As the craze for fonts and typography reaches a fever pitch, foundries are going to all-new lengths to sell their target audiences—designers—right where they live: in Adobe Creative Suite. And just which programs within the Creative Suite the foundries choose to make their pitch is truly telling. Not to mention, potentially unsettling.

Extensis blazes a trail in comping with web fonts

With big names like FontFont and Monotype only recently entering the in-Creative-Suite sales race, it can be a bit hard to believe that a dark horse like Extensis—best known for their popular font management software Suitcase Fusion—was the first out of the gate.

But believe it or not, the little digital foundry that could truly did beat the big boys to the starting line, releasing their un-inspiringly named Web Font Plug-in months before two of the biggest names in typography.

The Web Font Plug-in offers Photoshop users the ability to comp with actual Extensis web fonts, not to mention the huge library of Google web fonts, making it a versatile tool with a voluminous selection. So long as your only interest is web typography, that is. For, like Google’s font service, Extensis doesn’t offer fonts available for print.

In a way it’s no true surprise, considering that Extensis has rather staked its claim in the web font territory with its WebINK product, the Font Dropper tool, and the delightful FontFuse, where you can try web font pairings and compare them with others’ confabulations. Extensis, unexpectedly born in Portland, Oregon (hardly a tech Mecca), specializes in the digital side of the typography equation, so their trailblazing in tying the comp work to the digital realization seems sensible enough. (Yes, Oregon, I’m going to hell for the obvious analogous verb use here.)

Nonetheless, it’s interesting to see two more-or-less venerable heavyweights of the typography industry duking it out over territory another corporate entity discovered.

FontShop does web fonts for PhotoShop

What’s in a name, the Bard notoriously, and rhetorically, asked. Well, in this case, a curious symmetry. And more, of course.

FontShop International, well-known for everything from its founders (Erik Spiekermann and Neville Brody, two of the biggest names in typography) to its FontFont shop—and hey guys, FontFont is a way better name—stepped up to the plate second with its FontShop plugin.

(Are we noticing a trend in boringly named plugins yet, folks?)

Despite its sophomoric appearance on the scene, the FontShop plugin does offer a certain sexiness: the ability to comp with FontShop fonts. As the makers of what may well be dubbed “the new Helvetica”—Meta and Meta Serif—FontShop brings a lot to the plate in terms of unique and yet highly functional fonts. And as a distributor, they can offer a lot of classic faces too. That’s something Extensis’ WebINK can do too, if to a lesser extent, but you won’t find any propriety FontShop faces or families in the former’s catalogue. Plus, as the major players behind the emerging web standard for web font file formats—WOFF—you know FontShop has a keen understanding of what it takes to make a font work on the web.

For full disclosure’s sake: I don’t have CS5 yet, so I haven’t yet taken either of these plugins for a spin. But once I upgrade, I guarantee I’ll be installing them both, and weighing their merits (cough!) face to face.

But what’s really interesting to me …

You know that old saying, “Put your money where your mouth is”? Yeah—it’s that both Extensis and FontShop are backing the web font horse here implicitly. After all, Photoshop’s the de jour program for web design; notoriously not a fine print typography tool. But ideal for comping, mocking up, and producing assets for the web to give people an idea of just what they’ll see when they fire up their favorite browser. Not so Monotype.

Monotype opts for an InDesign plugin

If you’re at all into typography, you know Monotype is a behemoth of the industry. A kind of old behemoth. And that age shows—sometimes positively, as in the enormous breadth and depth of their font catalog, and sometimes negatively, as in the design of their website, which, even with the recent intervention of Jeffrey Zeldman and his studio (discussed here), still looks old, ugly, and unwieldy.

But they’re not too old to grok the value of this new plugin sales channel thing. Interestingly, they’ve decided not to come in third in the race, but first (sort of), by designing their plugin for InDesign, the definitive print design tool for anything longer than a single page. In a way this is yet one more sign of their venerability: in riding the new wave of sales generation, they’ve chosen to do it old school. Like an actual kahuna ritualistically curling on a hand-carved wooden board.

I know, I know, print (unlike punk) is not dead. And hallelujah for that. But still, Monotype is clearly not fully ready to embrace customers using their web font hosting service or facilitate their web design workflows. It’s as if they figure, “Well, the brand picked their identity fonts for print, obviously they’re going to use the same for the web.” And that’s not an unreasonable assumption, especially in an age where brands can have even their bespoke fonts hosted by a third party.

