A nice homage to vintage, thriller title sequences (or actually vintage, thriller trailers) is to be found in the video for Kanye West’s new track Paranoid featuring Rihanna. The video directed by Nabil Elderkin owes a lot to a LOT of references, but I guess that’s what homages are all about.
Lets count them, shall we! Start with Nosferatu, add a little Fallen Angel (thanks Art of the Title Sequence ), toss in some Sin City, and all those great ’30s-’50s sci-fi and horror thrillers. The story line is a little weak, but the typography, production design and referential, l0-fi styling is lovely. There’s been a trend in hip-hop videos in the past few year that likes to “visualize” the lyrics with on-screen typography. That stuff is usually pretty arbitrary, decorative and dull, so it’s refreshing to see it here, with an unexpected historical slant (as well as some relationship the theme of the tune… uh, I think). Not sure if Kanye “art directed” – apparently he often does.
A few weekends back, sitting in a cafe in Knightsbridge, I spotted this lovely logo across the street in the window of Glow, a local spa. Quite elaborately crafted, its “slinky” like shapes are really well realized. I wasn’t quite sure what a slinky had to do with a spa, but upon visiting their website, I realized it’s not slinky at all, but rather bulb filaments (that glow). Of course.
Though well before my time, I absolutely love the graphic tradition of pulp fiction novels. Apparently, they drew their nick-name from the cheap paper they were printed on, always intended to be low-cost, high-thrill, mass entertainment.
Spanning the 20’s to the 50’s in their pure, original form, their cover illustrations were as sensational as the stories inside , but I would argue that it was the cover typography that imbued much of the tension and thrill these covers seem to be charged with. The type wobbled and vibrated, exploded and arched, it was vibrant and colourful and aggressive. The choice of words didn’t hurt either – “Tension, Jolting, Amazing, Crime, Phantom, Death…”. EC (Entertainment Comics) was one of the leaders in this edgy fare (see above), who specialized in shocking, unexpected endings . EC would continue to push harder and harder (graphic in more ways than one) until censorship pressures forced them to finally shift their focus to humour comics instead. They then went on to create MAD Magazine, that has become an American icon - I read monthly as a kid.
Exciting and often sexy, the pulps’ subjects spanned every genre from crime to sci-fi, science to the occult, chilling accidents to freaks of nature, and the design, illustration and typography of their covers is pure, seductive, visual entertainment. Unlike many of its competitors, EC would proudly publicize its artists who were all widely respected at the time, and encouraged them to push the boundaries. The result is a body of graphic design work with amazingly unique, and high-impact lettering design. Time to head over to eBay… I’m inspired!
As a kid, my dad would bring me back a new Tintin album each time he went away on a business trip. I loved Tintin then, and I still do today, and now, as a professional designer, I have an even greater respect for the creator, Hergé (Georges Remi). Not only were the Tintin stories thrilling and transporting, but the covers alone (before I even opened the books) got my heart racing. That title type (probably hand lettered) was the epitome of ‘adventure type’ for me. Just looking at it, I knew this was going to be a good episode. “The Adventures of Tintin” – what could be more exciting? Then of course were the huge, lushly detailed visuals featuring the central image from each story, whether they be giant red rockets, or submarine-shaped sharks – they were/are all thrilling.
Inside, while lapping up the colourful pages, I was (we all were) exposed to the designed objects of the day, and the obsessive attention to detail Hergé and his artists paid to these designs, whether they be rockets, boats, planes, trains or cars. The amazing site Les autos de Tintin by François de Dardel, loving celebrates Hergé’s attention to car design. Amazingly, de Dardel actually identifies all of the vehicles (153 of them apparently) in each and every Tintin album/episode (see below).
And, because life sometimes elegantly connects the dots around us, featured there is an image of Tintin riding in a vintage London taxi cab (see below with dark frame around it). That taxi is from exactly the same era as an Austin London taxi in a documentary film I am working on called Alfred & Jakobine. If you’d like to know more about the film, please visit the official website www.alfredandjakobine-movie.com
It may be quite clear from a cursory review of my posts, that I am rather drawn to historical design and typography. While I am undeniably a creature of modern times, I just love old stuff. Old cars, old books, old art movements, and old type.
Well, I am certainly not alone, and while a curiosity has always been there among us designers, there is an interesting phenomenon at work at the moment – analog is becoming digital like never before – old is becoming new; vintage is vogue; forgotten is being remembered, and all in an unabashed celebration of “wear and tear” – the more visible clues of ‘non-modern-ness’ the better! Case in point is the wonderful collection of vintage block type from Oliver Weiss’ Walden Type Co. Not only have they curated a really fresh array of “real vintage” letter forms (fresh even relative to the wonderful collections that Dover has produced in their books for years and years – more recently with digital scans included), but their collections are very affordably priced. The Wild West Press collection (which the above specimens come from ) consists of 47 fonts and hundreds of little clip art pics, all for $49.95 USD.
