Month: April 2021

It is impossible for graphic design students studying in Canada to not know who Jim Rimmer is because he is one of Canada’s most remarkable typographic figures. 

Jim Rimmer was known for playing many roles in the design industry such as a commercial artist, type designer, book designer, and mentor to countless artists; however, the works that had helped him become famous were his book design and type design. Shadow River, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are some of the few books he had designed and participated in the printing process back in the 1990s. Moreover, Jim Rimmer was also an excellent type designer. There are six typefaces made traditionally by cutting out the metal and a lot more in digital format. The six typefaces were named to those important to him, such as Nephi Mediaeval (after his father, John Nephi), Juliana Oldstyle (after a daughter), Fellowship (in honor of the American Typecasting Fellowship), Albertan (after his wife), Hannibal Oldstyle (after Mark Twain’s birthplace), and Duensing Titling (after long-time friend Paul Duensing) (The Jim Rimmer Collection, 2005). 

Overall, Jim Rimmer had left a legacy of design works with top-notch quality, and I think that we as design students should learn more from him. His works might not be as appealing as the designs that we see today but they will never be outdated.

Wolfgang Weingart is one of the iconic swiss designers known as the pioneer of ‘New Wave’ or Swiss Punk typography. 

To understand how he had developed the style known as Swiss Punk, we need to go back to the beginning of Weingart’s career in design. Weingart first started to take a step in the design world in April 1958 when he returned to Germany to attend a two-year program of applied graphic arts at the Merz Academy in Stuttgart. In those years, he had learned the fundamentals of typography, such as typesetting, linocut, and woodblock printing. However, the actual turning point of his life happened while he continued an apprenticeship at Ruwe Printing because he was able to discover a style called “Swiss Style”. The discovery of the International style was a start, but he was not consumed by it. In other words, after years of teaching and conducting numerous experiments with his students, he later found a way to create a new style called Swiss Punk by eliminating the strict elements of the Swiss-style as well as incorporated with his playful style.

Weingart is indeed one of the special designers that had become successful because he was not afraid of breaking the rules of graphic design. Later when he became an instructor at Basel School of Design, Weingart had tried to teach the new generations of designers to take a more adventurous path toward design because he believes in the limitless creativity that this career offers.