“the” project

September 1st 2011

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.

Download

Creative commons, etc…

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

August 23rd 2011

40 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?

Download

Creative commons, etc…

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

July 14th 2011

11 notes |#

Consider life in the 1890s. Ink was big business, but a tradesmanly one. Ault & Wiborg paid out to top talent. Boston Art Nouveau titan (and fellow pressman) William Bradley or Toulouse-Lautrec shilling ink was like Scorcese directing commercials for Final Cut Pro. Business to business advertising on a gorgeous scale. Design and art history have salvaged these for their beauty, but let’s not forget their original context. Colored chemicals for profit. But, the lettering… Bradley consulted with ATF. He had chops, even if they tended to big flouncy display chops. Big serifs. Eave serifs. Weaponized canopy serifs, bowing low with gravity to wicked points. Serifs to hold back the rain from above or thresh wheat down below.

Download

Creative commons, etc…

©1898 and ™ William Bradley and The Ault & Wiborg Company?

Posted at 5:01pm and tagged with: lettering, ad, serif, caps, 1890s,.

June 22nd 2011

3 notes |#

The little I know of this book: it was based on Gauguin’s life and met with scandal upon publication (burnt in a filming of Fahrenheit 451) for all the irresponsible libertine artiste urges? Society was shunned in the name of capital “A” Art. So too was typographic logic cast aside for the freedom of organic pen and brush strokes in the Bantam edition’s title. Caps do not match their lowercase by traditional standards. Caps do not match themselves. Two out of three (“T” and “M”) are what I generalize as Nonthreatening Postwar Modern, built upon the legacy of Bodoni but drawn with cartoon squish and bounce for midcentury headlines. Baselines wavered. Straight strokes swung gently, warped inward a little, like letters stretching after a nap. Sometimes waists, like the “T” here, are cinched a little, sucked in ensuring a gut is kept at bay. Lowercase serifs climb up above the usual ramrod straight clip, a more human touch with some historic precedent. The lowercase x-height is inconsistent. Stress dips back to oldstyle. Relationships from thick to thin stay sparkly Modern, connections are fragile like candy floss and begin to pull pieces away from the “h” stem which looks unsettling and biological, as if the entry point was barbed? I don’t understand why serifless “h” feet ignore the logic of the single serifed “n.” Perhaps the transparency got damaged before press, features were lost. Perhaps the letterer could not be bothered by my narrow expectations of serif relations’ diversity. Philistine am I.

Download

Creative commons, etc…

Posted at 12:51pm and tagged with: lettering, book, serif, book, 1950s,.

February 16th 2011

8 notes |#

This is shaky, almost inadmissible. The quantity of similar quirky characters (“N”) could suggest this was typeset… but, and perhaps it’s just the low resolution talking, they don’t all match, especially across the series of regimented covers which suggests a very disciplined letterer. Or, a warden of an art director slyly mixing banged up foundry type with spot lettering. A long legged “R” here, a more condensed “of” ligature there. This was published for Freemasons, a group capable of appreciating rigidity and repetition of an ornamented standard format. So consider this gray. The “T” is the star, and it’s the first drop cap presented. A crossbar doing something to approximate American Pole Wladyslaw Theodor Benda’s ’20s exoticized “elsewhere” Arabesque but keeping within the confines of oldstyle typographic shapes. Swiped from Vintage Blog. If you recognize the face, let me know.

Download

Creative Commons, etc…

Posted at 9:29am and tagged with: 1920s, lettering, serif, magazine, dropcap,.

February 4th 2011

1 note |#

“The workman in drawing letters should use the technical limitations of the craft in which he works, to its own advantage. He should not endeavor by trickery to obtain results in one material or method that by right belong to others. Nor should he undertake to master that which in the nature of things is not to be overcome…he should not draw in line to imitate the technique of a woodcut, or design a type to give the effect of a letter engraved in copper…” — Frederic W. Goudy reflecting upon his 1905 design Engravers’ Roman, which could likely be attributed to his initial, and relatively out-of-character, weight of Copperplate Gothic drawn in succession for the invitation market. “Today, I would refuse even to consider such a commission; then my ideas were not so fixed.” I thank Goudy’s lapse. I thank a titan of original American type design for that family. Sadly, careless typographers blow it up without recognizing how fine serifs in small sizes turn warty when large, and shouty (or ignorant) typographers discredit the font as a blight. So, when I see lettering artists keep true to the engraved formula of however big+sharp thin serifs, especially with widened proportions, it looks lovely.

