born again by Design: BELL CENTENNIAL

BELL CENTENNIAL

10th January - 7th February 2011

The morning started with an introduction from Julia describing their journey till now. Erwan Lhuissier was there, explaining in his presentation the ideas they exhibited for their type specimen projects. This was followed by us getting together into groups and drawing our lucky typeface we'd be working on for the next 5 weeks of this first work-based learning projects. Our inspiring team were: Amy Manning, Sylwia Palka, Eurico Sa Fernandes and myself

Eurico's fortunate pick of the draw!
Eurico's pick gave us no other but the 
now well respected BELL CENTENNIAL! 
I say: "now well respected" because 
that was the one typeface neither of us 
or anyone else in the room wanted as we found out but as the saying goes "do not judge a book by it's cover" is something that knocked us on the head very quickly, and well this was the start of a very exciting and momentous project. 


 



HISTORY: Designed by Matthew Carter between 1975 - 1978 for the use in the American telephone directories. The sole purpose for it to retain readability when printed in small sizes up to 6pt. It's unique design prevented the ink blotting, and spreading into the counters of the font. These are known as ink traps or ink notches.

 









The rest of the day started with us simply doing some primary and secondary research and finding examples of how it has been used before, a few examples: And what do you know, designed by a South African agency!

A typeface that could save the tress...



Mini - using Bell Centennial

Although St' Brides library is great and the staff there are so friendly and 
helpful we didn't discover anything new to that of which we knew already 
relating to our project. We still took away the information from a case-study 
based on Bell Centennial and also looked for inspiration from the books. Nigel 
also gave us this perfectly kept Baseline, and to our amazement it was just as 
old as some of us. Published in 1986 = respected, and priceless.










We starting thinking of what else has a similar characteristic, and 
retains it's form - similar situation...  A balloon. First we inflated 
a balloon, drew a letter or number of our choice from the typeface, 
then slowly deflated it to see the change.

Shrinkles was the best discovering for me, I loved the drastic 
transformation and the intensity of colour. However presenting 
this would be a bit tricking in our circumstances...
I found out that Muslin is the best material to shrink to a very
noticeable size. However at the store the label read: pre-shrunk' 
which was not going to help in this case, I tried it anyway and the 
results proved to that of the label, it had already gone through 
it's shrinking stage and all I was left with was a faded mark. Oh dear.




  
 


We went on to bake cookies which show the size differentiation, 
at first before going into the oven it's raw it's easy to see the ink 
traps, then once baked the ink traps are filled in, the ink 
traps disappear and almost perfect edges are formed.







In our thought process bacon or even drying fruit out could be a good
example of the concept relating to our font. This experiment proofed
to be a example of what we are not trying to achieve, as it cooked
the bacon shrunk but also disintegrated a bit loosing the smoothness
along the edges. Bell Centennial is perfect and this bacon idea is not.









I'll be back soon - work in progress on the documentation process...