It is considered poor etiquette to type in all caps. Nobody likes to be SHOUTED at. I find it interesting that the same guidelines don’t seem to apply to handwriting. Like many people, I print in all caps and I have never heard the “shouting” observation made when it comes to penmanship.

I was reading the comments on a Flickr post by Shaun Inman where he analyzes his own penmanship and it seemed like many designers share my addiction for uppercase. Is it my imagination or this a trend? Time for another survey…

Design Survey Question 5: In your handwriting, what do you capitalize?

(If you were wondering about survey 4, it looks like Be A Design Group readers aren’t unbeige.)

Photo taken by Melody Simmons and provided on Weekend America’s site

This won’t be the first time I’ve confessed my NPR addiction and posted something drawn from it, and I’m certain it won’t be the last one, either, but I was struck recently by a short segment on Weekend America.

Among the newer programming offered by NPR, Weekend America is an even more freewheeling cousin of Weekend Edition or even All Things Considered from an “article” standpoint, and they offered up this curious and fascinating story a little over a week ago now about a Baltimore effort to garner money to fight homelessness in the city.

First, I’m struck by what an artful and highly conceptual fundraising effort this is (much like Benn Ray is in the story), and second, I’m struck again by this almost purely typographic physical illustration of the point Baltimore is trying to get across. As I listened to the story I was really fascinated by how much these parking meters successfully landed in a place in between fine art and design, and also captivated by a certain conjecture: what must it be like to walk up to one of these meters without any of the background on what they do, what they are, and what purpose they serve?

I’m curious to know what the BA readers make of them as well…

Although we’ve touched the art vs. design nerve here before fairly recently, I actually find these meters cross that gap far more effectively and insightfully without resorting to hitting someone over the head with their message or blurring that message to such a degree that few would tend to decipher it.

What do you think?

As my thoughts turn towards my Spring semester courses, and particularly towards the Typography class I’ll be teaching for the first time I’m reminded of this recent logotype “find” that appeared in an on-line banner ad. It’s really refreshing to see an identity designer utilize a design approach that likely came straight out of a typography class in their past: communicate an idea purely through the use of type forms, type orientation, and type relationships.

My eyes were caught by this fairly delightful identity solution a few weeks ago - glad to continue to see moments of good visual wit popping up in the midst of many designs that we’d sooner ignore or forget online!

For our second graphic designer survey question we tackle the subject of typefaces. Of the fonts in your personal collection, how many do you own? 100%? 50%? 0%? Cast your annonymous vote here, or just check out the results.

A new poll means that the voting booth has closed on our our Designism survey. You can view the results here, or here is a summary:

34% say “Design has always been about making the world a better place, so I don’t really get the point of inventing the word ‘designism.’”

31% have no idea what designism is.

13% are pumped about the idea.

another 13% were offended by the politics.

6% think it is a waste of time.

3% think designism is going to change the world.

For years, my parents kept boxes and boxes of childhood artifacts belonging to my brother and I in their attic back in our hometown of Fort Dodge, Iowa. Baseball cards, books, action figures, schoolwork, artwork going back to preschool, and more were sealed up in plastic boxes, sandwiched amidst fiberglass insulation and the like. They always told us that once we had room to store them ourselves, we had to either take them home with us, or throw them out.

Of course, I not only didn’t throw this stuff out when I moved into my house last year, I brought every last thing back with me so I could look through it all before deciding what could be thrown out. There’s a wealth of creative inspiration in that old stuff.

Amidst one of the boxes, I found a manila A-4 envelope marked “LETTER PEOPLE” in faded blue Bic. The unmistakeable handwriting of one Tom Nemitz, circa 1985 no doubt.

NOW EMBEDDED! Click “continue reading” to view the trailer on our site. (thanks to YouTube.com)

My recent resurgence of interest into comic books has led me to try to understand the medium from the perspective of a graphic designer. Basically comic books are the same as any other standard layout: text and images working together. They work together in a very specialized way, illuminated most fully in Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. That’s a topic I hope to dive into fully another day. Today, I’ve seen the most amazing thing. A visually-stunning, über-kinetic new medium: The Digital Graphic Novel.

