When promising your friends and family that you’ll blog every day about TypeCon, it’s easy to overlook the fact that to do so you’ll need to stop having fun and immersing yourself in type and actually sit down and write the damn thing.

I promise, very soon, stuff on my experience at TypeCon in Buffalo. I was up until about 4am last night, so I predict a bit more sedentary activity for me today.

One of these days, the powers that be in the entertainment industry will realize how valuable a robust offering online will be to their bottom line and their audience share. Until then, we’ll just need to keep an eye out for the more enticing furtive steps in their slow toddle toward the inevitable. As someone who doesn’t have cable and relies mostly on Netflix for their movies, the web is the obvious choice. And, over the last month or so, Hulu has been my destination of choice for TV and movies.

Logos can be the simplest visual end-products that a designer works on, but they are often also the most complicated projects. A logo is typically a spearhead or a flagship for an organization’s branding, so most people have seen thousands of them. They know what they like and they know what they don’t like. They know what brands are powerful and which aren’t. For this reason, it feels very easy to the average non-designer to critique, poke fun at, and speak about logo design. In many ways, this is great. Sometimes the biggest hurdle in a project is a clammed-up client who is fearful of speaking their mind in front of a design professional. In other ways, it can be the designer’s bane, because most people have a skewed view of logo design.

Ever wanted to make a quick font? Well, now you’ve got your chance. FontShop just opened up their modular web-based font building tool, FontStruct.

I got a chance to play around with the closed pre-launch version and I can attest to its robustness. I was skeptical when I got the invite, but it does everything it needs to and exports a functional font file to boot.

My only public “fontstruction”, Faketur, is a work in progress containing what I’d call a first shot at the lowercase letters for a blackletter font. It has big spacing issues and some characters in need of intervention, but I plan to keep on adding and tweaking. I’ll likely post when it’s in better shape.

Check out FontStruct. The team did an impressive job for this handy little free web tool. Congrats, guys.

One of my favorite type families, Kent Lew’s Whitman, is just about to make the transition from beautiful specialized book face to full-fledged modern workhorse. This is music to my ears.

Back in the beginning of the winter of 2007, we had to replace our old furnace. Before the good people at Petro came in and deconstructed it, I took some photos for posterity.

This news seller clearly got these letters from other sources for bargain basement prices. It drives me crazy every time I see this sign because I know, I know, I’ve seen these letters in a logotype/logotypes before. Anyone have any guesses where these letters originated from? My brain will thank you.

Yesterday, my friend Steve mentioned that the signage of Boston’s T, which originally used Helvetica, was slowly being replaced with Arial. It inspired this image.

Design Observer, a consistently strong design blog/journal/website, has a great piece on Wilhelm Deffke by Stephen Heller. To claim my awareness of Deffke was anything more than vague would be stretch, but most people do have an awareness of his work. After all, we are all living in a world influenced by the work of Deffke and his contemporaries in Germany.

Deffke’s most enduring work, for me, is the Zwilling J. A. Henckels AG mark on the left. If you imagine it etched into the blade of a knife, you may remember it, as that’s Zwilling’s best-known product.

Unfortunately, his work at simplifying and modernizing many older symbols, such as the Hakenkreuz, has tangled his name up with the Nazis. They took his geometric simplification of the Hakenkreuz, done decades before their existence, flipped it, and now most of the world recognizes it as the National Socialist’s swastika. Just to be clear, Deffke was not an ideological Nazi and did not design it for their use. (I suggest you read the article for the details and judge for yourself.) In fact, they took it without asking, which is kind of their thing, historically speaking.

Regardless, the article is a fascinating look at the ideological origins of the modern logo. It’s a good reminder of the power of ancient icons and marks, a legacy which our modern marks attempt to tap into. To look at dreck like the new Xerox bubble is to see how thin the soup can get, the further you stretch the stock. To look back to the beginnings is to catch the scent of a fuller meal in the kitchen of a true chef. Examining Deffke’s work on these symbols reminds us that some forms have roots deep into our primal consciousness, and that there are lessons we can learn away from the computer, with our eyes on our origins.

