easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

Last week, on a visit to Boston, I got to visit the Katherine Small Gallery in Somerville. It’s a gallery, because it does have exhibitions, but it’s most obviously a bookstore. An inviting, dangerous bookstore.

Michael Russem, the proprietor, greets each new arrival with the same welcoming line: “This shop deals only with graphic design and typography, so lower your expections!” If your tastes and interests are anything like mine, however, this introduction will only raise your expectations. And the shop exceeds them.

The shelves are full of books about typography, both current and rare. I was relieved to see that many of the most inviting were books that I already possessed; but not all. Naturally I ended up leaving with a bag full of books, which Michael bundled up in such a way that I managed to fit them into my carry-on bag for the flight home. (Such restraint I showed! As I told him, if I had wandered into a shop like this thirty years ago, I would have bought far more of the books – if I could have afforded them.) Then there was his own collection, which were not for sale but were displayed behind the desk and available to browse.

In a fit of perfect serendipity, I found that the current exhibit was on the book-jacket designs of Michael Harvey. I am a big fan of Michael’s distinctive lettering style (and of the man himself, now much missed), so this was a must-see for me. The germ of the exhibit was a small collection of mock-ups for covers and jackets, which were exhibited alongside the finished dust jackets. The glassed-in tops of two display cases were full of Michael Harvey designs, and flat-file drawers underneath them held many more.

I can certainly recommend a visit to Katherine Small Gallery if you’re in the Boston area. Michael Russem’s dry sense of humor is displayed in the folded map that he handed me: “A Complete Checklist & Map of Brick & Mortar Typography & Graphic Design Bookshops in & Around Boston.” Open it up and you find a lovely map of Boston, with exactly one shop: his.

[Top: Proprietor Michael Russem at the bookshelves behind the desk. Middle: a display case showing three sketches/mock-ups by Michael Harvey for a book jacket. Bottom: “A Complete Checklist & Map of Brick & Mortar Typography & Graphic Design Bookshops in & Around Boston.”]

Categorized as book design, books, culture, design, typography |

I’ve been engaged in a wide variety of book projects in recent months. First, the limited editions of Little, Big (numbered, lettered) were finally released, after an extraordinarily long gestation. Then there was an even more limited edition (five copies, officially) of Cory Doctorow’s “Martin Hench” novels Red Team Blues and Bezzle, one tucked quite literally into the other, and hand-bound in purple leather by master bookbinder John DeMerritt.

At a completely different end of the production spectrum, I just finished designing and typesetting Sandra Bond’s novel Three Men in Orbit, the third of her books that I’ve designed for Canal Press, an independent imprint run by the redoubtable Michael Dobson. Michael uses Amazon’s publishing machine to actually produce the books; their production methods are so stripped down that they don’t even want crop marks on the cover file, and the placement of a bar code on the back cover is always a bit approximate. But they produce physically readable books; it’s my job to make sure that it’s optically and typographically readable. The official publication date of Three Men in Orbit is August 1, and copies will be for sale at the Glasgow worldcon.

A project that began either 20 years ago or a year ago, depending on how you look at it, just got published: The Sleep of Reason, Michael Swanwick’s collection of very short stories based on images from Goya’s Los Caprichos. The stories were originally published online on The Infinite Matrix, and are now in print via PS Publishing in the UK.

Meanwhile, I’m still in the midst of a collaboration with Arabic type designer Mamoun Sakkal on a bilingual book of commentary on the Quran – a fascinating project for someone who is neither Muslim nor a speaker or reader of Arabic. The publisher asked me if I offered any classes or workshops on book design…

Another long-running project has been the complete works of poet JT Stewart, Our Bones Sing of Salt. Since I had designed two of JT’s earlier chapbooks and quite a few broadsides and related ephemera, it made sense for me to not only edit the manuscript but put it into an appropriate design. We’re in search of the right publisher at this point (and I’m fully aware that a publisher may want their own design rather than mine), but we’ve produced a nice package for them to consider. I don’t want to publish it myself, but that’s always an option.

