Easy on the eyes

One of the questions I love to ask in interviews is "What's your favourite website and why?".

It's a slightly less daunting question than "What's your favourite book" because somehow, websites don't divide into high and low (or "so bad it's good") categories.

When people are talking about their favourite sites, I'm listening to what they're saying about the freshness of the writers' voices, or the perfection of the information architecture, or how the search seems to have better results than any other site they use, or the way the design makes them feel.

When I think about this question myself though, I often get a little stumped. I spend much of my time on Twitter (where I get flicked out to specific pages on websites, but rarely move further through them) or immersed in my feedreader, where the content is stripped of all design and UX consideration, and is just about the information and the voice.

So asking the question of others made me ask it of myself. Here's where I got to.

The Guardian website (before they changed the homepage, creating four-column, uncategorised mayhem - why, Guardian, why?) always makes me feel like a saner and more intelligent human being. Their arts & books coverage is great, I'm forever being tempted into Comment Is Free, and the information architecture sets my mind at ease.

ArtsJournal is consistently the fifth thing I review in the morning (5th, you ask? The list looks like this: Twitter, work email, personal email, feedreader). It's not about the design (in fact, I always flick to the diehard view) it's about the curation. It's like every day someone smarter and more worldly than I is pointing me in the right direction.

Thinking for a Living gives me that clenched-chest feeling of love. I don't care that it's actually a little hard to navigate, I just think it's beautiful. Especially this. I also subscribe to this awesome feed.

Hoefler and Frere-Jones. Inside every web and every art person I know, there seems to be a little font-head trying to get out. Sure, I like H&FJ's fonts just fine, but to be honest, if you put them in a line-up, I dunno if I'd be able to pick them out. What I love though is the way they talk about type. And the grey.

Two typos and a conference

1.

In a comment on yesterday's post, Duncan left a link to a 2003 lecture by designers Jessica Helfand & William Drenttel, 'Culture is not always popular'. As well as some periodic table eye-candy, Helfand and Drenttel were posing a pretty interesting question - but desingers need to understand the subject matter of what they're visually communicating?

2.

I have a big crush on typographers Hoefler & Frere-Jones, so you can imagine my (thankfully internal) shriek of girlish glee when I found them on Twitter

3.

Spaces are still open on next week's Engage Your Community conference & workshop day in Wellington. If you want a really good, astoundingly well-priced introduction to contemporary web communications, get in there fast.

Typeheads

Last night I finally got round to watching the Helvetica documentary, which marked the 50th anniversary of the creation of the Helvetica font by interviewing designers, typographers and design commentators, alongside footage showing how ubiquitous the arch-modernist font is in our urban environments.

I like fonts just fine. I would rate my caring as about 50% - midway between people who love using Comic Sans, and people who think people who love using Comic Sans should be lined up and shot.

The documentary reminded me how much I love listening to articulate people talk about a subject they love. In particular, it was a joy to hear Tobias Frere-Jones and Jonathan Hoefler talk about their design process: they use emotive or memory-inflected phrases when describing to each other what they're trying to achieve with a font, rather than talking about ascenders and descenders and chamfered edges.

For example, from their description of the creation of 'Tungsten':

A few years ago, we started wondering if there was a way to make a typeface in this genre that was disarming instead of brutish, one that employed confidence and subtlety instead of just raw testosterone. It was an unusual design brief for ourselves, completely without visual cues and trading in cultural associations instead: “more Steve McQueen than Steven Seagal,” reads one note; “whiskey highball, not a martini” suggests another.

Tungsten is a steel-grey metal with an extremely high melting point (second only to carbon), making it ideal for use in things like filaments in electric lightbulbs. I've recently re-read Oliver Sack's memoir of his chemical-mad childhood, Uncle Tungsten, so I was feeling ready to like the H & F-J font as soon as I saw the name. Then this morning I happened across New Zealand typographer Kris Sowersby's Karbon - which made me wonder if anyone has laid out typefaces into a periodic table-like display.

And of course someone has. Design and science geeks rejoice.

Typefaces and Te Papa

Question for the day - what was the first typeface designed in New Zealand? When? And by whom?*

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This week's post about the Vogue typeface kicked off some comments, including Cheryl Bernstein's note about the history of graphic design in NZ receiving more attention, what with The National Grid and the Joseph Churchward show at Te Papa.

I saw the Churchward show during the weekend. Normally, I visit Te Papa in a hold-your-nose fashion: I take a deep breath, I go straight to what I want to see, and then I get the hell out. On this occasion, I'd gone back for another look at the Dashper/Mrkusich/Driver hang - which I liked even more the second time round.

After that though, I did something unusual - I went for a bit of a wander. First I saw the Churchward show in the Illott room (and I stick to my guns - any sense of modernism that attaches itself to this roomlet is accidental) . Prompted by the note that one of Churchward's tyepfaces was used in the re-design of Tangata o le Moana: The story of Pacific people in New Zealand, I went to check that out.

First up, while the selected font is nice as display text, it doesn't work on the wall labels. But far more important is this observation: the re-design of this Pasifika exhibition seems to demonstrate the slow sea-change that's coming over Te Papa. Sure, it's still expensively kitted out. But it seemed to me that in this rendition collection items were given precedence over interpretation and design - a turn-around from the earlier version that was in place for Day One.

After wandering through TOLM, I headed for what might be my favourite thing in Te Papa. You can have the Northland Panels - I'll take the Captain Cook cloak.

