…”
[François Didot, the paterfamilias of the Didot dynasty, was licensed as a bookseller in 1713 and as a master printer in 1754. His son Pierre-François Didot (1732-1793) was the first member of the family to function as a typefounder.]
p. 22, fig. 12 “Johann F. Unger and F. Didot, Unger-Fraktur Typeface, 1793.” [It is not necessary to include “typeface” in the title of a font unless that is part of its given name; and the word should not be capitalized. Unger-Fraktur was cut by Unger alone after Didot had failed to cut a satisfactory fraktur for him.]
p. 23, fig. 13 “Giambattista Bodoni, Bodoni Typeface, 1785.”
[The image is ITC Bodoni 72 by Janice Prescott, Holly Goldsmith, Jim Parkinson and Sumner Stone (1994).]
p. 16, fig. 6 “Claude Garamond, Garamond Typeface, 1540.”
[The image is of Garamond Classico by Franco Luin (1993).]
p. 17 “Anton Schönsperger” should be “Johannes Schönsperger the elder”
p. 20, fig. 9 above “William Caslon, Caslon Typeface, 1725.”
[The image is of Berthold Caslon Buch by Günter Gerhard Lange (1977).]
p. 20 “Caslon is a Transitional roman….”
[William Caslon’s types vary greatly from size to size. His text faces are generally described as Dutch Oldstyle, but his larger faces could reasonably be called Transitional (or, to follow German practice, Baroque).]
p. 21, fig. 10 “John Baskerville, Baskerville Roman (great primer), printed by John Baskerville, Birmingham, England, 1772. St. Bride’s Printing Library, London.”
[The image is of a digital version of Fry’s Baskerville cut by Isaac Moore in 1768. Why is St. Bride’s Printing Library listed as a source for a digital font?]
p. 21 “In 1750, Baskerville established a foundry in Birmingham and began promoting his eponymous type….”
[Baskerville never established a foundry nor did he sell his types—which did not bear his name until the 20th c.—commercially. Baskerville’s punches were probably cut by John Handy. The cutting seems to have occurred between 1750 and 1754.]
p. 21 “…the Didot Foundry, which was originally established in 1713 by François Didot…”
[François Didot, the paterfamilias of the Didot dynasty, was licensed as a bookseller in 1713 and as a master printer in 1754. His son Pierre-François Didot (1732-1793) was the first member of the family to function as a typefounder.]
p. 22, fig. 12 “Johann F. Unger and F. Didot, Unger-Fraktur Typeface, 1793.” [It is not necessary to include “typeface” in the title of a font unless that is part of its given name; and the word should not be capitalized. Unger-Fraktur was cut by Unger alone after Didot had failed to cut a satisfactory fraktur for him.]
p. 23, fig. 13 “Giambattista Bodoni, Bodoni Typeface, 1785.”
[The image is ITC Bodoni 72 by Janice Prescott, Holly Goldsmith, Jim Parkinson and Sumner Stone (1994).]
p. 23 “…Bodoni would prove to be more popular than the startlingly original Didot…”
[This statement is true of 20th c. America, but certainly not of 19th c. Europe or even 20th c. France.]
[This statement is true of 20th c. America, but certainly not of 19th c. Europe or even 20th c. France.]
p. 26, fig. 18 “Anonymous, Specimens of Decorative Typefaces, c.1850.”
[The image is of three handlettered alphabets, not typefaces.]
[The image is of three handlettered alphabets, not typefaces.]
p. 34, fig. 1.4 “William Morris, Golden Roman Typeface, from Art & Its Producers, 1896.”
[Morris’ face was called the Golden type—after The Golden Legend, the first book printed in it—not Golden Roman.]
p. 35 “Morris also worked in the related field of typography, creating a number of historicist typefaces, including Golden (fig. 1.4), a roman font based on the Old Style type of Nicholas Jenson.”
[Typography is the selection and arrangement of type, not the design of type.]
p. 46, fig. 1.19 “Georges Auriol, Auriol Typeface, 1902.”
[Auriol spelled his name George in the English fashion. His eponymous typeface was issued in 1901, not 1902. The image, a digital version of Auriol, has the following text: “The typeface called Auriol was designed in 1901 by Georges [sic] Auriol (1863–1939) for the Deberny & Peignot foundry.” The face was actually issued by G. Peignot & Sons which did not merge with the Deberny foundry until 1924.]
p. 52 “A key moment in the history of American graphic design came in 1889, when the widely read periodical Harper’s Magazine published a poster and cover page for its holiday issue (fig. 1.26), designed by the Swiss-born French artist Eugène Grasset (1841–1917).”
[The Harper’s Magazine cover shown in fig. 1.26 is dated Christmas 1892 (as the caption correctly states). Is the year in the text wrong or is the wrong image shown?]
p. 57 “Two industrial machines, the Linotype (1886) and the Monotype (1889), allowed typesetters to work with a punch keyboard that directly controlled machinery for casting hot-metal type (fig. 1.34).”
[The date of the Monotype should be 1887.]
p. 57 “Handset typography was rendered obsolete by these inventions almost overnight….”
[This is not true. Outside of newspaper printing, the two composing machines did not gain widespread acceptance until the 1920s.]
p. 58, fig. 1.33 “William Bradley, Bradley Typeface. The Inland Printer, vol. 14, no. 3, December 1894.”
[The masthead of the magazine is not type but handlettering. It is the source of ATF’s Bradley typeface.]
p. 58 “Additionally, ‘grotesque’ was also used in the United States to denote sans serif faces.”
[Grotesque was the British term for sans serifs in the 19th c. The preferred American term, as Eskilson notes earlier, was Gothic.]
p. 58 “Franklin Gothic was produced by ATF in a wide variety of sizes and weights….”
[ATF issued Franklin Gothic in a single (heavy) weight. For customers who wanted other weights they suggested Alternate Gothic, News Gothic, Monotone Gothic and Lightline Gothic as companions. ITC Franklin Gothic was designed to fill this void.]
p. 59, fig. 1.35 “Morris Fuller Benton, Franklin Gothic Typeface, 1902.”
[The image is the regular weight of ITC Franklin Gothic by Victor Caruso (1980).]
p. 59 “The typesetting industry witnessed a rebirth of sorts because of the competition between the makers of the Linotype and Monotype machines, each of which used proprietary faces in order to gain a competitive advantage. In later years, this battle created a situation where almost all standard faces existed in two variants: one initially created for the Linotype, the other for the Monotype machine.”
[No dates are provided for these assertions. Monotype had no proprietary faces prior to 1913 and Linotype had none prior to 1913. From the 1920s to the end of the 1970s both companies developed libraries of proprietary faces that the other did not have (the exceptions to this being Times New Roman which Monotype licensed to Linotype as Times Roman, and Sabon which was developed simultaneously for both machines). It is true that both Linotype and Monotype had their own versions of a handful of classic faces—eg. Garamond, Caslon, Baskerville and Bodoni—but this was a small number of faces prior to the age of Postscript fonts. And it should be remembered that they were not alone in having their own versions of the classics. For instance, metal versions of Garamond were offered not only by Linotype and Monotype but by ATF, Ludlow, Amsterdam Type Foundry, Grafotechna, VEB Typoart, Stempel, Berthold and Simoncini.]
p. 94 “Blackletter characters strongly resemble the letters formed by the blunt-edged quill pen used to write manuscripts.”
[This is not true for all variants of blackletter at all times.]
p. 94 “By the 1890s, much of German printing relied on the variant of blackletter named ‘fraktur,’ and this term is sometimes used casually as a synonym for blackletter.”
[In Germany, fraktur is the common name for not only a specific variant of blackletter but for the entire category. It is not used casually.]
p. 94 “Blackletter is highly ornamental, featuring exaggerated calligraphic flourishes and strong modeling of the stems of the letters.”
[This is not true of blackletter in general, though it does apply to some letters in some faces. Most ornamentation in blackletter types is confined to the capitals, principally those that are in the “Old English” mode. (There are far more decorative roman faces than there are decorative blackletter ones.) Very few blackletter faces have exaggerated calligraphic flourishes. In general, Blackletter tends to be simple and compact.]
p. 94 “Recent studies have shown that readers familiar with blackletter read at the same speed as readers of roman typefaces….”
[There have been no recent studies on this subject. This claim is based on an assertion by Zuzana Licko that we read best what we read most.]
p. 94, fig. 2.31 “Otto Weisert, Bocklin Typeface, 1904.” should be “Otto Weisert, Arnold Böcklin typeface], 1904.”
[The image is a digital version.]
p. 94 “the famous type specialist Karl Klingspor” Karl Klingspor was not a type specialist but the co-owner with his brother Wilhelm Klingspor of the Rudhard’sche foundry which became the Gebruder Klingspor foundry. He did not design any typefaces.
p. 102 “The lettering in the logo [1908] is derived from a typeface that Behrens created for AEG, the first time that a corporation had ever acquired its own copyrighted lettering. This face was called Behrens-Antiqua when it was released to the public by the Klingspor foundry some years later (fig. 2.41).”
[Frederic W. Goudy created typefaces for Schlesinger & Mayer department store in 1902, Barron’s Boston News Letter in 1904, and for the Mandel Brothers department store in 1907. Although none of these businesses was as large as AEG, they still preceded Behrens-Antiqua. There is no mention of the heavy, oldstyle alphabet that Behrens designed for AEG sometime between 1908 and 1912 (see G19 in Industriekultur: Peter Behrens and the AEG, p. 440).]
p. 103, fig. 2.43 “Peter Behrens, AEG Lamp, 1910. Poster. Offset lithograph….”
[This poster is not an offset lithograph but a stone lithograph. Offset lithography, invented in 1904, was not yet in widespread use at the time this poster was made.]
p. 104 “Behrens also made an important contribution to German typography, especially through the three typefaces he designed, Behrens-Antiqua…, Behrens-Fraktur, and Behrens-Schrift….”
[There is no typeface called Behrens-Fraktur. Behrens’ third design was Behrens Medieval (1914).]
p. 104, re: fig. 2.45 “The subdued text is separate from the image, and is notable only for its muscular ‘T,’ which is compressed by neighboring letters on both sides—an example of spacing between letters done for decorative effect.”
[The tall T is a common feature in Roman inscriptions. It, along with the tall I and tall Y (used in Greek words), was used to save space in a line. Behrens has employed the tall T in the first and fourth lines for that very reason. In the second and third lines—where space is not an issue—he probably included it for its classicizing effect. The form of the M and N (without serifs at their apexes) is proof that he was consciously mimicking Imperial Roman capitals.]
p. 108 “maque-tte” —poor hyphenation
p. 115 “Perhaps indicative of his high status as a graphic designer a decade after the Priester contest, is the manner in which Bernhard uses his name as a compositional device to balance the rectangle formed by the poster frame in the upper left.”
[Bernhard was not the only poster designer in his day to carefully use his signature as a design element: Thomas Heine (see fig. 2.32), Peter Behrens (see fig. 2.45), Hans Rudi Erdt (see fig. 3.4) and especially Ludwig Hohlwein (see figs. 3.6, 3.7 and 3.34) are contemporaneous examples.]
p. 116 “In 1914, Friedrich Bauer (1863–1943) designed an excellent hybrid type called Hamburger Druckschrift.”
[The correct date is 1904.]
p. 130 “…Sachplakat lettering is roman and often features small serifs, while Bernhard here [fig. 3.31] embracing the blackletter tradition.”
[Bernhard and others used fraktur in posters that are in the Sachplakat style (see fig. 3.8, Das Plakat, 1916). The use of blackletter was a response to the nationalism engendered by World War I, not a sign of a new style of poster.]
p. 139, fig. 3.43 “The words are presented to the viewer as a jumble of mixed type….”
[There is no type in the poster. All of the letters have been drawn by hand in imitation of specific typefaces.]
p. 152 re: fig. 4.9 “Kauffer has also done something exciting with the hand-drawn lettering at the bottom of Winter Sales, where he has designed the word ‘Underground’ to flicker back and forth in the viewer’s eye between two and three dimensions, as the shading momentarily creates a sense of sculptural relief. This type of three-dimensional lettering was quite popular in the nineteenth century as display type, but Kauffer has here infused it with Cubism so that the shadows sometimes break away from the shape of the letters.”
[It is more likely that Kauffer picked up this method of decorating letters from signpainter’s manuals than from Cubism.]
p. 156 line 3 is poorly ragged, suggesting that a new paragraph is starting on line 4.
p. 156 “Johnston developed an eponymous face… Johnston Sans (fig. 4.13).”
[In fact, Johnston referred to the design as the Underground Alphabet while he was working on it. The first sheet of the finished design (1917) was labeled “Standard Alphabet. Johnston Type.” suggesting that either Waterlow & Sons, the printers, or London Transport named it after Johnston. When it became Johnston Sans is not discussed by Justin Howes in his monograph on the face.]
p. 156 “This spare display type [Johnston Sans] is highly geometric….”
[Although Edward Johnston used a compass to construct the round letters such as C, G and O, the typeface overall is not geometric but humanist in its forms.]
p. 156 re: Johnston Sans “…it was more important to Johnston and Pick that the lettering provided the same sense of glamour and modernity that the abstract posters emphasized.”