But it sure doesn’t make those brands’ web comping work any easier.

A new sales channel for a new golden age of typography

All sniping at Monotype and speculation about the ways sales channels reflect the companies that choose them aside, the really interesting thing about all this is the essential method itself. In a way this is almost as creepy as contextual advertising (you know, the email from Starbucks you get a minute after you ask Siri about a local café?). Maybe even creepier. After all, the Adobe Creative Suite is to most designers what any writing implement is to a writer. It’s their tool, sure, but it goes deeper than that—it’s the tool they rely upon to translate their internal visions to life. It’s how they express who they are.

And now there’s the equivalent of advertising within them. (Once you opt in.)

The smartphone revolution did something similar. Once upon a time, a phone was a tool you used to keep in touch with long-distant friends and loved ones. Now, it still does that, but it’s also laden with ads. And not just the kind you get bombarded with in your browser of choice. Now they’re in your apps. The tools you use—granted, through the genius and hard work of others—to get shit done.

Once upon a time, the programs you have on your desktop were sacrosanct. Inviolate oases of ad-free space where you could focus on the job at hand: getting shit done. Right now I’m writing, and as flawed a tool as Microsoft Word is at getting that job done, it is doing a fine job of partitioning off the million available distractions this mighty machine of a computer offers. No Flash-powered ads, no pop-ups, pop-overs, flyouts—nothin’. I can relax, focus, and write.

But the advent of advertising channels like plugins make me wonder: Will I someday be subjected to ads right here in Word? Will FontShop and Monotype notice that some writers like fonts too!?

I know. I’m getting a little alarmist here. And I don’t mean to sound like I’m totally down on these methods of generating leads. Like I said earlier, I’m probably going to download all three of these plugins once I get CS sufficiently updated to handle them, if for no other reason than to see what they’re like. Plus, you could say that throwing shopping ability into a productivity tool like the Creative Suite is a great way to kill two birds with one stone: I can design something with just the face I want and buy it, all without leaving the program, without disconnecting from the tool to go online. Fairly cool. And as a marketing professional myself, I can’t help but admire the ingeniousness of this approach.

On the other hand, CS is a place to get stuff done. But more than that, to create. I don’t want to be shopping there. Even if I’m still in my creative tool, I’m disconnecting with it in order to consume. Email marketing is often lauded as being the most intimate way to market to people, but adding an extension to the very programs people use to complete their work? That’s sly.

I recently got the chance to contribute blogs to not one, but two fantastic outlets on typography and graphic design in general: the event blog for the inaugural TYPO San Francisco—the American manifestation of Europe’s “premiere design event”—and Eye magazine’s blog column, Type Tuesday.

Blogging TYPO SF

For TYPO San Francisco, I had the singular opportunity (and pleasure) of volunteering for the event’s Press Team, a seriously on-the-ball squad of designers, writers, and Tweeters who dedicated a sizable portion of their time at the conference to keeping the wide, wild world of the web informed of the goings-on.

My duties there included recapping the following presentations:

Heath Kessler’s The Pendulum Swings Back: Creating Opportunities for an Online Community in the “Real World”

Heath Kessler speaking at TYPO SF

Kessler, art director at San Francisco’s own web and print magazine The Bold Italic, offered guests a fascinating glimpse of the creation and evolution of his publication. A unique response to the worldwide crisis faced by local  journalism—namely, evolve or die—The Bold Italic tackles a rapidly changing local media landscape by soliciting the input and expertise of local writers and designers. In other words, letting the source speak for itself.

To learn more about the magazine and its groundbreaking integration of the digital and physical environments it seeks to cover, check out my recap of Kessler’s talk on the TYPO San Francisco blog.

Juliette Bellocq’s Becoming a Microscope

Juliette Bellocq speaking at TYPO SF

Taking her title from a creative method developed by famed artist, designer, activist and nun, Corita Kent, Bellocq gave attendees a whirlwind tour of her own output, which often employs graphic design as a means of encouraging creative interaction between individuals and their communities. Celebrating the acts of hand-making, creating scenarios, and enjoying good food, Bellocq and her studio, Handbuilt, facilitate community engagement with and innovative solutions to pervasive problems.

Read my summary of her presentation to learn more about placing creative work at the heart of generating change.

