easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

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 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 |

We’ve finalized the dates for this year’s ATypI conference: September 17–21, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The conference theme, appropriately enough, is The Old · The New – appropriate because this is the new, ever-evolving Russia but it is also the 300th anniversary of the start of Peter the Great’s historic reform of Russian typography, when the progressive, authoritarian czar established (by fiat) a whole new style of typography for the Russian language. So there was a dramatic break between the old and the new three hundred years ago, here in Peter’s city; and today there are the ongoing effects of the political break begun nearly twenty years ago, plus the breakneck speed of technological change. It’s like wearing a pair of glasses where one eye sees the old, the other the new; but you’re constantly seeing through both at once.

Categorized as events, typography |

This has nothing to do with design or typography (except in the larger sense that we design the society we live in), but it’s topical and seems worth recording.

The Washington State Democratic caucuses were mobbed. Four years ago, before the last presidential election, they’d set a record, with about 100,000 in attendance; this year it was double that. I remember the crowding last time, when a whole bunch of local precincts met in the same large hall at a school (I think it was) somewhere across town; this year there were fewer precincts, and we met in the gymnasium of an elementary school just a few blocks away, but it was every bit as jam-packed. And chaotic. You had to push your way through the crowd just to sign in, and once you’d done that, it wasn’t clear what else there was to do, except wait.

It was hot. It was loud, though no one voice could be heard clearly through it all. There were different groups around the hand-lettered signs for each precinct — a few folding metal chairs, all occupied, and a continuous crowd of people standing or trying to thread their way through, in one direction or another. The whole thing seemed ill-planned, and unable to cope with the numbers. (Funny, that’s exactly the way it felt four years ago. Don’t they learn?)

It was unpleasant enough that when Eileen found someone who told her that, if we’d signed in with our preference and we weren’t planning on changing it, we could simply go, that’s what we did. I was glad I hadn’t done what I was thinking of at first, and signed in either as uncommitted or as a John Edwards supporter, just to make a point about how Edwards had been right on the issues; then I would have had to stick around for the discussion (if anything could be heard in that madhouse) in order to change my vote to Obama.

There didn’t seem to be any rancor; a lot of people, like me, liked both candidates, despite the news media’s efforts to manufacture a scenario of opposing camps of true believers. (I suppose there must a few, somewhere. I haven’t met any, though.) It seemed a hopeful crowd.

From local news reports, I gather than our caucus was typical; they were all over-crowded, even the Republican ones. (Though in our neighborhood, I’d be surprised if the Republicans could have filled a living room. But you never know.) I never even found out the results for our own precinct (it didn’t happen to be one of the ones picked by the news media to mention, and I hadn’t stuck around to find out first-hand), but it seems that across the state, Obama has won hands-down. In fact, in most areas, he’s won 2-to-1. (Actually, I just checked the Washington Democrats’ website; it doesn’t break the results down to the precinct level, but in our legislative district, it’s more like Obama 3-to-1.)

So that’s the caucus process. Simpler than it was four years ago, when there were more choices and I had to stay around and negotiate with people who supported other candidates, and ultimately change my own vote. This time, with only two candidates left in the race, it was just a matter of making a choice. Either one would be a good president, but Obama’s more promising.

Meanwhile, just to keep things interesting, Mike Huckabee won the Kansas caucuses, so he can continue to be a thorn in John McCain’s side. “Confusion to your enemies!”

Gonna be an interesting year.

Categorized as events |

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 |

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 |

Just five days after getting back from Japan, I was off to the UK for the 2007 ATypI conference in Brighton. The theme was “Hands on,” and the series of talks and workshops dovetailed nicely with that flexible idea. The nearby village of Ditchling, where Edward Johnston had lived and Eric Gill had established one of his utopian crafts communities, came up repeatedly in presentations and casual conversation; indeed, one of the pre-conference excursions was a day at Ditchling, although I was too busy with conference organizing and board meetings to get to it.

The kick-off on Thursday night was Looking for Mr Gill, a short film by Luke Holland about Gill’s reputation in Ditchling and his effect on the village. It’s a film that I think ought to get shown in the United States; I’m going to see what can be arranged in Seattle and San Francisco.

