The Typographic Experiments by Wolfgang Weingart - Essay Example

Lecturer: Wolfgang Weingart Introduction Wolfgang Weingart is considered among the most eccentric designers to exist in the second half of the 20th century with us perception of typography, unconventional teaching approach and experimental work continuing to influence visual design as well as training courses for upcoming typographers throughout the world. He was born in 1941 and initially spent his life in Salem where he began his schooling (Weingart and Wolff 18). Nonetheless, he did not prefer strict learning that was achievement oriented as preferred to engage in technical handicrafts, where he discovered classical music and drawing. He went to Lisbon along with his parents in 1954 for a period of two years as his father was working there as a diplomat. During their travelling, especially to Arabic nations, Weingart started recording visual discoveries using his camera including structures containing graphic landscapes, totally different lifestyles and details in the architecture. His parents could see his profound level of enjoyment in design and made arrangements for regular drawing lessons along with school work. Wolfgang Weingart His increased involvement in the pictorial world resulted in a stronger aversion to dry school lessons and even though he was not aware if what he wanted to pursue, it was evident that it was an aspect of his imagination involving creative design and an exploration of creative potential (Jubert et al. 379). In 1958, he went to Merz Academy, which was a private college that taught applied graphics and art while allowing students to explore visual design in the interaction between specific areas and suitable presentation approaches. In the college, the school’s small printing workshop is what greatly fascinated him and this is where he started experimenting with type. As he sought models, he was strongly captivated by specialist journals’ modern Swill typography that was exciting while at the same time plain and clear. The tension that existed in the limited repertoire of twenty six letters as well as the essentially endless options for their design became a critical experience that defined his career as a typographer. In order to acquire the required skills, Weingart began an apprenticeship as a typesetter that lasted three years in 1960 in a printing house that was located in Stuttgart. He got the opportunity to work on his personal typographic projects over weekends but was eventually advised to stop his apprenticeship and move to Basle as he could be appreciated and encouraged there while at the same time being guided through his career. However, he completed his apprenticeship as well as other design projects and even published a number of them before he contracted Ruder and Hofmann in 1963. The two were astonished by the amount and maturity of Weingart’s ideas and his autonomy as a young designer as he had the ability to go through their courses beginning in 1964 while working on his personal designs in workshop. He considered the free work as an escape from the strict basic exercises associated with the coursework and the disciplined methodology in regards to design whose value remained unclear to him. He slowly acknowledged the educational context related to elementary exercises and how they are applied in graphics and typography. His autonomous design work was influenced positively by this insight to become more systematic and receptive to newer design ideas. When the College of Applied Art in Basel began offering a Further Training Class which was a postgraduate course that was intended for graphic artists in 1968, Weingart was appointed to lecture typography (Hollis 259). He came up with a unique curriculum for the new course and continually refined it up to 2005 when he retired from teaching. The central element of the approach entailed complicated visual topics that the students who came from more than thirty nations set personally while working closely with their teacher. This allowed them to learn from the designs Weingart used for his own posters, book covers and catalogues, and the manner in which he explored new design approaches through film collage on light tables and experimenting in the darkroom. This impartiality to technology resulted in the use of a Macintosh computer in typography in 1984 in a Swiss design college. Weingart was made an associate of the Typography Monthly in 1972 and he was invited to give lectures and seminars all-over the globe and published a book that presented the outcomes of his work in teaching as well as various articles in specialist press (Swissdesignawards.ch). Additionally, Weingart is also a member of the Alliance Graphic International and has been awarded severally including a prize from the Swiss Interior ministry. He showed his personal work for the first time in 1990 in a detailed exhibition titled WordSigns, WritingFields, PictureSpaces that was held at the Institute for New Technical Form with the planning and conception of the exhibition being critical preparations for an overview of his work published at the turn of the millennium. In the book, he documents his design steps, development and influence in individual projects, and the substantial textual and pictorial design of the publication impressively illustrating all the qualities that influence his eccentric approach to his experimental designs and typography. These include