easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

Thursday’s column by Jon Carroll in the San Francisco Chronicle (which I read online at the excellent SFGate.com, since these days I’m usually not local and can’t pick up the Chron on the street) was all about newspapers. About how newspapers, which everyone says are dying, aren’t dying at all – although, he suggests, they might be signing up for a mutual suicide pact. As Jon Carroll points out, newspapers do make money – in fact, as Roger Black has pointed out, they make profit margins that would cause some other large businesses to break out in great big smiley faces all day long. (Check out the profit margin in supermarkets sometime.) It’s just that someone upstairs thinks they’re not making money – or not enough money.

As an editor/designer who has put together a book about the design of newspapers, not about their business, I’m no expert on the profit-and-loss sheets of our nation’s daily papers (not to mention those of other nations around the globe). But it’s perfectly obvious that newspapers are still a profitable business, overall; and also that they are a fundamental part of our information system – in other words, in how we think. The good ones are worth their weight in, well, paper (not such a cheap commodity these days), and even the mediocre ones offer an astonishing value for a pittance every day. Plus, they’re good for wrapping fish.

Newspapers: still not dead. Changing, yes; that’s usually a sign of what we call life.

Categorized as information design, publishing, society |

I just wrote an article for Eye, the excellent graphic-design magazine out of London, about type and lettering on public buildings. It’ll be in the spring issue, Eye 67. The starting point for this piece was Rem Koolhaas’s new Seattle Public Library, and the original ways in which really big type was being used for some of the internal signage. The article expanded far beyond there, of course. (It’s embarrassing to remember how long ago I first spoke with John Walters, Eye’s editor, about doing such a piece. It’s one of those subjects that just keeps expanding; I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended up as a book.)

There’s a lot of smaller-scale signage in the library, too – the sort of ordinary informational stuff that everyone has to deal with. I took a bunch of photos of the SPL signage, in the course of my research. Only one of them ended up in the magazine, but I was intrigued by some of the side-roads and byways that didn’t get covered in a more general article. One unexpected juxtaposition is illustrated here: an informational sign from the library (left), which was free-standing at the top of the “books spiral,” SPL’s unique form of library stacks; and another free-standing sign (below), using the same typefaces and remarkably similar color and shapes, which I noticed next to the fuel pumps in my local gas station on Capitol Hill.

Coincidence? Well, yes, probably. But it’s a surprising bit of design echo, in two entirely different contexts that are only about a mile apart. Fill ’er up! Would you like a book with that?

Categorized as ambient letters, architecture |

The first I knew that I’d been quoted in a front-page article on the Image section of last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times was when I responded to a phone message on Monday morning from a potential client in LA. They’d read the article and decided I was their man. I knew that Times journalist Adam Tschorn had interviewed me by phone, while I was on the road at a conference in Florida, about the fonts used by Barack Obama and the other presidential candidates; I hadn’t realized, though, that the article had been published.

Now I find, thanks to a heads-up from Amy Redmond, that this article has been republished (in shortened form) by The Age in Melbourne. I guess this makes me Big in Australia, too. Wonder whether any of my Melbourne friends noticed.

Thanks, Adam. Nice article.

Categorized as culture, fonts, typography |

Can this be the first book to be promoted with a YouTube video? (Probably not.) The music and presentation seem terribly retro (I was thinking France in the 1920s, though the combination of i and j made me think of Dutch, where ij is a diphthong), but it appears to be something brand new – a book, by Marion Bataille, that’s coming out next fall. A simple alphabet, but treated anything but simply. I wonder what the manufacturing costs for this book were.

A tip o’ the hat to Jeff Barlow for pointing this one out.

Categorized as books, letters |

“But a designer is not a major industrialist,” says Bruce Sterling, science fiction writer and self-described “design ideologue,” in an interview about Torino, the northern Italian industrial city that has been designated the first World Design Capital. “A designer is usually somebody who is putting together a coalition of engineers and financiers, marketers, advertising people and consumers, who can think the thing through and make it more user-friendly, cheaper, modish and a little ahead of the game.

