I was going through some old papers today and found this:

It’s a short article I wrote that appeared in the November 1967 issue of Town Views, the student newspaper at the elementary school I attended. I was 11 years old at the time.

As I recall, I heard about the interabang* from a newsletter my dad used to bring home from work. It was published by Falk, an industrial company that made forklifts or something. But always had interesting topics. I remember seeing M.C. Escher’s work for the first time in one issue.

Seeing this again I realized it’s probably the first type-related thing I ever wrote. I’m sure at the time I just thought it was interesting.

*This is an alternate and apparently older spelling that still appears in some dictionaries—usually it’s spelled “interrobang” today.

While I was visiting Omaha this past summer (I spoke and did a workshop for AIGA Nebraska), I spotted this curious bit of typographic design:

Looks like the artist was going for a Lubalin-style solution—Avant Garde with Swashes. It’s attractive, but not very easy to read, especially the “g”.

I wonder how long it’s been in use? I can’t decide if this is a design from the seventies or eighties, or if it’s a recent design imitating that period. I’m leaning toward the former, mainly because of the use of Optima in the tag line.

Last year, I did a logo design for Not Coming to A Theater Near You, a website devoted to movies off the beaten path. The designer, Rumsey Taylor, who was redoing the look of the entire site, wanted the logo to look like a title card from a film noire feature. What I came up with is based mainly on the title card from “Mr. Arkadin” (1955).

In spite of appearances, I don’t usually use an actual brush in my lettering designs, but in this case I did. The final art is vector-based, but I worked out the construction of the letters with brush and ink. (I’m not skilled enough at brush lettering to do the final art that way.)

The image above is a “treatment” I did to make it look like an actual title card from an old film, sort of a “serving suggestion.” On the wesite, Rumsey chose a simpler approach. The site redesign looks great, and I was happy to see that he’s using Metallophile Sp8 as a webfont (via Typekit).

The Bohemian Cafe in Omaha, Nebraska. Shot on August 23, 2011.

I just discovered today that my old pal, illustrator Dan Picasso, has a new website. danpicasso.com. Back in the eighties, Dan and I worked together at MPR and later shared an office together as freelancers. We’ve drifted apart since then.

Dan uses a real airbrush in his work—none of this Photoshop nonsense. Most of the works displayed on his site are new to me. He’s done some amazing pieces of lettering design. He definitely had an influence on my taste for lettering and type. And I love the car paintings. I don’t think I’ve seen them before.

I’ve attended all three of the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum’s annual “Wayzgoose” events so far. Last year’s, held in early November, was enjoyable as always, but I think I prefer the mix of presentations and hands-on workshops of previous years over having only workshops.

Still, it was great how they tied all the workshops around a common purpose—creating a portfolio of prints (including the portfolio itself). You can see one of my prints above, a pressure print from a hand-cut plate based on a free-form ampersand design.

I highly recommend the Wayzgoose if you are a type fanatic like me, into letterpress printing, or both. It’s held in the Fall in Two Rivers, Wisconsin. Attendance is limited, and it fills up quick, so you might want to get on their mailing list to be notified regarding when the next one will be held.