Recently in typographique Category

"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.

“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.

“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.

“While questions have clearly been around since time immemorial . . . the question mark has not. This handy graphic sign seems to have been formed from a Q with a little o under it as an abbreviation of the word quaestio (query, question). Similarly, the exclamation point—a.k.a., ‘screamer’ or ‘bang’—is derived either from an abbreviation of Latin interiectio (interjection) or else from the interjection Io! (‘Hey!’).”

—Alexander & Nicholas Humez, ABC Et Cetera: The Life & Times of the Roman Alphabet, 1985.

“The word punctuation comes from the latin verb pungere (to puncture, prick), of which the past participle is punctum, a mark of punctuation having originally been a spot pricked with a writing instrument.”

—Alexander & Nicholas Humez, ABC Et Cetera: The Life & Times of the Roman Alphabet, 1985.

“During [the early 1700’s] the period and the comma were also known as the jot (ultimately from the Greek iota) and the tittle (from Latin titulus). As for dot, the word seems originally to have meant head of a boil or pimple.”

—Alexander & Nicholas Humez, ABC Et Cetera: The Life & Times of the Roman Alphabet, 1985.

“Harold Blume writes of the mystic Kabbalah as ‘a collective, psychic defense of the most imaginative medieval Jews against exile and persecution pressing on them inwardly. So, some Kabbalists spoke of a missing twenty-third letter of the Hebrew alphabet, hidden in the white spaces between the letters. From these openings the larger Torah was still to emerge.’”

—Richard A. Firmage, The Alphabet Abecedarium, 1993.

The secret of history of graphic design, marginalized, at best, by most American books on the subject, involves a thing called punk rock. Punk was born in the United States in the late 1960s, in the form of bands like the Thirteenth Floor Elevators in Austin and Iggy and the Stooges from Detroit. It further developed in New York with the Velvet Underground and the Ramones. But it ultimately had its strongest flowering and its greatest impact on graphic design in Great Britain, in the mid to late 1970s. I feel that I would be remiss as a graphic design educator if I did not now present, from the ten-part documentary The Punk Years, Programme 7: Ridicule Is Nothing To Be Scared Of.

I bought these postcards from Burma while travelling there in 1986, because, with my recently acquired degree in graphic design, I was astonished at the print quality. Which is awful, of course, but so bad that the images become unreal and maybe even magical. Amazingly, they capture the spirit of the place"both the terrible poverty and the transporting beauty.

"I had only a smattering of Burmese, but even that seemd like a small victory over astounding linguistic odds. Burmese has the perverse syntax of Japanese and the tonal complexities of Chinese. Its writing system is based on a devilish series of interconnecting circles. Apparently, it is a great compliment to say to a Burmese person:

This means, "Your handwriting is so round.""

"Andrew Marshall, The Trouser People: A Story of Burma"In the Shadow of the Empire, 2002.

Having just learned how to cut "n" paste YouTube videos into my site, I am now proud to present an instant graphic design education to anyone who might be interested. This should take about half an hour. I have carefully arranged the curriculum, but of course you can click wherever and whenever you like.

(P.S. I have just been informed that watching multiple screens simultaneously can get you through the program even sooner. What the heck, I say go for it!)

There, wasn"t that fun" It was fun for me. (I"m learning more about this blog thing every day. COMING SOON: individually linkable entries!)

"The greatest hyphenator ever was Shakespeare (or Shak-speare in some contemporary spellings) because he was so busy adding new words, many of them compounds, to English: "sea-change," "leap-frog," "bare-faced," "fancy-free." Milton also hyphenated a lot ("dew-drops," "man-slaughter," "eye-sight") and so did Donne, who loved compounds like "death-bed" and "passing-bell," where the hyphen carries almost metaphorical weight, a reminder of what Eliot called his singular talent for yoking unlike ideas."

"Charles McGrath, Death-Knell. Or Death Knell., The New York Times, October 7, 2007.

