Assignment2| Type Expression

Assignment2| Robert Hunter Middleton (1898-1985)

Impression and opinion

For this past few week, I have been doing my own personal research about Robert Hunter Middleton. he’s like the kind of mysterious, hardworking and a dedicated craftsman font designer that I would like to know. He designed nearly one hundred typefaces and all of it to me are a perfectly coordinated design and have it’s own characteristic. He can perfectly design a existing typefaces and come up with a practical new designs .

The first time I recognize one of his typeface is stencil, which actually existed any in action drama series and war movies that I’ve watch ever since I was a child which I am attracted to it. And of course, as we observe it, we could see it anywhere in our surroundings. It more like a strong, industrial and show power and bravery. It’s also to me like a symbol of a industrial transition .The television series I used to watch when I was a child which is the” A-Team” the logo they use is stencil, which one of his creation. And also one of my favourite war movie which is “Full Metal Jacket” which was directed by my favourite legendary film director “Stanley Kubrick”, the title of the movie used a army-themed displays which is also a stencil font for the title. It was design in 1937, but to me it is already futuristic and this graffiti like font always existed and used in the future. This type of font are like graffiti in a perfectly shaped and coordinated designed.

Philosophy

During his career, Middleton designed nearly one hundred typefaces. Three of them stand out from his lifetime production as examples of unique creative excellence; Eusebius, Stellar, and Delphian Open Title. It was the Eusebius italic that gave him the first chance to display his natural talent, with Stellar, he explored the variable-weight sans serifs landscape, a brave design move that was brought to its final conclusion by Hermann Zapf's Optima, twenty nine years later. His tour de force, Delphian Open Title, invokes that rare intellectual response, admiration. At Ludlow, his design tasks were to create solid commercial variations of existing typefaces for the Ludlow machine and come up with practical new designs.

Robert Hunter Middleton exemplifies the practical creative type designer, one who has both feet firmly planted on the ground. By providing high quality typefaces for the economically priced Ludlow machines, Middleton helped to create a kind of "middle class" among America's small printers. The Ludlow machine combined with Middleton's typefaces helped small printers not only to survive but actually compete with the larger companies who had the expensive Linotypes. It is an achievement that is worthy of any type designer, then, now or in the future.

http://web.archive.org/web/20001210145800/webcom.net/~nfhome/middle.htm

Assignment2| Robert Hunter Middleton (1898-1985)

Robert Middleton was born in 1898 in Glasgow, Scotland. In 1908 he emigrated to the U. S. In 1922 was a student at the School of the Art Institute under Ernst Detterer. Together Detterer and Middleton began working on a typeface based on the Roman of 1470 by Nicolas Jenson called Eusebius. The typeface design was later commissioned by Ludlow Typograph and upon graduation Middleton went to work for Ludlow. There he learned matrice cutting from Robert Wiebking and in 1933 became head of the type design department.

Along with Detterer and Oswald Cooper, Middleton was one of the founding members of the Society of Typographic Arts and was the first secretary of the organization. He was also a founding member of the 27 Chicago Designers. Along with Herbert Bayer and others he helped to found the Aspen Design Conference.

Middleton was also a collector of wood engravings by Thomas Bewick. When a dealer bought a collection of Thomas Bewick's wood engravings Middleton convinced him to sell them in smaller lots so they would be available to interested collectors. Middleton himself purchased several. He had been operating his own private press, the Cherryburn Press, and discovered how to print Bewick's illustrations on the hand press.

He was also interested in paste papers for book binding and had accumulated over 150 designs for binding papers and had a sample book of the designs which he could reproduce. Middleton also learned punch cutting from Victor Hammer and later completed the Andromaque face after Hammer had died.

Archives of Middleton's work are included in the Newberry Library, Special Collections at University of Illinois at Chicago, and the Art Institute of Chicago.

Source: http://typophile.com/node/16089

Assignment1|Final

Here are the final presentation of my own personal work for assignment 1.Basically all of the alphabet is base on sans serif typeface. Lucky for me, i manage to capture the majority of all the alphabet images at a single location. And i only choose a picture that have the same typeface characteristics.

Assignment1|progress

I was required to compile a set of typography by photographing objects arround them that

resembles a typeface based on a type family.The alphabets consist of all 26 letters from A-Z.

The first week i head down to "ikea" which located at "mutiara damansara" because my concept was more base on home decor.Basically, I manage to captured lots of picture which include almost all of the alphabets except for E,i managed to capture the picture at cyberjaya park.The alphabeth M and,Y which i capture the picture of their shape inside my house.

|Here are the picture of some the alphabets|

Introduction

Hello,

This is my personal blog specially created for Design Process Digital Media 2. This semester, my studies are more focusing on "TYPOGRAPHY", and It is really fun,interesting to explore typography.