The Fantastical Worlds of Gustav Doré

The Ancient Mariner and the Wedding Guest

My current topic, as you’ll realize from the last post, is graphic designers, illustrators and other visually creative types. I began with Escher last month; however, another classic illustrator who is right up there in my universal top ten is Gustav Doré.

The Albatross

Doré was born in 1832 in Strasbourg and, with very little training at all, went on to become one of the most outstanding illustrators of the age. The fact that his work echoes down through the years and is still found in canonical works alongside the literary texts they originally complemented, attests to the exquisite and evocative power it retains for its beholders. 

I recall reading The Rime of the Ancient Mariner as a small child and gazing for hours – hours! – in awe at the expressions Doré bestowed to Coleridge’s characters: the wedding guest’s shocked face, the sailors’ terrified countenances, the nightmare-woman Life-In-Death madly throwing dice.

The majestic posture of the albatross and the lonely lost galleon gliding aimlessly in the dark can be summoned to my mind in thorough detail even today, due to the power of Doré.

Christ

Doré’s main media were wood engravings and illustrations, but he was also a sculptor and painter, in other words a talented multi-disciplinary artist. He became rich during his lifetime, being commissioned to create images for such works as The Divine Comedy, Paradise Lost, Inferno and “The Raven,” as well as the bible and famous folks tales.

Gustav Doré was highly sought after and extremely successful in many areas, but one of his deepest wishes, which was to find “the love of a good woman” and marriage, was never fulfilled. He lived with his mother his whole life and died after a short illness at the age of 51.

Little Red Riding Hood

The National Gallery of Canada is currently hosting a 3-month retrospective on Doré, with many works on loan, and an article about this was published in The Globe and Mail on June 12.

Check out the link for James Adams’ article:

http://bit.ly/1qCcOeO

Caiphas

Gustav Doré

Impossible Constructions

M.C. ESCHER

Graphic Artist

Maurits Cornelis Escher, born 1898 in Holland is, to my mind, one of the most brilliant graphic artists the world has ever had. His work is famous around the globe and many books and websites contain samples of his work.

1961 wood engraving: Mobius Strip I

Known to the world as M.C. Escher, he intended to study architecture, but found instead his calling in printmaking and drawing. His creations range from true-to-life to the incredible – fantasy worlds where “nothing works.” 

The images below illustrate his “impossible constructions,” as well as his symmetrical endeavours and sketches of landscapes made during his travels. He lived for varying times in Italy, Switzerland and Belgium, as well as his native Holland, and made hundreds of woodcuts, engravings, lithographs and drawings, inspired by the countries he settled in or by his vivid imagination. As well as being a graphic artist, Escher was involved in tapestry designing, murals and book illustration.

Impossible construction

Ascending and Descending

Relativity

Transformation

Metamorphosis

Fish and Frogs

Symmetry

Seahorse 11

Clowns

 Realistic

Hand With Reflection Sphere (self portrait)

 

Corte-Corsica

Today

Once seen, Escher’s art is not forgotten: the pieces have a haunting, often ethereal quality that cannot help but move the viewer. His art evolved via principles of perspective and impossible spaces and, as far as I’m concerned, his prolific output and innovative mind will seldom see equals in his genre.

M.C. Escher died in 1972, but his work brings his name to mind for many admirers to this day. One can buy a watch with an Escher design on the face, sculptures of his most famous art, not to mention jigsaw puzzles, posters, men’s ties, bags and T-shirts. 

They are all sure to be conversation pieces. 

Super Family Typefaces

Many roman types consist of a family of fonts in the range of roman, bold, italic and perhaps small caps (which are not the same as reduced-size capitals). Semi-bold may be in the mix too. Some type families consist of only a couple of fonts, such as roman and bold.

There are, however, super families, which are priceless for both versatility and consistency, for they share basic structures whilst giving each font within the family a different weight and space. Super families give a designer the ability to mix typefaces successfully without a piece looking overdone. 

