T.I.N.T.I.N.Type and Installation Nowype and Installation Now

photo: joseph egan and hunter thompson

Table of Contents Table of Contents -

pg. 4-5 "flourish"

pg. 6-11 "Type n cast"

pg. 12-13 "new book"

pg. 14-19 "refining type"

pg. 20-21 "Alexis"

pg. 22-29 "Grooming font"

pg. 30-31 "Hair"

pg. 32-39" "reflection/ transparent"

pg. 41 "editors note"

T.I.N.

Magazine Design Project by -Alexander LaTourrette

FLOURISH BY DANA TANAMACHI-WILLIAMSDESIGN // Wednesday, 25 Jun 20141You might find Dana Tanamachi-Williams listening to country music or collecting vintage packaging for inspiration while she works on any given number of projects within her new-ly-formed Brooklyn-based design firm. Tanamachi Studio started modestly, but now Dana is adding clients like Oprah, Time Magazine, Nike, Burton, Target, and even Google to her roster. —Brent Gentile

Brent Gentile: I think I discovered Tanamachi Studio as a result of the chalk-based work, but is that something you’re currently moving away from?Dana Tanamachi-Williams: The funny thing is that by trade, I’m a graphic designer, letterer, and sometimes illustrator. When my work began to gain traction, it just happened to take the form of chalk. But I’ve never considered myself a “chalk artist.” That’s something total-ly different. I’m a designer, first and foremost, and that can come in many sizes, shapes, or mediums, so working with new materials was certainly uncharted territory professionally, but personally—not at all. For instance, last year I was approached by a publisher to create a how-to stencil book specifically to be used with chalk. I thought the idea was pretty fun, but felt that chalk was pretty limiting, considering how much I love working and crafting in different mediums. So, I pitched it to the publishers to let me do the book using paint, em-broidery, cut paper, bleach pen, etc. I simply showed them all the personal work I had been doing in these mediums, and they immediately gave me the green light. And I’m incredibly excited about releasing a typographic stencil book, DIY Type, this September. So, am I try-ing to move away from chalk? Not necessarily. It just feels like a natural progression to work in other mediums that I enjoy and feel comfortable in. I’m incredibly thankful my clients trust me enough to do so!

Have you always been interested in typography?Before my first design classes in college, I had no idea what typography was. But when we started learning about parts of letters, and the differences between serif and sans serif, a whole new world opened up to me. I remember thinking, “Wow, so you’re telling me that the spaces between each letter in a word really matter, and that they should all visually be the same? There are people out there who care about this stuff?” And I decided that I want-ed to be one of those people. I love design, and I put those elements to use every single day, but I mainly use letters and simple illustrations to solve most of my design challenges. It just feels right to me. After I graduated and moved to New York, I was able to draw a lot of type by hand while working on Broadway show posters at SpotCo during the day. And I’d find myself doing the same on my subway ride home or on nights and weekends.

With your most recent personal project, Flourish, it seems like you’re moving more toward using ornate patterns. Is that something new for you?Yes, pattern is definitely something new for me. While traveling to Tokyo a couple years ago, I became obsessed with collecting books of Japanese floral patterns. After I returned, I would visit Kinokuniya Bookstore here in NYC just to stay inspired. I knew there was a way to incorporate these patterns with my typography, I just didn’t know how that would take shape. Finally, last year, I embarked on this large-scale personal installation, Flour-ish, where I used these Japanese-inspired patterns to create giant letters on a 36’x11’ wall. I didn’t outline the letters, but instead let the pattern just fill up the shape of the letter and stop when it reached the exterior. Flourish was a lot of hard work, but incredibly thera-peutic. After quickly mapping out each letter, I spent the next three days drawing these patterns freehand with a gold paint pen. A month later, I was working with Nike on brand-ing the 2013 San Francisco Nike Women’s Marathon, and they loved the Flourish piece so much, they asked for a similar installation of their own. It definitely goes to show that if you continue pushing your limits with personal work that inspires you, clients will see what you’re capable of.

