This typeface will repeat on you
Only proper type geeks know the pang of spotting a spanky new typeface and not being able to play with it like, straight away cause it’s too expensive or custom made or whatever. Replica had me converting Swiss Francs seconds after spotting it on the Lineto website [lineto.com/Replica]. It’s by the fine folk with the annoying website called Norm [norm.to] is rigourously designed and has the potential to knock Akkurat off it’s throne. Other recent typeface releases worth investigating: Facebuster [typetrust.com], StagDot (even though it is literally the Guardian’s [markboulton.co.uk] typeface in dot form) [vllg.com/Schwartzco/StagDot] and Doodeka [fontstruct.fontshop.com/doodeka].
What’s Up #35: Jarrik Muller
Typography is my aeroplane. I think it may be Jarrik Muller’s too [getbusyfoklazy.web-log.nl], in which case he ain’t never coming down cause this stuff is delirious fun. The image below is from a submission for Rojo [rojo-magazine.com] magazine. His foliosite is divided in two to separate out personal projects and study projects. Not so lazy then, really.
What’s Up #34: Ludovic Balland
Ludovic Balland’s foliosite [ludovic-balland.ch] is almost, completely monochrome which highlights how bold his studio’s typographic vision is. To achieve this they’re not only manipulating existing typefaces in new and exciting ways but also creating new typefaces from old (or from scratch). If you are looking for a sample of his studio’s more exciting work, seek out the compendium they produced for the 5th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art [bb5.berlinbiennial.de] entitled ‘When Things Cast No Shadow’ [jrp-ringier.com], where a crazy cast of typefaces that should be jostling for attention are roped into order with surprising results.
As a sidenote jrp | ringer are also the publishing house behind Ezra Petronio and Suzanne Koller’s forthcoming (and rather expensive) monograph [jrp-ringier.com]. You may know them better as Work In Progress [petronioassociatesblog.com].
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What’s Up #33: Claire McManus
Claire McManus [ampersand8.co.uk] is super busy. Currently installed as part of the talented team at the AA (Architectural Association) Print Studio [aaschool.ac.uk], working with Mr Zak Kyes [www.zak.to] and Mr Wayne Daly [waynedaly.com], she’s been producing all manner of sparkling typographic treatments for various AA events and activities (including their end of year show, the AA Projects Review [aaschool.ac.uk/publications]). She’s also pointed Boicozine in the direction of a couple of bits and bytes that may be of interest to you, dear reader, such as this rad ‘documents folder’ [25togo.com] and, more importantly, in case (like me) you didn’t realise it was under threat, a petition to save the Type Museum from closure [petitions.pm.gov.uk/typemuseum].
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What’s Up #31: Fanette Mellier
Fanette Mellier [fanettemellier.com] has just completed her residency in Chaumont as part of the annual Festival International de l’Affiche et du Graphisme de Chaumont 2008 (they could think of a snappier title huh). She has also been putting the finishing touches on an ace new identity for the Parc Saint Leger Contemporary Art Centre [parcsaintleger.fr]. It’s modular and multi-faceted, comes in a variety of colours or in basic black and has a rather nifty set of punctuation that ties in with the geometric shapes that make up the custom display typeface which you can see above. Further proof that France is kicking serious graphic butt with this latest generation of creative types.
N or M?
Anyone who has followed Boicozine since way back when will know I’m a massive fan of Tom Adams’s [tomadamsuncovered.co.uk] work on Agatha Christie books around the middle of last century. As far as this author’s concerned, they have never been bettered. The Agatha Christie series has been redressed innumerable times since the books were originally conceived. The latest batch of cover designs by David Wardle [designedbydavid.co.uk] are still not a patch on ‘the Adams’ but do add an interesting twist to the cannon. The big change is that they are primarily typographic covers, with individually rendered type styles created to suit each book. Although many seem to be a little too ‘jolly’ for my liking, they are a vast improvement on the blurry photographic style covers they are replacing and should be of interest to type freaks the world over.
