19 August, 2008
Never Looked Better
In the year and change since we released the Gotham Rounded family, I’ve noticed an unusual paradox at play. Some designers choose the fonts because of their high-tech associations, and can coax out of them an “engineered” quality that evokes the engraved markings on keyboards and camera lenses (both prime ingredients in Gotham Rounded’s design.) Others choose the fonts because they’re friendly, and use them to achieve a playful tone that’s somewhere between a kids’ science book and a Japanese synthpop single. But every once in a while, someone chooses the fonts for both reasons, finding a way to reconcile these seemingly contrary intentions in a single piece of design. Scott Dadich, the Creative Director of Wired, has a knack for making type do two things at once, but only when he’s not making it do twelve things at once. (He’s one of those publication designers who makes me glad I stuck with type design.) Together with his dream team, designers Wyatt Mitchell, Margaret Swart, and Christy Sheppard, Scott introduces in the September issue of Wired a redesign that features Gotham Rounded, in what I think is an incredibly smart application.
The magazine’s Play section, once home to gadgets and new technology, now exhibits more of the broadly philosophical thinking that distinguishes the very intriguing Wired of the 21st century. The addition of Gotham Rounded is just part of a design strategy designed to give the section a more distinct voice and a clearer point of view: another smart device is the yellow “progress bar” that tracks the movement of the section, and makes for some marvelous visual serendipity when it intersects both type and image. But positively brilliant are the dominating initials that form a sort of periodic table of themes: a general topic is abstracted from each article, which is represented by a two-letter abbreviation, which signals the nature of the writing to follow. It’s a very clever way of reinforcing the magazine’s editorial range — and reminding readers that Wired is not about things but about ideas — and it excitingly builds anticipation for next month’s issue: will it cover these same topics? New ones? It’s one of the most striking and original solutions I’ve ever seen for building a genuine section-within-a-section, a daunting challenge for any magazine. Wired achieves it with spectacular success. —JH
14 August, 2008
Obnoxious Character Recognition
At the heart of the game of cat-and-mouse played by bloggers and spammers is Captcha, purveyor of those staticky demands to enter the code exactly as shown above. Captcha is premised on the idea that brains are still better than machines at reading text, and that by forcing visitors to decipher a distorted piece of typography, the system can successfully distinguish between humans and robots. Of course, ongoing advancements in OCR technology have sparked a proportionate response in the impenetrability of Captcha, provoking an arms race whose chief casualty is the quality of life online. Next time you’re submitting to some real-world indignity — say, stripping down to your underwear at an airport security screening — try to look forward to the geniality of the virtual world, in which your own computer, from the comfort of your own home, will upbraid you for mistyping B89gqlIIl. And this after it went to all the trouble of obscuring the type using a three-dimensional distortion matrix, edge softening, gaussian interference, random occlusion, and your least favorite font. Puny human.
But happily — brilliantly! — Captcha’s inventor, Luis von Ahn, has inverted his own technology in the service of something grand. Von Ahn’s latest project, reCaptcha, replaces Captcha’s random gobbledygook with actual snippets of digitized books that computers have so far been unable to decipher. ReCaptcha uses each individual human intervention to improve the quality of digital literacy, a welcome relief for readers of this 1861 text that mentions modems (“modem art” is a common flub.) National Public Radio has the full story in this four-minute interview with the inventor himself. —JH
7 August, 2008
A Secret Universe in Your Desk Drawer
My weapon of choice is a Pilot Precise rollerball, but I keep a General’s Sketching Pencil below my monitor. I don’t write with it: it’s not sharpened; it’s there because I admire its typography, which in less than four inches goes from italic small capitals to a cheery script, to a pair of unrelated sans serifs in two different sizes. It is eclecticism incarnate, and it’s got a lot of heart.
Once you start to notice their markings, pencils draw you into a beguiling world of exotic lettering. With color unavailable to their designers — absurdly, the color of a pencil either definitely indicates the color of its lead, or is completely arbitrary — pencils have historically expressed their identities through playful typography. The range of information they need to convey (manufacturer, product name, grading and classification, place of origin) calls for a self-contained system of semantic distinctions, and the unforgiving process by which tiny letters must be hot stamped into soft pine demands durable letterforms of considerable ingenuity. These conditions recall the challenges of designing newspaper text faces, which must first and foremost be legible. But where expressiveness trumps clarity, things get interesting.
Bob Truby’s Brand Name Pencils offers an inviting tour of his collection, complete with closeups of each and every specimen. The brief sampling above already reveals more kinds of script, blackletter and tuscan than can even be categorized, and these are among the collection’s more conservative members. Check out the Dixon Aerial 2280 No. 2, whose logotype might be classified as “open Lombardic capitals with terminal lightning bolts.” Definitely not a species you see every day. —JH