Type Casting Steven Brower ^My first job in book design was at New American Library, a publisher of mass-market books. I was thrilled to be hired. It was exactly where I wanted to be. I love the written word, and viewed this as my entrance into a world I wanted to participate in. Little did I suspect at the time that mass-market books, also known as pocket" books (they measure approxi¬mately 4" X 7", although I have yet to wear a pocket they fit comfortably into), were viewed in the design world as the tawdry stepchild of true liter¬ature and de-sign, gaudy and unsophisticated. I came to understand that this was due to the fact that mass-market books, sold extensively in super¬markets and convenience stores, had more in common with soap detergent and cereal boxes than with their much more dignified older brother, the hardcover first edition book. Indeed, the level of design of paperbacks was as slow to evolve as a box of Cheerios.On the other hand, hardcover books, as if dressed in evening attire, wore elegant and sophisticated jackets. Next in line in terms of standing, in both the literary and design worlds, was the trade paper edi-tion, a misnomer that does not refer to a specific audi-ence within an area of work, but, rather, to the second edition of the hardcover, or first edi-tion, that sports a paperbound cover. Trade paperbacks usually utilize the same inte-rior printing as the hardcover, and are roughly the same size (generally, 6" x 9").Mass-market books were not so lucky. The interior pages of the original edition were shrunk down, with no regard for the final type size or the eyes of the viewer. The interi-ors tended to be printed on cheap paper stock, prone to yellowing over time. The edges were often dyed to mask the different grades of paper used. The covers were usually quite loud, treated with a myriad of special effects (i.e., gold or silver foil, embossing and de-bossing, spot lamination, die cuts, metallic and Day-Glo pantone lors, thermography, and even holography), all designed to jump out at 1 and into your shopping cart as you walk down the aisle. The tradition mass-market covers had more in common with, and, perhaps, for the part is the descendant of, pulp magazine covers of earlier decades, their colorful titles and over-the-top illustrations, than that of its ^.stylish, larger, and more expensive cousins.

Article 1-Type Casting :Setting the tone for a letters visual language

So, when I made my entry into the elite world of literature, I began in the "bullpen" of a mass-market house. I believed I would be afforded a good opportunity to learn some-thing about type and image. Indeed, in my short tenure there, I employed more display typefaces in a year and a half than I will in the rest of my lifetime. And, I abused type more than I ever dreamed possible.There, type was always condensed or stretched so the height would be greater in a small format. The problem was that the face itself became distorted, as if it was put on the inquisitionist rack, with the horizontals remaining "thick" and the verticals thinning out. Back then, when type was "spec'd" and sent out to a typesetter, there was a standing order at the type house to condense all type for our company 20 percent. Sometimes, we would cut the type and extend it by hand, which created less distortion but still odd-looking fac-es. Once, I was instructed by the art director to cut the serifs off a face, to suit his whim. It's a good thing there is no criminal prosecution for type abuse.The art director usually commissioned the art for these titles. Therefore, the job of the designers was to find the "appropriate" type solu¬tion that worked with these illustra-tions to create the package. It was here that I learned my earliest lessons in the clichés of typography. Mass- market paperbacks are divided into different genres, distinct cate-gories that define their audience and subject matter. Though they were unspoken rules, handed down from generation to generation, here is what I learned about type during my employ:Typefaces I GenreWestern Romance Science FictionAfrican (in spite of the fact thatThe typeface is of German origin)MysteryChildren'sNonfictionHorrorHumor/Teen titles

And so it went. Every month, we were given five to six titles we were responsible for, and every month, new variations on old themes hung up on the wall. For a brief period I was assigned all the romance titles, which, themselves, were divided into subgenres (histor-ical, regency, contemporary, etc.). I made the conscious decision to create the very best romance covers around. Sure, I would use script and cursive type, but I would use better script and cursive type, so distinctive, elegant, and beautiful that I, or anyone else, would recognize the difference immediately. (When, six months after I left the job, I went to view my achievements at the local K-Mart, I could not pick out any of my designs from all the rest on the bookracks.)Soon after, I graduated to art director of a small publishing house. The problem was, I still knew little of and had little confidence in, typog¬raphy. However, by this time, I knew I knew little about typography. My solution, therefore, was to create images that contained the type as an inte¬gral part of the image, in a play on vernacular design, thereby avoiding the issue entirely. Thus began a series of collaborations with talented illustra¬tors and photographers, in which the typography of the jacket was incor¬porat-ed as part of the illustration. Mystery books especially lent themselves to this endeavor. A nice thing about this approach is that it has a cer¬tain informality and familiarity with the audience. It also made my job easier, because I did not have to paste up much type for the cover (as one had to do back in the days of T-squares and wax), since it was, for the most part, self-contained within the illustration. This may seem like laziness on my part, but hey, I was busy.Eventually, my eye began to develop, and my awareness and appreci-ation of good typog-raphy increased. I soon learned the pitfalls that most novice designers fall into, like utiliz-ing a quirky novelty face does not equal creativity and usually calls attention to the wrong aspects of the solution. The importance of good letter spacing became paramount. Find-ing the right combination of a serif and sans serif face to evoke the mood of the material within was now my primary concern. The beauty of a classically rendered letterform now moved me, to quote Eric Gill, as much "as any sculpture or painted picture." I developed an appreciation for the rules of typography.The RulesI said, it is a common mistake among young designers to think a quirky novelty face equals creativity. Of course, this couldn't be fartherfrom the truth. If anything, for the viewer, it has the opposite of the intended effect. Rather than being the total sum of individual expression, it simply calls attention to itself, detracting from, rather than adding to, the content of the piece. It is no substitute for a well-reasoned conceptual solu¬tion to the design problem at hand.As a general rule, no more than two faces should be utilized in any given design, usually the combination of a serif face and a sans serif face. There are thousands to choose from, but I find I have reduced the list to five or six in each category that I have used as body text throughout my career:SerifBodoniCaslonCheltenhamGaramondSans Serif Franklin Gothic Futura Giii Sans News Gothic Trade GothicYou should never condense or extend type. As I stated, this leads to unwanted distor-tions. Much care and consideration went into the design of these faces, and they should be treated with respect. There are thousands of con¬densed faces to choose from without resorting to the horizontal and ver¬tical scale frictions.

