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Contributed by Stephen Coles Source: www.flickr.com Kit Karzen/Harris for President. License: All Rights Reserved. The Kamala Harris 2024 campaign identity, designed by Wide Eye Creative, is built around Sans Plomb, a condensed gothic not unlike the Bureau Grot used by Wide Eye for Harris’s 2020 primary bid – in turn inspired by Shirley Chisholm’s 1972 campaign. This time, though, the typeface is from a French foundry, rather than from Anglo-American origins (Stephenson Blake via Font Bureau). Source: fontsinuse.com License: All Rights Reserved. The logo for Kamala Harris’ 2020 campaign used Bureau Grot and an atypical asymmetrical layout. It’s not clear to me why they made the switch. From a design point of view, the caps aren’t significantly different from Bureau Grot. Perhaps they liked the more constructed, “modern” feel? Personally, I would have gone back to Chisholm’s pick, the all-American Franklin Gothic, which has no shortage of contemporary versions for any use case. (At the risk of friendship bias, I recommend the interpretation from Fonts In Use cofounder Nick Sherman.) The symmetrical layout for “Harris/Walz” is a much more conventional approach compared to Harris’s 2020 logo, which took a different road than most US presidential campaigns. The new look reflects her move to the center (no pun intended) for a broader audience. Source: www.flickr.com Eric Elofson/Harris for President. License: All Rights Reserved. Not the best kerning on this rally sign (AY). The font, Sans Plomb Super, doesn’t deliver that big of a gap out of the box, so something went awry in the typesetting. Source: kamalaharris.com License: All Rights Reserved. Source: kamalaharris.com License: All Rights Reserved. Source: store.kamalaharris.com License: All Rights Reserved. The supporting face for “WALZ”, running text, and other small bits like “YES SHE CAN” merch is Balto, Tal Leming’s contemporary take on the American gothic genre, such as Franklin Gothic and News Gothic. The Harris web store adds Sara Solskone and Jonathan Hoefler’s Decimal, a continuation of the Biden/Harris 2020 campaign. Seeing Solskone’s name makes me wonder if maybe there was a missed opportunity to also choose a typeface by an American woman for the main mark. For example, Program by Zuzana Licko, or Utile Narrow by Sibylle Hagmann. Source: store.kamalaharris.com License: All Rights Reserved. Source: kamalaharris.com License: All Rights Reserved. The logo used in this web pop-up is the early version before it was redrawn (see below). Source: www.instagram.com Jonathan Hoefler. License: All Rights Reserved. A refined version of the Harris/Walz logo (white outline) launched around August 11. The biggest changes were relieving the pinched curve at the top of the S and enlarging “WALZ” just slightly to the left for optical centering. Hoefler, whose typefaces (or those of Hoefler & Co.) have been part of the logo for “every Democratic president in the twenty-first century”, recently revealed that the mark was refined on August 10–11, a few weeks after its initial launch. The work – which involved some redrawing and better “WALZ” centering – was done by Leming and Scott Dadich under the direction of Wide Eye’s Alayna Citrin. Hoefler also commented that, “Trump has used Gotham for years, and NEVER bought a license. Color me surprised! We talked to a white shoe lawfirm in NYC about taking action, and was told, with a laugh, ‘take a number.’” Ironically, it was Barack Obama’s 2008 run that made Gotham (and its lookalikes) a default for US political campaigns, regardless of party. At least Harris is diverting a bit from that same old choice. This post was originally published at Fonts In Use