curiosity, relentless questioning, comprehensive craft training and extreme enjoyment in the exploration of typography which were usually instinctive and filled with passion but not without self-doubt. In his tenure that lasted thirty seven years, Weingart taught various notable students including Jim Faris, Emily Murphy, Jerry Kuyper, April Greiman and Franz Werner among others. The design process he used was illusorily simple as students were first supposed to consider the proper size, style and weigh of the letters they sought to use. The students set the type through choosing the lead letters one by one from the type case and putting them against each other in a composing stick, cautiously determining the appropriate spacing between letters, leading and spacing at the end of the line. Ultimately, the completed composing was dried with baby powder after being printed in a letterpress proofing press after which students cut it and started designing. So that the shadows of the cut paper could be eliminated and their compositions viewed as one plane, a glass would be lowered cautiously on to the surface. In the event that any aspect did not feel right in terms of the size, style or weight of the type, then the entire process of composing and printing needed to be repeated. When he was teaching, Weingart continually produced a various experimental works including cover designs, posters as well as Typographische Monatsblätter magazine’s call-for-entry, where he was a member of the editorial board between 1970 and 1988 (Blackwell 130). A poster he designed and printed in 1976 for John Glagola, a photographer included broad silver bars that were printed across the name of the artist and this signaled the decline of foundry type as a feasible means of commercial printing. Ultimately, Weingart looked for newer ways of creating images and adopted halftone bendway films and halftone screens that were employed in photomechanical processes as his new instruments from the mid-seventies. He employed the repro camera in stretching, blurring and cutting type, which was a radically newer approach towards marrying continuous tone letters and images. He was proud that his design process depended solely on the manipulation of films and overlapping of colors that will most evident in the work he did for black-and-white-format posters that were designed in 1976-79 and a sequence of color posters in 1980-83. Weingart’s experimentations allowed him to invent his personal visual language as he usually pursued an idea to the point that he becomes certain that it can work or not. In terms of Gutenberg, Weingart, who was a printer, typesetter and inventor developed his posters on his own from the beginning to the end. He is determined to be involved in the whole process from developing the concept to preparing the film for the printers. During processes like looking through the copy camera or development of the film among others, newer possibilities and ideas develop and even mistakes inspire newer possibilities. Weingart is considered as a master and pioneer in his field by the people with whom he studied (Clair and Busic-Snyder 118). This is because his working method was predominantly a precursor to the development of exceptional capabilities associated with software programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. However, Weingart did not forget his intensive experience and training in the aspects of hand-setting type and he introduced great structure and clarity to complicated information in the 1974 brochure on Creative Jewelry and the Art Basel catalog in 1980. From his investigations, he even intended to capture the robustness and impulsiveness of his on handwriting that was distorted deliberately as a form of typography in posters that announced his 1990 retrospective exhibition that was to be held at the Institute for New technical Form in Darmstadt. Conclusion The typographic experiments that were conducted by Weingart covered three distinct eras as far as typesetting technology is concerned including letterpress, phototypesetting and finally, the use of the computer. However, regardless of the ease with which he accepted and pushed the limits of the first two processes, he was still indifferent to computer technology. To Weingart, the computer is misleading aspect while comparing it to a digital watch, where a traditional watch denotes a landscape and a story, while a digital watch only denotes a specific moment. This is the main reason why the students who were taught by Weingart do not design on computers as they are initially asked to work out the ideas they have by hand. He intends his students to experience design as a hands-on experience and this makes its surprising that he pioneered the introduction of the Macintosh computer into typesetting in Switzerland. Works cited Blackwell, Lewis. 20Th-Century Type. London: Laurence King, 2004. Print. Clair, Kate, and Cynthia Busic-Snyder. A Typographic Workbook. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley, 2005. Print. Hollis, Richard. Swiss Graphic Design. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Print. Jubert, Roxane et al. Typography And Graphic Design : From Antiquity To The Present. 10th ed. Paris: Flammarion, cop, 2006. Print. Swissdesignawards.ch,. Swiss Federal Design Awards - Wolfgang Weingart. N.p., 2014. Web. 29 June 2015. Weingart, Wolfgang, and Katharine Wolff. Typography. Baden/Switzerland: Müller, 2000. Print. Read More