This is not as simple as it seems. The computer settings for type are rife with inconsistencies that need to be corrected optically. Certain combinations of letterforms are more difficult to adjust than others. It is paramount that even optical (as opposed to actual) spacing is achieved, regardless of the openness or closeness of the kerning. It helps if you view the setting upside down, or backwards on a light box or sun-filled window, or squint at the copy to achieve satisfactory spacing.I would caution you in the judicious use of drop shadows. Shadows these days can be rendered easily in programs such as Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator, and convincing-ly, too. The problem is, it is so easily done that it is overdone. Thus, the wholesale usage of soft drop shadows has become the typographic equivalent of clip art. Viewers know they have seen it before. Rather than being evocative, it mainly evokes the program it was created in.Hard drop shadows, ones that are 100 percent of a color, are easily achieved in Quark and placed behind the main text. This method is gener¬ally employed when the main text is not reading against the background, because of a neutral tone or an image that varies in tone from dark to light. The handed-down wisdom is; If you need a drop shadow to make it read, the piece isn't working. These solid drop shadows always look artificial, since, in reality, there is no such thing as a solid drop shadow. There should be a better solution to readability. Perhaps the background or the color of the type can be adjusted. Perhaps the type should be paneled or outlined. There are an infinite number of possible variations.If you must use a solid drop shadow, it should never be a color.Have you ever seen a shadow in life that is blue, yellow, or green? It should certainly nev-er be white. Why would a shadow be 100 percent lighter than what is, in theory, casting the shadow? White shadows create a hole in the background, and draw the eye to the shadow, and not where you want it to go: the text.Justified text looks more formal than flush left, rag right. Most books are set justified; while magazines are often flush left, rag right. Centered copy will appear more relaxed than asymmetrical copy. Large blocks of centered type can create odd-looking shapes that detract from the copy contained within.Another thing to consider is the point size and width of body copy. The tendency in recent times is to make type smaller and smaller, regard¬less of the intended audience. However, the whole purpose of text is that itbe read. A magazine covering contemporary music is different from the magazine for The American Association of Retired Persons.

It is also common today to see very tidy columns of text, with the copy set at a small point size. The problem is that a very tidy. Column is hard to read because it forces the

eye to move back and forth, tiring the reader. On the other hand, a very narrow measure also is objectionable, because the phrases and words are too cut up, with the eye jumping from line to line. We, as readers, do not read letter by letter, or even word by word, but, rather, phrase by phrase. A consensus favors an average of ten to twelve words per line.'

Lastly, too much leading between lines also makes the reader work too hard jumping from line to line, while too little leading makes it hard for the reader to discern where one line ends and another begins. The audience should always be paramount in the designer's approach, and it is the audience—not the whim of the designer, or even the client—that

defines the level of difficulty and ease with which a piece is read. As Eric Gill said in 1931, "A book is primarily a thing to be read."'

A final consideration is the size of the type. As a rule of thumb, mass-market books tend to be 8 point for reasons of space. A clothbound book, magazine, or newspaper usually

falls into the 9.5 point to 12 point range. Oversized art books employ larger sizes—gener-ally, 14 point to 18 point or more.

Choosing the right typeface for your design can be time-consuming. There are thousands to choose from. Questions abound. Is the face legible at the setting I want? Does it evoke

what I want it to evoke? Is it appro¬priate to the subject matter? There are no easy an-swers. When a student of mine used Clarendon in a self-promotion piece, I questioned why he chose a face that has 1950s connotations, mainly in connection with Reid Miles'

Blue Note album covers. He answered, "Because I thought it was cool." I lectured him profusely on selecting type simply based on its "coolness." Later, I relayed the incident to Seymour Chwast, of the legendary Pushpin Group (formerly Pushpin Studios). He

observed that Clarendon is actually a Victorian face, which he and his peers rewved as young designers in the 1950s. When I asked him why they chose to bring this arcane face

back to life, he replied, "Because we thought it was cool."

