Mark’s Notebook - Page 40

Just arrived in Boston yesterday for TypeCon 2006. While walking along the famous Freedom Trail, I snapped this photo of a great vintage sign. Scooby seems to like it, too. (By the way, if you walk on the Freedom Trail the wrong direction, should it be called the Tyranny Trail?)

Update, Febrary 2013: I never got around to writing more about TypeCon 2006. Sorry about that. It was pretty great. I did a short presentation about Adrian Frutiger (who was awarded the SOTA Award that year) and the folks from Bitstream did a musical number about Bitstream typefaces in the fashion of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Lettering on the back of an antique cardboard chess board. Discovered in a yard sale, St. Paul, Minnesota, summer 2005.

I recently completed work on a lettering design for the front of a building in Ketchikan, Alaska. The letterforms were based loosely on historical examples from the area. Traditionally, sign makers would fill as much space as possible, using the slats or runs of bricks as a grid on which to build the letters. The shapes of the letters themselves, while following standard styles and practices, often displayed idiosyncrasies unique to each sign maker, unlike today when most such signs are made with off-the-shelf fonts, typed on a computer keyboard, and “output” to a vinyl cutter.

Although I do my final artwork electronically, the letters were designed from scratch with paper and pencil. The finished design was sent to Ketchikan where local sign painters (above) applied my design to the building using traditional techniques—real paint and real brushes. According to the client, the sign has become a “photo op” for tourists.

(Photos courtesy Deby Slagle, Alaska Fish House. Used with permission.)

Yesterday afternoon I went to a packed rock concert with my daughter at the new Minneapolis Public Library. You read that right: a rock concert in a library. The band was Harry and the Potters who, if you have never heard of them, pretend to be Harry Potter (two of them) and play songs inspired by characters and situations in the famous books. (That’s “Bill Weasley” on drums.) The warm up act was Draco and the Malfoys (what else?), who advised the audience that there was no point in staying once they finished. Both bands were very fun, very loud, and very punk rock. Fans do amazing things sometimes.

The 42 members of the Proxima Nova family get a real workout in What’s On TV, the best-selling magazine in the UK. Virtually all the type in the magazine is set in Proxima Nova, from the headlines on the cover to the tiny, densely-packed text in the radio and TV listings section. It’s all part of a recent redesign of the magazine, and, according to one of the designers, the reaction from readers has been positive. The magazine also requested a new weight—halfway between Regular and Semibold—which I may release to the public at some point.

Reader Egemen Sentin wrote to point out an odd coincidence he noticed on the “How to Spot Arial” page: “The first four characters (a, t, c and g) that you chose for distinguishing between fonts Arial, Helvetica and Grotesque are also the first letters of the four bases of DNA, adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine – proof that fonts have genes!”