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Greetings, Esteemed Visitor

Below you will find a monograph I designed over the course of a few weeks as one of my final projects for the graphic designer, A.M. Cassandre. Most of this time was spent in research and actually writing the essay, but nonetheless, the book you are about to view was designed with specific care and thought.

Peignot
the revolution of A.M. Cassandre

Take note that the book has been reformatted to be viewed more easily, as the printing process would normally render reading the book in a spread form would be impossible if I provided the original copy; all the pages being jumbled in an convenient pattern to be printed back-toback. Unfortunately, this book is not available for purchase. However, if provided with adequate forewarning, I can provide my sole hard copy for you to view, should you deem it necessary,

~ YiuTung Ho

Peignot
the revolution of A.m. Cassandre
A UMBC publication

About the author


YiuTung Ho was born on December 12, 1983 in New York, at which point he promptly began to drive everyone around him crazy with questions about life, philosophy, and everything unknowable. Isolated by race, he was eventually taken out of high school and continued his education at home, where he began to pursue his interests in art. Although often discouraged by the more traditional of his relatives, he nonetheless persevered his studies of the visual world of aesthetics. A graduating senior in graphic design, YT is looking foward to a change in lifestyle once this book is completed.

This book is dedicated with love to my fellow long-suffering, backs-to-the-wall, desperately crazy Art students in all their forms. Poor buggers.

Contents
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. introduction Cassandre the bifur typeface de-evolved letters Peignot the fall into disuse conclusion bibliography appendix colophon 9 11 13 15 16 18 21 22 23 25

This book was first published in 2008 by UMBC This is the first, last, and only edition of the book ever to be painstakingly designed by YiuTung Ho Peignot. Copyright @ 2008, 2009 by Justin Case. All rights might be reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For further information address UMBC Office of Visual Arts 1000 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD, 20132 UMBC books might be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information please write UMBC Division of Financial Affairs 1000 Hilltop Cirle, Baltimore, MD, 20132 First UMBC edition published 2008 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is not available. ISBN 0-06-054093-T

introduction

Peignot

Peignot, scion of Art Deco, was a sign of things to

come. Through its forms and ideas, it would revolutionize ideas on typography and how we perceive the written word. It is both a innovative typefaceand yet not. It is a new designand yet also an old concept. Besides the commercial aspects, Peignots designer intended to make a point with his creation and to impart the beauty of something that he saw to others. Wrong or right, time would tell if the rest of the world agreed with him. Typography and the larger concept of graphic design are unusual forms of art. Where other art forms were created, in a sense, to be visual poetry where the artist extols the wonders and horrors of the world onto canvas for those who may listen, graphic designers are often featureless, purpose-driven individuals who scour away their personal opinions, characteristics, and very manner in order to deliver a message as clearly and potently as possible to the wider public. Where a painter may cater to those few wealthy souls who prize them for their aesthetic or symbolic values, a graphic designer concerns himself with evoking and provoking the common man. He creates works that have commercial value, to communicate an idea or a message that can be easily understood by anyone. In this way, a designer ensures that business in all its forms runs smoothly and profitably. Like the conventional arts however, graphic design is an evolving idea, its values, concepts, and tools change and adapt as necessary, and the most basic of a graphic designers tools is his typefaces, or the styles and the characteristics of the written word, to be picked and selected by the designer much like a painter and his brushes. Among them, one of the key typefaces of the mid-20th century, was Peignot, designed by one of the premier designers of his time, A.M. Cassandre.

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Cassandre
Adolphe Mouron, who would later
give himself his moniker of A.M. Cassandre, was Ukrainian by birth. Shortly after the outbreak of World War 1, he and his family moved to France and made Paris their home. In his teens, he struck out to become an artist, and introduced himself to poster-design as a way to support himself financially. It was then he worked under the pseudonym Cassandre, naming himself after the daughter of ancient Trojan king Priam, a girl supposedly gifted with prophetic abilities1. Indeed, he would earn the name with his poster designs, which were revolutionary and exemplifying the still-forming Art Deco movement. He was one of the pioneers of the movement, giving birth to evolution that would lead to increasingly geometric abstract designs and doing away with the floral dcor of Art Nouveau. With broad sweeping planes of color and simple symbolic iconography, Cassandre began to press into something that would closely resemble synthetic cubism. Posters like his LIntransigeant would prove to be highly effective at attracting and keeping the publics attention by providing powerful imagery combined with concise statements.

