The original TYPO kicks off tomorrow in Berlin and some of the San Francisco team is here to observe and get inspired for next year. If you can’t be here, don’t dismay, six talks will be livestreamed around the globe.

Stay tuned to Typotalks.com/Berlin to view:

Thursday, May 17

16:00 (7am PST) Daniel van der Velden

20:00 (11am PST) Lars Müller (In German)

Friday, May 18

16:00 (7am PST) Nat Hunter

20:00 (11am PST) Matthew Butterick

Saturday, May 19

11:00 (2am PST) Lupi Asensio, Martin Lorenz

19:00 (10am PST) Jessica Hische

The talks from Tina Roth Eisenberg, Joshua Davis and Mike Monteiro are now available at www.typotalks.com/video. The presentation from Khoi Vinh will be up shortly.

All other presentations reamain in the editing room and will be posted very soon to a secure page and only accessible only to attendees of TYPO San Francisco 2012. Attendees will receive login information to the email address used to register for the conference shortly. Thanks for your patience as we work diligently to get all the videos from the inaugural TYPO San Francisco online.

Photo Credit: Amber Gregory

Neville Brody doesn’t want you to think outside the box: it would appear he’d prefer you do something like tear it up, tape it back together, spray paint it, wear it as a hat, and then throw it out. Brody wants designers to decide what to do with their own boxes.

Since we’ve moved from a physical to digital space, Brody feels that experimentation has given way to an engineering approach. ”Facebook feels very much like a grown up version of AOL.” The world starts to look the same.

“Design should not be precious. We don’t want to make things to put in museums. If you use it too much, you should wear it out.” Brody points to New Deal, the typeface he designed for Michael Mann’s film “Public Enemy” (starring Johnny Depp as John Dillinger). The typeface was purposefully designed to have no shelf life, to never be reused or desired for reuse (contrast this with most film fonts that are bought, rather than created).

The way we arrive at these ideas—of sameness and permanence and thinking outside the box but inside a slightly bigger box—Brody partly attributes to the culture of design schools. He points to the Royal College of Art, where he teaches: students were telling him they hate graphic design, calling it “a manipulative thing to make people buy stuff.” They see it as a political thing that they don’t want to be fed, but have more control. ”I think art schools should be where new things happen…where new brains are formed.” Brody encourages students to create the courses themselves, to treat the school as a laboratory for new ideas that help fend off the trend of sameness.

With that in mind, Brody turns to the history of design, and typography in particular, as a method of building corporate. Traditionally, typography is seen as a way of manipulating thought without you even realizing it. Brody likes the idea of bucking that trend by designing things that force consciousness of design upon the viewer: “Make trouble, make think.” Brody decided to make a little of both with the Anti-Design Festival, reflecting on 25 years of London’s design culture, where a lot of things “didn’t get made.” ”If an idea didn’t look like it would make money,” Neville sighs, “it wasn’t pursued.” So he invited the public to contribute to the “organized chaos.” People would bring stuff in and take stuff home. There were no rules. It was constantly changing, had no order, and was pure joy.

Brody continues on this point with the example of FUSE, the quarterly design magazine last published in 1997 after an impressive 20 year run. It became a laboratory for explorations of design and type. Brody showcases examples of explorations in typography that threw off the shackles of legibility and language. The results could be compared to the familiar Wingdings, but that would be like juxtaposing a Debussy etude with the Alka-Seltzer jingle. The experiments are closer to art than design, in the sense that “design” has been co-opted by commercialism and art is the last bastion of creative exploration. Indeed, Brody contends that digital space closes the income gap: “Connect is what we should be doing, with society and other skill sets and disciplines.” A design community that is less insular, and more open to non-commercial pursuits, will elevate the craft beyond a mere profession so that designers can dictate the course of commerce, not the other way around.

“Bringing design back into a living space, that’s what I’m about,” he says. “That’s why I’m at the Royal College,” inspiring young designers to make trouble, make think.

