KABK — Colin M. Ford, Designer

Typenotes: Summer reading for incoming MATD students

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 16:53:00 -0400

Typenotes: Summer reading for incoming MATD students :

These resources would be good for the incoming t]m students as well… and pretty much anyone ever.

LettError Type and Typography: ToolSpace

Sun, 05 Jun 2011 11:16:00 -0400

LettError Type and Typography: ToolSpace:

This is an article written by Jan Middendorp for a LettError monograph published in 2000. It is ostensibly about Just and Erik, but on the whole I think it represents what I have learned in this past year: make your own tools, don’t let your tools make your design.

Tools can do amazing things—they can create perfection every time. As one of the section titles says, “A hammer can do what a hand can’t”. We need tools, and good tools are built on the ideas of other tools; progress on top of progress. If it didn’t exist so, every time I wanted to write a blog post I would have to invent fire all over again.

I’ve learned that we can’t let our ideas be constrained by our tools, however. Every time I hear of someone opening up Illustrator “just to get some ideas down” I get a shiver now. I get similar shivers when I hear people only using the tools inside of FontLab, or the macros others have written. I get shivers every time I read the desperate pleas of graphic designers on blogs and mailing lists imploring, “Please, Adobe… Maybe in CS6 you could include this…?” I was once like that, and now I know I was locked in a box.

Use those tools, yes, but don’t make them your crutch. I believe that everyone using a computer—our finest tool to date—should not take anything on its face. If something made by someone else is not working for you, hack it or write it yourself. If you find yourself wasting time with a repeatable task, invest the time now to automate it instead of wasting your entire life doing it over and over again.

Most importantly of all, the computer cannot give you ideas like a hammer cannot tell you how to build a house. In the article Middendorp warns of letting the “toolspace” become bigger than the “ideaspace”. Always maintain a large ideaspace, and then modify or make your tools to fit that space, enabling you to make your ideaspace even larger.

Thanks to Gustavo Ferreira (@hipertipo) for reminding me of this article.

One of the things about The Netherlands is that they like to eat...

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 19:20:00 -0400

One of the things about The Netherlands is that they like to eat their letters here. Pictured is citrus-flavored sugar sprinkles for desserts. I’m going to take a lifetime supply of these back to the US.

Martina Flor, Alumna of last year’s t]m, took this photo...

Mon, 23 May 2011 15:27:00 -0400

Martina Flor, Alumna of last year’s t]m, took this photo of me at Typo Berlin.

What a fun time we had! We had lots of crits, relaxed a bit, but now we’re in the home stretch! Oh boy…

Our awesome classmate Florian just had a wonderful interview...

Mon, 09 May 2011 09:04:00 -0400

Our awesome classmate Florian just had a wonderful interview posted on Fontanel, a dutch design blog. Congrats, Florian! (via Fontanel)

I’ve updated my website’s “desktop” to...

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 10:26:34 -0400

I’ve updated my website’s “desktop” to reflect my current working situation. My deck, afternoon sunshine, a glass of homemade iced tea, the Haagse Bos in the background, and lots of glyphs to fill in on my typeface.

Type and Media Class of 1920

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 15:03:00 -0400

Not really, of course. Though awesome photos of some yet-unknown lettering class, probably in England. Thanks to the blog Old Chum. ~~I’ll update if I find the source.~~

Edit: Old Chum says: “Signwritten Art by A.J. Lewery. This photo is from Laird Art School 1955”. So I was only 25 years off!

Home sweet home… We have less than 100 days left in our...

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 15:30:35 -0400

Home sweet home…

We have less than 100 days left in our program. It’s starting to get warmer, but not so warm that you can go outside without a coat just yet. The tulips should be coming out any week now. Holland is starting to break free from the cold and gloom that we had during the winter, though I don’t get so see much of it because I’m usually inside working. If my apartment didn’t have a big window I would unfortunately not get to see much of it at all.

This coming week we have a lot of fun things planned: three days of Miguel Sousa, topped with a visit from some Reading students and a visit to Enschedé.

Just wanted to give everyone an update!

We're Back again!

