overseas logogram

The peripatetic polyglots at the helm over at Language Log direct us to a host of for the nonce Sinographs from Hong Kong which could be described as neologism—rather neographisms or visual portmanteaux inventing characters by mixing the component parts and meaning-bearers from different glyphs to form something nuanced and paraliteral.  The pictured example seems to borrow selectively from 鎮靜 (zhènjìng, that is combined calm, poised) but taking on a new context in this form as equanimous and not un-dispassionate, unshaken.
As one reader commented, this zhìzào (制造, making characters) is reminiscent of the 1987 publication originally to be entitled Mirror to Analyse the World: The Century’s Final Volume by artist Xu Bing but was instead ultimately called after the Chinese term tiān shū that itself originally was reserved for divinely inspired writing (akin to speaking in tongues) but came to signify gibberish in “A Book from the Sky.” Very much up to the interpretation of the reader, the bound edition limited to a single print run, the book is composed with a set of four-thousand characters (comparable to the lexicon of modern Chinese writing) and imitate natural language on the page in terms of diversity and frequency but are wholly made up, nonsense words, as if a book in a Latin script were filled with Wingdings. The above banners, however, have a meaning and message that can be puzzled out.

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cut-throat competition: gig workers are tethering their smartphones in trees to gain an edge of miilliseconds over others for a limited number of contracts

the hackney year: season after season of recorded back garden bird song and other sonic gems via Things Magazine

october surprise: a cynical campaign ploy threatens to erode public trust in science and medicine

a transparent corridor in the air: a design firm completes the longest glass-bottomed suspension bridge along the approach to Three Gorges

ascii art: artists creates “typicitions” on his vintage typewriter

snitches get stitches: the prohibition against social gatherings are polarising college campuses

eula: monopsonistic on-line retail giant deploys union-busting tactics to perpetuate myth of “freelance” work-force and maintain their impressment

6x6

a jay ward production: rediscover the classic cartoon Hoppity Hooper

distance learning is the art of applying the bride to the child: Dorothy Parker’s (previously) take on remote kindergarten

long in the tooth: a Greenland shark is recognised as world’s oldest veterbrate type specimen: explore the extensive Letter Form Archive—via Pasa Bon!

nimby, yimby: mapping applications that reveal percentage of golf course and parking lots in your town

casa azul: a virtual exploration of Frida Kahlo’s Blue House—via Messy Nessy Chic plus the edible sunflower and a tiny tug

owls to athens: a look at how our avian friends influenced language and limn thought (see also)

liner notes

Via Everlasting Blört we are directed to this fabulous gallery curated by Reagan Ray (previously) of album cover art designed by the imminent Milton Glaser (see also).
We especially like the appreciative prologue about the intricacies and interlacing of his work and how a custom, one-off typeface might be later expanded into a font. With over two hundred and fifty jackets to his credit and a career spanning six decades, it is a challenge to select favourite but most are represented in the collection above. In addition to the iconic covers Glaser created for Bob Dylan, Harry Chapin and Albert King, we really like the psychedelic look for the cover band The Baroque Inevitable plus this commission for Al Caiola’s Magic Guitars “Music for Space Squirrels,” which you can listen along to below.

point suscrit

Noticing an all-caps headline with BİDEN rendered as such with the dotted i (called the tittle in English though there’s no case for the letter j in Turkic scripts, see also) as opposed to the dotless that appears later in the word for asylum, I was intrigued about the distinction and wondered how Turkish orthography treated these letters. As with İstanbul, the dotted version usually represents the long vowel sound, close front unrounded, whereas ı most times denotes an oo sound, close back unrounded. Not all computing platforms are able to encode this difference properly—sometimes the numeral 1 is substituted for the dotless ı—resulting in consequential miscommunications.

mendicant marks

Previously we have encountered the glyphs left by the hobos, vagabonds and other members of the travelling community as coded guidance (see here), but it was not until this discovery by our faithful antiquarian that we had seen a map made by and for the community in this ethnographic study of Kent that included a chart and key in circulation from 1870. The map was was rendered by a local screever or sidewalk-chalk artist who would normally be consigned with religious iconography and whom captioned figures with such names as “¾ Sarah.” See more at the links above for a glimpse into this world of cunning and survival.

now that’s the ticket

Via Boing Boing, we are treated to a preview of the combined campaign poster for former rivals and contenders for the office of president of the United States of America which completes Joe Biden’s re-branding and represents only the fourth time a woman candidate was championed for national office by a major political party (see also, footnotes on number two) but crucially, the first time one prevails, we believe. Moving away from his solo work, for which Biden had previously used the more angular and sharp font Brother 1816, he and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris have chosen a newly commissioned typeface called Decimal from Hoefler & Co. (see previously)—the same foundry that created Gotham for Barak Obama’s run for high office.

