Seen in an antique store near Burlington, Vermont, on July 13, 2011.

Seen in Santa Crus, California, on April 4, 2008.

A story’s been quietly developing out of our San Francisco office over the past few months. Meghan Arnold and Michael Pieracci, our respective communications director and logistics man have steadily laid the groundwork and made way for the arrival of TYPO, Europe’s premier design conference, to our city. As April approaches and we enter the next phase of publicity and preparations, the two continue to work steadily at creating time and space for meaningful personal connections and the coming together of a community.

Michael and Meghan’s planning began with a few central ideas and questions. How to translate a conference aesthetic; Who best represents Bay Area design culture, and how to incorporate them and their work? They have since selected a theme and written the first words of introduction to it, landed the venue, hired an intern, set up audio/video, gone through the selections of caterers, managed airfare and hotel accommodations, solicited a volunteer staff, and of course, lined up speakers for the event. I sat down with the two of them recently to find out what the work’s been like.

Meghan Arnold | “It’s been exciting, and personally really interesting working with some of the icons of international design culture.”

Michael Pieracci | “Organizing the logistics behind a conference, I’ve discovered, taps into my own ways of being creative; in making an experience for our speakers and our attendees.”

Audience views Dale Herigstad’s talk at TYPO London 2011. © 2011 kassnerfoto.de

TYPO San Francisco 2012 Main Stage; Novellus Theater, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts

One aspect of incorporating local culture plays off the contrasts between San Francisco and Berlin; the one being tight, the other loose. Michael continues, “We’ve tried to create a very casual atmosphere here where conference attendees feel comfortable getting up and going for a walk, dropping in on a workshop, grabbing a drink or meeting and talking in the halls.”

Their efforts have not gone unaided. Advised by UX and brand designer Robin Richmond, who last year organized TYPO London, and Benno Rudolf in Berlin, who led and directed all the preceding years’ TYPO conferences, the two have handled the difficult tasks and maneuvered around the pitfalls of conference planning gracefully. Considerable help has also come from the backing of the conference’s facilitators, Erik Spiekermann and Kali Nikitas. Kali chairs the Communication Arts department at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, and works as a designer, educator and curator of graphic design work. Erik is of course a co-founder of FontShop, a type and graphic designer, strategic planner and businessman.

Erik Spiekermann and Neville Brody onstage at TYPO London 2011. Photo courtesy of FontFont

TYPO San Francisco’s confirmed speakers include design observer and Pentagram partner Michael Bierut, Pixar storyteller Michael B. Johnson, internationally recognized multiple media designer Neville Brody, the newly-local letterer and illustrator Jessica Hische, FontFeed’s own Yves Peters, designer and educator Juliette Bellocq, and local type and nameplate designer Jim Parkinson. It’s been real work, but Michael and Meghan describe the process of lining up speakers as very fulfilling. Reaching out to the international design community they’ve so far gotten a tremendous response, and representing local culture they’ve found nothing but speakers of the same caliber. Check the complete speaker list for the most up to date information on who’s speaking.

And I’ll be there—helping with workshops, like Damon Styer’s signpainting workshop, and making friends.

On one of the many times I have visited the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum, I got a peek at the hundreds of “cuts” they had stored in the back. These are large wood and linoleum plates made mainly for posters. Most of them came from Globe Printing in Chicago. I think they had arrived fairly recently when I saw them.

One in particular caught my eye. I recall that it was about two or three feet wide. On one side was this design, obviously intended for use on political posters:

But on the reverse side was this amazing piece of craftsmanship and ingenuity:

Apparently, cuts were reused when they were no longer needed. In this case, a larger plate was cut down. Not only that, but the open areas were filled in, mosaic fashion, to ensure an even impression for the new cut on the other side. To my eye, the discarded design was the more interesting one. It looks like it read “…ES BROS.” I really like the design of the “B”:

(Photos taken in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, on March 30, 2009.)

I finally got around to framing the beautiful commemorative print I got from the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum back in 2009. To give you an idea of the size, the frame is five feet tall. By far the biggest thing I’ve ever had framed. Here are a couple close-up shots:

I love the part below the big heading where it says, “THIS IS THE SMALLEST WOOD TYPE EVER MADE, OUT OF A MACHINE WEIGHING 950 POUNDS”.

The print was taken from a literal showcase of Hamilton Wood Type made for the 1893 Columbia Exposition in Chicago. It’s composed of virgin (never used for printing) wood type, some of it painted. If you have seen wood type before, it’s usually dark brown in color, stained from use. This is what the stuff looked like when it was brand new.

The curators of the Hamilton were able to pull prints from the showcase without getting a bit of ink on it. The display was taken out of its protective case and wrapped in 3M window insulator film. The film was inked and the prints were pulled from that. It’s not as crisp as a print taken directly from wood type, but it’s the first time any kind of print was made from this old type in over 100 years.

More photos here. If you’re at all interested in type, wood type, or letterpress printing, I highly recommend paying a visit to the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum. It’s in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, about a couple hours by car north of Milwaukee.

Seen in Davis, California, on April 5, 2008.

Seen at the Eastman House, Rochester, New York, July 19, 2008. I think this was on the side of an old movie projector that was on display.

Another cool nameplate, seen on June 20, 2009, in Saint Paul, Minnesota.

It really wasn’t designed for small sizes on screens. Words like milliliter can be very difficult to decipher. If you ever had to read or write a password with 1, i, l or I, you know the problem. That little comparison below is also available from the download page.

If you cook recipes from a US cookbook, you need to use measurements that seem archaic to a metrified European like myself. They use cups for liquid measurements. US fluid ounces are different from UK fluid ounces, but that is another story. I made a conversion chart for our kitchen, listing cups, tablespoons (which they like to abbreviate as TBSP), teaspoons (TSP) and milliliters. Europeans know that one of the advantages of the metric system is the fact that liquid measurements follow the same standard as those for other substances. Thus, a liter of water (i. e. 1000 milliliters) weighs 1 kilogram (i. e. 1000 grams). I’m using US spelling here, UK English would be litre and kilogramme.

I made a pdf which you’ll find in the download portion of this blog, so you can download it, print it out and stick it to you fridge door or wherever else you wish. Magnets cannot be downloaded over the internet yet.

La typo dans tous ses états, ou comment la typographie investit notre environnement. Exposition collective de typographes, graphistes et photographes, en partenariat avec l’Atelier du Livre d’art et de l’Estampe de l’Imprimerie nationale et la revue Graphê.
Avec Albert Boton, Michel Bouvet, Eric Brocherie, Kook Ewo, Gonzalo Garcia Barcha, Franck Jalleau, Clotilde Olyff, Guillaume J. Plisson, Jean François Porchez (ZeCraft), Julien Priez.

When I was studying at the Atelier national de création typographique (ANCT) in Paris in the mid 1990s, our hero was Hans Eduard Meier, the creator of Syntax. My friends and I admired his sensitive historical research and the original approach that led him to the development not only of novel type forms, but subsequently to a better definition of the humanist sans serif category in type design. I find his work underrepresented in histories of type design today, so when I saw Roxane Jubert’s article on Meier in Etapes Graphiques in 2000, I asked for permission to republish the article online. Roxane, my former classmate at ANCT, happily obliged.

Ten years later, Spanish publisher Campgràfic decided to publish Meier's book under the title La Evolución de la Letra, (original edition: Die Schriftentwicklung / The Development of Writing / Le Développement de l’Ecriture, 1959).  Roxane wrote the introduction for the book, and updated her Etapes Graphiques article. I asked Roxane to add illustrations and captions to the text, and commissioned an English translation. We are now happy to offer online illustrated articles in English, French and Spanish.

— Hans Eduard Meier, a life dedicated to letter design
— Hans Eduard Meier, une vie dédiée aux caractères
— Hans Eduard Meier, una vida dedicada a los caracteres

Special thanks to Hans Eduard Meier for allowing us to reproduce his visual material, Roxane Jubert for extensive work on the online version of the text, Parry Jubert for the English translation, Carlos García Aranda for the Spanish translation, and Gustavo Ferreira for help with online presentation of the articles.

We live a few blocks from the Minnesota State Fairgrounds, and every summer the “Back to the Fifties” car show is held there. There’s usually no need to actually pay to get into it to see the cars—our neighborhood is full of them, cruising around, for the duration of the show. But lately I’ve paid to get in, mainly to get shots of the nameplates, or “brightwork” as it is known.

The Chevy “Bel Air” nameplate, from the late-fifties, is my all-time favorite. The design is so simple and stylish. (Photo taken in Saint Paul, Minnesota, June 20, 2009.)

There might be a personal bias to my “Bel Air” preference. We always had Chevies when I was a kid, a ’59 Bel Air and a ’64 Bel Air—the car I learned to drive on and the car I drove during high school in the early seventies. Here’s a cartoon painting I did of it back then as a joke:

(When I was in high school, I had a little side business doing cartoon drawings of cars like this for my friends. I’ll post more of them sometime.)

Seen in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, on March 28, 2009.

