Los Angeles-based Tristan Eaton is a muralist, fine artist and pop-culture mixologist. His ability to fuse painterly precision and hand-rendered typography elevates his images beyond mere portraiture: they become reflections of our modern world.
Classic elements of signage, advertising, pin-up and theatre graphics embody his multi-faceted work. Even at sketchbook scale, distilling this kind of complex vision into a 2-D format is challenging. At mural-size, these compositions become powerful artistic statements.
Nostalgic? Sure, but the images testify to the resilient relevance of the “Golden Age” of advertising. An age in which our wants and needs were conflated with, and controlled by, consumer jingles and branded trademarks.
Eaton’s colorful montages elicit a Pavlovian response, drawing us in with both their comforting famil-iarity and the shock of the new. The images knowingly call upon the propaganda powers of the medium and its many messages. They almost dare you to psychoanalyze them.
Of course these fine-art pieces aren’t “selling” anything, but good signage is often able to conjure up this same level of interest and intrigue.
The drafting skills Eaton brings to his work are enviable. But look closer; every tool he uses hearkens back to the talents of the sign writers who came before him. He is surely standing on the shoulders of those giants, who still inspire us today.
See more of Eaton’s work at www.tristaneaton.net
Adrian Frutiger (1928-2015)
Swiss typeface designer Adrian Frutiger passed away on September 10, 2015 at age 87. Frutiger’s most famous creations, the sans-serif type families Univers, Avenir (which, in French, means “future”, a nod to the typeface Futura) and (of course) Frutiger, are still widely used by designers world wide.
A lifelong fascination with legibility permeates Frutiger’s work. Legibility, to a typographer, is a function of a typeface’s design. It’s an informal measure of the ease with which a viewer can distinguish one letter from another at any distance. Frutiger rigorously designed his fonts based on the most current legibility research. Sometimes even clear and legible type wasn’t good enough. When Frutiger was asked to design signage at the new Charles de Gaulle Airport outside Paris, he couldn’t find a typeface that was legible from afar and from an angle.
Frustrated, he developed the font Roissy, which he later improved and tweaked, and finally renamed “Frutiger”. He designed other sign projects in the ’70’s, including the signage system for the Paris Métro. He also worked on the signage system for the Pompidou Centre. Prominent current users of his typefaces include CNN, Deutsche Bank, the BBC and Apple Maps. Frutiger was admitted into the European Design Hall of Fame in 2009.
The lesson of Frutiger’s design career is clear: never settle. If the font you are using doesn’t convey the proper message, find a new one. If one doesn’t exist, create it. In any professional discipline, true titans are rare. With the passing of Adrian Frutiger, the fields of sign design, wayfinding and typography all lost a true pioneer and visionary of titanic proportions.