easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

After more than eight years of working for myself, I’ve just taken a job in the typography group at Microsoft. The focus of the team is on providing fonts for all of Microsoft’s markets around the world, in whatever language or writing system, though I also hope to have some influence on how fonts are used – i.e., typography.

“In any case,” as I said to some friends, “it looks like we’ll be staying in Seattle for the foreseeable future.” Eileen and I had been thinking about moving back to San Francisco, which we also consider home, and I had looked at a couple of possibilities in the Bay Area. “Well, unless President Obama asks me to become Minister of Typography.”

Okay, that may be just a riff, but in reality I think it would be a good thing to have a Secretary of Design, or someone with a similarly high level of government responsibility. (I’m tempted to call this Minister With Portfolio.) As I keep saying: since we live in a designed world, we might as well get good at it.

[Photo: Logos have a life cycle of their own, or at least their physical embodiments do. This broken sign, on the back side of a concrete slab in front of one of the buildings on the corporate campus, appealed to my love of missing, crumbling, or distressed lettering in the environment.]

Categorized as ambient letters, design, signage, typography |

When I opened up the recently arrived Washington State Voters’ Pamphlet (a hefty 136 pages, including the complete texts of various state and county initiatives), I was surprised to discover that there’s a typographer running for President of the United States. Or at least a labor leader with typographical connections. Gloria La Riva, the presidential candidate of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, lists her current occupation as “President, Typographical Sector, Media Workers Union, Local 39521, CWA (Communication Workers of America).” (Her running mate, Eugene Puryear, lists himself as a student and community organizer.) While I’m not about to vote for the La Riva/Puryear ticket, I am tickled to know that the long history of labor organizing in the typesetting and printing business has a place on the ballot this year.

Categorized as society, typography |

I got back last Tuesday from a week in St. Petersburg, Russia, for this year’s ATypI conference. The theme of the conference was “The Old · The New,” and we saw plenty of both – not only in contrast to each other but in many varied forms of both old and new. Our two principal venues, for instance, reflected different current uses for old buildings.

The main program was held in a 19th-century palace, the “pink palace” or Beloselsky-Belozersky Dvorets, which is situated right on the corner of Nevsky Prospekt, the Fifth Avenue of Petersburg, and the Fontanka river, which reminded me of the Seine in Paris. Inside the pink palace, we had two highly decorated function rooms, one an auditorium and the other more of a big seminar room. The old wooden floors creaked when people walked in or out, but otherwise the sound was good. The foyer in between was where we served lunch and had the coffee breaks, and where people could mingle (one of the main functions of an ATypI conference). In the evenings, we adjourned to a very different venue: the Loft Project Etagi (it should be spelled “Etazhi” in English, but the Latinization must be based on French), a five-storey former bread factory that’s been converted into art galleries, boutiques, and culture-related offices. As their description puts it, “The conversion of the space was minimal; as a result, many industrial artifacts have been kept as part of the interior setting: cast-iron floors, tied concrete columns, a boring mill [stet], backing equipment, etc.” This sort of “downtown” arts space contrasted nicely with the faded elegance of the pink palace. We put up the various exhibitions on the second floor of Etagi, and Friday night’s exhibition opening was open to the public; it was jammed. Saturday night we took over the top floor, a modern art gallery with a wine bar, for the main conference party. (This was a more informal replacement for the “gala dinner” that ATypI always used to have.) It was a fine party. Briefly we had to stop everyone from having fun so I could thank all the organizers and sponsors, and so a representative from the government press & arts entity could give a short speech and hand out commemorative plaques. After the party closed, I accompanied a group of typographers to a nearby bar, where we talked and drank until nearly 4 a.m. As I put it on Sunday, “I can no longer blame my exhaustion on jetlag; this time I’ve earned it fair and square.” But I was up for the first talk the next morning, ready to kick things off in my official capacity.

Everyone seemed to agree that the conference went well. There was a certain amount of division between the Russian-speakers and the non-Russian-speakers, as in general one track was in Russian and the other in English, but there was also a fair amount of fluidity and overlap. (We were trying to plan things to encourage as much cross-communication as possible, but some sorting by language is inevitable.) I couldn’t even begin to describe all the things that people spoke on or presented; it was generally a very good program. I ended up being the MC for one track some of the time, so I couldn’t be as flexible as an ordinary attendee in deciding which track to follow. And being president of ATypI, I was always feeling responsible, even when other people were actually carrying out the tasks.

