Blackletter in Scranton

The scale of these letters in Scranton, Pennsylvania is fantastic.
Thank you to Bill Deere for taking the photos.

"A Gem of a Little Island"

Sand Island was the name, in the early 1970s, for a microscopic dot of land off Pohnpei, a much bigger island that is still only a speck in the vast western Pacific. This blog is named Sand Island because that dot was the setting for happy childhood adventures. Time and memory have turned the island into a symbol of a balanced life, and an ideal to find again.

Sand Island is the green spot to the northeast of Garden Island. Sand Island is now called Joy Island, and the site of abandoned resort hotel huts.

I think I've been in mourning for Sand Island and the three years when my family lived on Pohnpei. It's a middle-aged thing, in part. My restless parents left a suburban life in California for Catholic lay missionary teaching jobs in a very remote place. Now, at the age of 46, I am older than they were then. 

On Pohnpei we didn't have much to do during weekends because at that time there were no roads to the Jesuit campus where we lived. We had to explore the parts of the island that we could reach on foot or that were no farther than a day's roundtrip by boat. Luckily, there were a handful of beautiful islets nearby, on Pohnpei's outer reef. Unlike the main island, which is ringed by muddy mangrove swamps, the reef islands were uninhabited and surrounded by beaches, coral, and sand. Sand Island was one of the smallest islands we visited and it wasn't on the reef, but inside it, amidst acres of shallow, sandy-bottomed lagoon. If we happened to stay on the island when the tide sank lower than expected, during the trip home we had to get out of the boat so that it would stay afloat. I recall my parents walking the boat through shallows, leaving a murky trail and scaring up stingrays that shot away like shadows from puffs of sand. 

My brother Ron and a family friend on one of our outings 

My parents had a Micronesian outrigger canoe made for us, but it was too small for
my brothers and me to all ride in at once

We didn't have television or telephones, little radio, and sporadic power. Google Earth didn't exist, of course, and I don't remember having a clear idea of the shape and size of the island. In three years, I never saw the other side of Pohnpei. When we were on Sand Island, I had no idea what lay around the western peninsula of Pohnpei, though I always wanted to know. Our ignorance and isolation meant that we sometimes felt like the first people in the world to discover narrow entrances into the deep mangrove, hidden corners in the reef, or bizarre marine life. We went shell crazy and scoured the reefs around Sand Island at low tide, turning over chunks of coral looking for cowries and cones. We never knew what would be revealed: eels, octopi, sea urchins... We gathered buckets of shells and now I feel guilty about how we picked the reef clean. I didn't want to stop collecting, even if I wandered far out on the reef, alone. 

Sand Island was low, windswept, fairly clear of underbrush, and you could see through the coconut trees from one side to the other. My brothers and I snorkeled and came in for picnic lunches of warm peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Schools of mullet and needlefish—fast, thin surface swimmers that appeared as dark lines on the horizon of water across our facemasks—surrounded the island. Stingrays abounded in the sand and seagrass and we knew they were dangerous, but we kids explored freely. Once, I swam over a large, deep hole and I could just make out the sandy bottom, which was covered with the dark, slowly-moving shapes of stingrays. This terrified me, and one of my greatest fears was, and remains, getting pulled by overpowering currents into deep water. The worst possible fate I could imagine was being dragged by a tidal rush through a reef pass, past the pounding surf of the outer reef's protective ring, into the dark blue, vacant Pacific. Weren't my parents more concerned about us? Now, I'm amazed at the number of close calls we had. Nothing poisonous lived on Pohnpei, but the ocean was full of danger, including fast tides that drained the reefs nearly dry.

Sometimes I wonder if I have tried to re-create or re-capture the calm security my parents provided, the undemonstrative but committed care that allowed my brothers and me such freedom. After three years on Pohnpei, we were eager to begin a new adventure in the outer world, where (we thought at the time) "real" things happened, but sometimes I think I have been out of place since we left. The last thirty-five years have been a distraction, a detour from the inevitable, and I think I have always expected to end up somewhere like Sand Island, a tropical place where I could explore nature unchaperoned. Now, I am impatient with guided tours and cautious, passionless travel.  

