Dispatches from Reading

Flickering

2008-12-22T15:13:00.004Z

Just a quick post to point to my Flickr space, which is by far the resource I’m updating the most these days. I’m posting there all sorts of stuff, from sketches to pictures from Michael Twyman’s wonderful monday lectures/exhibitions. As you’ll quickly notice I’m a really bad photographer but I think taking pictures is a good way to document what’s going on at the department, sometimes even better than words alone. Enjoy!

☞ www.flickr.com/photos/verbosus/

Not from Reading

2008-12-22T11:40:00.000Z

I’m back in Italy for the Christmas break. I came home last saturday and will stay until the 1st of January, when I’ll be back in Reading with my sister, who hasn’t yet seen the UK. The last few weeks have been very busy. We had another week with Gerard Unger working on our typefaces some more and ending with his usual lecture on the traditional Dutch chocolate letters:

I have been going through ups and down with my typeface project. What I found interesting is that Gerard continued pushing me to try more and more experimental forms, until I finally reached a point where my “usual” shapes where gone. Now I’m moving in this uncharted territory, not sure about the outcome but glad to be experimenting more than I anticipated.

On another note, one sunday morning I went with Eben and Julia to the Reading cemetery. It’s somewhat of a must for Reading students to go there once a year, especially since it’s so big and full of inscriptions carved in stone. This is very different from Italy, where most of the tombstones only have metal or plastic letters attached to the marble or granite surface.

Before leaving for Italy, Amélie kindly took it upon herself to organise a movie night at the department. We watched some typographical movies then turned the Tschichold workshop (the room where we typeface designers tend to hang out in the department) into some kind of disco, dancing through the night with silly Eric Gill paper hats we did with Martin. We where joined later during the night by Dan, Joke and Mathieu, three of last year’s MATD students that where in Reading for their graduation ceremony. Here is Dan wearing my hat:

We also managed to squeeze in a little letterpress session right before leaving, but I’ll talk more about it later. Coming home has been good: I had many people to meet and much stuff to research for my essay, which is due on the 19th of January. I’m researching phonebook typefaces so last week I visited the archives of the italian yellow pages company, SEAT, in Torino, together with Piero De Macchi. It was a long trip during a cold and rainy day, but the outcome was worth it:

My research hasn’t stopped there, though. I managed to squeeze in a little visit to the amazing Enrico Tallone, of Alberto Tallone Editore. If you don’t know about them and you care about typography and fine printing, you should do yourself a favour and get to know who they are and what they do. It turns out Enrico also had some relevant materials for my research. I need to go back to Torino anyway in the next week to meet Piero De Macchi again about his Nomina typeface and meet a couple of other people related to my ongoing Officine Simoncini research (if you’re interested, I recentely published an artilcle about it in the Italic 2.0 book by De Agostini), before going back to the UK again. I must say I love doing this kind of research: every time I meet someone new, they give me twice as much information as I was asking for and everybody is always very welcoming to me, for some reason.

Needless to say all of this makes me very busy, but hey, I can’t complain!

Greek Week

2008-11-30T01:27:00.003Z

I left you on the 30th of october while we where having our Arabic workshop with Fiona Ross: a month has gone by and we had two other non-latin workshops, another one by Fiona Ross on Indian scripts and the Greek workshop by Gerry Leonidas, making this last week “the greek week”.

Trying your hand on a new script is definitely confusing at first. As I kept saying these days, it felt like driving a car by night, with my lights turned off: where is it, exactly, I’m trying to go? The approach here in Reading is to give us an overview of the scripts, both from scribal sources and from typographic sources, then trying our hand at actually reproducing the shapes paying attention to the proportions and rhythm of each script, and then seeing the correlation between written samples and type. While we didn’t do it with Arabic and Devanagari due to the complexity of the scripts, we did go digital with Greek. Here are my sketches:

On tuesday we had Richard Kegler from coming in to talk about his experience about founding and running P22, and on thursday we went to London to hear Jost Hochuli speak at the St Bride Library about “Systematic Book Design <QUESTION MARK>”. As you might have guessed, the pace is increasing steadily here in Reading: while all these workshops where going we had another week-long visit by Gerard Unger, and we also have our regular fixtures of the week like the research methods seminars, Michael Twyman’s classes, James Mosley’s classes, etc.

