Alphabet City Press

9 August 20139 August 2013

Meter Man

I moved to the big city to go to art school, and I made a lifelong friend. We bonded over beer at the local pub and an effort to make our dull drawing class more interesting by wrapping objects and models in great swathes of black plastic. Recently she told me about her idea to collect graffiti characters and turn them into an animated story. She leads a busy life and I don’t know if the idea will be realised, but it’s her birthday today, so I thought she might like this character to get her started.

6 August 20136 August 2013

PMS

The Pantone Matching System (PMS) is a standardised colour reproduction system. Pantone began as a commercial printing company in the 1950s, and the systemisation of their pigments and inks was instigated by newly employed part-timer, Lawrence Herbert, in 1956. The system, whereby each colour is designated a number, allows designers to colour match pretty accurately, regardless of the equipment used to produce the colour. I came across the Pantone Guides early in my design career, and could label the world around me by Pantone number. I subsequently lost much of that familiarity because my work took my in the direction of the CMYK world, but some numbers remain entrenched.

3 August 20133 August 2013

Paper size

In Australia, the most common paper size is A4, and measures 210 x 297 mm. The format from which A4 is derived is a metric system called ISO (International Standards Organisation) 216, a system which uses a ratio of 1 to the square root of 2, yielding a 1:1.414 ratio across all paper sizes. Using this system, when the paper is halved, the resulting size maintains the same proportion. An AO sheet (rounded to the nearest millimetre) measures 840 x 1188 mm, and is 1 square metre. Each ISO paper size is one half of the area of the next size up: A1 is 840 x 594, A2 is 420 x 594, A3 is 420 x 297, A4 is 210 x 297, and so on, all the way to a tiny 26 x 37 A10.

31 July 201331 July 2013

Full stop

A full stop (or period in American English) is a punctuation mark that denotes the end of a sentence. The symbol itself derives from Aristophanes of Byzantium who invented a system of punctuation where the height of dot placement determined meaning of a thought or sentence. Until quite recently full stops were commonly used after initials or titles, but punctuation fashions change, and A. A. Milne is now AA Milne, and Mr. and Mrs. are plain old Mr and Mrs (or Ms, more likely). As for a full stop after a single word, I have no explanation, but there is enough of it around on buildings of the late 1800s, especially banks, hotels and civic buildings, that I can only surmise that it was the style of the times.

28 July 201327 July 2013

Utchers

Butchers are proving to be quite, um, fruitful with their signage. In general they are such a happy lot, always ready with a sharp knife to dice that juicy piece of rump steak for your casserole. Perhaps all that cleaver wielding puts them in a good frame of mind to beautify their establishments. This building no longer houses a butcher, but there is no doubt it still has a lot going for it, with its richly stained and cracked render, decorative brickwork, and simple, no-nonsense sign, which despite its age and missing letter remains surprisingly modern.

25 July 201325 July 2013

Sutterlin script

In 1911 Ludwig Sutterlin was commissioned by the Prussian Ministry for Culture to create a modern handwriting script, to be used in offices and schools, and Sutterlinschrift was the result. From around 1920 it began to replace Kurrent, the old German blackletter handwriting, and in 1935 it officially became the style taught in schools. For most non-Germans, Sutterlin is illegible, but in the world of publishing the lower case d lives on. In proofreading it is the symbol for delete and stands for the Latin deleatur – let it be deleted.

22 July 201321 July 2013

Blue and green

Blue and green should never be seen unless they’re in the washing machine. Or so my mother used to recite on washing days when I was young. Years later I heard that ‘blue and green should never be seen unless there’s a colour in between’ and I realised my mother had made up her very own version of the old saying to entertain me. Either way, what a ridiculous notion that certain colours should not go together—although I doubt the painters of this facade chose green because it would look fabulous against a cloudless blue sky, nor that painting it one bright colour would make the gothic sans letter forms stand out so well.

19 July 201319 July 2013

Book store

What optimism, what confidence in the permanence of books, to set ‘book store’ in stone! This book store did in fact trade for almost a century, but times are tough, publishing times even tougher, and the building was auctioned last month with talk of it becoming a restaurant, or a nightclub, or something or other which will most definitely not include books. At least the art supply shop next door is still open for business, so there is hope for us yet.

16 July 201316 July 2013

Blue B

I love everything about this: the shades of grey and silver in abstract shapes on the metal capping; the wood of the telegraph pole, dirty and textured and streaked with creosote; and most importantly, the bold sans serif blue B, startlingly clear and bright, attached with rusty rivets. The typeface looks like a cross between Gill Sans Bold (with its slightly smaller upper bowl) and Akzidenz Grotesk but is more likely a generic gothic sans concoction.

13 July 201313 July 2013

Ritz

Swiss hotelier César Ritz started it all in the early twentieth century with his luxury hotels. To live in elegance and luxury, especially in an ostentatious manner, or to dress fashionably, is to put on the ritz. Irving Berlin wrote a song about it: Fred Astaire danced it, Ella Fitzgerald swinged it, Mel Brooks parodied it, Bertie Wooster made a hash of it (until Jeeves set him right), the Leningrad Cowboys speed-metalled it. The swanky Ritz Hotel in London serves a very nice traditional afternoon tea — more, I think, than you could hope for at the Ritz Holiday Flats, despite the quite lovely script lettering of its name and the evocative palm tree.