I Heart Type

A New Life

2011-01-19T07:26:00.001-08:00

Yessss! My blog is finally (after a zillion years of not having this capability on any of my sites) incorporated into The Letter Office's site!

Visit us!

2011 Resolution: Post Sketches!

2011-01-08T06:27:00.000-08:00

Function Following Form

2010-10-28T05:50:00.000-07:00

By the always-fantastic Oslo Davis

've touched on this before, in my post about my love of libraries, but the recent influx of opinions and analyses regarding content for e-readers compelled me to throw in my two cents.

The biggest problem with e-readers—which is to say, devices specifically formatted for reading books and publications, since the iPad has other uses as well—is that they are a product designed for the makers' gain, not the users'.

The publishing industry did not start to sink because readers thought carrying a book with them made their bags too heavy, or that they wanted more of a variety for their daily commute, or because they thought that books and magazines simply took up too much space in their houses. Book and magazine content is not music, despite the repeated and stubborn attempts to make their futures synonymous.

As Khoi Vinh (former design director at the New York Times) touches on in his recent article, e-reader manufacturers and those they charged with populating the machines with content, are barking up the wrong tree. As long as they continue to attempt to make e-readers a substitute for print, they will continue to fail. Take, for example, the number of articles alone dedicated to screen lighting, typography, and note-taking—all aspects of books that simply aren't an issue in print. Their attempts to create a machine that somehow bests the traditional medium only gives them more problems to try to solve.

The promise that e-readers are somehow going to save publishing stems from one thing: advertising dollars. Periodicals are folding by the day, and the primary instigator of that is a massive loss of revenue to digital platforms. Fine, conceded. But the knee-jerk reaction that seems to be the impetus for the advent of e-readers—make periodicals digital too—seems creepily like allowing the client to art direct the format.

As for book publishing, there were far more, less transparent issues at play. Brick-and-mortar mega bookstores took over the industry, got too big, diversified their inventory too much (by adding music and cafes and toys and Christmas gifts and Burt's Bees hand cream and, as my mother-in-law calls them, "books for people who don't read".) And then they were shocked when the recession hit and this model of business was not only unprofitable, it is unsustainable.

In another instance of relinquishing creative control to the client, mega bookstores then bullied their ways into publishers' marketing departments, dictating everything from content they would and would not carry or support, to the design of book jackets. (Ever wonder why 50% of literature written by women now seems to sport a pink, sparkly high heel on the cover?) And now we find that the retail cost of e-books is nearly on par with their printed versions, making it even more obvious that this is about making publishers money, not expanding or improving the publishing industry. Publishers=1, Writers, Printers, and Everyone Else=0.

I've digressed. But the point is, e-reader manufacturers can continue to thrust the 'problem' (there was no problem with books or magazines as formats) into the hands of otherwise very capable innovators. But until they sort out what that problem ever was, they will likely never find a solution.

A Letter I Have Written...

2010-09-14T07:29:00.000-07:00

...And Really Want To Send To This One Copy Editor:

Dear XX,

I feel compelled to write you after what was truly a frustrating and demoralizing process of working with you on this [project]. While I respect your expertise as a copywriter, it seemed time and again throughout the process that you assumed a responsibility to art direct my work, rather than respecting the established team in place — my creative director included.

Your utterly unconstructive comments, "this isn't doing it for me" and "reminds me of a brochure" not only dismissed the creative decisions we make as professional designers, but put us in the uncomfortable position of trying to ascertain what was actually legitimate critique and what was coming from your own aesthetic and/or assumption of control over the creative process. Following up that drivel with notes like, "Looks great!!!!" only added to the condescension.

Unfortunately I am working within an organization that does not value its creative staff; under better circumstances, my defense of my work and the reasoning behind the typographic and other visual decisions I make would not have been trumped by your uninformed commentary, all of which has ultimately led to the mediocre and compromised result we are sending to print today.

I'm writing because I suspect that throughout your career, designers like me have also wanted to tell you precisely what I have, but have lacked the ability, position, or confidence to do so. Or perhaps they have more tact, which is certainly more than we, as designers, can say for writers like you.

New Kids and the Block

2010-05-12T14:02:00.000-07:00

Young designers!

I hate to pin this all on you -- surely we have more experienced culprits too -- but this trend is really wearing thin. It's an understandable reaction when one discovers type, to experiment with removing counters, exploring width and legibility, constructing alphabets out of a single geometric shape, and asking 'what makes a letter a letter?'

But it's important to note that these types of typographic experiments were kinda already nailed in the beginnings of the last century during Dada, deStijl, Bauhaus, Russian Constructivism... with (usually) a much higher level of craft and meaning. It's great to explore these things for yourselves, but passing them off to clients is a little embarrassing in their lack of substance and seeming naivete about the history of type.

At the very least, this level of trendiness lacks longevity, and is obviously played out. I collected a few of these to show some students, but I think I'm just going to start screen-grabbing them until we've exhausted their ubiquity. I like to beat points to death like that.

How to Design a Book: A Type 102 Review

2010-04-04T08:48:00.000-07:00

was excited for the arrival of Tony Brook and Adrian Shaughnessy's new book, Studio Culture: The secret life of the graphic design studio. The book is a collection of essays and interviews written by some of the world's most revered design studios on what they believe to be the most important and integral aspects of their own studios, as well as their observations on what doesn't make for a positive, collaborative space.

I picked up my package at the post office and tore it open on my walk to the subway. Finding a seat on the train, I settled in to the first page (I read everything, especially in design books, starting at looking at the binding and endpapers, and moving on to one of my favorite parts, the imprints page.)

But an uneasy feeling came over me from the very start: the title page was barren, with its information pushed in to the top right corner. Moving on to the acknowledgements, I saw the text was treated much the same way, only worse, because being on a left-hand page the text was now being pushed toward the gutter. Further on to the contents page, I immediately noticed a weird affectation of two long em-dashes, (— —) rather than one en-dash, ( – ) serving as page ranges. Flipping swiftly on to the next page and the next, I started to get irritated at all of the type and layout.