NEW BOOK: TYPORAMA: THE GRAPHIC WORK OF PHILIPPE APELOIGDESIGN // Wednesday, 26 Mar 20141

Influential on both sides of the Atlantic, Philippe Apeloig is considered one of the most fascinating and distinguished graphic designers working right now. Beginning his formi-dable career in 1985 when he designed the poster for the Musée d’Orsay’s first exhibition, Chicago, Birth of a Metropolis, Apeloig has worked and taught extensively for esteemed museums and cultural institutions in France and across the globe. He challenges, “My job is to perturb.” And indeed, Apeloig does just that with the visual language he creates in bro-chures, posters, exhibition catalogs, logos, and typefaces, consistently fashioning a mystical sense of movement and rhythm while inviting his audience to dance through the letters and lines. We have a feeling that Typorama: The Graphic Work of Philippe Apeloig, the gorgeous retrospective of a highly original graphic designer, will become essential reading for anyone with an interest in the recent history of graphic design. —Lalé Shafaghi Thames and Hudson Books

Breaking the RulesOf course, there are always exceptions to the rules. An infinite number of faces can be used within one design, particularly when you employ a

120 broadside-style ^e solution, a style that developed with the wood type settings of the nineteenth century. Another style, utilizing a myriad of faces, is that influenced by the Futurist and Dada movements of the early twentieth century. As Robert N.Jones stated in an article in. the May I960 issue of Pnn/magazine: "It is my belief that there has never been a type-face that is so badly designed that it could not be handsomely and effec-tively used in the hands of the right... designer.'" Of course;' this was before the novelty type explosion that took place later that decade, and, again, after the advent of the Macintosh computer. Still, Jeffery Keedy'a contemporary type designer whose work appears regular-ly in Emigre, con¬curs: "Good designers can make use of almost anything. The typeface is the point of departure, not the destination." Note the caveat "almost."Still, bad use of good type is much less desirable than good use of bad type.When I first began in publishing, a coworker decided to let me in on the "secrets" of pick-ing the appropriate face. "If you get 'a book on Lincoln to design," he advised, "look up an appropriate typeface in the index of the type specimen book." He proceeded to do so. "Ah, here we go— Log Cabin!"' While, on the extremely rare occasion, I have found this to be a useful method, it's a good general rule of what not to do.

Article 2-Refining Type-keeping style and font consistent

Back to Basics: Stopping Sloppy Typography John D. BerryThere's a billboard along the freeway in San Francisco that's entirely typo¬graphic, and very simple. Against a bright blue background, white letters spell out a single short line, set in quotation marks: "Are you looking' at me?" The style of the letters is traditional, with serifs; it looks like a line of dialogue, which is exactly what it's supposed to look like. Since this is a billboard, and the text is the entire message of the billboard, it's a witty comment on the fact that you are looking at "me"—that is, the message on the billboard—as you drive past.But, as my partner and I drove past and spotted this billboard for the first time, we both simultaneously voiced the same response; "No, I'm looking at your apostrophe!"The quotation marks around the sentence are real quotation marks, which blend in with the style of the lettering—^"typographers' quotes," as they're sometimes called—^but the apostrophe at the end of "looking" is, disconcertingly, a single "typewriter quote," a straight up-and-down line with a rounded top and a teardrop tail at the bottom.To anyone with any sensitivity to the shapes of letters, whether they know the terms of typesetting or not, this straight apostrophe is like a fart • in a symphony—^boorish, crude, out of place, and distracting. The normal quotation marks at the beginning and end of the sentence just serve to make the loud "blat!" of the apostrophe stand out. If that had been the purpose of the billboard, it would have been very effective. But unless the billboards along Highway 101 have become the scene of an exercise in typographic irony, it's just a big old' mistake. Really big and right out there in plain sight.

The Devil Is In the DetailsThis may be a particularly large-scale example, but it's not unusual. Too much of the signage and printed matter that we read—and that we, if we're designers or typographers, create—is riddled with mistakes like this. It seems that an amazing number of people responsible for creating graphic matter are incapable of noticing when they get the type wrong, this should not be so. These fine points ought to be covered in every basic class in typography, and basic typography ought to be part ofthe education of every graphic designer. But clearly, this isn't the case—or else a lot of designers skipped that part of the class, or have simply for-gotten what they once learned about type. Or, they naively believe the software they use will do the job for them.Maybe it's time for a nationwide—no, worldwide—^program of remedial courses in using type.Automated ErrorsAs my own small gesture toward improvement, I'll point out a couple of the more obvi-ous problems—^in the hope that maybe, maybe, they'll become slightly less common-place, at least for awhile.Typewriter quotes and straight apostrophes are actually on the wane, thanks to word-processing programs and page-layout programs that offer the option of automati-cally changing them to typographers' quotes on the fly. (I'm not sure what has made the phenomenon I spotted on that billboard so common, but I've noticed a lot of examples recently of text where the double quotation marks are correct but the apostrophes are straight.) But those same automatic typesetting routines have created another almost uni-versal mistake: where an apostrophe at the' beginning of a word appears backwards, as a single open quotation mark. You see this in abbreviated dates ('99, '01) and in colloquial spellings, like 'em for them. ■ The program can turn straight quotes into typographers' quotes automati-cally, making any quotation mark at the start of a word into an open quote, and any quotation mark at the end of a word into a closed quote, but it has no way of telling that the apostrophe at the beginning of 'em isn't supposed to be a single open quote, so it changes it into one.The only way to catch this is to make the correction by hand— every time.