“So what the designer is bringing to the table is a new conception of the product, and the coalition he’s able to form by coming in orthogonally and resolving a lot of the issues. If you tear most manufactured objects apart, you’d be able to name the departments who put it together. [Looks at the audio recorder] ‘This is the electric engineering guy, this is the console guy, these are the optics guys, the marketing department insisted on putting this logo here, and the legal department put that warning there…’, et cetera. Whereas the designer can come in, melt these warring things together, get everybody on the same page, and come up with something that looks really great to someone who is not one of the gang.”

Bruce has a great ability to see how things connect; and to see how everything could be shaken up so it connects better.

I was, as far as I know, the first editor to publish Bruce Sterling on design, when I was editor and publisher of U&lc Online. I was creating a web-based companion to U&lc, and to do so I brought in a trio of rotating columnists: Olav Martin Kvern, Eileen Gunn, and Bruce Sterling – one each month, to synch up with the quarterly publishing schedule of the printed magazine. It seems today like an amazingly slow, leisurely schedule for an online publication, but at the time it made sense. You can still find some of Bruce’s columns, “Look at the Underside First,” although the design and formatting has changed, in the archives of the ITC website.

I like the notion of designers putting together coalitions; it matches the complex way in which design really happens. There’s always a big emphasis on design superstars, sort of the auteur theory of design, but in fact design is always collaborative.

Categorized as design |

If you’re in Seattle, the city whose name is notoriously hard to kern, note that Northwest Film Forum is showing Gary Hustwit’s film Helvetica tonight and Thursday night, as part of ByDesign08, co-sponsored by the Seattle chapter of AIGA. It’s a film well worth seeing, not only for its portrayal of the typeface but for its investigation of how type is part of our everyday visual experience, whether we notice it or not.

Categorized as events, fonts |

In Mexico City a couple of weeks ago, when we had lunch with members of the local type community in the café of the Palacio de Bellas Artes, I met Marina Garone, an Argentinian typographer who lives and works in Mexico. She told us about the exhibition and lecture series she had just organized, “Las otras letras: mujeres impresoras en el mundo del libro antiguo,” about the traditions and history of women printers, and how they embodied the “professional, intellectual and economic life of women.” The opening, which Eileen and I would dearly have loved to be able to attend, was to take place on March 8, in Puebla.

The lecture program is taking place this week, at the Lafragua Library and the Palafoxiana Library, which are co-hosting the events.

“With this exhibition we want to present an aspect of the history of books and printing which is practically unknown in the Iberoamerican world: prints in which the professional, intellectual and economic life of women is reflected. In this exhibition, a total of 63 works printed by Spanish, Mexican, Flemish, and French women, undertaken between the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries, will be presented.”

At lunch, Marina gave Eileen an impressive book, Casa de la primera imprenta de América: X aniversario, published by the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana in 2004, celebrating the earliest printshop in the Americas, which includes her essay “Herederas de la letra: mujeres y tipografía en la Nueva España” (heirs – heiresses, literally – of the letter: women and typography in New Spain). This is clearly a fertile area for investigation.

When I asked Marina whether the exhibition would travel, she named a number of cities around Mexico and also in Spain where it was scheduled to be shown; and I hope it will come to the United States sometime as well. I think it should. Certainly I know many women printers in this country – and those who appreciate them – who would be glad to see it.

Categorized as culture, events, printing |

We’ve all been reading for quite a while about the future of advertising, where ads would be targeted directly at each individual consumer, based on information collected about our buying habits, our viewing habits, our listening habits, maybe even our philosophical habits. But I hadn’t realized that it was already happening.

Yesterday I dropped by a local website that I check periodically, Crosscut, a Seattle-based news and comment site with some smart thinking and good writing. As I browsed down the home page, I came across an ad from Amazon – and stopped cold. The four books being advertised were all design and printing books. All of them. How likely is that? Would the average reader have a yen for books about graphic design? No, but I would; in fact, my recent browsing habits on Amazon would probably show a lot of books about typography and related subjects. Was this ad tailored specifically to me?

The answer is yes. If you click on the ad’s link to “Privacy Information,” you find that, indeed, Amazon is using their records of what you’ve looked at on their site, and choosing which books to push in their ad based on that. Which means that each Amazon ad on Crosscut (or any other website that hosts such an ad) varies its content depending on who’s looking at it, or more precisely whose computer you’re using to look at it. The future is here.