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(figure 2) (figure 1)

Photographic portrait of Cassandre painting the Normandie mural for the Exposition International, Paris, 1937

(figure 3)

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1. Alain Weill et al., Every Face of the Great Master: Cassandre Exhibition (Tokyo: Suntory Museum, 1995), 9.

the bifur typeface

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12 13

ABCDE FGHIJK LMNOP QRSTU VWXYZ 1234 5678 90


(figure 4)

His typography too was new and un-

usual for his time, beginning with his Bifur typeface. Boldly innovative, Bifur featured highly geometric forms combined with a minimalist mentality to reduce the letter forms to their bare essentialsan odd but visual pleasing merging. Meant for short powerful words on the poster. Bifur was designed as a display type, and can easily lose a viewer in long, tightly grouped sentences. Bifurs downfall was that it was perhaps too distinctive. While aesthetically pleasing, the type may have been commercially handicapped because it was too unique and too easily recognizable in an industry which would typically prefer more neutral typefaces capable of being applied repeatedly to numerous products. It also therefore necessitated the use on secondary fonts for longer messages, which would raise initial costs of production. While the type did receive some initial success, the type was so tied to the Art Deco that once the movement died off, so too did Cassandres creation. Bifur, however, would serve to illustrate Cassandres fondness for strong sansserif capital letters. It would be these concepts that he would carry over to his more successful Peignot design.
(figure 6)

(figure 5)

Bifur, a typeface constructed out of geometric shapes and blocks of gray shades, will always be extremely recognizable as well as incredibly unreadable when grouped together.

de-evolved letters
n the history of writing, through the centuries of time and the Middle Ages, the written word was commanded chiefly by scribes and calligraphy. Men, of course, are infinitively more prone to errors and sloppiness than machines, and it is in this way that Cassandre attributes the mutation and disfigurement of the lower-case letters. One universal thing that can be said about people is that they have bad hand-writing. Either through clumsiness or willful defiance, scriveners throughout the ages alter the writing style that they were taught, and then believe their minor changes are inconsequential or even an improvement on the previous version. From father to son and back again, the degeneration of the original gradually erodes what Cassandre would believe to be the nobility and dignity of the capital letter forms. The evolution of letters is a slow one and it would take centuries to create what we now recognize as the lower-case letters, yet devolve it did. The letter a, for example, is nothing less than an A that has been deformed by ages of bad hand-writing. So too are the E, R, T, N, and many others besides. The only reason other letters, like the c, i, o, s, u, x, and y retain something resembling their original forms is due entirely to the fact that these letters are somewhat simpler in their forms and thus harder to disfigure.

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(figure 7)

Carolingian miniscule from a tenth century evangeliarium

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peignot
Peignot, named for the man who had
supported Cassandres work for many years, is more than a typeface. It is in a sense a revolution, or rather a counterrevolution. This all-purpose typeface was designed partly to combat the degeneration of the letters in the alphabet and return to their old capital Roman forms. Ah, but with the creation of the printer, it will be possible to restore the alphabet to their true forms. As mentioned before, from the lithograph to the more modern laser-printers, it is now possible to create millions of copies of letterforms without a single change or discrepancy. Other than the need to stick with the familiar and imitate older books and scripts, there is little reason to stop us from discarding the lower-case letters and returning to the capitals, seeing as it is no longer the age of calligraphers, but the age of the engraver, the copier, and the printer. Cassandre does not attempt to completely eliminate lower-case letters, however. The human eye requires a bit of height variation in words in order to be legible. Even in single word phrases, having all capitals within them would quickly make the phrase overwhelming, garish, and AGGRAVATING. Whether the difficulty in reading them is a result of instinctive drives or cultural conditioning is debatable, but it is quite clear that ridding the alphabet of lower-case versions would be undesirable. He instead simply replaces them for the part with scaleddown capitals. Some of the letters, by necessity, had to remain the same. The b, d, f, i, and j still retain their classic un-capitalized forms. While this choice may seem hypocritical, it is likely that Cassandre felt it was necessary to leave some elements to indicate that these were lower-case letters instead of just by scale. In some cases, as with the i and the j, it might be difficult to differentiate them from their upper-case forms had Cassandre decided to alter them as well, since Peignot was a sans-serif type, leaving even fewer distinct markings to identify the capitals with. To promote legibility, he raised the ascender height which would greatly affect the letters b, l and f, and then further modified h and k to have an unusually tall-looking stems and ascenders. This decision seems to be intended to avoid the monotony of a stunted typeface and keep the retinas interested and moving. The effect works rather well, and as a result, even large blocks of text rendered in Peignot is quite readable.

