Author: Dan Rhatigan

Hot, Slutty, Pink Bijou Type

Most of my side projects have organically spun out from one another, and all tie back to my pretty deep interest in typography.

Pink Mince was at first an effort do something creative — to somehow use type and my other graphic skills — as my day designing type took me further from actually doing much type. For Pink Mince #9 — Punk Mince — I started gathering old sheets of Letraset, which got me thinking about how Letraset was such a huge part of the graphic landscape in a certain era. I began paying attention to where those typefaces showed up, and that eventually led to Pink Mince #12 — The Stroke — where I recreated the typography from a bunch of old gay porn magazines. While preparing those cover designs, I had to actually identify all the typefaces used, and pay close attention to how they were set. For one of the covers, the original type was nowhere to be found, so I had draw it myself, and this eventually became the first Bijou release, Gloridot. To draw that type and duplicate all those covers accurately, I began tracking down original copies of images I had found on Tumblr so I could better see the details. THAT made me pay even more attention to the type that was available in the era of dry transfer, which caused me to collect yet more Letraset. Eventually, I needed to keep track of what I was collecting, and the wording slowly turned into proper research (slow and informal research, but still). The typefaces that I have so far released as Bijou Type have grown out of the magazine research that I have been doing for quite a few years now. You see the cycle, right? Pink Mince to Letraslut (and its online shop) to the Hot Type Club to Bijou Type.

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Stop! The name of love.

Earlier this year, the Italian type foundry Reber R41 released R41 Stop, a revival I designed for them on commission. R41 Stop, of course, is based on Stop, the distinctive design released in 1971 by Nebiolo, designed by Aldo Novarese with help from others in the Nebiolo studio. This version that I designed for Reber R41 is specifically based on the version of Stop that they manufactured as dry transfer type. The design is fundamentally the same, but a careful digitization of the original glyphs reproduced for dry transfer reveals certain subtle differences in curvature. I wish I could discover more about the R41’s process for preparing artwork for reproduction — whether they prepared new stencils like Letraset, whether they photographed existing artwork, or some other method. Alas, the information seems lost.

In reviving a typeface that I love as much as I love Stop, I didn’t want to simple reproduce what had existed. I wanted to do that part of it well, but it was also very important to me to add more to the concept. I wanted to take Stop further, so I could feel like I truly earned some design credit that could sit alongside Novarese’s. I added additional symbols, support for Cyrillic and Greek, and a number of alternative character forms based on the ways that people have hacked Stop’s design over the years. In making a version Stop that was specifically derived from R41’s dry transfer product, I tried very hard to honor that material legacy, and design the new glyphs whenever possible to look like they could have been made out of existing shapes from the basic sheet by a decent designer with a scalpel and a steady hand.

You can see R41 Stop on the Bijou Type site, purchase a license from R41 or Type Network, or activate it with Adobe Fonts.

Rick Fiala and Christopher Street

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.

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Perversion for Profit

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.

The *Real* Top Ten

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*:

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What We Saw Was What We Got

I missed this when it was first posted, but my old pal Andy wrote a bit about an old project I was a part of: The WYSIWG Talent Show.

Worst Sex Ever and the WYSIWYG Talent Show, or Tales from Blogland

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.

Liftoff!

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.

Pictorial Paste-ups

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.

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Going to the Chappell

My friends at Type Network wrote a lovely little article about the past Summer’s exciting discovery that Chappell Roan’s tour featured some giant-sized Ringold Sans in the stage graphics for her song “Naked in Manhattan”.

Chappell Roan’s bold and theatrical style has quickly made her a standout in the music industry, and her performances at Outside Lands and Coachella in 2024 were no exception. The visual identity of her set was highlighted by the use of Ringold Sans, a font from partner Bijou Type that perfectly captures the spirit of her performance. Clean and striking, yet warm, Ringold Sans added a modern yet approachable touch to the event, aligning seamlessly with Roan’s emotive and genre-defying music.

Titans of Transfer Type

Recorded at ATypI in Paris on May 13, 2023, this overview of the production of transfer type between the 1960s and the early 1990s looks at the most prominent brands (Chartpak, Letraset, Mecanorma, Zipatone, et al.) and the various licensed and original typefaces that they distributed. Details include the challenges and advantages of working with transfer type, the prominence of certain typefaces across multiple brands, the development of original designs by certain brands, and the spread of designs and genres across international markets.