When the type industry was industrial

Monotype Works, Salfords, 1973

When we show material from Monotype’s archive in the UK, I like to include photos of the Monotype Works, the company’s cluster of factory buildings in Salfords, Surrey. Seeing an aerial view of the Works and a few glimpses inside some of the factory buildings gives a real sense of scale to the operation. It took a lot of people, space, material and equipment to make all those machines and all that type, and it can be tricky for people who’ve only interacted with digital type to really appreciate what went into creating the typefaces that carry over from the days of metal type.

Inside Monotype Works, Salfords, 1920s

Another point that I like to make is that the Monotype Works in Salfords was just one location out of many that were producing type (and type-making machines). Even if you look at the companies that are part of Monotype today, there were (at one time or another) the Works in Salfords, a plant in Scotland, a plant in Frankfurt, plus Lanston Monotype in Philadelphia, and Linotype’s plants in Brooklyn, England, and Germany. That’s an awful lot of activity and infrastructure. And it’s only one slice of the industry.

Even traditional foundries (as opposed to companies like Linotype and Monotype who made machines that letter people produce their own type) were huge. Have a look the Caslon Letter Foundry in London around 1902, or the Haas Type Foundry in Switzerland in 1950, or even a printing operation that made its own hot-metal type like the US Government Printing Office.

When we talk about the type industry today, we’re talking about software and design companies, from tiny one-person studios to (at Monotype’s end of the scale) a few hundred people. What has disappeared is a proper industry of machines and factories and scores of people. Physical type is a small-scale craft these days, which is pretty great in some ways, but a sad loss in others.

What’s Ћ point?

[A short blog post I recently wrote for Design Week…]

The English language (and the Latin alphabet it uses) is well-known for adapting itself with the times and the needs of the many different people who use it. Because the language and the writing system have changed so much already, someone or another regularly comes along with a new pitch for yet another change. But is it a great idea or just a gimmick to propose something new when we’ve already got the building blocks?

Recently Paul Mathis, an Australian restaurateur, has decided to “improve efficiency” by shortening the word “the” to a letter “Ћ”* which is designed to look like a combination of the letters “T” and “h”. Mathis seems baffled that “and” can be abbreviated with an ampersand while being only the 5th most commonly used word in English, while the most commonly used word still requires THREE WHOLE LETTERS! His pitch is that his new character could save valuable strokes of the pen or valuable characters in a tweet. Maybe so, but is his the right solution?

Although he proposes this as a new shape, in fact just writing about it requires an existing solution (and probably not the best): the Cyrillic capital letter “Tshe”, used for Serbian.** If you look at Ћ in just about any typeface, though, you can see that it’s already got better proportions than just a T and an h crammed together. What troubles me the most, though, is that saying Ћ can replace “The” would be awkward for people who already know the Cyrillic alphabet and the sounds its letters can make.

Besides, the Latin alphabet already has a Unicode-ready single character that makes the right sound, and it comes in both upper- and lowercase: the thorn! Used mostly in Icelandic today, Þ and þ are used for the “th” sound of “the”. The eth (Ð and ð) might work a little better linguistically, but thorn also has history on its side. That quaint “Ye Olde” tavern you like? That comes from an older way of writing thorn that looked more like a “y”.

These gimmicks occasionally gain some ground, though. Martin Speckter invented the interrobang — ‽ — in 1962 and it finally made its way into the Unicode standard, although you’d be hard-pressed to find it in general use. You may also have seen talk of the SarcMark – which someone suggested could be used to denote sarcasm to avoid any awkward misinterpretations during text or email conversations – however that idea didn’t really take off either.

The ampersand grew out of writing convention, and eventually took on a slightly subtler meaning than just any instance of “and”. That kind of evolution is how these concepts take root. Mathis’s gimmick is more of a limp stab at a revolution, and probably one we should dismiss. Þ end.

Continue reading “What’s Ћ point?”

A Brief History of Typography 1928 – 1980

Note: for the sake of posterity, and because I’ve been blogging long enough to know that online stories tend to go missing after a while, I’ve started trying to repost articles in which I’m included. This lovely post by Ellen Shapiro, who came to see us at Pencil to Pixel, originally appeared on Print magazine’s site.

At Monotype’s “Pencil to Pixel” pop-up exhibition in New York City last month, 3,400 students and professions learned about the history of typography. Artifacts demonstrated how metal type was historically designed, made, specified by designers, and set by typesetting companies — and translated into today’s font menus for individual users.

“The lesson from an exhibition like this is that the design of a typeface can outlast the moment that produces it, and that a good design can evolve to meet the needs of technology without losing its essential spirit,” said Dan Rhatigan, Monotype’s UK type director. “Lots of younger designers who came through seemed really eager to see the background of the typefaces they already know, and the exhibit helped them appreciate why we’re still trying to improve the technology behind those designs,” he added.

