“the” project

September 12th 2011

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,.

August 4th 2011

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Suzie Wong’s significance, book to stage to film to ballet adaptations was unknown to me, before my media-aware time. Some claim the story classic. Others may target it for any number of offenses: Estranged Westerner in an Exoticized Eastern Land. Saving the Hooker with a Heart of Gold. Pandering Pidgin English. Yellow Fever. Regardless, it stuck. Maybe “the west [America] was trying to prove they have gotten over racism” according to France Nuyen (Suzie on stage) or Ming Wen’s reductive speculation that “male fantasy for a pretty subservient concubine” is key? The character’s appeal, or attraction to postwar East/West culture clashed lovers schtick endured, revived as nightclubs on three continents, implying a lifestyle beyond story. The aesthetics range, it is curious to see which interpretations of nostalgia were adopted. Amsterdam and New York chose squared geometry of ebony window screens. Beijing revived the film’s 60s gogo jetstream sans logo, full-sail shapes previewing the international swinging world to come, where large scale free form plastic or fiberglass paneling was grafted to functional bodywork, obscuring the boring normal bits of life. Too much speculation over Brush Script titled 2010 novel retelling the story for today’s global economy could spiral into questioning whether the art director was typographically misinformed, a sad attempt at calligraphy, or meant it to look appropriately street-level OEM cheap in a fit of brilliance. Or, was it a contemporary typographic “retelling” of the hand lettered 1950s cover shown here? My favorite bit, is that the lettering coupled with the illustrated girl of indeterminate age (ignoring shifty shore leave sailor background and her brazen red nail polish) could very well be Suzie Wong Girl Detective/Reporter/Blogger. Harriet the Spy by way of Veronica Mars. Time and place are anywhere/when choker-collared dresses could be deemed fashionable on a girl with more determination than you. Handwritten script runs all vague directions, kid carefree or adult vice. It is Reiner Script to the (crooked) bone. Differences in letter construction vary, and perhaps the letterer doused the pen with too much ink, changes in direction left globbier rounds unlike the chiseled look of Reiner.

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Posted at 9:16am and tagged with: lettering, script, brush, lowercase, 1950s, book,.

July 9th 2011

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Now, some proper art appreciation of repetition and contrast for such a small ditty of sheet music ephemera (note this particular scan is cropped, it’s On not In the BEACH at BALI BALI.) Contrast: artist and letterer Jeff Miska emphasizes the words from script to roman but links the two smartly. Discipline kept things in a sans world, little to no flex in weight. Even while the script’s slope is so fierce and space tightens up, “Look at me!” diagonal emphasis is repeated in the “A”s which dominate the caps. The “E” foot even anchors the overt “A” diagonal with a snug slanted end unlike it’s two other cross strokes. Further contrast: all those circles in the art. But, all those zig zags everywhere else macro layout to micro lettering. Foreground people look -zig- to thoughtbubble people whom look -zag- to titling filled with -zigs- to -zags- in the script. Isolating “the” led into a little analytical bunker, deep dark subterranean tunnel vision. Sounds of worldly logic were ignored. “The” seemed organic despite the uniform weight and parallel logic driving its curveless course. Or, probably, I blew up a low resolution image and saw what I wanted. The lettering here, hand rendered as ever, “lived” in a way more machined diagonal sans/script/italic-y type does not. Not all strokes followed uniform trajectories. Some arced more. Some shear edges bubbled in the heat. I doubt Miska intended any of it, his vision may have been more precise, like 2012. Ink and fingers and paper just veered off course of their own volition, resulting in implied straight edges built by the slightest of curves.

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Posted at 11:48am and tagged with: 1930s, lettering, connecting, script, lowercase, sheet music,.

June 15th 2011

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The tendency to admire the naive is easy, but it is tricky thinking to equate: the more amateur the effort, the deeper its authenticity. That is a very punk notion. Type/lettering folk and punks share common aptitude to needlessly quibble over small details and how they signify something’s whole merit. I have never heard this 7” released on Tremor records, I only know local journalists deemed it punk. Any drivel on naivety and goodness is mine, because I admire the lettering in confusion. It is a punk deviation from connecting scripts and logical abstract doodling. Punk is two minute music with easy power chords, it is negligent for the sake of speed and middle fingers. The striving amateur letterer was dedicated to the jaggedy and inefficient craft of coloring in. Not speedy, but simple and focused. The haste of fluid calligraphy is impersonated with blunt outlining tools then shapes are filled by techniques many of us explored when idle with graph paper. As points connect along straight(ish) lines, shapes triangulate and a rudimentary typographic “stress” fizzles into being. Extrema are pulled in and through themselves, lines cross, analog Flash tween morphing is invoked. The sharp corners bulge with marker bleed because punk works on cheap absorbent paper. This is reconstructed calligraphy in slow tangram pieces. The time spent crafting such a brash punk script seems so unpunk. And was it amateur? A typographer would question too much about the inconsistent play of positive and negative shapes, so, probably. I’ve no idea anymore, it’s just good.

