During a discussion of modern architecture in Wales (as you do), David pointed me in the direction of some pictures of the Millennium Centre in Cardiff, which has some fantastic lettering on the front canopy. The letters, big, chunky and pretty dramatic and spell out the title of a work for chorus and orchestra commissioned from Gwyneth Lewis for the opening ceremony of the building. I particularly like the way the two languages have been written together - the Welsh one being flush-left, the English flush-right, with the ragged edges slotting together nicely - and that they aren’t a direct translation of each other. The lettering itself is lovely, with varied letterforms and spacing giving the whole thing the sense of something hand-done, which given its scale is something to behold. In Lewis’ own words:

The windows out of which the words are made suggest to me an ideal of poetry: that it should be clear enough to let light in and out of a building, offering enough a distinctively local view of the world; it should speak a truth which is transparent, beautifully crafted but also fragile and, therefore, doubly precious.

I think it looks great as it is, but I’ll be interested to see what it looks like after a good layer of verdigris has formed on the copper.

The appearance of the building reminded me of a big regeneration project for Morecambe’s seafront, which also has a strong typographic element. Well, several in fact. It’s the Tern Project, a series of sculptures, walkways, and general improvements to the seafront to make it a more fitting location to see Morecambe’s (arguably) finest asset - its view of the bay. The Tern Project website gives you some idea of what’s been done, but I think whoever built it based it on a museum or art gallery’s site - i.e. make the pictures as small and uninformative as possible - probably labouring under some delusion that seeing a nice big photo will somehow deter you from visiting. Note to developers of these sites: it doesn’t! Put big pictures on your site! Let people get an idea of it, and they’ll be more likely to visit! A photo can only give a rough impression, but seeing the context and some detail, you will hopefully want to visit. The top two of these pictures are mine, the bottom one is from this we-think-all-caps-is-cool site. Still, irritating websites aside, I would strongly suggest paying a visit to Morecambe to have a look at the artworks, and to see the view across the bay to the Lake District.

The nonist is continuing with his series of Graphis annuals and has posted a set of scans from the 1957/58 edition. Go and take a look! If you’re in the UK, you might notice something rather familiar, something that reminds you of an advert much more recent than the late 50s. Now, I’m wary of assigning nefarious motives to people about this kind of thing, but it’s quite interesting to compare and contrast the two:

I’m fascinated by imaginary products created for films and games - there’s an art to creating something just similar enough to real products to be recognisable as a brand type, but without actually copying any particular identity. Some films and games come very close to existing brands (RUF in Children of Men; GAP for pets, Tube in GTA 3; Subway) while others work within the conventions of a product type so you know what kind of thing it’s supposed to be (pretty much everything in the Truman Show). I have an article I’m writing on brand conventions, but that’s not for today. The reason for this post is some of the work featured in this interview with Sarah Bradley, graphic designer and typographer at Pixar, and ex-lead title designer at Disney. In the article is a matrix for a box of rat poison shown in Ratatouille, which I just had to make into a fake box shot - I do this a lot at work and it’s fun to do, so I couldn’t resist.

The original matrix:

I just found a link to this odd thing on NOTCOT. It’s essentially a synthesiser control panel for changing the forms of glyphs in a typeface, but instead of just changing sound, it treats the strokes as a kind of ‘play-head’ for creating sound, rather like a groove in a vinyl record. As you change the glyph, you change the sound, and vice versa. Also, what you do to one glyph will be done to all the others.

Now, my first impressions after looking at the results are to say that this is an evil device born of the unspeakable nether regions of mythological demons - I mean, to do this to type? They’ll be kicking puppies next! However, I’ve since watched the video and I think there may be some interesting things in there, say, altering the stress on type, adding some interesting brush strokes and the like, but that what you get would be a starting point for any kind of type project. I wouldn’t ever use any of the results as they are. Besides, the noises the thing makes are stunningly annoying. It’s no wonder most of the results are so hideously ugly, you’d end up with a seriously bad headache and a foul temper after a few minutes of using it.

