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I will take the plunge and find you on the other shore.
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I can’t stop thinking about you every day.
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Bodoni, you may be more than 180 years older than me but you are a picture of elegance and sophistication. I’m charmed by your humble beginnings gracing the pages of 18th century Italian books and enamored with your rise to fashion icon, laid bare across the glossy pages declaring that single word that you will be remembered forever as being in your voice… Vogue.
Best viewed in the starkness of clean black and white you are perfectly suited for the fashion world. Tall and leggy, delicate and timeless. I love the roundness of your tear-drop terminals, the contrast of thick lines and thin lines and the surprising little features like the brush-drawn shape of the leg of your capital R and the centered placement of your capital Q.I am sure that when Giambattista Bodoni carved your curves and lines from metal that he hoped for great things in your life. Could he have ever imagined that his daughter would go on to be such an icon of style and culture? -
I wish I had been braver, I wish I had been bolder, I wish I had been daring.
Typography by Sean Dowling
Photography by Sean Dowling -
Okay, let’s just deal with this one right now. Overall I’m not a fan. Previously I have discussed my displeasure with fonts that have a ‘handcrafted look’ (like script) but as they are generated by a machine this illusion quickly falls apart as the human brain is hardwired for recognizing patters. And what better pattern can there be than perfectly repeated glyphs?
One of the few usages of the typeface that I can tolerate is the title for the film Avatar. I detest the film as an immortal monument to James Cameron plagiarizing the work of one of my favorite illustrators and conceptual artists , Rodger Dean. One of the very few saving graces for this film is that the Graphic Designer who built the title lock-up diligently altered the letterforms of the three capital ‘A’s so they wouldn’t form a pattern in your head and ruin the hand-written look.Aside from all that there are some nice elements. I like the high cross bar in the capital ‘E’ but only because it reminds me of art deco elements funnily enough, but the lower case ‘y’ looks like it was drawn by a child with a crayon. Look at the display word ‘Hieroglyphics’ and how the descenders for the ‘g’, ‘y’ and ‘p’ are just shouting at each other. Horrible, just horrible. -
My design blog has moved!
Come find me at http://dontbeshit.tumblr.com/
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People keep telling me I will get over you… I won’t.
Typography by Sean Dowling
Photography by Sean Dowling -
Typically people think of serif fonts as feminine and sans serif as masculine. Strangely for me this is reversed in the case of Lubalin Graph and Helvetica. To me Lubalin Graph is one of ‘the boys’, a knock around lad that always gets you in trouble with the staff at the pub. The sort of friend that without hesitation approaches attractive women at the bar and invites them over to where you are sitting. Only for you to discover that he has told them that you are an astronaut in training or some other such ridiculous thing and you stumble through perpetuating the lie while he smirks into his beer. A dear, dear friend that you want to punch in the face and hug at the same time.
Herb Lubalin’s self-titled font as an evolution of his earlier Avant Garde. An exquisite example of a geometric slab serif (something that is quite unusual). Notable feature the capital ‘Q’. it makes me think of a stick man Groucho Marx stepping through a porthole in a submarine. Cracks me up whenever I see it. -
Gill Sans, Eric Gill’s notable, 1928 self-titled work. You’ve seen this everywhere, the BBC logo, British Rail and in the pop-culture explosion of ‘Keep calm and…’ Posters. Though the original of this poster was a hand lettered font that was very similar, it was not actually Gill Sans.
This font is widely used, but an interesting issue has come up. There are some out there who would boycott this typeface due to the creator being a notorious pederast and ‘dog-lover’. Should we clamour and shout about the creator’s typographic work despite the fact that it is so utterly unconnected to his predilection for incest and pets? Like I said, an interesting debate.Forgive me if I don’t concoct some flowery, purple prose about this typeface, I’m sure you can understand why I hesitate. -
I wanted to fuck you right where you were standing
Typography by Sean Dowling
Photography by Sean Dowling
