This book is about building very large construction projects—megaprojects. I chose Chaparral as the basic text face because it has squared-off serifs that impart an industrial look without being true slab-serifs. Chaparral has a small x-height, which allows a good amount of interlinear white space to make it easier to read. Also, Chaparral looks like the book was set in metal type and printed letterpress. I used Franklin Gothic for the subheads, running heads, and captions; Bank Gothic for the chapter numbers; and Eurostile for the chapter titles.

The trim size is 8″ x 10″, slightly smaller than a traditional 8.5″ x 11″, which helps it stand apart on the book shelf. The book consists of 19 chapters in 2 parts, plus front matter and index. For the chapters, I placed a 9 pica tall image the full width of both pages on every spread in the chapter. The photographs showed many megaprojects—most of them bridges because bridges are very long and fit the shape of the image, and they are probably the most recognizable large projects encountered in every day life.

Click on page images to see enlarged views. More info here.

Year in and year out, like the appearance of insects in the spring, someone circulates a clever email message lamenting the confusing complexity of English spelling. A long time ago, some wag concocted the word “ghoti,” that is, ”fish,” which was composed of the /f/ sound of “gh” in “tough,” the /i/ sound of “o” in “women,” and the /sh/ sound of “ti” in any “tion” word. English spelling is so whacky. Let’s fix it!

>sigh<

How wrong-headed that complaint is.

The English language is the world’s greatest multicultural project. Any word can come from anywhere else and stay at any of five main English residences: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and interjections. (For structural reasons, the smaller English enclaves of pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions are highly restricted—nobody’s been in or out in a long looooong time.)

If you’re a foreign word, you are free to come in—no immigration controls, no quotas, no visa restrictions. There are only a few rules: If you dress in a non-Latin alphabet, you’ll have to change into Latin clothes; if you walk across the page from right to left, well, you’ll have to do it the other way ’round; if you like to make odd sounds that aren’t among the 45 or so English phonemes, then the natives will find some for you that sound almost the same.

English will also let you keep the letters that make you what you are (i.e., foreign) in your own original order—that’s right, you can keep your own spelling! At first, you’ll be walking stooped over, in what is called the “italic” mode. But after a while, that’ll wear off and you can walk upright. Eventually you’ll even forget to wear all those strange diacritical marks, too. Think of that: You can keep your foreign appearance because ultimately, English speakers aren’t really worried about the wildly inconsistent spelling in English, which is caused mostly because foreign words aren’t forced to change to follow basic English practices.

But foreign words do have to agree to accept a few things, mainly English plurals (that applies to you, nouns and verbs), possessives, and English syntax and grammar. (English sometimes allows a bit of leeway on that, like the French habit of putting the adjective after the noun. It’s not like English imposes a date certain by which a foreign word has to follow all the rules, you know.)

So whenever you feel the onrush of a public outcry to bemoan that wacky English spelling, just remember that English is the greatest multicultural experiment around.

aesthetics : canon : art :: rhetoric : grammar : language

Both pictorial art and language are “free creative” acts, that is, each of them forms and shapes its products (images, words) completely separately from the things pointed at. Over time and within a relatively contiguous community of recipients, norms of how these forms should look or sound arise and are endorsed and retained—canons, standards, conventions, grammars, preferred pronunciations, and ultimately the cultural phenomenon of taste.

Consider how often, and how unnoticed, it is that certain constructions are almost entirely conventional, not truly imitative or “representative,” yet they do not arrest our attention. Outlines themselves are an invisible convention; hatch marks for shading are sometimes an invisible convention. In language (I’ll use English, which I’m most familiar with), structural words (prepositions, conjunctions, etc.) tend to remain invisible until, through repetition, odd locution, or misuse, the reader or listener becomes aware of them.

Rules and guidelines eventually develop to describe how images or language work, why certain forms or presentations can appear to be defective and others quite extraordinary. I suspect the rules were developed as teaching aids to instruct the student how to work efficiently and what to avoid, as practical lore and folk wisdom based on previous success or failure. That’s how the warning against splitting infinitives or ending a sentence with a preposition takes root as hard and fast prohibitions. They were introduced as guide for students, who observed the injunctions with deep reverence, but eventually the wise advice became linguistic fetishes enforced with the power of taboo. Curiously, mastery of technical details, and especially prescriptive rules, has become more highly regarded than true expressive excellence: a cursory review of many academic and policy texts will demonstrate that fact.