If you refresh the web page, the Amazon ad changes its contents – but they’re still based on your own recent patterns at Amazon’s own site. The contents even seem to vary by web browser; I was using Safari when I discovered this, but logging on to Crosscut from Firefox brought up an Amazon ad with no obvious relationship to me. (Something to do with how my preferences are set in the two browsers? Probably.)

I’m never surprised by invasions of info-privacy; I’ve read enough science fiction to have been expecting this for a long time. But the potential for embarrassment, at the very least, is large. You log on from somebody else’s computer, and when you get to the Amazon ad, you see a suspicious number of books about…typography! “You, uh, look at a lot of, uh, ‘type,’ don’t you?” you ask your friend. His guilty secret is out, for all the world to see.

Update March 10:

Today’s New York Times has an article on this very subject – how web ads are being targeted directly to individuals – but it conspicuously fails to mention Amazon. A surprising omission.

Categorized as advertising, culture, information design, tech |

Today in his blog on Wired.com, Bruce Sterling wrote a post called “Historical Musings About the Future Ruins of Seattle,” with a link to a “future tour” of the ruins of Seattle’s ancient 520 bridge (“Come Visit the Historic Ruins of Highway 520”).

This made me think of a short piece I wrote in the late 1980s, when the local culture of the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle included ingenious artistic flyers posted on telephone poles – all sorts of art and text, quickly xeroxed and stapled to the wooden poles, soon to be soaked and weathered away, or torn away by irate citizens, or simply covered over by the next layer of new flyers. Many were ads for bands and clubs, part of Seattle’s well-known poster culture. But what I did was create tiny stories, each one complete in itself, and post them on the phone poles in the neighborhood.

One of them was called…

Roman Seattle

from The Mossy Stones Speak: A Handbook of Roman Seattle

It’s easy to see, as you walk around the top of Capitol Hill, the remnants of the ancient Roman city. The capital-less columns on the side of the hill are only the most obvious reminder; now they overlook the freeway, but once from that spot you could have looked west toward the colony’s busy port. The Gallo-Roman tower at the northern crest of the hill, now used for the storage of drinking water, may in fact pre-date Roman settlement, although it shows no sign of Phoenician influence. (Excavations in the vicinity of Volunteer Park have not uncovered any evidence that the tower was connected with the aqueduct system, which implies that its use as a water tower is of much more recent origin.)

Very little else remains of the Roman city, yet its stones and paving have been used again as the building blocks of modern Seattle. It is easy to see fragments of concrete pavement in the walls shoring up the city’s terraced yards today. These chunks of paving have often been brought from more than one site and jumbled together, making it virtually impossible to reconstruct the original location, despite the wealth of material. There are very few inscriptions dating from this period, even fewer than one might expect from random jumbling; it is possible that the local people ransacking the ruins for building materials deliberately discarded fragments with inscriptions on them, or turned the incised sides toward the earth for aesthetic or superstitious reasons.

The plunder of ancient Seattle still goes on, to the despair of archaeologists specializing in this area. The city continues to feed off its own rich and lengthy past, and if it diminishes the record in the process, it does assure a continuity in the successive waves of history that have crested here.

(© 1991)

In 1991, Chris Stern turned my little story into a gorgeously printed letterpress book, hand-bound in boards with accordion-fold pages, hand set and illustrated with his own woodcuts, which were printed in five different shades of gray. I have letter “A” of twenty-six copies. The image at the left is a detail from the principal illustration.

Categorized as book design, culture |

Last December, Seattle’s new streetcar débuted, connecting downtown with the rapidly developing South Lake Union. This tram, like the development of South Lake Union itself, was the brainchild of Paul Allen, Microsoft co-founder. It was a cold winter day when the service began, but I managed to get there in time to ride the streetcar on the evening of its first day. I may also have seen the new streetcar line’s first drunk – an amiable drunk, to be sure, who was gently ushered off the car at a convenient stop.

The line is quite simple – there and back again – but I was curious to see how the informational signage would be handled. It seems pretty good at letting you know where you are, and the stops on the street are fairly well marked.

The fare boxes were covered with a decorative paper wrapping, because for the first month everyone got to ride for free. Presumably now the fare boxes are in operation; I’ll have to go back downtown and see.

Categorized as ambient letters, design |