Head's up everybody! I've just set the release date for the Steinweiss Script Family for Tuesday, November 9th. It will be available only on MyFonts—at least initially. And I'll be running an introductory sale at a 20% discount. For a good preview of what's in the font and how it's OpenType features work you can download "The Steinweiss Script User's Guide" (about 1.2 MB).
Back in the summer of 2009 I was contacted by Josh Baker at Taschen Publishing about doing some work on the huge commemorative edition they were putting together on the work of Alex Steinweiss. For those of you who are not familiar with that name, Mr. Steinweiss is considered to be the inventor of the album cover as we have come to know it—as a kind of mini-poster with graphics relating to the musical content of the album. He produced hundreds of covers for 78 RPM albums between the late 1930s and the late 1940s. Of course I was thrilled to have anything to do with this project. My assignment was to do some lettering for the cover and title page that was in the spirit of Mr. Steinweiss' very graphic calligraphy, which had become known as "The Steinweiss Scrawl". This "scrawl" had become ubiquitous and inextricably associated with his work. Here's an example of one of his album covers:
Steinweiss' calligraphic work was very spontaneous and kinetic, while the work of lettering artists tends to be more carefully studied and worked out. So it was a bit of a challenge to try to capture that spontaneity in my piece of digital art for Taschen's cover—as seen below:
While I was working on this, Josh and I had discussed the possibility of doing similar lettering for all the different chapter headings and headlines throughout the book (about 16 of them), but decided that it wasn't practical for budgetary reasons. The subject of creating a "scrawl" font was also discussed, but was nixed for the same reason—in addition there wouldn't have been enough time to do it: creating a font from scratch can be a very time-consuming process.
Around 1951 Alex Steinweiss had actually created a font called "Steinweiss Scrawl" for Photo-Lettering. (Coincidentally my first job after graduating Cooper Union was as Ed Benguiat's assistant at Photo-Lettering!). But this font was extremely limited in it's capabilities, and although it had a certain bouncy charm and naïveté, in my opinion, it didn't really capture the fluidity of Steinweiss' calligraphy:
At any rate, shortly after completing the Steinweiss project for Taschen, I decided to pursue on my own the design of a font in the spirit of his calligraphy. The challenge was enormous—to create a typeface that retained the sense of hand-letting and fluidity within the context of a digital font. Where Steinweiss' scrawls were all slightly different from each other, shifting and changing according to the needs of a particular cover design, a font designer has to commit to specific forms that need to be set in stone, so to speak. In this particular font, the "managed" nature of the design had to appear to be "unmanaged"!
Part of my solution was to create the typeface with a ton of alternates, lowercase ligatures, and caps/lowerase ligatures. Creating this as an OpenType font would be the only way to wrangle these thousands of pieces together into a coherent typeface design. Luckily I was able to count on the expert programming help of Patrick Griffin of Canada Type. Also, I was fortunate enough to be able to contact the Steinweiss family through Taschen, and get the official Steinweiss approval for this font design.
At this point until the fonts are released (very soon!), for those interested in seeing more, you may download "The Steinweiss Script User's Guide" that I've just completed (about 1.2 MB).
In a nutshell, here's how the fonts are organized: "Steinweiss Script" is a family of fonts in three weights: "Steinweiss Script Light", "Steinweiss Script Medium", and "Steinweiss Script Bold". Additionally, within each weight there are three variations: Simple, Fancy, and Titling. These relate to the size/ratio of the caps to the lowercase, the complexity of those caps, and the size of the ascenders/descenders on the lowercase characters. The reason for all this is to add usefulness to the font, making it accessible not just for headlines, but for longer passages of text as well.
I am going to try to release these fonts within the next week or so. Please stay tuned for more information! I will announce here as soon as they go live.
If you missed my talk at TypeCon in July, you’re in luck! I’ll be giving another dog and pony show to the local Graphic Artists Guild chapter in downtown LA on the evening of October 23rd. I’ll be talking about what inspires me by discussing the creation of the Guild’s logo, the design of the new Canter's Deli Food Truck, and Alphabet Soup Type Founders. All are welcome—Guild and Non-Guild members alike!
Check out the particulars on the Graphic Artists Guild /LA website.
Years ago I designed the cover for the 6th Edition of the "Graphic Artists Guild Handbook–Pricing & Ethical Guidelines". I'd like to believe that my cover helped start a tradition of having excellent covers for the Guild's main publication. Among the previous cover artists have been such luminaries as Lou Brooks, Noah Woods, John Hersey, and Richard McGuire—each with a decidedly different point of view and aesthetic. Now my wife, illustrator Laura Smith has joined that grand tradition.
The Graphic Artists Guild has just released the 13th Edition with Laura's beautiful work gracing the front back and spine:
The cover artists chosen by the Guild for the this project have always been given free reign to come up with a theme that would be carried through the book. Laura chose a circus theme since two things she loves are storybook illustration and circus imagery. This is especially evident on the back cover of this book where she's created and written copy for an elaborate series of spots highlighting in circus/storybook style various aspects of the business of design and illustration:
Laura has always been one of the few illustrators who understands how to completely integrate typography into her illustrations, and this cover really demonstrates that fact. The Guild has chosen to highlight Laura and tell more of this story in their Member Spotlight. But also please check out the rest of the Graphic Artists Guild website—it's the only organization that's totally devoted to promoting and protecting the social, economic and professional interests of all graphic artists.
I will be headlining an event that the LA Chapter of the Guild will be holding later this month in downtown Los Angeles . . . but more about that later.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I wasn't going to post the PEGs cover I designed back in the day, but since Ms. Blake asked, here it is. Side note: the beginnings of the style that eventually became my Metroscript font can be seen in the word "Guidelines".
"Appetite – A reciprocal relationship between Food & Design" opened last night at my alma mater The Cooper Union, hosted by the Herb Lubalin Study Center. The exhibition explores how design influences our day to day relationship with food, and covers everything from restaurant signs and menus to supermarket price labels and takeout packaging.
I was fortunate enough to have some of my work included in this show—my "Le Train Bleu" project that I had recently highlighted in this blog. Although I couldn't make it to the opening, my good friend Louise Fili was kind enough to send me some snaps of my work displayed in the exhibition:
Hungry for more? The exhibition is at 41 Cooper Square (3rd Avenue between 6th and 7th Streets), NYC. The show runs through October 9th. The gallery hours are Monday through Friday: 12–7; Saturday: 12–5. The exhibition was curated by Alexander Tochilovsky. Read an interview with Alexander about this exhibition at Eye Blog, and read more about it and see more photos of the exhibition from the opening at Design:Related.
Due to a threatened lawsuit by the folks at FontHaus (who somehow believe they are the only ones entitled to use the name "Bank Gothic") I have changed the name of my font "Bank Gothic AS" to "DeLuxe Gothic". I have great respect for the original designer of Bank Gothic, Mr. Morris Fuller Benton, and chose the name DeLuxe Gothic because it was the name that The Intertype Corporation used for their version of this classic font during the early years of the 20th Century.
My particular take on this design was that I always felt it could use a set of lowercase letters, and that is what sets my font apart from the rest. You can get a better look at it if you download the DeLuxe Gothic Brochure. Coincidental to the release of my renamed font, I've decided to run a Special Promotion on MyFonts: 50% off this font for one time only, and for a limited time—hurry and get yours before they sell out!
My good friend Mark Simonson recently alerted me to a very interesting use of my most recently released font Grafika. He found it Behance's online portfolio for Spanish designer Vicente García Morillo. It was used to produce a flyer for Phil Asher, a UK DJ/Producer performing in Madrid under the guise of "Phlash".
What piqued my interest about this particular usage was the fact that Mr. Morillo used Grafika in ALL CAPS—something I had never anticipated. I usually recommend that this font be set in upper and lowercase. But I have to admit that seeing this flyer has changed my mind.
Today I was surprised to see that Veer, one of my font resellers, had selected one of my fonts—PowerStation—to use throughout it's current online and print promotion "The Super‑Incredible Activity Book for Creatives".
They actually used PowerStation as the basis for major graphics on over 15 pages throughout the 100 page book.
Veer selected both PowerStation Solid and PowerStation Solid Wide to feature in this promo.
I was pleased to see that they used this font in a variety of different layouts, demonstrating its flexibility—despite the fact that PowerStation's layered typesetting features or faceted letterforms weren't used.
Thank you Veer . . . and thank you Joe Newton!
