Author: Dan Rhatigan

IML 1980

leatherarchives:

Our countdown to International Mr. Leather continues with 1980

Having started late in the first year, there was a determination not to get off to a late start in 1980. “What if we…” conversations were all around, but the hardest thing was the realization that the first IML had been a smashing success. What do you do, Chuck and Dom asked each other, to top that? What do we do to improve on it? On top of such “gotta succeed” feelings, they had to deal with the fact that Patrick Batt, the Gold Coast manager in 1979 who had been the go-to man and the get-it-done guy, was no longer on the team. He had gotten into a disagreement with Chuck over an incident at the bar. The result for him was that he was free to attend IML without having to do anything. For IML, it meant rethinking, reinventing and finding new ways.  International Mr. Leather, Inc.

TYPO Labs: Variable Fonts Progress Report

Fastest upload ever! I just gave this talk earlier today at TYPO Labs in Berlin. I’ve barely slept for the last two days, so I’m surprised that I sound so lucid.

Since last September’s announcement of the new OpenType 1.8 spec, variable fonts have been moving from concepts and demos into practical solutions. This overview will summarize the progress made so far on new fonts, the environments that can support them, and what some designers have already learned to do with them.

Update: And here’s a nice montage of scenes and impressions from the event:

Source Han Serif: An open source Pan-CJK typeface

When I started at Adobe last September, the Adobe Type team had been hard at work for quite some time on a major project: Source Han Serif, a serif-style family supporting pan-CJK languages. This is a follow-up to Source Han Serif, but pushes the scope a little further than that project, particularly in that it turns out to have been the original story for Frank Grießhammer’s wonderful Source Serif, as well.

I didn’t do much for the project itself other than keep an eye on its progress while my better-qualified colleagues finished what they’d started, but thy were kind enough to let me talk about the work and how it fits in with Adobe Type’s overall mission, which IS my job to worry about.

Variable Fonts in Print

Just a quick interview feature in Print about some upcoming things in the type world:

Variable Fonts with Dan Rhatigan

By: Callie Budrick | April 1, 2017

If you’re working in the typography world, you may have heard the whisperings of collaboration between some of the biggest names in technology. Adobe, Apple, Google and Microsoft have been working together (with the help of independent type foundries and designers) to create something that’s going to change the way we see type — literally. They’re called variable fonts, and Dan Rhatigan took the time to tell us everything we needed to know about them.

“Variable fonts are a way of taking many, many, many styles within a typeface family — from very lightweight to very bold weight, from wide to skinny — and packaging them all up into one small file,” he explains. You’re not just saving space, you’re also getting access to all of the possible weights and sizes on the spectrum of a font. That includes more than the names you would choose from a font menu like bold or light. But how does it work?

Basically, “it’s a more complicated and sophisticated version of a font file. But it’s still just a font file and will behave on any operating system that can support it,” says Rhatigan. Variable fonts are based in formulas like any other font file. “In terms of how it knows what it can do, that’s where the applications will come in and be able to register, ‘oh, these are all possibilities within one file,’ rather than having to specify a different file to get a different style.”

Example of how Variable Fonts, a developing font technology, can work. Source: Erik van Blokland

He explained it to me like this: the same mechanism that allows a webpage to read flow when you zoom in and out in a browser window can manipulate a font’s style when it gets built into the CSS. So if you take a phone or tablet, and you turn it from vertical to horizontal, “the same device detection that allows it to register that the device orientation is changing could allow the font file to switch to, say, a more condensed style for the vertical orientation, or a more expanded style for the horizontal.”

Variable fonts are still in the early days of conception, but that isn’t stopping people from experimenting and pushing the boundaries here and now. David Jonathan Ross from DJR Foundry and the Dutch type foundry Underware have both been testing experiments. The Big Four have also been getting input on the technical side from designers and typographers around the world. Erik van Blokland from LettError has contributed a lot of the math that has made dynamic fonts more flexible. Friends from Monotype who helped develop TrueType GX in the 90s and Dalton Maag from Typekit have also been have helping make variable fonts the best they can be. “It’s encouraging to me that people aren’t holding their cards close to themselves, and that they’re trying to engage in a dialog as we all come to understand what will be possible and what we can make possible for people who use these fonts.”

The header of LettError’s website, demonstrating dynamic fonts.

A few days before chatting with Dan Rhatigan, I had a conversation with Paula Scher. She made the comment about how she prefers when design leads the software, rather than the software leading the design. Is it possible that variable fonts could be a shortcoming by giving designers too many options to work with? “Variable fonts will be a very flexible tool. My hope is that…it will encourage designers to think very deeply about what they can do with that. I would hate to see people saying things like, ‘Oh, I can have any weight,’ and then begin using weights that don’t make sense just because [they’re available],” he says.

As for other possible drawbacks, “[it’s] an added responsibility for type designers,” says Rhatigan. Variable fonts will require type designers to be more methodical, since every possible weight will be available to developers. “You can’t make a weight and then clean it up.”

“Variable fonts are not the solution for all kinds of fonts. Not everyone will have to make [or use them]. They’re a good solution for packaging up large font families that would otherwise come with a lot of different styles within them.”

Marcus Leatherdale shares never-before-seen portraits of Robert Mapplethorpe

[Repposted from an old ID article from 28 March, 2017]

As he debuts photographs of the provocative artist made during a late night in 1979, Leatherdale shares his memories of Mapplethorpe and downtown New York.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, many considered New York to be a city in decline (the Council for Public Safety produced a controversial pamphlet aimed at keeping tourists out of town entirely). Yet the era produced a generation of renegade New York artists. As hip-hop emerged in the Bronx, the burgeoning punk movement cross-pollinated with the avant-garde nightlife scene downtown. In this post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS period, members of NYC’s queer community were breaking new ground not simply in the art they made, but also with the lives they lived. The work and ideas produced in this era still profoundly shape New York today.

Continue reading “Marcus Leatherdale shares never-before-seen portraits of Robert Mapplethorpe”

Valenstein & Fatt

While I was in London recently, I helped my pals at Grey London with a film about why they’re taking on the names of their original founders, Valenstein & Fatt, to talk about diversity in the industry.

I was originally asked to talk about the typeface they chose to recapture the spirit of Grey, circa 1917, but as it turned out I was much more passionate about how hard it has always been for immigrants and other marginalized groups to assimilate into American culture, despite the myth of the Great American Melting Pot.

Valenstein & Fatt from Valenstein & Fatt on Vimeo.

(I begged them to re-kern that logotype, though.)

Update: A second video, with my take on Valenstein & Gray’s choice of Century Schoolbook for their re-imagined brand:

Valenstein & Fatt: The Logo from Valenstein & Fatt on Vimeo.

Continue reading “Valenstein & Fatt”

The Blank-ish Page

This talk took place on Saturday, June 18, 2016 in The Great Hall at The Cooper Union as part of Typographics.

Typographics 2016: The Blank-ish Page from Type@Cooper.

My summary from the program:

It can be difficult to explore possibilities of typography when designers—and especially clients—assume certain things are given, when these variables are not hard limits, just conventions. I want to look at the background of certain defaults of our software, to get people to consider them in some context and think about them more critically.