Once again I find myself inspired by resident BADG author Nate Voss. His recent venture into typography reminded me of this terrific sign I nearly choked on a year or so ago. It’s presence dominates an Edmonton intersection, overcoming the likes of suburban giants such as Blockbuster, KFC and McDonalds.

The first time I saw it, I had just rolled up to the stoplight and did a double take at this nearly sixteen-foot tall titan of typographic terror that sits unsettlingly close to the street. There was silence in our car, until my wife read it, as it appeared, in an eighth-grade boy’s puberty-stricken voice, “baAAYYYWWwood.”

Now, every time I drive by this corner, the same voice finds its way out of my lungs, and every time I see typographic exercises like the ones Nate is undertaking, this sign flashes into my eyes, and I feel compelled to warn students, designers and the general public to be careful with type. It is very powerful, and mustn’t fall into the wrong hands.

UPDATED AGAIN! This week we add a little more complexity to our extremely limited assignment from last week, and I drop an in-class assignment on my students… which I then have to sit down and do right along with them.

“I’m Pete Ricketts and I believe in kids, America, apple pie and fun fonts!”

Well, I’m Tom Nemitz and I believe when a congressional candidate uses Comic Sans in his television spots that he gets automatically DQ’d from my ballot. No iffs, ands, butts or serifs about it.

The Assignment: Four typefaces (Garamond, Baskerville, Bodoni, and Univers), 2 characters each—with no mixing—drawn into five compositions representing opposition, tension, overlapping, details, and scale. Twice. No repeats. No tracing. 2” x 2”. Total of 40 hand-drawn compositions. And black on white type only.

Very recently it was brought to my startling attention that I have forgotten more about design than I currently know. The professional daily grind has whittled my knowledge and expertise down to a skill set; a bag of tricks from which I can pull out answers to easily solveable layout problems. As I work in advertising, my idea of design has been slowly transformed—without my knowledge—into a concept-over-form mentality from its original concept-is-equal-to-form set.

Starting tonight, I’m teaching (essentially) Type 101; the foundation for everthing that graphic design is built on, not to mention the remainder of my students’ educations. I’m doing it in 11 weeks, once a week, for five hours a night. Due to my recent revelation, I feel somehow unqualified to aptly teach this course.

An Aside: I went to the University of Nebraska at Kearney. It’s a design powerhouse school located in the center of nowhere. My professor studied design under none other than Phillip Meggs himself. That, I suppose, puts me two educational steps away from the man who literally wrote the book. I spent one solid year studying nothing but typography and, much like high-school French, I now feel like I have very little to show for any of it.

So I am going to do every homework assignment, read every chapter, do every book report—and maybe even the extra credit—for this class. I’m going to do them under the same constraints as my students, using the same materials. And every Friday morning, I am going to post the results of my labor here, and damnit I’m going to learn what it means to design again.

If I was brilliant, or even just snotty, I wouldn’t do this. But I’m neither; I’m just a real designer with real clients, where deadlines and bottomlines factor into my work as much as rulelines and guidelines. But the way you have to do this job is to take the project that’s in front of you and do it the best that you can every time. I believe I once did that better than I do now, so I’m going back to school to get it back. I’m writing about it here on the chance that I’m not alone in feeling this way.

There is something absurd about typography on the web. Think about these scenarios: You don’t need to own a font to read a book set in Goudy. You don’t need to own Futura to watch a Wes Anderson film. You don’t need to own Times to read the Times. You don’t need to own any fonts to watch television. Why not? Because that would be insane. And yet this same logic doesn’t apply on the internet. Online, a person needs to own a fully licensed version of a font in order to view it in a web browser. You are reading Arial right now. That’s right, Arial. Why? Because everybody on Earth has a licensed version of Arial on their computer. The great democracy of the internet has failed to produce typography any better than the least common denominator of system fonts. As a designer, I hope you are outraged and offended. So what can you do about it?