As reported by Engadget, it appears that the Sony e-reader and Amazon’s Kindle are both essentially the same product.

The Kindle, if the FCC photo is to be believed, is ugly as hell. It looks like something out of NASA in the 1980s.

The Sony reader is a bit better, but as you can see in this photo by Rick Wilking from Reuters, it still comes off as a super-sized Palm Pilot. Has no one been paying attention to Apple’s success?

Over at Design Observer, founding contributor and designer of some note, Jessica Helfand has written a succinct piece on some of the factors at play when a designer chooses type.

“About a year ago, I participated in a student portfolio review involving nearly a dozen American schools, many (most?) exhibiting the classic projects that characterize all undergraduate design programs – the color studies, the poster problems, the typographic exercises – all of which teach the student about that most essential design conceit: letterforms, and how to use them.

And here, I quickly discovered that something had gone horribly wrong. One after another, bright-faced young hopefuls displayed the products of their long hours in the studio. Book after book spilled forth with content ranging from how to cook a frittata to how to understand Freud. There were personal books, commercial books, literary and poetic books, serious and silly books, childrens books, how-to books, and everything in between.

And there they were – virtually all of them – typeset in Futura.”

I recommend it for designers and non-designers alike. It’s well worth the few minutes it takes to read it. As someone who went to school for design, I sympathize with her perspective and agree with her sentiments.

For those unfamiliar, this is Futura.

Typographica’s ‘Our Favorite Fonts of 2006’ list is out. A bit late, but certainly no less worthwhile. The list is a bit longer than usual, since 2005 was pushed to two parts with the second ultimately withheld until now, due to the “sheer volume” of entries this time around. To me, this is a good sign for type design (or at least for Typographica). For the second 2005 installment, I chose Dino dos Santos’s Estilo (Flash site). It's a distinct little deco display face that's quite fun to set.

Our Favorite Fonts is an excellent resource for quickly putting your finger on the pulse of type design and get a quick look at some of the most interesting and notable fonts released during the year. Plus, the authors are type and graphic designers, which gives this list a bit more depth and character than a straight-up specimen list. Too much great work for me to even pick a few favorites from the list this year, which actually reaches back into 2005. Give it a skim to see how varied and vibrant type design can be in one year.

Also see Part 1.

I’ve been shamed by Greg Storey. Oh, I don’t know Greg personally. And he doesn’t know me. But last month, I was reading a post of his and was confronted by my own delinquency. I had known what I should do, and I had even known when. Heck, I had even tried to do it, but I lost sight of my goals and let things slide. It took a stranger’s account of that glorious moment, that laying bare of the state of things, to remind me that I forgot to order my copy of FontBook.

I’m happy to say that I once was lost, but now I’m found.

I have a handful of delicious posts planned for you to mentally munch on, most of which were meant to be up by now. But we all know how that goes. In the meantime, feast your eyes on Hevlticake.

I have about 11 hours of train ride ahead of me over the next two days, so I expect to get a lot of blogestry done. And you, the consumer, will be the winner! If you ask nicely, I will say hello to Boston for you.

Update: To further my understanding of hubris, the powers that be have decided that our laptop hard drive should fail, taking with it about 2 weeks of data. So, please forgive me for not delivering on my promises. It has been an un-fun week. God must be cracking the hell up at this point.

As promised, now that I’ve gotten my mitts on a copy of Casino Royale on DVD, here are some screen caps of the title sequence, designed by Framestore CFC.

Good people of the internet, the DVD has existed for more than a decade. Yet, the design of DVD menus seems to grow more tyrannical and confused with time. Those responsible are blinded by the insidious vices of pride and greed, tempted into committing one, two, or perhaps all of the Sins of DVD Menu Design.

“...they kill the life of grace and risk eternal damnation unless absolved in the sacrament of confession, or taken away by a perfect contrition.” --Wikipedia.