[Justin Howes says that Pick chose a monoline letter because it would be clearer and more open when used under the dim lighting conditions prevailing in the Underground stations; and be “more straightforward and manly” so as to avoid confusion with advertisements.]
p. 157 “After the Underground network grew in complexity following a massive expansion in the 1920s, Pick commissioned Harry Beck (1903–1974) to devise a simple yet comprehensive map of the different routes.”
[According to Ken Garland, author of Mr. Beck’s Underground Map, Beck came up with the map on his own and then had a difficult time convincing management to adopt it.]
p. 158 “…the stationery was made using letterpress techniques…. the letterpress technique was inexpensive and accessible, though lacking any ideological connection to the machine world idolized by the Futurists.”
[Letterpress was the dominant printing technology at the time and thus would have been the inevitable choice of the Futurists for their stationery. Whether the letterhead was printed on a handpress, a cylinder press or by a power press is not known.]
p. 161 “The Futurists had their most immediate impact on graphic design through their transformation of Cubist painting into a more vital, energetic style.”
[I would disagree. The major impact of Futurism on graphic design was in the area of typography.
[Morris’ face was called the Golden type—after The Golden Legend, the first book printed in it—not Golden Roman.]
p. 35 “Morris also worked in the related field of typography, creating a number of historicist typefaces, including Golden (fig. 1.4), a roman font based on the Old Style type of Nicholas Jenson.”
[Typography is the selection and arrangement of type, not the design of type.]
p. 46, fig. 1.19 “Georges Auriol, Auriol Typeface, 1902.”
[Auriol spelled his name George in the English fashion. His eponymous typeface was issued in 1901, not 1902. The image, a digital version of Auriol, has the following text: “The typeface called Auriol was designed in 1901 by Georges [sic] Auriol (1863–1939) for the Deberny & Peignot foundry.” The face was actually issued by G. Peignot & Sons which did not merge with the Deberny foundry until 1924.]
p. 52 “A key moment in the history of American graphic design came in 1889, when the widely read periodical Harper’s Magazine published a poster and cover page for its holiday issue (fig. 1.26), designed by the Swiss-born French artist Eugène Grasset (1841–1917).”
[The Harper’s Magazine cover shown in fig. 1.26 is dated Christmas 1892 (as the caption correctly states). Is the year in the text wrong or is the wrong image shown?]
p. 57 “Two industrial machines, the Linotype (1886) and the Monotype (1889), allowed typesetters to work with a punch keyboard that directly controlled machinery for casting hot-metal type (fig. 1.34).”
[The date of the Monotype should be 1887.]
p. 57 “Handset typography was rendered obsolete by these inventions almost overnight….”
[This is not true. Outside of newspaper printing, the two composing machines did not gain widespread acceptance until the 1920s.]
p. 58, fig. 1.33 “William Bradley, Bradley Typeface. The Inland Printer, vol. 14, no. 3, December 1894.”
[The masthead of the magazine is not type but handlettering. It is the source of ATF’s Bradley typeface.]
p. 58 “Additionally, ‘grotesque’ was also used in the United States to denote sans serif faces.”
[Grotesque was the British term for sans serifs in the 19th c. The preferred American term, as Eskilson notes earlier, was Gothic.]
p. 58 “Franklin Gothic was produced by ATF in a wide variety of sizes and weights….”
[ATF issued Franklin Gothic in a single (heavy) weight. For customers who wanted other weights they suggested Alternate Gothic, News Gothic, Monotone Gothic and Lightline Gothic as companions. ITC Franklin Gothic was designed to fill this void.]
p. 59, fig. 1.35 “Morris Fuller Benton, Franklin Gothic Typeface, 1902.”
[The image is the regular weight of ITC Franklin Gothic by Victor Caruso (1980).]
p. 59 “The typesetting industry witnessed a rebirth of sorts because of the competition between the makers of the Linotype and Monotype machines, each of which used proprietary faces in order to gain a competitive advantage. In later years, this battle created a situation where almost all standard faces existed in two variants: one initially created for the Linotype, the other for the Monotype machine.”
[No dates are provided for these assertions. Monotype had no proprietary faces prior to 1913 and Linotype had none prior to 1913. From the 1920s to the end of the 1970s both companies developed libraries of proprietary faces that the other did not have (the exceptions to this being Times New Roman which Monotype licensed to Linotype as Times Roman, and Sabon which was developed simultaneously for both machines). It is true that both Linotype and Monotype had their own versions of a handful of classic faces—eg. Garamond, Caslon, Baskerville and Bodoni—but this was a small number of faces prior to the age of Postscript fonts. And it should be remembered that they were not alone in having their own versions of the classics. For instance, metal versions of Garamond were offered not only by Linotype and Monotype but by ATF, Ludlow, Amsterdam Type Foundry, Grafotechna, VEB Typoart, Stempel, Berthold and Simoncini.]
p. 94 “Blackletter characters strongly resemble the letters formed by the blunt-edged quill pen used to write manuscripts.”
[This is not true for all variants of blackletter at all times.]
p. 94 “By the 1890s, much of German printing relied on the variant of blackletter named ‘fraktur,’ and this term is sometimes used casually as a synonym for blackletter.”
[In Germany, fraktur is the common name for not only a specific variant of blackletter but for the entire category. It is not used casually.]
p. 94 “Blackletter is highly ornamental, featuring exaggerated calligraphic flourishes and strong modeling of the stems of the letters.”
[This is not true of blackletter in general, though it does apply to some letters in some faces. Most ornamentation in blackletter types is confined to the capitals, principally those that are in the “Old English” mode. (There are far more decorative roman faces than there are decorative blackletter ones.) Very few blackletter faces have exaggerated calligraphic flourishes. In general, Blackletter tends to be simple and compact.]
p. 94 “Recent studies have shown that readers familiar with blackletter read at the same speed as readers of roman typefaces….”
[There have been no recent studies on this subject. This claim is based on an assertion by Zuzana Licko that we read best what we read most.]
p. 94, fig. 2.31 “Otto Weisert, Bocklin Typeface, 1904.” should be “Otto Weisert, Arnold Böcklin typeface], 1904.”
[The image is a digital version.]
p. 94 “the famous type specialist Karl Klingspor” Karl Klingspor was not a type specialist but the co-owner with his brother Wilhelm Klingspor of the Rudhard’sche foundry which became the Gebruder Klingspor foundry. He did not design any typefaces.
p. 102 “The lettering in the logo [1908] is derived from a typeface that Behrens created for AEG, the first time that a corporation had ever acquired its own copyrighted lettering. This face was called Behrens-Antiqua when it was released to the public by the Klingspor foundry some years later (fig. 2.41).”
[Frederic W. Goudy created typefaces for Schlesinger & Mayer department store in 1902, Barron’s Boston News Letter in 1904, and for the Mandel Brothers department store in 1907. Although none of these businesses was as large as AEG, they still preceded Behrens-Antiqua. There is no mention of the heavy, oldstyle alphabet that Behrens designed for AEG sometime between 1908 and 1912 (see G19 in Industriekultur: Peter Behrens and the AEG, p. 440).]
p. 103, fig. 2.43 “Peter Behrens, AEG Lamp, 1910. Poster. Offset lithograph….”
[This poster is not an offset lithograph but a stone lithograph. Offset lithography, invented in 1904, was not yet in widespread use at the time this poster was made.]
p. 104 “Behrens also made an important contribution to German typography, especially through the three typefaces he designed, Behrens-Antiqua…, Behrens-Fraktur, and Behrens-Schrift….”
[There is no typeface called Behrens-Fraktur. Behrens’ third design was Behrens Medieval (1914).]
p. 104, re: fig. 2.45 “The subdued text is separate from the image, and is notable only for its muscular ‘T,’ which is compressed by neighboring letters on both sides—an example of spacing between letters done for decorative effect.”
[The tall T is a common feature in Roman inscriptions. It, along with the tall I and tall Y (used in Greek words), was used to save space in a line. Behrens has employed the tall T in the first and fourth lines for that very reason. In the second and third lines—where space is not an issue—he probably included it for its classicizing effect. The form of the M and N (without serifs at their apexes) is proof that he was consciously mimicking Imperial Roman capitals.]
p. 108 “maque-tte” —poor hyphenation
p. 115 “Perhaps indicative of his high status as a graphic designer a decade after the Priester contest, is the manner in which Bernhard uses his name as a compositional device to balance the rectangle formed by the poster frame in the upper left.”
[Bernhard was not the only poster designer in his day to carefully use his signature as a design element: Thomas Heine (see fig. 2.32), Peter Behrens (see fig. 2.45), Hans Rudi Erdt (see fig. 3.4) and especially Ludwig Hohlwein (see figs. 3.6, 3.7 and 3.34) are contemporaneous examples.]
p. 116 “In 1914, Friedrich Bauer (1863–1943) designed an excellent hybrid type called Hamburger Druckschrift.”
[The correct date is 1904.]
p. 130 “…Sachplakat lettering is roman and often features small serifs, while Bernhard here [fig. 3.31] embracing the blackletter tradition.”
[Bernhard and others used fraktur in posters that are in the Sachplakat style (see fig. 3.8, Das Plakat, 1916). The use of blackletter was a response to the nationalism engendered by World War I, not a sign of a new style of poster.]
p. 139, fig. 3.43 “The words are presented to the viewer as a jumble of mixed type….”
[There is no type in the poster. All of the letters have been drawn by hand in imitation of specific typefaces.]
p. 152 re: fig. 4.9 “Kauffer has also done something exciting with the hand-drawn lettering at the bottom of Winter Sales, where he has designed the word ‘Underground’ to flicker back and forth in the viewer’s eye between two and three dimensions, as the shading momentarily creates a sense of sculptural relief. This type of three-dimensional lettering was quite popular in the nineteenth century as display type, but Kauffer has here infused it with Cubism so that the shadows sometimes break away from the shape of the letters.”
[It is more likely that Kauffer picked up this method of decorating letters from signpainter’s manuals than from Cubism.]
p. 156 line 3 is poorly ragged, suggesting that a new paragraph is starting on line 4.
p. 156 “Johnston developed an eponymous face… Johnston Sans (fig. 4.13).”
[In fact, Johnston referred to the design as the Underground Alphabet while he was working on it. The first sheet of the finished design (1917) was labeled “Standard Alphabet. Johnston Type.” suggesting that either Waterlow & Sons, the printers, or London Transport named it after Johnston. When it became Johnston Sans is not discussed by Justin Howes in his monograph on the face.]
p. 156 “This spare display type [Johnston Sans] is highly geometric….”
[Although Edward Johnston used a compass to construct the round letters such as C, G and O, the typeface overall is not geometric but humanist in its forms.]
p. 156 re: Johnston Sans “…it was more important to Johnston and Pick that the lettering provided the same sense of glamour and modernity that the abstract posters emphasized.”
[Justin Howes says that Pick chose a monoline letter because it would be clearer and more open when used under the dim lighting conditions prevailing in the Underground stations; and be “more straightforward and manly” so as to avoid confusion with advertisements.]
p. 157 “After the Underground network grew in complexity following a massive expansion in the 1920s, Pick commissioned Harry Beck (1903–1974) to devise a simple yet comprehensive map of the different routes.”
[According to Ken Garland, author of Mr. Beck’s Underground Map, Beck came up with the map on his own and then had a difficult time convincing management to adopt it.]
p. 158 “…the stationery was made using letterpress techniques…. the letterpress technique was inexpensive and accessible, though lacking any ideological connection to the machine world idolized by the Futurists.”
[Letterpress was the dominant printing technology at the time and thus would have been the inevitable choice of the Futurists for their stationery. Whether the letterhead was printed on a handpress, a cylinder press or by a power press is not known.]
p. 161 “The Futurists had their most immediate impact on graphic design through their transformation of Cubist painting into a more vital, energetic style.”
[I would disagree. The major impact of Futurism on graphic design was in the area of typography.
p. 167 why is this section on “Book Design and Typography in Britain”—focusing on Sir Francis Meynell and Eric Gill—in the middle of a chapter devoted to “Modern Art, Modern Graphic Design”?]
p. 167 “The English text was set in Monotype’s Cochin, a roman type that had been designed in 1914 by the French typographer and foundry owner Dominique Peignet [sic].”
[Cochin, called Moreau-le-jeune, was originally designed by Georges Peignot c.1912; Lanston Monotype renamed it when they cut their version in 1915.]
p. 165, fig. 4.29 “Eric Gill, Gill Sans Typeface [sic], 1928.”
[The image is a digital version of Gill Sans Light which was not issued until 1930.]
p. 167 “Rudolph Koch” should be “Rudolf Koch”
p. 176, fig. 4.40 “Morris Fuller Benton, Broadway Typeface [sic], American Type Founders, 1929.”
[The correct date is 1928.]
p. 177 “While ostensibly not a display face according to Cassandre, Bifur, like many Art Deco faces, makes such a strong visual statement that it was very seldom used for unassuming general purpose text.”
[This is a misreading of the publicity for the face which advised not to use it as a text face.]
p. 177 “In the lower-case alphabet, which is actually made up of small capitals, Peignot extends the idea of elegant, attenuated forms to a radical extreme. For example, the ‘l’ is almost a pure vertical, while the lower case [sic] ‘h’ features an asymmetrical ascender on its left half.”
