Chop suey fonts…

Typographic stereotype (hey, the chef loved it).

Probably the most recognizable and ubiquitous of “ethnic fonts” are the faux Asians: Ginko, Kanban, Mandarin, Rickshaw, Wonton, et al. Also available are cliché representations of Greek, Arab, Yiddish, African American, Tropical Hispanic, Slavic, Franco-Asian, French, Basque, and Klingon.

Paul Shaw’s piece in Print Magazine about ethnic stereotyping in graphic design got me to thinking about the many stereotypes that typography can convey:
hippies, trekkies, scrapbookers, programmer/geeks, new-agers, believers in unicorns, headbangers, fratboys, needlepointers, taggers, restroom taggers, creative renaissance fairgoers, secret agents, and cowboys.

But since we all use the Roman alphabet, how are we ever going to stereotype Italians?

Georgia on my mind…

It occurred to me recently that we’ve seen increasing instances of old-style figures (lowercase, non-lining numbers) in graphic design in the past few years. Typographers have always used text figures, but graphic designers have been largely ignorant of them owing, in part, to the lack of affordable extended font families in the early years of the desktop revolution.

Matthew Carter designed Georgia in 1996 for Microsoft’s Web Core Fonts program, and it’s now all over the internet. Why? Because it was included (wisely) in the system software for both Macs and PCs. Web designers use system fonts for all live type (type which has not been converted into a graphic) so that default fonts (think Courier) will not stand in as substitutes for specified fonts.

Georgia has handsome old-style figures, and this has renewed interest in non-lining numbers amongst designers.

Thank you Matthew Carter, and (dare I say it?) thank you Microsoft.

The fleurons are lovely this time of year…

Just as some of us use italic ampersands in order to liven up dreary type, designers sometimes turn to ornaments in order to embellish text. In the past, red was the preferred color for fleurons, because red was so often set up as the second color on a two-color print run. Dingbat fonts aren’t very interesting, and Adobe Wood Type Ornaments have been raided with embarrassing frequency, but if one keeps one’s eyes peeled, there are other typographic elements which can be employed as decorations.

I recently found an upper case V in a Spencerian script font, which worked well as ornamental brackets for a logo which was done in Roman small caps.

By converting type to vector paths, one can reshape type, combine letters, extend swashes and modify terminals. Sometimes, one might even create a fleuron where none existed before.

Invisible, but hardly unnoticed…

The pilcrow is a typographic character largely unknown to the general public, though it may look vaguely familiar. This venerable glyph marks the beginning of a new paragraph, and is present, though unseen, in modern page layout programs, unless “show invisible characters” is selected in the type menu (though, even then, the discreet pilcrow does not print).

The development of this symbol is not clear and the colorful etymology offered by Hoefler & Frere-Jones is oft-repeated, but not convincing.

Mediaeval scribes used these marks in much the same way we use them today, as a separation between groups of related sentences. Once the convention of extra leading (space between horizontal lines of type) was introduced, the pilcrow fell into use mainly as a proofreader’s mark, meaning “insert paragraph break.”

Icons and needlepoint, one pixel at a time…

I recently created two bitmap ornaments for our website. Instead of the usual fleuron as a typographic decoration, Lynn Harvey, our resident electronic design expert, asked for a standard 16 x 16 pixel gif of something new. I settled on a scallop. I reduced a photo and traced one vertical half of it pixel by pixel. I deleted the photo, adjusted the colors and copied, pasted, horizontally flopped the vertical half and abutted it with the original. Fun work!

Recently, someone working on a website asked me for a “fist”— an old typographic convention that looks like a pointing hand. There ought to be scores of good fists out there, right? Well, I had no luck in a Google image search, so I decided to create an original. I thought of the ingenious set of icons designed for Apple’s first graphic user interface by Susan Kare, and started looking at photos. Pointing hands are horizontal, so the first order of business was to “condense” horizontally. The coloring is also abbreviated, so it must be intensified. I saved the gif with a transparent background, so the fist can be dropped into any html design.