Sean McBride’s A Renaissance in Web Typography

Sean McBride speaking at TYPO SF

In case you haven’t noticed, we’re living in the midst of a renaissance. For the less type-inclined, it might be less than apparent, but we’re all enjoying its foremost benefit: an improved reading experience on the web.

Sean McBride is one of the engineer-cum-designers working at Adobe’s (recently acquired) Typekit, one of the major web font hosting services. For his presentation, McBride shared his insights into the current renaissance in web typography—which, if you’ve been living under a rock, is due to the now much-wider range of fonts available to web developers via the @font-face CSS spec.

McBride covered the history of web typography, the development of the @font-face spec for CSS, how to use it, and most interestingly, why web font hosting services such as Typekit are so valuable for contemporary web design. Learn more about the typographic renaissance we’re living through at the TYPO SF blog.

Designers in Dialogue: Parra and Jason Munn

Parra, Jason Munn, and Joseph Becker speaking at TYPO SF

Subtitled Music Matters: Graphic Design, Typography, and the Art of the Poster, this talk featured a conversation between designers Jason Munn, Parra, and curator Joseph Becker. Munn and Parra are two radically different designers who often approach the same problem—how to translate music into words and images in show posters and tour merchandise—from opposite ends of the spectrum.

Munn excels in expressing complex concepts in the most minimalistic and conceptual of manners, transforming a car, the serpentine trail of skidmarks, and the paths of two trailing bullets into the story of Bonnie and Clyde. A near polar opposite, Parra works with hand-drawn, highly organic type and surrealistic, beaked characters to depict moments captured from incomplete narratives (often drawn from his personal experiences).

Dive into these two designers’ disparate but equally innovative careers at the TYPO SF blog.

Note: All TYPO SF photos above are courtesy of Amber Gregory

Guest blogging for the Eye blog: #FontSunday … on #TypeTuesday

Helvetica on a composing stick, via the Museum für Gestaltung

I have a confession to make: I’ve come to love Twitter.

Why? Well, it’s a great place to find the latest-breaking news—and the latest-breaking opportunities. I discovered my chance to blog for TYPO San Francisco through Twitter, and I also earned my shot to blog for the venerable Eye magazine there.

For my Eye blog contribution, I detailed the recent Twitter phenomenon for typomaniacs: #FontSunday. This hashtag represents a social media initiative by the UK’s Design Museum that asks the type-obsessed of all stripes to post pictures of their favorite fonts and typographic settings for all to enjoy.

It was easy enough to delve into the event itself, which offers up a literal flood of beautiful type, but learning about the genesis and history of the event itself proved frustrating—as is generally the case with events that take place on Twitter. The site does a great job of focusing on the new, the now, and the ephemeral. Archiving that now, on the other hand, isn’t a strong suit.

So I reached out to the Design Museum itself via Facebook, and the organization was kind enough to supply some richly detailed answers, of which you can learn more on my post on the Eye blog. My sincere thanks to editor John L. Walters for allowing me to contribute to his fabulous Type Tuesday column.

The new web typography app Typecast offers designers the ability to compose their type settings in the browser. Is it revolutionary, unnecessary, or just a bit of fun? We’ll answer that by digging into just how Typecast works to make your design workflow easier (or doesn’t).

The problem(s) Typecast seeks to solve

To understand the great potential value of a tool like Typecast, you first have to understand the challenge it seeks to overcome. The first of these is that most font hosting services—such as Typekit, FontDeck, and even Google, in many instances—don’t offer designers the ability to download desktop versions of the fonts they’re using. There are certainly means to do this: one may buy a web-use license for a desktop font and then have one of these services take care of the hosting for you. But that can be a pretty expensive route, with most of the high-quality fonts designers crave costing at least a couple hundred dollars U.S.

Mocking up without the fonts you need.

Why is this a problem, you ask? Well, it means that as you create comps for the site in Photoshop, or whatever tool it is that you use, you don’t have the fonts you want to use. Which leads to all sorts of problems such the visual characteristics of fonts influence so much of the look of one’s site. That’s why you’re using them, after all.

Or, as Elliot Jay Stocks put it:

Typesetting in Photoshop is like trying to paint a landscape with only … a couple of crayons and a poor photocopy of the scene.

There is a sort of a solution for this issue out there, which is Extensis’ Web Font Plug-in for Photoshop (awkward casing theirs). The problem with that solution, unfortunately, is that it only includes fonts from WebINK or Google and requires installation of Suitcase Fusion, a font management system. You can’t blame Extensis for this since WebINK and Suitcase Fusion are their own proprietary products, but it does make it a limited solution at best.