At first glance, this seems to be an unavoidable situation. The font companies own the fonts, and any attempt to set them free is going to meet strong resistance. But what if there were legal ways to give fonts to the masses? Wouldn’t you support any effort to increase the options for web fonts? Of Course you would. Rest assured that the absurdity of limited online font selection is a very solvable problem. Here are five ideas to get the ball rolling towards an internet filled with rich typography…

Almost perfectly timed with the units on Renaissance and Pre-Renaissance document design that I’ve been studying with my students in Meggs’ History of Graphic Design lately, the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha is currently exhibiting multiple pages from the continuing St. John’s Bible Project commissioned by St. John’s University / Abbey. I won’t take up an extensive amount of space describing here what the Joslyn describes in detail on their own site, but I will briefly comment on what a wonder this project is to behold in person.

Those interested should also visit the principle site for the St. John’s Bible.

I am always fascinated when I hear of a designers disdain for a certain font. Sometimes I totally agree and other times I almost feel embarrassed for having used a font that others disdain. I have included a few tidbits I have come across over the last few years of specific fonts that certain designers hate. What font do you loath?

Of course there is the famous Design Observer post in which Mr. Bierut expresses his hatred of ITC Garamond.

Listening to Noreen Morioka at an AIGA event, she expressed how sick she was of the ubiquitous Gill Sans.

Here are a few thoughts conveyed in Be A Design Group posts.

Drew declares and end to Mrs. Eaves.

In agreement with the majority(I assume) of designers in the country, Tom and Donovan give Comic Sans the shake down.

“Is that Insignia? Gross!” David Kadavy says this about a font on a deck of classic type design that Donovan posted about.

On a night about 2 years ago I had nothing better to do so I sat down and spent about 5 hours bookmarking a huge list of type and typography links (mostly type designers and foundries).

While some of these links are now probably outdated and some only offer a few poorly designed typefaces, I figured I’d share the list with everyone so someone else could get some use out of it (since I usually visit the same typography sites and haven’t visited a ton of the links on this list since I made it).

The result of Font Aid III, Fleurons of Hope, is available for purchase. All of the proceeds from Font Aid III will go to charity on behalf of the tsunami victims. Font Aid III was a collaborative effort between The Society Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) and Building Letters. What a great excuse to purchase a font.

I submitted my own fleuron on one of the last days of the deadline. Looking at all the others from the greats like Matthew Carter, I know I have a lot to learn. Mr. Carter’s is the one on the top right and mine is the second from the left in the same row. I designed my fleuron around the theme of rebuilding. It isn’t the boldest mark, but hopefully someone will find a use for it.

The font is only $20 and 220 designers submitted designs. A great resource. If you are on OS X, you can purchase all of the fleurons in one Open Type font. If you get the True Type version they spread the fleurons between two fonts. Embellish away.

If you work in Macromedia Flash a lot or just like using pixel fonts, you may want to check out the BitFontMaker. It lets you create and save your font in TrueType format - all from within a nifty, easy-to-use Web interface. (Where was I when this got posted to the Internet a year or so ago?)

… Or if you want to go the longer route and use a full-blown font editing application, you can also follow MiniFont’s pixel font design tutorial.

Here is a link to StereoGum.com where you can watch Beck’s newest music video. To all the type enthusiasts out there, prepare to be blown away. You can also take a peak at the Guero album art. Here’s the link:

Beck’s Black Tambourine video

Just saw this abstract of a research paper on how serif and sans serif fonts affect children’s ability to read. Thought it might be interesting since there have been several conversations about this before. Here’s the abstract:

“This paper describes part of the work of the Typographic Design for Children project at The University of Reading. The aim was to find out whether children found serif or sans serif types easier or more difficult to read, and whether they found text with infant characters easier or more difficult to read. We listened to 6-year-old children reading in a classroom, using specially designed, high quality test material set in Gill Sans and Century with and without infant characters. We also asked children for their views about the typefaces used. We used miscue analysis to study tapes of children?s reading to see whether more errors occurred in text set in a particular typeface. The substitution category of miscue was explored in more depth to see whether differences were attributable to typeface. The results show that children in our test group could read text set in Gill and Century equally well.”