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you gotta eat them plums: an arcade version of William Carlos Williams’ “This is Just to Say” (see previously)—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links

op art: more on the Hungarian-French artist Victor Vasarely (see previously, born Győző Vásárhelyi, *1906 – †1997) whose work informed the movement

earth for scale: ESA solar probe finds new “campfire” phenomena on the Sun

manhatta: a 1921 short considered America’s first avant-garde experiment set to the verse of Walt Whitman

slob serif: awful typefaces (not this one) for awful protests—via Memo of the Air

primary pigments: more colour stories (see also) from Public Domain Review

hasta la pasta: the history behind linguini, fusilli and every variety in between

goldman sans

From the New Shelton Wet/Dry, we learn that an infamous investment bank has released its own signature family of sans-serif typefaces that is free to use in whatever manner one sees fit so long as one does not use the font to criticise the company or its practises. Statements of facts I suppose are exempt.

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ningaloo canyons: incredible footage from the previously unplumbed depths of the sea off western Australia

sea bass on a bed of contact lenses: hilarious mistranslation of French haute cuisine (see previously)

working lads institute: an antique gallery of portraits of those rehabilitating at the White Chapel Mission of London

cooper black: a look at the history behind the ubiquitous typeface, via Messy Nessy Chic, whose other finds are well worth checking out too

now is the time: raising the first new totem pole on Haida Gwaii (see also) in generations

geocities to neocities: the illustrious cabinet of hypertext curiosities of Mx van Hoorn, via Kicks Condor  

corrugated community: the vernacular architecture of Tīrau, New Zealand

kps 9566

Though only in use domestically, the DPRK (North) Standard Korean Graphic Character Set for Information Interchange, is ISO compliant and renderable across all platforms and is an efficient approach to translating the large repertoire of Hangul into a format for programming and transmittable all around the world.
While not all glyphs in the standard have Unicode equivalents (like the symbol of the Workers’ Party of Korea, the Hammer and Sickle and Brush, or personal cartouches for the country’s senior leadership) the standard is responsible for several indispensable emojis, like HOT BEVERAGE (☕) originally proposed as a map marker for a tea house, the black and white flags—again as map markers indicating battlefields, the ☔ and the ⚡, used as a lightning bolt or electricity but first used to warn of the dangers of high-voltage lines in the vicinity.

¤

We’re directed to an interesting survey that examines the colour of money globally of currently circulating currency, banknotes and isolates the Pantone hues that inform them, further identifying trends, occupations and professionals depicted, etc. The colour chart is an exhaustive, identifying the reference colour—for example—of the Icelandic kroner as Turquenite, Arubian florins as Pink Gecko or the Bhuanese ngultrum as Sundress. The title symbol is the generic currency sign, used to represent any or all denominations and originally employed when one keyboard didn’t have all the speciality typographical characters of another, proposed and championed as an alternative to the $.

segoe print state of mind

Friend of the blog Nag on the Lake directs our attention to a neat project that explores font families by the localities that inspired them.
Created by foundries to build up their portfolios and offer a greater range of styles—most debuting well before the trend of cities hiring a designer to give them a united, corporate image, the United Fonts of America allows one to triangulate in a sense geographic coordinates and style with hometown pride and mediate on what the association signify. Whose namesake is Tahoma exactly? Plus there’s all the other aspects of toponymy to consider besides. This map is focused on the US and it’s a good heuristic tool to get one thinking further afield.
Is there a typeface for where you live or do business, the product of a marketer or otherwise? Inspired I found that there was in fact a digital script commissioned by Linotype, designed by Rosemarie Kloos-Rau and released in 1992 named for a place we’re associated with. Within the framework of the industry standard DIN (see previously) 16518 governing handwriting and calligraphy, it is commonly used for brochures, greeting cards and call-out boxes in articles.

