A Benevolent Skull

The annual Mexican fiesta Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, has crossed many borders over the years, and rightly so. To celebrate the memory of those we have loved and lost is a reunion of benevolent souls and keeps them with us for a time. Beginning the first day of November, this welcomed holiday tradition has come to be symbolized by skeletons and skulls (known as calaveras), which we owe to one of Mexico's finest artist and printmakers, José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913), who died 100 years ago. Posada is best known for his satirical wood engravings of dancing skeletons in colorful costume. (Find more Letterology postings on Posada here and here.) Surely he has many dancing on his own grave today.

The Day of the Dead lives on

Posada would probably be quite proud to see the many modern day adaptations of his calveras. Being a letterpress printer, I'm certain he would particularly favor this typographical skull, which was born of a collaboration of three skilled printers, Jamie Murphy, Justin Knopp, and Robert Pratley. The two-color Dia de los Muertos broadside was printed at Knopp's Typoretum Press in North Essex, England. It is built of two distinct layers—one of metal type and ornaments, and the other of wood ornaments, which fittingly glows in the dark. The wood layer was inspired by Aztec motifs, while the metal ornament design was influenced by the contemporary decorations of the Dia de los Muertos' masks. (And a wonderful likeness of someone I once knew ;)   

Jamie Murphy of The Salvage Press in Dublin tells me that the wood layer was hand-inked and printed on an 1851 Albion press. For the glow-in-the-dark ink, he hand-mixed phosphorescent powder with a matt varnish in various measures until arriving at the perfect printable consistency. Constructing the metal layer with the many small ornaments presented the biggest challenge, Murphy claims—though it appears to be an impressive lock-up in the image below. It was printed on a 1960s Farley proof press with a split fountain process combining two hand-mixed fluorescent inks.  

The broadside was printed on a 250gsm (110 lb.) Somerset Velvet 100% cotton paper in an edition of 100, and measures 297 x 420 (approximately 12 x 17"). Signed and numbered copies of this adorable benevolent skull can be ordered directly from either The Salvage Press or Typoretum. 

Wrestling With Typographic Terms

Armin Vit served up this Nacho Libre type analogy a while back for round number one of Coudal Partner's Layer Tennis blog. Again, I'm late for the game match, but Vit's typographic wrestlers are worthy of a replay. Myself? I would have played the "justified horizontally" wrestler card next. Game over!
::From Layer Tennis via Wrong But Funny. 

Ephemeral Books

I'm rather intrigued by the ice book projects of Basia Irland who is an environmental artist concerned with river and watershed restoration. She works with research biologists, botanists, stream ecologists and community groups on various conservation projects to promote healthy watersheds. As part of her river restoration projects, she works with participants to hand carve ice books of frozen river water and embeds each with local native seeds which become sort of an "ecological language or riparian text" as she calls it. As the frozen books are launched downstream, the ice melts in the river's current and the seeds are released. Theoretically the seeds will grow into plants and trees which help to stabilize the river banks and provide shelter for fish and wildlife. I imagine this could happen, but it seems rather overly simplistic to me. I do appreciate the concept however and think her ephemeral books are beautiful. They promote an awareness of watershed preservation and restoration, and oh yeah, it must be really fun to watch ice books float downstream. You can watch a video of Irland's ice book project Receding/Reseeding here.

This ice book weighed 200 pounds and included seeds of the mountain maple, columbine, and spruce. It was released in Boulder Creek, Colorado in 2007.

A young ice book reader wonders why there are no pictures. 

Irland makes other materials in the construction of her environmental books. The one above is Barnacle Book II on the shores of Puget Sound in Washington state. Below is a text of sand dollars in what else, but sand.

The Book of Drought is made from parched field notes and dehydrated paragraphs. The pages are dry from being sun-baked.

Santa Brand Chocolate

The marketing of Christmas never seems to end. Some of it is good, but so much of it is useless crap. This one is in a class all by itself. It is an outer wrapper from Rowntree chocolate candy bar packaging from the 1950s. Simple and playful, this sweet chocolate packaging is truly a gem.
::From Jason Liebig's flickrstream.

First Day Christmas Covers

This first day of stamp issue with a very elegant typographical ski pole and snowflake ornaments, commemorates the 1962 World Ski Championships in Poland. This just has to be their clever idea of a Polish joke... a ski pole for a skiing Pole? It just has to be ;)  

1968 British first day cover commemorating toys and games. No design credit given here, but the cover illustration certainly looks like the brilliant work of British designer Tom Eckersley (1914-1997). 

Another 1968 British first day cover of the same commemorative toy stamps. This time illustrated with someone in her red pajamas standing barefoot on a block of ice. I somehow missed that holiday tradition. 

