Free versal…

erhaps nothing brightened old manuscripts like a versal, or illuminated large, initial cap. Jessica Hische offers a beautful array of fancy lettrines along with code that will create a mortise and place a drop cap in your blog. Go ahead; illuminate your next post!

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?

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.

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.

Hey, keep it down…

I’ll get straight to the point here: all caps should hardly ever be used in text and bold should never be used. Never, ever. If you want to emphasize something, use italics. You’ll end up with a more polished-looking finished product.

Graphic designers who have access to extended font sets (I don’t on this blog, so please use your imagination), use small caps for common abbreviations (like 11:00 AM), initialisms (e.g.: TV or UFO) and proper acronyms (UNESCO or NATO). Well set type rarely includes all caps beyond two-letter geographical initialisms (Mexico, D.F. or Washington D.C.) or proper name initialisms (RFK or MLK).

The temptation to use theatrical typography is widespread with so many common folks now having access to so many typestyles, but as the great typographer Robert Bringhurst says, “most writing and typography remain contentedly abstract.” In other words, writing does not communicate more successfully if it is accompanied by bold, all caps, and exciting fonts.

Whither Palatino?

Graphic designers have punished Hermann Zapf’s beautiful 1948 design, Palatino, for over a decade by avoiding it. Its crime? Ubiquity. It was everywhere after the desktop publishing revolution put it into the hands of the hoi polloi in the late 1980s. It’s time to forgive. Palatino is a gorgeous, robust font. It shouldn’t suffer because of indiscriminate licensing, or promiscuous distribution.

The greatest weakness of Palatino is, perhaps, its clunky ampersand. Mr. Zapf more than made up for it though, with the lively, energetic italic ampersand. Substitute the italic ampersand for the roman, and you’ve got instant elegance.

Latin: it’s all Greek to me…

A device graphic designers employ when they’re working on a layout that includes blocks of text, is greeking. It can be accomplished by simply sketching horizontal lines with a pencil, or, with the advent of design software, by dropping indecipherable paragraphs into text boxes. Many designers call the placeholder text Lorem Ipsum, because these are the first two words of the most commonly used greeking text.

There are alternatives. You might consider using the colorful hillbilly greeking text, or perhaps hypertext will suit your next design project.