Edik Ghubazyan “Design begins with the right choice of fonts”
Edik Ghubazyan, lecturer at the chair of Computer Graphics and Fashion Design of SAFAA has big contribution to the development of Armenian letter art. He is the author of about 500 fonts. Yesterday he presented a part of his works at “Albert and Tove Boyajian” exhibition hall.
In his congratulatory speech Aram Isabekyan outlined the importance of letter art both in typography and design, long accepted and broad application of that type of art in the West, existence of large-scale exhibitions and awards set for them. “We have an excellent alphabet, letters, but we didn’t possess elaborated typographic forms for them, fortunately some specialists appeared who developed this work and Edik Ghabuzyan was one of them”, outlined Mr. Isabekyan.
The dean of Design and Decorative Applied Arts faculty Avetik Avetisyan spoke about the indifference that was around the culture of letter art, the lack of exhibitions on that theme or their very limited number and as a result the inconsolable and unattractive, disgraceful fonts of advertising posters that can be met in the city like controversy to the perfection of Armenian alphabet. This was also mentioned in the author’s speech, when a European colleague expressed so “you are lucky enough to have such perfect letters that don’t need any design”. However the culture of letter art needs huge attention and professional approach especially in printing, typography. He recalled a German specialist, president of Munich Printing and Design Union, Boris Kohen together with whom he had evolved activities in organizing competition on non-Latin fonts within the frames of “Granshan” International font competition established in Yerevan in 2008.
The types of letters, fonts should be chosen very carefully not only for facilitating the reading but also to fit with the content thus show professional approach to all of this. Edik Ghabuzyan brought a very typical example saying how one can use the same font for Teryan’s and Charents’ poetry. They should definitely differ. Even in school textbooks the fonts used in the History, Chemistry, Math and Literature subjects have been the same for many years, which is a wrong approach and the same situation is with advertisement posters; Whereas design begins with the right choice of fonts.
In recent years there has been some progress towards this direction; there is a variety of fonts, publishers have started using different fonts. Almost all publishing houses collaborate with Edik Ghabuzyan among them “Tigran Mets”, “Zangak”, “Edit Print”, “Antares”.
The previous solo exhibition of the author was in 2012. In South Korea he has participated in 12 biennials, the works are presented in more than a dozen of catalogues. He tells what an importance is attached to letter art in that country, “They regularly organize exhibitions and after the exhibition is closed they send the works to schools and poste on the wall; the schoolchildren are in constant visual contact with them”, that subconsciously shapes the perception of aesthetic value of letters.
Melanya Badalyan
Translated by Naira Stepanyan
