In the autumn of 1997, on a visit to New York City, I made a point of dropping in to the office of I.D. magazine,* which I had been reading and admiring for some time. I liked the visual appearance of the magazine and its editorial approach, and I thought it would be fun to write for them. I got in touch with the editor, Chee Pearlman, and arranged to come in. What I remember is that she instantly recognized the coat I was wearing, one of Michael Cronan’s “Walking Man” Origami Coats, and gave me a thumbs up. She introduced me to Peter Hall, who was then I.D.’s Associate Editor at the time. Peter said he didn’t have any immediate writing needs, but he in turn introduced me to Margaret Richardson, who was the Editor and Publisher of U&lc magazine, the quarterly publication of ITC (International Typeface Corporation). And Margaret needed good design writers.
(* Not i-D, which was an entirely different publication)
That’s how I began writing for U&lc, initially doing descriptions of the new fonts that ITC was issuing. I went back to Seattle and kept writing (it was good gig, and paid decently), until late in 1997 when I got a call from Mark Batty, President of ITC. He was looking for a new editor for U&lc. Initially he had asked Peter Hall, who was a very logical person to ask, but Peter told him that he was tired of being and editor and wanted to spend his time as a design writer. So Peter suggested that Mark talk to me.
It was the proverbial offer I couldn’t refuse. I had been feeling somewhat stale in what I was doing professionally, and both Eileen and I were ready for a change. Mark flew me to NYC for an interview, and after talking with me he offered me the job.
Suddenly we were looking at moving to New York City. It would be a disruptive move, but Eileen and I both found the prospect exciting. We were both originally from the Northeast, and we found the energy of New York exhilarating. (At one point, when we were walking around Brooklyn in search of an apartment, we spotted an empty parking space. Our immediate instinct was to seize the opportunity: “You lie down in the space to save it,” Eileen said, “and I’ll go rent a car!”)
Before I even started the job officially, I was invited to join the management team on their annual retreat in early January, which in this case was going to be at a dude ranch in Arizona. I had already planned to be in the San Francisco Bay Area that week, so I flew on from San Francisco to Phoenix. From there I caught the private bus northwest to what turned out to be “Merve Griffin’s Wickenburg Inn and Dude Ranch.”
That’s where I started getting to know the rest of the ITC management team, and where they started getting to know me. It wasn’t a very large team, and there wasn’t a terribly rigorous schedule to our “offsite,” but we did have meetings – actually useful to me, to get an idea of how the company worked – punctuated by drinks around the pool. And excursions. One afternoon we went on a horse ride: a slow amble on horseback along a fairly well manicured desert trail. (It was, after all, a dude ranch.) Another day, in the very early morning, we went for a ride in a hot-air balloon. (What I remember, besides how cold it was in the Arizona dawn, was the loud noise that the hot-air burner made when it was turned on – and the utter silence when it was turned off, leaving us to glide silently through the Arizona sky.)
I guess I made a decent impression, since when I showed up for work in New York a few weeks later, I was welcomed to the team.
*
During my stopover in the Bay Area, I had met up with Mark van Bronkhorst, who was the designer of U&lc, at his home office in Albany, just north of Berkeley. For several years, Margaret had been asking a different graphic designer to design each issue, something that gave U&lc a certain unpredictability from issue to issue. But shortly before I was hired, that practice changed: she hired Mark van Bronkhorst as the regular designer. At the same time, U&lc underwent a radical change of format: from its long-time tabloid size down to an eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch magazine page. This physical downsizing had taken place with the issue before I started, but I actually thought it was a good idea.
In line with that radical change, which would of course outrage long-time readers, Mark and I hatched the idea of creating a new logo for the magazine. As I wrote later in a retrospective, that act created more backlash and fervor than anything else we did at U&lc during my tenure. It probably didn’t help smooth rufflable feathers that Mark used clip art of 1970s hipsters to illustrate the change on a wrap-around cover for the first issue with the new logo.
The new, compact logo fit better with a smaller magazine, and would be easily adapted to the web, which was a growing part of ITC’s business. One of the tasks that Mark Batty had told me he wanted me to take on was the develop the website, U&lc Online, into an online publication that would lure readers to ITC’s new web-based direct-sales outlet for digital fonts.
*
ITC had moved, not too long before, from its longtime home on 2nd Avenue around the corner to an office building at 228 East 45th Street. The previous home was just one office in a tall modern-looking building, 866 2nd Avenue, but visitors sometimes came under the impression that the whole thing was “the ITC Building.” Within the office there was an exhibition space, the ITC Center, where exhibits of type and typographic design were regularly mounted.
