Alphabet City Press

19 February 201624 January 2016

Liquid aloha

The supermarket at Princeville, with its colourful displays of packaging and interesting bottle shapes and labels, can hold me captive for hours. It takes some doing to get my head around the fact that the grocery store in a small town on a small island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean can offer more choice than some major stores in my considerably larger home town of Sydney. But on this particular day we had been out in the heat for hours, and just wanted to get back to our apartment and open the bag of chips, crack open a cold one, and sit on the deck while the sun went down on Bali Ha’i.

15 February 201623 January 2016

C is for Caslon 3

Caslon 3 is ATF’s 1905 cut of William Caslon’s 1725 typeface. Every cut of Caslon—and there are many, including digital-only versions such as Adobe Caslon and Big Caslon—is slightly different, but Caslon 3 is relatively true to the forms of the original. Caslon is an old-style serif typeface.

12 February 201624 January 2016

Hukilau

A hukilau is a centuries-old Hawaiian method of fishing. When the time to catch the fish is right, a large number of people, sometimes the entire village or community, gather at the beach to participate in the event. They would work together to cast a large net from shore, and the resultant catch provided food for everyone. Hukilau Beach is in La’ie, on the northeastern shore of Oahu, and is so named because of the hukilaus that took place there until around 1970. The Hukilau Song was written by Jack Owens in 1948 after he attended a hukilau at La’ie, and has since been covered by many Hawaiian and non-Hawaiian musicians. And the first hula I learnt was the Hukilau, played and sung by Uncle Sam and taught by Auntie Malihini on Maui.

8 February 201623 January 2016

B is for Bernhard Fashion

Bernhard Fashion was designed by Lucian Bernhard in 1929, originally for American Type Founders. Born in Germany and based in New York, Bernhard designed about a dozen typefaces, many of them with his name in the title. This highly stylised display typeface was designed to evoke the spirit of the roaring twenties.

5 February 201624 January 2016

Falling fruits

In Hawaii there are plenty of warning signs nailed to coconut trees, but this one is stuck in the ground at the Lyon Arboretum, in the upper Manoa Valley. Harold Lyon, who gives the arboretum its name, was a botanist from Minnesota, and during his tenure as director almost a century ago planted around 2000 species of trees. My walk through the tropical rainforest, in the rain, was most enjoyable, and made even more so by coming across this home-made laser-printed sign, laminated for weatherproofing. I hardly noticed the actual fruit, just that it was falling fruits in Frutiger.

1 February 201623 January 2016

A is for Albertus

Albertus was designed by Berthold Wolpe around 1932 for the Monotype Corporation. Wolpe was a German-born, London-based typographer, type designer, typographic historian and calligrapher. Albertus is recognisable as the typeface used on London street signs, and was also used by Wolpe on many of the book jackets he designed for Faber and Faber. It is a glyphic serif typeface, intended to resemble letters carved into bronze.

29 January 201624 January 2016

Dump no waste

This notice is etched into the sidewalk in Honolulu’s Chinatown. I’m not sure if the fish is cheerfully oblivious, still swimming around in pristine waters, or if it has already swallowed a mouthful of waste, and is a warning to passers-by that this is the fate that awaits a fish if the oceans are polluted. With its bee-sting lips and googly eyes, it could easily be cousin to the fish that Bart pulls out of the water downstream from Monty Burns’s nuclear plant. Or is it just a happy carp?

25 January 201624 January 2016

Earth

This week I went to see Earth Platinum at the State Library. Earth Platinum is the largest atlas in the world: 128 pages, 150 kilos and measuring 1.8 x 1.4 metres closed. The Earth books are the brainchild of Millennium House publisher Gordon Cheers. Through my association with Millennium House as a designer on many of their books, I followed the trials and tribulations of Earth during its production, but seeing it in the flesh was something else. It was open at Europe, and I desperately wanted to turn the page and look at more. I have a copy of Earth Concise, which is a mighty book in itself. At 576 pages and measuring 410 x 315 mm it is only concise in relative terms, but at least I can lift it and it does fit (albeit sideways) on my bookshelf!

22 January 201622 January 2016

DF Moderns

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the birthday of Wilbur Lincoln Scoville, the pharmacist who gives his name to the Scoville scale—the scale that measures the hotness of chillies. The thought of hot chilli peppers immediately brought DF Moderns to mind! The Moderns font, designed by David Sagorski, is a collection of dingbats inspired by twentieth century modern art—notably Picasso and Kandinsky—and published by Letraset in 1994. Sagorski’s other fonts include Expressions, Mo Funky Fresh, Bang and Faithful Fly.

18 January 201618 January 2016

Altemus

The Altemus Collection is the work of Robert Altemus, a New York-based designer. It contains around 8000 ornamental and dingbat designs across thirty font families. As well as the character sets you might expect, like Altemus Dingbats and Altemus Borders, there is a slew of alluring others: Birds, Suns, Spirals, Roughcuts, Rays, Pinwheels, Leaves, Kitchen, Toolkit, Pointers and Bursts. Altemus was influenced from everything from Brazilian art deco architecture and 1950s fabric designs to decorative elements found on old packaging at flea markets. What I find so impressive is that the elements of the collection are original, drawn from scratch before being worked up into vector format.