Next saturday most of us will be off home for the holidays, working on our essays and on our typefaces while trying to rest a bit. Now if you’ll excuse me I’ll wander off to bed!

Extreme

2008-11-26T18:36:00.006Z

Hello dispatched, sorry if it’s been a while since my last post. We’re going to take a slight detour of our regular typographic program because I want to write about the best concert I’ve seen so to date, which was at the Astoria in London on monday night.

I know some of you will probably start wondering about my bad taste in music (right, Claus?), but please realize I literally grew up listening to these guys: Extreme, is a band from Boston, USA. I first found them through the Freddie Mercury tribute concert, where they played a spectacular performance and were sort of “blessed” by Brian May as “the band that more than anyone else on this planet knows what Queen was about”. And – lest you don’t know it – Queen is just the best band ever, full stop. After that I just basically listened to Extreme all through high school and beyond, and loved each new record they put out – which was unfortunately too little of them: after the fourth (amazing) record they called it quits, so I had to reconcile myself with the idea of never hearing that music played live ever again.

The fans never stopped listening to their music, so when the rumors of a reforming and a new tour started spreading out, everybody was, let’s say, extremely excited.

I went with Matte to the gig, we met under the Freddie Mercury statue at the Dominion in Tottenham Court Road, the proceeded to the Astoria. The venue was packed, so we found a spot upstairs where we could see what was going on. What followed where two hours and something of pure rock, ending in a tribute to Freddie Mercury & Queen. They also did a lot of old favourites plus some more new tracks from the last album, which I really enjoyed.

I just sang my heart out through the whole night, and came back home with a huge grin on my face which still won’t go away even if a couple of days have passed – it was that good. Gary, Pat, Nuno, Kevin: thanks, I really had a blast! Thanks also to Matte for the pictures above: I had my camera with me but since it was semi-professional they wouldn’t let me take it into the venue, I had to leave it at the reception.

And now I’m back to practicing greek typography!

Earls

2008-11-08T02:08:00.001Z

This morning I woke up early and I took Earleigh road to go to the Earley station.

Arabic Workshop

2008-10-30T20:29:00.003Z

This week we had the Arabic workshop with Fiona Ross. We started on tuesday with an introduction to the script and especially Fiona’s experience in managing the design and production of Arabic typefaces for Linotype, through the case history of the re-development of Yakout by Tim Holloway, and the several steps of revision they went through. We also started drawing right away, to get a feel for the shapes and get acquainted with the Arabic script. The first day ended with some of us going to see the La graine et le mulet, a French movie about some arab expatriates in France.

The day also the weirdest in Reading so far, weather-wise: I went to the department in the morning without my jacket because there was a wonderful sunny sky and it was quite warm, then it started to rain (cats and dogs!) in the afternoon. The high point was reached when coming out from the movie: it was snowing!

The second day of the workshop was spent mostly drawing and sketching, with a lecture by Yannis Haralambous in the afternoon on the nuances of Unicode, OpenType, how typefaces actually work from a technical point of view, what are the problems involved in developing typefaces for complex scripts like Arabic, and how computers deal with them, TeX, and other geeky things. It was very intense and very challenging to follow Yannis’ super-sharp mind as he was explaining these concepts – which I admit I though I had a much better understanding of that it turned out to be the case.

Today we mostly kept on sketching and looked with Fiona at other issues related to Arabic typeface development, starting from calligraphic/lettering sketches and then going to the computer. We also did a class evaluation of several Linotype typefaces together, to see how our understanding of Arabic shapes was developing. The workshop ended with Fiona showing us some of the materials in the department collection and giving some feedback on our sketches.

All in all it’s been a great ride. While I can’t claim to know very much about the Arabic script, I certainly learned a lot this week: I now know some of the pitfalls and major problems in developing an Arabic typeface, and can identify and reproduce some of the glyphs needed.

By the way: many thanks to Deema, our classmate from Saudi Arabia. All the time I was sketching and I couldn’t figure out for the life of me what I was writing of it was even readable, so I used her eye to help me during these three days. Thanks!

