The Feminist History of Typography

By: Salinas D. Cardenas

Table of Content Beatrice Warde.......................................2 Gudrun Zapf-Von Hesse...........................4 Rosemary Sassoon...................................8 Patricia Saunders.....................................10 Margaret Calvert.....................................14 Kris Holmes............................................16 Freda Sack.............................................20 Susan Kare.............................................22 Cynthia Hollandsworth Batty.....................24 Carol Twombly........................................28 Zuzana Licko..........................................30 Sara Soskolne.........................................34 Veronika Burian.......................................38 Nadine Chahine.......................................40 Jill Bell..................................................44 Source...................................................46 Colophone.............................................47

The First Lady of Typography

“a woman could know any thing about printing, typography, and such a s.”

They had never hired a woman in their place above the rank of secretary and had no idea how to deal with ‘her.’ But I got the job with the use of a secretary

Beatrice Warde |

1900 -1969

Warde, an American typographer and author, took an early interest in calligraphy.

Which she pursued further by studying at Columbia University. This expanded her knowledge of the history of typography and printing. She worked as an assistant at the library of the American Type Founders Company from 1921 to 1925. In 1925 she immigrated with her husband, Frederic Warde, a typeface designer, to Europe where she wrote for the renowned trade journal, The Fleuron.

In 1926 the journal published the finding of Warde’s research on the lineage of the typeface by Claude Garamond, in which she found that in some cases was wrongly attributed to him, when in fact it was the work of Jean Jannon of Sedan.

The article was published under her pseudonym ‘Paul Beaujon.’ This decision was due to her husband also writing about typography and they didn’t want two Wardes contributing to the same topic. She couldn’t use her maiden name since her mother was also in the field of literature. Furthermore, at the time no one would have acknowledged that “a woman could know anything about printing, typography, and such as.” Her alter ego, Beaujon, was offered a position as an editor at the Monotype Recorder in 1927 on the basis of such writing, Beatrice Warde accepted the job. Her acceptance of this position was a great astonishment to executives and staff that were anticipating a man to arrive. By 1929 she had already earned a promotion to the role of publicity manager — a position she held until her retirement in 1960. She made this comment on her appointment: “They had never hired a woman in their place above the rank of secretary and had no idea how to deal with ‘her.’ But I got the job with the use of a secretary and part of a desk.” This statement illustrates how, despite the respect shown for her professional and personal qualities, she was always considered an outsider in the male-dominated world. Today she is known as the “First Lady of Typography”, having been one of the few women who made a name for themselves in typography prior to the computer age.

3

Gudrun Zapf-Von Hesse |

1918 - 2019

Hesse learned the craft of bookbinding as an apprentice under Otto Dorfner in Weimar. During her apprenticeship as a bookbinder, she began to teach herself lettering from the books of Edward Johnston and Rodolf Koch, this would later shape her career. In 1940, she received her master’s certification and started working at the Berlin Bookbindery. From 1946 to 1955, she operated her own bookbindery on Frankfurt and Main. Each of her volumes was an elaborate ‘work of art’, whether it was made out of leather or parchment paper with hand-gilding, decorative letter stamps from brass cut by her own hand. During that same time until 1954, she taught at the Stadelshule in Frankfurt and Main and designed a series of typefaces for Stempel to showcase her calligraphic skills. This gave her the motivation to give new life to the typefaces. The range of her designs extended from ‘Carolingian Minuscules’ to ‘Classic Antiqua’ up to a modern script font, which was always marked by an impressive sense of proportion. Her first typeface for Stempel was ‘Diotima’ which remains one of the most popular fonts for premium printing. Her clients not only include German companies, but also American firms such as Hallmark in Kansas City and Bitstream in Cambridge. She designed the typeface ‘Shakespeare’ for Hallmark and ‘Carmina’ for Bitstream. In America, she was featured more than in Germany. She was featured in numerous exhibitions and received the Frederic W. Goudy Award for outstanding contributions to the printing industry, it is comparable to the German Gutenberg Prize.

