davidthedesigner

jjjj... just a cotton-pickin' moment

OK, I'll admit it - sometimes I get things wrong. So a big thanks to both George and Andrew for drawing my attention to the doubtful veracity of that Peter Saville website that I mentioned last week. I have to own up to sometimes just taking things at face value, so I'd assumed that if a typeface is being given away, it must be coming direct from the originator. But if I'd looked more closely I'd have seen, of course, that the font in question is Trajan, which belongs to Adobe and shouldn't be given away at all. (You know, somehow I can't help feeling that when discussion turns to Peter Saville there's always a lot of smoke and mirrors involved.)

But my error does make me go back and dig a little deeper: and the 'J' which ought really have been at the top of my list is Johnston.

It was commissioned by Frank Pick in 1913 and completed in 1916 to become the first alphabet created for a specific corporate identity. Eric Gill, whilst he was a student of Johnston's, also worked on the typeface - and it became a major influence on the later development of Gill Sans. It was redesigned in 1979 by Eiichi Kono at Banks & Miles to produce New Johnston, the variant of the original font currently used by Transport for London. International Typeface Corporation also released a variant in 1999 called ITC Johnston, produced by British type designers Richard Dawson and Dave Farey, which you can read about here.

slightly tough exterior, and a teddy bear inside

There's an interview with Steve Jobs from 1993 that's doing the rounds at the moment (or, that means I've seen it on several different sites over the past few days). It's well worth taking 10 minutes out to watch it - it's at the bottom of this post - because he's talking about the process of branding and hiring Paul Rand to do it. But it's easy to look at it and assume he's talking about Apple. But he's not. So it's also worth taking a little time to understand the context: because he is, in fact, talking about the branding of NeXT Computer - the company that Jobs founded after he'd been sacked from Apple by the man he brought in to run it, John Sculley. And this is the 'little jewel' that he's talking about:

Actually, I did seriously consider buying a NeXT computer at the time that I bought my first Apple Mac (though not my first computer; that was an Apricot F2), but I ended up with a Quadra 700 instead. And the legacy of NeXT (after being bought out by Apple following Jobs return to the fold) was Mac OS X. Anyway, here's the movie:

moving swiftly along...

I'm finding it hard to keep to my schedule of posting two fonts every two weeks - and I'm pretty certain that I'm falling behind. So, to make amends, here we are with the second post in as many days. And it brings us to a type designer that none of us would expect to find here, I'm sure: Peter Saville. If in fact he did design the font above, though that has to be the presumption.

UPDATE: My presumption was wrong - the font that you can download for free is, in fact, Trajan. Instead I've replaced it with Johnston, over here.

It was used on the cover of Closer and is therefore called Joy Division Closer - and you can download it for free (along with a number of other fonts) from Peter Saville's website.

And now back to somebody who's been mentioned before and will be mentioned again: Eric Gill. And the font this time is Joanna, which Gill designed in the period 1930-31 and used to handset his book An Essay on Typography. It's notable for its almost vertical 'upright' italics, and the unusually small size of its italic characters. Joanna is versatile and extremely legible. The letterforms are a bit narrow, so the face is very economic as well - a lot of text can be packed densely together on a page with Joanna. It also mixes very well with other typefaces designed by Eric Gill; especially Gill Sans.

iFonts

I'm having a struggle here in the middle of the alphabet, and the Is have been just as difficult as the Hs were. Still at least it's making me do a bit of research and allowing me to discover fonts that I've never used, but which could come in handy one day.

If ever I'm asked to design a newspaper, for instance, then I might start by choosing Ionic. The earliest form of which was brought out by Vincent Figgins in 1821, and intended for display work. In 1863 a more refined version appeared which had more contrast between thick and thin strokes and the serifs were bracketed. Further developments were made, however the robustness of the Egyptian style was retained making the face suitable for newspaper text setting. With a large x-height and strong hairlines and serifs, the Ionic font family became widely used by the newspaper industry as a body type and provided a model for many 20th-century newspaper typefaces.

But if I wanted something a bit more 19th-century (at least in appearance), then I might well choose Industrial Gothic. I can't tell you a great deal about it, except that it was designed for Monotype by Jim Parkinson, whose website can be found just here.

an arboreal aberration

I happened to be in Birmingham over the weekend (this one, not that one). I couldn't help noticing that the council seems to have employed somebody to count all of the trees and then to tag each one with its own number. Is that in case they escape?

ooh, look - a halfway decent olympics logo

What they never tell you before you become a designer is that the whole business is based upon the 'feast or famine' principle. Well I've already had my share of this year's famine, but fate determines that it now wants to pile it on from every possible direction. So I've got my nose to the grindstone: don't expect much from me this week as a result. You lot will just have to wait, I'm afraid.

But here's something to keep you happy in the meantime. A wonderful flickr set of mid-70's logos (via the always-reliable O.K. Blog).

sometimes i hate designers; sometimes i hate helvetica

and here's why...

if there's one thing that designers can't stand...

...it's someone looking over your shoulder.

Don't you agree?

is the post office its own worst enemy?

I only ask because I've just come back from the Post Office - and, for the life of me, I simply can't understand how they could make things any more complicated. To be honest, I rarely post anything these days. I used to do invoicing by snail mail, partly because I thought that a nicely presented correspondence would help to soften the blow at the receiving end. But the last time I did, I made the mistake of using some really lovely Chinese envelopes that I'd been given which took an A4 letterhead folded in half vertically. I duly went off on holiday and discovered that the three clients concerned had been presented with a 'large letter' surcharge because I'd made the mistake of putting first-class stamps on. So now, of course, I do it all electronically.

So, if I had the choice, I probably wouldn't use the Post Office at all. But sometimes - like today - you're asked to send off some A4 print-outs. And they have to go in board-backed envelopes so that they survive the journey. And because I only need to do this every 3-4 weeks, I have no idea of what the postal charge is. Which means I have to get in the car and drive to the Post Office to get them weighed. And I'm busy, so I have to rush to get there before the Post Office closes at 5.30pm. And I'd like to wager that the last half-hour is their busiest time of day. Because there always seem to be at least 10 people in the queue who are sending at least 10 assorted parcels each to all corners of the globe (it's all those people, of course, who make their living by trading on eBay).

So, what exactly do the Post Office do to cater for this rush of business at the end of the day? Well, first of all they instruct their staff to use the last half hour to cash up. Great, so suddenly you've got a rush of customers, but you have to close all but one of the tills so that all the counting up can be done. And the poor cashier who's left to deal with the customers also has to look over the shoulders of everyone else to make sure they're counting up properly. It turns the process of buying stamps for two letters into a 15-minute transaction.

But it doesn't end there. No, because the Postman in his Postman Pat van comes to collect the post from the Post Office at 5.15pm. So you get to the till at 5.16pm and the cashier tells you that these letters won't now go until tomorrow because the Postman's just left with today's post. "That's OK - just give me the stamps and I'll put them in the post box round the corner" I say, "that's collected at 6.30pm". "I'm not supposed to do that" she says, "I'm supposed to print labels. We get paid for printing labels, but we don't get paid for selling stamps". "Oh, sorry, my mistake" I say, "I thought that's what Post Offices were for".

Still, at least I won't have to go there again for at least another three weeks (if I'm lucky).

other interesting things

Russell has announced that Interesting 2008 will happen on 21st June. If it's like last year, tickets go immediately - so I'm not sure if I'm doing myself any favours by letting you know about this here.

Meanwhile, if you've ever wondered what Ben looks like, I can tell you. He looks like this:

And if that hasn't put you off, you can also hear him speaking over at know your values (confession: I nearly typed 'know your limits').