{typography} – Page 52 – { feuilleton }

Susan Kare

A post for Ada Lovelace Day, “an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.”

Susan Kare was, and still is, a graphic designer specialising in user interface graphics. Facebook users may recognise her gift icons but her earlier work is even more familiar to Macintosh users since it was her job at Apple in 1983 to design the icons for the first Macintosh interface. Many of the original black & white images have been phased out or replaced by higher-resolution equivalents but some still remain, in particular the pointing hand, the stopwatch (which became an hourglass in Windows) and the Command symbol which was based on a map icon for Swedish camping grounds. She also designed some of the fonts used by the first Mac OS including Geneva—still a web standard—and Chicago which was the primary Mac font for many years. In a field overly-dominated by men, her work lies at the heart of technology we’re using today, right down to the Mac keyboard on which I type these words.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Folder icons

Soviet posters

“Lenin is dead but the Russian Communist Party lives on” (no date).

More typography and yet more Soviet poster art which seems perennially popular with graphic designers. Bold Constructivist designs like this example are part of the reason why: over 80 years old yet still striking. Type foundry P22 have a set of Constructivist fonts similar to the typeface used here. Poster tip via Coudal.

Sieg Heil Iconographers, title spread (2006).

I plundered the Soviet style in 2006 for the design of Jon Farmer’s Sieg Heil Iconographers for Savoy Books. The typeface this time was Jonathan Barnbrook’s contemporary design, Newspeak. Does the assertive bad taste of the book’s title undermine the Communist propaganda or do the Agitprop graphics ironically counterpoint the discussion of fascist history within? That’s left for the reader to decide.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Lenin Rising
• Dead Monuments
• Soviet ceramics of the 1920s
• Enormous structures II: Tatlin’s Tower

Periodic Table of Typefaces

Marvellous. Typefaces sorted by popularity according to surveys. Interesting for this Bodoni fan finding Bodoni as the first serif at no. 3. Some surprises too—is Univers really that popular?

Created by Squidspot. See the whole thing here. Via Metafilter.

Who designed Vertigo #6360 620?

Autobahn by Kraftwerk; Vertigo #6360 620.

Colin Buttimer was in touch last week to let me know he’d copied my Barney Bubbles post (with my permission) to his excellent new site, Hard Format, which is devoted to the art of music design. In the intro to that piece he repeats something he’d mentioned to me earlier, namely his belief that Barney Bubbles designed the UK release of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn album in 1974. I thought this unlikely at first but the more I’ve been thinking about it the more possible it seems. So here’s a quick run through the evidence in the hope that someone out there may have more information to either confirm or deny the theory.

Continue reading “Who designed Vertigo #6360 620?”

John Bickham’s Fables and other short poems

Or Fables and other short poems : collected from the most celebrated English authors : the whole curiously engrav’d for the practice & amusement of young gentlemen & ladies in the art of writing to give its full title, a children’s primer from 1731 and another free title available at the Internet Archive. John Bickham was one of the famous family of engravers among whom George the Elder is particularly celebrated for his own stunning penmanship in The Universal Penman (1740), a book which is still in print. The moral fables here are mostly single-page verse pieces with titles such as The Lady and the Wasp or The Spaniel and the Camelion. One short piece, On Liberty, is especially pertinent following the weekend when the Convention on Modern Liberty declared its mission to resist the rise of the Total Surveillance State.

Oh Liberty! thou Goddess heav’nly bright,
Profuse of bliss, and pregnant with delight;
Eternal pleasures in thy presence reign,
And smiling Plenty leads thy wanton train.
Eas’d of her Load, Subjection grows more light,
And Poverty looks chearful in thy Sight.
Thou mak’st the gloomy face of Nature gay,
Giv’st Beauty to the Sun, and pleasure to the Day.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
• The etching and engraving archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Letters and Lettering
• Studies in Pen Art
• Flourishes