23 posts tagged “typography”

This was a great find at Take Note in Lower Hutt today. Take Note is a post office and gift shop run by my friend Mandeep but I have never bought a book from there before. I was surprised to find it displayed prominently and being an automobiliac I paid the $40 for it.

   My cover differs slightly: the News Gothic-set headlines have been replaced by the same text in ITC Benguiat, while the lettering around the masthead is now Akzidenz-Grotesk. Inside, there are great Car articles from 1965 to 1974, covering the best of the first decade (I became a reader, thanks to Gary Hayvice, whose daughter was a classmate of mine, in 1981). I grew up with Llewellyn, Bishop, Setright and the rest; I remember Bulgin, and very briefly, wasn’t there a chap called James May? But some of the earlier talents appear in this compilation.
   Some articles are prescient—the warning that Honda could be a big player if it chose to build saloon cars, and the war for oil and how it might run out (from the first fuel crisis in the 1970s)—and others are less so, such as the warning that a Channel Tunnel would be a folly. Others are plain out of place in today’s politically correct world, namely the nude models that adorned cars at motor shows.
   There are even old advertisements, including one for women—flogging copies of Good Housekeeping. It was very sexist and the idea that cars were designed to pull birds was very much in evidence.
   It’s hardcover, so it should be a proud collection of 1960s’ and 1970s’ motoring journalism in my home.

Show us your favourite font.
Submitted by [this is connie].

You mean favourite typeface. There is a difference (font implies type style and point size).
   Believe it or not, it’s not one from my own company’s range. I have always liked Helvetica and the Swiss school of design, and decided to improve on the design for Lucire. The typeface is called, predictably, Lucire. A 2006 advertisement follows (it’s the headline typeface).

The above was a re-type again. Why is Vox shutting down when I click ‘Save’?

This wasn’t on YouTube when I last blogged about A Man Called Sloane, America’s coolest spy since Matt Helm pretended to be Dean Martin pretending to be Matt Helm, but here are some trips down memory lane for a few of you …

   What was very odd, for trivia buffs out there: Robert Conrad’s name appears before the title, which according to the commenters on YouTube, makes this unique among QM productions. It’s just the highlights plus the opening sequence, but considering I hadn’t seen this since 1981, it was a lovely revisit. And that typeface would be considered very trendy right now.

[Cross-posted] This has been official for a while (or so I think—not that I ever heard what the Electoral Commission thought, but I did see it on its website). However, I wanted the party to approve the news first before sharing it with you all. The following is the overseas release which was rewritten from the one sent to domestic newsmedia. One that includes a mention of the Bush–Cheney campaign of 2004 was sent to US media.

JY&A Consulting revamps logo for New Zealand’s Alliance Party

Wellington, May 9 (JY&A Media) New Zealand political party, the Alliance, is looking more modern and relevant, thanks to its new logo by JY&A Consulting (http://jya.net/consulting).
   Devised by JY&A Consulting’s Jack Yan, the new logo signifies a new beginning for the democratic socialist political party.
   Mr Yan says that he has been a keen observer of general elections in the UK, US and New Zealand since the 1980s and that played a part in his team’s design.
   He says the Conservatives in 1983, Labour in the UK in 1997 and 2002 and Labour in New Zealand in 1999 and 2003 had certain commonalties in their campaigns, centring around typography.
   He also said that in those years, the party’s name was important, not the symbol—hence the traditional Labour rose was not present on that party’s election materials in 1997 and 2002.
   By abandoning the old A symbol of the Alliance and concentrating on the word, Mr Yan says that the party looks more professional and ready.
   The Alliance has contested every General Election in New Zealand since 1993. However, due to party changes it is trying to rebuild itself for the country’s General Election later this year.
   ‘We have two major parties in New Zealand that vote pretty much the same on all issues,’ says Mr Yan, ‘and minor parties that get ignored because of a lack of visibility. I wanted to change that. Why should minor parties be laboured with second-rate brands?’
   The logo is based around the Frutiger typeface and its lettering is predominantly in red, with a red dot over the i in Alliance to signify its environmental awareness.
   He says the letter i also shows the humanizing aspect of the party.
   ‘As a piece of design I think it looks more cohesive than the committee-led logos of National and Labour,’ he says, criticizing the major two parties in New Zealand.
   ‘I was given a lot of freedom, which is a good sign of how the party leadership handles matters. It clearly believes in trusting the right people.’
   As well as heading JY&A Consulting’s parent, Jack Yan & Associates, Mr Yan co-wrote Beyond Branding in 2003 and is a director of the Medinge Group, a branding think-tank based in Sweden.
   In October 2007 he was a keynote speaker for the Alliance Party at its annual conference.