[The lowercase letters are not small capitals but uncial-influenced characters. The ‘l’ is not one Peignot’s distinctive letters.]
p. 190 “It is arguable that De Stijl’s greatest contribution to graphic design lay in the popularization of Lissitsky’s graphic work.”
[I would disagree and suggest that the importance of De Stijl lies principally in how its exploration of asymmetry and emphasis on white space as active space influenced die neue typographie in the 1920s.]
p. 217 “An important advantage for Lissitsky during his German sojourn was the ready availability of up-to-date printing equipment, so that he was never forced to ‘fake’ his typographic experiments by using hand-drawn lettering that pretended to be mechanical type, something Rodchenko had had to do on several occasions.”
[German printing and typefounding was certainly superior to Russian, but it had no bearing on the need to draw mechanical-looking letters. There were no typefaces in that style at the time in any country. The only options for “mechanical” type were either letters drawn by hand using compass and ruler (as Theo van Doesburg and Vilmos Huszar also realized) or letters constructed from rules and other typographic material (as Piet Zwart and Lissitsky both did). Large letters in a design—no matter their style—had to be drawn by hand in Germany as elsewhere. Thus, Lissitsky drew the words “Drawing Ink” in his Pelican Drawing Ink advertisement of 1925.]
p. 231 “The typography of the lithographed cover [of Utopia], by Oskar Schlemmer (1888–1943), complements Itten’s conceptual speculation with its whimsical, intuitive design, which features an assortment of typographic elements drawn from Cubism and Futurism.”
[Schlemmer’s cover (fig. 6.8) was only a comp. The design that was actually printed was by Margit Téry-Adler.]
p. 234 “The cover page [of Staatliches Bauhaus, 1919–1923) represents perhaps the best use of the book’s unusual square format (fig. 6.16)…. The expanded bold sans serif type features damatic contrasts, because some of the words are made up of letters divided into horizontal bars.”
[The image in fig. 6.16 is the title page of the Bauhaus catalogue not the cover which was designed by Herbert Bayer. The large letters on the title page are not type. They were drawn by hand as is evident by an examination of the various A’s.]
p. 236, fig. 6.16 “Láslzó Moholy-Nagy, Exhibition Catalog Staatliches Bauhaus im Weimar, 1919–1923, 1923. Cover.”
[Moholy-Nagy designed the title page, not the cover.]
p. 242 “Universal [Herbert Bayer’s 1925 alphabet] differs from Stencil [Josef Albers’ 1925 alphabet] in that its geometric forms are made up of strokes of uniform thickness, obviating the calligraphic element of most type.”
[This conclusion is backward. If anything, Stencil is less calligraphic than Universal since its geometry is planar (as opposed to linear) and it is modular.]
p. 242 “In the contemporary era [to Universal], Art Deco letters such as those in Cassandre’s Peignot were only designed in upper case.”
[Peignot was released twelve years after Bayer designed Universal. Furthermore, Peignot has a lowercase that is distinct from its capitals.]
p. 243, fig. 6.24 “Herbert Bayer, Universal Typeface [sic], 1923–5. Courtesy of P22 Type Foundry.”
[Bayer’s alphabet was never made into a typeface until the digital era when The Foundry released Archetype Bayer and, later, P-22 created P-22 Bayer.]
p. 244, fig. 6.25 “Paul Renner, Futura Typeface [sic], 1927. St. Bride Printing Library, London.”
[The image is of a digital version of Futura not the metal typeface issued by Bauer. There is no reason to credit St. Bride for it since they have no ownership stake.]
p. 244 “…the final version of Futura departs from the pure geometry of the earliest prototypes, and Renner introduced a weighted, slightly calligraphic stroke in many of the letters.”
[Other than the thinning of strokes where they join—a necessity in any good type design—there is no weighting of strokes in Futura, let alone any that is calligraphic. The calligraphic influence in Futura is to be found in the structure and proportion of some of the capital letters such as the slightly splayed M and the narrow E.]
p. 244 “…in 1933, under the new Nazi government, Futura was officially banned in Hanover and government offices were forbidden to use it ever again.”
[This is not true. Futura was never banned by the Nazis, even while Renner was under arrest. In fact, additional weights of the face were released by Bauer during the 1930s, Gebrauchsgraphik continued to be set in it (even when it shifted to a blackletter masthead), and a Futura-like letterform was used for a plinth at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.]
p. 247 (6 places) and p. 249 “Die Neue Typographie” should be “Die neue Typographie”
p. 249 “For the text of Die Neue Typographie [sic], Tschichold employed Akzidenz Grotesk, an anonymous sans serif that was widely available at the time.”
[No. The editors of the English language edition of Die neue Typographie claim that Aurora Grotesk comes closest in appearance to the typeface used by Tschichold.]
p. 249, fig. 6.31 “George Trump” should be “Georg Trump”
pp. 247–249 the discussion of the New Typography makes no mention of such key figures as Piet Zwart, Ladislav Sutnar, Walter Dexel and Johannes Burchartz.
p. 250, fig. 6.32 “Paul Schuitema, Toledo-Berkel, 1930s….”
[The advertisement is autographed “Paul Schuitema 1926”.]
p. 257, fig. 7.5 “IMM Advertisement, Fortune magazine, Feb 1930, p. 17.”
[The image shows two advertisements, one for the Hotel Lexington alongside one for I.M.M. which owned the White Star Line, the Red Star Line and the Atlantic Transport Line. The contrasting styles of the two advertisements perfectly captures Eskilson’s point in the text yet he makes no mention of the one for the Hotel Lexington. (Why not spell out February?)]
p. 254 “During the 1920s…. Someone with the title ‘art director,’ often a graphic designer, had general responsibility for the design and typography of a given publication, although they might not always do the actual work themselves.”
[This is not true. Art directors were originally just that, men who chose art and directed its placement in magazines. Layout and composition were often carried out by printers or, a new speciality, the type house. This state of affairs changed by the 1930s but no one has yet traced the evolution of the magazine art director. In this introductory synopsis there is no mention made of W.A. Dwiggins’ coinage of the term “graphic design” in 1922.]
p. 256 “The United States had earlier rejected sponsoring a pavilion at the exposition because of a disdain for the modern styles to be exhibited there.”
[The official American report on the exposition (issued in 1927) indicated that the United States did not participate because its goods were not of a high enough quality.]
p. 257 re: T.M. Cleland’s format for Fortune: “…a characteristically conservative design…”
[This assessment fails to see how radical Cleland’s use of the “transom-window” frame was for the masthead and cover of the magazine. The frame may have been very conservative, but it was used in imaginative ways.]
p. 261 “…at Seventeen Pineles employed a standardized type, lower-case Bodoni in its bold, condensed italic form.”
[The masthead may have been standardized, but it was not set in type. The letters were drawn by hand.]
p. 263 “Brodovitch used the eminently functional modern seriffed typeface called Bodoni for most of the text in Harper’s Bazaar, showing that sans serif type was not essential to the creation of a harmonious modern design.”
[Bodoni has never been considered, even by its adherents, as a “functional” typeface, let alone an “eminently functional” one. (Bodoni is “modern” in contrast to an oldstyle face, not to a sans serif. A less misleading description for typefaces such as Bodoni and Didot is neoclassical.)]
p. 270 “A good example of this type of lettering existed at the Bauhaus, where the name of the institution was incorporated into the structure using Herbert Bayer’s all lower-case Universal.”
[No. The letters were all capitals as is evident in fig. 7.36.]
p. 270 “Like most Constructivists, Hitchcock and Johnson were under the misapprehension that sans serif lettering was more legible and functionalist than traditional seriffed forms, while in reality the serifs on letters serve to increase their legibility and especially their readability….”
[Serifs are an aid to readability, but not necessarily to legibility of letters.]
p. 271 “…the same year [1931] of Hitchcock and Russell’s exhibition [Modern Architecture: International Exhibition at MoMA], New York City residents witnessed the completion of the Art Deco Chrysler building (fig. 7.25)….”
[The Chrysler Building was built between 1928 and 1930 (as the caption in fig. 7.25) correctly states.]
p. 281, fig. 7.39 “Anonymous, Hitler Baut auf (Hitler Is Building), 1940….”
[The poster is signed Günther Nagel.]
p. 283 “The image [fig. 7.39] suggests a return to German tradition in that there is no sign of modern life in the poster….”
[This interpretation is correct, but there is a sign of modern life in the poster: a factory in the distant background.]
p. 284, fig. 7.44 “Anonymous, Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) Exhibition, 1936–7. Poster.”
[The poster is signed Vierthaler.
p. 167 “The English text was set in Monotype’s Cochin, a roman type that had been designed in 1914 by the French typographer and foundry owner Dominique Peignet [sic].”
[Cochin, called Moreau-le-jeune, was originally designed by Georges Peignot c.1912; Lanston Monotype renamed it when they cut their version in 1915.]
p. 165, fig. 4.29 “Eric Gill, Gill Sans Typeface [sic], 1928.”
[The image is a digital version of Gill Sans Light which was not issued until 1930.]
p. 167 “Rudolph Koch” should be “Rudolf Koch”
p. 176, fig. 4.40 “Morris Fuller Benton, Broadway Typeface [sic], American Type Founders, 1929.”
[The correct date is 1928.]
p. 177 “While ostensibly not a display face according to Cassandre, Bifur, like many Art Deco faces, makes such a strong visual statement that it was very seldom used for unassuming general purpose text.”
[This is a misreading of the publicity for the face which advised not to use it as a text face.]
p. 177 “In the lower-case alphabet, which is actually made up of small capitals, Peignot extends the idea of elegant, attenuated forms to a radical extreme. For example, the ‘l’ is almost a pure vertical, while the lower case [sic] ‘h’ features an asymmetrical ascender on its left half.”
[The lowercase letters are not small capitals but uncial-influenced characters. The ‘l’ is not one Peignot’s distinctive letters.]
p. 190 “It is arguable that De Stijl’s greatest contribution to graphic design lay in the popularization of Lissitsky’s graphic work.”
[I would disagree and suggest that the importance of De Stijl lies principally in how its exploration of asymmetry and emphasis on white space as active space influenced die neue typographie in the 1920s.]
p. 217 “An important advantage for Lissitsky during his German sojourn was the ready availability of up-to-date printing equipment, so that he was never forced to ‘fake’ his typographic experiments by using hand-drawn lettering that pretended to be mechanical type, something Rodchenko had had to do on several occasions.”
[German printing and typefounding was certainly superior to Russian, but it had no bearing on the need to draw mechanical-looking letters. There were no typefaces in that style at the time in any country. The only options for “mechanical” type were either letters drawn by hand using compass and ruler (as Theo van Doesburg and Vilmos Huszar also realized) or letters constructed from rules and other typographic material (as Piet Zwart and Lissitsky both did). Large letters in a design—no matter their style—had to be drawn by hand in Germany as elsewhere. Thus, Lissitsky drew the words “Drawing Ink” in his Pelican Drawing Ink advertisement of 1925.]
p. 231 “The typography of the lithographed cover [of Utopia], by Oskar Schlemmer (1888–1943), complements Itten’s conceptual speculation with its whimsical, intuitive design, which features an assortment of typographic elements drawn from Cubism and Futurism.”
[Schlemmer’s cover (fig. 6.8) was only a comp. The design that was actually printed was by Margit Téry-Adler.]
p. 234 “The cover page [of Staatliches Bauhaus, 1919–1923) represents perhaps the best use of the book’s unusual square format (fig. 6.16)…. The expanded bold sans serif type features damatic contrasts, because some of the words are made up of letters divided into horizontal bars.”
[The image in fig. 6.16 is the title page of the Bauhaus catalogue not the cover which was designed by Herbert Bayer. The large letters on the title page are not type. They were drawn by hand as is evident by an examination of the various A’s.]
p. 236, fig. 6.16 “Láslzó Moholy-Nagy, Exhibition Catalog Staatliches Bauhaus im Weimar, 1919–1923, 1923. Cover.”
[Moholy-Nagy designed the title page, not the cover.]
p. 242 “Universal [Herbert Bayer’s 1925 alphabet] differs from Stencil [Josef Albers’ 1925 alphabet] in that its geometric forms are made up of strokes of uniform thickness, obviating the calligraphic element of most type.”
[This conclusion is backward. If anything, Stencil is less calligraphic than Universal since its geometry is planar (as opposed to linear) and it is modular.]
p. 242 “In the contemporary era [to Universal], Art Deco letters such as those in Cassandre’s Peignot were only designed in upper case.”
[Peignot was released twelve years after Bayer designed Universal. Furthermore, Peignot has a lowercase that is distinct from its capitals.]
p. 243, fig. 6.24 “Herbert Bayer, Universal Typeface [sic], 1923–5. Courtesy of P22 Type Foundry.”
[Bayer’s alphabet was never made into a typeface until the digital era when The Foundry released Archetype Bayer and, later, P-22 created P-22 Bayer.]
p. 244, fig. 6.25 “Paul Renner, Futura Typeface [sic], 1927. St. Bride Printing Library, London.”
