Email your representative. (http://killacta.org)

Saw this at Mystic Blue Signs in New Orleans last summer during TypeCon. It was in a big old French book about lettering and engraving. I wish I’d written down some information about it. I think it was from around 1880.

The alphabet on this particular page was very unexpected. It looks almost like Avant Garde in some ways. And dig that crazy “g”! Way ahead of its time.

I picked this up in a used book store in Omaha, Nebraska, last year. Most people who might collect a magazine like this would be interested in the content—photos and articles about Broadway of the 1930s. I find that interesting, too. But the reason I decided to buy it was because of the design and lettering it contained.

The contents page lists a guy named Nelson Gruppo as art director. I’ve never heard of him, but he certainly had style. The typographic above treatment graces the contents page. (That copy is pretty ridiculous, though.)

Elsewhere in the magazine, lettering artists did many of the feature titles:

Even more lettering gems are found in the advertisements:

I’d like to think it must have been fun to be a lettering artist back then. It sure looks like fun, anyway. Unfortunately, there are no credits for the lettering. I wouldn’t be surprised if the great Tommy Thompson did some of these.

I am on the TGV to Paris as I write this, on my way to act as “Président du Jury”, Typography category, of the annual design competition organised by the Club des Directeurs Artistiques de Paris. I don’t know when I’ll be ready, yet one thing is certain – this instalment of My Type of Music is late. Although I did manage to assemble all the covers and do basic research, it was a bit difficult for me to snap back into rant mode last week. I honestly don’t know how this episode will work out. Here’s some album covers from January, with the first ones dating back as far as the end of November.

Occasionally I get trumped by my expectations. The striking double-exposed photograph of a goat’s head is what initially drew me to the cover of Bruiser, the third album for British indie rock band The Duke Spirit. However it was the type that puzzled me. At first I thought it might be Akzidenz-Grotesk Light Condensed (too square) or Titling Gothic Condensed Light (R too square, S too round). After trying the lesser-known TV Nord Condensed Light I went through our entire list of other News/Trade Gothic alternatives, but still couldn’t pin this one down. The key was the curvature of the spine of the “S”, the height of the waist of the “R”, the not too square/not too round quality of the bowls and the balanced character of the letter forms.

Eventually it struck me that this “simply” is FF DIN Condensed Light, which frankly made me feel like a fool for not recognising it immediately. This is because I originally learned to know the DIN faces as technical and slightly awkward designs in one medium weight and two widths. Albert-Jan Pool improved and dramatically expanded them into today’s immensely popular super family counting five weights in regular and Condensed widths, all with matching italics, and five Round weights.

To make everything a little more confusing some versions of the album sleeve, as well as the cover for the single Surrender for example, trade in FF DIN Condensed for the equally popular Agency FB. This revival is based on a single-weight narrow square sans serif designed in 1932 by Morris Fuller Benton, reworked into a family of also 25 styles by David Berlow (and is a lot easier to identify).

Rational type families with a clear methodology in the succession of weights and widths make typesetting more reliable and predictable. Yet I will always have a soft spot for vintage designs with a little quirk. For example the gaps in the range of weights and widths in Monotype Grotesque force you to think out of the box and work a little harder. Similarly the differences in design between the lighter and the heavier weights of Beton can make the use of this geometric slab serif quite surprising. In the same genre Memphis also has something unexpected – for example the ear of the lowercase “r” becomes a circle in the Bold and Extra Bold weights.

Memphis is used to set the artist’s name on the album sleeve for In Case You Didn’t Know, the second album for the 2009 X Factor (UK) runner-up Olly Murs featuring Rizzle Kicks and Jester as guests. I would have preferred a contemporary alternative like FF Ernestine, Lexia or Kulturista. Although the design is not exceptional, I like that a typographic solution was used for such a mainstream release. The letters cut out in the coloured pages in the background lend the artwork a playful atmosphere which suits the boyish looks of the singer.

White Alternate Gothic No. 1 reversed out of a photograph of off-white paper. What more would you need for an EP called Nothing by Zomby?

