Fannonjames typographic portfolio

TYPOGRAPHIC PORTFOLIO “An exploration of the history, usage, and terminology of type as used in the graphic arts.”

James Fannon

Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising

Spring 2016

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JAMES

FANNON

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hic Design

As a graphic designer, I constantly seek to challenge myself with new types of design, new ways of solving problems, and finding new inspirations.

My style is minimalistic, using black, white, and one or two colors.

There can be beauty and excitement in simplicity, and capturing these types of feelings using these limitations is one of my greatest goals as a designer.

2 ~ Portfolio James Fannon Spring 2016

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

fonts used

5

typographical terms

6

logo designs

8

character studies

12

poster design

14

ubiquitous type

16

sketches

20

newsletter

22

pop!

- nurjan free - Futura - SignPainter - Didot - airwaves - Helvetica

fonts Used

4 ~ Portfolio James Fannon Spring 2016

Typographical Terms

Logo

Design 6 ~ Portfolio James Fannon Spring 2016

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AMPERSAND DESIGN STUDIO Los Angeles, California

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JAMES

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WEEKLY

CHARACTER STUDIES

Font Used: Times New Roman

8 ~ Portfolio James Fannon Spring 2016

The letter A

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o one knows why ‘A’ is the first letter of our alphabet. Some think it’s because this letter represents one of the most common vowel sounds in ancient languages of the western hemisphere. Other sources argue against this theory because there were no vowel sounds in the Phoenician language. (The Phoenician alphabet is generally thought to be the basis of the one we use today.)

No one also knows why the ‘A’ looks the way it does, but we can construct a fairly logical chain of events.

Some say the Phoenicians chose the head of an ox to represent the ‘A’ sound (for the Phoenicians, this was actually a glottal stop). The ox was a common, important animal to the Phoenicians. It was their main power source for heavy work. Oxen plowed the fields, harvested crops, and hauled food to market. Some sources also claim that the ox was often the main course at meals. A symbol for the ox would have been an important communication tool for the Phoenicians. It somewhat naturally follows that an ox symbol would be the first letter of the alphabet.

The Phoenicians first drew the ox head ‘A’ as a ‘V’ with a crossbar to distinguish the horns from the face. They called this letter “alef,” the Phoenician word for ox. Through centuries of writing (most of it quickly, with little care for maintaining detail) the alef evolved into a form that looked very different from the original ox head symbol. In fact, by the time it reached the Greeks in about 400 BC, it looked more like our modern ‘k’ than an ‘A’.

The Greeks further changed the alef. First, they rotated it 90° so that it pointed up; then they made the crossbar a sloping stroke. The Greeks also changed the letter name from alef to alpha. Finally, they made the crossbar a horizontal stroke and the letter looked almost as it does today.

The Romans received the Greek alphabet by way of the Etruscan traders of what is now northern Italy. While the Romans kept the design, they again changed the name of the first letter–this time to “ah.” The sound “ay,” our name for the ‘A,’ was not common to the Latin language.

The Roman capital letters standard of proportion 2,000 years. They’re also lowercase designs. ‘A’ is more stories.

have endured as the and dignity for almost the basis of many of the the first letter. There are 25

CHARACTER STUDIES

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he letter V comes Waw, as do the and Y. In Greek, the letter upsilon to represent, at first, the was later fronted to [y], the ‘ü’ in German.

The letter V

from the Semitic letter modern letters F, U, W, ‘Υ’ was adapted from waw vowel [u] as in “moon”. This front rounded vowel spelled

In Latin, a stemless variant shape of the upsilon was borrowed in early times as V—either directly from the Western Greek alphabet or from the Etruscan alphabet as an intermediary—to represent the same /u/ sound, as well as the consonantal /w/. Thus, ‘num’ — originally spelled ‘NVM’ — was pronounced /num/ and ‘via’ was pronounced [ˈwia]. From the 1st century AD on, depending on Vulgar Latin dialect, consonantal /w/ developed into /β/ (kept in Spanish), then later to /v/.

During the Late Middle Ages, two forms of ‘v’ developed, which were both used for its ancestor /u/ and modern /v/. The pointed form ‘v’ was written at the beginning of a word, while a rounded form ‘u’ was used in the middle or end, regardless of sound. So whereas ‘valour’ and ‘excuse’ appeared as in modern printing, ‘have’ and ‘upon’ were printed as ‘haue’ and ‘vpon’. The first distinction between the letters ‘u’ and ‘v’ is recorded in a Gothic script from 1386, where ‘v’ preceded ‘u’. By the mid-16th century, the ‘v’ form was used to represent the consonant and ‘u’ the vowel sound, giving us the modern letter ‘u’. Capital ‘U’ was not accepted as a distinct letter until many years later.