Did an architect lay this out? I wondered. But no, the designers are quite awesome designers — albeit primarily known for their striking posters — working in whatever we're calling neo-Modernism these days. But it seems like nearly all of the design decisions made ignored the essentials of book layout in favor of a "cool" aesthetic. Here's the bottom line: I could not read this book on the subway. The type and structure of this book is such that you'd better be sitting motionless in natural, or under flourescent light to read it. I teach typography, so naturally the teacher in me kicked in and, having nothing else to do for the rest of my train ride, I composed this, a Typography 102 Review For Designers.

Typographic Color
This term does not get nearly enough attention, perhaps because a lot of designers don't quite understand what it means. Typographic color refers to the range of white – black values on a page. In a block of text, it's the amount of black we perceive; a range of color is achieved through stroke contrast of the type itself (which gives density to the letterforms,) the type's width, weight and point size, and how tightly or loosely one sets the leading.

Below is the same text. On the left is Gotham Thin — a sans serif with low stroke contrast — and on the right is Janson. They're set at the same point size and leading, but you can see how the right column is "darker". If we adjusted the scale, leading, and/or weight, we would see an even greater difference.

In Studio Culture, not only is there very little typographic color, the type is set in a warm gray spot, lowering the contrast even more. Combined with an incredibly small point size, on light gray paper, even those with good vision will strain to read. Other pages have text knocked out of the gray color, which may be nice to read on screen, but can be laborious on a page. Overall we have a lot of gray pages.

Scale and Contrast

As Ellen Lupton says, clients tend to like type too big; designers tend to prefer type too small. Generally speaking she's right, but I would qualify this by saying designers appreciate scale (we also like HUGE type!) and we also like proportion. Studio Culture's type — dare I say it — is too small. I'm certainly not saying that 8pt type (I can't tell if that's what it is, but I'm guessing) is always too small; in fact I think that's often a nice point size for body text. But this typeface has no stroke contrast, it's gray, the leading is tight, the pages have very small top and bottom margins, and the column widths are short. All recipes for too much samey-same. Captions are even smaller.

Typeface Selection

A lot of the problems mentioned above would not be problems if a suitable font had been chosen. It was not. Optimo Hermes was evidently based on a 1969 typewriter face, but something tells me it was not cut this small. Being a typewriter face, it's also monospaced (eliminating, yet again, even more contrast, since we have cut out width variation.) The letterspacing overall is poor, with lots and lots of bad kerns happening, as well as an awkward lack of ligatures. In blocks of text, it is difficult to distinguish an o from an a; when knocked out of the gray the thinner stroke of the apostrophe and quote marks nearly falls out completely.

Page Structure and Other Considerations

The grid is a fairly standard two-column affair, and that's fine, but the only breathing room we're given as readers is that typically only three of the four columns in a spread are used. The margins, as mentioned above, are tight around all edges, which could work if headers or interview questions or whatever were treated in a different way (they are actually just lighter than the body text, which makes one drawn to the answer first and the question second.)

Also employed is many a type nerd's pet peeve: no hyphenation. So now we have a crazy right rag in a tight column, so keeping your eye on the line, yet again, is a problem.

The pages that do feature imagery are also too samey-same, so that when flipping through the book I've no idea which section I'm in. Each new section begins with a left-hand duotone image in the spot plus black, but they are quite dark and do not illuminate (pun intented) what are obviously pictures of bright and sunny studio spaces. The images that accompany the text are mostly quite small, and if this was because of a page limit I think there could have been much nicer ways to handle this. Instead it seems like they could only get 72 dpi images or something — I want to see these studio spaces!

Good Things

From what I have read so far, the texts are quite good, and would be incredibly engaging if I weren't so distracted by all of the above. With the exception of some glaring proofreader misses ('then' instead of 'than', twice in the same paragraph; 'I' instead of 'me') the interviews are personable and honest.

Frankly, if this were another design book with big pretty pictures with supporting text, rather than a book I'm meant to read, I would not have spent my whole morning writing this post. I'd flip through and look at the pictures and peruse the diminutive captions at will. But I really want to read this book, and I eventually will. I just wish I weren't wishing for the Kindle version.

On Process (What's new?)

2010-03-29T14:05:00.000-07:00

Here's a good litmus test to assess how good your process is at your place of (design) work:

Write a paragraph or two describing how your project evolved, from its initial concepts to its end result, without writing anything about client changes.

In theory, the work you've produced should still be sound, with its foundation rooted in a solid idea, supported by a framework of visual aesthetics that reinforce it. If the result you've produced is a bit weak, has holes in its ideas, or relies primarily on a visual style to communicate -- well that sounds like compromises in the process were made.

The exercise will allow you to see where exactly that happened in your process, and will help you to avoid those potholes next time.

It's Funny 'Cause It's True.

2010-01-08T06:10:00.001-08:00

The Don Draper Privilege

2010-01-05T07:10:00.000-08:00

he late, great Lou Dorfsman once said, "there's no such thing as boring design projects, just boring designers." Don Draper underscored this sentiment in the last season of Mad Men when he said, "a lot of creatives will tell you clients get in the way of good work...that's never been my experience" — a not-so-subtle jab at creatives who find their best intentions at the mercy of The Client — and a not-so-subtle pat on his own back. It's as if these two men—both of whom were creative directors in the '60s (albeit deceased and fictional, respectively)—believe that if a client undermines the direction, process or concept you've presented, it wasn't a strong enough idea to begin with. Surely no client could ever resist the genius of Don Draper! (No, really.)

But in design today, these cut-and-dry notions become much more complex. What Dorfsman was innocently trying to say, of course, was that every project a designer is given should be approached with a sense of freshness and importance, no matter how mundane it may seem. He worked his way up to become Creative Director and Vice President at CBS, no doubt in some part due to this enthusiasm for his work, and I heartily commend that attitude. But like many things that have changed between then and now, a positive approach or great presentation is often not what creates fantastic outcomes, or even excellent and efficient processes. The design industry has grown since then — for one thing, '60s art departments were not subject to the veto power of marketing teams. More significantly, clients and all those other people we answer to are much more aware of the design process — in that any marketing associate may feel comfortable making the statement, "make this change so I can see what it would look like" because they believe that changes, by way of them being instant and digital, are easy to make. Designers who must adhere to these whims are then forced to go against another great piece of design advice: never show them an outcome you don't want them to choose. Further, marketers often tend to address form over conceptual continuity, so the process gets reduced to their aesthetic preferences. When this happens, the client will almost always win.

