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.
A first! I’m on a flight back home to Portland, and I just glanced up to see a commercial on another passenger’s screen — using Gloridot! It appears Walden University has done a series of spots.
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 the 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 you g 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.
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 farreleased 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.
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.
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.
