 The core, I guess, concept of Supervillows That Caught My Eyes is that it's such an interesting, complex thing that tried to do a lot of stuff in a very, very simple way. And it's essentially a modular typographic system that was used to create type illustrations and ornamentation. So immediately it kind of set off all of my alarm bells, all of the things I like. It just kind of hit all the spaces that I was really curious about. And I came across an album in the Lou Ballin Archive many, many years ago and I just couldn't make any sense of it. It just was so weird and so awesome at the same time. I really had to understand it in a more succinct kind of way. But as soon as I saw it, there's just really interesting magical quality to it and I'm hoping to kind of impart some of that today and kind of paint a broader picture for it. But essentially what we're going to be looking at is this awesome, awesome thing. This is one of the promotional pieces from that. But in combination, the typographic, the modular system essentially kind of starts to look like this. And it's profoundly deep and surprisingly, surprisingly varied which is what you hope for a modular system that could do lots of different things. So to properly kind of contextualize it. So as I said, it set off all of my curious curiosity alarm bells and I wanted to sort of delve into all of those things and sort of to create the proper conditions to establish kind of how this system came to be, how this project came to be. So the context of ornamentation and typography goes quite far back, surprisingly far back. And we're talking about cut metal, you know, sort of cast type. So the earliest examples of ornamentation that starts to influence the shapes of letter forms goes back as far as around 1690s. There's a British foundry, Thomas Grover foundry that created a typeface that was eventually called Union Pearl. Probably not out of the unification of Scotland and England. But it's the first time typeface attempted to bring in these visually ornamental elements right into the letter forms. So there's this divide, letters or letters ornament. If there is ornament, it's an ornament. But this is sort of a graphic attempt to kind of reconciling the two spaces. Another really important figure and aspect of ornamentation and typography was the work of Father Sebastian Trichet who was active in the middle of 17th century and into the 18th century. He was part of the Vignogne commission that created the context and the groundwork for the Romain de Roix typeface or the family of typefaces that were created for the imprimary, the royal imprimary. What's really interesting about Father Trichet is he was a mathematician, he was an inventor, he was a hydrologist. He built most of the canals in France, at least devised a lot of the canals. He had a very keen eye for things and he was the story supposedly that he was visiting Cathedral, looking at some canal work that he was doing somewhere outside of Paris and he walked into Cathedral and noticed the floor. And the floor had a very simple tile pattern. Essentially a square tile that was divided exactly in half, top half was black, the bottom half was white. So he didn't see, he didn't notice the whole thing with, you know, he's a very good eye for things. He noticed the element that made it and he saw this really beautiful complex pattern and realized it was only made with one piece. That's sort of the beauty of a complex pattern is that all you need is one piece that in permutation can create a lot of possibilities. So if you take that modular unit, the beauty of a square is you can rotate it 90 degrees and you have essentially four shapes out of one unit. And then just depending on how you link it, the combinations are pretty endless. So it's this strangely amazing thing of using something so simple to create a very vast array of options. So he sketched it out, he kind of dabbled in sort of what that was. And left notes and some of the writing and some of the stuff, this is now called the true shape tile in Oliver's name. So this is well known in math and has implications in other spheres. But it's in a way the simplest way of thinking about ornamentation and typography and typesetting. You're limited by size, you're limited by scale and why not create something that gives you a lot of possibilities out of a very simple unit. So you could see the extrapolation from this. His ornamentation theory didn't really go into Romain de Roix. But people like Fournier, this is the, just as a reference, this is sort of some of the plates from 1704 for the Romain de Roix. And you can even see the little tiling kind of played out, played a role in the bottom of the plates. But Fournier was aware of the work that the true shape was doing. Fournier was trained as a wood engraver and he had done some ornamentation in wood and realized the potential of this true shape modular system of sort of this tile system and kind of extrapolated something out of that and started creating some ornamentation. It wasn't really using the true shape tile system. He wasn't making a pure half and half. But he saw the, kind of extrapolated the context from it that helped him conceive of the ability to do ornamentation at different scales using very simplified forms. Essentially kind of breaking down a complex pattern into modular units that you can link together. So this is some of Fournier's ornamentation. This is really like the, as far as excessive ornamentation, kind of the beginning of the excessive ornamentation that happens sort of around this time in the mid-18th century. Just before the mid-18th century. This is from the manual. Well, not the manual. This is a sample book that Fournier put out in Pierre. I should specify Pierre Simon Fournier. And some of these ideas started kind of trickling across the continent. Jacques-François Rosard, a punch cutter living in the Low Countries, mostly kind of based in what's now the Belgian sort of region. He did quite a bit of ornamentation. So a better known contemporary of his is Fleishman. They were, I'd say, a little bit competitive. They both created kind of a new Dutch style of type. Rosard struggled kind of under the... He had a lesser reputation. I think he constantly struggled that Fleishman was better known. But he created a lot more interesting things. He was better known for music types and he did a lot of these ornamentation things. He used the Tarrataise, essentially patterns that could be printed for tarot cards. It was a very useful tool for a lot of printers. But the methodology is also very similar. If you can break down a complex pattern into very small, simple shapes and you could just reuse the left side, the right side, the middle part, you can create a lot of stuff. And this is a true Tarrataise, one of these pattern devices for printing of kind of a continuous pattern that is done later. It's a 19th century design to do the Tarrataise, but this is based on the truchet tile. So this is a pure extrapolation of that idea, half and half. And you can see, if you rotate the pieces, you can create a lot of possibilities, a lot of permutation. But you can see, essentially it's half and