One of the things I've always loved about this cloak is that it's so bloody hard to find. Conceptually, I can totally see what the Day One crew was doing. The cloak is a signifier for a moment of contact between cultures, with Cook as its fulcrum. Cook here sits symbolically and physically at the interstices between the tangata whenua, European arrival in Aotearoa New Zealand, and people of the Pacific.

Which is all fine and dandy conceptually, but as an experience for the viewer? The cloak is obscured behind one of the dullest parts of the floor (the talking Treaty poles - I mean, WTF people? these are still here?), concealed by opaque glass panels, unconnected to either of the flanking exhibitions, and in the dark (admittedly, for conservation purposes, and I do like the way you get to turn the little firefly lights on for your personal viewing pleasure).

My next part of my wander exemplified for me how the conceptual ambitions and experiential realities of Te Papa so often part company. After the Cook cloak, one of my most favourite parts of Te Papa is the space behind Te Hau ki Turanga in the Mana Whenua exhibition. Partly, it's the honey-sweet smell of the thatch. But mostly it's the way this spot demonstrates how exhibitions and architecture do battle in Te Papa. Behind Te Hau ki Turanga a wooden palisade fences off an oddly-shaped, obviously un-usable, lumpy section of wall, window and floor. It's always seemed to me like someone said "Oh shit, what are we gonna do with that completely useless part of the floor? Stupid building design. I know, we'll fence it off and hope no one notices. Phew. Crisis averted.".

But, you know what? Overall, I enjoyed my wander, and the crowd of 200 people on the Marae watching a demo by the Royal NZ Ballet left a good taste in my mouth, not a sour smell in my nostrils. You never know, what with City Gallery about to shut down for a year, maybe I'll be spending more time at Te Papa.

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* So - there is a tangential-ish relation between this question and the rest of the post. A website tells me that Churchward "self-published a handful of original fonts in 1978 becoming the first and only company in New Zealand to publish original photo-lettering." I'm an amateur, and don't expect this means he was the first person to publish a font in NZ. But who was?

This week's crush

This week I've been doing some typeface detective work (with some help from other interested parties). The typeface in question was used for the catalogue that accompanied the Centennial Exhibition of International and New Zealand Art, which opened at the National Art Gallery in Wellington on 10 November 1939.

Printed by Wright & Carman Ltd (177 Vivian Street) the catalogue is a lovely little thing, and the font is what made it for me - the long bars on the capital G, the low-slung em dash, and in particular the quirky vertical tail on the Q.

First up was some fruitless but fun sleuthing on Identifont, where you can try to ID your font through a gradual narrowing process, making calls about bars, spurs, slants and x-heights. Identifont told me that the typeface was Neuzeit Grotesk, an attractive sans serif from 1928, designed by Wilhelm Pischner.




But no! The M is right, but the bar on the G is too short and it lacks the defining characteristic, the vertical tail on the Q. So I went old-school, and typed 'typeface Q vertical tail' into Google. Et voila - the first result was a post on Typophile titled "Geometric text sans w/low x-height and vertical tail on Q - Vogue".




The above sample of text had been uploaded as a mystery image, and people on the forum quickly identified it as Vogue - a typeface designed for the eponymous magazine in 1930, and later released for general use. There doesn't appear to be a digital version of the font out there; but it's part of the 1920s/30s rage for geometric sans serif fonts that gave birth to Kabel and Futura (both close to Vogue, but alas, lacking that vital Q tail.)

So there you go; the tyranny of distance wasn't so terrible that in under 10 years a typeface cut for a fashion mag couldn't end up gracing the catalogue of a (frankly, at that time) provincial gallery on a far-flung island in the Pacific.

Three links for Tuesday

Busy busy day, so it's a link round-up, I'm afraid ....

The Otago University Art History and Theory blog is written largely by (post-grad?) students. Posting is a little erratic, but definitely worth subscribing to the feed so you catch the occasional gem, like this assessment of Hamish Keith's 'The Big Picture'.

For type-freaks - The Ampersand, a blog devoted to the elegant &.

And Jerry Saltz's latest column on Louise Lawler, who photographs artworks in collectors homes, in galleries, in auction houses and in museum storage. The review contain's this week's best sentence:

To see a Delaunay crowded behind a TV, a Warhol “Green Stamps” painting on a hideous red wall, or an extraordinary Mondrian behind an armchair is like seeing how meat is processed.

New favourite blog

ilovetypography.com [includes contributions by NZ typographer Kris Sowersby]

Not only is it beautiful to look at, but typography has some of the best words: 'glyph', 'kerning', even the no-nonsense 'font'.

And for those of you wanting to turn your kids on to typography, try the Bembo's Zoo site [with the sound on].

Image: from the article 'Small Caps' on ilovetypography.com

Type cast

Gwynneth Porter and Warren Olds (of Clouds) have apparently taken Over the net to task for daring to suggest that the Venice un-publication might use Helvetica.

To my mind, Helvetica is one of typeface's silver foxes (alongside Gill Sans). The Swiss font is 50 this year, and still proudly utilised by brands ranging from Gap to Tupperware. MoMA saw fit to throw it an exhibition to mark its half-century (Helvetica, by the by, was the first typeface the Museum acquired). These people baked it a birthday cake. Lars Muller's written a book about it (he calls it the 'perfume of the city'). Gary Hustwit made a film.

But I guess there's always Comic Sans.

Designer joke: Two fonts walk into the bar and the barman says "sorry lads, we don't serve your type".