Things are looking up

Unexpected events prevented me from distributing this in a timely manner, but it’s too good to let slip through the cracks.

Photograph intrepidly made by Tim Roth.

In case you’re not familiar with my dining table aerials, here’s some context, and below are some more examples.

All best,

Patrick.

Adults eating during kids' birthday party

Bucatini

Spring equinox aerial

Tom Vanderbilt wrote an excellent and informative article about self-driving cars in the new Wired magazine. You can read the whole thing online. I love the lede:

The object, vaguely pink, sits on the shoulder of the freeway, slowly shimmering into view. Is it roadkill? A weird kind of sagebrush? No, wait, it’s … a puffy chunk of foam insulation! “The laser almost certainly got returns off of it,” says Chris Urmson, sitting behind the wheel of the Prius he is not driving.

Distressed type, or type in distress?

Anyone can set type now, and millions of people do so everyday, perhaps without realizing they’re doing it. If you tweak a blog layout, fine-tune a Powerpoint presentation, or write a document in Word, you make decisions about type and readability that will affect the experience of anyone who reads or sees the work. It’s true that when texting or writing emails to personal friends, you needn’t fuss with getting your type (or grammar, or spelling) perfect. But when you write for an audience or the general public, you’re publishing, and when you’re publishing, it helps to know the basics of how type works.

I taught a class in graphic design in spring 2011, and as a result found myself synthesizing a lot of what I know into little handouts and talks. This article is one of my favorite handouts from the class. It came along early on, when I was teaching about the basics of type, and setting up a framework for discussion. First I gave a talk similar to the following text, and then we talked about the handout, which I’ve titled “We are all typesetters” and included here as a downloadable PDF for personal and educational use (please contact me if you’d like to use it for anything else).

The information here is very basic—a place to start. It’s aimed at students learning graphic design, and specifically the InDesign page layout program. But the general rules, and the story of how type has evolved, are useful for anyone who writes, designs, or communicates professionally, on the web or in print.

The relationship between designers, printers, and typesetters has changed considerably in the 600 years since movable type was invented.

At first, the “designing” and “typesetting,” and for that matter, the type design itself, was all taken care of by printers. Printers were also their own publishers.

In the 19th and 20th century a lot of these roles were split into separate divisions of labor. Up until about 20 years ago, it went like this:

The designer specified (“spec’d”) the type that would be set to fit into her design.

The typesetter (a separate person, usually working for a type house) received these instructions from the designer, and set the type on a typesetting machine, either by handsetting the lead type, or, as technology advanced, by using a keyboard to input the text and various codes. The type was then delivered to the designer on plain sheets of paper at the requested width. These sheets were called “galleys,” and comprised however much type was needed for the project, whether it was a two-word ad or a 60,000-word book.

The designer would then cut and trim the sheet of type to fit her design. If there were small changes they would sometimes be accomplished by cutting out text with razor and replacing it with newly set text. Or the designer would have a new block of type set with corrections in place.

Nowadays, the designer and the typesetter are the same person. As designers, we receive text from a variety of sources, usually digital and already typed in for us. However, when using this supplied type, and when writing or supplying our own text, we need to remember that we are now not just designers but also typesetters. Every time you decide on a font size, or change the length of a line, or break up a clause—or two!—with em dashes, or any number of other things that you can routinely do in various computer programs, you are setting type, and then re-setting it, and then setting it again.

The flexibility is marvelous. But it can also make for some really terribly set type. Your job is to learn the basics of how type works, so that your documents will be well-designed enough to attract the attention of your audience, and readable enough to reward their continued curiosity.

The PDF, “We are all typesetters,” describes some common mistakes that are carried over from the days when we were just writers and typists—not typesetters. It also covers some good typesetting practices to keep in mind as you work on your designs.

I recently discovered the Herb Lubalin Study Center through their photostream on Flickr. It’s a visually stunning collection of graphic design from 1950 to 1980.

Lubalin was one of the greatest designers of the twentieth century (and, thanks to his dominion over early 1970s design, a big influence on me). Steven Heller wrote a good roundup of his career here.

The Center was founded to house Lubalin’s vast design archive, both his own designs and many, many others. If you are in New York City you can visit, for free and by appointment, to study this incredible collection. Or you can just follow along with the images on the screen and enjoy from here. They’re on Twitter, too, if you swing that way.

Thanks to the folks at the Center for making this work accessible to all.

Above photographs courtesy of the Herb Lubalin Study Center.

The printer we worked with on this book is so accurate with color that the experience of receiving the printed book is a lot different than it used to be years ago. Instead of finding out what the book looks like in print, you find out that the book looks just like you thought it did! This is, of course, very convenient, though it removes a bit of the thrill of receiving the printed piece. The spine, though … the spine is still a surprise. And this one turned out just how I wanted it to.

If, by some misfortune, you won’t be attending Pickathon this year, you can buy a copy of the book from Tim’s website here. We hope that this book will usher in a regular, if not annual, printed celebration of the artists and people that make Pickathon special.

Typesetting note: The ‘Portlandia’ is a specific build of the Lyx, for Portland’s Clever Cycles shop. Typographically speaking, I treated it like a cultivar in a gardening book: enclosed it in single quotes, and kept other punctuation outside the quotes.

As someone who works with typography and design every day, I have a few books I turn to when I need to clear my mind of clutter. One of my favorites is Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style, which includes this rumination on the sanctity of the title page: “Think of the blank page as alpine meadow, or as the purity of undifferentiated being. The typographer enters this space and must change it. The reader will enter it later, to see what the typographer has done.” Lines like this refresh my understanding of the task at hand and clarify my sense of purpose.

Carolina de Bartolo’s new book Explorations in Typography has a similar effect, albeit via entirely different means.

Read the rest of the review on Typographica!

Every year the local Audobon chapter sponsors a "raptor road trip": a route along Sauvie Island with four bird-expert-staffed viewing stations, complete with spotting scopes, so that newbie bird watchers like us can see and identify various raptors and shorebirds. We’ve meant to go to this for years and finally made it this year. We saw a lot of birds — kestrels, bald eagles, sandhill cranes, egrets, snow geese — and had a fun day on a misty morning on Sauvie. Anastasia brought her little stuffie Owly along for the ride. Everyone, and I mean everyone, thought that was pretty darn cute.

This is a lot of things.

A photo of a mockup of a notebook idea i have.

The mockup will also become a piece of mail art for a mail art group I am participating in this year.

The words are a snippet from a poem I wrote, using found text, back in the 1990s.

This is also an interesting photograph of a work table in our office. I read a description of someone else’s "scarred worktable" and for the first time really understood what that would mean. Didn’t notice how scarred ours was till I made this photo.