As both its function and form suggest, the ampersand is a written contraction of "et," the Latin word for "and." Its shape has evolved continuously since its introduction, and while some ampersands are still manifestly e-t ligatures, others merely hint at this origin, sometimes in very oblique ways.
He goes on to describe several ampersands they've designed for their typefaces. When designing the ampersand for Silkscreen, I came up with a solution that many continue to dislike:
If you're logged in to Flickr, you can see it action at a more appropriate size in the "prints & more" label above a photo. The symbol is basically a capital E with a vertical line through the middle...an e-t ligature that's really more of an overstrike. I fashioned it after the way I hand-write my ampersand, which I got from my dad's handwriting1. I don't know where he got it from; it's not a common way to represent that symbol, although I did find a few instances in the list of fonts installed on my computer.
I didn't think about this way at the time, but the odd ampersand is one of the few distinguishing features of Silkscreen. There's only so many ways you can draw letterforms in a 5x5 pixel space so a lot of the bitmap fonts like Silkscreen end up looking very similar. The ampersand gives it a bit of needed individuality. (The 4 is the other oddish character...it's open at the top instead of diagonally closed.)
[1] Now that I think about it, I borrowed several aspects from my dad's handwriting. I write my 7s with a bar (to distinguish them from 1s), my 8s as two separate circles rather than a figure-eight stroke, and my 4s with the open top. Oh, and a messy signature. ↩
Here's the trailer for Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
It was done by a fellow named Pablo Ferro; it was his first movie trailer. Steven Heller writes:
After seeing Ferro's commercials, Kubrick hired him to direct the advertising trailers and teasers for Dr. Strangelove and convinced him to resettle in London (Kubrick's base of operations until he died there in March 1999). Ferro was inclined to be peripatetic anyway, and ever anxious to bypass already completed challenges he agreed to pull up stakes on the chance that he would get to direct a few British TV commercials, which he did. The black and white spot that Ferro designed for Dr. Strangelove employed his quick-cut technique -- using as many as 125 separate images in a minute -- to convey both the dark humor and the political immediacy of the film. At something akin to stroboscopic speed words and images flew across the screen to the accompaniment of loud sound effects and snippets of ironic dialog. At a time when the bomb loomed so large in the US public's fears (remember Barry Goldwater ran for President promising to nuke China), and the polarization of left and right -- east and west -- was at its zenith, Ferro's commercial was not only the boldest and most hypnotic graphic on TV, it was a sly subversive statement.
Kubrick wanted to film it all using small airplane models (doubtless prefiguring his classic space ship ballet in 2001: A Space Odyssey). Ferro dissuaded him and located the official stock footage that they used instead. Ferro further conceived the idea to fill the entire screen with lettering (which incidentally had never been done before), requiring the setting of credits at different sizes and weights, which potentially ran counter to legal contractual obligations. But Kubrick supported it regardless. On the other hand, Ferro was prepared to have the titles refined by a lettering artist, but Kubrick correctly felt that the rough hewn quality of the hand-drawn comp was more effective. So he carefully lettered the entire thing himself with a thin pen. Yet only after the film was released did he notice that one word was misspelled: "base on" instead of "based on". Ooops!
If you want that hand-lettered look for yourself, Pablo Skinny is a font by Fargoboy that closely duplicates Ferro's handwriting.
Update: According to this Wikipedia article, the work of Canadian avant-garde filmmaker Arthur Lipsett caught the eye of Stanley Kubrick after an Oscar nomination for his short film, Very Nice, Very Nice and, more importantly for our business here, that Kubrick directed the Strangelove trailer himself in Lipsett's style after Lipsett refused to work with Kubrick on it:
Stanley Kubrick was one of Lipsett's fans, and asked him to create a trailer for his upcoming movie Dr. Strangelove. Lipsett declined Kubrick's offer. Kubrick went on to direct the trailer himself; however, Lipsett's influence on Kubrick is clearly visible when watching the trailer.
