November 2007 Archives

Words forming thought and vice versa, an illustration from Language in Thought & Action by S.I. Hayakawa, 1940.

“Figure 3 (1-8) shows the evolution of the lower-case g from the Roman original. 9-11 are comic modern varieties having more relation to pairs of spectacles than to lettering—as though the designer had said: A pair of spectacles is rather like a g; I will make a g rather like a pair of spectacles.”

 —Eric Gill, An Essay on Typography, 1936.

“Everybody thinks that he knows an A when he sees it; but only the few extraordinary rational minds can distinguish between a good one & a bad one, or can demonstrate precisely what constitutes A-ness. When is an A not an A? Or when is an R not an R? It is clear that for any letter there is some sort of norm. To discover this norm is obviously the first thing to be done.”

—Eric Gill, An Essay On Typography, 1936.

“The traditional use of red for the commentary and ritual directions in ecclesiastical books and for the initial letters of more important passages is a reliable precedent where the customer is able to pay for it. At the present time only a few rich enthusiasts are prepared for such expense, with the consequence that such rubricating is only done in books printed for what may be called a luxury market.”

—Eric Gill, An Essay On Typography, 1936.

“[T]he business of printed lettering has, under the spur of commercial competition, got altogether out of hand and gone mad. There are now about as many different varieties of letters as there are different kinds of fools. I myself am responsible for designing five different sorts of sans-serif letters—each one thicker and fatter than the last because every advertisement has to try and shout down its neighbors.”

—Eric Gill, An Essay On Typography, 1936.

“A mysterious aspect of color is that it is created in the brain and seen to exist in the physical environment. But the physical environment contains only light waves and is in fact colorless. The colors are inside our brains, not outside.”

“[T]he most commonly reported type of synesthesia is hearing or seeing letters in color. Vowels, and often consonants, too, have very specific—and fixed—colors for the synesthetes who see letters in color. For the synesthete Katinka Regtien, for example, the vowel E is not simply red but a specific translucent red with a hint of orange. . . .

“[The] rules, the sign language and grammar of the Game, constitute a kind of highly developed secret language drawing upon several sciences and arts, but especially mathematics and music (and/or musicology), and capable of expressing and establishing interrelationships between the content and conclusions of nearly all scholarly disciplines. The Glass Bead Game is thus a mode of playing with the total contents and values of our culture; it plays them as, say, in the great age of the arts a painter might have played with the colors on his palette. All the insights, noble thoughts, and works of art that the human race has produced in its creative eras, all that subsequent periods of scholarly study have reduced to concepts and converted into intellectual property—on all this immense body of intellectual values the Glass Bead Game player plays like the organist on an organ.”

—Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi), 1943.

The ideal typographic color is an even grey that can be better seen when you slightly squint your eyes at a page of type. Typographic rivers are, of course, the vertical ribbons of white space that sometimes appear by happenstance in a column of type. They are hell on typographic color. Rivers are most common in newspapers, which often have narrow columns and tight deadline. The problem with rivers is that they draw your attention away from the line of type that you were trying to read, breaking your attention to the text. Call me silly, but I am thinking that this post might be the first in a series that pays respect to some of the great typographic rivers, a series I might call I’ve Known Rivers, Rivers I Have Known, or A River Runs Through It. I’m not sure what, but definitely a river pun.
    We’re starting with a good one, a doozie even: pages 560 and 561 of the 1966 english translation of Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s second novel, Death on the Installment Plan. In the course of these childhood memoirs Céline comes to rely more and more on the use of ellipsis, or suspension points, to capture the actual process of thought and experience, an experiment that he continued with increasing intensity for the rest of his career, to the dismal of his book designers, and perhaps even a large percentage of his readers. But Céline was a genius! You could definitely argue that his disruptive rivers are appropriate here, that they add emphasis to the violent and deliberately shocking text in the same way that futurist F.T. Marinetti’s concrete poetry described the violence of a modern battlefield. Bravo Céline! This A River Runs Though It moment is for you!