Without the proper internal structure to prevent this kind of back-stepping — i.e., a good creative director who funnels creative "feedback" through himself or another designer before offloading it to the project's designer, work suffers. And designers eventually stop fighting for better work.

I remember in the first years of Speak Up, a lot of the site's community grew from frustration with Design Observer; many designers finding D.O. too self-referential, too elitist, too New York, and without regard to the "realities" of the design industry as a whole. And I could see where they were coming from — and in fact for awhile was a pretty active commenter on Speak Up — while also cherishing the ideals Design Observer set forth. It reminded me of something our department chair in art school said once, when asked by a student why we weren't given assignments to design brochures. He said, "you'll have plenty of time to design brochures when you're working; at the very least let's try to aim higher than that." And that seems to be what Design Observer offers us: the aspiration to think more and design less, and politely not being the place to vent about crappy clients or slashed budgets.

We are not all Michael Bierut or Paula Scher. But it doesn't mean we don't aspire to work like them, in an environment like theirs, where energy is spent on good thinking and fruitful collaboration, rather than arguing for the role of design to begin with. That can be exhausting, and it certainly doesn't promote creative growth. And who wants to stick it out long enough to be in charge at a place where one's work is constantly undermined?

Draper, Dorfsman and other creative directors have the privilege of thinking and growing. We look to people in their positions to defend the roles of the designers 'beneath' them too – even those who don't work for them. But what else can we do? My friend Tait started an excellent community for those just starting out, called Junior, which among other things helps unite lost-soul graduates by articulating and demystifying the creative process. This happens often via interviews with, and advice by, creative directors — easing the transition between school and work.

For everyone in the middle, staying creative and articulate means constant self-education and examination. It means not getting mired in office politics, and it means being open to criticism of one's work. It also means putting yourself out there, with the assumption that the more you do this, the more you will get back. It is a bolder position to take when you don't have the authority of a Creative Director, but at least it's the path that will lead you to it.

Street Art Takeover

2009-11-05T12:16:00.001-08:00

ou may have seen articles the past couple of weeks about Public Ad Campaign, an organization that brought together artists and activists to reclaim some 20,000 square feet of public space from illegal advertising.

Along with white-washing eight sites, here is what I contributed.

Crimes, they are a-changin'

2009-11-03T09:14:00.000-08:00

've begun several posts defending the importance of 90s graphic design, but never finished them because they've grown into wild and rambling tomes, attempting to bridge too many subjects. The latest attempt got close, and then Ellen Lupton went and wrote a piece for Print Magazine that sums it up much better than I could. Go read it.

I've been a designer long enough to recognize that fastly-held beliefs as to what is and what is not aesthetically appropriate tend to wane over time. While there are tons of type crimes I consider Never Okay, I still believe that a really good designer can make most things work as long as they address a concept.

That said, I was just flipping through Jan Tschichold's The New Typography, realizing I've never read it through, when it occurred to me that I probably never finish it because the type in my edition is ugly and incredibly hard to read. My paperback edition was printed by University of California Press in 1995 and the notes on the design in the back read:

"The text was set in 7.75 Imago Light Extended with 11.6 point leading. The typeface was revised by extending its overall set widths by 112 percent; character spacing was expanded to a Quark XPress tracking value of 16. Display fonts were set in Frutiger Ultra Black with a tracking value of 19."

In other words, they horizontally stretched a font that was probably too light to begin with, set it small and with too much leading, then fully justified the paragraphs. That's...like, impossible to read. Also, Goudy was the one who personally insulted anyone who would think of letterspacing lowercase, so it's not just my beef.

So I'd like to clarify that 90s typography was not a particularly great result. It was its transparency of process and its exploration of expression that was a necessary juncture in graphic design. It was messy, but messy in the way a desk covered in art supplies is — gratifying.

Graphic Designer/Customer Service

2009-10-21T20:33:00.000-07:00

hate this crap.

Printing company seeks graphic design/production person to work with customers on their printing jobs. Deadline-oriented, great customer service skills & punctual. Must be proficient in Quark, InDesign, Photoshop & Illustrator. Salary: under $35,000

Shouldn't job outlets like Media Bistro (where this listing was found) be a bit more discerning? It is insulting to our profession that they would support a company's assumption that graphic designers double as customer service representatives. It's not only an example of a company that places little value on design; it's also a company trying to get two jobs out of one person, for the price of one low-paying position.

It can only end badly: the people who would apply for this job are either administrative assistants who may have learned some software and therefore feel qualified to be designers — thus contributing to more crappy design in our environment; and then there are the recent design graduates who are desperate for work in an economy that isn't hiring people with no experience. So you've got new designers who may well be really great juniors, second-guessing their own self-worth and thinking, well, at least it's a design job.

Tsk tsk, Media Bistro.

Institutionalized: The Loss of the Library

2009-10-16T17:00:00.000-07:00

New York Public Library on 135th Street, Harlem

erhaps because — like the post office — the library was an institution I embraced as a child, I feel compelled to defend it; like defending books in a Kindle-loving world. I love that nearly every town in America — and most of the Western world — has a library. It seems like one of the few commonalities we can have with cultures that are otherwise totally different from our own. Early on libraries obviously filled a community need to educate outside of children's schools. They became natural meeting places and universally-accepted quiet zones. They became public venues for thinking. Imagine that! These days there are very few places you're allowed to go for free. Everything has to be sold. While research largely no longer needs to be done within libraries, it doesn't negate the importance of these kinds of spaces.

