Category: ultratypographic

Pencilled, Pixelated

Since I started working full-time at Monotype, and especially since I took over as UK Type Director last Spring, work has consumed a larger and larger part of my life. This would be bad if I didn’t love this job more than any other I’ve ever had, and if I didn’t feel like I was contributing to what happens at Monotype. My attempts to keep up with this site, always a tricky endeavor at the best of times, may have fallen slack, but I’ve hardly been slacking off elsewhere.

Monotype. One of a kind. (Photo by http://twitter.com/desypha)

The last two weeks have been the culmination of a frantic couple of months of preparation for a giant exhibition of work from Monotype’s past and its present, and hopefully a look at its future. Pencil to Pixel, masterminded by my extraordinarily talented colleague James Fooks-Bale, designed by SEA, partially curated (and with guided tours) by me, and pulled off thanks to the efforts of many more, was huge success by all measures, and hopefully one of many more endeavors to come.

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The Devo/Letraset Crossover

Letrasets

I get irrationally excited when two seemingly unrelated things actually have an intersection I didn’t know about:

Booji Boy is a character created in the early 1970s by American New Wave band Devo. The name is pronounced “Boogie Boy”—the strange spelling “Booji” resulted when the band was using letraset to produce captions for a film, and ran out of the letter “g”. When the “i” was added but before the “e,” Devo lead singer Mark Mothersbaugh reportedly remarked that the odd spelling “looked right.”

Booji Boy

A home for Sodachrome — at House Industries

Result!

I have already mentioned — on quite a few occasions — an eccentric typographical experiment called Sodachrome that my friend Ian Moore and I designed for our friend Rathna. Ian and I have always been very proud of Sodachrome, but as a set of fonts it’s a design that is cumbersome to work with, and certainly the kind of a display typeface where a little of it goes a long way. So even though the design was finished years ago, it has languished a bit for lack of the proper outlet, aside from occasional licenses we granted (with instructions for how to deal with the tricky fonts) along the way when people asked.

Well, I’m pleased to announce that Sodachrome has finally found the perfect place to live: The Photo-Lettering collection, from my esteemed pals at House Industries. I’ve been a big fan of the PLINC collection and service right from the start, having awaited the launch for years after hearing the idea of it discussed at a conference.

PLINC includes a lot of superb, exuberant typefaces, but what has always been more interesting to me is its model. Rather than just offering licenses for display fonts that may only have limited utility, PLINC uses a custom-built typesetting engine to offer downloadable headline settings of just a few words at a time, much like the original Photo-Lettering company did with its massive phototype library. It’s a fascinating idea, and part of what got them a nomination for the Designs of the Year at London’s Design Museum.

Pink Mince

What PLINC really accomplishes is the ability to play with colour and transparency to reveal what Sodachrome’s design is about, and make it much easier to implement that typical layout software. So yay! A match made in heaven.

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A Type Nerd’s Time in India

Last year I submitted an article to a very excellent zine called FAQNP (which stands for, mischievously, “FAQNP‘s a Queer Nerd Publication”) for their “Queer Nerd Travel Guide” issue, since I’m a queer nerd who travels a lot.

FAQNP #3

The gents at FAQNP have kindly agreed to let me reprint my story about how Western brands drop their typographic standards when they trade in India. You should repay that kindness and check out some of their back issues or cool merchandise.

Spread from FAQNP #3

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Type choice and type use

I’m still getting back into the swing of things after an extraordinary one-week trip to Iceland for this year’s ATypI conference in Reykjavík. Although I’ve attended ATypI before, this was the first year I’ve been a speaker, and one lucky enough to be allowed two presentations. The first of them was a variation on talk I’ve been doing lately about typographic issues that should be considered when working with webfonts. Luckily, one of my colleagues was able to record it:

Given at ATypI in Reykjavík on 15 September 2011.

The slides themselves are here, in case you couldn’t see them clearly in the video: