Moldovian Typography in Chisinau

The week in Chisinau is over now. A lot of interesting insights in the newspaper design of the 1940's. I just looked in some newspapers from 1945 and 1946, broadsheet, four pages and almost no pictures. I was told by Mihail Guzun, head of journalism department and former editor in chief at the Moldavian Youth Newspaper that they could be criticized by Moscow because of spilling important space for too many pictures. That happened in the 1970's.


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Preparations for PhD Start in Reading

After a good meeting with my PhD supervisor professor Sue Walker, a short chat with the inspiring typo lecturer Gerry Leonidas and an interesting seminar with Michael (former Head of Department Typography and Graphic Communication I'm ready for going back to London.

I hope that I manage to get a Reader Pass.

It was also good to visualize how my goal is going to look alike when seeing Petra Cerne Oven's thesis.

She started with the same quote from Otl Aicher on typography and politics from the same source. Fascinating and inspiring.





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Olimpic typography

Visiting the poster collection at the Royal Library.


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During a visit at the Romanian printing house Ardealul in Cluj, a city in the heart of Transylvania, during 1999 I came across an interesting story told to me by an old print maker who had worked before and after the take over of the political power by the communists in Romania.

According to the old printmaker, when the propaganda activists came to the typography they ordered that all the serif fonts should be collected and melted down so only the sans serif should be used for the typography setting of the printed matters executed at the Ardealul printing house in Cluj. According to him that was an act to prove the rupture from the bourgeoisie and their aesthetics. My thesis is that the communist regime in Romania tried to use typography and letter shapes to convey their propaganda and even other regimes used and can deliberately use certain letter design to influence the masses when reading their messages. This aspect deals with the visual rhetoric of typography. Another explanation to the standardization and the use of the sans serif letters in large scale in Romania will be limiting the existing typographic variety in order to control the visual rhetoric of the propaganda. This aspect deals with control of design as a tool for problem solving. Those two aspects will follow the study during the search for findings and interviews related to the topic.