e. Anemic TypeThe other rude noise that has become common in the symphony hall is fake small caps. Small caps are a wonderful thing, very useful and some-times elegant; fake small caps are a distraction and an abomination.Fake caps are what you get when you use a program's "small caps" command. The software just shrinks the fill-size capital letters down by a predetermined percent-age—^which gives you a bunch of small, spindly- looking caps all huddled together in the middle of the text. If the design calls for caps and small caps that is, small caps for the word but a fill cap for the first letter—it's even worse, since the fit-size caps draw attention to themselves because they look so much heavier than the smaller caps next to them. (If you're using caps and small caps to spell out an acronym, this might make sense; in that case, you might want the initial caps to stand out. Otherwise, it's silly. (And—here comes that word again— distracting.)If it weren't for a single exception, I'd advise everyone to just forget about the "small caps" command—forget it ever existed, and never, ever, touch it again. (The exception is Adobe InDesign, which is smart enough to find the real small caps in an OpenType font that includes them, and '■ use them when the "small caps" command is invoked. Un-fortunately, InDesign isn't smart enough, or independent enough, to say, "No, thanks," when you invoke "small caps" in a font that doesn't actually have any. It just goes ahead and makes those familiar old fake small caps.) You don't really need small caps at all, in most typesetting situations; small caps are a typo¬graphic refinement, not a crutch. If you're going to use them, use real small caps: properly designed letters with the form of caps, but usually a little wider, only as tall as the x-height or a little taller, and with stroke weights that match the weight of the lowercase and the caps of the same type¬-face. Make sure you're using a typeface that has true small caps, if you want small caps. Letter space them a little, and set them slightly loose, the same • way you would (or at least should) with a word in all caps; it makes the word much more readable.

ALEXIS TYRSA TYPOGRAPHYILLUSTRATION // Monday, 14 Oct 2013211

"Alexis Taïeb – known as Tyrsa – discovered graffiti in the late 90s, and it was graffiti that led him to discover his natural talent and love of typography. He studied at the renowned Gobelins School in Paris, where he honed his unique and adaptable style with a focus on print and web design. Since graduating in 2007, he has amassed a versatile portfolio of work that showcases his engaging and precise visual style. Varied as it is, his work is linked by one simple goal – to reinvent the simple letter without losing any of its beauty or its meaning. His versatility and modern edge have led to work with Parisian agencies BETC Euro RSCG, Publicis, DDB, TBWA and Sid Lee, and his recent projects include designing logos and print campaigns for Jordan, Nivea Q10, Ricard and Adidas." - Alexis Taïeb

Article3-GROOMING THE FONTWriting begins with the making of meaningful marks.

10.1 LEGAL CONSIDERATIONS10.1.1 Check the license before tuning a digital font.Digital fonts are usually licensed to the user, not sold outright, and the license terms vary. Some manufacturers claim to believe that improving a font produced by them is an infringement of their rights. No one believes that tuning a piano or pumping up the tires of a car infringes on the rights of the manufacturer - and this is true no matter whether the car or the piano has been rented, leased or purchased. Printing type was treated the same way from Bf Sheng's time until the 1980s. Generally speaking, metal type and prototype are treated that way still. In the digital realm, where the font is whol-ly intangible, those older notions of ownership are under pressure to change.The Linotype Library's standard font license says that "You may modify the Font-Soft-ware to satisfy your design require¬ments." FontShop's standard license has a similar provision: "You198do have the right to modify and alter Font Software for your cus¬tomary personal and business use, but not for resale or further distribution." Adobe's and Agfa Monotype's licenses contain no stich provision. Monotype's says instead that "You may not alter ^ .f Font Software for the purpose of adding any functionality..,. You V agree not to adapt, modify, alter, translate, convert, or otherwisechange the Font Software...." . ' GroomingIf your license forbids improving the font itself, the only the Font legal way to tune it is through a software override. For example, ' you can use an external kerning editor to override the kerning table built into the font. This is the least elegant way to do it, but a multitude of errors in fitting and kerning can be masked, if- r '' need be, by this means.

