easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

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.]

Categorized as architecture, culture, events, typography |

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.

Categorized as fonts, type designers |

Vincent Connare, who when he worked at Microsoft created the ubiquitous typeface Comic Sans, does a wonderful stand-up presentation of his handiwork and a small sampling of its overuse and misuse around the world. Vinnie’s original brief was to make a typeface for the word balloons in Microsoft Bob, the overly helpful little animated character in Windows 95, that would be based on lettering in comic books. He succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

Comic Sans is one of those typefaces, like ITC Souvenir, that’s too successful for its own good. It’s curved and “friendly” in a way that irritates typophiles but appeals to everyday users. And it’s on everyone’s machine, so it’s available to be misused in every way conceivable.

Thanks to Cynthia Batty for pointing me (and the ATypI members’ list) to this brief video of Vinnie’s talk at the ROFLThing conference in New York. The type designer is not responsible for how the typeface gets used. You create a tool and let it loose on the world; sometimes it’s used the way you thought it would be, other times it’s turned to uses you never conceived of.

But I confess that I have this errant fantasy of the ultimate inappropriate typeface: Comic Sans Blackletter!

Categorized as events, fonts, type designers |

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”).

Categorized as ambient letters |

Everybody has forwarded this link to me, though Deb Gibson was the first. I’m familiar with the book, Geoffrey Dowding’s Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type (1954, reissued in 1966), though all I have is the Hartley & Marks reprint from 1995 and a xerox of the original that Steve Renick gave me many years ago. I have not actually seen this remarkably poor binding typography face to face, but if it is really the way the title was embossed on the cloth in the original edition, I can only speculate about what Dowding might have said about it at the time. As Loren MacGregor put it to me the other day, “I suspect the book was bound by someone not familiar with the contents.”

The “Fail” folks aren’t the first ones to notice this unfortunate conjunction of title and execution; it was also noted on the Hoefler & Frere-Jones blog back in January, under the title, “Precisely What the Author Had in Mind” – a longer but perhaps clearer description than the noun-cluster “Proof of Concept Fail.”

Dowding’s book is well worth seeking out, though even the Hartley & Marks edition is out of print. I think he carried his argument for tight spacing slightly too far, but he was right in principle; and he gave close thought to the details that make text typography good or mediocre.

Categorized as books, design, typography |

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.]

Categorized as ambient letters, letters, science & art, signage |

In a daring daylight raid, elements of the Microsoft Typography team carried out an action targeted to advancing the cause of macro-typography and raising the visibility of fonts in the most literal way, says our anonymous informant.

Since the Microsoft Typography team, along with the rest of Windows International, was moving to a new building on the Microsoft corporate campus over the weekend of December 12, it seemed only appropriate to make a visible statement about the importance and ubiquity of type in the visual environment. Through the use of six-inch-square pixels cut out of sticky-backed black vinyl (a technique used previously for an installation at the Design Commission during TypeCon Seattle), these large-scale representations of bitmap characters from the Verdana and Georgia type families appeared without warning on the walls of the new building. This was reportedly achieved without a single X-acto-based industrial accident.

Verdana and Georgia were originally commissioned by Microsoft for onscreen reading of text. The way they were designed was the opposite of the usual process of designing type for the screen. Instead of creating outlines and then hinting the outlines (giving them rules to follow when turning into bitmaps at small sizes), type designer Matthew Carter started by designing the bitmaps – the end result that he wanted to see at each size – and then worked with hinting wizard Tom Rickner to create outlines and hinting that would achieve those shapes. The letters of the wordlet “typo” on the wall of Building 9 are taken from the bitmaps of 10pt Verdana and Georgia (in a mix of styles) at 96dpi. (Can you identify which letters are from which font, and in which style?)

The first versions of Verdana and Georgia were released in 1996; they now represent an early stage in the development of digital type at Microsoft. What will it look like when the MST commandos attempt to represent grayscale hinting and ClearType subpixel rendering at wall-size scale?

