Luna’s Café

eBooks – linear, interrupted

2011-11-21T17:29:00.001Z

I’ve been happily reading G. K. Chesterton’s The man who was Thursday on my iPad. Happily, because the only print edition I own is the 1938 Penguin edition, which is set in 10/11pt Monotype Times New Roman in a style which decided pre-dates Tschichold’s Penguin composition rules: extra spaces between sentences, no word division to help justification, spaced-off punctuation, etc. Print isn’t always lovely.

Using Stanza, I could format the Project Gutenberg text pretty much as I wanted to – with indents, not line spaces to separate paragraphs, the ability to alter line feed independently of face size; yes, I managed to format quite a happy page. The iPad choice of fonts is restricted but in this case, with little italic or anything more exotic in the text, Apple/HTF’s Hoefler Text looked ok.

So why did I enjoy Thursday when I’ve previously ranted about the typographic problems with eBooks? It all comes down to the configuration of the text.

Although a fantasy (‘nightmare’ is Chesterton’s description), Thursday is pretty much a standard prose novel. A few poetry extracts (we’ll come to those later), and more than a dozen chapter headings, but otherwise just paragraphs of text. No subheadings, no pictures, no lists, no tables, no notes. Using the schema devised by Michael Twyman to describe the possible configurations of verbal graphic language, the bulk of Thursday sits firmly in the category labelled ‘linear interrupted’.

‘Linear interrupted’ means that the text just runs on, in a linear fashion, within each paragraph unit. Paragraphs themselves are ordered in a linear sequence, with no differentiation. The ‘interruption’ is only imposed by the external constraint of the frame in which the text is composed – in metal, the text area formed by the page chase, in digital page layout by the text box and its margins, or the area available on the screen in which text can be rendered. Line breaks are arbitrary, and understood by the reader as such. The arbitrariness is reinforced in traditional print by the choice of justified setting, which neatens everything up into a block, so the only deviation from a regular left or right margin is the (meaningful) white space that indicates a paragraph start or break-line.

(Of course, many typographers argue that even word spacing – even at the expense of an aligned right-hand edge – is an even better indication of linearity, through the evenness of rhythm it indicates, than the squaring up of text. But these are just two ways of indicating to the reader that the stuff just runs on.)

And even in traditional typesetting, the idea of being able to reflow a text into a given space is a common one. Books are always being reset, reformatted, larger, smaller – my Thursday is, I’m sure one of dozens of typographic presentations of that text. But as a nearly pure piece of linear interrupted, it is eminently reflowable, and fits the reflow model of the dynamic-layout eBook very well. While every book designer thinks they have hit on the perfect page for their publication, you can’t deny the need for more than one solution.

So where does the reflow model break down? Well, even in Thursday, it breaks down whenever a paragraph isn’t a ‘normal’ one. It doesn’t have to, because the text could have attributes, or the text engine rules, that prevented the following problems:

Chapter heading becoming detached from the following text. Stanza doesn’t seem to observe keep options, or maybe the headings are not properly coded as headings – after all, the one defining attribute of a heading is that it belongs with what follows, not what went before.

Poetry being ‘over-displayed’. I mentioned that you could decide whether to indicate paragraphs by vertical space (staccato) or no space and indents (traditional, more linear). Well, you can for main text, but not for displayed text, which was coded/rendered with a line space between each line of quoted verse.

Hyphenation. I left this on, and most of the time it worked. It broke capitalized words, though, and didn’t seem to mind breaking a very short word (the hero’s name is Syme, or Sy- | me as it was often rendered).The text is also short enough to read in about 3 or 4 sittings, so the lack of headlines wasn’t a bother (Stanza doesn’t bother you with an over-intrusive ‘where you are in the book’ indicator, though you can see a percentage read if you want to.)

So far, the Stanza implementation of Thursday was, as I said, reasonably happy. Better than a crampedpre-war Penguin. But as you can see, even in this text, anything that vergesout of the pure linear interrupted mode starts causing problems. Enlarging thetype, I forced the lines of poetry to turn over. The turns align with the startof the line rather than indenting – but while this is not as good as a hangingindent, it is, I suppose, better than having the start of the line indentedwith the continuation full out, which would really blur the distinction betweenprose and verse.

You will also have noticed from the screen-shots that thequote marks are straight throughout this text, which is a pity given the generallygood appearance of the type.

To conclude, Michael Twyman’s schema gives us a usefulchecklist of the configurations that demand spatially sensitive, rather thanarbitrarily reflowing, presentation. A list (and you can define poetry as beingmore list-like than continuous prose-like) needs its list-iness preserved.Headings are also a kind of list, in that they have text nested beneath themwhich, if hidden, renders the headings as a list of contents. A play or poem with line numbers is not continuous prose, but some kind of matrix, where the alignment of rows across columns must be preserved if the text area is resized. One could go on. But I would argue that beingmore analytical about the configuration that the individual elements that a textcontains will lead to better designed eBooks through better design of thecomposition rules that render them.

Michael Twyman, ‘The graphic presentation of language’, Information Design Journal, Volume 3, Number 1, 1982, pp. 2–22

Diagramming remembrance

2011-11-11T23:00:00.000Z

¶ Two interesting articles here and here.
With acknowledgement to Jessica Hagy

Steve Jobs on design

2011-10-08T16:58:00.001+01:00

‘Design is not limited to fancy new gadgets. Our family just bought a new washing machine and dryer. We didn’t have a very good one so we spent a little time looking at them. It turns out that the Americans make washers and dryers all wrong. The Europeans make them much better – but they take twice as long to do clothes! It turns out that they wash them with about a quarter as much water and your clothes end up with a lot less detergent on them. Most important, they don’t trash your clothes. They use a lot less soap, a lot less water, but they come out much cleaner, much softer, and they last a lot longer.

‘We spent some time in our family talking about what's the trade-off we want to make. We ended up talking a lot about design, but also about the values of our family. Did we care most about getting our wash done in an hour versus an hour and a half? Or did we care most about our clothes feeling really soft and lasting longer? Did we care about using a quarter of the water? We spent about two weeks talking about this every night at the dinner table. We’d get around to that old washer-dryer discussion. And the talk was about design.

‘We ended up opting for these Miele appliances, made in Germany. They’re too expensive, but that’s just because nobody buys them in this country. They are really wonderfully made and one of the few products we’ve bought over the last few years that we’re all really happy about. These guys really thought the process through. They did such a great job designing these washers and dryers. I got more thrill out of them than I have out of any piece of high tech in years.’

Wired, Issue 4.02, February 1996

¶ Thanks to Alison Black for pointing me to this article.

Understanding the past, designing the present

2011-09-25T21:43:00.002+01:00

This was the presentation I gave at Researchers’ Night at the University of Reading on 23 September 2011

I’m a researcher in, and apractitioner of, typographic design – that is the way we present languagevisually on the written, printed, or electronic page and in the environment –and my main concern is how very complex texts, such as works of reference, canbe made easier for the reader to use.

So I’ll talk about my work that isconcerned with the history of English dictionary design, and how that connectswith the design of dictionaries today; and also how looking at important earlyeditions of the Book of Common Prayerled to the design decisions necessary when producing a scholarly text of thebook for widespread publication.

Lexicographers, the people whowrite dictionaries, are very close to leading edge research in linguistics.Dictionaries in the popular mind are prescriptive – is it in the dictionary? –and there is an annual publicity fest when publishers announce which words arein (flashmob, crowd source) and which are out (charabanc, aerodrome).This is good fun, but it hides the real descriptive nature of dictionaries.Underlying every dictionary is information about the connections between words,about the patterns in language.

In Samuel Johnson’s day, thisinformation was evidenced by the collection of literary quotations that heresearched and collected. Today the evidence is contained in corpora, large collectionsof written, printed, and broadcast texts that have been transcribed and taggedso that they can be sorted and searched. Corpora have transformed dictionarymaking, allowing quantitative evidence to replace the lexicographer’sinevitably partial reading or prejudice.

Dr Johnson acknowledged themutability of language – in his Plan of an English dictionary (1747) for the dictionary he implied he would ‘fix’ theEnglish language (in a bid to obtain funding through the prospect of a concreteresult), in his final Preface to the published work (1755) he admitted languagewas beyond fixing. Corpora can change with the use of language, anddictionaries can stay abreast of how we, the people, use words.

Johnson’s dictionary, of course,was reprinted and effectively rewritten many times in the century or so afterits publication. And its presentation changed, too. Nineteenth centurydictionaries developed a habit of presenting the supporting quotations – theactual evidence of usage – in smaller type, in order perhaps to save space.Looking back at Johnson’s original page design, we see just one size of type:and equality is implied between the evidence and the interpretation, andbetween the original authors and the dictionary maker: indeed, the authornames, carefully arranged at the right of the column, can be seen asalternative access points into the text, balancing the capital headwords on theleft.

I was able to use some of theinsights gained by looking at Johnson’s dictionary when working on the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary and arange of school dictionaries. In the Shorter,it became clear that the compression of illustrative quotations into banksseparated them – often by some distance – from the relevant definitions. The designtask stemming from a decision to restore the link was to re-sequence thematerial in the SOED database so thata more immediate connection could be made.

The downside was that this system increasedthe number of paragraph breaks and therefore the number of lines the textoccupied. To counteract this, we looked at the shapes of letters that were moreamenable to being slightly condensed, that is made narrower. Gerard Unger inour Department has designed many fonts with a flat, horizontal join betweenvertical strokes and curved strokes, and it was this design feature thatallowed the type to be made narrower without becoming less readable, andcompensating for the extra lines – in fact the design allowed a considerableincrease in the number of words to be contained without increasing the numberof pages in the dictionary.

Another project concerned withadding real-language illustrative quotations, the design of the schools dictionary used the same approach to font choice, and also looked back toparagraphing structures in 18th and 19th century dictionaries. 20th centurydictionaries were reviewed to consider features which unified or disruptedentries, in order to make it clear to the reader how the page was divided upinto individual entries.

The Book of Common Prayer is one of the most important early moderntexts that has survived to the present day. I was involved in the design of a newedition by Brian Cummings which contains three texts – those of 1549, Cranmer’s originaltransformation of the Catholic rites into a new but still transitionalprotestant form; 1559, the more firmly protestant edition that would have beenfamiliar to Shakespeare and Milton; and 1662, the compromise between ritualistsand puritans that followed the restoration after the civil war.

The typography of each of theseindividual printings is different: but, for a modern edition, they are similarin one respect: they are set in black letter, or gothic type. This is the typethat was used for English language texts in early printing, whereas scholarlybooks, almost always written in Latin, were set in roman type. The aim was notto produce a facsimile, but to produce a text that was easy for today’s readerto understand, while allowing direct comparison between the three editions.Clearly the new edition could not be set in black letter. What became clearthrough consulting the original printings in the Bodleian library and on onlinesources was the distinct different in other aspects of typography: 1662 isaltogether a grander affair, a real statement of a settlement of opinion andthe victory of a particular approach to services in the Church of England. Itis larger in format, has not one but two impressively illustrated engraved titlepages, and makes use of large displayed roman type to divide the text intosections for each service.