So let us examine these sins, so that we may know of their folly and be led by the light of Reason, unbesmirched in our own journeys.

In addition to a myriad of other odds and ends, I, with Alisa, run a small design studio called R Design. The reason I mention it is that after wrestling with the dull giant that is Internet Explorer and my own dodgy code, the R Design website is now up.

Feel free to comment here or email me about it. I've placed a big punch link to it here on Current Config in the upper righthand corner. By the way, that big ol’ cap R is from a typeface I’m working on called ‘Sulphur Tip’, which is based on some poster lettering by Lucian Bernhard.

A little while ago I promised to discuss the superlative title sequence for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. So, without further ado...

Graphic design annuals. They are, from what I can tell, a quick way to see what style is popular today, and a largely self-congratulatory resumé builder for design studios. They’re also considered by many to be a visual resource for graphic design professionals and students. However, since the annuals rarely contain any explanation of the project goals, purpose, or degree of success for the client, they’re mainly a style gallery. It always feels a bit like flying a plane over a city to find out about its citizens. And considering how much lip service is paid to ideas and concepts in our field, I’m always a bit surprised by this. Well, not that surprised. The annuals are also cash cows for the magazines, as entry typically requires an entry fee, so packing the magazine with winners increases the likelihood that others will enter for their chance to shine amongst the stars. This situation adds to the self-selecting nature of their showings, as well as the fact that a few judges have to sift through enormous piles of entries. (In fact, this process is so daunting we're often told by the magazine about how hard it is multiple times.)

Do I sound a bit snarky and skeptical of design annuals? Well, I am. But a former co-worker friend and I figured out a way to make the most of these industry exercises and bring a degree of depth and exploration to the normally overwhelming and sometimes demoralizing experience of scanning design annuals. The topographic survey of the design annual took on the qualities of an archeological dig as we turned over the earth and held up each find, bringing both of our views to bear to divine something more.

In the name of further tootelage of one’s own horn...

Typographica’s ‘Our Favorite Fonts of 2005’ list is out! Growing interest has pushed the list to two parts this year, which is pretty sharp. This time I chose Porchez Typofonderies’s Deréon. My little piece is in part 1, but be sure to keep an eye out for part 2.

Our Favorite Fonts is an excellent resource for quickly putting your finger on the pulse of type design and get a quick look at some of the most interesting and notable fonts released during the year. Plus, the authors are type and graphic designers, which gives this list a bit more depth and character than a straight-up specimen list. Lots of great work this year.

I thought about picking my favorite font that I didn’t choose, but there are just too many. Zingha and FF Maiola struck me at first glance, but each one gets more interesting the more I look at them.

My first full-length article for Typographica is now up. Check it out here.

Alisa and I checked out Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events on DVD a little while back, and I must say that it was a very interesting film and a truly gorgeous one. It didn’t meet my expectations, but it didn’t let me down, either. It is very much its own world. I haven’t read the books, but I would guess that the film is more about the spirit rather than the letter of the tales (it takes events from a few of the books in the series).

A little while ago (November-ish) I was on our friend Elise’s balcony and while looking out over the sterile and bland landscape of Arlington, VA, I noticed something on the sidewalk below.

I was at The Council on Foreign Relations in NYC recently for a thing and saw this gorgeous marble plaque inside their building, which is the former home of the Pratts.

It’s a bit crowded, but beautifully so. What it lacks in clear hierarchy it makes up for by rewarding closer examination. The quirks it reveals are a part of that reward, such as the capped ‘N’ with the A-like form created by the first leg’s backward step, and that crazy lowercase ‘g’ that I appreciate because they are so odd, but work well in the conext. Though I’m still not sure what the motives were for that ‘N’. Part of me wonders whether it was a mistake made to appear intentional through repetition (oops).

