easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

A couple of weeks ago, we drove down to Portland to see a play that promised to mix science fiction and typography. How could I resist a that combination? (“Are you sure you didn’t write this play?” asked a skeptical friend of mine when I told him about it.)

The play is Futura, written by Jordan Harrison, and directed in this performance by Kip Fagan at the Portland Center Stage. (I say “this performance” because the play was having a sort of parallax début: it opened simultaneously in Portland and Los Angeles, after being workshopped in 2009 at the JAW Playwrights’ Festival in Portland.)

The opening act is a lecture on typography – and a good one. In the best science-fiction tradition, you realize, as the lecture goes on, that there’s more to the context that you thought. When the lecturer whips out a genuine piece of paper, it is clearly meant to be a shock to her students. This is a world where physical books have been superseded, and banned, replaced by an agreed-upon digital library that keeps changing, and has no grounding in solid fact. The lecturer drops acerbic references to her late husband, who seems to have been murdered, apparently by the forces of imposed order.

The first act ends [spoiler here!] when the lecturer is suddenly kidnapped, blindfolded and hustled offstage.

The trouble with Futura is that it breaks down after that. The four actors seem good; it’s the writing that lets them down. The arguments between two of the main characters in the second act are true to life, the kind of half-thought-through emotional arguments that people really make. But the play itself doesn’t rise above them, or go any deeper. The logic falls apart at the slightest touch. The metaphor, reminiscent of Fahrenheit 451 and 1984, doesn’t really offer any more insight than a sort of worried extrapolation of Google’s attempt to digitize the world’s books.

The stage sets were wonderful. (I wonder what they were like in the LA performance.) I’m not at all sorry that I went to see this play; I’m just disappointed that it wasn’t better than it was. There’s a lot to be said about books, printing, digital literature, and society; but this play didn’t go beyond its own characters’ blinkered arguments.

Still: “Futura”? How could any typographer resist?

Categorized as books, culture, events, science & art, society |

As I have followed the news about the earthquake and tsunami disaster in northeastern Japan, naturally my thoughts have turned to the many people we met in both the typographic and science-fiction communities when Eileen and I visited Japan in 2007. Our closest Japanese friends, we found out quickly, were all right, as was everyone in their circle of friends. I certainly hope that all of the wonderful, generous people that I met in the Tokyo Type Directors Club, in the Japan Typography Association, at Idea magazine, and from other parts of the Japanese typographic community are safe and sound; and that all of their families and friends are, as well.

[Photo by Taro Yamamoto, 2007.]

Categorized as culture, events, society, type designers |

“In the history of typography,” writes Jan Middendorp in his introduction to Creative Characters: the MyFonts interviews vol. 1, “the 1990s represented a phase of unprecedented democratization of the type design and production process… It seems the 2000s have accomplished a similar step for the user… Today, many managers, secretaries, bloggers or scrapbookers have preferences regarding the fonts they use.”

Creative Characters was launched in 2007 to give a peek behind the creative curtain and introduce “the faces behind the fonts,” the people who design type. The newsletter has been edited by Jan Middendorp, who has conducted interviews with type designers from all across the world of type. Twenty-six of them have been collected between covers in this book.

Middendorp is a good interviewer. He knows his subject, and he asks intelligent questions; he doesn’t ask long, rambling questions to get his own ideas across, but instead looks for for a response from the people he’s there to listen to. The nature of each interview, of course, varies with the interviewee.

Jim Parkinson, the lead-off subject, is self-deprecating in recounting his own notable history as a lettering artist. “Many people who worked for Rolling Stone in the early years still think it was the coolest job they ever had.” And: “Of all the people I have been lucky enough to bump into, Myron [McVay] taught me more about lettering and type design than everyone else put together, save Roger Black. I still do most things the ways Myron taught me.”

That’s not unusual. David Berlow, asked about his influences, says, “I’m still learning a lot from the people I’m supposed to be teaching.” Christian Schwartz, after receiving the Prix Charles Peignot from ATypI: “Although I have some really great collaborators, they’re all far away, so I spend almost all of my time working in my little office at home, by myself, which makes my job seem very anonymous. It’s a real honor to be recognized by my colleagues.”