This provided a starting point forthe design solution. There are elements which are consistent between theeditions – all divide prayers into those which are essentially dialoguesbetween priest and people, and those said by the priest alone; there are readingsdirectly from scripture; and there are ‘stage directions’ (how to performactions or read prayers) and notes (what needs to be done to prepare thechurch, what the meaning of a service is, and importantly where there is scopefor deviation from the text, etc.).

These common elements were givencommon typography between the three texts. In general, this meant that theheadings, which are written very differently in the editions, could then carrycome of the weight of indicating to the reader which text they were currentlyreading. It was decided to present these line for line, using the same type asthe original, observing the quirkiness of word division and the frequentchange, in the early editions, between black letter and roman. This in turn reflectedthe rather hasty production of the early editions, and allowed something of thegrandeur of the presentation of the 1662 edition to come through.

The resulting design explains tothe reader, I hope, something of the change in typography in this crucial period– a move away from the manuscript tradition of black letter, very compactlyset, with an emphasis on creating shapes and gradations of size that do notrelate to the logical structure of the underlying text – so that the biggesttype on the page might be used for the least important word, and the emergenceof a more rational approach which tends to emphasis the important words. Thischimes with the editor’s decision to observe the original spelling,capitalization, and punctuation of the texts – which sounds alarming but isactually very easy to read.

I hope these examples show howhistorical research and an understanding of the techniques and practices of thepast can provide a framework for thinking about contemporary design decisions,whether in presenting text more rationally or allowing the reader to appreciatesome of the flavour and original presentation of an historical text.

In the grass, snake

2011-09-25T18:40:00.001+01:00

This young grass snake appeared in our garden today, shimmying across a path, curling up and hissing!

Where to locate a Pile of Poo

2011-09-17T20:42:00.000+01:00

If you’re looking for a bunny girl or a pile of poo, look no further than the new Unicode version 6.0, which, among many other more serious changes, now includes

1F46F 👯 WOMAN WITH BUNNY EARS
1F4A9 💩 PILE OF POO

You can now typeset Hugh Hefner’s fantasy or a steaming pile with the confidence that anyone around the world will be able to render your intent precisely – as long as someone designs a font with the right characters on the right code points.

Upper-case spooks

2011-09-14T22:33:00.002+01:00

Do spooks type hunt-and-peck style, with the caps lock held firmly down? Do we shout at foreigners, typographically? Or is lower-case too democratic for dealing with a repressive regime? I think we should be told.

Image from the Guardian

Inside the weave

2011-08-25T18:16:00.009+01:00

Laura Ellen Bacon is artist in residence at Compton Verney, and is creating a wonderful white tape cocoon among the interstices of some trees in the Capability Brown park. The work seems quite different from the woven forms she has previously produced: there is no inherent strength in the material, so the smooth inner compartment (an implied shell or nest?) is literally held in place by the tension of a multitude of tied lengths of tape, using the trees as anchoring points.

Starting off as straight lines, they are tensioned into curves by further attached strips in a way that is not dissimilar to the use of control points on bezier curves in type design. This results in a certain randomness from the outside, as the smooth internal effect is most clearly seen when you actually enter the structure – it’s big enough for two people to stand in comfortably. The work will last a season – perhaps more? Today it was the home of a young robin and a mouse (who did not stay around to be photographed).

More images here.

Digital focus

2011-08-10T20:43:00.001+01:00

I’m looking forward to reading Sophie Goldsworthy’s new Rough Guide to Digital Photography. Look for the lovely images of Tuscany and Indian tea plantations on her website here.

Berating your client

2011-08-04T21:12:00.000+01:00

Following on from the brief we’d all like to have received, here is the letter of desperation to the client that we’ve all probably composed in our head, but never sent. Augustus Pugin did send this letter, though, when his client had the temerity to suggest the addition of a gallery (a solecism in a Gothic church):

‘… here are no Less than 5 protestant archdeacons pulling down galleries of every kind, all the works of the Camden & oxford societies denounce them & now after I had ingeniously got rid of the organ Monstrosity your lordship proposes to erect a gallery in the only perfect revival that has been accomplished. what Can I say or do, the gallery would not hold 20 people if crammed full & it would utterly ruin the church. all the Learned men will flock to this church as a Model & then they will see this Monstrosity. what a miserable fate awaits every architect of this wretched country. I have Lived to see almost every building on which I have set my heart either upset or ruined & now a gallery at Cheadle. perfect Cheadle. Cheadle my consolation in all my afflictions. Mercy I entreat.’

Pugin’s client relented. The gallery was not built.

Rosemary Hill, God’s architect: Pugin and the building of romantic Britain (London, 2007) p. 268

Reading the signs

2011-07-28T20:28:00.000+01:00

Rob Waller’s provoking piece in Eye and its associated illustrations on their blog raise interesting questions not just about reading buildings, but about affordance and consideration for the user in any typographic form.

Making the Prayer Book fit

2011-07-28T18:46:00.000+01:00

Occasionally there is a need to make a new edition of a book, or a new setting, match an earlier one as closely as possible. Here is an excellent description of the problem as encountered by Peter Ducker, designer at CUP of a re-set Book of Common Prayer.

Restoring Scotland Yard to the Wright stuff

2011-07-27T21:02:00.000+01:00

It’s worth quoting in full Ann Pillar’s excellent letter in The Times today (the lead, no less):

Form and function at Scotland Yard

Sir, The debate about form following function extends beyond the architecture of the Olympic velodrome (letters July 23 and 25). The design of the New Scotland Yard sign (by Edward Wright) is one of the nation's finest examples of form and function in design. Or was, until defaced by a pointless blue marketing plaque.

Wright's idea was that the sign, which announces New Scotland Yard and humanises its anonymous glass curtain wall face, should also symbolise the function of the Metropolitan Police. He designed the constantly revolving triangular shape and reflective steel lettering on three sides to be symbolic of the Met's constant vigilance in guarding our safety. The sign, which has never been copied, has achieved an iconic status worldwide.

It would be best to reunite the form and function of the sign by reinstating the original lettering. This would restore the sense of symmetry and balance to a piece of design that has become part of the fabric of our lives, equal in iconic status to Big Ben (used to represent government), and the finial figure of the Old Bailey justice.

Neither of these designs needs marketing, yet.

ANN PILLAR
Department of Typography and Graphic Communication, University of Reading

For more on Edward Wright, see here.

Virginia Woolf … cover designer?

2011-07-26T14:38:00.002+01:00

I photographed these books in Virginia Woolf’s bedroom at Monk’s House, Rodmell, East Sussex. They are painted over an ordinary Methuen edition of Shakespeare.

Luna’s Café: The Next Generation

2011-06-09T17:41:00.001+01:00

Legacies of Modernism
The State of British Poetry Today | 9-11 June 2011 | Université Paris-Diderot

Friday 10 June, 3.15 pm Panel 5
Joe Luna, University of Sussex: ‘All your poems are belong to us: reading internets in contemporary British poetry’

‘Is that an extra code for something? Cuz my generation doesn’t deal with direct sarcasm’ (Ryan Trecartin)

‘Access denied’ (Milton, Paradise Lost, IV. 137)

Is there a new digital humanism afoot in contemporary British poetry? My paper will explore this fecund contradiction by positing links between traditional Romantic notions of Immortality and Spirit (as evinced by Hazlitt and Shelley among others) with a new breed of poets for whom ‘Immortality’ is found in the multiple lives of computer game characters, and ‘Spirit’ becomes isomorphic with the Ghost in the Shell. In his Lyric Poetry and Society, Adorno states that ‘In industrial society the lyric idea of a self-restoring immediacy becomes – where it does not impotently evoke a romantic past – more and more something that flashes out abruptly, something in which what is possible transcends its own impossibility’; but where, in the truly infinite abstractions of digital society, can we locate this ‘immediacy’, and what are its implications for the poetic recuperation of humanity at the risk of absolute dispersion by the tentacles of late-capitalist alienation? Arguably the dialectics of internet culture and video-game mentality produce a collectivization of human subjects who at once recognize their humanity through the increasingly ‘realistic’ semblances of life such diversions procure, at the same time as they are removed from the ‘reality’ of active subjectivity and their interaction reduced to chat boxes and status updates. How are contemporary poets responding to and working in the motherboards of digital Pop culture? I will argue that works by Justin Katko & Jow Lindsay, Jefferson Toal, Mike Wallace-Hadrill and Jonty Tiplady produce varying forms of ‘.jpeg transcendentalism’ that flesh out in belligerent chrome an ‘intense inane’ (Shelley) that instead of ‘impotently evoking’ a Romantic inheritance, recuperate and détourn the ersatz affirmation in digital culture precisely in order to transcend its own impossibility.

A new PhD studentship opportunity at Reading

2011-06-08T19:17:00.003+01:00

This AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award Studentship is suitable for UK/EU applicants:

The Typeface Designs of Eric Gill

University of Reading – Department of Typography & Graphic Communication
St Bride Library, London

An AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Award studentship (fully funded fees and maintenance) between the University of Reading and St Bride Library, London is available to a suitably qualified UK or EU student.

The period in which Eric Gill's typefaces were first manufactured was the golden age of hot metal typesetting and Gill himself is arguably the most important British typeface designer of the twentieth century. However, as an artist he did not have the necessary technical knowledge of type production and so craftsmen and engineers also played a role in manufacturing Gill's typefaces. This research will document the complete body of Gill's work as a typeface designer for the first time; explain the role he played in the conception and manufacture of each of his designs; evaluate the impact of hot-metal typesetting technology on Gill's typefaces and investigate the extent to which this was carried forward into subsequent versions which were produced for photocomposition and digital typesetting.

In addition to extensive archival research at St Bride Library this doctoral research will draw on the archives of the Monotype Corporation Type Drawing Office held by Monotype Imaging, and of Ditchling Museum.

Closing date for applications: 24 June 2011

League division one

2011-04-28T00:17:00.001+01:00

League tables tell you anything you want, but it’s still nice to see Reading ranked number 4 in the country for art & design in the Complete University Guide.

Food, glorious food …

2011-04-26T22:47:00.000+01:00

… is nowhere to be seen on Coralie Bickford-Smith’s new Penguin covers.

A top ten logo from Reading

2011-04-26T21:38:00.002+01:00

Nice to see Ian Dennis's National Theatre logo has been voted by readers of Creative Review as one of their top ten favourites.

