easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

Almost everything about the iPhone seems to be brilliantly designed. Almost. The big exception is the font. What on earth were they thinking? Helvetica?

Helvetica has many virtues, as the recent movie makes clear. But the same thing that makes it so smooth, so all-of-a-piece, is what makes it hard to differentiate one letter from another – and particularly one number from another. Helvetica’s numerals are among the hardest in the world to tell apart, yet Helvetica gets used over and over again in situations where telling those numerals apart is essential: on business cards, for instance. I am continually irritated by Apple’s Address Book program, where it’s hard to tell at a glance whether I’m looking at a 3 or an 8, a 6 or a 5. The same thing crops up in Apple Mail, where the number of messages in a mailbox is communicated in little Helvetica numerals, faint against a pale background.

Apple is a company whose corporate culture understands design. So it’s astonishing to see them make such a foolish choice. Does Apple’s designers’ visual resolution not extend to fonts? Do they never look up a phone number, or quickly glance at the date on a calendar?

As an exercise for the user, here are the most easily confused numerals. At the top is Helvetica, first in black and then with each numeral in a different color. On the left is a composite of all of them overlaid on top of each other. The four lines below show the same numerals in ITC Franklin Gothic, ITC Stone Sans, FF Meta, and Calibri. I’m only showing the “lining” or uppercase figures, which are all the same height. Which do you find easiest to read?

Categorized as design, fonts |

A book project that’s nearing completion is the 25th anniversary edition of Little, Big, by John Crowley. I’m designing it for Incunabula – for whom, fourteen years ago, I designed Crowley’s short-story collection Antiquities. This edition will present the definitive text, carefully edited by Ron Drummond and approved by the author, and it will marry Crowley’s prose with art by artist/printmaker Peter Milton.

These are not illustrations; they were not done for this book. They work as complements to the text; both the text and the art existed independently long before they came to be combined in one edition. Making that juxtaposition work, of course, is the hardest part of designing the book.

In June, Ron Drummond and I drove from Ron’s home near Albany, N.Y., to northeastern Vermont, to Stinehour Press, to supervise the printing of a poster that would serve as a print test for the book. Most importantly, it would prove to us – and to Peter Milton – that what we were planning and what Stinehour could deliver would do justice to his art, in a format that would still be a comfortably readable volume. We picked up the printed posters first thing in the morning in Lunenburg, and drove down to southern New Hampshire in time to have lunch with Peter and Edith Milton in their large, art-festooned old house in Francestown, where Peter signed off on our print sample (literally, as Ron prevailed on him to sign several of the posters). Then we drove west to Conway, Mass., at the edge of the Berkshires, to have dinner with John Crowley and his family, and get his approval. We covered the complete range of the project in that one day.

The project, like most labors of love, has taken a little longer than we anticipated, but it’s in its penultimate stage. This week, John Crowley was in Seattle, teaching a workshop and giving a reading at Richard Hugo House, and I had the pleasure of handing him a bound blank book, a sample of the binding. It’s a heavy object, but not unnecessarily weighty; I like to call it “the Oxford Lectern Little, Big,” and in fact the lectern at Hugo House looks a bit like something you’d read a sermon from. Hefting the book and looking at its blank pages, Crowley said, “So do I get to keep this and use it as a journal when the project is finished?” Yes, of course. When the project’s finished.

Categorized as books, design, events |

While we were in Japan, Eileen’s book won the Sense of Gender Award, in the category of works in translation. It’s an award to “celebrate works that invite us to reconsider gender in various fields, including literature, movies, and manga”; it was established in 2001 by Mari Kotani, Reona Kashiwazaki, and Noriko Maki, for the Japanese Association of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy. There was an amusing, thoughtful awards ceremony on Sunday, Sept. 2, at the World Science Fiction Convention in Yokohama, and Eileen came away with a handsome little crystal trophy and a great big smile.