House Industries is at its best here, combining a respect for vernacular sign painting and a human touch with a sense of whimsy and humor to great effect. But perhaps the most impressive moment in this 80 page book occurs on page 27. Could it be" Yes, it's the DJ Misc logo, designed by Tal Leming in Outerspace!
    Outerspace is the name of the font. Tal, its down-to-earth designer, was once a student of mine at LSU. He freelances for House Industries now, and I suspect that he designed much of this catalog. If so, congratulations Tal, on a job well done. And thank you for the continuing free publicity.

“Her Enlightenment is perfect,—‘And we are nothing, you and me’—she pokes at my chest, ‘Jew—Jew—’ (Mexican saying ‘You’) ‘—and me’—pointing at herself—‘We are nothing. Tomorrar we may be die, and so we are nothing—’ I agree with her, I feel the strangeness of that truth, I feel we are two empty phantoms of light or like ghosts in old haunted-house stories diaphanous and precious and white and not-there,—She says ‘I know you want to sleep.’”

—Jack Kerouac, Tristessa, 1960.

Charles Barbier & Paul Neff, Mexico, 2004, 12"x15".

Tom Gregg, Petit Four, 1990, 5"x7".

“He began reading the paper. The print swam and spread like Japanese flowers. Then it was sharp again, orderly, running in a smooth black and white paste over his orderly black and white brain.”

—John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer, 1925.

“Dripping with a tango the roadhouse melted pink like a block of icecream.”

—John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer, 1925.

“He was crumbling plaster with something that rattled achingly in his chest, she was an intricate machine of sawtooth steel whitebright bluebright copperbright in his arms.”

—John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer, 1925.

“They are walking up the Mall in Central Park. . . .
    She is walking in her wide hat in her pale loose dress that the wind now and then presses against her legs and arms, silkily, swishily walking in the middle of great rosy and purple and pistachiogreen bubbles of twilight that swell out of the grass and trees and ponds, bulge against the tall houses sharp and gray as dead teeth round the southern end of the park, melt into the indigo zenith.”

—John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer, 1925. My spellchecker is going crazy here! Dos Passos was an influence on Jack Kerouac and it shows. They both made up new words whenever they needed them. So did Shakespeare!

There are signs in the graphic design community of a reaction against the slick digital look of ”the future“ that I am going to call a primitive revolution. This low-budget hand-rendered look “works” because it stands out from the pre-processed competition. It is visually startling and often witty and refreshing. Art directors like the primitive revolution because it is effective, at this point in time, in the marketplace. Graphic designers like the primitive revolution because it raises interesting questions about our culture’s values, because it reaffirms their humanity, and because it’s fun.
    I mention all this because of a website that I ran into today: Hijackyourlife.com. Hijackyourlife and Hand Job: A Catalog of Type, are two of the fullest expressions of this primitive revolution that I know. One of them comes the Netherlands and the other from the United States. It it too much to think that this intensely personal revolution may be occurring internationally" (Thank you Johnny B for the brilliant link.)

By student demand, here is a link to the article at SmashingMagazine.com entitled 40+ Excellent Freefonts For Professional Design. (ATTENTION STUDENTS: Please choose and use these fonts with care. There are some good typefaces here, and perhaps some great ones, but I think the word ‘excellent’ in this context may be a slang appeal to youth culture, or the youth market, and does not necessarily connote excellence in the classic typographic sense of preeminence. In other words, you may have to pay for your preeminent fonts.) (Thank you Bryan Briggs.)

Dan Funderburgh makes unusual wallpapers and repeats.

“A small bearded bandylegged man in a derby walked up Allen Street, up the sunstriped tunnel hung with skyblue and smokedsalmon and mustardyellow quilts, littered with second hand gingerbread-colored furniture.”

—John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer, 1925.

“The cabin boy lay on his back looking at the clouds. They floated from the west, great piled edifices with the sunlight crashing through between, bright an white like tinfoil. He was walking through tall white highpiled streets, stalking in a frock coat with a tall white collar up tinfoil stairs, broad, cleanswept, through blue portals into streaky marble halls where money rustled and clinked on long tinfoil tables, banknotes, silver, gold.”