Stade 2 is the fourth studio album of Mr. Oizo, pseudonym for French electronic musician and film director Quentin Dupieux – the posters for his latest film Rubber were discussed in the ScreenFonts episode of March & April 2011. The artwork is by Parisian graphic designer/animator So Me (Bertrand Lagros de Langeron), the art director for Ed Banger Records. He already has been featured here on The FontFeed and on Unzipped as he produces very interesting music videos.

Art aficionados will have noticed the illustration on the album sleeve is an homage to David Hockney‘s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures). Album title and artist name are truly hand lettered (repeating characters are not identical) in a Century-style serif face, outlined and shaded.

Gary Numan can barely be seen in the photograph on Dead Son Rising, his album of songs that grew from unused demos from his previous works. The image was taken by Ed Fielding. He explains in an interview with Quiet City that working with the veteran new wave artist was a dream come true. Having always been a fan of Numan’s work, Fielding had the opportunity of shooting one of his shows at Leeds for a local webzine. After seeing these photographs online, Gary’s manager – and producer of Dead Son Rising – Ade Fenton asked Fielding to collaborate on his project Artificial Perfect. Gary Numan saw the work and liked the concept, and through this Fielding ended up working closely with Numan.

As Dead Son Rising was Fielding’s first major album with Gary and something he wanted to be proud of, it was a real challenge. Before he heard any of the music, he had a gut feeling that he wanted to shoot in an asylum – the brief was to find a place that was bleak/industrial/barren/sinister. There were some safety concerns during the shoot because the asylum had been closed for a number of years and the place was quite run down and unsafe in areas. There were many rooms and corridors to explore, so the challenge was to get the images safely. On top of that the shoot also was done in winter, so it was very cold and damp with lots of standing around for hours. The resulting images proved to be worth the effort, and can be explored in the CD booklet of the album.

The typography on the Dead Son Rising album sleeve is nicely done. It is set in what looks to be blurred News Gothic caps, with a mirrored N, as well as mirrored 2s and a 3 substituting for the S and E respectively. There’s just the right amount of these substitutions; more would have been overdoing it. A simple red dot above the text provides the finishing touch.

Undun, the 13th studio album by The Roots is a concept album about the life of Redford Stephens, a fictional character who gets involved with drugs. The photograph gracing its sleeve is by Jamel Shabazz, a photographer, lecturer and teacher of the visual arts, whose work spans decades. Shabazz has been documenting the Urban Life for over 30 years. Born and raised in Brooklyn, NY he picked up his first camera at the age of 15 and proceeded to record the world around him. Jamel has drawn inspiration from the great James Van Der Zee, Gordon Parks, Robert Capa, Chester Higgins and Eli Reed.

The type is unassuming, centred in the “blank” sky area of this beautiful image. Yet I think there really was no need to resort to tired default faces like Adobe Caslon and Helvetica. Even when working with a classic-looking image contemporary faces work perfectly well.

The artwork for Johnny Foreigner vs Everything, the fourth full-length album for British rockers Johnny Foreigner was created by the band’s long-time visual media assassin Lewes Herriot. The overpainted image features Herriot’s signature ghost figures, like creepy rejects from a twisted Pac Man game. Matching the darkly cartoonish atmosphere, the album title was hand lettered in an elongated upright script and shaded sans caps similar to FF Prater Block.

The album cover for their Danger Mouse-produced seventh studio album El Camino is as straightforward as the music of The Black Keys, with the type in extruded sans caps.

On This One’s for Him: A Tribute to Guy Clark Shawn Colvin, Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle, Patty Griffin, Lyle Lovett, Willie Nelson, Ron Sexsmith, Kevin Welch, John Townes Van Zandt II, and The Trishas are just some of the singers who contributed to this two-disc tribute to Texan singer-songwriter Guy Clark. I had to call in the help of Typophile’s deadly efficient Type Identification Board to find out the sans caps were Nick Shinn’s Sense. This family is one half of a type system built around a cultural axis, with a modern (Sense; minimalist) and an old style (Sensibility; humanist) variant positioned as the poles of the sans serif genre.

A couple of years ago extremely bold display faces with (almost) disappearing counters were all the rage. Their popularity has waned a little, but they still occasionally pop up on posters, covers and album sleeves. An example of this style can be seen on Back to Love, the fourth release for the soul singer Anthony Hamilton featuring production from Babyface, James Poyser, Kelvin Wooten, and Salaam Remi. The angular typeface is Radomir Tinkov’s Tenshu, which could be mistaken for a seventies design.

