I’ve had this link on Hello Bauldoff hanging around for ages - the design of the box and the bold typography are fantastic, and the colours in the photo really appeal. One thing I noticed was the old-style General Mills logo which is far nicer than the version on their website, though they still use the crazy ‘G’ symbol. It’s the kind of thing that would drive me bonkers if I had to stare at it at breakfast every morning - is it a ‘G’? Is there an ‘M’ in there? Or is it some bonkers ampersand?

I know it’s the main point of the campaign they’re doing, but I’d remove the t-shirt promo flash, or massively simplify it - to me it looks like it’s trying too hard for that retro-Americana thang. The rest of the box carries that off perfectly, so it’s just not necessary.

I found this little tip today on the International Herald Tribune developer blog. It’s a simple solution to an old problem in a modern context - avoiding widows and orphans online. I’m poking around in the innards of my CMS (Expression Engine) to see about doing this on Ministry of Type (I am not going to do it manually!) and fortunately it will (if I do it) be retroactive, unlike the IHT.

Hurrah.

OK. Rant time. I was sent this wonderful, wonderful link today. For many years now, I’ve been increasingly bothered by these little yellow flies buzzing around on my screen. They drive me to a level of distraction and rage that (in terms of interfaces) only Windows nag-bubbles can beat. Why developers think that these things are so helpful and vitally useful that they must pop up at almost every opportunity, and that the user must be given no obvious recourse to turn them off, I don’t know. They are the gnats of the typographic world - buzzing and darting in front of your eyes, imparting very little of use, and even then merely duplicating what the rest of the interface provides in a much more studied and calm manner.

The reasoning for them existing is often given (at least in the online world) as ‘accessibility’, assuming somehow that a user needing some kind of assistive technology would also be the kind of user always able to hold a mouse pointer steady over an arbitrary interface element for the requisite two seconds to see the damn thing. For the rest of us, just leaving the pointer somewhere ‘out of the way’ while typing, reading or (heaven forfend!) thinking, results in this pointless yellow box popping up. Perhaps ironically, it’s a situation made worse by using that finest of input tools, the wacom tablet, as removing the pen from the sensing region leaves the pointer static wherever it last was on screen; perfect prey for the predatory tooltip.

The actual accessibility modifications that lead to tooltips showing up everywhere are such things as adding title attributes to links and other elements, and the tooltip is merely an unpleasant symptom of this noble effort. That the browser shows a tooltip for these things is analogous to an overkeen child endlessly demonstrating how clever they’ve been: Look at me! Look at me! Look at me! In fact, the browser does not need to display tooltips for these things - they are there to provide additional information when the context of the item is removed, such as in an audio or text-only browser. If the interface relies on tooltips in, shall we say a conventional environment, then it’s a very poor interface indeed, or an experimental dotcom-boom-era ‘project’, which is I suppose the same thing.

I’ve done a fair bit of work designing interfaces, and I’m glad to say most of them are tooltip-free. I’d rather all of them were, but you can’t win every battle. My message to developers, marketers, designers, whatever, but more importantly OS developers, it’s quite simple: give us an option like this, please:

This Flickr set of vintage logos has been around a while now, and I looked and didn’t immediately get much inspiration. I mean, anyone else who’s linked to them has done the equivalent of, “Hey look, old logos! Um. Yes. Old logos!” so I guess I’m not alone.

Still, patience rewards the virtuous (or something) and I had a closer look through the ‘Original Size’ of all of them - my, that was a fun exercise, thank you, Flickr - and found some logos that I think are pretty interesting. Unfortunately, most of the ‘logos’ on those pages really don’t deserve the distinction of being called logos. In fact, most of them are pretty poor. I guess that makes the good ones stand out better. Perhaps.

So, enough bad-mouthing. I’ve traced (manually, of course, with lovely beziers) the ones I either like, or think are inspirational and felt quite a bit of ’70s and ’80s nostalgia in the process. You may have a different set of choices of course, and no, I wouldn’t include the Lubalin logo in the ‘crap’ ones. I just don’t like it very much. I know, I know, there’s a space in Design Hell reserved just for me… Below are thumbnails of the ones I’ve traced, and I’ve added notes for most of them too. If you’re reading this on the home page, click “Read the rest…” to see the whole lot.

1. Forening for Boghaandvoerk
   I’ve seen plenty of FF ligatures, but it’s the FB one on this that I like and wanted to keep for reference.
   
2. Cumberland Capital Corp.
   Just great. I imagine it’s supposed to imply ‘growth’ with the tree image, but it makes a pleasing image - perfect for a monogram.
3. Fernandec & Rubin
   This ampersand is wonderful.
4. New York Aquarium
   Reminds me of Japanese mon, and unlike a lot of the logos that look symmetrical but aren’t, this one is. Perfectly.
5. National Sea Products Limited
   A fish with a crown? How could I say no? I like the composition and old-timey lettering too.
6. Oy Finleuy Ab
   This one makes me laugh. It looks like a demented chameleon.
7. Norwegian Caribbean Lines
   Interesting to keep, just to show any letter can be made to trail off into a wavey line.
8. Keystone Park
   I did make a slight modification to this - I cleaned up the ‘central reservation’ in the curved road. I’m not entirely sure what a motorway intersection has to do with a parkbut I’m sure it made sense at the time.
9. Jonneret SA
   Lovely wavey lines… ‘nuff said.