An 1874 book about an American missionary in Pohnpei, entitled Ponapé: Light on a Dark Shore, describes a boat trip around Pohnpei that was delayed by bad tides. The group had to spend the night on a small, uninhabited island, and I wonder if it was Sand Island. It could have been. I'll end with the book's description of that island, partly because I liked finding this antique account of such an obscure place, partly because of its quaint enthusiasm: 

"What a gem of a little island it was! Nearly circular and no larger than I could run across in three or four minutes, covered with a velvety carpet of grass, studded with young cocoanut trees, with a white sand-beach strewn with shells and corals, it seemed like a mimic island only, brought up by some magic wand as a home for the fairies. We seated ourselves on the beach while we worshipped and sang 'All hail!' to the Maker of heaven and earth, then launched our canoe and away. The morning was cloudy, earth and sea and sky all of an inky purple. The mountains, however, were darker, except a streak of light struggling through a break in the clouds and reflected over the waves. I can never tell when Ponapé is prettiest, she is so beautiful in every mood. Now the dark clouds are mostly gone. On one side the blue sky, streaked with silver, is smiling down on the green-robed hills, but on the other the grand old mountains veil themselves still in mist." 

New Members of the Design Canon?

When graphic design history began to interest more people in the 1980s, a professor at North Carolina State University, Martha Scotford, asked whether the few existing design history texts had created a canon of objects and designers. Scotford strove to add diversity to the canon she identified, in part by writing a book about designer Cipe Pineles.

By 2009, when Angela and I wrote The Handy Book of Artistic Printing, the number of design books had exploded, but Angela and I felt there was a need for another because we believed that some important graphic design in the late nineteenth century had been overlooked. At the heart of our book are sixty specimens of the best artistic printing we could find, including the one above, which was designed in 1880.

This year two books have been published that contain this same image: The Rise and Fall of the Printers' International Specimen Exchange by Matthew McLennan Young, and Graphic Design before Graphic Designers by David Jury. Both books focus on the nineteenth century and reflect a contemporary interest in craft, ornament, and alternatives to modernism. One book is a close study of a narrow topic, from Oak Knoll Press, while the other, from the larger publisher Thames & Hudson, analyzes more design from a longer period of time.

Has this printer from Akron, Ohio, Paul E. Werner, joined the ranks of El Lissitzky and Herbert Bayer and other well-known designers whose work is considered part of a canon of graphic design? Obviously not quite yet, but the reproductions of Werner's design are certainly large in all three books. All three point out how striking the design is and it is interesting to compare their descriptions:

Graphic Design before Graphic Designers (2012)
"There are occasions when the efforts of artistic printers appear distinctly avant-garde in nature. Included in the first volume of The Printers' International Specimen Exchange, among the floral fete programme covers and choral society concert notices, Paul E. Werner's self-promotional piece provides a severe jolt to the senses. The choice and diversity of typefaces at the centre of the 'sun' and the wispy, cloud-like borders are the only reminders that this is 1880."

The Rise and Fall of the Printers' International Specimen Exchange (2012)
Young simply reproduces the slightly cranky 1880 review of Werner's work in the Printers' International Specimen Exchange: "Mr. Paul E. Werner, Akron, Ohio, U.S., unfortunately, in getting up his contribution, overlooked the regulation as to size, and made his specimen 2 inches too wide and an inch too deep, besides leaving us to pay the carriage on the parcel. Being the last arrival it was too late to return it, and we were reluctantly compelled to decide on using only the first page, which could be reduced without entirely destroying its beauty. It is a striking design, shewing concentric circles of black, red, gold and tint, an the order named, with golden rays (rules) extending from the outer edge, the white centre containing Mr. Werner's 'card,' [worked in black: this is enclosed in an ornamental border worked in two tints. ... of a quality which shews the unique style of Mr. Werner's work."

