easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

We just got back last weekend from Mexico City, where I went to meet people and research potential venues for next year’s ATypI conference. (This year’s, as noted below, will be in St. Petersburg.) Although Roger Black, who has been the key figure in making this happen and was going to meet us there, had to cancel at the last minute because of a sudden dental emergency, we met with Ricardo Salas – director of the design school at Anáhuac University, very well-known graphic designer, and the driving force behind local organizing for the event. Ricardo organized a whirlwind tour of museums and theaters in the Centro Histórico, all of which seemed promising. He knew the principals of all the venues; indeed, he seemed to know virtually everyone in the city.

It was my first visit to Mexico City. Since I absentmindedly forgot to carry my digital camera with me on the day we trooped all around the Centro, I can’t display snapshots of any of the places we visited, such as the amazing Museo de Arte Popular (folk-art museum) or San Ildefonso with its early murals by Orozco, Rivera, and other famous Mexican muralistas. I could show you photos of a bunch of friends eating, drinking, talking, and laughing in the sun, but that would be cruel to those languishing in wintry northern climes.

Type design and typography are alive and very well in Mexico, although everyone there kept telling us that this was mostly a development of the last ten or twenty years. Yet Mexico has a very long printing history; the earliest printing press in the New World was, and is, in Mexico City. And of course design, graphic and otherwise, has been an essential element of Mexican artistic life.

Categorized as architecture, culture, design, events, printing |

A friend send me a link to the Design Police, where you can download cut-out labels that can be stuck onto offending examples of bad typography and design. The very first of the stickers, all of which are stark white on red, says, “Kern this!” with a pointing arrow. Among the noteworthy stickers are: “Hierarchy required”; “Track this!”; “Display font unreadable as body copy”; “Please reduce line length immediately”; “Do not use faux italic”; and the ever-popular “Comic Sans is illegal.” (Sorry, Vinnie.) I particularly like “Caution: rivers,” which really does sound like a warning sign.

A couple of them have more to do with content than with graphic design, though they’re good advice: “Get your tone of voice right” and “Hire a copywriter.” And the huge, stark “WIDOW” could easily be applied too freely; there are worse things than widows on a page. My personal favorite, though, must be: “Microsoft Word™ is not a design tool.”

Well, all right, anything can be a design tool, in the right hands. But still.

Categorized as design, typography |

Seattle’s street signs have recently been undergoing a change. While they’re still the same recognizable freeway-green rectangles, outlined in white and with white letters reversed out of the green, the new signs have noticeably larger type. The old signs (top, left) were always easily legible – upper and lowercase letters, except in secondary information such as “AVE,” and always spaced loosely enough to be readable at an angle from a moving car – though a lot of the old signs are now too faded to do their job. (I had to search a bit to find an example of old signs that were still in good condition.) Even the numerals were legible, an important consideration in a city with lots of numbered streets.

The new street signs (bottom, left) aren’t obviously different, except that the letters are larger. They take up more of the space inside the green rectangle, which creates a less pleasing shape but make them readable from a greater distance away. They look a bit bloated when you see them from the sidewalk, as you walk along a city street; but from a moving car, they’re large and clear. Clearly that was the priority in their design.

Some of the small details are fussier in the new signs. It might seem better to have “Ave” in upper and lowercase letters, like the street name, since it’s more legible than the old all-caps setting; but this is purely secondary information, so it’s actually a distraction. Similarly, the gratuitous addition of superscripts such as “th” on “10th Ave E” just clutters things up. The simpler the form, the better, as long as the essential information is there.

In case you’re wondering, the arrows in the bottom photo are there simply because I took that picture at a peculiar intersection where streets come together at an angle.

Categorized as ambient letters, design, information design |

When I first arrived in Seattle, at the tail end of 1975, you had to go to another neighborhood just to find an espresso. Starbucks was a little shop in the Pike Place Market that sold bulk coffee and tea, with a single outpost on Broadway, on Capitol Hill, a short but steep walk away from where I lived. And they didn’t sell espresso in those days; that came later. For that full sipping-an-espresso experience, you had to go to one of the city’s hip student coffeehouses, such as the Last Exit or the Allegro, in the University District.

