Ragtag grab-bag
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.)
My old pals at the TDC were kind enough to invite me to represent Adobe Fonts on a panel about the state of the type industry at their Type Drives Culture event this past March. I got to say a bit about why we make fonts available the way we do. Watching the video above, I’m also rethinking this past winter’s whole experiment with wearing turtlenecks.
During the second half of the twentieth century, the United States moved toward greater social acceptance of LGBT people, due to the cumulative efforts of numerous groups engaged in social and political activism. One of the many challenges facing any attempt to bring together a community of gay people was the difficulty of producing and distributing any books or periodicals with overtly gay content, which was under threat of various methods of censorship. However, even as legal hurdles fell away, social censure remained an ongoing challenge to gay communities and the publications targeted to them.
During that same period, the graphic arts industry experienced its own rapid evolution, as the development of ever faster and cheaper means of typesetting and printing made a greater variety of typographic choices available with fewer barriers to their use and reproduction. Typewriters, phototypesetting systems, rub-down type, and eventually desktop publishing software provided an increasing number of ways to easily prepare text for layout and reproduction, with less and less formal training required to do so.
Continue reading “Hot type in the cold type era”
I just realized that “Three typefaces for mathematics”, my MA dissertation from the Typography department at Reading is one of a handful of examples posted at typefacedesign.net (and includes a link to the full document hosted on Issu). For future reference, that may be a more reliable place to find it than on this site, although for now it’s still available here. I lost all the source files (InDesign doc, illustrations, scans) in the Great Hard Drive Crash of Twenty-Twelve, so I’m glad that there are still copies of the PDF in circulation.
As I’ve often told people over the years about my experience on the Typeface Design MA, one of the most valuable things I learned there was how to properly research and write about a subject. There is some irony to my saying “valuable” here, in that I have a very good career in typeface design, but I actually think that what I learned about critical thinking, looking for and using primary source material, and shaping and defending an idea have proven to be fundamental to much of the work I’ve done as a designer, curator, and (begrudging) writer over the years since I finished my degree.
I’ve always been flattered that my dissertation has been used in class as an example of solid academic writing, considering what a slow and painful process it was to write it. I’m not a great writer, nor very disciplined at being productive when I need to write, but I discovered that working on something like that is an excellent way to clarify my thinking about something, by forcing me to consider every day. It exposes the gaps in my thinking in a way I can skim over in a talk, a tweet, or conversation.
It’s good to remind myself of the usefulness of the writing process as I consider whether I’m ready to buckle down and return to Reading (the university, not the town) to work (remotely, and part-time) on a PhD. It’s one thing to be interested enough in a subject to go deep, but another to get proper guidance and to be challenged on my assumptions. I often joke that I did a PhD’s worth of work on Monotype history when I worked there, but without ever getting any credentials. The reality is, though, that I did all that work without getting credentials OR doing the research work with any real rigor. Time to get serious, at last.
I was in Hamburg last month at the kind invitation of the Peter Schmidt Group, who asked me to speak at their Beyond Type event. Despite the jet lag, I managed to speak in full sentences about the future of typography as I see it.
This is and will always be the best pop song about typography.
I was asked to speak at Adobe MAX once again this year, which gave me another opportunity to try and get people excited about some of the latest developments in font technology, and why I think they’ll prove to be significant. Sadly, of the two versions of this talk I gave at MAX, the less successful session was the one recorded. This one was held in a large hall subdivided into a number of rooms with curtains, and there’s a whole lot of audio interference from the other rooms, which made it hard for me to concentrate when speaking, and also screwed up the recording quite a bit. Nevertheless, there are some good nuggets you might enjoy.
Aaaargh! Pink Mince and some of the source material for the “Punk Mince” and “The Stroke” issues is featured in this incredible exhibition about Letraset at the Sheffield Institute of Arts and I want to see it SO MUCH. The exhibition is connected to Letraset: The DIY Typography Revolution, the fantastic book about Letraset and its history that was published this year, which included an interview with me, some photos of Pink Mince, and lots of photos of items form my collection of Letraset sheets, ephemera, and paraphernalia.