—

Neville Brody is a difficult designer to summarize, and would appear he likes it that way. He is perhaps best known for his early album covers for Fetish Records, various type families, art direction of The Face and Arena magazines, and the foundation of Research Studios. He currently serves as an educator, making further reading on his work in digital spaces and print media an appropriate assignment.

posted by Cori Johnson

Photo Credit: Amber Gregory

Thomas Phinney is a type sleuth, font detective, and an all around Sherlock Holmes kind of guy when it comes to fonts. In his own words, “I’m just a font geek who knows a little about printing.”

So why does Thomas answer to the title Font Dectective? For starters, he was involved in the research and commentary on the disputed Bush national guard memos. Thomas is frequently consulted as an expert on several cases of allegedly forged documents, which is how he pulled a sizable crowd with grumbling stomachs to the screening room of the YCBA for his lunchtime talk on Friday.

He treated the audience with a few cases he’s in which he’s played type sleuth, particularly in the state of California. Here’s 2 of them.

Case #1: The Evil Stepmother:

Once upon a time, a nice man with a couple of kids married an evil woman with an evil daughter. The husband died and unfortunately he had no will which meant his wife would inherit ⅓ of his estate and his children would receive ⅔, but somehow the wife was able to swindle everything.

The children tried contesting this and finally, 7 years after husband had died, the evil stepmother finally produced a will that was dated 1983. Enter Thomas.

He began by looking at the font used in the will. It was written in Times New Roman but then he noticed that the print quality was just a little too good for something produced in 1983. After some study, he finally concluded that the document had been printed on an inkjet printer that wouldn’t have been available in 1983.

The conclusion: The evil stepmother was the mastermind behind the forged will and recieve help from her friend who typed the will and acted as a “witness”. The evil stepdaughter forged the signature on the document. Eventually, the man’s children got the money they deserved and they all lived happily ever after. Except for the stepdaughter and stepmother who fled prosecution and have been hiding ever since.

Case #2: The Quarterback Conundrum

Not too long ago (nor far away) there lived a man named “Bullet” Bob Hayes. Bob Hayes was a particularly speedy gold medal Olympic athlete and during his time was considered one of the world’s fastest men.

Eventually, Bob got tired of running all the time, so he switched to football and become a wide receiver for Dallas Cowboys. In 2002, Bob passed away and in 2004, there was an attempt to induct him into the Hall of Fame which failed, but another attempt in 2009 proved to more successful. Because Bob was obviously not available to read an acceptance speech, his stepsister read one for him. She claimed that Bob thought he may some day be inducted into the Football Hall of Fame and so he had written an acceptance letter before he died.

However, during the acceptance speech, a reporter caught a shot of the acceptance letter and questions began to rise. Could have this letter really been written in 1999 like his stepsister claimed?

The conclusion: This one’s easy. The acceptance letter was written in Calibri and Calibri didn’t make its debut until it replaced Times New Roman as the default font in Microsoft Office 2007. You do the math.

–

Thomas Phinney is guru of fonts and typography for Extensis, purveyors of the WebINK web font service, Suitcase Fusion and Universal Type Server. He has testified in court as an expert witness, and was twice quoted in the Washington Post regarding the forged memos concerning president Bush’s National Guard service. Thomas has an MS in printing from RIT, and an MBA from UC Berkeley. His typeface Hypatia Sans is an Adobe Original.

— posted by Brooke Francesi

Photo Credit: Amber Gregory

When Mike Monteiro and Erika Hall cofounded Mule Design, neither of them knew anything about the business of design—that is, how to sell it to and deal with clients. They made plenty of mistakes, so he’d like to tell you a few things to avoid in your career as a professional designer.

