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Rudolf Barmettler (ed.)

Zurich Type Design

Ein Fach- und Lesebuch für alle an Schrift Interessierten


Book design: baldinger•vu-huu, Paris
German and English texts
296 pages, fully illustrated
22 × 30,7 cm, softcover with jacket

Euro (D) 49.–, Euro (A) 50.40

available

ISBN 978-3-03863-043-2

CHF   55.00


•    70 new text fonts from type design courses in Zurich

•    17 cross-discipline essays on readability, the history of fonts, calligraphy and teaching type design, etc.

•    A specialist book and reader for anyone interested in fonts

Font design is booming enormously in the “western world”. This trend was primarily triggered by new technologies from the beginning of the 1990s that enabled a scalable and mathematically accurate representation of graphic elements without a loss of quality.
There is a wide spectrum of brand-new creations for display, graphic and title fonts – a terrain which decorative graphic artists are increasingly taking over. A second group digs out old fonts, redraws them and launches them digitally.

Docents and students of Type Design study programmes in Zurich have been working on new text fonts. These post-diploma courses have focused on text fonts for printing, screens and wayfinding since they began. They are suitable for reading longer texts. Texts without extravagant and obtrusive typefaces foster a person’s capacity to imagine and think about what he or she has read.

All graduates realised a text font, and this publication shows their approved results. Some 70 font designs are presented as specimen pages. Besides that, the docents shed light on individual disciplines and reflect on important aspects of their work:
André Baldinger comments on teaching methods, attitudes and zeitgeist in type design, while Anton Studer contemplates on seeing and perceiving. Katharine Wolff emphasises “the importance of calligraphy in the digital age”. Georg Salden insists that font design is a physical process. Walter Haettenschweiler tells us about his career as one of the world’s most illustrious designers for title and display typefaces. Robin Kinross (E) uses monotype as an example to explain economic, social and technical correlations.
Further contributions by Rudolf Barmettler, Remo Caminada, Christian Flepp (E), Hans-Jürg Hunziker, Bruno Margreth, Fiona Ross (E), Mischa Senn.

About the Editor

Rudolf Barmettler (b. 1956) attended the preparatory course and graphics class in Lucerne and was involved in research in the area of visual communication, for example under Hans Rudolf Lutz, from the very beginning of his professional life. He worked in Zurich with Georg Staehelin and in Paris with Jean Widmer and as an assistant for many years at the chair for creative design at ETH. At the same time, he studied documentary filmmaking at HFF Munich, graduating in 1997.
He is docent at ZHdK for Typography since 1989, and from 1999 to 2008, he was Head of Visual Communication studies. He is also Head of the CAS/MAS Type Design and Typography post-diploma courses, which he initiated back in 2006. He is invited to conferences and lectures throughout the world and his research focus is on investigating Swiss font design in the 20th century.

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