Phileas

2008-10-28T09:29:00.004Z

It traveled from Shangai (China) to Incheon (Korea) to Warsaw (Poland) to Köln (Germany) to Apeldoorn (Netherlands) back to Köln (Germany) to Stansted (United Kingdom) and finally to Reading. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce you phileas, standing side by side with my former laptop, oscar:

It has a good feel to it, the new trackpad is very nice and with the help of Migration Assistant I was back in business in about two hours – lovely. The screen is very reflective but I guess I’ll get used to it. Let’s get cracking!

I’m off to Fiona Ross’ Arabic workshop.

Unger Workshop

2008-10-25T13:13:00.007+01:00

The first few weeks of the course we where all waiting for the drawing to start: on tuesday Gerard Unger came to Reading to hold our first practical workshop. The week was very intense, I’m presenting here my excercises and results.

The first morning Gerard showed us some material then proceeded asking us to start thinking about how to design typefaces for continuous reading on a mobile phone screen. He said we should think about it, sketch, then have a first “smoke proof” (my words, not his) by inking our drawings, photocopying and reducing them. I thought it was a bit awkward to proceed in this way, because if you want to design a typeface for screen you should really be doing it, you know, on screen. I then understood that Gerard wanted us to think more about the process than the result, especially for those of us who had never put together a typeface before. With that in mind, I set out to work on some sketches for a generic low-resolution typeface.

I thought I would make a typeface with very low contrast, huge x-height and very short descenders and ascenders, and experiment by making the connection between the curves and the stems very contrasted. This idea is pretty popular at the moment in the form of ink traps, but I tried making it even more experimental by introducing an idea used by Simoncini in his Selene newspaper typeface (I’ll talk about Selene, Simoncini and my research on it much more at length later on).

As for the style of the typeface, I experimented with several lowercase as before settling on one I thought would be appropriate and resistant enough, by making some experiments with reduction with the photocopier. I then drew many other glyphs in order to compose some test words, photocopied, inked them and finally pasting them together:

I probably designed my cuts too narrow, so on Gerard’s suggestion I tried to see if I could remove them or make them more visible to see how they would perform. I experimented with reducing them to “regular” ink traps or filling them in completely, looked from a distance, squinting, etc. then I proceeded with digitizing my drawings.

While digitizing I also tried making the connections from the curves to the stems very spiky, then producing more extreme versions of my cuts and bites and combining these with the spiky connections by making the typeface a multiple master. That way I could produce variations and see how they would perform side by side at various sizes. At this point I wasn’t thinking of screen rendering anymore (although I kept an eye on it in FontLab) but was trying to get at least a good printout from the laser printer in the MA room, which was driving me insane.

And that was it: in four days I produced a whopping 17 glyphs typeface with two Multiple Master axes (Cuts & Spikes) and conducted some experiments on how you can distort a letter before it becomes unusable. Although I’m aware that the fitness for purpose of this typeface is questionable at best (it didn’t go anywhere near a mobile phone screen!) it made me reflect on what it is to actually deal with distortion in your letter shapes, how the photocopier and the laser printer and the screen do completely different things to your letters and on possible strategies to try and counter it.

I also had a lot of fun at first drawing, inking, photocopying, pasting, etc. although I must admit it got tedious incredibly fast, because I’m just so much more productive in FontLab it doesn’t even compare.

Bonus track: when cutting and pasting my letters, I basically had a type case of letters I had designed and I actually had to manually kern some of them to make them fit. Kerning by scissors, insane fun!

Ersatz

2008-10-19T17:06:00.003+01:00

The new word for today is ersatz. I was reading the article Future Tendencies in Type Design written in 1985 by Hermann Zapf in Visible Language, volume XIX number 1, and he wrote:

Janson is a typical seventeenth century typeface and should be respected as an original design of this historic period in the Netherlands. It was created out of the spirit and artistic background of that time. The Janson is, in my opinion, not at all an espression of the alphabet in the twentieth century. […] It is possible to design something new within the structure of the Janson, but we should leave the foundry design alone and create a new Janson, not just make an ersatz design.

According to Wikipedia, ersatz is a German word literally meaning substitute or replacement.

