Paul Shaw Letter Design

Blue Pencil

Blue Pencil is a “slog”: a slow blog. It does not get updated daily or even on a regular schedule. Instead, it gets updated when there is something of value to be posted. Postings often take a long time to prepare and appear at intervals of a few weeks or even months. Sometimes there is a flurry of postings within the span of a few days. Blue Pencil may be unpredictable in its frequency, but not in its purpose. Blue Pencil is fiercely dedicated to the 3Rs: research, reading and writing.

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7 October 2011

Tutorial no. 5—Calligraphy: The Basics of Italic 1

The Basics of Italic: Skeletal Forms

The four images that comprise The Basics of Italic are scans of photocopied sheets I designed in 1993 for inclusion in the newsletter of the Associazione Calligraﬁca Italiana in Milano, Italy. That is why the notes are written in Italian. I will provide an English translation for each sheet as it is posted.

The ﬁrst sheet shows the skeletal forms of Italic as a means of comparing and contrasting it with the …
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6 October 2011

Blue Pencil no. 18—Arial addendum no. 2

Nick Sherman has been avidly following my Arial postings and in a recent email had this to say:

In the post, you say: “A clone is not only a typeface that looks like another one but has nearly the same data. By this deﬁnition Arial is not a clone of Helvetica, even though it has muscled in on Helvetica’s commercial success.”

In some ways you are wrong. While the outlines of Arial are different from Helvetica, most of the …
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1 October 2011

Blue Pencil no. 18—Arial addendum

Nick Sherman suggests that those interested in the Arial story look under the Wikipedia hood to see who has contributed to its account of the typeface. “This can be found by comparing previous edits of the article, under the ‘View history’ tab. For example, you can see that Thomas Phinney has edited the Arial article several times. You can also find some interesting tidbits under the ‘Discussion’ tab.

He also reminds me that John Downer tackled the subject …
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24 September 2011

Blue Pencil no. 18—Some history about Arial

I have moved the third portion of Matthew Carter’s email to me regarding Just My Type (see Blue Pencil no. 17—Correction) to a separate post since it was not a correction but a further elucidation of a commment I made. And I have paired it with Rod McDonald’s follow-up email (formerly Blue Pencil no. 17—Addendum).

Matthew Carter: Somewhere there must be a proper account of the beginnings of Arial, but at the risk of repeating myself or somebody else, here goes. …
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20 September 2011

Blue Pencil no. 17—Corrections

I received this email from Matthew Carter pointing out some mistakes in my dissection of Just My Type.

A couple of corrections to your corrections:

p. 66 The original weight of Snell Roundhand was released in 1966. I arrived in Brooklyn in September of 1965 and had to do Cascade first and make a start on Helvetica Compressed. My one surviving Snell drawing was revised on August 1st 1966 which provides a ‘terminus post quem.’ The Bold and Black weights …
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17 September 2011

Blue Pencil no. 17Just My Type: Addendum no. 2

In my published review of Just My Type for Imprint I mentioned some of the larger themes percolating beneath the surface of the book. One that I forgot is the notion that typefaces should look like typefaces. This is similar to Eric Gill’s declaration that “Letters are not pictures or representations.” (An Essay on Typography, p. 23) Gill was offended by letters that tried to look like things (such as letters made of tree branches, viz. the back cover of …
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16 September 2011

Blue Pencil no. 17— Just My Type : Addendum

Predictably, my review of Just My Type on Imprint has aroused controversy. Steve Heller has defended the book—to some extent. In doing so, he mentioned that he had reviewed the book favorably for The Financial Times. When I read his review I was not upset that he liked Just My Type. I was upset by some of his reasons. Two statements jumped out at me:

He [Garfield] jumps headlong into the swelling waves of type minutiae, and is extremely knowledgeable …
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16 September 2011

Blue Pencil no. 17—Just My Type—Part Two

p.71 “Carter then [after apprenticing at Enschedé] returned to London, and found there wasn’t much demand for skills rooted in the 1450s. So he began to paint signs, another archaic art. At the beginning of the 1960s he [Matthew Carter] went to New York… After a while he was offered a job at the Mergenthaler Linotype Company in Brooklyn….”
The implication here is that Carter moved to New York early in the 1960s, worked as a sign painter in the city …
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16 September 2011

Blue Pencil no. 17—Just My Type—Part One

Just My Type. Jacket design by Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich.

Just My Type: A Book about Fonts
Simon Garﬁeld
New York: Gotham Books, 2011
[London: Proﬁle Books, 2010]

This is the original review that of Just My Type that I wrote for Imprint. I am posting it here because a number of comments in this dissection refer to it rather than to the revised review that Imprint published. For the revised review visit Imprint.

It was inevitable that once typefaces became fonts that the …
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31 August 2011

Der Typografische Kanon

Prater Gastsgätte Biergarten in Berlin

During my visit to Berlin this past July I went to the Prater beer garden with a group of type geeks led by Indra Kupferschmid, Florian Hardwig and American expat Dan Reynolds. Among the others was Christoph Koeberlin who asked us to name our ﬁve essential type books. Although I do not read German I own and cherish many German and Swiss books and so chose ﬁve of them for my list: Buchkunst im …
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30 August 2011

The Rchive no. 2

Imperial R written with broad-edged brush by Father E.M. Catich (unretouched), 1961

Father E.M. Catich, a former Chicago signwriter who taught art at St. Ambrose College in Davenport, Iowa, devoted much of his life to explicating the manner in which Roman Imperial Capitals (Capitalis Monumentalis) were created. In Letters Redrawn from the Trajan Inscription in Rome (Davenport, Iowa: Catfish Press, 1961) he outlined each of the letters from the Trajan Inscription, based on the many rubbings he had made of …
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30 August 2011

The Rchive no. 1

Inscription of Epaphroditus (Museo Nazionale di Roma), 1st c.

This R is taken from the inscription to Epaphroditus, a freedman who served Emperor Nero, in the courtyard of the Museo Nazionale in Rome. It is the ﬁrst in a planned series of showings of the letter R. The R is the most complex capital letter. In its classical, inscriptional form it consists of a vertical stroke (the stem), a short horizontal stroke (the link between the stem, the leg …
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