Urban Lettering Tour
Last weekend I went on an Urban Lettering Tour with Paul Shaw, organized through the Type Directors Club to take place in Greenwich Village and SOHO. The plan was to walk around and discuss the lettering on the buildings in the neighborhood. It was pouring rain that morning so we ended up deviating from the predetermined itinerary. There were about 20 of us in the tour and all were all deemed Super Dorks for walking around in the pouring rain, talking about type.
I’d seen Paul moderate the Navigating the Labyrinth talk with Massimo Vignelli and co. a few months back and clearly the man knew his stuff. So I was relieved to walk up to a group of soaking wet people in the subway to find Paul, enthused as ever, trying to breath life into the rest of the group.
We met up in the Canal Street station and slowly made our way around SOHO. The rain let up for a while and I was able to snap some photos. Paul is a walking encyclopedia of type and must spend his days roaming the city, memorizing the lettering on each building. The tour was three hours long and we may have only gone within a 6 block radius. We stopped at almost every building to discuss the details that went into the lettering (both good and bad).
I was blown away by some of the buildings in that neighborhood. Some of these places I walk by on a regular basis, but have never stopped to notice the fine details. I like to think that I’m a pretty detail oriented person, but Paul takes it to a whole new level. The tour was a good reminder to open my eyes and look up when I’m walking through the city. There is so much history on every corner, you’ve just got to pay attention.
Over the past few months, I’ve been working on a type magazine for an editorial design class that I just wrapped up. One of the feature articles is based on the walking tour that Tobias Frere-Jones has done. Working with that story for a few weeks inspired me to take a similar tour. I’m not a member of the TDC, but I usually keep up with the events that they have in the city. This seemed like a great tour so I signed up!
It was well worth the 45 bucks (for a non-member). I met some fellow type nerds and learned a ton about the SOHO area. Once I got home and took of my soaking wet socks, I was really glad that I went.
Hanging & Discussing
A discussion was started the other day with a few co-workers about hanging punctuation. I proposed that bullets and quotation marks be hung in the margins—a lesson learned from my mentor and with help of Robert Bringhurst, whose The Elements of Typographic Style book I keep on my desk at home at all times. In defense of my point, I quickly pointed them to Mark Bolton’s Five Simple Steps to Better Typography series.
I’ve had people argue with me on this before. It seems like hanging punctuation is no longer a widely accepted design element. I am as guilty as the next person when it comes to indentation. A few years ago, it never even occurred to me to hang punctuation. I was so used to seeing it indented into the text block that it never crossed my mind to do anything else. As I my education in typography matured, I was exposed to hanging punctuation and I’ve never looked back.
There are a few sites that act as examples of hanging punctuation:
- iA
- Sushi & Robots
- This Tumblr theme. Even though I had to edit the CSS to hang the bullets for this post.
Since I became aware of the magic of hanging punctuation, it has begun to serve as a flag on the page, telling me “Hey! I know what I’m doing!”. Just like the subtle use of a ligature tells me that the designer took the time to consider the letter forms and their appearance on the page.
Is hanging punctuation outdated?
It was pointed out to me by a co-worker that the original word processors for the personal computers did not support hanging punctuation and that it was counter-intuitive for the average user to set a negative indent. For this reason, hanging punctuation has slowly been making it’s way out.
This may be the case, but it seems to me that over the past year or so, hanging bullets have been making a comeback on the web. Maybe that’s just my eye becoming more aware to those types of details, or maybe hanging punctuation has been waiting in that dark corner, drinking Kool-Aid while doing push-ups and is finally ready to come back with a vengance. I hope it’s a little bit of both (especially the Kool-Aid part—it’s almost summer!). The hanging bullet is a mark of typographic awareness and it’d be a shame to see it thrown out because QuarkXPress didn’t know how to negative indent.
Either way, I’m really glad that I work with people that care enough to actually have a pretty in-depth conversation about something as nerdy as this. Next week: en and em dashes!
What we’re missing on the web
Designing for the web often serves a different purpose, and can have it’s advantages over designing for print. We trade paper alignment headaches for browser rendering migraines and color swatches for the hexadecimal system. But what gets lost in translation? There are a few traditions that have been around long before cascading style sheets that are still missing on the web.
Real small caps
Small caps are misunderstood by web browsers. They are more than capital letters shrunk down. When typefaces include them, small caps are completely redrawn letters that usually match the x-height of the typeface. Robert Bringhurst explains:
Genuine small caps are not simply shrunken versions of the full caps. They differ from large caps in stroke weight, letterfit, and internal proportions as well as in height. Any good set of small caps is designed as such from the ground up. Thickening, shrinking and squashing the full caps with digital modification routines will only produce a parody.