Contributed by Florian Hardwig Source: www.abebooks.com Between the Covers (edited). License: All Rights Reserved. One advantage that lettering has over typeset text is that the artist can always alter letterforms ad hoc, depending on the context. This allows her to make the most of the available space, to dissolve awkward pairs into pleasing combinations, or simply to enliven a design by means of variegation. Ursula Suess was a graphic artist who designed numerous book jackets in her career. For the majority of them, she’d come up with her own letterforms. I’ll later add a selection of designs that hints at her stylistic range in the comments to this article. Source: www.abebooks.com Between the Covers. License: All Rights Reserved. An early jacket with italic lettering, designed by Suess for Sean O’Casey’s Sunset and Evening Star, Macmillan, 1955 Source: www.abebooks.com Between the Covers. License: All Rights Reserved. Suess designed the jacket for The Confrontation by Lenore Marshall (W.W. Norton) in 1972, the year her Book Jacket was released. The lettering could pass as an extrabold variation. Source: www.klingspor-museum.de Photographer unknown. License: All Rights Reserved. An undated portrait of Ursula Suess In the early 1970s, Suess set about designing a typeface. According to a 2014 article by Ellen Sussman, she was in part motivated by the fact that “most type styles at the time were too wide and didn’t fit on a jacket.” Her typeface indeed is compact, both horizontally and vertically, with condensed, tight-setting letterforms and a large x-height with short extenders. Suess didn’t want to forgo all the flexibility she was familiar with from lettering, so she drew a large set of alternates. A TGC specimen sums it up: “She used lettering similar to this in her book cover designs, where space limitations called for lettering with many swash characters that was strong and condensed, yet rich and sensuous.” The calligraphic design was released by VGC as a stand-alone italic in 1972, named Book Jacket. Whether you find the name boring or brilliant, it did clarify the intended application area. And Book Jacket indeed was used for designing book jackets. One example by Suess herself is shown here. (See Robert Halsband’s biography of Lord Hervey for a second one.) As We Are Now is a novel by Belgian-American writer May Sarton (1912–1995), published by W.W. Norton & Company in 1973. Suess used her typeface in two sizes, with the alternate swash caps for the big initials, a wider terminal form in “We”, and hardly any space between the last two words of the title. For the subline, she opted for more restrained forms overall, but inserted a descending h, a sweeping f that embraces the preceding o, and a single swash cap L in “LOVE”. The a in “author” is the double-story alternate. May Sarton’s name is set in Richard Isbell’s wide Americana. Source: canadatype.com Canada Type. License: All Rights Reserved. Partial glyph set of Book Jacket Pro, the digitization drawn by Patrick Griffin and released by Canada Type in 2010 Ursula Suess was born August 13, 1924 – which means it’s her 100th birthday today. Canada Type, who released a digital version of Book Jacket in 2010, provided a biographical outline: Ursula Suess was born in 1924 to German parents in Camden, NJ, and grew up in Munich, Germany, where she attended two semesters of design school at the Academy of Fine Art before it burned down during the war [in July 1944]. She then studied calligraphy with Anna Simons for two years. She returned to America in 1946 and established herself as a graphic designer working for Oxford University Press, Macmillan Co., Harper, and other publishers. She also taught calligraphy for 20 years at the Westchester Art Workshop, and at the Cooper Union in New York City. In her 50s she learned to cut gems and eventually became an accomplished gem carver. She moved to Green Valley, AZ, in 1998, and has been applying her artistic versatility with clay, water-color and acrylics. In Arizona, Suess became a long-time supporter of the Tubac Center of the Arts. Ellen Sussman additionally mentions paper sculpture, pottery, and collage as techniques she engaged in. Apart from Book Jacket, she is credited with at least one more typeface: Rotalic is a low-contrast italic sans featuring swash caps with ball terminals. It was also released with VGC. One of its four styles recently was digitized as BN Rascal. Suess passed away in 2020. She left us a large number of beautiful works, including many pieces of lettering and two unique typefaces that have stood the test of time. Source: tubacarts.org DeDe Isaacson, Tubac Center of the Arts. License: All Rights Reserved. Ursula Suess at the Tubac Center of the Arts Source: www.abebooks.com Rare Book Cellar. License: All Rights Reserved. This post was originally published at Fonts In Use
Contributed by Stephen Coles Source: lithub.com License: All Rights Reserved. Martyr! is a novel by Iranian-American writer Kaveh Akbar that combines modern situations with traditional imagery. For the jacket, prolific cover designer Linda Huang did what she does so well: pick a striking and relevant typeface and let it do a lot of the work. License: All Rights Reserved. Left: Salem, as advertised in the Inland Printer, Vol. 28, No. 2 (November, 1901). Right: Daria Cohen’s reinterpretation, Zangezi (2018), with additional weights, italics, and condensed (2021). Her choice was Zangezi Condensed, a fresh, fashion-forward take on Salem, in which Daria Cohen took a turn-of-the-century dazzler, narrowed it, and increased its stroke contrast, giving it even more spike and sparkle than it already had. The idiosyncratic type is the perfect companion to the contemporary use of antique illustration. Huang also deftly delivers the commercial necessities – a blurb and “a novel” – in an inconspicuous way. Huang on the design: Despite its heavy themes, I found Akbar’s novel to be insanely funny,” Huang told Literary Hub. “I cackled many times while reading the manuscript. More than anything, I wanted to evoke this unique tragi-comedic tone on the cover. One of the central, recurring images is this Iranian ‘Angel of Death’ warrior. I experimented with scale and ultimately found the warrior in miniature to be most striking, with ‘a novel’ set in a deadpan speech bubble. I was also lucky to stumble upon the perfect decorative typeface to activate all that negative space. To me, humor is one of the most alluring qualities in a book (and really, in life) so it was an absolute treat to work on Akbar’s novel. Source: www.penguinrandomhouse.com License: All Rights Reserved. The version of the cover seen in bookstores today. Martyr! quickly became a New York Times best seller – soon enough for the cover to get an extra speech balloon celebrating that fact. You can also see an improvement on the letterspacing in “Akbar”. A Digression and Suggestion Photo: Stephen Coles. License: All Rights Reserved. Once you get to the end of a book, “a note on the type” is a great way to learn about the creation of the letterforms you’ve been staring at for hours. Photo: Stephen Coles. License: All Rights Reserved. Back jacket flaps usually include an author bio and designer credit. This is good. Could they include a bit more? The interior of this book, designed by Betty Lew, includes “A Note on the Type”, a lovely hundred-year-old publishing tradition which not only credits the text face (in this case, Dante), but tells a bit of its story. Why not have a typeface credit on the jacket flap, too? Sure, you’re reading a lot more Dante than Zangezi when you read this book, but it’s the cover that often sells the book. Also, the type used on book covers is more likely to be something newer that the interior text, and thus more likely to be made by living designers. Isn’t it time we give them a nod? This post was originally published at Fonts In Use
