Thursday January 26, 2012
Filed under:
Links
Miscellany
Posterity and How We Save Stuff
Earlier today I watched this wonderful presentation by Jeremy Keith that he gave at the Build conference. He touches on something I’ve thought about for a long time, going back even before personal computers: The long term prospect of the media we record things on—paper, records, magnetic tape, film, video tape, floppy disks, compact disc, DVDs, hard drives and servers.
I had almost the same thought as Jeremy: I picture archaeologists in the distant future studying what remains of our culture and finding lots of documents and records right up until around the end of the twentieth century—and then almost nothing that can be read or decoded.
Printed books, artwork, typed and written manuscripts, photos on film and paper, with all of these media, you can either read and decode it directly with your eyes. It may be faded or fragile, but if it survives, whatever is recorded on it will survive. Even movies on film and phonograph records could be reverse-engineered just by using observations and common sense, even if some of the nuances may be lost.
Then you get to magnetic tape. If you’ve never seen it before, it’s not obvious what it is, and even if you guessed correctly, the magnetic signals on the tape fade over time and the tape itself deteriorates.
Things start getting really bad when you go to analog video tape. To even make sense of what’s on the tape—assuming you figure out that it’s some kind of motion picture medium—you would need to reinvent the television and video tape player. Very difficult, but conceivable.
All bets are off when you get to digital storage, which Jeremy gets into in detail in his presentation. To me, it seems that it would be nearly impossible to recover anything stored digitally if, in some cataclysm, the knowledge of computer technology was lost.
Even things from the recent past are getting difficult to access. I switched to digital tools for most of my design and artwork in the late 1980s. Some of the work I did—in the form of PageMaker files, for example—I would have a difficult time retrieving. Yes, technically, much of this stuff can be accessed if you have old enough hardware and software. But hardware doesn’t last forever, and what about more recent software that requires internet activation?
When I look back through my old artwork, I have less and less in the form of physical objects—drawings, photos, printed samples. Physical objects get old, faded, and damaged, but you can still hold them, and look at them. Digital stuff never gets old or faded, but if even a few bits of data are corrupted, an entire file or disk can be lost forever, even if you still have something to read the media.
Then I think, who cares, other than pack rats like me? I thought the same thing watching Jeremy’s talk. Sure, huge amounts of digital culture may be—probably will be—lost to the future. But remember, there are many things from the past that are lost to us now because they happened before sound and picture recording—musical performances, theatrical performances and speeches, historical events. But lots of stuff did survive and will survive. We still print tons of books and magazines (so far). People still keep journals and diaries, and artists still keep sketchbooks.
Ultimately, culture is for the living. If it survives to be studied and appreciated by people in the future, great, and I hope it does. If not, I’m sure they’ll be busy making their own anyway.
Thursday January 26, 2012
Filed under:
Roving Photographer
Way Too Tight
Seen in Saint Paul, Minnesota, July 5, 2010.
Tuesday January 24, 2012
Filed under:
Personal Archaeology
More on Uncle Knut at CCA
One more follow up on the item I posted last week, in which I mentioned my uncle Knut who worked as a designer at Container Corporation of America…. After I posted that, Knut sent me a photo of the cookie package he designed:
This was (I believe) one of the first packages for Keebler chocolate chip cookies, and my uncle’s first printed package design. It debuted in July 1967. It seems so tasteful and restrained compared to the modern equivalent.
I was very impressed by this as a budding artist. It put into my mind the notion that, if you were good, your work could be seen by millions of people. Definitely something I was attracted to very early on, and probably something a lot of artists and designers can relate to.
Monday January 23, 2012
Filed under:
Type & Lettering
More From Route 66: Barstow
Shot in Barstow, California, on August 17, 2010.
Sunday January 22, 2012
Filed under:
Type & Lettering
Palomino Motel on Route 66
We actually stayed in this motel along historic Route 66 on our way to TypeCon when it was in Los Angeles in 2010. The sign was definitely part of the appeal. Not the best place I’ve ever stayed. But really, what can you expect for $26 per night? On the other hand—free WiFi!
