BRADBURY THOMPSON BY SAHR QUREISHI Bradbury Thompson was a prominent American graphic designer and art director of the twentieth century who was a master in his field and profession. He was born in 1911 in the Midwestern town of Topeka, Kansas. He attended Washburn University and graduated in 1934. His work has received high praise ad has been recognized by large organizations like the American Institute for Graphic Arts (AIGA), the Art Directors Club, and the Type Directors Club. He unfortunately died in 1995, but his contributions to the world of design will remain and be praised for years and years to come. Thompson’s graphis styles utilized a lot of repetition of imagery meshed with the playful use of CMYK coloring to mimic more of a printmaking style. He worked at a promotional magazine called Westvaco Inspirations for a number of years. During this time, Bradbury Thompson, using his innovative and conscious style, designed over sixty issues for the magazine. Thompson was known to blend a variation of more classical typefaces with historical illustrations and then using a more modernist graphical style of organizations to concoct the many curious works of design that he did during his entire career and lifetime. One on Bradbury Thompson’s many prominent contributions to the world of design was the theory and articulate design of Alphabet 26 that was crafted by him in the 1950s. This proposal looked at the most basic and universal pieces of what makes a typeface: the letters. In short Alphabet 26 is a generalized and simplified alphabet system that removes the distinction of uppercase and lowercase letter through the way they are drawn, and focuses more on how the distinction can be made by simply using larger or smaller variations of the letter. The inspiration for looking more critically at the foundation of our language and articulation came from Thompson’s own personal experience of trying to teach his son to read. He was having issues trying to create the visual and phonetic connection between the uppercase R and lowercase r in the sentence, “Run pal. See him run.” Thompsons then realized that there were nineteen other instances in the english alphabet in which the way uppercase and lowercase letters were visually represented were different from each other. After coming to this realization, Thompson set out the remake the alphabet and reduce it t its most simple and easy to comprehend form. Of the nineteen characters that differ in the uppercase and lowercase alphabet, Thompson decided to keep the lowercase version of four of these characters ( a e m n ) and the characters that remained of the nineteen characters, he kept the uppercase counterparts (B D F G H I J K L P Q R T U Y) in his frankenstein alphabet. While the alphabet does look quite a bit odd when it is meshed together, it serves as a tool to look more critically at how people, designers specifically, should look at what is considered as fact or “set in stone” in order to open up the opportunities and broaden the horizons for which the world of design and creation can truly become. Looking at Alphabet 26 as a proposal outside of the world of design, in the realm of child development, it is believed that the system of Alphabet 26, ot something similar to it may find itself to be useful when teaching young children who are learning comprehension and reading skills to be able to distinguish letters better and faster without the confusion of uppercase and lowercase letters. The letters B, D, P, and Q are especially difficult for children to read when they are all lowercase, so allowing for the variant letters to help them to be able to distinguish the letters more early on will help them progress faster when it comes to comprehension levels. One os the issues with Alphabet 26, however is the actual implementation of it. While the proposal works well in theory and helps to look at the world of design more curiously and critically, it may be difficult to actually integrate the actual use of the alphabet across a platform. In order for it to fully work itself out, everyone, or atleast a large majority of the population would have to use it and integrate it into the learning lessons and overall everyday life. In short, Bradbury Thompson has had a huge impact in the world of graphic design and typography. Not only was he able to create and put put pieces of design that were visually interesting and playful in the way that they meshed together a number of different graphical styles, typography, imagery, and ways of organizations, but Thompson also helped the world of design to look more inward and towards itself and how we can push the boundaries of what is concrete fact and what can be further innovated.
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