The two are stylistically similar for sure, but Ferro is credited with having designed the main title sequence (according to the titles themselves). That passage doesn't appear to have been derived from any particular source, so I looked for something more definitive. From a 1986 article by Lois Siegel
After his Academy Award nomination, he received a letter from British filmmaker Stanley Kubrick. The typewritten letter said, "I'm interested in having a trailer done for Dr. Strangelove." Kubrick regarded Lipsett's work as a landmark in cinema -- a breakthrough. He was interested in involving Lipsett. This didn't happen, but the actual trailer did reflect Lipsett's style in Very Nice, Very Nice.
Kubrick described Very Nice, Very Nice (1961) as "one of the most imaginative and brilliant uses of the movie screen and soundtrack that I have ever seen." Kubrick was so enthused with the film he invited Lipsett to create a trailer for Dr. Strangelove (Stanley Kubrick, 1965) an offer Lipsett refused. Stanley Kubrick, letter to Arthur Lipsett, Arthur Lipsett Collection, Cinematheque québécoise Archives, Montreal, May 31, 1962.
It's not clear what the connection is between Lipsett's work and the trailer that Ferro ended up producing for Strangelove, but several sources (including Heller) say that Ferro developed his quick-cut style directing commercials in the 1950s, work that would predate that of Lipsett.
Lipsett more clearly influenced the work of another prominent filmmaker, George Lucas. Lucas found inspiration in Lipsett's 21-87 in making THX-1138 and borrowed the concept of "the Force" for the Star Wars movies. Lucas' films are littered with references to Lipsett's film; e.g. Princess Leia's cell in Star Wars was in cell #2187. (thx, gordon)
Ampersand usage varies from language to language. In English and French text, the ampersand may be substituted for the words and and et, and both versions may be used in the same text. The German rule is to use the ampersand within formal or corporate titles made up of two separate names; according to present German composition rules, the ampersand may not be used in running text. In any language, the ampersand's calligraphic qualities make it a compelling design element that can add visual appeal and personality to any page.
I tacked this specimen of Estupido Espezial!!! to my wall, where it immediately became a litmus test for visitors. Most people would say nothing, but woe be unto anyone who admired the thing in earnest: "hey, cool font!" would immediately land any visitor on the Suspicious Persons list. The best were those who would stare for a moment with bafflement before bursting out laughing, a few of whom became good friends, good clients, or both.
Craig Oldham's Nudist typeface is flesh-colored with some bits pixelated out. Other "weights" include a fig leaf version and a black censor bar version. Entirely SFW.
The designers at H&FJ are often asked if there are particular letters that we especially enjoy drawing. Office doodles testify to the popularity of the letter R, perhaps because it synopsizes the rest of the alphabet in one convenient package (it's got a stem, a bowl, serifs both internal and external, and of course that marvelous signature gesture, the tail.)
I would love to see a collection of those office doodles.
The physical embodiment of a collection of letters (whether it's a case of metal pieces or a computer file) is a font. When referring to the design of the collection (the way it looks) you call it a typeface.
Oh and also good was that they were thoughtful enough to wait until 2007 was actually over to make their selections.
Interview with Susan Bradley, who did some graphic design and designed a typeface for Pixar's Ratatouille. I enjoyed her response when asked about "one thing everybody should do today":
Something backwards or something analog you'd normally computerize.
They were very big around 1970 or so. Bookman set the example, even though it's from much earlier. By the mid-seventies, they were adding Bookman-style swashes to everything. They were usually called Whateverthefontwascalled Flair.
Scroll down the page for samples of Univers Flair, Franklin Gothic Flair, etc.
Does one's choice of typeface affect the grade you get on a college paper? Papers written with Georgia and Times New Roman (serifs) got As while those with Trebuchet (sans serif) got Bs.
In light of the Mitchell Report, Yanksfan vs Soxfan has proposed a record book annotation system so that sports fans can tell which records were set under the influence of which substances. The asterisk is for straight-up steroids and some of the other marks are as follows:
! = Amphetamines $ = Gambling || = Cocaine ~ = Alcohol . = Dead ball era ∞ = Wore glasses † = Crazy religious freak X = General douchebag
Like indoor plumbing and toga parties, Trajan hails from Rome. Matter of fact, you can find almost 2,000-year-old inscriptions on Trajan's column, where they have totally off-the-leash keggers on Saturdays... Russell Crowe has co-starred with Trajan three times now.