It’s not the best example of cut letterforms. I’m not as into the lowercase letters, particularly as they get smaller. Also, there seem to be a few issues of consistency in the second line and the cut of the aforementioned lowercase. But, all in all, it really struck me.

Thanks to David Bravo for taking the photo for me.

AT&T, now owned by SBC, has released their newly “refreshed” logo. So, what do you think?

I’m particularly interested in the opinions of non-designers. For that reason, I’m going to reserve my own comments until later. I’d like to hear some genuine thoughts on whether you like it, does it represent the attributes of “innovation, integrity, quality, reliability and unsurpassed customer care”, is it better than the old one?

Here’s the full press release on the logo.

Since I’m on the topic of movies and type, now’s probably a good time to scold the awful job of typesetting done for Constantine’s opening titles. This was actually brought up by Sabih from Tank Design earlier on Current Config, and now I’ve got a capture of the type, now that the film’s on DVD.

Look at that. Holy crap, that’s bad type. I realize I’m more attuned to it that most, but I don’t think you need design experience to see how oddly spaced that Futura* is. And considering that the titles are about, oh, 5 seconds long, how did that get through?

My experience, generally, with movie-related type is that it’s either fascinating and great, or a marketing-driven non-decision. So, it’s always nice to see a great face used for movies. In this case, Hoefler & Frere-Jones’ Requiem is the typeface and The Exorcism of Emily Rose is the film.

The expected choice here would’ve been Carol Twombly’s Trajan. So much so, in fact, that a short film about Trajan’s abuse by the movie industry was made.* Fortunately, the designer(s) responsible gave the project an extra depth with a gorgeous typeface inspired by a 16th century Italian serif design. Requiem has all of Trajan’s stature without the imperious Roman character. Requiem’s design has thinner, slightly more ornate feel that gives the characters a biblical religious tone with just a tinge of malevolence that harmonizes perfectly with the ancient evil in the film. It’s a bit like old, dark, wrought iron: beautiful, unless you’ve got a reason to think otherwise, then it’s a little creepy.

Unfortunately, whoever’s responsible for the web marketing lacks the subtlety or the funds to pick up on this good decision. Guess what they use instead?

How’d you know?

*I’ve got nothing against Trajan, per se, but it’s a lot like Mrs. Eaves: a great design with such a degree of obvious character that it’s a very safe choice, even if it isn’t the most appropriate or interesting solution. In a way, it’s the perfect choice for film marketeers: say a whole lot while saying nothing at all.

I’ve just now caught up with most of my life after getting back from TypeCon (Except for writing about TypeCon. Sad, I know.), and I got a chance to actually sit and absorb FontShop’s fourth issue of font magazine. Honestly, it’s my favorite thus far, though that’s not surprising since there are so many names I recognize and admire/appreciate associated with it. font 004 is friendly and accessible, which is not always the case with type-centric publications and the writing within. The content is interesting and engaging, fun but not overly fluffy or shallow, and there are some interesting design moments within.

Phew. After lots of doing (mostly by the web master, admittedly) my redesign of the Theatre Alliance of Greater Philadelphia’s new website is up. Overall, I’m happy with it. We’ll be refining and revising it in the coming months (or years), but the improvement over the last one is significant, and that helps everyone. Plus, the identity redesign is now fully implemented across all of the major communication channels and materials. It’s always a little scary and exciting to see your work living in the real world.

If you’re in Philly and want to find some theatre or a theatre job, check it out.

For seven years now, The Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) has held an annual type conference in a different host city. This year, it’s in New York City and I’ll be there.

My very generous friend Paul is even letting me crash at his place so I can begin the type-geekery one night early. If I make it out of this without leaving my job for an internship drawing type, I’ll consider that ‘not losing my head’ during the con.

To say the least, I am pumped.

I saw a Texas quarter recently (I’m holding right now, in fact, and you can see one to the left here.) and I’d like to thank the Texan government for providing such a durable lesson in typographic basics, in the form of a ‘what not to do’.

