Designspiration

 

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5 Examples of Good Infographics

Behance

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Massimo Vignelli

Massimo Vignelli, January 10, 1931 – May 27, 2014, was and Italian designer who worked on an array of areas including, packaging design, houseware design, furniture design, public signage, and showroom design. He co-founded Vignelli Associates with his wife, Letta, and his personal motto was, “If you can design one thing, you can design everything.”

Vignelli was a Modernist and his work reflected simplicity through geometric forms. He received numerous awards including nine Honorary Doctorates, an AIGA Gold Medal, the first Presidential Design Award, presented by President Ronald Regan, and the Visionary Award from the Museum of Art and Design, New York.

Max Bill

Max Bill, December 22, 1908 – December 9, 1994, was a Swiss architect, artist, painter, typeface designer, industrial designer, and graphic designer. Bill was the most influential person on Swiss graphic design and was connected to the Modern Movement. He wanted to create art that represented the New Physics of the early 20^th century and create objects so that the new science could be understood in the form of art.

Paul Rand

Paul Rand, August 15, 1914 – November 26, 1996, was an American art director and graphic designer, as well as one of the first American commercial artists to embrace the Swiss Style of graphic design. He was best known for his corporate logo designs for companies such as IBM, UPS, Enron, Morningstar, Inc., Westinghouse, ABC, and Steve Jobs’s NeXT. He attended Pratt Institute, Parsons The New School for Design, and the Art Students League of Yale University. Rand was inducted into the New York Art Directors Club Hall of Fame in 1972.

Jan Tschichold

Jan Tschichold, April 2, 1902 – August 11, 1974, was a typographer, book designer, teacher, and writer. He converted to Modernist design principles in 1923 and became a leading advocate of modernist design. His most noted work Die neue Typographie was a manifest of modern design, which pushed only sans-serif typefaces. He also preferred non-centered design and advocated the use of standardized paper sizes for all print. He published a series of manuals on the principles of Modernist typography, which were influential in Germany. Later in life he moved towards Classicism and condemned Die nueue Typographie as too extreme and went as far as to condemned Modernist design in general as being authoritarian and fascistic.

Typefaces he designed include, Transit, Saskia, Zeus, and Sabon.

Piet Zwart

Piet Zwart, May 28, 1885 – September 24, 1977, was a Dutch photographer, typographer, and industrial designer. He was trained as an architect, but began graphic design projects when he was thirty-six. Although he had no formal training in typography he became a pioneer of modern typography and was well known due to his work for Nederlandse Kabelfabriek Delft and the Dutch Postal Telegraph and Telephone. His influences included Constructivism, Dada, and De Stijl. He was awarded the “Designer of the Century” award by the Association of Dutch Designers.

Stefan Sagmeister

Stefan Sagmeister, co-founder of the design firm Sagmeister & Walsh Inc., was born on August 6, 1962 in Bergenz Australia. He is a New York based graphic designer and lettering artist and has designed album covers for artists such as Lou Reed, OK Go, The Rolling Stones, David Byrne, Aerosmith, and Pat Metheny. He has received two Grammies and won the National Design Award for Communications from the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum

Sagmeister studied graphic design at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and received a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Pratt Institute in New York. He has designed branding, graphics, and packaging for clients such as the Rolling Stones, HBO, the Guggenheim Museum, and Time Warner. His personal motto is “Design that needed guts fron the creator and still carries the ghost of these guts in the final execution.”

Matthew Carter

Matthew Carter is a typeface designer, born in London on October 1, 1937. He is the son of typographer Harry Carter and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and designed the famous 1.0 web fonts Veranda and Georgia. In 2010 he was named a MacArthur Fellow, also known as a “genius” grant.

Erik Spiekermann

 

Erik Spiekermann, born May 30, 1947, is a German typographer and designer. He is currently a professor at the University of the Arts Bremen. He worked as a freelance graphic designer in London and founded MetaDesign in Berlin with two partners. He also started FontShop, the first mail-order distributor of digital fonts. Spiekerman was awarded an Honorary Doctorship for his contribution to design by the Art Center College of Design in April of 2006 and was the first designer to be elected into the European Design Awards Hall of Fame in May of 2007.

Jessica Hische

Jessica Hische, an American letterer, illustrator, and type designer, was born in 1984 in Charleston, South Carolina. She graduated from the Tyler School of Art with a degree in Graphic and Interactive Design in 2006. She has been featured in Forbes, GDUSA, and Print magazine. Clients such as Wes Anderson, Penguin Books, The New York Times, Tiffany & CO., American Express, Target, Victoria’s Secret, Nike, Samsung, and Wired Magzine come to Hische. She currently works out of Tile case, a collarborative studio in San Franciso California with Erik Marinovich.

Wim Crouwel

Willem Hendrick Crouwel, one of the founders of the design studio Total Design, was born on Novermber 21, 1928. He is a Dutch graphic designer, type designer, and typographer. He studied fine arts at Academie Minerva in Groningen, the Netherlands and typography at Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. In 1967 he designed the typeface New Alphabet which uses the technology of the cathode ray tube, containing only horizontal and verticle strokes. He also designed the typefaces Fodor, Grindik and is well known for his use of grid-based layouts and typography based in the International Typographic Style.

Adrain Frutiger

Adrian Frutiger

 

 

   The typeface designer Adrian Frutiger, born in Unterseen, Canton of Bern, was influential during the second half of the 20^th and into the 21^st century. His most renowned typefaces are Frutiger and Univers.

   He began his interest in typography at a young age, inventing scripts and stylized handwriting in reaction to the cursive required by Swiss schools at the time. As a boy he was originally interested in sculpture, but was discouraged by his teachers and father and pushed towards the direction of printing. Although he then focused on print, the influence of sculpture was still apparent in his work.

   When he was sixteen he apprenticed as a compositor for the printer Otto Schaerffli, in Interlaken. He also studied under Walter Käch and Alfred Willimann in 1949 and 1951 in the school of applied arts in Züric. There he primarily focused on calligraphy with a nib and brush.

   Later, Charles Peignot, of the Paris foundry Deberny Et Peignot, recruited Frutiger after seeing his illustrated essay Schrift / Écriture / Lettering: the development of European letter types carved in wood. At Deberny Et Peignot Frutiger designed the typefaces "Président", "Méridien", and "Ondine.” He also designed Egyptienne in 1956 and, after Univers, it was the second new typeface to be commissioned for photocomposition. He also created variations of Univers for the Paris Metro and Charles de Gaulle International Airport wayfinding signage in the 1970’s. His later typefaces include Versailles, Avenir, Vectora, and Frutiger Next.

Frutiger’s career and typeface development spans the hot metal, phototypesetting, and digital typesetting eras and he now lives in Bremgarten-Bern.

What Makes Univers Unique + What is the Univers Grid

Univers is a San-Serif typeface designed by Adiran Frutiger in 1954 in the Swiss Style of graphic design. It is classified as a neo-grotesque typeface and was notable on its launch for its comprehensive range of weights and styles designated with numbers instead of names. Univers currently consists of 44 faces, with 16 uniquely numbered weight, width, and position combinations. 20 of these fonts have oblique positions, 8 support Central European character set, and 8 support Cyrillic character set.