easilyamused | John D. Berry’s blog

Registration is now open for Typ09, the 2009 ATypI conference in Mexico City (26–30 October 2009). To register, go to the ATypI Store. The sooner you do this, the cheaper it will be: there’s a very early rate, an early rate, and a regular rate, depending on how close to the conference dates you register. The very early rate is good until Sept. 11.

The conference takes place during the last week of October, which is after the end of the rainy season in central Mexico, so the weather should (with any luck) be sunny and pleasant, while the recent rains will have washed some of Mexico City’s famous pollution out of the air. The timing also makes it extraordinarily easy to stay a few extra days and experience the the uniquely Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead.

Typ09 has benefited from the enthusiastic support and involvement of the Mexican type community, and of typographers from throughout Latin America. Three full days of main-conference program, in a historic building at the heart of the city, will be followed by two days of TypeTech and hands-on workshops at the hilltop campus of Anáhuac University, near the city’s western edge. Both the lovely modern campus and Mexico City’s amazing Centro Histórico are inviting settings for a unique event.

¡Hasta la vista, en Mexico!

Categorized as culture, events, typography |

Last year, Gabriel Martínez Meave and his colleagues Isaías Loaiza Ramírez and Alfredo Lezama Osorio created a dramatic short video about Mexico and typography, which was first seen at ATypI 2008 in St. Petersburg when Roger Black and Ricardo Salas presented the 2009 ATypI conference, Typ09, for Mexico City. This animated video is now up on YouTube, where you can see it for yourself. (Warning: contains music.)

Typ09, the 2009 ATypI conference | Mexico City | October 26–30, 2009

Categorized as culture, events, letters, society, typography |

Today’s New York Times has an article about the new credit-card legislation that just passed the U.S. Senate (and, later in the day, the House), which would limit the exorbitant interest rates and extra fees and sudden changes of terms that have become standard practice among credit-card companies in recent years. One of the details that I noticed deep in the article has typographic relevance:

“The bill also bans expiration dates on gift cards and certificates any sooner than five years after the card’s original issue date. And the retailer or card issuer will have to print the terms of any expiration date in capital letters in at least 10-point type. Call it the fine print rule.”

Capital letters? I can see the intended effect, but the real effect will be to make the important text less readable than it would otherwise be. ALL-CAPS are inherently less readable and less inviting than upper- & lowercase – especially if they haven’t been tracked looser than normal, to give a little extra space between letters.

Legal contracts such as “Terms of Use” agreements often use all-caps to emphasize the most important parts. But if there’s a long passage in caps, it’s even more likely to be skipped by anyone reading it than the regular text might be. (Perhaps this is the point, in some legal agreements.) Far better would be to set the important bits in normal case but make it bold for emphasis. (Maybe not in Times New Roman, whose bold is really a headline typeface rather than a bolder version of the text face.)

Requiring “capital letters in at least 10-point type” does have one advantage: it’s easy to define. Although typefaces vary wildly in their apparent size, it’s usually the lowercase x-height that varies the most (compare Times and Helvetica at the same point size); the capital letters are likely to be of similar height even when the design is different. But this just highlights the folly of trying to define legible type simply by its point size.

Categorized as information design, society, typography |

The first type conference I ever attended was Type90, the 1990 ATypI conference in Oxford, England. It was also the first ATypI event that was truly a conference, widely publicized, rather than a “congress” of insiders. Type90 was the brainchild of Roger Black, who even then was a well-known editorial designer and had just co-founded the Font Bureau. This year’s ATypI conference, the first one in Mexico City, is also Roger’s brainchild, which is one of the reason’s he pushed to have it called “Typ09,” as a sort of allusion to or inversion of Type90.

At Type90, I was a newcomer; I knew only a couple of people there, though I knew a few others by reputation. Several of us relative newcomers ended up hanging out together during the weekend; a number of friendships began there.

Not too long ago Thom Feild unearthed a photo from Type90, showing a bunch of us in a pub on the final day of the conference. Recognize anyone?

[Photo (counterclockwise from lower left): Phil Baines (London), Tom Bee (Edinburgh), Susan Skarsgard (Ann Arbor), me (Seattle), Iskra Johnson (Seattle), Thom Feild (Seattle), random local at the table behind us (Oxford, presumably), and April from Apple (Cupertino; sorry, neither Thom nor I can remember her last name). Photo copyright by Thom Feild. Slightly larger version here.]