Mike remembers when he first came to San Francisco from Austin, he wanted to live a healthier lifestyle and stop driving a car and ride a bike. He hadn’t bought a bike in a couple decades, so when he walked into the bike shop he was overwhelmed by the choices. The bikes ranged from $300 to $5000 and he had no idea what type of bike was right for him. Thankfully, just as he was about to storm out in frustration, a super cute bike shop salesperson came up and offered to help him. She explained about all the different bikes, and guided Mike to the bike that was a right fit for what he was looking for. This, Monteiro says, is an example of empathy: something that designers are sorely lacking.

Don’t complain about your clients’ not understanding you something you failed to explain.

This disconnect is often a byproduct of the tendency of designers to be deeply immersed in the intricacies of their craft. When they arrive in client services, they are unaware that they’re expecting their clients to know just as much about design as they do. This would be like a doctor condescending to patients because they didn’t go to med school. (They even have a saying for this in the medical profession: bad bedside manner.) ”Put yourself in your client’s less stylish shoes,” Monteiro says, and get used to explaining things to them. “It’s part of your job.”

Eye-rolling is not a design skill; it’s passive-aggressive. Assert yourself.

A common complaint Monteiro hears from designers is that they aren’t included in the evaluation or decision-making processes. What they’re really saying is that they’re not invited to the meetings. Monteiro isn’t about to let them off the hook for this. “Eye-rolling is not a design skill. You need to assert yourself.” Ask to be included in meetings. If you contribute one positive thing at the meeting, he says, he guarantees that you will be invited to every meeting thereafter. Clients want you to be there, they just don’t know it because you aren’t telling them that you need to be there in order to do your work.

RFPs are a client’s way to tell you they’re scared.

(Author’s note: creative liberties were taken in painting this story as a fairy tale. Let it be clear: according to Mike, this actually happened.)

Once upon a time, there were Three Little Pitches from three agencies. They each presented to a client in an attempt to win the job:

1. The first little pitch was full of comps that the agency pulled out of thin air.
2. The second little pitch was more convincing, but when they were asked questions they disappeared into thin air.
3. The third little pitch, however, broke the rules. The agency arrived empty-handed. When the client asked to see an example of their work, the agency responded: “I don’t know your symptoms yet. How can I solve your problem when I don’t know what it is yet?”

Never work with someone you can’t argue with.

If you don’t know how to say no to your clients, you’re not doing your job right. Don’t let someone else dictate your process. Anyone can be a pixel-pushing monkey, but that’s not what they hired you for: they hired you for your process. If they think research is a waste of time, tell them that’s unacceptable and explain why. You need to be able to do your best work, and they need to respect how you go about doing it. And if they have a shitty idea, don’t agree to design it. Respectfully and matter-of-factly inform them that it’s a shitty idea and move forward. Living in fear of your clients is no way to live, let alone a way to run a business.

No one is born a good client. It’s your job to teach them.

Everything that goes wrong in your dealings with clients is your fault. No, really. When a wrench is thrown into the machinery, you have to figure out how you allowed that wrench to sneak in through the front door. Sure, we’re human: we make mistakes. But if you’re being pushed around, it’s your fault for letting yourself be pushed around. If your clients resist your decisions because they don’t understand them, it’s your fault for not explaining them properly. If clients are making unreasonable demands and constantly telling you to jump, you have obviously given them the impression that your response will be, “Sigh…how high this time?” You are the common denominator in your professional relationships. If you’re constantly dealing with “bad” clients, you’re picking the wrong ones.

Don’t despair, fair designer. There’s some good news: when everything is your fault, you have the power to fix it. You can start right now by getting back to work.

—

Mike Monteiro (or, if you’re brave, @Mike_FTW) has been yelling at designers to get their shit together for years. He finally codified this message in the now infamous “Fuck You, Pay Me” talk at San Francisco Creative Mornings. He co-hosts Let’s Make Mistakes, a podcast on the culture and business of design with Katie Gillum on the Mule Radio Network. He also wrote a book on the subject, Design Is A Job, which you should buy if you want your clients to take you seriously.

posted by Cori Johnson

New Bohemia Signs proprietor Damon Styer led a hands on workshop Friday morning teaching the technique of lettermaking using a quill brush. Instruction began with starting and finishing simple strokes, and then with practice, the construction of an all caps gothic alphabet.

