Product Description

Graphic artists recognize genius when they see it, and most acknowledge that de Vicq's website and book, "Bembo's Zoo," was a milestone in creative design. In his new effort, de Vicq takes the designs of type and ornaments (known affectionately in the trade as "dingbats") and common linecuts to form the faces of his literary heroes. In the second part he combines type ornaments and icons to suggest a face with singular attributes: pride, fear, fanaticism, and surprise. But these are not drawings; they are images arranged from the combination of specific and discrete graphic forms. They are created on a computer and not in a composing stick. They are the face, and faces, of the future.

Printed throughout in two colors, often displaying the various letters, sorts and ornaments that make up the whole, this is our typographic offering of the year wholly original, totally inventive. In these typographic assemblies transformed into ingenious portraits, de Vicq has managed, in the prose of Prose, "to make the alphabet sing." With a preface by Francine Prose

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #960947 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-31
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 96 pages

About the Author
Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich is an award-winning graphic designer, and a former creative director for Random House & Harper Collins.

Customer Reviews

Faces from Fonts
Men of Letters begins with an elegant series of portraits of literary giants composed solely of typefaces and typographic ornaments. It would seem clever enough that each portrait is illustrated by using only the letters from one specific font which perfectly suits it's subject; but each likeness is also remarkable. The reader sees the individual letters and images of the famous writers simultaneously, like portraits by a modern Archimboldo. In the next part of the book the author creates faces from arrangements of multiple pictograms that reveal specific themes such as Greed or Fear. Anyone who attempts to use the computer creatively will be awed by de Vicq's mastery.
This a the perfect gift for designers, writers, readers, and students.