[The image is of a digital version of Futura not the metal typeface issued by Bauer. There is no reason to credit St. Bride for it since they have no ownership stake.]
p. 244 “…the final version of Futura departs from the pure geometry of the earliest prototypes, and Renner introduced a weighted, slightly calligraphic stroke in many of the letters.”
[Other than the thinning of strokes where they join—a necessity in any good type design—there is no weighting of strokes in Futura, let alone any that is calligraphic. The calligraphic influence in Futura is to be found in the structure and proportion of some of the capital letters such as the slightly splayed M and the narrow E.]
p. 244 “…in 1933, under the new Nazi government, Futura was officially banned in Hanover and government offices were forbidden to use it ever again.”
[This is not true. Futura was never banned by the Nazis, even while Renner was under arrest. In fact, additional weights of the face were released by Bauer during the 1930s, Gebrauchsgraphik continued to be set in it (even when it shifted to a blackletter masthead), and a Futura-like letterform was used for a plinth at the 1936 Berlin Olympics.]
p. 247 (6 places) and p. 249 “Die Neue Typographie” should be “Die neue Typographie”
p. 249 “For the text of Die Neue Typographie [sic], Tschichold employed Akzidenz Grotesk, an anonymous sans serif that was widely available at the time.”
[No. The editors of the English language edition of Die neue Typographie claim that Aurora Grotesk comes closest in appearance to the typeface used by Tschichold.]
p. 249, fig. 6.31 “George Trump” should be “Georg Trump”
pp. 247–249 the discussion of the New Typography makes no mention of such key figures as Piet Zwart, Ladislav Sutnar, Walter Dexel and Johannes Burchartz.
p. 250, fig. 6.32 “Paul Schuitema, Toledo-Berkel, 1930s….”
[The advertisement is autographed “Paul Schuitema 1926”.]
p. 257, fig. 7.5 “IMM Advertisement, Fortune magazine, Feb 1930, p. 17.”
[The image shows two advertisements, one for the Hotel Lexington alongside one for I.M.M. which owned the White Star Line, the Red Star Line and the Atlantic Transport Line. The contrasting styles of the two advertisements perfectly captures Eskilson’s point in the text yet he makes no mention of the one for the Hotel Lexington. (Why not spell out February?)]
p. 254 “During the 1920s…. Someone with the title ‘art director,’ often a graphic designer, had general responsibility for the design and typography of a given publication, although they might not always do the actual work themselves.”
[This is not true. Art directors were originally just that, men who chose art and directed its placement in magazines. Layout and composition were often carried out by printers or, a new speciality, the type house. This state of affairs changed by the 1930s but no one has yet traced the evolution of the magazine art director. In this introductory synopsis there is no mention made of W.A. Dwiggins’ coinage of the term “graphic design” in 1922.]
p. 256 “The United States had earlier rejected sponsoring a pavilion at the exposition because of a disdain for the modern styles to be exhibited there.”
[The official American report on the exposition (issued in 1927) indicated that the United States did not participate because its goods were not of a high enough quality.]
p. 257 re: T.M. Cleland’s format for Fortune: “…a characteristically conservative design…”
[This assessment fails to see how radical Cleland’s use of the “transom-window” frame was for the masthead and cover of the magazine. The frame may have been very conservative, but it was used in imaginative ways.]
p. 261 “…at Seventeen Pineles employed a standardized type, lower-case Bodoni in its bold, condensed italic form.”
[The masthead may have been standardized, but it was not set in type. The letters were drawn by hand.]
p. 263 “Brodovitch used the eminently functional modern seriffed typeface called Bodoni for most of the text in Harper’s Bazaar, showing that sans serif type was not essential to the creation of a harmonious modern design.”
[Bodoni has never been considered, even by its adherents, as a “functional” typeface, let alone an “eminently functional” one. (Bodoni is “modern” in contrast to an oldstyle face, not to a sans serif. A less misleading description for typefaces such as Bodoni and Didot is neoclassical.)]
p. 270 “A good example of this type of lettering existed at the Bauhaus, where the name of the institution was incorporated into the structure using Herbert Bayer’s all lower-case Universal.”
[No. The letters were all capitals as is evident in fig. 7.36.]
p. 270 “Like most Constructivists, Hitchcock and Johnson were under the misapprehension that sans serif lettering was more legible and functionalist than traditional seriffed forms, while in reality the serifs on letters serve to increase their legibility and especially their readability….”
[Serifs are an aid to readability, but not necessarily to legibility of letters.]
p. 271 “…the same year [1931] of Hitchcock and Russell’s exhibition [Modern Architecture: International Exhibition at MoMA], New York City residents witnessed the completion of the Art Deco Chrysler building (fig. 7.25)….”
[The Chrysler Building was built between 1928 and 1930 (as the caption in fig. 7.25) correctly states.]
p. 281, fig. 7.39 “Anonymous, Hitler Baut auf (Hitler Is Building), 1940….”
[The poster is signed Günther Nagel.]
p. 283 “The image [fig. 7.39] suggests a return to German tradition in that there is no sign of modern life in the poster….”
[This interpretation is correct, but there is a sign of modern life in the poster: a factory in the distant background.]
p. 284, fig. 7.44 “Anonymous, Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) Exhibition, 1936–7. Poster.”
[The poster is signed Vierthaler.
p. 284 The discussion of the Entartete Kunst Exhibition poster (fig. 7.44) fails to note the presence of Futura type (in light, medium and black—stencilled—weights) or the parody of El Lissitsky’s famous poster Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge.]
p. 285 “Despite his opposition to Nazi policies, Renner was one of the only modern designers who never fled Germany.”
[This is an exaggeration. Georg Trump, Johannes Molzahn, Johannes Canis, Walter Dexel and Willi Baumeister all remained in Germany and Herbert Bayer stayed for five years before emigrating.]
p. 300 “In the post-war period, the graphic design profession was transformed by the rise of the Swiss style (also called the International Style, a term this author prefers)….”
[Although the two terms have often been used interchangeably there are distinctive differences between the work of Swiss designers and those in other countries. One difference is that non-Swiss designers tended to use Helvetica while Swiss designers—with the significant exception of Emil Ruder and his followers—preferred Akzidenz Grotesk, even after Helvetica was available. The Ruderites favored Univers and disdained the grid.]
p. 303, fig. 8.2 “Berthold Staff. Akzidenz Grotesk Typeface [sic], Berthold Foundry, 1896.”
[The more commonly listed date for Akzidenz Grotesk is 1898, though there is recent research suggesting that the face was based on Royal Grotesk issued by Ferdinand Theinhardt in 1880. “Berthold Foundry” should be “Berthold AG” of “H. Berthold AG”. The image is a digital version of Akzidenz Grotesk.]
p. 307 “While Akzidenz Grotesk remained the type of choice for Bill and Müller-Brockmann throughout their careers, Paul Renner’s Futura also persisted as a popular choice for Swiss designers.”
[This statement is not supported by the work shown in Swiss Graphic Design by Richard Hollis. Also, Müller-Brockmann increasingly used Helvetica after 1968.]
p. 307, fig. 8.7 “Max Miedinger, Neue Haas Grotesk Helvetica Typeface, 1951.”
[This is a mishmash of a caption. The typeface in the image is Helvetica. Credit for its design goes to Eduard Hoffmann as well as Miedinger. The date should be 1960.]
p. 307 “…Helvetica, was created in 1953 for Eduard Hoffman [sic] of the Haas foundry in Zurich. Hoffman.… In 1951 he commissioned Max Miedinger (1910–1980) to create a new sans serif based on Akzidenz Grotesk, and Neue Haas Grotesk was born (fig. 8.7).… In 1957, Neue Haas Grotesk was sold by Haas to a German foundry, Stempel.”
[The documentation of Neue Haas Grotesk/Helvetica begins in 1956. The face was not only commissioned by Hofmann but art directed by him as well. Miedinger executed the drawings. Akzidenz Grotesk was the principal source of inspiration for the new design but other existing grots (eg. Schelter Grotesk) were analyzed as well. The type created by Miedinger and Hofmann was named Neue Haas Grotesk after the Haas foundry of Münchenstein, near Basel, and issued in 1957. In 1960, the D. Stempel AG foundry of Frankfurt, Germany (which had an interest in the Haas foundry) licensed the design and changed the name to Helvetica. They tweaked the design slightly so that the same artwork could be used for the Linotype version made by their affiliate German Linotype GmbH. The image in fig. 8.7 is of Helvetica from Stempel.]
p. 307 “A follower of the functional, logical precepts of the International Style, Frutiger….”
[Frutiger was never an adherent of the International Style, even as his typeface Univers became popular with many designers working in that idiom. Frutiger’s aesthetics are more complicated than that as evidenced by his wide range of type designs, his deep interest in symbols and signs, and his insistence on the value of handwork within a machine context.]
p. 307, fig. 8.8 “Adrian Frutiger, Univers Typeface [sic], Deberny & Peignot Foundry, 1954–7.”
[The idea of numbering the members of Univers was Frutiger’s, but the famous diagram (shown in fig. 8.8) illustrating the system was created by Rémy Peignot.]
p. 307 “In 1950, a few years before Frutiger joined Deberny & Peignot, the firm had developed the ‘Lumitype Photon’ phototypesetting system.”
[Rene Higonnet and Louis Moyroud demonstrated their first phototypesetting machine in 1946, named it the Photon in 1948 and continued to develop it for another six years. Deberny & Peignot invested in the machine in the early 1950s and in 1954 an agreement was reached to market it as the Lumitype. That year the first commercialized machine was demonstrated and in 1955 Lumitype SA was set up as a company. Deberny & Peignot were not involved in the development of the Photon/Lumitype machine other than financially.]
p. 308 “Called Optima, this conservative typeface was released for the Linotype in 1958 (fig. 8.9). Zapf had sought to make a sans serif that included some of the structural characteristics of seriffed letters, particularly those of ancient Roman carvings. Zapf also admired the typography of the Renaissance, and there are variations in stroke width in Optima that recall the calligraphic strokes of Modern styles.”
[Optima was developed by D. Stempel AG and released by it and Linotype GmbH simultaneously in 1958. The inspiration for the design came from Renaissance tombstone lettering in S. Croce, Florence which Zapf first sketched in late 1950. The variations in stroke width have nothing to do with “modern” styles of type. Optima is actually a much more radical design than its contemporaries Univers and Helvetica since there was little precedent for it. This is evident in the confusion that greeted the face upon its release: was it a sans serif or a serifless roman?]
p. 311 the paragraph devoted to “Basel Type” makes no mention of Emil Ruder or Karl Gertsner, both of whom were as important as Armin Hofmann.
p. 312 “In the United Kingdom, typography and graphic design professionals of the 1930s through the 1960s were generally reluctant to adopt the International Style.”
[Although it is correct that British design was typographically conservative during Stanley Morison’s lifetime, that conservatism was not a reaction to the International Style. The Swiss Style emerged in the late 1940s and the International Style did not follow until the 1960s.]
pp. 314–315 “During this period, England had one great champion of the International Style, the typographer Herbert Spencer (1924–2002).”
[Spencer was a champion of modernism not the International Style per se. Another important figure in British modernism at that time was Anthony Froshaug who was much closer to the International Style than Spencer.]
p. 316 “While some American graphic designers accepted the rigid ideology prevalent in Zurich, many more saw the International Style as just that—a style, which should be flexibly employed as the occasion demanded. For this reason, it is common to see elements of the Art Deco or other, eclectic styles, intrude into an otherwise geometrically structured image. For example, Lustig’s 1948 book jacket for Anatomy for Interior Designers….”
[This shows a severe misunderstanding of what the International Style was. It was not synonymous with all post-World War I modernism, but a specific approach. Alvin Lustig was NOT a practitioner of the International Style.]
p. 319 “…one can sense that Bass did not want to constrain his images [re: posters for The Man with the Golden Arm, Vertigo and Exodus] with the grid.”
[The grid did not become a significant part of American graphic design until 1965 when Unimark was established. All of the Bass posters shown were produced before 1961. But, like Lustig, Bass was never a proponent of the International Style, anyway.]
p. 318, fig. 8.22 “Saul Bass, Vertigo, 1958. Poster.…”
[As with all other references to Bass’ film poster work, the contribution of Harold Adler, who did the lettering, is not recognized.]
p. 320 “Of course the idea of corporate identity… did not first develop in the 1950s. Among its antecedents was the work in Germany for AEG that Peter Behrens performed during the 1910s…. However, Behrens’s work was essentially anomalous during the early part of the century….”
[Behrens’ work for AEG began before 1910. More importantly, there were other examples of corporate design work prior to the 1950s: Fred G. Cooper’s work for New York Edison from 1904 to 1927, O.H.W. Hadank’s work for Haus Neuerburg (a tobacco company) from the mid-1920s to the mid-1950s, and Container Corporation of America from 1934 to the early 1980s. (CCA is discussed in the book, but not until p. 322)]
p. 325 “Georg Trump’s City Medium grotesque face”
[City is a square serif design—a modernized Egyptian—not a sans serif.]
p. 326 “(…and later went on to design a Schaftstiefelgrotesk called Trump Deutsch in 1935.)”