Shot in Tucumcari, New Mexico, on August 14, 2010.
Saturday January 21, 2012
Filed under:
Type & Lettering
Bucket o' Letters
Seen in an antique store in Mount Vernon, Iowa, October 23, 2010.
Friday January 20, 2012
Filed under:
Type History
Type & Lettering
ATF Alphabet Card Boxes
While looking for some obscure typographical thing this morning, this ad in a 1955 ATF (American Type Founders) catalog caught my eye:
I have several boxes like the ones shown in the photo. I acquired them with a bunch of other stuff some years ago when the University of Minnesota Journalism School revamped its graphics lab. Here’s one of them:
The silk-screened label is beautiful:
It’s too bad I don’t have any of the type sample cards they were designed to hold. “Here’s something you will want!” Still true, even in 2012.
Thursday January 19, 2012
Filed under:
Type & Lettering
Vinyl Sign, Not Aging Well
This is either really cool or really sad. I can’t make up my mind.
Seen in Saint Paul, Minnesota, November 3, 2010.
Wednesday January 18, 2012
Filed under:
F.Y.I.
Help Stop SOPA and PIPA
PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.
Tuesday January 17, 2012
Filed under:
Type & Lettering
Flowers
Old neon sign, seen in Seattle, Washington, June 19, 2011.
Tuesday January 17, 2012
Filed under:
Type History
A Bit More About CCA Calendars from Uncle Knut
After posting my follow-up on Sunday, my uncle sent me some more details about the CCA calendars:
“Most of the calendars during the late sixties and early seventies were designed at the CCA Corporate Design Center, which was located in downtown Chicago. It was run by John Massey who was head of all CCA corporate design and promotional material. He had two brothers that worked for him. We referred to them the Kalfus brothers (not sure of the spelling). They did many of the calendars. John Massey used Helvetica type only on everything they designed. Bill Bonnell came later and may have designed some of the last calendars CCA did.”
Somebody ought to do a site about CCA’s design history. So many things like this are virtually non-existent on the web.
Sunday January 15, 2012
Filed under:
Personal Archaeology
Type History
More on the Edikit and CCA Calendars
That “Edikit” image I posted yesterday was just one piece of the whole kit, the only part I still have that’s intact. It’s the cover of a 28-page booklet of half-size layout grids printed on one side of each page in non-photo blue (light blue) ink. The only text is printed on the inside front cover in 24-point Century Schoolbook, centered, capitalization as shown:
put your ideas
down here because
this is where you
begin.
And that’s how I actually used it. I did a thumbnail layout on every available page, and sometimes a drawing or doodle on the reverse side, including these typeface ideas, drawn with a red Sharpie on the inside back cover:
The one near the bottom was probably inspired by seventies art deco faces like Washington or Epic. It even has tiny numbers indicating alternate characters, just like in the specimen books.
Regarding the CCA calendar, I contacted my uncle, Knut Simonson, who I mentioned was a designer at CCA in the sixties. He doesn’t have the red can that the 1968 CCA calendar came in anymore, but he does still have the calendar itself. He shot these two photos of it for me:
The clear plastic part fit snugly inside the can, and the triangular, paperboard calendar part fit inside that. When assembled, six months are visible on the outside. To see the other six, you slip it out, change the way it’s folded, and slip it back in.
It’s interesting that the ones-place digits are printed much larger than the tens-place digits. I wonder why this was done? To make it simpler and more elegant? It makes the numbers kind of hard to read, almost cryptic. Another case of form over function, I’d say. Overall, a good example of the minimalist way designers still tend to use Helvetica.
Knut doesn’t remember who designed it, but I found some similar calendars done for CCA in the seventies credited to a guy named Bill Bonnell. Maybe it was him. Too bad all the examples are in black and white. Probably scanned from an old design annual, printed back when color was expensive.
Saturday January 14, 2012
Filed under:
Personal Archaeology
Dumbest Thing I Ever Did as a Designer
I suppose I had an excuse: I had no formal training yet, but I was possessed by the romance of graphic design.
