there R other wa
ys to accompli
sh the sam
e thing.

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Another unmemorable post

Google has quietly introduced an API (application programming interface) for web fonts. This could potentially result in better — and also worse — web typography — depending on the skill and knowledge of the people who implement it. Unfortunately only a small minority of font users these day take the time to educate themselves about the print tradition.

Google’s font system involves referencing fonts stored at fonts.googleapis.com. The open source license fonts are then served up by the Google servers and should appear on your web pages without your needing to upload or embed them. There are instructions here.

Only a small number of fonts are available at present but no doubt the list will grow. I wonder what the type designer community will think about this.

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Google font API

You could do worse. Click the detail to view the entire chart at inspiration lab.

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How to pick a typeface: The flowchart

a. Captains of vessels in the fleet of the early seventeenth-century Dutch adventurer Joris van Spilbergen.

b. Winning dogs in the hunting dog category at the Westminster Kennel Club dog show.

c. Characters in a new Star Trek television series to be released next fall.

d. Other.

. . .

. . .

. . .

The answer, of course, is “other” — these are some of the best typefaces of 2009, in the opinion of I Love Typography. Another favorite from this set is the amazingly extensive (and expensive) Trilogy, shown below. An interesting selection, worth checking out (the type sample is clickable).

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Trilby, Allumi, Calluna, Giorgio, Leksa, Sentinel, Catacumba

The latest iteration of this hoary shtick comes to us via Pentagram. To play along, use the password CHARACTER.

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What’s your type?

Yesterday I showed some ancient inscribed letterforms from Ostia Antica. Today we flash forward some seventeen hundred years to this inscription over a gate in the Vatican complex, which is dated 1831.

I don’t like this one so much. Whoever inscribed these letters was clearly working from typeset models. But the thin lines, right angles, and sharp serifs of the Romantic period are the result of developments in typesetting equipment and papermaking that have nothing to do with letterforms inscribed in stone.

These kinds of incongruities often result when work in one medium is transferred to another without consideration for the essential character of the medium.

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Vatican type

Here is some handsome lettering from ruins at the ancient port city of Ostia, west of Rome. I don’t know what period this fragment dates to, although the age of Hadrian always seems to be a good guess.

For comparison, here’s a sample of the typeface Trajan (the movie font!), designed in 1989 by Carol Twombly for Adobe based on inscriptions on Trajan’s column in Rome. They might just be the effect of the centuries, but I prefer the softer serifs of the inscribed letters in the photo. I also like their less regular vertical axes.

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Classical letterforms from Ostia

Above, where I mentioned his work as a proofreader, I initially typed “proofreading” instead, and I was sorely tempted to retain that error, for reasons that will become apparent. Sometime in the past year or two Will e-mailed me the following poem, entitled “The Printer’s Error,” by Aaron Fogel. It seems a fitting memorial, and I hope the author will not mind me running it here in Will’s memory.

The Printer’s Error

Fellow compositors
and pressworkers!

I, Chief Printer
Frank Steinman,
having worked fifty-
seven years at my trade,
and served five years
as president
of the Holliston
Printer’s Council,
being of sound mind
though near death,
leave this testimonial
concerning the nature
of printers’ errors.

First: I hold that all books
and all printed
matter have
errors, obvious or no,
and that these are their
most significant moments,
not to be tampered with
by the vanity and folly
of ignorant, academic
textual editors.
Second: I hold that there are
three types of errors, in ascending
order of importance:
One: chance errors
of the printer’s trembling hand
not to be corrected incautiously
by foolish professors
and other such rabble
because trembling is part
of divine creation itself.

Two: silent, cool sabotage
by the printer,
the manual laborer
whose protests
have at times taken this
historical form,
covert interferences
not to be corrected
censoriously by the hand
of the second and far
more ignorant saboteur,
the textual editor.
Three: errors
from the touch of God,
divine and often
obscure corrections
of whole books by
nearly unnoticed changes
of single letters
sometimes meaningful but
about which the less said
by preemptive commentary
the better.
Third: I hold that all three
sorts of error,
errors by chance,
errors by workers’ protest,
and errors by
God’s touch,
are in practice the
same and indistinguishable.

Therefore I,
Frank Steinman,
typographer
for thirty-seven years,
and cooperative Master
of the Holliston Guild
eight years,
being of sound mind and body
though near death
urge the abolition
of all editorial work
whatsoever
and manumission
from all textual editing
to leave what was
as it was, and
as it became,
except insofar as editing
is itself an error, and

therefore also divine.

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Will Powers (1946-2009) and “The Printer’s Error”

Ikea has used the geometric bauhausesque Futura (left above), designed by Paul Renner around 1925, as its signature font for some fifty years. It’s a font that emphasizes the Platonic essence of letterforms in an interesting way but provides little forward momentum, so to speak, for extended reading.