Texas, as we know, is ‘The Lone Star State’. So, it makes sense that the designer (State. Governor Rick Perry) would want to use this phrase in his quarter. Unfortunately, as is often the case, the type gets the short shrift and is jammed under Texas’s western prominence. In order to fit the type into this oddly shaped area, Perry deemed that the line should be broken twice, and nestled under the southern nub of the prominence. In accommodating the shape, the lines also required tight leading*, which could get extra-tight because there are no descenders** in the phrase ‘The Lone Star State’ to accommodate. So far, not so bad.

The creative brief for this display must’ve read something like this:

...should also target key market demographic of adorable demon children who’ve just lost two teeth biting into the skull of a stray dog. And want to be lemony fresh!

It’s so mind-rending that I couldn’t allow it to be on my front page. Click below to gaze into the abyss...

I use Adobe Creative Suite (CS) on my home machine, and Adobe CS 2 at work. CS is a suite of about 7 or so Adobe creative apps: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, and GoLive, along with some other odds and ends. I made the transition from Photoshop 7 and Illustrator 10 at home about...maybe 9 months ago? I don't remember. Anyway, the old icons, some of you may remember, looked like this:

Adobe then put MetaDesign to the task of redesigning their product line (I still like MetaDesign’s work and general philosophy, even if they aren’t the darlings of the design world anymore). They did a great job, in my opinion, and unified the product line, integrated their relatively new app (InDesign) and created a clean, elegant identity and packaging line. The resulting icons, of course, had virtually nothing to do with their predecessors.

This past weekend, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that a gorgeous typeface I’d (very prematurely) considered a touch too mannered for the staid realm of book typography, is actually a pleasure to read. That face is Hoefler & Frere-Jones’s gorgeous and classically striking Requiem.

Anyone interested in becoming a graphic designer and dealing with typography should buy a copy of Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style when they become a student. They should read it once through after or in the midst of a basic typography course, and leave it by their desk for easy reference. Then, after a year or two, they should pick it back up and read it again (Who knows? Maybe there’ll be a new edition by then. There are already three) and put it back by their desk. Then, when they’re ready again, most likely after they’ve left school and worked for a while, they should read it again. If they’re lucky, they’ll readily understand 60% of it and benefit immensely from the additional 20–30% they’ve picked up since the last time.

But, like most canonical works, Elements mirrors the art it elucidates: a pool that warmly invites the reader to wade and provides depth and enjoyment for those who know how far out they can push themselves, but will appear murky and cold to newcomers unfamiliar with the waters. I’ve recommended this book to roughly 60 design grad students and probably an equivalent number of undergrads and designers. I’ve given it as a gift, and even recommended it to a few non-designers. This method probably left a few stranded swimmers, but until I teach again, with a class of my own, I probably won’t stop.

A while back, I was contacted by Stephen Coles, one of the editors of the online journal of typography Typographica, about putting some thoughts down about my favorite release or a notable release of 2004. Of course, I eagerly accepted and chose Avenir Next.

Today, Typographica’s Our Favorite Fonts of 2004 was posted. It's a knowledgeable, succinct, and informative list of some of the most interesting and notable fonts of ’04. There are some very talented and significant type designers who’ve contributed, so if you want to put your finger on the pulse of type design and your eyes on its future course, look no further.

Have you seen as many DHL trucks as I have recently? I think it's related to their new ad campaign. Alisa and I saw it a few weeks ago and the day after I started seeing their trucks all over the place.

Now that's a well-coordinated campaign. But it's not just the coordination that's making it so effective. It's also the new identity.

I had the fortune recently to get myself a license for Whitman, a beautifully functional serif family. It’s built on a foundation of classic design structure, with a distinctly modern style. Whitman, named for the poet, is probably best summed up by the designer himself.

“While this design is thoroughly modern in its styling, I tried to instill in Whitman some of the traditional values of classic text types. I sought to create a type which, although hopefully distinctive, might appear somewhat ordinary at first glance and behave itself well in text.”

Lew is right on the money.