The Secret Society

2008-10-19T15:46:00.003+01:00

The forces of evil have been summoned to create a new, secret society for typeface design students. Dices have been rolled, bits have been flipped, everything is ready for the deployment of the new .org-anization. Hints about its evil identity are scattered all over the place. Keep your doors locked, your serifs bracketed and your mouths shut about it, because it’s definitely coming!

A Minor Miracle

2008-10-17T13:05:00.006+01:00

When I was in primary school I didn’t mind learning how to write. I remember I hated colouring stuff, so much so I used to take back homework to my teacher saying I used to prefer it in black and white (and get a note for that). But writing was OK. I wasn’t great at it, and I later found out that I had learned to make all the loops in my round shapes in clockwise direction, which is the opposite of what you want when writing in the style they teach kids in Italy, which is some sort of simplified English roundhand. I remember at one point playing with my handwriting, I must have been six or seven, trying to condense it horizontally or to expand it, and sticking with these experiments for weeks on end.

I realised all my double clockwise loops where way too time consuming and hurtful for my wrist when I was in secondary school, and then moved onto high school and university. I was quite quick at writing, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what I had written, when trying to decode my notes back at home. That eventually became a problem in high school, when I had to re-read all my essays to my professors because they couldn’t quite decipher anything of mine. When I went to university I had already pretty much given up on my handwriting. I think I have a pretty good sense of shapes, alignment and space on the page, but the signs themselves where messy and just impossible to read. My first university exam was a written one; I was in a class with 150 other students (oh yeah!) and the professor walked in to announce the results. He said it took him a long time to go through all the papers, and that in one case he just had to give up because the handwriting was so bad. Guess who’s paper that was?

As a last resort I sort of tried migrating to all caps when I had to write short notes, but as anybody who knows a bit of calligraphy, ALL CAPS is not really meant to be written with a pen, so that somewhat makes matter worse. It’s also way more slow than proper cursive, because all the shapes are separated and you’re always raising the pen and going back to the paper, then again and again.

Enter my love/obsession for typography at about the age of 20, just after entering university. I just loved looking at the shapes and I found I was quite good at keeping them in my head, recognising them back once I saw them, noticing the nuances and details. It just frustrated me that with my poor handwriting – and drawing skills, I must add – I would never be able to do any of that on my own. I felt I could look at type, but I wasn’t allowed to make it, I felt like an outsider.

For some reason, three years ago I started thinking back at designing type, I just couldn’t get it outside my head. I started redrawing with bezier paths on the computer old, dead typeface from Italian foundries. I remember sending over to my friends a screenshot of a lowercase a in FontLab: the point placemenet was all wrong and the proportions didn’t quite match, but guess what? It was there! I then drew more and more, but still strictly on the computer. At the beginning of last year I had had enough of my handwriting inferiority complex and decided to enrol in a calligraphy class with ACI (Associazione Calligrafica Italiana). My teacher, Francesca Biasetton, taught me the basis of the Cancelleresca script, a beautiful Renaissance handwriting style that few people practice today in Italy, and fewer use it as an everyday handwriting.

My first experiments sucked, of course, but I was really surprised: I wasn’t as bad as I planned, I could do it! That was a revealing moment for me. After that, I started drawing and drawing and drawing every day, with all sorts of pens and quills and pencils, trying different styles and methods, then digitising my drawings and restart again. I’m not a great calligrapher by any means, but my handwriting now is reasonably readable, I can fake many writing styles and make things look pretty and neat. And I can also play with the shapes regardless of the tool, which is the key to proper type design.

I can’t quite explain why I felt having a good handwriting was a requisite for being a type designer – it’s not – but probably it was just a self-challenge I had to overcome in order to start pursuing this new interest/passion.

I understand this might sounds like nothing to you, but to me it feels like I experienced a minor miracle. And the best part is that it’s still going on as I get more and more practice!