Then there’s the book of my own selected essays, tentatively titled Working with Words, which is currently at a publisher. Whether I’ll end up getting to design that one is an open question.

Oh, and I’ve put together a couple of speculative proposals for small, entertaining books that riff on typographic ideas. All very much in the realm of Maybe, at this point.

So I guess that with design, writing, editing, typesetting, production management, and marketing, I’m still very much involved in the creation of books. Appropriately enough, I’ve done three talks in the past year about aspects of book design, and written an article on the subject for Jean François Porchez’s revived Typofonderie Gazette.

Categorized as book design, books, design, publishing, typography, writing & editing |

At long last, after more than 17 years of ups, downs, and circuitous side trips, the 40th anniversary edition of John Crowley’s Little, Big was published in late 2022, and the limited Numbered and Lettered editions are finally being distributed. The extra delay on the limited editions involved two different shipments of slipcases being lost en route from China, as well as a painstaking on-site check to ensure that each of the individually signed and inscribed four-page signatures got into the right individual copy. Plus, of course, the apparently inevitable twists and turns of fortune that have accompanied this project from the beginning. (Ben Kamm attributes this to the troublesome whims of the fay. I just say it must be Coyote.)

The Trade edition won an award at the Publishing Professionals Network (PPN) Book Show last year. (As manager of the judging team, I was involved in the judging process, but I recused myself from any consideration of my own book. As did judges whose books had been submitted.) The Trade edition itself is a luxurious book: 800 pages including etchings and prints by Peter Milton, exquisitely printed in a 7.5×10-inch format on Mohawk Superfine by Brilliant Graphics in Exton, Pennsylvania. The Numbered and Lettered editions (which sold out years ago) include a new short story by John Crowley, as well as the slipcases with more Peter Milton art. In the Lettered copies, Crowley wrote out a short passage from the novel in his elegant chancery italic handwriting.

The vision behind this project was Ron Drummond’s, publisher of Incunabula and instigator of ambitious undertakings. Ron and I collaborated over many years on the details of the book’s design; the overall page grid and the details of typesetting were mine, with Ron deciding on image trims and specifying the placement of Peter Milton’s art. Ron also commissioned three different essays about the book, to be published on the generous flaps of the dustjackets, one for each of the three editions. (On the Trade edition, which you can still purchase, the essay is by Neil Gaiman.)

It’s been a very long process. As I’ve written before, there were times when I took to referring to this as “Zeno’s book project,” because like Zeno’s arrow it seemed that it would never reach its target. Amazingly, it has. And it seems to be a bulls-eye.

[Images: The three editions of the Little, Big 40th anniversary edition: Numbered (top), Lettered (middle), and Trade (bottom).]

Categorized as book design, books, design, editorial design, people, printing, publishing, typography, writing & editing |

After a bit of a hiatus, I’ve come back to my sporadic typographic memoir, this time to talk about the years in the 1990s when I was the house designer for Copper Canyon Press. In that time, I designed not only the books but all the collateral material as well, trying to keep a consistent feel to everything that came out of the press while maintaining a variety of approaches to individual books.

This chapter is posted on Medium, as are all the previous chapters of the ongoing memoir project.

I still have all the files I created in producing those books, but I was working on a Mac before Apple adopted OS X, which fundamentally changed the file formats of the entire operating system. Unfortunately for future compatibility, all of those old files, none of which had filename extensions, now show up in the modern MacOS as “Unix executable files,” for lack of any other identification. Of course, the file information is still there; add the proper extension and the file type becomes recognizable. Whether it becomes openable, after something like a quarter century, is another question. But there are old Macs and old OSes and old versions of PageMaker. Somewhere.

In a few cases, I did create PDFs of my designs, either book covers or collateral like brochures. But any instances of Minion Multiple Master, the most advanced type technology of the time, which I used a lot, got lost in translation; current Adobe Acrobat technology doesn’t recognize the old MM fonts.

Such a waste of a brilliant technology! Such a short-sighted abandonment of sophisticated design. (Don’t get me started.)

Of course, with today’s variable fonts technology, you can get many of the same effects – and more. I just hope this tech doesn’t get left by the side of the information highway the way multiple-master formats did.

Really, isn’t the point to not lose information as techology advances? Including typographic and graphic-design technology. Our books need to be still readable in 500 years; or five years.

Categorized as book design, books, design, fonts, publishing, type history, typography |

In 1978, in the Great Hall of Cooper Union in New York, a heated debate took place over a proposed redesign of the NYC subway map. In 2021, Gary Hustwit and Standards Manual published the transcript of that debate, accompanied by photos taken that same evening, in a smart-looking little book called The New York Subway Map Debate. It’s a document of design in the very real world.

The debate was a battle of two antagonistic concepts of what a transit map was supposed to do. In 1972, Massimo Vignelli and his studio had designed an elegantly abstract new subway map, doing away almost entirely with geography and presenting a schematic, almost a wiring diagram, of how to get from one point to another within a closed system. In 1978, a new map, championed by railroad enthusiast and cartographer John Tauranac, was proposed as a replacement. The new map would restore a semblance of geography, connect the subway to the city streets above, and show how the complex tangle of New York’s subways really worked. It was, as designer and debate panelist Peter Laundy later described it, “really a tunnel map rather than a route map.”

I started riding the New York subways in 1966, when I was sixteen. Shortly before that, Vignelli and Bob Noorda had designed a new signage system for the subways, assigning color-coded numbers or letters to each route. I found this system easy to follow; what I didn’t find easy to follow was the old signs in all the stations, pointing to the “BMT trains” or the “East Side Local.” The new system had not fully replaced the old, and to a novice these mixed signals were confusing. The Vignelli map had not yet been created, but the then-current subway map did identify all the lines by number or letter. There was no clue on it to the old nomenclature, or to the fact that the NYC subway system had been cobbled together from three separate companies, the IRT, the BMT, and the IND.

That map, and the Vignelli schematic in 1972, was an attempt at imposing order on a fundamentally chaotic and contradictory system. This, it seems to me, is exactly what design is supposed to do.

[Originally published on January 1, 2022, in PPN Post and Updates, the newsletter of the Publishing Professionals Network.]

Categorized as design, events, information design, signage, society, typography |

After a mere 13 years, this website is getting an overhaul and a brand-new design. Besides being updated to look like something from the modern world, it’s more directly focused on showing the breadth of my work. The primary purpose, of course, is to make it absurdly easy for people who might want to engage my professional services. (That might be you.)

The images on the portfolio pages are meant as examples, not case studies. If you’re interested enough to want to know the details of how a project was done, and with what purpose in mind, we should talk directly.

All the pages of the old site will still be accessible from the “legacy site” link on the main menu. (I say “will be” because at the moment it’s hiding behind a technical glitch.) The design, although not responsive, was at least intended to be comfortably viewable and readable on a phone as well as on a larger screen. (The even less responsively designed “dot-font.com” website is also still there, if you’d care to check it out. It’s got pretty pictures and free text downloads from two of my books of essays.) And of course the standalone website for the Scripta Typographic Institute, which was already responsive, remains unchanged.

Like most design projects, this one has been collaborative. I took on much more of the hands-on coding than I had ever done before, figuring out how to build the responsive grid that I wanted to use for the portfolio pages. But, as always, much of the heavy lifting and correction of misconceptions has been done by Paul Novitski, my long-time webmaster. (Remember that term?) Paul had been encouraging me for years to dive under the hood; at last, this year, I started doing so. It’s been fun as well as useful. I should also call out Dave Miller at Artefact for useful strategic thinking when I was starting this project, and Alexandru Năstase of TypeThursday Bucharest for insightful advice near the end.

