“the” project

March 31st 2012

As a formal exercise, it is interesting to push stress a particular direction. Out of comfort into out-of-whack. Weight emerges in the stacked text, as if washed out from dramatic foot lighting. Skinny feet broadening into wide shoulders. The “G”s break the trend and will be ignored. What’s interesting is the useful way the gentle increase builds horizontally letter by letter to add emphasis within the stacked and justified text, it takes a very strict and confining method of arranging headlines and offers movement. The stack turns segmented and ethereal rather than industrially still, able to bare heavy loads. Smokey. Wafty. That episodic shift in upward stress always resets at the harshest contrast (baseline to cap height). New line, new event. Extracted from the layout, “The” looks goofy to contemporary eyes. Looming letters now belong to retro-minded fright night flicks or the jumpy cartoons which need type to match animated contortion. Outside of the block, they look extreme. Bradley’s high contrast art makes the lettering less extreme given all the competition and pattern in the background. I’m guessing the magazine is about cooking? It was published by a stove and ranges company which only lasted for a few years. Maybe the blew their budget on Bradley, 1896 was the final year.

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All © and ™ 1896 William Bradley and Garland Magazine?

Posted at 11:59pm and tagged with: lettering, magazine, sans, 1890s,.

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,.

August 5th 2011

19 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,.

July 2nd 2011

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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,.

May 22nd 2011

25 notes |#

What looks good small might lose its sheen big. Consistently contradictory methods drive this site and declare I don’t adjust the spacing for whim or preservation’s sake. The excitable reader in me, not just the traditionalist typographic education etched into my post-script tracking bones, wants those letters to tighten up. Big and bare, “The” is no longer urgent as it shouts on the cover. Letters enlarge, so must the vacancy between them. Users would be best to cram those stems as tight as legibility and output can handle for the suspenseful effect compressed italic sans were historically perfected for (not to mention the now vacuous counters and gaping “e” aperture.) Bear with the tangent, but might the notion of tight spacing best sells EXCITEMENT be both economical as well as aesthetic? Busier tense flickering of dark and light positive/negative shapes make the links between eye-brain-nervous system trigger faster and harder? And, we were raised in an era of advertising descended from broadsides. Ink plus paper plus space (on and off the paper) equaled money so space was filled with tight headlines yielding greater copyfit as a result of thrift which became urgency’s look and feel? Scrollable (and “pinchable?”) screens become endless. How much longer will the notion of FILL ’ER UP last? When can tall letters track out beyond our current comfort zone? When, or has, the nineties’ broken rule returned as a viable option? Perhaps it is, perhaps this looks fine to the fresh-faced youth. To my eye, the “e” yawns, no danger is pending at The Farmhouse.

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Posted at 7:05pm and tagged with: 1950s, book, condensed, italic, sans, lettering,.

April 22nd 2011

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Baselines, uniform character widths, and propriety be damned. In smutty stag stories like The Passionate Namedropper moddish arrows abound and nothing is steady, society’s norms are ignored. Behind closed doors the letters bounce and pile like partially dressed bodies. A serif “i” even gets involved. Open minded scandalous lettering here, but friendly enough due to the soft strokes which may have been created using a rounded Speedball B series knib? Such knibs could help the different sizes maintain weight when photographic or digital typesetting methods would lose heft as characters shrunk (see the “on” pair). Or, perhaps the letterer had drilled those informal sans practice sheets so thoroughly that the letters defaulted to such clear sans while they focused on the odd couplings and immodest ligatures. No ending is clipped clean, each is pliant, touchable, because of those cartoony tools?

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Posted at 3:54pm and tagged with: 1960s, connecting, magazine, sans, lettering,.

April 13th 2011

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Charles Livingston Bull invented Witch Haus graphics before vector art and synthesizers, in the pianola era. Digital children with your pyramids, artful cropping, and mutant angled sans: your art is not wholly of the future. In 1902, a mammoth contributor to the rugged pictorial identity of the US (working for Country Gentleman, Barnum + Bailey, The Saturday Evening Post, the war effort) chose to mix his signature naturalism with formally decorative frames, more in keeping with the cropping of muralists fitting scenes to the 3D whims of an architect’s frieze than filling the familiar rectangle page as a book illustrator might. More so, the titling says something (then) new in trying to look old, primally, Earthenly deep. In these instances, lettering artists evoke abstract notions so precisely that I imagine them more as gardeners in labcoats crossbreeding a new species of flower, repeatedly pollinating, beeless, using eyedroppers and Q-Tips. By adjusting only a few angles and dimensions, this sans has invented lineage in what I can only guess is the reimagining of monolinear inscriptions, decorative Uncial shapes, and a pile of guesswork post Mackintosh considering there is no canonical sans serif letter as stated by Sumner Stone who specializes in this sort of subtlety. What does that mean? If Serif Romans can link back to the Trajan Column, the Sans still has no academic consensus root. People can’t authentically suggest deep history in a sans the same way manuscript calligraphy makes us go “ooh, really old, like Monk in candlelight old.” Livingston Bull seems to take the industrial approach to fudging Mackintoshian letters, not unlike ATF and the Viennese cafes soon after. There was an international urge to slant and muck with cross bars to snap words together. Mind you, the majority of that last bit is conjecture and enthusiasm, less proper research. So, look at the angle and a jarring ligature so thick and carpenterial it appears loadbearing. Weighty connections in diminuitive words like “the” feel wrong, conspicuous. There is no room to politely ignore how unusual it is, blown up and singled out. Stare at your feet and not the unfortunate birthmark of a typoghraphic feature. It is substantial , and we cast it for our layouts due to its preternatural iffyness. Ligatures in all but light sans demand too much attention, historical fakery in ways we don’t accept. This is a functional sans in masquerade fare, I suspect this “THE” unsnaps its ligature and straightens its crossbar for work Monday morning. More pep in its step for the previous weekend’s debauched ball.

Swiped from Golden Age Comic Book Stories.

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Posted at 6:12pm and tagged with: 1900s, lettering, sans, caps, connecting,.

January 27th 2011

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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,.