“the” project

February 2nd 2012

It looks like a lettering exercise. Here is a Speedball B knibbed pen, you have quite a little bit of space to between the Dell logo and “ONE.” Give us a “The.” You have two minutes. [Dip. Scritch. Scratch. Swoop. Done.] Hasty and instinctual and tight, all of which is fitting. The cramped squirm of the “h” writhes like the pinned man in sad yellow socks, all the more humane for its discomfort next to solid, inevitable crime block gothics. Victimlettering. Swiped from UK Vintage.

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All © and ™ 1949 Dell and Helen McCloy?

Posted at 9:26am and tagged with: lettering, book, script, monoline, 1940s,.

December 31st 2011

42 notes |#

An adventure that will blaze… A love that will flame… ‘Till the stars grow cold… is illustrated as a strident horse-and-camel epic ranging from the UK to a plate tectonically confused Euraisafrica. Impetuous adventure. Brush lettering is flared for the swashbuckling men in turbans, some condensed romans dance for western blondes in red heels. Here, multiple layered brush strokes were required to build up weight but leave tell tale hillocks at overlaps, artifacts which betray the hand of the letterer. I decided to exaggerate them and regulate the quirks into features. Certain of the digitization’s traditionally flat(ish) bases’ stroke ends now have arcing shapes emerging from the severed ends. The “h” ascender deserves a logical corner joining two true trajectories. A respectable point, perhaps just a little blunted from the brush’s glob of ink. Instead, the sure shot is interrupted by a spear point jutting northeast. This is no longer a mistake of naturally occurring doubled strokes with performance enhancement but a new shape emerging from within, or overlapping the silhouette? Where the emergent shapes are potentially violent in the flats, bladed, the curved strokes were also emphasized with cushioning bloats in the “T” top swash and “e” round. Sharp and soft. Adventure and love. Conquest and comfort.

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All © and ™ 1950 20th Century Fox?

Posted at 5:12pm and tagged with: movie, lettering, brush, 1950s, poster,.

November 11th 2011

40 notes |#

“Decorations by W Aylward” is honest. “Decoration” is a term rarely used today given the serious emphasis attributed to DESIGN and the puffed-chest academic shamanism it takes to wield it. Honesty is refreshing. It’s only a poem, with illustrations and fancier titles than normal. Scribner’s Magazine dealt high definition entertainment in 1913, it was America’s first mass market rag to include COLOR illustrations (1887). Leading talent was commissioned to dazzle audiences. Lettered decorations along The Way to Inde pass through heat distortion, fluttering romances, shimmering confusion, and other trespasses. So, which South Asian script is this lettering approximating? Probably all of them, pulled from Aylward’s recollections of people in overheated environments with wavy flags and symbols which looped in and out of themselves breaking Latin logic. The horizontal stroke topping the “W” is a little Lombardic and excusably close for a seafaring Wisconsonian referencing linear connections in Devanagari or Bengali, but has little relation to the other typographic conventions on his page. The Way to Inde is mapless, adrift, and beset with guesswork. It picked up a backswooping “d” from some colony using early engraved French type. This confusion, or playfulness, is why I love it. Freed and odd. The strange beast has interesting contrasts, strong verticals in stems with rigidly bored (drilled) counters, like they’ve been tunneled into. Antfarm negative space? A lot of the action here is in the small shapes. The minimal counters, small gestures amplified by so much surrounding black, movement implied by inky little feet kicking out exit strokes (“h” up, “e” down), while partnering stems suction tight to the baseline. The lumpiness of the brush and ink curdles where multiple overlapping strokes define a curve. Inked with oatmeal. I stopped while debating how much bump and melt to apply to the “h” ascender serif-blob, questioning whether or not this could be approached as an eastern cousin to Cooper Black, and it seemed like a terrible idea.

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Posted at 10:57am and tagged with: lettering, script, brush, 1910s, magazine,.

