Nate
: ?From a consistently wonderful blog of French signage. I particularly love the handcrafted nature of this particular duplication.?
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And yet, here are Cameron Moll and Bryce Knudson managing to impart all kinds of aura and ritual to the reproduction. The reproductions are weirdly more authentic than the original which is just a file with dubious forward-compatibility.
I enjoy this alchemy, made possible by the presence of easier reproduction techniques. It transmutes the time needed to make a letterpress work into painstaking labour when, at the moment of invention, it was labour-saving. Imagine the salespeople and inventors of these machines learning that their long term legacy would be assured by how difficult they are to use, compared to their displacing successors (yes, yes, I know there are special features of the resulting print that are unique to the process but the video is all about the process itself).
What I’m deeply curious about is what comes next. At what point will the techniques have morphed and changed to that point that lovingly submitting PDFs to be printed “by hand” on colour printer feels more authentic than whatever’s replaced it? I suppose we’re about due for dot-matrix nostalgia.
I think we’re already seeing some glimpses of that sentiment in essays like this one: I want to make things, not just glue things together.
Nate
: ?This is a promotional video from a 400-year-old convent of the "Barefoot Carmelite" order in Ecija, Spain, near Seville. They were down to 11 nuns and had had no new novices join for three years, so they decided to try something drastic: YouTube. The video has generated lots of interest, and their first YouTube-inspired novice has just joined the order. I know I'm pretty far outside their target audience and so can't be expected to get the aesthetics of their video— which appears to depict convent life as taking place on another planet. A Kenny G. planet. With neon, Comic Sans typography. I suppose if you can get past all that and still want to join, that's a good sign you may have a vocation.?Nate
: ?From a consistently wonderful blog of French signage. I particularly love the handcrafted nature of this particular duplication.?Nate
: ?The word pixel, of course, is a shortened form of "picture element," and dates to 1965. But a form of it appears in the 1936 Frank Capra/Gary Cooper movie Mr Deeds Goes to Town, in which Cooper's character is described during a trial as being "pixilated." The witness explains thus: "The word 'pixilated' is an early American expression derived from the word 'pixies,' meaning elves. They would say the pixies had got him. As we nowadays would say, a man is 'barmy.'"?
The struggle to adequately render letterforms on a pixel grid is a familiar one, and an ancient one as well: this bitmap alphabet is from La Vera Perfettione del Disegno di varie sorte di ricami, an embroidery guide by Giovanni Ostaus published in 1567.
Renaissance ‘lace books’ have much to offer the modern digital designer, who also faces the challenge of portraying clear and replicable images in a constrained environment. Ostaus’s alphabet follows the cardinal rule of bitmaps, which is to always reckon the height of a capital letter on an odd number of pixels. (Try drawing a capital E on both a 5×5 grid and a 6×6, and you’ll see.) Ostaus ignored the second rule, however, which is “leave space for descenders.”
I’d planned to introduce this item with a snappy headline that juxtaposed the old and the new — for your sixteenth-century Nintendo! — before reflecting on the pixel’s moribund existence. Pixels were the stuff of my first computer, which strained to show 137 of them in a square inch; my latest cellphone manages 32,562 in this same space, and has 65,000 colors to choose from, not eight. Its smooth anti-aliased type helps conceal the underlying matrix of pixels, which are nearly as invisible as the grains of silver halide on a piece of film. And its user interface reinforces this illusion using a trick borrowed from Hollywood: it keeps the type moving as much as possible.
Crisp cellphone screens aren’t the end of the story. There are already sharper displays on handheld remote controls and consumer-grade cameras, and monitors supporting the tremendous WQUXGA resolution of 3840×2400 are making their way from medical labs to living rooms. The pixel will never go away entirely, but its finite universe of digital watches and winking highway signs is contracting fast. It’s likely that the pixel’s final and most enduring role will be a shabby one, serving as an out-of-touch visual cliché to connote “the digital age.”
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: ?A page from the 1927 edition of Samuel Welo's 233-page Studio Handbook, a type and design book in which every page was hand-lettered by Welo. Many of the pages remind me of dialogue cards from silent films, which makes sense given the era. The whole handlettered aesthetic, though, also brings to mind a line from book-cover-designer Chip Kidd in which he and another designer agree something to the effect of "Computers and graphics software are wonderful tools, but no designer should be allowed to use then before age 40."?
Nate
: ?I just liked the look of this, and the great stream of associations—from apple pie to heavy metal—that are referenced by this contemporary, computerized take on old-style German blackletter calligraphy. [Andy cannot help adding: do my eyes deceive me, or do I see a reference to the Christian-subculture product par excellence, "Testamints"?!?]?
Nate
: ?Pity the plight of vulnerable European letters! Really, though, one thing I love about the web in recent years is how, more and more, non-latin alphabets are rendering correctly, without fuss or extra downloads, in my browser window. May the increase continue!?In practical terms the ISO ruling now means that in future it should be easier to find the Eszett on computer keyboards and in programmes. But it remains to be seen how keyboard manufacturers will react. Other vulnerable European letters have come under threat in the internet era, such as the Scandinavian vowels æ, ø and å. However, official recognition for the Eszett should mean that it is protected, at least for the time being, and cannot be scrapped as it has been in Swiss German.
Kerstin Güthert, managing director of the Council for German Spelling Reform, said: “It’s up to the people to decide whether or not they will use it.”
Germany’s typographers, at least, are predicting its comeback and celebrating the Eszett’s new-found status.