My book about type

 Ha, now it's been five years since my last post. I've beaten my own record for infrequent posting. The impetus for this post is that Bloomsbury (my and JK Rowlings[!] publisher) just published my book "Advanced Typography." Thank god I got it done (more or less) before COVID made my responsibilities at OCAD more onerous. Everything I know about type in 256 pages.

This has been the worse summer ever in terms of having to do school-related work, and the shit of preparing for online teaching is flying towards the fan of September's semester start much faster than I would wish. Still, Zoom aside, more and more people are communicating through type. So this fall, I think the emphasis of my typography classes might shift a bit more to typographic content than typographic form. Not that I'll be ignoring form, but while typography can clarify language, typographic content is the reason typography exists.

OCAD workshop 2015-16

It's been (shockingly) four years since my last entry. The reason that I suddenly remembered this blog is that, winter classes being over,  I began thinking about workshop, the course formerly known as thesis. In the years since May 2012, not that much has changed. I have continued teaching thesis/workshop, typography and type design classes, as well as the (now online) history of typography Although my area of expertise is without doubt typography, few of my workshop students have concentrated on mainly typographic projects. Students who do well in my class are group-focused and production-oriented (class participation and attendance are very important, as are weekly presentations of work).

This is essentially a research class, and research in the sense we refer to it is communicable, and requires documentation and writing. Your research might focus on design methods, on design technologies, design philosophies, design techniques. Christopher Frayling's Research in Art and Design is a good overview of the different approaches that work in my class.

• The research question is an important framing device for exploration.

These are some of my approaches to and ideas about workshop:

• I try to foster a very cohesive and collaborative atmosphere.  I have all students sit together, and ask for input from all on all. Activities require students to interact with each other.
• I don't think that the workshop class should be limited to class hours. I am generally in my office and available at 100 McCaul weekdays from 10 to 6 except when in class or in meetings. (This includes the summer, which is a good time to run workshop ideas by me.) 
• If you have a vision and initiative, I will support you. But I will not tell you what you should do. 
• I believe that graphic design should communicate, and that your project should communicate original ideas in original ways. I am not very interested in style-focused or straightforward commercial applications. This doesn't mean that I don't like practical work; communication is by definition practical. But doing a good job of something that has been done before is not enough for a full year project. 
• Your work should make the audience see and think in a way that they haven't before. I work best with original and exploratory ideas on big subjects. My students have tended towards material exploration, with relatively few doing onscreen/projection work, but this is not a requirement...more a tradition that has developed over the last four years.
• My class is neither specifically a preparation for practice as a junior level designer, nor a preparation for postgraduate education. Your interests could be in design or postgraduate education, but the skills required for a junior level design position (software skill, ability to follow instructions and emulate styles) are not a focus of this class. However:
• There is an academic aspect. I ask for a 2,500 word literature review essay that gives context for your work. I also expect extensive documentation of work process (writing and image).

Questions to ask yourself before choosing your final workshop class and direction.
-->

• What do you care about?
• What are you interested in?
• What are you good at?
• What would you like to get better at?
• What do you intend to do after graduating?
• What is your initial research question?
• What readings / existing work are the framework for your work?  

As I said, I am generally available at any time through the year if you want to discuss this further.

History of Typography

I am teaching the history of typography this summer for the third time, and once again I am reminded that the history of typography (at least in Europe), from its inception to the present, is a representation of the events of the more general history of culture, and often, a harbinger of future developments. The Gutenberg press was the model for industrialization and mass production, the adoption of the Carolingian letter by early printers signaled the beginning of Humanism as the foundation for European society for the next 500 years, leading to the Enlightenment and, eventually, 20th C Modernism, which, though a bit tattered and tarnished, is still with us today. The typefaces and styles that have recorded these 500 years also shed light on the cultural forces at work, as well as the technologies of the time. Around 1900, typography even gives us advance indications of what is to come: the mining of the past, and the development of new, idiosyncratic typefaces as much about themselves as anything else, can be interpreted as an early form of postmodernism, as the logical conclusion of the evolution of the Roman typeface had been reached with the faces of Didot and Bodoni at the turn of the 19th century. Looking at what happened then, the typographical free-for-all and then the typographical upheaval associated with the social upheavals of the 18th and 19th centuries culminating in the First World War, we may gain some insight into what is happening, and what will happen, today when we are living through a technological revolution that is qualitatively not unlike the industrial revolution that was taking place 200 years ago. Looking at how typographical forms are used today may give some idea about what is coming in the future, not just in typography, but in the culture as a whole.

But when I tell people I teach type history, I often get the impression that they think it is irrelevant.

Another subpixel typeface

Even smaller than the subpixel typeface above, this one is condensed. The designer is here

I was asked to design a hairline face to go with this face:


I was given as reference these two faces. It was suggested that the final typeface might be related to these two:



and




This is what I came up with:




There are lots of problems with this kind of relationship. One is that there is a visual problem between bold and light faces because the counters of light faces are visually larger, while the strokes are smaller. It makes the two weights hard to integrate successfully.

I was watching the English / USA World Cup today (supporting England because a) my parents grew up there, and b) the USA already wins enough stuff). Imagine my typographical delight that England has names and numbers in Gill Sans, quintessentially English typeface from 1925 or thereabouts. Very few countries can claim to have such a universally known yet specifically national typeface (maybe Switzerland...). I don’t know how much this affects non-typographically obsessed people. Does the British fan recognize (probably subconciously, if at all) the fact that it is a particularly English face? Do people from other countries?
And it’s true unimproved Gill...check out the characteristic overly simple, slightly too tall “1” on Wayne Rooney’s shirt.

Tacky eighties / cool seventies typeface

I've been working on this typeface for the last little while. It’s not really my kind of thing: too geometric. I can’t decide whether I like it or not. Sometimes it feels like something from the 1980s, an adolescent science fiction techno-utopia kind of face, which I really don't like:

At other times, I like its 1970s Dutch modernist Wim-Crouwelish graphic design modularity:

Anyway, just about any typeface will work somewhere, with some copy, and even if I can't see any use for this one, I will probably keep working on it....