Jan Tschichold

Jan Tschichold was born in 1902 in Leipzig, Germany. Following in his father's footsteps, he learned sign lettering at a very young age, later going on to become a renowned designer and typographer. His typographic interests landed him a job as a calligraphy teacher in 1921, though he had little training in the art he was seen as a sort of prodigy. Upon attending the Bauhaus exhibition in 1924, his passion immediately changed and "as though overnight" he started designing rigid, sans-serif, layouts with large amounts of negative space. This shocked and intriqued people at the time, for the modernist movement in typography wouldn't begin for another 20 years! Putting these new principles into action, he published a book called "The New Typography" in 1928. By the early 1930's Hitler had come to power in Germany and deemed Tschichold's typography as a threat, temporarily imprisoning him. Fortunately, he was able to escape to Switzerland where he lived out the remainder of his life. By 1935, he had published another book called "Typographic Design" and by the end of the 1930's he began to let go of the rigid Bauhaus principles he had been mastering for over a decade. His later works reflected a looser, free, and more creative design. In 1946, he was offered a job in London to redesign Penguin Books, where he stayed for 3 years. Upon returning to Switzerland he released two more books, "Arbitrary Measurement Relations of the book page"(1962), and "Master Book of Typefaces". His last and possibly greatest achievement was releasing his typeface Sabon after many years of development. It is now one of the respected classic typefaces. His reign as a teacher, typographic prodigy, and designer came to an end in 1974.

-http://retinart.net/artist-profiles/jan-tschichold/

www.cssbasics.com

Chapters 1-4 of www.cssbasics.com refreshed my memory of the difference between html and css and reiterated the different kinds of css (external, internal, inline). However, I did learn a few new things. The first thing that I learned was that you can apply a css style to more than one heading at a time (h1, h2, h3, etc.). I also found it interesting and useful that you can add little footnotes and reminders to your code by using a /*footnote*/ that will not be detected when the website is in screen mode. I also learned that when your value has more than 2 words you must put "quotations" around it.

tree ring masthead

After talking to Professor Pannafino about my original masthead, I was advised to add organic elements so that it correlated with the theme of my magazine. I was originally told to try to making an organic shape that went off the left edge of the page with my magazine title inside. Instead I decided to use a tree rings as inspiration. I found an image of a sliced tree on google. I then used the pen tool to trace around the edge of the tree stump and around the edge of the first tree ring. I pulled colors from the comforter on the bed to tie it all together. The words underneath are the articles that I am going to include on the cover.

This is my new juxtaposed image. I added the leaves at the bottom of the picture from the image that I took with my digital camera. I didn't really want to make any alterations to my image but I was required to include an image that I took with a digital camera. 

magazine feather

I created this feather in illustrator as a logo for my magazine. I found a google image of a feather and used the pen tool to trace around it. I then used the pencil tool and scribbled in the bottom part of the feather.

image masthead together

This was my original masthead with my image. It blended in too much with the colors and didnt really pop. It also seemed to be floating because it was just a rectangular form.

new masthead

Upon meeting in class, we decided that my masthead needed to be more organic to be incorporated with the image more. I decided to reference tree rings with this circular design. I then pulled the red color from the bedding of my picture to make it pop. I think that this masthead is much more successful than the others.

treebed juxtaposition

I juxtaposed the two scanned images in photoshop and they turned out better than I had expected them to. I am really happy with the results so far.

images

The first image is the image that I took with my digital camera that I am going to incorporate into my magazine cover. I tried to take an actual landscape picture but It didn't turn out the way that I expected it to so I am just going to scan a tree background and add this tree in next to the wooden bed. The wooden bed and the bottom tree picture are scanned images.

new masthead design

I played around with the mastheads that I created last week in class and I made a new masthead with a cement looking texture behind the words. I also created the small feather at the bottom of my mastheads in illustrator as the magazine's logo/symbol of some sort. I wanted to go with a feather because I thought that it wasn't as cliche as a leaf would have been for this magazine theme. I think that it works well with my idea.