Wolfgang Weingart

Reading through Wolfgang Weingart's Typography - Wege zur Typografie: My Way to Typography provided insight into the rationales behind experimental design. 

A large inspiration for his work was his travels in the middle and far east. He was seeking the creative connection between the "intense emotions" experienced on his trips and passion for his profession.

Weingarts most memorable experience in the Middle East was visiting the ruins of Palmrya. These ancient ruins inspired him to think of type more as a surface rather than a sole communicator, manipulating letterforms to create the patterns he'd seen abroad. 

Visiting indian cities such as Pushkar and Nathdwara gave him large incentives to try large-format linocuts. The immense murals were celebratory and showed off the beauty of colours to Weingart.
As a result his travels has influenced a new direction for him, experimenting with unusual letter spacing and repeating the same word over and over again on the same page. This can be applied to my own practice, taking time off and forgetting about graphic design for a while before entering third year. Using my experiences and observations back at home and applying it in the course. 

The reasonings behind Weingart's approach to design became evident once he started to outline what Tschichold's rules of typography were. In a previous passage prior to the image above, he states how Tschichold was "a master in setting forth standards for classical typography." Tschichold argues that typography should be about readability and not about creating a frivolous style to demonstrate the designers skill. Weingart was curious to question the established typographic practice, change the rules, and to reevaluate its potential. He wanted to prove typography was an art. An example of this rebel against the rules is evident in the image above. The use of underline would traditionally be omitted. This comes from his memory of questions from the test he received whilst he was a typesetting apprentice. The question and answer was "why should the typesetter avoid the use of underlining for emphasis? Because it destroys the beauty of a printed piece."

It is his explanation of traditional and established rules of typography that made me understand why his work is designed that way. Hence the quote "The only way to break typographic rules was to know them." By understanding the rules, the typographic experiments are then informed and not for a superficial purposes.

Another major impact on his work was the advancement in technology in graphic design which stems from his focus on the production process. What shifted his work from typographic to graphic was his personal discovery of superimposing and producing transparent films he could use for imagery, i.e. offset lithography. By learning the entire process itself, he got an understanding of being a lithographer as well as being a designer which was never practiced during his time. This could a point to take within my own practice. To learn to be more hands-on in the design process and to experiment with analog techniques to produce design that takes advantage of the processes it uses.