Flickering

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

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

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

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

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

Arabic Workshop

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

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.