Dispatches from Reading

Finis

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 23:50:00 +0000

Dear dispatched,

this will be my last post on Dispatches from Reading for the very simple reason that I’m not in Reading anymore. In fact, I’m not even in Europe: as I write this I’m sitting on the Caltrain from Sunnyvale to San Francisco, in California, United States, headed for WWDC at the Moscone center. I arrived last saturday to my new home in Cupertino and I’ll be here until November to intern as a type designer in the Type group (Frameworks department) at Apple.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, my colleagues of the 2009 MATD class (of which I am still part, make no mistake) are working their butts off to finish their practical projects (typefaces) for the submission deadline of the 6th of July, and after that the deadlines for the reflection on practice, the workfile and, lastly, the final dissertation submission on the 17th of September. My workfile is done but my practical project is far from it and I’ll be putting the “final” touches to it from here. I will also write my dissertation over the summer, I hope to make it in time for the deadline. I did most of my research already and I have my room here in Cupertino full of books and articles. I have very good material on my hands and I hope to do it justice by not rushing my writing too much.

Back to Reading: the weeks before leaving the UK have been very intense. We had a lot of visitors to the department, lectures, reviews etc. We did the usual MATD trip to the Low Countries and it was really a blast meeting one to one with all these typographic monuments (just a sample: Robert Granjon’s Ascendonica italic original punches! Nikolas Kis’ Armenian and Georgian types, with handwritten notes on top! Original drawings from many typefaces by Jan van Krimpen, Gerard Unger, Bram de Does!). We also had dinner at Thomas Milo’s place in Amsterdam and at Gerard and Marian (and Juanita) Unger’s place in Bossum, great food, great people!

And of course I had a lot of goodbyes to say. I will miss the walks by the Thames, the ales, the grill parties, the easy access to so many awesome typographic resources in the department and beyond, but most of all I will miss the people from all over the world with whom I shared this crazy ride. Thank you, guys and girls!

I will do my best here, and I will be in good company: there’s more than 400 other interns this summer working on all sorts of interesting stuff from the iPhone to OS X to UI design to accounting & finance to the iTunes store, etc.

To wrap up this post: thanks for following along these Dispatches from Reading, I will keep people posted with a new series of Dispatches from Cupertino – I don’t know yet in which form or language.

I also look forward to check out the work of next year’s MATD students, and be sure to drop me a line when our own work will be up on typefacedesign.org sometime in July, I would really appreciate to have your feedback on my Enquire family.

Cheers!

Apnea

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Tue, 26 May 2009 16:30:00 +0000

Dear dispatched, the independent training type designer refuses to die! Reading has been beautiful in the past two months. I indulged with long walks by the Thames and generous grilling in various friend’s houses, but mostly I’ve been bent on my laptop drawing letters for my typeface, either at the department (where I can print!) or at home in the cave:

I’m still cooking every now and then, but mostly I’m either panicking or procrastinating because of the impending deadline for our practical project. My brief is a bit ambitious and I’m not sure I can pull it off, but I decided to come to terms with the fact that whatever I come up with will never be good enough for my standards: it’s a student project, I’m OK with that.

Today we have Fred Smeijers giving some feedback on our projects, on thursday there’s a lecture from Matthew Carter in London at the St Bride Library, and next week we’re all going to the Netherlands for the usual MATD trip. We’re busy!

Meanwhile, here’s a rose from the front yard in my apartment in Foxhill road:

Marching On

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 02:02:00 +0000

Second term is over, so today I’ll move back to Italy for three weeks of work and research for the dissertation. Yeah, and the Easter break, although it won’t be much of a break because of the aforementioned things, of course.

So where did the past month go, anyway? I left you at the end of February and it was all fuzzy. March wasn’t much better, and I anticipate April and May to be even worse (or better, depending on the way you look at it). But let’s make a brief recap.

I started the month with arguably one of the best moments in Reading so far – at least for me. As you probably know by now I have a very keen interest in Renaissance typography, and in particular on the types cut for Aldo Manuzio by Francesco Griffo da Bologna. One of my classmates, Eben Sorkin, is also doing some research on Reinassance typefaces, and while talking about it after class with James Mosley he mentioned the British Library had not one, but four copies of the De Aetna printed by Aldus in 1496. James kindly agreed to visit the British Library with us to make a comparison of the four copies, so we had a wonderful day at the beginning of March. Not only we saw the stuff, but we also got to try the now famous pastries of the Belle Époque on Newington Green. I’m not going to embarass James any further in this post, but I just wanted to thank him (and Gillian, of course!) once again for the amazing day. To top it off, we ended up in a very nice japanese restaurant. Needless to say, I was more than happy:

Before going I also did a little bit of an excercise with Eben: we met at the department with some pictures I shot of the copy of the De Aetna that’s in the Biblioteca Estense in Modena, and started redrawing some of the glyphs. We didn’t have any sort of revival in mind, we just wanted to get a better feel for what we were going to see at the British Library. Here are some of my sketches, which I digitised while discussing the shapes with Eben to see if I understood them correctly:

All that was followed by the four days in the Netherlands for the Robothon conference. I’m not going to write much about it because other people have done so much better (read accounts by Reading graduates Rob Keller and Dan Reynolds or view the presentations from the conference). Den Haag was amazing and Robothon even more so. I’m looking forward to go back there on our MATD trip to the low countries, towards the end of May. Hot on the heels of Robothon we had a visit to the department by Tobias Frere-Jones, pictured here by Claus giving some feedback my practical project:

(The thing he holds in his hands is an iRex Iliad, which I have here with me in Reading so I could test typefaces on).