The range of type designers interviewed here is wide; what they have in common, besides quality, is that they’re all active today, and they all have something to say about their careers and their work. Some dig deep into typographic history for their inspiration; others shun it. Some draw spectacular display faces; some craft meticulous text faces; some do both. The other thing they have in common is that at least some of their fonts are available from MyFonts.com.

These interviews all appeared first as e-mail newsletters from MyFonts. Like most of us, I receive these delightfully formated e-mails and, more often than not, put them aside in my inbox to read later. I find that it’s easier to read them in this invitingly designed physical book, which has spacious pages, colorful displays, readable text, and a format with flexible covers and loose sewn binding that is light enough to carry around and comfortable to hold in your lap and pore over at leisure. The page design not only shows off each designer’s typefaces, but has varied examples of other graphic designers’ real-world use of the faces – for example, a page of newspaper and magazine designs by Tony Sutton using a range of typefaces from Nick Shinn. Everything about this book is inviting and workable. This is only Volume 1; the series of interviews continues to appear in our e-mail, and I hope the next set will be collected soon in Volume 2.

Categorized as book design, books, fonts, type designers |

The first Thursday of every month features an “art walk” in downtown Seattle, when galleries throw open their doors and stay open through the evening. On the first Thursday of this month, I dropped by the newly opened storefront space of Marquand Books, on Second Avenue near the Seattle Art Museum, to see an exhibition of notable books from the 90-year history of the University of Washington Press. UW Press has been taking prizes for book design for decades, especially under its long-time art director Audrey Meyer, who retired several years ago. The range of books on display at Marquand reminded me of both the longevity and the quality of UW Press’s publishing program – and of course many of the books themselves were old friends. The way the books were displayed emphasized their covers, but you could pick them up and thumb through them to appreciate the interior design as well. (I looked to see whether the one book I’ve designed for UW Press was included – Answering Chief Seattle by Albert Furtwangler (1997) – but it didn’t make the cut.)

University presses are suffering, like all publishing ventures, from the disastrous economy and the competition of newer publishing technologies, and I’m sure UW Press is no exception. It’s well worth being reminded that a serious and creative approach to publishing, teamed with a sensitivity to book production and design, can produce volumes that we want to keep on our shelves for many years to come.

[Photo: from Marquand Books’ invitation to their “Tribute to University of Washington Press.”]

Categorized as book design, books, events, publishing |

Sunday, December 19, was Jack Stauffacher’s ninetieth birthday, and more than 150 of his friends came to celebrate it at the San Francisco Center for the Book. It was a gathering that illuminated both the breadth of Jack’s knowledge and his influence, through the wide variety of talented, creative people who showed up for the occasion in the midst of a ferociously stormy winter weekend. (“It always rains on my birthday,” Jack told me the day before. “It’s December – what can I expect? The clouds to open, trumpets to sound, and the sun to shine?”)

In talking about Jack, I can’t do better than quote Chuck Byrne, who wrote twelve years ago: “Jack Stauffacher describes himself as a printer. It is a somewhat deceptive term for us today. His use of the term connects him to a five-hundred-year tradition of the entrepreneur-publisher-designer-typographer-printer. Like the best who made up that custom, he possesses a love of type and printing and the ability to convey meaningful words and thought.” (“Jack Stauffacher, Printer,” 1998; cribbed in this case from the AIGA’s webpage from when they awarded Jack the AIGA medal.)

Chuck was one of the organizers of this birthday event, which brought together people from all parts of the Bay Area’s book, printing, arts, and design communities (and a few of us from farther away). It would be impossible to tell you all the people who were there, even if my memory for names hadn’t turned into a sieve. It was certainly a celebration – not just of Jack Stauffacher but of the interlocking creative communities that he has influenced, and continues to influence.

As Andrew Hoyem, of Arion Press, said a couple of days afterward, “I ran into people there that I hadn’t seen in years!”

It was a printer’s occasion. In the course of the party, Jack approved the inking on a hand-set letterpress keepsake that he had designed for the occasion, and many people ran off copies. There were a number of other keepsakes distributed, too (I brought one that I had commissioned from Jack leNoir and Maura Shapley at Day Moon Press in Seattle), but the most spectacular was the single big foldout artifact created by Pat Reagh, featuring Jack’s favorite typeface, Kis.