This reminds me of Red is Not Funny, J. Tyler Helms' illustration of the wide use of bold red letters in distinctly unfunny comedies. (via cameron hunt)
For some of Gill's fans, even looking at his work became impossible. Most problematically, he was a Catholic convert who created some of the most popular devotional art of his era, such as the Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral, where worshippers pray at each panel depicting the suffering of Jesus.
These details of Gill's private life were revealed in a 1989 book by Fiona MacCarthy...here's a NY Times review of the book soon after it was published.
In the past few weeks, I've seen several people mention the 50 Years of Helvetica exhibit at the MoMA along with some variation of "Woo! I might need to take a trip to New York to go see this!" You should know that this exhibit takes up just a small corner of the Architecture and Design Gallery on the 3rd floor...it's essentially a case and a handful of posters and other specimens. If you're in the museum already, definitely check it out, but you'll be disappointed if you make a special expensive trip just to see the Helvetica stuff.
It is The Daily Prophet which emerges in this film as a secondary character, performing interstitial cameos made all the more exhilarating because the camera sweeps in and out, ricocheting off the page, magnifying and dramatizing a typographic vocabulary that combines a slightly mottled, letterpress-like display face with great portions of illegible calligraphy.
The official typeface for our license plates is now called FE-Mittelschrift, with FE meaning it is Fälschungs-Erschwert, i.e. difficult to forge. Apparently car thieves, terrorists and notorious law-breakers had been exploiting DIN's geometric construction principle and turning E into F or 3 into 8 etc by simply using a bit of black tape or white paint.
Here are all the alphanumeric characters:
Note the tamper-resistant differences between the 6 (no notch) and 9 (notched), the E & F, the I & 1, the O & zero, the P & R, and so on.
This past weekend, Tobias Frere-Jones led a typography tour of lower Manhattan for the AIGA, which I'm sad I missed (out of town guests + didn't get a ticket in time). Luckily several people have uploaded photos from the tour (set 1, set 2, set 3, set 4), including a shot of one of my favorite lunchtime destinations, the Cup & Saucer. Love that sign (see close up).
The newly designed US$5 bill is the worst one yet...the phrase "typographic train wreck" comes to mind. The purple 5 in the lower right, while useful, is one of the most amateur design choices I've seen on something that's destined for such a wide market. (thx, tom)
New web site for Hoefler & Frere-Jones, the noted and celebrated typeface designers, including a weblog. Subscribed. Oh, and the browser fonts of choice for the meticulous duo? "Lucida Grande, Lucida Sans, Verdana, Georgia, Helvetica, Arial" (thx, jonathan)
Cartype: "A comprehensive collection of reviews and study of typographical applications of emblems, car company logos and car logos with images, comments, links, car company information and general interest."
Peter Saville, the British designer closely associated with Factory Records, is offering free downloads of some of the fonts he used in designing record sleeves and other work for New Order, Joy Division, and other Factory Records artists.
Update: Several Peter Saville fans from around the world have written in to say that the above site is not Peter Saville's official site (this is). It's also unclear whether those fonts were indeed made by Saville (probably not) or ever offered for download free of charge (probably definitely not). But they're still neat fonts, so download at your own risk.
Update:Kai has identified some of the fonts offered as shoddy versions of the following:
Joy Division Closer - Trajan (Adobe)
Blue Monday - Engravers Gothic (Bitstream)
New Order 1981 - Futura (Bauer)
New Order 1993 - Handel Gothic (Linotype)
New Order Ceremony - Albertus (Mecanorma)
New Order 316 - BT Incised 901 (Bitstream) = Antique Olive (Linotype)
New Order Regret - Rotis Serif (Agfa)
Michael Bierut's 13 reasons to choose a particular typeface for a project. "Once I saw a project in a student portfolio that undertook the dubious challenge of redesigning the Tiffany's identity. I particularly disliked the font that was used, and I politely asked what it was. 'Oh,' came the enthusiastic response, 'that's the best part! It's called Tiffany!'"