[Trump Deutsch is not Schaftstiefelgrotesk but a simplified textura. It is distinctly different from Element, National and Deutschland.]
p. 326 “He [Paul Rand] used a Helvetica-like grotesque, called simply Westinghouse Gothic….”
[Westinghouse Gothic—the “Gothic” is telling—is much closer to an older style of sans serif such as Alternate Gothic than it is to Helvetica.]
p. 326 “While the eye logo was sometimes embellished with the CBS acronym in grotesque letters, Golden also established the redrawn version of a modern roman face, Didot Bodoni, as the house typeface for the network.”
[Didot Bodoni makes no sense. Both CBS Sans and CBS Didot were designed by Freeman (Jerry) Craw who rarely receives the credit he deserves for this work.]
p. 329, fig. 8.38 “Lester Beall, International Paper Logo [sic], 1972.”
[The logo was designed in 1960.]
p. 333 “This thirty-nine-story tower [the Seagram building] shimmers in shades of brass and brown…. The ‘glass box’ structure seems to be a pure Neoplatonist solid, a universal shape of harmony and balance.”
[The Seagram Building, as the description above indicates, is a poor choice to exemplify the ‘glass boxes’ of the International Style in architecture. Lever House nearby is a more apt example.]
p. 338 “The flame-like red lettering seems to zigzag back and forth across the page, with the shape of each letter changing in order to fit into the available space. The red letters seem to project from the cool green background; this use of brilliant complementary colors is a hallmark of the 1960s rock poster. In response to this sacrifice of legibility in the name of expressiveness, the concert promotor Bill Graham (b. 1931) resorted to using asterisks that referred the viewer of the poster to the bottom margin, where the specifics of the concert were rewritten in legible type.”
[This does not describe fig. 9.1. (BG 34-1) a poster whose lettering is not flamelike and although red is not on a green background. The small type at the bottom is not a reprise of the difficult-to-read lettered text above, but a list of ticket outlets. BG 18-1 by Wes Wilson has red flamelike letters on a green background but no asterisks or redundant text.]
p. 343 “…the Morgan Press, a typography outfit that owned a varied collection of what were at the time considered museum pieces [old wooden type]….”
[The Morgan Press was a type house that specialized in wood type. John Alcorn of the Push Pin Studio designed two catalogues of their offerings. The Morgan Press wood type collection is now at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of American History.]
p. 344 “…an almost random sampling of new illustrations, clip art, and lettering are arrayed in a boxed grid (fig. 9.10). This particular design [from The Push Pin Monthly Graphic] seems almost likea parody of the International Style grid, as it fills the spaces with quirky images that scarcely relate to one another.”
[The image was published in 1959 before the International Style took hold in the United States. Most likely it was influenced by the boxes of Joseph Cornell or possibly the Dadaist game of the exquisite corpse.]
p. 346 “An image for the Olivetti Corporation is a wonderful example of the Push Pin style applied to advertising…. Glaser created this pastiche of Italian Renaissance painting, stencil lettering and a dog… in order to advertise a shiny new red typewriter.… Right above the typewriter, itself an Italian product, there is a winding river that is a cliché of classical Italian painting.”
[In fact, the Olivetti poster (fig. 9.13) is a direct reference to a painting of a mourning dog by Piero di Cosimo, complete with clichéd river. See Art is Work by Milton Glaser, p. 226.]
p. 346 “Reproduced tens of millions of times… the rebus [I (heart) NY]… inspired a flood of like-minded designs over the next decade, including Paul Rand’s new take on his original IBM logo.”
[It is doubtful that Glaser’s design inspired the “Eye, Bee, M” poster (1981) as Rand had toyed with such a rebus for years before.]
p. 347 “Another designer associated with the Push Pin Studio, Paula Scher….”
[Paula Scher’s only association with the studio is through her marriage to Seymour Chwast. She never worked for it.]
p. 348 “The back of the Rampal album [Sakura] is unusual in that its design relied solely on typography, at a time when record covers tended to be image saturated on both sides.”
[All type back covers were still common on record albums in the 1970s, especially in the field of classical music which included Rampal.]
p. 348 “The reassessment of vernacular sources by postmodernists was influenced by the work of Andy Warhol….”
[Warhol’s first exhibition was in 1962, several years after the members of the Push Pin Studio had begun to explore vernacular sources. They were a bigger influence on other graphic designers in the 1960s and 1970s than Warhol.]
p.350 “In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of new typefaces were designed as alternatives to the popular Helvetica…. [ITC] Avant-Garde Gothic….”
[Avant-Garde Gothic, as the text correctly points out, originated as a magazine masthead. There was no intent at the time to design a typeface as an alternative to Helvetica. If anything, the goal was to “update” Futura. The popularity of ITC Avant-Garde Gothic was primarily due to the popularity of Lubalin’s approach to design and the marketing efforts of U&lc.]
p. 351 “…Souvenir, designed by Ed Benguiat…”
[ITC Souvenir is a redesign (and extension) by Benguiat of Souvenir by Morris Fuller Benton (ATF, 1914) which in turn was based on Schelter Antiqua from the Schelter & Geisecke foundry. At heart it is an Art Nouveau typeface.]
p. 351 “…the letters of Souvenir were designed to be tightly spaced… a factor that helps distinguish 1970s fashion from the more widely spaced designs of the 1980s.”
[This is correct but it fails to explain why the ITC look—which extended beyond ITC Souvenir to the entire font library at the time—came about. It was rooted in the typographic work that Herb Lubalin did—with the help of Aaron Burns of The Composing Room—in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The same factors that spurred Lubalin to create tightly spaced typography were behind the decision by Hoffmann and Miedinger to design Neue Haas Grotesk (Helvetica) with no sidebearings.]
p. 352 “In 1968 Weingart moved to Basel, where he accepted a position at the same Kuntsgewerbeschule where Armin Hofmann taught.”
[This is correct, but more importantly, Weingart succeeded Emil Ruder.]
p. 355 “During the 1970s, Friedman influentially rejected the absolutism of ‘legibility’ as the core criterion for judging graphic design, replacing it with the more open-ended term ‘readability’, which in his mind allowed for a more multivalent creative process.”
[The terms “legibility” and “readability” need to be clearly defined.]
p. 355 “This poster [Yale University Orchestra Concert, 1973] displays a number of postmodern elements, including the quirky mix of lettering in a wide variety of weights and sizes, whimsical overprinting that distracts the viewer from the core of the design, and multiple axes that create a kinetic effect. Note the way in which the red accents on ‘Janacek,’ normally minor diacritical elements, jump out at the viewer.”
[What is not mentioned in this description is how indebted Friedman and Greiman were to Piet Zwart’s 1920s designs for NKF in the treatment of these accent marks.]
p. 358, fig. 9.29 “Allen Hori, Typography as Discourse, 1989.”
[The image should be identified as a poster.]
p. 365, fig. 9.41 “Zuzana Licko, Emperor 8 Typeface [sic], 1984.”
[The image shows not only Emperor 8, but also Emperor 10, Emperor 15 and Emperor 19.]
pp. 365–367 the discussion of Emigre’s early bitmapped fonts (eg. Emperor) would benefit from an explanation of why bitmapping posed an aesthetic problem to the designers of early digital fonts. Also, a reference to the grid-based lettering (c.1919) of Theo van Doesburg would have been apropos.
p. 366, fig. 9.43 text in image: “Ed Fella, created in Template Gothic a sort of hybrid….”
[Barry Deck created Template Gothic as the caption correctly notes.]
p. 366, fig. 9.44 “Neville Brody, Arcadia Typeface [sic], 1986.”
[Brody designed an alphabet for the ‘Avanti’ section of Arena in 1986 which became the digital typeface Arcadia c.1990.]
p. 367 “Postscript [sic] was ‘device independent,’ meaning it allowed a designer to command just about any sort of output device, including 3,000dpi [sic] professional image setters of all sorts, to print type exactly as it was intended.”
[The real importance of PostScript being device-independent was that typographic output could be accomplished on the machines of a variety of manufacturers. No longer were Monotype faces only available on Monotype machines, Linotype faces on Linotype machines, Compugraphic faces on Compugraphic machines, and so on. PostScript was challenged by other “languages” (eg. Intellifont) in the 1980s.]
p. 382 “His [Elliott Earls’] first success in typography came in the mid-1990s, when a number of his custom typefaces were published by Emigre.”
[Earls’ early “custom” typefaces are actually sampled and copied from existing designs: Dysphasia is distorted and distressed Akzidenz Grotesk; Bland Serif Bland is hand comped Helvetica; Penal Code is Bland Serif Bland with markings; and Distillation Straight, Derma and Perma are all severely altered versions of Trump Medieval.]
p. 385, fig. 10.13 “Fred Seibert, MTV Logo [sic]. 1985.”
[Philip Meggs says (A History of Graphic Design, 4th ed., pp. 422–423) that the basic logo was designed by Pat Gorman and Frank Olinsky of Manhattan Design in 1981.]
p. 405, fig. 10.35 the text says, “Arial was designed in 1988 for Monotype….” but the caption says “Arial Typeface [sic], 1989. Monotype Corporation.”
[The history of Arial is contentious, but Robin Nicholas, one of its designers, says it was begun in 1982. Lawrence Wallis gives 1988 as its date.]
p. 405 “In terms of typography, many designers feel that there has been a cheapening of the quality of type, especially as metal type has been transformed into digital sets that do not make allowances for the subtle changes in proportion and shape for different sizes and weights of type.”
[Since the late 1980s designers have tried to solve the problem of optical sizes of fonts in the digital world. Adobe created Multiple Master fonts c.1990 which had optical size as an axis. Although they are no longer offered, independent designers such as Sumner Stone, Mark van Bronkhorst and John Downer have all created size-specific typefaces. Other than the issue of optical sizing, most knowledgeable observers agree that digital typography and typefaces are as good, if not better, than their metal predecessors. Digital fonts, especially in the OpenType format, often contain small caps, oldstyle figures, tabular figures, Central European accented characters, ligatures, case fractions, alternate characters and more. Not only are character sets larger today, but so too are families. And programs like InDesign allow greater typographic refinements than were ever possible in metal composition.]
p. 407 “…Arial has been derided by graphic designer Mark Simonson (b. 1955) as a ‘scourge’ that is exemplary of the manner in which the digital age has led to a degradation of typography. Another bête noire of the typographic community is Comic Sans…. Somewhat histrionically, and perhaps ironically, the website BanComicSans.com claims that the spread of this font ‘threaten(s) to erode the very foundations upon which centuries of typographic history are built.’ From this perspective, the age of desktop publishing has resulted in a situation where there are no longer gatekeepers to the world of typography, and with Comic Sans the inmates have taken over the asylum.”
[The views of Simonson and BanComicSans.com do not belong in a general history of graphic design. They are as useful as the rants against ITC Souvenir that Frank Romano published for years in the 1980s or the complaints about Futura, Kabel and Gill Sans by New York type houses in the late 1920s. The space taken up with the discussion of Arial and Comic Sans could have been more profitably devoted to talking about digital typefaces that had a true impact: Lucida, ITC Stone, Adobe Garamond, Minion, Meta, Beowolf, Scala, Thesis and others.]
p. 407 “…Macromedia’s Fontographer… introduced in the second half of the 1980s….”
[Fontographer 1.0 was created by Altsys in 1985.]
p. 407 “Brody created FF Blur in 1990 (fig. 10.37) by transforming Helvetica into a hazy form by manipulating it with the newly released program, Adobe Photoshop.”
[That may be the standard story, but an examination of Blur shows that it is derived from Akzidenz Grotesk rather than Helvetica.]
p. 407 “Garage Gothic is a fine example of the postmodern adoption of the vernacular; it is essential to recognize that Frere-Jones did not simply appropriate his typeface from the stamped tickets of the world, but, in line with Robert Venturi’s conceptualization, he used a commonplace set of numbers as the jumping-off point for his art.”
[Frere-Jones had no choice since New York City parking tickets—his specific inspiration—have no letters to copy.]
p. 407 “Bits is perhaps the best of a new breed of conceptual type….”
[Letters have been made out of images and objects for millennia as shown in Letter and Image by Massin (1970).]
p. 407 “A number of typeface designers have embraced the idea that digital type must innately demonstrate its unique quality of changeability. For example… FF Kosmik….”
[FF Kosmik was preceded by Beowolf from Letterror (Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum). They are both examples of what the duo calls randomfonts which were a direct challenge to the predictability of PostScript fonts.]
p. 407 “Walker features five kinds of what Carter calls ‘snap-on’ serifs in different styles, allowing the museum’s designers to choose the best version of the typeface for a given application.”
[The point of Walker is that there is no such thing as the “best version” of a typeface.]
p. 408 “The name of Hoefler’s face, Fetish No. 338, gently mocks both the obsession with digitally driven pastiches and the sheer quantity of new faces, the name suggesting that there are 337 earlier versions.”
[Fetish No. 338 is referencing older type names such as Caslon no. 337, Caslon 471 or Caslon 540. The numerical part of these names did not indicate the number of iterations of a design, but simply its place within the production of a foundry over time.]
p. 408 “While inexpensive technology has enabled a number of inventive new types to come to light and make it in the mainstream, the situation has also led to what most typographers see as a precipitous decline in the quality of new faces.”
