watching words move
This week jkr kindly sent me a book. Looks good great. I’ll read it soon.
I can’t remember why I searched Twitter for ‘jkr’, but Jennie Spiller (a graphic designer at Turner Duckworth) appeared in the results. That, in turn, had me click on Jennie’s profile link pointing to The Disciples Of Design (TDOD), where I found this.
The TDOD post mentioned the 1962 experimental type booklet watching words move, by Ivan Chermayeff, Tom Geismar, and Robert Brownjohn. It was a new one for me (although probably not for you), so I Googled it, and found these spreads.
“First published in 1962, this work of experimental typography uses letters in a single typeface, Helvetica, to achieve surprising results — motion and narrative, emotion and humor.”
There are a few more images on Rebecca Woodcock’s blog.
Reminded me of this logo from my negative space collection.
Mouse, by johnson banks
But my point is…
Looks excellent, and goes to show, the definition of a word can be contained within the appearance of the word itself.
watching words move can be bought here:
on Amazon.com
on Amazon.co.uk
7 appreciated comments, click here to add one
Sam Jones
Nice find. There’s another book very similar to this by Ji Lee called ‘Word as Image’. There’s a great promo video for it too – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J59n8FsoRLE
Dec 22nd, 2011
Lee Newham
My tutor at College (Malcom Swatridge, one of the funders of The Partners) set a similar project to us. We had to hand render everything.
It was a great project. I have always been a fan of Robert Brownjohn. If you don’t know of him, look him up! His work on film titles was especially good. He did Goldfinger and From Russia with Love.
Dec 22nd, 2011
Lautaro
Lovely book, I already ordered it! Must say, that’s not helvetica.
Dec 23rd, 2011
Martin
I have that book as well Lautaro and agree it is a great one. Good post!
Dec 24th, 2011
Raja Sandhu
Nice, David, thank you for the post.
This sheds light on the intuitive nature designers have with typography. This is often the type of thing that stays on the far right corner of the art board never makes to Logo_final-Final.ai . It’s becoming far too much to see hobbyists creating — what they claim to be are — ‘logos’ from this type of experimentation.
Anyway, always nice to see the great classic work of Chermayeff, Geismar and Brownjohn.
Dec 28th, 2011
Sheryl
Very nice post about logos. Thanks for bringing ‘em up.
Dec 29th, 2011
AJ
Aksidenz Grotesk, not Helvetica. Honestly, they’re similar… but really easily recognizable, Aksidenz (and similar Grotesques and derivatives, like Arial) has diagonal terminals, Helvetica has 90 degree terminals.
http://www.davidairey.com/images/typography/helvetica-or-akzidenz.gif
Jan 10th, 2012
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