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