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Posted at 4:24pm and tagged with: 1970s, distressed, lettering, lowercase, music, ragged, script,.

March 30th 2011

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Something sparky and essential was lost by leeching the red and brush texture from the signpainterly title and has been replaced by cooled efficient seamless black in the digitized version. By negating those features, along with the needless quote marks (also core to the appeal of a practiced sign painter script) I feel I’ve turned it into a cartoon. I’ve switched off the neon sign and the sudden loud quiet of lost glow and hum is more significant than appreciating the bare shape of its letters. They still read as hand rendered brush strokes, their buttery girth remain, it is still remarkably fun looking (the lower curve of the “t” seeming to spring from the cross bar at a crooked angle, setting a new course turn right quick), but some heat has left.

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Posted at 8:45am and tagged with: 1940s, lettering, brush, script, lowercase, movie,.

December 7th 2010

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At first this was a throw away, revived for the sake of variety because I hadn’t played with a stereotypical flared lock up from the late 60s and it was bound to happen eventually. Best be done with it sooner than later. Little was considered, I offer no insight. This is sugar and soda and empty calories lettering, until I did some research. I just assumed the Modniks were created to compete with Archie and the gang a few youth trends later down the comics audience’s evolution. What I found was an educational publisher notorious for missing the mark (Mods in 1970 were already outmoded) and being the pride of grandmothers, masking facts and history lessons with aching forced attempts at relating to kids with trend packaging. Most grievous, the artist did not know the difference between a cello and an upright bass. The cherry of a postscript is that the title flopped then was converted into a masculine street racing comic. Same characters, new title Modwheels, new art, same bobbing heads atop the logo formatting. How Puzzling.

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Posted at 1:43am and tagged with: lowercase, flared, connecting, comic, 1970s,.

November 23rd 2010

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Consider me penitent. Sloppiness in lettering-hunting then file organizing meant the source material credits were lost. Or, never existed. Just now, I spent too long looking for “Around the world” on advanced image search for naught. This mysterymeat aesthetic looks equally 50s, 70s, 80s, more 80s, and 90s to me depending upon the market. Why did the lettering artist dot a “t”? How fundamentally punk. How can someone cognizant of letter shapes enough to break them so deliberately produce such a runt “e” dwindling next to lipoid thick “th?” Surely that is crafty negligence.

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Posted at 12:37am and tagged with: lettering, script, inky, lowercase, brush,.

November 10th 2010

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The things talented people can do with brushes and ink are sometimes small, and mighty, and under-loved. The “Air Step” is nice, but the incidental copy shines with the effortlessness of a trained hand crossing their Ts with force. Willpower is in that contrast, you can feel the body of the brush finally relinquishing a payload of ink, so thick crossing so thin strokes. And that was the initial appeal of this piece of calligraphy. The surprise when zooming in was the snagged ink of the vertical strokes, still wet and pulled right, pooling at the intersections. Such detail from throwaway headlines isn’t for our eyes, and I risk having revived a craftsman’s lack of patience, but to interesting effect. The weights all screwy and the counters aren’t matched, too needle-eyed tight, but the mistakes are the features here?

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Posted at 5:44pm and tagged with: connecting script, script, lettering, ad, shoes, brush, lowercase,.

September 9th 2010

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So what if the spacing’s strange given the wide entry into the massive looped “h” ascender and the “e” trails off the end. This is perhaps my favorite so far, just for the brash strike through of the “t” cross bar. The contrast of sharp to airy loop, with that much swagger in so few letters, appeals.

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Posted at 3:44pm and tagged with: 1930s, album, lowercase, connecting script, brush, lettering,.

September 9th 2010

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Multiple liberties were taken with the “h”’s nubbinly short ascender in Harry J. Weston’s Australian WWI recruitment poster. Serifs were divined from the blunt things stuck on the end of the stems. The shakes and quiver of, I’m guessing, an illustrator approximating the sign painter’s craft is adorable, as is the condensed “Hill” and “us” plainly indicating Weston ran out of room and didn’t care enough to plan thoroughly. But, there was a war on.

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Posted at 1:27pm and tagged with: serif, lowercase, poster, 1870s, Australian, lettering,.