half. If you look in between the tiles, you could see that one half is black, one half is white, the black side is in size. And if you start looking at that late 19th century, early 20th century, a lot of type founders are producing quite elaborate designs or an imitation using similar principles. Like I said, you take a complex design, you break it down into smaller elements, and you can cast things consistently and you can lock things up and create a lot of really beautiful designs. Another influence within the history of printing and the history of typography is the artistic printing movement that tried to exploit as much as they could from material that could be done in the printing press, not trying to do anything as an engraving, really just relying on the stuff that you have in the type shop. You know, locking forms and creating curved forms, making type 2 things that never did. They're influenced by engraving, they're influenced by photolithography and chromolithography, but they're trying to limit themselves to what you can do within the printing press and really trying to show off. They started using very, very fancy inks and very complex levels of printing. Most the UK and the United States are sort of in this arms race of who was going to do better artistic printing. And as an extrapolation of that, some of the founders, of course, always sort of get in on the trends. You know, they started noticing the trends of how the printers are doing these things and then said, hey, we can start making these things for you. McKellar Smith and Jordan, which is, who's lineage traces to the first American type foundry, the first American designs are in the back around of McKellar Smith and Jordan. Binion Ronaldson, which is the first surviving type foundry in the United States that created the first American type. He's printed and cast here rather than matrices that were brought over from overseas. They eventually become McKellar Smith and Jordan in the 19th and 20th century. Late 19th century, they got absorbed into ATF, but they're known for creating very, very elaborate ornamental pieces that sometimes would turn into design. So they would take things that were meant for ornamentation and designers would, or printers in this case, would turn them into letters. It's a strange sort of inversion. That's not what McKellar Smith and Jordan intended, but here you go. These are letter forms that kind of turn into it itself. This is mostly for borders and images. You can create these complex things, including things like buildings and houses. There's enough material, there's enough furniture, so to speak, real ornamental furniture with doors and windows that you could buy a kit from McKellar Smith and Jordan. You can make beautiful, complex illustrations just on the whole page. This is from Bowen Company down on the New York City's seaport. They have some material from McKellar Smith and Jordan. Here's a lockup of a house. It's pretty legit. It's a good-looking house. And then as you get, as you inch into the 1920s and 1930s, you see a lot of foundries making this sort of stuff and promoting this kind of stuff, using essentially ornamental pattern pieces to make images and illustrations. It makes sense on a practical level. If you're printing letterpress, you don't have to put anything else in there. You can just rely on the stuff you have in the cases. You don't need to have an engraving, which takes a bit of work. You have to make sure that it's type high. It's just an extra piece of work that, you know, it's not cumbersome, but it does take time. So why not maybe use the stuff you have? And also just it's curious. It's novel. It looks different. You can make an engraving that looks like that building. You can make an engraving that looks like those flowers, but you're not going to get that sort of texture. You're not going to get that look and feel for it. So it made sense that it creates a new formal language right off the bat. So this is from Ludwig and Meyer. A lot of this is in Germany. This is a student piece from Düsseldorf from 1928 where they're using rules. They're using ornamental structural elements that are used for delineating tables and charts and they're using them to create imagery. So printers are dipping into their cases and finding novel ways of making designs. And this is a student project. So a lot of the students in studying printing, printing apprentices are starting to kind of dabble in this stuff. And there's a kind of a natural context around this as well. But this is designed by Fritz Ritter from Munich. It's done completely using, it's I think a New Year's card for 1928, done entirely using the available ornamentation. But some of this has forms and stuff that the founders are also making in line with this stuff. So it's not just kind of out of the box ornamentation stuff, or borders. They're a little bit too limiting. This is much more complex and these shapes are coming from foundries that are creating these things. In the cases up front are some examples of the foundries that are doing this sort of work. This is fantastic. This is from Haas, Basel from 1920s. It's not Helvetica Haas. This is completely something else. But same company. Chromatic. You can see sort of this pixel art, early pixel art. It's kind of amazing. The other bit of context around this is sort of the general modern movement and part of the reason why that stuff is looking the way it does, part of the reason why those foundries are making these things is there's this general movement within the art's scenes towards modularity and sort of modernism as we sort of start to define modernism. You start to find this graphic simplification. Then Doisburg's design using the same elements essentially, stuff that you can have in the print shop to construct letter forms that could have width and compression just based on how you put the pieces together. If you look closely, if you ever have a chance to see the original or kind of the original print, you could make out the little edges between where the type locks up or like the border pieces lock up. It's not cast type, it's not made type, it's just made into just elements. And the freedom that allows is fantastic. You're not stuck with sort of these classical forms that a lot of these folks were sort of rebelling against. And the freedom of the press, the freedom sort of of the printing press rather, like how you could move material around and use these things to become more graphic and to be a little bit more interesting and then kind of break the monotony of this kind of locked in rectilinearity of the page. Again, Doisburg in 1925, you see this happening in Soviet Union with the constructivists are also trying to break the plane, they're looking for models. And there's a close relationship between Dada Futures and Dyshtil, Russian constructivist, Hungarian constructivist, Czech constructivist, especially in this case, he spent a lot of time in Germany going back and forth and talking to people who were teaching in Bauhaus. This isn't necessarily what Bauhaus visually looks like, but there's an aspect of this interest in these simplified modular forms. Rochenko's work, a