STEFAN SAGMEISTER | The Happy Film

Watching designer Stefan Sagmeister’s autobiographical documentary, The Happy Film, will not leave you significantly happier afterward. But the fast-paced, painfully honest, stressfully contemplative movie will trigger rushes of insight, empathy and voyeuristic pleasure.

In the film, Sagmeister—the prominent graphic designer known for environmental performance typography and whose work appears in museums like MoMA—sets out to analyze, define and capture happiness as a concept, emotion and commodity. He spends most of the film showing how interpersonal minefields, notably his inability to find and stay in love, impede his ability to achieve happiness. From this discordance emerges a highly entertaining confessional that is as much a reality show as experimental art piece.

The Happy Film started as part of a conceptual design project that includes “The Happy Show,” a museum-exhibition-cum-carnival-midway. Its global tour has attracted more than 350,000 people. But while the exhibit encourages visitors to reflect on their own happiness, the film is infinitely more personal; documentary filmmakers often are characters in their own films, but they’re rarely so candid. Sagmeister’s project captures his signature chutzpah, sure, but hinges on an intensely personal search for love and happiness that provides poignant insights into his struggle to make lasting personal commitments beyond his professional life.

Sagmeister derives happiness from upending the status quo with his work. He once gained 30 pounds in one month to document, through daily photographs, what a strict diet of junk food does to an otherwise fit body. In one of his more eccentric pieces, Sagmeister used a razor blade to carve details from one of his many design lectures into his torso, and used a photograph of his scabs in a promotional poster. The Happy Film is like carving into his inner self. He is both investigator and the investigated. And though the movie meant to be autobiographical, “I did not see a lot of things coming during the shooting,” Sagmeister says.

The Happy Film is divided into three sections, each following Sagmeister for one month as he pursues happiness along one of three paths: Meditation. Talk therapy. Prescription drug therapy. The beautifully photographed meditation scenes are in large part set in Bali, where, after various failed attempts to reach nirvana, Sagmeister falls in love with a former student. Happiness at last. But the relationship quickly deteriorates and sadness sets in. The therapy section records him in sessions with a psychotherapist who questions his ability to commit, despite his recently ending an 11-year relationship. This leads him to renew a relationship with a long-lost love in Austria. That relationship fails too, and depression ensues. In the drug section, a pharmacological therapist monitors his intake of mood elevators. “I love pharma,” he notes in the film. Ignoring a warning against making radical life changes until his meds stabilize, Sagmeister immediately falls for and becomes engaged to a woman who allows him to document the rise and fall of their relationship. Those scenes are among the film’s most emotionally taxing and uncomfortable to watch. Happiness is when love hits hard and sadness, invariably, follows.

THE FONTS OF FASHION | Helvetica and Futura

All designers use pretty much the same font families.

Using, the particularly favoured, Helvetica and Futura font variations, high fashion designers and brands stumbled on a way to make clear visual statements.

The preference for Helvetica and Futura is all over the ad industry, and with good reason—they’re clean, readable, and versatile. Saint Laurent’s logo in Helvetica Neue Bold, for example, looks as sophisticated stitched on the side of a purse as it does on a jacket label. Nike’s oblique Futura logo validates the quality of a pair of running shoes and authenticates a basic hoodie as a classic.

While the minimal Chanel emblem makes as much sense on the perfume bottle in your grandma’s bathroom as it does the backpack of a brand-obsessed tween.

If you want your fashion label to have longevity and versatility, give it some classic type.

NEUTRA HOUSE NUMBERS | Honoring an Architectural Icon

When you love clean, modern design it applies to every part of your life, including typography. Neutra, a very popular typeface from the 1930s, was specified by the famous mid-century architect Richard Neutra for his projects and is still favored, especially in metal, by many architects of new contemporary homes. 