Leaving on Tuesday meant that I had one full day free, after the end of the conference; and Monday turned out to be a gorgeous sunny day, not a cloud in the sky and temperatures around 60°F. I visited the Russian Museum, where I made a beeline for the 20th century art and found two iconic paintings of Anna Akhmatova; I also ran into a couple of people from the conference there. Otherwise I strolled up and down and over the canals, admiring the 19th-century buildings, most in a classic Italian style, and wandered through the Mikhailovsky Gardens and one end of the Summer Garden, past the brooding palace known as the Engineers’ Castle, finally enjoying a cup of coffee outside a Seattle-style coffee company (a local chain called “Coffee House”) on Malaya Sadovaya Street in the sunlight. Earlier, on Wednesday, after checking in with our conference director and making sure there wasn’t anything I needed to deal with, I walked my feet off (the long, wide avenues do go on a long way) and visited the Hermitage, where I finally got to reacquaint myself with the Van Gogh that I had first seen in DC in 1973, in a tour called “Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Paintings from the USSR.” That painting had brought tears to my eyes thirty-five years ago; today it didn’t, but still I spent ten or fifteen minutes just looking at it. I also renewed acquaintance with a number of other paintings that had been in that exhibition (Derain, Cézanne, Matisse) and saw many more that had not gone traveling.

[Photos, top to bottom: transport: the old, the new; the second book printed in Cyrillic (Krakow, 1491); Oleg Genisaretsky delivering the keynote address; School #308; advertising poster at a bus stop on Nevsky Prospekt – another take on the old, the new.]

Categorized as events, science & art, type designers, typography |

At Seattle’s Bumbershoot music and arts festival over Labor Day weekend, there was a remarkable exhibit: the Seattle–Tehran Poster Show. Curator Daniel R. Smith had gone to Tehran to investigate the graphic-design scene there, meeting as many local designers as he could, and he then put together this exhibition, which gives a parallax view of our two cultures. He paired each Iranian poster with one from Seattle, sometimes based on nothing more than a similar approach to letters or images or subject matter. Both cities have vibrant graphic-design communities, and both have created some wonderful posters.

The treatment of Arabic text is fascinating (that is, the Persian language, Farsi, which is written in the Arabic alphabet). Sometimes the letter forms are entirely deconstructed, given architectural or vegetal structure. When human faces or forms appear, they tend to be stylized, often intertwined with words. The Seattle posters, too, are interesting, but it’s clearly the work from Iran that grabs your attention.

Bumbershoot only lasts over the holiday weekend, but a slightly different version of the show, called “Seattle–Tehran Poster Show Remix,” is up at the Design Commission in downtown Seattle until October 15. I intend to go down and check it out.

Categorized as culture, letters, society, typography |

I’ve been reading Cory Doctorow’s new book of essays, Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future, and finding it easy to read. This is not surprising, since I designed and typeset the interior of the book myself, but it’s reassuring when I actually have time to sit down with a copy of the finished, printed book and test that it’s truly readable. It is. (I’m not talking about the prose here; Cory’s writing is compulsively readable, in pretty much any format.) The author seems pretty happy with the design, too.

I’ve done a lot of book interiors for Tachyon Publications, but this was somewhat different from most of them. I wanted a typeface that was serious yet not too literary; it would have seemed silly to typeset Cory’s essays in Bembo, for instance. And it had to be very forgiving: it had to make a lot of different combinations of ALL CAPS and C4PS&NUMB3R5 look good, not like big undigestible chunks clogging up the flow of the prose. Normally I would use old-style figures in a book, and small caps for acronyms and anything set in all-caps. But in these essays, Cory uses a lot of acronyms – DVDs, FBI, RIAA, VHS, and DRM are just a few from a single essay – and there are some combinations of capital letters and numbers or other symbols that come from Leetspeak or keyboard-based typing habits that rely on the simplicity of plain ASCII characters. They’re part of the flow, not an interruption of it. This was not exactly an edition of the Penguin Classics.