After getting a feel for pulling the brush and making tight strokes, participants laid tracing paper over examples of the alphabets and got busy practicing. Here’s where the education truly begins, as hours of practice develop into the muscle memory necessary to produce consistent, controlled work.

Damon and his staff regularly open the doors of their shop on 9th Street here in San Francisco for similar beginner-level workshops in signpainting.

Written and Photographed by David Sudweeks

Photo Credit: Amber Gregory

A few years ago Yves Peters noticed a demand from people to know what typefaces are being used on movie posters. So he started blogging about it on the FontFeed blog.

When you start looking at movie posters all the time, you start noticing some pretty major trends. If the movie is a comedy, it will most likely include large, chubby red or blue type. If it’s a romantic comedy, the font will mostly likely be serif. Indie films? More than likely you can expect some sort of hand-rendered Helvetica or Gotham. But, Yves notes, all type aside, if there are two people laying in bed on the movie poster. You can almost be guaranteed there won’t be any action.

Another thing he noticed is that there is one typeface that defies any specific category. And that’s Trajan. He also kept hearing that using Trajan on a movie poster would make a movie Oscar material. Not being one to blindly accept a statement this bold, Yves decided to see if this was actually true.

After viewing a ridiculous number of thumbnails (16,089 to be exact) here’s what he found. Warning: this was not a scientific study.

Trajan was released in 1990. This meant he needed to filter through over 20 years of movie posters. This also meant he needed to set a few ground rules

1. Trajan was used for the original poster
2. Trajan has to be the main typeface
3. Each film only counts once

What he found?
There are over 400 movie posters in 20 years that use Trajan. Yves once again noticed a few trends.

• If a popular film uses Trajan on year, the use of Trajan explodes in the next year.
• In 1999 Adobe expanded the typeface. The use of Trajan in movie posters went up.
• In 2005 Trajan was bundled into a few programs. Again an explosion.

Recently, Trajan was expanded to more weights and a sans version. Yves estimates again we will see a boost in Trajan

So here’s the breakdown.
Trajan has defied genre and is being used in drama, romantic comedies and horror files. Brilliantly enough, the Oscars even decided to adopt Trajan.

However, in 2006 Gotham starting to popping up in posters – really popular ones. And in an even more brilliant move than before, the Oscars jumped on the bandwagon used Gotham as their primary font in marketing materials last year.

So the real question is, will using Trajan or Gotham on your movie poster actually get you an Oscar? Probably not.

–

Yves edits The FontFeed, a daily dispatch of recommended fonts, typography techniques, and inspirational examples of digital type at work in the real world; and Unzipped, his blog on the FontShop BeNeLux home page. He also is an accomplished drummer with British/American/Belgian pop/rock bands Troubleman and Rosa Luxe*. Yves’ talent for being able to identify most typefaces on sight is utterly useless in daily life.

— posted by Brooke Francesi

Photo Credit: Amber Gregory

First of all, I think you need to know that, by his own admission, Heath loves the word “verdant.” Because he likes green, growing things. In fact, as attendees of his session discovered, he seems to like vibrant, growing, dynamic things of all types. Especially when they involve community, creativity, and the ways people can nurture both by diving further into their neighborhoods, learning more about the people around them.

Heath also provided a wonderful definition of TYPO SF: it’s like Comic Con for design nerds: we are a passionate bunch of weirdos … even if we don’t wear costumes.

But to get to the point of his talk, Heath introduced us to the vision and evolution of The Bold Italic, the web and (now) print magazine where he works.