Categorized as fonts, letters, tech, type designers |

I was sad to hear the news that Günter Gerhard Lange had just died. GGL, as he was frequently referred to, was a central force in the typographic world. Through his long-time work at the Berthold type foundry in Germany, he set the standards of quality for type design in metal and later in photo and digital typesetting. Even in the United States, where Berthold was less well known, the big, square E2 Body Types type-specimen book from the 1980s was treasured. Often enough, it was the Berthold interpretation – that is, Lange’s interpretation – of classic typefaces that were judged the best. It’s easy to see, from studying the type samples, that even when he made changes to the original design, he always did so with their usefulness in modern text typesetting in mind. (Some compromises are always required in adapting a typeface from an earlier time to modern equipment; it’s what choices you make, and how you implement them, and in what spirit you do so, that makes the resulting new typeface usable or not.)

The only time I met Lange was at the 2000 ATypI conference in Leipzig, where of course he was a major presence. I wished that I spoke and understood more than a smidgin of German; he was renowned as an articulate and forceful speaker, though not in English. At the conference, the New York Type Directors Club presented him with its TDC medal, and I wrote about that event in one of my earliest “dot-font” columns for Creativepro.

[Photo: © FontShop, Marc Eckardt]

Categorized as type designers |

I had nothing new to bring with me to Seattle’s typographers’ pub last Tuesday, so I brought something old: my copy of Hermann Zapf’s little book, About Alphabets: Some marginal notes on type design by Hermann Zapf. I’ve always liked the ambiguity of that subtitle-cum-author’s-name: yes, the book is by Hermann Zapf, but it’s also true that the type designs discussed in it are all by Zapf as well. So it works either way.

It seemed appropriate to bring this particular book, since November 8 was Zapf’s 90th birthday. I’m not sure what kind of celebration was held in Darmstadt, but I know it was an anniversary that was appreciated in many corners of the world.

In Paul Standard’s preface to the 1960 book (my MIT Press paperback is the 1970 edition), he writes: “If the foregoing lines say much of books, it is because type designs have no independent or detached existence. Types are produced with great effort at great cost, produced for use in printed matter required for learning or study or for industrial or commercial needs. And HZ’s supreme concern, whether in writing or in printing, is never the single letter but the fusion of such letters into a working text.” Although digital type can be produced without the great cost inherent in the older industrial technology, a good text face – which is what Standard is talking about – still takes enormous effort and skill. And their purpose is still, as it always is, their weaving together into meaningful text.

Categorized as books, fonts, letters, type designers |

One of my favorite American poets, Hayden Carruth, died in September at the age of 87. I had the honor and the pleasure of designing two of his books, for Copper Canyon Press, as well as designing a new cover for a reissue of his Collected Shorter Poems. One of the new books I designed had the wonderfully evocative title quoted above (“It’s what we used to have for breakfast,” he said).

Recently, I finally got around to subscribing to the long-running magazine Poetry, and the first thing I read when my first issue arrived was not a poem but W.S. di Piero’s account of spending time with Hayden Carruth. Di Piero’s final anecdote, about Hayden going walkabout before a TV interview, particularly pleased me. I can’t claim to have known Hayden more than slightly, but I do recall an evening in New York City a few years ago when Michael Wiegers and I picked up Hayden at his hotel and took him downtown to the New School, where he was supposed to do a reading. He claimed it was going to be his last city reading (“I hate this place,” Mike remembers him saying), and perhaps it was; I haven’t checked.

The taxi we caught to take us downtown was driven by a classic New York cabbie, the kind of long-time driver who regaled us with tales of his encounters with savvy traffic cops over the years. (“But officer, there was no sign there telling me I couldn’t turn left.” “Sure, buddy, but you’ve been driving a long time; you know perfectly well that there used to be a sign there. I’m giving you a ticket.”) This character and his stories delighted Hayden.

At the New School, there was a noisy social gathering upstairs before the event, and after a while I noticed Hayden ducking out the fire door to the stairs. I figured I’d better follow him; I knew Mike had told me that he worried that Hayden would bolt. I found Hayden on the sidewalk out front, sitting on the curb and smoking a cigarette. I don’t smoke, but I joined him on the sidewalk, and we talked companionably for a while. When he was done with his cigarette, we just got up and took the elevator back up to the event, where Hayden gave his reading to great applause.

Categorized as books, culture, events, writing & editing |