Why even having the fonts you need on your desktop isn’t an ultimate solution

Even if you do own the rights to the web font you want to use on your site, you’re faced with another issue that could be anything from a minor niggle to a big whopper: You don’t know how the font will look in the browser. This could be huge because some fonts just look terrible on the web, or look okay but only at certain sizes.

Which is exactly why the Typecast solution is a pretty good one. I’ll explain why it’s just a pretty good one, at best, a little later in this post.

For now, let’s dig into the app itself and see if we can discover some of its joys and its flaws.

How Typecast works

In reading the following, keep in mind that Typecast is currently in beta and you have to request an invitation. Invitations are sent on a rolling basis, so it could be some time before you get to join in on the fun. The plus there is that by then some of the problems we’ll mention here might have been hammered out.

Once you’ve received your invitation, you’ll be directed to set up your account and log in. And if you’re a Firefox user like me, you’ll discover that you can’t use Firefox. At present, the tool only supports the webkit-friendly browsers Chrome and Safari. Not a huge issue, but if, like most design-inclined folks, you’re a browser partisan, issues of familiarity and missing plugins may arise.

Once you’re all set up, you’ll log in and see an intro module containing a brief video that covers the tool’s functionality:

A pretty comprehensive look at the functionality available, but it moves quickly and doesn’t call out certain features in a more than passing way, so let’s focus in a bit more.

Once you’ve watched the video, you’ll notice an area to the lower left headed “Your Projects.” It’s pre-filled with a project that isn’t actually yours, titled “The Goldilocks Approach (Sample).”

Typecast's project area of the dashboard

Here you see the options that’ll be available for any project you do actually create. Clicking the header will take you into the project. The next line down shows when the project was last updated. Below that are two links that allow you to download the project and to comment on the project.

Clicking Download generates a zip file containing several HTML pages (one for each column in the product) that reference an included CSS file packed with styles automatically generated by the app based on your decisions (or in this case, the Typecast team’s decisions). Also included is a handy text file titled fonts-in-use (not a reference to the awesome site curated by Sam Berlow, Stephen Coles, and Nick Sherman), which lists all the fonts included in the project and their sources.

Click Add comment and a standard comment form will appear in the right column, allowing you to add notes on the project. (A great feature if you’ve got more than one designer working on a project and need interaction between them and/or final approval.)

These two options highlight two great features and goals of the tool:

1. Easy saving of the app’s output for use on your site(s).
2. Easy collaborative options that allow for a team of several designers to tweak, make notes on, and compare different versions of the typeset content.

To the right of all this are links to rename, trash, and duplicate the project.

What lies within The Goldilocks Approach

Clicking on the header itself takes you into the sample project, which attempts to show what the tool can do by example.

At the top left you’ll see an icon of a home (which takes you home, natch), a link to the project itself, and a Switch project link. Pretty self-explanatory. To the right you’ll find persistent links for sharing and exporting projects, providing feedback, and signing out. The Share & Export button works like the Download link described above, but the Feedback link is a bit of a surprise—and a problem.

The feedback problem

Instead of working like the Add comment link on the home page, which allows team members to comment on the project, this Feedback link allows you to send your thoughts to Typecast. And while I’m happy that Typecast thought to make feedback that easy, I’d much rather have the ability to comment on the project I’m looking at for my team members. Would be so much easier to provide useful commentary to my team while looking at the project itself, rather than taking notes in a separate doc and then inputting them in the app’s home page.

In a way, I get the logic here. Someone is far more likely to notice a problem with the interface when actually working with it, rather than on the home screen. So it makes sense to have an option to provide feedback right there where the problem is occurring. And another team member might want to know where I have a problem with the design before logging into the actual prototype.

But that hardly calls for such an either/or approach. It would be far better for a designer to see the design as he or she is commenting on it/solving the problem. And there’s no reason not to provide both options within the project. (Unless there’s a coding limitation I couldn’t possibly understand without explanation.)

Typecast project columns

Moving down, you’ll see a row of numbers that lets you quickly navigate between the various columns of the project. This column functionality can help designers ensure consistency across pages, and each column will be saved as its own HTML file upon exporting. Another way to use this functionality would be to mock up alternate typesetting solutions for comparative purposes. Columns you’re not working on currently grey out, which is a bit of a double-edged sword since it makes focusing on your current work easier, but comparison harder.