The alternate poster for We Bought a Zoo – discussed in the most recent instalment of ScreenFonts – was “Jónsified” for the original soundtrack composed by the Sigur Rós singer Jon Thor Birgisson. The tree-with-animal-paws motif was placed on a textured background, Interstate was swapped for a distressed narrow sans, and smudgy handwriting was added. All these little changes alter the atmosphere just right to match the mood of Jónsi’s ethereal and poetic music.

After having been spotted on the cover for Peter Wolf Crier’s Garden of Arms two episodes ago, Michael Cina’s art shows up again, this time on Headcage, Matthew Dear’s four track EP produced with Van Rivers and the Subliminal Kid. Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ Verlag, originally created for the Guggenheim Museum, perfectly suits the subdued and art-like lay-out. Their website explains that this geometric sans was inspired by both rationalist designs of the Bauhaus school, such as Futura and Erbar, and newsier sans serifs such as Tempo and Metro/Geometric 415.

The album cover for This Means War, the third album for the Ohio metal band Attack Attack! which mixes electronic elements in its sound, is appropriately gritty. The double A monogram reminds me of the New Deal typography that was discussed in the June 2009 episode of ScreenFonts. A number of typefaces have similar square capital As – Futura Display, FF Moderne Gothics, Refrigerator Deluxe, MVB Solano Gothic Retro and so on. The band name underneath is set in Brothers with Stylistic Alternates activated. On the FontShop website these can be previewed simply by collapsing the Controls (the cog symbol), which gives access to the available OpenType features.

I couldn’t care less about Futura used on the album sleeve for A Different Kind of Fix, the third album for British rock band Bombay Bicycle Club, produced by Ben Allen along with contributions from Jim Abbiss and Jack Steadman. No, I am fascinated by the pseudo-scientific illustration, like an anatomic plate from a magical parallel universe. Brighton illustrator Katie Scott created this artistic impression of the brain, oesophagus and nasal passage, as well as the drawing on the CD disc itself and other covers for the band. Like Dummy magazine explains, Katie visualises alien and human forms in minute detail through anatomical and nature-themed illustrations, some intended to be more accurate interpretations than others. Her work hints at 50s science book diagrams and H.G. Wells novels, while her sketchbook drawings are hilariously dry but still awesome to look at.

The cover for Emotional Traffic – Tim McGraw’s last album on Curb Records, originally completed in 2010 and featuring Ne-Yo as a guest – had me laugh out loud. Instead of having a genuine quote from an actual review, the country singer put “My best album ever” in ITC Franklin Gothic Extra Compressed on the album cover, a quote by… himself. As if he was going to say anything else!? What a ridiculous thing to do. The script is Brisa.

Another country album, another forgettable mainstream album sleeve. The only thing worth mentioning on 100 Proof by American Idol contestant Kellie Pickler is Richard Lipton’s elegant Sloop Script, which comes in two styles of capitals and three styles of ascenders and descenders. The designer could at least have mixed them up a little for a more lively and sophisticate appearance.

On Area 52 producer Peter Asher and a 13-piece Cuban orchestra help reinterpret some of Rodrigo y Gabriela’s favourite songs. The illustration mimicking a revolutionary wall painting makes sense, yet I fail to understand why a Cuban-themed album has a motif resembling the war flag of the Imperial Japanese Army as a background and faux-Cyrillic typography.

Just like I was completely enamoured with UK design collective EH?’s innovative sleeve design for Boom Bip’s Zig Zaj last episode, I am spellbound by Jeanette Johns’s cryptic artwork on Provincial, the debut solo full-length album for The Weakerthans’ lead singer John K. Samson. This artist living and working in Winnipeg, Manitoba completed her BFA (honours) majoring in printmaking in 2008 at the University of Manitoba. Johns works primarily in silkscreen and etching, often with the addition of a variety of other techniques such as paper marbling, gold leaf and digital printing. She explores the relationship between observation and aesthetic experience by constructing and layering imagery of maps, diagrams and graphs.