Maxim Zhukov remembers: “ITC’s address was printed in U&lc, but I did not need to know it: the building sign on the façade said ‘2 Hammarskjöld Plaza’, in, yes, Avant Garde Gothic, the flagship typeface of the ITC. No graphic designer had to ask the passersby for directions.” (“Aaron Burns: Till we meet again,” typejournal.ru)
The new office, where I arrived in early 1998, was a spacious full floor in an older office building. (I learned later from Mark Batty that when they were looking for new office space, they found that this one gave them more room than the old office and at a cheaper price.) ITC’s staff was much reduced from its heyday, so everyone had an office and we all had plenty of space at our disposal; these were not the cramped little offices that I was used to seeing for other magazine publishers. My office, which had been Margaret Richardson’s, was large and well-lit, with a long black table that she used as a desk. She told me that every time they put a new issue to bed, she cleared off all the papers and drawings and notes that had been piled up on the table, leaving it gleaming and clean – which sometimes caused people to worry that she was about to quit! No, she was just clearing the decks before the next issue.
Eileen and I ended up finding an apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, in a three-storey 19th-century building that I’d call a brownstone except that it was actually brick. Since the ITC office was in midtown Manhattan, just a few blocks from Grand Central Station, I could catch the F train every day to get to work, transferring once or twice to end up at Grand Central, from which it was an easy walk. It felt odd to be commuting to work in midtown Manhattan, just like my school friends’ fathers when I was growing up in suburban Bronxville, even if I arrived by subway rather than by train. (My own father had driven to work in Mount Vernon, rather than commuting into the city like so many other Westchester businessmen.) Sometimes, when I felt like it, I would take the scenic route, choosing the exit from Grand Central that led me directly into the Chrysler Building’s grand Art Deco lobby.
*
Being the editor of U&lc was both fun and challenging. I have always loved the processes of editing and publishing, everything from planning an issue to working with the words of a particular article. The magazine had a long pedigree, and people expected certain things of it. Although its purpose had always been to publicize ITC typefaces, it had done so by appealing to the art directors, type directors, and graphic designers who would specify the fonts and ask for them from the shops where they got their type set. In those days, art directors would send out for type, carefully spec’d for ads, brochures, or whatever, then work with the type house through a series of proofs and changes (often quite a lot of changes) before pasting up the resulting photo type on layout boards for photo offset printing. By the time I got to ITC, the desktop publishing revolution had changed everything, and the company was marketing its digital fonts directly from its website. The purpose of U&lc was still to keep the potential customers interested, and to show off new typefaces as they were released.
So the contents of U&lc might be almost anything that would pique the interest of graphic designers. It wasn’t necessarily showing off typographic layouts, though of course the magazine itself demonstrated ITC fonts in action in the most flamboyant manner possible. Articles might be about masks or kites or Japanese woodblock prints, or about lettering on buildings or Victorian engravings, or about jazz-album sleeves or book covers or street signs. During my brief time as editor, I got to commission articles on the old Vietnamese writing system, a company (Octavo) turning high-quality scans of classic books into live text, the “printing farm” of innovative letterpress printers Chris Stern and Jules Faye, Studio Vista’s seminal line of little square design books, and the establishment of a digital design school in Zimbabwe.
One of the advantages of taking over a prestigious design magazine and of being in the heart of New York City was connecting directly with the city’s graphic-design culture. I became quite active in the Type Directors Club, eventually ending up on the TDC board of directors during a turbulent period in its history. I got to know Carol Wahler, the TDC’s long-time executive director, and her husband Allan, quite well. Mark Batty and I would attend the monthly meetings of the venerable Typophiles, which at that point had a membership so agèd that we joked (cruelly, but just to each other) about who might have dropped dead by the next meeting. (The Typophiles later got new life breathed into them and are now quite active, but in those days the club felt moribund.) The Society of Publication Designers, which shared an office with the TDC, put on large events like their annual gala in Grand Central Station.
One of the old-time typographers I got to know was Jerry (Freeman) Craw, who had been an important part of the type community for decades. Jerry was happy to take me to his favorite French restaurant for lunch, where he would would tell me stories about the design world of the 1960s and give me his strategy for getting the best French wine for the least price (Order the second-cheapest wine on the wine list, he told me. Also: Muscadet de Sèvre-et-Maine sur lie.)