Ian worked on the project in 1974, and it has been featured in the April issue of the graphic design magazine, alongside Michelin, World Wildlife Fund, and Woolmark. His logo beat those of Apple, NASA and the London Underground to number ten in the top twenty list.

Ian, who now runs Indent Design in Reading, graduated in 1973 in Typography and Graphic Communication and almost immediately went to work for legendary Dutch designer FHK Henrion. ‘Henrion had been working on a design but had to go to a conference, so he asked us all to have a go.

‘He'd created a Union Jack design made up of triangles and I could sort of see a ‘NT' in it, but I worked up something at home in Letraset, then developed it by hand after suggestions from Henrion.’

The logo is still a feature of the Theatre's publicity and the South Bank site. And I agree with former National art director Michael Mayhew about why it has stood the test of time – ‘because it is so beautifully simple.’

Swiss hit

2011-04-25T22:15:00.002+01:00

What our Part 2 students get up with Sara Chapman. Enjoy!

Typography is about reading – and so are ebooks

2011-04-24T21:09:00.038+01:00

Amazon’s latest UK Kindle ad shows how little care it takes over the typography of the ebooks that it hosts. This is their latest full-page ad in the Guardian. I can just about forgive the opening words in ALL CAPITALS, because, although letterspaced SMALL CAPITALS are much nicer, even William Morris resorted to chapter openings in the all-up style. The real give-away is the confusion of the hyphen with the dash. My first reading of the opening sentence assumed a Joycean style, mimicking ‘riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s’, followed by ‘doubt-but’ (what a disbelieving goat does?). But no, I was supposed to read those tiny, close-up horizontal marks as dashes – and then the parenthetical clause should become clear. Except it doesn’t. And William Boyd is a parenthetical stylist, a major dash-monger, with three on the opening page of Ordinary Thunderstorms, all decisively mangled by Kindle. He also believes in the use of the hyphen when creating compound adjectives: ‘pale-faced’, ‘even-featured’, ‘charcoal-grey’. Oh dear, they get mangled too, as Kindle thinks that they are non-breaking hyphens, and so studiously avoids correctly justifying the line preceding them to ensure that the compounded words are not (as they should be) divided by a line break. Here by the way is the printed original:

How can so little care be given to the presentation of text on a[n electronic] page? Do publishers care, or even realize, what is happening to the texts they lovingly commission, copy-edit, and proof-read, when they enter the electronic domain?

I wonder, especially if they sub-contract the ebooking of their print files to Amazon, rather than apply quality control themselves. Here, for example, is a complaint on Amazon about a student edition:

‘The reason for the poor review is not anything relating to the translation, but the rendering of text not only in this book, but many of [this publisher’s] translations released in this series. The main problem is that the text is not rendered in a clean manner, so that, for example if you highlight “Livy” in the introduction of this text it is rendered “Liz7"” when you look under “highlights and annotations”. This means that if you search for “Livy”, your search will not find this word. This has been a constant problem in a number of this publisher's books. I have contacted them about the issue but have received no response. I would recommend [another publisher’s] text which provides a clean rendering of the text as well as hyperlinks to the footnotes which this publisher does not provide.’

The image below is not from the text criticized, but shows what happens when a printed book is scanned, word by word, to produce a searchable PDF.

And the original print edition:

Note how the running headlines, which orient the reader so successfully in the print edition, are very little use in the ebook.

Not that other publishers are blameless: the following screenshots are from an edition of the Canterbury Tales, where we can see

headings not identified as such, because they do not ‘keep’ with the following text;
headings (such as ‘NOTES’ which are at the wrong level in the heading hierarchy;
misaligned note cues causing text misalignment;
verse not correctly formatted, so that a turn-line does not indent, nor does the start of a line assigned a line number align correctly.

And here is the original printed page, showing text and notes simultaneously:

But at least this edition of Chaucer has line numbers. Another publisher's edition of Wilde simply omits them, leaving the reader floundering helplessly in relation to a citation in any other edition or critical text, or indeed in relation to the edition’s own notes, which are identified by line number, but are not accessible by hyperlink from the text.

Let’s look at the original print edition, and see how effectively the reader is oriented by indentation, headlines, line numbers, and page numbers; and how easily one can look up a note at the back of the book, and know where to return to in the main text.

In comparison with the inadequacies of consumer electronic texts, printed books are still miracles of compact, considerate texts that care for their readers, and how they are used.

Edit

Here’s an interesting link to a TeX implementation of justification on a Kindle.

Edit 2

Thanks to all the readers who picked up my misreadings and misspellings.

Use ’em, don’t pin ’em on the wall

2011-04-22T18:22:00.002+01:00

Paul Shaw’s careful explanation of why it’s dangerous to fetishize fonts.

Reading the news in Arabic and Persian

2011-04-21T21:12:00.000+01:00

Titus Nemeth’s excellent Nassim font is now used on the two major middle-east news sites run by the BBC, the Arabic and Persian services. And here’s a link to the BBC’s global visual language with its specific focus on typography as the primary design element.

Reading the papers

2011-04-21T15:10:00.001+01:00

The publications of the Simplification Centre during its time at Reading can be downloaded here.

Paul Stiff and what interests typographers

2011-04-21T14:36:00.000+01:00

Re-reading some of Paul’s writings since his death (see Robin Kinross’s obituary), this perhaps-overlooked piece in Typography Papers (because it was a ‘response’, not an article in its own right) seemed to sum up some provoking views about what should interest typographers.

‘… typography is far more about configuring and positioning characters than about the shapes of characters. A theory of writing and typography based solely on the construction of letters, allied to a view of reading which looks no further than ‘legibility’, is like traditional linguistics in which nothing much of interest happens outside the sentence.

‘From the telescopic perspective of information design the challenging problems of today are not connected with what type designers and typographers do or do not do. This is because most designing is done by people who are not professional designers and who get no help from professionals. Some digital typographers have tried to solve the problems which non-designers face by devising ‘automatic typography’ systems which do the designing work. The aim of these systems has been to design documents as they are written. The idea is to let authors get on with their writing, and let the designing take care of itself: so all that authors have to do is declare, as they write, that this bit of text is a chapter heading, and this is a list, and so on. Realizing the idea means that a ‘meta-document’ has to be designed before any real document is written. Designing a meta-document entails prefabricating a whole repertoire of graphic formats for text elements (‘chapter heading’, ‘list’, ‘subheading’, ‘caption’, and so on) which visually represent the whole range of text elements which may occur in any text which has not yet been written.

‘This is different from what professional typographers normally do: design texts after they have been written. Here there is an obvious parallel with lettering and type design: the fifteenth-century revolution in ‘automatic typography’ systems led for the first time to sets of letters, and their spatial relations, being designed before the texts in which they would be used were written.’

Typography papers 4, 2000, pp. 92–133.

Royal wedding blues

2011-04-21T12:16:00.003+01:00

Heraldry is an aspirational art: if you don’t have a coat of arms, you might like to think that some day you will be granted one, or that perhaps some long-forgotten ancestor indeed was. Michael Hancher suggests that this is one of the reasons that heraldic terms are illustrated so frequently in early (and even recent) dictionaries: being a gentle(wo)man involves understanding the arcane meanings of a blazon (or even what a blazon is).

So the forthcoming royal wedding makes even the Guardian anxious to inform us of the exact meaning of Kate Middleton’s new armature (she won’t be fully armed till she’s married, if you see what I mean). The explanation brings in another English obsession, punning. But it also usefully reminds us how we've got our colour–gender assignment twisted over the years. Middleton’s lozenge is suspended from blue ribbons as a sign that she is an unmarried daughter: blue for a girl, perhaps because of the traditional association with the Virgin Mary, who is often depicted wearing a blue mantle.

Hancher, M. 1996. ‘[The Century Dictionary:] Illustrations,’ Dictionaries, 17: 79–115.
—— 1998. ‘Gazing at the Imperial Dictionary,’ Book History, 1: 156–81.

A lexicographer’s retreat

2011-01-24T11:22:00.017Z

We can’t see the blue plaque, but thanks to Google Earth we’re able to see the house that lexicographer, missionary, and amateur astronomer Robert Hunter built for himself on Staples Road, Loughton, Essex in 1882. It faces Epping Forest, and the garden looks down the Roding valley.

Epping Forest District Council’s conservation area report includes the following:

‘7 Forest Villa was built (as Forest Retreat) by George Beckett in 1882 to the specifications of Dr Robert Hunter who was a Scottish missionary and lexicographer. Hunter compiled most of his 14 volume Encyclopaedic Dictionary (1879–1897) and his Bible Dictionary (1893) in the house. The former being the biggest before the Oxford English Dictionary was released. Hunter used the house not only as his residence, but as a place of refuge for sick children from the Victoria Docks. He died in the house on 25th February 1897. There is now a blue plaque is visible on the house.

‘The appearance of the house is severe; being a Scottish-style detached house, twin double bayed, the bays splayed, with brick piers and stone dressings. The house is built of Woodford red brick, tuck-pointed, under a steep slate roof. Arranged on the half landing principle to take advantage of the hillside site, the rear rooms are about 5ft lower than those at the front. There is a prominent central belvedere, where Hunter conducted astronomical investigations. The house has tall chimney stacks and original doors, shutters, and windows throughout. The front door has never been pierced for a letterbox, and the mechanical bell pull, still in operation, and all other door furniture are original. The rear elevation is plain, all redbrick, with burglar bars to the original ground-floor sash windows. The original clinker-built timber lean-to laundry room was added in 1970 and is hardly visible from street. There is an ugly but concealed 1950s garage. The interior contains most of the original fittings. The garden covers a quarter of an acre, replanned in 1930s by Reginald Lloyd. There is an Edwardian greenhouse and a lattice fence to front. The street aspect is identical to that at the date of building.’

Why is Hunter important?

The earliest use of bold headwords in a major English dictionary appears to be Robert Hunter’s The Encyclopædic Dictionary (originally pubished by Cassell, later published by Edward Lloyd) which appeared in parts from 1879. Hunter’s page is a remarkable precursor of Murray’s OED layout: bold lower case is used for headwords, senses are divided using a ‘branching’ numbering system, and each sense within the hierarchy begins a new paragraph.

The Encyclopædic Dictionary is generous in its use of space: a hanging indent is used for headwords, numbered sense paragraphs begin with a further indent, and a half-line space separates each entry. The clarity of the innovative all-lower-case bold headwords is compromised by the addition of light en-rules to indicate syllabification and diacritics to indicate pronunciation. The headline shows the first and last new headwords on the page, separated by an em-rule. Bold is used for the major sense-division indicators, and subtle semi-bold numerals are used for numbered senses. Overall the use of metalanguage is systematic and analytical. Italic is used consistently for register, subject field, and grammatical labels (slang, Naut., Transitive). Register and subject-field labels introduce the relevant sense, rather than being part of the wording. Illustrative quotations are set in the conventional broken-off style, but this disrupts the page minimally, as there is already considerable vertical fracturing of each entry.