Categorized as events, typography |

Last week I stopped by the opening of an exhibit at Seattle Central Community College, showcasing the work of students from SCCC’s graphic-design course taught by Jennifer Kennard, “X Type: Experimental Typography.” There was some noteworthy work, and I suggested to Jennifer that there ought to be a website showing it. One of the more unusual works was a video by Sean Fischer, featuring dancers enacting, horizontally against a white-sheeted background, the letters of the alphabet. To see the video, check out this link, then scroll down until you find “Dancers Expirimental Type” (yes, with that spelling). It’s refreshing, amusing, and the dancers were obviously having a lot of fun. (Note: there’s music with the video.)

If you’re in Seattle, it’s worth visiting the atrium gallery at SCCC and checking out the show.

[At left: the letter C.]

Categorized as education, letters, typography |

When I read through the new edition of Jost Hochuli’s Detail in typography, I found myself wondering, “Have I really learned anything about type in the last twenty years?” Most of the points I find myself making to people over and over again can be found in these pages, organized and explained more clearly than by any other writer I know. A large part of what Hochuli says can be summed up (inadequately) in the aphorism I keep repeating: typography is all about space.

Detail in typography was originally published in 1987 by Compugraphic, as one of a triad of little booklets by Jost Hochuli; the other two were the complementary volume The design of books and a jeu d’esprit called Jost Hochuli’s Alphabugs, in which the author/designer played with expressive display typography and the meaning of words. The books were (all three of them, I think) published in several languages; the English-language edition was translated by Ruari McLean. (One of my two copies of Detail in typography is inscribed to me by Ruari McLean, dated February 1989. I never met McLean, unfortunately, though we were in contact about his then-unpublished translation of Jan Tschichold’s Neue Typographie.)

The book was revised and updated in German in 2005, and this new English edition, published by Hyphen Press in London, is expanded and newly translated by Charles Whitehouse. Although the book is slightly longer than its first edition (64 pages instead of 48), its format is even smaller: 125 x 210 mm, to match the Hyphen Press format for small books. It fits handily in most pockets. Like its original edition, this one is two-color, paperbound with full-width flaps, on uncoated off-white paper stock, and it opens easily in the hand. Jost Hochuli is a master of book design, and Robin Kinross, proprietor of Hyphen Press, is a stickler for production quality.

Hochuli’s focus in this little book is the details of text typography, or “microtypography.” (The design of pages and whole publications is the realm of “macrotypography”; he has expanded on that subject in Designing books: practice and theory.) The fundamental elements that he writes about are the letter, the word, the line, linespacing, and the column, with a bit at the end that he calls “the qualities of type.” He leads off with a short discussion of the process of reading; this was where I first encountered the word saccade, a technical term for rapid eye movement, specifically the way our eyes move as we read a line of text. (They don’t move smoothly along the line, but jump from clump to clump of letters – not necessarily by word, but by visual cluster. They jump backwards, too, quite frequently; just how frequently is one of those things we quantify while trying to come up with a scientific measurement of readability.)

I won’t make Hochuli’s points for him here, nor will I expropriate them as my own. (I quote them often enough.) I’ll just repeat one paragraph from his introduction, because he clearly lays out the scope of what he’s writing about:

While macrotypography – the typographic layout – is concerned with the format of the printed matter, with the size and position of the columns of type and the illustrations, with the organization of the hierarchy of headings, subheadings and captions, detail typography is concerned with the individual components – letters, letterspacing, words, wordspacing, lines and linespacing, columns of text. These are the components that graphic or typographic designers like to neglect, as they fall outside the area that is normally regarded as ‘creative’.

This is one of those books that belongs on everyone’s bookshelf – everyone who deals in any way with turning text into readable pages, whether the words are their own or someone else’s.

Categorized as book design, design, information design, publishing, typography |

ATypI has just issued the “Call for Presentations” for this year’s conference in Mexico City, Typ09. We have also posted some preliminary information about the conference on the ATypI website, and we will have hotel and travel information there shortly.

This year, the main program will be a bit different from usual. Instead of two or more tracks of simultaneous program items, all timed to a uniform length, we’ll have a single continuous track, with varying lengths depending on what seems appropriate for each item. This will take some virtuoso juggling of the proposals and the final schedule, but it’s Roger Black‘s idea that this will enliven the proceedings and give everyone who attends a more cohesive experience. I’m looking forward to it.

The continuous three-day main program downtown will be followed by an intensive two days of workshops, including the now-traditional TypeTech but also several other workshop tracks, at Anáhuac University.

