“the” project

December 31st 2011

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,.

September 17th 2011

9 notes |#

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

36 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,.

July 2nd 2011

33 notes |#

It is tempting to see this as a black sheep of the WPA’s Federal Theater Project. Criminal psychology and aesthetics aping the era’s titan German film industry (which would also work its way into the EG Robinson and Bogart film version released the same year due to director Anatole Litvak’s transEuropean stage and screen pedigree) don’t particularly fit the bolstering social goals of the program. But, doom and gloom sell best in bad times. But, the visuals. Tense wrists produce quick and sharp curves, fitting as suspicion bets silk screen films were made with knives rather than brushes. There are no bubbling strokes seen in other painterly FTP poster lettering. Ends are snipped clean rather than taper where a brush would flex and strain, thinning as edges join producing a nip/point which betrays direction of the signpainter’s exit stroke. Here, certain southeastern curves go awkward where an arm could no longer bend with grace and safety, when the artist opted for better control over surface bite of a sharp blade tip. Pure conjecture, but the downward arc of “The”’s “E” and “Clitterhouse”’s “C” do not look comfortable. Luckily, when a title is filled with long straight-stroked words like “DR. CLITTERHOUSE,” awkward round details easily exaggerate to shout louder from the crowded set. The secondary information, the Who, Where, and When of the poster, belong to that faux-inscriptional form of lettering which influenced the heavy and disconnected 70s styles pushed by ITC? If only the FTP kept better records about the artists specially employed to make the posters, or the digital librarians cared enough to cite them. (S)he was responsible for several, all of them striking.

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Posted at 12:46pm and tagged with: lettering, sans, theater, 1930s, poster,.

January 27th 2011

3 notes |#

Strip it down in caps. Four verticals. Five horizontals. Nothing else. After much wobble and show in last week’s science fiction venture, poster artist Dion’s structure plainspoken sans construction is welcomed. However, flavor is not lost as hitching a crossbar so many rungs up the “H” in an otherwise monotone sans is statement enough. Snipping the top “E” bar throws it over the top allowing the definite article to steal the titling show. Late at night, drowsy, I envision it as the flouncy scarf bunched into a suitcoat pocket, one beaming and dandified note in an otherwise sober business ensemble. Contemporary brand consultants would probably cough, advise Dion that the product name RAPID has multiple opportunities to emphasize straight-to-round relationships, then overcharge for said advice. But, 1910 was a more adventurous time, pour housewives had nothing to defend the homestead from unsettling winking suns save metal polish and odd horizontalled sans. Lithography artists liked their sans wild, before international type designers wedged traditional proportions built on familiarity and legibility into them for cast display type. Swiped from Galerie Montmarte.

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Posted at 12:50am and tagged with: lettering, caps, sans, poster, ad, 1910s,.

November 8th 2010

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Solid, dark, refreshingly plain, and just a hint of rounded corners, what I generally call “routed” even when the means of production is entirely illustrative. This may look familiar as the WPA’s series of public health initiatives is well archived and documented though the flashiest state park and tourism posters get the most design press coverage. I doubt such thick and blocky sans would be used to target new mothers should a public awareness campaign be necessary today. It would probably look harmlelessly “feminine” like the now defunct print edition of Domino magazine, which was well made but hardly the aesthetic a federally funded Patriotic call to action merits. The type here makes breast feeding dutiful, your/her part to helping a substantial America not fall to ruin, and the comparatively softer illustration (though it still eerily smacks of Soviet influence, nyet?) elicits the matronly comfort. These posters should be available from a POD service somewhere, and if not, the Library of Congress isn’t recognizing a small but profitable enterprise.

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Posted at 5:00pm and tagged with: sans, caps, poster, 1930s, WPA, lettering,.

September 9th 2010

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One matchbook, or a promotional travel coaster? No clue.

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Posted at 1:34pm and tagged with: poster, 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,.

September 9th 2010

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A 20s monoline mutt with much unnecessary serif-ing by me when playing with the ink gain at the end of strokes resulting from such cheap printing and absorbant show card stock.

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Posted at 11:12am and tagged with: poster, 1920s, monoline, serif, lowercase, lettering,.