easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

Okay, here’s a good example of type used creatively. You may have seen these ads for the recent movie Gone Baby Gone; this one is from the Arts section of today’s New York Times. There’s nothing very subtle about the ad as a whole (big close-up head shots, lots of WORDS IN ALL-CAPS, excited declarations of awards and award nominations, a cacophony of visual noise), but the use of descending weights of type in the title is evocative, playing off the meaning of the words themselves. Not beautiful, but expressive and appropriate.

I won’t say anything about the competing sans serifs around it. My lips are sealed.

Categorized as ambient letters, typography |

This is a nearly perfect example of how not to space type, if you want the words to be read. It was a poster-size ad on the side of a bus stop near the 16th Street BART station in San Francisco; I snapped this photo several years ago, but I still haven’t run across a better bad example.

It’s a good thing the names are familiar; otherwise you might be wondering who “Oeune Don,” “Dxe Choks,” and “Mary J Buge” were. Perhaps if you were standing around for a long time waiting for a bus, and you had nothing better to do than puzzle out what this says, it would be effective. But the real point of advertising on bus shelters isn’t to reach the captive audience of bus-riders; it’s to catch the attention of the people driving by – for whom this collection of letters would look like a rickety bunch of yellow sticks.

If typography is all about negative space, this is negative typography.

Categorized as ambient letters, information design, typography |

This is one of my favorite pieces of decorative iron grillwork in San Francisco – a city full of decorative grills. Most of them are simply security grates in front of doorways or windows, but even those usually take the form of something elaborate, even baroque. This one, on a neighborhood bar in the Mission District, is stark in its simplicity (though the bright red wooden frame does rather spoil the effect).

Despite the frame and what looks like fake-wood paneling, this is not a view from inside the bar, but from the outside, on the street.

Categorized as ambient letters |

If you’ve been to our house, perhaps you have, though it’s currently displayed in an unconspicuous place. I’ve had this poster since I picked it up on the street in Berkeley, California, sometime in the early 1970s; most likely during the year I lived in San Francisco after graduating from college in 1971. I bought it not just for its political content but because it was beautiful. But I’ve never been able to find out who made the poster.

It’s silkscreened, in many colors. There’s no signature. The art is brilliant, the lettering very funky (deliberately, I assume), and the vertical placement of the word “DOWN” is witty. But who did it? I asked David Lance Goines, who I thought might know, but the artist he suggested wasn’t working in Berkeley that early in the ’70s. Have you seen this poster before, or other work by the same artist? I’d love to solve this mystery at last.

When I got this framed, several years ago, by the Seattle artist and frame-shop owner Kay Rood, she reminisced about her days in France in May 1968, helping student radicals print revolutionary posters for that spring’s huge demonstrations. But alas, she said ruefully, it never occurred to her to keep copies of any of them.

[Update, Dec. 14:] I’ve added a close-up of a detail from the poster, to give a little better idea of what the artwork is like. Some of it reminds me of cut-paper techniques and of woodblock prints, though this is silkscreened.

Categorized as ambient letters, culture, design |

My copy of the Helvetica DVD arrived a couple of days ago – you know, Gary Hustwit’s full-length documentary about a typeface, which has become inexplicably popular far beyond the typographic world. What this film does more than anything else – more than tell us about the actual typeface Helvetica, though it does that quite well – is show us how ubiquitous type is in the world around us, and how this obscure practice, typography, is something we live with every single day. That, I imagine, is the source of its wider appeal.

I’ve been browsing the DVD’s “Extras” – outtakes and extra material that didn’t make it into the movie. My favorite quotes are from Neville Brody and Erik Spiekermann:

Neville Brody on type in the world: “All schools should be teaching typography. We should be fundamentally aware of how typographic language is forming our thoughts.”

Erik Spiekermann, after describing how he’s been re-designing the timetables for the German railroads: “That stuff is what makes a nation’s culture: it’s the visual surrounding. You know: good architecture, good food, and good timetables, or good announcements on the walls of stations – I think that’s a very important cultural contribution.” [Erik Spiekermann]

I was also pleased to hear that, like me, Erik looks first to the lowercase a when identifying a typeface.

Categorized as ambient letters, culture, fonts, type designers, typography |

In the quest for transit signage all around the globe, I snapped this shot last weekend on the platform of Portland, Oregon’s MAX light-rail system, at the Hollywood station. Helvetica was in evidence on the platform, although in the trains themselves, much of the informational signage used Thesis Mix.

Portland’s light-rail system is more extensive than I’d realized. It has three lines, with more planned. There’s also a downtown streetcar line, and of course a whole network of buses. MAX is part of a three-county metropolitan system (which is why the transit agency is called “TriMet”). While it falls short of the kind of city-blanketing network you’d find in New York, London, or Tokyo, it does get people around. Seattle’s single line, still incomplete, looks anemic by comparison.

Categorized as ambient letters, design |

On a street in London, on my way back to the tube station from Hoxley Square, I spotted this mixture of lettering: the lovingly hand-drawn text and logo, and some unusually hopeful-looking graffiti underneath. Not a bit of pre-formed type to be seen.

I almost got hit by an over-enthusiastic driver gunning his engine when the light changed, as I was out in the street getting a good angle for the photo. Typespotting can be hazardous to your health.

Categorized as ambient letters |

I think perhaps someone has finally found the right and proper use for the typeface Hobo. It has always struck me as one of the least useful popular display faces, but who can argue with its use on a casino billboard promising “More Rewarding Fun!”? Hurry on down.

Categorized as ambient letters, fonts |

What exactly is the connection between this faded lettering on a neighborhood theater in Seattle and Elbert Hubbard’s peculiar expression of the Arts & Crafts movement, the Roycroft community in upstate New York? Certainly this blocky lettering bears no resemblance to the overly precious decorative types used in Roycroft books.

Categorized as ambient letters |