—John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer, 1925.

“‘Thought I could git a work as a longshoreman, ma’am, but they’re layin’ men off down on the wharves. Mebbe I kin go to sea as a sailor but nobody wants a green hand. . . .’”

—John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer, 1925.

“He pulled out letters and memoranda at random from his collection . . . ‘I’ll read you one among many’ . . .
    He kept all these admiring letters in his mauve and lavender portfolio.”

—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan, translated by Ralph Manheim, 1966.

“Right away Antoine pushed the fat mama down on her knees . . . He was awfully brutal . . . She had her ass up in the air . . . He tickled and teased her . . . He couldn’t find her dingat . . . He tore her ruffles . . . he tore everything in sight . . .”

—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan, translated by Ralph Manheim, 1966.

“The bathers crowd around, all hysterical . . . The raging sea pounds me down to the bottom, then lifts me gasping to the surface . . . In a flashing moment I see that they’re discussing my agony . . . There they are, every imaginable color: green . . . blue, parasols, lavender ones, lemon-yellow ones . . . I whirl about in pieces . . . And then I don’t see a thing . . .”

—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan, translated by Ralph Manheim, 1966.

“[T]he universe that we know is immensely large and complex. Its extension in time and space is beyond human scale and comprehension. The universe is 15 billion years old; our sun is 4.5 billion years old. In contrast, our human species appeared only 130,000 years ago and the first cave paintings only 35,000–50,000 years ago. The numbers alone enforce both a sense of perspective and humility. Humbling, too, is the knowledge that we are intimately connected with the universe ‘all the way up and all the way down,’ because we know that chemically and biologically we share a common ancestry with both the stars and the simplest life forms.”

—Dennis Ford, The Search for Meaning: A Short History, 2007.

“[T]rue alphabetic writing consists in having a sign for each sound (technically each phoneme) of the language, rather than one for each word or one for each syllable. This is the most efficient writing system possible, since a language will be found to have some thousands of words and at least a couple of hundred different syllables, but the words and syllables are made up of individual speech sounds which seldom exceed sixty to seventy in number, and sometimes number as few as a dozen. Hence an alphabetic writing system can, with the fewest possible units . . . record every possible utterance in the language.”

—John P. Hughes, The Science of Language, 1962.

”[A]s far as can be ascertained from the available records, the principle of alphabetic writing has only been discovered once—hence, in the whole world there is only one alphabet. . . . [A]ny people which writes in alphabetic signs has learned and adapted the use of the alphabet from another people who, in turn, had done the same. . . .
    The earliest preserved inscriptions in alphabetic script date to about 1725 B.C. and were found in and around Byblos, in the country then known as Phoenicia (now Lebanon). It would seem that an alphabetic script which we might call Old Semitic was fairly familiar in that region at that time. . . .
    This Old Semitic alphabet is of course the ancestor of the Hebrew, Phoenician, and Aramaic systems of writing. From these northern Semites, the knowledge of the alphabet appears to have passed, on the one hand, to the Greeks of Asia Minor, and on the other, to the Brahmans of ancient India, who developed from it their devanagari, the sacred script in which the religious rituals and hymns of the ancient Hindus were recorded.”

—John P. Hughes, The Science of Language, 1962.

“The sky too has its changes. . . . Clouds map it up at times, but it is normally a dome of blending tints, and the main tint blue. By day the blue will pale down into white where it touches the white of the land, after sunset it has a new circumference—orange, melting upwards into tenderest purple. But the core of blue persists, and so it is by night. Then the stars hang like lamps from the immense vault.”

—E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, 1924.

“A little green bird was observing her, so brilliant and neat that it might have hopped straight out of a shop. On catching her eye it closed its own, gave a small skip and prepared to go to bed. Some Indian wild bird. . . .
    ‘Do you know what the name of that green bird up above us is"’ she asked, putting her shoulder rather nearer to his.
    ‘Bee-eater.’
    ‘Oh no, Ronny, it has red bars on its wings.’
    ‘Parrot,’ he hazarded.
    ‘Good gracious no.’
    The bird in question dived into the dome of the tree. It was of no importance, yet they would have liked to identify it, it would somehow have solaced their hearts. But nothing in India is identifiable, the mere asking of a question causes it to disappear or to merge in something else.”

