Week 9 Studio Research - Janice W

Herb Lubalin, a founder of ITC in New York, had been awarded the 62nd AIGA medal in 1981, he is known for his fonts ITC Avant Garde Gothic®. 

During the late 1970s, digital technology was limited, Lubalin used his own creativity and imagination, sight and insight to earse boundaries and push back frontiers and designed his own font.

He is known as  a man who profoundly influenced and changed our vision and perception of letter forms, words and language.

“If words are a way of making meaning, then the shapes of their letters give voice, color, character and individuality to that meaning.”

adidas logo in ITC Avant Garde Gothic

Verena Gerlach, a typeface designer from Berlin, who found her own design studio, Fraugerlach in 1998 for graphic design, type design and typography in Berlin.

After the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989, she collected a lot of visual materials to lament the disappearance of shop signage and lettering. (her design inspiration for digital typefaces ‘FF Karbid’)

The places in the Old Eastern suburbs were under widely planned reconstruction after 1989, she reckons the only way not to lose all the cultural impressions and excitement of that time in Berlin (i.e. beautiful letterings, old signs as well as paintings on the facades) was to record them through digital preservation: photographs and show them on in other contexts.

She combined old techniques for printmaking and reproduction with contemporary innovations in the early twentieth century. The FF Karbid family has grown from 2 families to 4 families in numerous new typefaces, to be used in a new time and new media. In this way, the old lettering can live again.

“ The typeface has been trimmed down to the bare essentials of a text face, which makes it eminently readable, especially at small point sizes. FF Karbid Text is a font that captivates through its sheer liveliness. The sweeps that replace the serifs and link the characters create a flowing movement.”

“ The weights were not balanced and a Light was missing. You could say that the new FF Karbid Pro is like Berlin: it evolved during this time; it has grown up and has become serious despite all the party hype. Many different people have moved to Berlin and perhaps FF Karbid Pro is the gentrified version of the old FF Karbid.”

The first one is intended for body text in small fonts; the second one, serif is abandoned in selected letters like l and n; Third, in order to improve legibility, the strong serifs lend the footing of the typeface;

 Verena is an active user of instagram, she keeps updating her page with photos every day, hoping everyone could share the beautiful letterings they have come across in our everyday life.