There is one good thing about it though: the display interface. It reminds me of graphics from Star Wars, or the info-screens in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Any moment you expect a Ti-Fighter to come in and start blasting vertices from the bastardised remains of the glyphs:

If you’re here to ask me to translate something into Mongolian for a tattoo, please go and read the note at the bottom of the article now.

It’s not every day you come across something that you’ve not only never heard of before, but never even suspected existed. Such it was with me and Mongolian Calligraphy until yesterday evening. I found some examples of it in a Google image search from here and here and decided I needed to learn more about it.

It turns out that thanks to Stalin and the Soviet Union we nearly ended up losing the classic Mongolian script as a living writing system entirely:

Introduced in the times of Chinggis Khaan, some eight centuries ago, it was widely used until 1942, when Stalin decided that Asian nations including Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Mongolia must all use Cyrillic instead of their native script. Mongolia Today

Thankfully, now that the Soviet Union is dead and gone there are now efforts to revive interest and skills in ‘Old Script’. There are a couple of other writing systems used for Mongolian, but I’m mostly interested in the classic script, and especially the calligraphy it makes possible. It really is beautiful. Interestingly, it’s read from left to right, as Wikipedia explains (from the classic script article):

Most other vertical writing systems are written right to left, but the medieval Uyghur alphabet and its descendants - the Mongolian, the Oirat Clear, the Manchu, and the Buryat alphabets - proceed from left to right. This is because the Uyghurs rotated their script 90 degrees anti-clockwise to emulate the Chinese writing system.

I noticed the left-to-right reading direction after a bit of research led me to The Mongolian Bible site, which has the New Testament translated into Mongolian and presented in classic script. You need Internet Explorer to see it, as it uses Microsoft-specific things to display the font and the vertical type, but if you have IE it’s worth a look.

Made me look twice, thrice… does that say, “kerning?” or “keming?”. A neologism from David Friedman:

Just a little, hey-look-at-this post. I love these illustrated (or would that be illuminated?) fruit by Sarah King. See them (and a banana) on the Evening Tweed site.

I’ve had some images from these articles in my ‘inspiration’ folder for about two years now, maybe even three. I’ve only just got around to looking closely at the lettering on them - it was the virtuoso watercolour technique that attracted me to them originally. The most interesting one for me is the Sudana chocolate poster… or is it packaging? The article doesn’t say. I think the best way to understand lettering is to redraw it using beziers - not a technique that works for everyone, but it works for me. I noticed right away that the letters are drawn with refinement and precision, and it was a very pleasant job to reproduce them with (almost) every point at extrema. The ‘S’ needed a couple of extra points along the main stroke, as if Holwein applied a little extra pressure at the midpoint to create a subtle bulge there. The swirly ‘a’s are a little more involved, and to draw them so they can be rendered reliably means a few extra points and outlines, and what with this being lettering they are of course different from each other. I doubt I’ll want to create a font out of these, but I’ll keep them handy for any lettering projects I have, that ‘R’ especially.

I remember as a kid finding a load of little glass bottles buried among some building waste in the garden. I’m not sure where they came from or what they were for, but I know one still had a bit of cork stuck in its top, and each one had a different shape embossed into the front. I was fascinated with them, and what they could have been for - clearly nothing environmentally persistent, nothing toxic anyway. I washed them out and kept them for a while, eventually losing track of them in the whole growing-up thing. So, when I came across this collection of perfumes (via Non 2) I had quite a nostalgic moment. It’s an oft-remarked phenomenon that things that are individually uninteresting or unremarkable gain a special significance and appeal when collected together. A scan of a coffee stain on paper is nothing special, but scan a whole load of coffee stains in and upload them to Flickr, hey presto! It’s interesting!

I am so wanting some of these from Harmonie Intérieure. Definitely bookmarked for when I get round to decorating, and I’m looking forward to seeing the ‘urban’ collection too.