Paul's full name is Paul Friedrich August Renner and he was born on the 9th of August, 1878 in Wernigerode, Germany. As a teenager, he studied Greek and Latin for 9 years and then went on to study art at higher education level. He later got involved in design and became concerned with typeface. He was brought up to have a very German sense of leadership, of duty and responsibility. He was suspicious of abstract art and disliked many forms of modern culture, such as jazz, cinema, and dancing. But equally, he admired the functionalist strain in modernism. Thus, Renner can be seen as a bridge between the traditional (19th century) and the modern (20th century). He attempted to fuse the Gothic and the roman typefaces.
He started working on Futura in the summer of 1924 and is his most well-known work. Renner's Futura was a very important font at the time, especially in Germany and has become an inspiration and the foundation for many geometric types to date. He also created two other typefaces called 'Plak' and 'Tasse' which are also commercially available.
Along with the typefaces he created, he also wrote a few books 'Typographie als Kunst' (Typography as Art), 'Die Kunst der Typographie' (The Art of Typography) and 'Colour Order and Harmony'. These are only a few of the books he has written. He died aged 78 on the 25th of April 1956 in Hödigen, Germany.
Futura Experiments:
We were put into three groups, I was grouped with my classmates Jack, Jordan and Dave. The whole class was given the same quote to create from the studio rules list but we were all given different fonts. Ours was Futura and the quote was, "Accept change as inevitable".
There were four words and four members so we divided the words equally, my word was 'change'. We had to find the font in a typography book, in a magazine or from the font box and photocopy it to trace or cut and stick. We created thumbnail sketches to decide how we would like to arrange each of our words and it was trial in error until we founda way that worked. We finally decided to trim the tracing paper and mount it on newspaper.
After we did that we had to create our own quotes in the font we were given. My quote was "Good artists copy, Great artists steal" by Pablo Picasso. I wanted to arrange the fonts so they weren't all straight. I didn't really like how some letters overlapped but some of them worked well. I liked how the 'i' in Picasso has the tittle in the middle of the counter in 'P'. I hatched some of the letters so they weren't black but weren't plain and used a permanent marker for the ones I wanted darker. In all, I am please with my own and my groups achiements today.
Group Experiment with anything but paper:
We were asked to create the quote, "There's no 'I' in team" with objects around the room in two groups as quickly as we could to see which team won. My team did it the fastest but I think that the other groups objects made for a better picture, though I am still proud of our efforts. Here is the final photograph of what we did.
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| "There's no 'I' in team." |
After we had photographed it, we had to put all the pieces back and get briefed in for the day's lesson. We were to create our own design based quotes using anything but paper to see how creating we could be. My quote was, "Good artists copy, Great artists steal." by Pablo Picasso and my idea was to spread red, acrylic paint across glass and write into it with my finger in a made up font to see how the technique works. However, when I had finished and I took a picture, I wasn't happy with the font and how child-like the whole thing looked. So I got something to write with other than my finger (the rubber on the end of a pencil) and borrowed a font out of the font box and copied the existing font. This approach worked a lot better.
Though using a rubber made the lines thinner and therefore a little harder to read from the glare, the image as a whole works so much better when it is from an existing quote... If I were to try and use a quote that doesn't exist, I should either base it on an existing one and alter parts that I want to change to make it my own or I would have to keep the letters consistant. Same height, same width and each letter should match up with other letters of that kind. For example, 'A's should match other 'A's and so on.
In all I am pleased with the work I created on that day. After we made these, we went through to the Mac Suit and printed our favourite version of our own quote and the group quote in A3 to pin out on the display wall in the hallway. We then filled in our sketch book with pretty much the same as I have put on here and then started research for the project.