Every few years, ATypI needs to shake up its programming a bit. I was just looking at some issues of the TypeLab daily newsletter from the Antwerp conference in 1993, with emotional denunciations of the moribund state of ATypI programming and calls for livening it up through the fresh young blood brought in by TypeLab. (It worked.) Maybe now it’s time for another experiment in refreshing the mix.

Categorized as design, events, type designers, typography |

Last week I was in Mexico City for several days of intense but productive meetings with the local organizers of Typ09, this year’s ATypI conference, which will be held there in October. It was almost exactly a year since Eileen and I first visited Mexico City, for preliminary meetings and to look at potential venues. This time we were nailing down the venues for the main conference program (at MIDE, the Museo Interactivo de Economía, a modern high-tech museum in a fully restored 18th-century monastery in the historic center of the city) and for the two days of hands-on workshops, TypeTech presentations, and master classes (at Anáhuac University, in the hills west of the city, which has extensive meeting and working space and a very well-maintained infrastructure).

We visited MIDE and figured out how to make best use of its spaces, and we also visited the nearby Palacio de Bellas Artes, where we should be able to hold the gala dinner, thanks to the support of the Mexican government’s minister of culture, Sergio Vela, whom we met at his office. We also visited the university’s beautiful hilltop campus and imagined creative ways to use its many classrooms, theaters, and display spaces. Since Mexico City’s traffic is legendarily awful (and Anáhuac is not, unfortunately, near any Metro line), the only way to hold events in two widely separated places will be to concentrate on one (the Centro Histórico) for three days, and the other (Anáhuac) for the rest. Hotels will be in the heart of the city, with bus transportation to the university on the workshop days. We are also planning some optional side-trips after the conference; the dates (October 26–30) were chosen not only to avoid the end of the rainy season but to segue neatly into visiting Oaxaca for the Day of the Dead celebrations (and also to see typographic and printing treasures there).

Typ09 will be the first ATypI conference held in Latin America; enthusiasm is running very high, not only in Mexico but in Argentina, Brazil, and other Latin American countries with typographic communities. Even in a time of economic collapse, the organizers expect a larger attendance than we have had at any ATypI conference in many years.

[Images, top to bottom: Roger Black, Barbara Jarzyna, Ricardo Salas, and Mónica Puigferrat in front of the Palacio de Bellas Artes; the Palacio de Bellas Artes; an arcade around the central courtyard at MIDE; detail of a shop sign in the Centro Histórico.]

Categorized as architecture, culture, events, typography |

Everybody has forwarded this link to me, though Deb Gibson was the first. I’m familiar with the book, Geoffrey Dowding’s Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type (1954, reissued in 1966), though all I have is the Hartley & Marks reprint from 1995 and a xerox of the original that Steve Renick gave me many years ago. I have not actually seen this remarkably poor binding typography face to face, but if it is really the way the title was embossed on the cloth in the original edition, I can only speculate about what Dowding might have said about it at the time. As Loren MacGregor put it to me the other day, “I suspect the book was bound by someone not familiar with the contents.”

The “Fail” folks aren’t the first ones to notice this unfortunate conjunction of title and execution; it was also noted on the Hoefler & Frere-Jones blog back in January, under the title, “Precisely What the Author Had in Mind” – a longer but perhaps clearer description than the noun-cluster “Proof of Concept Fail.”

Dowding’s book is well worth seeking out, though even the Hartley & Marks edition is out of print. I think he carried his argument for tight spacing slightly too far, but he was right in principle; and he gave close thought to the details that make text typography good or mediocre.

Categorized as books, design, typography |

Well, someone must be reading this stuff. The other day, John D. Boardley, who runs the website I Love Typography, posted this Photoshop mash-up (it’s rather far down the page in his “week in type” for November 11). He was presumably inspired by my off-the-cuff remark a couple of weeks ago about the need for a Minister of Typography. Thanks to Jennifer Kennard, who pointed this out to me; it cracked me up when I saw it. And you certainly won’t find me complaining; I think I’m in good company.

Boardley made a connection between this notion and an idea expressed by Robin Kinross in Unjustified texts: “Could typography be a topic of regular and intelligent discussion in newspapers? […] If music, architecture, cookery and gardening have critics and columnists, then why not typography?” Kinross was taking off from an idea of Erik Spiekermann‘s (“The typographer Erik Spiekermann set off this hare in his book Rhyme & reason, in which he complained that one could never read discussion of typography there”), and it’s a point I’ve made myself when arguing for more public design and typography criticism. Although Boardley says the Kinross quotation is “not completely related – this is just how my mind works,” the connection seems logical enough to me.

Categorized as society, typography |