Download

Creative Commons, etc…

Posted at 9:29am and tagged with: lettering, serif, caps, ad, 1950s,.

January 11th 2011

1 note |#

Look quick and see a lovely unremarkable 1900s layout, the jobbing sort where a lovely archival print is combined with lovely (stock?) floral line art, and is surrounded by a lovely lock up of lettering. Look close and see the foibles. Letter shapes change upon a whim. Glyphic serifs end sharp and shallow, one of those features whose effect is felt best in quantity building up a crisp layout gently guiding your eyes in and out of sparkly shapes. Then the Hands “s” ball terminal confuses it all. So round, so soft and alien in its serif surroundings, like its about to be popped. The letterer charged ever forward, imagining newer lovelier shapes, leaving mismatched “n” and “d”s in his/her wake. This is a cardinal sin to typographers reliant upon those control characters, disturbing the relationships between straight to curved shape midstream would be disaster in a font. The letterer cares not, individualized shapes reign: “T”s flex wide then shallow, some “E”s turn up their cross bar noses at their soft or hard edged brethren. The variables are what make these antiques lovely. Even the rules between the boxes shimmer and shake. Isolated, there is an admirable draping downswing in “THE” from the curved “T” serifs and wide disproportionate “E” strokes. A soft arc motion considering how chunky the weight is.

Download

Creative Commons, etc…

Posted at 6:58pm and tagged with: lettering, caps, serif, sheet music, 1900s,.

December 24th 2010

|#

Have yourself a Welsh little Christmas. Board the train at Paddington a half century ago, wait for the porter to call you for your scheduled lunch in the catering car, and receive this three color beauty as a menu. Eric Fraser was one of Modern history’s less favored breed entitled commercial artist. Not precisely an illustrator, not just a letterer, not just a paste-up and layout man. And happily, not a Modernist set to reshape a Universal World with geometric icons and formless information loaded with ideals. That pen had personality, and drew formfit letters indicative of, according to him, South Wales. The dancing stress in the ascending and descending strokes is more aggressive than the tapering of similar Koch or Bernhardian lettering which I imagine he referenced. It looks like he placed a 20s Klingspor type specimen aside the drafting table to flip back and forth from Koch Antiqua to the Modern used for “Ratio-Latein” There may have been booze involved for this looks too fun, looped dragon feather detailing and letters’ thick to abrupt thins making clipped curves rather than a traditional swooping flow. For example, look at the “T” where the weight shooting down the stem appears to skip a track, the motion switching from within the curve to outside it then recorrecting itself just before the lozenge-terminal. Like a guilty hustle back inbounds to cheat a ref or a pro driver’s quick wheel adjustment into the turn to escape a fishtail. Fun and brash. Image swiped from Mike Yashworth’s scans of Eric Fraser’s work.

Download

Creative Commons, etc…

Posted at 8:30pm and tagged with: lettering, menu, serif, 1960s, pen-based,.

November 30th 2010

|#

Complexities of turn of the century, the previous one, bookbinding are probably the source of the strange bleeding. I’m guessing the golden ink bled mercilessly, flooding fine subtle and shallow brackets, uncovering pointy serifs where none existed to connect neighboring letters like the tide’s gone out. What is certain is that this may have been one of the 15 updated editions since its original 1900 publication, hastily reprinted with slapdash letters whose horizontal weights don’t bother with uniformity. Today, we see this softened application as horror film type for hauntings, its gossamer connections for wispy corruptible teenagers. Or, 90s retro, once avant-garde digitizing the fuzz of photographed screen type. There may be some insightful book designer’s typographic commentary on the English versus the dueling Dutch republics in South Africa but it is doubtful. I find this book fascinating because it is wartime journalism, strict cold reportage, from a man who later believed in ectoplasm and fairies, and no doubt prior influenced John Watson’s character the returned soldier physician veteran.

Download

Creative Commons, etc…

Posted at 10:44pm and tagged with: 1900s, book, caps, connecting, serif, lettering,.