Digested on November 26, 2002Posted by David Earls
Jolly Exciting Breaking News Hastily Added:
I am Mr Excited. FontLab 4.5 has been released for MacOS X. The first mainstream font editor for MacOS X has arrived, and you can get a demo from the site to play with today. Is this the nail in the coffin for FOG once and for all? With less than one month before Apple stops supplying new Macs that can boot into Classic, things are going to get very interesting indeed.
What went before:
Unusually big post, this one, lots of news. If you get bored of the first bit, feel free to skip it. The events of the recent couple of weeks have given me pause for thought, so my apologies for a rather late posting.
This Friday (November 28th) is the annual Buy Nothing Day, sponsored as ever by the nice chaps in Adbusters. Its message of reminding us all of our effects on our home of our often excessive consumption seems particularly apt this year. As an oil slick laps up on the Spanish coast from an oil disaster that might just still turn out to be worse than the Exxon Valdez, America prepares to use its big bully tactics against the Iraqis (500,000 dead Iraqi kids is a price worth paying, remember?) in order to secure more of the black stuff. Another oil spill of the Chinese coast in the last couple of days serves to remind us that these things are far from rare.
Yet things are getting worse. As I see adverts for fuel-guzzling SUVs popping up all over the place, it reminds me of our own responsibility and direct complicity in this as designers. I wonder how many of us nodded sagely as we read about the renewed First Things First Manifesto, maybe even signed our names to it, but since then have used our skills and talents to promote those very things we claimed to abhor. It is not easy to say no, I know from personal experience just how scary it is saying no to the person who puts a salary in you bank every month. But will you?
Landor Associates, for example, didn't. They happily lie through their f**king teeth, visually, for their clients. Take their BP rebranding. Their proud website case study says "The new organization needed an identity that symbolized their dynamic category leadership and reflected the attributes they aspired to: performance, environmental leadership, innovation and progressive ideas. [...] Bright and bold, the identity evokes natural forms and energy that represent, respectively, BP's position as an environmental leader as well as their goal of moving beyond the petroleum sector.".
This environmentally friendly company likes to proclaim itself as the worlds largest solar energy producer, mainly off the back off its acquisition of the Solarex corporation (from Enron, funnily enough), which it picked up for $45m. Compare that to the $110000m (yes, $110000 million) it paid for Amoco and suddenly you start to wonder about its commitment to the environment.
As Tibor Kalman said, "Designers, stay away from corporations that want you to lie for them."
I'm a coastal person. Oil spills upset me. On to happier things.
Friendly type foundry Fountain released its new site this week, and only a few months late (like I can be snooty about being late). To celebrate the redesign, there is a clutch of new typefaces: Baskerville 1757, Montrachet, Monteverdi by Lars Bergquist, Grimoire and Sadness by Felix Braden. Eric Sans by the hairy (but lovely) Peter Bruhn, Lucifer by Lotta Bruhn, and coming up in a few weeks time, Alita by Peter Hoffmann and Girl by Dirk Uhlenbrock. I feel better already.
Typodermic also have a new website. Must be the time of year for it. Hmmm, you know what you need when you're designing a website, or indeed any text-rich graphic project, a decent set of randomised Lorum Ipsum, ideally configurable for your needs. Maybe from, say, a website devoted to it?
Gábor Kóthay has released SchwarzKopf via P22, an interesting distressed blackletter face that includes alternative glyphs in old and new variations. Worth a look I think. Also new out are the lucious scripts Avalon and Sloop, from Font Bureau. Oh, and a freebie is to be had in the form of the cutely-named Apocalipstick, over at Thirstype. That is, if you can work out how to use their awful website. Did they test it on anything other than IE6 on a PC? Nahhh.
Linotype are hosting TypoTechnica, a three-day forum in Heidelberg, Germany from the 21st of Febuary 2003. Entry is €250 (or €125 for Linotype library designers), plus 16% value added tax, if you're a fellow European citizen. Workshops and seminars galore.
Other bits and pieces: LunchBox want your typeface submissions, Emigre have a new catalogue out, LetterSetter has added LTR Billboard to its library over at LettError, and young Jonathan Barnbrook has some delicious T-Shirts for sale at VirusFonts.
Enjoy your day.
Edited: 27th November 2002
Thanks for Peter Bruhn for the photo URL, and Chris Long for the LettError addition
News Break added: 2nd December
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Digested on November 8, 2002Posted by David Earls
There it is, five simple words stuck right down near the bottom of the page, with no fanfare, and many didn’t notice it... “Better antialiasing on LCD displays”. It isn’t even turned on as standard, but MacOS X 10.2 has sub-pixel anti-aliasing technology (or, as Microsoft likes to call it, ClearType) for LCD panels. Turn it on by going into General pane of System Preferences, and down the bottom of the pane you'll see Font Smoothing Style. Three of those four options are purely for LCD panels, and if you are so equiped, may I recommend the light option as a good starter for ten, shown below at 300% magnification doing its funky stuff in Apple Mail.
Over at Typophile.com there has been an almighty amount of forum postings about the Ban Comic Sans campaign. Poor Vincent, it is hardly his fault that a typeface designed for one purpose is being misused by half-blind dolts in cheap suits and polyester ties on cheesy PowerPoint presentations (almost certainly also featuring stick-men clip art). Now, I hate the use of Comic Sans as much as the next pretentious Soho-based goatee’d graphic designer, but making a mockery of a person like this just is not fair. If you want to sticker public places about something, let it be something important, like people’s lives, or your own community’s health. Alternatively, get a fucking life.
Pardon my language. Actually don’t, I meant it.
There is another lecture to be held at St Bride Printing Library here in rainy London. Your £4 entry fee includes wine (oh yes), but mainly Marianne Tidcombe speaking on the history and work of The Dove Press. The event is from 7pm (but turn up at least 15 minutes early) on Tuesday 12th November. Naturally, more details are on the St Bride website, should you need directions.
Fancy giving brush lettering a go? You would need a good teacher, I reckon. John Downer, perhaps? The man himself is at New York’s Cooper Union running workshops on the 23rd and 24th November. $155 gets you in, providing you have taken a calligraphy class at some point.
A quick run-down of what else has been happening. Microsoft are sponsoring an Indian Font Design Competition to combat the lack of Hindu fonts – OpenType only, ok? Nick Curtis emailed into spread the word about his latest six releases. Now then boys and girls, how about the ability to “show text with any formatting of any language in all browsers on all platforms”, that has to be good, right? So say those at the GlyphGate project, run by Morisawa & Co Ltd (in Japan) and em2 Solutions (in Sweden). Over in the Netherlands, the Gilde der Letterontwerpers opened its (very cute) website to an admiring Dutch-speaking audience, while unleashing sarcasm on monoglot English speakers. Low country indeed, ja?
Right, that’s it for another week. Oh, one last thing. Do you like the little favicon I installed onto Typographer.com this week? Isn’t it cute? I am so proud.
Thanks to both Si Daniels and Clive Bruton for pointing my foolish URL error.
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