Contributed by Stephen Coles Source: lithub.com License: All Rights Reserved. Martyr! is a novel by Iranian-American writer Kaveh Akbar that combines modern situations with traditional imagery. For the jacket, prolific cover designer Linda Huang did what she does so well: pick a striking and relevant typeface and let it do a lot of the work. License: All Rights Reserved. Left: Salem, as advertised in the Inland Printer, Vol. 28, No. 2 (November, 1901). Right: Daria Cohen’s reinterpretation, Zangezi (2018), with additional weights, italics, and condensed (2021). Her choice was Zangezi Condensed, a fresh, fashion-forward take on Salem, in which Daria Cohen took a turn-of-the-century dazzler, narrowed it, and increased its stroke contrast, giving it even more spike and sparkle than it already had. The idiosyncratic type is the perfect companion to the contemporary use of antique illustration. Huang also deftly delivers the commercial necessities – a blurb and “a novel” – in an inconspicuous way. Huang on the design: Despite its heavy themes, I found Akbar’s novel to be insanely funny,” Huang told Literary Hub. “I cackled many times while reading the manuscript. More than anything, I wanted to evoke this unique tragi-comedic tone on the cover. One of the central, recurring images is this Iranian ‘Angel of Death’ warrior. I experimented with scale and ultimately found the warrior in miniature to be most striking, with ‘a novel’ set in a deadpan speech bubble. I was also lucky to stumble upon the perfect decorative typeface to activate all that negative space. To me, humor is one of the most alluring qualities in a book (and really, in life) so it was an absolute treat to work on Akbar’s novel. Source: www.penguinrandomhouse.com License: All Rights Reserved. The version of the cover seen in bookstores today. Martyr! quickly became a New York Times best seller – soon enough for the cover to get an extra speech balloon celebrating that fact. You can also see an improvement on the letterspacing in “Akbar”. A Digression and Suggestion Photo: Stephen Coles. License: All Rights Reserved. Once you get to the end of a book, “a note on the type” is a great way to learn about the creation of the letterforms you’ve been staring at for hours. Photo: Stephen Coles. License: All Rights Reserved. Back jacket flaps usually include an author bio and designer credit. This is good. Could they include a bit more? The interior of this book, designed by Betty Lew, includes “A Note on the Type”, a lovely hundred-year-old publishing tradition which not only credits the text face (in this case, Dante), but tells a bit of its story. Why not have a typeface credit on the jacket flap, too? Sure, you’re reading a lot more Dante than Zangezi when you read this book, but it’s the cover that often sells the book. Also, the type used on book covers is more likely to be something newer that the interior text, and thus more likely to be made by living designers. Isn’t it time we give them a nod? This post was originally published at Fonts In Use
Contributed by Florian Hardwig Source: www.c82.net C82 / Nicholas Rougeux. License: All Rights Reserved. January 1990, ft. an unidentified rounded sans Source: www.c82.net C82 / Nicholas Rougeux. License: All Rights Reserved. February 1990 ft. Italia Bold C82 is the website of Nicholas Rougeux, a Chicago-based designer and data artist. One of the many great things one can find on C82 is his collection of train tickets sold by Metra. Every month, the commuter rail system in the Chicago metropolitan area releases a new ticket design. In 2004, Nick started collecting. Over the years, and with the help from other ephemera enthusiasts as well as of Metra, the archive considerably grew in size. At the time of writing, it includes an impressive 1,395 tickets, spanning more than fifty years of commuter history. This post highlights the monthly tickets from 1990 and 1991. In a recent blog update, Nick comments: In the early 90s, ticket designs varied significantly with new typography and visual styles appearing each month. I can’t say these are some of my favorites but I recognize that this may have been in an effort to curb counterfeiting. However, I do enjoy some of the typography from the 1990s tickets. I owe a big thanks to fellow collector John for these and others. Each of the tickets features a different typeface. Many of the chosen fonts stem from the libraries of ITC (Korinna, Quorum, Serif Gothic, Zapf Chancery, …) and Letraset (Caxton, Italia, Romic, …). There are also classics that go back to the era of foundry type, like Beton, City, or Optima, and Monotype originals like Albertus and