The opening title to Ashes to Ashes (BBC1, Thursday, 9 p.m.) has made it on to the internet and makes an interesting study.
   The comparisons to Life on Mars are obvious. Star Keeley Hawes narrates an introduction, as John Simm did with the original parent series. It’s taken from a line of dialogue that she delivered to herself in the mirror in the first episode—I think most of us saw that coming.
   Edmund Butt’s music is obviously a homage to his original theme for Life on Mars but with a more energetic electric guitar.
   The typeface chosen is interesting: the 1983-released Neue Helvetica. It’s not exactly what I would have chosen for the 1981 theme. However, this was also expected from the pilot’s opening, as well as the way the words Ashes to Ashes appear on screen, playing on a 1980s computer program.
   It’s clear that this is a related show even if you never saw the first episode and the designers have conveyed its feeling pretty well. Essentially, this is Life on Venus.

The titles to Blake Edwards’ The Tamarind Seed are a great example of the late Maurice Binder’s 1970s’ work. This spy film, with music by John Barry and starring Julie Andrews (the real-life Mrs Blake Edwards) and Omar Sharif, is little known and one of the very few times Edwards did not collaborate with composer Henry Mancini. The visuals and the theme work beautifully and Binder shows his preference by this time for Swiss typography (the use of Helvetica for one). In the past I had shown some 1960s’ Binder work, but I think there’s still a lot of modernist beauty to this 1974 film’s opening.

A YouTube member has been posting some beautiful Maurice Binder title sequences, including those from my favourite movies, Arabesque (mysteriously not released on DVD) and Charade. I love the modernist nature of Binder’s work, and while he is best known for the James Bond gun-barrel sequence, there was a lot more to the man’s designs.
   The following two are mated to Henry Mancini scores for Stanley Donen films.

   Another favourite (again with Mancini, and Donen producing and directing) is this opening from the Audrey Hepburn–Albert Finney film Two for the Road:    A few more to round off this post. We have The Grass Is Greener, which shows that Binder could do a very cute sequence with babies. The second is Raquel Welch packing a parachute in Fathom. Ken Hughes’ Billion Dollar Brain is unusual and less pleasant, but it fits with the tone of the last Harry Palmer film. But even here, Binder’s sense of modernist typography continues.    His style continued into the 1970s and remained, in my view, current for that decade. The last for this post is from the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me, and is closer to what some associate with Binder (girls and Helvetica). The Marvin Hamlisch song, performed by Carly Simon, is particularly fitting. The titles to Moonraker, which I find to be very 1970s and with a John Barry-composed song, are not yet on YouTube.
   In all cases, there is a sense of timelessness, which shows just how suited the principles of modernism were to title design. These ideas are still often observed by some of the most famous designers out there, such as Wayne Fitzgerald.

I see Mr Dan Rather is suing CBS for $70 million. Wow, for that, he can buy a cranky judge a pair of pants. I originally read the article on AP, but here is a version from the folks at E! News:

In the lawsuit filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, Rather accuses CBS of violating his contract by purposely cutting into his allotted airtime on 60 Minutes and of committing fraud by conducting a biased inquiry into the incident that came to be known as “Rathergate,” seriously damaging his reputation in the process.

   I’ll see if I can track the statement of claim down if we get some time here, but the inquiry, from my recollection, was hardly biased.
   At the centre were the Rathergate documents (or Killian documents), which were critical of the service from a young George W. Bush in the US National Guard. They were the subject of one of my articles in Desktop many moons ago, and I was interviewed around that time about my analysis. There are a few records of that interview around the web, but here is a part that I located, which I repost as a reasonably definitive analysis of the documents’ typography:

   Dan Rather, of CBS, claims in his defense of the documents that the Times Roman typeface has been around since 1931. That is true, but the specific cut of the typeface used in the letters is post 1985. According to Mr. Yan, “Every time a font is recut for a different machine, experts are able to tell. Each laser printer, each digital file, has subtle differences.” But, Dan Rather being the professional journalist he is certainly must know more about typeface than all the leading font developers and computer script geeks in the world do.
   Mr. Yan went on to state, “Specifically, the typeface in the letters appears to be Times Roman, as licensed by Linotype of Germany, after 1985. It is not Times New Roman as Mr. Rather claims (as 'New Times Roman' [sic]), which is different again—that is very evident from the PDFs. (Hence in a lawsuit I worked on in 2001, the typeface was designed in 1954 but could only possibly have come off a Hewlett Packard LaserJet III post 1993). Despite reproduction, the proportions and sizes of the letters relative to each other remain the same and are identifiable to any true typographic expert.” Now, I bet you won't hear this full explanation on CBS’s 60 Minutes I, II, or any other number they want to throw out.
   Can CBS find a typewriter hiding somewhere in a barn outside New York City that might be able to produce this exact typeface that Mr. Rather claims was bestowed upon these typewritten documents? Quite possibly they could, but the only typewriter that could of come close to resembling a Times typeface was an IBM Selectric and those letters don’t have the Times cut Mr. Rather is defending. To further the point of the ease of telling forgery typed documents Mr. Yan stated, “Even to a layperson, the Selectric Golfball settings would seem looser (i.e. the type is not so close together).”
   Still Mr. Rather claims that other documents from the White House have superscript. “Superscript letters,” Mr. Yan shared, “on old typewriters were either (a) in the same size but raised or (b) were separate, selected letters in a cut that made them visually the same weight. The 60 Minutes documents have superscript letters that could only have been proportionally and mathematically reduced on a computer.”
   Finally according to Mr. Yan the defenders of these documents make “very fundamental errors, they can be argued against by any first-year design student studying typography. They also seem to be skewing the issue away from the typeface, which the one matter that effortlessly categorizes CBS documents as counterfeit.”