September 17th 2011

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And baby makes 100. Come see the screwball 3D sans mismatch a story about Navajo and Fed agent clashing, racism, horse swindling, patriotism, enlistment, The Great War, and broken promises! This sans has joy buzzers and whoopie cushions in mind, not the weighty conflicts of The Vanishing American’s story. It makes me wonder whether 1920s Hollywood didn’t believe in advertising according to plot, or in targeting audiences. Maybe vivid color and westerns was enough to put butts in seats. Anything to jar the eye and demand attention, including confusing “inappropriate” lettering. I look at the overlapping baselineless angled shapes and think on how many contextual alternates it would take for an OpenType font to recreate this sort of complexity as a tool. The engineering feat, as an act of logic and intelligent coding would be more artful than the visual product. Incredibly smart fonts producing questionably dumb typesetting is not worth it. This sort of goofiness is best lettered, by hand, custom-fit for the job, because the number of occasions bouncy 3D sans is the best option cannot outnumber the hours or dollars dedicated to replicating its effect in software.

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Posted at 1:19pm and tagged with: 1920s, Toned, caps, lettering, poster, shadow, sans,.

September 12th 2011

29 notes |#

After rounds of “the”s lettered with (relatively) elaborate contours and alien features, a simple sans was called for. Simple does not mean vanilla. I consider it a reset, a typographic palette cleanser. Beefy weights with thinner cross bars in the tradition of Gill Kayo have become Comedy Sans to me due to frequent use on PG movie posters. Proportion here is different from Gill, but the non-militant friendliness is similar. That “e” winks. Or, the slight counter and small aperture in the “e” accentuates its strong jaw as weight does not lessen as is customary in some gothics. It’s only missing a cleft. Fittingly, one of Barclay’s sailor subjects said “Really, we were skinny kids with our ribs hanging out. I said to him, ‘I don’t look like that!’ and he answered, ‘Well, if I sketched you like you are, it wouldn’t make much of recruiting poster, now would it?’” While Barclay was an iconic painter, and experimental jet camouflager, his sketches for titles and placement don’t suggest he was responsible for the boisterous lettering used on his posters. Perhaps some unnamed recruitment office commercial artist had a knack for jocular lettering which would buy you a beer on leave.

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Posted at 10:49am and tagged with: 1940s, lettering, lowercase, poster, sans,.

September 9th 2011

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Odd shapes are smoke screens for bad point placement or badly translated curve proportions. This is hardly faithful, I kept getting distracted by new ideas in letter features. Penman Costello merges Rhinoceros beetles and spiney conch shells, the segmentation of carapace armor and goth kids’ rings with the Latin alphabet. Light in weight but prickly and possibly borrowed from blackletter leftover by Pennsylvania’s German population? There is a polite lie in “reviving” lettering like this then allowing it to live with so few kinks in its edges. It was scratchy, as can be expected from enlarging handwritten body text. Unless the coarseness of an outline is a feature, intended by the penman to be a fight between ink and toothy paper, I see little need to digitize it. What captures the eye and the head here is the conflict between wide swoop swash and tight-wristed disconnected letter construction. Considering the deliberate stencil-like approach, I emphasized the overlap of strokes in curves. How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? Can I show how many hand movments are necessary for Costello to build a swash? But, why is the “e” complete? To count the component strokes of one “h” (including that extraneous armor piercing ascender horn ) then glance at the density of the source memorial text is to feel the dedication to repeat that sequence over and achingly over. Respectful dilligent tendonitis.

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Posted at 1:53pm and tagged with: 1920s, lettering, swash, stencil, script, Pen-based, poster,.

September 1st 2011

19 notes |#

This is the blockbusteriest of films that 1925 had to offer. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Stupendous Story of Adventure and Romance states the opening title. Or, Mighty Prehistoric Monsters Clash with Modern Lovers! as an alternate Professor Challenger character poster proclaims. Stop motion thunder lizard gore! Actors with too much eye liner and harshly justified hand lettered interstitials! Generations’ poor archiving of painted promotional posters leads to wobbled intentions in digital revivals! The source was less than 100 pixels wide, but the crashing heavy wordmark was interesting enough to puzzle out. There is no such thing as “fidelity” in the digitization. Edges warp in the humidity (The Lost World is in South America). Soft arcs along each facet give the impression of inflating a jewel. Whatever the beastly intent of the letterer, “The” now has the severity of a ring pop or mylar balloon. Hints of a mold’s hardness are denied by materials used in mass production. Character recognition is reliant on very slight counters amidst all the heavy strokes. The “e” may have once been an inline, long faded yellow near invisible. And, that cantilevered swash of unusual proportions? Grecians tend to be extreme, stony monolithic, things but rarely are they “jaunty” enough to defy gravity so boldly. A support system is missing here, buttresses may be hidden using mirrors. I do not believe in the architectural trickery allowing that to stand.