An Uncertain Media Landscape

The way the media pendulum swings is vital for Gannett (Heath’s employer), the second largest media company in the country. Recognizing the need to evolve in a rapidly transforming media landscape, they started a Design and Innovation Team to see how they could take advantage of the changes happening.

So they partnered with IDEO, and decided to explored the ways local media wasn’t meeting San Franciscans needs. These were their findings:

We want the story behind the story
People use insider information as social currency. In the SF Bay Area, we like to peek between the cracks in the window blinds to see what’s going on in there and beat our friends to the scoop. We want to know not just the drag queen’s name, but also what’s in her closet, where she’s from, what her favorite dessert is.

We want local media to serve as a sense maker, or curator
There’s so much going on, we want media to let us know not all of it, but what we should know about, what we want to know. We want entry to relatively closed systems, such as subcultures and scenes that are building the radically changed world around us.

We want the opportunity to participate and self-reflect
To meet this need, The Bold Italic team decided to attempt to Invert the paradigmatic top-down process of media, providing readers with opportunities not just to learn, but also for action and interaction.

People want elegantly designed information
San Francisco is a design capital, and it’s populated by a bunch of fantastic weirdos. And that makes both the design of information and all the weird stuff about our local history and culture vital to the presentation.

Looking at the locals

After deciding what the people where looking for, The Bold Italic team decided to look at how to categorize the people with those needs. They established three basic groups:

Kin: this is basically everybody; all the social groups out there.

Provocateurs: the ones driving their Kin to check out unusual things, making these people an obvious target for Heath’s team.

Merchants: San Francisco’s hyper-localized mercantile environment makes the merchants as important to address as the Kin.

Hence, The Bold Italic

The Bold Italic intends to give the city a voice; locals design and write the stories, and the articles’ audiences vary from general to very specific subcultures.

Then they decided to set several standards for the presentation of content:

The first gamble: One image above the fold. The Bold Italic team decided to invert the standard webzine model. Instead of focusing on lots of little things every day, they decided to focus on just one idea, and doing it very well. The challenge then becomes how to bring the story to life in a way that doesn’t drive people away, that it becomes too weird or focused to address a larger audience.

For headlines, they selected Knockout, and they’ve found ways to make it express everything from deciding on what it means to like in San Francisco to presenting a story on San Francisco’s pornographic history.

The writing should be first-person and uncensored, for example: “Living in San Francisco means hearing your neighbors fuck.” On first reading a story should seem so familiar that it seems addressed to you, even if it’s all about a life that’s nothing like your own.

Build on a three-column grid.

End all stories with a how-to, a guide for readers to take this content further and experience more of their city.

And, the most vital rule: The Bold Italic can break its own rules. Simple constraints can lead to infinite variation and creative solutions.

The overriding challenge: creating flow. Making sure that each day of publication could be presented in a unique way that addressed the story at its heart without throwing readers off. And that, in the end, is what defines the brand.

Microhoods

Eventually The Bold Italic team noted that story pitches tended to come from what they called “microhoods,” miniature neighborhoods within neighborhoods. So they decided to throw parties in each microhood they identified. The parties are led up to with features on the area that highlight players in the locale, introducing people to the spirit of the area. And then they throw a 3- or 4-block block party.

Area merchants provide the food and drink, local musicians play and artists/photographers display their work. This creates the opportunity for the reader to not only learn about, but actually dive right into the spirit of the place.

Next challenge: create a print magazine

Tell familiar stories in unusual ways: for instance, a fashion story told through the eyes of icons in other fields, such as art, publishing, education, etc.

After a few of these microhood parties, the team realized that people wanted something tangible to take home with them, something to grasp about the publication that brought them out for a great experience.

And hence, The Bold Italic. Issue three’s files ship to the printer Monday. Look forward to it.

