Part of my job involves developing websites in multiple languages, and earlier this week the decision was made to produce an arabic version of a particular very flash-heavy website we did. It’s going to be an interesting challenge, as the website in question is one of those that emulates the action of turning pages in a book (needless to say it’s a pure marketing ‘teaser’ style website) and so the entire site will need to be reconfigured to right-to-left reading and page turning. Anyway, those are fairly straightforward technical details and shouldn’t take too long. What really occupies my time is selecting a new typeface for the site - we use Arno Pro for its wide range of language support, especially Cyrillic and Greek, and so the new arabic face should work well with it. And lo, just this evening I find Palatino Arabic in the Type Director’s Club 2008 winning entries. Perfect.

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 sent me a link to this, somewhat appropriate for April Fools Day, about an H&FJ spoof font, estupido. I find the idea of creating swashes for OCR A hilarious, but I thought, shouldn’t robots have fancy type too? One day, our machine comrades will be attending theatres and poetry recitals, and instead of programmes set in flourish-heavy Regency scripts like we do, maybe they’ll want something a little more evocative of their earlier eras; Simpler, slower times before 100 Exabyte connections ruined the slow pace of digital romance… And who says computers can’t read swashes? It’s discrimination I say! Discrimination!

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.

Typographer.org has returned, with a beautiful new design and a single-column format. The infrequent Bald Condensed features will be given their own pages, as in David’s own words:

What happened to Bald Condensed? Nothing, it just appears less frequently, that’s all.  New editions of Bald Condensed will be announced in the news feed from now on.

And for the first time (oddly), I notice that the logo is not just truncated Didot - the serif has been removed from the ‘h’. Subtle!

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.

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.

There’s a design agency near where I live called Eighth Day, and when they put up their sign I enjoyed the use of the numeral ‘8’ to form a lowercase ‘g’. I’ve seen some hand-drawn examples of it in the past, but not in a logo. I’m sure plenty of examples must exist - it is after all an effective and yet straightforward typographic trick. I thought this example was even more intriguing, with all the letters formed from part of numeral eights. I’m especially loving the neat positioning of the trademark symbol - it’s unusual to see it nicely integrated into a logo.

I’m feeling pretty glad right now that I have the perfect project where I can use this new script face. It’s an astonishingly complete script, with 4280 glyphs in each weight, covering Latin, Greek and Cyrillic. I don’t know of any other script that comes close. I work on projects where the work is localised into many European languages, often including Greek and Russian, so having typefaces and type systems that work for all of them makes life a hell of a lot easier. We make heavy use of Arno Pro nowadays for that very reason, but I was thinking we needed a script face to back it up on this particular project. I think Champion Script Pro fulfils that role perfectly. The “making of” blog post is fascinating, as is the set of examples on the Parachute site itself. I’ve nabbed a few examples for Latin, Greek and Cyrillic as a taster. Beautiful:

Typographica’s annual review of type releases has just been published, and I’m very pleased and honoured to have been asked to contribute to it! There are fantastic reviews of 2007’s notable releases on there, so go and take a look. My review of Meta Serif is available here. Thanks to Stephen Coles for asking me, and for the nice compliment in the link!