Graphic design is a profession, academic discipline and applied art whose activity consists in projecting visual communications intended to transmit specific messages to social groups, with specific objectives. Graphic design is an interdisciplinary branch of design and of the fine arts. Its practice involves creativity, innovation and lateral thinking using manual or digital tools, where it is usual to use text and graphics to communicate visually.
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line spacing, letter spacing, and spaces between pairs of letters. The term typography is also applied to the style, arrangement, and appearance of the letters, numbers, and symbols created by the process. Type design is a closely related craft, sometimes considered part of typography; most typographers do not design typefaces, and some type designers do not consider themselves typographers. Typography also may be used as an ornamental and decorative device, unrelated to the communication of information.
Otto Karl Wilhelm Neurath was an Austrian-born philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist. He was also the inventor of the ISOTYPE method of pictorial statistics and an innovator in museum practice. Before he fled his native country in 1934, Neurath was one of the leading figures of the Vienna Circle.
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 typefaces.
Emigre, Inc., doing business as Emigre Fonts, is a digital type foundry based in Berkeley, California, that was founded in 1985 by husband-and-wife team Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko. The type foundry grew out of Emigre magazine, a publication founded by VanderLans and two Dutch friends who met in San Francisco, CA in 1984. Note that unlike the word émigré, Emigre is officially spelled without accents.
Emigre was a (mostly) quarterly magazine published from 1984 until 2005 in Berkeley, California, dedicated to visual communication, graphic design, typography, and design criticism. Produced by Rudy VanderLans and Zuzana Licko, Emigre was known for creating some of the first digital layouts and typeface designs. Exposure to Licko's typefaces through the magazine lead to the creation of Emigre Fonts in 1985.
Zuzana Licko is a Slovak-born American type designer and visual artist known for co-founding Emigre Fonts, a digital type foundry in Berkeley, CA. She has designed and produced numerous digital typefaces including the popular Mrs Eaves, Modula, Filosofia, and Matrix. As a corresponding interest she also creates ceramic sculptures and jacquard weavings.
Isotype is a method of showing social, technological, biological, and historical connections in pictorial form. It consists of a set of standardized and abstracted pictorial symbols to represent social-scientific data with specific guidelines on how to combine the identical figures using serial repetition. It was first known as the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, due to its having been developed at the Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in Wien between 1925 and 1934. The founding director of this museum, Otto Neurath, was the initiator and chief theorist of the Vienna Method. Gerd Arntz was the artist responsible for realising the graphics. The term Isotype was applied to the method around 1935, after its key practitioners were forced to leave Vienna by the rise of Austrian fascism.
Beatrice Lamberton Warde was a twentieth-century writer and scholar of typography. As a marketing manager for the British Monotype Corporation, she was influential in the development of printing tastes in Britain and elsewhere in the mid-twentieth century and was recognized at the time as "[o]ne of the few women typographers in the world". Her writing advocated higher standards in printing, and championed intelligent use of historic typefaces from the past, which Monotype specialised in reviving, and the work of contemporary typeface designers.
Emil Ruder was a Swiss typographer and graphic designer, who with Armin Hofmann joined the faculty of the Schule für Gestaltung Basel. One of the main masters of Swiss design.
Rick Poynor is an English writer on design, graphic design, typography, and visual culture.
Herbert Spencer was a British designer, editor, writer, photographer and teacher. He was born in London.
Johanna Drucker is an American author, book artist, visual theorist, and cultural critic. Her scholarly writing documents and critiques visual language: letterforms, typography, visual poetry, art, and lately, digital art aesthetics. She is currently the Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA. In 2023, she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Anthony Froshaug (1920–1984) was an English typographer, designer and teacher, born in London to a Norwegian father and English mother.
Marie Neurath, born Marie Reidemeister, was a German designer, social scientist and author. Neurath was a member of the team that developed a simplified pictographic language, the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, which she later renamed Isotype. She was also a prolific writer and designer of educational books for younger readers.
Graphic design is the practice of combining text with images and concepts, most often for advertisements, publications, or websites. The history of graphic design is frequently traced from the onset of moveable-type printing in the 15th century, yet earlier developments and technologies related to writing and printing can be considered as parts of the longer history of communication.
Christopher Burke is a British writer on typography and a typeface designer.
Hyphen Press is a London publisher of books on design and typography. Hyphen Press was founded by Robin Kinross in 1980, but has published nearly all of its books beginning in the 1990s.
Karel Martens is a Dutch freelance graphic designer, specialized in typography
Rudolf Modley was an Austrian-American research executive, graphic designer, management consultant and author, who founded Pictorial Statistics Inc. in 1934. He illustrated and wrote a series of books on pictorial statistics and pictorial symbolism.