In my senior year of high school, I was the editor of the yearbook. I’d been on staff in previous years, but now I was in charge. Even at 17, I knew what good graphic design looked like. My uncle was a graphic designer in Chicago, where he worked at one point for Container Corporation of America, designing stuff like the original Tab soft drink can and the Keebler Rich ‘n Chips cookie package. His aesthetic and way of looking at the world rubbed off on me at an early age.
American Yearbook Company sent us a large, beautifully designed yearbook production kit that they cheekily called an “Edikit”. Clearly, they had some talented people working on it, hoping to impart some sense of good design on hapless teenagers. I could see what they were doing and took it to heart.
One of the things that influenced my budding sense of graphic design were the calendars that CCA did every year, which my uncle would send to me. There was one in particular for the year 1968 that came inside a large, bright red paperboard can with “nineteensixtyeight” wrapped around it in large, white Helvetica letters. Here’s the only photo I could find of it:
So, in my 12-year-old mind, I associated spelling out numbers (all lowercase) with cool, sophisticated graphic design.
Fast forward to 1973, and I had my first big design project, my high school yearbook. And I wanted to use every design trick I’d learned so far. I was not so much into Helvetica. It already seemed a little passé. My favorite typeface at the time was Times New Roman, which had been used to great effect in National Lampoon magazine. The NatLamp design influence is pretty obviious on some of the pages:
So, as I was developing the format for the yearbook, one of my “clever” design choices was to have all the page numbers spelled out (in lowercase, of course):
So far, so good. But it does this on every page, all the way to the end:
They must have thought I was insane. Keep in mind that this was back when typesetting machines, as far as I know, had only rudimentary ways to store keystrokes. At best, some sort of paper tape system. It horrifies me now to think how much work I made them do, just so I could have my fancy page numbers. Yet, I don’t recall the American Yearbook Company rep objecting to it.
Today, you could easily write some sort of script to get numbering spelled out like this, but back then it probably meant that some poor typesetter had to type it all in manually. And proofread it. I’d like to think that they somehow captured the keystrokes in case some other idiot had the same idea. Or maybe some other idiot already had and so it was really no trouble for them to run the job again for me.
All that aside, it was not a very good design idea anyway. Sure, it looked cool, but page numbers are meant to be read at a glance, not seen. I just shake my head, now. What a dumb idea.
Friday January 13, 2012
Filed under:
Type & Lettering
Radio
Photo taken on July 11, 2011 in Newark Valley, New York. Notice the custom 3-D effect added by the owner of this book.
Thursday January 12, 2012
Filed under:
Personal Archaeology
Big Night
I attended two events tonight.
The first was (nominally) a Type Tuesday event, but really a Minneapolis Institute of the Arts / AIGA Minnesota event: “What Fonts Say” featuring Craig Eliason, talking about where type designers get their ideas, going back to Gutenberg, and Chank Diesel, talking about where he gets his ideas. Which was fine and enjoyable.
Afterwards, we headed to the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts in Minneapolis (after stopping for gas) and attended a reunion of people who have worked for the Utne Reader, which was founded almost 30 years ago.
Not everyone who ever worked there attended, but a lot more than I expected. Some I hadn’t seen since the late 80s, when I parted ways with the magazine. Eric Utne was there, of course, but I was surprised and delighted to see so many people from the early years, when I was freelancing as its designer/art director.
Eric managed to get a bottle of 30-year-old scotch for the old-timers. First time I’ve tasted scotch in at least that long, and I’m glad he got it. I might change my mind in the morning.
I’ve got mixed feelings about my time with the Utne Reader for reasons I won’t get into, but I met the love of my life there and worked with a lot of really great people. It was a blast to see them again.
Wednesday January 11, 2012
Filed under:
Type & Lettering
Henry's Diner
Photo taken on July 17, 2011 in Burlington, Vermont. This photo has been on the lock screen of my phone pretty much since I snapped it.