While in New York City to give a talk at the Type Directors Club Laura and I stopped in at Bloomingdale's. I hadn't been back to Bloomingdale's for many years, so while there I thought I'd check to see if some signage I had designed for their "Le Train Bleu" restaurant might still be in use. To my utter amazement, my work was there—still in use after 30 years. The restaurant itself is a stunning recreation of a vintage dining car, and has been virtually unchanged inside since the day my work first adorned its entrance.
The Original "Le Train Bleu" was a luxury French night express train which carried wealthy and famous passengers between Calais and the French Riviera from 1922 until 1938.
Back in 1980 I had designed and painted art for two panels that were to bookend the stairway leading up to the restaurant. The challenge, as outlined to me by then Bloomingdale's Creative Director John Jay, was to design a poster reminiscent of the great transport posters of the '20s, '30s and '40s,—but in an extremely thin vertical format: almost a 4 to 1 height to width ratio. Also the design had to be able to mirror itself so that it could appear on either side of the entrance. Designing the piece so that one had almost a bird's-eye view of the train which was letting out a very art-moderne steam stream seemed like a natural for the format.
This was not a typical project for me at the time because I had never executed a painting like this before. In addition the typography played a much smaller role in the design, and in the end was much more toned down than in most of my other work.
Above is the menu cover I designed as a companion to the stairway panels. It depicts the same train as in the panels from the more traditional "heroic" viewpoint seen in many transport posters of the time. I redid the lettering, but kept it in the same moderne style—only in a lighter weight. And unlike the panels the art for which I had painted in gouache, I did the menu cover as pre-separated mechanical art—much more akin to my current work which is usually done in Adobe Illustrator.
Additionally I had designed the "Le Train Bleu" seal or monogram that appears in relief outside the restaurant and on printed materials. This was much more akin to the type and letterform-centric work that I've become known for, and was designed to be very heraldic in nature. To my surprise this large monogram in relief was also still there, looking as fresh as the day it was first mounted in the vestibule of the restaurant at the top of the stairs.
For those who are interested there are prints of the Le Train Bleu vertical format artwork available on my ILLOZ site. These prints are finely produced, hand-crafted 12 color fine art lithographs that are virtually identical to the original painting.
Please also see my more recent supplemental posting on Le Train Bleu at Bloomingdale's.
My friend Jed Davis, for whose recording company Eschatone Records I had designed a vinyl record label, recently asked me to design packaging for an unusual project. While most people in the recording industry are trying to figure out "what's next", Jed was asking the question: how can I get back to basics? What came before MP3s, before CDs and Casettes, before 8–Tracks, and before 33, 45 and 78 RPM records? The answer: wax gramophone cylinders, of course!
So Jed decided to release one of his own recordings not only as a digital download but, hoping to reach the untapped centenarian demographic, also as a limited edition, signed wax gramophone cylinder. But unfortunately, as Jed was to learn from The Vulcan Cylinder Record Company, it had to be made of hard plastic instead of the traditional wax. Undaunted, Jed decided to move ahead declaring that since it would be hard plastic "it will never degrade, no matter how many times you play it on your family Edison". He also decided to accommodate all those without gramophones by including a free digital download together with the purchase of the cylinder.
When Jed asked me to design the labels for the cylinder, I thought "Well, I've designed covers for LPs, for cassettes and for CDs. This may very well be my last opportunity to design a gramophone label." The title of his release was "Yuppie Exodus from Dumbo", and Jed gave me free reign to design both the wraparound label and the round label for the top of the cylinder container:
When the labels were finally printed by Vulcan, the colors came out a little differently from what I had designed, but I have to say that I'm pretty much OK with it. I think it does give it a slightly more vintage feel that's appropriate for this project:
This is a signed (by Jed and by me) and numbered edition limited to 50 cylinders. Hear the song and purchase the cylinder/download HERE—before it's too late!
If you're going to be anywhere in the vicinity of New York City in late July, then I'd love to invite you to the talk I've been asked to give by the Type Directors Club. I'll be talking about my work, both new and old—and more specifically about all the influences I've had over the years that helped form my aesthetic sensibility, especially those that worked on me as kid growing up on the streets of Brooklyn. So is it "Nature or Nurture"? You be the judge!
I'll be in New York to attend the opening night festivities at Cooper Union on July 20th for TDC² 2010 – the show which honored my Deliscript fonts.
My talk will be held on Thursday, July 22nd, 6:00–8:00 PM at the Type Directors Club: 347 W. 36th St, #603, NYC.