Here are close-ups of some of the artifacts that were on display as well as some typography history:

1928 — Eric Gill’s pencil and ink drawings for Gill Sans, the fifth best-selling typeface of the twentieth century. Gill (1882-1940), a British sculptor, stonecarver, printmaker and typeface designer, designed Gill Sans in 1926-1928 for Monotype at the request of Stanley Morison, who was interested in a contemporary sans serif face with British character. Classified a “humanist” sans-serif face intended to be legible in both display and text, its proportions were based on Roman letterforms rather than being constructed geometrically. Famed uses of Gill Sans include programs for British Rail, the London Underground, Penguin Books, Saab Automobile, and the BBC. Note the use of white gouache paint to touch up the letterforms.

1937—Copper patterns for Eric Gill’s Joanna. Copper pattern plates were utilized in the manufacturing stage between the drawings and the metal type itself. A transitional serif typeface named for one of Gill’s daughters, Joanna was designed in 1930 and originally intended as a proprietary face for his printing business, Hague and Gill, opened in Buckhamshire, outside London, with son-in-law René Hague. It was adapted by Monotype in 1937 and made publicly available in 1958. Gill set the text of An Essay on Typography, his classic book on letterforms, typesetting and page design, in Joanna. In the book, he demonstrated and championed the first use of “rag right” rather than justified columns to create even letter- and word spacing.



1939—“Big Red,” a comprehensive specimen book of Linotype faces. Published by Mergenthaler Linotype Company, this classic reference tool measures 7.75″ x 10.75″ and contains 1,215 pages of type specimens for hand-set headlines and text set on linotype machines, including model ads and announcements with lavish use of dingbats, ornaments and borders.


1932—Littleworth. These rare, original letter drawings are in the Monotype archive for Littleworth, a hot-metal typeface no longer available,

1971—Classic linotype faces were remastered for photo-typesetting. These brochures announced Monotype newly released versions of Helvetica and Univers for use on the first photo-typesetting machines.


1980—The ITC Typeface Collection, a specimen book of the library of the International Typeface Corporation. This 574-page, 12 x 12” square book is a compendium of the individual “26 Good Reasons to Use” booklets originally designed by Herb Lubalin and released by ITC throughout the 1970s. It was published to interest manufacturers of typographic equipment and materials in licensing the ITC typeface library, which included American Typewriter, Avant Garde Gothic, ITC Benguiat, ITC Bookman, ITC Century, ITC Franklin Gothic, ITC Garamond, Korinna, Lubalin Graph, Serif Gothic, Souvenir, and Zapf Dingbats. In addition to Herb Lubalin, type designers included Ed Benguiat, Tom Carnase, Tony DiSpigna, Aldo Novarese and Herman Zapf.

The book concludes with a copyfitting chart, essential to all designers, part of whose job was to mathematically convert typewritten manuscripts into set type by calculating the size and leading to fit on the page.

In 1980, ITC subscribers included Cello-Tak, Chartpak, Letraset and Zipatone, manufacturers of rub-down lettering, in addition to Alphatype, Berthold, Compugraphic, Monotype, and other purveyors of photo-typesetting equipment. Agfa Monotype acquired ITC in 2000.

2013—the typographic body art of Dan Rhatigan, Monotype’s UK-based type director. This was the “display” in the exhibit I was most curious about (even though he was standing next to a display of covers and spreads of U&lc, a few of which I’d had a hand in).

“My tattoos are always a point of interest with type crowds,” said Rhatigan, who said he got his first tattoo, the swashy ‘R’ of an ersatz family crest he designed, in 1998. “After staring at that ‘R’ for months, I realized that my love of type is timeless. So I started adding shapes I loved from different typefaces, working with different tattoo artists who appreciate the idea enough to carefully reproduce the artwork I supply.”

Rhatigan’s friend Indra Kupferschmid put together a custom MyFonts list of most of the typefaces that are tattooed on him. There are a few others, too, he added (some of which apparently can’t be shown in polite company), including letters from Delittle Wood Type foundry; from H&FJ’s Champion Gothic; and from Sodachrome, designed by Rhatigan and Ian Moore for House Industry’s Photo-Lettering collection.

Psycho Sixteen

In this flyer I made for my friend Lynn’s 16th birthday party, we can see that I was playing aorund with this punky, pre-digital, cut-n-paste aesthetic ages ago. This was 1988 when I was 17, just about to head off to college. Lynn and I both straddled the edge of Staten Island’s suburban-y punk scene, so this wasn’t entirely us being poseurs. You can definitely see the early seeds of the Punk Mince art direction.

Media: felt tip pen, Letraset, Letratone, Apple IIe printouts, cut-n-pasted catalogue photos, and the Xerox machine at my part-time receptionist job at a Catholic retreat house

Two great independent magazines

I generally don’t talk about Pink Mince when I’m doing things related to my day job, but I threw in a handful of visual references to accompany an interview in the latest issue of 8 Faces magazine. (If you like or love typography, then you really should check out 8 Faces.)

You can order 8 Faces here. And, of course, you can order Pink Mince here. You can also buy that t-shirt (and others) at the Pink Mince Zazzle shop.