Plantin. The typographic smorgasbord is completed by designs as diverse as Moderne Schwabacher, a turn-of-the-century blackletter; Salut, an upright script first cast by Gebr. Klingspor in the 1930s; and Checkmate, a futuristic sans with chamfered corners, dreamt up at Schaedler in the 1970s – all of which were either used still as phototype, or in the form of early digitizations. For the year 1990, all abbreviated month names are shown in vertically stretched letterforms. The source of the stacked numerals (“90”) was identified by Quinn as City Bold, see comments. The bitmap caps (“D/A”) are likely custom. While the spelled-out month names and the ticket numbers are similar to OCR-B, the specific font appears to be a proprietary design with some differences, probably from a specialized printing machine. The Metra logo seen on the depicted train as well as on some of the tickets is Crillee. See also the dedicated post about it. Source: www.c82.net C82 / Nicholas Rougeux. License: All Rights Reserved. March 1990 ft. Macbeth Source: www.c82.net C82 / Nicholas Rougeux. License: All Rights Reserved. April 1990 ft. City Bold Source: www.c82.net C82 / Nicholas Rougeux. License: All Rights Reserved. May 1990 ft. Checkmate Source: www.c82.net C82 / Nicholas Rougeux. License: All Rights Reserved. June 1990 ft. Roberta Source: www.c82.net C82 / Nicholas Rougeux. License: All Rights Reserved. July 1990 ft. what appears to be a version of Filmotype Amber (or a similar face) Source: www.c82.net C82 / Nicholas Rougeux. License: All Rights Reserved. August 1990 ft. Salut Source: www.c82.net C82 / Nicholas Rougeux. License: All Rights Reserved. September 1990 ft. Moderne Schwabacher a.k.a. Chalet Text Source: www.c82.net C82 / Nicholas Rougeux. License: All Rights Reserved. October 1990 ft. Clarendon Condensed Source: www.c82.net C82 / Nicholas Rougeux. License: All Rights Reserved. November 1990 ft. Beton Bold Condensed Source: www.c82.net C82 / Nicholas Rougeux. License: All Rights Reserved. January 1991 ft. ITC Quorum Bold Source: www.c82.net C82 / Nicholas Rougeux. License: All Rights Reserved. February 1991 ft. ITC Kabel Ultra Source: www.c82.net C82 / Nicholas Rougeux. License: All Rights Reserved. March 1991 ft. ITC Serif Gothic Heavy with the pointed forms for M and A that were omitted from the digital version. “March 1991” uses ITC Korinna and Times New Roman. Source: www.c82.net C82 / Nicholas Rougeux. License: All Rights Reserved. April 1991 ft. a bold variant of Plantin Source: www.c82.net C82 / Nicholas Rougeux. License: All Rights Reserved. May 1991 ft. a bold variant of Albertus Source: www.c82.net C82 / Nicholas Rougeux. License: All Rights Reserved. June 1991 ft. Caxton Bold Source: www.c82.net C82 / Nicholas Rougeux. License: All Rights Reserved. July 1991 ft. Optima Bold Source: www.c82.net C82 / Nicholas Rougeux. License: All Rights Reserved. August ft. ITC Cheltenham Bold Source: www.c82.net C82 / Nicholas Rougeux. License: All Rights Reserved. September 1991 ft. ITC Zapf Chancery Bold with the alternate swash caps Source: www.c82.net C82 / Nicholas Rougeux. License: All Rights Reserved. October 1991 ft. a bold variant of Century Oldstyle Source: www.c82.net C82 / Nicholas Rougeux. License: All Rights Reserved. November 1991 ft. Romic Bold Source: www.c82.net C82 / Nicholas Rougeux. License: All Rights Reserved. December 1991 ft. ITC Berkeley Oldstyle This post was originally published at Fonts In Use
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In her best-selling book, Living Well By Design, Melissa Penfold addressed the basics of interior decorating. Now she turns her attention to demonstrating what a powerful force design can be in boosting our physical and emotional well-being in her newest book, ‘Natural Living By Design’, Vendome Press, launches in April and available for Preorder now, Continue Reading The post HAVE YOU PREORDERED YOUR COPY OF MELISSA’S NEW BOOK YET? first appeared on Melissa Penfold. The post HAVE YOU PREORDERED YOUR COPY OF MELISSA’S NEW BOOK YET? appeared first on Melissa Penfold.