[It is true that there is a plethora of “poorly designed faces” today, yet it is also true that there are probably more well designed faces today than at any comparable time in the history of type. A quick recitation of excellent and original typefaces since 1990 would include: PMN Caecilia, Meta, Scala, Balance, Lexicon, Clearview, Swift, Hollander, Ellington, Minion, FF Clifford, Whitman, Mercury, Celeste, Brioso, Cycles, Vialog, Dax, Gulliver, Foundry Sans, Documenta, Requiem, Gotham, ITC Officina and Myriad.]
p. 408 the story of the redesign of Franklin Gothic by Matthew Carter for the Museum of Modern Art is not a good example of “what can go wrong in the new digital age of typography” but an example of what can go right as the digital era has made it economical to commission type upgrades or entirely new custom faces.
p. 409, fig. 10.44 why show only the basic form of Walker and none of the variations with “snap-on” serifs since those are what make it notable?
p. 409, fig. 10.45 text in the images says “Franklin Gothic was popular with followers of the International Style….”
[This is not true. Advocates of the International Style in the 1960s rejected Franklin Gothic, News Gothic and Trade Gothic along with the geometrica sans serifs in favor of Akzidenz Grotesk and later Helvetica. Franklin Gothic was revived by the anti-International Style designers at ITC in the 1970s as a reaction to the dominance of Helvetica.]
p. 420 mentions Jonathan Barnbrook’s Virus Fonts without citing any specific faces, including those with a overt political stance (eg. Exocet or Fat Bastard or Nixon).
p. 422 “Akzidenz Grotesk. One of the first high-quality sans serif typefaces….”
[How is high-quality defined?]
p. 422 “Arcadia. Neville Brody designed Arcadia in 1986 based on his earlier work for Arena magazine.”
[Arcadia was released c.1990 based on an alphabet done for Arena in 1986.]
p. 422 “Arial. A typeface designed in 1988 as an inexpensive copy of Adobe’s Postscript [sic] Helvetica.”
[The date is contentious—it is left out of the Monotype chronology in the centennial issue of The Monotype Recorder, but is dated 1982 elsewhere in the publication. Why and to whom Arial was “inexpensive” is not clear.]
p. 422 “Art Deco. An English-language term derived from the name of the 1925 exposition of decorative arts held in Paris; Art Deco is a style characterized by geometric regularity.”
[The term was coined by Bevis Hillier in 1968. Art Deco is much more than “geometric regularity”. The French name of the exposition should be provided.]
p. 422 “Georges Auriol” should be “George Auriol”
p. 422 “[ITC] Avant-Garde Gothic. Herb Lubalin designed this stylish sans serif typeface in 1967 for the masthead of the magazine Avant Garde.”
[Lubalin’s colleagues (principally Tom Carnase) designed lettering for the masthead of Avant Garde not a typeface. The typeface followed between then and 1970.]
p. 422 “Behrens-Antiqua. A roman typeface designed by Peter Behrens in 1908 for the AEG corporation.”
[Behrens designed lettering for AEG prior to 1908 which became the basis for Behrens-Antiqua released by the Klingspor foundry.]
p. 422 “Behrens-Fraktur. A decorative typeface designed by Peter Behrens in the early 1900s as a compromise between the blackletter and Art Nouveau styles.”
[There is no typeface named Behrens-Fraktur. Behrensschrift was designed by Behrens as a hybrid of blackletter and roman styles and issued by Klingspor in 1901. (Fraktur is not a decorative style.)]
p. 423 “Bembo. A fifteenth-century Old Style type designed in Venice by Aldus Manutius.”
[Bembo was designed by the staff at Monotype Corporation under the direction of Stanley Morison in 1929 based on a typeface cut by Francesco Griffo in 1495 for Aldus Manutius.]
p. 423 “Bocklin” should be “Arnold Böcklin”
p. 423 “Cochin. A roman typeface designed in 1914 for the Monotype letterpress machine by the French artist and foundry owner Dominique Peignet [sic].”
[Georges Peignot designed Moreau-le-Jeune (later named Cochin by the Lanston Monotype Co.) in 1912.]
p. 423 “Comic Sans. A decorative typeface released by Microsoft in 1995.”
[Comic Sans is not a decorative typeface but a script in the handwriting or casual vein.]
p. 424 why are there no dates in the glossary entries for Dadaism, De Stijl or Futurism?
p. 424 “Deutschland. A blackletter typeface produced under the Nazis in 1934, it mixes calligraphic strokes with the simplified structure of contemporary sans serifs.”
[Schaftstiefelgrotesk faces such as Deutschland are characterized by their avoidance of calligraphic strokes.]
p. 424 why no dates for Electrance, Elliott’s Blue Eyeshadow or [HTF] Fetish No. 338 fonts?
p. 424 “FF Dax. A popular, stylish sans serif typeface designed in 1997 by Hans Reichel.”
[This is correct but why is this in the glossary when it is not mentioned in the text?]
p. 424 “Franklin Gothic. a high-quality sans serif typeface designed in 1902 by the American Morris Fuller Benton.”
[Again, how is “high-quality” being defined?]
p. 425 “Garamond. Fifteenth-century Old Style type designed in France by Claude Garamond.”
[Garamond cut his types in the 16th c.]
p. 425 “Hamburger Druckschrift. A typeface designed in 1914 by Friedrich Bauer in the hope of reconciling the blackletter and roman traditions.”
[The correct date is 1904.]
p. 425 “Helvetica, originally called Neue Haas Grotesk, was designed in 1953 by [Eduard Hoffmann and] Max Miedinger.”
[The correct date is 1957.]
p. 425 “International Style. A term coined in 1931 by Museum of Modern Art curators Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock to explain the new geometric style in architecture. In graphic design, ‘International Style’ refers to work that operates under the same aesthetic and ideological principles; also called the Swiss Style.”
[This definition needs to point out that the International Style in graphic design is a later phenomenon than its architectural counterpart. Also, it is not entirely synonymous with Swiss Style.]
p. 426 “Italics. Type that slants elegantly upward and to the right.”
[Italic, or chancery cursive, need not slant at all. It is defined by its narrowness, ductus and structure. In type, italics tend to slope but elegance and upwardness are irrelevant. Italics also refers to emphasis within a typographic text.]
p. 426 “Job printer. A general term for a printing house and its employees that work ‘job to job’ without apparent specialization or design training.”
[Job printing refers to all printing outside of books, magazines and newspapers. Printers—of all kinds—never had formal design training prior to the creation of printing schools in the 20th c. These schools trained both job and book printers.]
p. 426 “Kunstgewerbeschule. A Viennese school dedicated to the theory and practice of the decorative arts.”
[There are many Kunstgewerbeschules in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The word simply means “college of arts and crafts”.]
p. 426 “Lubok. A kind of Russian folk art print, many of [sic] which featured religious stories.”
p. 426 “MoMA Gothic. In 2005 Mathew [sic] Carter created MOMA [sic] Gothic….”
p. 426 “Monotype. An industrial machine, developed in 1889….”
[The year should be 1887.]
p. 427 “New Typography. A term coined in 1923 and soon made popular by Jan Tschichold….”
[This is ambiguous. It does not clearly credit Láslzó Moholy-Nagy with the coinage. Also, the German original die neue typographie should be included in the glossary definition.]
p. 427 “Old Style. Roman type of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that is characterized by understated contrast, bracketed serifs, and oblique stress.”
[Old Style faces were also cut in the 17th and early 18th centuries.]
pp. 426 and 427 “Postscript” should be “PostScript”
p. 427 “Phototypesetting. A technique developed in the 1950s whereby type was reproduced from photographic negatives as opposed to the metal type used in the Monotype and Linotype machines.”
[Phototypesetting’s history predates 1950. It replaced all metal type, not just that produced by the Monotype and Linotype machines.]
p. 427 there are no dates for Purism
p. 428 “Carolingian Minuscule” should be “Carolingian minuscule”
p. 429 “Souvenir” should be “ITC Souvenir”
p. 429 “Template Gothic. A typeface designed by Barry Deck in the early 1990s….”
[The typeface was designed in 1990 and issued in 1991.]
p. 429 “Verdana. An elegant typeface designed by Mathew Carter [sic] for Microsoft in 1996, [sic] it is hoped that it will eventually displace the ubiquitous Arial.”
[A glossary is no place for editorializing.]
p. 430 there is no date for Walker
p. 430 “Westinghouse Gothic. A bespoke sans serif typeface designed by Paul Rand for the Westinghouse Corporation in 1968.”
[The correct year should be c.1961.]
p. 430 there are no dates for the Wiener Werkstätte
p. 441 “Art Chantry” should not be an entry under A
p. 441 “Auriol, Georges” should be “Auriol, George”
p. 443 “Bocklin” should be “Arnold Böcklin”
p. 444 “City medium grotesque typeface” should be “City Medium typeface”
p. 446 “FF Blur” and “FF Dax” typefaces should be indexed under B and D respectively, not under F
p. 449 “Haas foundry, Zurich” should be “Haas foundry, Münchenstein”
p. 451 “Koch, Rudolph” should be “Koch, Rudolf”
p. 453 “Mazzei, Nancy, MTV logo…” should be “Mazzei, Nancy, MTV2 logo….”
p. 285 “Despite his opposition to Nazi policies, Renner was one of the only modern designers who never fled Germany.”
[This is an exaggeration. Georg Trump, Johannes Molzahn, Johannes Canis, Walter Dexel and Willi Baumeister all remained in Germany and Herbert Bayer stayed for five years before emigrating.]
p. 300 “In the post-war period, the graphic design profession was transformed by the rise of the Swiss style (also called the International Style, a term this author prefers)….”
[Although the two terms have often been used interchangeably there are distinctive differences between the work of Swiss designers and those in other countries. One difference is that non-Swiss designers tended to use Helvetica while Swiss designers—with the significant exception of Emil Ruder and his followers—preferred Akzidenz Grotesk, even after Helvetica was available. The Ruderites favored Univers and disdained the grid.]
p. 303, fig. 8.2 “Berthold Staff. Akzidenz Grotesk Typeface [sic], Berthold Foundry, 1896.”
[The more commonly listed date for Akzidenz Grotesk is 1898, though there is recent research suggesting that the face was based on Royal Grotesk issued by Ferdinand Theinhardt in 1880. “Berthold Foundry” should be “Berthold AG” of “H. Berthold AG”. The image is a digital version of Akzidenz Grotesk.]
p. 307 “While Akzidenz Grotesk remained the type of choice for Bill and Müller-Brockmann throughout their careers, Paul Renner’s Futura also persisted as a popular choice for Swiss designers.”
[This statement is not supported by the work shown in Swiss Graphic Design by Richard Hollis. Also, Müller-Brockmann increasingly used Helvetica after 1968.]
p. 307, fig. 8.7 “Max Miedinger, Neue Haas Grotesk Helvetica Typeface, 1951.”
[This is a mishmash of a caption. The typeface in the image is Helvetica. Credit for its design goes to Eduard Hoffmann as well as Miedinger. The date should be 1960.]
p. 307 “…Helvetica, was created in 1953 for Eduard Hoffman [sic] of the Haas foundry in Zurich. Hoffman.… In 1951 he commissioned Max Miedinger (1910–1980) to create a new sans serif based on Akzidenz Grotesk, and Neue Haas Grotesk was born (fig. 8.7).… In 1957, Neue Haas Grotesk was sold by Haas to a German foundry, Stempel.”
[The documentation of Neue Haas Grotesk/Helvetica begins in 1956. The face was not only commissioned by Hofmann but art directed by him as well. Miedinger executed the drawings. Akzidenz Grotesk was the principal source of inspiration for the new design but other existing grots (eg. Schelter Grotesk) were analyzed as well. The type created by Miedinger and Hofmann was named Neue Haas Grotesk after the Haas foundry of Münchenstein, near Basel, and issued in 1957. In 1960, the D. Stempel AG foundry of Frankfurt, Germany (which had an interest in the Haas foundry) licensed the design and changed the name to Helvetica. They tweaked the design slightly so that the same artwork could be used for the Linotype version made by their affiliate German Linotype GmbH. The image in fig. 8.7 is of Helvetica from Stempel.]
p. 307 “A follower of the functional, logical precepts of the International Style, Frutiger….”
[Frutiger was never an adherent of the International Style, even as his typeface Univers became popular with many designers working in that idiom. Frutiger’s aesthetics are more complicated than that as evidenced by his wide range of type designs, his deep interest in symbols and signs, and his insistence on the value of handwork within a machine context.]
p. 307, fig. 8.8 “Adrian Frutiger, Univers Typeface [sic], Deberny & Peignot Foundry, 1954–7.”
[The idea of numbering the members of Univers was Frutiger’s, but the famous diagram (shown in fig. 8.8) illustrating the system was created by Rémy Peignot.]
p. 307 “In 1950, a few years before Frutiger joined Deberny & Peignot, the firm had developed the ‘Lumitype Photon’ phototypesetting system.”