The typeface I chose was Chaparral Pro, a sort of humanist slab-serif text face designed by the very talented former Adobe type designer Carol Twombly. Chaparral doesn’t have much variation in the width of the strokes, so it doesn’t look “bright” like Times Roman or Janson; but its letter forms are comfortable, familiar, and easygoing, and it reads well in long text. Chaparral has been a favorite of mine since it first came out, though I don’t often get a chance to use it in a book; it might seem a little strong for, say, a book of fiction. But it hit the right balance here. And its caps and its full-height lining figures don’t overpower the lowercase the way they do in some traditional book faces.

Although Chaparral does have old-style figures, the only place I used them was in the table of contents. Similarly, the font includes true small caps, but I only used them in the front matter and the running heads. In the body of the text, it was full caps and lining figures all the way through – in the spirit of the prose itself.

In making the physical object – what Cory calls the p-book – comfortable for carrying around and reading on the fly, it helps to keep it small and light, printed on flexible, off-white paper in a binding that opens freely. Worzalla, the printer, did a good job of this. The strikingly simple cover that Ann Monn designed stands out from other books, and it gets curious glances when you’re reading the book in a coffeehouse. The spine will also stand out on a bookshelf, a useful selling point for physical book-product.

The essays themselves? Read ’em.

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

My recent article for Eye magazine, “Legible in public space” (first image at left), has been translated into Polish and will be published in the next issue of the Polish magazine 2+3D (second image at left), a design quarterly published in Kraków and devoted to “grafika plus produkt.”

2+3D looks like an interesting magazine, and I’m pleased to be in it. Wish I could read Polish.

Categorized as architecture, fonts, typography, writing & editing |

Registration is open for the 52nd annual ATypI conference (St. Petersburg, Russia; September 17–21, 2008). In fact, we’re coming up on the cut-off point for the discounted “very early” rates. After July 18, you can register at the “early” rate (still a discount); after August 15, only at the full rate. So it pays to plan now. The preliminary program is online already, and the website has information and advice on planning travel, including visas, and accommodation in St. Petersburg. See you there?

This upcoming weekend, we’ll see the other major type gathering of the year, TypeCon2008 (Buffalo, N.Y.; July 15–20, 2008); in fact, the pre-conference workshops should be happening right now. Unfortunately, I can’t make it to TypeCon this year, but I’m sure it will be enjoyable (even if I won’t miss re-experiencing an East Coast summer’s heat and humidity). This year, as I pointed out to SOTA director Tamye Riggs, is the tenth anniversary of the first tiny TypeCon, held in an exurban hotel in Westborough, Mass.

And I just got off the phone this afternoon with Roger Black, discussing plans for next year’s ATypI conference, in Mexico City. Both St. Petersburg and Mexico City mark expansions beyond ATypI’s traditional heartland of Western Europe and occasionally North America; this seems appropriate given the widespread nature of type in everyday life.

Categorized as events, type designers, typography |

When I googled the name “Zapfest,” to find something I had written about the 2001 San Francisco celebration of calligraphic type, I was startled to find a link to something called “Zapfest 2008.” It turned out to be a one-day music festival in Oxford; it also turned out to be, for reasons unexplained, canceled. (Well, these things happen.) I don’t imagine the reasons had anything to do with possible confusion with a typographic festival that took place seven years ago, but it’s an odd juxtaposition. Clearly, for the organizers of the Oxford music event, the name breaks down into “Zap” plus “fest”; the combination “Zapf” would have been a coincidental one. But for those of us who know and admire the work of Hermann & Gudrun Zapf, it’s hard to imagine not immediately thinking of them and their work upon seeing such a name.

Incidentally, the book that came out of the original Zapfest exhibition is still available.

Categorized as culture, events, letters, type designers, typography |

I’ve been intending to write an article about Steve Renick and his work ever since his sudden death in 2002. Even before that, I had the idea in the back of my head. And clearly, such an article needs to be written, since when I google him in various ways, in search of the best link for his name above, in the first sentence, everything I come up with is partial and oblique. But this is not that article; it’s just a few notes towards one.