The next link in this area allows you to add a new column, and since the canvas is, to quote the intro video, “infinite,” you could mock up an entire site within one project (though I can’t imagine how that would affect the tool’s functionality).

CSS, style guide, and baseline options

On the far right of the column links area you’ll see three more links: CSS, Style Guide, and Baseline.

Clicking on CSS opens up a panel that lists all your Typecast-generated CSS styles in ready-to-paste into your favorite plain-text editor of choice formatting. There’s even an option to publish the CSS directly to your site using a link to the Typecast stylesheet—though, as the app itself warns, this isn’t ideal for a live website. The greatness of this feature lies not in live review, but in the way it facilitates internal review via a locally hosted version of a site, conducted by experts who aren’t necessarily part of the mocking-up process, including copywriters, creative directors, and other stakeholders.

The Style Guide is, to my mind, one of the app’s real gems. Besides a specimen for each font used in the project, it also provides visual examples of each style, from H1 to p. This makes the Style Guide a great tool for designers as well as editors, copywriters, and SEOs, letting them know, and respond to, what each element of the typographic hierarchy should look like. That makes the Style Guide an invaluable tool not only for establishing design standards and editorial expectations, but also for developing brand standards.

The Style Guide is, in other words, HUGE.

Baseline options is also a valuable tool since it acts as a guide for the vertical rhythm of the site’s typography, a seriously essential concern. In fact, according to many a web typographer, the essential element of a refined presentation of content.

How Typecast works (really this time)

I realize that, so far, I haven’t actually said a word about the real Typecast interface. All of the above are some great—and some needs-refinement—features. But the heart of Typecast lies in its ability to provide real-time web-based typesetting, and that’s our subject (finally) now.

The “character” panel

Typecast's "character panel"

At the heart of the Typecast typography interface is the panel you see at the right, which anyone familiar with Adobe Creative Suite products will recognize as a variant on the character and paragraph panels. At the top you see an indicator of the HTML label (with class, if appropriate) you’re about to edit. The selected tag defaults to wherever your cursor is in the text column to the right of this panel. The blue button with up and down arrows allows you to switch tags without having to move the cursor, though in most cases you’ll want to be at least able to see the tag you’re currently editing.

Next you see the currently selected face, with previous faces used for said tag listed below. This updates as you go, listing up to the last two you selected. (A handy feature if you’re the indecisive type and find yourself frequently switching between recent selections.)

Another blue button opens a dropdown that lists all the app’s default faces with visual previews of each, again a la Adobe CS programs. You can also type the name of the face you want into the text box, if you already know what you’re looking for.

Another great feature of Typecast is that if a face hosted by one of its partners—Typekit, FontDeck, and Fonts.com, Monotype’s hosting outfit—isn’t already loaded into the app, all you have to do is search for it and the app will load it in! Awesome.

A less-than-awesome feature of the selection dropdown is that it automatically collapses as soon as you pick a face. Would really be so much easier if it remained persistent till you found the look you wanted and closed the dropdown yourself using that blue button. Alternatively, it could change dynamically, as in current versions of Word and in the text size options below, though I imagine that could slow things down quite a bit.

Below the face name you’ll see a color picker and another dropdown that lists the font (or weight)—i.e., Book, Italic, Black, etc. The color picker includes swatches a la Dreamweaver and many another web interface, but also allows you to input hexadecimal values for that custom color touch. A great feature here is the palette area, which remembers other colors you’ve used in the design to help you keep the color scheme consistent. Nice.

Next up are sliders for text size, line height (leading), and spacing (tracking). The sliders are a bit imprecise and difficult to control, though you can tweak to just the right size using the plus and minus buttons above the slider. What is cool is the dynamic updating of the font as you move the slider. If you’re a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants and trust-your-eye type of typographer, this might suit. But if you’re following a more rigorous and mathematical plan of action, all you have to do is click the size indicator in the center above the slider and type in the exact value you want.

All three options default to pixel values, but ems and percentages are just a click o’ the dropdown away. (An interesting choice since the subject of the article in The Goldilocks Approach is responsive design, but whatever.)

Below this area are buttons—again very Adobe—for alignment options and casing. The latter appears to only toggle between all-caps and sentence-case, which is a little odd since capping of all initial letters is an option in HTML.

There’s one final panel-related option, though it actually means the negation of the panel: click anywhere on the canvas outside of the panel and the text and you get a nice panel-free view of the copy.