lot of the lettering that he would do for publications that he was doing is also very interested in these very simplified geometric forms that kind of give the page greater vitality. Yusmin, who told it, the Bauhaus and he made this sort of lettering study in 1925 that influenced other designers. And the piece on the right is his design for a prospectus for Bauhaus. Again, Bauhaus doesn't all look like that. I think that there's a misconception that Bauhaus' design is always like that. There's a lot of traditional typhuses, there's a lot of traditional layouts. It's not so simple. And if you're curious, there's a fantastic article on Fonsignus about Bauhaus' typography and the comments is where it gets really, really interesting, where you kind of see the full extent of how things really were. So there is a tendency within some of the masters, within some of the artists, some of the students to go towards these things, but that's not, they're not creating a Bauhaus style per se, that all comes later. Now we sort of think of it that way, but it's about a bit messier in a good way. Herbert Baer, he's in investigation of this universal typhus, is rooted in the work that Yusmin was doing in 1925. Joseph Albers, his work in the 1920s for these stencil and kind of modular devices is also kind of in the same space. And you can see the modularity there, especially in the one on the right. It's just a simplified set of units, a very small subset that you can mix and match and make new letter forms. You don't have to do anything using existing type. You can do something using custom made pieces. And these custom made pieces are a derivative of the work that these printers are doing anyway. They're using rules and they're using this material. And again, foundries catch up. They're seeing what's going on and they're trying to accommodate that desire, that need and saying like, here have a lot more stuff to play with and they're making these amazingly robust things. This is a companion to Futura, which was kind of ornamentation, but it's kind of a similar proportion to it. It's called Schmuck, but it's, you know, it means ornaments. And you can see how they're applying and there's a few specimen books that show this. But it's kind of a lesser known bit about Futura that it had these companions. They're sort of the kind of more stylized Futura, sort of at the bottom there, the heavier weight, but there's also the heavier weight. But there's also these amazing pieces that go into it. Not to be outdone, not stemple, the other big German manufacturer, of course, had their own. And they're about a few years apart. They're very close together. So they're creating material in the same way. They're trying to accommodate this need and at also different sizes. So when you have a lot of different sizes, you can do much more. You're not stuck with the same size elements that it creates. But you can take, let's say, on the right, the bigger pieces and mix them with the smaller pieces because it's metal type. You know, as long as you can lock it up, you know, and printers are doing complex lockups at this point. Anyway, you can do a lot of really cool things. There's also some student projects. This is some student work in Stuttgart at Gower-Berschule in Stuttgart, or late 20s, I'd say, 28, 29. Same idea, similar idea that the Duchess of Albers is exploring. Like, how can you make letter forms out of a kit of parts? What kind of shapes, what kind of pieces do you need in order to make a full alphabet? And both of these are pretty serious-looking alphabets. I mean, they're different, but they're legit, again. Like, they're letter forms. And so, if you move away from the conventional understanding of what a letter form used to look like and you kind of open up the boundaries, it's pretty vast territory. In Italy, Nebiola, there's a specimen of this in the case by the front entrance from letter form archive, Frederick Meccanov by design by Giulio de Milano. Aldonovares didn't do everything for Nebiola. There's a lot of other people. Giulio de Milano is an important figure for Nebiola. In the mid-30s, he designed this typeface, again, made of kit of parts. You just buy the pieces and you can see how you can make a super tall letter, like that R, or the A, where you can make something super wide and heavy. Like, the A, you can make something very short and you can also change the shapes you have. You can make an A that has kind of an apex to it. You can make an A that's rounder. You can do a lot of stuff with this, as long as you have the right elements. It shows the elements at the top. They also made an inverted version of it called Fredger Razzanalli. It's kind of like a knockout. So this is the best way they could show it. It's fantastic as an image this guy putting together these little bricks. Same time. In the stateside, ATF also made something that was very, very similar. The alpha blocks, which is also in the case, been around 1944 and lasted for quite a while. It was used a lot of typeships have it. A lot of typeships have it. They have no idea what it is, but it's alpha blocks. It's weird stuff, but it's kind of awesome. Same thing. If you can envision something, you can make it. And I've seen some really elaborate designs using alpha blocks, like that star. You can switch color midway. It's totally doable. You can do a lot of stuff. And it's a complex set that allows you to make letters if you wanted to. You can make illustrations, but all in the case. All in the printing bed, rather. Cassandra's by viewer for De Begni Peno. ATF is also looking for these formal limitations and extrapolating kind of a space where Cassandra could find a really beautiful combination of things, breaking it down into essentially a series of solid forms and shading, either through color or through gradient. And creating this, it's a little maybe harder. I guess you could see it. The gray parts are just a series of single lines. They're sort of, it's gray because it's black lines that are thin that are spaced out together. This is one of the promotional books that Cassandra designed for. It's amazing. But it's something that is indicative of that time. There's a tendency on kind of a cross-aspectrum from the avant-garde artist and also down to the trade. They're interested in, by this potential, Art Deco as a huge visual role that it plays. And then there's kind of this notion of modernism and modernist. So the terms are not synonymous. They're different ideas and they both explore kind of more geometric forms, but they're doing it in different ways. Modernism has a different philosophy behind it. Modernistic is sort of more of the Art Deco, more of the visually expressive things and a little bit more commercial. But you see a lot of this work pretty much across everywhere. In the 1920s, 1930s, especially in 1930s, this Art Deco style and this kind of limited palette is pushing a lot. Like you could see this is from 1932, a Parisian design. They're using those elements. They're using, especially kind of, if you look at the bottom there on the bottom right, the pieces are those modular elements that they're putting together. A lot of printers are also