Working Paper No. 84, Designing the Future: The Influence of Lloyd J. Reynolds on American Product Innovation

This research inquiry shall explore how critical advances in American design products and consumerism can be traced back to the late Lloyd J. Reynolds and the silent yet powerful influence he has had on a generation of students, such as the innovative pioneer, Steve Jobs. Lloyd J. Reynolds was a renowned calligrapher and teacher at Reed College. The inquiry is structured chronologically, leading to Apple\u27s 2022 valuation of about two trillion dollars. Four significant areas shall be examined to trace this trajectory. Firstly, the paper examines the effects of calligraphy/typography on Lloyd J. Reynolds. Secondly, it delves into Steve Jobs’ inspirational time at Reed College, his travels to India, and how Zen Buddhism sparked his interest and later shaped his work at Apple. Thirdly, the paper covers the development of typography into the digital realm and how it changed the technology sector, specifically Apple. Lastly, the research paper highlights the importance of user experience design and innovation and their implications on consumerism and economics. Apple\u27s ascent to its leading position in the technology industry is analyzed in this area. The study shall use a qualitative research approach. Data shall be examined on previous interviews with experts in the design field, and analysis of primary and secondary sources, including Reynolds\u27 writings, interviews with him, and historical accounts of his teachings and inspiration

Designing the Future: The Influence of Lloyd J. Reynolds on American Product Innovation

This research inquiry will explore how critical advances in American design products and consumerism can be traced back to the late Lloyd J. Reynolds and the silent yet powerful influence he has had on a generation of students, such as the innovative pioneer, Steve Jobs. Lloyd J. Reynolds was a renowned calligrapher and teacher at Reed College. The inquiry is structured chronologically, leading to Apple\u27s 2022 valuation of about two trillion dollars. Four significant areas will be examined to trace this trajectory. Firstly, the paper examines the effects of calligraphy/typography on Lloyd J. Reynolds. Secondly, it delves into Steve Jobs’ inspirational time at Reed College, his travels to India, and how Zen Buddhism sparked his interest and later shaped his work at Apple. Thirdly, the paper covers the development of typography into the digital realm and how it changed the technology sector, specifically Apple. Lastly, the research paper highlights the importance of user experience design and innovation and their implications on consumerism and economics. Apple\u27s ascent to its leading position in the technology industry is analyzed in this area. The study will use a qualitative research approach. Data will be examined on previous interviews with experts in the design field, and analysis of primary and secondary sources, including Reynolds\u27 writings, interviews with him, and historical accounts of his teachings and inspiration. The findings of this research will contribute to a deeper understanding of the historical roots of American design products, consumerism, and user experience, as well as provide insight into the role of significant educators and mentors in shaping digital creative industries

StrokeStyles: Stroke-based Segmentation and Stylization of Fonts

We develop a method to automatically segment a font’s glyphs into a set of overlapping and intersecting strokes with the aim of generating artistic stylizations. The segmentation method relies on a geometric analysis of the glyph’s outline, its interior, and the surrounding areas and is grounded in perceptually informed principles and measures. Our method does not require training data or templates and applies to glyphs in a large variety of input languages, writing systems, and styles. It uses the medial axis, curvilinear shape features that specify convex and concave outline parts, links that connect concavities, and seven junction types. We show that the resulting decomposition in strokes can be used to create variations, stylizations, and animations in different artistic or design-oriented styles while remaining recognizably similar to the input font

La typographie numérique : outils,formes et transformations

Mémoire de Master PUN s\u27intéressant à la typographie, comment cette dernière a influencé le domaine du design graphique. Ainsi que les perspectives ouvertes par la mise en place la typographie numérique

The discourse in early digital type design technologies

This thesis is concerned with the development of digital type design technologies and the discourse around them through new environments during a period of radical change and transition in the type manufacturing industry. It maps the emergence of a new field by exploring environments of discourse such as trade associations, academic institutions and the publication landscape, established as a response to new communities and identifies them as catalysts of change. The research considers different numerical models of letterform description devised through academic research, corporate research and commercial endeavours during a phase of type manufacturing that spans from the zenith of phototype setting to the introduction of office-based laserprinting, covering most of the 1970s and 1980s. A particular event, identified as a highpoint in this discourse and as a main catalyst of change, is the Association Typographique Internationale’s working seminar hosted at Stanford University in the summer of 1983. It marks a focus point in these discussions during a period of several linear and concurrent developments, and it reflects issues that maintained their relevance after the introduction of the digital PostScript format, which followed the period surveyed in this thesis. Although more than a dozen digital type design systems were developed by 1983, this study is particularly concerned with five systems considered for presentation at the Stanford working seminar. While some of these systems found no particular use, others had some commercial success or even became well established among an international list of type manufacturers. All five encapsulate the relevant issues discussed at Stanford; from a research standpoint they are equally significant in providing information on the challenges type designers faced at the time. As this research investigates a relatively short and recent period, it is characterised by a lack of certain archival material. In addition to a handful of academic archives, this thesis heavily draws on primary source material, on records and artefacts from personal collections, on oral history as a method to record the voices of contemporary witnesses, and uses these sources as an opportunity to discover hidden figures that have been overlooked in the past. This thesis explores debated issues such as maintaining standards, while introducing new ones; shared responsibilities, collaborations as well as conflicts between designers and engineers; challenges and opportunities for established manufacturers versus an emerging generation of independent designers; as well as implications that new technologies had on the essentials of designing and digitizing type, from learning new terminology to measuring quality, dealing with compatibility and the introduction of automated and parametric design

AutoGraff: towards a computational understanding of graffiti writing and related art forms.

The aim of this thesis is to develop a system that generates letters and pictures with a style that is immediately recognizable as graffiti art or calligraphy. The proposed system can be used similarly to, and in tight integration with, conventional computer-aided geometric design tools and can be used to generate synthetic graffiti content for urban environments in games and in movies, and to guide robotic or fabrication systems that can materialise the output of the system with physical drawing media. The thesis is divided into two main parts. The first part describes a set of stroke primitives, building blocks that can be combined to generate different designs that resemble graffiti or calligraphy. These primitives mimic the process typically used to design graffiti letters and exploit well known principles of motor control to model the way in which an artist moves when incrementally tracing stylised letter forms. The second part demonstrates how these stroke primitives can be automatically recovered from input geometry defined in vector form, such as the digitised traces of writing made by a user, or the glyph outlines in a font. This procedure converts the input geometry into a seed that can be transformed into a variety of calligraphic and graffiti stylisations, which depend on parametric variations of the strokes