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Aurèle Sack

Awarded

Aurèle Sack

Fonts 'LL Brown Typeface'

Graphic Design

Jury report

In the Tradition of Modernism
How can one fol­low in the foot­steps of mod­ernism and still de­velop a type­face that is en­tirely con­tem­po­rary? Aurèle Sack, type­face de­signer and graphic artist from Lau­sanne, an­swers that ques­tion with his font fam­ily 'AS Brown', which took him four years to de­velop. Spe­cial­ists will im­me­di­ately iden­tify Sack's model and laypeo­ple will prob­a­bly sense some­thing fa­mil­iar: Sack refers in gen­eral to the grotesk type­faces of the early 20th cen­tury, specif­i­cally to the trail­blaz­ing de­sign of Ed­ward John­ston (1872-1944), who was com­mis­sioned to cre­ate a type­face for the Un­der­ground Elec­tric Rail­ways of Lon­don in 1913. Its un­em­bell­ished clar­ity has set stan­dards and it su­perbly demon­strates the in­flu­ence of cor­po­rate de­sign on the suc­cess of the com­pany. But in de­sign­ing 'AS Brown', Sack was not in­ter­ested in re­vamp­ing an ex­ist­ing font; he wanted to de­velop a type­face with a 'new and mod­ern per­son­al­ity'. The reg­u­lar cut is slightly larger than usual, mak­ing it es­pe­cially leg­i­ble, which also ap­plies to the ital­ics, slanted at a 10° angle. The type­face is avail­able in four weights, from ul­tra­light to bold, and three slants, and is al­ready being used suc­cess­fully, for in­stance in Das Mag­a­zin, the week­end news­pa­per sup­ple­ment, where it ap­pears in com­bi­na­tion with 'AS Gara­mond' (de­vel­oped in co­op­er­a­tion with the de­signer Jonas Vögeli). ECAL by Tschumi, an at­trac­tive pub­li­ca­tion about the new ECAL Cam­pus by ar­chi­tect Bernard Tschumi, is also per­sua­sively printed in 'AS Brown Reg­u­lar' and de­signed by Aurèle Sack. In­ci­den­tally, Sack has close ties to the Ecole can­tonale d'art de Lau­sanne (ECAL). He grad­u­ated in Vi­sual Com­mu­ni­ca­tion in 2004 and now teaches courses there in ty­pog­ra­phy and book de­sign. His pre­ci­sion and per­se­ver­ance are as im­pres­sive as his ob­jec­tive of de­vel­op­ing a con­tem­po­rary and ver­sa­tile type­face that fol­lows in the foot­steps of mod­ernism.
Peter Stohler

Biography

Aurèle Sack
Born in
1977
Education
Graphic Designer

Web

www.aurelesack.com

also in

2006

2014

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