This outdoor telephone box sits next to the entrance to one of the far-flung buildings on the Microsoft corporate campus. It’s a remarkable example of someone thinking about what angle you might be looking at a sign from. Viewed straight on, the lettering looks curiously wide and squat; it takes you a minute to figure out what it says, though it’s ultimately recognizable. The lettering style really comes into its own, however, when viewed from an acute angle – as might be the case if you were approaching the door from the side. The word is most readable when it’s seen from the most extreme angle.

I suppose they could have simply put the word ‘TELEPHONE” on the side of the box, too, and solved the problem that way. But this is an ingenious bit of sideways thinking.

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Last week we were in Madison and other bits of Wisconsin, and on the way home I noticed this bit of inadequate signage at the Dane County Airport in Madison. (This is, I should note, generally a very well designed small city airport.) We were flying on Northwest, but the signage problem would be the same for any airline. It’s all about, as I keep saying, space.

When you’re driving up to the Departures gates at an airport, what is the primary thing you’re looking for? The name of the airline. In an airport the size of Madison’s, there’s no question of multiple terminals; it’s just a matter of deciding where to pull up at the sidewalk and let your passengers off. The one and only thing that the signage needs to do at that point is identify each airline, distinguishing it clearly from all the others.

This sign for Northwest Airlines fails at its task. (The signs for the other airlines fared similarly poorly; this just happened to be the airline we were flying on.) The light, thin letters are squashed together so tightly that you cannot distinguish one from the next at any distance – and distance is exactly what counts in signage like this. The tight spacing might be readable if you were looking at this on a printed page held in your hands; at a distance of thirty or forty yards, as you drive up to the terminal looking for the right airline, it just merges into a single barely intelligible shape. (I almost wrote “unintelligible,” but since the name is set in caps and lowercase, rather than all in caps, at least it does have an irregular shape that you might potentially recognize.)

The two photos at the left are close-ups, one closer than the other; the one below is a more realistic example of what you might see as you arrive at Departures. (Except that I’ve sharpened the photographs in Photoshop, so they might be a little easier to make out.)

Sure, other airlines have longer names, which would fill up more of the area of the sign. But that’s not the point. The spacing is much too tight for a functional sign. The curbside signage at the Dane County Airport may look elegant, but it doesn’t do its job.

I only wish it were alone in this failure. Unfortunately, it has lots of company.

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Today’s New York Times has an article about the new credit-card legislation that just passed the U.S. Senate (and, later in the day, the House), which would limit the exorbitant interest rates and extra fees and sudden changes of terms that have become standard practice among credit-card companies in recent years. One of the details that I noticed deep in the article has typographic relevance:

“The bill also bans expiration dates on gift cards and certificates any sooner than five years after the card’s original issue date. And the retailer or card issuer will have to print the terms of any expiration date in capital letters in at least 10-point type. Call it the fine print rule.”

Capital letters? I can see the intended effect, but the real effect will be to make the important text less readable than it would otherwise be. ALL-CAPS are inherently less readable and less inviting than upper- & lowercase – especially if they haven’t been tracked looser than normal, to give a little extra space between letters.

Legal contracts such as “Terms of Use” agreements often use all-caps to emphasize the most important parts. But if there’s a long passage in caps, it’s even more likely to be skipped by anyone reading it than the regular text might be. (Perhaps this is the point, in some legal agreements.) Far better would be to set the important bits in normal case but make it bold for emphasis. (Maybe not in Times New Roman, whose bold is really a headline typeface rather than a bolder version of the text face.)

Requiring “capital letters in at least 10-point type” does have one advantage: it’s easy to define. Although typefaces vary wildly in their apparent size, it’s usually the lowercase x-height that varies the most (compare Times and Helvetica at the same point size); the capital letters are likely to be of similar height even when the design is different. But this just highlights the folly of trying to define legible type simply by its point size.

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The first type conference I ever attended was Type90, the 1990 ATypI conference in Oxford, England. It was also the first ATypI event that was truly a conference, widely publicized, rather than a “congress” of insiders. Type90 was the brainchild of Roger Black, who even then was a well-known editorial designer and had just co-founded the Font Bureau. This year’s ATypI conference, the first one in Mexico City, is also Roger’s brainchild, which is one of the reason’s he pushed to have it called “Typ09,” as a sort of allusion to or inversion of Type90.