The album sleeve shows Jeanette using geometric patterns in an effort to translate the beauty of order. By colouring in the rectangles defined by the rules and lines in what seems to be an accounting book she creates an image that is both systematic and random. It is an abstract composition of unusual beauty, occupying a realm somewhere between the organic and the mathematical. The type is again Futura, but wonderfully set, so I can live with that. The stamped number 109 in the upper right corner is a nice detail which adds to the authenticity of the .

Attack On Memory, the second album for Cleveland’s Cloud Nothings was produced by Steve Albini. Above the blurry photograph of a lighthouse we find the lovely FF Magda Clean.

I really like the atmosphere in the cover image of Laura Gibson’s latest, La Grande, an album inspired in part by the town of the same name in Oregon. The singer-songwriter, wrapped in a blanket with native American patterns, is photographed standing behind a camp fire. The very deep blue of the night sky creates a gorgeous contrast with the black forest and the red, golden and earth tones in the foreground. Because of the long exposure the sparks in the fire create mesmerizing, almost calligraphic lines.

Although the capitals and some small letters are identical, I don’t think the script is a font but hand-lettered. It resembles a curlier FF Pepe. Identical letters most probably were copy-pasted, a common practice in lettering. The same script can also be found on the covers of her two previous albums, and we see how it evolves towards its present form. It is not exactly what I would call an accomplished style of calligraphy. Nevertheless its naive and somewhat awkward structure suits the artwork.

The album cover for Sinners Never Sleep, the album produced by Garth “GGGarth” Richardson for the rock band from England You Me at Six, made me do a double-take. That board and plastic letters looked strangely familiar…

And indeed, these are the exact same letters as found on TV On The Radio’s Dear Science, discussed a little over three years ago on The FontFeed.

The art that graces the cover of Making Mirrors, the first album in five years from Gotye, was painted in the 1980s by Frank De Backer, the father of the Belgian-Australian singer and multi-instrumentalist (real name Wally De Backer).

Gotye- Somebody That I Used To Know (feat. Kimbra)- official film clip from Gotye on Vimeo.

The graphic style was interpreted by body artist Emma Hack for the official music video of the single Somebody That I Used To Know on which New Zealand singer/songwriter Kimbra guests. Emma’s 21-year career has evolved from beginnings as a children’s face painter and qualified hairdresser and make-up artist, to a body illustrator and visual artist of world acclaim. Directed, produced and edited by Natasha Pincus, the clip shows both artists gradually being overpainted to blend in with the mural in the background. The video took 23 hours to paint and film in stop motion, and it’s quite impressive.

Kimbra herself must have a thing for bodypainting, as the cover for her debut long player Vows attests.

We finish in style with Clay Class, post-punkers Tobin Prinz and Suzi Horn a.k.a. Prinzhorn Dance School’s follow-up to their self-titled debut. Their sparse indie rock sound is visualised with quiet images of (dried) flowers and leaves. It is fitting that all type is set in all lowercase OCR-A, yet each time I see this face used I wonder why some designers are so afraid of “real” type. There are other contemporary options that convey the same atmosphere, like the aforementioned FF Magda Clean and FF Alega and some others.

Oh yeah, there’s one thing I learned on my train ride to Paris Thursday evening – writing at 300 km/h didn’t magically make me work any faster. But at least I didn’t waste any time.

Seen in an antique store near Burlington, Vermont, on July 13, 2011.

G-Type has launched a new website with 25% off all fonts. They've also released a new font, Rollerscript.

Seen in Santa Crus, California, on April 4, 2008.

A story’s been quietly developing out of our San Francisco office over the past few months. Meghan Arnold and Michael Pieracci, our respective communications director and logistics man have steadily laid the groundwork and made way for the arrival of TYPO, Europe’s premier design conference, to our city. As April approaches and we enter the next phase of publicity and preparations, the two continue to work steadily at creating time and space for meaningful personal connections and the coming together of a community.

Michael and Meghan’s planning began with a few central ideas and questions. How to translate a conference aesthetic; Who best represents Bay Area design culture, and how to incorporate them and their work? They have since selected a theme and written the first words of introduction to it, landed the venue, hired an intern, set up audio/video, gone through the selections of caterers, managed airfare and hotel accommodations, solicited a volunteer staff, and of course, lined up speakers for the event. I sat down with the two of them recently to find out what the work’s been like.