On the occasion of Helvetica's NYC premiere tonight, Michael Bierut remembers a time when no one knew anything about type or fonts except for designers and typesetters. "[Today] we live in a world where any person in any cubicle in the world can pick between Arial and Trebuchet and Chalkboard whenever they want, risk free, copyfitting tables be damned, and where a film about a typeface actually stands a chance of enjoying some small measure of popular success."
Exhibit on Helvetica (the font, not the film) opens tomorow at the MoMA and will be available for a good long time (until March 31, 2008). "Widely considered the official typeface of the twentieth century, Helvetica communicates with simple, well-proportioned letterforms that convey an aesthetic clarity that is at once universal, neutral, and undeniably modern."
Winners of the Helvetica haiku contest I pointed to a couple of weeks ago. My favorite of all the ones listed: "i shot the serif / left him there full of leading / yearning for kerning". Close second: "She misunderstood / When I said she was 'Grotesque' / Akzidenz happen". I am a sucker for puns.
Back when type was set with individual metal letters, those letters were called "sorts". Popular letters like a, e, t, i, etc. would occasionally run out and the printer would then be "out of sorts".
Update: Scratch that. Individual letters are called "sorts", but "out of sorts" came from somewhereelse. (thx grant and hal)
Perhaps the highest praise I can offer for Helvetica comes courtesy of Meg, who was snickering on the way into the theater about going to see a movie about a font and exited saying, "that was great, now I want to be a designer!" The rest of the audience, mostly designers and type folks, loved it as well. But for the non-design folks, what's compelling about the movie is getting a glimpse of how designers think and work; that it's not just about making things look pretty. The modern world is awash in signage and symbols and words and for a lot of them, especially the corporate messages, there's a reason why they look the way they do. The story of Helvetica offers a partial key to decoding these messages.
A friend of mine who works at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln emailed to let me know that they've posted both audio and video of a talk that Chris Ware gave at the school last week. If you're short on time, the real meat of the video starts around 18:30 when Ware starts a slideshow that delves into his process. In addition to his series of Thanksgiving-themed New Yorker covers from last year, he also talks about some of his other work, including Rusty Brown and the strip he did for the NY Times Magazine.
Typography language pedantry: font vs. typeface. "'Fonts' and 'typefaces' are different things. Graphic designers choose typefaces for their projects but use fonts to create the finished art."
Helvetica, The Movie! "The film is studded with the stars of typography: Erik Spiekermann, Matthew Carter, Massimo Vignelli, Michael Bierut, Wim Crouwel, Hermann Zapf, Stefan Sagmeister, Jonathan Hoefler, Tobias Frere-Jones, Experimental Jetset."
Great detailed post about how the inside of a book is designed. Page counts are determined for business reasons so the designer has little choice but to find the proper font to make the given text fit in the given space...readability is a secondary consideration. (thx, susan)
Lamenting the sad state of the typography on girls' asses. "This booty type is in fact similar to public signage that I've worked so closely with over the years: it's meant to be seen, it's communicating important and relevant information, it can be used to alert people of a problem ("SLUT!"), or it can simply be pointing out a scenic overlook."
In Five Steps to Font Freedom, Adrian of Be A Design Group suggests some ways to improve typography on the web, noting that you don't need to own the fonts in books, movies, newspapers to view works in those media. The fifth suggestion is interesting, even outside of that particular goal:
5. Build Free Versions of the Classic Fonts If we can't convince the font companies to set their versions of classic fonts free, we will recreate them ourselves. The great fonts are based on designs that are centuries old that can't possibly be protected by copyright law. Although it would be a major task, the collective power of the online community could create quality versions of classic fonts. Little by little, we can build an open source classic font library! Does anybody have a complete set of the original Garamond that I can borrow? Let's get started...
Applying the open source development process to make freely available and modifiable versions of classic fonts like Garamond, Caslon, Bodoni, Baskerville, etc. is a fantastic idea.