Being There

2008-10-14T22:50:00.004+01:00

Everybody says Reading is at its most beautiful at the beginning of autumn, before the long, dark, grey winter. I’m now enjoying every minute of sunshine and generally still trying to get a feel for the place. It’s the second week of lessons now, the third since I arrived from Italy, and things are looking great so far. I finished last week by taking a short break off to London. I hadn’t been there since five years and I found it much better! I made a visit to a very nice design studio near Old Street, then I went out for a pint and some sausages and mashed potatoes with Matte, who I hadn’t seen in ages.

This week started with the first Michael Twyman lecture. Michael set up the typography department, and even though he’s retired now he still comes in every monday to show items from his huge, amazing personal collection, to challenge the minds of us MA students. It was brilliant.

I stayed for another hour after class looking at the samples he brought in, then in the evening I started the Foxhill Drawing Bureau with Camille and Gesine: we would pick an image from the ones I shot, then redrew some bits that interested us and then some. Really fun!

Today we had another lecture with Gerry about the influence of the tools on letterforms and then a wonderful lecture from the visiting Alastair Johnston on Richard Austin (both of them, father and son). Tomorrow Fiona will introduce us to the resources in the department, then we have a letterpress workshop on thursday and then we’re off for the weekend. Next week: Gerard Unger!

Oh, and tomorrow I’m ordering my new laptop, so that should be cool as well. What can I say, I’m having a blast so far!

The title of this post refers to the Peter Sellers movie Being There which we saw over at Claus’ place two days ago – and which I loved.

Polaroid

2008-10-10T09:05:00.004+01:00

A quickie: I’m heading to London to meet people. Tonight with Matteo we’ll be on Polaroid, an Italian radio show in Radio Città del Capo at about 8:30 PM (BST) or so.

First lecture

2008-10-07T21:20:00.002+01:00

Today we walked to the department (under the rain) and had our first day of lectures after yesterday’s IT briefing. We had James Mosley talk about the history of letterforms and Gerry Leonidas to talk about the course, the reading list and in general how Reading approaches typography and research in this field in general.

The picture above is Gerry showing us an original of the famous Dwiggins letter, and comparing to a printout from a PDF. The point he was trying to make is that seeing this stuff with your own very eyes is completely different than seeing a reproduction, and that the MATD course will be a very hands-on experience for us, especially with the wealth of material that’s in the department, which we will go through in due time.

Yesterday night we went to the postgraduate party – which was OK – then came home and had some real fun with Claus, Émilie, Camille, Gesine and Eben until 3 in the morning, trying not too make too much noise because of the neighbors. This is a great way to start the first week!

Do Me a Flavour

2008-10-02T12:20:00.002+01:00

I’ve been in the UK since last saturday but I’m still trying to find my way around this place. I’m living in a shared apartment in Foxhill road: me, Camille (French) and Gesine (German) call it “the small flat with the BIG personality” because it’s tiny, but it’s also a really cozy place.

Right now I’m on the couch checking email and stuff with Camille and my laptop is just so noisy it’s driving me mad, I hope to get a replacement really soon. Apart from it, I sorted some of the tasks for this week like getting the student card but didn’t quite manage to sort out the bicycle issue (me, Gesine and Camille want one but it’s difficult to find second hand bikes in town). I was thinking about sports stuff for a change, but I’m way too lazy.

We also had the first introductory welcome meeting to the department yesterday, where we got to know each other a bit better and got some security information and a general introduction to how the course it’s gonna be. The outcome is that we’re all very excited of starting but also somewhat scared at the sheer quantity of stuff we’re supposed to work on. But hey, that’s why we’re here in Reading!

Yesterday we also had Claus, Amélie, Gro, Eben and Julia coming over to Foxhill after dinner and Claus (far out there guy!) came up with the “do me a flavour” moniker when I tried feeding him some typical English salt and vinegar crisps.

All in all I’m well, Foxhill is starting to feel like home and I’m really looking forward to get the ball rolling on the type front. Cheers!

Dispatches

2008-10-01T07:58:00.007+01:00

Hello typeheads, let me introduce you to the new and improved version of the series of letters formerly known as Dispatches from Bristol but also known as Dispatches from Japan at some point and as Readying for Reading for quite a while as well. We’re dispatching right on your personal computing device from Reading, a little town in the south of England just over the left hand side of London.

