Month: July 2008

Make hay while you can still hit the nail on the head.

India7 Comments

Composing stick loaded with a few words

I spent most of last week TypeCon, where I took three classes and attended about half of the presentations. The highlights were, hands down, the day I spent making mudpies at Hal Leader’s aptly named Paradise Press and Erik Spiekermann’s obscenity-laced presentation on opening night (big, big crush).

Overall, I think this was my favorite TypeCon of the four I’ve been to, but few of the conference sessions I attended stand out, so mostly I must have liked it because of my trip to Paradise. Hal’s just such a sweet guy, and he’s so enthusiastic about letterpress, and I love the smell of inky machinery, and I love doing meditative handwork like picking letters out of trays and building them into lines of text. The best TypeCon ever? Would be spending four days just doing that. I’d probably need a wheelchair afterward, though—it killed my feet to stand all day, and the next morning I discovered that I had a major sore spot way deep in my left shoulder from holding a composing stick full of lead all day.

Newsflash: Lead is heavy.

Continue reading “Make hay while you can still hit the nail on the head.” →

What does a type designer’s handwriting look like?

India3 Comments

Erik Spiekerman's handwriting

In case you haven’t seen it—I hadn’t—faithful reader Schizohedron points out the following fun thing to look at:

There’s great power in a typeface, but what’s always interested me more than the typeface is the designer behind it – why did they create the typeface? Where did their inspiration come from? How did they start?

Lately, I’ve been asking just one question, though. Something which has always intrigued me: these people that help us communicate … how do they themselves communicate? If we strip away the monitors, and the printing presses, and the typefaces … how would William Caslon have written on a post-it note?

. . .

So, to satisfy my own curiosity I asked a number of prominent typographers to send me a scan of their handwriting. This is the result.

The respondents are Erik Spiekermann, Göran Söderström, Nikola Djurek, Sebastian Lester, Mark Simonson, Kris Sowersby, Eduardo Manso, Veronika Burian, Marian Bantjes, and Dino dos Santos.