Author: Dan Rhatigan

Ziggy played guitar here

After living out of suitcases for the past few months, I finally get to settle down again this month. I was spared the horrors and aggravation of gambling on strangers when some friends of mine in Greenwich let me know that one of them was moving out and freeing up a room, a much better situation — in terms of rent, location, and housemates — than I was facing otherwise. So I’ll be south of the river again, happily reunited with my books and the rest of my clothes. I’ll also be living in a neighborhood where I’ll be within walking distance of decent food and places to hang out, a welcome relief from the general lack of amenities in Leyton. (It was a nice enough two years in a super flat with a super housemate, but sorry, Leyton, as a neighborhood you kinda suck.)

Ziggy Stardust

On the whole, Greenwich looks like a great area. There’s the nice bit nearby, with the shops and observatory and the river taxi and the park. In the other direction are trains which will get me up to my studio or down to the office with minimal fuss. Lots of charm and amenities, to say the least. However, the gentleman whose room I’m taking points out an exciting piece of trivia that dwarfs all of that, at least this morning. It seems as if the pharmacy on the corner down from the new place is actually the site of Underhill Studio, where David Bowie developed Ziggy Stardust.

Early in 1971 Bowie was regarded as washed-up, a one-hit wonder. That summer he worked up Hunky Dory, which was a critics’ fave but initially made no impact on the charts. Then around September 1971 he started work on the album that would make his name: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. And Ziggy, the ultimate rock-’n’roll creation, was hatched at Underhill.

Hunky Dory had been put together in the recording studio, without any preparation. Ziggy was the one time when Bowie worked as a proper band, with guitarist Mick Ronson, bassist Trevor Bolder and drummer Woody Woodmansey, taking time to work out the songs beforehand. “It was a bit more rock and roll and we were a rock band,” says Bolder. “So doing that album was more like Oh yeah, we know what to do with this. We rehearsed it, we went in and we played. At Underhill Studios in Greenwich.

— Paul Trynka, Starman: David Bowie – The Definitive Biography

There’s a bit more detail at The Greenwich Phantom, but essentially, yeah — I’ll be buying aspirin at the conceptual birthplace of Ziggy Stardust come next month.

Birthplace of Ziggy

Avant Garde

Avant Garde

I spent the day working on a custom version of this typeface, thinking that it’s one of those designs that only seems to deserve its fame when it’s used just right, but the rest of the time feels a bit off. I don’t love it, but I have a deep affection for it. Avant Garde was, after all, the typeface that turned me into a typographer.

Kroy 80 Supplies and Specimens-coverKroy 80 Supplies and Specimens

When I was a pimply 14-year-old freshman in high school who still just wanted to draw comics for a living, I joined the staff of the school newspaper hoping to contribute a bit of art now and then. One of the first things I was taught was the use of the Kroy machine, which set type on transparent strips of adhesive tape for the headlines in the paper. Among the font discs we had on hand was Avant Garde Demi, and it included a number of the alternate glyphs that actually make this design interesting. Playing with that font and that machine was the first time I thought about the visual possibilities of a certain style of letter, and how you could create something by manipulating how you arranged letters. It wasn’t an immediate conversation, but something clicked, connected to my fascination with comic book titles and sound effect balloons, and — obviously — eventually led to a lifelong fixation.

Avant Garde Sparky

[Letraset photo via alexvmsf]

Old Friends

I had a vivid imagination as a kid, in a way that is a lot harder to maintain once you get older and have to devote more and more mental space to the rest of the world. I wasn’t lonely, but I spent quite a bit of time alone. This wasn’t a matter of deprivation at all — I had plenty of friends in the neighborhood, and was typically active, at least as much as a nerdy introvert who didn’t like sports was likely to be. I guess perhaps it feels like I spent so much time alone just because that time was creatively rich.

I invented characters and worlds, built spaceships and house out of boxes and styrofoam packing inserts and Lego and odds and ends. I collected action figures, but ignored who they were “supposed” to be and made them into new characters. Before 1977 my cast was primarily made of Fisher-Price Adventure People, but after 1977, well:

Brother Sister

…there was really no other competition.

Continue reading “Old Friends”

Childhood dreams

I’ve been trying to be diligent about duplicating here what goes into my Tumblr feeds now that I’ve pulled the old stuff into the archives, but this time it makes more sense to combine these three posts into one.

As much as the stories and the images of old comics seared themselves into my memory as I grew up, the ads in them are burned in even deeper. The repetition of seeing the ads in issue after issue, month after month, give them a certain resonance. Here, then, are a few favorites that popped up on Public Collectors.

Continue reading “Childhood dreams”

Dazzling array of Bengali book covers

Bengali book 3

While I’m on the subject of Indian lettering, I should give a shout to this exquisite collection of book covers posted to Flickr by Quinn Dombrowski. The range of lettering and illustration styles shown in these covers will blow your mind, I hope, and show a little something about the richness of the lettering tradition in those scripts. And dig those rich lithography colors!

Bengali book 1

Continue reading “Dazzling array of Bengali book covers”

Hand-Painted Type

Hanif Kureshi

It’s been a treat to see Hanif Kureshi‘s completely awesome HandPaintedType project getting a lot of attention and praise during the last month or so. I met Hanif back in March, at Typography Day in Ahmedabad, and immediately took a shine to the painted lettering he put on display, and it’s no suprise that I was all for the idea of documenting and supporting the efforts of those artists. Hanif showed this short film he made as an introduction to the situation that inspired this project:

Handpainted Type is a project that is dedicated to preserving the typographic practice of street painters around India. These painters, with the advent of local DTP (Desktop Publishers) shops, are rapidly going out of business with many businesses and shops switching to the quicker, cheaper but uglier vinyls. Many painters have given up their practice altogether.

The project involves documenting the typefaces of road side painters across India, digitizing it and archiving it for future generations.

I had a lot of discussions about the sign painters with a lot of designers while I was in India. It’s a difficult bind for the artisans whose livelihood is giving way to the production of cheap digital signage. They can’t match digital sign shops in terms of price or speed, but the work they do is both more charming and more likely to last for a long time. Of course, style and longevity are probably low priorities for customers who are also trying to eke out a living in a difficult economy.

I think the key to survival for the sign-painters may lie in the hand of designers and other tastemakers who not only appreciate the work, but are also more likely to have the market savvy to shift the perception of the lettering trade from being “just” a trade to acknowledging the artistry. A similar thing has been going on in the West with the explosion of interest in crafts and the handmade object, and I think it could certainly happen in India, where everyone seems so quick to see the vibrancy of the handmade letter in comparison to the glut of poor typography. The fonts will improve, though, and what then of the lettering artists (and the art of lettering itself) if they can’t find a place for themselves elsewhere in the culture?