Alphabet City Press

8 October 20136 October 2013

Four posters

I love this row of posters. They work on every level: they are colourful; they tell you everything you need to know in a logical order; they are free from superfluous embellishment; they are eye-catching and completely no-nonsense with their made-to-fit bold sans serif type; and they evoke memories of that pre-poker machine time when live music at the local pub was not the exception to the rule. Who wouldn’t want to check out the Shy Guys and the Lonely Boys, middy of whatever’s on tap in hand?

5 October 20135 October 2013

Ten

This number ten adorns an industrial building in Alexandria, although, given the widespread gentrification of the area, I’m not sure whether the building actually houses an industry or if the facade hides some fabulously chic domestic architectural wonder. Either way, someone has gone to the trouble of painting the brick wall white and placing the street number in an orange oval, giving it much more appeal and personality than if they had attached an off-the-shelf number from the hardware store.

2 October 20132 October 2013

Ink traps

Ink traps are a feature of certain typefaces, most notably Bell Centennial, where corners or details of the letterforms are removed, usually at a junction, to compensate for the spread of ink during printing on newsprint. Bell Centennial was designed by Matthew Carter for AT&T, who required a new phone directory typeface (for their 100th anniversary) that would fit more characters per line and increase legibility at a smaller point size. Carter improved on AT&T’s earlier typeface, Bell Gothic, by increasing x-height, slightly condensing character width, opening up counters and bowls, and drawing deep ink traps, which, at the smaller point size used in the phone book, become invisible.

29 September 201328 September 2013

Franklin Gothic

Franklin Gothic, the widely used sans serif typeface named after Benjamin Franklin, was designed around 1903 by Morris Fuller Benton, head of typeface development at American Type Founders. In 1980 ITC commissioned Victor Caruso to produce four new weights – book, medium, demi and heavy – and in 1991, David Berlow drew twelve condensed, compressed and extra-compressed variations. The typeface can be distinguished by the weight stress within individual letters, for example the left side of the A is lighter than the right, and the left stroke of the M is lighter than the other three strokes. I came upon this album art, with its pre-digitised type, on one of those Saturday mornings when you run into someone you know at every turn – one of whom was taking a whole lot of records to the op-shop. After we stopped to shoot the breeze she went on her way one Beach Boys record lighter.

26 September 201326 September 2013

Bowling Club

My ukulele club holds its meetings here, at the Gladstone Park bowlo, twice a month. It’s a good spot – close to the main street but tucked away at the edge of the park – and when you sit outside enjoying a beer and just about the best fish and chips in town, the view across the bowling lawn and park transports you from the hustle and bustle of the city to the quiet of a country town. The board on the wall inside is a bonus. I am particularly taken with the expressive uppercase B and C, and there is just enough unevenness in the handpainted script to convey more personality that an out-of-the-box typeface would have done.

23 September 201323 September 2013

Yellow dot

I couldn’t remember what O’Maras did (or indeed if the information was even displayed) without looking them up because I was so dazzled by their use of a yellow dot in place of the apostrophe. It’s really very good! So simple, yet so effective because it loses nothing in translation, is eye-catching without dominating, and is quite visually pleasing.

20 September 201320 September 2013

Green post

Narooma is a seaside town located on the south coast of New South Wales. The name derives from the Aboriginal word meaning ‘clear blue waters’. The waters may certainly be clear blue, but so is the sky, making this green post on the harbour breakwater—with its motley collection of numbers that look like they were sourced from the local hardware store—stand out bright and sharp in the strong afternoon light. I have a particular fondness for Narooma. When I was about eight years old, on a summer holiday road trip, my parents were unable to find accommodation, so we opted for a quiet stretch of beachside parking and set up makeshift camp, me in the open boot of the car. When we woke, the previously deserted area was chock full of surfers and early morning swimmers, no doubt experiencing the clear blue waters for themselves.

17 September 201317 September 2013

Garamond

The first book I designed for ABC Books, some years ago now, was Great Working Horse Stories, a book which was a bestseller thanks to its huge popularity in rural areas. Imagine my surprise when it made an appearance on music quiz show Spicks and Specks, in the segment called ‘substitute’, in which panelists have to sing songs using words of an unrelated text, and their team mates have to guess the songs. Pete Smith (voice of Sale of the Century) sang Sweet Caroline, It’s Not Unusual and Oh What a Night using the very book I had designed! The book title was set in Adobe Garamond, a serif oldstyle typeface. Adobe Garamond, released in 1989, is a digital cut of the roman types of Claude Garamond and the italic types of Robert Granjon.

14 September 201314 September 2013

The Lakes Hotel

The Lakes Hotel is in Rosebery, a suburb of Sydney named after Archibald Phillip Primrose, the fifth Earl of Rosebery, who visited Australia in 1883–84. Rosebery has an interesting mix of commercial, industrial and residential buildings. A large section of it was developed by Richard Stanton (who is better known for the Federation suburb of Haberfield) and until the 1990s it lived up to its reputation as a garden suburb by holding regular garden competitions. Rosebery also had a racetrack where Pharlap trained, and a tram line, which would perhaps go some way to explaining why there is a whole swag of hotels between Redfern and Rosebery which display signage that looks very much like this, with its distinctive asymmetrical O.

11 September 201311 September 2013

Fire station

Mittagong fire station is noteworthy for having a female captain — the first female firefighter to be appointed to that position in the Southern Highlands. I like the building for the shape of its roofline and the clear, well-maintained, sans serif letters that stand out like a beacon in the clear afternoon light. I don’t know why there is an odd space in the date, but at least it has symmetry with the peak of the roof!