Tuesday January 10, 2012
Filed under:
Font Sightings
The Coquette Bistro Wine Bar
I had one of those moments that only a type designer can have last summer during TypeCon 2011 in New Orleans. After attending a gallery reception at Mystic Blue Signs, a group of us headed on foot in search of a particular recommended restaurant that was about six blocks away. When we were almost there we spotted this:
John Downer, who was with us, immediately went inside and got us a table. Normally, we would need a reservation, but apparently the idea that the designer of the typeface Coquette had stumbled onto upon the Coquette Bistro Wine Bar amused them as much as it did us.
The other diners (besides John) were Petr van Blokland, Roger Black, Delve Withrington, Ronald Arnholm, and William Berkson. The meal was excellent, which shouldn’t have surprised us. We learned later that it was one of the top-rated restaurants in New Orleans. Anyway, it made my day.
This hand-drawn chalk sign outside was cool:
Monday January 9, 2012
Filed under:
Son of Typecasting
Revolutionary Road
I’ve heard this movie compared to Mad Men—or maybe it was the other way around. I didn’t like this as much as Mad Men. In spite of great characters and great acting (the neighbors’ crazy son was great), and beautiful photography, it just didn’t do much for me. The principle characters, a married couple played by Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio, have two kids, but the kids might as well have been played by extras and barely appear in the movie. Maybe it was intentional and meaningful, but it seemed weird.
Anyway, you probably don’t come here for my review (the movie’s a few years old after all). You came for the dirt on the typographical props.
The movie is set in 1955, so there’s lots of opportunities to get things wrong. It wasn’t too bad for the most part—a lot like Mad Men in fact. The general effect is good and authentic, but things kind of fall apart in the close ups, especially in HD. (The prop people must hate HD.) Magazines look like what they are—fifty-year-old magazines. Same with other vintage ephemera. There didn’t seem to be a lot of typographic props made for the movie. I did catch one klinker, a “for sale” sign:
That’s ITC Garamond (1976) and Helvetica (1959). Did I mention the music was pretty?
Sunday January 8, 2012
Filed under:
Personal Archaeology
Type History
My First-Published Type-Related Article
I was going through some old papers today and found this:
It’s a short article I wrote that appeared in the November 1967 issue of Town Views, the student newspaper at the elementary school I attended. I was 11 years old at the time.
As I recall, I heard about the interabang* from a newsletter my dad used to bring home from work. It was published by Falk, an industrial company that made forklifts or something. But always had interesting topics. I remember seeing M.C. Escher’s work for the first time in one issue.
Seeing this again I realized it’s probably the first type-related thing I ever wrote. I’m sure at the time I just thought it was interesting.
*This is an alternate and apparently older spelling that still appears in some dictionaries—usually it’s spelled “interrobang” today.
Saturday January 7, 2012
Filed under:
Type & Lettering
Avant Garde Swash?
While I was visiting Omaha this past summer (I spoke and did a workshop for AIGA Nebraska), I spotted this curious bit of typographic design:
Looks like the artist was going for a Lubalin-style solution—Avant Garde with Swashes. It’s attractive, but not very easy to read, especially the “g”.
I wonder how long it’s been in use? I can’t decide if this is a design from the seventies or eighties, or if it’s a recent design imitating that period. I’m leaning toward the former, mainly because of the Optima.
Friday January 6, 2012
Filed under:
Recent Work
Technique
Not Coming to a Theater Near You
Last year, I did a logo design for Not Coming to A Theater Near You, a website devoted to movies off the beaten path. The designer, Rumsey Taylor, who was redoing the look of the entire site, wanted the logo to look like a title card from a film noire feature. What I came up with is based mainly on the title card from “Mr. Arkadin” (1955).
In spite of appearances, I don’t usually use an actual brush in my lettering designs, but in this case I did. The final art is vector-based, but I worked out the construction of the letters with brush and ink. (I’m not skilled enough at brush lettering to do the final art that way.)
The image above is a “treatment” I did to make it look like an actual title card from an old film, sort of a “serving suggestion.” On the wesite, Rumsey chose a simpler approach. The site redesign looks great, and I was happy to see that he’s using Metallophile Sp8 as a webfont (via Typekit).