The Handy Book of Artistic Printing (2009)
"Some observers, such as type historian Herbert Spencer, have noted the latent avant-garde qualities of artistic printing, and this specimen exemplifies the 'modern' potential in its methods, elements, and ethos. Sixty years before Raymond Loewy designed the Lucky Strikes cigarette package, Paul Werner, 'Superior Printer' from Akron, foreshadows that icon of twentieth-century graphic design. Five typefaces—some of them fancy—give away the age of this composition, but they maintain a low profile and even weight that don't compete with the spectacular black, red, and metallic gold sunburst surrounding them. The unobtrusive, tan, corner-filled border also reveals a reluctance to relinquish conventional decoration."

The Werner bullseye is not the only example of artistic printing reproduced in all the books. A promotion for the Boston Type Foundry (below), designed by C. W. L. Jungleow of Boston, also appears, although it is quite small in Jury's book.

Perhaps the selection of these designs for the books simply reflects the eternal appeal of circles, or the inability of our twenty-first-century eyes to forget the bold geometry of modernism. Isn't it exciting when those Victorians designed apparently prescient forms, as Christopher Dresser did with his teapots? Whatever the reasons for their popularity, I expect to see more of these two designs in the future.

Kabel and Nostalgia

In 2010, and again this year, a friend and I designed t-shirts around important soccer competitions, first the World Cup and now the European Championship. By 2010, the Beatles t-shirt designed by Experimental Jetset was well known and much imitated. Before putting lists on shirts, we were already intrigued by all kinds of lists and found that our thinking paralleled Experimental Jetset's statements about their shirt. We wanted to honor players (who are the essence of the teams), were intrigued by the ordering impulse behind list-making, and liked the sound of the names on the international teams. 

Unlike the Experimental Jetset shirt, our shirts use the typeface Kabel instead of Helvetica, and we left off the ampersands at the ends of the lines of type.

Didi's Germany 2012 European Championship shirt, in the German team colors of black and white.

Experimental Jetset's use of Helvetica grows, in part, out of respect for the modernist design that surrounded them in their youth in The Netherlands. Helvetica was admired by designer Wim Crouwel, one of the heroes of Dutch modernism, because of its apparent freedom from historical references and its resulting "neutrality." For Experimental Jetset, the choice of the typeface for a band shirt that would "reach the essence of a group" implies that they continue the modernist association between Helvetica and neutrality. However, it is difficult to ignore the simple nostalgia of Experimental Jetset's devotion to Helvetica, and their claim that the Beatles shirt is an exercise in modernist "self-referentiality" is not quite convincing.

We were not interested in using the the most reference-free typeface and embrace nostalgia. Kabel bold makes our lists look satisfyingly sturdy, while also suggesting the seventies and eighties, when my friend Sam first became besotted with soccer. We use a version of the typeface that was redrawn for the International Typeface Corporation by Victor Caruso in 1975. Because of the revival of Kabel and popularity of geometric lettering in the late sixties through the early eighties, we are using Kabel in part because of our own nostalgia for a youth more influenced by American advertising than European modernism.

L'eggs pantyhose logo and packaging, designed by Roger Ferriter, a member of the Herb Lubalin studio in New York, in 1969. The logo is a modified version of Kabel.

Kabel appeared in a Heinz beans ad mock-up on season five of Mad Men, set in the late 1960s.

Rudolf Koch, self-portrait, 1905.

The original Kabel was designed in the turbulent 1920s in Germany by Rudolf Koch (1876–1934). He crafted the typeface for the Klingspor Foundry in Offenbach in 1926–29 and the prevalent story is that it was named Kabel to commemorate the laying of a telephone cable between the United States and England. (This story may be a myth; the first two-way phone conversations between the US and England did happen in the twenties, but they were radio-based and did not require cables.) Koch was a patriot who fought for Germany in World War I, a devoutly religious man, and a much-loved teacher and artist who was influenced by the English Arts and Crafts movement.

Koch's Kabel (1926–29) at the top, and ITC's Kabel (1975) at the bottom.

The ITC Kabel has a much higher x-height, like many ITC typefaces. 

Recently, designer Garrett Boge created Koch Original, a digital version of Kabel 

that is more like the design from the 1920s. 

On our shirts, tightly leaded lines of Kabel seem to lock together when the names are carefully arranged so that ascenders, descenders, and accents do not hit each other. Our snug letterspacing and leading suggest the "tight but not touching" spacing of the 1970s, when phototypsetting made type immaterial and letters could be crammed together. Koch  was very good at drawing, writing, and cutting tight-fitting type, so it's no surprise that Kabel bold felt right on our shirts. Some of Koch's type compositions have the same spirit as our shirts. He was expert at creating rhythmic rows of letters, especially with the strongly vertical, heavy, traditionally German blackletter forms. Some eccentricities in the design of Kabel, such as the angled ends of letters and the open lower-case g, reveal a more personal sense of form than one might expect in a geometric, modern sans-serif typeface (like Futura, for instance). This expressiveness is one reason Kabel is sometimes associated with German Expressionism. 

Rudolf Koch, Ten Commandments, cut in wood, 1922

Koch's typeface Neuland, used in 1923 in a tight, flush-left, rag-right design.

The May 6, 2012 issue of The New York Times Magazine featured a Kabel-like typeface, possibly custom-designed. The issue's cover story questioned the usefulness of the rich, and I wonder if the type was chosen to suggest the mythic hedonism of the seventies and eighties, Studio 54 and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. 

The contents page from the May 6 edition of The New York Times Magazine.

Primary source: Gerald Cinamon's Rudolf Koch, Letterer, Type Designer, Teacher, published by Oak Knoll Press and The British Library in 2000.

More Blackletter by Pentagram

In 2009 the design firm Pentagram redesigned the identity for The Oak Room and The Oak Bar in the Plaza building in New York City. The Oak Room has since closed but the lettering is still on the building, on Central Park South.

Highway Signs

old logo

new logo

left: the sign outside our hotel; right: the new logo

Over Christmas I stayed in a Red Roof Inn along the highway in North Carolina. While our hotel sported the classic lower-case logo of blackletter typography in the textura style, just up the highway was another Red Roof Inn with a completely different sign. Apparently I don't get out of New York City enough. About seven years ago RRI unveiled a new logo designed by the Laurel Group, a San Francisco branding and marketing company. The new logo is being applied to renovated hotels.

As you might guess from my fondness for PDBs (Public Displays of Blackletter), I'll miss the old blackletter logo. The letterforms have that nice "picket fence" vertical stress of textura and echo the angles of the red boxes that often contain them (they don't seem intended to suggest anything teutonic about the design of the hotel chain, which was founded in Ohio in 1973).

The new logo is safely bland and inoffensive, unless you are offended by blandness. More tedious is the inevitable marketing justification for the new logo. Accor North America, the holding company of RRI, announced:

"Retiring the familiar Old English typestyle inside a red box with slanted top, the new logo breaks 'out of the box' to reflect the contemporary, spacious feeling of Red Roof Inn's new room design while conveying more energy and personal attention through its handwritten typestyle." Also: "The new handwritten type style conveys the updated, casual, relaxed atmosphere and friendly personalized service."

The new lettering is the branding equivalent of sweatpants, which I suppose is "updated" and personal. It says that you don't need to comb your hair or tuck in your shirt when you fumble into the hotel lobby for that free cup of coffee in the morning. It certainly does NOT convey energy! The stacked architectural tension of the old logo had more energy and - quite simply - more personality, even if it was naive and ahistorical.

Heaven Uses Blackletter

I was walking by the mess known as the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in New York and noticed some striking vinyl banners on the chain link fence around the church grounds. Who is making such a bold typographic choice (besides sand island, of course)? It turns out Pentagram has designed a new identity for the cathedral.