What started you being interested in typefaces?

[Member zen…]

This topic was imported from the Typophile platform

As a kid and teenager in the 60s and 70s, I went to a gothic architecture church that made the church bulletin using what today is a Blackletter typeface called "Linotext". That got me hooked :) :) back then the church printed the bulletins on their own small typesetting machine...Looking back i wish I had a look at that machine....I just remember being told that they were made there. That church no longer makes that style of bulletin. The very top of the cover of the bulletin with the church's name, was a Blackletter type that is different than Linotext is now for the first letter of each word of the church's name, but the rest of the bulletin used Linotext. For an image of the church bulletin go to....
http://www.flickr.com/photos/zeno3333333/5736579584/sizes/l/in/photostream/

[Member hra…]

That our* C64 could, but didn't, do Armenian.

* My older brother was instrumental.

hhp

[Member dez…]

Zeno,
I grew up in Pittsburgh and lived there from 1944 through 1976. I passed that building many times.

[Member zen…]

dezcom,cool...I was in Penn Hills....Too bad their bulletin is just plain now, nothing special at all.

[Member dez…]

Zeno,
I grew up on the North Side and later lived in Squirrel Hill.

Probably there was a parishioner in that church who was a printer. After he died, no body knew how to do the work.

[Member 5st…]

Squirrel Hill - really?? A hill named after a furry rodent? Let me guess, peanut butter was the 'currency' of choice???

n.

[Member dez…]

Actually, bagels were the better choice.

[Member Té…]

Not cinnamon rolls? Oh, well... I guess it's just us heathen Norse types that like cinnamon.

Hennyway, I think it was a pack of URW faces that came with a now-forgotten app; a magazine freebie, as I recall. I had recently bought a Windows box and, IIRC, Lotus Ami Pro.

[Member Pub…]

My high school newspaper sent our typewritten copy to a printer to be typeset (on the Linotype, I assume). As a reporter and features editor, I had to learn copyfitting, and how to spec headline type. Around the same time I bought some sheets of transfer lettering I found in a hobby shop and had some fun fooling around with them (Hellenic Wide was a favorite). But those were just gateway drugs, making me all too susceptible when I went to Cornell and took a class with Prof. Peter Kahn, who had a little workshop tucked away in Uris Library, with a Vandercook and some cases of type. I did a very little bit of very bad letterpress printing, but I had the typography bug for life.

[Member Cha…]

Sign Painting!

[Member zen…]

Dezcom....Each Sunday after we left that church in downtown Pittsburgh, we would go to a bagel shop on Murray Av in Squirrel Hill called "Bagel Land"....I hear it's gone now....They were sooo good!

[Member Joh…]

Bagel shmagel. I have the classic bagel-cutting scar on my left hand, as pointed out to me by a Jewish friend, but in fact I got it while cutting an avocado: I'd just sharpened my knife, and it went straight through the big seed and into my hand.

[Member eli…]

Wow. If I ever need a kitchen knife I'll borrow yours, John. I'll go somewhere else for guacamole though.

[Member hra…]

You should see his butifarra negra recipe.

hhp

[Member dez…]

Zeno,
The official name was "New York Bagel land" and it made the finest water bagels this side of NYC. I used to go there early on Sunday morning and get them hot. I lived 3 blocks down Murray so they were still hot when I got home. Now they are gone and so are all the other dozen independent bagel places there. Now, only the chains are there.

[Member Mar…]

I can remember noticing the type in the schoolbooks (Century Schoolbook) when I was learning to read and on alphabet cards (seems like it was Futura in my memory).

[Member Max…]

I think that could have been Bannikova Roman, used for the headlines in… Novgorodskaya Pravda.

And for sure that was Goudy Old Style. I noticed how beautiful the title of an American art book looked. It was Masterpieces of Painting from the National Gallery of Art (Huntingdon Cairns, John Walker, ed. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1944).

Later I learned that the typeface that caught my eye was Goudy Old Style, created by an American designer Frederic W. Goudy, and much later that the book was among the winners of the Fifty Books of the Year competition held annually by AIGA.

I tried to copy those letterforms, as closely as I was able to. I even ruined the jacket of that book by tracing the cap- and the baselines, and marking the horizontal boundaries of the letters.

The year was, probably, 1958.

Now back to the main subject. You know that H&H Bagels, New York’s best bagel bakery, is no more?!

[Member dez…]

NO!!! Maxim, say it isn't so!

[Member zen…]

dezcom, after church we would get 2 dozen from "New York Bagel Land" and before we got home to Penn Hills, the 5 of us ate them all...I loved the salt ones...

[Member zen…]

PS...we usually got salt, onion, and egg....

[Member zen…]

....We would drop my mom off in front of the bagel store, then drive around the streets some and come back to see if she was waiting outside the store bagels in hand...we always drove past a huge synagogue near there that back then had this huge banner up front saying "Save Soviet Jewry"....dezcom, if you say you also remember that big sign in front of the synagogue, I swear I will be hearing the music "It's a small world" all day LOL

[Member dez…]

Yes, I do remember that sign! I always expected it to be saying Jewelry :-)

[Member zen…]

Too funny....
When I was 9 and first started using that church bulletin with the Blackletter type in it, where it said "Prayer" I at first thought it said "Dranger" LOL....

[Member Rya…]

I honestly don't remember what got me started. I know I knew that a person could make a 'font' quite early in life. Some friends of mine were taking a class on it in a vo-tech class in highschool. (in the US a vo-tech class is a class about something highly technical--car repair, etc. Most of the time there is only one place per county where you can get this training, and the students would have to leave their high school and travel to this place, which is the main reason why a lot of people liked to take the classes) So I was about 14 when I found out that it was possible for someone to make a font, but I never really took any interest in it. 20 years later I made my first typeface.

I don't know what made me want to get into it, but I can tell you sometimes I wish I never did. Type design is fiendishly hard. Probably because it looks so simple. Sometimes I get really sick of it, like, literally sick to my stomach. And what's worse is that there is no escape. We are surrounded by text everywhere, all day. The only place you could go to get away from it would be somewhere out in nature, far away from humanity. If I was a landscape painter, and grew sick of seeing landscapes, I could just hold up in my apartment. If I was a portrait painter, I could stay home, keep the TV off, and not talk to anybody. However as a type designer there really is no escape.

Moreover I really do think Spiekermann was right. It is a disease. An incurable disease. No matter how sick of it I get, or how frustrated, I come back to it shortly. I'm a fairly creative person. I have written over 12 hours of music, from classical to rock to hip hop to sound collage. I'm a graphic designer. I have acted in plays, and made short films. I have tried my hand at oil painting. I have written hundreds of pages of stories and essays, and won awards for it. I have written hundreds of poems and done the stand up spoken word thing. I have written tens of thousands of lines of computer code. I cut people's hair, men's and women's... the list goes on... But none of it, not one other part of it, has such a strong hold on me as type design. I imagine its what taking heroin must be like. Once you get a taste you're hooked for life. I believe this is because such small changes can make such a huge effect. Moving a node by one em, or a control arm by one em, can make a huge difference, and all it takes is one click of an arrow key, whereas with anything else, making changes requires a lot more work, and may not even be noticed. I sit and I look at my type in fontlab, and it's so easy to see, "oh, this part is a little too thick." click. "Oh look at this other part, it needs this." click. The ease of changing it all and the huge effects such easy and small changes can have is incredibly addictive. The perfect typeface is only one small click away, and then just one more click, and then just one more click, and then just one more click.....

[Member Cha…]

Nothing better than getting paid to do what you love!