By way of the Digital Traveler, here"s a picture of a storefront in Rangoon, Myanmar. The name Myanmar suggests that the picture was taken after June 18, 1989, when the ruling junta changed the name of the country from Burma to Myanmar. The striking circular letterforms are Burmese characters. (Let"s hope they will never be designated "Myanmarian.")

Here"s what I just learned about the Burmese alphabet at Wikipedia:

It is properly called the Burmese abugida, and the characters are round because straight lines would have ripped the palm leaves on which it was traditionally written. There are 33 consonants, but the last letter in this alphabet "although recognized as a consonant, is actually a vowel," and this secret vowel can furthermore be used to indicate other vowels.

This alphabet reads from left to right, just as English does. There are no spaces between words, but when casually written there are sometimes spaces between phrases. The puctuation is limited to two characters, one or two downward strokes, which serve as a comma and a period, respectively. (This is perhaps not so strange when you consider that in Roman times, Latin was written without worspaces and without punctuation of any kind.)

The Burmese abugida evolved from the Mon script, which has its roots in the Brahmi script of ancient India, which many academics now believe "had indigenous origins, probably from the Indus Valley (Harrapan) script." Which is a way of saying that it probably does not share a common ancestor of European scripts, as had long been believed.

Thanks to the rebranding of QVS, the cable shopping channel that no one has ever admitted to watching, let alone using, the letter Q is in the news! Here are a few things I learned this week:

""Q" might be a rare letter in the English language (and even rarer in most Germanic languages), but its unusual nature makes it popular with marketers.

"NameWire, "the product naming blog."

"In fact, there are 603 US trademarks either pending or already registered for products and services named "Q," without any embellishment.

"Q is a sexy, cool letter. It"s much better than an L or an A, which are tough to brand."

"Jeff Charney, chief marketing officer for QVC, at Advertising Age.

"We"d really like to own the 17th letter of the alphabet."

"Jeff Charney, chief marketing officer for QVC, at The New York Times.

Is this what it has come to" Am I the only one disturbed by this" We can"t let them take, uh . . . any more of OUR letters!

From Japan, an amazing collection of vintage American album cover art. And it"s all clickable.

''I like a fine prospect, but not on picturesque principles. I do not like crooked, twisted, blasted trees. I admire them much more if they are tall, straight and flourishing. I do not like ruined, tattered cottages. I am not fond of nettles, or thistles, or heath blossoms. I have more pleasure in a snug farm-house than in a watch-tower'and a troop of tidy, happy villagers please me better than the finest banditti in the world.''

'Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility, 1811.

'Michael Bierut, at DesignObserver.com.

''ʇı̣ əsnqɐ ʇ,uɐɔ noʎ ɟı̣ əpoɔı̣un sı̣ pooɓ ʇɐɥʍ'

˙5002 'uoʇʍǝu dılıɥd'

'The emerging International Typographic Style was exemplified by several new sans-serif type families designed in the 1950s. The geometric sans-serif styles, mathematically constructed with drafting instruments during the 1920s and 1930s, were rejected in favor of more refined designs inspired by . . . Akzidenz grotesk. . . . In 1954 a young Swiss designer working in Paris, Adrian Frutiger, completed a visually programmed family of twenty-one sans-serif fonts named Universe. . . .

In the mid-1950s, Edouard Hoffman of the HAAS type foundry in Switzerland decided that the Akzidenz Grotesk fonts should be refined and upgraded. Hoffman collaborated with Mex Miedinger, who executed the designs, andt their new sans serif, with an even larger x-height than that of Univers, was released as Neue Haas Grotesk. When this face was produced in Germany . . . the face name was [changed to] Helvetica, the traditional Latin name for Switzerland. Helvetica's well-defined forms and excellent rhythm of positive and negative shapes made it the most specified typeface internationally during the 1960s and 1970s.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'The Berthold Foundry [at the turn of the twentieth-century] designed a family of ten sans serifs that were variations on one original font. This Akzidenz Grotesk (called Standard in the United States) type family had a major influence on twentieth-century typography. In addition to . . . four weights . . . Berthold released three expanded and three condensed verions. Akzidenz Grotesk permitted compositors to achieve contrast and emphasis within one family of typefaces. It was a major step in the evolution of the unified and systematized type family.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'Sans-serif type made its modest debut in an 1816 specimen book issued by William Caslon IV. Buried . . . in the back of the book, one line of medium-weight monoline serifless capitals proclaimed 'W CASLON JUNR LETTER FOUNDER.' It looked a lot like an Egyptian face with the serifs removed, which is probably how Caslon IV designed it. . . .