   My view is: Dan Rather was lucky that he lasted as long as he did for a story based on forged documents. He could have gone the same way as his producer, Mary Mapes, who was fired.
   What we cannot comment on, without seeing the contracts, is this additional contention in the claim:

According to Rather's complaint, he extended his tenure as anchor of the network news broadcast in 2002 with a contract guaranteeing him $6 million-per-year and top billing on the midweek 60 Minutes spin-off if he happened to leave his anchor position before March 2006.

   However, the suit does go on about his post-Rathergate experiences:

   Rather's contract entitled him to a regular correspondent's position on 60 Minutes.
   Rather had eight segments on the air in 2005, all of which, according to him, he had to fight tooth and nail for and he still ended up with half as many reports as his colleagues.
   “He was provided with very little staff support, very few of his suggested stories were approved, editing services were denied to him, and the broadcast of the few stories he was permitted to do was delayed and then played on carefully selected evenings, when low viewership was anticipated,” the lawsuit states.

   I remember some press reports at the time that we would see Rather on 60 Minutes even after he stepped down as the anchor of the flagship news programme.
   I imagine that CBS would have been careful about airing his segments because mud sticks, so as an outsider I can’t say that Rather’s claims are without merit.
   But to allege that he was made a patsy for the White House—given the network’s anti-war stance—is a bit hard to believe.
   What does surprise me is this in the E! report:

CBS … forced him to issue a public apology on Sept. 20, 2004—“despite his own personal feelings that no public apology from him was warranted.”

   Personally, I think the apology was warranted. His own reputation was saved in part because of it—but now we learn that he didn’t feel sorry for duping the American public with fake documents, Rather might have to take a hit.
   Apparently, he wasn’t responsible for the errors, according to his complaint. At the time, however, the inquiry panel found:

   He relied on a trusted producer and didn't check the story for accuracy or, apparently, even see it before he introduced it on the program, the panel said.
   CBS rushed the story on the air and then blindly defended it when holes became apparent, said the panel, which was unable to say conclusively whether memos disparaging Bush's service were real or fake.

   As the President’s opponents will tell us, there is plenty of stuff which one can use to criticize Dubya. Resorting to fakery was unnecessary, especially using something that could be so readily exposed.
   The conservative press is already fuming:

Dan Rather’s lawsuit against CBS should be dismissed, both in court and in public opinion, as a shameless and ridiculous effort to retract his on-air apologies for his smearing of President Bush with bogus National Guard documents in 2004. The New York Times reports Rather is suing CBS for what he claims is the network’s “‘biased’ and incomplete investigation of the flawed Guard broadcast.” That’s rich, since it was Rather’s reporting itself that was biased and incomplete.

   The timing of reviews of Mr Rather’s report on the Boeing Dreamliner or 787 cannot do the man much good now, either. On Wired yesterday:

By taking a cheap shot at Boeing, Dan Rather may be headed for a comeback less graceful than Britney Spears' performance at the MTV Music Awards.

Aaron Rowe at Wired, who is trained in researching materials’ engineering, investigated Rather’s 787 report. He calls those summarizing his report to be ‘misleading’, but stops short at doing the same to Mr Rather. It does seem he’s been found not guilty by Mr Rowe, who raises the possibility that ‘Perhaps this is part of an attempt by Rather to make a comeback after the debacle that resulted in his departure from CBS News.’
   That may be all it is. Rather knows how the media work. He has been part of them and he has been the subject of them. And just a few triggers can get people re-reporting things inaccurately.
   It’s certainly getting him in the headlines, to be sure. Just like another person we thought we would not hear from again.
   In that context, Rather is still a pretty shrewd chap in his mid-70s.
   And now that the President is so unpopular, through the vagaries of the MSM, Rather might actually wind up looking more innocent.

Regardless of politics, I still feel this is one of those classic typographic works on a par with some of the best US designs of the 1960s. I immediately think of the greats like Milton Glaser.