As editor of U&lc I traveled to several design and type conferences. In 1998 I went to the first TypeCon, a small affair held in a motel in Westborough, Mass., to Fuse98 in San Francisco, and to the 1998 ATypI conference in Lyon, France.
TypeCon was aimed at type aficionados rather than type professionals, but it ended up attracting a large number of independent type designers. Matthew Carter was the guest of honor, but a lot of the rest of the attendees were relative newcomers. It was a cozy, friendly affair.
Fuse98 was the third Fuse conference, and it was definitely full of itself. High theory met attempted revolution in a jarring day of talks, music, and pretentious videos.
The ATypI conference gave a lot of attention to French typography and type design, but it also had to deal with – or avoid – ongoing controversies about type designers’ intellectual property.
In Lyon I had an expense account, albeit not a lavish one. Late one night, after we had all gone out to dinner, a number of us were still ready to keep talking and drinking. We found a bistro that was still open, and Max Bruinsma, the editor of Eye magazine, and I ordered champagne for the whole table. It was a convivial time, but only later did I learn that Max had expense account and had paid out of his own pocket.
The next year I attended ATypI again, this time in Boston, as well as FontShop’s Typo Berlin. There was quite a contrast between those two: at ATypI everyone hung out together, while at Typo Berlin there was a clear hierarchy of speakers/presenters and then the mass of attendees. One was a gathering of the type community; the other was a presentation to the graphic design world.
*
ITC was owned by Esselte, a Swedish company with no other connection to the type business. And in 1999, Esselte was trying to divest itself of any companies that didn’t fit into their portfolio. That included ITC.
It didn’t matter that ITC was a profitable business; it was essentially too small to matter. Too small, as Mark Batty put it to me, for the big boys at Esselte to give it even enough of their attention to sell it. Mark had put together an offer for an employee buy-out; management couldn’t be bothered. Once it became known that ITC was on the chopping block, Adobe made an offer to buy it; again, Esselte didn’t respond. So in the autumn of 1999, the company was essentially wound down, with the small staff being gradually laid off. I was one of the last to go, because I had agreed to manage the final emptying out. Quite literally: Nov. 23 was the day for everything in my office to be cleared out.
Before that, I had spent the final few weeks finding homes for the archives, so they didn’t end up in a dumpster on East 45th Street. When Mark and I inspected the contents of ITC’s warehouse, we found all the early pasted-up boards of the first few years of U&lc, as well as heavy stacks of film from each issue. We reluctantly decided that the film would never again be of use to anybody, but the pasted-up layouts were definitely treasures. (We didn’t find as much original artwork as we had hoped. I guess the archives had been pruned at some point in the past.)
I offered the boards to the AIGA, who happily accepted them and took them into their own library. The many slide shows from the various exhibits that had been mounted at the ITC Gallery, which had been available for organizations to borrow and show around the country, I donated to the Cary Collection at the Rochester Institute of Technology. I offered almost-complete sets of U&lc to many schools and universities, but almost all of them already had a collection in their possession; they had all been subscribers to U&lc for many years. I kept a complete set for myself, and a few other gems, and finally let a gang of students from SVA come and rummage through the remaining piles of extra copies for whatever they wanted. It was painful to let anything be scrapped, but admittedly there wasn’t any need to hang onto thick piles of extra copies of random issues.
Before this dénouement, while everyone was still on the company payroll, Mark hosted a farewell party at a very nice restaurant in midtown Manhattan. When the time came to pay, he said to me, “Why don’t you put this on your company card, since I approve that.” No need to haggle over final expenses.
So by the end of 1999, ITC had shut down. The final issue of U&lc was vol. 26, no. 2, the Fall 1999 issue. Mark van Bronkhorst had decided to quit doing the design – even though I offered the chance to design the final issue, once I told him there would be no more – so that issue was designed by Deanna Lowe. It was an unaccustomed luxury for me to work with a designer who was just a few blocks away, instead of across the country. She did an excellent job of making those letter-size pages pop. The website was still up, but its future was unsure.
Ironically, after they had shut down the company and laid everyone off, in early 2000 Esselte changed its corporate mind and sold the rights to ITC to Agfa Monotype. Happily, at my suggestion, they kept the ITC type library as a separate collection, rather than just folding it into the general Monotype font offerings. U&lc Online would continue for several years, though in a somewhat different form and style from what I had created.
[Copyright 2025.]