Saturday, 12 November 2016

OUGD403 - Interview with House Industries, Ken Barber

House Industries is a graphic design studio and digital type foundry, founded in 1993 by Andy Cruz and Rich Roat, originally starting off as Brand Design.
The studio specialises in hand lettering, which bares the same principles as layout design. For instance, Ken Barber suggests that in creating letterforms it needs to be considered how each letter relates to each other. You need to communicate a sense of balance and contrast, and understand the way in which elements relate to one another.
This relates to Massimo Vignelli's beliefs about the importance of the syntactical elements of a project (for example, type and sizes), as he also believed there must be an appropriate and balanced relationship between these elements, showing how they relate to one another.

Barber believes that to become a good letterer must have an understanding of type history. For instance, referencing existing typographic forms to produce your own hand-written forms, as this provides a foundation or underlying system of typography for which you can work from. Again, this can be considered to relate back Vignelli in his ideas of semantics, whereby he believed that you must research the history of a subject to better inform the nature and development of your work.

Along with these important elements of lettering, the main piece of advice I will take from this video is to be your own client. Provide yourself with self-directed projects in order to gain new skills and knowledge within design that, as a result, can help in the progression of your own work.

http://www.gestalten.tv/motion/house-industries

No comments:

Post a Comment