Fontsmith

http://www.newyorklivearts.org/

Fontsmith has helped to create the Logo for Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane’s Dance company. The identity created by London based NextBigThing, was tweaked and crafted to work over a wide range of media and legibility at various sizes. Getting this kind of logo to work well and balance is really important in creating a harmonious relation ship with all the graphics and uses that a Theatre group demands. At Fontsmith we did our fiddling to get the logo mark looking ballet brilliant.

What an interesting weekend. Apart from all the vodka and Goulash I visited several museums in Krakow, Poland. Not least Oskar Schindler’s factory.
I arrived in Krakow on Friday morning with a few traveling mates. Including Yu Kung art director at BBH in Shanghai. Yu and I have travelled together a few times now and have a little photographic competition each time. Over the years we have built up a rather unique and interesting catalogue. For a laugh we sometimes make silly short films or adverts. Yu behind the camera and me infront. My alter ego is a character named Magma.A male model… Think Zoolander… Great fun and very tongue in cheek.
This time however the photography and footage was much more sober and serious. Taking photos of the museums at Auschwitz did not feel right somehow. It is a wonderfully shocking and disturbing place. Very saddening that human beings can treat others with such contempt and hatred, fuelling violence and mass murder.
I decided the to take photos on my iPhone and only of typographic things. I felt this would be memorable and not too graphic.

At Schindler s factory there was a very good exhibition of the history of the Polish invasion. The Nazi symbolism. The Nazi plan. The Nazi branding. And of course the Nazi typographic styling. Blackletter lettering and type is still very much owned by the Nazi party and the war. All the propaganda, everything was straight from the Nazi brand guideline, including the silly walk and salute. I think this alone shows the mind boggling thought and plans that went into it all. I’ve never seen anything like it. A truly mad and very sad time in human history.

Peace Out people!

After a few days of playing around trying to get the best screen display (without a full Manual hint), finally figured out a very good solution. Our friends at Fontdeck gave us a hand!

I have to say that over the years there have been type foundries that have stressed the importance of doing manual truetype hints for the windows environment. I believe this used to be the case, in the days before high res monitors and smart phone. Not only have the displays become better, but the screen display rendering software has improved greatly. With or without the ‘cleartype’ option switched on. By the way I am only talking about PC’s with Windows operating systems. Macs are brilliant.
To charge customers an extortion to provide what I see as fairly easy to build a perfectly acceptable and clean rendering of a truetype font on today’s computers, is taking the Mick.
I personally have no desire manually hint truetype fonts. Through our partners at Fontdeck we have been able to work up a solution for our Truetype fonts that autohint our typefaces to an extremely high standard. It takes a day or two rather than a month or two to do it manually. The results are very very good. In an office environment where some customers still want truetype fonts supplied this is fantastic news. It’s great for Fontsmith too. We don’t have to worry about the expense of pixel pushing.