Author: Dan Rhatigan

Brief Encounters

Since the inspirations for Bijou typefaces (so far) come from the research I have been doing into the history of gay magazine publishing, I get particularly excited when my typefaces are used for projects with a bit of queerness to them.

So happily, the first use of Buckram by anyone besides me was for Brief Encounters: Queer Instant Photography, a small photography exhibit at a gallery here in Portland. When one of the artists, Michael Espinoza, reached out to me about using Buckram for gallery labels and some related text pieces, I was more than to help out. Perfect conceptual alignment!

It’s always useful to see someone else use one of my typefaces for the first time, since I get a better sense of how well it really works after being so close to it for the long stretches of time it takes to finish a typeface. It’s a huge relief to see someone use it well, and confirm that the design has real potential!

Finding a creative jump-start

For the past couple of years, a small town near the foothills of the Italian Alps has welcomed a dozen-or-so passionate typographers and I to spend our holiday not on a beach or by a pool, but rather immersing ourselves in Italian type history. Summer in the Veneto has plenty of charms for the typical visitor – incredible food and wine, sunny skies, beautiful vistas – but this group is more likely to get emotional about vintage wood type, ornate printing presses, and rare type specimens.

The 1895 journal of the Nebiolo type foundry, in the collection of Tipoteca Italiana Fondazione, Cornuda.

All this inspiration is part of TipoItalia, a two-week residency at Fondazione Tipoteca Italiana, a museum of type history in Cornuda, about an hour north of Venice. Tipoteca holds an extraordinary collection of material gathered from printers and typefounders all across Italy, and it serves as the home base for a creative getaway. Participants of TipoItalia get to see all kinds of type and lettering – inside the museum and out – and work together in the museum’s print studio to transform what they see around them into new work, experimenting with letterpress printing, bookbinding, and digital type design.

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Meta post

No one tagged me, which is no surprise because this project has been so dormant for so long, but there’s a set of blog questions going around that has had me thinking about my tentative efforts to paying attention to this platform once again.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

My participation in discussion groups — especially alt.zines (and I am amazed that this old site I helped put together is still online) — dovetailed with my interest in tinkering with publishing during the early days of the web, so my old zine Rumpus Room slowly morphed into a web site to hold the features I had already published, and that slowly morphed into occasional updates, and then tools appeared that made it easier to publish those updates without writing pages from scratch all the time.

Publishing a zine in the ’90s was an expensive endeavor, since I was young and poor and trying to take the production values seriously. So my desire to express myself in some fashion shifted from print to the web, and after a while the online part took on a life of its own.

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Textiles

This is not a resolution as such, but a plea to the universe for the time and the motivation to get these Buckram italic styles finished this year. I realize it’ll never be the workhorse I need until they’re done, but earlier last year I felt like if I didn’t release the uprights, I would sit on the project forever. Meanwhile, I’ve forced myself to play with weight for emphasis more than I typically would.

Since no one has licensed Buckram yet, at least I have time to tweak! (How’s that for looking at the glass as half full?)

At least I know the punctuation marks are just right. I had been looking for just the right marks for the fingers tattoos I had been planning, only to realize I had already designed exactly the shapes I wanted for Buckram.

Perpetual Professional Burn-Out

Ah, the holiday season — the time of the year when I invariable get a minute or two to catch my breath and reflect upon how exhausted I seem to be by the end of each year. It doesn’t take any deep reflection to know why: I do too much, and too much of it at once, because I constantly chase too many parallel interest and side hustles, and I exist in a state of almost perpetual over-commitment. I’m interested in too many things! Since I am lucky that I can earn a living by doing things that I enjoy anyway, work tends to bleed into non-work, and hobbies overlap with my profession.

An Instagram story prompt had me thinking today about how much I have actually done for work and work-adjacent activities over time. It’s…a lot. (And I say this while feeling a huge amount of shame over letting yet another work-adjacent project blow its last deadline because I haven’t had the time to properly concentrate on it.)

Twenty years ago (!), I published a post about my real résumé — all the jobs I’ve had, not just what I would list on a CV — and that was already a lot. So, let’s see what I’ve been up to since April 2004…

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A little too queer

I am back in Brazil for the first time in 25 years or so, and it is still a delight. São Paulo is a very different vibe from Rio de Janeiro — it’s the NYC/LA conflict of South America — but it’s all still warmth and magic to me, with a dash of economic disparity and culture shock.

My last trip was an extended holiday vacation, while this was a week of work-related type nerdery surrounding the DiaTipo conference. I led a workshop on marketing type foundries and fonts, and gave the final keynote. (Hopefully there will be a recording to share eventually.)

One teeeeeeny little bit of tension about the event is that is held at a Presbyterian university — in a country that continues to struggle with religious conservatism — and the truly terrific team organizing the conference are mostly very queer. They have unfortunately had to struggle a bit with their host, and I think that my proposed talk may have ruffled a few feathers. (Maybe it was the slides showing just the titles of gay magazines, maybe it was general openness about the queerness of my life and my work.) I’m lucky that I am at a place in my life and career that I can get away with openness like that, but I hope the organizers’ desire to include me didn’t cause more stress for them.

So, as a show of appreciation for this wonderful, energetic team of young people who stood by me, I just want to say that I am impressed with them, and I deeply grateful for their hospitality, and I just hope my example offers a little bit of courage to keep on keepin’ on.

Just look at all those beautiful, enthusiastic faces! We were all really lucky to work with such a magnificent crew.