Yesterday afternoon I went to a packed rock concert with my daughter at the new Minneapolis Public Library. You read that right: a rock concert in a library. The band was Harry and the Potters who, if you have never heard of them, pretend to be Harry Potter (two of them) and play songs inspired by characters and situations in the famous books. (That’s “Bill Weasley” on drums.) The warm up act was Draco and the Malfoys (what else?), who advised the audience that there was no point in staying once they finished. Both bands were very fun, very loud, and very punk rock. Fans do amazing things sometimes.

The 42 members of the Proxima Nova family get a real workout in What’s On TV, the best-selling magazine in the UK. Virtually all the type in the magazine is set in Proxima Nova, from the headlines on the cover to the tiny, densely-packed text in the radio and TV listings section. It’s all part of a recent redesign of the magazine, and, according to one of the designers, the reaction from readers has been positive. The magazine also requested a new weight—halfway between Regular and Semibold—which I may release to the public at some point.

Reader Egemen Sentin wrote to point out an odd coincidence he noticed on the “How to Spot Arial” page: “The first four characters (a, t, c and g) that you chose for distinguishing between fonts Arial, Helvetica and Grotesque are also the first letters of the four bases of DNA, adenine, thymine, cytosine and guanine – proof that fonts have genes!”

Kevin Savetz has just posted MP3 files of the “First Philadelphia Computer Music Festival,” an LP released in 1979 by Creative Computing magazine, on vintagecomputermusic.com. If you are a fan of 2001: A Space Odyssey and have wondered why HAL sings “A Bicycle Built For Two” when he is being disconnected, check out the last track, recorded in 1963.

Last week I was in upstate New York and discovered this beautiful Art Deco sign on the Syracuse University campus. Photo taken April 7, 2006, in Syracuse, New York.

Just for fun, I’ve decided to share my first published writing on the subject of typography. It appeared in the April 19, 1977, issue of Metropolis, the Weekly Newspaper of Minneapolis. Metropolis unfortunately folded about six months later, but it was an incredible place to work. I may write more about it sometime.

As its production manager, I didn’t get much chance to write, but this was one exception. After four months there, I had a reputation as someone who knew something about type. Metropolis had a page in the back called “Final Draft.” It was a page where anything might appear, from short stories to comics to photo essays. I can’t remember anymore if the editor, Scott Kaufer, asked me to write something or if I suggested it myself. Some of it makes me cringe to read again. Some of it is not quite correct. There are things in it that I wouldn’t necessarily agree with anymore, and I am surprised at how jaded I sound. Keep in mind, though, that I was only 21 years old when I wrote it, and, as everyone knows, a 21-year-old knows all there is to know.

(Originally published in Metropolis, the Weekly Newspaper of Minneapolis, April 19, 1977.)