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 19:41:00 -0500

Sorry for the Radio silence, everybody, we had a busy past couple of weeks followed by a relaxing week of vacation. I’ll start from the beginning:

We finally finished our Paul van der Laan revival projects. I was extremely proud of everyone in our class on the high quality of all our revivals. Many added a bold, an italic/oblique, or both to the assignment. I struggled a little bit in the beginning to decide what direction to take so I don’t have such amazing things, but I am grateful for the experience never the less.

Here is an issuu version of the specimen/report.

It’s named Planegg after the original book that I found it in. Planegg is a small German town, and the book is a very Art Nouveau play about the town and nature (as far as I can tell). The entire book is typeset in a typeface by Peter Behrens named Behrens-Schrift, who designed his typeface in 1902 to be a sort of organic amalgam between Fraktur and Antiqua scripts. Paul asked me kindly not to set my entire book in Planegg, so the text is one of my favorite sans serifs, Whitney by H&FJ.

After that, we had a very exciting event with Typeradio and Indra’s Saarbrücken students. The Saarbrücken students were given 12 typefaces designed by 12 Dutch typeface designers (most of them being our teachers) to create sound pieces of, and the sound pieces in turn were given to us for us to create typefaces from, not knowing the original typeface. Some of them were very hard to pin down. Thankfully, Marina brought her camera to the event, so head on over to the Flickr group to get a good look.

Immediately afterward, Katie and I left for Paris and London (4 days in each) and we had a wonderful time. (We unfortunately don’t have so many together because as it often goes, one of us would be taking a photo of the other).

After we returned to Holland we made a small afternoon trip to Utrecht to see the Dick Bruna Huis and the Rietveld Schröderhuis, both taken care of by the Centraal Museum of Utrecht. Dick Bruna is the creator of Miffy (Nijntje in The Netherlands) and friends, as well as a very nice graphic designer. The Rietveld Schröderhuis, as you might remember from your Art History textbooks, is (probably) the world’s only pure example of De Stijl architecture.

From here on out, class-wise, it is all in for our thesis. I’m building a blog to to take care of only thesis research, so I will share a link to that when it is ready. We’re all going to be terribly busy until July; I believe there is only around 116 more days left.

When did Type & Media get the abbreviation "T]M" and why?

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 17:33:00 -0500

This is probably one of the main questions we get as members of this program. As I understand it, the answer lies in our professors’ generation.

A little background: most people who know about t]m is that it began as a program started by Gerrit Noordzij. In the 1960s he began to teach at KABK, and in the 1970s he developed a “letter design” program. Most (but absolutely not all) of our teachers now were a part of his program in the ’70s and ’80s.

In 1980, Frank Blokland, Jelle Bosma and Albert-Jan Pool started a “letter club” to help pool resources, discuss ideas, and get feedback on their design work. You see, in the 1980s (I am far too young to know any of this first-hand, mind you) it was difficult for independent letter designers to get their designs accepted by large foundries; just designing typefaces was costly because the equipment itself was costly, and any hard-earned experience gained from dealing with foundries was invaluable. The odds were on their side if they stuck together, and it worked.

In 1986 the group consisted of the 3 founders plus Petr van Blokland (no relation to Frank), Henk van Leyden, Peter Matthias Noordzij (GN’s son), and Marie-Cécile Noordzij-Pulles (Peter’s wife) when they adopted the name “Letters]”. More people joined in the coming years, including Just van Rossum, Luc(as) de Groot, Bart de Haas, and Peter Verheul.

So the answer to the question is we get our bracket in honor of Letters], the organization that helped out many of our teachers.

This is just a brief overview—for those wanting to learn more, they should turn to none other than Dutch Type by the indomitable Jan Middendorp. The history of our program and our teachers essentially starts on page 175, Letters] is specifically on pp. 180–1.

A list of current lecturers for t]m is here.

My poor English-language spell checker. My fellow classmates...

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 11:44:00 -0500

My poor English-language spell checker.

My fellow classmates and I are fairly busy this week because at the end of next week we have our first Thesis presentations, a trip to Amsterdam to see Typographic Matchmaking in the City, and on the following Monday our revivals are due!

We did have a very exciting past couple of days as it was t]m’s Portfolio Dag and KABK’s Open Dag. We were all very busy talking to perspective students, meeting alumni, and having drinks with important visitors. Those of the new people I met, it was very nice to make your acquaintance!

