Alphabet City Press

7 March 201423 February 2014

Lens

What first attracted me to this was the patterns and shadows of the concertina grille and the colour palette of blues and greys. It made me think that for once, the typography wasn’t primary, but then when I viewed it without the letters it lost a certain je ne sais quoi, and I revised my opinion! The typeface is Gill Sans.

4 March 201423 February 2014

ITC Berkeley Oldstyle

ITC Berkeley Oldstyle is a revival of University of California Old Style, a typeface designed in 1938 by Frederic W Goudy exclusively for the University of California Press at Berkeley. In 1983 Tony Stan was commissioned by ITC to work on the revised version, and ITC Berkeley Oldstyle was released in 1983. ITC Berkeley Oldstyle features elongated ascenders and descenders, a calligraphic weight stress, smooth weight transitions and a fairly generous x-height—features which result in excellent character legibility. It is one of my typefaces of choice when I’m designing text-heavy books: its lightness and clarity make swathes of text less intimidating without any loss of gravitas. The italic weight is one of the most legible serif italics there is, and I particularly like the angled horizontal stroke of the lower case e.

1 March 201423 February 2014

1927

This is a satisfyingly eccentric yet understated 1927. The ball terminals on the 9 and 2 bring to mind quotation marks, and the swell and kick of the 2’s horizontal stroke make it quite swan-like. In fact the whole thing is rather graceful and lighthearted. The numbers are not overly ornate yet they exude a great deal of character.

26 February 201423 February 2014

White arrow

The FedEx logo is the best logo ever. I still remember the first time I saw that white arrow, the one that’s hidden in plain sight. I was working in-house for a book publisher when a parcel arrived from the US containing a piece of artwork I had commissioned for the project I was working on, an illustrated book about Ancient Rome. Midway through opening the parcel I stopped dead in my tracks: I saw the logo as I had never seen it before! The remarkable thing is that, in an office full of designers, no one else had ever seen it either. I’m not the only one who think the FedEx logo is brilliant. Designed by Lindon Leader in 1994, it has won a swag of design awards, and is used in design schools to demonstrate the effectiveness of negative space. Leader’s design philosophy centres around simplicity, clarity and understatement, where less is more. To create the FedEx logo he used a combination of Univers 67 and Futura Bold, morphed until the arrow was just so.

23 February 201421 February 2014

Aloha

In the Hawaiian language, aloha means more than just hello and goodbye: one interpretation describes it as the joyful (oha) sharing (alo) of life energy (ha) in the present (alo). The Aloha Spirit refers to the attitude of friendly acceptance for which the Hawaiian Islands are renowned. Typographically, the word Aloha is usually written in colourful, ‘friendly’ handwritten or script typefaces, often embellished with illustrations of hibiscus flowers, ukulele-playing hula girls and sunsets—imagery which has as much to do with the Hawaiian climate and landscape as a state of mind. Shown here is Hawaiian Aloha BTN, by Breaking the Norm, a font library created by Brian Bonislawsky of Astigmatic One Eye and Stuart Sandler of Font Diner.

20 February 201419 February 2014

3816

The numbers on telegraph poles mean something. It’s like a secret coded language, a shorthand of information for those in the know. Some markers are fairly obvious: a red-on-white HP indicates the location of a hydrant, a vertical black-on-yellow bus stop speaks for itself. Some numbers indicate the pole number and the distance from the source—which might be what these are—but it doesn’t really matter because I am biased more towards the aesthetic appeal of wonky silver numbers hammered into dry, splitting, splintery timber, and the rich array of textures and tonality. The much newer smart poles, with their banners, cctv and feature lighting, are not nearly so abundantly accessorised.

17 February 201413 February 2014

Chemist

I like the hand-drawn, and to observe the decisions that have been made in order to render writing x onto surface y. This chemist window is part of an old building, although I don’t know how long the signage has been there. Great care has been taken to curve the gold, tooled and drop-shadowed letters, yet the crossbar of the H doesn’t quite follow the arc. I particularly like the fullstop, more diamond than square, and that the size of the letters proved more important than fitting the whole word within one pane. The ABC of the printed poster in the window is Lithos Bold, an Adobe typface designed by Carol Twombly in 1989.

14 February 201413 February 2014

Valentines

February 14, Valentine’s Day, was first associated with romantic love in Geoffrey Chaucer’s time, when, in 1382, he wrote (translated): For this was on St Valentine’s Day, when every bird cometh there to choose his mate. So the custom of giving flowers, chocolates and greeting cards—known as valentines—evolved in England, and goes back centuries, although in modern times handwritten valentines are less common than mass-produced greeting cards. In the UK an estimated 25 million cards are sent each year, and in the US the figure is a staggering 190 million. When you take into account the valentines that are made in school activities, that number increases to 1 billion. And that’s not counting e-valentines. In the area of book arts there are bookbinding structures that lend themselves extremely well to expressing matters of the heart—something as simple as folding two leaves of a book into the spine creates a heart shape. In typography, Zapf Dingbats contains three widely recognisable heart shapes, although I can’t recall every having the need to use the sideways one.

11 February 20149 February 2014

The letter D

In English, the letter D is the fourth letter and third consonant of the alphabet. D represents a voiced alveolar stop, which means it is sounded when the tongue is placed at the alveolar ridge (the roof of your mouth behind your teeth) and the tongue is pushed off with sound from the vocal cords. D’s origins can be traced to the Phoenician dalet, meaning door. The letter D is a musical note, has a value of 500 in roman numerals, and in typography, can be as heavy and imposing as Blackoak or as delicate and elegant as Gotham Thin, plus everything else in between.

8 February 20148 February 2014

The Beatles

The Beatles logo is one of the most universally recognised pieces of lettering, and first appeared on Ringo Starr’s drum kit in 1963. It was designed by Ivor Arbiter, who ran Drum City, London’s first drums-only store, as part of the payment negotiation for Ringo’s new Ludwig drum kit. Arbiter made a rough sketch on a scrap of paper, and was paid £5 for arranging the artwork, which was painted onto the drum head by local signwriter Eddie Stokes. The capital B and dropped T were intended to emphasise the word beat. While there is nothing typographically sophisticated, or even particularly interesting, about The Beatles logo, the power of typography is such that it endures in its ability to evoke memory and emotion. Yesterday marked the fiftieth anniversary of The Beatles’ first arrival in America, and tomorrow marks the fiftieth anniversary of their appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. The typeface has been digitised as ‘Bootle’.