Hunter’s division of senses, however, has none of the rigour or economy of Murray and certainly lacks the simplicity of Johnson: entries disintegrate into columns of paragraphs numbered with finer and finer grades of senses (‘Each word has been sub-divided as far as possible into the various meanings which it assumes at different times.’ – Preface, p. ii). Phrasal verbs, though displayed in full, are particularly difficult to locate, as italics rather than bold are used for these. It is easy for readers to lose track of the hierarchy of sense-divisions in a long entry.

Extract from my article ‘Clearly defined’ in Typography Papers 4, 2000, p. 56

Is Fagin buried here?

2011-01-22T17:04:00.019Z

Holy Trinity Church, Clapham, may be the burial-place of the man who gave his name to Charles Dickens’s character in Oliver Twist. Fagin, his name phonetically remembered, was the boy who took the young Dickens under his wing while working at a boot-blacking factory in the early 1820s. This week’s TLS, taking an article by Peter Rowland from Dickensian Digressions, a book scheduled for publication by the Academica Press in the spring, reports an interesting conjecture:

‘But there also appears in those parish records one entry which could well be crucial. The name “Fagin” has been already discounted in our search. If we also discount the name “Fagan”, and cast our net a little wider, we find ourselves confronted by a Robert Fegen who could very well be our man. Again, the actual pronunciation of this name makes it totally indistinguishable to the ear from either Fagin or Fagan.

‘The Robert Fegen in question was born in 1804, which makes him eight years older than Dickens – and we are searching, it must be remembered for someone who was “much bigger and older” than the “young gentleman” who had just started work in the blacking factory. Fegen would, in fact, have been nineteen years old in 1823 but he had not yet formally come to man's estate and it would be pardonable for Dickens, recalling these events twenty-two years later, to think of him as a “boy”, albeit a rather large one.

‘It is not known what career Robert Fegen was following when he married Sarah Elizabeth Love at St Mary’s church, Lambeth, on October 23, 1827. They lived in Bromell’s Road, to the east of Clapham Common. Sadly, their married life lasted little more than five years, for he died on April 29, 1833 at the age of twenty-nine and was buried at Holy Trinity church, Clapham.

‘At this point, pending the discovery of further information, the hunt comes to an end. There seems a very strong likelihood that Bob Fegen is the young man for whom we have been searching, but no way of establishing this beyond an absolute shadow of a doubt.’

David Farkas

2011-01-18T21:43:00.005Z

David, Professor at the University of Washington in Seattle, visited today to talk to MA students about strategies for providing readers with summaries and synopses of extended texts, including QuikScan and SwitchBack.

Pretty ugly

2011-01-16T16:51:00.040Z

The paper by Diemand-Yauman, Oppenheimer, and Vaughan, ‘Fortune favors the bold (and the italicized)’, made it to the Today programme on Friday, courtesy of Jonah Lehrer of Wired. This paper reports two linked studies investigating the claim that a degree of disfluency in documents (put simply, making them harder to read) leads to improved memory performance.

Its findings have been reduced to ‘ugly fonts help you learn’, ‘typographic history is wrong’, even ‘Kindles are bad for you’, but I’m sure these leaps are not justified by the paper itself. As someone who thinks that good typography consists of good writing that is well articulated, well set, and properly printed (or presented onscreen), I find the concentration on the ‘magic bullet’ effect of a typeface change worrying. Setting your text in Caslon won’t make you write like G. B. Shaw, despite the Shavian insistence that his works be set exclusively in that typeface.

First, let’s look at the typefaces that the investigators considered disfluent: Comic Sans, Comic Sans Italicized, Bodoni MT, Monotype Corsiva, Haettenschweiler (similar to Compacta Bold). The first experiment compared Arial with Comic Sans Italicized and Bodoni MT. It isn’t clear from the paper whether the italic or roman version of Bodoni MT was used – one of the problems is that we are only shown two example stimuli from the first experiment, and none from the second experiment. For an investigation in the effect of visual presentation of text, this is a pretty big omission.

With the exception of Haettenschweiler, all these fonts are near normal in weight and proportion. Comic Sans may be the butt of jokes and typographic snobbery, but its letterforms are clearly within the norms of the western type canon. Monotype Corsiva might appear ‘arty’ to some but again it isn’t really a leftfield font. At first sight Haettenschweiler is – at least it has normal letterforms emboldened and condensed to a very abnormal degree for a text face – but on reflection it’s a fairly conventional font for newspaper headlines. So while a longish text in Word might be really difficult, a short bullet-pointed list, or a straightforward PowerPoint slide might not be so problematic. But there’s a special problem with Haettenschweiler, which we’ll come to.

For experiment 1, we know that simple, comparable texts were set in 16pt Arial, 16pt Comic Sans Italicized (60% greyscale), and 16pt Bodoni MT (60% greyscale). I’ve recreated one of the experiment 1 texts in all the typefaces tested in both experiments (I’ve sloped the Comic Sans by 12 degrees).

Different (from Arial) the variant fonts may be, but I would contend that they are not ‘ugly’. Screen resolution may improve or degrade the effect of tinting the type, but these variants are well within the norms of screen display and print production. (Remember Haettenschweiler and Monotype Corsiva weren’t used in experiment 1.)

Experiment 2 set school learning materials in the ‘disfluent’ typefaces. The process isn’t described very fully, because we get no idea of what the documents (Word and PowerPoint) looked like to begin with, or how much text they contained. We are told that one teacher objected to the use of Haettenschweiler because it was ‘difficult to read’ – Comic Sans Italicized was immediately substituted. We are also told that ‘the font size of the supplementary material was not changed unless the size coupled with the disfluent font made the text illegible as reported by the teachers or the experimenters, in which case the font size was adjusted to allow legibility’ (my italics).

The tables in the paper demonstrate the statistical basis of the claim that the disfluent presentations were more memorable to students. But they don’t break down the results by document type and font. When questioned on their feelings about the material they read, the students reported no discernibly different responses to the materials they were presented with, and that this ‘lack of observed liking/motivational differences between fluency conditions is unlikely to be due to insensitivity measures.’ (This strikes me as very odd, because the work done by Sue Walker demonstrates that schoolchildren can articulate their responses to typographic presentation very clearly.)

So what might we conclude from this paper? Its conclusion is that ‘small interventions have the potential to make big improvements in the performance of our students and education system as a whole.’ What they have found is that changing a document from a typographic default, a norm, makes for an improvement. That somehow doesn’t come as a surprise to me: Arial was designed to look like Helvetica, not to be the ideal typeface for children’s educational materials. Increasing inter-liner spacing often improves a text no end. All the variant fonts, Haettenschweiler excepted, have what conventional typographers might consider either better inter-linear spacing or a more even rhythm of character spacing. Comic Sans (and perhaps even Monotype Corsiva) resemble handwriting. Haettenschweiler looks like the bold, brassy headlines in tabloid newspapers.

What if the findings actually indicate the opposite: that Arial is the ‘ugly’ font, and moving away from a crowded, over-tightly spaced font improves things? Far from working because they are ‘ugly’, these other typefaces might work simply because they are ‘different’.

¶ See also Alison Black’s blog.

Design studentships in Typography

2011-01-13T17:28:00.003Z

We are looking for exceptional candidates for full-time postgraduate study in the Department of Typography at Reading. The University will award one AHRC-funded studentship for our practice-based MA programmes: Book Design, Information Design or Typeface Design, with entry in October 2011.

We will also be putting candidates forward for doctoral and MA studentships funded by the University of Reading.

Send your completed applications (including two references) to Elaine Harris by Friday 18 February 2011 at Joint Faculty Admissions Office, HUMSS 126D, University of Reading, Whiteknights, Reading RG6 6AA. Ms Harris will also be the first point of contact for any enquiries relating to the competition.

Cutting the circle

2011-01-05T21:21:00.005Z

Max Gadney selected this as one of his best graphics of 2010. I agree it’s good, but yet again, circles are used to indicate relative size – and we know that we can’t visually make circles add up. The Venn diagram use of circles for non-quantifiable items is fine – see the work of Jessica Hagy. Can anyone rethink this following Isotype principles of graphic units that are easily (visually) manipulated by the reader?

Finger on the page

2011-01-05T16:33:00.005Z

iPads and other touch-screen devices have reconnected our fingers with reading matter after a period when we found it difficult to interact with vertical displays by touch. And touching what you are reading has a long history – of tracing the line of text when reading with a child, or pointing to the relevant place in the liturgy for the celebrant to read from, or simply trying to keep your place. Mike Esbester’s photograph of timetable readers not only touching, but reconfiguring their entire stance to read a text (short-sightedness? sciatica?) is a charming reminder of our need to get physical with text.

Esbester, M. ‘Nineteenth-century timetables and the history of reading’, Book History, 12 (2009), 156–85

MA Book Design class of 2010

2010-12-17T23:32:00.003Z

These happy people graduated today!

Photo by Laura Bennetto

Ngram font mania

2010-12-17T23:29:00.004Z

I’ve clearly got carried away with Google’s new corpus analysis tool. Here are timelines for Garamond, Times New Roman, Gill Sans, Univers, Helvetica, and Arial in British English.

Fonts threaten typefaces

2010-12-16T22:52:00.003Z

Google’s new ngram tool shows how the word typeface is losing ground to font.

I can’t believe he wrote that!

2010-12-04T12:54:00.012Z

Thomas Hanmer’s edition of Shakespeare was printed in Oxford in 1745, and shows the move away from the Fell types to newer founts by Caslon. Hanmer is determined to improve the authenticity of the text of Shakespeare’s plays, but is he also determined to improve Shakespeare?

‘Most of these [false] passages are here thrown to the bottom of the page and rejected as spurious … and it were wished that more had then undergone the same sentence. The promotor of the present Edition hath ventured to discard but a few on his own judgment, the most considerable of which is that wretched piece of ribaldry in King Henry V. put in the mouths of the French princess and an old Gentlewoman, improper enough as it is all in French and not intelligible to an English audience, and yet that is perhaps the best thing that can be said of it. There can be no doubt but a great deal more of that low stuff which disgraces the works of this great Author, was foisted in by the Players after his death, to please the vulgar audiences by which they subsisted: and though some of the poor witticisms and conceits must be supposed to have fallen from his pen, yet as he hath put them generally into the mouths of low and ignorant people, so it is to be remember’d that he wrote for the Stage, rude and unpolished as it then was; and the vicious taste of the age must stand condemned for them, since he hath left upon record a signal of how much he despised them. In his Play of The Merchant of Venice a Clown is introduced quibbling in a most miserable manner, upon which one who bears the character of a man of sense makes the following reflection; How every fool can play upon a word! I think the best grace of wit will shortly turn into silence, and discourse grow commendable in none but parrots. He could hardly have found stronger words to express his indignation at those false pretence to wit that were then in vogue; and therefore though such trash is frequently interspersed in his writings, it would be unjust to cast it as an imputation upon his taste and judgment and character as a Writer.’

