easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

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 |

“Well,” said a friend of mine, with a laugh, “the New York Times thinks hyphens are old-fashioned.”

My god, what in inordinately stupid article! Hyphens exist for clarity. All punctuation exists to make it possible to read our words right the first time through, not have to puzzle over them. (That’s why we have spaces between words, too. We didn’t always.) There’s no virtue in less or more punctuation; only in exactly the right punctuation to communicate clearly.

Charles McGrath, who ought to know better, is just twittering on about fashion.

And I won’t even get into the usefulness of hyphens in typography.

Categorized as culture, typography, writing & editing |