That changed. When Starbucks became an international chain of coffee bars, I realized that what it was really selling wasn’t just coffee: it was design. Or at least the feeling of design. (This raises all the perennial questions about the relationship between design and style.) Quite simply, it felt good to go into a Starbucks and spend some time there – sort of like having coffee in an art-museum café.

What Starbucks is these days, as far as I can see, is basically a caffeine-based soda fountain. In a lot of Starbucks outlets, they look at you funny if you order a straight espresso; they have to go searching for a real espresso cup. An Overhead Hemi Double Frappuccino Nonfat Mocha, on the other hand, they can handle with ease.

This isn’t a bad thing, except for those of us who like straight espresso. The American soda fountain was a cultural institution and a social gathering place; its demise has been a loss for American culture. If Starbucks fills that gap, I won’t complain, even if they do so by imitating the sweet soda-fountain offerings of my youth (with an extra jolt for the workaholic). Well, maybe I’ll complain a little.

[Photo: the original Starbucks logo, currently found only on the original Starbucks store, in Seattle’s Pike Place Market. Photo by me, this afternoon.]

Categorized as culture, design |

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 |

When I saw the photos of the door and room signage in the New York Times building, in John Hockenberry’s article in the current Metropolis, I wondered how easy it would be to find your way around in the newspaper’s new digs.

Signs on rooms and doors, designed by Pentagram, use images from the newspaper’s photo archives as backgrounds – a nice touch of context and tradition. Labels are superimposed over the black-and-white photos, in reversed-out industrial-grotesque lettering. Each room number contains several levels of information, encoded in an alphanumeric string: 20S2-234, for example, means room 234 in quadrant 2 of the south section of the 20th floor.

But if you’re actually walking around the 20th floor, trying to locate a particular office and wondering exactly where you are, does this undifferentiated string do the job? I haven’t been in the new Times building, so I don’t know the answer first-hand, but I’ve wandered the corridors of enough confusing office buildings to know the problem. Room numbers like this all tend to run together, at least at first glance – and first glance is exactly what you use to orient yourself in unfamiliar surroundings.

It seems that a simple bit of added contrast would help sort out the parts of the complicated number. Why not use weight or color to make the “S” or “N” stand out, which would also clearly separate the numbers of the floor from the number of the quadrant? Wouldn’t that make these numbers more functional?

As it stands, they seem excessively uniform and minimal, as though the photo were the most important part, not the information conveyed by the sign. They’re like a stereo remote where all the buttons look the same. Which one is fast forward? What floor am I on?

Categorized as architecture, design |

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 |

In August we visited Kanazawa, an old city on the Sea of Japan, where there’s a ruined castle, one of the three most celebrated gardens in Japan, and the brand-new, opened-in-February 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art.

What got my attention was the museum. It’s circular in plan, with four entrances; there’s no “front,” and the museum’s spaces comprise a cavalcade of rooms, corridors, and open courtyards, all of them of different sizes, shapes, and even heights. It’s the most amazing interpenetration of outside and inside, public space and private space, that I’ve ever seen. The art was pretty good, too, but it was the museum itself that I’m glad I saw.

One of the permanent installations is the James Turrell Room, a huge square room like a Roman pluvium: open to the sky in the middle, with stone walls and bench seats and a stone floor with subtle, nearly invisible drainage for the runoff when it rains. And it did rain. When I first went into the Turrell Room, it was a humid, pre-storm day; the clouds ran overhead on the wind, with patches of blue sky appearing and disappearing behind them, and the air in the room was intensely humid. (So was the world outside.) A little while later, when I dragged Eileen and Ellen Datlow back to see the Turrell Room, it had rained; the floor was wet, and a light after-storm sprinkle still fell through the wide square opening in the roof. In typical James Turrell style, extremely subtle banks of lights glowed behind the backs of the side-benches, tinting the walls a slowly-changing range of pastels, which added to the luminous effect. It was a peculiar form of site-specific magic.

One of the two current exhibits was created for the Kanazawa museum, although the artist was from the UK: Grayson Perry’s “My Civilization” presents a kaleidoscopic overview of Perry’s transgressive work, in a form created expressly for this venue. The show opened in Kanazawa, and only later would it head off to London. While Perry’s drawing and ceramic skills impressed me, and he struck me as a wonderfully disruptive kind of artist, it remained the museum itself that pleased me more than any of the art within it.