¶ Hanmer is referring to Henry V act 3 scene 4, where Princess Catherine learns English from her maid Alice, allowing some humorous mispronunciations of body parts and clothes as she points to each one, culminating in con for gown:

CATHERINE D’hand, de fingre, de nails, d’arma, d’elbow, de nick, de sin, de foot, de cown.
ALICE Excellent, madame!

Ancient and Modern

2010-11-28T19:39:00.015Z

The recently reprinted 1911 Oxford ‘facsimile’ of the 1611 King James Bible contains a major anachronism: the types are resolutely ‘Modern’ in style, that is they derive from designs that were developed at the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and bear no relation to the styles used in the original edition. The illustration shows the original 1611 setting of the Preface, and the 1911 resetting.

The problem is that the 1911 edition is not a simple reprint; if it had been, a photographic reproduction of the original pages would have sufficed. It was intended to be read as well as admired, so the black-letter type of the original, deemed unreadable, had to be abandoned, and rendered in roman type. And while Caslon was available for some headings, a Modern with a Scotch flavour was used for most of the setting. Some pages (the fiendishly difficult to re-set Kalendar, for example) were reproduced from line blocks.

Make your own book

2010-11-21T22:42:00.017Z

The English Atlas, the first volume of which was printed in Oxford in 1680, was an ill-fated venture that ultimately contributed to the bankruptcy of its promoter, the bookseller and printer Moses Pitt. An oversize folio, the sheets took so long to emerge from the press that the following frank admission of the book’s inaccuracy had to be made in the second volume:

The sheets were too large to be bound conventionally in signatures of 8, 16, or 32 pages; instead, each leaf of 4 pages, supplied separately, was pasted on to a guard, which was attached to the spine of the binding. Furthermore, the text was printed letterpress and the maps from copper engravings, two quite separate printing processes. (The printing shops would have been at different locations in the city.) This required a clear plan for assembling the book:

But the nature of the task meant that purchasers could decide exactly what to do with the plates and text, as this final note freely admits:

E. G. R. Taylor. ‘ “The English Atlas” of Moses Pitt, 1680–3.’ The Geographical Journal, 95, 4 (April 1940), 292–9

Remind your reader

2010-11-19T16:15:00.017Z

Mathematical notation took many centuries to develop. By the mid-seventeenth century, the main operators that we know today were established, +, –, =, but the multiplication sign × had only been used since 1631, and the proportion sign :: is of similar vintage. So the list of symbols in this 1703 edition of Archimedes’ Elements of geometry may have been technically redundant, but would still have acted as a useful reminder.

¶ If you’re wondering why the division sign ÷ isn’t included, it wasn’t introduced into England until 1688.

Tacquet, Andrea. Elementa geometriæ planæ ac solidæ, & selecta ex Archimede theoremata. Cantabrigiæ: Typis academicis. Impensis Corn. Crownfield, MDCCIII [1703].

Oughtred, William. [Clavis mathematicae] Arithmeticae in numeris … Londini: Apud Thomam Harperum, M.DC.XXXI [1631].

Johann Heinrich Rahn, trs. John Pell. An introduction to algebra. London: printed for Moses Pitt. 1688.

Kinda nice

2010-11-15T21:02:00.011Z

Reading Lidwell, Holden, and Butler’s excellent Universal principles of design, I noticed one that isn’t enunciated: being kind to your users. The authors of the 1662 the Book of Common Prayer clearly thought this was an important principle of design, as evidenced by these two examples, from ‘The visitation of the sick’ and ‘Prayers for use at sea’:

The very sick get spared the lengthy sermonizing, and those in peril on the sea are able to make their peace with their maker – quickly.

The whole world in your hands

2010-11-12T23:29:00.008Z

However elegant this title-page from Christopher Plantin’s press may be, in 1583 it had a hard selling job to do. Nomenclator (‘dictionary’) is the title of this multi-lingual glossary ‘of all things’, organized thematically, but the largest type on the page announces that it covers ‘EVERYTHING’. This is the third edition: ‘much enlarged and corrected from the previous editions’ is the gist of the subtitle. Dictionaries are always announced as new and better than before. And of course the largest graphic item on the page is Plantin’s well established brand of the golden compasses. Fittingly for a classification of all human knowledge that is published in book form, the first section is about … words relating to books.

Hadrianus Junius, Nomenclator, omnium rerum propria nomina variis linguis explicata indicans, 3/e. Antwerp, 1583.

Dexter Sinister at Reading

2010-11-10T22:17:00.008Z

This week’s visitor was Stuart Bailey, who presented some of his work under the Dexter Sinister label. Discussing publication/events in New York, Edinburgh, and Basel, Stuart demonstrated how his artwork/design is intended to set up frameworks that provoke writing, because writing can never take place in a vacuum, but must always have a form to fit into. Illustrated is the text to be read by an ‘elevator operator’ at the Whitney Museum, NYC, charmingly set in Johnston and Monotype Fournier.

Just like that!

2010-11-04T20:27:00.007Z

David Pearson demonstrates the magic of Tschichold’s redesign of Penguin book covers to an appreciative audience at the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication today. David was visiting MA Book Design students who are working on a paperback series project with Fraser Muggeridge.

When typography doesn’t help

2010-10-29T10:05:00.005+01:00

Careful use of typography should eliminate ambiguity. But it falls down when faced with the mind-set or expectations of the reader. Take this example from the 1662 service for the ordination of priests in the Church of England.

What must have struck seventeenth-century readers as a very positive declaration (‘I think so’) strikes the modern reader as at best an equivocation, at worst absent-mindedness (‘I think so’).

AV translators did not read Fowler – official!

2010-10-22T17:49:00.010+01:00

The entry ‘which, that, who’ occupies five and a half dense columns in Fowler’s Modern English Usage. Boiled down, the ‘Warden of English’ claims that which is informative but non-defining, while that is defining. (‘The river, which is tidal, is dangerous'; ‘Rivers that are tidal are always dangerous’). But look at this presentation of the sermon on the mount from the AV:

(Visulization by ManyEyes)

Circling the square

2010-10-22T16:58:00.018+01:00

Stan Rueker, of Humanities Visualization, visited the Department recently and showed, among other visualization tools, Mandala.

This lets you search an XML file and create collocations between words. To give you an example, I’ve loaded Book 1 of War and Peace, and looked for paragraphs that contain the names Natasha, Pierre, and Andrei. Mandala is presenting me with those that contain both Natasha and Pierre, and Pierre and Andrei.

Paul Stiff raised an interesting objection to Stan’s visualizations, namely the problem of the circle in data graphics. It’s much less easy to instantly assess the relative sizes of circles than it is to assess the relative sizes of squares. Below I offer examples from the ManyEyes site that I think support Paul’s point of view.

(While you are on the ManyEyes site, look at our own Gerry Leonidas as the subject of data visualization!

In his own write?

2010-10-09T13:32:00.002+01:00

What more appropriate volume for John Lennon’s birthday?

Design legend or design history?

2010-08-19T12:14:00.007+01:00

If you were impressed by Evan Davis’s flight in a Spitfire on Today this morning, it’s worth disentangling some of the myths about the aircraft by reading Kenneth Agnew’s excellent article about the aircraft in Journal of Design History.

In this little classic of design research, Agnew discusses the problem of deducing design processes from surviving objects, especially when the original documentation is incomplete, there are few (or no) un-restored examples, and there are many popular misconceptions about the quality of the design or the performance of the object.

The photograph, from the Aircraft Restoration Company website, shows the elliptical wing design discussed by Agnew.

Kenneth Agnew, ‘The Spitfire: Legend or History? An Argument for a New Research Culture in Design’. Journal of Design History, vol. 6, no. 2 (1993), pp. 121–30

The book that Fell to earth

2010-08-16T23:29:00.003+01:00

A Dodo in Oxford: A Panel Discussion

Wednesday 13 October at 7pm
Blackwell Bookshop, 48–51 Broad Street, Oxford
Tickets: £2

In 2008, a diary was discovered amongst some books donated to a charity bookshop in Oxford. It was a most remarkable book, supposedly written over three hundred years ago by a student, describing his life and unusual pet, a dodo. The author of the diary was student of science and recorded his pet’s every move, as well as the reactions of his friends and acquaintances. He had some idea of the bird's rarity, but not that his pet might have been the last dodo to have walked upon the earth.

Doubts have been cast over the authenticity of the diary, so every page has been photographed and reprinted here, meaning that this work does at least three things – it provides a portrait of the famous bird, it reveals glimpses of seventeenth-century Oxford, and it offers the history of a book – how it was printed, made, unmade, forgotten, and ultimately revived.

Four panellists will discuss the details and vicissitudes of this piece of history – Professor Paul Luna, Head of Typography and Graphic Communication at Reading University; Clive Hurst, Head of Rare Books and Printed Emphemera at the Bodleian Library; David Shirt, scientist and lexicographer, with a special interest in ornithology; and Michael Johnson, editor of A Dodo at Oxford. John Mitchinson, one of the men behind QI, will chair this discussion.

Tickets cost £2 and can be obtained by telephoning or visiting the Customer Service Department, Second Floor, Blackwell Bookshop, Oxford. 01865 333623.

A seventeenth-century ASBO

2010-08-11T15:24:00.006+01:00

The impressive Fell types owned by the University of Oxford were not always used for imposing, learned tomes. They were also used for jobbing printing – they were the University’s Arial and Comic Sans as well as its Garamond Premier Pro and Perpetua Titling. Here’s an example of a piece of jobbing printing from 1672 (Madan 2932), set in leaded Double Pica (about 22 pt):

‘Whereas Tuesday next is to be observed as a day of Fasting for the martyrdom of Charles I. No shops are to be open, no children or servants are to loiter about, no tippling or drinking to be allowed in taverns, &c.

‘Jan. 27. 1671

‘Oxford, at the Sheldonian Theatre’

It was ‘stuck up on all common places of the city’. See Anthony Wood's Life, ed. Clark, ii.
215 n.

Why graphic design is futile

2010-08-11T12:55:00.004+01:00

This cheap’n’cheerful identity for UK television station Five, introduced last year, is due to be replaced now that porn publisher Richard Desmond has gobbled up the station. While I’m not sure it will be missed, it does make you think that graphic designers would be better off making something that had a reasonable chance of a working life, like a cheese soufflé for example.