My name is Antonio Cavedoni and I’ll be your host through this journey from a little happy house in Foxhill road, 81. Apparently it’s going to last a year here in Reading, from October 08 to October 09. Like the former series you’ve been enjoying, in this one we’re going to be mostly complaining about the weather but also talk about typefaces, junk food and possibly some more off the cuff remarks about the smell of things, the colour of the sky and the temperature in the house (hint: quite cool at the moment).

I’ll also be entertaining you with the occasional out of focus picture, or something. Be sure to enjoy the process and to generally take it easy, ’cause to us this year will be a BIG DEAL. Be also sure to let go of your ego, embrace your failures and generally acknowledge that yes, you’re wrong, ’cause I’ll have a hard time at it!

All Systems Are Go

2008-09-27T07:28:00.002+01:00

Luggage… check, friends… check, money… check, flight ticket… check, documents… check, backups… check, emergency phone numbers… (watches in pocket) check. Ready!

Burn Before Reading

2008-09-21T21:05:00.004+01:00

I went to see the Cohen brothers’ Burn After Reading yesterday night so I couldn’t resist playing with the title of the film, sorry. I’m pretty much done shopping, I think. Now I “just” need to work my ass off all the week until it’s saturday. To the left you see me, burning in anticipation for next week – or something.

I decided I will leave Italy with my old TiBook. This machine has been beaten to death but as pathetic as it may sound I think I’ll wait until the 14th of October before getting a new one. This situation is of course terrible – I am relying on “rumor” sites in order to make a purchasing decision from a company that has disappointed me so much in the past. Meh. My TiBook barely holds together and is certainly not a very good work machine, so the first few weeks in the UK will be adventurous at best.

Julia has started a new blog where she’ll be writing about typography, MATD, life the universe and everything. I was talking about this to Amélie, another fellow MATD student, and she came up with the idea of putting together a group blog or something. We’ll talk about this all together once we’re in Reading, I think.

So much for my updates, it’s packing time.

Letterpress is not dead

2008-09-18T13:24:00.000+01:00

As you can imagine, the last few weeks before leaving are pretty much spent working with a hectic pace, meeting and waving goodbye to friends and relatives, and generally having loads of good food before… the English treatment.

I was around with friends in Modena a couple of days ago, then we went to see Claudio’s workplace. His work is basically in quality control for mechanical parts. He checks that the pieces he’s given from various factories match the expected sizes up to several degrees of precision. One of the things he has to do is to properly label each piece, and I found out he does this by literally striking a punch inside the metal of the mechanic piece with a hammer. Lovely:

Over the weekend I was back in Varese to hold two more days of workshop on layout and typography. I’ll probably post the slides and some writeup of the whole experience over at the studio blog before the end of the week.

As it happens I started doodling with yet another new idea for a typeface. I tried to keep it neat and clean on paper and sketched a lot, then digitized my drawing by eye. I don’t have the whole lowercase worked out yet; instead of my usual rush to complete the alphabet I’m trying to take it more slowly this time. I also thought I might be better off not showing anything about it until I’ve made up my mind on how the lowercase and uppercase are supposed to look like.

I must now be off renewing my driving license – it’s my first expiration after I got it, in 1998.

Updates before the jump

2008-09-13T11:00:00.000+01:00

Some updates before the jump. I’m about to finish a round of visits to various doctors as I wanted to get a proper, thorough check up before leaving. I’m also working to close most of the outstanding works at the studio: of the two major projects I have at hand, one is currently entering maintenance and the other is dormant but hopefully doable in the next two weeks. Two issues remain outstanding but will need to be taken upon once I’m in the UK: one is getting a bank account, the other is getting insurance for my personal belongings.

I also just finished reading a bunch of articles from Gerry’s introductory MATD reading list. These are the ones I went through:

Phil Baines, Face lift: new cuts at the Times.
Emily King, Digital type decade.
Robin Kinross, The digital wave.
Matthew Carter, Galliard: a modern revival of the types of Robert Granjon.
Jack Stauffacher, The Transylvanian Phoenix: the Kis-Janson types in the digital era.
Ladislas Mandel, Developing an awareness of typographic letterforms.

