easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

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 |

The first I knew that I’d been quoted in a front-page article on the Image section of last Sunday’s Los Angeles Times was when I responded to a phone message on Monday morning from a potential client in LA. They’d read the article and decided I was their man. I knew that Times journalist Adam Tschorn had interviewed me by phone, while I was on the road at a conference in Florida, about the fonts used by Barack Obama and the other presidential candidates; I hadn’t realized, though, that the article had been published.

Now I find, thanks to a heads-up from Amy Redmond, that this article has been republished (in shortened form) by The Age in Melbourne. I guess this makes me Big in Australia, too. Wonder whether any of my Melbourne friends noticed.

Thanks, Adam. Nice article.

Categorized as culture, fonts, typography |

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 |

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 |

Okay, here’s a good example of type used creatively. You may have seen these ads for the recent movie Gone Baby Gone; this one is from the Arts section of today’s New York Times. There’s nothing very subtle about the ad as a whole (big close-up head shots, lots of WORDS IN ALL-CAPS, excited declarations of awards and award nominations, a cacophony of visual noise), but the use of descending weights of type in the title is evocative, playing off the meaning of the words themselves. Not beautiful, but expressive and appropriate.

I won’t say anything about the competing sans serifs around it. My lips are sealed.

Categorized as ambient letters, typography |

This is a nearly perfect example of how not to space type, if you want the words to be read. It was a poster-size ad on the side of a bus stop near the 16th Street BART station in San Francisco; I snapped this photo several years ago, but I still haven’t run across a better bad example.

It’s a good thing the names are familiar; otherwise you might be wondering who “Oeune Don,” “Dxe Choks,” and “Mary J Buge” were. Perhaps if you were standing around for a long time waiting for a bus, and you had nothing better to do than puzzle out what this says, it would be effective. But the real point of advertising on bus shelters isn’t to reach the captive audience of bus-riders; it’s to catch the attention of the people driving by – for whom this collection of letters would look like a rickety bunch of yellow sticks.

If typography is all about negative space, this is negative typography.

Categorized as ambient letters, information design, typography |

Browsing through a local bookstore yesterday, I kept picking up interesting-looking new books and opening them, only to put them down again when I saw the inside typography. An uninviting text page can put off any reader; it’s just that as a typographer and a book designer, I can tell exactly what it is that puts me off.

Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day, in Penguin trade paperback: typeset in an overly contrasting version of Baskerville (probably ITC New Baskerville, though I couldn’t be sure), in lines that were two or three picas too wide for comfortable reading. John Crowley’s The Solitudes, in the newly reprinted edition from Overlook, is set in Rotis Serif, a typeface that looks superficially attractive but consists of a mismatched set of letterforms in which the most common letters are quirky and draw attention to themselves.

The Landmark Herodotus sounded fascinating: a spacious volume, informatively annotated, bedecked with useful maps. But its text type appears light and blotchy throughout. The typeface is Matthew Carter’s excellent ITC Galliard, but it looks like the early Adobe version, which was indifferently digitized and has a poorly spaced italic. The numbers are all set in lining uppercase numerals, jutting up to full cap height, instead of old-style lowercase numerals, as befits any text, and especially a translation of a classic. In addition, the page design doesn’t quite fit the binding; it’s a thick book, and the gutters are too narrow, which would make reading uncomfortable.

I found one fine exception: Maps: finding our place in the world, edited by James R. Ackerman and Robert W. Karrow (University of Chicago Press). The typeface is Dolly, which is robust and easily readable in extended text, and the page design uses it effectively. That one I might actually buy. It’s the shame the same designers didn’t take on the Herodotus.

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

My copy of the Helvetica DVD arrived a couple of days ago – you know, Gary Hustwit’s full-length documentary about a typeface, which has become inexplicably popular far beyond the typographic world. What this film does more than anything else – more than tell us about the actual typeface Helvetica, though it does that quite well – is show us how ubiquitous type is in the world around us, and how this obscure practice, typography, is something we live with every single day. That, I imagine, is the source of its wider appeal.

I’ve been browsing the DVD’s “Extras” – outtakes and extra material that didn’t make it into the movie. My favorite quotes are from Neville Brody and Erik Spiekermann:

Neville Brody on type in the world: “All schools should be teaching typography. We should be fundamentally aware of how typographic language is forming our thoughts.”

Erik Spiekermann, after describing how he’s been re-designing the timetables for the German railroads: “That stuff is what makes a nation’s culture: it’s the visual surrounding. You know: good architecture, good food, and good timetables, or good announcements on the walls of stations – I think that’s a very important cultural contribution.” [Erik Spiekermann]

I was also pleased to hear that, like me, Erik looks first to the lowercase a when identifying a typeface.

Categorized as ambient letters, culture, fonts, type designers, typography |