Sans serifs, which became so important to twentieth-century graphic design, had a tentative beginning. The cumbersome early sans serifs were used primarily for subtitles and descriptive material under excessively bold fat faces and Egyptians. They were little noticed until the early 1830s, when several typefounders introduced new sans-serif styles. . . . Vincent Figgins dubbed his 1832 specimen sans serif in recognition of the font's most apparent feature, and the name stuck.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'Around 1790 [Giambattista] Bodoni redesigned the roman letterforms to give them a more mathematical, geometric, and mechanical appearance. He reinvented the serifs by making them hairlines that formed sharp right angles with the upright strokes. . . . The thin strokes of his letterforms were trimmed to the same weight as the hairline serifs, creating a brilliant sharpness and a dazzling contrast not seen before. . . . Bodoni's precise, measurable, and repeatable forms expressed the vision and spirit of the machine age.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'John Baskerville [was] an innovator who broke the prevailing rules of design and printing in fifty-six editions produced at his press in Birmingham, England. . . .

Baskerville's type designs, which bear his name to this day, represent the zenith of the transitional style bridging the gap between Old Style and modern type design. His letters possessed a new elegance and lightness. In comparison with earlier designs, his types are wider, the weight contrast between thick and thin strokes is increased, and the placement of the thickest part of the letter is different. The treament of the serifs is new: they flow smoothly out of the major strokes and terminate as refined points. His italic fonts most clearly show the influence of master handwriting.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'After apprenticing to a London engraver of gunlocks and barrels, young [William] Caslon opened his own shop and added silver chasing and the cutting of gilding tools and letter stamps for bookbinders to his repertoire of engraving skills. [He was encouraged] . . . to take up type design and founding, which he did in 1720 with almost immediate success. His first commission was an Arabic font for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. This was followed closely by the first size of Caslon Old Style with italic in 1722, and his reputation was made. For the next sixty years, virtually all English printing used Caslon fonts, and these types followed English colonialism around the glove. Printer Benjamin Franklin introduced Caslon into the American colonies, where it was used extensively, including for the offical printing of the Declaration of Independence. . . .

Beginning with the Dutch types of his day, Caslon increased the contrast between thick and thin strokes by making the former slightly heavier. . . . Caslon's fonts have variety in their design, giving them an uneven, rhythmic texture that adds to their visual interest and appeal. The Caslon foundry continued under his heirs and was in operation until the 1960s.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'Claude Garamond was the first punch cutter to work independently of printing firms. His roman typefaces were designed with such perfection that French printers in the sixteenth century were able to print books of extraordinary legibility and beauty. Garamond is credited, by the sheer quality of his fonts, with a major role in eliminating Gothic styles from compositors' cases all over Europe, except in Germany. . . .