taking these, part of the reason why the foundries started doing this kind of sales pitch to these printers is that they started noticing that people were taking these ornamental pieces like lines and just solid shapes and would file them and make inlines with them and cut things in them or turn them or shave file stuff off to make new forms. So they're taking existing blanks essentially that would print solid and they're making a single line or maybe a double line. What's shown on the left there, creating a different visual texture or more like those constructed B. So it's a half a circle and if you just take a file and just cut a line into it and line it, you can print something that has a new, you don't need two pieces, you don't need a rectangle next to it, you can make the half circle look different. So the foundries are seeing that the printers are doing this and they're kind of trying to accommodate saying, hey, you can buy this out of the box and here we can sell you more type this way. But it's something that they're trying to expand on the stuff that they have without doing too much. All of a sudden you get a slightly visually different texture to it. And the biggest factor of course in all of this story is that this is a Spanish design. Supervillas was made in Barcelona after the Civil War and the Spanish Civil War played a huge role in all of this. Supervillas wouldn't really exist without the Spanish Civil War. If anything like these forms would be constructed out of existing typefaces, this was something that had a huge impact on the printing scene and this is where the story gets a little bit more complex. If you start looking at Spanish design, it's very much in step with what's going on in the rest of Europe. Even I would say especially in the early 30s during the Republic, the second Spanish Republic, there's a greater tendency towards making things even more geometric. They're taking the visual cues that they're seeing, design work that's happening in France. There's a very strong influence of Soviet design that comes into Spain because of the natural affinity between the Spanish Republic and the Soviet government and there's a lot of support back and forth, mostly from one side. But they're seeing a lot of this constructivist work. They're seeing a lot of this graphic design and a lot of the commercial work that's made in the Spanish sector, mostly books, posters, are very much influenced by this geometric and ornamentality. It's a really kind of untapped space. I'm waiting for more people to delve into the Spanish design because if you start looking for books then there are lots of them out there and they're not very expensive. It's just kind of an untapped market but the Spanish books for the 30s are phenomenal. The constitution of Spain uses the feature, that kind of stylized feature. It's very much in vogue of what's going on. There's a series of really amazing designers that are worth kind of their own space, their own books, their own articles because the work is just so phenomenal. There's an influence of Hartfield, the photo collage, photo montage similar to, you know, what is going on and Soviet Union, Lysitsky, Rychenko are making these very complex photo montages. And there's a different, a slightly different aesthetic here but it's very much coming from those places. You could see the direct influence of sort of the publishing and the Soviet publishing influenced the Spanish scene. This is actually either theater programs. This was published from around 1927 or 1926 if I'm not mistaken all the way through the mid to late 30s. And the aesthetic of these covers of these theater programs stayed pretty consistent. They kind of kept to this stenciled form, this very geometric stenciled form in slightly different ways. Later in the 30s it became a little bit more pictorial oddly strangely in the late 20s it was much more graphic and much more minimal and then it gets a little bit more, it makes sense in the context of Spain but visually sort of a little bit in inverse. Hartfield even designed things for Spanish publishers. So this is a publisher in Madrid. This is from 1931. It's a lot of exchange. There's a lot of things happening in Spain in this period that we don't know much about sadly, strangely. I mean these are just so fantastic and it's a lot of it is out there. It doesn't take a lot to kind of dig these up. The piece on the right is from Catalonia, 1932. The designer Nornai Ignacio Zabala is a well-known 1930s graphic designer in Barcelona in Catalonia. A stamp, Joseph Salas, another important Catalan graphic designer in the 30s. And the newspapers. The masts of the flags of the newspapers are phenomenal. This is all from late 20s, early 30s. They're all using similar forms. I mean it's like it's not hard to kind of do a quick dig at some of the Spanish newspapers and you start looking at them. More than half of them look this way. They're clued in. They're tapped into the entire context. They're sharp. They know that this makes sense but kind of positions them in a particular light. You could see sort of this Republican feel. This kind of very workman spirit to it. It's not fancy. It's not classical. It's rough, a bit rough. Strong. So these visual connotations come through. It's not serif. It's not classical. It's new. It's refreshing. It means that they're sort of, they're kind of looking at the future. They're looking forward. It's no surprise the future is also kind of love this graphic form. And the same thing that happened in Germany happened in Spain. The Spanish type foundries create ornamental pieces. This is a Jose Aranza type foundry in the office in Madrid in Barcelona. They created their ornamental kit that they're very actively promoting in making letters. So the dominant form in this specimen book is they show the kit of parts but they also show quite a lot of lettering which you don't, you do see it in the German books but this is heavily leaning towards that because it's a lot easier to do letter forms within printing bed when you have these things. So essentially what they're showing here is like you could do everything here using all of that and just add an additional type. It's kind of at the bottom and you're done. You have an image. You have an illustration. You have everything. Plays into the context of what's there. There's another page from that book. It's really beautiful. Two color. But we're talking about very small printers. We're talking about jobbing printers. The other important part of this whole story is that printers are the designers. This is a period when you don't have necessarily a need or a strong field of graphic designers that are middlemen between the client and the printer. So the clients go to the printers and the printers design for them. Like if you need a small ad or if you need a wine label, you don't need a designer. You don't need an artist to make it. You just go to the printer and say, I have this thing. I need this thing. It needs to say this. Can you help me? And they help you. They typeset it and they print it for you. So, you know, we're used to thinking that we need someone to make the stuff before it gets