Please RSVP to the TDC by Email or call them at (212) 633-8943 to reserve your spot.
Because of my involvement with the design of the Canter's truck, I've just heard about the attempt by the City of Los Angeles to severely limit where food trucks can serve the public. They're trying to do this by prohibiting them from parking at meters in commercial zones. Without providing adequate, alternate parking areas, this would effectively put many of the trucks out of business. If you, like me, feel that these gourmet food trucks are adding to the culture and vitality of the city, and don't want to see them gone or severely curtailed, then please sign this ONLINE PETITION. And please let others know!
I'm just back from a stay in The City of Light, and just wanted to share an impression I had that typography and lettering are admired and extremely well respected there—possibly as much or more than anywhere else in the world. If nothing else, Paris is a city where history permeates everything, and you can almost trace its history through the many layers of lettering and signage that stretch back over many decades. I say respected because so much of it has been preserved, and not painted over or replaced just to be up to date. In fact, many shops kept and preserved the lettering from previous incarnations, even though the name and nature of the business had changed. It was refreshing to see that just about every business that had a public face, from the smallest boutique to the largest high-end stores, all took great pains to maintain an artful, thoughtfully designed appearance. Aesthetics on every level are a part of the culture, and an understanding of the importance lettering and typography seems to be universally understood and encouraged. Here is a small sampling of some snapshots I took while strolling around the city:
My new favorite restaurant in Paris—not so much for the food, as for it's graphics and interior.
The mosaic floor of one of Paris' many arcades.
A sandwich shop. I love those colored bottles!
Metro signage – not the typical art nouveau version everyone's familiar with.
Paris' Wax Museum . . . an Art Déco Extravaganza
A confectionery shop with signage that dates back . . . who knows how long? Still in perfect condition.
Contemporary tile work in the Metro's Concorde Station. This incredible project was begun in 1989 and contains the text of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This typographic work covers the entire arched wall and ceiling of the station.
And finally, (please excuse the shameless plug) while walking the streets of the Marais, I happened across a shop called "L'Art du Buro" which had my QWERTY pen displayed front and center in its window. Certainly an ego boost, if ever there was one!
Our new URL, effective immediately is: http://www.alphabetsoupblog.com Please add this as the new replacement bookmark. New posts coming soon!
Just up on Veer, this all-inclusive collection of my fonts is on sale at 30% off the total of what they would cost if purchased individually. Veer's special promotion will be ongoing until the middle of May.
SignQuest was the company that RoadStoves had recommended to "wrap" the truck with the graphics I had designed. They produce large scale banners and signs as well as vehicle wraps. One interesting project they were recently involved with was wrapping the Hollywood Sign for the "Save the Peak" campaign. The goal of this campaign is to raise funds to purchase the land adjacent to the Hollywood sign. Hopefully this would prevent commercial development that would permanently mar the view of the iconic sign and the world-famous silhouette of the hills that frame it. Wrapping the Hollywood Sign was a complex project, but wrapping a truck properly is also difficult and time consuming. Getting it right means placing the many strips of 3M Controltac vinyl film in the right positions:
Louie Navarro is seen above carefully positioning the vinyl on the service side (the side from which the food will be served) of the truck. He must carefully gauge where to position the film at the back of the truck so that the graphics end up at the right spot by the time they reach the front.
Over on the driver's side, Louie positions the main graphics. There are many ins and outs to the truck surface, and the Controltac film is flexible enough to conform to them all, ending up looking very much as if it had been painted on. It's pretty amazing.
Here's one photo of the driver's side. I'll post more photos from different angles as they become available.
In the meantime the Canter's Truck has begun cruising the streets of LA with Bonnie Bloomgarden at the helm. To find out when they're going to be in your area you can follow them on Twitter.
Photo: Adam Stein
Due to my inability of being able to get good photographs of the completed Canter's truck, I'm holding up posting the final chapter in this saga. I hope to be able to get some better shots by the end of this week. If not I'll just post what I've got.Thanks for your patience!
Above: Careful placement of my credit below the trash receptacle.
Belgian designer and writer Yves Peters has been posting his comments and critiques about the winners of the TDC² 2010 Typeface Design Competition, and has finally reached the Display Type category—the one in which Deliscript was selected. While Yves' comments are considered and thoughtful—and with regard to Deliscript were for the most part on target—I feel as if I would like to comment on a couple of his remarks.
