Ragtag grab-bag
Just released: another in the series of short videos produced by D&AD that peer into the wonders of the Monotype archive. In this latest one, I have a chat with James-Lee Duffy of We Are Shadows about a stack of Futura specimens from the Bauer foundry, and how Futura is used today.
Continue reading “Futura: The Typeface of Today and Tomorrow”
For posterity, since I neglected to post it earlier in the year. This super cut of old Monotype and Linotype films still gets me excited.
The latest video that the D&AD has produced down at the Monotype archive in Salfords, featuring a couple of MATD students having a chat with me about typefaces and research.
Exploring Gill Sans from Chris Light on Vimeo.
I Directed, shot and edited this for Monotype on behalf of D&AD. In the third of film in our series, A Living History of Type, Type Director Dan Rhatigan unearths the project files for Gills Sans, one of the most iconic typefaces in the Monotype Archive.
Together with Typeface Design students from the University of Reading, Dan explores how Gills Sans has both evolved and developed over the years, through an array of correspondence, proofs, notes and memos dating back to the phototype era.
This is a few months old, but it shouldn’t be a surprise that I’ve been delinquent about posting it here for posterity. (Blah blah not paying enough attention to the blog yadda yadda.) Over the last year, we’ve been letting the D&AD come down to Monotype‘s archive in Salfords to film people exploring the material there. The resulting film clips are part of the Inspired by Typography section on their site, part of a growing collection of material to hopefully get people excited about this stuff.
In this clip, I go fishing through a box of original drawings to investigate some things drawn by the mysterious Fritz Steltzer, and then come across some really sublime original drawings by Imre Reiner for his typeface Mercurius Script.
I’d never seen Mercurius before, and when we filmed this I thought it may have been an unreleased design — or at least one never digitized — but it turns out it’s still available. I’m not completely wild about the actual typeface, which somehow lacks the ZING of the original drawings. I think it may be mostly an issue of spacing and fit, so maybe I’ll get an opportunity to tinker it with it someday and see if I can get it right.
I also make a few guest appearances in this earlier video they shot at the office:
While I’m on the subject of New York, I should also share this look back at the latest Pencil to Pixel that we put on there this past May. This was a huge success, an awful lot of fun (despite the exhausting effort of pulling it off), and the main reason I spent all of the preceding February there.
I was a little obsessed with this movie and book during my formative years, for reasons I couldn’t — or wouldn’t — quite figure out at the time. I learned about sex by reading some incredibly graphic Outsiders fanfic written by a girl in my class when we were 12, which tells you a lot about how many stories you hear about Catholic school have some basis in fact.
Similarly, I was secretly fixated on this cover for this book, by the same author:
Ooops, I accidentally skipped December, didn’t I? Well, it was a busy month, but thankfully not as busy as the two prior ones. I was feeling a little burnt out, however, and kept a low profile.
I was travelling and speaking a lot for work, often addressing the subject of using type on the web and other screen-based devices. Here, in case you are so inclined, is a 20-minute talk I gave on the subject in early November at the Future of Web Design conference in New York:
It’s a new year now, however, and I’m feeling refreshed and full of energy, so hopefully there will be more to come soon.