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Posted at 5:50pm and tagged with: lettering, movie, 1920s, swash, grecian, slab, serif,.

August 26th 2011

6 notes |#

Old Church Slavonic writing, as seen in decorative Russian Orthodox manuscripts which obviously influenced illustrator Zvorykin, is innately fiery. Dancing and spiky. Violently pretty and so dizzying to my comfort zone. Flame lettering is obviously appropriate to the story, and so someone decided it ought to live on in translation. I don’t know who adapted Zvorykin’s early Cryillic letterforms to Latin (possibly the artist himself?) but they did an interesting if not “good” job of it. The amount of subtle variation (to connect or leave “R” bowls open?) makes me wonder whether bilingual Russians would look at this mingling, faux Cyrillic, as insulting or aptly guided? For once it’s not used to mock or lionize Soviet-era strength, order, or severity and instead projects a “different degree of ‘Russianness,’” the intricate and the historical pride absent from most of our contemporary (Western) notions of Russian aesthetics. The mind wanders to fuzzy Cold War political and cultural ramifications considering this book and “In the Russian Style” seemed to boom under Jacqueline Onassis’s tenure as an editor at Viking Press in the late 70s. Perhaps that’s appropriate, Zvorykin did make the book while exiled in France during the Revolution, a gift to a Western employer.

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Posted at 1:34pm and tagged with: lettering, caps, 1930s, book, pen-based,.

August 23rd 2011

34 notes |#

Changeling lettering. What happens when serifs are kidnapped by the lettering fairy? Overkill becomes feature. Perhaps “THE” ate of the fae food, drank the nectar, got stuck in their garden forever. Germinating, reshaping, growing extra bits, forsaking then forgetting its own legible heritage as it roots-in permanent. How might letters go native in a world of phoenixes and minor deities? Extraneous additions. Superfluous unknown biology. Indulgent letterers with little imagination might have taken that challenge and swashed out the little word till its actual width tripled with ever more decorative swoops, overpowering its function as definitive article. But, illustrator D. S. Walker twisted letter anatomy as tools to defy the common, within his layout’s spacing constraints. How many crossbars are too many? Why shouldn’t the “T” invade the “H“‘s sovereignty, like creeping vines seeking some other plant’s water source, wild. No gardening sheers in sight. Waists and crossbars lift to the sun. I’m curious if left to their new magical flora state, out of sight, how might “THE” look in another 80 years?

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Posted at 1:16pm and tagged with: 1920s, book, lettering, serif, caps,.

August 5th 2011

18 notes |#

Lately, there has been less revision, less challenge in shapes shown. Inker’s tracings of selections held enough artistry to build commentary soapboxes upon. After hearing a Carter lecture, again, a non-existent challenge was accepted to avoid thoughtless preservation leading to “taxidermy,” if only for the length of a post. This revisionist exercise was fun, but will be very short lived. It is doubtful anyone will take offense at adjusting Crack Comics’ lettered legacy, no matter how loved Gill Fox may have been. This cover is hardly a cherished artifact nor cultural touch point, even for funny books. Bubbled sans are plentiful. What caught my eye was the contrast in plumpness within and outside the “E.” Its structure seemed upholstered, a stiff frame padded outward and minimal fluff around to the crossbar. I wondered whether the effect could sober up, deflate and approach the crop of recent mutant sans which smartly utilize shallow curves in all characters to upend possible boredom with straight-sided historical sans. Diminish the bounce and level out the interior angles. What if a sausage-link sans like VAG Rounded went to boot camp, trained under a humorless drill sergeant and came out with a broken spirit but lots of resolve?

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Posted at 10:12am and tagged with: lettering, 1940s, sans, caps, comic, rounded,.