At Type90, I was a newcomer; I knew only a couple of people there, though I knew a few others by reputation. Several of us relative newcomers ended up hanging out together during the weekend; a number of friendships began there.

Not too long ago Thom Feild unearthed a photo from Type90, showing a bunch of us in a pub on the final day of the conference. Recognize anyone?

[Photo (counterclockwise from lower left): Phil Baines (London), Tom Bee (Edinburgh), Susan Skarsgard (Ann Arbor), me (Seattle), Iskra Johnson (Seattle), Thom Feild (Seattle), random local at the table behind us (Oxford, presumably), and April from Apple (Cupertino; sorry, neither Thom nor I can remember her last name). Photo copyright by Thom Feild. Slightly larger version here.]

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Last week I stopped by the opening of an exhibit at Seattle Central Community College, showcasing the work of students from SCCC’s graphic-design course taught by Jennifer Kennard, “X Type: Experimental Typography.” There was some noteworthy work, and I suggested to Jennifer that there ought to be a website showing it. One of the more unusual works was a video by Sean Fischer, featuring dancers enacting, horizontally against a white-sheeted background, the letters of the alphabet. To see the video, check out this link, then scroll down until you find “Dancers Expirimental Type” (yes, with that spelling). It’s refreshing, amusing, and the dancers were obviously having a lot of fun. (Note: there’s music with the video.)

If you’re in Seattle, it’s worth visiting the atrium gallery at SCCC and checking out the show.

[At left: the letter C.]

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When I read through the new edition of Jost Hochuli’s Detail in typography, I found myself wondering, “Have I really learned anything about type in the last twenty years?” Most of the points I find myself making to people over and over again can be found in these pages, organized and explained more clearly than by any other writer I know. A large part of what Hochuli says can be summed up (inadequately) in the aphorism I keep repeating: typography is all about space.

Detail in typography was originally published in 1987 by Compugraphic, as one of a triad of little booklets by Jost Hochuli; the other two were the complementary volume The design of books and a jeu d’esprit called Jost Hochuli’s Alphabugs, in which the author/designer played with expressive display typography and the meaning of words. The books were (all three of them, I think) published in several languages; the English-language edition was translated by Ruari McLean. (One of my two copies of Detail in typography is inscribed to me by Ruari McLean, dated February 1989. I never met McLean, unfortunately, though we were in contact about his then-unpublished translation of Jan Tschichold’s Neue Typographie.)

The book was revised and updated in German in 2005, and this new English edition, published by Hyphen Press in London, is expanded and newly translated by Charles Whitehouse. Although the book is slightly longer than its first edition (64 pages instead of 48), its format is even smaller: 125 x 210 mm, to match the Hyphen Press format for small books. It fits handily in most pockets. Like its original edition, this one is two-color, paperbound with full-width flaps, on uncoated off-white paper stock, and it opens easily in the hand. Jost Hochuli is a master of book design, and Robin Kinross, proprietor of Hyphen Press, is a stickler for production quality.

Hochuli’s focus in this little book is the details of text typography, or “microtypography.” (The design of pages and whole publications is the realm of “macrotypography”; he has expanded on that subject in Designing books: practice and theory.) The fundamental elements that he writes about are the letter, the word, the line, linespacing, and the column, with a bit at the end that he calls “the qualities of type.” He leads off with a short discussion of the process of reading; this was where I first encountered the word saccade, a technical term for rapid eye movement, specifically the way our eyes move as we read a line of text. (They don’t move smoothly along the line, but jump from clump to clump of letters – not necessarily by word, but by visual cluster. They jump backwards, too, quite frequently; just how frequently is one of those things we quantify while trying to come up with a scientific measurement of readability.)

I won’t make Hochuli’s points for him here, nor will I expropriate them as my own. (I quote them often enough.) I’ll just repeat one paragraph from his introduction, because he clearly lays out the scope of what he’s writing about:

While macrotypography – the typographic layout – is concerned with the format of the printed matter, with the size and position of the columns of type and the illustrations, with the organization of the hierarchy of headings, subheadings and captions, detail typography is concerned with the individual components – letters, letterspacing, words, wordspacing, lines and linespacing, columns of text. These are the components that graphic or typographic designers like to neglect, as they fall outside the area that is normally regarded as ‘creative’.

This is one of those books that belongs on everyone’s bookshelf – everyone who deals in any way with turning text into readable pages, whether the words are their own or someone else’s.