Around 1530 Garamond established his independent type foundry to sell to printers cast type ready to distribute into the compositor's case. This was a first step away from the 'scholar-publisher-typefounder-printer-bookseller,' all in one, that began in Mainz some eighty years earlier. The fonts Garamond cut during the 1540s achieved a mastery of visual form and a tighter fit that allowed closer word spacing and harmony of design between capitals.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'[Geoffroy] Tory's Champ Fleury (subtitled The art and science of the proper and true proportions of the attic letters, which are otherwise called antique letters, and in common speech roman letters), first published in 1529, was his most important and influential work. It consists of three book. In the first, he attempted to establish and order the French tongue by fixed rules of pronunciation and speech. The second discusses the history of roman letters and compares their proprtions with the ideal proportions of the human figure and face. Errors in Albrecht D'rer's letterform designs in the recently published Underweisung der Messung are carefully analyzed, then D'rer is forgiven his errors because he is a painter. . . . The third and final book offers instructions in the geometric construction of the twenty-three letters of the Latin alphabet on background grids of one hundred squares. It closes with Tory's designs for thirteen other alphabets, including Greek, Hebrew, Chaldean, and his fantasy style made of hand tools.

Champ Fleury is a personal book written in a rambling conversational style with frequent digressions into Roman history and mythology. And yet its message about the Latin alphabet influenced a generation of French printers and punch cutters, and Tory became the most influential graphic designer of his century.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'An important humanist and scholar of the Italian Renaissance, Aldus Manutius, established a printing press in Venice at the age of forty-five to realize his vision of publishing the major works of the great thinkers of the Greek and Roman worlds. . . .

In 1501 Manutius addressed the need for smaller, more economical books by publishing the prototype of the pocket book. . . . [This] was set in the first italic type font. . . . Italic was closely modeled on the cancelleresca script, a slanted handwriting style that found favor among scholars, who liked its writing speed and informality.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'It was not Florence, where the wealthy Medicis scorned printing as inferior to manuscript books, but Venice . . . that led the way in Italian typographic book design. A Mainz goldsmith, Johannes de Spira, was given a five-year monopoly on printing in Venice, publishing his first book . . . in 1469. . . .

Nicolas Jenson, who had been Master of the Royal Mint of Tours, France, was a highly skilled cutter of dies used for striking coin. He established Venice's second press shortly after de Spira's death. . . .

Part of the lasting influence of Jenson's fonts is their extreme legibility, but it was his ability to design the spaces between the letters and within each form to create an even tone throughout the page that placed the mark of genius on this work. The characters in Jenson's fonts aligned more perfectly than those of any other printer of his time.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'In 1498 [Albrecht] D'rer published Latin and German editions of The Apocalypse illustrated by his monumental sequence of fifteen woodcuts. . . . D'rer's Apocalypse has an unprecedented emotional power and graphic expressiveness. . . . At age twenty-seven, D'rer earned reknown throughout Europe. . . .

His first book [as an author], Underweisung der Messung mit dem Zirckel unt Richtscheyt (A Course in the Art of Measurement with Compass and Ruler), [was published] in 1525. . . . The third chapter explains the application of geometry to architecture, decoration, engineering, and letterforms. D'rer's beautifully proportioned Roman capitals, with clear instructions for their composition, contributed significantly to the evolution of alphabet design. Relating each letter to the square, D'rer worked out a construction method using a one-to ten ratio of the heavy stroke width to height. This is the approximate proportion of the Trajan alphabet, but D'rer did not base his designs on any single source. Recognizing the value of art and perception as well as geometry, he advised his readers that certain construction faults could only be corrected by a sensitive eye and trained hand.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'The Book of Revelation had a surge of unexplained popularity in England and France during the 1200s. A scriptorium at Saint Albans with high artistic standards seems to have figured prominently in this development. At least ninety-three copies of the Apocalypse survive from this period. . . .