Typefaces • Hesse Antiqua (2018) • Alcuin (1991) • Carmina (1986) • Columbine (1992) • Nofret (1986) • Smaragd (1953)

• Diotima (1952) • Ariadne (1954) • Christiana (1991) • Diotima Classic (2008) • Shakespeare (1968) • Caligraphic

5

Shakespeare Diotima

@

Carmina

Hesse Antiqua

caligraphic

Christiana

Alcuin Ariadne

@

Nofret

Rosemary Sassoon |

1931

Sassoon was trained as a scribe and a designer. She explores the methods of teaching handwriting. First looking at calligraphy and handwriting on how children learn to read, she started investigating the subject further. She gained a Ph.D. in her work of developing the ‘Sassoon Primary’ typeface. This typeface was modeled on fonts found in early school books in the twentieth-century. The ‘Sassoon’ typeface is characterized by its harmony between the spaces inside and outside the letters as well as their soft, almost ornamental forms. The ‘Sassoon’ type family already encompassed more than twelve different typefaces for educational purposes. In addition, she turned her attention to screen fonts and examined how typography can influence the absorption of information and has published extensive textbooks related to her field of research.

Typefaces • Sassoon Book (1995) • Sassoon Felt (2004) • Sassoon Infant (1995) • Sassoon Joined Nordic (2001) • Sassoon Patterns (1988) • Sassoon Joined English (2001) • Sassoon Primary (1990) • Sassoon Montessori (1988) • Sassoon Sans (1995) • Sassoon Write (2007) • Sassoon Primary Cond. (1990)

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Patricia Saunders |

1933 - 2019

Saunders joined the Monotype Drawing Office in Salford, Surrey in 1951 as a drawing clerk. She contributed to the making of many Monotype faces such as ‘Castellar’, ‘Spectrum’, and ‘Glint Ornament’, as well as non-Latin designs that originated in-house. Like most women that worked in the Monotype Drawing Office, she was involved in the completion of the character set for hot-metal typefaces and optical sizes and weight for existing designs. Patricia Saunder met her husband, David Saunders at the Monotype Office and married in 1959. She left Monotype in 1960 to start a family but returned to the company in 1982. When she left they were still using hot-metal typefaces, but when she returned they had moved towards using Monotype Lasercomp digital laser phototypesetter. Patricia Saunder was more specifically remembered for her typeface contribution in the early ‘80s. Most notably the font ‘Arial,’ which was co-developed with Robin Nicholas that was adopted by Microsoft as their core font. They also created the typeface ‘Corsiva’ based on ‘Monotype Grotesque’ as a script face font. In 1992, she designed ‘Columbus’, a digital typeface with a Spanish feel as a tribute to explorer Christopher Columbus. She remained a vital member of the Monotype Office until her retirement in 1993. Patricia Saunders will long be remembered as a role model for aspiring female type designers as her type design continues to inspire further generations working in the field.

Typefaces • Arial (1990 - 1992) • Columbus (1992)

• Monotype Corsiva (1991)

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Arial

Columbus

Monotype Corsiva

Margaret Calvert |

1936

Calvert was born in South Africa and studied at the Chelsea School of Art in London, England in 1950. During her time there some of her professors included Jock Kinneir, whom she later collaborated with to create the signage for Gatwick Airport. In 1957, she and Kinneir were commissioned to design the new motorway signage system for Britain. Their design was a functional and yet elegant signage system that became a model for many other countries’ signage systems. One of their most important and earliest achievements was in the field of information design for their development of the typeface ‘Transport’. Before, road signage was typically only in all capital letters, however ‘Transport’ used a combination of majuscule and minuscule while still being legible even from a great distance due to its letterforms. She also designed numerous pictograms for the new signs, for example, ‘men at work’ and ‘school kids crossing’. Kinneir made Calvert partner and renamed the office to be Kinneir Calvert Associates in 1964. Their design work was fully collaborative and resulted in the sign system for the British rail, airports, hospitals, military and for the UK’s Tyne & Wear Metro in 1980. After Kinneir retired in 1979, she developed her own studio. She also taught at the Royal College of Art in London, where she was the director of the department of graphic arts and design from 1987 to 1991. She was one of the first women to be inducted into the AGI in 1976. In 2006, she and Kinneir were exhibited in the Design Museum in London. In 2011, she collaborated with one of her former students, Henrik Kubel to digitize the typeface ‘Transport’ and ‘Rail Alphabet.’

