Herb Lubalin was a revolutionary designer, and it was his experimentation and risk-taking that laid the way for (and inspired) the typographic freedom of expression we all have today. Whether or not tight type and expressive typography is your ‘cup of tea’ so to speak, it is important to understand how and why it came about in order to appreciate its tremendous impact on the evolution of type and design. Courtesy of International Typeface Corporation. Notice the size and placement of the comma, tucked away so as not to disturb the overall color and texture of the rest of the type. The message expressed here with the use of very tightly set caps is made even stronger by the placement of black-and-white color breaks, particularly the word ‘equal’ which also breaks the grid. The message is visual as well as editorial. The overlapping ascenders and descenders of this piece take a back seat to the dramatic effect of the “i” lying on its side in the margin. “The impact of the message depends upon the beauty in the styling of the words, Go To Hell, unencumbered by competition with fanciful typography,” as Lubalin put it himself. This piece combines a bold typeface set with tight letter and line spacing, with a very elegant hand-lettered script to illustrate a point expressively and typographically. Look at them carefully and you will see many different ways in which the type ‘paints a picture’ that reinforces the what the words say. He created these three typographically daring pieces for U&lc. The work of Herb Lubalin broke with tradition in every possible way. More after the jump! Continue reading below↓įree and Premium members see fewer ads! Sign up and log-in today. This quarterly journal was the perfect platform for Lubalin to present his innovative typographic ideas, and experiment with complete freedom. Herb Lubalin was the original editor and design director of U&lc (Upper & lowercase), the influential typographic journal published by International Typeface Corporation to both promote and demonstrate their typeface library. The typographic trends initiated by Herb Lubalin and imitated by countless others, particularly the emphasis on tight type at the occasional expense of readability, were a reaction to the absence of the restrictions of hot metal typesetting that preceded them. The elimination of so many restrictions in the typesetting process had a major effect on typography and design. Images became sharp and crisp, corrections could be made electronically, and most importantly, there was now complete flexibility with regard to intermixing styles, weights and sizes letter spacing and kerning line spacing and word spacing as well as hyphenation and justification. The equipment took up much less space, and a typeface, whether a new design or a metal type classic, could be converted into a workable font much faster than in metal. Typesetting could now be done electronically rather than mechanically, setting over five hundred characters per second compared to perhaps five or six previously. The improvements over hot metal typesetting were qualitative as well as quantitative. Phototypesetting came about in the mid-1950s, and was a photographic process of setting type whereby typefaces were made into negatives through which light was focused onto photosensitive paper, producing an image of the type. Why did he do this? In part because he could – these were typographic capabilities never before possible prior to the arrival of phototypesetting, the ‘revolutionary’ typesetting technology that changed everything. Lubalin handled type in an illustrative, expressive way, often by employing type as graphic elements or by creating typographic puns. His work incorporated tight letter-and-line spacing, extreme kerning with acute attention to every typographic detail, and the overall use of type in ways never before seen.
Herb Lubalin (1918–1981) was a brilliant, innovative, gutsy New York designer whose groundbreaking and adventurous use of type influenced designers around the globe.
One influential designer not to be overlooked is Herb Lubalin (Loob- a-lin), who was one of the most prominent figures in typography and type-centric design in the 1960s and 1970s. An important aspect in the education of a designer is learning about those who came before.