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The Trouble with Typography
This is a re-post from March last year, but I didn’t want to bury it in the Boicozine archive because, a year on, it’s still just as relevent especially after reading this… [aestheticrew.com]. So the typeface licensing debate goes on, only it looks like foundries will have to to go the way of record companies and film studios soon if they don’t pick up their game. Here’s how it ran last year… Today’s topic for discussion, ‘Typography is in trouble’, and not just any sort of trouble but serious trouble of the most heinous kind… and possibly something to do with extinction as well. This is due to three distinct factors which I shall endeavour to introduce here, one by one: The rise of the Photoshop Monkey, Internet Browsers and the Type Foundries themselves.
Photoshop is easy. That’s why people love it. It can do some crazy stuff for you but if are designing most of your work in Photoshop then you shouldn’t really be designing at all. Does that sound harsh? Have a look around at the visual noise you see everyday. Have a look at any effects laden website disaster [smashingmagazine.com]. Have a look at any recent Movie Poster [impawards.com]. Many of these Photoshop Monkeys will lazily pick through their existing font menu and use whatever is pre-installed on their computer rather than seeking out the most appropriate or well drawn typeface for the job. Either that or lazy marketing hacks (who love manipulating Photoshop Monkeys cause they can’t argue their case as well as fully fledged Graphoes) will specify a typeface simply because they have it on their PC and, therefore know what it’s called and what it looks like. In this case familiarity doesn’t breed contempt, just laziness.
The website you are looking at has the ability to display any typeface you’d like to specify. In fact, any website that employs Cascading Style Sheets [wikipedia] has been able to do this for ages now. Problem is your Browser can’t (well, IE4 could but this doesn’t really help much — Note: it’s back in Safari 3.1, see link above) [msdn.microsoft.com]. Could be developers just decided embedding fonts was unnecessary when you had a least five typefaces to choose from already. For the developer that finds typefaces a frivolous waste of resources you can already specify them as simply ’serif’, ’sans-serif’, ‘monospace’, ‘cursive’ and, ‘fantasy’ (!?). The other possible reason leads us to our third set of culprits in our ‘death of typography’ scenario…
Typefaces are expensive. Well, most good ones are. They can take a long, long, time to put together or require the sort of slight of hand only a handful of type experts can deliver. Typefaces need to be less expensive. Compare them to your average consumer product. Pretend you are shopping on your local high street or shopping mall or whatever and Woolworths now have a typeface aisle. Should I get Children of Men on DVD for £15 pounds or buy Berthold’s new OpenType version of Akzidenz Grotesk for £230 [bertholdtypes.com]? Sure, it’s a loose analogy but none of these type foundries seem to want to admit that many of the decisions regarding typefaces are being taken out of the hands of your traditional design professionals. People being free to create their own types of media (be it a blog, or a blurb book [blurb.com], or a myspace profile etc) means decisions on what typefaces to use are being made by more and more people. Typefaces are mass media. So why do they continue to be marketed to a select few. Surely, there’s some educating to be done on both sides of the fence here.
There are real solutions to this dilemma. Possibly, the best way to solve it is to separate typefaces into two distinct areas. The ‘bite-size’ chunkette [wired.com/snack_attack] and the Deluxe (or Professional) edition. For a typeface to be popular, all it really only needs is four fonts (this is what you should be calling a singular version of a typeface [typophile.com/wiki]), the Regular, the Italic, the Bold and the Bold Italic. That’s your basic package right there. Now all you have to do is market it like the delicious collectable eye-candy that it is and you’re away. The way the web is, this should get people chopping and changing fonts like crazy. The thing to remember is, that like candy, this is only the cheap substitute to the real meal (and you and I know that it’s okay to snack between meals but never substitute your dinner for candy). That’s where the Pro version comes in and the big cash money comes out. Whaddya think? It’s time to stop edging around the consumer and dive straight in. Now which foundry is going to be first to test the water?