printed. Well, you know, in a lot of the 30s in the same United States, 20s, 30s, the printers are the designers. You know, they're trained and they're doing the best they can. So, obviously, the quality is a little bit wonky. There's an inconsistency, but they're not going to necessarily need to bring someone outside. They can just do it themselves. And so that's the clients are going directly to them. And these printers are trying to stay trendy. They're trying to keep up with what's going on and they're seeing things, and they're trickling, you know, it's sort of, it's their interpretation of the seven guard. Like what they see and what they can do is a little different, you know. So, there's this dilution that happens, but dilution, sometimes in a direct, sort of very literally, it's just diluted and it's not as good. Sometimes the dilution that turns into something unique and something interesting. You know, this whole notion of vernacular does sometimes make things more interesting, does make things better. But this is mostly for, you know, for these jobbing printers. They have very small jobs. These clients need very small things and they just don't want to fuss with it, you know, or have to pay for high cost of engravings. And the graphic design, the sort of the more professional, I guess, artists, the commercial artists that are active right on the cusp of the Spanish Civil War are really, really distinct and the design of the propaganda during the Spanish Civil Wars is really profound and very, very vast. And graphically, visually, they're very easy to tell apart. You don't have to be a scholar to understand who's on what side. The phalangist, in this case, the sort of the fascists of Spain who were very much anti-Republic. There's also the monarchists. There's a lot of folks that are not interested in the Republic and want to bring things back to a certain order. Their stuff is very photorealistic or realist. They're interested more in the pictorial. They're not interested in these graphic, simplified abstractions. They're very much interested in things like people and this is all the one on the right is the anti-Marxism. But they're creating these very strong visuals using imagery and very powerful imagery. But even within their work, it's really hard to ditch the simplified graphic forms. That lettering on the bottom left there is from that Spain. Another couple from the phalanges. You can definitely get the drift of what they're trying to do. They said that the middle piece of lettering on the poster on the left, it's the same roots. It's a kind of graphic. So they have this very strong rejection of this very simplified abstraction, but they're still using it anyway. It kind of cuts both ways. But the socialists, the Republican posters are graphically a little bit different. But the war has wreaks an intense havoc on the country. It's a devastating thing that happened to Spain. The Republicans eventually lost out to Franco, or Franco kind of was instrumental in positioning himself at the end of the war and ruled for a very long time in Spain as a dictator essentially. But the fighting was pretty intense and it did a huge amount of damage to a lot of the industry. So it took a long time for Spain to kind of come out of this period. And one of the heaviest hit places were small towns where a lot of the battles were fought and the printers basically were left with not much material. Forget printing. You need stuff. Printing is not that essential when the country is completely broken apart to such a degree. You have to kind of piece the lives back together. But a lot of the printers to this day, there are towns that have 50,000 population or smaller don't have proper printing facilities. They still don't have photo engraving. It's basically just kind of stopped, time stopped for a lot of these towns and so things just happen elsewhere. The big cities do stuff. The big cities were able to pick themselves up. But small cities are still probably in some ways really from the Spanish Civil War. It's a phenomenally brutal thing that happened there. The scale of bombings and everything that happened in the 30s is really profound. But here's a bomb shelter in Valencia in 1937 and the architectural lettering is coming from the same roots. It's the same stylized modular forms. These kind of very geometric forms. So this is a piece of lettering for a bomb shelter. And it's very much in keeping with the aesthetic of the time. It's art deco, but it's also very much from this very particular strain of art deco. And the biggest factor, as I said, is the photo engraving. Basically, photo engraving got wiped out in Spain. And just to kind of show you how complex photo engraving is, this is an American Photo Engravers Association, the annual of how photo engraving works. Essentially, I'll show you the slides, but the basic gist of photo engraving is you have a metal plate that gets coated with photosensitive material. That material reacts to light and hardens. The parts that are exposed to light, they harden. And when you put acid or some kind of acidic material on it, it eats away at the stuff that wasn't hardened. So anything that wasn't exposed to light, part of the positive negative image, the positive side gets hardened, the negative parts don't, and they get washed out essentially by this acid. So you have a recessed, you have a raised surface. And it can be tacked to a plate, and then you can print from it. So it can be printed exactly in the same bed. So this goes through and shows you the various stages of the photography. And then you have to strip it. You have to add the chemistry to the plates. And then you can etch the plate. It could be done in zinc, or it could be done in copper. And it's a very labor-intensive process that relies on a lot of different steps. I mean, if you don't have a camera, then that's it. You can't do it. And this stuff usually would have to be done somewhere else. The drawings are pretty amazing. Like the echo on the guys. This weird thing. It's like a sci-fi movie. Routing, you have to route out the excess material. So it's lighter, it's not as heavy. It's also stuff that doesn't need to get printed. You have to do a lot of finishing of this. You have to cut them down, get them to be squared off, so you can lock it up in the bed. You do finishing. You can use these special calipers to test the entire bed of the surface to make sure that it's at the right height. If it's not at the right height, it's not going to print. You're going to have areas that print and areas that don't print. So the guy in the... Where is this? Somewhere. He's got this like... It's hard to see. There's this little special kind of caliper to check it, test it, wrap it, ship it. And you're done. But this is insane. This is normal, but there's no way that a lot of these printers could do this sort of work, especially devastated from the Spanish Civil War. So here's where the main player for Supervillows comes in. Joan Tarchut. This is him as a young man and probably around 20 years old. He was born in 1920 a little bit later on the right. This is from Alex Tarchut, his grandson. This is a really amazing sort of