[Rene Higonnet and Louis Moyroud demonstrated their first phototypesetting machine in 1946, named it the Photon in 1948 and continued to develop it for another six years. Deberny & Peignot invested in the machine in the early 1950s and in 1954 an agreement was reached to market it as the Lumitype. That year the first commercialized machine was demonstrated and in 1955 Lumitype SA was set up as a company. Deberny & Peignot were not involved in the development of the Photon/Lumitype machine other than financially.]
p. 308 “Called Optima, this conservative typeface was released for the Linotype in 1958 (fig. 8.9). Zapf had sought to make a sans serif that included some of the structural characteristics of seriffed letters, particularly those of ancient Roman carvings. Zapf also admired the typography of the Renaissance, and there are variations in stroke width in Optima that recall the calligraphic strokes of Modern styles.”
[Optima was developed by D. Stempel AG and released by it and Linotype GmbH simultaneously in 1958. The inspiration for the design came from Renaissance tombstone lettering in S. Croce, Florence which Zapf first sketched in late 1950. The variations in stroke width have nothing to do with “modern” styles of type. Optima is actually a much more radical design than its contemporaries Univers and Helvetica since there was little precedent for it. This is evident in the confusion that greeted the face upon its release: was it a sans serif or a serifless roman?]
p. 311 the paragraph devoted to “Basel Type” makes no mention of Emil Ruder or Karl Gertsner, both of whom were as important as Armin Hofmann.
p. 312 “In the United Kingdom, typography and graphic design professionals of the 1930s through the 1960s were generally reluctant to adopt the International Style.”
[Although it is correct that British design was typographically conservative during Stanley Morison’s lifetime, that conservatism was not a reaction to the International Style. The Swiss Style emerged in the late 1940s and the International Style did not follow until the 1960s.]
pp. 314–315 “During this period, England had one great champion of the International Style, the typographer Herbert Spencer (1924–2002).”
[Spencer was a champion of modernism not the International Style per se. Another important figure in British modernism at that time was Anthony Froshaug who was much closer to the International Style than Spencer.]
p. 316 “While some American graphic designers accepted the rigid ideology prevalent in Zurich, many more saw the International Style as just that—a style, which should be flexibly employed as the occasion demanded. For this reason, it is common to see elements of the Art Deco or other, eclectic styles, intrude into an otherwise geometrically structured image. For example, Lustig’s 1948 book jacket for Anatomy for Interior Designers….”
[This shows a severe misunderstanding of what the International Style was. It was not synonymous with all post-World War I modernism, but a specific approach. Alvin Lustig was NOT a practitioner of the International Style.]
p. 319 “…one can sense that Bass did not want to constrain his images [re: posters for The Man with the Golden Arm, Vertigo and Exodus] with the grid.”
[The grid did not become a significant part of American graphic design until 1965 when Unimark was established. All of the Bass posters shown were produced before 1961. But, like Lustig, Bass was never a proponent of the International Style, anyway.]
p. 318, fig. 8.22 “Saul Bass, Vertigo, 1958. Poster.…”
[As with all other references to Bass’ film poster work, the contribution of Harold Adler, who did the lettering, is not recognized.]
p. 320 “Of course the idea of corporate identity… did not first develop in the 1950s. Among its antecedents was the work in Germany for AEG that Peter Behrens performed during the 1910s…. However, Behrens’s work was essentially anomalous during the early part of the century….”
[Behrens’ work for AEG began before 1910. More importantly, there were other examples of corporate design work prior to the 1950s: Fred G. Cooper’s work for New York Edison from 1904 to 1927, O.H.W. Hadank’s work for Haus Neuerburg (a tobacco company) from the mid-1920s to the mid-1950s, and Container Corporation of America from 1934 to the early 1980s. (CCA is discussed in the book, but not until p. 322)]
p. 325 “Georg Trump’s City Medium grotesque face”
[City is a square serif design—a modernized Egyptian—not a sans serif.]
p. 326 “(…and later went on to design a Schaftstiefelgrotesk called Trump Deutsch in 1935.)”
[Trump Deutsch is not Schaftstiefelgrotesk but a simplified textura. It is distinctly different from Element, National and Deutschland.]
p. 326 “He [Paul Rand] used a Helvetica-like grotesque, called simply Westinghouse Gothic….”
[Westinghouse Gothic—the “Gothic” is telling—is much closer to an older style of sans serif such as Alternate Gothic than it is to Helvetica.]
p. 326 “While the eye logo was sometimes embellished with the CBS acronym in grotesque letters, Golden also established the redrawn version of a modern roman face, Didot Bodoni, as the house typeface for the network.”
[Didot Bodoni makes no sense. Both CBS Sans and CBS Didot were designed by Freeman (Jerry) Craw who rarely receives the credit he deserves for this work.]
p. 329, fig. 8.38 “Lester Beall, International Paper Logo [sic], 1972.”
[The logo was designed in 1960.]
p. 333 “This thirty-nine-story tower [the Seagram building] shimmers in shades of brass and brown…. The ‘glass box’ structure seems to be a pure Neoplatonist solid, a universal shape of harmony and balance.”
[The Seagram Building, as the description above indicates, is a poor choice to exemplify the ‘glass boxes’ of the International Style in architecture. Lever House nearby is a more apt example.]
p. 338 “The flame-like red lettering seems to zigzag back and forth across the page, with the shape of each letter changing in order to fit into the available space. The red letters seem to project from the cool green background; this use of brilliant complementary colors is a hallmark of the 1960s rock poster. In response to this sacrifice of legibility in the name of expressiveness, the concert promotor Bill Graham (b. 1931) resorted to using asterisks that referred the viewer of the poster to the bottom margin, where the specifics of the concert were rewritten in legible type.”
[This does not describe fig. 9.1. (BG 34-1) a poster whose lettering is not flamelike and although red is not on a green background. The small type at the bottom is not a reprise of the difficult-to-read lettered text above, but a list of ticket outlets. BG 18-1 by Wes Wilson has red flamelike letters on a green background but no asterisks or redundant text.]
p. 343 “…the Morgan Press, a typography outfit that owned a varied collection of what were at the time considered museum pieces [old wooden type]….”
[The Morgan Press was a type house that specialized in wood type. John Alcorn of the Push Pin Studio designed two catalogues of their offerings. The Morgan Press wood type collection is now at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of American History.]
p. 344 “…an almost random sampling of new illustrations, clip art, and lettering are arrayed in a boxed grid (fig. 9.10). This particular design [from The Push Pin Monthly Graphic] seems almost likea parody of the International Style grid, as it fills the spaces with quirky images that scarcely relate to one another.”
[The image was published in 1959 before the International Style took hold in the United States. Most likely it was influenced by the boxes of Joseph Cornell or possibly the Dadaist game of the exquisite corpse.]
p. 346 “An image for the Olivetti Corporation is a wonderful example of the Push Pin style applied to advertising…. Glaser created this pastiche of Italian Renaissance painting, stencil lettering and a dog… in order to advertise a shiny new red typewriter.… Right above the typewriter, itself an Italian product, there is a winding river that is a cliché of classical Italian painting.”
[In fact, the Olivetti poster (fig. 9.13) is a direct reference to a painting of a mourning dog by Piero di Cosimo, complete with clichéd river. See Art is Work by Milton Glaser, p. 226.]
p. 346 “Reproduced tens of millions of times… the rebus [I (heart) NY]… inspired a flood of like-minded designs over the next decade, including Paul Rand’s new take on his original IBM logo.”
[It is doubtful that Glaser’s design inspired the “Eye, Bee, M” poster (1981) as Rand had toyed with such a rebus for years before.]
p. 347 “Another designer associated with the Push Pin Studio, Paula Scher….”
[Paula Scher’s only association with the studio is through her marriage to Seymour Chwast. She never worked for it.]
p. 348 “The back of the Rampal album [Sakura] is unusual in that its design relied solely on typography, at a time when record covers tended to be image saturated on both sides.”
[All type back covers were still common on record albums in the 1970s, especially in the field of classical music which included Rampal.]
p. 348 “The reassessment of vernacular sources by postmodernists was influenced by the work of Andy Warhol….”
[Warhol’s first exhibition was in 1962, several years after the members of the Push Pin Studio had begun to explore vernacular sources. They were a bigger influence on other graphic designers in the 1960s and 1970s than Warhol.]
p.350 “In the 1960s and 1970s, a number of new typefaces were designed as alternatives to the popular Helvetica…. [ITC] Avant-Garde Gothic….”
[Avant-Garde Gothic, as the text correctly points out, originated as a magazine masthead. There was no intent at the time to design a typeface as an alternative to Helvetica. If anything, the goal was to “update” Futura. The popularity of ITC Avant-Garde Gothic was primarily due to the popularity of Lubalin’s approach to design and the marketing efforts of U&lc.]
p. 351 “…Souvenir, designed by Ed Benguiat…”
[ITC Souvenir is a redesign (and extension) by Benguiat of Souvenir by Morris Fuller Benton (ATF, 1914) which in turn was based on Schelter Antiqua from the Schelter & Geisecke foundry. At heart it is an Art Nouveau typeface.]
p. 351 “…the letters of Souvenir were designed to be tightly spaced… a factor that helps distinguish 1970s fashion from the more widely spaced designs of the 1980s.”
[This is correct but it fails to explain why the ITC look—which extended beyond ITC Souvenir to the entire font library at the time—came about. It was rooted in the typographic work that Herb Lubalin did—with the help of Aaron Burns of The Composing Room—in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The same factors that spurred Lubalin to create tightly spaced typography were behind the decision by Hoffmann and Miedinger to design Neue Haas Grotesk (Helvetica) with no sidebearings.]
p. 352 “In 1968 Weingart moved to Basel, where he accepted a position at the same Kuntsgewerbeschule where Armin Hofmann taught.”
[This is correct, but more importantly, Weingart succeeded Emil Ruder.]
p. 355 “During the 1970s, Friedman influentially rejected the absolutism of ‘legibility’ as the core criterion for judging graphic design, replacing it with the more open-ended term ‘readability’, which in his mind allowed for a more multivalent creative process.”
[The terms “legibility” and “readability” need to be clearly defined.]
p. 355 “This poster [Yale University Orchestra Concert, 1973] displays a number of postmodern elements, including the quirky mix of lettering in a wide variety of weights and sizes, whimsical overprinting that distracts the viewer from the core of the design, and multiple axes that create a kinetic effect. Note the way in which the red accents on ‘Janacek,’ normally minor diacritical elements, jump out at the viewer.”
[What is not mentioned in this description is how indebted Friedman and Greiman were to Piet Zwart’s 1920s designs for NKF in the treatment of these accent marks.]
p. 358, fig. 9.29 “Allen Hori, Typography as Discourse, 1989.”
[The image should be identified as a poster.]
p. 365, fig. 9.41 “Zuzana Licko, Emperor 8 Typeface [sic], 1984.”
[The image shows not only Emperor 8, but also Emperor 10, Emperor 15 and Emperor 19.]
pp. 365–367 the discussion of Emigre’s early bitmapped fonts (eg. Emperor) would benefit from an explanation of why bitmapping posed an aesthetic problem to the designers of early digital fonts. Also, a reference to the grid-based lettering (c.1919) of Theo van Doesburg would have been apropos.
p. 366, fig. 9.43 text in image: “Ed Fella, created in Template Gothic a sort of hybrid….”
[Barry Deck created Template Gothic as the caption correctly notes.]
p. 366, fig. 9.44 “Neville Brody, Arcadia Typeface [sic], 1986.”
[Brody designed an alphabet for the ‘Avanti’ section of Arena in 1986 which became the digital typeface Arcadia c.1990.]
p. 367 “Postscript [sic] was ‘device independent,’ meaning it allowed a designer to command just about any sort of output device, including 3,000dpi [sic] professional image setters of all sorts, to print type exactly as it was intended.”
[The real importance of PostScript being device-independent was that typographic output could be accomplished on the machines of a variety of manufacturers. No longer were Monotype faces only available on Monotype machines, Linotype faces on Linotype machines, Compugraphic faces on Compugraphic machines, and so on. PostScript was challenged by other “languages” (eg. Intellifont) in the 1980s.]
p. 382 “His [Elliott Earls’] first success in typography came in the mid-1990s, when a number of his custom typefaces were published by Emigre.”
[Earls’ early “custom” typefaces are actually sampled and copied from existing designs: Dysphasia is distorted and distressed Akzidenz Grotesk; Bland Serif Bland is hand comped Helvetica; Penal Code is Bland Serif Bland with markings; and Distillation Straight, Derma and Perma are all severely altered versions of Trump Medieval.]
p. 385, fig. 10.13 “Fred Seibert, MTV Logo [sic]. 1985.”
[Philip Meggs says (A History of Graphic Design, 4th ed., pp. 422–423) that the basic logo was designed by Pat Gorman and Frank Olinsky of Manhattan Design in 1981.]
p. 405, fig. 10.35 the text says, “Arial was designed in 1988 for Monotype….” but the caption says “Arial Typeface [sic], 1989. Monotype Corporation.”
[The history of Arial is contentious, but Robin Nicholas, one of its designers, says it was begun in 1982. Lawrence Wallis gives 1988 as its date.]
p. 405 “In terms of typography, many designers feel that there has been a cheapening of the quality of type, especially as metal type has been transformed into digital sets that do not make allowances for the subtle changes in proportion and shape for different sizes and weights of type.”