At the ATypI annual general meeting, I was elected president of ATypI. As I told a friend who asked what extra work and duties this illustrious post entailed: “The presidential palace, of course, and the Praetorian Guard. Potemkin villages built for my benefit, every time I tour the countryside. I don’t think there are any drawbacks, though they did say something about a little ceremony they do come harvest time…”

At the Saturday night “garden party,” we announced that next year’s conference will be held in St. Petersburg – Russia, that is, not Florida. Next year marks the 300th anniversary of the creation of the “Civil Type,” Peter the Great’s dramatic reform of the Cyrillic alphabet. Since St. Petersburg was founded by Peter to be his new capital and “window on Europe,” the conjunction of city and anniversary is especially appropriate.

[Photo: the kinetic Ken Garland, one of the principal speakers at the ATypI conference, spun on his heel just as I snapped the picture.]

Categorized as culture, events |

When Eileen and I spent three weeks in Japan – the second half of August and the first week of September – we met several different groups of Japanese typographers, all of whom treated us wonderfully and extended their very generous hospitality.

The very first, the day after we arrived in Tokyo, was a small committee of people with a purpose: they are trying to establish legal protection for the design of typefaces in Japan. There has been, historically, no such legal protection, but they have some official interest – one of the three people I met with that day was from the Japan Patent Office – so perhaps they will actually be able to make something happen. At this point they’re collecting information about precedents in other countries. I described as well as I could the quixotic nature of the efforts in Europe and North America (it’s always an uphill battle, and a source of great frustration for anyone involved in designing typefaces), and offered to put them in touch with as wide a variety of knowledgeable people as I could. Two of the people I met with that day, Tomoko Nakatsuka, a researcher with the Institute of Intellectual Property, and a colleague of hers, later attended this year’s ATypI conference in Brighton, where they met with quite a few type designers, typographers, and others with a particular interest in this question.

Thanks to an introduction from Eiichi Kono, I also had coffee one afternoon with Reiko Tanihara, a young designer who had studied at the London College of Printing and had done her thesis on the mixing of the Latin alphabet and Japanese characters. I asked her a lot of questions about how a Japanese reader would perceive different kinds of typographic treatments, and learned a good deal about how the Latin alphabet fits into visual communication in Japan today. (I gather that the younger generations learn the Latin alphabet as just one more part of their very complex system of writing.)

During our later sojourn in Tokyo, after a week in Kyoto, Kanazawa, and the mountain villages of Gokayama, Eileen and I were the guests (along with science-fiction editor Ellen Datlow, our friend from New York, with whom we were traveling) of the Japan Typography Association, at an elaborate dinner at the Japan Publishing Club in the Kagurazaka neighborhood of Tokyo. It was a relatively formal but cheerful affair, with JTA members standing up and introducing themselves and their work, along with much general conversation; I had to get the gist of what they were saying through translation, since I speak no more than a few phrases of Japanese, and my own brief speech was translated in turn. One of the things I hoped to do was renew the existing ties between the JTA and ATypI. As I said to the JTA members, what I like best is making connections across boundaries, and linking Japanese and Western typographers is a large part of that.

I couldn’t begin to mention all the people I met at the JTA dinner. Kyoko Katsumoto, who organized the event, and Shigeru Fuse, who is on the Intellectual Property Right Committee, had kindly met us at our hotel and taken us by taxi to Kagurazaka. Most of the members were local, but Kyoko had come all the way from Osaka, a trip of several hours even by shinkansen. She showed us a catalog of digital typefaces that featured her own work; even without being able to read Japanese, I could appreciate the skill and artistry that went into some of those designs. One typeface, with a rounded, hand-carved look, managed to simultaneously echo ancient Chinese written forms from 2500 hundred years ago and reflect contemporary grunge-inspired display fonts – a startling, eclectic feat.

Two days later, after a lunchtime party at the publisher Hayakawa (which published Eileen’s book in Japan), we met up with Kiyonori Muroga, the editor-in-chief of Idea magazine, for whom I had written a short contribution to the special issue about Jan Tschichold. He took us back to the Idea offices – which looked very much like any magazine offices I’ve ever visited, a familiar clutter – then to the studio of the magazine’s designers, Shirai Design Studio, where we met a number of local designers and typographers, including Taro Yamamoto, Adobe’s main representative in Japan, whom I had conversed with by e-mail but had never met. Eileen had another commitment that evening in Yokohama, and had to leave early, but I went with Muroga-san and the rest to a fascinating little restaurant in the neighborhood, where I had a chance to try shochu, a strong, grappa-like distilled liquor that can apparently be made from any one of a bewildering variety of substances.