Typefaces • Calvert (1980) • Motorway (1958)

• Transport (1963) • New Rail Alphabet (2009)

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Kris Holmes |

1950

Holmes contributed to the design of some typefaces like ‘Lucida’ and ‘Wingdings’, that are installed on almost every computer today. She not only studied art, type design and calligraphy, but she also studied film animation. The schools she attended were SVA in New York, RIT, Harvard University, and UCLA’s Film School.

Her illustrations and calligraphic work were published in specialized trade journals as well as popular magazines. Her animated films have won several awards.

However, she became well known for her typeface designs. She developed and collaborated with a former classmate, Charles Bigelow. In 1976, they joined together to form Bigelow & Holmes, a foundry that has since produced over 150 typeface designs. Along with TrueType adaptations such as ‘Monaco’, ‘Geneva’, and ‘Chicago’. They also developed the font family ‘Lucida’, which was initially conceived especially for low-resolution laser printers. It has since evolved over the years into one of the largest and most versatile typeface families that exist today.

‘Lucida’ is installed as a system font on all Windows computers and is a favorite for scientific publications like The magazine Scientific American. They also designed the typeface ‘Sierra’ and the ‘ITC Typographica Series’. She also taught at RIT, the Museum Art School in Portland, and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.

Typefaces • Lucida Font Family (1984-95)

• New York (Apple, 1991)

• Monaco (Apple,1991) • Chancery (Apple,1994) • Leviathan (1979) • Sierra (1989)

• Geneva (Apple,1991) • Kolibri (1994) •Isadora (1985)

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Leviathan Geneva

Sierra

Lucida

Monaco

Chancery New York

Isadora

Kolibri

Freda Sack |

1951 - 2019

Sack earned her degree in graphic design and typography, after that she had her first design job with Letraset International in 1972. She was appointed to senior type designer at Hardy Williams Design in London in 1978. She worked there on campaigns and corporate typefaces for clients like British Post Office and Renault. In 1980, she joined Typographic Systems International, where she uses the newly developed Ikarus Software to implement font designs. Her work was guided by the interest in combining tradition with new possibilities in type design. Since 1983, she had freelanced for companies like British Airway, Air UK and Vauxhall. She worked with Walter Tracey and Shelley Winter to develop the headline font for the Daily Telegraph. In 1990, she partnered with David Quay, together they opened The Foundry. They use this to market their fonts and offer typographical consulting services. She received the award for typographic excellence from the TDC in 1994. In 2000, she further developed The Foundry typeface library. She designed for companies like WWF, Swiss Airlines and the Yellow Pages. Freda Sack has been active for many years in the International Society of Typographic Designers and was elected to be their president. She also lectures widely in the UK.

Typefaces • Ignatius (1987) • Paddington (1977) • Proteus (1983) • Vermont (1987)

• Jenson Old Style EF (1982) • Promotor (1983) • Orlando (1986) • University Roman (1984)

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Susan Kare |

1954

Kare was ‘the woman who gave Apple a face’. She studied fine art at New York University in 1978. She then worked for the Museum of Fine Art in San Francisco before moving to Apple in 1983. She designed the first icons for the Apple Macintosh and she had an influence on the operating system’s metaphoric interface that is still used today. She created the famous wastebasket, the wristwatch, ‘Happy Mac’, the dog ‘Moof’ and ‘Clarus the Dogcow’. She also created the Apple symbol on the command key and icons like the lasso and paint bucket and many more pictograms. She designed the typefaces ‘Geneva’, ‘Monaco’ and ‘New York’, all of which have enjoyed lasting popularity as system fonts. The font ‘Chicago’— the most prominent typeface used for the interface of the ‘Classic Mac OS’ as well as the first four IPod generations — this is her most famous font design. She also worked for Windows to help create the current status of interface design.

