Alphabet City Press

14 August 201514 August 2015

He

I had an email from my friend a couple of days ago. She’s in Tasmania this week, so I was not expecting to hear from her. She had attached a couple of photos of a pub sign, but it was the message itself which was inordinately pleasing: ‘I love how the H has extended a helping hand to the E,’ she says. ‘See what you’ve done to me—photographing typography—I mean, really!’

10 August 201510 August 2015

CMYK

CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Key (or blacK)—the colours that are used in four-colour process printing. Overlapping dots of cyan, magenta, yellow and black produce the full spectrum of reflective colour found in photographs. Colours for type and graphics can be made from combinations of these colours as percentages. For example, 100 percent yellow and 50 percent magenta makes orange, or a mixture of cyan and yellow makes green. In the printing process, the screen for each colour is printed at a different angle to improve print quality and reduce moiré patterns. In book design, a fifth black plate is often used for text, because if the book is published in several languages, only the black text plate needs to be changed.

7 August 20157 August 2015

The garden island

For a minute or so I was filled with hope that there might be a publishing industry on Kauai—the garden island referred to here—but the building houses an Italian cafe. However, the local newspaper is called The Garden Island and is housed in a newer building across the road, so I would guess that, when the newspaper was first published in 1902, it started its life here. I like the incised sans serif lettering, stark and graphic in the afternoon light.

3 August 20153 August 2015

Liquor

I can spend hours in Hawaiian grocery stores, walking along the aisles, checking out the huge array of goods—not for purchase, but for the visual feast on offer. You’ll find not just one flavour of something on the shelf, but a dozen, or two dozen, variations on a theme, the pattern of repeated colour-coded labels making a design impact. Even the fresh food looks good. Trays of ahi poke in the seafood section (ok, so now I’m getting hungry), and in the bakery, rows of cakes with icing in colours that are surely not real. I particularly like the myriad bottle shapes in the liquor section, although in this store it was the sign that drew me in, the letters indicating that perhaps it had sampled too much of its own kind. Hic.

31 July 201531 July 2015

Blue moon

It’s a blue moon today. Some say a blue moon is the second full moon in a calendar month, others that it is the second full moon in a zodiac sign. If a season has four full moons, the third is called the blue moon. Whichever way you look at it, a blue moon is an additional full moon in relation to a calendar period of time, and it’s significant enough that people write songs about it. The origin of the term remains sketchy, but as good an explanation as any is that it derives from someone, sometime, saying ‘you would argue that the moon is blue’ in the same manner as we would say ‘you would argue that black is white’. There are a few fonts with the name Blue Moon, but this one is by Fonthead Design, and the dingbat is from Eclectics, designed by Pepper Tharp.

27 July 201527 July 2015

Children’s pool

The sky was grey, the wind was howling and it was just starting to rain, but I just had to stop and take a picture of the children’s pool before beating a hasty retreat to the car. The pool, at Eastern Beach in Geelong, is a shallow area contained within the larger semicircular boardwalk. Whenever I visit the area I love walking around this boardwalk and taking in the view, especially across the bay to the You Yangs in the distance. This particular day, though, my head was down and my collar turned up, which is perhaps why my focus was closer, and I saw this painted sign for the first time.

24 July 201522 July 2015

Broadway

The typeface used in the Miami Vice logo is Broadway, a decorative Art Deco typeface designed by Morris Fuller Benton for ATF in 1927. In the actual logo—as opposed to my rendition of it—the typeface was customised for the word ‘vice’. The logo is as 80s as Sonny Crockett’s shoulder pads and hairdos, but it occurs to me now, after watching the final episode recently, that its design was more considered than I realised, a complement to Miami Beach’s famous Art Deco district where much of Miami Vice was shot. Miami Beach was the first twentieth-century neighbourhood to be recognised by the United States National Register of Historic Places. There are 800 structures of historical significance, most built between 1923 and 1943. They feature pastel colours, porthole windows, ship-like railings, curves, glass, chrome and terrazzo. Miami Vice has been credited with raising the awareness of the architecture, and many buildings were renovated in the 90s, post-filming, turning what was once a poverty-stricken and crime-ridden area into a tourist destination.

20 July 201520 July 2015

Miami Vice

The unseasonal spring clean that started in my office has taken on a somewhat scattergun quality. One minute I’m throwing out old magazines (they have gone! what a relief!) and the next minute I’m putting the office clean-up on hold while I sort through my wardrobe. And dusty old videos—where I came upon the last episode of Miami Vice. I loved Miami Vice, and when I watched this recording—so old the ads had 7-digit phone numbers and the tv station hadn’t started using an ID bug—I was reminded how ahead of its time it was and how influential it has proved to be. Even now, while much of it was so dated, it exuded style and originality. This is the staggeringly fabulous closing shot of that final ep.

17 July 201516 July 2015

New reality in spelling

Really, it’s going from bad to worse. Last December, on the morning of the Lindt cafe siege in Martin Place, our esteemed newspaper, digital edition, published a photograph, headline and, in upper case under the byline, the words ‘FAKE BODY’. At first this elicited a mere eye-rolling ‘here’s a good one’ response in my household, but as the seriousness of the situation unfolded, it became a far from amusing blunder. The typo in this headline, while not quite so insensitive as the story that went online before the text was ready, is still inexcusable. The Sydney Morning Herald is the oldest continuously published newspaper in Australia, although given its numerous staff cutbacks and resultant decrease in quality of journalism—not to mention the increasing occurrence of mistakes in spelling and grammar—it must be hanging on by a thread.

13 July 201513 July 2015

Push button for

We were looking for something we had read about: an unlikely shop with a massive collection of fine writing instruments and quality paper supplies. We knew where it was supposed to be (a hop skip and jump from the Iao Theater) but we couldn’t find it. Then we crossed the road and went into a tea shop to see if they could point us in the right direction. And this amazing tea shop turned out to be the pen shop! A couple of hours later we left with our new pens and other bits and pieces in hand, richer from the experience of spending time there, talking with the owner, listening to his music, taking in the aroma of spiced tea, and trying out an array of fountain pens. This crossing sign has nothing to do with that extraordinary shop other than the link in my mind of time and place, and the fact that we had to push the button to cross the road to get there. But I guess that in itself speaks of the impact of signage and typography and how it affects us on a subliminal as well as conscious level.