Digested on February 28, 2003Posted by David Earls
Design is a tool for political and social change, and this week saw attempts of a multinational giant to use copyright law to stifle change quashed by those jolly nice people across the English Channel in Paris.
StopE$$O, a campaign run by Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and People & Planet, has been using a bastardised version of the Esso logo since May 2001, much to Esso’s annoyance. In a clear attempt to silence its critics, Esso France took legal action against the lobbying group last July, and managed to obtain from the French courts an injunction against the french StopE$$O website. Not only did Esso demand the removal of all logos, but also wanted 80,000 euros per day for damage to their reputation. Had the French courts awarded the company this for the full term, that would have been in the region of 45 million euros. Thankfully, Justice Lacabarats in Paris said that StopE$$O’s use of the logo was allowable as a matter of free speech, and referred to Esso’s case as “unuseful and not serious”.
The French decision comes two days after the campaign managed to close 120 Esso petrol stations across the UK. Poor old Lee Raymond (CEO and Chairman of ExxonMobil), its not been a good week for him. Incidentally, that 45 million euros his company wanted wouldn’t actually cover his yearly salary.
Onwards. A memorial service is to be held at St Bride Church on Fleet Street here in London in honour of John Dreyfus. The service starts at 11.30am, on Tuesday 6th May 2003.
The International Font Technology Association announced its creation at Linotype’s TypoTechnica conference last week in Heidelburg, Germany. The steering committe consists of Clive Bruton (FontZone), Ted Harrison (FontLab), Laurence Penney, Thomas Phinney (Adobe) with John Hudson taking the Chair. There is more information on the new group in this article over at the ATypI website.
Macromedia Freehand MX has been released, and works pretty darned well. After the disappointing Freehand 10, the interface has been totally reordered and made actually usable. Along with the usual collection of extra silly features (3D modelling in a 2D illustration package? Ha!), Macromedia have made substantial improvements to its performance under MacOS X. It is actually now usable on a G3 iBook, even using its new anti-aliased previewing modes (no longer based on the Flash engine). The screengrab above, incidentally, comes from my new currently under development typeface, Not Soho.
Thats it for this week. Tot ziens!
Current masthead setting: Sabon Next, by Jean-François Porchez
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Digested on February 21, 2003Posted by David Earls
ATypI is opening its doors a little wider to encourage those from the poorer nations of the world to join. For those nations that have a GDP of US$14500 or lower, a new Associate Membership fee applies of £22 (standard membership is £62.50). The list of nations that fall into that category is actually rather upsettingly large, and can be found, along with more details of the scheme, in this press release. The genesis of the new structure appears to have come from the Is ATypI Elitist? thread over at Typophile, and the heavy lobbying of a certain Ramiro Espinoza, proving that sometimes peaceful protest can work. Shame it doesn’t seem to for Tony Blair and the thicker-than-an-elephant-pie Dubya, of course.
Emigre has released Tribute, a new family from Frank Heine. The lovely press release quotes John Downer, who said “It is evident that Frank Heine’s ‘Tribute’ possesses an element of ‘type caricature’ in its drawing, but this fact doesn’t relegate it to that one category. Heine has really gone beyond parody, well into an area of personal exploration. He has challenged many traditional assumptions that we ‘connoisseurs’ of hand-cut type have maintained in our attitude toward the historical accuracy sought and loved and expected in ‘revivals.’ The result is a unique combination of caricature, homage, alchemy, and fanciful reinterpretation. Tribute, I think, recalls Guyot’s native French-learned style, primarily as a point of departure for an original – albeit implausible – work of historical fiction, with merits and faults of its own.”
This week saw the release for the first public beta of Textpattern, the content management system developed by Dean Allen. Yes, you should be interested, as it contains Textile, a typographic formatting engine that makes your web writing a little more readable and typographically correct. But here is the real deal – Mr Allen writes for the web himself, via his infinitely popular Textism website. As such, he has an empathy for whats important in a web CMS from a user’s perspective, and the early betas I have been lucky enough to play with over the last few weeks show this through and through. Early days, but its going to be rather good.
What’s in a single letter? Quite a lot when the newest typography website is Typographe.com! A new typography blog from the French section of ATypI. Jolly neat it is too, but only available in the French language.
Quark Xpress 6 is finally on its way, and Quark is drip-feeding the computer and design press snippets of information about it. Apparently, its MacOS X and Win 2k/XP only from now on.
The UK this week finally banned tobacco advertising. I’ve not paid much attention to cigarette packets since I stopped my ludicrous 40-a-day habit a couple of years ago, until last night in a crowded pub when someone showed me the new health warnings. Nearly half of the front and back of a packet is emblazened with a giant black on white health warning. Ugly type never felt so right.
And finally, my internet connection is restored, as of yesterday. 5 days, 7 weeks, same difference – expect more updates from now on. If you are in the UK and thinking of an ADSL line, dont bother with Virgin, their customer service is ill-educated and incredibly slow.
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Digested on February 5, 2003Posted by David Earls
Jamie Nazaroff (Zang-o-Fonts) has been having problems with over-zealous legal departments. A just too perfect example of a litigious company bullying a small indie with legal (and lets face it, monetary) might. To quote, "Their claim was that my font 'Omicron Delta' was in violation of their trademarks for their faces 'Delta' and 'Delta Jaeger'." John Butler's comment on this upsetting posting at Typographi.ca was simple but inspired - "I recommend you forward their letter to both Delta Airlines and the people who make Jaegermeister." Read Berthold's original message here, and feel free to send your own words of outrage to Melissa M. Hunt, Berthold's Vice President & General Counsel, at her email address. Have fun.
Onwards to happier things. Eric Kindel will be holding a talk on "Reconstructing stencil letters, c1700" at St Bride Printing Library, here in cloudy London later this month. Starting at 6.45pm on Tuesday 18th, admission is a fiver, or just £3 for concessions. Free wine too. Mmmm, wine. Eric, besides being a writer and designer, also lectures at Reading's Department of Typography, providing me with the following convenient, if slightly contrived, segue.
Also a regular at Reading, Gerard Unger has released his own website this week, and most worthy of a rummage it is too.
Yet another Reading regular, Jean-Francois Porchez will be discussing the development of Latin types for multiple languages at Typophile Lunchbox this Thursday. The online discussion will be hosted at 12:30pm Pacific Time (that's 8:30pm GMT).
Garage Fonts released a stack of typefaces, and in the absense of web access at home, I shall lazily just cut and paste from their press release: "Adamopolis by Adam Larder, Arbuckle by Robby Woodard, Solidarity by Jason Hogue, Archive Solid, Capibara, Epos, and Melvin by Pieter van Rosmalen, Nemesis by Jonathan Edwards, Oplontis by Marc Tassell; serifed font Parvenu by Anna Maria Geals; san serifs Tera by Nikola Djurek and District, a 14 weight type family designed by Dylan and Kienan Smith for corporate communications and branding." They are also having a sale, visit their website for more details.
And late news (freshly stolen from Typographica) is that Apple posted this interesting piece on font management for creatives under Mac OS X. Enjoy
Thanks to John Downer for pointing out this digest's errors.
Edited: 6th February 2003
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The masthead is currently set in Sabon Next, by Jean François Porchez.
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