The MoMA called her a ‘pioneer and influential forces in computer iconographer’, she since designed thousands of memorable icons using the minimalist grid of pixels. The reason for her success was her use of interface graphics being more like road signs than illustrations and not following fashionable trends. After leaving Apple, she became one of the first employees at NeXT as a creative director, it was another firm founded by Steve Jobs. She worked for a while as an independent graphic designer from 1988 until getting a position at Chumby Industries. In 2001, she was a recipient of the Chrysler Design Award.

Typefaces • Chicago (1984-97) • San Francisco • Venice • Los Angeles

• New York • Toronto • Geneva •Monaco

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Cynthia Hollandsworth Batty |

1956

Batty, an American type designer that played a central role in the establishment and implementation of legal licensing standards for typeface designs. She studied at the College of Art and Craft in Oakland, CA in the early ‘80s. She was the editor of the journal Calligraphy Idea Exchange. She started AlphaOmega Typography in the mid-1980s to develop and distribute her own font design. She designed several typefaces with calligraphic qualities like ‘Hiroshige’ and ‘Tiepolo’, which were some of the most successful. In 1987, she founded the Typeface Design Coalition to work for the legal protection of typeface design and software in the USA. The following year she moved into a managerial position at Agfa Computer Graphic, where she was responsible for typeface design and development. At that time she was also serving as a consultant to the ITC Typeface Review Board.

She was part of ATypI as one of the board members for years and later became the president. While president she started the ‘Anti-piracy’ campaign during the 1990s. She became actively involved in the calligraphy debate during this time as well. During the late 1990s, she became a member of the development team for Agfa’s enterprise-wide integration of SAP Software.

Typefaces • Hiroshige (1986) • ITC Tiepolo (1987) • Agfa Wile Roman (1990)

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Hiroshige

ITC Tiepolo

AGFA Wile Roman

Carol Twombly |

1959

Twombly is one of the most influential designers in the twentieth century before the age of 35. She started out studying architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, where she discovered her interest in typography and graphic design by one of her teachers, Charles Bigelow. While still a student, she began working at Bigelow & Holmes. Where Kris Holmes taught her how to draw fonts and use Ikarus Software. After completing her studies, she worked first in Boston before going to Stanford University to be part of its digital typography program run by Bigelow. Her first font was ‘Mirarae’ which won her first place in a competition sponsored by Morisawa in 1984. She became part of the font development team at Adobe, where she developed some of her most famous fonts. She was the first woman to win the Prix Charles Peignot in 1994 and was awarded multiple times by ATypI for outstanding type designers. In 1999, she retired from the field of design, but before retiring she created fonts like ‘Lithos’ and ‘Trajan’ that are inspired by ancient greek and roman typefaces. ‘Chaparral’ used a combination of traditional book lettering from the sixteenth century with a slab serif typeface of the nineteenth century. ‘Adobe Caslon’ was based on Caslon’s ‘Baroque-Antiqua’, and ‘Myriad’, an autonomous design that is shaped like an Antiqua without serifs.

The typefaces of ‘Trajan’ and ‘Myriad’ are both system fonts on all Macintosh Computers. Carol Twombly made an impact in the world of type by creating original qualities of designs and adapting them to fit in a digital format.

Typefaces • Mirarae (1984) • Charlemagne (1989) • Lithos (1989) • Adobe Trajan (1989) • Adobe Caslon (1990) • Myriad (1992) • Viva (1993) • Nueva (1994) • Chaparral (1997)