lineage of the Tarchut family skipping a generation, but there's this really interesting link between... If you guys are familiar with Alex's work, it starts to make sense when you see. But there's a missing link and it's kind of more organic than it actually seems. It's not a direct... He didn't know his grandfather's space, but Joan did type. So his father was born in France, moved across the border into Basque Country and eventually made his way down to Catalonia and settled in Catalonia. And he owned a printing plant. He was a printer. He had a small-scale printer. He was printing in France before he moved to Spain. But he kept... He was doing some of that in the Basque Country and then he also started doing that in Barcelona or near Barcelona. So his son is born essentially into a printing family and his son is interested in letter forms. He designed a few typefaces. Juventude is the sort of... probably the better known of his typefaces. He was also sold in France under a different name, Uriel. Foundry typographique Française was a foundry that had very close links to Catalonia, mostly because of the Civil War, the effects, the after effects of Civil War. There's a few people who moved because of the war over to France and kind of hooked up with the scene of typographers there and were pulling some resources to this whole interest in Mediterranean design of letter form, kind of this Latin movement that is very much kind of pushed by this foundry. But this is around 1950. He also did the Bizon. He did a lot of these before the Spanish Civil War. The family kind of left Catalonia to go... I mean, Catalonia was deeply entrenched in the Spanish Civil War. They were in... essentially kind of hiding during the war but he started working on his typefaces before the war and after the war. By 1940 he was able to release these typefaces. The Bizon and Muriel. And this is his father's work. This is Esteban Trushoot Bachman in 1930s had... was noticing how bad some of the design was and he was very interested in helping printers, local printers, small printers, to give them something different, to give them something new. And he was very active in writing and he wanted to sort of lead by example. He created a series of albums called Adam, the acronym is Adam. So archivo documentare da artemadena. Documentary archives of modern arts. It's kind of Art Deco. It's essentially Art Deco. He's a version of Art Deco and he's creating these really beautiful albums to help printers understand how to do things better, how to do things visually strong or better, how to kind of expand their possibilities. And essentially knowing that like if someone sees something they can copy it. They can make the same thing. If they don't know that there's a trick that you can make something out of something else, they may not be, you know, clued into it. And so he's very actively taking advantage of that typographic system that I showed from Eranzo. He's using it for a lot of the designs in Adam albums. There's a series of these that come out in 1930s. So another element that played a huge part in Jean Treschout's insight into like what needed to happen. And these are some of the early drawings, kind of some of the early sketches for what becomes essentially supervillows. These are studies of how these albums would be promoted. So this is Jean's work. It survives. Is there hand drawn? But if you look at the, there's a few pages that look exactly the same from the finished work. But these are mock-ups. Initially it was called Splex, but it sort of became more of supervillows with sort of a catcher, a better name. But the thing that he wanted to figure out is how to make these letter forms. So essentially like everything I just showed, printers don't have photo engraving tools. How can you expand and make a more robust version of what those founders are making, but something that goes even further. It's not just like a set of squares and lines and circles or half circles and triangles. How can you make something that's a lot heftier and has a lot more flexibility to it? How can you make letter forms that could be made up from modules, but also then those same elements could be used for an imitation, for sort of flourishing, but also for illustrations. And that's the space that he wants to occupy. He knows that printers don't have photo engraving. They're not going to get photo engraving for a long time. He wants them to do better. He's picking up the torch from his father from these Adam albums and he wants to give printers something even better and using the same notion of creating these albums that would teach printers how to do these things. So he's doing these very small sketches. He's influenced by this visual aesthetic by Art Deco, kind of this art modern. And he's piecing these things together and the sketches are pretty fascinating. So in the end, this is some of the metal type that was produced and I'll show you sort of how the series played out. But this is what the type looks like when it's cast, a few different sizes, these very interesting elaborate pieces. And to make it work, it's a lot of work. So they called it supervillows, which means like super fast. It's anything but super fast. It's probably the slowest thing you could possibly imagine doing because it's really difficult to lock it up because you're dealing with a lot of different sizes, different shapes. It's easier to do in a printing bed because you're dealing with rectilinear forms. You can kind of just snap things. It fits well together. But still, there's a lot of work that needs to be done. And in order to make it successful, he needed to show as much as he could of how this works. I'll run through basically just of kit of parts. It's a series of these modular elements. That becomes the core of what you would buy. So you have these elements that came in a few different variations with patterns attached to them to save the printers from filing the stuff anyway. They knew that they might do it. Here's already the stuff done for you. So they had a couple of these versions of the same shapes with these patterns cut into them. And then you had a series of additional forms that were narrower, taller, lighter at a few different sizes. And then you had complementary pieces. So you would buy one of the three core sets and then you can buy additional elements. You could also just stick to a very small set and you can buy additional elements. And everything came in groups. So like fonts today, you can buy this with this or if you want, you just get that weight and you want the lights and bolts, like you can have that. So it was sort of mixable and everything was delineated. These are kind of the more comprehensive catalogs of this type system, but it goes from very simple. They're geometric things, roundy kind of geometric things. It doesn't have like too strong of an affinity for very harsh edges and a lot of this like flourish stuff, which is kind of interesting in the context of this art deco. Like there's not a lot of this sort of stuff, but he's just kind of throwing it in there. And it does start to make sense when you see his use of it. So this goes on. You know, you can