New York Public Library, Fifth Avenue

Libraries also make a big difference in how a person discovers information. Nearly every project I start for a client begins at the library. I can wander in, plop down on the floor in front of a section that looks interesting, and browse. Browsing in a library is nothing like browsing on the internet, because your leaps of what to look for are not coming from within. The library has curated this process for you.

For example, I was designing a book cover last year for a textbook on Punishment & Sentencing, which isn't exactly my area of expertise. I cruised through crime, and law and some vaguely ominous prison books before my eye wandered to the next shelf perpendicular, which held the large art monographs. I picked up a book on Louise Nevelson, another childhood favorite, and began reading about her theories of space and confinement, and her explorations in monochromatic texture. I was immediately drawn to these notions as being illustrative of the criminology book. I checked out the monograph, plus several other possible references (for free!) and made my way home to get to work.

Even the freight entrance is lovely

People pay a lot of attention to how we get to the content of things, which is why Kindle has so many supporters. The problem for people like me is that visual people need visual stimulants in order to successfully retain information. I remember what I've read and can access it later in my mind because I am always conscious of how the words looked on a page. I think about books I've read and in my mind I pull up an image of my bookshelf and scan it for help in research. And even while web sites may be designed differently, with different colors and fonts and simulated textures, I don't necessarily recall my Firefox history because it isn't something I walk by in my house every time I go to the kitchen.

A library somewhere on the Upper East Side, New York

Even though the libraries here in Harlem are pathetically under-resourced (I've vowed to donate all of my art books to them in my will, if libraries still exist when I'm dead) I do love that they're still these welcoming, warm spaces. At least people can look for jobs, or use the internet, or sprawl their books over the vast old tables and read with good lighting and high ceilings. I am a bigger believer in needing good space to study in; while libraries have lots of things to look at, they are remarkably devoid of distractions like low light or television screens. Such is the nature of their design.

To bring up Kindle again, one of the biggest flaws I find with it is that it doesn't address any specific brief for readers — its invention was a way for publishers to cut costs, not to offer advantages to consumers. I doubt there was an overwhelming number of people who said they needed to have a selection of 10,000 books with them for their commute to work, or people who said they would read more if only they didn't have to turn pages. All that technology and hype, and each "book" is only a few bucks cheaper than the real deal in paperback.

I realize I tend to sound like an old curmudgeon when I write about these things, but I just think so much of this is short-sighted. Libraries and books have hundreds of years of thinking behind them. The legacy of these beautiful buildings quietly shows that.

Accepting my first design award at age 11,
for a bookmark design contest at my local,
The Baldwin Public Library

Outside My Window

2009-09-30T11:06:00.001-07:00

orking from home has its perks — a fridge, pajamas, all of my books — and its downsides — isolation, complacency, sloth, procrastination. I've found that I have the ability to work both tremendously well from my lovely home desk as well as tremendously badly, depending on my mood. But the biggest factor seems to be that days when I don't go outside before 3pm generate the most boring work. So I've now vowed to go for an hour-long (at least) walk once per day. It gets my blood flowing, my thoughts churning, and I get to explore the streets of Manhattan.

Here are some snaps I took during yesterday's walk, from my house in Harlem down to 82nd and Broadway.

This doorway was so wonderfully textured, and I couldn't help but wonder whether these types of individual small businesses even have a chance of surviving anymore. I know I try to support small and local businesses as much as I can, but I also know that big companies consistently undercut mom-and-pop prices, rendering them unable to compete.

I just thought this was funny.

And is this a District 9 thing?

Some buildings along Marcus Garvey Park:

Pretty script.

Central Park North:

The Children's Aid Society Logo:

I've seen a lot of logos emulating this as of late. The sort of 3-D-Lego-Rubiks-Cube look, only I've seen it most recently as a system for lettering. I'm not a huge fan of the recent stuff as it smacks of trendiness and doesn't seem like it will have much longevity. I did a quick look around for the history of this one, to no avail. But I'd guess it's from the 80s, and the building block nature of it, and being two-color, gives it some relevant heartiness.

This amazing Art Deco theatre on Broadway is for sale...

Next post: LIBRARIES.

How to Brief a Creative Part Two: Using Real Words.

2009-09-28T17:04:00.000-07:00

everal months ago I got a design brief from a fellow designer whose clients didn't like the first round of logos he had created for them, so he (weirdly) hired me to come up with some new directions. His brief to me included these excerpts:

Requirement: Logo and Branding Opportunity: Expansion of the [company name] brand. Alternate revenue stream. Existing infrastructure What is our unique proposition? Edgy and premium quality service at a competitive price point. What allows us to say this? We have the infrastructure already in place to deliver that promise. Tone: Vibrant, bold, edgy Channels: TBD

Good lord. If designers talk this way now, we're all in trouble. The main problem with this brief of course is that you could apply this 'description' to anything and nothing. There's nothing tangible and it really doesn't seem like he (or perhaps even his client) was sure of what they wanted. When designers get briefs like these, they end up engaged in a 'guess and check' situation, often leading to a 'search and destroy' situation. The designer is now in charge not only of the answer, but the question too. The resulting work will seem vague rather than thorough, and no one will come away happy.

Designers aren't marketers, so using marketing vernacular to describe your message won't be as helpful as doing some legwork prior to the briefing. You should be able to describe your product or service in laymen's terms. When in charge of creating my own message for projects, I try to create a synopsis that I can describe in about 15 seconds to most anyone. The effort involved in this exercise is well worth it, because while it defines your message in easily articulated terms, it also means that the brief is less likely to change throughout the design process. Think of it like a mission statement.

Ideally, a creative brief is best built with input from the designer that includes some flexibility for the outcome, but the initial briefing process needs to explain your message from the angle of how you want your audience to perceive it. This means that you should check the words, "I like..." at the door. It's not about your personal preferences any more than it is about the designer's.

Most of the time, a project evokes something in its audience. Explore the sentiments your project should convey to the people interacting with it. Use words that actually mean something rather than buzz words whose meanings are elusive. Make lists of these words and the things they make you think of. Ask yourself whether those conclusions are objective.

To this day I don't understand what I was supposed to do with the 'brief' above (what do they even mean by "channels"?)