Here's a sampling of the rest of the AIGA Design Conference, stuff that I haven't covered yet and didn't belong in a post of it's own:
Juan Enriquez gave what was probably my favorite talk about what's going on in the world of genetics right now. I've heard him give a variation of this talk before (at PopTech, I think). He started off talking about coding systems and how when they get more efficient (in the way that the Romance languages are more efficient than Chinese languages), the more powerful they become in human hands. Binary is very powerful because you can encode text, images, video, etc. using just two symbols, 1 and 0. Segue to DNA, a four symbol language to make living organisms...obviously quite powerful in human hands.
Enriquez: All life is imperfectly transmitted code. That's what evolution is, and without the imperfections, there would be no life. The little differences over long periods of time are what's important.
Enriquez again: The mosquito is a flying hypodermic needle. That's how it delivers malaria to humans. We could use that same capability for vaccinating cows against disease.
1. Design is the easy part. 2. Learn from your clients, bosses, collaborators, and colleagues. 3. Content is king. 4. Read. Read. Read. 5. Think first, then design. 6. Never forget how lucky you are. Enjoy yourself.
Nicholas Negroponte: If programmers got paid to remove code from sofware instead of writing new code, software would be a whole lot better.
Negroponte also shared a story about outfitting the kids in a school in Cambodia with laptops; the kids' first English word was "Google", and from what Negroponte said, that was followed closely by "Skype". He also said the children's parents loved the laptops because at night, it was the brightest light in the house.
Ben Karlin and Paula Scher on the challenges of making America, The Book: Books are more daunting than doing TV because print allows for a much greater density of jokes. In trying to shoot the cover image, they found that bald eagles cannot be used live for marketing or advertising purposes. The solution? A golden eagle and Photoshop. And for a spread depicting all the Supreme Court Justices in the buff, they struggled -- even with the Web -- to find nude photos of older people until they found a Vermont nudist colony willing to send them photos because they were big fans of The Daily Show.
Bill Strickland blew the doors off the conference with his account of the work he's doing in "curing cancer" -- his term for revitalizing violent and crime-ridden neighborhoods -- in Pittsburgh. I can't do justice to his talk, so two short anecdotes. Strickland said he realized that "poor people never have a nice day" so when he built his buildings in these poor black neighbohoods, he put nice fountains out front so that people coming into the building know that they're entering a space where it's possible to have a good day. Another time, a bigwig of some sort was visiting the center and asked Strickland about the flowers he saw everywhere. Flowers in the hood? How'd these get here? Strickland told him "you don't need a task force or study group to buy flowers" and that he'd just got in his car, bought some flowers, brought them back, and set them around the place. His point in all this was creating a place where people feel less dissimilar to each other...black, white, rich, poor, everybody has a right to flowers and an education and to be treated with respect and to have a nice day. You start treating people like that, and surprise!, they thrive. Strickland's inner city programs have produced Fulbright Scholars, Pulitzer Prize winners, and tons of college graduates.
I caught 30 minutes of David Peters' presentation of Typecast: The Art of the Typographic Film Title and realized I should have gotten there in time to see the whole thing. I could sit and watch cool movie titles all day long. Among the titles he showed were Bullit, Panic Room, Dr. Strangelove, Barbarella, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Superman. The title sequence for Napoleon Dynamite (which was discussed on Design Observer last year) was shown later in the main hall.
At the closing party at the Museum of Science, we checked out the cool Mathematica exhibit that was designed by Charles and Ray Eames, two designers who were also pretty big science/math nerds.
And some final thoughts from others at the conference. Peter Merholz says that "form-makers", which make up the vast majority of the AIGA audience, "are being passed by those who are attempting to use design to serve more strategic ends". (That's an interesting thought...) A pair of reviews from Speak Up: Bryony was a bit disappointed with the opening Design Gala but left, like everyone else, in love with emcee John Hockenberry while Armin noted that the preservation of digital files is a big concern for museums in building a collection of graphic design pieces...in 35 years, how are you going load that Quark file or run that Flash movie?
Here's the front page of the new Guardian. They've completely revamped the paper...it's smaller and has a new font, among other changes. They changed the format to Berliner because "unambiguous research [showed] that readers increasingly find broadsheet newspapers difficult to handle in many everyday situations, including commuting to work".
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