—E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, 1924.

“When they argued about it something racial intruded—not bitterly, but inevitably, like the colour of their skins: coffee-colour versus pinko-grey.”

—E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, 1924.

“The remark that did him the most harm at the club was a silly aside to the effect that the so-called white races are really pinko-grey. He only said this to be cheery, he did not realize that ‘white’ has no more to do with a colour than ‘God save the King’ with a god, and that it is the height of impropriety to consider what it does connote. The pinko-grey male whom he addressed was subtly scandalized; his sense of insecurity was awoken, and he communicated it to the rest of the herd.”

—E.M. Forster, A Passage to India, 1924.

My art. Not the art that I’ve created, but the art that I own. Art that I liked enough to pay for. Well . . . one of these was a gift, one them was purchased at art market prices, and the other purchased at a thrift store. I”m a thrift shopper . . . but the point is, this is all art that I like. Art is experience, not a market commodity. So, take a deep breath. Relax. And please enjoy a few paintings from my collection.

Charles Barbier, Marsh, 2005.

Wayne Jones, Untitled, 1994.


Jim Kellough, Old Bald Head, 2001.

I posted yesterday’s question on a graphic design educators listserv, and I have already received three great responses. My question hasn't been directly answered (which means it’s a good question, rIght") but I have learned a great deal. There is more to the words serif and sans-serif than you might have expected. If you’re interested in such things and you have some time, check out How should ‘sans’ be pronounced", a lively discussion of the subject at Typophile.com.

I have been researching typographic terminology for an article I plan to submit to a number of on- and off-line publishing houses. (Was that vague enough") According to the Oxford English Dictionary, famous for its exhaustive word histories, the word ‘serif’ was a back formation from the word ‘sans-serif’. In other words, serif was not, as I have always assumed, a French word, but rather a ‘faux-french’ word invented in England just after the English invention of ‘sans-serif.
    According to the OED, the words were first recorded in print in 1830 (serif) and 1841 (sans-serif).  So it seems that serif came first, right" No, actually. They are so close to each other biblio-geologically that apparently the invention of the word ‘sans-serif’ led quite nicely to the invention of the word serif. 
    My question now is this: if there was no word ‘serif’, what word was previously used, in any language, to describe what my first type teacher, P. Lyn Middleton, called ‘the little feet on the letters’"  It's almost impossible to believe that no one ever mentioned them. Sans-serif Roman type was, amazingly, not invented until the mid-nineteenth century. For nearly 2000 years, if you wrote with the Roman alphabet, the serif was literally ubiquitous!

So, aside from, perhaps, the color red, what’s Burmese about Burma-Shave" Did I hear you ask" Well, as Leonard Odell tells it in Frank Rowsome’s book The Verse by the Side of the Road, Burma-Shave was preceded as a family enterprise by a liniment or topical health aid developed by his grandfather and named by his father:
    “We called it Burma-Vita. Burma because most of the essential oils in the liniment came from the Malay peninsula and Burma, and Vita from the Latin for life and vigor—the whole name meaning Life from Burma.”
    It is unclear whether any of these particular essential oils made it into the shaving cream knows as Burma-Shave, the result of over 300 chemical experiments, but as a prefix for a product name, Burma- was alive!