Written by John Moore Williams

Morag Myerscough talked about many things today. Among these a common point that she came back to was her various obsessions. These obsessions are important because they are what ended up being the definitions of her own style. Which when you think about it makes sense. She showed a slide of various designs using tomatoes, and preceded to say that at one time she had a massive obsession with tomatoes. Then moving on there was an obsession with chairs. During this time she collected chairs, and over time had acquired 123 chairs in total. She also created the “Nonsense stools” where she hand stenciled phrases on stools. Later she created another set of stools for a railcar café in the UK, and then another set for London College of Communications.

She also talks about her obsession with color (which I absolutely share!). This obsession is in fact so large that it is shown in everything that she produces. She actually did a series of suitcase photos using her own clothes. In the photos her clothes are rolled and placed orderly inside the suitcases. In doing this she said that she realized the similarities between her wardrobe palate and the colors in the pieces and installments she was producing.

Other Obsessions she talks about are

• Neon Signs
• Pasting cheap paper on the floor (which immediately made me want to do the same, if I didn’t have carpeting.)
• Putting patterns on floors
• Patterns in general
• Spraying and painting on wood

A concept that she had talked about which I loved is what she called Future Vintage. It was the idea of taking cues and inspiration from previous decades that (dare I say it) you may be obsessed with, and using that as a reference without actually replicating it. It’s how you can design something that has a sixties kind of feeling without actually looking like it came straight out of the sixties. It’s learning to take the things you like best about a certain period of time and/or place and making it a modern piece.

Though I focused on obsessions Myerscough’s talk this afternoon was not titled Obsessions. Her presentation today was called “Knowing me, Knowing You”, and as she described, to her it meant connecting with people. What a better way to connect with people than to put yourself completely out there and not just admit your obsessions, but, as she did, take your obsessions and just go with it. Your obsessions at their rawest are just who you are, so the best way to show them seems to be just to embrace them as Morag Myerscough has done, and without a doubt, will continue to do.

-Ashley Hampton

Photo courtesy of Michael B. Johnson

Michael Johnson set up his presentation today by giving us an outline of what he was going to be talking about. Going from a brief history and overall philosophy of PIXAR to how they work and function as a studio. He delves into how PIXAR started as a spin off of Lucas Film, and eventually merging with Disney. The company of PIXAR itself is “all about casting” (as he said). The most important part of PIXAR is the group of people working for them. Michael Johnson described PIXAR as “art as team sport”, it is the ultimate in collaborative art. With that many creative people on a project the type of culture that begins to develop is a “best idea wins” kind of culture. This is a great strategy because it drives the creative force to only get better as the company grows older and gets bigger. As John Lasseter said “quality is the best business plan”, and it’s a plan that has seemed to work well for PIXAR since the first Toy Story in 1995.

Going into the process of making a movie Michael Johnson broke it down into four basic steps.

• Make a Believable world
• Create a character that is believable in that world
• Create a story
• Repeat until done

It was at the last bullet that he had the whole room laughing. Because very rarely do you ever present a project for the first time and it’s perfect, exactly how they want, absolutely nothing needs to be changed. A lot of times even, you have to start over completely. But that is just really in the nature of being in commercial art.

Another interesting aspect to Michael Johnson’s presentation was when he talked about the process of creating the art style. When developing the scenes and choosing the different color schemes they get boiled down to color strips of the colors being used in each scene, they called these strips of color “color-scripts”. The interesting thing is that when color is chosen so carefully, as it is at PIXAR, just looking at all of the color strips from a movie together just can get a sense of how the story progresses over time. You obviously don’t get any detail, but with color you can feel the general emotion in the movie, which I feel is much more important.

Though we would like to think that making a movie is easy, it was made clear to us today that it is not. That is not to say that it can’t be fun. A reoccurring theme in the conference is that if you don’t have fun with what you do, (even if its “hard fun”) then you should find something that you do have fun doing. Work at a job where you actually want to go into the office (or wherever), in the morning and you will have more of a chance to succeed at what you do.