We also had some more visits from Gerard Unger, two workshops with Victor Gaultney (one about Cyrillic and the other about italic), another workshop with Fiona about south indian scripts and a slew of “interim reviews of practical work” – which are essentially crit sessions on our typefaces – with Gerry. Meanwhile spring came early to Reading and I started going for long walks across the town, and especially by the Thames. As much as I used to complain about the city during winter, I have to say Reading now looks really good, and I think it’s only going to get better now that I know all the nice parks around the town! Two weeks ago I also had a visit from some friends from Italy, who fed me like I was in some sort of exile. We had a lovely time!

So that’s it, I really need to go back and pack my stuff now!

Fuzzy

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:33:00 +0000

And I thought the essay deadline made me busy!

February blazed by like it almost never happened: first the country was stopped because of the snow then we had two Gerard Unger visits – critiquing our designs and lecturing on his own work and on Excoffon (yay!) and Dwiggins (double yay!), Victor Gaultney – on his work on multi-script type design and cyrillics in particular, Per Mollerup – on signage and wayshowing, John Hudson – doing a workshop on how to harmonise invented shapes with existing designs, Fiona Ross – doing her usual workshops, this time on South Indian scripts, and finally a delegation from the ESAD school in Amiens, including Sébastien Morlighem, Alice Walter (the I love Banco girl!), Patrick Doan, Raphaël de Courville, etc.

Meanwhile I kept on working on my typeface project: I’m pretty much settled with my lowercase sans & serif and I’m working on my uppercases at the moment (while keeping an eye on italics and possible weight expansions). Essentially we’re reaching a stage in the MA where we work on our projects most of the time, receive crits from Gerry, Gerard, Victor or other visitors, then keep working some more, rinse, repeat… It’s demanding work, but it’s why I’m here and I’m loving it!

Yesterday we also had the first ‘feedback’ session on our essays. I put the quotes because Gerry tried a new method with us this year, having us read, correct and mark the essay of one of our classmates. We’ll see how it goes, I guess. Tomorrow or next week we should receive a formal feedback with marks and feedback from our supervisors.

Oh, and next week most of us will be in Den Haag, for Robothon 2009. I’m looking forward to meet even more people!

Back Again

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 22:18:00 +0000

I came back to Reading on the 1st (!) of January with Caterina, my younger sister – above – and spent three or four days doing sightseeing with her in London and then getting back cracking on my essay. It’s been quite challenging to write again: it turns out all the materials I gathered during the break were far too many for my essay and I don’t think I summarised them properly in the end. But still, after several all-nighters (!) and rampant procrastination the deadline came this monday and I finally got some proper sleep. This is the scenario the afternoon before the deadline:

I must say one of the constants of the past month or so has been… food, of all things: of course I expected to have a lot of good food during the break, but when I got back, partly through my sister, I got motivated and started cooking like crazy. I now have tortelloni di spinaci, polpette di maiale e manzo con purè, torta di ricotta, gnocchi di ricotta, gnocchi di patate, ragù di manzo, polenta and zuppa di legumi under my belt. I need to explore a little bit more into the desserts and maybe get some better equipment (like a pasta flattening machine!) or ingredients, but I’m definitely having a good time!

Ah, some bits I forgot to mention from before the break: I managed to do some letterpress printing with the department’s equipment and some bookbinding during to Paula Barahona’s informal friday workshops (thanks, Paula!).

Anyway, back to the course: after the break and the essay, lectures resumed as usual. We had Adam Twardoch visiting for a FontLab/type technologies workshop, which also included a short visit by Marina Chaccur who was on holidays in Europe and came over to Reading. This week, after a short visit by Victor Gaultney we all rushed back to work on our typefaces as we had Gerry’s review on thursday. It went OK, but we stll have a lot of work ahead of us.

Abtee

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:44:00 +0000

This is a silly little project I put together last April and never got around to publish because of… lack of a logo. I’ve been making sketches every now and then but nothing really worked for me until this weekend when I hit something I was finally satisfied with, which you see above.

So what is abtee, anyway? I have been using Spreadshirt for a couple of years now to produce the odd t-shirt every now and then, but nothing really serious. Then one day I was fiddling with the weights of a typeface I was designing and it occurred to me that doing a t-shirt for each letter of the alphabet would have been a nightmare with warehousing, managing supplies, etc. and then I was reminded of Spreadshirt. So I talked about it over lunch with my family and we agreed the idea was silly. But!

The name abtee is even sillier: a-bi-ti means “clothing” in Italian (but to get there you have to pronounce it half in Italian and half in English). One could say it rhymes like a-b-c, which makes it appropriate for what we’re trying to do. Anyway, I’ve been sitting on this idea for far too long so there it is!

Flickering

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 15:13:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 11:40:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Sun, 30 Nov 2008 01:27:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 18:36:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 02:08:00 +0000

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

Arabic Workshop

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 20:29:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 09:29:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Sat, 25 Oct 2008 12:13:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 16:06:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 14:46:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 12:05:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 21:50:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 08:05:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 20:20:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 11:20:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 06:58:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Sat, 27 Sep 2008 06:28:00 +0000

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

Burn Before Reading

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 20:05:00 +0000

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

noreply@blogger.com (Antonio Cavedoni) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 12:24:00 +0000

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.