The article by Phil Baines is about the redesign of the Times’ typeface, from Gunnlaugur SE Briem’s Times Millennium to Times Classic – which was redesigned again last year into Times Modern as part of Nevile Brody’s Research Studios redesign. My friend Claudio Piccinini was in correspondence with Times Classic’s designer Dave Farey at the time, so I got a booklet from the Times Classic launch exhibition too, which had some more information. All in all I must say I really enjoyed the different takes on Times New Roman over the years, the motivations for the redesign and all the different implementations. I must also add I found very interesting this TypeRadio presentation by Mike Parker claiming to have uncovered some interesting facts about Times Roman’s past. Apparently he followed up with a talk at the recent TypeCon about the alleged attribution of Times New Roman to Starling Burgess. Font Bureau is also working on a revival of the original drawings, called Starling and to be released soon.

I liked very much the Galliard article: it’s very well written and it let somehow transpire Matthew Carter’s love towards his profession (bonus points for his closing remarks). Stauffacher’s article surprised me with the depth and breadth of Nicolas Kis’ work: I was somewhat aware of his importance in typographic history, but didn’t expected such an engaging story. The man was prodigious, cut his own types and sold them all over Europe.

I also just finished reading Geoffrey Dowding’s Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type and Frederic W. Goudy’s Typologia (which where not on the reading list) and Robin Kinross’ Modern Typography and Texts on Type, a miscellanea of writings about type edited by Stephen Heller and Philip B. Meggs (which were).

Phew!

How I got to Reading

2008-09-03T08:59:00.001+01:00

Yesterday night I was chatting at the bar downstairs with Federica and Linda, one fresh master graduate from Siena and the other about to graduate in London, and Linda asked me how I got to pick Reading. I thought I might as well post it here, since it’s where I am supposed to document all the hows and whys about the MATD.

After many months reading, drawing and generally daydreaming about type design, I felt the desire to concentrate a bit more on it and not just in my free time. I wanted to have some time to properly learn some things like spacing, kerning, typeface production. As I was reading about Type]Media in Den Haag and MATD in Reading, last August, I thought a master would have been the perfect thing for me. A full year of nothing but type, fun!

So I started mulling over the idea and thinking about possible scenarios. As I’m a partner in a design studio I knew it wouldn’t have been easy to “just” leave for a year, so I tried to put it the best possible way to my partners. In september I went to ATypI in Brighton, and spoke briefly about it with Joe, Luc(as), Elena and other people. I even met Gerry one night, together with former MATD graduates, and talked to them about it as well. After thinking about it for a while, in late October I became committed to the idea and decided to start investigating about how to get in the two courses. I hadn’t yet decided on which one yet, I just knew I really wanted to do it.

After emailing former graduates of either the two courses I was even more confused, especially – as expected – since each one was recommending the master they’d taken. I didn’t feel I had enough arguments to differentiate too much or prefer one vs. the other. So I looked a bit to the Web sites, read some information, then decided to write to the course directors.

Towards the end of October I emailed Gerry Leonidas (MATD), who promptly replied with a series of things I needed to consider and to outline the admission program. After a couple of weeks I also emailed Jan Willem Stas (Type]Media). I must have been caught in the spam filter or something, but I never got a reply back.

December came, work was pretty hectic in those days so I didn’t focus too much on my application as there was plenty of time (I thought). Right after Christmas I decided to tell my partners about this, before starting the application procedure. They had a right to oppose and I thought it was fair to not rush it too much. After all, the health of the studio was more important in the short term than my personal satisfaction, since there’s six of us involved, and I didn’t want to damage it in any way. They where of course concerned about what would happen, but recognised it was something I really wanted to do, so in the end they where pretty supportive of me.

This is the bit where it gets weird: January came, and work restarted in the usual, hectic way. I still hadn’t heard from Stas so I thought I should have sent a followup email, but as I thought there was no rush and I wasn’t aware of any deadlines, I happily worked away, working on my portfolio every now and then. In mid-february I went to Milan for work and went and met Marta Bernstein at her studio since I was interested in her thesis about italian typographic history in the 19th century. One of her partners in the studio – and co-writer of the thesis – is Emanuela Conidi, who was attending (and still is) the MATD in Reading at the time so I figured I was going to ask her about it. Once we got to the subject of Reading, I told her I kept meaning to apply to Type]Media as well. That’s when I knew the applications for this year had been closed at the end of january – because she had just applied for it, and had been offered a place.

