In a context filled with heavy constraints, Mandel believed in the social responsibility of the designer, and created a methodology that deserves to be rediscovered by designers today. He conceived several families for Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, Portugal, the UK and USA, and developed a unique approach, both in term of design choices and in the way he adapted his working process to successive technologies. Mandel subsequently worked as an independent designer, specializing in typefaces for telephone directories. Starting his career with Adrian Frutiger at the Deberny & Peignot foundry in 1954, he succeeded him as Head of the design studio, a role he kept until 1977. Shortly, the quote from description: French typeface designer Ladislas Mandel (1921–2006) is a major, yet little known figure of the second half of the twentieth century.
This was a very fascinating lecture with a lot of specially collected materials. I’ve heard of Ladislav Mandel’s telephone typefaces before, but of course didn’t know that much. Rediscovering the work of Ladislas Mandel It was a modern changing world presented to children through fun. Articles highlighted everyday concerns of children, and very early on they started to tackle less common topics of gender equality, nature preservations etc. This was replaced with topics such as technology and science running in parallel with stories and poetry. In the aftermath of the WW2 topics predominantly reflected national (Yugoslav) consciousness, bravery of partisans and commitment to Tito’s agenda. Rooted in contemporary society, issues were highly influenced by cultural changes and nuances in political regime.
Through the 70-year long history Ciciban served as a driving force of education and enlightened emancipation of “little people” through rich typography, excellent illustrations and high level of interactivity. It is an example of excellent editorial, typographical and publishing achievement unparalleled by any of the later examples. Here is how Petra explains magazine’s background: Ciciban is a Slovenian children magazine. The level of illustration, the artists who worked for it, the level and the quality - were unique. We also had such magazines which were illustrated in a similar way. This talk really touched all my childhood memories. What happens when we apply audio effects to letterforms? Can we meaningfully modify shapes via that route?” Petra Černe Ovenĭesigning young readers through typography What do letters then sound like? What does an ‘E’ sound like? Can we hear the difference between Gotham and Garamond? What can we learn from looking at the harmonics of letterforms? But things become less abstract once we do the reverse: reconstructing shapes out of sound waves. Imagine we take the cold hard numbers that define shapes digitally, and pretend they are sound waves. This talk documents a serious, yet playful exploration of shape analysis and transformation based on signal processing, inspired by trigonometry, analog synthesizers, Lissajous and Fourier (but not Fournier!). While interesting, these are often based on subjective perception and therefore remain rather vague. Here is how Just describes the subject: “There are many parallels between sound and letters, music and typography. It was interesting to see how the sound and it’s waves transforms into the character shape and back. This was probably the most unexpected lecture for me.
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