Colin Brignall

Last updated

Colin Brignall (born 1942) is an English type designer and photographer. In addition to designing typefaces himself, he has worked as a type director and typographic consultant to Letraset and the International Typeface Corporation (ITC), selecting and overseeing other designers' typefaces.

Early life and career

Brignall was born in 1942 in Warwickshire. [1] He began his career as a press photographer on Fleet Street in London, and in 1963 joined the type design studio Letraset as a photographic technician. [2] While working at Letraset, he developed an interest in typography and began to design his own typefaces, despite having no formal training. [3] He produced numerous typefaces for Letraset's dry transfer range beginning in the 1960s, including Aachen (1969), Premier Shaded (1970), Harlow (1977) and Superstar (1977). [2] He later designed Italia (1977), Romic (1979), Corinthian (1981) and Edwardian (1983), which were designed for use in text rather than display, in contrast to his earlier work. [4]

In 1980, Brignall became Type Director at Letraset, a role in which he was responsible for the selection and art direction of all new typefaces released by Letraset. [3] He left Letraset in 1995 [5] and was appointed Typographic Consultant to the International Typeface Corporation (ITC) in 1996, [4] scouting new typefaces and designers. [5] At ITC, he collaborated with other designers on several historical typeface revivals, including ITC Rennie Mackintosh, ITC Golden Cockerel and ITC Founder's Caslon. He later rejoined Letraset as Typographic Consultant. [4]

The Type Directors Club awarded Brignall their TDC Medal in 2000, largely for his work in sourcing, directing and encourage the work of other type designers. It was the 20th medal awarded by the club in 32 years and the first presented outside the United States. [6] Individually, Brignall has designed over 100 alphabets. [1]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Matthew Carter</span> British type designer (born 1937)

Matthew Carter is a British type designer. A 2005 New Yorker profile described him as 'the most widely read man in the world' by considering the amount of text set in his commonly used fonts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ed Benguiat</span> American type designer (1927–2020)

Ephram Edward Benguiat was an American type designer and lettering artist. He designed over 600 typefaces, including Tiffany, Bookman, Panache, Souvenir, Edwardian Script, and the eponymous Benguiat and Benguiat Gothic.

Aldo Novarese was an Italian type designer who lived and worked mostly in Turin.

Robert Joseph Slimbach is Principal Type Designer at Adobe, Inc., where he has worked since 1987. He has won many awards for his digital typeface designs, including the rarely awarded Prix Charles Peignot from the Association Typographique Internationale, the SoTA Typography Award, and repeated TDC2 awards from the Type Directors Club. His typefaces are among those most commonly used in books.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Type Directors Club</span> Organization for better typography

The Type Directors Club (TDC) is an international organization devoted to typography and type design, founded in 1946 in New York City. TDC believes that type drives culture, and that culture drives type—and is dedicated to cataloging, showcasing, and exhibiting typography worldwide.

Doyald Young was an American typeface designer and teacher who specialized in the design of logotypes, corporate alphabets, lettering and typefaces.

The International Typeface Corporation (ITC) was a type manufacturer founded in New York in 1970 by Aaron Burns, Herb Lubalin and Edward Rondthaler. The company was one of the world's first type foundries to have no history in the production of metal type. It is now a wholly owned brand or subsidiary of Monotype Imaging.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Christian Schwartz</span> American type designer (born 1977)

Christian Schwartz is an American type designer. He has been awarded the German Design Award and the Prix Charles Peignot.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gerard Unger</span> Dutch typographer (1942–2018)

Gerard Unger was a Dutch graphic and type designer. He studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam from 1963 to 1967, and subsequently worked at Total Design, Prad and Joh. Enschedé. In 1975, he established himself as an independent developer. A long-time guest lecturer at the University of Reading, he mentored many modern typeface designers. He lived and worked in Bussum, Netherlands.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sumner Stone</span> American typeface designer and graphic artist

Sumner Stone is a typeface designer and graphic artist. He notably designed ITC Stone while working for Adobe. A specimen of ITC Stone is shown at his personal website.