As you can see, there’s a lot in the panel! But not everything.

In-column options

The particularly web-savvy may have noticed the lack of a couple options here: column-width and margins. These are very important typographic characteristics, obviously, but they don’t quite fit into the character panel.

So the folks at Typecast smartly placed them right there in the column area … or rather, just outside it. You can adjust the column width by grabbing the endpoint indicators to either side and adjusting with plus and minus symbols, much like the text size slider. Or just type in the value you want. Same goes for the top and bottom margins, though I was disappointed to see you can’t enter negative values here.

One flaw I witness here is that I can’t find a way to set left and right margins, a major bummer if you want to create indented or outdented chunks of copy (as one often wishes to with block quotes and callouts).

The chink in the armor of awesome I (thought I) found

While noodling about to write this article, it occurred to me to wonder if I could write new CSS styles within the app. And after a bit of looking around—I headed first to the aforementioned CSS pane, which seemed a natural choice to me—it seemed I couldn’t.

Major fail, Typecast, I thought.

But I should’ve known these genius folks wouldn’t overlook such a simple thing as that. In fact, I don’t know how I missed it at all!

Right there at the top of the character panel’s HTML flyout (remember when I said you could click the HTML tag to switch from the current tag?), there’s an option to write in a new style.

Like I said, genius, folks.

So, Typecast: revolutionary, unnecessary, or just a bit of fun?

I’ve dug into Typecast in a pretty in-depth manner and called out the things I love and the things I think need some tweaking. But what’s the value of the tool?

Overall, I’d call Typecast revolutionary—for the moment. For web designers and typographers who don’t have access to a font on their desktops but plan to use it in their web presentations for a brand, it’s a godsend. But if they do have access to those fonts—and if they’re brand fonts, they should—its value seems a little less revolutionary, at least in the initial comping stage.

Where it will come in very handy is in the transition from comp to full-fledged live web page, from PSD to HTML. Why? Because it makes the translation from graphic styles in a design program into HTML tags and CSS styles much easier. Instead of painstakingly translating type settings from the graphics programs to CSS, Typecast can do the work for you, which is obviously pretty awesome.

And, as a copywriter and editor, I can see a lot of value in the auto-generated style guide for streamlining other team members’ workflows outside of design. The style guide makes for a quick and easy visual guide that can be passed out to editors, proofers, copywriters, graphic designers—in short, any creative team member who isn’t a web designer—to help them understand how brand standards will be applied on the web.

As of now, the only real problem I see with Typecast is that you only get WYSIWYG-style access to the CSS. You “design by eye”, as the Typecast team puts it, and it writes the code. And you can’t dive into the code to fine tune it or force things the WYSIWYG interface can’t—such as create the aforementioned left and right margins.

Another bummer is that you can’t use self-hosted fonts with the tool. This could be a major drag for brands who’ve paid for a web-use license on a custom or foundry font that isn’t hosted by one of the companies Typecast supports.

Still, I love Typecast, and it’s still being developed. In fact, a member of the Typecast team recently informed me they’re planning some new features and want a chance to talk to users about it soon. Hopefully I’ll be able to follow up on this post soon with more info!

So what do you think? Have you had a chance to use Typecast yet? And if so, what do you think of it? If not, do you want to? Let me know!

In part through the influence of the fantastic Vernacular Typography project, I’ve become obsessed with one particular manifestation of the typescape that surrounds us all. The one most likely to avoid our ever-forward-looking gaze, in fact: the type beneath our feet.

Wherever you go in the urban, and even the rural, world, you trod upon the words of others. And you hardly ever notice it. Granted, these are words of purely utilitarian value—at least, that is their primary intent. But as I’ve discovered these ultimately disregarded and yet wonderfully resilient signs, I’ve noticed a peculiarly poetic element to their time- and elements-scarred contours, to the strange messages they so often convey when divorced from their familiar contexts.

A close-up shot of a sewer opening cover

This small cover, for instance, struck me for its lovely textures and rusted color, which seemed to echo beautifully the decay and squalor you expect to find beneath its thin metal plate. And the fading away of the S pulled the word ewer to my mind—a ewer being a vase-like pitcher used to hold anything a person might drink. Richly ironic contrasts abound!