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Zuzana Licko |

1961

Licko studied at UC Berkeley from 1981 until 1985. Early on in her design career she experimented with the font in the FontEditor program and facilitated a solid knowledge of programming. After her studies, she worked on the development of PostScript technology at Adobe Systems. She found a partner, Rudy VanderLans, on both professional and personal levels. Together in 1984, they founded the magazine Emigre, where Licko’s font designs were regularly featured. It was highly influential in the 1980s and ‘90s because of how Emigre’s aesthetic ignored conventional notions of legibility and raster-based layouts. In 1985, they founded Emigre Fonts to market experimental typefaces that made playful use of digital techniques. Zuzana Licko focused on pixel fonts design, not only because of the response to technical developments but to probe a formal language befitting this new and different digital medium. In the 1990s, she developed a fluid and elegant font ‘Mrs. Eaves’, that was based on the font ‘Baskerville’, naming it after the typeface designer’s wife. ‘Mrs. Eaves’ features an exceptionally high number of ligatures, like ‘Filosofie’, that is a redesign of ‘Bondoni’ letterforms. She took a central role in finding a contemporary way to convert classical typefaces into digital forms. She later created an essay, ‘Discovery by design’ discussing the digitalization of fonts in more detail. The couple received the Chrysler Award in 1994, the AIGA Gold Medal in 1997 and the Charles Nypels prize for the innovation in typography in 1998.

Typefaces • Emigre (1984) • Mrs. Eaves (1996) • Lo-Res (1985) • Filosofia (1996) • Modula (1985) • Triplex (1989) • Citizen (1986) • Matrix (1986-92) • Oblong (1988) • Senator (1988) • Variex (1988) • Elektrix (1989) • Journal (1990) • Totally Gothic (1990) • Program(2013) • Dogma (1994) • Base 9&12 (1995) • Solex (2000) • Mr.Eaves (2009) • Fairplex (2002) 31

Emigre Variex

Modula

Mrs. Eaves Elektrix

Solex

Filosofia

Lunatix

Matrix

Fairplex Hypnopaedia

Mr. Eaves

Sara Soskolne |

1970

Soskolne after ten years practicing graphic design in her town of Toronto went back to school at the University of Reading in the UK. Where she received her master’s degree in typeface design in 2003. While there, her master’s dissertation research sparked an ongoing project of exploring the evolution of the sans serif in types of the nineteenth century. She gets inspiration as a designer by the experience of reading and her abid interest in creating typefaces that not only serves, but enriches that experience. She returned to Canada and joined Hoefler & Frere-Jones in 2005, where she contributed to the design of many font families like ‘Gotham’, ‘Chronicle’ and ‘Verlag’.

Typefaces • Gotham (2001) • Chronicle (2002) • Rngside (2017) • Numbers (2006) • Whitney (2004)

• Verlag (1996) • Tungsten (2009) • Idlewild (2011) • Sentinel (2002) • Quarto (2014)

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Chronicle

Gotham Idlewild

Verlag

Tungsten

Rngside

Sentinel

Quarto

Veronika Burian |

1973

Burian was born in Prague and studied industrial design in Munich.However, her work shifted focus to typography, partly because of her activities as an instructor of graphic design at the Milan Politecnico and her involvement in an exhibition ‘Italic 1.0’ at ATypI. In 2003, she completed her master’s degree in typeface design at the University of Reading. In 2004, her typeface ‘Maiola’ was awarded the TDC Certificate of Excellence in TypeDesign. With a former classmate, Jose Scaglione, they founded a type foundry in 2006 called TypeTogether. Where it became known for legible typefaces with unusual distinctive details. Their fonts are frequently used in magazines and have repeatedly received the European Design Award. She also worked until 2007 as a type designer for DaltonMaag in London, where she designed a number of bespoke fonts for individual clients. She currently lives and works in Prague and holds lectures and typography workshops at international conferences and universities. She is one of the few women who have been invited to speak at TypoBerlin.

Typefaces • Ebony (2015) • Adelle (2009) • Athelas (2008) • Bree (2008) • Catalpa (2019) • Karmina (2007) • FF Maiola (2005) • Portada (2016 • Protipo (2018) • Ronnia (2007) • Tablet Gothic (2012-13)

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Nadine Chahine |

1978

Chahine is a prize-winning Lebanese type designer for creating the Arabic version of fonts like ‘Helvetica’, ‘Frutiger’, and ‘Palatino’. Before being known for her typeface designs, she studied graphic design at the American University of Beirut and completed her master’s degree in typeface design at the University of Reading.

