Although not as visually elaborate as Moscoso’s posters, the
Electric Circus’s kinetic typography nevertheless reverberated with visual
cues that fused form and content and added impact to the word-pictures
jarred loose by the colorful language. Chermayeff ’s jiggly, hyperventilating
alphabet wed word to image, too. At the same time, other designers like
Gene Federico, Lou Dorfsman, and Herb Lubalin coaxed typeset words
into visual and verbal configurations and took new liberties that the
introduction of widespread phototypesetting afforded in the 1960 s.
Chermayeff and Geismar met as students at Yale in the mid-
1950 s while doing research for papers on typeface design. In the spring
of 1957 they teamed up with Robert Brownjohn to form Brownjohn
Chermayeff Geismar. Brownjohn had studied with Moholy-Nagy at the
Chicago Institute of Design and Chermayeff worked with Alvin Lustig in
New York. They called themselves a design office instead of an art studio,
which signaled a new professionalism based on problem solving and
utilization of broad aesthetic resources. In those early years, before
Brownjohn left the firm in 1960 , the partners found inspiration in sorties
to Coney Island and other urban hinterlands, immersing themselves in the
sumptuousness of street vernacular. In text accompanying a photographic
essay formalizing what he and his friends discovered, Brownjohn wrote,
“everything of interest in this wide-open area of social uplift [the city]
has been done by dead men or by amateurs, or vandals or politicians or
accident or neglect or dirty old men or the makers of big, busy neon signs”
(“BJ”,Eye,Vol.4,No. 1 ).
The alphabet for the Electric Circusposter began as an exploration
of typographic expression in hot metal composition. In a booklet titled
That New York,designed as an experiment for the Composing Room,
Brownjohn, Chermayeff, and Geismar pushed the limits of typographic
invention. They explored type as texture, stretched and distorted words and
letterforms, created incongruous typographic hybrids, and layered words to
the point of illegibility. If all this sounds vaguely familiar, “This and other
works utilizing rubber stamps, wrong fonts, and fragmented letters
preceded David Carson by thirty-five years,” observed Ivan Chermayeff.
For the title,That New York,the designers began with a sans serif
typeface whose letterforms were overlapped and manipulated on film, in
both positive and negative formats. The effect was a double-exposed image.
New letterforms appeared—the A, O,and Rhad double counterforms and
additional legs, and the N, Y, W,and Khad new spiky protuberances. Using
all capital letters afforded maximum play in the interstices with additional
strokes added for vibrational energy.
In 1959 the firm designed the jacket for the book Toward a Sane
tuis.
(Tuis.)
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