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The only letters Cassandre did not really alter and could have are those of the d and the y. There are a few possible reasons why that may be so. The lower-case d is quite different from the upper-case D, with the arc and the stroke exchanging positions and gaining an ascender. It is likely that this was influenced heavily by the old Greek letter delta. Perhaps Cassandre felt that it was an exception to the rule as this was the case. Or perhaps he felt that the form was simple and pleasing enough to avoid being altered. Or perhaps he thought that the world had grown too accustomed to the d form and that changing it to the upper-case would be too jarring to those reading it for the first time? The same may also be true for the lowercase y, which was the smaller version of the capital, dropped down below the baseline to have a slanted character. While possessing a descender, having it straightened may have made in unfamiliar. Regardless of why, the unaltered forms of these letters do not particularly detract from the Peignot typeface in any particular fashion.

Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg Hh Ii Jj Kk Ll Mm Nn Oo Pp Qq Rr Ss Tt Uu Vv Ww Xx Yy Zz 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 !@#$%^&*()?:;/\][{}` The quick little brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs and cats
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(figure 8)

The Peignot type was designed to a stylistic general purpose font and so can be used aesthetically for a wide number of situations.

(figure 9)

fall into decline


Because of these things, Cassandres
Peignot is easily readable by most peoples standards. Yet, the lower-case is still regarded as something of a failure. While it is true that the typeface is a beauty to read, legible, and able to be used in all sorts of applications, it was never adopted for wide-spread actual text-based products. It may, perhaps, been a result of psychology. No matter whatever advantages something may have to offer, people have always been slow to change to things that they are unfamiliar with. Despite the attractiveness of lower-case Peignot, the ideas it presented were too new and bold for people to use. When Peignot is used, designers tend to use it in upper-case, and then only for signs, logos, and titles; never for textbased works. That, of course, is a shame given that the typeface works beautifully in that function. Within its wingless form, it possesses a sort of dignified elegance that other typefaces have difficulty matching and had it been met with the sort of attention it surely deserved, Peignot would have shaped typography and influenced history and modern thinking. Alas, with its commercial failure, it followed Bifur into disuse, albeit its descent would be slower with small revivals. In the end, Peignots only real claim to fame would be the engravings at the Palias de Chaillotall in capitals.

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With the failure of the lower-case Peignot, the capitals too were resigned also to disuse. While designers could still use it, it meant that they still had to purchase a second typeface if they wanted more than just a logo. It just would not be cost effective enough. Then as times past and the world would be more forgiving of unusual ideas, Peignot would be overshadowed by newer, ultra-modern typefaces like Helvetica. That typeface giant, so neutral almost to the point of being completely characterless, was so pleasing to the eye and easily applied that companies would begin using it for everything. Peignot and typefaces like it would be seen as almost archaic, and thus undesirable in the newer fast-paced world. Typefaces with thick blocky stems like Broadway would suddenly be discarded for thinner ones. Character and sensitivity would not be as powerful a criteria any longer, and they would be supplanted and usurped by an increasing need for minimalism. Machine efficiency and no-nonsense business transactions would drive these notions before them and change the world itself. There simply would not be any room or time for more decorative old-fashioned typefaces. Such would seem mean the end of any real chance for Peignot to revolutionize the written world as Cassandre once wished.