Street signage ... at your feet

Of all the ground-level shots of type I’ve taken lately, this is the only one from San Francisco, the beloved and beautiful city where I work (and sometimes play) across the bay. Here I inverted the type since, being Californian, Spanish is never far from my mind, and the semantic interplay between was and the Spanish mas delights me. The leaf blew in on a fortuitous wind, capturing with its dry gold and lost nature the was, and with its looming shadow the mas. The various pebbles ground into the impressed letters add lovely texture even as they add their own rich wrinkle to the photo’s theme.

Grave site marker

This is actually the oldest of my ground-level type photos, taken before I even realized my nascent obsession. This one struck me not so much for its poetic elements, but more simply for the oddity (or perhaps wholly appropriate choice) of marking a cemetery on the ground. Other signage at eye level denotes the nature of the space too, but those signs were much more temporary seeming, as if they had been installed much later and in the expectation of a coming move. Poetically speaking, I do enjoy the pun that grave site makes, as a cemetery is a rather serious place indeed. In retrospect I’m also struck by the font choice. Ground-level type seems to have an almost ubiquitously Gothic character (Gothic being a font classification here, not a thematic descriptor), and this piece is no exception, despite the graver serifs we’re used to see adorning our temples of mortality.

So far, the vast majority of my photos have been of cast metal type, but just as bountiful, and generally far more distressed, is the painted type one sees in parking lots and splayed across building walls. Just to vary the theme a bit, here’s a shot of some parking lot signage cropped just right to tell a story it never intended. Reduced to near illegibility, the letters come across through variations in the background, almost as if they were painstakingly worked into the gravel and tar of the blacktop. And in a sense they were, not by human hands, but by time and rain and wind—eroded to send alternate messages, just as my human eye has done.

Parking spot signage

Much like the type captured in the Vernacular Typography project, the words beneath our feet are glimpsed in the midst of a state of flux, as subject to human whim and need as to the vagaries of the weather. And that lends these messages a peculiar fragility and power that I’m happy to capture.

I very much look forward to continuing in my fascination. No matter how many odd looks I get as I kneel down on city concrete or in the midst of an intersection to snap a pic. So look forward to more photos of the type beneath our feet, and let me know if you’ve snapped any similar pics!

s you can clearly see, I got a little out of hand with the A, allowing it to sprawl all over the page in a kind of organic explosion. Seems appropriate enough for its shape, which recalls a mountain erupting up through the earth of the baseline grid, at least to my eye. I’ve simply allowed time to drape it in greenery, adorning it with curves to match its natural sharpness and angularity.

Traditionally, such decorative initials aim for a squarer shape, allowing the accompanying text to run more closely against and around it. The shape for this A runs more toward the rectangular, allowing for more breathing room and creating an area of very light typographic color, calling a great deal of attention to itself.

eware the more upright and acute B, for it features less even color. Its counters explode with a riot of florid curlicues and fleur-de-lis, creating a dense and dark internal mass. That thickness and complexity also creates a subtle illusion of swelling, turning the normally negative space of the counter into a positive shape echoing the rounded three-dimensionality of the circular forms behind and before the letter. Outside, however, the space opens up, with a row of knocked-out flowers preceding a large row of circles, which two smaller rows echo after the letter.

I plan to continue this project to produce a complete set of decorative initials, one for each letter of the alphabet. In the meantime, feel free to use these, if you’d like, on your own blog or website. Doing so is quite easy: Just right-click on the image and select Copy Image Location. Alternatively, if you think you might use these on a regular basis, go ahead and download the image to your hardrive for easy reuse later. Once you’ve got the location or the image, just drop it in at the beginning of a paragraph, make sure it’s aligned left with zero padding on all sides. Enjoy!

If you’d like to find out more about Igino’s fabulous project, head here:http://iginomarini.com/fell/the-revival-fonts/. If you like the fonts, you’ll be pleased to know that Google has been kind enough to provide it (as well as many other fonts) for free use on your site. If you’d like to find out more about that, head here: http://code.google.com/apis/webfonts/.

Erg Arts, the online publishing arm of Cricket Online Review, asked me to design the cover and interior for their upcoming e-chapbook, More Po/Ems by Richard Kostelanetz, soon after publishing some of my visual poetry in a recent edition of Cricket.

Kostelanetz, a widely published and well-known experimental poet, had many highly specific demands for the layout, and, with a series of delays due to various exigencies, the design process has taken some months. Still, I regard the final product as a fine piece of work, and am especially excited that this will be my second interior layout credit. Here are a couple of shots of the interior and another look at the cover:

Wanted to take a moment to announce my latest publication, iu, from mIEKAL aND’s superb Xerolage imprint. Head to the Xexoxial site to pick up a copy of your own.