Designed by Christian Schwartz for House Industries, the typeface family Neutraface "the most typographically complete geometric sans serif family ever", was based on Richard Neutra's architecture and design principles. Richard Neutra — One of the most influential architects of the twentieth century helped define modernism in Southern California and around the world.  His notable projects include the Kaufmann House (1947) in Palm Springs, the Lovell Health House (1929) in Los Angeles and the Kronish House (1955) in Beverly Hills, among others. 

The Neutra collection is open and unobtrusive....offering functionality and timeless California aesthetic. You don’t need to own a Neutra home in order to enjoy a piece of Neutra history.

ED BENGUIAT | Drummer, Designer, Typographic Icon

The man who designed ITC Benguiat is considered one of the type industry’s greats – and one of its longest-living. Ed Benguiat has created more than 600 fonts, and has designed some of the most iconic logos and movie titles of the 20th century.

By his own admission, Benguiat’s career has been one made of happy accidents. He says that the only thing he didn’t teach during his 50-year career at the School of Visual Arts was a course in being in the right place at the right time.

Benguiat grew up in Brooklyn, New York. The kind of kid who “was a smart ass and thought I could do anything”. He had a career as a jazz percussionist, playing the drums in the big bands of Stan Kenton and Woody Herman, after his father set him up with a drum kit when he was 10 and he took lessons.

Benguiat was interested in art from boyhood. It was a straightforward ambition that landed him in art school: “I didn’t know anything about it I just wanted to paint naked ladies.” It didn’t entirely work out: “My instructor said I better hurry up and get out of the art industry before I destroyed it because I couldn’t draw anything.” But, Benguiat realised, “if it was technical, I could draw it.”

The female form, however, dominated his first job. “Everybody laughs at this, but it’s true: I had to remove the cleavage from photographs of women.” Benguiat worked as a paste-up boy for magazines such as Photoplay, Movie Life and Movie Stars Parade. Under the draconian censorship laws of the Motion Picture Production Code, known in the industry as the Hays Code after its president, “licentious or suggestive nudity” and “excessive or lustful kissing” had to be removed from films - and film magazines.

“The magazines weren’t permitted to show the cleavage of a woman because Hay’s Office said it wasn’t proper,” Benguiat adds. “So I’d use an airbrush and re-touch it, or use a doily or something. I did that for two years.”

Typography had been in Benguiat’s family. His father was the display director of Bloomingdales, so he had access to his brushes and pens. After designing a logo for a company, he was asked to create an alphabet to match. It was his first foray into graphic design and corporate identity.

It was when Benguiat started working as a designer for Photo-Lettering, Inc - known in the trade as PLINC, a company that set headlines and advertising text - that he first started to see that royalty penny drop: “They sold the alphabets as words from the fonts I did, so that was the beginning for me."

Benguiat didn’t stop at fonts and typefaces. He made whole new fonts for films such as The Planet of the Apes and Super Fly and David Lynch's TV series Twin Peaks. He was nearly involved in the film adaptation of one of Stephen King’s novels, but production companies and the road accident which nearly left the author an amputee got in the way.

But, much as it was a logo that got him into the industry, it is logos which remain Benguiat’s most-prized work. “I’ve done the logo for The New York Times, I’ve done the logo for New York Magazine. For Sports Illustrated. The logo for Ford Cars.

“They’re my keepsakes in my mind so when I walk down the street I can say, ‘Hey, I did that.’ You know. I’m very proud of it. When I see the New York Times on a building on a wall, I can look up and say, ‘That’s my logo.’ So that’s my contribution to society.”

Benguiat continues to work, designing the odd logo, “sketching and drawing and doodling. But I don’t look forward to it because it’s a lot of work.” He prefers to keep up a weekly lunch date with the rest of graphic design’s old guard. Benguiat’s aware of the impact of the internet on typeface design, but, as someone who innovated the industry himself, doesn’t appear fearful.

