Half a century ago, Ivan Chermayeff, Tom Geismar, and their colleague Robert Brownjohn made — by hand — a notebook of pasted-up letters and words. They titled their experimental notebook watching words move; the exclamations shown here were part of that work. Watching words move first appeared in 1962, as an insert in the British magazine Typographica. In 2006, Chronicle Books republished the book, true to the original, still simply black and white. As a lyrical postscript, five designers — including Michael Carabetta, creative director at Chronicle Books — reflect on the original booklet’s innovativeness and influence. I cherish my copy of the new edition. It’s not EXPEN$IVE ($10), and your library may be incomplet without it. I also think it’s a grand gift for graduates of any age.
Michael Bierut designed the logo (below left) for the libraries in the New York City public schools. The exclamation point — a visual pun that children can appreciate — perfectly makes the point that you are entering a room where exciting things happen. You can read a bit more about this long-term pro bono project of Bierut’s on a recent Felt & Wire post.
The typographic exclamation point (above right) is one of several dozen posters Bierut designed between 1998 and 2006 for the Yale School of Architecture. He occasionally paired up with another designer, in this instance Genevieve Panuska. You can read more about the project on Design Observer. Once you’ve finished admiring, or critiquing, the posters in the comfort of your own screen, you can scroll down and follow the flurry of comments (57 varieties!) that flew through cyberspace the week after the original post. You can also purchase Forty Posters for the Yale School of Architecture. All proceeds, if you buy your copy from Winterhouse, will support the AIGA Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing and Criticism; the book’s publication was underwritten by Mohawk Fine Papers.
The logo for Beautifull, purveyors of “Real, Good Food” in San Francisco, ends with an exclamation point that is a teaspoon. Caution: The homepage is typographically over-seasoned!!! But the teaspoon stands proud on the back of staff t-shirts.
Alyson Kuhn, the Editor of Felt & Wire, occasionally starts and ends her subject lines with exclamation points. ¡Hasta mañana!
Images from watching words move reproduced with permission from Chronicle Books.
