MEANINGFUL MEMES

There’s a story behind each of these quotes, and the fonts in which they‘re typeset.

As part of my social media campaign, I’ve been posting quotes that are Shinntype specimens. Naturally, the font and setting must fit the tone of the words nicely, but in these “memes” I also try to have the text say something about the typeface or the layout, even if only obliquely.

 

I bought a lot of Sex Pistols’ records, was into the politics and style, read the punk fanzines, and was thrilled by Jamie Reid’s “ransom note” typography for the band. That was in 1977. When he died last year, I was prompted to make a typeface with that crazy effect—but not with only one glyph per character. The OpenType format enables far greater complexity, so my design, Polypraxia, has four alternates for each letter, number and symbol. Searching for suitable self-referential text, I came across the above quote in an interview with Reid in the fanzine Scam.

 

From a speech by George Brown (1818–1880), in the typeface bearing his name. He was one of the Fathers of Confederation, a politician and journalist, and the founder and editor of the influential Toronto Globe, which subsequently merged with The Mail and Empire, in 1936, to form The Globe and Mail.  When I was commissioned to design a suite of typefaces for that newspaper in 2001, it occurred to me to name the sans serif after the great man. The above text bears some relevance to the fractious state of Canadian politics today.

 

Dair is the authentic Cartier, as Carl Dair intended. He designed it to fit closely in body text, and that enabled an even tighter style for display setting, which was quite the thing in the 1970s. I have a collection of Canadian coffee table books from that era—many published by McClelland & Stewart—which show Cartier titles set very tightly, and such was the impetus for the TBNT (tight but not touching) version of Dair, specially kerned for headlines, shown above.
1967 was momentous for Mr Dair. His typeface Cartier was released, and his book Design with Type (still in print!) was published. And, perhaps not unrelated, he died of a heart attack on a flight from New York to Toronto. He did not, therefore, get to see his typeface used like this, but I’d like to think that it’s appropriate, following the M&S precedent, and subscribing to the principle of contrast which informs his textbook.

 

As research for the commission to design a typeface commemorating Mordecai Richler, I read several of his novels and was intrigued by Barney’s Version, his last. Strange to say, despite having many of the conservative qualities of a classic book face, the Richler typeface design was inspired by that very postmodern work. A full explanation is in this PDF.  

 

Beatrice Warde was the Marketing Manager of British Monotype, but the title falls short. She was a copywriter, editor, journalist, lecturer and in general a peerless ambassador for typography. Her text for a poster advertising the introduction of Perpetua in 1932, This is a Printing Office, was legendary and reproduced in print shops around the world.  As an essayist, she contributed to the Penrose album almost every year from 1937 to 1961, on everything from Cyril Burt’s readability research to the pseudo-typographic lettering in cartoonist Walt Kelly’s speech balloons.
The essay The Crystal Goblet or Printing Should be Invisible  marks a philosophy of typography that is fundamental. I would, however, be inclined to dispute it, especially to argue for its opposite in a certain kind of type specimen, e.g. for Pratt Nova, where the intent is to make the reader look at the typeface—in which case an ornate beer stein is to be preferred.

 

From the time I started using Apple computers in the 1980s, I was always hearing sensible people (Microsoft users) dismiss the Mac as too pricey, too artsy, and a niche product which wouldn’t last. That certainly seemed to be the case when the remarkable Mr Jobs was ousted and the company foundered in the mid ’90s. And when he was brought back—just the same only more so—and launched the odd and colourful iMac in 1998, they all had a good laugh, it being quite unlike what a computer was supposed to be. But he laughed last, as it rescued Apple from ruin and transformed the personal computer into a consumer product for the masses. Scotch Biplex: the answer to a question nobody asked.

 

I did wonder whether it would be appropriate to include something I’d written amongst all the quotes by famous writers, but the perspective of thirty years has introduced a mitigating element of otherness. I was a quite different person then.
Fontesque looks like a lot of fun, although in truth it was born of frustration with convention, if not anger, in keeping with the ethos of the day—grunge and deconstruction—and that’s apparent in the aggressive anaphora of this copy, written for the back cover of a specimen booklet.

 

Naming a typeface can take forever, but not in this case. Seeing as how I had combined the historically disparate elements of scribal lettering (37° upstroke), foundry type (modulated stem widths) and techno (mechanical regularity), Jean‑Luc Godard’s Alphaville sprung to mind. It’s a science fiction movie, shot in contemporary modernist buildings, with the protagonist a film noir private detective. Font and film, ostensibly futuristic, yet each a portmanteau blending the iconography of different eras. ●