Verdana (designed by Matthew Carter around the late 1990s, I think; at right above) is a more “humanist” (the letterforms to some degree evoke traditional Renaissance pen letterforms) font that was designed for use at small sizes on computer monitors. To this end it has a large x-height, large counters (openings), broad character widths, and other features that help to identify letters and tell similar ones apart at small sizes.

A lot of typeheads are distressed by Ikea’s decision, largely because Ikea is using Verdana as a display face, a function for which it wasn’t really intended.

Well, true, it doesn’t look as good, so why are they making the change? I think it’s because people under a certain age find Verdana comfortable and familiar because they see it all the time on their computer monitors. So it might feel friendlier to the children of the computer age than a stick-and-ball face from the 1920s.

It’s also possible that in the long run Ikea is intending to phase out its print catalogue and go online only. A big virtue of Verdana online is that it resides on practically everyone’s computer, so you don’t have to worry about font substitutions.

My guess is that few people outside the type world will notice or care about the change. How do you feel about it?

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Update, 9/04: Dueling petitions

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image via fontblog

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Ikea replaces Futura with Verdana

Yes, if Comic Sans (I know, I know, it’s not really a comic book font) has lost its appeal, you now have a wealth of alternatives from which to choose. If your idea of cool looks something like the sample above — who am I to judge? — you can find many many more at comicbookfonts.com.

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Pow! Comic Sans! Meets! Its! Match!

Extra-Slanty Italics Introduced for Extremely Important Words

NEW HOPE, MN—In an attempt to address writers’ ever-growing word-emphasis needs, Minnesota-based Pica Foundry has developed a new, extra-slanty italic font, design director Jordan Soderblum announced Monday.

“When writing important words, authors too often bypass regular italics in favor of all capital letters, which not only look awkward but also disrupt the flow of the text,” said Soderblum, whose new italics design is slanted at a more acute 60-degree angle instead of the normal 75. “We believe that the additional 15 degrees of slant will allow authors to create a much more intense and immediate reading experience.”

Soderblum said that his design team is currently developing a demi-semibold typeface for writers who “kind of, but not really” want to accentuate subheadings.

— The Onion, June 16, 2009

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Breaking news in typography

This site has been around, in various forms, for a long time. It began as an auxiliary to the Mercury House book publishing site that we put up in December 1994. At that time it was my personal page on the MH site, and so at first it developed a kind of resume-like structure, hints of which can still be seen here if you look hard enough.

One result of this sprawling accretion of 15 years of content of various sorts is that it’s become a bit difficult to keep everything tidy and up to date. So, after I got hacked last fall I patched the vulnerabilities and removed the garbage and restore everything as best I could.

But is wasn’t until I got a comment asking about typefaces over at the Asian Art Museum site that I realized that I had reverted the typehead section of the site to an older iteration that was unsatisfactory in several ways. So I’ve spent a part of today getting the section in better shape. I’ve improved the navigation of the pages and generally tightened things up a bit.

I’m afraid the discussion of faces tends to favor the traditional and doesn’t get much into many of the interesting contemporary faces that have been created in recent years — that is an assignment still to be completed.

Generally for each face I show a sample (mostly without, so far, comparing the many different digital versions that may be available), highlight identifying features, discuss the designer and history, talk about the qualities of the face and how it might be used, and give a few quotes from type designers or users about the face. For example, here are a few quotes about Bembo (a face I like and have used often):

• “Bembo roman and italic are somewhat quieter and less faithful to their sources than Centaur and Arrighi. They are nevertheless serene and versatile faces of genuine Ranaissance structure.”
  —Robert Bringhurst
• “On the whole it has to be said that while the first italic [Fairbank] has too much personality the second [Bembo italic] has too little. While not disagreeable, it is insipid.”
  —Stanley Morison
• “Tolerable but uninspiring.”
  —John Miles (RN)

There is much more that I need to do to make The Typehead Chronicles truly top-drawer, but there is some content there that might be of interest just the same.

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The Typehead Chronicles of Thomas Christensen, ABCedminded Typographer

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via BuzzFeed (“I went to this store. It was a huge disappointment.”)

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When kerning goes bad, 2 . . .

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Rapping typeheads

In the nineteenth century, which was a dark and inflationary age in typography and type design, many compositors were encouraged to stuff extra space between sentences. Generations of twentieth-century typists were then taught to do the same, by hitting the spacebar twice after every period. Your typing as well as your typesetting will benefit from unlearning this quaint Victorian habit.