Although she could have no hand in this new iteration, I still owe a lot of thanks to the late Julie Gomoll for her advice and guidance on the initial form of this website.

What really got me interested in creating a new website was the possibilities now available for responsive grids. At last, it seemed, web design was beginning to do things that interested me! I found Rachel Andrew’s CSS grid newsletter and tutorials especially helpful. I’ve had lots of fruitful discussions with Jason Pamental about flexible design and typography on the web (although I have not tried using variable fonts in this design). And as someone who originally came to design through production, and who takes a production-based approach to any design project, I was happy to finally get my hands dirty. (“How do you clean all this syntax out of your fingernails, anyway?”)

Categorized as book design, design, editorial design, information design, onscreen design, typography, writing & editing |

“Who’s your favorite book designer?” That was the innocent-seeming question that Deborah Iaria, an Italian typographer based in London, asked me yesterday, during one of TypeThursday’s one-to-one “coffee” chats on Zoom. We had just established that we both loved designing books, so that question didn’t come out of the blue. But it’s a question I haven’t been asked very often, unlike the much more common query, “What’s your favorite typeface?” (My reply to that is usually, “It depends on what I’m going to use it for,” followed by naming a few perennial favorites like Verdigris, Dolly, Profile, and Beorcana.)

After a long pause while I pondered the question, I decided on an answer: the late San Francisco printer Jack Stauffacher. Not only had I learned a lot from Jack in person, but examples of his aesthetic and his craft, even before I met him, had taught me a lot of what I know about placing text and image on a page. And about the importance of books as carriers of culture.

But since that conversation, I have kept coming back to the question. There are lots of excellent book designers, both historical and contemporary, but which ones have influenced me the most? Which ones are my “favorites”?

From the first half of the 20th century, I would cite Jan Tschichold, W.A. Dwiggins, and Bruce Rogers as primary influences. And Jack Stauffacher’s old friend, whom unfortunately I never met: Adrian Wilson. From my own time, I greatly admire the work of the late Steve Renner, long-time art director at the University of California Press, whose spare, modern style always seemed in direct contradiction to his passion for restoring old hotrod cars.

Two more recent designers whose work I have tried to emulate are David Bullen and Tree Swenson. David Bullen established and maintained the high standards of the Berkeley-based North Point Press in the 1980s (the initial templates owed a lot to Jack Stauffacher), which was a model to me of an independent book publisher of works worth reading. Tree Swenson was the long-time publisher and designer of Copper Canyon Press, the eminent international poetry publisher in Port Townsend, Washington. After Tree left and Sam Hamill asked me to take over as house designer, it was Tree’s established standards of quality that I tried to live up to. (I was very happy when she seemed to think that I had succeeded.)

Others who leap to mind are Valerie Brewster, who later took over much of the book design for Copper Canyon and has produced many, many subtly and elegantly designed books, and Saki Mafundikwa, who was an art director at Random House before returning to Zimbabwe to found the visual/digital design school ZIVA, and who wrote and designed the seminal book Afrikan Alphabets. And John Hubbard, whom I worked with at Marquand Books in the 1990s, and who has continued to design exquisite art books ever since. No doubt I’ll think of more the moment I commit this post to pixels.

I haven’t even considered anyone from before the turn of the 20th century, and I’m not reaching beyond the Western world of printing and publishing. I’ve seen some brilliant book designs from Japan and China, but since I can’t read either language, I can’t really consider them to be influences on my ideas about text typography.

So: who’s your favorite book designer?

Categorized as book design, books, design, people, publishing |

I had fun recently collaborating with Richard Brath, the author of Visualizing with Text, on a cover for this upcoming book from CRC Press. It’s part of the AK Peters Visualization Series, a line of books from Routledge that focuses on different ways of visualizing information, largely scientific or technical. Brath has written a specialized yet informative study of the many ways that text can function as an element of visual design.