[Since the late 1980s designers have tried to solve the problem of optical sizes of fonts in the digital world. Adobe created Multiple Master fonts c.1990 which had optical size as an axis. Although they are no longer offered, independent designers such as Sumner Stone, Mark van Bronkhorst and John Downer have all created size-specific typefaces. Other than the issue of optical sizing, most knowledgeable observers agree that digital typography and typefaces are as good, if not better, than their metal predecessors. Digital fonts, especially in the OpenType format, often contain small caps, oldstyle figures, tabular figures, Central European accented characters, ligatures, case fractions, alternate characters and more. Not only are character sets larger today, but so too are families. And programs like InDesign allow greater typographic refinements than were ever possible in metal composition.]
p. 407 “…Arial has been derided by graphic designer Mark Simonson (b. 1955) as a ‘scourge’ that is exemplary of the manner in which the digital age has led to a degradation of typography. Another bête noire of the typographic community is Comic Sans…. Somewhat histrionically, and perhaps ironically, the website BanComicSans.com claims that the spread of this font ‘threaten(s) to erode the very foundations upon which centuries of typographic history are built.’ From this perspective, the age of desktop publishing has resulted in a situation where there are no longer gatekeepers to the world of typography, and with Comic Sans the inmates have taken over the asylum.”
[The views of Simonson and BanComicSans.com do not belong in a general history of graphic design. They are as useful as the rants against ITC Souvenir that Frank Romano published for years in the 1980s or the complaints about Futura, Kabel and Gill Sans by New York type houses in the late 1920s. The space taken up with the discussion of Arial and Comic Sans could have been more profitably devoted to talking about digital typefaces that had a true impact: Lucida, ITC Stone, Adobe Garamond, Minion, Meta, Beowolf, Scala, Thesis and others.]
p. 407 “…Macromedia’s Fontographer… introduced in the second half of the 1980s….”
[Fontographer 1.0 was created by Altsys in 1985.]
p. 407 “Brody created FF Blur in 1990 (fig. 10.37) by transforming Helvetica into a hazy form by manipulating it with the newly released program, Adobe Photoshop.”
[That may be the standard story, but an examination of Blur shows that it is derived from Akzidenz Grotesk rather than Helvetica.]
p. 407 “Garage Gothic is a fine example of the postmodern adoption of the vernacular; it is essential to recognize that Frere-Jones did not simply appropriate his typeface from the stamped tickets of the world, but, in line with Robert Venturi’s conceptualization, he used a commonplace set of numbers as the jumping-off point for his art.”
[Frere-Jones had no choice since New York City parking tickets—his specific inspiration—have no letters to copy.]
p. 407 “Bits is perhaps the best of a new breed of conceptual type….”
[Letters have been made out of images and objects for millennia as shown in Letter and Image by Massin (1970).]
p. 407 “A number of typeface designers have embraced the idea that digital type must innately demonstrate its unique quality of changeability. For example… FF Kosmik….”
[FF Kosmik was preceded by Beowolf from Letterror (Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum). They are both examples of what the duo calls randomfonts which were a direct challenge to the predictability of PostScript fonts.]
p. 407 “Walker features five kinds of what Carter calls ‘snap-on’ serifs in different styles, allowing the museum’s designers to choose the best version of the typeface for a given application.”
[The point of Walker is that there is no such thing as the “best version” of a typeface.]
p. 408 “The name of Hoefler’s face, Fetish No. 338, gently mocks both the obsession with digitally driven pastiches and the sheer quantity of new faces, the name suggesting that there are 337 earlier versions.”
[Fetish No. 338 is referencing older type names such as Caslon no. 337, Caslon 471 or Caslon 540. The numerical part of these names did not indicate the number of iterations of a design, but simply its place within the production of a foundry over time.]
p. 408 “While inexpensive technology has enabled a number of inventive new types to come to light and make it in the mainstream, the situation has also led to what most typographers see as a precipitous decline in the quality of new faces.”
[It is true that there is a plethora of “poorly designed faces” today, yet it is also true that there are probably more well designed faces today than at any comparable time in the history of type. A quick recitation of excellent and original typefaces since 1990 would include: PMN Caecilia, Meta, Scala, Balance, Lexicon, Clearview, Swift, Hollander, Ellington, Minion, FF Clifford, Whitman, Mercury, Celeste, Brioso, Cycles, Vialog, Dax, Gulliver, Foundry Sans, Documenta, Requiem, Gotham, ITC Officina and Myriad.]
p. 408 the story of the redesign of Franklin Gothic by Matthew Carter for the Museum of Modern Art is not a good example of “what can go wrong in the new digital age of typography” but an example of what can go right as the digital era has made it economical to commission type upgrades or entirely new custom faces.
p. 409, fig. 10.44 why show only the basic form of Walker and none of the variations with “snap-on” serifs since those are what make it notable?
p. 409, fig. 10.45 text in the images says “Franklin Gothic was popular with followers of the International Style….”
[This is not true. Advocates of the International Style in the 1960s rejected Franklin Gothic, News Gothic and Trade Gothic along with the geometrica sans serifs in favor of Akzidenz Grotesk and later Helvetica. Franklin Gothic was revived by the anti-International Style designers at ITC in the 1970s as a reaction to the dominance of Helvetica.]
p. 420 mentions Jonathan Barnbrook’s Virus Fonts without citing any specific faces, including those with a overt political stance (eg. Exocet or Fat Bastard or Nixon).
p. 422 “Akzidenz Grotesk. One of the first high-quality sans serif typefaces….”
[How is high-quality defined?]
p. 422 “Arcadia. Neville Brody designed Arcadia in 1986 based on his earlier work for Arena magazine.”
[Arcadia was released c.1990 based on an alphabet done for Arena in 1986.]
p. 422 “Arial. A typeface designed in 1988 as an inexpensive copy of Adobe’s Postscript [sic] Helvetica.”
[The date is contentious—it is left out of the Monotype chronology in the centennial issue of The Monotype Recorder, but is dated 1982 elsewhere in the publication. Why and to whom Arial was “inexpensive” is not clear.]
p. 422 “Art Deco. An English-language term derived from the name of the 1925 exposition of decorative arts held in Paris; Art Deco is a style characterized by geometric regularity.”
[The term was coined by Bevis Hillier in 1968. Art Deco is much more than “geometric regularity”. The French name of the exposition should be provided.]
p. 422 “Georges Auriol” should be “George Auriol”
p. 422 “[ITC] Avant-Garde Gothic. Herb Lubalin designed this stylish sans serif typeface in 1967 for the masthead of the magazine Avant Garde.”
[Lubalin’s colleagues (principally Tom Carnase) designed lettering for the masthead of Avant Garde not a typeface. The typeface followed between then and 1970.]
p. 422 “Behrens-Antiqua. A roman typeface designed by Peter Behrens in 1908 for the AEG corporation.”
[Behrens designed lettering for AEG prior to 1908 which became the basis for Behrens-Antiqua released by the Klingspor foundry.]
p. 422 “Behrens-Fraktur. A decorative typeface designed by Peter Behrens in the early 1900s as a compromise between the blackletter and Art Nouveau styles.”
[There is no typeface named Behrens-Fraktur. Behrensschrift was designed by Behrens as a hybrid of blackletter and roman styles and issued by Klingspor in 1901. (Fraktur is not a decorative style.)]
p. 423 “Bembo. A fifteenth-century Old Style type designed in Venice by Aldus Manutius.”
[Bembo was designed by the staff at Monotype Corporation under the direction of Stanley Morison in 1929 based on a typeface cut by Francesco Griffo in 1495 for Aldus Manutius.]
p. 423 “Bocklin” should be “Arnold Böcklin”
p. 423 “Cochin. A roman typeface designed in 1914 for the Monotype letterpress machine by the French artist and foundry owner Dominique Peignet [sic].”
[Georges Peignot designed Moreau-le-Jeune (later named Cochin by the Lanston Monotype Co.) in 1912.]
p. 423 “Comic Sans. A decorative typeface released by Microsoft in 1995.”
[Comic Sans is not a decorative typeface but a script in the handwriting or casual vein.]
p. 424 why are there no dates in the glossary entries for Dadaism, De Stijl or Futurism?
p. 424 “Deutschland. A blackletter typeface produced under the Nazis in 1934, it mixes calligraphic strokes with the simplified structure of contemporary sans serifs.”
[Schaftstiefelgrotesk faces such as Deutschland are characterized by their avoidance of calligraphic strokes.]
p. 424 why no dates for Electrance, Elliott’s Blue Eyeshadow or [HTF] Fetish No. 338 fonts?
p. 424 “FF Dax. A popular, stylish sans serif typeface designed in 1997 by Hans Reichel.”
[This is correct but why is this in the glossary when it is not mentioned in the text?]
p. 424 “Franklin Gothic. a high-quality sans serif typeface designed in 1902 by the American Morris Fuller Benton.”
[Again, how is “high-quality” being defined?]
p. 425 “Garamond. Fifteenth-century Old Style type designed in France by Claude Garamond.”
[Garamond cut his types in the 16th c.]
p. 425 “Hamburger Druckschrift. A typeface designed in 1914 by Friedrich Bauer in the hope of reconciling the blackletter and roman traditions.”
[The correct date is 1904.]
p. 425 “Helvetica, originally called Neue Haas Grotesk, was designed in 1953 by [Eduard Hoffmann and] Max Miedinger.”
[The correct date is 1957.]
p. 425 “International Style. A term coined in 1931 by Museum of Modern Art curators Philip Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock to explain the new geometric style in architecture. In graphic design, ‘International Style’ refers to work that operates under the same aesthetic and ideological principles; also called the Swiss Style.”
[This definition needs to point out that the International Style in graphic design is a later phenomenon than its architectural counterpart. Also, it is not entirely synonymous with Swiss Style.]
p. 426 “Italics. Type that slants elegantly upward and to the right.”
[Italic, or chancery cursive, need not slant at all. It is defined by its narrowness, ductus and structure. In type, italics tend to slope but elegance and upwardness are irrelevant. Italics also refers to emphasis within a typographic text.]
p. 426 “Job printer. A general term for a printing house and its employees that work ‘job to job’ without apparent specialization or design training.”
[Job printing refers to all printing outside of books, magazines and newspapers. Printers—of all kinds—never had formal design training prior to the creation of printing schools in the 20th c. These schools trained both job and book printers.]
p. 426 “Kunstgewerbeschule. A Viennese school dedicated to the theory and practice of the decorative arts.”
[There are many Kunstgewerbeschules in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The word simply means “college of arts and crafts”.]
p. 426 “Lubok. A kind of Russian folk art print, many of [sic] which featured religious stories.”
p. 426 “MoMA Gothic. In 2005 Mathew [sic] Carter created MOMA [sic] Gothic….”
p. 426 “Monotype. An industrial machine, developed in 1889….”
[The year should be 1887.]
p. 427 “New Typography. A term coined in 1923 and soon made popular by Jan Tschichold….”
[This is ambiguous. It does not clearly credit Láslzó Moholy-Nagy with the coinage. Also, the German original die neue typographie should be included in the glossary definition.]
p. 427 “Old Style. Roman type of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries that is characterized by understated contrast, bracketed serifs, and oblique stress.”
[Old Style faces were also cut in the 17th and early 18th centuries.]
pp. 426 and 427 “Postscript” should be “PostScript”
p. 427 “Phototypesetting. A technique developed in the 1950s whereby type was reproduced from photographic negatives as opposed to the metal type used in the Monotype and Linotype machines.”
[Phototypesetting’s history predates 1950. It replaced all metal type, not just that produced by the Monotype and Linotype machines.]
p. 427 there are no dates for Purism
p. 428 “Carolingian Minuscule” should be “Carolingian minuscule”
p. 429 “Souvenir” should be “ITC Souvenir”
p. 429 “Template Gothic. A typeface designed by Barry Deck in the early 1990s….”
[The typeface was designed in 1990 and issued in 1991.]
p. 429 “Verdana. An elegant typeface designed by Mathew Carter [sic] for Microsoft in 1996, [sic] it is hoped that it will eventually displace the ubiquitous Arial.”
[A glossary is no place for editorializing.]
p. 430 there is no date for Walker
p. 430 “Westinghouse Gothic. A bespoke sans serif typeface designed by Paul Rand for the Westinghouse Corporation in 1968.”
[The correct year should be c.1961.]
p. 430 there are no dates for the Wiener Werkstätte
p. 441 “Art Chantry” should not be an entry under A
p. 441 “Auriol, Georges” should be “Auriol, George”
p. 443 “Bocklin” should be “Arnold Böcklin”
p. 444 “City medium grotesque typeface” should be “City Medium typeface”
p. 446 “FF Blur” and “FF Dax” typefaces should be indexed under B and D respectively, not under F
p. 449 “Haas foundry, Zurich” should be “Haas foundry, Münchenstein”
p. 451 “Koch, Rudolph” should be “Koch, Rudolf”
p. 453 “Mazzei, Nancy, MTV logo…” should be “Mazzei, Nancy, MTV2 logo….”
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