Imaginary Alphabet no. 6: Jada

It’s finally back from the printer! For those of you who aren’t familiar with Imaginary Alphabets, it’s an on-going personal project that “fills in the blanks of found lettering.” It is a single format—a booklet of sorts, that folds out to an 11x17 / A3 poster. Jada, the newest alphabet, is based on sheet music from a 1918 jazz standard, and is the first to have been built as a typeface rather than as lettering. I print a limited run of each alphabet, so please email me asap if you’d like to receive a copy in the mail!

Typefaces and Student Work

My syllabus, in every type and design class I teach, is clear: I will not accept work that uses pirated or stolen fonts. I don’t think that looking the other way on this issue for ‘the sake of learning’ or any other excuse I have heard is doing students any favors. And it’s clear that if a student thinks it’s okay while in college, their behavior will likely continue in the working world—as evidenced by the number of professional graphic designers who download type from illegal torrent sites, as well as studios that share a single font file that exceeds the license allowance.

Students aren’t learning how to be better typographers this way anyway. If they can’t design something that is engaging and effective using the tools they have, then they’re not working hard enough. I’ve always liked that Jessica Hische has talked about this in several of her talks: she didn’t like the free fonts that were available to her in art school, so she took the initiative to draw the kinds of letters she wanted to see in her work.

Type is expensive, and often prohibitively so for students. Adobe has tried to meet them half way with a student package, but in a culture that embraces the notion that ‘if you can get it for free, why pay even a little?’ I wonder how effective that approach has even been. 

But type costs a lot for a reason. The sheer man hours that go into a typeface is so significant that for a typeface to be commercially successful, a lot of licenses need to be sold. It’s especially hard because usually those man hours are genuinely worked by a single person. To further muddy the profit margin, third-party type distributors and foundries take a large cut of each sale. No one ever got filthy rich off this stuff.

Lastly, tempting as it may be to draw the parallel, this isn’t the same as software* and it isn’t the same as music. It’s not even the same as illustration or photography, which—and I’m not advocating stealing any of these things, either—can still make up for some losses with a large usage license, and anyway isn’t nearly as easy to obtain in high resolution. 

People on the right side of this fence can complain all they want, but ultimately there isn’t a lot most of them can do about it. Teachers, however, have an opportunity and a responsibility to instill the ethics while students are in front of them, and while we have the collateral and repercussions we can use to enforce them.

*Type is protected and distributed like software. But I’m establishing a difference between, for example, Adobe Creative Suite, and font licensing, because fonts behave differently (permanently) on your computer.

Reviving Howland

Last night marked our last class of the first term of Type@Cooper, as we presented our ‘final’ revival typefaces to the illustrious Sumner Stone and Allan Haley. With a scant 7 minutes of crit time per student, it was remarkable that our guests were able to offer such thoughtful observations.

Here is the specimen I created.

Monday Morning Revival Check-in (11/28)

Last week in class I was surprised to discover that I’d drawn some alternate characters I have zero recollection of drawing. (They were bad.)

This week is our last big push before our final critique of the term on 12/6. And just to add to the suspense, Jesse told us last week that we will be joined next Tuesday by Sumner Stone and Allan Haley. It totally reminded me of MasterChef or whatever when the contestants get told Gordon Ramsay is going to come taste their cooking. 

Anyway, Howie (working title) is coming along. I’m having more and more moments of understanding how small decisions can make or break the rest of the drawings. It’s like getting farther into an increasingly dense hedge maze, with more dead-ends and fewer options for going back the way you came.

Punctuation!

Mucho. (Recommendations for office chairs welcome!)

Checkin’ out these ligatures…

Super different…

Ha! Yeah right!

Monday Morning Revival Check-in

I end up working on my Cooper Type work later at night, more often than not, because my days are occupied with juggling other commitments. It’s an interesting way to work because I have more clarity in the mornings, but I can churn through things faster at night. So Monday mornings, I check in to see how (what) I did during the witching hour.

Some screenshots of some metrics windows:

I’ve got some weight inconsistencies going on (the x is particularly difficult.) I’m finding that one of the primary questions I return to over and over in this project is, how much do I remain faithful to the specimen and how much do I try to balance/tame some of the weirdness for a better overall typeface?

I’m closer to getting the spacing both accurate and faithful to the revival.

There are 4 different Ms in the specimen samples I’ve collected, so I’ve done one alternate for now. There are some other characters I may create alternates for as well, but I’ll go back once I’m caught up with the other deliverables.

The Use of Moveable Type

‘Typography’ is a word that gets used pretty freely to mean a lot of different things that aren’t exactly typography. Yesterday, @okaytype tweeted, “What is worse: not knowing the difference between Type and Lettering or not knowing the difference between Typography and Type Design?”

I’m not much of a purist. I have strong opinions but usually lack the endurance to follow through. So I guess I don’t really care that ‘typography’ is an umbrella term for type, actual typography, lettering, and type design, except when that’s voiced by graphic designers.

I teach typography, and by ‘typography’ I mean the use of moveable type, which is of course to say moveable digital type. Like I said, I’m not a purist; there’s no lead involved. What I teach is how to use type: beginning with identifying and acknowledging the anatomy and structure of letterforms, and proceeding to composing individual words by teaching how to explore scale, mass/weight, orientation, legibility (or, how much of a letter needs to be seen in order to identify it, which is not to be mistaken for readability) to communicate an emotive message.

And I teach that, gruelingly, for a full semester in Typography I, with only a scant venture into sentences, paragraphs, leading, and the stuff of multiple pages. 

I teach this way because I think that too much of the other stuff, like type design and lettering, gets in the way of the nuts-and-bolts craft of ‘setting’ good type. Students (and let’s face it, a lot of working designers) often rely too much on stylized display fonts to do the communicating and drop the ball on both craft and subtlety.

That’s why I also give my students this other definition of typography: the visual manifestation of language. 

More on that lovely statement, soon…

John Downer, Day 2

John Downer’s workshop for Cooper Type taught several integral considerations for developing a typeface. Beginning with basic spacing techniques, then moving into creating basic bitmap letterforms, the class was tasked with continual assessment from a distance. Both by stepping across the room, and using a reducing glass, this taught us to observe simultaneously: proportion, mass, and the relationship between black and white space.