Page 48, The Elements of Typographic Style, version 3.2 by Robert Bringhurst
Small caps do not exist on the web. At least not the way they are supposed to, even when the typeface used includes it’s own small caps. There is a CSS style that can be applied to type to display “small caps” in the browser.
font-variant: small-caps
One might think, great, now I have have another tool in my typographic toolchest. But wait, there’s something that you should know about these small caps rendered by browsers first, they’re fakes! That’s right, shrunken down capital letters parading around as small caps. Today’s web browsers don’t recognize small cap glyphs as an option and go ahead and create their own versions.
Below is the typeface Sorts Mill Goudy, displaying three different glyphs of two letters: lowercase, small cap, and capital. Clearly, each character was designed specifically. The shapes have been redrawn for each glyph and that is clear when comparing the design of the small cap and the capital letters.
I’ve included another image with the same characters but as they were rendered in Firefox 3.6 on a Mac:
The small capital characters are displayed different. The browser takes the capital letter and shrinks it down to what it thinks is the correct height. I’ve combined the two images so you can compare the differences. The browser-rendered font is in black and the actual glyphs are overlaid in cyan.
While this might not be a make-it-or-break-it type of issue for many people, I was taken aback when I realized this was happening. The browsers aren’t displaying the type that was designed to be used in certain circumstances. I felt betrayed! The more I learn about type, the more respect I have for it and for the designers.
This isn’t really an issue for most of the fonts out there on the web right now as many of them do not include small caps. In that case, the browser or Photoshop, or whatever the type is being rendered in, will create small caps for you based on the capital letters. But as type is able to be used more freely on the web now and in the future, I imagine and hope that designers will want access to the intended small caps for their favorite typefaces.
Solution
Typekit offers an interesting alternative. For a few of their fonts, they offer an additional Small Caps font. For example, FF Meta Web Pro and FF Meta Serif Web Pro are offered as any normal typeface is, but in addition, Typekit provides a Meta Small Caps Web Pro and a Meta Serif Small Caps Web Pro font. This means that to take advantage of the original small caps designed for each font, you would need to load this additional font on the page and specify it as a separate font every time small caps are used.
This can be a bit of a hassle, and it will increase the weight of the page, but it is a step in the right direction. Until browsers are able to recognize a small capital, we might have to just deal with this type of thing.
FML
FML or Fuck My Life: a statement announcing your negative attitude towards life.
While I’m sure most of us feel down on our luck at one time or another, the words “Fuck My Life” seem like they would be reserved for the more extreme situations (not burning the roof of your mouth on hot soup). I’ve recently started noticing this acronym pop up in friends Facebook statuses or Twitter feeds. I didn’t realize what it meant at first, but once I did, I was really turned off. Who decided this was the “thing to post”?
Why are so many people posting such negativity?
A quick search on Twitter for the hashtag #fml reveals just how many people are actually using this acronym and in what context.
Most of these #fml situations seem pretty trivial, and not worthy of such a harsh hashtag. I understand that it’s an exageration and is not to be taken literally, but I can’t help myself from taking offense; maybe I just don’t get it.
I try to be thoughtful and aware of what I put out there on the Internet, just as I am in real life. Your online persona is a reflection of you and it’s increasingly becoming more important. I’ve tried to shape mine to fit my actual personality. Your Facebook profile or Twitter feed can sometimes be someones first impression of you. so think about how you want to present yourself.
A Call
I would like to see more positive posts start showing up in my Twitter feed. There is a hashtag that people are using: #lml. I don’t think I’m going to start posting with that tag, as it seems a little cheesy. I would just like to see more positively when I log on. So please, friends and colleagues, stay positive and show me the love!
Temporary Neighbors
What is the social etiquette for sitting next to someone on a plane, bus or a train? On the east coast we are used to living practically on top each other, especially
in New York City. Our days are filled with near interactions. Walking down a crowded sidewalk, brushing shoulders with strangers; sitting on the subway next to people without saying a word; or being half-naked, doing hot yoga a foot away from someone you’ve never made eye contact with.
There are some instances where it seems more appropriate to break that invisible plane and make contact with a stranger. Does the duration of the trip have to do with how much communication we have with our temporary neighbor? Is there a sliding scale or a direct correlation between travel time and communication? Does where you were raised have something to do with it?
Small town vs. Big City
I’m originally from Cleveland, Ohio, where you know everyone on your
block and you all say “Hi” to each other on the street. Heck, you say “Hi”
to people you don’t know on the street. People in those parts are generally friendly and pleasant with each other.