There isn’t a current exhibit of Steve Renick’s work that I can point you to, unless you drop by the offices of the University of California Press, where he was Art Director for twenty years. In their library/meeting room, last time I was there, they had a lot of Steve’s work on display; even without that intention, any display of books from UC Press in the past two decades would show a lot of Steve Renick’s work, either as designer or as art director. He was a consummate book designer, with an understated style in a sort of classical Modernist tradition. He was a typographer in the best sense; I remember that he had a Monotype type-specimen poster, from the days of hot-metal typesetting, under the glass top of his drawing table. We would talk about typefaces and books and the details of typography; I believe it was he who gave me a photocopy of the long-out-of-print book by Geoffrey Dowding, Finer Points in the spacing & arrangement of type.

I would try to visit Steve at the Press whenever I was in the Bay Area. He was always friendly, helpful, informal, and curious about whatever was new. I remember arriving one day when he had just gotten his hands on a Mac and an early version of QuarkXPress; he was noodling around, trying things out, finding out how the software worked, thinking about how he could incorporate these new capabilities into the way he designed books. At that point I had never used XPress, but I had been designing and typesetting books digitally for several years; we compared notes on digital type and how it was set.

Many of the most high-profile books to come out of UC Press were Steve’s work, either designed by him or produced under his art direction: Henry Thoreau: a life of the mind, with Barry Moser illustrations; Geisha, by Liza Dalby; Poles apart: parallel visions of the Arctic and Antarctic, by Galen Rowell; the Allen Mandelbaum translation of Dante’s Inferno. He designed the remarkable English-language facsimile edition of Jan Tschichold’s Die Neue Typographie, the first time this classic of Modernist typography had appeared in English. That book, in fact, I had some responsibility for: I had been corresponding with Ruari McLean, Tschichold’s biographer and sometime translator, about getting his unpublished translation of Die Neue Typographie into print, when I found out that UC Press, all unknowing, was contemplating commissioning a translation, not realizing that a translation already existed in manuscript. I got hold of Steve, who put me in touch with the editor of the project; then I got the editor and McLean together and then left them to work out the best way to approach the book.

In contrast to his elegant, spare book designs, Steve’s hobby was fixing up old hotrod cars. (No doubt the engine details were as finely crafted as his typography.) I recall the first time he drove me to lunch in his current rod, and how flabbergasted I was at the apparent aesthetic contradiction of these two wildly different styles.

Steve was famously generous with his time and advice; everyone who has worked with him, been on a book-show jury with him, or just spent time with him remembers this. He was also resolutely unpretentious; in a group photo from a book-industry event, he would be the one over on the end with the rumpled jacket and oblique tie. He had an eagle eye for typography and a fine hand for design; his influence is easy to spot in the work of innumerable younger designers. Most of all, for book buyers and readers, he quite simply produced a wealth of books that we can read easily and that we can feel happy to have on our shelves.

Categorized as book design, publishing, typography |

If you’re in Seattle this Thursday, don’t miss the opening of an exhibit of brilliantly creative letterpress printing by the late Chris Stern, at the Design Commission (121 Prefontaine Place S., near 4th & Yesler). Chris and his wife and partner, Jules Remedios Faye, formed Stern & Faye, Letterpress Printers, and founded their “printing farm” in the Skagit Valley north of Seattle. Each of them was a fine, and unusual, printer and artist before they met, and their work together has been amazing. When Chris died of cancer a year and a half ago, many of us lost a friend and we all lost an original talent.

The exhibit is in several parts: in addition to Chris’s printed work, there will be photos and artifacts from the printing farm, and prints produced by friends, colleagues, and students of Chris and Jules’s, inspired by their work. Much of this will be for sale, to benefit Jules and help pay off Chris’s outstanding medical bills.

The opening runs from 5 to 10 p.m. (this is “First Thursday,” Seattle’s monthly arts walk in Pioneer Square). If you can’t make the opening, the exhibit will be accessible during business hours at the Design Commission for the rest of the month.

Yes, the exhibit includes a copy of the magnificent volume that Chris created from my little story “Roman Seattle.”

Update June 6:

I’ve posted a few photos from last night’s opening.

Categorized as book design, culture, design, events, letters, printing, typography |