That “Edikit” image I posted yesterday was just one piece of the whole kit, the only part I still have that’s intact. It’s the cover of a 28-page booklet of half-size layout grids printed on one side of each page in non-photo blue (light blue) ink. The only text is printed on the inside front cover in 24-point Century Schoolbook, centered, capitalization as shown:

**put your ideas

down here because

this is where you

begin.**

And that’s how I actually used it. I did a thumbnail layout on every available page, and sometimes a drawing or doodle on the reverse side, including these typeface ideas, drawn with a red Sharpie on the inside back cover:

The one near the bottom was probably inspired by seventies art deco faces like Washington or Epic. It even has tiny numbers indicating alternate characters, just like in the specimen books.

Regarding the CCA calendar, I contacted my uncle, Knut Simonson, who I mentioned was a designer at CCA in the sixties. He doesn’t have the red can that the 1968 CCA calendar came in anymore, but he does still have the calendar itself. He shot these two photos of it for me:

The clear plastic part fit snugly inside the can, and the triangular, paperboard calendar part fit inside that. When assembled, six months are visible on the outside. To see the other six, you slip it out, change the way it’s folded, and slip it back in.

It’s interesting that the ones-place digits are printed much larger than the tens-place digits. I wonder why this was done? To make it simpler and more elegant? It makes the numbers kind of hard to read, almost cryptic. Another case of form over function, I’d say. Overall, a good example of the minimalist way designers still tend to use Helvetica.

Knut doesn’t remember who designed it, but I found some similar calendars done for CCA in the seventies credited to a guy named Bill Bonnell. Maybe it was him. Too bad all the examples are in black and white. Probably scanned from an old design annual, printed back when color was expensive.

I suppose I had an excuse: I had no formal training yet, but I was possessed by the romance of graphic design.

In my senior year of high school, I was the editor of the yearbook. I’d been on staff in previous years, but now I was in charge. Even at 17, I knew what good graphic design looked like. My uncle was a graphic designer in Chicago, where he worked at one point for Container Corporation of America, designing stuff like the original Tab soft drink can and the Keebler Rich ‘n Chips cookie package. His aesthetic and way of looking at the world rubbed off on me at an early age.

American Yearbook Company sent us a large, beautifully designed yearbook production kit that they cheekily called an “Edikit”. Clearly, they had some talented people working on it, hoping to impart some sense of good design on hapless teenagers. I could see what they were doing and took it to heart.

One of the things that influenced my budding sense of graphic design were the calendars that CCA did every year, which my uncle would send to me. There was one in particular for the year 1968 that came inside a large, bright red paperboard can with “nineteensixtyeight” wrapped around it in large, white Helvetica letters. Here’s the only photo I could find of it:

So, in my 12-year-old mind, I associated spelling out numbers (all lowercase) with cool, sophisticated graphic design.

Fast forward to 1973, and I had my first big design project, my high school yearbook. And I wanted to use every design trick I’d learned so far. I was not so much into Helvetica. It already seemed a little passé. My favorite typeface at the time was Times New Roman, which had been used to great effect in National Lampoon magazine. The NatLamp design influence is pretty obvious on some of the pages:

So, as I was developing the format for the yearbook, one of my “clever” design choices was to have all the page numbers spelled out (in lowercase, of course):

So far, so good. But it does this on every page, all the way to the end:

They must have thought I was insane. Keep in mind that this was back when typesetting machines, as far as I know, had only rudimentary ways to store keystrokes. At best, some sort of paper tape system. It horrifies me now to think how much work I made them do, just so I could have my fancy page numbers. Yet, I don’t recall the American Yearbook Company rep objecting to it.

Today, you could easily write some sort of script to get numbering spelled out like this, but back then it probably meant that some poor typesetter had to type it all in manually. And proofread it. I’d like to think that they somehow captured the keystrokes in case some other idiot had the same idea. Or maybe some other idiot already had and so it was really no trouble for them to run the job again for me.

All that aside, it was not a very good design idea anyway. Sure, it looked cool, but page numbers are meant to be read at a glance, not seen. I just shake my head, now. What a dumb idea.

I attended two events tonight.

The first was (nominally) a Type Tuesday event, but really a Minneapolis Institute of the Arts / AIGA Minnesota event: “What Fonts Say” featuring Craig Eliason, talking about where type designers get their ideas, going back to Gutenberg, and Chank Diesel, talking about where he gets his ideas. Which was fine and enjoyable.

Afterwards, we headed to the Minnesota Center for the Book Arts in Minneapolis (after stopping for gas) and attended a reunion of people who have worked for the Utne Reader, which was founded almost 30 years ago.

Not everyone who ever worked there attended, but a lot more than I expected. Some I hadn’t seen since the late 80s, when I parted ways with the magazine. Eric Utne was there, of course, but I was surprised and delighted to see so many people from the early years, when I was freelancing as its designer/art director.

Eric managed to get a bottle of 30-year-old scotch for the old-timers. First time I’ve tasted scotch in at least that long, and I’m glad he got it. I might change my mind in the morning.

I’ve got mixed feelings about my time with the Utne Reader for reasons I won’t get into, but I met the love of my life there and worked with a lot of really great people. It was a blast to see them again.

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.

Popeye was my favorite cartoon when I was four or five years old. The ones I remember best—and love most—are the early one’s made by Max Fleischer Cartoon Studio. These are the ones in which Popeye wears a black shirt and the characters all mumble a lot.

The drawings have a solid feel to them, like they’re three-dimensional, but everything is stylized in very a cartoony way, including the movement. You can see a similar sort of style in the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine.

I’ve been making my way through the “Popeye The Sailor: Volume One, 1933-38” DVD set (which, coincidentally, uses my Mostra fonts on the package). Here are some things that have crossed my mind while watching these classic cartoons:

• “A Dream Walking” is one of the cleverest animated cartoons ever. Popeye and Bluto fight over who will save Olive as she sleepwalks through an under-construction skyscraper. There is a lot of complicated timing and tricky animation in this, and the humor comes out of it.

• The dance scenes in “Morning, Noon, and Nightclub”, in which Popeye and Olive Oil are nightclub performers, are beautifully cartoony—and funny. I also love the way Bluto walks in this one.

• “Popeye the Sailor Meets Sinbad the Sailor”, the earliest of the three two-reel Popeye color cartoons, has to be my all-time favorite. It’s too bad the Fleischers didn’t do any feature-length Popeye cartoons in this style.

• Several of the cartoons in this period (including “Sinbad”) utilize three-dimensional set for backgrounds. They are built to look like the usual painted backgrounds—until the camera moves, and the characters seems to be walking through a three-dimensional world.

• When I was in kindergarten, Olive Oyl was my dream girl. I’d forgotten about that.

• I was so into Popeye when I was little, I asked my mom to buy canned spinnach for me, which I ate—it was actually kind of good if you put enough butter on it. Had to be the first time I ate something because I heard it made you healthy.

• Every one of the title cards is beautifully hand-lettered. This was routine back when these shorts were made. It was much easier to use lettering than type for movie title cards, and less expensive. It affords much more variety of treatment as well, including illustrated effects.

Love this whole idea. This is how I set headlines when I was a young graphic designer. No way would I use a pencil, though. Too much risk of warping the sheet. I had a nylon-tipped burnisher, specially designed for the job of rubbing down transfer type. (Via Draplin)

Field Notes: Dry Transfer Edition Instructions from Coudal Partners on Vimeo.