Thinking back to it I kicked myself for not getting back to Jan Willem Stas earlier on. Type]Media, I learnt, was much different from MATD. Apart from being based in the Netherlands, where I never lived, the kind of learning programme is very different too: apart from the usual history and drawing classes, one is studying calligraphy, stone carving and other approaches to type making. MATD is more focused on history, research and non-latin typeface development as far as I can tell, but I’ll know more for sure after I’ve been through it. This is a very superficial comparison of course (they do non-latin in Den Haag, too, for eample), but I don’t think I’m in a position to really compare the two at the moment. Besides, a full comparison of the two courses would beyond the scope of this post, really.

So Reading was my only choice. I’m not saying it was my second choice: in retrospect I think it somehow suits me better since I’m already doing many of the things you do there, like research. It will help me sharpen my skills in the areas I would have been doing anyway in my rushed, unprofessional kind of way. I also already lived in the UK so I’m more used to the English way of life. To be honest, Reading feels more comfortable to me. But I don’t know what I would have done if I had had the chance to get a position in both universities. Does it matter now? Hardly.

Anyway, I sent my portfolio and application forms on the 28th of February and got a reply from Gerry on the 3rd of April. Success!

So this is how I got to Reading.

To somehow close on the matter, for poor souls like me: if you’re considering either one of the courses (or others, although I’m not aware of any other postgraduate studies quite like these two in Europe at the moment) make sure you ask about the application procedure as soon as the very idea of applying to either course crosses your mind. And if you get no reply, or you’re stupid like me and can’t find any information on the Web site of the course, phone, mail, insist until you have an answer. Don’t forget to be polite while doing this, it’s not like the world has to stop because of you. But be determinate!

Spontaneity

2008-08-28T22:43:00.000+01:00

But I do not think a design should be gone over again and again, as this tends to tighten and stiffen it, to kill the spontaneity of handling that is so desirable. To do this particular design as well as I can at the moment and to do the next one better, if possible, has been my rule for years.

—Frederic W. Goudy, Typologia, Studies in Type Design & Type Making p. 86,
University of California Press, 1977

Nine

2008-08-19T23:33:00.000+01:00

This morning I got in the post a “welcome pack” from the Reading university, detailing all the things I need to know to get there. As an international student I am supposed to be there by the 28th at the latest, so I decided to book a flight for the 27th since that’s the earliest date my room will be ready.

I just booked the flight from Milano Linate to London Gatwick. I’ll go to Modena by car, take the train to Milano Centrale, take the bus to Milano Linate, fly into London Gatwick, take the train to Reading and finally take a taxi from the Reading train station to my flat.

The flight was supposed to cost €73.99 but went up to 99.99 with taxes, insurance, baggage (which costs 9 euros, and is now billed separately) adding up to the final amount.

So… on the 27 (2+7=9) of September (9) for 99.99 (with 9 euros of baggage) I’ll be in Reading for MATD ‘09. Did I mention I’ll be 29 by then, since I was born in mid September 1979?

Slow August

2008-08-18T23:10:00.000+01:00

August is slowly ending. As I keep working from home I try to read a bit and doodle or draw type whenever I can. Yesterday night I was reviewing the texts for a book and started drawing this sans on a lark:

You can see a bit more details at the usual spot. I’m pleased with the results so far, especially in the key glyphs g, a and s. I also like how t turned out, whereas w desperately needs fixing. y is quirky, but it might fit.

I also refreshed – again – this blog’s header, finished reading Modern Typography (hard to reach the end, but it was good) and worked some more on Rest roman and italic. Work-wise, I’ve been procrastinating a lot of stuff but I can’t kick myself too much over it: the studio will restart in about two weeks so there’s plenty of time for me to finish things before september.

Rest italic

2008-08-14T20:30:00.000+01:00

I thought I might try to draw a chancery italic for Rest. I gave a first try at the lowercase today, results above (with wonky letterspacing which is a combination of faults between me and TextEdit).