Mark’s Notebook - Page 39

As you may be able to tell by my sporadic Notebook postings of late, I’ve been a very busy guy. Some of the things I’ve been working on I can’t talk about (yet).

One of the things I can talk about is three new fonts I will be releasing in the near future. All three were inspired by hand lettered titles in 1940s films.

Kinescope and Snicker are loosely based on title lettering in Fleischer Studio’s animated Superman films from the forties.

In both fonts I’ve ended up with something a bit different than the source of my inspiration, but I think you can see the resemblance.

Kinescope will include context-sensitive characters. For example, when a letter falls at the end of a word, the connecting stroke is clipped off. This gives settings a more natural hand-lettered look. Stylistically, Kinescope falls somewhere between Brush Script and Kaufmann Script, but more elegant than either.

Snicker is a cartoony block letter style. One of the design challenges with Snicker was to come up with a suitable lowercase—the lettering in the Fleischer titles that inspired me only used capitals. Although it is intended for display sizes, it works pretty well for text. Consequently, I’m toying with the idea of adding a lighter weight and italics. It could perhaps become a typographically interesting alternative to Comic Sans…

The third font, Launderette, is based closely on lettering used in the titles of the 1944 Otto Preminger film, Laura:

This font was originally commissioned by a filmmaker who wanted to use the same “font” in the titles of his own film. As with most films of that time, the titles were hand-lettered by an artist, not typeset.

The challenge with this font was that there were very few characters in the source lettering. Most of the characters had to be created from scratch to match the style of the existing ones. Launderette, like Kinescope, will have context-sensitive characters to give it a custom, hand-lettered look.

I hope to release these new fonts by the end of the year.

Update: Kinescope and Snicker have now been released (April 30, 2007). Unfortunately, the name Landerette was already in use (twice!), so I changed it to Lakeside. Lakeside has also been released (February 7, 2008).

What are the odds that a guy with a bass drum walks past the Holcomb-Henry-Boom Funeral Home on Snelling Avenue in Saint Paul while I’m stuck at a stop light and happen to have a camera with me? One out of one, apparently.

Dimensional letters seen on a building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, August 8, 2006.

Fellow font guy Stuart Sandler and his partner, Mike Ibach, have launched a new online font venue called Font Bros. The site has some of the same retro look as Stuart’s older Font Diner site, but unlike Font Diner, it offers a hand-picked selection of display faces from a dozen or so independent foundries (including Mark Simonson Studio).

The range of styles covers the whole gamut of type and lettering genres, not just retro. Some of the fonts (like Michael Doret’s amazing Metroscript) are brand new. They are also in the process of remastering the formerly freeware Fontalicious library, bringing it up to professional quality standards.

So, go check it out. It’s pretty cool. www.fontbros.com

Earlier this year, I completed a lettering assignment for the cover of “Stewardess,” a book by Chronicle Books, which was just published. Designer Ben Shaykin came up with the idea of doing a take off (!) on the old Skyway Luggage logo.

It can be tricky to get things like this to work if you don’t have the right letters, or too many or few letters. It can also be tricky to come up with the letters that didn’t exist in the original logo. In this case, the style was a straightforward script. It would be conceivable to base an entire font on this style, which is not always the case with logos.

I’m happy with the way it turned out. The book itself is a lot of fun to look at (it’s mostly a picture book) and is getting positive reviews.

Some time in the last year or so, I bought, through Amazon Books, Paula Scher’s book Make It Bigger, a beautiful overview of her outstanding career as a graphic designer. If you’ve ordered books through Amazon and haven’t opted out of their periodic mailings, you regularly get recommendations for other books in which you might be interested, based on your previous purchases. It usually comes up with reasonable suggestions, but take a look at the one I received the other day:

We’ve noticed that customers who have purchased books by Paula Scher often purchased books by Peter Hall. For this reason you might like to know that Peter Hall’s newest book, Understanding Disease: A Centenary Celebration of the Pathological Society, will be released soon. You can pre-order your copy by following the link below.

I guess there must be more than one author named Peter Hall.