A new logo is not going to increase your revenue stream in any quantifiable way,* and any designer who promises that is asking for unwarranted accountability when the client comes back asking for hard proof of return on investment. Unfortunately, I think that in looking for some stability in the marketplace, some designers imply that there is something inherently commercially strategic about graphic design. I just don't think that's true. Obviously with enough research and marketing efforts, business findings can inform how a logo is designed, but ultimately, I don't think that's the designer's job.

*Update: Last night I attended an AIGA event, where Debbie Millman discussed Sterling Brand's redesign of the Tropicana packaging. In the presentation she basically refuted everything I've written in the last paragraph here. Not only did they create a fully, unabashedly commercial strategy in the redesign, Tropicana sold 600,000 more units of orange juice as a result.

I stand by my statement that graphic design is not inherently commercially strategic. But Sterling Brands certainly proves that you can make it so.

Institutionalized: Saying Goodbye to Post Offices

2009-09-14T14:14:00.000-07:00

Above: Art Deco letterboxes in the Chicago Stock Exchange

just came from the post office, a place I visit at least once, if not a couple of times per week. Despite the occasional insanely mean postal employee behind the counter, I've almost always found a certain peace in the ritual of visiting the post office. When I was a kid it was something grown-ups did, so it felt important that I could run my own errand. Back then stamps were 29 cents, which was well within my means (candy at the corner store was 45 cents.) I loved choosing stationery and selecting a pen and setting to work. Then there was the mystery of dropping the letter into the blue box, followed by the gratification of getting a phone call from my grandmother thanking me for the letter a mere couple of days later. She once told me that the sign of a good woman was good penmanship, and I took that to heart.

On top of being infatuated with stationery and in love with critiquing my own cursive, I write a lot of letters as a self-righteous form of procrastination that few can argue with. So I buy a lot of stamps, and I've been doing that for more than 20 years. The United States Postal Service just raised the price of a first class stamp to a measly 44 cents. I could not believe my ears when I actually heard people complaining. I can't even think of anything else that cheap, let alone something that provides so much bang for its half-a-buck.

This afternoon I sent three small packages to Australia. I waited in line approximately 13 minutes, and paid a total of $9.76 for first-class service. No wonder the post office is going broke!

Standing in one particularly long line one afternoon at my local 125th street post-office, I got chatting with the woman in front of me about what it means now that the postal service is closing branches.

"We grew up with post offices around!" she exclaimed, "it's just not something I ever thought would go away."

"Same with newspapers," I interjected, and told her how my grandmother was shocked—almost hurt—that her evening paper no longer gets delivered every day.

"And you know, these younger generations," she nodded toward her daughter in front of her, "they don't know how to talk to the people around them. They can email. They can text. But they don't just strike up conversations. That's considered weird, or unsafe," she observed.

She was right. The post office line is a part of every community, and its elimination is just one more thing that forces a community indoors, apart from each other, unable to tolerate those around them. It's true that we stood in line for at least 45 minutes that afternoon. But I hadn't spoken to anyone else all day, because I'd been sitting in front of my computer, working at home. The more we talked, the more parallels we seemed to draw. The virtues of older generations—patience, manners, kindness, gratitude, thoughtfulness—were all represented by a trip to the post office, and were systematically being stripped away. And for what?

I still have a few pen pals, and getting a postcard from them in my mailbox after a long day is such a welcome token. Taking the time to sit down and write a short letter provides catharsis, serving as a reminder to slow down for a moment, to phrase your sentiments carefully, and to practice your penmanship.

Crikey! The Truth About Type Obsession

2009-09-13T09:55:00.001-07:00

ecently I was asked by a journalist for some advice: she was writing an article on "the excesses of type nerdery," and wanted to hear my take in light of the (completely over-dramatic) fray over Ikea's abandonment of Futura in its catalogues in favor of Matthew Carter's ubiquitous Verdana.

First of all, I don't really care about Ikea; I mean, I think it was a poor choice to choose Verdana—a font designed for the screen, not print and signage—and I understand that some designers think it was a bit of a "fuck you" to type designers when Ikea is supposed to be about presenting good design to the masses. I'll concede that there were some people whose reactions were bizarre (evidently someone started a petition against it.) But I'll parrot Steven Heller on the matter when he said that "some people just have no lives," referring to the uproar on the web. Another good point he made is that while Verdana was not a good design move, Futura is a pretty poor face for setting text, especially in a thing like a catalogue. So it's not like Ikea's design choices were ever the pinnacle of graphic design.

The thing that seems to be playing out here though, is not so much that designers threw some huge temper tantrum over Ikea's decision—it's journalists who noticed online type forums light up in discussion, who then exploited designers' technical reactions to twist the whole thing into a story about how fascist typographers are.

It may seem to people who aren't involved in design and typography that our online discussions about bad kerning or whatever—which, by the way, usually aren't directed at people outside our own community of nerds—are trivial and frought with "irrational hatreds." I'll concur that designers' love for the study of type can be extensive. Some are even excessive. But "irrational"? Not at all.

For those of us who revel in the discovery of found lettering, or who can spend hours and weeks adjusting the curves and strokes of a single letter during the tedious process of designing of a font, naturally our observations will be keener than the layman. But there are analogies aplenty to prove that most passionate people have a critical eye: a chef would surely balk at a chain restaurant's decision to swap out aged cheddar for Velveeta. A record collector wouldn't appreciate you comparing your downloaded mp3s to his lifetime's accumulation of vinyl. A textile designer would advise wool over linen for a winter coat. What's wrong with that?

When the aforementioned journalist approached me for comment, I pointed her in the direction of some interesting, beautiful and painstakingly gathered collections of type ephemera by some of the world's most respected and talented type designers. I remarked that while the common way to rib a designer is to mention Comic Sans (I jokingly started a facebook group last year about how organic food companies should embrace a new font), it's not really about a What's Hot/What's Not list of the season's top fonts—although that one-dimensional kind of 'reporting' does seem to be all these bloggers can come up with.

