Category: ultratypographic

Stop! The name of love.

Earlier this year, the Italian type foundry Reber R41 released R41 Stop, a revival I designed for them on commission. R41 Stop, of course, is based on Stop, the distinctive design released in 1971 by Nebiolo, designed by Aldo Novarese with help from others in the Nebiolo studio. This version that I designed for Reber R41 is specifically based on the version of Stop that they manufactured as dry transfer type. The design is fundamentally the same, but a careful digitization of the original glyphs reproduced for dry transfer reveals certain subtle differences in curvature. I wish I could discover more about the R41’s process for preparing artwork for reproduction — whether they prepared new stencils like Letraset, whether they photographed existing artwork, or some other method. Alas, the information seems lost.

In reviving a typeface that I love as much as I love Stop, I didn’t want to simple reproduce what had existed. I wanted to do that part of it well, but it was also very important to me to add more to the concept. I wanted to take Stop further, so I could feel like I truly earned some design credit that could sit alongside Novarese’s. I added additional symbols, support for Cyrillic and Greek, and a number of alternative character forms based on the ways that people have hacked Stop’s design over the years. In making a version Stop that was specifically derived from R41’s dry transfer product, I tried very hard to honor that material legacy, and design the new glyphs whenever possible to look like they could have been made out of existing shapes from the basic sheet by a decent designer with a scalpel and a steady hand.

You can see R41 Stop on the Bijou Type site, purchase a license from R41 or Type Network, or activate it with Adobe Fonts.

Rick Fiala and Christopher Street

One of the ongoing goals of the Hot Type Club is to find out more about who designed all these classic gay mags, and how they went about it. It’s tough to find out much detail about how magazines were produced — the gritty details of production tasks and working methods — since it’s not something the general public seem to care much about, I suppose. Or at least the process seems so unremarkable when it’s happening, and it’s only in retrospect that practical details look more like a valuable piece of history.

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The *Real* Top Ten

One of my last little projects before I left Adobe back in early 2021 was putting together a small feature (with an accompanying font pack) about my personal top ten list of fonts. This wasn’t a list of favorite fonts: it was a list of starting points for choosing the right styles for a given project. Basically, working out a good starter list for yourself is like the start of a choose-your-own-adventure process for type selection, so you can start with a few families that you know well, and begin mixing and looking for alternative choices based on what will really work for the task at hand.

The thing is, my choices for that feature were limited to options available in Adobe Fonts, so I had to skip a few of my real go-to’s for similar options available in the library. (Having a handle top-ten list makes it easier to start swapping in appropriate alternatives, of course.) It’s only natural to revisit the idea and share my real Personal Top Ten*:

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Liftoff!

Although I launched Bijou Type with a few typefaces a while back, to date they have only been available through my friends at Type Network and Adobe Fonts. At last, thanks to the wonderful work of Hank Brentlinger (for the design) and Lucas Czarnecki (for the build and overall site management), I am delighted to announce the arrival of my own site where you can inspect and license the Bijou families, as well as some other type projects I have completed over the years. Please drop in and check out Bijou Type.

Pictorial Paste-ups

It took many years of patience, luck, and persistence (and more than one ill-advised outrageous price), but I have managed to collect just about every issue of Bob Mizer’s Physique Pictorial. (Vol. 2 no. 1, I know you’re out there somewhere, but I probably can’t afford you anymore.)

Mizer is best known for his photography and filmmaking, but less so for the design and typography of Physique Pictorial. In fact, the magazine always had a fairly crude, almost punk approach to its layout. Text and labels were often set with a typewriter, and you can see the evidence of its cost-and-paste production methods, from the first issue in 1951 all the way through to Mizer’s last in 1990. Even though his last couple of issues feature cover titles made with crude digital fonts, the magazine’s layout was very much an analog process.

When looking at the entire run of Physique Pictorial, it’s clear that Mizer was pretty economical in his use of materials. That’s not to say that the magazine looked cheap. In fact, I’ve always been quite fond of the immediacy of the type and layouts, and Mizer’s emphasis on the photography and illustrations. Over the years, though, Mizer used a handful of pieces of artwork for the cover masthead over and over again. Whether he did it for thrift or for variety in the covers, the same few title treatments appear periodically throughout the entire 40-or-so years of the magazine’s run. Knowing that the magazine was assembled by hand, the reuse of these art elements suggest that Mizer kept the artwork on hand for decades, applying it as he saw fit.

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Going to the Chappell

My friends at Type Network wrote a lovely little article about the past Summer’s exciting discovery that Chappell Roan’s tour featured some giant-sized Ringold Sans in the stage graphics for her song “Naked in Manhattan”.

Chappell Roan’s bold and theatrical style has quickly made her a standout in the music industry, and her performances at Outside Lands and Coachella in 2024 were no exception. The visual identity of her set was highlighted by the use of Ringold Sans, a font from partner Bijou Type that perfectly captures the spirit of her performance. Clean and striking, yet warm, Ringold Sans added a modern yet approachable touch to the event, aligning seamlessly with Roan’s emotive and genre-defying music.

Titans of Transfer Type

Recorded at ATypI in Paris on May 13, 2023, this overview of the production of transfer type between the 1960s and the early 1990s looks at the most prominent brands (Chartpak, Letraset, Mecanorma, Zipatone, et al.) and the various licensed and original typefaces that they distributed. Details include the challenges and advantages of working with transfer type, the prominence of certain typefaces across multiple brands, the development of original designs by certain brands, and the spread of designs and genres across international markets.

Punk as footnote

The folks as Pavement Licker zine and Verdant Brewing have just announced a packaging collaboration — a limited set of beer cans featuring artwork taken from the zine’s archives. The really cool bit is that one of the cans features a piece I did for Pavement Licker #9 — a composition of clip art and Letraset typesetting I tinkered with for Pink Mince #9 — Punk Mince — but never used.

Verdant Brewing 1Verdant Brewing cans

The cans (all of them, not just mine) look great, but photos make it hard to see the full image that wraps around the can. Here is my “Punk as fuck” art, as shown in Pavement Licker in all its glory:

Punk as Fuck

In true zine-like cut-and-paste spirit, though, the pieces each have a background of their own.

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The BCC Quarterly

Very exciting to get my copies of The Book Club of California Quarterly (vol. LXXXIV, no. 3, Summer 2019), featuring my essay “Hot Type of the Cold Type Era”.

I particularly appreciate this comment in editor Kathleen Walkup’s introduction: “This essay is a critical addition to the current scholarship on queering the book, and the Quarterly is proud to have a role in contributing to this important work.”

Gay moments in advertising

From Drum #30, December 1968

This is a cute ad, but more relevant is that it’s an openly gay-themed ad from a type shop, the only one I’ve come across so far. Once in a while I’ve seen typesetter credits in a colophon. Occasionally, there’ll be small, plain in-trade ads for printers. I assume in both those cases they would involve businesses untroubled by the association with gay content. But good for Boro Typographers of (I deduce) Philadelphia, PA! (That’s where Drum was published.)