Typography... Wednesday? And more!

Hayley is sitting next to me blogging, while I am in the process of fixing my family's godforsaken computer. It's taking forever: ETA 212 minutes for my dad's iTunes library to copy to the backup drive. I haven't blogged in quite some time, and I felt like being corny, so now Hayley and I are blogging next to each other.

First things first: a belated Typography Tuesday.

Katoma Bouabane is responsible for Melting Words, a wonderful collection of photos of ice-cube-letter-things. They, to me, spell out (ha!) how temporary the feelings they express can be. I like them a lot.

from here.

Also great is fridayfonts. They share a new font every week developed by students at Academy of Visual Arts Hong Kong. None of them are incredibly utilitarian, but they're all very innovative and fun to look at.

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The wedding was great. I'm not going to go into great detail about it, because that would take forever. Suffice it to say that it was awesome and beautiful and great (and so, so stressful. I am never handling a wedding cake again, as long as I live). I'm very happy and honored to have been a part of it. It gave me a lot of inspiration for my own life: Graham and Sarah are incredibly in love with each other. If you want to read more about it, I'm sure Hayley's post will more than cover it.

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My parents are currently at a tea party. It is taking place in a public square paid for with tax dollars. My parents send their children to public school. I'm drowning in the irony. I'm actually about, as soon as this is posted, to go take some photos of it (and entrust Hayley with the computer. She doesn't want to come). I'll put those up as soon as they're ready.

EDIT: Lauren (whom I had the wonderful pleasure of meeting this weekend) took a brilliant, lovely photo of Hayley and I. It's one of the few photos of myself I actually like, and possibly the only good picture that will ever be taken of Hayley and me together. So thanks, Lauren. You kick ass.

Typography Tuesday - Arbitrary Constructs

Before I dropped my Linguistics class (it was waaay to early in the morning), I remember the professor saying something that made me think. There's nothing special about any word -- they're all just arbitrary constructs we all agree upon. For instance, if I say "chair," there's nothing magical about the word that makes it mean "thing to sit on." The only reason "chair" means "thing to sit on" is that we all agree that it does. Language nerd that I am, I'd love it if words had some special properties (they often feel like they do), but they don't. Type is the same way.

Sam Winston took Romeo and Juliet, cut out each line, and arranged them into Passion, Rage and Indifference. He then made collages of each collection (Indifference is still unfinished).

The first is Rage; the second is Passion. But can you really tell? I can't. There's nothing intrinsic or special about the type itself to tell you.
from here.


To go in the entirely opposite direction -- I know the last couple of these have been letters made of clever things -- but I really couldn't pass up "Alphabets" by Bela Borsodi. It's really a beautiful collection of photographs, and it took me a few minutes before I realized that they're all physically possible. The photos are brilliantly composed. It's like seeing a face in a cloud but knowing that it was put there. Even though letters themselves don't have any intrinsic meaning, the meaning we attach to them is enough, maybe.

from here.

Typography Tuesday - A Proverb

There's an old proverb that I cannot find again, and it goes something like this.

Two typographers are released from prison, witnessing daylight for the first time in years. One looks down at the ground, seeing dirt, trash, and ruin. He thinks "I won't miss this worthless world- how could my life walking on this earth ever be enjoyable?" The other looks at the sky, seeing the sun and clouds and birds, and thinks "I am looking forward to living a full life, lucky for this beauty around me."

It's one of those "it's-all-how-you-look-at-it" things.

The first typographer looked down and saw the earth:



The second typographer looked up and saw the sky:



From here.

Typography Tuesday - Fonts in Books in Fonts

Today, the theme is meta, inspired by a slough of music I am listening to this week. The headliner is Patrick Wolf, whose song “The Magic Position” says, “You put me in the magic position/to live to learn to love, in the major key.” This is meta. Discussing music theory within music is tongue in cheek, but this song also takes it a step further with rising major scales in the background. Another example of this is Jeff Buckley’s Hallelujah: “It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth/ the minor fall and the major lift/ the baffled king composing Hallelujah.” (Also see: that song from the Sound of Music: “Do! a deer! A female deer.”)

You get the point.

I love this tongue in cheek/artsy self-awareness, whatever media. Today’s typography grabs this theme, and is called Book as Type. Books are filled with fonts. This font is filled with books, which are filled with fonts.

As the creator, Amandine Allesandra, notes in this picture, “A book that is shut is but a block.”

And here is the alphabet- so colorful and gay!

What would be even cooler is to do a renegade setup of this in a library—a kind of underground typography vandalism. Leave your favorite librarian a special message—nothing says “I love you” like “I screwed up the order of your books for art.”

Typography Tuesdays!

I really like fonts, but I don't know as much about them as I'd like to. To help with that, I'm going to be doing a weekly Typography Tuesday here. Ariel is probably going to help with it here and there, as well.

I suppose my fascination with type started when I read this article about the Obama campaign's graphic design choices. The relevant bits:

"Then the lettering. Obama's identity contrasts a Hillaryesque serif typeface with a squiggle-free sans-serif presumably to imply that he combines gravitas with youthful vigor. Originally the letters were upper and lower case, which designers generally deploy to convey friendliness. As the campaign progressed, they have switched to all-upper case, which looks more authoritative, just what Obama wants. The sans-serif font changed, too: from Gill Sans, created by the British designer Eric Gill in the early 1900s, to a contemporary American one, Gotham.

Great choice. No typeface could seem better suited to a dynamic, yet conscientious, American public servant. Inspired by the handmade signs of 1940s New York, Gotham was designed in 2000 by Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, originally for GQ magazine. It has since appeared on everything from organic food packaging, to the Freedom Tower cornerstone at the World Trade Center site in New York. You don't have to be a typographic historian to get the message. A glance at the lettering on the "Change" banners at Obama's rallies conveys a potent, if unspoken, combination of contemporary sophistication (a nod to his suits) with nostalgia for America's past and a sense of duty."

Now, this blog is written in Verdana -- which is kind pretty much the way your Kindergarten teacher taught you to make letters (I didn't want it to distract from the images). My résumé is written in Georgia, which is very refined and businesslike; it reminds me of a small-town lawyer, like from a John Grisham novel. But I can't really pretend to know anything about "a potent, if unspoken, combination of contemporary sophistication ... with nostalgia of America's past and a sense of duty." So, I'll just be talking about fonts and, hopefully, I'll eventually be able to sound like I know what I'm talking about.

To get things rolling, here's a font made with a car!

iQ font - When driving becomes writing / Full making of from wireless on Vimeo.

There are more pictures on flickr, and the font is available for free download here.

When I was talking to Ariel about this yesterday, she showed me the Jockstrap font, which is just adorable.

That's all I really have for today. If anyone has suggestions on where they'd like to see this segment go, please don't hesitate to comment and let me know. I'm really open to ideas.