I added some more photos to the pool, and Marina should be getting hers on their shortly.

Back to Work!

Sun, 16 Jan 2011 17:29:00 -0500

Linda pointed out to me about a week ago that I never explicitly said on this blog that I made it to America and back. Yes I did, but it took some trying. I took photos to illustrate:

The snow cleared up enough for the NS to run regularly about 2 days after our big snow, so surprisingly, they were not the problem.

After British Air cancelled my flight twice, I wasn’t going to chance them doing it again, so I booked the cheapest flight to the USA I could find, which was a Continental flight to Newark, NJ. Besides the leg room being minuscule (but really, on what airline is it not?), it was a good flight. Yes, the lady in front of me was watching Eat, Pray, Love. I attempted to work on my typefaces, and succeeded for about half an hour before I saw everyone watching the Star Trek movie and was tempted over to the dark side (OK, so I mixed sci-fi references, sue me).

Next up was an AMTRAK train from Newark to Philadelphia, about 1.75 hours. I had to book a business seat because the rest of the train was sold out before I cooked up this last minute scheme to get to the US. You might ask me, “Colin, where was it easier to work on typeface design, economy on the cheapest flight you could find, or business class on a train from NYC to Philly?” I would answer THEY ARE EQUALLY HORRIBLE. Business class seat, so not worth it.

One more train at for what was at about 2am for me. I miss taking the R5 SEPTA train, so this was actually enjoyable. I was glad to be back in Philadelphia.

(Yes, I am a public transport fan, why else would I take all these photos?)

But the break was real short. Within a week I was back on a flight to Amsterdam. This one took off and landed without any problems whatsoever.

The week we got back was our review week. This is the week when all of our teachers go around and get to see our entire body of work. They see what we’ve improved on, what we’re capable of, and give us suggestions. Here’s what my corner looked like:

The thing I have to work the most on is the drawing. I just take a lot longer with analog things… Python I picked up really quickly, I think, and it was my favorite class. In the middle were the revival assignment and Peter Verheul’s contrast assignment; both of them were very helpful for teaching me how to design typefaces. The only way to learn is to do it over and over. I’m still working on both, will show them when they’re ‘finished’ by the end of the month.

We’re all getting ready for our daunting final project and each professor is trying his best to prepare us for what is going to come. We’re also working with Indra’s class and Type Radio on an assignment. Lots to look forward to!

Erik van Blokland had an idea a little while ago to make a new...

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 08:21:00 -0500

Erik van Blokland had an idea a little while ago to make a new unit for sizing type on a computer. His students were telling him things like “Well, I tried the text at 8pts and at 9pts and neither were working.” There’s a huge difference between two points when small, and adversely, one point size change when really big makes almost no difference at all. We should also stop being defined by whole-number point sizes when a computer is perfectly capable of decimal sizing. We should just use what looks right. Enter the Gerrit.

A Gerrit (“1G”) isn’t a unit per se, but it’s a .25% increase or decrease on the size before. So Gerrits as units only make sense when talking about change—no one static size is 1G or -2G or 300G. Similarly 10G is equal to 1 Noordzij, but 1N isn’t equal to 10*1G. It’s calculated with a loop, more like compounding interest.

You use the panel by opening it from the scripts panel, selecting the text you want to use and then using the buttons to size your text up or down. Operations are completely undoable. You can also just select the textbox containing the text with the black selection arrow, though in this case it will set all of the text in the box to “the text size of the first word + 1G or 1N”. Also, if the text overflows, for the moment it will be out of the range for tool, so click into the textbox and “Select All” the text to continue (invisibly) sizing, or resize the textbox so the text is visible again.

Erik had the idea for this InDesign plugin, and I helped him out a bit, we did some back and forth programming, and this is the result at the moment. I would love to hear any feedback or feature requests you all have, but I think it’s a pretty simple panel and it should probably stay that way.

To install this on Mac or PC, go to your InDesign program folder, find the Scripts folder, then put it in the Script Panel folder. Help finding this folder.

