I found the Latinotype site the other day via NOTCOT, and I’m rather taken with some of their faces. I’m particularly fond of Fidel Black, which I think I’m going to suggest for a rebranding project coming up soon; Biotech, which with its chunky and square lowercase is like a print-suitable cousin of Verdana Bold; and Regia Sans, because, well, I just like it. Go and take a look at the rest of their faces, and perhaps click Comprar on a few of them.

Pascal Blanchet has some great illustrations and artworks on his site, well worth a look. Follow a few links and you get to Drawn & Quarterly, with more of his (and many others) graphic novel work, which is definitely worth a look.

Antonio Carusone mailed me to announce his new project, The Grid System, a site (obviously enough) about grid systems. Now, I don’t normally post about things from mailouts or press releases, but since I’m particularly partial to a good grid and I’ve already found a couple of useful things on this site that I’ve found interesting and even bookmarked, I reckon I’d end up writing about this anyway. So, go and have a look.

What did I bookmark though? Well, Syncotype for one. It’s a bookmarklet, i.e. a bit of javascript you can bookmark and then run on any page you’re viewing, that overlays a baseline grid on your page. I have an 18px baseline grid on this site, which often ends up being broken by images I post not having a multiple of that as their height. It’s certainly something I could solve with a bit of extra javascript of my own (or even something server side) to ensure the height of a containing element of an image is indeed a multiple of 18px or a round number of ems, but I’ve not got around to it yet.

The 18px baseline grid. If you have default text settings in your browser, and use Syncotype with an 18px grid, this should all line up. Should.

Also, there’s the problem of whether such automatic measures are even appropriate. For a while I cropped and trimmed all images to a set of heights to match the baseline, but sometimes it just doesn’t fit the image and I found adding extra padding to the container (a paragraph tag in this case) actually spoiled the vertical rhythm of the page. I decided that as this site is a single column that it would be the apparent vertical rhythm that was important, rather than the real one. I wonder how other people solve the problem? Or even if they do…

I’ve been following this series of articles by Johnson Banks about their Art from Barrels project for Glenfiddich. The aim of the project was to get across the length of time it takes to make a barrel of Glenfiddich Single Malt, and the end results are pretty interesting. I haven’t got all that much to say about it, especially as the articles explain it all pretty well, other than to say I’ve discovered I like sandblasted letters in charred wood:

Funny how coincidences arise. I found both Mario Feese’s Air Lines and Chris Harrison’s Internet Maps at about the same time and was struck by how recognisable the continents are, and, as I’m fond of maps I thought I’d compare the two images. On the Air Lines map, most of the continents are rendered as a ghostly but fairly accurate outlines, with South America rendered as a beautiful abstraction, right to its tip. The Internet Map is obviously somewhat different, with almost all the connections between cities in rich countries; Africa barely exists and the tip of South America is shown with a single faint line, whereas North America and Europe are smothered in a riot of lines. I overlaid the two maps onto each other and I noticed an interesting thing about the Internet Map, which I describe below.

So, to align the maps I needed to use various groups of cities that appeared in both maps; using the southern hemisphere to get the horizontal scale right - there are sharp points for cities in South America, southern Africa and Australia, and in the northern hemisphere I used San Francisco, LA and Tokyo to get the vertical scale. Thankfully, both maps are using the same projection.

Everything pretty much lines up nicely, except there’s that node in the Gulf of Guinea which I originally thought might be some satellite uplink affair at Sao Tomé, maybe a huge data haven I’d never heard about. However, after lining up a map of Africa with both maps it turns out to be nowhere near any land at all. In fact, when I was trying to mark the point on Google Maps, I realise this big data interchange point (the biggest in Africa!) is at 0.0°N, 0.0°W, which is a suspiciously default sounding location. Maybe in the data that Chris Harrison used there are a few unknowns, with their locations set to null, and these connections should be shown elsewhere? If they were removed, Africa would be even more ghostly.

Just saw a link to this site on Coudal about the rebranding of Polaroid, written by Paul Giambarba, who did the rebrand. It’s a fascinating read, and I might post more about it, but the bit about the pre-1957 logo caught my attention. I was looking at the old logo, and wondering why they’d done the ‘a’ like that, and that with the kerning on the other letters it made it look like two words: “Pola roid”. The ‘r’ is a bit odd too. Seems that those weren’t the only problems with the logo identified by Giambarba:

Polaroid is reversed, or dropped-out, from a red patch in a mangled version of a typeface called Memphis. The true Memphis lower case “a” has an upper serif to distinguish it from an “o,” but close inspection will reveal that the upper serif has been removed from the Polaroid “a.” Thus the brand name could be easily misread at quick glance as Poloroid. Of all the counterproductive things one can do in commerce, this was outrageously stupid, especially when spending considerably to launch a new line of products. Paul Giambarba

At top, the pre-1957 Polaroid logo, in the middle, the word typed in Memphis and kerned tightly and at the bottom the same word, but with the upper serif of the ‘a’ removed.

I think that the word looks a load better with the serif. Still, Giambarba had already dismissed the typeface as ‘unreadable’, so the logo was clearly up for bigger changes than the reinstatement of a serif and the demangling of the ‘r’. Go and read the rest of it, it’s worth it.

Well it’s finally here. The actual day of the US election. I don’t really want to write about it, it’s been on TV, in the press, online, everywhere, for two years and I can’t wait for it to be over - I’m sure it’s got more coverage on British TV than any of our own elections ever has. It’s been at such a level of saturation that I, as someone who lives outside the US, a British citizen, someone who hasn’t been actively following the election, can look at this (rather nice - snippet at right) bit of typography and recognise pretty much all the stories it represents*. However, there are some compensations; there’s been a big focus on graphic design this time around, though seemingly only on the Obama side of things - to the extent that that Shepard Fairey poster is the subject of much parody.

The Obama campaign branding is of such incredibly high quality and consistency I’m hoping there’ll be a book about it - they must have had to use so many suppliers over the campaign, if not for artwork then printing, set building, copywriting and typesetting. To ensure a consistent quality and tone for such a long time over such a wide distribution is quite an achievement.

Anyway, now that the day is finally here, and with the full knowledge from my site stats that about 40% of my readership is from the US, I urge those of you from that country to get out and vote. The biggest threat to democracy is people thinking that the election is already won - it isn’t. So vote. I hear the turnout may be record breaking - let’s hope it is, and it inspires lazy British voters to get out there when it’s our turn. And to make this post a bit more related to type, some lovely posters to get you in the mood:

Posters from Monoscope, Supermarket, Things Are Fine and Tomorrow Partners.

* Note: This is not to say I don’t think the US election is important. I know that it is, but the level of coverage has been incredible, unbelievable. For this amount of coverage we’re getting into taxation without representation territory.