HOMELESSFONTS | Arrels Foundation

Homelessfonts is an Arrels Foundation initiative which consists of creating a collection of typefaces based on the handwriting of homeless. The idea behind these typefaces is for people and brands to use them in their announcements. All profits are intended to help the 1400 people supported by the Arrels Foundation.

http://www.arrelsfundacio.org/

TRAINSPOTTING’S FILM POSTER CAMPAIGN | 21 years on

With Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting sequel T2 Trainspotting to be released in the UK this Friday and in the U.S. March 17...The designers of its iconic, often copied, Helvetica-sporting posters, Mark Blamire and Rob O’Connor, talk about working on the project and how they arrived at the designs for the film’s poster campaign with Creative Review.

CR | The posters for Trainspotting were so unusual when they came out especially the campaign around the characters with one poster introducing each one. What was your inspiration for this? How did the campaign come about?

Rob O’Connor | Irving Welsh’s novel, from which the movie had been adapted, was written from the multiple points of view and in the voices of each of the main characters, and we felt it was important to stress the individuality of those personalities.

Mark Blamire | We had been initially given a still by the film distributors, PolyGram, from the film Backbeat, as a kind of visual guide for creating the Trainspotting poster campaign. But we hated the image and wanted to come up with something better. The film company had approved the idea of the individual shots for a character-based teaser campaign but the main image for the final poster was to be a group shot of the actors in a tight huddle. It wasn’t until we tried to get the actors into the group shots that the friction started. It was at this point that we realised that whilst the characters from the story were in a gang, they were by no means friends who could implicitly trust each other or want to be seen in a tight huddle-style group photo all hugging and being chummy in the manner that was initially planned. 

We were working on the main poster – and struggling – and also the individual character posters, which came together almost instantly, and seemed to be the only solution worthy of presenting to the client. We had also taken a literary device from the Trainspotting book by Irvine Welsh to introduce the numbering system [in the book it originally starts at number 63 which was confusing for the poster so it got changed to #1 though to #5].

RO’C | The numbering used throughout the campaign was a nod to the recurring device used by Welsh in the Trainspotting book – Junk Dilemma #63 – and so on.

MB | It was at this stage that we threw away the idea of the group shot and tried to make a combined version of the individual shots to make the main poster using a grid and boxes to contain each character. We introduced the device of a train station departure board (actually inspired by a British airport’s brand identity guidelines from the 70’s which used a yellowy orange colour for its cover) and added the caption ‘this film is expected to arrive 02:96 –  to continue the theme of the departure board. 

CR | The colour scheme – the black and white photography on white ground with bold orange Helvetica. It’s so strong. How did you settle on that? What was the thinking?

RO’C | Black and white photography, we felt, could be powerful without glamorising what we felt was a tricky subject – what with the abuse of heroin being at the forefront of the storyline. It has a gritty realism, and a Richard Avedon credibility and the slight wide angle lens captured a little humour in the characters. However, it needed an accent colour to make the campaign more memorable – orange was a strong option for this without opting for the average client’s ubiquitous favourite colour, red. The choice of orange referred subliminally to warning messages and the visual communication of British Rail – high visibility jackets, signage and so on. The arrow also referred to wayfinding signage. The clear, direct, information-style typography referred to the same visual language, as well as that of warnings found on pharmaceutical packaging.

CR | PolyGram gave you some initial ideas in the form of an image from the Backbeat film – but how much freedom did they give you once you got stuck into the job?

MB | Trainspotting was Danny Boyle’s second film and all the actors were relatively unknown, so the film didn’t come with any of the contractual baggage that you usually have to deal with when doing a film poster. The other great thing about how it all came about is we were given access to the actors and we were briefed about the poster when the film was still being made. Usually by the time the poster designer gets involved, the film is in the can and the actors have all gone home, and you are delivered a folder full of production stills which you have to try and work your magic on to make a good poster. So the film company had been very forward-thinking by giving us time to come up with a solution – and, crucially, the time with the actors to deliver that solution.