We are at the 25,000th year of a long history of teaching and refining techniques—and absorbing new modes and practices from elsewhere—about making and using art and language in society, and the guidelines have become very detailed, extensive, and complicated. Knowledge of them has taken on the trappings of esoteric learning, and adepts are honored publicly.

I’ve often run into the situation that a non-artist really likes one of my paintings that I think is poor because of this and that—blemishes or clumsiness or poor technique or other things I can easily see but that the other person just isn’t attuned to. The other person isn’t schooled in the conventions, and thus is less aware of departures from a norm, from those guidelines that form part of the foundations of taste and aesthetics.

Words are spoken in long strings of sounds that aggregate and blend together. But because we can move small sections of the sounds around—what we call words—we disaggregate the whole stream. Orthography has followed suit: word spaces were introduced into writing long after entire sentences and thoughts were inscribed on monuments in an unbroken parade of marks. Nowadays, we hear separate words with the reinforcement of having seen the words written as separate entities. (I’m sure you’ve had the experience of not being able to figure out what the song lyric says until you read the words on the album cover. Then you can “hear” the sung words as meaningful, rather than as a muddle of unfathomable sounds.)

Somehow, our attentive faculties enable us to perceive things clearly as they blur by. But when those transient things are made to be static, when the passage is halted, what we perceive undergoes a metamorphosis. Things in flux become like a snapshot of a friend that makes him look odd or funny, because his face is frozen with one eye squinted and the tip of the tongue sticking out of his lips. We don’t see those small details when he speaks, but the photograph records the instantaneous transformations between one stable pose and another. News photographs are particularly susceptible to this kind of freeze-frame exhibitionism. (On opinion and commentary sites, it’s very common to see a photograph of an opponent taken at an unflattering moment and a much more complimentary photograph of a favored person, used for rhetorical effect.)

Sounds, by the way, are harder to stop in a “freeze-frame” manner because we hear them across a span of time. If we halt a sound recording at a specific instant, we will hear a continuous, unvarying tone without any way to construct a full context. In a photograph, despite the interruption to the motion, the full visual field is preserved and we can form a complete context for it.

We construct clarity and precision out of fuzziness every day.

Sprint reminds me very much of Formal 436. Here’s a comparison of a few glyphs.

Click on each image for a 300dpi version.

In the late 1970s, Allan Haley wrote a series of brief fact sheets about type designs for Compugraphic Corporation. He entitled these sheets “Familiar Faces” and wrote a total of ten of them. They were assembled into one small, 20-page booklet and distributed to Compugraphic customers.

The “Familiar Faces” booklet is a very useful guide to some of the key features of various faces, and it gives illuminating background information about the provenance and development of some of these faces.

In the early 1980s, Agfa/Monotype acquired Compugraphic Corporation. The “Familiar Faces” booklet was not rerpinted, nor was it digitized.

However, it was expanded into a series of articles he wrote for Step-By-Step Graphics and some of those made it into a book called The ABCs of Type, which according to the author is now out of print.

Allan Haley is presently Director of Words & Letters at Monotype Imaging.

I have scanned my well-worn copy of “Familiar Faces” and, with the author’s gracious permission, published it on line as a flash animated book (click on the cover image above). If you prefer, you may download a PDF file of it.

"Man with Tulips," oil on canvas, 48" x 48", 2009

This is Man with Tulips, a recent painting (click on image to see a larger version).

You can see my main interests in the human figure with another object (flowers) and line drawing. Note how I developed some of the lines that define some of the contours of his back between his shoulder blades into autonomous marks, and how I made completely arbitrary orange and green organic shapes in the upper right (including several faint yellow “islands” in that same region).

The orange and black shapes on the left are again evocations of shapes from Clyfford Still’s works. The red line on the left that comes down from the top edge seems to end, but originally, it curved back up to form another shape I like, the curved rectangles from Motherwell’s paintings. But here, as I painted, I obscured the rest of the line. All that is left is the bottom of the orange area on the man’s pelvis that curves up around his elbow and then seems to vanish or blend into the yellow.

Here is a detail from the main heading.

Eventually, the thicker vertical strokes of the e were reduced to the two dots of the diacritical mark we now recognize as the Germanic umlaut.

I lived in France as a middle-school child and took art lessons there (mostly pastels, charcoals, and tempera, but a brief introduction to oil painting). In high school (in the U.S. again), my first job was working for my uncle in his typesetting shop, complete with handset type and three Linotypes. I quickly fell under the spell of type, type designs, and the foundations of graphic design.