10.2 ETHICAL & AESTHETIC CONSIDERATIONS'10.2.1 If it isn’t broken...., Any part of the font can be tuned - letter shapes, character set, c, fcharacter encoding, fitting and side bearings, kerning table, hint- ' 'A ing, and, in an Open-Type font, the rules governing character sub- ^ ^ ■v ' stitution. What doesn't need tuning or fixing shouldn't be touched.-1 If you want to revise the font just for the sake of revising it, you ^^"^4 better to design your own instead. And if you hack up 1^1" someone else's font for practice, like a biology student cutting up a frog, you might cremate or bury the results.^0^2.2 If the font is out of tune, fix it once and for all.One way to refine the typography of a text is to work your way through it line by line, putting space in here, removing it there, and repositioning errant characters one by one. But if these re- ' filaments are made to the font itself, you will never need to make •-them again. They are done for good.i^o.2.3 Respect the text first of all, the letterforms second, the type ■designer third, the foundry fourth.needs of the text should take precedence over the layout of I the font, the integrity of the letterforms’ over the ego of the de- signer, the artistic sensibility of the designer over the foundry's desire for profit, and the founder's craft over a good deal else.■aifi;" 199'fc.IsA r 10.2.4 Keep on fixing.Check every text you set to see where improvements can be made Then return to the font and make them. Little by little, you and the instrument - the font, that is - will fuse, and the type you set will start to sing. Remember, though, this process never ends Ethical and There is no such thing as the perfect font.

AestheticConsider- 10.3 HONING THE CHARACTER SET actions10.3.1 If there are defective glyphs, mend them.If the basic letter shapes of your font are poorly drawn, it is probably better to abandon it rather than edit it. But many fonts combine superb basic letterforms with alien or sloppy supple¬mentary characters. Where this is the case, you can usually rest' assured that the basic letterforms are the work of a real designee' whose craftsmanship merits respect, and that the supplementary- characters were added by an inattentive foundry employee. The- latter's errors should be remedied at once.You may find for example that analphabetic characters such.as @ + ± X = © are too big or too small, too light or toodark, too high or too low, or are otherwise out of tune with the basic alphabet. You may also find that diacritics in glyphs such" as a 9 e n 6 u are poorly drawn, poorly positioned, or out of scale with the letterforms.l + 2 = 3<9> 6±l -2x4a + b = c ■ a@b • © 2007 I + 2 = 3<9>6±I -2x4 a + b = c ■ a@b • © 2007jos^ Mendoza y Almeida's Photina Is an excellent piece of design, but in every weight and style of Monotype digital Photina, as issued by the foundry, arithmetical signs and other alphabets are out of scale and out of position, and the copyright symbol and at sign are alien to the font. The raw versions are shown in grey, corrected versions in black.euod-^euoi^Tfederic Coudy's Kennerley is a homely but quite pleasant type, usefulSf for many purposes, but in Lanston's digital version, the letterforms are*"^■burdened with some preposterous diacritics. Above left: four accepted J??Sorts as issued by the foundry. Above right: corrected versions. All fonts sort candidates for similar improvement. Below left: four accented sorts ^from Robert Slimbach's carefully honed Minion, as originally issued by @clobe in 1989. Below right: the same glyphs, revised byS-limbach ten years later, while preparing the OpenType version of the face./\..A ft \ Aa e 1 u a e 1 u%Sf5$•&•.ft'Jio.3.2 If text figures, ligatures or other glyphs you need on a ■ ^regular basis don't re-side on the base font, move them.?</for readable text, you almost always need text figures, but most ^digital fonts are sold with titling figures instead. Most digital fonts -/"also include the ligatures fi and fl but not ff, ffi, ffl, ^ or f^. You may ^^, find at least some of the missing glyphs on a supplementary font ^ (an 'expert font'), but that is not enough. Put all the basic glyphs ^together on the base font.If, like a good Renaissance typographer, you use only upright ^ parentheses and brackets (see §5.3.2), copy the upright forms from "|, the roman to the italic font. Only then can they be kerned and fetf^P^ced correctly without fuss.

'10.3.3 if glyphs you need are missing altogether, make them.'Standard iso digital text fonts (PostScript or TrueType) have 256 slots and carry a ba-sic set of Western European characters. Eastern European characters such as^cdegh-lnof^t'uare usually missing. So are the Welsh sorts "w and y, and a host of characters

which are accessible directly from the keyboard, or slots such as <t ^ ^~ ° %o I, which can be reached through insertion utilities or by typing character codes or by customizing the keyboard.If you need to add many such characters, you will need to make a supplementary font or, better yet, an enlarged font (True¬Type or OpenType). If these are for your own use only, the extra characters can be placed wherever you wish. If the fonts are to be shared, every