That’s why we were in Japan at such a hot, humid time of year: because the convention was then. Eileen’s collection of short stories, Stable Strategies for Middle Management, which I had designed and produced for Tachyon Publications in San Francisco, had been translated into Japanese as 遺す言葉、その他の短編 and published last year in Japan by Hayakawa Publishing. The Hayakawa edition owes nothing to my design, but it’s a handsome volume in its own right: a well-made hardcover (complete with silk ribbon!), intelligently and allusively illustrated both inside and out, and as far as I can judge well designed typographically. The title story of the Japanese edition is “Coming to Terms,” which had been recently published in Hayakawa’s SF Magazine, rather than “Stable Strategies for Middle Management,” the title story of the U.S. edition. “Coming to Terms” is a title that doesn’t lend itself easily to translation, though; the Japanese title for the story seems to be closer to something like “Testament,” which is also multivalent and appropriate to the story.

Categorized as books, design, publishing |

I kept trying to decide whether Tokyo’s subway system was easier or harder to find your way around than those of other major world cities. I once wrote a “dot-font” column about riding underground trains in London, Paris, and New York, all in a single month, and judging which city’s system made it easiest to tell where you were as the train pulled into the station. (London won, hands down.) How does Tokyo stack up against these three?

Hard to be sure, since in Tokyo I’ve got the added disadvantage of not reading Japanese (or not enough to be useful), so I’m forced to rely on the bits that are in English (or at least in romaji, letters of the Latin alphabet). That’s a handicap that a native Japanese-speaker wouldn’t have. The Tokyo Metro system – along with the Japanese rail system and the signage on major highways – is pretty good about including place names in English, for the benefit of Americans and other visiting foreigners; instructions and directions are a bit more haphazard. And my local informants were quick to assure me that the Tokyo ticket-vending machines, whether in English or Japanese, were confusing and poorly designed: “Bad interface,” muttered one, in a resigned tone.

To be sure, the Tokyo subway system is the largest and most complex in the world. But that seems to demand an even clearer, more rigorously thought-out design. Why, for instance, did there appear to be no standard, accepted map of the subways, like the famous schematic of the London Underground? I saw every kind of map, without standardization; the worst one looked like a many-colored bowl of noodles. Granted, it’s hard to keep the map visually simple when every piece of written information has to be presented twice, in two radically different writing systems; but it can be done. And color-coding, which is used extensively, seems inadequate when you’re trying to differentiate more than a dozen different lines. (One useful innovation, which I saw on some newer maps, was to label each station by its line and number: i.e., a letter to identify the line, and a number to show where that station falls along that particular line. Any station that serves as a junction between lines will have more than one designation; for example, Roppongi station is designated both H 04 – fourth station on the Hibiya line – and E 23 – twenty-third station on the Oedo line.)

Complicating matters in the Tokyo metropolitan area is that the system comprises not just the Metro itself but also an extensive network of local trains – and both of these include not just the public routes but several private lines as well. It’s not difficult – just complicated – to show all these lines on a map; but it can get very tricky trying to find your way around within a complex station, such as Shibuya, to transfer from one line to another. And in Yokohama – which is not technically part of the Tokyo metropolitan area but is enmeshed on many levels with Tokyo’s transit system – I found it impossible to buy a complete ticket for the two-part ride from our hotel to the Pacifico conference center in Minato Mirai; every time, no matter how I did it, I found myself having to top up my ticket at the other end, in order to pay the proper fare and be allowed to exit.

Tokyo’s transit system is obviously extensive and very useful. I just suspect that the locals in Tokyo take much the same pride that New Yorkers do in knowing the peculiarities of their subways. If you know the illogical but necessary shortcut that gets you across town efficiently while others flounder, it makes you feel good; you’re in the know. As a visitor, I wasn’t in the know, but I benefited many times from the helpful knowledge of locals, who often went out of their way to make sure that I got where I was going.

The noodle-bowl map must be among the bits of paper I got rid of before packing for the trip home, but here are a few links to some of the many existing maps of the Tokyo Metro – a bewildering variety:

http://www.bento.com/subtop5.html

http://www2.gol.com/users/pbw/tokyosub.htm

http://www.metro.tokyo.jp/SUB/SUBWAY/index.htm

http://www.tokyometro.jp/rosen/rosenzu/index.html

Categorized as design |