The interior spaces vary in height and shape and purpose; they’re intertwined with corridors and courtyards that are open to the air – and sometimes to the public, who otherwise have to pay an admission fee for the main exhibits. That interpenetration is at the heart of the Kanazawa museum: literally as well as intellectually.

The museum even uses a schematic of its circular layout as its logo. At the museum shop, I picked up a nicely patterned orange-and-white neck cloth (one of those necessities of Japan’s hot, humid summers) with the logo worked into its design; it served me well, both practically and as an image of the museum, until I left it on the Gatwick Express, three weeks later and a world away.

Although Kanazawa has a long history, establishing a cutting edge art museum there is probably a bit like creating, say, a Spokane Museum of Contemporary Art, and endowing it with a huge budget and a global mission. (Not that I wouldn’t be happy to see such a thing.) It appeals to my anti-metropolitan bias, though my equally strong metropolitan bias just shakes its head. I applaud what looks to me like a heroic effort, and I’m glad to have had the chance to walk through this museum only months after its opening, before some of my Japanese acquaintances have even had a chance to visit it

Categorized as architecture, culture, design |

When I was in San Francisco last week – no, the week before last – at Jack Stauffacher’s regular Friday lunch in North Beach, the people seated around the table found themselves reading about…themselves. Occasional luncher Kristina Bell had brought one of the editors of Task Newsletter, and he had brought with him copies of the first issue – which included an article by Kristina about these very lunches. Actually, it was a selection of transcripts from the conversation on various Fridays, plus a few thumbnail photos of attendees. To see some of the same people intently reading, or at least browsing through, an article about themselves and their conversation some months earlier…it gets recursive, like an infinitely receding set of mirrors.

I always make a point of trying to time my San Francisco sojourns so that I can make it to lunch on Friday. The café is nothing special, just a friendly place with decent sandwiches, not too crowded and not too noisy, where we can talk. To preserve the privacy of these permeable but non-public gatherings, the Task article blacks out the name of the café each time it’s mentioned, giving the piece a resemblance to something you might obtain through the Freedom of Information Act after it’s been redacted by the FBI.

Jack encourages a sort of show-and-tell from the people who come to these lunches, and you never know what people will bring. Sometimes it’s a book from Jack’s own collection, sometimes a project someone is working on, sometimes intellectual booty brought back from afar by a recent traveler. This time, Jack had brought a copy of the 1946 edition of László Moholy-Nagy’s The New Vision and Abstract of an Artist, designed by Paul Rand; I had just been looking at this very book’s title page in Alan Bartram‘s Bauhaus, Modernism & the Illustrated Book. It was instructive to see how much more effective Rand’s design was in the hand than in a tiny reproduction.

Like Jack himself, the lunches make connections: not just of people, but of ideas. I firmly believe that it’s in unpretentious exchanges like this that culture is made.

[Photos | Top: William Clauson, Jack Stauffacher. Bottom: Pino Trogu, Slobodan Dan Paich, Eileen Gunn, Kristina Bell.]

Categorized as culture, design, events |

Julie Gomoll, who gave me and Paul Novitski a lot of help in figuring out how this blog ought to work, is involved in a project that makes me envious. She’s busy setting up LaunchPad Coworking, a co-working café in Austin, Texas – and as soon as I heard about it I wanted one in my town, too. I’d like one around the corner, please. (Actually, since I live in Seattle, it seems entirely likely that someone will open such a café here, and when they do, it’ll probably be in my neighborhood.)

I’ve always liked the idea of dispersed work, and the complementary idea of places where people could work independently together. The physical combination of a workplace and a social space could be disastrous, but it could also be enormously energizing. Depends on the people, of course, and on how it’s set up.

Julie has started a number of businesses (go ahead, google her), and this one has instant appeal. She and her co-conspirators are documenting the ramp-up on a blog (naturally), with photos. Looks like fun. Let’s see, when will I be in Austin next?

They’re aiming to open in the spring.

Categorized as culture, design |