Walter Valentine Tracy RDI was an English type designer, typographer and writer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Compacta (typeface)</span> Sans-serif typeface

Compacta is a condensed sans-serif typeface designed by Fred Lambert for Letraset in 1963. It is visually similar to the typefaces Impact and Haettenschweiler, though Compacta has a distinctively square shape in comparison. Letraset was a dry transfer system, widely used by amateur or small-scale lettering projects, although many professional designers used it as well. Compacta was Letraset's first original typeface design, and proved widely popular. Rights to it were acquired by Linotype and others, leading to it becoming available in other formats such as digitally.

Ilene Strizver is a noted typographic educator, author, designer and founder of The Type Studio in Westport, Connecticut. Her book, Type Rules! The designer’s guide to professional typography, is now in its 4th edition.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Les Usherwood</span>

Les Usherwood was born in England, studied in Kent and started his career as a lettering artist. He moved to Toronto, Ontario, Canada in 1957 and worked for various companies until he started Typsettra with David Thomason in 1968. The company supplied typographic layouts, headline and text typesetting, mechanicals, custom lettering and notably typeface design.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">URW Type Foundry</span>

URW Type Foundry GmbH is a type foundry based in Hamburg, Germany. The foundry has its own library with more than 500 font families. The company specializes in customized corporate typefaces and the development of non-Latin fonts. It has been owned by Monotype Imaging since May 2020.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Harlow (typeface)</span>

Harlow is a typeface intended for display use. Designed by Colin Brignall and originally published by Letraset, it is inspired by lettering in the Streamline Moderne style of the 1930s and 1940s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Freestyle Script</span> Typeface

Freestyle Script is an informal display script typeface that was designed by Colin Brignall in 1969 and Martin Wait in 1981, by Letraset. Freestyle Script is famously used for commercials in 1980s, birthday cards, decorative, logos and many others. The bold version was designed in 1986. The publishers of this font are Adobe, ITC, Monotype Imaging, Elsner+Flake, Esselte Corporation, Scangraphic Type, Linotype, Image Club, and Letraset. This font has a few versions, namely Regular, Bold, LT, Plain, LET, EF, SB, SH, SH Reg Alt, and SB Reg Alt. Freestyle Script font supports up to 78 different languages for cursive (plain) and 33 different languages for other styles. The Cyrillic version of Freestyle Script was created in 1993, consisting of the glyphs in Latin supplement. The font has been included in MyFonts since 2000.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Adi Stern</span> Israeli graphic designer (born 1966)

Adi Stern is an Israeli graphic designer, type designer, and the President of the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fiona Ross (type designer)</span> British type designer, academic and linguist

Fiona Ross is a British type designer, academic and linguist. Since 2003, she has worked at the University of Reading, where she is a Professor and Lecturer in Non-Latin Typeface Design. She has received awards such as the 2014 SoTA Typography Award and the 2018 TDC Medal.

Phill Grimshaw was an English typeface designer and calligrapher who designed dozens of fonts for Letraset and the International Typeface Corporation (ITC) in the 1980s and 1990s.

References

  1. 1 2 "Font Designer – Colin Brignall". Linotype. Retrieved 22 January 2020.
  2. 1 2 Macmillan, Neil (2006). An A-Z of Type Designers. Yale University Press. p. 62. ISBN   0-300-11151-7.
  3. 1 2 "TDC Medal Winner — Colin Brignall". Type Directors Club . Retrieved 22 January 2020.
  4. 1 2 3 "TDC Medal Awarded to Colin Brignall". Fonts.com. Retrieved 22 January 2020.
  5. 1 2 Farey, Dave (Summer 1996). "'Take a gnat's bollock off that'". Circular, The Magazine of the Typographic Circle. Retrieved 22 January 2020.
  6. ↑ Berry, John D. (16 June 2000). "The Man Who Launched 1,000 Fonts". CreativePro.com. Retrieved 22 January 2020.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.