have shapes, forms, little edges, like connections, snap-ons things, serifs, like and everything is, you know, kind of sized and the stems are similar. So you could, you know, if you bought things at a certain size, they kind of worked together. You just have to line it up, but the stems extended and so the thickness of the stuff on the bottom would connect to another piece somewhere along the way. So the engineering of this is pretty profound to make this much stuff. First to figure out what you want it to be and then like make this stuff happen is just bananas for me. But you know, it goes on and on. And then when you start piecing it together, you get some of this stuff. So he's showing you can do display type. You know, go beyond the three typefaces that you have in your kit. Now you have like 50,000 fonts, not quite, but the permutations were several hundred options. If you mixed pieces together, you know, it was like three styles in three styles times 11 with these additional elements. You know, it's a really big quantity of options that you have like from the get-go. So the possibilities are somewhat endless and you could see how a similar shape of the S, at least those three with the addition of these kind of seraphie, you know, stemmy kind of things become pretty fluid and pretty flexible and you can do different R's, different G's, you know, you can explore how things are made and you could see exactly the visual roots of the stuff. It's coming from the same place that everything else in Spain is. This is a great one. It really takes color to make it really pop. I mean, it's a really fantastic thing to see it printed and the albums is what I fell in love with, seeing these printed forms. They're all letter-press. So if you bought any piece of the system from the founder that produced it, you would get a book, and I mean a book, about 50, 60 pages, completely letter-pressed by them that showed you how to use it, how to take advantage of the stuff, because basically it's like, it's not just a manual, but he really needed this thing to really understand like what you just bought. And he spent so much time and so much effort making this really beautiful thing. And fortunately there's a few sketches that survive where you can see how he's sort of thinking. So that's a sketch on the left and that's a finished printed piece on the right. All letter-press, multiple colors, probably maybe six, maybe eight colors. Silver ink is used quite, quite often. But he's just saying, look, you know, do you need an engraving? I can like do this amazing fountain with type and stuff and just call it a day. You know, so this is from, he produced a whole series of four albums. They were called Nove Adams, so the new Adams, sort of the new revival of these album albums. The second one was in 1942. The third and the fourth used pretty much supervillows exclusively. The first two were a bit of a mixture, but from 1942 this last one came out in 1952. It's pretty much just supervillows. And this last one especially is interesting because he goes into a great deal of explanation and philosophy behind how type works and how things should, it's really interesting to read it. It's printed in English, French and Spanish. So it's pretty accessible. So I'm going to show you, I'm going to focus a little bit on the fourth one. I spend more time. We've had this album for a little bit longer in our collection. This is the thing I fell in love with probably like 15 years ago in our archive. I'm still trying to figure out why we have it. I suspect it has to do with Aaron Burns because Jean Treschaud, I learned this this morning. He was invited to come to a conference, Inspirational Typography in 1966 that Aaron Burns put together. So it's very possible that when Jean came to the conference, he left this with Aaron Burns. Aaron Burns left some of his material to our collection. But these are scans from our archive. This is the cover of the last album, Nov. 4, 1952. He's using his own typo, which is kind of the dominant secondary typo for most of it. Everything else is super low. Every single thing is super low. The back end made up of type, lines of type and ornaments, that Egyptian hieroglyph is all super low. Two colors, three colors, four colors, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. It's insane. So I'm going to show you some of the pieces from it. The great thing about this book is on the front is the design or samples of the design. You flip it over. On the back, he shows you the pieces that go into that design. You cannot be more didactic than that. It's fantastic. It's like you could just copy it and just go and make the same thing. So this is printed three color. One, two, three. Yeah, three color using only those elements. And you can see on the right, I'm cropping in, you can see Spanish, French and English explanation. It's just a narrative. As you flip the pages, it doesn't necessarily relate to what's on the front. He just says this long narrative about typography, his perspective on typography, what's good about it, what's bad about it, what's to do. So it's just like you could read this stuff. You can also just follow the instructions like a Lego kit. You can like take these things. And it just goes on and on. Like I said, there's like 50, 60 pages. Everyone is like better than the next. Everything on the front there minus the bisonte italic on the bottom is made using those elements. Nothing else. There's nothing else there. Nothing engraved. Nothing. It's just this stuff. And what's amazing is you start to find like this insane range of forms. It's like if you have to make these shapes, you're going to do some wacky, amazingly weird things. And that's where it's really, for me, becomes like something that goes beyond this kind of rooted system in our deco with very sort of limited means. His ingenuity and inventiveness in these forms is pretty astounding. Look at this. How about that? A little composing stick. The artist and the printer. He's drawing in these typesetting at the same time. It's awesome. Type, a little bit of type at the top there. His own type. And the supervillows. And if you look at the caption, kind of at the top caption before the, at the top of the three columns, three paragraphs of text, he explains the secondary typefaces. So if you wanted to know what the other typefaces are, it's all credited there. Sipitura, bisonte. You've intuited. Everything is listed there. So you're never not sure what you're looking at. It's amazing that the color of it, this is letterpress. Pure letterpress. So to do each color, it's a separate pass. And registration. So these are volumes of books that he prints letterpress, sheet by sheet. That's why they spiral bound them. Because it's the only way really to get this, to come together after you've letterpressed pages and pages of the stuff. Sometimes five, six passes of each sheet. You're going to need the spiral bound piece to hold it all together. Some samples of showing labels, cards, a huge emphasis towards jobbing work. And he does show you what it takes. It's printed as a sketch. So this is how I'm thinking about making this design on the right. So the