typography – Page 8 – Alphabet City Press

22 June 201322 June 2013

Ale Signs

Winter in Sydney is mild compared to a northern hemisphere winter: nevertheless there is an ever-present permeating dampness, and today it really is cold. And raining. And miserable. Which naturally leads me to thinking about weather symbols like these. Ale Signs was designed in 1994 by Alessio Leonardi, an Italian-born type and graphic designer based in Germany. Leonardi has designed more than 50 typefaces, many of them lively and hand-drawn, and has published several books, including the comic book (co-written by Jan Middendorp) Mr Typo and the lost letters.

13 June 201313 June 2013

Pole

I was so focussed on the S in post and the O in office, and so horrified at the mess of signs, banners and posters covering the facade, with their excessive number of ill-chosen and badly used typefaces — I counted at least a dozen — that I initially failed to notice this fine juxtaposition of poles. I couldn’t bring myself to show the mess below the sandstone-carved lintel, and I am no fan of this style of screenprinted metal sign, but I do like the placement of the wonky telegraph pole in front of it. I also like the use of Eurostile, a geometric sans serif typeface, designed by Aldo Novarese in 1962 for the Nebiolo foundry in Turin.

7 June 20137 June 2013

T

From a distance I was not particularly taken with this lettering, perhaps because it is a vertical word, which never seems to read right – a bit like those awful logos that use the same initial cap for both words as an attempt at a design feature but invariably end up ugly and illegible instead. However, the ‘T’ was at eye level, where closer inspection and a different view was unavoidable. What I like is that there has obviously been an attempt to make it stand out from the crowd and that care has been taken in the attention to detail. The overkill of keyline, shadow and outline miraculously works to convey pride of ownership and a bold and welcoming jauntiness.

4 June 20134 June 2013

Hot jam donuts

I didn’t partake of these delicacies at the time because it was a sunny and unseasonably mild day, and the warm red, round-cornered lettering was not enough to tempt me. This cold morning, however, as I sit here with the heater on and half a mind to get back under the warm blankets, it’s another matter. I wish that donut van was here now, because I would most certainly be lured by the jammy colour and evocative letter forms.

1 June 20131 June 2013

Herald

It’s Saturday, customarily the day to sit around all morning with coffee and the paper. These days The Paper isn’t what it used to be — and it just isn’t the same on the iPad — but at least my local paper, The Sydney Morning Herald, is still being printed. The Melbourne Herald was a broadsheet newspaper published from 1840 to 1990. It began as the Port Phillip Herald and within eighteen months had the largest circulation of all the Melbourne papers. In 1849 it changed its name to The Melbourne Morning Herald and General Daily Advertiser. Quite a mouthful, when all you really need is one bold sans serif word to get the message across! The paper changed its name several times until it finally became The Herald on 8 September 1855 until its demise 135 years later.

29 May 201329 May 2013

Woollen

Before tourism, and before Ford, the wool industry brought wealth and identity to Geelong. Proximity to farmlands and an excellent port helped establish the industry and in the 1900s woolstores lined the foreshore – although these days those red brick woolstores house university campuses and shopping centres. The Federal Woollen Mills building is a little way north of town and was built around 1915 for the Department of Defence as a textile mill. The tall metal letters are still intact, but all the more appealing for their stains and rust and evidence of birds nests poking out from corroded corners.

23 May 201323 May 2013

13

It’s not that I’m particularly interested in signage per se, it’s just that it’s so prevalent and serves as such a public arena for a hugely diverse range of typographic styles and usage. Good design and appropriate use of type can make the ordinary, like this storage facility, look striking. This view is at the back entrance, where each of the numbers and roller doors are their own bold colour, but the view from the main road is eyecatching too: the numbers, even bigger than this one, sit at ground level and hug the corners of the building, their minimalist simplicity making them stand out from the crowd of industrial neighbours.

14 May 201314 May 2013

Chooks

The Geelong and District Poultry Club Annual Super Show was held on the weekend, and I had the good fortune to be in the vicinity! There were all sorts: chooks that looked so much like raptors it was a relief they were so small; huge fluffballs that didn’t look like chickens at all; chooks with beautiful multicoloured plumage that changed colour and shimmered in the light; bad-hair-day chooks; black chooks; white chooks; mottled chooks; even Foghorn Leghorn was there. The magnificent Rhode Island Red was almost declared champion of the day, his only shortcoming being his not-quite-big-enough size, but (no surprises here) my vote went to the noticeboard of certificates from the 1920s and 30s.

2 May 20132 May 2013

Containers

Every now and then I take a trip down to Botany Bay to take in the view and watch the planes take off and the ships come in to port. Botany Bay is Sydney’s main cargo seaport and two airport runways extend into it, but the northern and southern headlands of the bay are national park. This contrast between protected park and heavy industry is what makes the area so interesting. From the lookout at the end of Prince of Wales Drive, Port Botany, you can look straight out to sea through the headlands of La Perouse and Kurnell, over calm shallow waters that are home to hundreds of territorial marine creatures. In fact when Captain Cook landed at Kurnell in 1770 he named it Sting Ray Harbour after all the stingrays they caught. To the west is the visually rich and fascinating landscape of refineries and containers. I love those towers of containers – the patterns of colour, the marine-inspired names, and of course, the distinctive typography.

29 April 201329 April 2013

Wing Lee

As a designer you wouldn’t catch me dead angling type this way (let alone spacing the words so far apart), but this is so quirky they actually get away with it! There is an element of jauntiness and lightheartedness about it that is quite appealing. Interestingly, it’s the English words that get the wonky treatment – the characters are sedate in comparison – but that only adds to its charm.