Ace Jet 170

Future Futura

Work-in-progress on Typophile: Randy's tinkering with Futura.

Stroudley

    

Is it just me or can you count the number of really useful condensed Sans Serifs on one hand and have fingers left over to add the number of readable scripts?* Unfair? Let's try it...so there's, er...Frutiger Condensed, Univers Condensed (of course)...(Helvetica Condensed doesn't count, why would you want to use Helvetica Condensed? Helvetica, yes, but Helvetica Condensed?) So back to the count...Franklin Gothic Condensed is good but it is a bit, well, "last century". I rather like Amplitude Condensed but, conversely, it's a bit "now" really. And although I really like Myriad, it's condensed version looks a tad squashed to me. Of course now, thanks to DaMa there's Stroudley, which fell through the door along with their latest batch of excellent type specimens.

* Feel free to put me right. In fact, I wish you would. Prove me wrong.

TypeHype

A year in development, Alex from Thinkdust has just launched HypeForType, a new independent type foundry set up to champion "original and completely new typefaces". And what's more, he lives in Beeston, where me'old mate Pete used to live...whatever happended to Pete?...

...anyway, new fonts. Find out more here.

 

Maagfest

So, on Wednesday night Bruno Maag made a return appearance at UU as part of the Art and Design Fest linked to the Degree Shows. Particularly pleased to see him (I couldn't make it last time) off I trotted and what a treat it was; Bruno's infectious enthusiasm and opinionations make for a fascinating and entertaining talk.

Now, being a bloke and only able to do one thing at a time I didn't take notes, choosing to take photos instead so although this might be a bit disjointed what I thought I'd do here is provide annotations for some of the pics and just hope that the points are interesting enough. I doubt it will do justice to a vibrant and funny talk, and it will certainly skirt around some crucial points Bruno made to the largely student audience about the importance of craft and attention to detail. 

The talk didn't kick off with that picture of Adolf et al having a knees-up in their lederhosen but it's a corker isn't it? The future Führer doesn't look too happy with his flower arrangement. Bruno used it to accompany a point about the Nazis mastery of branding.

Other Maagisms included: Why does Subway insist on telling you who they are three times? If that restaurant can't be bothered to include the crucial full point in their price, what can you expect from their food? Helvetica is not Johnston. Never trust a bank that uses VAG. And, one hour's work makes the Jonathon Saunders logotype 100 times better. Those weird diagrams, that look like something from Archigram, show letterforms being hinted (which I still don't understand) and (thank God!) Southampton is considerably more legible than it used to be.

      

Effra

Design Week readers will probably have found one of these dropping out of last week's edition. Now with the recent addition of a full set of italics (not featured on the specimen but detailed online) Effra feels, to me at least, to be kind of Gotham-esque but perhaps a little warmer/less perfect (in a good way). Anyway, it's timely because the Maagster returns to Belfast this week to talk at UU again, as part of the Ulster Festival of Art and Design. I missed him last time so I'm really looking forward to it. He's on at 7pm, I presume in the usual place and it's a mere £4 to get in.

    

Mrs Eaves RIP?

Has everyone got their Mrs Eaves XL type specimen? Lovely. I really like the way Emigre produce their type specimens, very much in the style of a traditional specimen, only with an almost indiscernible something that is exclusively theirs. So indiscernible (if indiscernability can be measured by degrees, which it probably can't) that I'm unable to tell you what that something is. But it's there...somewhere.

It's lovely. But...I'm not actually sure about XL. Is it just me or does the increase in x-height kind of destroy a fundamental aspect that makes Mrs Eaves Mrs Eaves? Yes, OK, 8/10pt XL is way more legible than it's original equivalent but haven't we just ended up with a different font? Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Licko and have enjoyed using the future Mrs Baskerville many times, but as the comparison pages show, the original's low x-height is a characteristic that defines the font.

I'm terribly sorry for even thinking this and perhaps I'm about to be very unfair but the new font reminds me of Mr Beirut's dreaded ITC Garamond (not that it actually looks like it but just that the original:new-version shift is similar to what happened to Garamond once Tony Stan got his mits on it) what with it's lower-cases trying so hard to look all grown up. Booo, unfair! I hear you cry...and you'd probably be right. Give me a week and I'll be using XL on everything.

    

It Lives!

The Return of the King.

FrugalMaag

Has everyone (in the UK) been saving the DaltonMaag inserts from Design Week? Designed, as ever, by North I think they have a wonderfully frugal quality. No unnecessarily lavish production here, each is printed just black and one (lovely) key colour on thin recycled paper and folded down to a less than usual size. Minimum means but masterful effect: they're thoroughly informative.

  

   

   

Space

 

Way back in 1991 I was lucky enough to get along to what must have been one of the last Monotype Conferences. The stand-out speaker was Jost Hochuli who talked about Micro-typography or Good typography through detail. At the time I worked with a small team of designers who valued their production skills highly. We all had backgrounds in what used to be called "finished art" and had started out, mostly, in pre-Mac days. "The details" were important to us but as younger designers joined we became conscious of a need to manage standards. So I compiled guidelines for our working practices, which included extensive composition rules. 

Tschichold's Rules for Penguin played a large part (they'd been reproduced in Ruari McLean's book Jan Tschichold, typographer) but there was other material drawn in from various sources: Stanley Morison's First Principles of Typography, Vincent Stear's Printing, Design and Layout, to name just a couple, and significantly, Hochuli's talk at the conference.

It was just what we needed in those days when we were still trying to work out all the things we needed to know, the things that the typesetter used to take care of. And now, thankfully, everything he covered is covered in his beautiful book Detail in typography: all the finer points of letter, word and line spacing that I hope is, largely thanks to Hochuli, second nature to me know.

This is the first English edition of the recently extended and updated edition.

 

Clever or Crap?

I can't decide. As soon as I saw it I began to feel uneasy. Horizontally scaled type? Arial? A cold shudder down my spine...but then, perhaps that's just what Lippa wanted...

"The rationale behind Lippa's design rests on the idea that the reputation and prestige of the awards is already well established. His use of no-nonsense typographic slogans and a pared-down graphic approach is aimed at encouraging participation, creating a straight-talking, witty identity that challenges the viewer to get involved."

Encouraging participation? In a, "I could do better" kind of way?

Is it jumping on an ugly-type bandwagon?

Back to basics or just Back to bad?

You see, I can't decide.