- Walker S & Reynolds L. Information Design Journal, Serifs, sans serifs and infant characters in children’s reading books. Vol. 11, 2004.

This afternoon I had a conference call with my editor and the publisher to go over the final manuscript of my soon-to-be-released book. As I was throwing out my requests (or rather, DEMANDS) for the design of the inside of the book, they directed me to the following article in the January issue of the Publishers Marketing Association newsletter:

http://www.pma-online.org/scripts/shownews.cfm?id=902

The basis of the argument posed here is this: Since the vast majority of users do not know how to tap the power of programs such as Quark, FreeHand or even InDesign, they should just use Microsoft Word instead. The author cites a study by James Felici in his Complete Manual of Typography, 90 percent of the people who use such page layout programs never change the default settings, and, as Felici points out, these settings are never much good as they are.

Hmmm. I use Word an awful lot as an author and copywriter. But I sure as hell don’t use Word for anything but typing drafts. I can guarantee you in my day job as a designer, I never use Word for anything but typing words. That’s why they call it Word — you type in it. Then you go into InDesign — again, apty named — and design your materials.

In the spirit of Halloween, I feel compelled to make my first foray into the Be A Design Group blog with this dire warning. Everyone must stop using the typeface Mrs. Eaves.

Much to my amazement, the typeface [sic] Comic Sans didn’t just appear out of a lava pit of hatred, but was actually designed by a Microsoft employee named Vincent Connare. Vincent designed this typeface [sic] out of a lack of “fun” fonts (obviously he did not know the real fun of Garamond when used in italics).

So if it is so fun, why has Comic Sans become the arch-nemisis of our profession?

I can’t resist letting this flotsam & jetsam float to the surface…

The Comic Sans Cafe

Everyone knows I pick on Comic Sans like a ruthless warlord, so let’s not revisit that and just cut right to some juicy quotes from the site:

“Comic Sans is the groovy script font which comes with the Windows 95 Plus! pack and is now available for the Apple Macintosh.”

Ha. Anytime the word groovy is used to describe a font, take a stick and beat it away. Oh, and thanks for porting it over the Mac too, bud. In 1995 I was 17, and I was hoping for 2 things: facial hair and a Mac version of Comic Sans. Much love, my friend.

“Although it might be seen as a novelty typeface, which is great for titles, it’s also extremely readable on-screen at small sizes, making it a useful text face.”

Novelty typeface. Oh, you think? As for the rest of that statement: No. No. And, um, what’s the word I’m thinking of? I know its here somewhere…eureka, there it is: No!

OK, here’s where it gets fun, kiddos. (I know, how can it get any better without a performance of “The Love Theme From Comic Sans: The Movie” from Tony Orlando and Dawn? Well it does, so read on.) A note from the “designer” of the font!

[pleading]Show it, pleeease? I can’t wait! oooh!![/pleading]

A note from Vincent Connare, Comic Sans’ designer.

“During 1994 I noticed that a large number of cartoon/comic style software titles were under development at Microsoft. As Microsoft Creative Writer had a need for FUN fonts, I had an idea to make a lettering script similar to the lettering used by the major comic books.

“There was a consistent style used in comics, which was quite unlike the style of lettering you see in newspaper cartoon strips. I also noticed that many people were inappropriately using drafting lettering in comic speech balloons.

“I started to make the font in October 1994. Initially it was picked up by the team working on Microsoft 3D Movie Maker for use in speech balloons. As 3D Movie Maker progressed, the programmers added sound so the that the characters didn’t use balloons. However, the regular weight was still used for help pop-ups and dialog boxes.