Not surprisingly, the book is richly illustrated, so we had lots of possibilities when it came to pulling images that might be used on the cover. But first I tried out a number of dramatic single images of type or letters that did not come from the book. Richard responded with a very dense collage of images from within his own text, which I found fascinating but probably overwrought for a book cover. Especially for the cover of a book that would most likely be seen as a thumbnail in a catalog or online, rather than displayed lavishly on the front table of a bookstore.

The process, as I said, was fun, going back and forth and trying out different combinations to find one that would both be dramatic and reflect the diversity of techniques that his book covers.

I also got the publisher’s permission to replace the ITC American Typewriter that they had been using on the covers of this series with David Jonathan Ross’s recent revival of Dattilo, a typewriter-inspired Italian typeface of the early 1970s that was originally issued by Nebiolo. Like American Typewriter, Dattilo is not actually monospaced at all; it just reminds us of a monospaced typewriter face. But Dattilo has a much richer variety of weights and optical sizes, enabling me to take the same series design and give it a much more dramatic typographic treatment.

Richard Brath has written his own informative blog post about designing the cover of his book. The book will be published this fall.

Categorized as book design, books, design, information design, typography |

When Tree Swenson asked me to create a new visual identity for the Academy of American Poets, the brief included creating a new logo. Tree was then Executive Director of the Academy, which was (and is) based in New York City but represents poets and poetry from all over the country. Other parts of the visual identity included the annual report, the website, and promotional material and program books for the Academy’s annual fundraising event in New York, which featured, each year, several very prominent people from the literary and entertainment worlds.

In the logo, Tree told me, the emphasis should be on “Poets”: that was the word she wanted people to remember, not “Academy.” So from the first I thought it should be a two-element logo, with “Academy of American” essentially modifying “Poets.”

As you can imagine, I played with all sorts of typefaces and all sorts of arrangements. At first I aimed for something symmetrical, preferably square or circular, because that’s the least troublesome shape for a logo that has to be used in a wide variety of circumstances. But then I began breaking the boundaries.

By turning the word “Poets” into the central element, spelled out in all-caps in Matthew Carter’s elegant, sparkling typeface Big Caslon, and placing it within a classical-looking rectangle, I gave the logo a solid, clearly recognizable mark. But what about the rest of the name?

For that, I tried something entirely different, though also in an elegant and somewhat old-fashioned tradition. I set the words “Academy of American” in Zapfino, Hermann Zapf’s swooping calligraphic typeface, a dramatic contrast to the solidity of the Big Caslon caps. And I let the calligraphic strokes overlap the main element.

In fact, I tried out a large number of different placements of the Zapfino words, and what this process made me realize was that there was no one solution; in fact, there should not be a single solution. Instead, it became a modular logo that could change again and again in various uses.

Zapfino has an enormous number of swashes and alternate forms of letters, notably for both the lowercase f and the uppercase ‘A’. This meant that varying the logo wasn’t just a matter of moving around a calligraphic element, but of choosing a different arrangement of strokes for each instance.

The version we used most often had restrained A’s but an exuberant f in “of,” which swoops down into the word “POETS” and up outside the top of the box, plus somewhat restrained swashes on the d and y of “Academy.” Other versions substituted a swash version for the first A, breaking the box on the left as well as at the top.

In some instances, we did away with the box altogether. The membership cards boxed “POETS” but left “Academy of American” outside the box, floating above it, with swashes penetrating the space of the box and a swash on the final n flying out to the right. For the mailing label, where a horizontal approach was called for, both elements were in the same line, rather than stacked; though they still had a little overlap.

Then there was the website logo: poets.org. In ads in the New York Times and elsewhere, promoting National Poetry Month, we used a “poets.org” logo done in the style of the Academy logo: POETS in Big Caslon, and the “.org” in Zapfino, in a second color, with the tail of the g dramatically sweeping under the word “POETS.” (This proved to be a difficult design for use on the website itself. In the end the website design was done separately.)