Designing the candidates

2010-07-28T19:14:00.017+01:00

Only two Labour leadership statements have arrived so far, and at this point a Miliband leads Ed Balls in the design stakes.

DM’s is clean, using white backgrounds and green counterpoints to the necessary red highlights. Set in two recent sanserifs, with a simple grid, and printed on matt stock it declares ‘I’m careful with money, organized, and plain-speaking’.

Not so sure about EB’s effort – is that curious street-sign logo trying to channel EastEnders’s Albert Square and Coronation Street? A man of the people (well, soaps) and street-wise? It’s printed on squeaky shiny stock, with over-busy ‘Polaroid’ photographs – and someone ought to tell Ed that nobody in the real world uses Georgia for street-signs!

Ask me another

2010-07-25T19:42:00.004+01:00

Rob Waller recently mocked web security systems that demand you use their list of fatuous questions to provide ‘memorable answers’ to prove that you are you, and not a Turing machine. His point was that the questions seem more suited to the under-12s, rather than the over-50s who must be the only ones still stuffing money into these accounts. Here’s my contribution, from the normally sensible Nationwide:

It’s all Greek to me

2010-07-25T19:34:00.004+01:00

The Woodstock Literary Festival’s website is currently under construction – so our old friend lorem ipsum gets another outing …

By the way, the label that this site leaves in your web browser history is ‘Oxford Literary Festival’, which is run by quite another newspaper altogether. But when you look at their website …

New readers start here

2010-07-21T21:35:00.025+01:00

When times change, we have to learn new ways of reading. Currently, we’re learning how to cope with electronic texts, even though the support that they give to serious readers through their limited typographic palette is pretty miserable. At the turn of the seventeenth century, as the reformation finally turned England from a catholic country into a protestant one, new kinds of reading became possible, indeed, were required by law.

Connecting with scripture became a personal act of commitment to a text, not a social act, as reading the Bible in English replaced having chunks of it read to you, in Latin, as part of a collective ceremony. James Shapiro writes of the internalization of religious experience in 1599, and the confusion it caused. ‘[In] an imaginary dialogue, two churchgoing women [are] confused by all these changes: “Alas, gossip,” one says to her friend, “what shall we do now at church, since all the saints are taken away, since all the goodly sights we were wont to have are gone, since we cannot hear the like piping, singing, chanting, playing upon the organs, that we could before?” ’ The reformers’ answer was ever-closer study of the Bible, and printers declared how their editions enabled this.

‘ ❦ THE PRINTER to the diligent Reader.

‘Deare Christian Reader, to the intent that thou mightest the better enjoy the benefit of these notes or expositions vpon the New Testament: I thought it not amisse to declare vnto thee the vse of the same. And first, forasmuch as the quotations or citing of places of the Scriptures in the margent which direct to other places, conteining like phrase or sense, haue been so placed, tht none without great labour could find out the texts alledged, I have made these sixe severall figures or marks, ✣ ♣ ·.· ✜ ❉ ★, and haue set them aswel in the margent as in the text, so that thou mayest easily find that which thou desirest. For example, in the first worde of the first Chapter of Matthew is placed this first marke ✣ : looke out the like marke in the margent, and there thou shalt finde Luke 3.23. which place agreeth to this in Matthew: and so likewise thou shalt finde in the residue. But if many quotations belong to one place, word, or sentence, the first is onely marked, and those that follow vnmarked, appertaine to the same. And if it fall out that there be more then sixe directions in one columne, then is the first repeated againe, and the residue following in order as at the beginning: as it appeareth in the first columne of Matthew, where both in the text and margent also, they are all two times set downe, and the foure first repeated againe.

‘The notes which are directed by the figures of Arithmeticke, as 1. 2. 3. 4. &c. thorowout the Euangelists and Acts, declare the effects of summe of the doctrine contained between one of the said figures, and the next that followeth: as for example, from the figure 1. in the first line and first worde of Matthew vnto the figure 2. in the 18. verse of the same Chapter, the doctrine there gathered is set down in the margent in this sort: 1 Iesus came of Abraham of the tribe of Iuda, and of the flocke of Davide as God promised. And in the Epistles in like sort they declare the methode and arte which the Apostles vse, and how euery argument or reason dependeth one vpon another: thesee figures are begunne againe at the beginning of euery Chapter.

‘Lastly, the Notes which goe by order of the letter of the Alphabet placed in the text, with the like answering them in the margent, serue to expound and lighten the darke wordes and phrases immediatly following them. As in the first line and second worde, the letter, a, being referred vnto a, directly against him in the margent, sheweth that this worde, Booke, signifieth A rehearsall as the Hebrews vse to speake: as Genes. 5.1. The booke of the generations. These letters beginne at the beginning of euery Chapter, continuing vnto z. and so beginning againe with a, if there be so many Notes that they do exceede in number the letters of one Alphabet. This haue I faithfully done for thy commoditie, reape thou the fruit, and giue the prayse to God.

‘Farewell.’

The New Testament. Imprinted at London by Robert Barker, 1610/11 (Aaa2r)
James Shapiro, 1599: a year in the life of William Shakespeare, London: 2005 (p. 171)

The (beautiful) numbers game

2010-07-06T20:40:00.007+01:00

And now I see the Dutch have rather nice square Wendingen/Rietveld/De Stijl-inspired numbers on their shirts.

Photo: Guardian

Where’s the world book capital this year?

2010-07-06T14:29:00.015+01:00

There’s still time to enjoy sunshine, books, and letters – not to mention a Zlatorog beer – in Ljubljana, World Book Capital 2010; the Festival of Letters site is here.

The information design series at the Architecture Museum continues after the summer (you take a 20 bus to Fužine – Ljubljana’s equivalent to the middle of nowhere – and then walk to the Castle).

In the picture, taken from Jože Plečnik’s Castle Tower, and looking over the curve of the Ljubjanica: (foreground, centre-right) Plečnik’s Tromostovje (Triple Bridge), behind it Prešernov trg (Prešeren Square); in the centre of the picture, the square Nebotičnik (Skyscraper) is visible in the middle distance, just below the edge of the trees of Tivolski vrh (Tivoli Park).

No, don’t stop the carnival

2010-07-04T22:33:00.006+01:00

This year’s Eynsham carnival, while not reaching the glory days of the 1970s (when half the Chatto & Windus editorial board would turn up to support local author Mollie Harris) was still a Grand Day Out, with fun-fair food, an American Civil War re-enactment, some distinctly art-less craft stalls, the jazz and beer tent, and a singing robot (see above).

Best by far among the craftspeople was Ros Long of By Hand Books, who showed beautifully made portfolios and sketch-books.

Class of ’10

2010-07-03T19:21:00.003+01:00

Congratulations – more typographers arrive on the market! At least two of these graduating BAs will join us as MAs next year.

The numbers game

2010-06-27T15:51:00.021+01:00

Are England and Germany’s typographic cultures represented in their football strips? The England team’s numbers stay close to the Johnston/Gill model, while Germany’s have more than a nod to DIN stencil forms, and Herbert Bayer’s universal alphabet. Humanists or technologists to win?

Why paper-based publishing will survive

2010-06-26T14:18:00.008+01:00

Edit If you think the strip above is too small to read (because it has to fit the Blogger grid), then click on it to see it in situ at the Doonesbury website – and look here, too.

Edit For a take on Murdoch’s on-line pay-wall, see here.

Confessions of a justified reader

2010-06-22T11:31:00.009+01:00

Apple has built a Reader option into Safari 5 (above) that clears the clutter of adverts and marginal items from news articles on web pages. But it isn’t as customizable as Readability’s offering (below) – for example, Apple expects you to read text that is justified, and offers no options of typeface, column width, or background colour.

(The article on Polaroid photography shown is these screen shots is well worth a read.)

Convicted by ephemera

2010-06-20T19:19:00.012+01:00

Shotguns required (still require?) material to be inserted between the powder and the shot, to prevent gases from leaking past the projectiles at firing. Gun-wadding was frequently torn-up waste-paper, whatever was to hand. As it was ejected with the shot, it could survive to provide much-needed evidence. In Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, Lady Dedlock is incriminated in the murder of the lawyer Tulkinghorn when detective Bucket discovers that wadding near the body is ‘a bit of the printed description of [the Dedlock’s] house at Chesney Wold’.

Judith Flanders points out in this week’s TLS that Elizabeth Gaskell uses a similar plot device in Mary Barton, and that these (and several other) authors drew on a real-life case in 1840, when wadding proved crucial in identifying the murderer. And, Flanders continues, ‘life finally caught up with fiction in 1884, when John Toms was convicted of murder on the evidence of a piece of wadding which was identified as matching a broadside in his possession.’

Johnson’s Chemistry of Common Life (illustrated) was the wadding in the murder weapon in ‘The Judgement of Conscience’, Female Detective, ?1862/3. Judith Flanders will give a paper on female detectives in 19th-century fiction at the Second Annual Conference of the Victorian Popular Fiction Association.

London Transport at London’s service

2010-05-27T23:43:00.005+01:00

This was the slogan LT used whenever they did something that the public would loathe, such as getting rid of trolleybuses. But in 1951 LT took its obligation to inform the public seriously, as its emphasis on the quality of its information design in this advertisement placed in the Festival of Britain Guide shows.

Cox, Ian. South Bank Exhibition | Festival of Britain | Guide (London: HMSO, 1951), p. xxii

Symbols clashing everywhere

2010-05-27T23:16:00.006+01:00

Keith Tam’s second-year students from the School of Design at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University visited Reading today to see items from the Isotype collection and work by our MA students. Here they are looking at examples of Russian IZOSTAT charts.

Gill on a Ghost

2010-05-04T21:45:00.008+01:00

The new Rolls-Royce Ghost (yours for $245,000) features a start-stop button engraved with a stencil version of Gill Sans.

Picture from the New York Times

Classic texts for elections

2010-05-03T20:39:00.006+01:00

Boris Johnson is the latest in a long line to discover the Roman handbook to electioneering, Quintus Tullius Cicero’s Commentariolum Petitionis: Chairman Boris’s thoughts are here.

Over at OUP’s blog, there’s a nice parallel drawn by Nicholas Shrimpton between Anthony Trollope’s Plantagenet Palliser and our own Gordon Brown. (It might be worth mentioning that Palliser stays in power for 3 years, albeit at the head of a coalition government …)

Eric flies United

2010-05-03T18:23:00.012+01:00

The new identity for the proposed merger of Continental and United Airlines features a seriffed typeface, Perpetua Bold. Back in the 1970s, when Negus & Negus designed a logo for the newly-merged British Airways, Dick Negus chose Plantin Bold to replace the sanserif BEA and BOAC logos. Dating from the 1990s, Newell & Sorrell’s Mylius still adorns British Airways planes. On the sanserif side, KLM and Lufthansa retain thier 1960s logos: F. H. K. Henrion’s extended grotesque and Otl Aicher’s Helvetica respectively.

