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11 May, 2010
An Enchanted Alphabet
I have a special affection for decorated letters, especially the ornamented designs of the nineteenth century. You know the kind: they're chubby Regency typefaces, slab serifs or high-contrast ‘Fat Faces,’ mostly, whose surfaces are emblazoned with intricate patterns or pastoral scenes. The collection of L. J. Pouchée contains some genuine masterpieces that I’ve long admired, letters festooned with grapevines or peonies or cobblestones, or illuminated with bucolic vignettes of farmer at the plough. “We should really do something in this vein,” I once said to Tobias. “Covered in fax machines, or pigeons?” he quipped. I dropped the topic.
Designer Jeanie Nelson has picked it up. On her blog Jeanie & Jewell, she’s exhibiting a wonderful collection of ornamented capitals of her own invention, and they are absolutely enchanting. There are so many things to love about these that I hardly know where to begin: the cheery colors whose roles change from letter to letter, the witty imagery that conceals more than a few oblique puns, the whimsical way she tweaks the nose of typographic convention whenever the spirit moves her. (Most type designers start with the sober letter H that serves as a template for the rest of the design; Jeanie Nelson’s H, right now, is having more fun than any H that’s ever lived.) I’m delighted by this design not only because of its squirrels, dragons, pineapples and ice cream cones, but because it pays homage to a potent and beloved historical style without ever becoming a stuffy museum piece in period dress. That the koala bear in the K is climbing a letter made of wood just makes it doubly fantastic. —JH
| Share | • | Tags: | The Alphabet, Victoriana, Decorative, Ornament |
3 April, 2009
The Alphabet: A Dramatic Reading
This clip of James Earl Jones reciting the alphabet is so disturbing that I can't believe it actually aired on the Sesame Street of my youth — not without dissuading me from my current career, anyway. All I can say today is that I wish he'd included an "and," so that I could cobble together a sample of "This... is H&FJ" for my ringtone.
Other videos I'd like to see include Christopher Lloyd reading "lorem ipsum," and Christopher Walken performing the 1940 type specimen of the Linotype company: "How, is one... to assess, and evaluate, a type face in terms. Of its esthetic. Design." —JH
The Alphabet, by James Earl Jones
| Share | • | Tags: | The Alphabet, Video, Phonetics |
14 May, 2008
Taxonomy Meets Typography
Tina at Swissmiss turned me on to this lovely poster by Decoylab, which wouldn’t you know it makes lovely use of Gotham Extra Light. I’m amazed that designer Maiko Kuzunishi came up with so many recognizable silhouettes, more so that she found so many that are sympathetic with the shape of their initials. (The B is almost a butterfly already, but who’d have seen the J in jellyfish?) Maiko imagines her poster as a fine addition to a child’s room, and I agree: it’s cheerful, engaging, and subliminally inculcates in tomorrow’s animal lovers a taste for fine typography. —JH
Three-color Animal Alphabet Poster by Decoylab. 18" x 24" (46cm x 61cm), $40.
| Share | • | Tags: | Gotham, Posters, Nature, The Alphabet, Made with H&FJ |
28 April, 2008
Our Middle Name
Last month’s posts about the ¶ and the ß prompted a flurry of e-mail inquiring about other special favorites in the character set. Matt McInerney guessed correctly that the ampersand is one for which we have special affection, and asked if there was anything else we could say about it. How could we not? Ampersand, after all, is H&FJ’s middle name.
Though it feels like a modern appendix to our ancient alphabet, the ampersand is considerably older than many of the letters that we use today. By the time the letter W entered the Latin alphabet in the seventh century, ampersands had enjoyed six hundred years of continuous use; one appears in Pompeiian graffiti, establishing the symbol at least as far back as A.D. 79. One tidy historical account credits Marcus Tullius Tiro, Cicero’s secretary, with the invention of the ampersand, and while this is likely a simplified retelling, it’s certainly true that Tiro was a tireless user of scribal abbreviations. One surviving construction of the ampersand bears his name, and keen typophiles can occasionally find the “Tironian and” out in the world today.
As both its function and form suggest, the ampersand is a written contraction of “et,” the Latin word for “and.” Its shape has evolved continuously since its introduction, and while some ampersands are still manifestly e-t ligatures, others merely hint at this origin, sometimes in very oblique ways. The many forms that a font’s ampersand can follow are generally informed by its historical context, the whims of its designer, and the demands of the type family that contains it: after the jump, a tour of some ampersands and the thinking behind them, along with an explanation of the storied history of the word “ampersand” itself...
Continues...| Share | • | Tags: | Punctuation, History, The Alphabet |
