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Super Veloz: A Typographic System for the Small Printer

1985; The MIT Press; Volume: 2; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1511414

1531-4790

Enric Satué, George Tscherny, Hubert Leckie, Ivan Chermayeff, Rafael Moneo,

Historical Art and Architecture Studies

Fig. 1) Brilliant exercise in colors, published in the catalogs of NOVADAM, a Joan Trochut original, completely built with combinable pieces of Super Veloz. The development of an industrially advanced type design such as Super Veloz, which was designed by Joan Trochut in 1942, in so tragic a time for Spaniards as the early 1940s, seems amazing from today's perspective. The historical period in which this type is located, the brutal period following the Spanish Civil War in its most impure and stentorian years of Francoism, must be considered accidental. In reality, the process started much earlier, in the 1930s. This decade was a particularly significant time for the Spaniards, who were joyfully beginning an inspired and moving collective adventure, having been shaken by 100 years of traditional rulers: kings, cardinals, or generals. During Spain's republican decade, all intellectual activities developed in an extraordinary way, fomented by a euphoric social spirit which generated a spate of work that was profoundly Spanish, despite its universality. Works by Federico Garcia Lorca, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Manuel de Falla, Pau Casals, Luis Bunuel, Josep Lluis Sert, and others are examples. In the 1930s, graphic design reached a peak that has yet to be surpassed. The Spanish poster reached its apogee in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, an epic struggle for freedom that was passionately defended by the leading design professionals in the country. The civil war posters are the best-known products of those years. The quality of the new designers had already been recognized by the most reputable European critics. Some of these young designers were already on their way to becoming models of their epoch: the poster artist and master of photomontage Josep Renau, whom exile took to Mexico and East Germany before he returned to Spain in the body of a scarcely recognized mythical character; the poster artist Antoni Clave, exiled in Paris and happily transformed at present into a successful painter; and the typographer Enric Crous Vidal, transplanted from his warm birthplace of Lleida to a gray and gloomy Paris where he tried to find a common denominator for his Latin roots, searching for the typeface Mediterranean in a succession of celebrated designs. In the 1930s, Joan Trochut was a teenager with a solid base of typographic knowledge received from his father. He inhaled the