John D. Berry dot com » ambient letters

Unfortunate signage

John Berry — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 12:10:15 +0000

The street signs in the town of Alcoa, Tenn., which I found myself driving through a couple of weeks ago, have this unusual choice of typeface. It looks like Impact, though a bit straighter and narrower than even that impactful typeface. You can see what whoever chose this was thinking: keep it narrow but bold, something that will really stand out when seen from a car driving up to an intersection. The unfortunate part is that it’s too bold; it certainly draws your eye, but that doesn’t make it legible. The excessively fat strokes combined with the compressed shapes, and the very tight spacing and tiny counters, make it turn into a blob of black (or, in this case, white) against the background, so that it’s not in fact easy to read at all.

Oh well. Nice try.

Limbic artifice

John Berry — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 07:25:51 +0000

One of my favorite local shop-front signs (on Capitol Hill in Seattle) – not just for its contrast between the two typefaces used, but for the contrast between the pretty-looking type of the second line and the meaning of the words. It’s carefully composed (not vernacular or naïve at all), but the interplay of what it says and what it looks like is striking. As, no doubt, it was meant to be.

Palimpsest

John Berry — Tue, 25 May 2010 07:47:01 +0000

As part of my ongoing collection of faded, broken, and disinherited lettering, I snapped this sign outside one of the Microsoft buildings that once belonged to a different company; you can see the faint spoor of an older building name in the holes below the current sign. Typographic entropy always interests me.

Elegance & credibility, blown

John Berry — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 00:04:47 +0000

Brooks Brothers has an amazing ability to project established elegance and solid reliability in the realm of men’s formal clothing. A Brooks Brothers suit is iconic. When Brooks Brothers first established a store in downtown Seattle, a few years back, they managed to make it look as though the shop had been established on that corner since the founding of the company in 1818 – despite the fact that there hadn’t even been a town, much less a street intersection, at that spot nearly two hundred years ago. In the spot they moved to later, a couple of blocks away, the building isn’t quite as convincing, but the shop still has that aura of conservative quality.

Except in the execution of its typography. The choice of Bodoni for the type on this window text was clearly meant to emphasize the classic elegance of the brand. But the effect is spoiled by the typewriter apostrophes, which neither Giambattista Bodoni nor any type designer up until the advent of desktop publishing had ever conceived of. (It’s further spoiled by the fact that the second apostrophe doesn’t even belong there: the adjective is its, not it’s.)

Up against the wall

John Berry — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 04:41:57 +0000

This striking bit of hortatory graffiti was on the wall of an alley near City Lights Books in North Beach, when I was in San Francisco last week. (No, it wasn’t Kenneth Rexroth Alley, surely the best-named street in America.) The drip-effect may have been unintentional – at least at first – but I could imagine this being the basis for an entire lettering style. Whatever caused it, will or happenstance, it was effective.

Swiss-style Latin in Montreal

John Berry — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 04:04:55 +0000

When I was in the Mile End neighborhood of Montreal a couple of weeks ago, I happened to spot this idiosyncratic logo on a local shop. First I noticed the van, pulling into a parking space outside the shop; then I realized that the shop itself was the business with the logo.

The letters are clearly a heavy, wide variation of Helvetica (or something modeled on it very closely), but someone has given these precise Swiss letters little tails, joining them up into a connected script. Nobody re-drew the letters; that’s obvious from the mismatch between the curl of the “t” and the much narrower joining stroke. (My guess is that the capital-L is really a cap-I with the joining stroke added.) It’s clever, even it’s mechanically rendered. And it’s certainly a strange juxtaposition of cultural tropes, all in a few letters on a shop awning and a delivery truck.

Angles of acuteness

John Berry — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 05:35:18 +0000

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.

Entropic typography

John Berry — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 01:55:52 +0000

In the spirit of the expiring year, here’s a bit of decayed lettering on the awning of a car-repair shop in my neighborhood in Seattle. Digital distressing has nothing on the ravages of weather and sunlight. I’m not sure which is more poignant, the choice of typeface (Avant Garde?) or the phrase that it spells out (“Computerized Automotive Repair”).

Signage on the hoof

John Berry — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 07:49:51 +0000

I love seeing how things actually get made. This set of Flickr photos shows the shop that manufactures the highway signs for Washington State.

As successive photos reveal more of the underlying letters, and the visible part seems to be “ypo,” I find myself fantasizing that it will turn out to be spelling “Typography” – or perhaps the little-known Washington town of Typopolis. It is, however, “Keyport.” Oh well.

[Photo: Distributed by WSDOT under Creative Commons license.]

Toronto: design, tech, celebration

John Berry — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 05:24:12 +0000

Last weekend Eileen and I were in Toronto for the wedding of Cory Doctorow and Alice Taylor. It was my first time in Toronto since 1973, except for changing planes once or twice in the airport, and Eileen’s first visit ever. The hotel of choice for incoming guests was the Gladstone, once a notorious flophouse at the far edge of Queen Street West, now meticulously restored as a boutique hotel with each room decorated by a different artist. The neighborhood, known as West Queen West, seemed to be the funky artistic center of the city (or at least one of them) – the sort of place we would naturally gravitate to. It was a good setting for this confluence of digitally and geographically dispersed people, ideas, and creative energy.

This was a gala affair, though not exactly…um, traditional. The ceremony itself – admirably brief and amusing – was conducted by a magician, and there was a sort of steampunk Halloween theme to the whole celebration. Jack-o-lanterns were carved on the day before, and the event took place in a haunted house – well, actually in a great Victorian pile known as Casa Loma, the extravagant folly of a wealthy Toronto capitalist who went broke getting his mansion built. Costumes were the order of the day; Cory appeared at the Mad Hatter, and Alice as, well, Alice. The star of the show, of course, was their eight-month-old daughter, Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow (“Poe”).

Toronto had its share of type and design; in fact, the Queen West neighborhood is officially designated the “Art + Design District,” something I’ve never seen in any other city. And who could resist a bookstore named “Type”? (The sign “pre-loved” is actually the name of the shop nextdoor.) That’s where I bought Robert Bringhurst’s new book about Canadian book design, The Surface of Meaning.

[Photos: left, Alice Taylor (top), Cory Doctorow holding Poesy (middle), brain pumpkin as table centerpiece (bottom); above, signage on the street (top) and in the subway (bottom).]