Meghan Arnold | “It’s been exciting, and personally really interesting working with some of the icons of international design culture.”

Michael Pieracci | “Organizing the logistics behind a conference, I’ve discovered, taps into my own ways of being creative; in making an experience for our speakers and our attendees.”

Audience views Dale Herigstad’s talk at TYPO London 2011. © 2011 kassnerfoto.de

TYPO San Francisco 2012 Main Stage; Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

One aspect of incorporating local culture plays off the contrasts between San Francisco and Berlin; the one being tight, the other loose. Michael continues, “We’ve tried to create a very casual atmosphere here where conference attendees feel comfortable getting up and going for a walk, dropping in on a workshop, grabbing a drink or meeting and talking in the halls.”

Their efforts have not gone unaided. Advised by UX and brand designer Robin Richmond, who last year organized TYPO London, and Benno Rudolf in Berlin, who led and directed all the preceding years’ TYPO conferences, the two have handled the difficult tasks and maneuvered around the pitfalls of conference planning gracefully. Considerable help has also come from the backing of the conference’s facilitators, Erik Spiekermann and Kali Nikitas. Kali chairs the Communication Arts department at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, and works as a designer, educator and curator of graphic design work. Erik is of course a co-founder of FontShop, a type and graphic designer, strategic planner and businessman.

Erik Spiekermann and Neville Brody onstage at TYPO London 2011. Photo courtesy of FontFont

TYPO San Francisco’s confirmed speakers include design observer and Pentagram partner Michael Bierut, Pixar storyteller Michael B. Johnson, internationally recognized multiple media designer Neville Brody, the newly-local letterer and illustrator Jessica Hische, FontFeed’s own Yves Peters, designer and educator Juliette Bellocq, and local type and nameplate designer Jim Parkinson. It’s been real work, but Michael and Meghan describe the process of lining up speakers as very fulfilling. Reaching out to the international design community they’ve so far gotten a tremendous response, and representing local culture they’ve found nothing but speakers of the same caliber. Check the complete speaker list for the most up to date information on who’s speaking.

And I’ll be there—helping with workshops, like Damon Styer’s signpainting workshop, and making friends.

On one of the many times I have visited the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum, I got a peek at the hundreds of “cuts” they had stored in the back. These are large wood and linoleum plates made mainly for posters. Most of them came from Globe Printing in Chicago. I think they had arrived fairly recently when I saw them.

One in particular caught my eye. I recall that it was about two or three feet wide. On one side was this design, obviously intended for use on political posters:

But on the reverse side was this amazing piece of craftsmanship and ingenuity:

Apparently, cuts were reused when they were no longer needed. In this case, a larger plate was cut down. Not only that, but the open areas were filled in, mosaic fashion, to ensure an even impression for the new cut on the other side. To my eye, the discarded design was the more interesting one. It looks like it read “…ES BROS.” I really like the design of the “B”:

(Photos taken in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, on March 30, 2009.)

I finally got around to framing the beautiful commemorative print I got from the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum back in 2009. To give you an idea of the size, the frame is five feet tall. By far the biggest thing I’ve ever had framed. Here are a couple close-up shots:

I love the part below the big heading where it says, “THIS IS THE SMALLEST WOOD TYPE EVER MADE, OUT OF A MACHINE WEIGHING 950 POUNDS”.

The print was taken from a literal showcase of Hamilton Wood Type made for the 1893 Columbia Exposition in Chicago. It’s composed of virgin (never used for printing) wood type, some of it painted. If you have seen wood type before, it’s usually dark brown in color, stained from use. This is what the stuff looked like when it was brand new.

The curators of the Hamilton were able to pull prints from the showcase without getting a bit of ink on it. The display was taken out of its protective case and wrapped in 3M window insulator film. The film was inked and the prints were pulled from that. It’s not as crisp as a print taken directly from wood type, but it’s the first time any kind of print was made from this old type in over 100 years.

More photos here. If you’re at all interested in type, wood type, or letterpress printing, I highly recommend paying a visit to the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum. It’s in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, about a couple hours by car north of Milwaukee.