The other amazing thing which probably worked in our favour, was that we never got to see the finished film until after the poster was designed, approved and sent to print so again this was very liberating not to take on somebody else’s visual direction of how they wanted their film to look. I think if we had seen the film first and then started designing the poster, we would probably have never have gone for the clean approach that we inevitably took for the final poster.

WATCH | T2 Trainspotting Trailer

ROADLINERS | Uncelebrated Typographers of the Road

Roadliners is a film about inspiration and craft, and the uncelebrated typographers of the road. Filmmakers Pretend Lovers documented a day in the life of Glasgow roadliner Thomas ‘Tam’ Lilley - whose work embodies honesty, beauty, humility, and intelligence.

WATCH | https://vimeo.com/162399433

KÖLN-BONN AIRPORT | So Simple

In the middle of the two cities Cologne and Bonn is a small airport in the very west of Germany. Köln-Bonn Airport​ is ​making a name for itself with the unique and daring corporate design by Intégral Ruedi Baur. The idea was to position the airport as a friendly place where the majority of people will start into their holidays​.

The typeface used for this project is SimpleKölnBonn (or Simple-Airport), a customized version of Simple that Intégral Ruedi Baur had commissioned from Swiss design studio NORM for which a large set of special pictrograms was designed. Simple esthetics, casual atmosphere, and stroke thickness of fonts and icons match perfectly. The colorful background of the large icons are off-set from the thick black outline, leaving a “handmade” impression or one of sloppy printing.​

See more: http://www.koeln-bonn-airport.de/

IKEA | The Epic Swedish Fontroversy

After 50 years of using Futura, Ikea switched to the ubiquitous typeface Verdana. The Ikea catalogue is the third most printed book in the world, behind the Bible and Harry Potter.

IKEA abandoned its elegant typeface Futura in favor of the modern Verdana, and the switch had caused consternation not only among type geeks, but real people. Suddenly there was a font war.

People began talking about their love of one typeface and distrust of another. The arguments showcased the classic battleground of font warfare: new type, old type; a pure intention versus an Evil Empire; a supremely beautiful typeface battling against a supremely functional one.

The New York Times joked that it was “perhaps the biggest controversy to ever come out of Sweden.” Wikipedia wasted no time in accepting a new page called Verdanagate. It became the hot topic — a fontroversy — in Graphic Tweets. The passion some people displayed when it came to type seemed tribal, like the passion of sports fans.

The two fonts in question had much to do with this. Futura has a quirkiness to it that Verdana does not, with a pedigree linked to political art movements of the 1920s. Verdana, on the other hand, despite being a superb font, is linked to something modern and commonly reviled: Microsoft.

Verdana was created with the Web in mind; Microsoft designer Matthew Carter constructed the type for Internet Explorer and it’s now one of the most often-used fonts in the world.

Futura, on the other hand,  has a long and distinguished heritage. It was created by the German designer Paul Renner in the 1920s. Futura was Stanley Kubrick’s favorite typeface, used in the titles and advertising of “2001: A Space Odyssey.” It was the first font to land on the moon, on a plaque left there in 1969. Ikea has been using a refined version of the font for half a century, and has even commissioned the typeface to be drawn out in more weights and languages specifically for its brand. In fact, it’s called “Ikea Sans.”

The change allows the company to use a uniform font in all countries and to use the same font in print and on the Web. Yet it can’t be denied: Ikea is trading away a font with a tradition of modernist design, having elaborate associations, for one that has only one major association: with the computer screen. This is so offensive to many because it seems like a slap at the principles of design by a company that has been hailed for its adherence to them.

SWISSTED | International Typographic Style Posters

Swissted is an ongoing project by graphic designer Mike Joyce, owner of Stereotype Design in New York City. Drawing from his love of punk rock and Swiss Modernism, two movements that have (almost) nothing to do with one another, Mike has redesigned vintage punk, hardcore, new wave, and indie rock show flyers into International Typographic Style posters. Each design is set in lowercase Berthold Akzidenz-Grotesk medium—not Helvetica. Every single one of these amazing shows actually happened!

http://www.swissted.com