“Because the regular weight was cleanly hinted for the screen it was also included with the Windows 95 OEM version, the Windows 95 Plus pack, Publisher and Microsoft Internet Explorer. Hope you find the font fun.”

Single tear.

Sparked by David and Bennett’s conversation on serifs and their origins, I browsed Amazon to see what the status was on the new Bringhurst volume and found it’s been out for a little over a month.

In mentioning this, however, it’s probably worth mentioning Bringhurst in some detail in case his name is new to any of us (or simply worth repeating for those familiar with him.)

During my studies in Italy, I took this photograph of an inscription inside of the Amphitheater of Pompeii. It dates to sometime shortly after the restoration of the Amphitheater after the earthquake of 62 A.D.. This is a fascinating specimen to me because I think it exhibits the relationship between medium and form in type design.

This is an extension of my Confessions Post in the way that I am sharing another one of my resources. I have scanned an entire alphabet of vintage Price Marker hand stamps. Apparently they were for shop owners to price their merchandise. There are a few letters missing but basically the alphabet is intact. Here is the hi-res version. Use this for good design not evil.

I sat down to make a post about the national attention that typography is receiving on the news right now, but it looks like I am going to take this in a different direction. First, let me bring you up to speed:

CBS is being accused of forging documents that question Bush’s service in the National Guard on 60 Minutes. To the delight of type nerds like myself, the news has been filled with typography talk. Kerning, letter combinations, quotation marks, and other telling typographical elements seem to suggest that the documents are forged because these features weren’t available before Microsof Word. For a better description of the story, turn on the news or do a Google search. (An interesting sidenote is the role that bloggers played in bringing this story to the attention of the mainstream media.)

Here is where I digress. I did a quick search of the design blogs I read, and sure enough, Design Observer was already talking about this very issue (sort of). Unfortunately, what could have been an informative article turns out to be nothing more than an opportunity for Design Observer to push their political agenda. If you pay attention to their blog, you know this isn’t the first time this has happened, but this one seems especially blatant.

It wouldn’t suprise me if this has already been posted on….it seems right up the alley of this blog. Forgive me if this is the case, but the “Found Type Gallery” at www.typophile.com is a must-see. It gives you a good view of how aesthetic tastes can vary around the globe. It reminds me of when I was in Italy, and Helvetica Bold Rounded was EVERYWHERE.

The site is a good resource for books, too.

Apparently this guy (I think a dude did this site — my sincerest apologies if it turns out to be a dudette author) really loves handwritten signs. Me, I get a kick out one at least bi-monthly. ‘Course, that could be ‘cos of the handwritten kick me sign on my back. What?

I digress. Anyhoo, some people have such super handwriting, its simply stunning. And then there’s me…

The real question is, does this “Museum Of Handwritten Signs” really exist? The little alien guy in my stomach says no, and he’s usually right. So I’m saying no. Doesn’t mean the online museum can’t help us to murder some minutes in the middle of the afternoon!!

Some signs have been awesomed. Some have stellarly bad kerning. Others have enough issues with leading that they need to go see Dr. Seaver (the dad on Growing Pains — you’ll recall, he’s a psychiatrist). And some have a combo meal of all three.

Here’s one final question: how many words in that last paragraph don’t actually exist? I could change ‘em but where’s the fun in that? Game on.

Museum Main Still More On Location! Still More Yet Oh My Stop It Even Worse

Since the main logo of this site is made up of ever-changing found type photos of the letters B and A, I thought I’d share a couple of sweet galleries of found typography.

ï Itchy Robot
ï Typophile

I also recently started my own collection off with the nice photo above. (But shouldn’t it be spelled with 2 r’s? “WonderRoast,” right? Then again, that’s probably why it’s called “WondeRoast,” because you wonder where that second “r” got off to…)