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I

n most languages which use the Latin alphabet, v has a voiced bilabial or labiodental sound. In English, it is a voiced labiodental fricative. In most dialects of Spanish, it is pronounced the same as b, that is, [b] or [β]. In Corsican, it is pronounced [b], [v], [β] or [w], depending on the position in the word and the sentence. In German and Dutch it can be either [v] or [f ].

In Native American languages of North America (mainly Iroquoian), v represents a nasalized central vowel.

In Chinese Pinyin, while v is not used, the letter v is used by most input methods to enter letter ü, which most keyboards lack (Romanised Chinese is a popular method to enter Chinese text).

In Irish, the letter v is mostly used in loanwords, such as veidhlín from English violin. However the sound [v] appears naturally in Irish when /b/ (or /m/) is lenited or “softened”, represented in the orthography by bh (or “mh”), so that bhí is pronounced [v], an bhean (the woman) is pronounced [ n va/n], etc.

Font Used: Athelas

Poster Design 12 ~ Portfolio James Fannon Spring 2016

Ubiquitous Type

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ypography makes at least two kinds of sense, if it makes any sense at all. It makes visual sense and historical sense. The visual side of typography is always on display, and materials for the study of its visual form are many and widespread. The history of letter- forms and their usage is visible too, to those with access to manuscripts, inscriptions an old books, but from others it is largely hidden.This book has therefore grown into something more than a short manual of typographic etiquette. It is the fruit of a lot of long walks in the wilderness of letters: in part a pocket field guide to the living wonders that are found there, and in part a meditation on the ecological principles, survival techniques, and ethics that apply. The principles of typography as I understand them are not a set of dead conventions but the tribal customs of the magic forest, where ancient voices speak from all directions and new ones move to unremembered forms.

One question, nevertheless, has been often in my mind. When all rightthinking human beings are struggling to remember that other men and women are free to be different,6 and free to become more different still, how can one honestly write a rulebook? What reason and authority exist for these commandments, suggestions, and instructions? Surely typographers, like others, ought to be at liberty to follow or to blaze the trails they choose.

Typography thrives as a shared concern - and there are no paths at all where there are no shared desires and directions. A typographer determined to forge new routes must move, like other solitary travellers, through uninhabited country and against the grain of the land, crossing common thoroughfares in the silence before dawn. The subject of this book is not typographic solitude, but the old, welltravelled roads at the core of the tradition: paths that each of us is free to follow

The presence of typography both good and bad, can be seen everywhere.

or not, and to enter and leave when we choose - if only we know the paths are there and havea sense of where they lead. That freedom is denied us if the tradition is concealed or left for dead. Originality is everywhere, but much originality is blocked if the way back to earlier discoveries is cut or overgrown. If you use this book as a guide, by all means leave the road when you wish. That is pre- cisely the use of a road: to reach individu- ally chosen points of departure. By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately, and well. That is one of the ends for which they exist.

Letterforms change constantly, yet differ very little, because they are alive. The principles of typographic clarity have also scarcely altered since the second half of the fifteenth century, when the first books were printed in roman type. Indeed, most of the principles of legibility and design explored in this book were known and used by Egyptian scribes writing hieratic script with reed pens on papyrus in 1000 B.C. Samples of their work sit now in museums in Cairo, London and New York, still lively, subtle, and perfectly legible thirty centuries after they were made.

Writing systems vary, but a good page is not hard to learn to recognize, whether it comes from Tang Dynasty China, The Egyptian New Kingdom typographers set for themselves than with the mutable or Renaissance Italy. The principles that unite these distant schools of design are based on the structure and scale of the human body - the eye, the hand, and the forearm in particular - and on the invisible but no less real, no less demanding, no less sensuous anatomy of the human mind. I don’t like to call these principles universals, because they are largely unique to our species.

Dogs and ants, for example, read and write by more chemical means. But the underlying principles of typography are, at any rate, stable enough to weather any number of human fashions and fads.

“Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence.�

Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a tiny stage, of It is true that typographer’s tools are presently changing with considerable force and speed, but this is not a manual in the use of any particular typesetting system or medium. I suppose that most readers of this book will set most of their type in digital form, using computers, but I have no preconceptions about which brands of computers, or which versions of which proprietary software, they may use. The essential elements of style have more to do with the goals the living, speaking hand - and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise.

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news

letter news letter

pops!

Pop! is a hypothetical magazine cover used for teaching typography basics. During the course of many weeks, different principles and directions would be applied for a slow, steady buildup of skills. At its core, it is used to increase understanding of foundational typography principles and as a way to encourage using type as a design element.

Being limited to certain guidelines per week, such as onlly using specific sizes or weights, as well as the addition of rules and color challenged me in creating designs in ways I would have never done before. It is not only a test of knowledge of design, but creativity, as well. It certainly expanded my horizons when it comes to typographical design.

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frida kahlo

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volume ten issue nine

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JAMES

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hic Design