Books, Design and Culture
A short interview with Simon Garfield author of Just My Type on NPR’s All in a Weekend:
NPR Weekend Edition: Just My Type, Simon Garfield
I love the story about a man who tried to go a day without Helvetica.
Comments closedFF Spinoza — A nice looking new type family designed by New York-based art director Max Phillips:
With the goal of readability in mind, Phillips named the typeface after 17th century rationalist and lens-grinder Baruch Spinoza, a man whose job it was to help people see clearly.
The family is meant as an elegant workhorse, a classic text family with just enough individual character to hold its own in display sizes. It was inspired by mid-century German book faces like Trump Mediæval and Aldus, and by the types of Nicolas Kis. The forms are narrow and economical, with open counters. The line is firm and distinct. It has strong thick strokes and serifs to help it grip the page. Its intended virtues are firmness, clarity and modesty.
Interestingly, Phillips is also author of the Shamus Award-winning mystery Fade to Blonde, and co-founder of the pulp-infused Hard Case Crime imprint.
Sign Manual — The New Yorker takes a look at Helvetica and the New York City Subway System by Paul Shaw:
Though Helvetica was always the choice font for typographic synchronization, it was simply too expensive to ship over from Amsterdam, where it was made (back in the days of metal type, lead font plates had to be imported, a costly endeavor, since the plates had to be custom manufactured to fit American printing presses). In the early sixties (much like today) New York City Transit just didn’t have the money. Instead, the MTA used a similar font called Standard, or Akzidenz-Grotesk, which took nineteen years to fully phase out. It wasn’t until 1989 that the MTA officially ratified the decision to replace it with Helvetica in its “Sign Manual.”
The review is accompanied by a slideshow of images from the book.
Something Irretrievably Lost — Rob Young, former editor of The Wire magazine, talks about his latest book Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music with Mark Thwaite at ReadySteadyBlog:
[T]here will always be a tradition, running underneath the more visible forms of pop and rock music. At certain times it comes into focus and is a fairly hip reference point for various artists; at other times – much of the 80s and early 90s, for example – it’s practically invisible and/or unredeemable.
Right now we’re on an upswing, possible as an inevitable reaction to the huge leaps forward in digital and electronic music in the 90s; also because, when making or locating all sorts of music has become so easy and accessible, there’s a certain nostalgia for an indefinable organic quality to the production and a sense that music can be about more than purely formal concerns. This, I’m sure, is connected at some instinctive level with the destabilising effects of recent political developments here. It’s very noticeable that folk revivals tend to occur when people are afraid of something being irretrievably lost.
The Computational Process — Ted Striphas, author of The Late Age of Print, on the distinction between ‘“algorithmic culture” and “culturomics”:
I must confess to being intrigued by culturomics… Having said that, I still want to hold onto the idea of algorithmic culture. I prefer the term because it places the algorithm center-stage rather than allowing it to recede into the background, as does culturomics. Algorithmic culture encourages us to see computational process not as a window onto the world but as an instrument of order and authoritative decision making. The point of algorithmic culture, both terminologically and methodologically, is to help us understand the politics of algorithms and thus to approach them and the work they do more circumspectly, even critically.
And finally…
Just a reminder that the late and final deadline for AIGA’s reinstated 50 Books/50 Covers is April 21, 2011.
A Swiss Typeface + 2 Italian Designers = New York City — Michael Bierut reviews Helvetica and the New York City Subway System by Paul Shaw for the WSJ:
Mr. Shaw is irritated with the widespread belief that the modern New York subway system has always been associated with the Swiss typeface Helvetica. This misperception was fueled by the attention the typeface received in 2007 on the 50th anniversary of its introduction, especially in Gary Hustwit’s “Helvetica,” a documentary survey of the astonishing ubiquity of a lettering style that appears over the entrances of American Apparel and Staples, on Lufthansa airplanes and New York City garbage trucks, on Comme des Garçons bags, and, yes, on New York subway signs. But the last, as Mr. Shaw shows, was not always so.
The Habit of Reading — Harvard professor Marjorie Garber talks about her new book, The Use and Abuse of Literature, with The Atlantic:
I don’t believe there’s a necessary divide between highbrow and lowbrow or whatever. I think that the habit of reading is intensely pleasurable and it’s also hard. The pleasure of it is partly the pleasure of detection, the pleasure of recognition, the pleasure of response… I’m very optimistic actually about the future of literature and literary reading—I’m far from despairing and I don’t actually feel that there’s a crisis. What we need is to continue to show the power of reading, the pleasure of reading—and, again, more people experience that than we are sometimes aware of.
Jessa Crispin, editor-in-chief of Bookslut, reviews the book for NPR:
In fact, it’s proof of literature’s strength and lasting value that a 19th century writer like Jane Austen can still speak to the contemporary love lives of her readers, and that a book like the Diary of Anne Frank can still cause a ruckus among protective parents. That fight over comic books? The same arguments were made about Shakespeare, because, it was suggested, Elizabethan drama wasn’t real literature. (Early debates also routinely happened over novels, ballads and books written by women.) People have been trying to ban books for ages, from the 18th century’s Fanny Hill and the court cases against Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Ulysses, all the way to Harry Potter. “[Literature’s] greatness… is enhanced rather than undercut” by these challenges, Garber argues. There will always be stubborn, scandalized readers trying to define what literature is, but the greats will endure.
From Head to Hand — A lovely essay by ceramic artist Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare With Amber Eyes, on Primo Levi’s The Wrench and being a maker, in Slate:
Here, at last, was a book structured round structure. It was a conversation about how you took one part of learning and took it to another job. This made sense of how deeply connected the hand and the head really are. It articulated for me the way that I would throw a dozen porcelain pots and look at them, affectionately perhaps but also with a dispassionate eye, and plan the next dozen. It understood how I knew when dipping a pot into a bucket of glaze or listening to the sound of the flames when firing my kiln that there is something out of balance.
And, above all, there was a feeling that Levi was not speaking for people who make things. He doesn’t explicate or translate technical terms. In The Wrench, Faussone’s voice is clear and unhurried, paced in response to the real complexities and real pleasures that he encounters. Alongside him is Levi with his “specific challenge: I have a double experience—a chemist in the world’s eyes, and feeling, on the contrary a writer’s blood in my veins.”
People Like Us — A profile of Coudal Partners on Signal vs. Noise, the 37 Signals blog:
Despite the varied efforts, one consistent theme for the firm is a sense of curiosity and playfulness… That attitude attracts kindred spirits. “In our experimental films, in our contests, in our blog postings, and the products we make, we are trying to satiate our own curiosity and interest,” he says. “And we just take it on faith that there are a lot of people who share those curiosities and those interests with us. And if so, they will buy our products and they’ll watch our movies. Maybe you don’t have to sell to everybody. Maybe there’s enough people like us.”
And finally…
Bass is Best — Steven Heller on the movie posters of Saul Bass, for The Atlantic:
Comments closedBass’s work is appealing for its nuance, and his keen ability for making subtle, abstract symbols speak louder than literal photographs. What makes the new Hollywood versions so unappealing is the inability to allow the viewer to fill in the blanks. When Bass worked for Hollywood studios he created a consistent identity for films, from main and credit titles to posters and ads.
