dsng.net - the daryl sng blog

Was searching around for pics of the "I Love New York" logo to show how the Singapore Day 2007 "I Love Sg" logo uses the totally wrong typeface if it's intending to be a play on Milton Glaser's famous logo. Okay, so not everyone has American Typewriter (or the variant that Glaser used) but surely one could use a Courier typewriter-style font.

Also, while searching, I came across this tourist site promoting the Finger Lakes region as "the heart of New York state". I have to say, though, from their map, the region looks to me less like a heart and more like the Y-fronts of New York state.

Labels: fonts, type

Casting Against Type

For various reasons, I've been thinking of the Frere-Jones brothers. Firstly, I got in a shipment of magazines from my aunt's store including an old New Yorker that had Sasha Frere-Jones writing about Mariah Carey and how with the "Fantasy" remix with ODB she invented the whole "male rapper / female chorus" sound that's so ubiquitous today. Which come to think of it is probably true, that whole sound is such a cliche now. He also writes glowingly about "All I Want For Christmas Is You" as one of the few worth additions to the modern Christmas canon, and it's nice to know someone shares my opinion of that song.

And then I read in Karen's blog that Helvetica, a film about the ubiquitous Helvetica typeface and about typography in general is coming out next year, on the 50th anniversary of Helvetica. Here's a quick description:

Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which will celebrate its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives.

Pardon me for geeking out, but I've loved typography since I was a kid, and this sounds awesome. (It's by Gary Hustwit, who produced the excellent I Am Trying to Break Your Heart.) The Typographica writeup has a funny line booing the villain Arial (which reminds me of my previous musings on Arial vs Helvetica).

So, yeah, among the people featured are Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones. What a talented pair of brothers, the Frere-Joneses. Just don't confuse Sasha with Tobias.

Labels: fonts, type

Linksfest: Packed and Ready to Go

Here's the secret to getting your lift to go into express mode. Otis only, apparently. And here's a playlist of every free song in the iTunes music store. Okay, that just means songs below 30 seconds in length. (Via Jason Barrow.)

Queer Eye for the Reporter Gal: how come Superman's super vision doesn't come with fashion sense? That red-and-blue outfit really doesn't work.

Singaporean band Soul'D Out keeps a blog. Good to see blogs here expanding into different spaces - promotion, that sort of thing... speaking of soul power, here's Ultimate Christian Wrestling.

How to tidy your kitchen and inflict pain on your enemies at the same time (lots of well-designed stuff to look at)... since I'm also jonesing for good type design, here's the free font blog, including Kontrapunkt, which I linked to before.

And Halle Berry is a good sport.

Labels: fonts, type

Typeface of the year

Just because I like talking about type: the Danish Design prizewinner for typeface of the year in 2004 was Kontrapunkt.

Labels: fonts, type

I really hate Chicago

I've realised that for some reason people have been quite intrigued / horrified that I would choose not to buy an iPod because I don't like its use of Chicago as a font. (Example - heck, I even got a link at the Cult of Mac blog.) To which I say, hey, it's not like Apple needs my money. And typeface design is a very big thing to me - when I was working at the Let's Go offices, I hung out with the designers and talked typefaces all day (and all night - we shared an apartment). So if I'm getting something that's being sold on the quality of its design, all the parts of its design have to mean something to me. Of course, now that the iPod Photo uses Myriad, I don't really have an excuse...

That new Mac Mini though, I've thought about. Would be nice to have it in the house for my parents to use. Which I guess makes me one of those people Farhad Manjoo is talking about in Salon, who treat the Mac Mini as another household appliance, to run in parallel with their PCs:

But if you think of the Mac Mini as an appliance, as a device for photos and making movies, you can conceive of using the Mac without "switching," Snell notes. You can use the Mac alongside your Windows computer, in much the same way you can use an iPod in your Windows home. Stephen Baker, an analyst at the NPD Group, a market research firm, echoes this thought. "The whole 'switching' thing isn't the way to look at this," Baker says. "People who are buying these are not switching all their Windows PCs to Macs. As more and more households get more and more kinds of computers in the house, they have a range of PCs for different uses. It's reasonable to expect that the Mac will be part of that range," he says.

Back to Chicago: fortunately, I see from this article on reviled fonts and elsewhere that I have good backing on the I-hate-Chicago movement. And even on the "I hate Chicago so much that I won't use any product that uses that font" movement. Type snobs of the world unite. We have nothing to lose but our kernings.

By the way, this page displays in Georgia, which I fully admit looks crap on some systems (those that don't run ClearType, perhaps?). Pot, meet kettle.

Tangential link: Typophile Forums.

Labels: fonts, type

Why I don't own an iPod

I know I should want an iPod, it's the greatest design since sliced bread, etc. etc., but I really, really don't like the Chicago typeface that it uses. Maybe an iPod Mini, with its more pleasing Espy Sans?

And yes, this is how I make my purchasing decisions. I won't buy things from places that use "shop" as a transitive verb either - as in "shop our store", which I just saw in an e-mail from J. Crew. Ugh.

Labels: fonts, type

Gotham City

Interesting article in the New York Times today on the typeface used for the World Trade Center memorial. It's Gotham, designed by Tobias Frere-Jones. (The logical question, of course, was for me to ask if he was related to the New Yorker's music critic, Sasha Frere-Jones. A comment on the City of Sound blog notes that they're brothers. I'd love to hear their family discussions.) Gotham's based on those signs that are classically New York - the Port Authority Bus Terminal sign, chiefly, as well as those P.S. 124 (or whatever number) signs, and so on. I love typefaces that immediately makes one think of a city: I feel that way about Johnston, the London Underground font.

Labels: fonts, type

Fonts of wisdom

Since people have somehow stumbled onto my blog looking for typeface information, let's just say that while I love typefaces and general questions of design, maybe Karen over at Snog Blog can provide much more in-depth information. I particularly like that I learnt the name of the typeface used on street signs in Singapore (it's Rotis, if you're too lazy to click the link).

Labels: fonts, type