PS I notice that Continental Airlines checked out this post at 21.59 today.

Socrates in pictures

2010-05-03T17:07:00.011+01:00

In this week’s TLS, Martha C. Nussbaum writes about the place of the arts in education, and bemoans the threat of education policy directed solely towards economic growth: ‘Citizens cannot relate well to the complex world around them by factual knowledge and logic alone. The third ability of the citizen, closely related to these two, is what we can call the narrative imagination.’

Nussbaum, from the remainer of the article, is clearly thinking of the ability of the arts to foster sympathy, ‘the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of that person’s story’. The imaginative and abstract arts may be the key enablers of such ‘sympathy’, but narrative imagination, and the transformation of factual knowledge into action, can also be served by the humbler graphic arts. Otto Neurath’s vision of Isotype as an enabler of democracy through the clear presentation of data, and in a way that told a story rather than as an abstraction, surely provides us with an example of design being used for the Socratic ideal of an informed citizenship.

Where the bold things are

2010-04-18T15:38:00.010+01:00

The coming of the railways in the 1820s gave rise to a new world of reading: the timetable (of a coach service, for example) had previously been presented in the form of a list, with departure times from a public place, often an inn.

This early railway timetable, from the exhibition based on the ‘Designing information for everyday life, 1815–1914’ project, shows a stage of development. Bold types are used: the volume of material to be read, and its potential complexity, requires the reader’s gaze to be directed and organized by strong colour contrasts. The text is beginning to detach itself from the linear, sentence-like prose of earlier timetables, but has not yet resolved itself into a fully tabular form. That would come very quickly: this example is dated 1840; by the mid-1840s the fully tabular timetable was established. In this example, bold is used to provide a hierarchy of headings, and assist navigation around the document, rather than highlight elements at text level within a part of the document.

The new railway traveller is faced with some technical language to understand: ‘down’ means trains travelling away from the main terminus of the line (usually taken to be London); ‘up’ is a train returning to the main terminus. Was this terminology used by coaches before railways? Tooley Street station is now part of London Bridge station.

Behind you!

2010-04-14T12:53:00.009+01:00

I can almost hear the stage whisper: ‘Yes, we know “Knowledge Centre” is a silly name when we really mean library, and yes, it’s in the Green Building – you know, the one that’s green.’

Photographed at the Churchill Hospital, Oxford

Fritillaria meleagris

2010-04-11T11:58:00.004+01:00

The appearance of the snake’s head fritillary is always magical in our garden – there is only a solitary example, it seems to appear from nowhere, and then disappear just as quickly. Its heavy head hides brilliant yellow stamens.

As easy as falling downstairs

2010-04-01T21:04:00.017+01:00

The well-rounded vehicle on the right is an Alexander Dennis Enviro400. Unfortunately the well-rounded exterior is not matched by a well-rounded interior – particularly with regard to the staircase. Why is it so easy to fall down a modern double-decker’s staircase, when it used to be so difficult in the days of rear-entrance buses?

If you look at the plan of a London Routemaster, you'll see that the staircase is at the rear, at that the interior wall is curved, matching the curve of the exterior. You descend, first facing towards the rear, but then radidly turning to face towards the nearside. You can place your weight against the outside handrail, following the curve as you make your descent, working with the inertia of the forward-moving bus to keep you canted towards the side or rear of the bus all the time.

On the sleek Enviro400 the staircase runs towards the back of the bus for most of its length (my photograph shows an Enviro500 in Hong Kong; for a UK vehicle see here). You start your descent facing the offside, that is you are working against the inertia of the moving vehicle. The panelling meets at a 90° angle, so there is no curve to lean against to transition from facing offside to facing towards the rear. Now you have a straight drop, facing to the rear in front of you, with the inertia of the bus propelling you down it. There is a correspondingly sharp angle to the panelling and stairs at the bottom.

In short, in my opinion, the Routemaster stairs assist you in descending, the Enviro400’s actively work against a safe descent.

The photograph of the Alexander Enrivo 400 is from Wikipedia; the floor plans of the Routemaster from 73 urban journey [a bus blog]; information about Stagecoach Oxfordshire’s buses is from their website; the Hong Kong bus photograph is from www.statemaster.com ecyclopedia entry on the Enviro500; the link to the Enviro 400 interior images is to Alan O. Watkin’s site; the photograph of the rear of the Routemaster is from Ian Smith’s Bus Stop.

Warning: eBooks can seriously damage your poetry

2010-04-01T14:08:00.004+01:00

Ideally, the text measure in a poetry book accommodates the normal length of a verse line. Shakespeare wrote relatively regular pentameters which require between 50 and 55 characters to the line. Don’t say that Kindle users haven’t been warned about the need to keep point sizes small to avoid turned lines. (Image above from the Mobipocket website, below Tschichold’s Penguin Shakespeare.)

Which side [of the plate] are you on?

2010-03-28T17:25:00.003+01:00

One of my heroines is Marguerite Patten, whose work in the second world war for the Ministry of Food helped the nation struggle through rationing. I’d rate her common touch above Elizabeth David (far right), who is credited with introducing rustic Mediterranean cooking to Britain (‘dishes which are particularly suitable to our servantless lives’).

David’s A book of mediterranean food (1950) was illustrated by John Minton (‘exquisitely pretty’ was publisher John Lehmann’s description). In Modern typography in Britain, Paul Stiff discusses the graphic impact of the book, and quotes Elizabeth David on Minton’s jacket illustration: ‘In the shop windows his brilliant blue Mediterranean bay, his tables spread with white cloths and bright fruit, bowls of pasta and rice, a lobster, pitchers and jug and bottles of wine, could be seen far down the street.’

The jacket and title-page are reproduced from the 1980 Jill Norman/Book Club Associates reprint.

In the margin

2010-03-22T20:43:00.005Z

The British Library copy of a 1552 printing of the Book of common prayer has an intriguing handwritten subtraction in the margin of its title-page. ‘1718 | 1552 | [rule] | 0166’ presumably calculates the book’s age at the date of its inscription.

Government for the people …

2010-03-22T13:36:00.010Z

Rewired State is a website showing proposals for digital enhancements of democracy, many based on visualizing data otherwise locked away in government departments. The one shown above is essentially a document comparison site that highlights what has been amended in the passage of a bill.

This one shows interlinking directorships in public companies (the more boards they sit on, the fatter the cats get).

There are videos of the presentations here.

A health care bill for elderly types

2010-03-22T10:51:00.011Z

Judging by its choice of types and typography, the US Government Printing Office clearly still lives in the nineteenth century, harking back to the glory days of T. L. DeVinne. (The typefaces used in the bill are DeVinne, Century Bold, Cheltenham Bold [not on this page], with Times for line numbers.)

Source: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.3590:

Better understand data and concepts – with type that glows!

2010-03-21T21:43:00.004Z

This stern-looking, flat-voiced lass from Redmond tries to persuade us that Word Art will enhance our communication when we switch to Office 2010. Well, if you like a typographic dominatrix scene, enjoy. (The clunky interface indicates it’s Silverlight, not Flash or QuickTime.)

No apostrophe here!

2010-03-20T22:56:00.006Z

The March issue of History Today provided me with a neat Celtic counterbalance to ‘It’s Scotland’s apostrophe’.

Parody, parody, parody

2010-03-20T22:37:00.003Z

John Gross was at the Oxford Literary Festival today, talking about his new anthology The Oxford Book of Parodies. The best description I’ve heard of this book is ‘an alternative literary history’; an indirect literary chronology that introduces readers to great writers through affectionate – or sharp – reimaginings of their work. John spoke about the problem of presenting a literary parody to an audience that might not be familiar with the original. Would they get the joke without the impossible expedient of printing the parodied item on the facing page? He concluded that the acuity of the parody determined this: the parodies by Max Beerhbohm of minor literary figures of his time were rendered plausible by the obvious accuracy of those of Shaw or Wells.

He didn’t specifically touch on the problem of the visual presentation of parodies – how much does one’s recognition of the wit depend on the configuration of the parody text echoing that of the parodied? But this was a consideration in the design of the book. Many of the sources John draws his examples from (New Statesman competitions, for example) prevented accurate or complex typographic referencing of the original. In designing the OBP digital typesetting provided a liberation from these constraints, so the question became, not can we make the parody look like the original, but rather when should we do it?

Some cases come to mind: A. E. Housman’s parody of Greek tragedy (is it a parody of the stilted translations, or the stilted Greek itself?) needed to be set in the style of the Oxford Classical Texts, or Brill editions, and not regularized into the standard ‘drama’ format used in the rest of the book.

Robert Benchley’s parody of Wagnerian opera requires the pedantic typography of a 19th century theatre programme.

The text from Posy Simmonds’s Graphic novel Gemma Bovery was recreated to match the original character-for-character, space-for-space; it’s a parody of a newspaper column, and (I believe deliberately) takes the poor justification and erratic typesetting of her own newspaper, the Guardian, for its inspiration.

Anne Fadiman’s take on Clarissa Harlowe as a text-message-smart kid from Beverly Hills 90201 could have been rendered as a window from a mail client, but I chose to render it as a print-out – in a default Windows 7 core font, of course.

But by far the most challenging was the typographic recreation of a non-existent entry in the OED. Henry Bayliss, an assistant to Sir James Murray, prepared this, in exact adherence to dictionary style, when Murray decided in 1902 that the word radium was not widely used enough to warrant inclusion. Peter Gilliver has reproduced the spoof slip from the OED archives, and this is how it appeared in Dictionaries, 25 (2004):

Gilliver subsequently transcribed the slip to appear in Charlotte Brewer’s book on the OED:*

None of the the foundry types used for the (hand-set) OED have been digitized, so it was a matter of finding acceptable substitutes, and adjusting the sizes on the current 72 point = 1 inch system to match the traditional bodies (brevier, nonpareil) used in the dictionary. The regularity of the original’s typesetting and the fidelity of the spoof helped the task immensely. For the basic body type (brevier Oxford Old Style), Linotype Old Style 7 was used, 7.8/8pt, with normal horizontal and vertical scaling. The italic was given an additional slant of 10° to match the extreme slope of the original. For the nonpareil type, 6.4/6.5pt was used. The special ‘A’ version of Imprint, digitized by Monotype for the setting of OED2, provides the semibold old-style figures for dates. Font Bureau’s Giza, modified by expansion and additional stroke weight, substitutes for the OED’s Egyptians. Finally Rockwell, again with stroke weight adjustment, provides the bold square brackets around etymologies.

I think there are two ‘slips’ in the parody, and I corrected them in the setting, with Peter Gilliver’s approval. The subject field label Math. was italicized, and a b. was inserted to introduce the attrib. and Comb. block. I wonder if these formats were so conventional, and known to the editors and compositors, that Bayliss felt no need to include them on the slip?

