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”.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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 that 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 young 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.
Just look at all those beautiful, enthusiastic faces! We were all really lucky to work with such a magnificent crew.
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.