The articles that cry 'crazy' upon reading forums on Typophile support some notion that designers' passion, specificity and wealth of knowledge is something to be ridiculed. They're just the jocks picking on the nerds. Considering most of them are poorly written and haphazardly researched, they might do well to take a page from the nerds and study before claiming they're ready for the test.

Letters from Lake Tahoe

2009-07-21T21:14:00.001-07:00

In no particular order...

Elizabeth on Elizabeth Street shopfronts

2009-07-19T13:10:00.000-07:00

This article originally appeared in Design Reporter, a publication for the State of Design Festival in Melbourne.

he Melbourne Museum has an excellent permanent exhibition called The Melbourne Story, in which a wall-sized photograph from the turn of the century depicts bustling Christmas shoppers at the foot of the Bourke Street Mall at Elizabeth Street. The GPO, that Gold Rush-era pillar, stands in one corner, while what are now heritage-listed façades sprinkle the immediate surrounds. The lesser-known City of Melbourne building—a fascinating hodge-podge of Queen Anne and Baroque features—is just down the block at Little Collins Street. The image is so striking because that is what Elizabeth Street once was.

Today, it is difficult to think of Elizabeth Street as the regal thoroughfare history suggests, because while almost all of its original, impressive architecture still stands, it is lorded over by a visual tyranny of tackiness. From its Flinders Street base to the Queen Victoria Market, Elizabeth Street bleeds cheap signage, creating a seedy atmosphere with little-to-no visual cohesion and a completely uninviting and divided front. How did a street that still boasts monoliths like Mitchell House and the Argus Building come to look like a neglected suburban strip mall?

At its inception, shopfront signage was “a spontaneous response to the communication needs of the industrial revolution ... graphic design was invented to sell the fruits of mass production to growing consumer societies,” says American designer and educator Katherine McCoy. And unlike its cousin, environmental design, shopfront signage is not primarily a directional tool. Its first job is to identify—so while standard design principles like colour, contrast, scale and legibility still apply, shopfront signage has its own constraints, specifically the readibility from distances for both car and foot traffic.

Further, Elizabeth Street has its own particularities. The Australian sun is probably the reason for the ubiquitous awnings that intercept our view of the aforementioned historical buildings. But like many things that were badly designed to start with, accessories evolved to patch up the weak spots. Once the awnings stretched nearly to the street, what real estate could be given up to advertise a shop without sacrificing precious window space? And once that was answered, (stick the sign high above the door) how were people going to see it from a tram or car? Because shopfront signage is often viewed as an after-thought to a business owner preoccupied with actually starting a business, it’s not seen as the kind of design that warrants the investment of time and money it really deserves.

Branding advocates will claim that businesses’ exteriors need to serve two purposes: to maintain the visual rules established for other areas of the business, and to stand out. This is where the thinking becomes short-sighted. For one thing, while franchised businesses tend to look the same regardless of their location, Elizabeth Street is largely devoid of franchises. Secondly, a juice bar does not need to compete with a backpack store. One would assume we could think beyond the surface of marketing and branding assumptions to infer that no shop is an island, especially in a busy city, and argue for a basic set of visual standards that would elevate the whole of the street.

This is not just about form; (although Pen City’s use of Comic Sans vinyl lettering and Tropicana Juice Bar’s flourescent, designed-in-Microsoft-Word signage are particularly offensive) it is first about function. In 1957 Nicolette Gray wrote,

Without doubt the first consideration in the designing of street lettering should be to ensure that it fulfils its purpose; that it should be immediately legible. But, since it is a necessary adjunct to every town street—and indeed most streets are insufficiently labelled—it is also of importance that it should be an ornament to its locality, a pleasure to the inhabitant as well as a convenience to strangers.

Bad signage is not an ornament, a pleasure or a convenience. Both the city as well as the small business owners on Elizabeth Street have a vested interest in creating an area that feels safe, inviting and exciting, that references its cosmopolitan heritage. Paris, the largest tourist city in the world, has managed to do this beautifully by maintaining a comfortable distance from both cheesy, ‘ye olde’ signage and without advocating fascist rules that only value one aesthetic.

Shopfront signage defines our landscape more than other areas of graphic design because it is publicly experienced yet not disposable. We don’t choose to engage with it as we would a book or website. It is why the internet is rife with images of signs that are not just eyesores, but are grammatically incorrect, ironically misleading, or the device that diminishes an area’s reputation.

Unfortunately for everyone involved, the design of shopfront signage has been largely left to inexpensive sign making companies, thanks to the advent of cheap, vinyl lettering and lightbox “graphics.” Like so many other crafts that have been made obsolete by these “technologies,” we have abandoned the quality materials and craftsmanship that once made a streetscape noble. Stone carvers, gold gilt letterers, sign painters and makers of fabric awnings are mostly gone now, although the latter is still in use on well-regarded roads like North Melbourne’s Errol Street.

The truth is, loud and cheap signs are no longer the way to stand out, at least not in a positive way. Cheap and plentiful does not an interesting sign make. These days, business owners who value modest aesthetics are taking into consideration their surroundings when designing exteriors, and companies like Aesop are finding success with that approach. Conversely, Hotel Formule 1 is an inexpensive hotel chain that could benefit from the fact that its Elizabeth Street franchise is housed in a building whose exterior is posh and sophisticated, but that logic is abandoned in favor of brand consistency; the bright yellow and race car aesthetic prevails.

It’s not that retroactively punishing small businesses is the favored course of action, either. These observations are a call to the city as well as food-for-thought for the owners and inhabitants of buildings on Elizabeth Street. An initial investment in the creative minds of Melbourne designers could go a long way as we think to future goals. As a society disposability is itself being disposed of; longevity and sustainability are the order of the day.

1. McCoy, Katherine, ‘American Graphic Design Expression: The Evolution of American Typography’, Design Quarterly 149, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990, pp. 3-22.
2. Gray, Nicolette, ‘Street Lettering’, Architectural Review, 1957 April / vol.121 / number 725.
3. Additional research: picturevictoria.vic.gov.au; auspost.com.au; wikipedia.org; typophile.com; walkingmelbourne.com

What I Haven't Done on My Summer Vacation

2009-07-14T16:15:00.001-07:00

ear Readers,

I stopped officially working three weeks into May, and my brain activity has slowed nearly to a halt. It took me eight hours today to write 1,000 words for the State of Design Festival in Melbourne. Oy.

