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.

Page 29 of 33
<
1
...
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
>

12 September 2010

The 1979 New York City Subway Map: A Question of Authorship, Part I

Paul,
Thanks for your posting on the 1979 subway map, which focuses attention on the difﬁcult question of authorship.
A subway map comprises several connected elements, which may have resulted from distinct design decisions, by different individuals or voted by a committee. The 1979 MTA map was produced by a committee of 12 people plus 3 staff at Michael Hertz Associates, working for almost 3.5 years (Nov 1975 to Jun 1979). During this time the chair changed (Fred Wilkinson to John Tauranac), …
Continue reading →

11 September 2010

What’s Online no. 1: Display

For years website designers Greg D’Onofrio and Patricia Belen of Kind Company, best known for the design of the website Alvin Lustig 1915–1955: Modern Design Pioneer, have been assiduously collecting examples of modern design from old books and periodicals to corporate brochures and other ephemera. Instead of hoarding their wealth of material, they have decided to generously share it with the rest of the world through Display, their new website.
Greg and Patricia are doing this …
Continue reading →

11 September 2010

Erhard Ratdolt’s 1486 type specimen

Patrick Cramsie is correct and I was wrong. The first known type specimen sheet, dated April 1486, was issued by Erhard Ratdolt at Augsburg (Germany). Only one copy survives. See Annals of Printing: A Chronological Encyclopedia by W. Turner Berry and H. Edmund Poole (London: Blandford Press, 1966), p. 56 which reproduces the sheet. It shows a decorated initial A in the white-vine style common in Paduan and Florentine manuscripts of the time, ten sizes of rotunda faces, three sizes …
Continue reading →

11 September 2010

About Blue Pencil

Some people have misunderstood the lengthy postings about books on Blue Pencil as book reviews. They are not. The original impetus behind Blue Pencil was to provide detailed dissections of the shortcomings, both authorial and editorial, of books in the field of design, beginning with those devoted to the history of graphic design. The postings are intended to be the digital equivalent of the editor who, in the heyday of the 20th century, wielded a blue pencil with a vengeance …
Continue reading →

31 August 2010

Blue Pencil no. 10—The Story of Graphic Design

The Story of Graphic Design: from the Invention of Writing to the Birth of Digital Design
Patrick Cramsie
New York: Abrams and London: The British Library, 2010

p. 23 “graphe” should have an grave accent on the final e

p. 23 “constantcy” [is this a Britishism or misspelling?]

p. 25 “distiction” should be “distinction”

ﬁg. 2.6 Scribal palette and brushes[,] c.15,500–14,500BC the image should be larger; as it is, the objects are not clear

p. 33 “A red quartzite statue made in Egypt between 750 and …
Continue reading →

23 April 2010

Blue Pencil Comments no. 2—Marian Bantjes

Marian Bantjes has responded to my posts about her Saks Fifth Avenue heart. Here is here comment and below it my response.

Marian Bantjes 4/4/10

Paul, for you to use my Saks heart as a comparison to a Spencerian script is madness. It bears absolutely no relation to a formal script (the first clue being that it is a monoline), nor was it meant to. The letters do not flow properly from …
Continue reading →

22 April 2010

Blue Pencil no. 9—Type: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles vol. 2 1901–1938

Blue Pencil no. 6 (1 October 2009) was devoted to Type: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles vol. 1 1628–1900 edited by Cees W. de Jong, Alston W. Purvis and Jan Tholenaar. The companion volume was published in February 2010. It was obviously already edited and prepared for publication when my comments were posted as many of the same problems that plagued the ﬁrst volume are still present in this one.
Type: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic …
Continue reading →

22 April 2010

Blue Pencil Comments no. 1

When I set up this slow blog I decided not to publish comments for several reasons: 1. I wanted any comments to be substantive rather than simply expressions of praise or vituperation; and 2. I feared that I wouldn’t have the time to curate them properly. The sort of comments that I would like to include on the blog are those that add knowledge: correcting my posts regarding facts, spelling, etc.; adding additional information ﬂeshing out my comments; or arguing …
Continue reading →