Read the rest of “Vintage Logos”

You know, when it comes to designing a logo that’s going to appear on documents, mousemats, brochures, you know: portable things, you really do have a duty to examine it from all angles. It also helps to get people in whose thought processes tend to the profane, because such people exist in great numbers ‘out there’ in the real world and will at a moment’s notice point out any even slightly lewd or coarse associations*. Also, perhaps develop a familiarity with iconographic representations of the human body, just in case your logo resembles such a figure. Say, like the Cerne Abbas Giant would be if the ancients fancied a more demonstrably explicit image…

Anyway, this logo for a British Government agency is quite hilarious, and I’m amazed they’re going ahead with it. Oh, and from the Register article that the Times sourced this from:

For the record, and in case you’d like to get your hands on a rebranded OGC mousemat, we gather staff have stripped the building of every example not nailed down, so check eBay later this week for your five-knuckle shuffle collectable.

* I have to state that I, of course, would never do such a thing. I blame the Times.

There’s a nice article on Cocoia Blog about the ‘pollution’ of various Mac OS X user interfaces by Helvetica. It’s worth a read, though I can’t resist excerpting this little bit, as it made me laugh:

Speaking of iCal, which proudly boasts Helvetica in miniature point sizes on the screen, it has the utterly mind boggling feature that it shows you calendar information on a computer screen with everyone’s favorite 1950 typeface for print, and prints these exact calendars on paper in Lucida Grande, a computer display font from this milennium. “Utterly backwards” might be an apt term for such misfit typography.

The Guardian today had an interesting article on the possibly imminent demise of the semi-colon in French. It also goes on to suggest that this particular punctuation mark is already dead in English, and it is the Anglo-Saxon influence that’s causing the problem with modern French. I use it quite freely myself, and I’m sure anyone who’s read this site knows I’m rather fond of long sentences. In fact, it’s from re-reading what’s I’ve just typed that leads me to add semi-colons; commas are too weak (and in a long sentence, confusing) and full-stops are too heavy, too much of an end, which isn’t always what you want. I wholeheartedly agree with Michel Volkovitch when he says:

“For constructing a piece properly, distinguishing themes, sections and sub-sections - in short, for dissipating any haziness or imprecision of thought. It puts things in order, it clarifies. But it’s precious, too, for adding a little softness, a little lightness; it can stop a sentence from touching the ground, from grinding to a halt; keeps it suspended, awake. It is a most upmarket punctuation mark.”

I agree with the closing paragraph of the article, too, in that it is the fear of using the semi-colon incorrectly that leads to it not being used. I was never taught how to use it at school, and a quick straw poll of some friends and colleagues today shows that of 12 people, only three were taught to use it. Of course, those three were French. Still, half the people polled did know how to use it, so all is not lost.

David at Typographer.org points out the latest article that shows us how we’re doing it all wrong. He’s right; if you’re really concerned about such things, get The Elements of Typographic Style, and develop an informed opinion on how and when to break the rules, by learning those rules. As I’ve written before, one of the main reasons we use the typographic approximations we do is the keyboard itself, from its development in typewriters to today’s use with computers. If you would rather the world was divided cleanly between typesetters and those who type, then you will never be satisfied - it’s never going to happen. We live in a world of what we might term hybrid-typography, where we routinely use many typographic techniques and tools not available to the typist, but not all the ones available to the typesetter. We rely on Word (say) to convert three dots to an ellipsis, a dash to an em-dash, straight quotes to curved, but we don’t get interpuncts in prices, multiplication symbols in dimensions or true primes in measurements. Well, not most of the time anyway. We could try putting them in, but as many people have complained, many fonts don’t have primes, never mind mathematical symbols, interpuncts or even true degree symbols. Of course, that’s only if you’re using poor quality fonts*. Then, of course, we could just all use typewriters again, but unless you’re a first-year design student that…

* I use the term font, as distinct from typeface, here. The typeface may have the design of the symbol, but it’s not certain whether the font would.

Zapfino, feeling special.

I like drawing the ampersand. It’s the character that when you’re designing a typeface seemingly gives you the greatest artistic freedom. It’s big and swooshy, with lots of room for playing with curves, swirls and if you’re feeling special, lots of fine, delicate lines. But why? Why does this, and no other character, allow so much freedom? Well, the ampersand is hardly ever used in body text any more. It used to be - Gill used it frequently to adjust line length* when setting text - but modern usage has it pretty much limited to combining pronouns in titles, company names and credits. So when we design an ampersand, we can design it with a general assumption that it’ll be used in display sizes and weights, and we can fill it with beautiful refinements and detail, knowing that any uses at body sizes will be rare enough not to be a serious problem. Well, perhaps. There are plenty of typographers who feel that the ampersand should again be used in English as a legitimate replacement for the word ‘and’, and mourn the demise of it in common use. After all, until relatively recently the English language was considered to have 27 characters in its alphabet, with the ampersand right after z. A good thread to read on the topic is here.

Logos for E&A, Victoria and Albert Museum, Herb Lubalin’s ampersand and Mother & Child Logo and ampersands from Goudy Old Style, Hoefler Text Italic and Bell MT Italic.

* This seems to be the reason, though I by no means have an exhaustive knowledge of Gill’s work.

Another great link via Ace Jet 170, this article on the Font Feed about lining, tabular and old-style figures. I’m a fan of old-style figures anyway, and prefer to use them in most of my work as I find them much more readable, even for numerical data. Still, I suspect I’m somewhat disnumerate, so having the extra ‘word shape’ provided by old style numerals is going to be helpful for readability. I was also raised at a time when maths books were also set with old-style, and somewhat contrary to the example in the Font Feed example, so were most recipes I saw.