W.A. Dwiggins Research Blog by Kelly Rakowski
Kelly Rakowski started a new blog on her research of Type Designer, Illustrator, Graphic Designer, Puppeteer and Book-Artist William Addison Dwiggins
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What I didn't know, is that Dwiggins also did a lot of work on marionettes. Very beautiful stuff:
All photographs by Kelly Rakowski.
Here is a short piece on WAD, as he called himself, from Wikipedia:
William Addison Dwiggins (June 19, 1880 Martinsville, Ohio - December 25, 1956 Hingham, Massachusetts ) was a U.S. type designer, calligrapher, and book designer. He attained prominence as an illustrator and commercial artist, and he brought to the designing of type and books some of the boldness that he displayed in his advertising work.
His typefaces—Electra and Caledonia are most widely used—were specifically designed for Linotype composition and have the clean spareness of the motor age. Metro is most notable as his most modern sans serif typeface. Metro was developed by Linotype in the late 1920s in response to similar type being sold from European foundries such as Futura, Gill Sans, and Erbar.
His scathing attack on contemporary book designers in An Investigation into the Physical Properties of Books (1919) led to his working with the publisher Alfred A. Knopf. A series of finely conceived and executed trade books followed and did much to increase public interest in book format. Dwiggins was perhaps more responsible than any other designer for the marked improvement in book design in the 1920s and 1930s. He gained recognition as a calligrapher and wrote much on the graphic arts, notably essays collected in MSS by WAD (1949), and his Layout in Advertising (1928; rev. ed. 1949) remains standard.
WAD (as he called himself) is credited with coining the term 'graphic designer' in 1922 to describe his various activities in book design, illustration, typography, lettering and calligraphy (his first typeface designs were released much later). The term did not achieve widespread usage until after the Second World War.
.
What I didn't know, is that Dwiggins also did a lot of work on marionettes. Very beautiful stuff:
All photographs by Kelly Rakowski.
Here is a short piece on WAD, as he called himself, from Wikipedia:
William Addison Dwiggins (June 19, 1880 Martinsville, Ohio - December 25, 1956 Hingham, Massachusetts ) was a U.S. type designer, calligrapher, and book designer. He attained prominence as an illustrator and commercial artist, and he brought to the designing of type and books some of the boldness that he displayed in his advertising work.
His typefaces—Electra and Caledonia are most widely used—were specifically designed for Linotype composition and have the clean spareness of the motor age. Metro is most notable as his most modern sans serif typeface. Metro was developed by Linotype in the late 1920s in response to similar type being sold from European foundries such as Futura, Gill Sans, and Erbar.
His scathing attack on contemporary book designers in An Investigation into the Physical Properties of Books (1919) led to his working with the publisher Alfred A. Knopf. A series of finely conceived and executed trade books followed and did much to increase public interest in book format. Dwiggins was perhaps more responsible than any other designer for the marked improvement in book design in the 1920s and 1930s. He gained recognition as a calligrapher and wrote much on the graphic arts, notably essays collected in MSS by WAD (1949), and his Layout in Advertising (1928; rev. ed. 1949) remains standard.
WAD (as he called himself) is credited with coining the term 'graphic designer' in 1922 to describe his various activities in book design, illustration, typography, lettering and calligraphy (his first typeface designs were released much later). The term did not achieve widespread usage until after the Second World War.
Labels: Blogs, Graphic-Design, Illustration, Type-Design
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10:22 AM
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