10.3.6 Check the kerning of the word space.The word space - that invisible blank box - is the most common character in almost every text. It is normally kerned against slop¬ing and undercut glyphs: quotation marks, apos-trophe, the letters- A,T, V, W, Y, and often to the numerals 1,3,5. It is not, hpwevei) nor-mally kerned more than a hair either to or away from a pre¬ceding lowercase/in either roman or italic.A cautionary example. Most of the Monotype digital reviv¬als I have tested over the years have serious flaws in the kerning tables. One problem in particular recurs in Monotype Baskerville, Centaur ^ Arrighi, Dante, Fournier, Gill Sans, Poliphilus & Blados Van Dijck and other masterworks in the Monotype collection. These are well-tried faces of superb design - yet in defiance of tradition, the maker's kerning tables call for a large space (as much as M/4) to be added whenever the/ is followed by a word space. The result is a large white blotch after every word ending in/unless a mark of punctuation intervenes.Is it east of the sun and west of the moon — or is it west of the moon and east of the sun?Monotype digital Van Dijck, before and after editing the kerning table.issued, the kerning table adds 127 units (thousandths of an em) in the roman, and 228 in the italic, between the letter/and the word space. The corrected table adds 6 units in the roman, none in the italic. Other, iess drastic refinements have also been made to the kern-ing table used in the second two lines.Professional typographers may argue about whether the added space should be zero, or ten, or even 25 thousandths of an em. But there is no professional dispute about wheth-er it should be on the order of an eighth or a quarter of an em. An extra space at large is a prefabricated typographic error - one that would reek of disbelief and instantaneous correction from |Tenley Morison, Bruce Rogers, Jan van Krimpen, Eric Gill and others on whose expertise and genius the Monotype heritage is built. But it is an easy error to fix for anyone equipped with the Requisite tool: a digital font editor.

10.4.1 If the font looks poor at low resolutions, check the hinting.Digital hints are important chiefly for the sake of how the type will |6ok on screen. Broadly speaking, hints are of two kinds: generic Kints that apply to the font as whole and specific hints applicable only to individual characters. Many fonts are sold unhinted, andfonts indeed are sold with hints that cannot be improved. 1 Manual hinting is tedious in the extreme, but any good font editor of recent vintage will include routines for automat-ed hint¬ing. These routines are usually enough to make a poorly hinted l0xt font more legible on screen. (In the long run, the solution is high-resolution screens, making the hinting of fonts irrelevant except at tiny sizes.) That is to say: leaving the traces of meaningful gestures. Typography begins with arrang-ing meaningful marks that are already made. In that respect, the practice of typography is like playing the piano - an instrument quite different from the human voice. On the piano, the notes are already fixed, although their order, duration and amplitude are not. The notes are fixed but they can be endlessly rearranged, into meaningful music or meaningless noise.

Pianos, however, need to be tuned. The same is true of fonts. To put this in more literary terms, fonts need to be edited just as carefully as texts do - and may need to be re-edited, like texts, when their circumstances change. The editing of fonts, like the editing of texts, begins before their birth and never ends.You may prefer to entrust the editing of your fonts, like the tuning of your piano, to a professional. If you are the editor of a magazine or the manager of a publishing house, that is probably the best way to proceed. But devoted typographers, like lutenists and guitarists, often feel that they themselves must tune the in¬struments they play. Pay Attention, NowThere are plenty of other bits of remedial typesetting that we ought to study, but those will do for now. The obvious corollary to all this is, to pro-duce well-typeset words, whether in a single phrase on a billboard or sev-eral pages of text, you have to pay atten-tion. Proofread. Proofread again. Don’t trust the defaults of any program you use. Look at good typesetting and figure out how it was done, then do it yourself. Don’t be sloppy. Aim for the best.Words to live by, I suppose. And, certainly, words to set type by.JW

The spacing of letters is part of the essence of their design. A well-made font should need little adjustment, except for refining the kerning. Remember, however, that kerning tables exist for the sake of problematical sequences such as/*,gy, "A, To, Va and 74. If you find that simple pairs such as 00 or oe require kerning, this is a sign that the letters are poorly fitted. It is better to correct the side bearings than to write a bloated kerning table.The spacing of many alphabetic, however, has as much to do with editorial style as with typographic design. Unless your fonts are custom made, neither the type designer nor the founder can know what you need or prefer. I habitually increase the left sidebearing of semicolon, colon, question and exclamation marks, and the inner bearings of guillemets and parentheses, in search of a kind of Channel Island compromise; neither the tight fitting preferred by most anglophone editors nor the wide-open spacing customary in France. If I worked in French all the time, I might increase these sidebearings further.abc: def; ghx? klm! «non» abc: def; ghx? klml «hmm» abf: def; ghx ? klm! « oui»Three options for the spacing of basic alphabets in Monotype digital Centaur: foundry is-sue (top); French spacing (bottom); and something in between. Making such adjustments one by one by the insertion of fixed spaces can be tedious. It is easier by far, if you know what you want and you want it consistently, to incorporate your preferences into the font.

