Posters Is Here

I'm steadily making progress on my posters and I think they are coming along nicely. The best part about spiders is that they are very recognizable. People are almost hardwired to recognize them, it seems.

Spider Poll is Now Up

Have fun voting. Of course, it's anonymous so get those phobias off your chest*.

*this site is meant for entertainment only. Not intended as a replacement for psychiatric help for arachnophobia or any phobia.

TYPEFACE: Movie From Class

The documentary we watched in class on Monday was mainly focused on the impact that letterpress has (or had) on industry, society, communication and art. While its influence has mostly wained it is still a viable tool for those wishing to express an idea or message typographically.

The film focused a great deal on a town that was at one point very prosperous because of the importance of wooden type at the time. All that remains of that factory is a museum where a handful of locals (and the infrequent visitor) spend time amongst the wooden blocks and presses. There are a few locals remaining that still remember how to operate the machinery and how to create new blocks, but these people are in their 80's and there aren't any young people lined up to learn this trade.

We learn that woodtype was a huge business when it was one of the only ways to print, especially if you wanted to print something that was very large, like an outdoor poster. The cost of making a wooden stamp was tiny compared to one made of steel. The factory in Hamilton supported a whole town just by printing. In the 60's, we're told, offset lithography takes over and wooden printing business takes a nosedive.

Until recently no one cared at all about letterpress. However, lately there has been something of a renaissance in this method of print. It has become trendy within the art scene to embrace the uniqueness and hand made quality of a print made from a wooden block. There are defects and designs the wood creates that wouldn't be easily possible to make on a computer, certainly not if it were to be convincing. With each letter sitting on a different block the amount of variety between one and the next beats any computer font. In a time of digital immediacy, something that actually takes time to make becomes more valuable, which is good news for letterpress.

The film seems to suggest that it is possible that there will be a real reemergence of letterpress based on the level of interest that we see now, but while there is interest will there be enough to sustain the movement to the point of becoming mainstream? And if so, will it lose its charm and quirkiness and fall back out of the attention of the populace? I suppose we'll have to wait and see, but I think that there will always be some individuals that will hold onto this old school technique.

Otl Aicher - Font Designer Biography

Otl Aicher was one of several leading German graphic designers during the twentieth century. He was born in Ulm, Germany in the year 1922.

He was a friend and classmate of Werner Scholl. Through this friendship he met Werner’s family which included his siblings Sophie Scholl and Hans Scholl. These people (Hans and Sophie) would be eventually executed in the year 1943 for their membership in the White Rose movement, which was a resistance movement during World War Two against the Nazi regime in Germany.

As the Scholls were, so was Otl Aicher in that he was against the Nazi movement in Germany at the time. This sentiment was very strong. He was actually arrested in 1937 for refusing to join the Hitler Youth and was therefore automatically considered having failed the Abitur. The Abitur is a college entrance exam in Germany and is very important in a young student’s life. Later, he was drafted in the German army to fight in the second world war despite his views towards the whole thing. He tried to leave occasionally, at various times but was unsuccessful in doing so. Eventually, in 1945 he was able to desert from the army and took residence in the home of the Scholl’s which is in Wutach.

After the war, in 1946, Aicher began to study sculpture in Munich at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. In 1947, he made the bold step of opening his own studio in his hometown of Ulm. On a side note, he married Inge Scholl, the more fortunate of the Scholl siblings. Not too long after this he, along with Inge Scholl and Max Bill, founded the Ulm School of Design. This school became one of Germany’s foremost teaching and learning centers for design. They were most influential during the 1950’s and the 1960’s.

In a career defining move, he was able to contribute considerably in the corporate branding of Lufthansa Airlines in 1969. Along with his general input he was also in charge of designing the logo for Lufthansa Airlines.

Despite the significance of designing the logo for an entire airline, he landed another great designing gig a few years later when he was selected as the lead designer for the 1972 Munich Olympics. As part of his work on this project he created a new set of pictograms that eventually would lead to the ubiquity of stick figures in daily life. These now omnipresent and easy to understand stick figures were once actually ground breaking in design, and we can thank Otl Aicher for that. Not only did he bring stick figures into the minds of the modern pedestrian and motorist, he also developed the first Olympic Mascot. This was a dachshund named Waldi who sported stripes.

Farther down the road, in 1980 Otl Aicher was employed as a consultant of the kitchen company Bulthaup. And also during the 80’s (1988 to be specific) he created the wonderful and oft used font “Rotis Sans” which he named after the domicile of Rotis in the city of Leutkirch im Allgaeu.

He died on September the first, 1991.

Rotis Sans

Rotis is a typeface developed by Otl Aicher, a German graphic designer and developer of typography, in the year 1988. By developing Rotis, Otl Aicher set out to create a font with maximum legibility by using a uniquely and highly unified, and also varied, typeface family that can fit itself to the right context. Otl Aicher wanted to create a family of fonts which could serve nearly any typographical purpose, so that, for instance, Rotis could be used on a street sign but also a company letterhead or even stand as a logo itself.

Basically, the Rotis Typeface Family is as unified as it is diverse. Rotis can vary from full, glyphic, and sans serif. There are at this time four basic Rotis variants which include Rotis Serif (antiqua), Rotis Semi-Serif (semi-antiqua), Rotis Semi-Sans (semi-grotesque), and finaly Rotis Sans (lineale humanist sans serif).

Rotis serif has full serifs, while Rotis semi-serif has only hinted serifs. Additionally, Rotis semi sans has no serifs but It does have stroke width variation while again Rotis Sans has no serifs and with very little variation on stroke width.

The name of this particular typeface, which again was developed by Otl Aicher, is based on the name of a city. The name of the typeface comes from the place name Rotis, which is a quarter of the German town Leutkirch im Allgaeu. The significance of this place for Otl Aicher is clear because this was the place he was staying when he developed this well-known font. As opposed to the actual geographical place, the typeface of Rotis was initially written in all lower case letters because Otl Aicher thought of capital letters as a sign of dominance and oppression and hierarchy. This today is all but forgotten because, since the fonts were reissued by Monotype Imaging, the font names have be capitalized. Part of the fallout from this change was also affected fonts published by downstream foundries.

For someone or some company interested in exploring Rotis for themselves or their products, they would be able to purchase this font for $367.00. That would be in United States Dollars. So with its inherent versatility and it’s relative affordability one should expect to see one of the Rotis family fonts just about anywhere.

Notable uses of this font are too numerous to list, but a few of the more important examples would be:

Björk, the Icelandic musician known the world over for her quirky personality used this font for the artwork of her album Homogenic and all its corresponding singles. Björk was also in the band “the Sugarcubes” which preceded her much more successful solo career.

Another significant usage of Rotis would be by the German kitchen company Bulthaup, which incidentally employed the creator of Rotis Sans, Otl Aicher.

The Easy Asian country Singapore uses this typeface for their highway and street signage. Several other cities across the world use this font, but Singapore is the only country which uses Rotis in the fashion.

Bibliography

Rathgeb, M. (2006).Otl Aicher.New York, New York. Phaidon

Hofmeister, S.(2007, May).Rotis und der rest der Welt. Baumeister, 104,44

Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otl_Aicher

Http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotis