The Printing

Here's the part many have been waiting for.

All the research, history, design...What about the goods?

Democracy Spoken Here is a type art piece using a group of phrases from famous quotes of people from American history. They spoke of a true democracy, where every person really does count--regardless of their color, gender, race, belief--and now, very significantly, identification.

Whoa! Not so fast with those facts!

With the advent of what I call mutable media, we're stuck in a perpetual 1984: a recombinant jumble of events kluged into "alternative facts" of the day.
Proof of events is refuted because the once-unrefutable truth beheld by the cold eye of the photograph can now be manipulated to "delegitimize a president".

Fully aware of and capitalizing on the lack of digital savvy many have, the current administration has painted a picture of itself as a technological underdog at the mercy of those who attempt to deliver the facts. Calling reality into question seems to always have been America's real pastime.

Which is why print media remains so significant, even as huge printing plants fade as a romantic memory and consolidates into corrals of brokers. There's a wall to scale here: I wrote a few weeks ago that a nice portion of NYC earned its living in the print shops on Canal Street--and that erosion of jobs started in the early 1990's with the final and decisive blow to it in 2008 with the event of the tiny portable computer--the phone. What could take its place?

IT is one consideration. Still predominantly male, a quick certification gets you a job hooking people up to their ethernet ports. Some ascend the sales and design ladder, depending on the attitude toward innovation (read: education). So, is that where the meat-and-potatoes crowd went?

OK, no more snide remarks. I enjoy a good burger once or twice a year myself.

The idea behind Democracy Spoken Here is a resurrection of the art and craft of printing while resurrecting the art and craft of rebellion. A few words in black ink on a white piece of paper, printed just enough times to classify it as evidence go a long way to remind people that differences among people do not signify inferiority or failure.

We take for granted that many of the struggles of the marginalized have given us what we treasure today--starting with something as simple as the eight-hour work day.

What's under the lens here is authenticity. A few words might seem fairly straightforward to execute as genuine. Designing the typography and selecting the finest print medium that reflects their times is, though an art form, merely mechanical. The words are what stand as a testament to truthfulness and accuracy that we so cherish in this country, and which is so imperiled at this time.

Printing--Conversation II

The first known cover of
my high school mag-
azine. When the new
building got rid of its dome,
name of the magazine changed
to DOME.

In high school, I became art editor of my school's magazine, DOME in my sophomore year. Although my public high school wasn't much to talk about, and still maintains its mediocre status in NYC's DOE roster, it came from the grand tradition of having both a monthly newspaper and a twice-yearly magazine.

Both publications had their own offices and DOMINO, the school newspaper, talked about pertinent events like school sports, academic achievements and the occasional music review (of which my brother wrote a few) while DOME was the art and literary magazine and featured the more fine art side of the school.

And, both were printed in their own representative style: DOMINO was black ink on newsprint, and DOME was black ink on coated paper stock with a 2-color Kromekote cover. Kromekote is a beautiful white-clay-coated paper used for offset--and now digital--printing. Sadly, it yellows and is not archival, but the surface is smooth as glass and lends itself well to hand lettering destined for print reproduction.

Designing the layout of the magazine was also my entry into print production, since every aspect of the magazine had to be handled by the students--all the way to the doorstep of the printer. We even had an advertising and budget staff--with some very tenacious individuals--one of whom sells TV ad time for the Super Bowl to this day. Just about everyone else on my staff entered the magazine art, design or writing industry one way or another. I spent most of my education years longing to become an art director or photographer for magazines. That's how intoxicating magazine life can be and sadly,  careers in it are often for the very affluent.

Which is to say, no one with a trust fund was ever found working in a press room.

The print-on-demand kiosk at
MoMA. No longer do pillars
of unsold catalogs linger at
their bookstore. Not a sheet
wasted.

I loved printing and publishing; ink on paper was the way to express everything from Happy Birthday to an incite to riot. I devoured everything I could find about printed materials: the wonderful Constructivist movie posters, magazines from the 1950s forward, the giant movie posters wheat-pasted in the subways--yes, they were offset printed as late as 1998. I just wasn't wild about printed illustrated books. That permanence didn't resonate with me, even though my first job out of art school was to work as an assistant in the Studio Books division at Viking Press.

I believed--as I do now--the print medium, is meant for immediate consumption; immediately disposed of the next day. Its preservation in an archive is perfectly acceptable and necessary; however its manufacture to a more permanent intent makes books seem pretentious and outdated as they come off the press, even before they're bound.

That's why I love the museum catalog digitally printed on demand from a kiosk. But, alas, it's also a symptom of a developing American disease: Fact Amnesia.

We tend to forget anything we've said or done by the next news cycle, and pin its reporting on the dreaded media.

A permutation of American Exceptionalism? Ask Vladimir Putin--or as our new president would say: I don't know, you tell me.

Printing --Conversation I

Most of my friends' dads were printers, and their jobs were safeguarded by the unions. They went to work on the A train, and stood in the noise, dirt and smell of the giant presses that sat in hulking manufacturing buildings in what are now the tonier sides of town: DUMBO, Soho and Tribeca.

This was the set I had; I eventually
stored the letters in a jar; discarding
composing rods. 

When the "Negroes" came, they moved into areas in and around downtown Brooklyn through to East New York, disrupting the "safety" of the long ride on the A. Some came from the South, and others, "The Islands" (the Caribbean), starting a shift: the printing industry gradually changed from white pressmen to black ones; and as the production sphere turned digital, IT and production became more diverse, too. What's interesting is that middle and upper management in the print industry remained overwhelmingly working class white in New York, and, as I'd discover many years later--in 2000!--in the Midwest also.

None of this affected me at the time. We were the second "Latins" on the block (my godmother and her family were the first). And, our was landlord "forgiven" for renting to us because--I think--my mom was an Italian national and we were light-skinned, though we had other discrimination issues to deal with.

Now this would have been nice to own.
Note the R and Q. Not entirely Clarendon.

However, most significantly, my parents had never experienced the sense of security--the cradle-to-coffin guarantee of a job, house and pension--that the white working class had in my Queens neighborhood. Partly because we were immigrants and partly because my parents had experienced WWII where all economies were upended, we had an inner sense that we would always have to create the padding to let us land on our feet. We never had anything to take for granted, and that was OK. It meant that education was everything, and I believe that's why, quite often, immigrants send their kids to school.

Back to how I was exposed to printing.

My print exposure constantly developed in many different environments. My dad, not at all a printer, loved print medium. He would sit down with me and show me, through a magnifying glass, how the different colors of the Sunday comics were made up of dots of four colors, and how the tightly placed "rosettes" created the illusion of the color photographs on the covers of LIFE, Vogue and Ms. magazines.

This looks closest to a Clarendon font. Look at the
Q and R.  It appears to be condensed, however.

But the real magic came when he bought me my first rubber print set. There were animals and letter stamps; I don't know how my tiny fingers could be so dextrous to handle the square letters, but they were. I think if I look for a set I'll find it; I'll post an updated image.

What's fun to note is that I added text to my drawings (and later, in art school, silkscreens) with that same rubber set. The images I've found around the Internet show some sets as well as others with wood handles. The font is of the Clarendon inspiration, but alas, the give-away is the R and the Q. I did find one with a version of Clarendon, included here.

The SONY Logo, animated

In the last post, I wrote about the static SONY logo, which gives the eye plenty of time to tear it apart visually. When it's animated, it takes on a different life, with music, a voice over and other effects pushing the type back a few steps.

By far the most elegant is the current animated logo, a mere 2 seconds long:

A second, eight seconds long, two of which are in darkness and six of those in silence, the logo appears from the sunrise and ignites with the sound of a single piano key.

The logo for SONY pictures is also nice, though I'm not wild about the parting of the clouds in the beginning. The prism effect with a man's voice whispering "Sony" saves it for me. 

The one below has the same visuals, however, at the end, there is no voice, but some additional words appear: Pictures (in the regular, not bold Clarendon) HOME (Bold expanded) ENTERTAINMENT (Bold condensed). A little too much for my taste, but it runs quick. 