Several of Jack’s friends, and his two daughters, spoke briefly, and Chuck Byrne unveiled the hand-carved alphabet in slate that Chris Stinehour had made for Jack.

When Jack himself took the microphone, he spoke of the ongoing conversation, of how he delights in asking deep questions of everyone he meets, finding out about new things and gaining new understanding. And he urged us to carry this conversation forward – then he put down the mike to let us get on with it.

After all, this was just a birthday party, a punctuation point in a long discourse that’s not done. At 90, Jack may have slowed down a bit – all right, he no longer plays bicycle polo – but he’s still a vigorous voice for excellence, intellectual curiosity, and attention to our cultural history. And he’s intensely interested in what we have to say.

[Photos: (top) keepsake that Day Moon Press created for me for the occasion, designed by Jack leNoir and printed by Maura Shapley; (2nd from top) Jack Stauffacher holding the stone plaque hand-carved by Chris Stinehour; (3rd from top) Jack and Patrick Reagh, holding up Pat’s Kis keepsake; (4th from top) the milling throng; (bottom) milling around a couple of the hand presses at the San Francisco Center for the Book.]

Update: Chuck Byrne has posted three pages of photos taken by him and Dennis Letbetter at the event. For your convenience and amusement – no captions!

Categorized as books, culture, events, printing |

In a completely self-referential bit of digital navel-gazing, I’ve used the little online toy Wordle to generate a “word cloud” from the text of this very page. Wordle takes whatever text you feed it – or the text from a webpage whose URL you give it – and turns it into a visual representation of how frequently the text repeats certain words. The more often the word is used, the larger it appears. Wordle has several controls for changing what the visual representation looks like (color, orientation, language, even whether to exclude or include certain kinds of words), but the end result is generated at random. If you run the same text through again, with the same set of parameters, the sizes of the words will stay the same but the word cloud they form will be different.

As you can imagine, Wordle is a wonderful time-suck. (It’s also hard to type; my fingers keep wanting to type “World” instead.) The word cloud at the left has no significance whatsoever; it just represents what I’ve written in recent blog posts right here (at least, before this post itself is added). But it’s recursive fun.

Categorized as information design, tech, writing & editing |

The best use I’ve seen yet of Google Labs’ nifty new Books Ngram viewer is from Frank Chimero: “Rest in peace, medial s.” By doing a little intelligent searching on several words that would have used the long-s in earlier books but had lost that form in more recent times, he pinpointed when it changed: right around the year 1800.

Which is just about what I would have guessed, based on a thoroughly unscientific analysis of what I recall from books and publications I’ve seen from various periods. It also corresponds reasonably closely to the much more detailed summary given by James Mosley in his article “Long s,” which records not only changes in usage around the turn of the 19th century but also changes in the availability of the long-s in new type fonts.

[Image: long & short italic s, and a long-s/t ligature, from Adobe Jenson Light]

Categorized as books, culture, letters, publishing, science & art |

The Large Hadron Font Collider could soon begin a search for new sub-pixel positions, a leading typographer says.

If commissioning work goes well, the LHFC could become sensitive enough to probe a hitherto unexplored domain in typography by the end of the year.

Among the first candidates for discovery are two discretionary ligatures that have been predicted to exist. The £6bn ($10bn) collider is being used to smash together kerning pairs to shed light on the nature of the Universe.

Categorized as fonts, science & art |

Cory Doctorow’s self-published book With a Little Help has just been released. It seems a little redundant to announce something done by Cory, who has one of the most ubiquitous and entertaining public personas on the web, but I had a hand in this particular project. As I wrote last May, I designed the interior of the book and did the typographic production for the printed version, although the covers are entirely out of my hands. (There are several versions of the covers.) He’s been writing about the project for Publishers Weekly, so it’s not exactly a low-profile endeavor. Nonetheless, it’s an experiment – to see how a book published entirely outside the normal publishing channels compares in sales and success to one done the normal way. Let’s see how it does.

Oh, by the way, Cory writes good stories.

[Image: one of the four alternate covers to the paperback edition, this one by Frank Wu.]