(figure 10)

(figure 12)

(figure 11)

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There are conventions of an affective order, and characters and the way they are ordered procure certain satisfactions to the members of the human communities which use them, in accordance with the inclinations of their spirit. Even though it has definitely severed its ties with its pictographic origins, writing is related to the art of drawing; like any art, it involves questions of mass psuchology and the psychology of populations. Aesthetics and psychology are delicate subjects to handle and among the last to be approached with scientific methods. ~ Marcel Cohen2

(figure 13)

2. Marcel Cohen et all, A.M. Cassandre (New York: Rizzoli International, (1985), 101.

conclusion
Still, not all is lost. In recent years, a sort

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of revival and reevaluation has been occurring. Simply put, despite the seductive qualities of Helvetica and its like, people have been starting to grow weary of the typeface, having been submerged within it for years. Because of this, people have been considering the older, more personal and human typefaces in history. In addition, creating typefaces has never been easier with the current state of technologies. With so many designs being created every year, it is not impossible to say that even if Peignot is never utilized again, it is nonetheless still possible for Cassandres dream to be realized. Although his failures in typography would eventually take his life, perhaps he can rest easy knowing that the future is still yet full of possibilities.

(figure 15)

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(figure 14)

(figure 16)

Peignot Atypical, a typeface designed by the author.

bibliography
Bosworth, Wallace, Peignot Type Forms (Paris: Deberny & Peignot Foundaries Heller, Steven and Fili, Louise, French Modern: art deco graphic design (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1997) Mouron, Henri. A.M. Cassandre (New York: Rizzoli International,1985) Meggs, Philip B. Meggs History of Graphic Design (New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons inc, 2006) Weill, Alain et al., Every face of the great master Cassandre (Tokyo: Suntory Museum, 1995)

appendix

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1. A.M. Cassandre around 1933, A.M. Cassandre, 100 2. LIntransigeant, Meggs History of Graphic Design, 291 3. Cassandre www.mathgamehouse.com/mt/insider/davebrasgalla/ cassandre.jpg 4. Bifur typeface specimen Author created 5. Protoeclectica poster http://bp1.blogger.com/_gyc95FIYK60/RqcQEVwvEo1/ AAAAAAAADnY/eEgGojnJ3cU/s1600-h/print.jpg 6. le Bifur http://bp1.blogger.com/_gyc95FIYK60/RqcQEVwvEo1/ AAAAAAAADnY/eEgGojnJ3cU/s1600-h/cassandre_le_ bifur.jpg 7. Carolingian miniscule from a tenth century evangeliarium A.M. Cassandre, 96 8. Peignot typeface specimen Author created 9. Delta letters http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ Image:Greek_letter_delta.png 10. Palais lettering 1 http://www.flickr.com/photos/pierrenumerique/57103778/ 11. Palais lettering 2 http://www.flickr.com/photos/pierrenumerique/57103894/ 12. Helvetica poster http://www.drexel.edu/westphal/img/news/helveticaMovie_poster.jpg 13. Why Helvetica http://www.creation.uk.com/news/2007/09/06/why-the-helvetica/ 14. Peignot Atypical poster Author created 15. Cassandre http://www.sarahstocking.com/biography.asp?artistid=235 16. Broadway typeface specimen http://www.linotype.com/159239/tcbroadwayregularfont.html?PHPSESSID=3710d5862d691a3f1abb60e3 cb3e9d6f

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colophon

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Cover and Book designed by Yiu Tung Ho on his Dell XPS 410 computer in his tiny apartment. Fewer than five copies were printed on matte and glossy paper. Various typefaces were used, including Peignot, Helvetica, Garamond, Eurostile, Eurofurence Light, Bifur, and his own Peignot Atypical. He used Microsoft Word Professional to compose the text, as well as Indesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator of the Adobe CS2 and CS3 suite to design the book. Printed unaided by the author in the UMBC Information Bureau Print lab. May 2008

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fini.
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