10.3.5 Refine the kerning table.Digital type can be printed in three dimensions, using zinc or polymer plates, and metal type can be printed flat, from photos or scans of the letterpress proofs. Usually, however, metal type is printed in three dimensions and digital type is printed in two. Two-dimen-sional type can be printed more cleanly and sharply Grooming than three-dimensional type, but the gain in sharpness rarely the Font equals what is lost in depth and texture. A digital page is there¬fore apt to look anemic next to a page printed directly from handset metal.This imbalance can be addressed by going deeper into two dimensions. Digital type is capable of refinements of spacing and kerning beyond those attainable in metal, and the primary means of achieving this refinement is the kerning table.Always check the side bearings of figures and letters before you edit the kerning table. Side bearings can be checked quickly for errors by disabling kerning and setting char-acters, at ample size, in pairs: 11223344 ■ ■ • qqwweerrtt)^':... If the spacing within the pairs appears to vary, or if it appears consistently cramped or loose, the side bearings probably need to be changed.The function of a kerning table is to achieve what perfect side bearings cannot. A thor-ough check of the kerning "table therefore involves checking all feasible permutations of charac¬ters: 1213141516 ... qwqeqrqtqyquqiqoqpq ... (a(s(d(f(g(h(j(k(l ... )a)s)d)f)g... -1-2-3-4-5 ... TqTwTeTrTtTyTuTiToTp ... and so on. This will take several hours for a standard iso font. For a full pan-European font, it will take several days.Class-based kerning (now a standard capability of font edit¬ing software) can be used to speed the process. In class-based kerning, similar letters, such esaddddddddq, are treated as one and kerned alike. This is an excellent way to begin when you are kerning a large font, but not a way to finish. The combina¬tions Ta and Ta, Ti and Ti, il and 11, i) and 1), are likely to require different treatment. If you know what texts you wish to set with a given font, and know that combinations such as these will never occur, you can certainly omit them from the table. But if you are prepar-ing a font for general use, even in a single language, remember that it should accommo-date the occasional foreign phrase and the names of real and fictional people, places and things. These can involve some unusual combinations. Character It is also wise to check the font by running a test file - a spe- Set daily written text designed to hunt out miss-ing or malformed characters and kerning pairs that are either too tight or too loose. On pages 204-205 is a short example of such a test file, showing the difference between an ungroomed font and a groomed one.It is nothing unusual for a well-groomed iso font (which might contain around two hundred working characters) to have a kerning table listing a thousand pairs. Kerning instructions for large OpenType fonts are usually stored in a different form, but if con-verted to tabular form, the kerning data for a pan-European Latin font may easily reach 30,000 pairs. For a well-groomed Latin-Greek-Cyrillic font, decompiling the kerning instructions can generate a table of 150,600 pairs. Remember, though, that the number isn't what counts. What matters is the intelligence and style of the kerning. Remember too that there is no such thing as a font whose kerning cannot be improved.

TYPOGRAPHY WITH HAIRILLUSTRATION // Friday, 20 Sep 2013221

This typeface 'Hair type' is constructed out of strands of hair gathered together. Each clump of hair is shaped to form a letter in the alphabet from designer Monique Goossens. Mo-nique's work includes elements of both design and autonomous art. It often takes the form of staged images in which she challenges established concepts of function and material. In consequence, shifts occur at elementary level and result in a degree of estrangement. A refined appreciation of materials enhances this process, leading to beautiful and unexpect-ed discoveries. Photographs of these scenes become the definitive works. Monique’s work is playful, humorous, surprising. Her graphic work follows a similar process as she collates photographs into books and develops letter types using a range of materials.

Type Project-" transparent/reflection"by Alex Latourrette

A part of typographic intrigue, Transparent/Reflection is a work made to provoke the intellect behind typography. Type is a man made force created entirely artificially for the purpose of mental manipulation. The veryheart of typography’s success lies in how obnoxiously subtle it is. It enters your subconcious state of mind, planting a nest of words and concepts that can influence your behavior.

Transparent/Reflection started as a way to show the ipact of something that is near invisble. However as the proj-ect progressed and obstacles came up the purpose of the project changed and warped. The clear tiles meant to sig-nify the clearness of type broke and cracked, the seams falling apart. eventually on the aluminum frame meant to hold the original letter “interpretate” was left. Type can be an interpretation, but in the end its purpose is to loudly and silently provoke ideas.

The coarse plexi-glass tiles, tak-ing their once intended shape. were taken apart for aluminum glue.

Stuffed in a paint bucket. They would also be guide-lines for the paper letters to come.

Using the plexiglass idea as the core con-cept, the letters “transparent” were cut out of white and taped to the sidewalk. using chalk and exacto knives for precise cuts.

the mirroring letters would serve as this form of reflection.

Opposite the new pa-per letters were aluminum letters bent by hand. Using the reflective element of a metal was the core concept here. shining a dim yellow glow at night, it would be a metaphor for hidden transparency.

The two projects side by side caught the attention of peo-ple passing by. By forcing their subject matter into this corridor, travlers would see it.

It was fully installed for 2 days pending. A small chalk line traced from it all the way to the plaza entrance.

At night a lone bucket with slips of paper would tell the dual meaing of the installation. In the background i carved a man of stars and flowers, inspired by my good friend from far away. At the ready, awnsering nay ques-tions people had during the art walk first friday.

Overall, it was a very catharticly relaxing project. A minor success and a great challenge.

Editors Note:A willing and motivated team that cna work as friends re most effective.

Before any hard work can be acheived make sure people have friends that they can ask for help. :)

Aside work diligence is due, where it is lacking discipline is a must.

T.I.N.