typography – Page 6 – Alphabet City Press

3 January 201431 December 2013

Root pills

Dr Morse’s Indian Root Pills were first made in 1854 in Buffalo, New York, and were distributed in Australia by the Comstock Company until the 1990s. The pills contained herbal ingredients that were claimed to cleanse the blood, and as blood impurity was believed to be the cause of all disease, it is no surprise that it was one of the most successful patent medicines ever made. I had never heard of Dr Morse’s root pills, but driving along the road to Morpeth, NSW, this barn was hard to miss. It’s a dramatic sight—a big old ramshackle barn surrounded by fields, painted on two sides, vibrant in the harsh summer sun—but I particularly liked the close up view of the rust and patchwork corrugated iron and its contrast with the much more recent paintwork. The letters are hand drawn, but they are Copperplate Gothic in style.

19 December 201319 December 2013

St Marys Hall

I don’t know what I expect a church hall nameplate to look like, but this spindly metal lettering isn’t it. I like it though — the tall letters attached to a bodgy framework that leaves the first S hanging and the way it looks against the brick background. I like the dangling T, the high crossbar of the A and the short diagonal strokes of the M that make me think of those high-hitched trousers Gary Cooper wore, and the not-very-curvy curve of the R and how the bowl hasn’t quite been wrestled into shape to join the vertical stroke.

16 December 201316 December 2013

Pinkertons

I almost missed it, the way it blends into its faded paint and blue sky surroundings. The name Pinkertons is synonymous with detective agency in the way that hoover is synonymous with vacuum cleaner. Allan Pinkerton established his agency in the United States in 1850 and became famous when he claimed to have foiled a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. However this building is most definitely not home to the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. The sign on the door leading upstairs says ‘Pinkertons Optic House’, and there is a locksmith on the ground floor. At a stretch they could relate to spying and lockpicking, but really, it’s a coincidence, and I just liked those pale blue letters and the incongruity of seeing Pinkertons in a small NSW country town.

13 December 201313 December 2013

Cream

I love the springiness of this script. It sits so neatly on the baseline — the r and m tidy and straight and the curves of the e and a sitting exactly right. The kerning is less even, and that’s what gives it such personality. The m appears to be pulling away from the a, stretching the line that links them. Or perhaps the m has tugged and then let go, causing a rebound that has the e crashing back into the r and forcing the loop upwards. I can’t decide if the C wants no part of it and has detached itself on purpose or if it couldn’t keep up with the wilful forward movement of the m.

4 December 20134 December 2013

Aperture

The word aperture comes from the Latin apertura, meaning opening, so it follows that, in typography, aperture would refer to an opening in a letter from. Specifically, it is the opening to the partially enclosed negative space (or counter) in characters such as a, c, e, n and s. Apertures can be small or large depending on the typeface. The lower case e of Berkeley Oldstyle Book has a large aperture due to the angle of the horizontal bar, but the e of Bembo Bold has a relatively small aperture. Vectora’s a has a tiny aperture, and while Serifa Light’s is larger, it is still small compared with that of Today Extra Light.

22 November 201322 November 2013

Skype

We are fairly techno savvy in our household. As computer-literate iUsers, we can, for example, select music through devices that are not plugged in to the speakers from which the sound emanates, or we can piggyback devices to expand functionality. However, a working knowledge of how to use the technology at our disposal doesn’t necessarily imply complete understanding of the science that goes into making them function. So imagine how thrilled I was to discover the explanation for how skype works! It’s nothing more than pigeon post and wires!

16 November 201316 November 2013

Caret

Hat, control, uparrow, chevron, shark-fin, fang, call it what you will: the caret is a wedge-shaped mark made on written or printed matter. Although the caret is used widely in ASCII and unicode, in publishing it is more commonly recognised as a proofreading mark, which is where it has its origin. In Latin, caret means ‘it lacks’, so the name describes its function as the proofreading mark that indicates the place where something — a punctuation mark, a word, a phrase — should be inserted. The mark to be inserted is generally placed within the caret and it is written below the line of text for a line-level punctuation mark such as a comma, or above the line as an inverted caret for a character such as an apostrophe.

13 November 201312 November 2013

Bannister’s

There’s a lot wrong here, and not just the letter spacing. It is one of the few — well, the only — bits of lettering with any sense of style I could find along a commercial strip that was so awful it was shameful, a street bursting with shops — ugly, noisy, smelly, crass — that have sprouted too quickly and competitively with little thought for anything other than the tourist dollar. This, in an area that should know better. But I was lucky to find a spot across the street where I could obtain an unimpeded view of this building name. I like the B and R, and the S that isn’t quite straight, that perfect A, and the acute angle of the apostrophe. And the fact that they didn’t pull it down.

14 October 20135 October 2013

Top 10 fonts

My attention was drawn recently to an article in The Guardian, in which Domenic Lippa of Pentagram listed his ten favourite fonts: Akzidenz Grotesk, New Baskerville, DIN 1451, Franklin Gothic, HTF Didot, Gotham, Knockout, Gill Shadow, Rockwell and Sabon. What a task to choose only ten! It made me think about my favourites, and also how they change over time — there are fonts I once used on a regular basis but have barely looked at these last couple of years. I would have to agree with Lippa that Akzidenz Grotesk is ‘probably the best typeface ever designed’, and despite its current ubiquitousness I would also include Gotham on my list. And perhaps Archer, which is the type I am, according to Pentagram’s ‘what type are you?’ game.

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.