One of the ongoing goals of the Hot Type Club is to find out more about who designed all these classic gay mags, and how they went about it. It’s tough to find out much detail about how magazines were produced — the gritty details of production tasks and working methods — since it’s not something the general public seem to care much about, I suppose. Or at least the process seems so unremarkable when it’s happening, and it’s only in retrospect that practical details look more like a valuable piece of history.
This 1965 film from the Citizens for Decent Literature is a blistering screed against the tempting evil available on newsstands. “Perversion for Profit” was financed by Charles Keating and narrated by news reporter George Putnam. It’s fun, in its way, but it’s also an example of the conservative mindset that would soon be further challenged by court cases defending the right to send homosexual material through the mail.
I love when it gets to this frame, about 9 minutes into the clip. At this point, my Hot Type Club reference collection is extensive enough that I’m pretty certain I own every issue shown below.
One of my last little projects before I left Adobe back in early 2021 was putting together a small feature (with an accompanying font pack) about my personal top ten list of fonts. This wasn’t a list of favorite fonts: it was a list of starting points for choosing the right styles for a given project. Basically, working out a good starter list for yourself is like the start of a choose-your-own-adventure process for type selection, so you can start with a few families that you know well, and begin mixing and looking for alternative choices based on what will really work for the task at hand.
The thing is, my choices for that feature were limited to options available in Adobe Fonts, so I had to skip a few of my real go-to’s for similar options available in the library. (Having a handle top-ten list makes it easier to start swapping in appropriate alternatives, of course.) It’s only natural to revisit the idea and share my real Personal Top Ten*:
I wish the old web site were still alive and functioning (but you can look through my old posts or browse on the Wayback Machine), since over the course of three years or so we really put on some spectacular shows, and worked with a lot of wonderful and talented people — many of whom have found fame and success in a variety of fields.
As Andy talks about in his article, it all feels like a snapshot of a bygone era of internet culture. Even then, I think we were trying to preserve a personal, organically interconnected version of the online experience before it all washed away.
It was one era, passing onto another. Similarly, I feel like it might be time to shift gears again. For many years now, I surrendered too many of my thoughts and updates and connections to a series of social networks, very much at the expense of the body of work (if you can call it that) I’d been cultivating on this site since 1996. Not only did I offer all that energy to the commercial objectives of big companies, but I got swept up in as many bad habits of being online as rewarding ones. Time, I thing, to return to Ultrasparky and scream into the void from my own place.
Although I launched Bijou Type with a few typefaces a while back, to date they have only been available through my friends at Type Network and Adobe Fonts. At last, thanks to the wonderful work of Hank Brentlinger (for the design) and Lucas Czarnecki (for the build and overall site management), I am delighted to announce the arrival of my own site where you can inspect and license the Bijou families, as well as some other type projects I have completed over the years. Please drop in and check out Bijou Type.
It took many years of patience, luck, and persistence (and more than one ill-advised outrageous price), but I have managed to collect just about every issue of Bob Mizer’s Physique Pictorial. (Vol. 2 no. 1, I know you’re out there somewhere, but I probably can’t afford you anymore.)
Mizer is best known for his photography and filmmaking, but less so for the design and typography of Physique Pictorial. In fact, the magazine always had a fairly crude, almost punk approach to its layout. Text and labels were often set with a typewriter, and you can see the evidence of its cost-and-paste production methods, from the first issue in 1951 all the way through to Mizer’s last in 1990. Even though his last couple of issues feature cover titles made with crude digital fonts, the magazine’s layout was very much an analog process.
When looking at the entire run of Physique Pictorial, it’s clear that Mizer was pretty economical in his use of materials. That’s not to say that the magazine looked cheap. In fact, I’ve always been quite fond of the immediacy of the type and layouts, and Mizer’s emphasis on the photography and illustrations. Over the years, though, Mizer used a handful of pieces of artwork for the cover masthead over and over again. Whether he did it for thrift or for variety in the covers, the same few title treatments appear periodically throughout the entire 40-or-so years of the magazine’s run. Knowing that the magazine was assembled by hand, the reuse of these art elements suggest that Mizer kept the artwork on hand for decades, applying it as he saw fit.