Super families are especially useful in books that contain several recurring elements that all need to appear as separate information on the same page; for example body text, sidebars, tables, captions, headings and subheadings, footnotes, etc. All these different elements can maintain a consistent look by the use of super family types, which have various weights and styles, such as thin, light, condensed, black, compressed and medium, on top of the fonts mentioned above.

Helvetica is one such super family and was mentioned in last month’s post. 

So is Scala, designed by Martin Majoor in the early 1990s.

The serif, the sans serif and the open type formats of Scala all have a common spine, yet each font has a unique look. 

Another example is Jeremy Tankard's Trilogy, created in 2009, which includes Egyptian, sans serif and fat face. I think this super family is especially beautiful, with its extremely thin lines contrasting with very fat ones and with such gorgeous details (notice the “CEREMONY” M and N skinny serifs and fat curly-cues, and take note of the lovely R).

The Last Word On My History of Typefaces

So far I have discussed Black Letter, Old Style, Transitional and Modern typefaces.

Here’s a quick breakdown:

Black Letter: the first typeface – its paradigm was the scrolls of medieval scribes. It has thick vertical lines and thin horizontal connectors. Today we regard this kind of typeface as good for headlines, but not for body text.

Old Style: letters with thick serifs and low contrast between thick and thin strokes. These first roman types arrived in the fifteenth century as an alternative to Black Letter and were an instant hit for readability.

Transitional: letters with thinner serifs and a higher contrast between thick and thin strokes. Popular in Europe and the U.S., these are still used today.

Modern: the styles of these typefaces include very thin serifs and extreme contrast between thick and thin strokes. Like the others mentioned above, these are still in use and in fact currently popular with designers for marketing pieces.

HOWEVER…all these typefaces did have one thing in common: Serifs.

William Caslon’s great grandson, William Caslon IV, decided change was in order. He designed a typeface without serifs. This new kind of typeface is now known as sans serif.  It took a while to catch on but as we all know, sans serif fonts are now extremely popular. One of their first uses was in billboard advertising where letters had to be wide and tall, and sans serifs were a good fit for this. As well, they are a good contrast to serif types, with many documents today containing a mix of two or more different typefaces for effect.

Could you read a page of this?

After this innovation, many would-be typographers got in on the act and a slew of new sans serif faces appeared, some of them completely illegible due to being too chunky or abstract. 

However, we also have this period to thank for some timeless new typefaces, both serif and sans serif. For instance, slab serifs – also known as Egyptian because of the thick, block-like serifs that simulate those seen on hieroglyphics – are huge today and we see variations of them on TV, in books, in advertising and on business pieces. They make catchy headings that stand out in aesthetically pleasing ways. Rockwell is an example of a slab serif.

Later still came another artistic creation in the design of typeface, the geometric sans. Futura, designed by Paul Renner, has a foundation of geometric principles: squares and circles.

Gill Sans, by Eric Gill, is similar but not as stark – with its softer curves it became known as humanist sans.

More recently still – fifty years ago – the sans serif Helvetica was developed by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann to fulfill a need for a typeface that could be used for various purposes and in various weights.

Helvetica has many fonts, from bold to light, from Black to condensed; it is extremely versatile, because with just one type family a designer still can create an eye-catching document using various fonts for headers, tables, etc.

Trivia Break:

Helvetica is one of the most global typefaces in the sans serif style. Even Japanese, Hebrew, Greek, Chinese and other non-Western alphabets have a version of Helvetica for use in their own languages.

                          

Today

The advent of computers meant easier typeface design, at least after the early problem years were behind us (when early screens with their obvious and clumsy-looking pixels hindered such development). Now there are thousands of new typefaces that are easy to buy and download.

We no longer need to consider issues of the old printing press days, such as fitting a last spare line onto a full page, for we can now kern and track our letters, reduce a type size or the leading and so on. We can choose typefaces that fit different functions. Life in the printing, marketing and design worlds has never been easier.