Weiss explains the origins of Wild West Press collection here (from the introduction in the accompanying manual): To create this set of fonts, we have sifted through original material from the Library of Congress and a great number of other historical sources. Where ever possible,we identified the fonts used in each specimen and thus arrived at a short list of typefaces that printers appear to have favored most. We are pleased to make these fonts available for the first time in the context of printing in the Old West. As they are taken from original specimens they carry the chinks and dings of hard use, which should only add to their charm.
Well, I love them (of course), and though I only bought the collection about a week ago, I’ve already used them for the titles of a documentary I’m developing called Alfred & Jakobine (news to come!). Anyway, great work Walden Type Co. Keep it up, and thanks for your efforts and for remembering the forgotten. A small sampling from the 47 beautiful, scratched, uneven, worn fonts can be seen below.
One of those I-wish-I’d-thought-of-this-ideas! Lot of work! Over about 7 months (when he had free time between design projects) designer Rhett Dashwood searched miles and miles of aerial imagery from Google Maps (primarily over his home region of Victoria, Australia, in order to piece together a complete, aerial alphabet. Buildings, rock formations, hedge rows, roadways, anything… nice one!
As I dive deeper into 3D typographic modeling and animation (for my title design work), I am continuously experimenting (and what fun it is). Here’s a rather interesting new test I just created in Cinema 4D that shows the destructive effect wind has on all the faces (front, back and sides) of some 3D type – the surfaces of the letterforms quickly separate and become indecipherable, abstract ribbons, floating in the air, wrapping around each other. This is exploratory work for some titles I’m doing for a friend – the very talented cinematographer/director Rollo Hollins. Below is the fully rendered animation. Kinda reminds me of when the Millennium Falcon was floating away into space from the Star Destroyer, unnoticed, with all the metallic junk! Stay tuned for more experiments.
Gotta hand it to these guys. They have really filled a much needed niche. Physical, hand-made fonts (though many of theirs are actually beautifully executed 3D graphics – hand made in a different way) that make it a hell of a lot easier for all of us to create title designs out of clouds, smoke, ice, and even toast (!) than we could ever manage easily on our own. Estonian based Hand Made Font only established themselves in 2008, but they’ve obviously been busily at work building this comprehensive collection. They also do a lot of commissioned design/lettering work for magazines and advertising (it looks like the cloud and smoke fonts were both developed for the Slovenian travel board). The fonts are all jpgs rather than actual fonts for typesetting, so require a little more technical know-how to work with, but nothing more than the designer’s requisite knowledge of Photoshop. Amazing work.
I’ve always loved the entirely utilitarian, but accidentally beautiful, random graphic compositions that exist on airport runways and the asphalt roadways leading here and there. Lines and letters, numbers and lights, grays and whites, reds and yellows, shadows and skid marks. Isolated (and particularly in black and white) they become quite interesting, abstract typographic/graphic compositions. One day, I’d love to have free access to wander around an airport (not likely!) and take some carefully composed photos, or better yet, from a helicopter where the vantage point would allow even more interesting views of all the lines, numbers and lights.
I finally had my camera with me during a series of recent flights, and here are a few of my airport runway photographs.
This is incredible. Barack Obama’s administration has proposed a radical, and unprecedented idea in their ongoing commitment to environmental responsibility, and forward thinking. It is an addition to our modern, latin (English) alphabet. Named “tache”, it’s a merging of “t” and “h” to form a new character type called a “fusion diagraph”.
Research and predictive modeling conducted at Carnegie Mellon University over the past year has concluded that because the combination “th” occurs more than any other in the latin alphabet (primarily in English), the reduction of it’s double-character footprint to a single-character footprint, could save a staggering 1.21 billion newspaper pages per year in the US alone. This would translate to a 3% decrease in the cutting of domestic forests to produce that new newsprint in the same 12 month period.
Interestingly, this idea is not a new one, though it’s goals certainly are. The “th” combination goes back to the Middle Ages when a fused character existed called “thorn“.
At any rate, “tache’s” implications for computer keyboards, spell checkers & dictionaries, as well as school children’s learning of their ABCs, not to mention our adult eyes acceptance this typographic “new kid on the block” have yet to be fully explored, but I for one, am knocked out by this radical thinking, and am sure it is not the last to come from Obama’s clearly open-minded approach to leadership.