This is a font of Optima, showing the upper- and lowercase letters. (The photograph is correctly oriented. You read, and set, metal type from left to right and bottom to top.)

Also, “typehuile” sounds like “type wheel” when you say it aloud.

Photograph of Optima by Matthias Kabel, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Charakterset_of_Optima.jpg

"Two Figures in a Room," acrylic on canvas, © 1983, 60" x 33"

It’s part of a comedian’s stock in trade to joke about how routine and stale sex gets in a long-term relationship. As Jay Leno once quipped about the clamor in California about same-sex marriage, “When you’re married, it’s all the same sex.” >rim shot<

They’re funny, but those jokes do a great disservice to long-term intimacy. The more you live with and know your partner, the more you learn about your shared pleasure and the ways you care about each other. And the more you look forward both to the known—and almost failure-proof—pleasures, as well as to the new discoveries and subtleties you may have missed before or just not gotten to yet.

The Bible uses the term “know” to refer to sexual intercourse. To make love many times over many years to the same person is to know that person so much more completely than to “be acquainted” with him or her—or “to be friends with” or “to live with,” even.

Consider the situation of the new lovers: In the very beginning, it’s all high expectations wrapped in the anxiety of “what if she [he] doesn’t like that?” The solution to that problem is to resort to two or three tried-and-true, pretty much off-the-shelf, sexologist-certified gambits . . . because you know—or at least, you strongly believe—that one of those gambits won’t fail. And for the next many encounters with each other, you repeat the great success of the first time with few variations or embellishments, and some lingering trepidations. Eventually, the apprehension goes away and you find you have settled into a familiar pattern. But then, you stumble onto that other sensitive spot that you didn’t know you or she [he] had, and then two days later, another one. And then one day, the carburetor doesn’t work, and you just laugh at the goofiness of it all. And the next day comes and there’s yet another thing that’s new.

What does this have to do with type and design?

Inevitably, graphic design—especially type-centric design—will be influenced by one’s relationship with typefaces. If you’ve spent a lot of time getting to know a small group of faces, you’ll be able to put their strengths to good use. Or there might be a few new ones you might be thinking of having a fling with.

You know the old faces well, just as you know your partner of many years. And you’ve discovered along the way that there are really sexy curves in that blandest of fonts, Helvetica, or that you were surprised when you were tickled by something you had not noticed before, like the way the right descending side of the l.c. “a” in Helvetica Bold was truncated and didn’t just slew into the baseline.

I’ve found that I am comfortable working with a small cadre of very familiar faces, and then occasionally I discover a new typeface that has as much allure and social confidence as the old faces. In the illustration above, I’ve come to deeply appreciate the faces in the first four lines. And then recently, I’ve made the acquaintance of the faces in the last two lines. I’ve set two books in Fontin, I’ve used Diavolo and Titillium in several posters and Kontrapunkt as the title font for two books on engineering.

The very last face, Formal 436, I discovered about six years ago, sort of lost in a big box of fonts (one of those 400,000 clip-art offers). What a discovery! A beautiful display font from Bitstream. To be truthful, at first I wasn’t so impressed with Formal. But I tried it. I liked it! And I came back to it more and more, reliving the same process of incremental delight in discovering other ways it enchanted me. The first several times I used Formal, I went for the tried-and-true successes, which just led to its other charms.

Apollo was like that. I ran across it two decades ago, trying to find a good substitute for Palatino. Designed by Adrian Frutiger, Apollo is very similar in appearance to Palatino, but it’s distinctively different. To me it feels more like a pen-drawn font. And it has a companion set of O.S. figures and small caps.

"Man with Tulips," oil on canvas, 48" x 48", 2009

Art, like design, type, and love, also follows the same route, namely, a long relationship with a small range of images and artistic choices. All of my paintings for the last 40 years have included a small number of components: abstract shapes and fields, a human figure (usually nude), and occasionally other objects (flowers, implements). In the continual revisiting of the same themes, subjects, and models, I look for the pleasures that I know will come but I am constantly surprised by some new twist or variation that I had not come across before—the way two colors mix when brushed together, the kind of edge formed by a brushstroke, the way some part of the body or the flower curves in a way I had not paid attention to before.

And then there is the other result: I decide to put away a technique that now has lost its frisson, its ability to stir or stimulate a sufficient response. I stop using a particular color, as I sometimes stop using a favorite font (for me, Cheltenham at one point). For more on my paintings, look at Figuring Things Out elsewhere on this website.