Seen in Davis, California, on April 5, 2008.

Seen at the Eastman House, Rochester, New York, July 19, 2008. I think this was on the side of an old movie projector that was on display.

Another cool nameplate, seen on June 20, 2009, in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

It really wasn’t designed for small sizes on screens. Words like milliliter can be very difficult to decipher. If you ever had to read or write a password with 1, i, l or I, you know the problem. That little comparison below is also available from the download page.

If you cook recipes from a US cookbook, you need to use measurements that seem archaic to a metrified European like myself. They use cups for liquid measurements. US fluid ounces are different from UK fluid ounces, but that is another story. I made a conversion chart for our kitchen, listing cups, tablespoons (which they like to abbreviate as TBSP), teaspoons (TSP) and milliliters. Europeans know that one of the advantages of the metric system is the fact that liquid measurements follow the same standard as those for other substances. Thus, a liter of water (i. e. 1000 milliliters) weighs 1 kilogram (i. e. 1000 grams). I’m using US spelling here, UK English would be litre and kilogramme.

I made a pdf which you’ll find in the download portion of this blog, so you can download it, print it out and stick it to you fridge door or wherever else you wish. Magnets cannot be downloaded over the internet yet.

La typo dans tous ses états, ou comment la typographie investit notre environnement. Exposition collective de typographes, graphistes et photographes, en partenariat avec l’Atelier du Livre d’art et de l’Estampe de l’Imprimerie nationale et la revue Graphê.
Avec Albert Boton, Michel Bouvet, Eric Brocherie, Kook Ewo, Gonzalo Garcia Barcha, Franck Jalleau, Clotilde Olyff, Guillaume J. Plisson, Jean François Porchez (ZeCraft), Julien Priez.

When I was studying at the Atelier national de création typographique (ANCT) in Paris in the mid 1990s, our hero was Hans Eduard Meier, the creator of Syntax. My friends and I admired his sensitive historical research and the original approach that led him to the development not only of novel type forms, but subsequently to a better definition of the humanist sans serif category in type design. I find his work underrepresented in histories of type design today, so when I saw Roxane Jubert’s article on Meier in Etapes Graphiques in 2000, I asked for permission to republish the article online. Roxane, my former classmate at ANCT, happily obliged.

Ten years later, Spanish publisher Campgràfic decided to publish Meier's book under the title La Evolución de la Letra, (original edition: Die Schriftentwicklung / The Development of Writing / Le Développement de l’Ecriture, 1959).  Roxane wrote the introduction for the book, and updated her Etapes Graphiques article. I asked Roxane to add illustrations and captions to the text, and commissioned an English translation. We are now happy to offer online illustrated articles in English, French and Spanish.

— Hans Eduard Meier, a life dedicated to letter design
— Hans Eduard Meier, une vie dédiée aux caractères
— Hans Eduard Meier, una vida dedicada a los caracteres

Special thanks to Hans Eduard Meier for allowing us to reproduce his visual material, Roxane Jubert for extensive work on the online version of the text, Parry Jubert for the English translation, Carlos García Aranda for the Spanish translation, and Gustavo Ferreira for help with online presentation of the articles.

We live a few blocks from the Minnesota State Fairgrounds, and every summer the “Back to the Fifties” car show is held there. There’s usually no need to actually pay to get into it to see the cars—our neighborhood is full of them, cruising around, for the duration of the show. But lately I’ve paid to get in, mainly to get shots of the nameplates, or “brightwork” as it is known.

The Chevy “Bel Air” nameplate, from the late-fifties, is my all-time favorite. The design is so simple and stylish. (Photo taken in Saint Paul, Minnesota, June 20, 2009.)

There might be a personal bias to my “Bel Air” preference. We always had Chevies when I was a kid, a ’59 Bel Air and a ’64 Bel Air—the car I learned to drive on and the car I drove during high school in the early seventies. Here’s a cartoon painting I did of it back then as a joke:

(When I was in high school, I had a little side business doing cartoon drawings of cars like this for my friends. I’ll post more of them sometime.)

Seen in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on March 28, 2009.

5th International Type Design Competition for non-Latin typefaces