Don’t be out of sorts…

 

Our wedding invitation: printed by Just My Type, Arcata, California

 

“If I were to be sat down at a computer and told, ‘here, you can do whatever you want,’ I wouldn’t know what to do. There would be too many choices,” says John Kristensen, of Firefly Press in this gorgeous short film. No garish bitmap filter or hackneyed vector technique can replace the artistry and craftsmanship in what Firelfy Press in Sommerville Massachusetts produces every day.

I operated a Linotype in the late ’70s, setting hot lead slugs of type. My coworker, Harry, would set up the Heidelberg windmills and then stand in front of the cases setting type by hand on a composing stick, deftly choosing sorts from the case with his free hand. Harry was deaf, so the noise of the shop (we also had two offset duplicators running much of the time) never bothered him.

When we’d throw in (dump galleys of type onto the granite counter to be replaced into the cases), he had no trouble distinguishing sorts. I was befuddled by the p, d, b, and q’s (they look like quadruplets), but they didn’t seem to slow Harry in the least.

Wayward typography…

Visible ink traps and a fill font

The headlines in the well-designed entertainment section of our local paper are set in a font which was specifically created for use in small sizes on newsprint. The ink traps are distinctly visible. Ink traps keep the inside corners of letterforms from rounding out due to ink gain. Ink fills the “trap” instead of oozing into the negative space inside the letter. I don’t know if the example is Bell Centennial Bold Listing, or another font, but it was definitely designed for the yellow pages or newspaper classifieds. The Eureka Reporter is the only publication I’ve seen that “misuses” a font in this way.

On the other hand, a widespread recent fad has been the use of Adobe’s Rosewood Fill in advertisements. Rosewood is an ornate carnivalesque decorative font, which has an accompanying “fill” font that, when placed behind Rosewood, provides a fill color. Rosewood Fill on its own has a crude, pleasantly rough-hewn appearance that says, “this message is so important, that our headline didn’t have a chance to shave and put its pants on.”

Update: Kevin Bell, Design Director of The Eureka Reporter, informs us that the font in question is Retina which was originally designed by Hoefler & Frere-Jones for The Wall Street Journal.

Make mine curly…

Quotation marks: they’re used to enclose direct speech and quotations. In most programs, the keyboard will give you double primes, which are used to mark inches. Graphic design programs default to typographic or “curly” quotes. In Britain they are called inverted commas.

According to the Oxford Companion to the English Language, “Double marks are traditionally associated with American printing practice and single marks with British practice”

In the Renaissance, quotes were marked by italics, but typographers first cut quotation marks in the mid-16th century, and by the early 17th century quotation marks were common.

The French and Italian custom prefers guillemets. Quotes are opened with left-facing double guillemets, and closed with right-facing double guillemets (e.g. «I prefer primes,» said the typewriter repairman).

As with the apostrophe, many English speakers (especially sign painters) are befuddled by the the rules which govern the use of quotation marks.

Just remember, quotes are used for direct attribution, not for emphasis.

What’s your sign, and how much does it weigh?

 

Currency symbols are almost invisible. We see them everywhere, but we rarely give them a thought, so let’s take a look at two of them.

Why is the symbol for the British pound sterling a stylized italic upper case L? It’s an abbreviated form of libra, Latin for pound or “pair of scales.” Libra is also the source of the abbreviation for the measurement lb.

Why is the dollar sign an S with one or two bisecting vertical rules? This all-American glyph is actually an immigrant. It comes to us from the Spanish peso. A stylized Ps, was an abbreviation for pesos in the New World. In English, it was first recorded in the 1770s in manuscripts and is seen in print in the early nineteenth century.

Again, a tip of the Textwrapper’s chapeau to the brilliant Humez brothers.

Optimal result…

The names sandblasted into the dark granite of the Vietnam War Memorial were set in Hermann Zapf’s Optima. The elegant, humanist font is tightly leaded in all upper case. It’s sublime, perfect.

The “black gash of shame” inspired bitter controversy when it was unveiled to the public. After so many years of quiet weeping and so many thousands of rubbings taken from the lettered granite, the dispute is forgotten to such a degree that it’s difficult to believe that there was ever a loud backlash against it.

We can all thank Maya Lin for defending her creation from Henry Hyde, James Watt and the many other philistines who would have turned the wall into just another war monument.