“the” project

September 9th 2011

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.

Download

Creative commons, etc…

Posted at 1:53pm and tagged with: 1920s, lettering, swash, stencil, script, Pen-based, poster,.

September 1st 2011

21 notes |#

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,.

May 14th 2011

13 notes |#

Considering the anatomical terminology employed to discuss letter structure, “physique” is rare. Typographers talk of masculine letters’ “stature” or discuss heavy weight/ink coverage in cheeky terms like “beef.” The proto fitness guru Anthony Sansone, as photographed by Townsend in The Body Beautiful, sold a physique finer than brute heft and muscle for the sake of manly titillation, which required finer titling? A generation or two before were Vaudevillian strongmen like Eugen Sandow and the circussy curly ad lettering of the time treated them as spectacles. Sansone opted for a curated Adonis build, simultaneously strong yet desirous. The book’s flourished thin script was a unique choice. Was it an editorial call to focus on aesthetic “beauty,” the typical duty of such scripts, to counterbalance the model’s mass? Emphasis in contrast? Swashes in tall, stiffened, letters of slight slope seem flaunted to me, and slow. Languorous. Beauty yes, fitness no. The slight-of-hand mixture of curves makes viewers think in terms of curved grace, bodily contours, and straight riding crops. Digitizing low res “the” involved much guesswork, primarily experimenting with weight flexing in curves. The exact nature of the “h” ink trap’s depth, angle, and how severe (or subtle) the whole area leaned right into that rebound curve is likely worlds away from the original. One abandoned adaptation clipped the curve flat against the baseline, but it was if the flow became stunted, improperly grounded. Unexpectedly, lettering led to a fascinating crash course in the history of bodybuilding and how it masked or artfully blended mail order erotica and created a 30s gay icon/entrepreneur.

Download

Creative Commons, etc…

Posted at 5:58pm and tagged with: lettering, script, connecting, swash, 1930s, magazine,.

November 1st 2010

4 notes |#

The lock up is puzzling, while the “T” swings upward, the “h” ascender stays rather shallow and a descender is invented to merge into the rule. But it’s still just so good and gooey and compact, still not distracting from the “C” in Country Gentleman. In a period of 25 years since this Schoonover Canoeing Through the Rapids cover, the publication shifted from presenting the machismo of an adventurous American agriculture to something tamer with less draw due to editorial or management troubles I know nothing of, eventually being bought and merged into the fanfareless Farm Journal. It’s a little sad, but the Golden Age of Illustration was dying, deco was booming, and mechanization was far sexier than canoes.

Download

Creative Commons, etc…

Posted at 12:34pm and tagged with: lettering, magazine, decorated, swash, script, 1930s,.