Here, Clarendon goes from the expanded to the regular in various representations. The animated graphic goes from a three-dimensional metallic sculpture to a flattened piece of typography. An underline animates in different presentations as well. 

Throughout it all, the font keeps its strong character while looking gently aloof and modern. 

The SONY Logo

The Sony Logo is set in Clarendon.

I always thought SONY was a Japanese word, but it's not. The company name was originally Totsuko Products when it was formed in 1955 (according to the website SONY Insider) and changed its name to Sony Corporation three years later.

  
Sony was the first Japanese company neon sign to show its logo in an upmarket area of Hong Kong; designer Yasuo Kuroki had modified the logo which was displayed in ads for Sony’s miniature televisions. The logo had slab serifs that looked something like Clarendon, but Kuroki's final design in 1972 is the one that's still in use today. It has less radical thicks and thins. 

In my opinion, the S and the O could use just a little kerning; perhaps it's the screen rendering that makes it look just a little too far apart. The sunrise version is quite elegant and is employed fully in the animated version for motion picture, which I talk about in the next post.
Ironically, the company had an international call for entries in the early 1980's to redesign the logo. After reviewing the thousands that came in, three were chosen, awarded with a thank-you, and the logo was kept to its original (PTL!)

Clarendon in the US

Back to the previous post: Why a type art piece and why now?

This election ripped some nasty scabs off a lot of gaping wounds. Journalists and artists got trolled mercilessly and shamefully. It became OK to talk about--well, you know. It's been pored over by everyone--and really, there's no one who hasn't groveled. Where are your scruples, Niki Haley?

But it goes back way before this, way back. This election has been in the making for 50, maybe 150 years. That's where it all began, and that's the reason why Clarendon is in the picture.

In the 1830's, a bunch of currents were sweeping the US, floating over from northern Europe, notably Britain. The Second Great Awakening. As ominous as the words sound, they were well-meaning. What they festered into was evident three weeks ago.

Left and detail above: A theatre poster from 1872. Note the thick but rounded
bracketed serif, a modification from the original British Clarendon. 

Around the 1830's the first winds of abolition started to pick up. They had been evident at the time of the Revolutionary War, but lay dormant as the US slapped together the Bill of Rights, the laws of Congress and the Star Spangled Banner. We settled into a country sharply divided by attitudes of City folks and Country folks, yet, as one of the most literate countries in the world at the time, we were in a position to make up our minds about a lot of things simply because we could read about them.

Tooling around the LOC website for 19th century graphics, I found the poster above, condemning the sale and keeping of slave in the District of Columbia. It was published in 1836 by the American Anti-Slavery Society, based in New York.

The Anti-Slavery poster, seems to be one of the early presentations of a Clarendon-style typeface: notice the bracket serif and the cross bar on the capital E, which differs from the Egyptian bold face regarded as Clarendon's predecessor.

Why a type art piece and why now?

Let's face it, this was a painful election. All sixteen months of it.

Starting with the 19--count'em--19--Republicans that had a go at the Seat of Power to Hillary and Bernie duking it out as the DNC sabotaged their way into the hearts of Wikileaks.

You can probably guess who I wanted for prez, but all in all, I was disappointed about the two finalists because they were such old fogies. Both of them. Not at all ageist, I had and still have problems with people running for office when they have an eye on the golf course (no smirks here; and, O plays a lot of golf. I just see golf as the last step before pull-ups and assisted living).

From the Fann Street Foundry Type Specimen Book.

That was one--of many--problems I had with RWR and his minion, 41. I think we need younger candidates; optimistic forward thinkers who are willing to chance and change it all. We need some disruption!

Well, that's what the electorate said; but they voted for the most establishment coot walking the planet. What could be more establishment than a billionaire daddy's boy from Queens?

Back to the type art piece.

I started it before the election. Really. I started it anticipating a hostile congress obstructing the plans and proposals of yet another president for eight years and I questioned why our democracy was being flung from a car window--from the get-go.

DEMOCRACY SPOKEN HERE responds to the voice of people who are marginalized and disenfranchised because of their gender, color or beliefs. It's a series of type treatments of quotes by Americans who were truly on the courageous edge and speak to the struggle of their journey.