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Public service announcement

For about the past week substantial posts have been coming almost daily. Yesterday featured a generous commentary on Bruce Rogers, the great American typographer best known for designing the neo-Venetian typeface Centaur. The post finds David Godine writing with ease and authority on Rogers’s career:

Rogers had certain natural talents, and among these were his abilities as a pasticheur; he could put himself into the skin of almost any century and make it his own. Nowhere are these talents displayed with more vigor and inventiveness than the books he produced in the sixteen productive years (1896-1912) he worked at The Riverside Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He had big shoes to fill; D.B. Updike had left to start his own shop in 1893 and both Houghton and Mifflin saw the need for a captive private press that could produce first-rate editions and printing at moderate costs. They had the editorial taste; they had the plant at Riverside on the other side of the Charles; they had willing and skilled workman. What was needed was a leader who could both direct a program and oversee the details of design and production. In Rogers, they found the perfect candidate, a typographer who was able to take over a small corner of the enormous factory on the bank of the Charles, select the titles, and produce the volumes without regard to either estimates or costs.

This was the decade immediately following Morris’s final efforts as a printer and designer and, above all, of the Kelmscott Chaucer, a book that appeared in 1896 and was, in so many ways, the culmination of Morris’s remarkable career as a craftsman and visionary. In its total integration of text and image, paper, printing, and ink, it would forever change what would be expected a privately printed edition and set the bar high (perhaps impossibly high) for any future “private press.” Although Morris died shortly after DBU left Riverside, his influence was strong and pervasive on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps Rogers absorbed some of it; he could hardly not be aware of it. And how could he ignore it working in Boston alongside Goodhue, Copeland and Day, and the arts and crafts revival that took the region by storm? But BR was nothing if not eclectic and inventive, and his three decades at Riverside produced books that hearken back to Jean de Tournes and the French sixteenth century, to Bulmer and Bensley of the late seventeenth, and to Pickering and Whittingham of the mid- nineteenth. As I said, he could slip into almost any clothes and make them fit.

Read more at the source.

The blog is a Google blogspot — if I were to make one suggestion to the Godine folks it would be to host the blog on their own website in order to take advantage of the authority that site has established with search engines. But that is a minor point, and one that is of no import to readers. For nearly forty years Godine has been among our top independent literary publishers. I’m looking forward to what is to come from this revitalized blog.

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David Godine on Bruce Rogers

Jan Tschichold is one of the inescapable figures in twentieth-century typoraphy. This photo was taken in 1926. Richard Hollis has written an appreciation, called “Jan Tschichold: Titan of Typography,” in the Guardian. Although Hollis’s article does not attempt much analysis or evaluation of Tschichold’s work, it does present another angle of approach to one of the most influential typographers of modern times.

Tschichold had, broadly speaking, a kind of two-part career. Initially he was a proponent of Bauhaus-inspired asymmetrical design, exemplified by this 1927 poster for a film by directed by Alexandre Volkoff.

Later, in his work with Penguin, he was a rather strident advocate of symmetrical design, as seen in this 1950 cover for The Great Gatsby.

In addition to the Hollis article, the Guardian also has a small slide show, from which these images have been taken.

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• jan tschichold at powell’s
• jan tschichold at amazon

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Appreciating Tschichold

I’m starting to think about this for a book that is more than a year off (maybe this is a way of avoiding current projects!). I like the way the word looks with some of the sans serif faces, like Avenir, but when I tested this on a few readers (notably, the author) none of them preferred this treatment.

Right now (and this is very preliminary) I’m here:

But this is a kind of grotesque solution from a typophilic point of view, because the word is set in all caps in an uncial face (Neue Hammer Uncial) — and historical uncials didn’t really have caps.

But maybe that doesn’t matter?

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UPDATE: Here’s the face in action (combined with an image):

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What typeface says “Bali”?

This great photo is from a series by Andy Clymer devoted to Las Vegas’s Neon Beonyard, where neon signs go to die be preserved for posterity.

The Boneyard, according to Jonathan Hoefler of Hoefler & Frere-Jones, is “a project of the Neon Museum, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and study of one of the nation’s great lettering traditions, the neon boneyard is of course located in the Las Vegas desert: an ideal climate for preservation, and convenient to the center of the energetic neon carnage of the 21st century.”

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The Neon Boneyard

I wonder how old this ghost type is. Located on an old building in historic Sutter Creek in Amador County in California’s Sierra Nevada (the town takes its name from John A. Sutter, who owned the sawmill where gold was found in January 1848), it reads “Brignole Estate General Merchandise.”

According to a history of Amador County published in 1927, “Bartholomeo Brignole … an energetic and scholarly young Italian, came to California in 1850, and mined successfully in the hills about Jackson and Sutter Creek, returning to Italy to claim his bride, afterward establishing their home in Sutter Creek in 1863. In that year, the business was founded where it is today, and is the oldest active mercantile establishment in Sutter Creek. ”

So the store was still operating in 1927 — but for how long afterward?

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Ghost type: Brignole Estate General Merchandise