loire: 12 of 20
I wish I knew more about Jean Lochu and his work, for he created, in my opinion,
two of the more elegant, well-designed faces of the late 1990s. His
Selune,
in which the influences of Grandjean and Firmin Didot appear to shine
through, was developed in 1998 and is replete with Greek and Cyrillic
versions. And Loire, released
in the previous year, conveys the spirit of two other French printers
and punchcutters – that of Fournier in the Roman and Granjon
in the italic.
But Lochu is no mere interpreter of his predecessors, nor does he intend to
be. That he is a calligrapher by training is apparent in Loire; the
highly drawn, hybrid numerals, the extended, abrupt serifs, and the
unusually high dots on i and j are just a few of the features that
distinguish it. Loire and Selune are both available through
Agfa-Monotype.
25-October 2002
tex 2: slightly more concrete ramblings
But I didn’t tell you where to get it or how to install it and actually
produce documents, did I? Nope.
First, go to the site of CTAN
(The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network). It is everything TeX, and
if it’s your first visit, you will need some direction.
- Click on “Look through,” which will take you to the
root directory.
- Scroll down to “systems” and click. Amiga? Atari? Yes, no one
is left out. Windows users will click on win32, the last entry,
and Mac users will stop at, well, mac.
From here on, I can only write with some knowledge about Windows. Five
percent of you? Less? Is this where you hit the back button on your
browser?
(Yes, it all happened long ago, and under duress. I’ll see you back on the
other side before long, however. I know nothing about using TeX/LaTeX
on a Mac but this: OzTeX installs very easily and is a breeze to use
(on CTAN under systems/mac), and Textures
is appealing largely because of its on-the-fly DVI processing. Request
the demo.)
So, now that we’re a much smaller group – oh, it’s just you?
- Click on win32, then click on miktex, which is, as the caption states,
“a free [and very complete] TeX distribution for MS-Windows32.”
This has evolved over the years into an amazing package. Christian
Schenk should get some kind of damn big prize for his continual
expansion and improvement of it.
- Click on setup. Oh, by the way, are you an instruction-reader? (What is
your Myers-Briggs profile?) If so, read install.html or install.pdf;
if not, proceed directly to setup.exe and save to disk.
- Select the “Download only” radio button, hit next, and then
select “Small.” It ain’t so small, really. Here,
small is pretty huge, but the world of TeX has grown so incredibly
over the past few years that “Large” is simply freaking
incomprehensible.
- Proceed onward and pick a country. Yes, your own. Finally, pick a folder
to which you will download.
- Let the setupwiz application take you where it will.
At this point, you are good to go – that is, if you are content to use
Wordpad or Notepad as a text editor. If you want something more –
something with a customizable interface that is tailored to TeX –
you may wish to try WinEdt. It’s a shareware program; if you
like it and want to keep using it, you pay $30–$70 after the
31-day trial period has elapsed. The “customizable” part
has a steep learning curve, but I view the application as indispensable.
You may download here
or from CTAN under /systems/winedt.
Delay no longer; set some text. Within miktex/tex/latex/base is a file called
sample2e.tex. Process it using LaTeX, and then view the result using
YAP (or, if using WinEdt, hit the DVI or PDFLaTeX buttons). You’re
well on your way.
Finally, you’ll need a book. The one to which I invariably return is
Lamport’s LaTeX:
A Document Preparation System (2nd ed.). Slim but dense;
doesn’t include all of the latest refinements, but serves as
an excellent base. If you want to use PostScript fonts right away,
seek out Alan Hoenig’s TeX
Unbound or The
LaTeX Graphics Companion, by Goosens, Rahtz, and Mittelbach.
22-October 2002
month, date, and type...
I was getting a little anxious.
Suddenly it was October – time to tear down the previous month and to
wonder once again whether I should fold carefully and archive, and
to lament once again the fact that I didn’t order two.
Just ITC New Baskerville, Walker, and Bodoni Poster left, and then what?
Would my conversation piece – my sole on-the-job connection
to typography – leave a permanent lacuna?
No! A new one is on its way, courtesy of Kit Hinrichs at Pentagram.
But why should I get so excited about a calendar?
Well, in a discipline in which control, restraint, and subtlety have their
rightful place, something that shouts and celebrates is a welcome
addition. And nothing quite sings the praises of typography like Pentagram’s
Typographic Calendar. The 2003 version – Hinrichs’s third
– is on sale soon at Crate
& Barrel, SFMOMA,
and Design Within Reach,
and is available for the first time in large and small sizes.
You can have your times and your eternities, too.... Buy one for the moment;
save one for posterity.
17-October 2002
interesting...
A few weeks back, I wrote that the lower case, roman a is the most useful
letter in the alphabet when attempting to identify a typeface; I justified
this on the basis that it is “the most visually interesting
and complex letter...”
Huh?
Had my 11th grade English teacher read this post, she would have printed
it off, circled offending, unsubstantiated claim in broad, red, felt-tip
ink, and screamed, “SO WHAT?” And so I’ll try again;
call this a second draft. Or at least an attempt at a clarifying footnote.
Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style begins with a “historical
synopsis” – four pages in which eight typefaces, each
of which is representative of a time and genre, are dissected into
their constituent characteristics. Bringhurst focuses on five:
(1) aperture: the openings in letters such as a, e, and s
(2) axis (or stress): the angle of the pen
(3) contrast: the ratio of stroke thickness to thinness
(4) serif: the stroke that may be added to a stem, arm, or tail
(5) terminal: the ending of the arm in letters such as a, f, and r
Taken together, these five features aid us in attempting to identify typefaces;
I propose here that of the letters in the roman lower case, only the
letter a can potentially provide information about all five. This
is certainly not true of all typefaces; indeed, it perhaps holds only
for some serifed faces.