That said, I'm not super sad about it. I'm in Detroit at the moment, spending most of the day in the pool. My skin is pink, which is as close as I get to a tan. I haven't worn shoes today. So there's that.

I also had a really great interview in NYC last week for a position teaching design at NYU, which is pretty cool. If I get it I will likely be teaching Typography I and II; there are a few other courses they seemed keen on getting me to teach as well, like 2D Principles and Design Theory. Exciting stuff as I've always suspected I might like teaching, mostly because I really like critiques.

The next day I swung by Barbara Glauber's studio, Heavy Meta. I'm a huge fan of hers, so I was very excited when she invited me to lunch. We chatted and I showed her my work, and we shared tales of being sturdy people from "the rust belt". It's really refreshing to see a strong woman who's so successful in design. I still see the field as being dominated by white men, although perhaps just white people in particular. The world of type seems a bit more global to me, but perhaps that is because it's a smaller world, with a smaller pool of uber-creatives.

In other news we got iPhones this week, which was been really exciting and has made me slowly check Twitter more often. I'm feeling like I've been missing out!

Going to Chicago in the morning for a few days, then off to NYC for the long haul on Saturday. Stay tuned.

Imaginary Alphabets

2009-06-15T16:39:00.000-07:00

This article originally appeared in the magazine, Patterns of Creative Aggression

he suburbs of Detroit lack stimulation. They are gray and sprawling, with stretches of beige strip malls and occasional blips of town squares that hold the only ‘old’ buildings to speak of. The earliest of these were small hubs for early 19th-century farming communities on the outskirts of ‘the big city’. I grew up in Birmingham: an affluent suburb whose city centre is indulgently called ‘Downtown’ based on its ‘eccentric’ 1920s buildings.

An Australian passing through wouldn’t see the grandeur of Gold Rush architecture; a European might be surprised if they knew this place was, for a time, the home of Eero Saarinen, Charles and Ray Eames, and Florence Knoll. But to a bookish child resident, ‘Downtown’ was a source of excitement and importance. I had never been to Europe or New York City, but I imagined this, only bigger, and not surrounded by any ranch-style houses. My favorite thing about these buildings wasn’t even the buildings themselves, but the large and dismissive companies within; the ones with their names carved above their revolving Deco doors. Or the small and exclusive restaurants, with gilded lettering on glass or wood panels. This was a city to me: the letters that told you where you were, or where you were supposed to go.

* * *

Of course, my idea of Europe and New York weren’t quite on the mark. No one can really prepare you for that. In France I fell in love with the red tin ‘Sortie’ and deep blue ‘Rue Saint Jacques’. In New York it was the faded yellow paint on bricks, whose black oblique brush strokes read ‘No Stick Ball Here’; it was the twin entrances of a Catholic school, with ‘Girls’ and ‘Boys’ carved dauntingly into stone. I noticed and craved to notice more and more, and not just the quaint colloquialisms but the signs and letters that showed neglect, decay and loneliness. My lifelong obsession with letters was getting an education beyond old typography classes. Their imperfection established personality, and it was about this time I realized that letters had become, in my mind, like people.

* * *

Walking by Punch Lane in Melbourne one day this winter, I spotted a sign for a restaurant I’d never seen before. It was hand painted, with confident but elegant strokes; boldly upright, white on black. As a script it looked so perfectly united—as if you’d never question the shapes of the letters or how they came to be standing next to one another. And I suppose this is what you want from a piece of lettering: for your word to look like one piece, as opposed to letters that just happen to be standing next to each other, like strangers in the bank queue.

When the word is a name, it’s even more important to maintain solidarity. After all, you wouldn’t want someone to look at your name and think, “jeez, wouldn’t his name be so lovely if not for that unfortunate ‘s’ hanging out at the end.”

I do realize of course that most people don’t have this kind of internal dialogue. But since I do, it was natural that once I passed this sign, I continued to think about it for the next several days.

So I went back and I took photographs of it, perching precariously atop a very narrow cement bollard. I wanted to know what the rest of the characters would look like if a whole alphabet had been made from this lovely script. This is what I came up with.

Above: introduction to the first in the series, Imaginary Alphabets.

Imaginary Alphabets is a lot of things for me: a way of procrastinating when I’m in between jobs, a way to promote and exploit myself and my skills, and perhaps most importantly, an exercise in my continuing self-education of typography. For others, I hope that the alphabets cause people to look up more, to notice their surroundings and how they are always and constantly changing.

I focus on found lettering rather than mechanized type because it calls attention to a craft that’s (mostly) functionally obsolete, but that is also essential for our understanding of type today. Hand-lettering has more identifiable flaws, and that is what gives it character. No two letters are alike in a piece of lettering, and what’s more is that each letter is shaped by the letters on either side of it: a letter’s past and its future are determined by its surroundings, which I suppose is a poetic way to explain why they are so humbly important.

* * *

Soon after completing the first Imaginary Alphabet, I spotted this fantastically faded, neglected script on a building on Smith Street in Collingwood. I’d been wanting to find some lettering in that area to explore because it was the first place I saw in Australia, and it was so far from what I thought Australia looked like that it still seems surreal to me.

I noticed the lettering on this building last September on Smith Street near Johnston in Collingwood. Its appeal was immediate—not only because of the letters’ deftly painted scrolls and faux-gilded depth, but also because it has that sense of old school, no-nonsense graphic design about it.

Sure enough, when I began researching it, I discovered a remarkable similarity between the lettering all along the shop fronts of turn-of-the-century Smith Street. It was a sign of the times, so to speak; a testament to the birth of the Industrial Revolution in Australia.

It was interesting to me, looking through the old images of Collingwood and Fitzroy and what the beginning of capitalism really looked like; and it was ironic that I was investigating this while Wall Street was crashing in New York—it was as if I was seeing it all come full-circle.