Categorized as book design, books, publishing |

This has turned out to be the year of web fonts. I don’t just mean typefaces designed for use on the web; that’s been going on for at least a decade and a half, most notably with the spread of Verdana and Georgia throughout the online world. I mean that at last we’re getting a workable system for using a variety of typefaces on web pages – and being reasonably certain that everyone viewing those pages will see the same typefaces, not some substitute based on what happens to be available on their computer.

A year ago, this seemed impossible. There was a whole track of programming at the ATypI conference in Mexico City about web fonts, and lots of interest in the topic, but there seemed to be no common ground for agreement about the right way to move forward.

WOFF

In the past year, however, the key players came together to form a Web Fonts Working Group under the auspices of the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium), and after months of hard work and persuasion, they agreed on a new format for web fonts. It’s called WOFF (Web Open Font Format), and it’s well on its way to becoming a generally accepted standard. According to Erik van Blokland, one of the creators of the format, WOFF will be “the only (!) specification that W3C will recommend for use on the web.”

All of the newest versions of major browsers, either out now or out soon, support WOFF, including the recently-released beta version of Internet Explorer 9. (Mozilla Firefox was the first to implement WOFF support; Mozilla was one of the developers of the format.) Browsers may implement other formats as well, but WOFF is likely to be the only format that’s guaranteed to work across all “modern” browsers.

Properly speaking, WOFF isn’t a new font format; it’s a software wrapper around an existing TrueType or OpenType font. The WOFF wrapper includes “metadata” – information about the font – that font vendors can use to tell you who designed the typeface, who licensed it to you, and what the terms are for that license. This is just information; there’s no enforcement involved, no DRM, nothing to prevent someone who’s willing to go to a little trouble from unpacking the font inside the wrapper. The purpose of the metadata is to make it obvious to anyone who downloads the font that it’s a web font, intended for use while viewing a web page, not a “desktop” font that you can use in any file or application you want. This whole approach is promulgated on the assumption that most people, if it’s clear and easy for them to do the right thing, will, in fact…do the right thing.

Web-font services

The newest versions of all the major web browsers support WOFF, which makes it a universal format going forward. Looking backward, of course, is another story. What about older browsers that don’t have WOFF support built in? Lots of websites will be viewed in older versions of all of the major browsers. That’s where web-font services come in.

At the same time that vendors and manufacturers are coming out with sets of fonts intended for the web, an increasing number of web-font services have sprung up, each offering its own system for supplying those web fonts to designers and end users.

There are two parts to a web-font service: 1) making the fonts available to web designers so they can specify them in the designs of their web pages; and 2) enabling those fonts to be downloaded to users’ systems when they view those web pages.

The web-font service takes care of delivering the right fonts in the right formats to each version of each browser; the website host or designer makes an arrangement with the service, usually for a fairly nominal fee, and then uses the fonts available for that service in designing their web pages.

The list of web-font services is growing almost daily; so is the list of font foundries who are offering their fonts in web versions. There are many different ideas about the best way to do this, both technically and from a business standpoint. A web designer just has to pick one and give it a try. They’re all available right now.

There is variation in quality, of course. Typekit, for instance, which is perhaps the best known, offers fonts from a lot of different foundries; some of them are better engineered for onscreen use than others. Webtype.com, launched by Font Bureau, offers not only a web-font service but several families of carefully designed new fonts, with their roots in metal but their forms dictated by what works onscreen. Adobe recently launched their web-font library, a wide selection of font families from their larger font library, and already Adobe has upgraded and improved the rendering of some of those fonts. On the web, it’s very easy to update things, to iterate; there’s no final form. Now that the floodgates have opened, you can expect things to keep changing fast, and the quality to keep getting better at a rapid rate.

For users, the WOFF revolution is a very good argument for upgrading your browser, since only the newer versions of each browser will support this format. (You may get good results from some of the backward-compatible formats offered by some web-font services, but you will get better results – the type will be more readable – with an up-to-date browser.) If you’re a web designer, it’s time to start looking into WOFF.

[Image: an apt slogan taken from the homepage of webtype.com]

Categorized as editorial design, fonts, publishing, tech, web fonts |