Yves mentioned the "Word Logos" I have thrown in, and mentions that they're only in English and that there aren't that many. I agree with this. I probably shouldn't have put them in at all. I had literally been working for months on Deliscript, and really wanted to get it out for release, so I guess I rushed through their creation, thinking of them as just a small extra feature to include. They probably don't add that much to the font, and I should have thought of the European market as well. The next time I do a feature like that I'll definitely try to do it in a much more expansive manner.
Yves also mentions that he is "unsure about the finer details in the character shapes", citing that "some curves and joins seem rather stiff, and the weight distribution and contrast in the character strokes appear a little off in some parts". I'm not sure, but I think this perception on his part may stem from cultural differences that we share, and from a possible misunderstanding of what I'm referencing. What I'm going for is not really in the lexicon of classical font design—rather it is from the American pop culture vernacular—from all the (traditionally) untrained eyes that created all the wonderful signage and ephemera that I grew up with.
Coming to font design from that background, I can totally understand how what I'm trying to do can seem foreign to those who are trained to look at fonts from a traditional perspective. While I'm sure we all share some of the same font heroes (such as Morris Fuller Benton) I also celebrate those whose work joyously displayed a flagrant lack of regard for what some would consider to be "the formal rules of design". It is to these designers whose names we'll probably never know—and to their typographic "mistakes" and flourishes that I find so engaging—that I try to pay homage to in my lettering and font design work.
While they were in print, the three volumes of Eric Baker and Tyler Blik's classic Trademarks series (which together sold 60,000 copies) were the authoritative books of logo design by decade. I had the distinct privilege of designing the covers for the first two. Many is the time that people have mentioned to me that they have those books, and had no idea that I had done the covers!
This definitive collection is now available from Chronicle Books in an expanded single volume with essays and samples of the work of 17 contemporary graphic designers (including myself), and with an introduction by Steven Heller. Over 1,000 iconic trademarks are packed into this extra-chunky paperback. While the original books have long enjoyed cult status, this attractive, updated edition will win legions of new fans among today's ever-increasingly design-savvy public. So run don't walk to your nearest purveyor of fine books, and snatch a copy before they're all gone.
Although most of the food trucks are similar in appearance, many contain details that slightly alter some of their proportions. So it became necessary for me to visit the Road Stoves truck depot and to take pictures of the truck that would be closest to the one that Bonnie would be getting, and to use those photos as templates for my design—I'd also have to Photoshop out the existing graphics, making the truck as clean as I could to act as a blank canvas for my new design:
I set about to create the elements for the truck wrap, basing the graphics on the look of the Canter's neon sign and my font Deliscript. I felt I needed to modify Deliscript a bit to make this a strong graphic statement—kind of like a logo for the truck. So I began by creating a large, circular initial "C" in Canter's—and that became the basis for the look:
I also settled on a palette of colors that I felt would be attractive and reflect what I thought of as a Deli aesthetic. The unique double "SS" in "DELICATESSEN" was borrowed from the neon sign—one of many small details that I felt would help keep continuity between the restaurant and the truck. I added some other elements such as "Since 1931" that Bonnie wanted. In my first iteration for the truck my feeling was that I'd try it as a white truck—a good clean look— and adjust the graphics accordingly.
I might've had the Good Humor truck from my youth in Brooklyn in mind:
Nevertheless, a white truck wasn't exactly what Bonnie had planned on. I have to admit that I'm glad she pushed me to do a more colorful truck. Even though the truck was to be treated as a "vehicle wrap" by SignQuest, a process that is being more and more widely used, I decided to treat the truck as if I was designing a paint job in order to give it a look that was more in keeping with its mid-century heritage. Keeping the color palette that I had first come up with I created some mock ups that I thought would work even better for Canter's than my all white version:
We also decided that it would be a good idea to have a slogan and, after much deliberation, settled on "...home of the Kibitz Room". The Kibitz Room is the dive bar/cocktail lounge that's off in a corner of Canter's Deli. Like Canter's, it's an LA institution that just seems to keep going and going.
I had envisioned that we would somehow use my very graphic take on the neon baker sign on the service side of the truck. So I put him on the door and let the steam from his platter trail back along the length of the truck towards the menu. Along the top of the truck yet another version of the Deliscript/Canter's logo:
In “Art Imitates Life…Imitates Art #3″ I’ll post photos of the actual truck wrapping, and also of the finished truck.