* Charlotte Brewer, Treasure-House of the Language: The Living OED. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007

Taxi drivers, doncha love ’em

2010-03-20T00:12:00.007Z

Friday’s Guardian, in an article about the imminent demise of Delhi’s autorickshas, described their drivers as ‘surly, betel nut-chewing and overcharging.’ It was ever thus. Paul Stiff has pointed out the fear of being ‘dished’ by a cabman that haunted visitors to Victorian London. And the Designing information before designers exhibition points out one of the answers: an ‘indicator map’, complete with measuring tape, that allowed you to ascertain the exact distance, and therefore the reasonable fare, between any two points in London.

Edit The new issue of Baseline 58 has an article with colour illustrations of many of the items in the exhibition.

A nation of shopkeepers

2010-03-19T23:55:00.006Z

Many thanks to Mark and his staff at the Blackwell University Bookshop, who let us take over the shop for the final crit in our MA Book Design cover project. In the photo, Fraser Muggeridge (in green cardigan) looks on pensively as Anke Ueberberg explains her Idiot’s guide series.

Together at Reading – some visitors

2010-03-19T13:33:00.005Z

TypeTogether principal Veronika Burian and Adobe’s Miguel Sousa visited the Department this week to talk to MA Typeface Design students. Recently, Bryn Walls, for 20 years art director at Dorling Kindersley, worked with MA Book Design and Information Design students.

Bryn Walls (left), Rob Waller, and Emma Hicks (MAID): a study in fire safety graphics?

Confusing the Germans

2010-03-07T20:27:00.007Z

This photograph appeared recently in an Oxford Times supplement, showing workmen removing a road sign from the Godstow Road approach to the Woodstock Road roundabout at the start of the second world war. It’s good to have a reference for the scale of pre-Worboys signs, and also an image which shows the variable character spacing and the rather odd approach to representing a roundabout of this generation of signs.

Jost Hochuli in Reading

2010-03-05T15:39:00.006Z

Following his talk at St Bride yesterday, to mark the opening of an exhibition of work by St Gallen book designers, Jost Hochuli visited Reading today to see our collections and discuss design with students on our MA programmes. The photographs show Paul Stiff explaining a point about the ‘Designing information for everyday life, 1815–1914’ exhibition; Eric Kindel in the Otto & Marie Neurath Isotype Collection; and MA Book Design student Christina Kuschkowitz presenting her home reference manual, Urban chickens.

It’s Scotland’s apostrophe

2010-03-05T10:50:00.002Z

The recent sale of railway posters from the collection of Malcolm Guest brought to light this image, guaranteed to raise the ire of any Lynne Truss.

Accidental subversions

2010-02-12T18:09:00.005Z

I hadn’t come across Clive Richards’s collection of chance encounters with signage before, many of which seem to show a particularly English brand of gentle humour.

By Underground to Southend-on-Sea

2010-02-12T12:42:00.005Z

From 1910 to 1939, you could take a District Railway train all the way to Southend-on-Sea.* So it’s appropriate that that’s the venue for an exhibition of new takes on Harry Beck’s Underground diagram, featuring work by Maxwell Roberts. Here are the details.

* John Robert Day, John Reed (2005). The story of London's underground (9 ed.). Capital Transport. p. 66.

Preserving the aesthetic without the repression?

2010-01-31T10:22:00.032Z

Maxim Zhukov, formerly typographic coordinator for the United Nations, contributed this piece to the ATypI forum about nostalgia for the brands and designs of the Soviet era:

‘ “A number of scholars/commentators are talking about the growing nostalgia in Russia for the Soviet era. Old Soviet brands (from cigarettes to canned goods) are being resuscitated; advertisers play on this; a “Soviet-style” theme restaurant has opened in Moscow; etc. As I understand it, similar things are happening in Poland, Slovenia, East Germany, and elsewhere. My concern is with Russia. Do you see this trend for Soviet nostalgia reflected in Russian typography over the past several years?” – Brian Bennett

You are correct. Nostalgia for the Soviet Union is certainly there, and has been for quite a while. Whether it is growing, I don’t know. It’s just that it seems to affect – to various degrees – many spheres of life in Russia: political, economic, social, cultural, etc. Since the number of people who remember from their own experience what Soviet life was like is rapidly shrinking, the myths and legends abound; they become more elaborate and fairy-tale-like, often bordering on the extravagant and outrageous.

I am sure that nostalgia takes various forms in Russia and in the former vassal nations of the USSR. There are many reasons for that; I am not going to dwell on them: I am no political scientist. The renewal of the old Soviet brands is indeed highly visible. It is interesting that the ‘name’ brands directly related to the Soviet period, such as Kirov [see also here], Krasnyi Oktiabr', Leningrad, and the like obviously help sales.

One of the best examples is the ever-popular super-fatty ice cream called ‘48 kopecks’ – that was the price of a block in the Soviet times. It now sells for about one hundred times that much: now that’s what I call nostalgia.

Often, Soviet nostalgia comes with a wink. Many members of ATypI, Russian and non-Russian, know of a Soviet-themed restaurant in Moscow called Petrovich. Yes, the standard Soviet fare is served there, with gusto. The restaurant owes its existence to the wicked inspiration of Andrei Bilzho, the creator of a popular cartoon character Petrovich, a clumsy ‘Homo Sovieticus’. One of the most appealing features of that ‘enterprise of public alimentation’ is its unique collection of Soviet cultural artifacts. Petrovich is not the only Soviet-themed restaurant in Russia, but it is the oldest (est. 1997) and is likely to be the best in its class.

The public craving for Soviet-style products naturally calls for matching graphic design. And rest assured that the offer conveniently matches the demand. The typographic tools are there. Many fonts offered by ParaType, the premier Russian digital type foundry, are actually revivals of the Soviet designs (e.g., Bannikova, Kuzanyan, Bazhanov, New Standard, Svetlana, Kudryashev, Kudryashev Sans, Lazurski, Telingater Display, Journal, New Journal, etc.), or of the older, pre-1917 typefaces that were still in use in the Soviet times (e.g., Academy, Black Grotesk, Elizabeth, Literaturnaya, etc.).

Oh, one more link.’

M. Z.

Details of the book illustrated above. The text is set in Literaturnaya, which Maxim reminded me was criticized by Allen Hutt: ‘The survival of this De Vinne-style type, from the worst design period of old Imperial Germany, in the premier Socialist country in the latter part of the twentieth century, is a typographical phenomenon as unique as it is deplorable.’ ‘A revolution in Russian typography’, Penrose Annual,Volume 61, 1968

Lisa Jardine on ebooks

2010-01-10T12:11:00.003Z

A link to a download of Radio 4’s A Point of View. And the text.

The Form of the Book book

2009-12-03T21:01:00.002Z

The Form of the Book Book

A collection of essays on book design by
Catherine de Smet
James Goggin
Jenny Eneqvist, Roland Früh & Corina Neuenschwander
Richard Hollis
Sarah Gottlieb
Chrissie Charlton
Armand Mevis

Edited by
Sara De Bondt and Fraser Muggeridge

Published by Occasional Papers

The black page

2009-11-01T17:53:00.009Z

Katherine Gillieson alterted me to this celebration of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy at Shandy Hall: The Black Page

Diurnal obsolescence

2009-10-21T20:27:00.013+01:00

What are we to make of the text that Barnes & Noble has chosen to use in the sample pages of its new ebook reader, the Nook. (Nook? As in Rookery Nook? Nookie Bear?) It is a passage from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, in particular the city of Leonia. Leonia is the ultimate in consumer wastefulness – every day all its consumer products, both ephemeral and durable, are thrown out, only to be themselves replaced 24 hours later. The detritus surrounds the city like a range of mountains.

Are Barnes & Noble telling us something about the purchasing of books – that we need new ones every day, and should discard the old? Or the the Nook releases us from this fate, as we need not accumulate any physical books at all? Or has some subversive noted that each season will bring a newer, better ebook reader, so that the old ones can be discarded, indestructible, on to the growing waste-dumps of Leonia?

By the way, William Weaver’s translation is correctly ‘light bulbs’, not ‘bulbes’; ‘tubes’, not ‘rubes’, of toothpaste. And I think the strange use of bold and bold italic is supposed to show how you can highlight passages of text.

The text appears to be in a version of Monotype Amasis, but the italic is a sloped roman (we are told it can display five fonts). The Nook has the marketing advantage of being able to show covers from the Banes & Noble online store in colour because, as well as the epaper reading screen, there is a shallow conventional colour screen below.

‘I demand a serial comma!’

2009-10-20T21:28:00.004+01:00

I haven’t got hold of a copy yet, but this volume is certainly on my must-read list.

‘Each year readers submit over three thousand grammar and style questions to the Q&A page at The Chicago Manual of Style Online. Some are arcane, some simply hilarious – and one editor, Carol Fisher Saller, reads every single one. All too often she notes a classic author–editor standoff over the ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ of prose styling: ‘This author is giving me a fit’. ‘I wish that I could just DEMAND the use of the serial comma’. ‘My author wants his preface at the end of the book. This seems ridiculous. I mean, it’s not a post-face’. In The Subversive Copy Editor, Saller suggests new strategies for keeping the peace. Emphasizing carefulness, transparency, and flexibility, she shows copy editors how to build trust and cooperation. One chapter takes on the difficult author; another speaks to writers directly. Throughout, the focus is on serving the reader, even if it means breaking ‘rules’ along the way.’

Trusting your designer

2009-10-17T11:51:00.004+01:00

Matt Carey brought this letter from Mick Jagger to Andy Warhol to my attention – the kind we’d all like to receive!

The grey and grey book

2009-10-11T17:22:00.003+01:00

Rob Waller spotted this article by Nicholson Baker (The Mezzanine, Double Fold) about the physical aspects of reading books and ebooks.

It’s not entirely negative, but here is his first impression of the Kindle’s typographic presence: ‘The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.’

Small subfusc cephalopod

2009-10-08T23:10:00.005+01:00

Reading alumna Clair Georgelli’s site shows her books chronicling the adventures of a Little Black Squid: Polka Dot Design

Readers do notice

2009-10-03T13:57:00.005+01:00

I was glad to read Philip Pullman’s review of Athanasius Kircher's Theatre of the World by Joscelyn Godwin in today’s Guardian draws attention to its design: ‘But the main thing to say about this book is that it is a stupendously good piece of design. Every illustration is reproduced in exactly the right place; the captions are superbly apt and very clearly signalled; the sidebars are tactfully positioned and filled with exactly the right amount of information. The paper is heavy and rich, and properly bound. The author and the publisher [Thames & Hudson] have taken real, prolonged, and exhaustive pains to make a beautiful book, and succeeded.’