Let’s try an experiment. I show here,
in the roman lower case of Christopher Burke’s FF Celeste, all
five of these characteristics in the letter a. I also attempt to show
if, and in what number, they are present in the other letters. For
example, three of them are present in b: axis, contrast, and serif.
And only one characterizes l: serif.
The point I wish to reinforce is that, while there are types of characters
(think Plato: versions of b, of k, and so on), the roman lower case
a, from an information-content standpoint, best illustrates the character
of the type. It is the face of the alphabetic corpus, the richest
source of each font’s physiognomy. And perhaps of each font’s
personality, too; but personality is a topic for another time, another
post.
15-October 2002
homage...
So, I finally got my act together the other night and made some time for
24
Hour Party People. It was my Forrest Gump; a big-time
nostalgia trip through my Anglophilic, particularly Mancunian, musical
past (save Happy Mondays). While Billy Squier, David Lee Roth, and
Steve Perry inexplicably touched the hearts and minds of my peers,
they had nothing to say to me. But Ian Curtis – and Bernard
Sumner, in Curtis’s wake – did.
But it wasn’t just the words or the music of Joy Division and New
Order; it was the whole package. You see, what I felt upon opening
a new Factory records release can only inadequately be described as
a kind of Gestalt, visuotactile adrenalin surge. Carefully working
through layers of plastic, cardboard, and adhesive, the sacred, Schliemannian
ritual began with the removal of transparent tape from the clear,
plastic sleeve (the sure badge of an import) that enveloped said cardboard.
Separation of plastic and paper yielded only another, inner layer
of plastic – this one semi-opaque – that was the static-charged
conduit to the grooves themselves.
Label was checked for proper turntable rate, and that having been set, needle
hit vinyl. Oh yes, back then, an album or dance single meant a record
– a 12-inch, vinyl disc – and the cardboard encasement
therefore provided a large canvas for cover art.
This canvas was what one looked at, admired, and interpreted while listening
to the music. Of the three senses that Joy Division and New Order
could conceivably penetrate, one was affected through words and music;
the other two, through sight and touch. And the person responsible
for shaping what we saw and felt, for defining and honing the Factory
image, is a designer named Peter Saville.
Saville (his character, that is) has a small part in the on-screen account,
but those who followed the Factory saga know that his real role was
an essential one; image was tantamount to music according to the Wilsonian
credo. Indeed, every Factory action, whether it be a New Order release,
the Hacienda opening, or the Hannett settlement, was enumerated, and
a Saville creation accompanied most of these.
But what was it about Saville’s work for Factory that is worth remembering?
During a period of cover design that embraced the spacey (think Boston),
the silly (think Devo), the hokey (think Supertramp), the otherworldly
(think anything 4AD), Saville simply chose the thoughtful and the
beautiful.
As an example of the former, consider the cover of New Order’s
1984 single, Confusion.
The importance of the numeric index was writ large and in violet;
eight-inch high Gill Sans figures told those in the know that this
was release 93. But it was reiterated subtly; the color strip on the
upper right edge spells “FAC93” in a code created by Saville
(see the back of the previous year’s Power,
Corruption & Lies for the decoder wheel). And the bitmapped
title was, well, confusing indeed. The C could just as well be an
O or an N; the O might be a B; the N approached H or W; and so on.
And as for the latter, the design of the aforementioned album was a risky
departure: a still-life painting by Henri Fantin-Latour. Said Saville
in a 1995 Eye interview, “In 1983, when I put flowers
on the cover of Power, Corruption & Lies, we hadn’t seen
flowers in pop culture since the 1960s. But fashion designer Scott
Crolla was buying Sanderson fabric and Georgina Godley was running
it up into dresses and there was this buzz about Flower Power coming
back.”
There is a resurgence of interest in Saville; he is enjoying what Neil Tennant
might call a second “imperial” phase: The movie, a forthcoming
book by Emily King, and a recent article in The New York Times.
The floral metaphor of annuals and perennials has been extended to typefaces
(see Michael Twyman’s quote in King’s
dissertation), and so too may it apply more generally to graphic
design. The work of Peter Saville reminds us, perennially, of the
powerful role design plays in our lives.
Other links:
(1) Eye
interview with Rick Poynor
(2) Dennis
Remmer’s Factory Records Discography
(3) New
York Times article by Horacio Silva
08-October 2002
themix: 11 of 20
I brake for Aveda
ads. No, it’s not the thought of having an auto-aromatherapeutic experience.
No, it’s not the flow, shape, or color of the coiffures. Rather, it’s
the type, which happens to be...TheMix.
A third of the Thesis
triumvirate – halfway between TheSans and TheSerif – TheMix
remains spanking-fresh and vital eight years after its release. The
version shown is TheMix Office, which includes normal and bold weights
as well as hybrid figures. Designed by Luc(as) de Groot and available
through his LucasFonts.com.
07-October 2002
eureka: 10 of 20
Released by FSI in 1998,
Peter
Bilak’s FF Eureka is
the abruptly-serifed cornerstone of a font family that also comprises
sans, sans condensed, monospaced, and monospaced condensed variants.
Top prize winner at the 19th International Biennale of Graphic Design,
this excellent, economical face is reminiscent of typewritten letterforms
yet contains elements of Venetian and Garalde oldstyles. See also
the designer’s rapidly expanding Fedra
family.
02-October 2002
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