When I first moved to the east coast, I ended up in Boston. That was a huge social transition. For the first time, I was relying on public transportation to get around the city and I quickly picked up the etiquette. At first, I was striking up conversations with anyone that sat across from me, usually with a reluctant response, if any. My first thought was that people were just being rude, but eventually came to realize that is just how it is. That’s the culture. People are doing what they’re doing and don’t really care to have you poke your head into
their lives. This is not to say that I stopped talking to people, or that I don’t still do this, I just try to be a little more aware when someone is tuning me out.
But what about long term travel? I’ve taken the bus back and forth between
Boston and New York many times and I’ve had many different types of
rides. I’ve sat next to people and never said a word or even made eye
contact with them, and I’ve also had 5 hour long conversations about God,
meditation and how wearing glasses can be a life changing experience.
First Impressions
That initial interaction sets the tone for the rest of the trip. There’s the hood up, headphones on, looking out the window, hoping no one sits next to me technique. There’s the bag-on-the-empty-seat trick. (I’ve seen that work. People are more likely to take an empty seat rather than ask someone to move their bag.) But then there’s the person who looks up, smiles and says “Hi” when you sit down.
I’m a talker (when I’m in the mood). I enjoy meeting new people and learning about their lives. I feel that if I’m going to sit next to someone for a while, I might as well find out what they are into. Who knows, maybe I’ll learn a thing or two. But I also realize that not everyone shares my enthusiasm. When trying to make conversation, what is the cutoff point? Can I take a hint and realize this person isn’t in to talking to me and I should mind my own business? I hope so.
We have all had that plane ride next to the guy who wouldn’t shut up when you just want to finish the last chapter of the novel you’ve been so engulfed in.
I’ve found it best to initiate contact immediately, introduce myself
and see how the conversation goes from there. And bring a good book
as a backup.
High Hopes
I know for many 2009 will not be remembered as a great end to the first decade of the millennium, but I’ve got to say, it was pretty good to me. In the past year, I managed to gain responsibility at a great job (that started as an internship), be encouraged by my professors to finish up my college career by taking a different and valuable internship opportunity (and actually listening to them), move from Boston to New York City, get a fantastic job with an incredible company, and all the while keeping close to the people that are most important to me.
Things to come
I would like to have this blog eventually end up being about design. I am not confident enough in my design ability to really try to tell others how do design something. But, I hope to work up to that and I plan on including posts relating to design and things that I learn on my journey as a designer. Until then, I am planning on using this blog to give me a chance to improve my writing. I’ll keep it casual and write about things I know, or things that just simply cross my mind. I hope to use this as a venue to share projects that I am starting, finishing, or in the middle of.
The goal is to be more of a content creator, not just a consumer. This is meant to be the beginning of my journey as a professional designer. I hope that this blog will serve as a reference that I can look back and see where I started.
Commitments
My days can get pretty hectic and are often limited on time to pursue things like blog posts (though I’m getting better with my time management). I saw a post on Twitter about an challenge called Project 52 and I thought it might help motivate me to consistently create content by having over 400 people trying to do the same thing.
Project52 is a personal challenge geared toward getting fresh content on your website. The goal is to write at least 1 new article per week for 1 year.
I think I can handle that, at least I hope I can. Over the last year, my interest in writing has really picked up. Writing is in my family and I have always had a strong interested in it, but not a strong motivation. In the past few months I have begun to write, but without publishing anything. It has been good practice, but I think I am ready to start sharing these stories with the rest of the world. I have started a personal project that is both writing and design related that I hope to be unveiling in the next couple of months.
A Full Plate
Spending the past few months in New York City has been an amazing experience. I feel so fortunate to have gotten a job and been able to move here. In the short time that I’ve lived in the city I have met some incredible designers, been to some really inspiring lectures (primarily through the SVA MFA in Interaction Design program and AIGA New York), and been able to take on some great freelance projects.
My days are usually spent in the Flat Iron District writing CSS and my nights split between designing freelance projects and sorting through the mass of design events that are happening in the city. Starting at the end of January, I will be taking a graphic design class at the School of Visual Arts through their continuing education program. It was tough to choose which class to take and there was a lot of advice-seeking and back and forth, but I think I have finally made a decision. I hope to share some of my work in that class on this blog as well.
I would like to wish everyone else that is participating in Project52 good luck. I hope we can all complete this challenge together! If 2009 was such a terrible year, than I am truly excited for 2010 because I can’t imagine it getting any better than this.