Letter worker, graphic designer, type designer and action calligrapher Timothy Donaldson created a new piece of calligraphy at Bilston Craft Gallery. The piece was commissioned by The Harley Gallery as part of Signs for Sounds. This touring exhibition curated by Jeremy Theophilus explores the contemporary practice of letter-forming from traditional calligraphy to the use of digital technologies and performance. It considers the impact of letter form, an art that we are surrounded by everyday – from traditional calligraphy to hi-tech type design. The event was beautifully captured on video by Anthony Davies for Last Phoenix Films. We witness the creation of a calligraphic work of art, as gesture becomes calligraphic movement becomes word, whose meaning is gradually obfuscated until it becomes meta-text. Timothy eloquently comments.

Timothy Donaldson at Bilston Craft Gallery from Bilston Craft Gallery on Vimeo.

From the scratch of the quill curling across the page, to letters painstakingly chipped and carved from stone, Signs for Sounds looks at the ways that artists use the age-old shapes of letters to amplify the effect of words. This exhibition examines the traditional skills of letter-forming, along with how we use lettering in the modern world – with artists’ films of graffiti and virtual typography where visitors can experiment with Jason Edward Lewis’ virtual typography to re-shape poetry on touchscreen monitors. Featuring examples of outstanding skill in letter-forming by leading practitioners, the exhibition shows how writing communicates meaning and how this is changing with the use of new media in the digital age. Exhibitors include letter-engraver Tom Perkins, calligrapher Ewan Clayton and performance artist Julien Breton, who dances letter forms using light. There is also a family-friendly activity area, and a display of creative writing by local writers’ groups Bilston Writers and Bilston Scribblers on the theme Sights and Sounds of Bilston.

The calligraphy in the video was performed live at the exhibition opening at Bilston Craft Gallery on December 8th 2011. Timothy Donaldson will repeat his calligraphic performance at Signs for Sounds: Contemporary Letterforming and Calligraphy, live in the Harley Gallery on Sunday February 19, 2012, where the exhibition runs until April 2012. Entry is free.

If you want to sample Timothy’s calligraphy as a typeface, download his dynamic script in three weights FF Fancywriting, one of the families that FontFont released to the public free of charge. See also his other typefaces on FontShop.com.

When I bought this computer in 2006, I did’t expect to still be using it in 2012. It hasn’t always been my primary machine, but it’s been in use one way or another all that time.

Apple has used essentially the same case design even longer, going back to the Power Mac G5 in 2003. I had one of those, too, and it was kind of a dog. This one is the first generation Mac Pro, which was released when Apple switched to Intel processors. I chose the mid-range model, with two 2.66 GHz Dual-core Xeon processors, a 250 MB hard drive, and 1 GB of RAM.

It was my main machine for several years, with a 15” MacBook Pro as a secondary machine for taking work on the road. Eventually, having to keep my work sync’d between them was too much trouble and I switched to a 17” MacBook Pro for everything. I retired the Mac Pro to the basement, using it as a server and for watching movies or playing music, and other non-work-type things.

About a year ago, I changed my mind. The 17” was too much of a compromise—not that powerful as a desktop machine, and it rarely left my desk, unless I was traveling. So, I got a MacBook Air and a 27” iMac. What made it possible? In a word: DropBox.

This setup worked great, but recently, the iMac started giving me the worst possible kind of trouble—kernel panics during backups. I still don’t know what the cause is, but I couldn’t trust it as my main machine anymore.

Long story short, I brought my old Mac Pro out of retirement. After upgrading the video card, hard drives, software, display and memory, it’s never run better. It’s smooth and quiet and plenty fast enough for my needs.

One of the things that made me reconsider it was a discussion sometime last year on Hypercritical, John Siracusa’s weekly podcast. Unfortunately, I don’t recall which show it was, but basically Siracusa pointed out one of his reasons for preferring Mac Pros over iMacs and portables: External hard drives usually have cheap power supplies. I can attest to this, having several fail on me over the years. The Mac Pro, however, has a very robust power supply and therefore hard drives you add to it are much more reliable, another thing I can attest to. I had never really thought about this before, and had even tended to use external drives with my Mac Pro. But it made a lot of sense, and now I’m sticking to internal hard drives for everything.

I’m very happy with this setup. I’ve got a really solid desktop machine now, and the MacBook Air is my all-time favorite laptop. And DropBox makes it easy to work with two machines. The most amazing thing to me is that this Mac Pro is so old and yet it has no trouble running the latest software. I’d say it was a pretty good deal.

Gee, they make it seem like a good thing.

This was actually for something that was used in shoe stores back in the forties. People put their feet inside an x-ray machine so that they could have their feet “scientifically” measured for shoes. That was before they realized how dangerous it was.

Seen in a museum in Madison, Wisconsin, March 30, 2010.

Seen in La Crosse, Wisconsin, April 2, 2010.