Snow Books

A Patch of Old Snow by Robert Frost is a miniature book designed by my friend Margery Hellman of The Holburne Press in 2002. It was printed in an edition of 50 at Bonnie Thompson Norman's The Windowpane Press. Knowing of my personal penchant for the snowflake, my good friend Bonnie presented this to me as a gift several years ago, and I have always treasured it greatly. As all of Margery's books, they are a recipe of thoughtfulness and craftsmanship, with a good measure of character. Her books are as much poetry in motion as the poet's words which she handsets in type (with her strained vision). This particular little book of hers is a beautiful interpretation of Frost's lovely poem. The book opens like a snowflake fractal, and letters and ornaments fall on the page like a dusting of light snow. After reading the short verse twice—you soon discover Margery's note near the end—When reciting his short poems, Frost frequently would repeat them. Now this gives me the happy feeling of snowfall accumulation * . * . * !

This spread reveals a pop-up sheet of vellum with text lightly printed in what appears to be a snow forecast from a newspaper, which nicely resonates with Frost's poem. 

The repeated verse on the clear vellum.

The single spreads of this book are backed with vellum papers which are structural, and the boards are attached separately. The attached "dust" cover is a clear vellum which reveals the title and gives it a nice frosty feel. The book is only 3" in height with 5 full spreads. There are a few more copies still available from Vamp & Tramp Booksellers as well as more of her books listed here.
*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   
Below is another small book of meditations which has nothing to do with snow other than conveying purity I presume. The cover design knocked me out when I saw it. The title page is pretty elaborate typography too. No publisher's date on it, but the inscription on the endsheet is dated 1887. The 4" tall book is printed in London by The Religious Tract Society. 
* * * Let it snow * * *    * * * Let it snow * * *    * * * Let it snow * * *

Frankenstein meets Frankenfont

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, reinvented from fragments of PDF fonts by the team at Fathom Information Design in Boston.
A team of visual storytellers from Fathom lead by data-viz wiz Ben Fry, recently recreated the entire text of Frankenstein using characters and glyphs from over 64,000 PDF documents obtained through internet searches. Precisely 55,382 different glyph shapes were extracted from 347,565 fonts in the PDFs, which were then coded and sequenced to fill all of the 342,889 individual letters found in the Frankenstein text. What emerges from this DNA-like sequencing is a new Frankenfont creation formed from font fragments by Fathoms' Fry and friends.
      The story opens with the display of the most common characters such as Arial, Helvetica and Times New Roman. As the story of the Frankenstein monster evolves, so does the text which is coded to completely devolve into grotesque shapes near the end. Familiar glyphs and fonts merge into obscure scripts; non-Roman fonts begin to appear; and even typefaces morph into pictograms. This Frankenfont transformation becomes the perfect metaphor for Shelley's classic tale of the deformed monster Frankenstein. 

While most books are typically designed to interpret the authors' words with little fanfare and with an obedience to convention as Stanley Morrison once put it, Fry's new Frankenfont edition plays with our sense of order, and the traditional design principles such as consistency, navigation and readability go entirely out the window. As a teacher of book design and typography for many years, I strongly advocate these principles of convention to my students. Afterall, books have been successfully published in this manner for over 500 years. Despite this endorsement, I'm also a big fan of innovation and experimentation in books. In Fry's edition of Frankenstein, a hallmark of book design and innovation has been reached with this conceptual approach to text layout.
      As a timely sidenote to this story, the topic of a frankenfont came up in my classroom just 2 weeks ago when Kevin Larson from the Advanced Reading Technologies Department at Microsoft, was speaking to my students about readability studies of various typefonts and individual characters. Larson is a text enthusiast and has published many studies on the science of word recognition and legibility of characters. The suggestion of a frankenfont was mentioned in jest as one which could build upon the best characters of many fonts in order to achieve greater legibility. The next day, my student Susan Schumacher added a post on our class Facebook page with a link to Fathom's new Frankenfont edition of Frankenstein.
      Copies of the Frankenfont project can be purchased in paperback or hardback editions on Blurb with all profits given to Donors Choose to buy books for students. Incidently, Ben Fry was recently awarded a National Design Award in Interaction Design in June from the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. 

All of the nearly 5500 unique words to be found in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. (Click image to expand). The key to any great novel is to put them all in the right place ; )
:: Thanks to James Gaddy of Co.Design for packaging this story so nicely.

Beyond Words

I realize this video project from Facebook's Creative Director Ji Lee is making the rounds everywhere, but yes, it is that good. You can see the stills of his visual puns at his website, Please enjoy. Or, get the print edition. This time the book is just as good as the film.
:: Thanks Nici!

A Fountain of Blackletter Text

A very unusual title page from a German text, dated 1676. It is said to be an early example of concrete typography, and it can be yours for only $450 on eBay. 

Heavenly Typography

Some people see faint outlines of unicorns in the heavenly constellations and others see dogs, or the canis minor. Yet Mr. Jehoshaphat Aspin looked up and saw a celestial type studio in the stars with a unicorn (monoceros) jumping over it. I wonder if this is where the term Jumpin' Jehoshaphat came from?
       This work is from Urania's Mirror: Monoceros, Canis Minor and Atelier Typographique, an 1825 set of lovely celestial cards (etched by Sidney Hall) accompanied by A Familiar Treatise on Astronomy, and included in the Heavens exhibit at the US Library of Congress.
:: From Trialsanderror's great Flickr site.