16 April 2010

From the Archives no. 10: Specimen Sheets vs. Alphabet Sheets

The Desk Catalogue of ‘Monotype’ Faces (London: The Monotype Corporation Limited, n.d.) is a ring binder of specimen sheets of Monotype and Monophoto faces dated from 1962 to 1966. The short introduction (unsigned but probably by Beatrice Warde) has this to say:
“It should be emphasized however that the primary purpose of these ofﬁcial specimen sheets is not that to which designers have attempted to put them, namely that of model-letter sheets for tracing in pencil layouts. For that purpose, the …
Continue reading →

14 April 2010

Blue Pencil no. 8—Idea 321 (2007)

Between 2006 and 2008 there was an astonishing outpouring of Tschicholdiana, books and magazines devoted to various aspects of the life and work of Jan Tschichold (1902–1974), the inﬂuential 20th c. typographer and typographic theorist. This is the ﬁrst Blue Pencil post devoted to looking at these works. It is focused on a special issue of Idea, a Japanese graphic design magazine, dedicated to Tschichold.
Idea: International Graphic Art and Typography 321 2007.3
“Works of Jan Tschichold 1902–74”
222 pp.
This special issue of …
Continue reading →

11 April 2010

A Case Study no. 1—Chocolate & Zucchini

Several years ago I was hired to ﬁx part of a book title. The book was Chocolate & Zucchini: Daily Adventures in a Parisian Kitchen, a cookbook/memoir by Clotilde Dusoulier (New York: Broadway Books, 2007), a spin-off from her website of the same name.
The problem was the word “Zucchini”. The jacket designer had set it in a typeface called Scriptina, a free font from Frederick Nader (aka Apostrophe) (2000–2001)*. Although the font is full of zesty letters, they do …
Continue reading →

9 April 2010

Tutorial no. 4—Designing with Lettering

When I began teaching calligraphy in the evening program at the School of Visual Arts in 1980 I found my students feared and loathed type. Their attitude was shared by many designers. This stemmed from the way in which typography was taught at the time in design schools. Metal type and letterpress printing equipment had been chucked out of most American design schools in the late 1960s as part of the transformation of the profession from its roots in commercial …
Continue reading →

8 April 2010

Tutorial no. 3—Roundhand

In Tutorial no. 1 I mentioned the names of a number of individuals who were adept at Spencerian lettering. One of those was Jean Larcher, who lives in a suburb of Paris and has been doing lettering and calligraphy of all kinds since the early 1970s. James Mosley, retired librarian at the famous St. Bride Printing Library in London, noticed my reference and sent me the two images that are posted here. These are details from an envelope sent to …
Continue reading →

8 April 2010

Addendum to Tutorial no. 2—Steinberg and Steinweiss

“The work I did for Saks is one of the very few pieces of lettering I’ve done that approaches calligraphic formality … and yet, no, that was not its intent. My direction from my clients, Michael Bierut at Pentagram, and Saks was to find a midway between the very formal Spencerian script of the Saks logo, and the energy of Saul Steinberg’s scrawl. It was meant to be vector smooth, but casual with an over-the-top freneticism of ‘wanting it.’ A …
Continue reading →

6 April 2010

Tutorial no. 2—Marian Bantjes

Tutorial no. 1 was not meant to be a showdown between Tony DiSpigna and Marian Bantjes or a referendum on the entire body of work of either individual. My goal was to use single pieces by each of them to explain what I see as the hallmarks of a good piece of lettering. The tutorial is part of an ongoing discussion I have been having with calligraphers, letterers and type designers for over twenty years about the concept of good …
Continue reading →

4 April 2010

Blue Pencil no. 7C—Helvetica and the New York City Subway System: The (Mostly) True Story

There has been a lot of controversy over who deserves credit for the design of the 1979 subway map. In Helvetica and the New York City Subway System I tried to avoid getting tangled up in the ﬁght between Michael Hertz and John Tauranac, both of whom were very generous in providing me with material and information about developments in the sign system. The sign system, not the map, was my primary interest at the time.
As someone who has worked …
Continue reading →

Page 29 of 33
<
1
...
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
>