Update: And so it begins: [fonts.info]
Further Reading on the Trouble with Typography:
The unfortunate death of Helvetica
[designbyfire.com/31]
Web Design is 95% Typography (Part 1)
[informationarchitects.jp/the-web-is-all-about-typography-period]
Web Design is 95% Typography (Part 2)
[informationarchitects.jp/webdesign-is-95-typography-partii]
Bizarre Bazaar
Around 1969, British Harper’s Bazaar [paperpursuits.com] had a bit of an identity crisis. It only lasted for a year and a bit, the outcome of which saw it merge with it’s main competitor, Queen magazine [wikipedia], to become Harper’s & Queen [vinmag.com]. But before this weird hybrid mag was born, they did some really interesting ‘messing about’ with the Bazaar identity. Looking very Biba [bibaexperience.com], even the masthead was dramatically redrawn in a sort of 60s/20s homage to Art Deco. Sans serifs were employed throughout in the magazine, which was rare for a fashion magazine at the time, namely Gill Sans.
A few years ago, I worked on the ‘Girl’ issue of a London-based music and lifestyle, and was so inspired by this 1969 edition of British Bazaar that I had a crack at building the typeface myself. It was only ever used for this special edition of the magazine and has been languishing on my hard drive ever since… until now. It’s not for sale because it’s unfinished but here’s a beta version of the ExtraLight weight available for free download for you to muck about with. Let me know what you think.
[ Download Bazaar ExtraLight Beta ]
Morph into Schwartzco
You may not have heard the name Christian Schwartz [christianschwartz.com], but it’s a safe bet you will have seen his one of his many typefaces. You don’t have to go far to find them either. The Guardian [guardian.co.uk] is a good place to start as is Wallpaper [wallpaper.com] whose masthead is purloined from a Schwartz typeface known as Amplitude [fontbureau.com]. Their recent redesign completes the picture, utilising a new sans serif called Graphik throughout the magazine. Creative Review [creativereview.co.uk/crblog] now utilises a Schwartz original called Farnham. If you’ve ever used the German public transport system Deutsche Bahn AG [bahn.de], you may have noticed a recent collaboration with Erik Spiekermann [spiekermann.com] developed as part of their new identity. Schwartz has even helped brand the Empire State Building [esbnyc.com]. Anyhoo, the whole reason for this post is to point out that Mr Schwartz has now rebranding his studio as Schwartzco, where you can peruse the folio of one of histories most prolific typeface designers. It’s top.
Rant: The Difference Between
Uettbein? & Wellbeing
The rise of the ‘logo designer’ is an interesting phenomenon. The logo designer is freed from the shackles of ordinary graphic design conventions. They actively shirk the responsibility of creating cohesive and rigourously designed visual identities in favour of creating mere stamps for clients to stick wherever they please. I imagine it’s quite an easy life, doling out logos like bites of candy (expensive candy, some logo designers may charge up to £600 for said ‘mere stamp’ without having to worry about implementation or ‘after sales care’). In the case of Gareth Howell’s ‘Optical Pleasure’ [opticalpleasure.co.uk] you don’t even have to bother with generating your own ideas for said logos. Just visit a website you like, grab a bit of artwork and away you go.
Am I sounding a little sarky? You might too is you opened up Computer Arts magazine [computerarts.co.uk] and saw you’re own original carefully considered artwork (in this case a typeface) with someone else’s name under it… and reworked so badly. In the image below, the top graphic is Gareth’s butchered rendition of the word ‘wellbeing’ which actually reads something like ‘Uettbein?’; in the middle there is the graphic posted on my foliosite which I guessing he used to make said logo and below is how the logo should have looked had Gareth actually had the ‘Bubbleblock’ typeface and used the letters correctly.
Gareth’s biggest blunder was mistaking a typeface for straight artwork. The typeface in question, Bubbleblock, is still in development and he could have asked for a Beta version which I have been gingerly distributing to a handful of fellow designers to see if it’s any good (it also comes with a legal notice outlining terms of use which Gareth’s wellbeing logo has breached). If you’d like a version of the Bubbleblock typeface, email [michael at boico.net] and if you’re especially nice I’ll email you back a Beta Test version for you to have a play with… then we can all start to create logos as special as the one Gareth has chosen to fling out into the world (well, into Swansea anyways).
At the risk of sounding like an accident insurance advert… have you had your work right royally ripped off (and I don’t just mean ‘re-appropriated’) by a another so-called ‘creative’? If so and you feel the need to vent, send us examples and we’ll post the best… er, most well jusified examples up here on Boicozine or just repeat after me… out with anger, in with love, out with anger, in with love…
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