following page is just like this tissue, printed tissue showing graph paper and showing a drawing that he made in order to follow. So he's instructing people. If you're going to think through this, take some graph paper and start mocking things up. I think that's wishful thinking, but he's trying his best. And who knows if it's traced from the print? Who knows? I don't know. It's too close, but pretty neat. But seeing his other sketches, you can tell he did a lot of planning. He did a lot of work to get the stuff to work together. Wine labels, there you go. You want some stuff? It's just at your back and call. It's just profound. It's all over the shop. He moves through such diverse territory. All the big type and the illustration made using Supervillows. Okay. That's a good one. I love this guy. Just those shapes put together. That's a good one. And you never know. If you think about these very simple parts, you can do a lot of really fun stuff with this. There's a lot of tight faces kind of lingering within this, just out of the lettering that he does with these things. But look how few pieces it takes to make the illustration and that type, the title, Maria. It's all using them. That's very small set of parts. I mean, obviously you need a few pieces, a few copies of each one, but it's all there. That's a great one. I'll show this closer. That's legit lettering. That's like serious lettering. It's made using these snap-on weirdo things. It's amazing. And that illustration, look at that illustration. Three colors. Look at the shadow on the left side of the building. It's that third color. It just kind of hits underneath. It's awesome. He's so good. He's so inventive. The top letter in the bottom. Palm trees. It's cool. Tiny. The effort that he went to to make you believe in this thing is profound. I just have the utmost respect for this guy. Just the sheer motivation and dedication to this craft. I mean, he was so convinced that this is the best way to do it. And you really wanted to prove that. Here's a good one. Springtime and You in France. A complex piece of design. Those are the pieces. Very few. Very few pieces. Or at least like modules. And then he breaks it down for you. In the book he shows you color by color the breakdown of what it takes to print something like that. So, you know, you start with that or that might be the last plate but then you have the red then you hit the blue and then you print the green and then you print this other thing that's not fast. Not fast at all. But look at the results that you get out of this amazing thing. But the lettering is all done using this. Let me backtrack. See the plates. You know, you get really good registration on the letterpress. But that's a lot of work. That's a lot of stuff to ask. So he's like showing you how to sketch this. He's showing you how to break down the colors. It's very didactic. He's showing you how to break down the colors. And then he has pages and pages of typefaces that can be put together. And he gave him names too. So in a way it's like if you're not very imaginative you can't come up with your own typefaces look at the page and follow the structure. Take this shape, take this shape and then you have a full alphabet. And he did a number of these. I'm only showing a few. There's some swans. In a way you could see his other typefaces. The, especially Bisoned the way it kind of has a very similar organic kind of a very tall stem structure with kind of these curly ends to each side. But this is very much built into Supervillus which had been working for a while during this period. And it does show up in use. It was used. It was bought. It was, you know, popular other printers loved it. They set their own stuff in Supervillus to promote themselves. I'll share a close-up of this one. It's fantastic. The colors and the flexibility that it has. It did okay. It did okay in Spain. Not amazing, but it did okay. It's so hard to use. It's not an easy thing to do. There's a pretty steep learning curve. You're going to do very simple things just time-wise. Especially jobbing printing is you could do it quickly. If you're going to take forever to setting this up, it's not something you maybe will kind of go to the trouble of. But it did well here and then also did well in France and Belgium through the Catalan network of immigrants and the founders. It was republished by FTF. It was sold rather by them. You can buy it in France and it did okay in France and Belgium. Strangely, all the way up to Belgium. FTF had a good reach there. Again, the Catalan community helped popularize it. It's a very Spanish. It's fun. It's more playful and tapped into some of the French stuff that was going on by Couspedal, another really interesting person who deserves his own talk. These are fantastic little life samples. If you travel around Spain, you're bound to come up with something like this. Especially visit a small printer, a printing shop, you might find something. And it has been revived. It has been digitized recently or not so recently. Time flies by. 2003, Andrew Balliouche and Alex Tertrut worked together to make a digital revival of faithful reproduction of the entire system. The entire kit apart as a digital type phase of styles. You can buy one, two, three or four. I think there's four different styles that have the core elements, the decorative elements, and then additional forms that you can piece together. It's robust and it's complex. You have to know, you have to kind of plan. You have to figure out how to use it. One of the best examples I've seen in use was in 2011 Astrid Stravaro's studio did the Ajay Open Conference when Ajay was in Barcelona. They created the whole branding based on the super-velo stuff. There's a good, there's a few more images on fonts and use that show a bit more of the system. But they were very simple kind of paired down using the initials of all the speakers, all the members, all the people who are participating to make these really beautiful, fun, playful things using these making initials out of the super-velo stuff. It's great, every single thing is different. You have endless possibilities and endless permutation. They kept the color palette pretty limited just to let the forms kind of do their magic and that kind of paired with kind of an accent color. It's a really smart way of getting these things to kind of work together. It's super strong visually and kind of you could see it. You create a very strong visual brand for it. And I think that's my last slide but I'm really fascinated by this idea and I think just the history and the story behind it is really awesome but I think if you think about the contemporary technology of what you can do with OpenType that's, it's interesting to just move, I'll leave it with that. Just like what is possible potentially with given how advanced the type technology has become this doesn't necessarily need to be revived in its purest form because the style is potentially too dated but the idea behind it is pretty amazing and I think that someone could do something, someone could really run with this concept and create something pretty profound. So thank you very much. Thank you.