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ATypI has just issued the “Call for Presentations” for this year’s conference in Mexico City, Typ09. We have also posted some preliminary information about the conference on the ATypI website, and we will have hotel and travel information there shortly.

This year, the main program will be a bit different from usual. Instead of two or more tracks of simultaneous program items, all timed to a uniform length, we’ll have a single continuous track, with varying lengths depending on what seems appropriate for each item. This will take some virtuoso juggling of the proposals and the final schedule, but it’s Roger Black’s idea that this will enliven the proceedings and give everyone who attends a more cohesive experience. I’m looking forward to it.

The continuous three-day main program downtown will be followed by an intensive two days of workshops, including the now-traditional TypeTech but also several other workshop tracks, at Anáhuac University.

Every few years, ATypI needs to shake up its programming a bit. I was just looking at some issues of the TypeLab daily newsletter from the Antwerp conference in 1993, with emotional denunciations of the moribund state of ATypI programming and calls for livening it up through the fresh young blood brought in by TypeLab. (It worked.) Maybe now it’s time for another experiment in refreshing the mix.

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Both publisher Ron Drummond and I were pleasantly surprised to discover a story in Wednesday’s Guardian all about the upcoming 25th anniversary edition of John Crowley’s Little, Big. It’s another excellent goad to finishing up the preparatory work (which often seems endless) and getting the book ready for the printer. Several people asked me about the state of the project at the recent Potlatch, a small literary science-fiction convention that Eileen and I were at last weekend in Sunnyvale, California. As I assured them (truthfully), we’re in the endgame now. Of course, since this project is being executed by an exaltation of perfectionists, even the endgame isn’t simple or easy.

The Guardian story, by David Barnett, is appreciative and informative, even if he never mentions that this edition will include a sumptuous selection of artwork by Peter Milton that complements Crowley’s text (without in any way being illustration). It’s the integration of art and text that has taken so long, but it’s one aspect that will make this edition unique.

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Last week I was in Mexico City for several days of intense but productive meetings with the local organizers of Typ09, this year’s ATypI conference, which will be held there in October. It was almost exactly a year since Eileen and I first visited Mexico City, for preliminary meetings and to look at potential venues. This time we were nailing down the venues for the main conference program (at MIDE, the Museo Interactivo de Economía, a modern high-tech museum in a fully restored 18th-century monastery in the historic center of the city) and for the two days of hands-on workshops, TypeTech presentations, and master classes (at Anáhuac University, in the hills west of the city, which has extensive meeting and working space and a very well-maintained infrastructure).

We visited MIDE and figured out how to make best use of its spaces, and we also visited the nearby Palacio de Bellas Artes, where we should be able to hold the gala dinner, thanks to the support of the Mexican government’s minister of culture, Sergio Vela, whom we met at his office. We also visited the university’s beautiful hilltop campus and imagined creative ways to use its many classrooms, theaters, and display spaces. Since Mexico City’s traffic is legendarily awful (and Anáhuac is not, unfortunately, near any Metro line), the only way to hold events in two widely separated places will be to concentrate on one (the Centro Histórico) for three days, and the other (Anáhuac) for the rest. Hotels will be in the heart of the city, with bus transportation to the university on the workshop days. We are also planning some optional side-trips after the conference; the dates (October 26–30) were chosen not only to avoid the end of the rainy season but to segue neatly into visiting Oaxaca for the Day of the Dead celebrations (and also to see typographic and printing treasures there).

Typ09 will be the first ATypI conference held in Latin America; enthusiasm is running very high, not only in Mexico but in Argentina, Brazil, and other Latin American countries with typographic communities. Even in a time of economic collapse, the organizers expect a larger attendance than we have had at any ATypI conference in many years.

[Images, top to bottom: Roger Black, Barbara Jarzyna, Ricardo Salas, and Mónica Puigferrat in front of the Palacio de Bellas Artes; the Palacio de Bellas Artes; an arcade around the central courtyard at MIDE; detail of a shop sign in the Centro Histórico.]

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The Type Directors Club in New York just announced the winners of its type-design competition, TDC2. Browsing the winners, in the TDC’s nifty new web interface, I was struck by how many useful-looking text faces were included, and also by the well-modulated peculiarities of a couple of the display faces (notably Orbe, by Rui Abreu, and Nebulon, by Carl Crossgrove). As often happens when I see the winners of the TDC type-design competition, I find myself itching to try them out.

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