On the cover of the annual report, the logo’s elements were rearranged along with the other typographic elements, including an enlarged ornament from the Zapfino font (which changed from year to year; the first one was the tip of a calligrapher’s pen). I would use Zapfino ornaments as occasional accents on later pages.

One other situation called out for a special treatment: when the logo would be displayed on the front of the lectern during the annual fundraising events at Lincoln Center. I tried out the slightly bold “Forte” weight of Zapfino, but decided that it wasn’t necessary. Instead, it was a simple stack of four words, in Zapfino and Big Caslon, on a black background, enclosed in a single-line box that some of the (relatively short) swashes burst through. It was meant to be readable at a distance in a large, dimly lit auditorium, yet still to be recognizably the logo of the Academy of American Poets.

This identity, with its ever-changing logo, was used for three years, until changes at the Academy brought on, as they often do, a change in its visual direction. The Academy’s current visual identity is very attractive and effective, though it is entirely different in style and feel.

Categorized as culture, design, typography |

In the course of less than a month this summer, I attended three major events, each of which had a nametag that attendees were supposed to wear. The first, in Dublin, was this year’s World Science Fiction Convention, which was being held in Ireland for the first time. The second, a week later in Belfast, was the Eurocon, or European Science Fiction Convention, which moves around among European countries and was hosted by the organizers of Titancon, an annual Belfast science fiction convention; holding it in Northern Ireland the week after the worldcon made it easy for people visiting from other countries to attend both conventions on their trip. The third event was ATypI 2019, the annual conference of the Association Typographique Internationale, in Tokyo – ATypI’s second time in Asia, as it happens.

Aside from dueling jetlags (I was only home in Seattle for five days between the two trips), this juxtaposition provided a classic opportunity to compare approaches to designing the nametags or badges for such an event. I’ve written about this before, in an article about nametags published in FontShop’s Font magazine: “The moment when the design of nametags really matters is when you’re stumbling about at an opening reception, trying to spot familiar names without rudely staring at people’s chests.” Although the organizers might consider the first purpose of a nametag or badge to be labeling someone as a paying (or non-paying) official attendee of the event, for the attendees themselves the purpose is to be able to identify individual people by name. And the distance at which you want to be able to read the name is about three meters (ten feet), well before you find yourself face to face with that person whose name you know you ought to recall.

So how well did the badge-designers for these three 2019 events do?

Well, the Dublin nametag does make the name fairly large, though not large enough to be read at any distance. Fully three-quarters of the area of the nametag is taken up with artwork, which incorporates the name of the convention. Not too bad, but not ideal.

The nametag for Eurocon/TitanCon seems perfunctory. It’s quite small, and the largest visual element is the label “Adult Attending.” The typeface used for the name is a pretty good choice – clear, condensed, bold, and set in upper- and lowercase – but it’s tiny. You can barely read it even if you’re peering at it up close. The same name set ten times larger would have been effective; and there’s plenty of white space to accommodate a much bigger name. The TitanCon nametag is basically not functional.

On the nametag for ATypI, which is the largest of the three, the attendee’s name is both big and bold, clearly set within a large white square. It might have accommodated longer names better with a somewhat condensed typeface (which would also let shorter names be set larger), but overall my only complaint is that the name isn’t set in black; instead, it’s set in a pale second color, which tends to drop back, visually. (The color varied depending on the status of the attendee.) But it was generally readable as you approached someone in the corridor, so it was doing its job.

I don’t understand why this is so difficult. It should be thought of as information design, not just branding. Combine the typeface and color of the TitanCon names and the size and placement of the ATypI names, and you’d have a near-perfect nametag. Yet year after year, organizers of conventions and conferences, even ones devoted to graphic design, reinvent the wheel. And they sometimes get it flat.

Categorized as design, events, information design |