Encouraged by the striking resemblances in sign lettering from the old photos, I started scrambling to find out who the sign writer was. My research at the moment has come to a dead end, however, and in the meantime, I learned that these alphabets are quite ubiquitous, and not nearly as infrequent and special here in Victoria as I had initially hoped.

So I decided instead to create an alphabetic response to my research, and to suspend my energy for a new and complete alphabet til something else presented itself.

* * *

The Process.
I finished the third alphabet yesterday. I had found the sheet music in a collectibles shop in the Yarra Valley and liked the variety of old Victorian penwork. Sheet music has such a distinct form; it’s regimented but has such energy and movement because of the musical notation. I also like that lyrics sort of get dragged through along the bottom of the fits and starts of notes and rhythm. The lyrics to this music are that kind of lame, innocuous old-timey music that fits so well with the sharp but bouncy letters in ‘Marguerite’.

I started by scanning the sheet music; then I quickly traced the letters in Illustrator. A lot of people ask me if these alphabets are ‘working’ fonts; the answer is no. They don’t need to be used in other contexts; the point is to make the letters exist basically as they were found, only with their other family members. I hate to think what people would do with these alphabets if they could load them up in Microsoft Word. Even the act of digitizing them would destroy a lot of their spirit.

After the existing letters have been made, the basic shapes needed to create the rest of the alphabet begin to surface. The ‘d’ and ‘b’ help create the ‘p’ and ‘q’. These shapes then define the ascenders for other letters like the ‘h’, which defines the ‘n’ and then the ‘m’. This process helps me identify letters for their similarities and differences. I can establish their height, thickness of strokes, and by experimenting with a pen and nib, figure out the various ways a letter can start and finish.

The overall goal is to capture the spirit of the found lettering. Like the buildings around me growing up, it is the personality and knowingness of the letters that — for me — give us our sense of direction, time and place. They remind us of what came before us, and hint at what could be ahead.

Direct to Public

2009-05-24T18:29:00.000-07:00

y first show is coming up a week from today. Whoa.

I had a crit last night with the mighty Stuart and got some good feedback and perspective of where I'm at and where I need to take this. [One of the things I really don't like about freelancing is I don't have that environment where I'm constantly bouncing things off my colleagues, so it's really great when I do get that opportunity.] I talked about my concerns of how people will perceive what I'm doing if they're not given an articulate context; I'm not glorifying these particular signs, or elevating sign writing to high art. Primarily, the show's purpose is to illustrate the landscape of Brunswick and show its temporality.

So it was interesting that later on in the evening I got a great email from a guy who just wanted to tell me that he's really looking forward to the show, adding that he's been documenting Brunswick's streetscape for the past few years through a similar lens. It brought up another concern about misperception, so I wrote this in reply:

"Being not from Brunswick (or even Australia) I do have my skepticism about my ability to portray a landscape I'm not actually a part of. I'm from Detroit and often get really protective about the way that outsiders see its Gotham qualities with little-to-no context. Recently I read an article about some Dutch urban planner types who were developing a project for an empty lot in Detroit and, while their idea was a good one, I got really annoyed that they saw the space as a blank canvas rather than a canvas whose pictures have faded because of neglect and corruption."

Anyway. Direct to Public is no dissertation; it's a small comment. It should be good. Stay tuned.

How to Brief a Creative, Part One: Fonts, Lettering & Logos.

2009-04-25T18:22:00.000-07:00

Fonts, Lettering & Logos

often hear these three words used interchangeably, particularly from clients, but even sometimes within the design community. It's interesting when it happens during a meeting with a client because while so much design vernacular is commonly heard these days, it's usually not being used correctly -- or more important -- accurately. So then I find myself thinking, are you really asking me to design a font? Or are you talking about doing some hand-lettering? Or do you mean you want some sort of logotype? It's tricky because I don't want to sound pedantic, but there really are big differences between all these things, and depending on their context, it can become very nuanced.

Here is a quick guide.

Font is frequently used when someone actually means typeface, so much so that these two things are actually becoming acceptably interchangeable even among designers. Technically, a font is a complete set of characters in one size of one typeface; for example, 12-point Georgia Italic. The "typeface" is all the letters, glyphs, punctuation, etc, designed in a set. Mrs Eaves is a typeface that includes lots of different weights, sizes, and families.

More often than not, a client who is asking for a font is actually just after some lettering, which I define here as custom letters designed in the context of a specific word or words. To this end though, I sometimes differentiate lettering from a logotype for two reasons: 1. because in my work most of my lettering is based on handwriting, whereas logotypes are commonly created using a pre-existing typeface, or at least they rely on one heavily. 2. a logotype may well be lettering, but the difference is really that a logotype is attempting to create a brand. Most of the lettering I do is not brand-driven; it's made to use as a headline, or the title of a book.

Brand and logo aren't the same thing either; the brand encompasses the whole she-bang, while the logo is the visual symbol. Which leads me to my next point.

Not everything needs to be a logo.

A lot of people these days have this knee-jerk reaction to logo-fy their product, message or service. And many, many graphic designers argue that this is what is going to set your thing apart from the rest. Sure, sometimes that's true. But a logo's not going to do that all on its own – not even Nike's – unless there is real substance behind it. Or at least a big pile of money.

It's common to take the name or title of something and want to make it look like a logo. The problem with this is that a logo tends to be a self-contained thing that can be applied (or in many cases, slapped on) to just about anything. Before you ask a designer to create a logo, ask yourself whether this is really what you need to achieve. If you're looking for a designer to help you communicate a message visually, keep an open mind; maybe what you need is just some unique, expressive lettering. Maybe it's an illustration, or an interesting image.

The point is, a good designer will explore your options with you from an experienced point of view. He or she will likely be able to help you define the brief and suggest creative ways to accomplish your goals.

I'll clarify here that that I'm not anti-logo; creating identities is an integral part of graphic design and I really enjoy it. But I think it is often the wrong prescription and the wrong diagnosis, which is why it's usually better to consult a designer sooner rather than later.