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colours of the world: Crayola crayons launch a special pigment pack to capture the diverse skin tones of people around the world—since fortunately the vast majority is not this

farringdon folly: the real life landmarks that informed and inspired (see also) JRR Tolkien’s Middle Earth

a typographical sirloin: visual mondegreens (see previously here and here) resulting from the keming—er, kerning of certain letter combinations

service à la française: the history and possible future of buffet-style dining (relatedly)

ultraflex: a futuristic Icelandic boogie band at the intersection of disco and Soviet-era calisthenics

where the rubber meets the road: tyre add-on device collects worn and shredded detritus before it goes into the environment

beyond the quick brown fox

Via Things Magazine, we see our affection for and fascination with the typographical samplers known as pangrams (see previously) returned.  Holoalphabetic phrases as they are known are those that use all or most of the letters on a keyboard to put a typeface through the paces, and are complimented with the filler text Lorem ipsum and its variants.
Whilst these methods are conveniently mnemonic and produce a lot of happy sphinxes and jackdaws (oder Haxenfüße und Querflöte—der deutschen Beispiele: Franz jagt im komplett verwahrlosten Taxi quer durch Bayern) they fall short in showcasing natural language distribution and the juxtaposition of perhaps contrary or ill-fitting characters. Ensnare, snuggle and boson might be more illustrative of problematic font-design. To that end, the foundry Hoefler & Co has offered some proofing texts that have a certain cadence to test one’s layout and typesetting: …Justin jocose for the djibouti sojourn of the oranj raj and hajjis. Knoll koala for the banknote lookout of the dybbuk outlook and trekked. Linden loads for the ulna monolog of the consul menthol and shallot… And so on.

qwerty or 🦆🐈🐄🐿️🦃🐢

To our delight we discover that in the mid-1930s—in order to raise qualified typists Smith Corona introduced a portable unit with animals on the keys to make the exercise more kid-friendly plus a set of nine rings—one for each finger and the right thumb to drum the space bar, to teach touch-typing and reinforce and associate letters with their rows through muscle-memory—knowing that one should use the birdie finger, doggie finger, etc, rather than by hunting and pecking. The most ambitious tutorial toy of its age, the typewriter looked to have promising Christmas sales the year it premiered but the Great Depression rather put a damper on further production and idea was abandoned to be championed later in other forms.

ffont ffamily

A commission from the Welsh government has netted a sleek, unifying typeface for its public services and signage that reflects Cymraeg and its unique orthographic characteristics (see also) with its range of diagraphs expressed in dedicated ligatures based on the textura of the country’s oldest manuscripts including the thirteenth century epic The Red Book of Hergest (Llyfr Coch Hergest) that recounts the heroic cycle of poems of Llywarch Hen and the struggle against the incursion of the Anglo-Saxons in the Mabinogion, the earliest collection of prose of the British isles, and The Black Book of Carmarthen (Llyfr Du Caerfyrddin, both distinguished by their location and the colour of their vellum bindings) that addresses various subjects including the Arthurian legend and Merlin (Myrddin).

all sales final

Via the inestimable Nag on the Lake (and a lot more to sample there), we were pleased to pour over and study this collection of ephemera of antique receipts, bills of sale and company letterhead from Whitechapel. Not only are the illustrations and typography and the use of pre-printed stock brilliant, it is amazing to note what detail and narrative is captured in these varied transactions, from the conventions of assigning telephone numbers and telegraphic addresses to book to wares purveyed.

manicule

The always interesting Pasa Bon! piques our curiosity regarding the punctuation mark known by the titular name or rather the index or the printer’s fist—scribes employing this symbol (☞, see also) to highlight and annotate corrections or notes.
Incorporated into standard typography, the sign’s modern sense is to direct readers to a cross-reference, point the way in advertising and was shorthand (reference the above stenography) of essayist H L Mencken to express the aphorism “When you point a finger at someone, realise that there are three pointing back at you,” bookending his telegrams with this reminder. Of course, the index also has a walk on role, a cameo according to what we’re mousing over. Much more to explore at the links above.

font specimen

Via Coudal Partners’ Fresh Signals (sadly no more), we are acquainted with the extensive archives of American Type Founders, a business trust established in 1892 by merging dozens of formerly independent firms for greater clout in the publishing and advertising industries. During its dominance, font families like News Gothic and Century Schoolbook were introduced as well as innovations in printing and letter-press techniques.