Author: Dan Rhatigan

Climaxing

I’m quietly obsessed with this dance sequence that kicks in about 10 minutes into Gaspar Noé’s film “Climax”. It is sublime, and there is more to notice every time I watch.

I regularly re-watch the sequence, just trying to follow the movements of individual performers in the ensemble. Sometimes, I just like to let the whole thing wash over me.

I also 🤩 the main title sequence, and that it happens 46 minutes into the film, just as things really start getting freaky.

The “Climax” titles are right up there with the title sequence from Noé’s “Enter the Void”.

A bit from BITS

I went to Bangkok, Thailand, for the first time last month, attending the the BITS design conference with a few colleagues on behalf of our employer. While I was still in town after the conference I was invited to stop by the Cadson Demak podcast. (See just the bit in English on Monotype’s Foundry Platform.)

We talked about my role as Director of Inventory Strategy & Curation at Monotype, and discussed font licensing and the rise of subscription models. Among other things, I explained how a shift away from perpetual licenses can give foundries increased discoverability and secure a steady income stream.

Back in Bijou Business

My much-loved, rarely used Risograph machine started making some troubling noises not long after I finished up Pink Mince #17, and effectively stopped working at all. I was pretty sure from the sound of things that it was mechanical trouble, and I had no idea how to even begin tinkering with such a complicated machine.

Happily, I finally found someone — kind of an itinerant Riso repairman — who was able to come by and show me how to properly open up the machine and understand how to access and replace the worn-out parts. He did most of the work (thankfully, because it was terrifying to see so many exposed electronics and moving parts), and made sure I at least knew how to handle the remaining details on my own.

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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.