“the” project

September 17th 2011

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,.

June 27th 2011

4 notes |#

Sometimes the printer is not your friend, sometimes history is left with androgynous cowboygirl legionnaires, and sometimes this is inspiring. As before, one variation is not fit to close my interest in this lettering. The core is fine, a sample of common early century arcing shapes bending to and around one another, a cohesive set which look like they shun the poor swash “y” in Grey as it’s just trying too hard. Next, the misregistered colors overlap to create special FX, possibly fitting: design by heat stroke in the wild west? “The” lettering can withstand this mechanical mistake, and shine for it, because the curves embrace the shift by softly merging with the overprint’s outline (more-within the letter, not the likely intentional highlight rule). The parallel curves are dancey as befits a swashy wordmark. The sans on the other hand becomes vertically striated with many straight characters. Hard lines are not forgiving. So I made two. One plain because the source lettering’s intent was good, and the second toned because the printer’s sloppiness output a “better” accident. And, the poor “e” looks out of place without any ball terminals. This is frilly, for rugged yet fashionable cowboygirl.

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Posted at 7:08am and tagged with: lettering, script, Toned, book, 1910s,.

March 14th 2011

33 notes |#

The Strand is worth looking at as a beast, 700+ monthly issues of, primarily, fiction. Its image and logo changed to fit the times. Three years from its closure, I hope this adorable lettering did not contribute to a drastic redesign triggering poor sales. The “filigrets” as someone dubbed them are charming, if not always uniform in the outlines and bump amplitude, and better for it. The digitized version may have cleaned that up for the sake of logic and troubles of working with low res imagery. I am not familiar with multicolored Tuscans enough to say the decision to handle varying “E” vertical serif tone shifts was unique, but turning the white inward/down struck odd and good, off from the logical all up or all down? Part of me wanted to wait till December to showcase such red and white festiveness.

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Posted at 2:02pm and tagged with: toned, 1940s, magazine, lettering, Tuscan, caps,.

October 18th 2010

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This is where digitization from low resolution images makes for the loosest of interpretations. Do I believe the points of this baseball banner lettering are actually blunted nubbins? No. Are they dulled in reproduction by photographing or screen-shooting the inherently fuzzed image? Probably, and so it becomes a feature to explore and the lottery of soft focus-to-pixel grid created nubbins of varying sizes (small for diagonal serifs and top/bottom extremes, larger for horizontals). Other remnants imperfectly kept include the floating “E” and misaligned “H” serifs. I only know see that I forgot that the “H” shadow ends just shy of the “E,” damn.

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Posted at 11:56pm and tagged with: serif, movie, caps, toned, tuscan, lettering, shadow, 1950s,.

October 13th 2010

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Twisting and turning through all the shadowed byways of a skyscraper city. An unaccustomed, truly unnecessary, five tones here, frantically inspired by a lack of trust in digital gradients to truly match the brushed (human, imprecise) title card and the random joy of enlarging low resolution images to gather grayscale palettes from pixel-Pointilist blocks. 1948 was well out of the American Deco era, but the film title still retains the high cross bars and high contrast associated with those times. The choice is interesting considering the art-conscious story of a magazine editor, note the bevvy of two flatly sober serif, script, and condensed sans ___ways logos beneath the film title. But, The Big Clock is a crime story, and so Hollywood most likely relied on the dimensional sans noir trope in case you hadn’t noticed the emphasized nor heard the literal “suspense” of the trailer.

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Posted at 10:51am and tagged with: lettering, movie, caps, sans, shadow, toned, 1940s,.

September 15th 2010

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Death Danced Beside Her. Bad printing makes for interesting letters. Shadows do not meet their natural casting corners and serifs blob out a little due to sloppy drawing or over-inking. Bouncing latin serifs, ever the exoticizing type treatment when combined with bronze skinned vaguely tropicalian beauties, are a virile little breed. They show up everywhere. I’ve seen them lurch along announcing zombie films and endanger the safety and security of level baselines in thrillers, how very fitting to combine both here. The decaying voodoo texture is a nice touch, for that special overkill flavor.

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All © and ™ to Gold Medal Books

Posted at 7:03pm and tagged with: book, caps, serif, shadow, toned, latin, lettering,.

September 10th 2010

2 notes |#

Vincent Price, not Bruce Wayne. The logo could easily have been swiped from Bob Kane’s costume design, but that’s not the point. The sheer 3D-ness of this awesome thing floors me. Not only did they flare out the shapes like Etruscan wood type, not only did they give it a deep drop shadow, they gave it a vertical lip outline with inner shadows. I urge you to hear the crime scene horn section ringing the murder mystery thriller in. It does not disappoint. Yes, the spacing is a little tight with so much contrast and extraneous eye candy to get in the way, but who cares?

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Posted at 10:31am and tagged with: 1950s, caps, flared, toned, shadow, movie, lettering,.

September 9th 2010

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Cross strokes like claws. Highway to the Dangerzone, though anacrhonistic, runs through my head. The Danny Boy from Memphis Belle, the closest thing I can tell to era-appropriate based on the bombers in the background, seems too twinkly and upbeat for lettering more fit to be blazened on ATV leathers or after burner conversion kits for suburban Toyotas.

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Posted at 1:55pm and tagged with: toned, caps, sans, book, brush, lettering,.

September 9th 2010

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The Hunter is a seemingly unlicensed pinball game, and baffles me, perhaps least so that the product developer kept the famous Robert DeNiro image but not the easily replicable Optima logo from the original The Deer Hunter poster and opted for a hand lettered rounded slab to make POW Russian roulette inviting from across a late ‘70s bar? Is the Warrant-video-blonde supposed to be Meryl Streep? The double outline bubble lettering is precious though, because few of its proportions stand to reason given how tightly packed the shapes are (pay close attention to the outline weights around the “E”’s vertical serifs).

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Posted at 12:47pm and tagged with: 1970s, slab, rounded, toned, book, caps, serif, lettering,.

September 9th 2010

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An unorthodox mystery. The notched and rounded alley-beaten lettering is made by the subtlest of white haloes around the blue. I’d like to think this was intentional, but I’m betting it was a pulp printer’s bad trapping. An approximate sloppy outline is included here. the “S” is the best portion, but out of bounds of “the” project.

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Posted at 12:04pm and tagged with: sans, distressed, toned, book, lettering,.