On our very last night in Japan, we visited Ginza (where, as Akira Kobayashi had put it to me in e-mail, “You will be standing at the most expensive quarter in Japan”) and met up with members of the Tokyo Type Directors Club, at the opening of an exhibit of work by Kenjiro Sano at the Ginza Graphic Gallery. We were introduced to the designer, and enjoyed what we saw of his work, but soon we were whisked off to another delightful restaurant and fed delicious morsels. (We ate extremely well in Japan, especially whenever we were with local people who knew the best places and the best dishes.) We met the flamboyant graphic designer Katsumi Asaba, who is president of Tokyo TDC and who presented me with not only several of his books but a set of three plates that he had designed (I worried about getting these back to Seattle safely, but they survived the journey just fine); Hiroko Sakomura, whom Matthew Carter describes as his “Japanese sister,” and with whom it turned out we had various unsuspected connections and mutual acquaintances; Takako Terunuma, who works with Asaba-san and organized the TDC evening; Masao Takaoka, who with his father Juzo is proprietor of a well-known letterpress printshop with a large, carefully chosen stock of Western foundry type; and several other local typographers. Also as guests at the dinner were two designers from Hong Kong, Teresa Chan and Benny Au Tak-shing, who were in Tokyo to work on a current project. I always enjoy this sort of cross-connection.

My memory for names, even in my own native language, is getting rather porous, so I especially appreciated the pervasive Japanese custom of exchanging meishi, or business cards. I suppose a more accurate translation would be “calling cards,” but these have long since fallen out of fashion in the West, where only in business settings do people routinely exchange cards (or even have them to exchange). I had arranged before we left to get new cards printed for both Eileen and myself, since I knew they would be expected. With the help of Eiichi Kono, who translated our English-language cards, I created a two-sided design that used the new ClearType screen-based font Meiryo, designed for Japanese Windows Vista, on the Japanese side of the card. Then I took the digital files to Day Moon Press, here in Seattle, where Maura Shapley had them turned into copper plates and printed them by letterpress onto stiff 2-point museum board. These made unusually thick but lightweight cards. Eiichi assured me that this would be the first time Meiryo was printed by letterpress. It was a particular pleasure to present them to some of the type designers from C&G who had worked on the creation of the Meiryo type family.

[Photos | Top: Tokyo main railway station. Middle: L–R, Shigeru Fuse, John Berry, Ellen Datlow, Eileen Gunn, Kyoko Katsumoto. Bottom: Kiyonori Muroga in middle (photo by Taro Yamamoto).]

Categorized as culture, events, type designers |

On Friday night of TypeCon2007, in Seattle last August, David Conrad hosted a party for TypeCon attendees at the Design Commission, his studio near the Smith Tower and Pioneer Square. The studio was festooned with artifacts of the various typeface design projects that Matthew Carter has been involved with for Microsoft: Verdana and Georgia, of course, but also earlier designs such as Elephant, and the most recent, the Latin-type (romaji) complement of the Japanese Windows typeface Meiryo. Projectors threw interactive typeface samples on the high white studio walls, and smaller screens along a lower wall offered excerpts from video interviews with the many people Matthew has worked with on his Microsoft projects. During the party, most people were busy talking or consuming the tasty munchies and the local wine and beer, but the informational mix they were moving through represented a significant part of the story of digital font development for the mass market.

At one point, I was standing with Tom Rickner, who has done the hinting on several of the fonts that Matthew has designed, and with Brian Kraimer, his colleague from Ascender Corp., when they started critiquing the gigantic white representation of bitmapped lettering on the front windows of the studio. “There’s an extra pixel in that cap-M,” said Tom. I looked; there was. I looked back at Tom. “Must be some bad hinting,” I said without cracking a smile.

This material is of particular interest to me right now, because I’m working on a new book in the “dot-font” series, a book about Matthew Carter’s type designs – how they came about, how they’ve been used, and the impact they’ve had in our visual culture. I’ll be watching those video interviews and mining them for anecdotes and insights. The purely digital typefaces leave fewer visible traces than old methods of type design: it’s all pixels. The hinting of screen fonts or the fine-tuning of outlines to take advantage of ClearType technology are recondite subjects, yet they have a clear impact on the type we see in the world around us. The interviews, the recollections of the people who’ve worked on these projects, ought to add a human dimension to this technical tale.

[Photo: Scene at the opening of the Matthew Carter exhibit, during TypeCon2007. Photo by Marina Chaccur.]

Categorized as events, type designers |