Download link Gerrit TypeSizer for InDesign v.1.1
(It’s a .zip file. Right-click, Save as…)

New in 1.1: The panel resizes the leading with the type size if it is set to something other than “auto”

The Downside of Internet—Nijhof & Lee Closing

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 07:15:31 -0500

The Downside of Internet—Nijhof & Lee Closing:

The physical store of Nijhof & Lee is closing its doors. Very sad. Going to try to visit this weekend before it gets too late.

Back to Den Haag… (photo by Marina)

Wed, 05 Jan 2011 05:33:38 -0500

Back to Den Haag… (photo by Marina)

Holy moley! Glad I’m not taking the train! But yes, my...

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 08:14:00 -0500

Holy moley! Glad I’m not taking the train! But yes, my flight today was cancelled again. Trying again on Thursday, and if that doesn’t work, on Friday… The Thursday flight circumvents London altogether, so I have high hopes for that working.

This is the international terminal at St. Pancreas station in London. The line took 9 minutes to film, apparently, and you can see s/he didn’t even start at the beginning. To quote the top comment, “Only the British can queue like that…” (Video linked @aegirthor)

Operation: Get Home in Spite of British Weather a failure, for now.

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 12:30:08 -0500

I woke up Friday morning and I found this unexpectedly out my window. I would have loved this snow like all the other snows we’ve had this winter except for the fact that I was going to leave on Saturday to go back and see my family for a very short period of time before I came back here and began our next semester.

All through Friday it was looking worse and worse for travel in The Netherlands. The trains were (predictably) having delays (NS trains have disruptions on even clear, sunny days). Schiphol was straining to stay open. By the end of Friday, the Randstad, the area in the west of The Netherlands where the 4 biggest cities are, was locked down. Almost no trains, highways at a crawl, horrible. Here is the homepage of De Telegraaf on Friday evening translated into English by Google Chrome:

I was nervous. My flight was the next day. I didn’t think I would get out; even if Schiphol was operating, I knew the trains wouldn’t be able to get me there.

When I got up the next morning at 8, things had improved. The NS was operating semi-normally, Schiphol was letting flights go, British Airways, my carrier, hadn’t canceled anything. It had stopped snowing.

That snow had moved to London, where my connecting flight was. At 10am, Heathrow had decided to close until 1700 because of snow, which means my flight to Heathrow was cancelled, but not my flight to Philadelphia. I just needed to get to Heathrow, I thought. I tried calling the numbers they list for The Netherlands for British Airways, but they were simply disconnected. No message, you just call and get hung up on. Unbelievable.

So, I needed to talk to someone about my flight, so I fought my way to Schiphol. When I got there were were, without exaggeration, thousands of people in the line for KLM. It was a queue line 10 people wide, winding from the desks in Terminal 2 through to 3, where BA was. So many people were standing in that line I’m sure not all of them knew what they were standing in line for.

Photo by BGNES, you can see the line I’m talking about in the background.

If there was one thing I learned from going to the Obama Inauguration with my friend Robin, it’s that you can’t trust that people know what they’re standing in line for. So I find the BA line and stand in it. I move about 20 feet down the line in an hour. A couple of expensive international phone calls later, I got my mother to call the BA hotline in the USA as they opened at 7am.

I’m rebooked for tomorrow, and we’ll see how that goes. If you are following Heathrow’s twitter (as I am, now), all of their tweets are whining about the snow, so I don’t know how this is going to go. Hasn’t it snowed in England before? Like, last year? I’m so sick of air travel I wish it was feasible to take a boat. I’ve booked another flight for the 23rd which bypasses Heathrow, which I will use when they inevitably cancel my flight.

Zen and the art of opening FontLab.

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 16:21:00 -0500

Zen and the art of opening FontLab.

While I’m at it with the chocolate letters, here’s a...

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 14:26:08 -0500

While I’m at it with the chocolate letters, here’s a straight link to the Type]Media2011 Chocolate Letters video Jan (Yanone) put together of our process. I’ve personally watched it about 10 times. RSS readers will need to click through.

Our chocolate letters are done! I’ll put up some photos of...

Tue, 14 Dec 2010 10:30:44 -0500

Our chocolate letters are done! I’ll put up some photos of mine specifically in a bit, but you need to read this great article Yves from The FontFeed wrote about our process and the history of chocolate letters in general. It’s really a great article! Thanks, Yves!