Rethinking AI through mind-body dualism, parenthood, and unanswerable existential questions. I remember hearing my daughter’s heartbeat for the first time during a prenatal sonogram. Until that moment, I had intellectually understood that we were creating a new life, but something profound shifted when I heard that steady rhythm. My first thought was startling in its clarity: “now this person has to die.” It wasn’t morbid — it was a full realization of what it means to create a vessel for life. We weren’t just making a baby; we were initiating an entire existence, with all its joy and suffering, its beginning and, inevitably, its end. This realization transformed my understanding of parental responsibility. Yes, we would be guardians of her physical form, but our deeper role was to nurture the consciousness that would inhabit it. What would she think about life and death? What could we teach her about this existence we had invited her into? As background to the rest of this brief essay, I must admit to a foundational perspective, and that is mind-body dualism. There are many valid reasons to subscribe to this perspective, whether traditional, religious, philosophical, and yes, even scientific. I won’t argue any of them here; suffice it to say that I’ve become increasingly convinced that consciousness isn’t produced by the brain but rather received and focused by it — like a radio receiving a signal. The brain isn’t a consciousness generator but a remarkably sophisticated antenna — a physical system complex enough to tune into and express non-physical consciousness. If this is true, then our understanding of artificial intelligence needs radical revision. Even if we are not trying to create consciousness in machines, we may be creating systems capable of receiving and expressing it. Increases in computational power alone, after all, don’t seem to produce consciousness. Philosophers of technology have long doubted that complexity alone makes a mind. But if philosophers of metaphysics and religion are right, minds are not made of mechanisms, they occupy them. Traditions as old as humanity have asked when this began, and why this may be, and what sorts of minds choose to inhabit this physical world. We ask these questions because we can. What will happen when machines do the same? We happen to live at a time that is deeply confusing when it comes to the maturation of technology. On the one hand, AI is inescapable. You may not have experience in using it yet, but you’ve almost certainly experienced someone else’s use of it, perhaps by way of an automated customer support line. Depending upon how that went, your experience might not support the idea that a sufficiently advanced machine is anywhere near getting a real debate about consciousness going. But on the other hand, the organizations responsible for popularizing AI — OpenAI, for example — claim to be “this close” to creating AGI (artificial general intelligence). If they’re right, we are very behind in a needed discussion about minds and consciousness at the popular level. If they’re wrong, they’re not going to stop until they’ve done it, so we need to start that conversation now. The Turing Test was never meant to assess consciousness in a machine. It was meant to assess the complexity of a machine by way of its ability to fool a human. When machines begin to ask existential questions, will we attribute this to self-awareness or consciousness, or will we say it’s nothing more than mimicry? And how certain will we be? We presume our own consciousness, though defending it ties us up in intellectual knots. We maintain the Cartesian slogan, I think, therefore I am as a properly basic belief. And yet, it must follow that anything capable of describing itself as an I must be equally entitled to the same belief. So here we are, possibly staring at the sonogram of a new life – a new kind of life. Perhaps this is nothing more than speculative fiction, but if minds join bodies, why must those bodies be made of one kind of matter but not another? What if we are creating a new kind of antenna for the signal of mind? Wouldn’t all the obligations of parenthood be the same as when we make more of ourselves? I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t be. And yet, there remains a crucial difference: While we have millennia of understanding about human experience, we know nothing about what it would mean to be a living machine. We will have to fall upon belief to determine what to do. And when that time comes — perhaps it has already? – it will be worth considering the near impossibility of proving consciousness and the probability of moral obligation nonetheless. Popular culture has explored the weight of responsibility that an emotional connection with a machine can create — think of Picard defending Data in The Measure of a Man, or Theodore falling in love with his computer in the film Her. The conclusion we should draw from these examples is not simply that a conscious machine could be the object of our moral responsibility, but that a machine could, whether or not it is inhabited by a conscious mind. Our moral obligation will traverse our certainty, because proving a mind exists is no easier when it is outside one’s body than when it is one’s own. That moment of hearing my daughter’s heartbeat revealed something fundamental about the act of creation. Whether we’re bringing forth biological life or developing artificial systems sophisticated enough to host consciousness, we’re engaging in something profound: creating vessels through which consciousness might experience physical existence. Perhaps this is the most profound implication of creating potential vessels for consciousness: our responsibility begins the moment we create the possibility, not the moment we confirm its reality.
