Pioneers of Modern Typography

Front Cover
MIT Press, 2004 - Architecture - 158 pages

Since its first publication in 1969, Pioneers of Modern Typography has been the standard guide to the avant-garde origins of modern graphic design and typography. In this essential reference, Herbert Spencer shows how new concepts in graphic design in the early decades of the twentieth century had their roots in the artistic movements of the time in painting, poetry, and architecture. Spencer examines the "heroic" period of modern design and typography, the beginning of which he traces to the publication in Le Figaro of the Italian artist Manetti's Futurist manifesto. He discusses the work of such "pioneers" as El Lissitzky, Alexander Rodchenko, and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. He examines the artistic background of the new concepts in graphic design, and traces the influences of futurism, Dadaism, de Stijl, suprematism, constructivism, and the Bauhaus. His text is profusely illustrated with examples of the new typography, shown in genres that range from posters and magazine covers to Apollinaire's "figurative poetry."

This revised edition, which follows the revised and redesigned edition of 1983, includes a foreword by design critic Rick Poyner that discusses the important contributions to the history of graphic design made by Herbert Spencer.

 

Contents

Foreword by Rick Poynor page
4
El Lissitzky
69
Theo van Doesburg
87
H N Werkman
101
Piet Zwart
117
Alexander Rodchenko
135
Jan Tschichold
151
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About the author (2004)

Herbert Spencer, an English philosopher-scientist, was---with the anthropologists Edward Burnett Tylor and Lewis Henry Morgan---one of the three great cultural evolutionists of the nineteenth century. A contemporary of Charles Darwin (see Vol. 5), he rejected special creation and espoused organic evolution at about the same time. He did not, however, discover, as did Darwin, that the mechanism for evolution is natural selection. He was immensely popular as a writer in England, and his The Study of Sociology (1873) became the first sociology textbook ever used in the United States. With the recent revival of interest in evolution, Spencer may receive more attention than he has had for many decades.

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