Her studies there focused on the relationship between Arabic and Latin scripts as well as the possibilities of combining the two. She taught Arabic type design at the American University in Dubai and the Lebanese American Universityin Beirut. Since 2005, she has lived in Germany and joined the Linotype as a specialist for Arabic related projects. In 2007, she started a Ph.D. program at Leiden University in the Netherlands, where she researched the legibility of Arabic scripts. In 2008, she received a TDC award for creating Arabic versions of these popular fonts.

Typefaces • Neue Helvetica Arabic (2015) • Avenir Arabic (2019) • Frutiger Arabic (2007) • DIN Next Arabic (2011) • Neue Frutiger Arabic (2018) • Zapfino Arabic (2014) • Univers Next Arabic (1997) • Palatino Arabic (2007) • Janna Arabic (2008) • SST Arabic (2017) • ITC Handel Gothic Arabic (2015) • Berytus Arabic (2007) • Hamra Str. Arabic (2007) • Koufiya Arabic (2008) • Badiya Arabic (2008) • Amariya Arabic (2017) • Palatino Sans Arabic (2006)

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‫ةيبرعلا رينيفأ‬

‫يبرع مداقلا نوكلا‬

‫يبرعلا نيدلا شع‬ ‫اكيتفله يون‬

‫ةيبرعلا ونيتالاب‬

‫ةيبرعلا ةيطوقلا لدناه‬

‫ةليمجلا ةيبرعلا‬ ‫ةيبرعلا اي وك‬

‫ةيبرعلا ال ناكسيسنرفلا قلطنا‬

Jill Bell |

Started working in 1980

Bell started working in the 1980s in Los Angeles. She studied at UCLA and Otis/ Parsons while working for Saul Bass. Her designs have been publicly exhibited and published in American trade journals like ‘How to Step-by-Step’ and Letter Art Review. She demonstrated her affinity for calligraphy and her appreciation of spontaneous forms, individual particularities, and irregularities in the script and type design. Her typefaces are distributed by ITC, Creative Alliance, Agfa, Fontek, and Adobe. She also created brand lettering for corporate clients like Disney and Johnson & Johnson. She has lectured widely and has spoken at prominent conferences including; TypeCon, ATypI, TypoTechinca, and TypoBerlin.

She is also a jury member for the TDC and Linotype’s Type Design Contests.

Jill Bell produces a monthly digital newsletter on topics related to typography and lettering. She also works as a graphic artist with a specialty in creating letterforms, logos, and fonts for over two decades at her company; Jill Bell Brandlettering.

Typefaces • Smack (1995) • Gigi (1995) • ITC Caribbean (1996) • Hollyweird (1995) • Bruno JB (2000) • Carumba (1995) • Carumba Hellenic • ITC Clover (1997) • PL Davison Zip • ITC Stranger (1997) • Swank (1995)

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Sources Bartelsheim, Sabine, et al. Women in Graphic Design 1890-2012 . 2nd ed., Jovis Verlag GmbH, 2012.

Carter, Rob. American Typography Today. Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1993.

Crull, Alyssa. 5 American Type Designers: Cynthia Hollandsworth, Kris Holmes, Zuzana Licko, Judith Sutchiffe, Carol Twombly. limited ed., Spurius Press, 1995.

Tselentis, Jason. Typography, Referenced: a Comprehensive Visyal Guide to the Language, History, and Practice of Typography. Rockport Publishers, 2012.

Webber, Laura. “Women Typeface Designer� Rochester Institute of Technology, 1 May 1997, scholarworks.rit.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4844&context=theses.

This book was designed by Salinas D. Cardenas while studying at Southern Utah University for her BFA Capstone project. The concept of this book is to celebrate and gives recognition to some amazing women that have changed how typography is used and seen today. It showcases 15 women typeface designers with handdrawn illustrations of the type designers with their most wellknown typeface that they created. This book is set in the typeface of HK Grotesk Regular at 13pt font for body copy and HK Grotesk Bold at 21pt font for the titles. It is printed on premium 100lb matte paper in a softcover book.

Book Edition

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