Angles on the head of a pin

An old foundry trick for showing off the precision of punch-cutting and typecasting abilities is to make something at a breathtakingly small size. This Typophile discussion about Roger Excoffon’s beautiful, bonkers typeface Calypso reminded me to dig out Monotype’s own example of punch-cutting prowess: the Lord’s Prayer on a 12-point square piece of type:

The Lord's Prayer

According tot he accompanying leaflet, each letter measures .008 inch from top to bottom. Monotype’s manufacturing methods were famously precise, holding tolerances down to .0001 inch. Those tolerances at every stage are part of the showmanship here. Producing a piece of type with such fine detail is the last stage of a process that starts with a 10-inch drawing that is reduced to a 4-inch copper pattern that is reduced to a full-size steel punch that is struck into a brass matrix that is used to cast the lead type. And that’s just the bare-bones explanation of what’s involved.

A sharp eye will notice that the text on the face of the piece of type is right-reading, while a typical piece of type will be in reverse so that it prints properly. This small piece of lead was meant to be seen through a magnifying glass, a bit of showing off — not for printing. If you look at a printed sample through the same magnifier, you can see that printing the type was much a much sloppier affair than cutting or casting it:

Lord's Prayer printed
The Lord's Prayer sample
IMG_1358.jpg

Continue reading “Angles on the head of a pin”

Nerdgasm

There I was, happily doing some research at the Center here in New York, digging through the Donald Mashburn collection, when I had a nerdgasm. I was looking through an archive of flyers for gay nightclubs and sex clubs, with a fair amount of porn catalogues in the mix, but it’s safe to say that I’m pretty jaded about adult material at this point. I was trying to pick out things from the ’70s or ’80s that had a certain graphic sensibility about them, with a vague sense of collecting material for a future issue of Pink Mince.

But then I saw it.

GMSMA 10-year anniversary program

Continue reading “Nerdgasm”

The iconic London Underground typeface turns 100

I wrote a short little thing for Wired UK about the history of the Johnston Underground typeface. I was worried that I could only barely scratch the surface in 500 or so words, but people seem to enjoy it anyway:


Last week
we celebrated 150 years of the London Underground,
but 2013 also marks the centennial of its iconic typeface, first
commissioned in 1913. Edward
Johnston
, a British calligrapher and lettering artist, was
asked to create a typeface with “bold simplicity” that was truly
modern yet rooted in tradition. Johnston’s design, completed in
1916, combined classical Roman proportions with humanist warmth.
This mix of qualities, driven by Johnston’s approach to the written
letterform, also influenced his student Eric Gill, who
assisted with the design of the Underground typeface and developed
some of its ideas in his own Gill Sans in the following decade.

“Underground” — later known as “Johnston” — was circulated as
a lettering guide for sign-painters and also made into wood and
metal type for posters, signs, and other publicity materials used
throughout London’s transport network.

Johnston himself only drew one weight of the typeface. He based
its weight and proportions on seven diamond-shaped strokes of a pen
stacked in a row. This gesture even shows up in the typeface
itself, with the characteristic diamond used as the tittle of the
“i” and “j”. He felt so strongly about the weight of the design
that when another student of his agreed to create an accompanying
set of bold capitals, Johnston wouldn’t speak to him for decades
afterward.

Johnston’s type became a distinctive feature of the Underground
brand over the years, but by the late ’70s it was less practical to
use the old wood and metal fonts. Inevitably, the brand was getting
watered down as other typefaces were chosen for different uses
around the system. In 1979, London Transport asked design agency
Banks & Miles
to modernise “Johnston” and prepare it for
the typesetting systems of the day, such as the Linotron 202.

Eiichi Kono, a new designer at the agency, was asked to revise
and revive the family. Not only did he redraw the proportions for
better display and even out some of the inconsistent details of the
original, but he also took on the challenge of adding two new
weights and accompanying italics for the full set, giving the
family much greater versatility. Some years later, this design was
further refined and expanded by Monotype, with even greater support
for different languages. Known now as “New Johnston”, the fonts are
used exclusively by Transport for London today as its brand
typeface.

Other versions are commercially available to the rest of us,
each taking a different approach to adapting Johnston’s design.

P22 Type Foundry released its
faithful, officially licensed version of Johnston’s original in
1997, also offering a number of lively graphic
elements
such as ornaments and borders that draw on TfL’s rich
visual history. P22 London Underground was later updated as P22
Underground Pro with many more weights and typographic
features.

While P22 revived “Johnston” as a display typeface, designer Dave Farey was
interested in refining the concept to work better for text in his
1999 design of “ITC
Johnston
”. His first iteration included three Roman weights
that were redrawn and respaced with a freer hand, using the
original as a starting point and a model. When adding italics
later, Farey looked back to Edward Johnston’s legacy as an
influential teacher of calligraphy and writing, and he devised a
more cursive set of forms that drew on a very English tradition of
lettering.

So happy birthday to the Underground and its namesake typeface,
in all its flavours.