What we have here are digital talismanic suggestions. In this series of vispo, design elements construct a place for you and eye to land. The dotted i returns u see. Letterforms conjure humanity in their very simplicity. These compositions rework certain concrete poetic ideas. The letters i and u undergo new permutations. It’s a satisfying jaunt through renewed verbo-visual possibilities. John Moore Williams is part of the next wave of visual poet.

- Nico Vassilakis

I didn’t know who I am before I saw iu. I didn’t know what I was, or the difference between I and U. I was continually thinking U were I when you were nothing of the kind. But in this book, in this John Moore Williams book, we discover that I am the mother of U, who is I bent in the middle and whose feet point up to the sky. Sometimes, I am a shadow. Sometimes, I is a change. Sometimes, I am in a pile of U’s and cannot get out. Sometimes, I is a whirling of shapes. Sometimes, I am spare. Because I go on forever, and I end at the end of each finger, each of which is just another I. I is clean. I am dirty. And in John Moore Williams’ hands of ten small I’s, I is everywhere and everything, the letter is examined as a meaning and a shape, the I is made into structures of beauty, and if you read the book you just might know what I am and you are.

- Geof Huth

iu is a textual journey that begins as a root, working its way up and around the viewer in a labyrinthine web of finely-woven vispoage.
Williams’ unending quest for uncharted wordscapes is most present in this newest work, uniquely and intricately grafted into a new flesh, begging exploration.

- Matina L. Stamatakis

from the introduction:

We are used to thinking of letters as merely media, as windows through which some message is conveyed without interference. They are the superconductors of significance, channels devoid of impedance or static, through which content is, ideally, passed with crystal clarity. This is perhaps most obviously true of the letter I, which has become so concretely associated with individual identity that it has practically disappeared as its own entity. The shape itself reinforces this disappearance; of all the letterforms it is perhaps the sparest, the most Spartan. Compounding this is the fact that it lends itself so easily to the conflation of form and content—it is, unlike most single letters, a word, and one that abstractly yet forcefully resembles its referent. It is the human form in hieroglyph, a body inscribed.

iu seeks to accept, complicate and reject this conflation, this crystal-clear union of sign and signifier. In accepting the sparest of letterforms as its subject, then attempting to create a wide variety of forms out of this simple cloth, the book embraces the generativity of restriction. At the same time, it attempts to explore the multifarious and complex meanings of identity and individuality through simple, iconic forms. Many of the pieces employ the archetypal forms and arrangements of the comic book, that most lyric and identity-obsessed of popular fiction forms, while others work through more concrete arrangements, attempting to graphically depict the semantic content in much the same way the letterform itself does. Oh, and then there’s the letter U, which our shorthand age has rendered nearly as pictographic as I.

Given my love of language and typography, I suppose it was only a matter of time (and technology) before I’d create a font of my own. And here it is: Hitchcock, presented, naturally enough, through a few famous quotes from the man himself, Alfred Hitchcock.

Originally inspired by the silhouette the master of American cinema used in his films, the font eventually moved away from that concept (though I still glimpse the ghost of it in our A), developing a more geometrically rounded and less elegant, but bolder look. It’s designed to be a display font, and the close kerning makes it difficult to read at smaller sizes (though that can, of course, be adjusted by hand).

As of yet, I’ve only developed the capital letters, but I plan to move on to the lower case and, eventually, variants like italic and bold. Still, as a display face, I can see giving it some use even with no more than a set of capitals to use. If you happen to find yourself inclined to make use of it, comment to that effect and I’d be happy to send it your way.

Book Cover Design for Marton Koppany’s modulations for Otoliths

This is just a corner of the cover design for Marton Koppany’s latest book from Otoliths, modulations. I’ve just agreed to become the staff cover designer for this fine small press and I couldn’t be more honored to have been asked to fill the role. This is a very visually conscious press headed by a renowned visual poet who often publishes visual and concrete poetic texts by some of the most respected names in the field, both through his online journal and his print press.

Cover design work for Thierry Brunet’s Waste, published by the ever-innovative BlazeVox Press, one of the small press world’s most successful imprints. Thierry requested that I create the cover for this publication, and provided detailed feedback and direction regarding the style. While I now regard it as a somewhat misguided early effort, I do feel the piece is effective and am proud to have my name in a BlazeVox Press book.