I don’t personally remember Burma-Shave signs; they were slightly before my time. But I’ve heard them mentioned from time to time and now I am researching all things Burmese for an upcoming lecture at school.
    Burma-Shave signs were an advertising phenomenon, born as America’s highway system was growing. Rhyming sets of five painted boards with a kicker Burma-Shave logo on a sixth sign, they lined highways all over America through the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. The last of over 600 Burma-Shave jingles were posted in 1963.
    Frank Rowsome Jr writes in his history of Burma-Shave signs, The Verse By the Side of the Road, “The signs themselves underwent continuous evolution. For the first five years they were one-inch pine boards, ten inches high and yard long, dip-painted twice with the background color mixed preservative. The lettering, a standard sign painter’s Gothic, was applied by silk screen. . . . To emphasize the new crop of jingles, signs alternated by years between red with white letterig and orange with black lettering. . . .
    “Yearly alterations of color had seemed a good way to call attention to the new signs, but it was noticed that whenever people spoke of Burma-Shave signs, they invariably described them as red and white. Orange-and-black ones seem to have made no impression whatever on the public’s retina, or at least on its memory. At this the company gave up, going almost exclusively to red and white.”
    Frank Rowsome Jr never mentions the original reason for the red and white color scheme, but a deep red is, unofficially, the national color of the country Burma (or Myanmar depending on which side of the political fence you’re on). But the red seemed right, to the designers of the original signs as well as the general public, which dismissed the orange signs as aberrations.

Just something to look at.

“Grandma was always out rustling . . . looking for white elephants at the auction rooms . . . she brought back everything, oil paintings, amethysts, whole forests of candelabras, cascades of embroidered tulle, cabochons, pyxes, stuffed animals, armor, parasols, gilded monstrosities from Japan, alabaster bowls and worse, gimcracks without a name, and objects nobody ever heard of. . . .
    At the Passage she helped us as long as she could with what junk she still had left from her stock. We only lighted one window, that was as much as we could fill . . . It was a discouraging lot of bric-a-brac, decrepit with age, gray elephants, crap; if that was all we had to sell, we were sunk.”

—Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Death on the Installment Plan, Translated by Ralph Manheim, 1966.

After a week or so of inter-server confusion, DJ Misc is back online! The only bad news is that I lost all the pictures from the old server. They were so deeply embedded in the text, or something, that . . . well . . . they’re gone. I know that many of you prefer pictures to text, I know that, so I’ll post some new pictures soon.

"I have been fortunate to witness several great moments in graphic design history, but none more overdue than the day The New York Times finally dropped the period from its masthead.
    Newspaper mastheads traditionally placed a period after the name, but by 1900 most papers had given up the practice. . . . Meanwhile, the period appeared day after day and week after week consuming ink, I estimate, at the rate of $84 a year.
    It was not until 1966 that the Times concluded there was little to be gained from further procrastination. . . .
    The ailing masthead was brought into our quarters on the appointed day. When the operating table was duly set Ed Benguiat, after honing his trusted scalpel to a fine edge, administered four deft strokes of the blade, severing the period with a minimum of discomfort. . . .
    It was an historic moment. . . . I hope we returned the severed period to the Times as a valuable contribution to its archives."

—Edward Rondthaler, Life with Letters as they Turned Photogenic, 1981.

Regular readers may have noticed that I haven't posted anything new for three days. This is in anticipation of an upgraded site and a new server! I've been holding off on the latest entries because I want them to be beautiful and linkable. So, while it may seem that nothing much is happening here, big changes are coming.

From the new server I'll be able to run up to 100 websites. Visions of a media empire are dancing in my head!

“The letter M is identified by two independent but generally ascending and more or less symmetric lines joined at or very near their tips by the ends or near-ends of a more or less v-shaped and generally symmetric pair of lines whose crotch or point of convergence does not fall below the imaginary baseline.”

—Edward Rohdthaler, Life with Letters, 1981.

“‘What shall we call a “thing” anyhow"’ [William] James asks. ‘It seems quite arbitrary for we carve out everything just as we carve out constellations, to suit our human purposes.’ . . .

In counting the stars and finding a resemblance, we in one sense discover what was always there, but in another, by adding to it, create something entirely new.”

—Dennis Ford, The Search for Meaning: A Short History, 2007.

“Modernization forces upon us a world that is denuded of all humanly recognizable qualities, including beauty and ugliness, love and hate, passion and fulfillment, sin and redemption. A person who restricts his or her attention to only what can be counted, measured and weighed lives, necessarily, in a very poor world.”

—Dennis Ford, The Search for Meaning: A Short History, 2007.

“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.”

—George Santayana, quoted by Dennis Ford in The Search for Meaning: A Short History, 2007.