The Douce Apocalypse, written and illustrated around A.D. 1265 is one of the many masterpieces of Gothic illumination. . . . The scribe used a lettering style whose repetition of verticals capped with pointed serifs has been compared to a picket fence. Textura (from the Latin texturum, meaning woven fabric or texture) is the favored name for this dominant mode of Gothic lettering. Other terms, such as . . . the English blackletter . . . are vague and misleading. During its time, textura was called littera moderna (Latin for 'modern lettering').'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'In 1424, only 122 manuscript books resided in the university library at Cambridge, England, and the library of a wealthy nobleman whose books were his most prized and sought-after possessions probably numbered less than two dozen volumes. The value of a book was equal to the value of a farm or vineyard.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'The origins of woodblock printing in Europe are shrouded in mystery. . . . Playing cards and religious-image prints were early manifestations. . . . Card playing was popular, and in spite of being outlawed and denounced by zealous clergy, this pastime stimulated a thriving underground block-printing industry, possible before 1400. . . . Playing cards were the first printed pieces to move into an illiterate culture, making them the earliest European manifestation of printing's democratizing ability. The games of kings could now become the games of peasants and craftsmen.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'The watermark, a translucent emblem produced by pressure from a raised design on the mold and visible when the sheet of paper is held to the light, was used in Italy by 1282. The origin of this design device is unknown. Trademarks for paper mills, individual craftsmen, and perhaps religious symbolism were early uses. As successful marks were imitated, they began to be used as a designation for sheet and mold sizes and paper grade. Mermaids, unicorns, animals, flowers, and heraldic shields were frequent design motifs.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

Bernard Maisner is a calligrapher and a specialist at historically accurate handwriting. And a movie star!

Niels 'Shoe' Meulman' is a Dutch graffiti artist, graphic designer, and calligrapher. He started tagging at the age of 16. Now he's 40 and his work is amazing. Click here to see his portfolio, which is worth checking out. And click here to watch a four-part interview with him on YouTube.

'Although by some reports he was illiterate except to sign his name, Charlemagne fostered a revival of learning and the arts. The England of the 700s had seen much intellectual activity, and Charlemagne recruited the English scholar Alcuin of York to come to his palace at Aachen and establish a school. . . . Many manuscripts were difficult, if not impossible, to read. Charlemagne mandated reform by royal edict in A.D. 789. . . .

Efforts to reform the alphabet succeeded. For a model, the ordinary writing script of the late antique period was selected [and] combined with Celtic innovations, including the use of four guidelines, ascenders, and descenders. . . . The Caroline miniscule is the forerunner of our contemporary lowercase alphabet. . . . Roman capitals were studied and adopted for headings and initials. . . . The use of a dual alphabet was not fully developed in the sense that we use capital and small letters today, but a process in that direction had begun.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'The codex, a revolutionary design format, began to suplant the scroll (called a rotulus) in Rome and Greece, beginning about the time of Christ. Parchment was gathered in signatures of two, four or eight sheets. These were folded, stitched, and combined into codices with pages like a modern book. . . .

Christians sought the codex format to distance themselves from the pagan scroll; pagans clung to their scrolls in resistance to Christianity. Graphic format thereby became a symbol of religious belief during the late decades of the Roman Empire.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.

'The Latin alphabet came to the Romans from Greece by way of the ancient Etruscans, a people whose civilization on the Italian peninsula reached its height during the sixth century B.C. After the letter G was designed by one Spurius Carvilius (c. 250 B.C.) to replace the greek letter Z (zeta), which was of little value to the Romans, the Latin alphabet contained twenty-one letters: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R (which evolved as a variant of P), S, T, V, and X. Following the Roman conquest of Greece during the first century B.C., the Greek letters Y and Z were added to the end of the Latin alphabet because the Romans were appropriating Greek words containing these sounds. . . .

Roman inscriptions were designed for great beauty and permanence. The simple geometric lines of the capitalis monumentalis (monumental capitals) were drawn in thick and thin strokes, with organically unified straight and curved lines. Each letterform was designed to become one form rather than merely the sum of its parts. Careful attention was given to the shapes of spaces inside and between the letters. . . .

Regardless of which tool initiated the serif as a design element, we do know that the original letters were drawn on the stone with a brush and then carved into it. The shapes and forms defy mathematical analysis or geometrical construction. . . . Some Roman Inscriptions . . . contain minute particles of red paint that have adhered to the stone through the centuries, leaving little doubt that the carved letters were painted with red pigment.'

'Phil Meggs & Alston Purvis, Meggs' History of Graphic Design, 2006.