Art Center's Graduate Showcase

We went to the Art Center College of Design's year-end graduate showcase last Friday night: me, my actress friend Jessica Quinn Donaghy, and my graphic designer girlfriend, who was an alum of the school (and former valedictorian, I might add). We spent three hours browsing through the portfolios of Art Center's graduate students--various disciplines on show included graphic design, motion graphics, transportation design, product design, environmental design, and many others.

I was most impressed by the environmental design work. This may be because my own particular design fetish has to do with furniture and interior design, but really, some of the work on hand was pretty phenomenal. One grad had an underwater theme to her work: lamps made up to look like jellyfish were suspended from the ceiling and attached to the wall.

The transportation design students were clearly very skilled, but after awhile I got tired of seeing The Car Of The Future everywhere I went. Perhaps if I understood the nuances of what made good trans-design, I would have a better appreciation for what I was looking at. Instead, it all looked like a bunch of car junkies wet dreams.

The product design room had some interesting work. This one in particular caught my eye, for obvious reasons:

It's an electric slide bass. There's a handle on the top of the neck with a clamp that presses against the strings. The bassist slides his or her hands back and forth to modulate the pitch. An interesting concept, except that it's completely counter-intuitive for any bassist to put his hand on the *top* of the neck. All bassists move around the neck with their left hand on the bottom--sort of akin to the motion of pumping a shotgun. Add to that the fact that if you have your hand above the neck, and slide the clamp all the way to the high register, you put your wrist in an extremely awkward, potentially painful position.

What ever happened to form follows function?

Delicato: The 'Calling All Dawns' Font?

I think I may have found my font for Calling All Dawns. Introducing Delicato, designed by Stephan Hattenbach for the Fountain type foundry (based in Sweden). I think it's quite good; it looks classic, without being overly used, and without the baggage of a font like Trajan.

Here's the creator of the font describing his product:

"After spending my early years experimenting mostly with display faces, my focus now is to make functional text fonts, incorporating both traditional and modern aspects.

Delicato is, in many aspects, built in a traditional way. Still, some modern details have been implemented which classic designs sometimes lack. The prime goal was to make a strong text font for books and longer texts in general. This fact does not exclude the possibilites for use elsewhere.

Throughout history existing designs have often been the source of inspiration for newer ones. Delicato is no exception and looking closely, similarities can be found in the lowercase of Jeremy Tankard’s Enigma and the stems of Petr van Blokland’s Proforma. My goal is to respect these sources and turn my own creation into something new with a unique and personal touch.

Most text faces carry a basic set of weights like regular, italic, bold and small caps. I wanted to expand that a little bit further and added a medium, alternates and a set of ornaments to make the family complete and versatile."

I know I have some artistic readers out there....what do you all think? Thumbs up? Thumbs down?

Three Typefaces

I'm dating a graphic designer these days, and since I'm a big-time design aficionado, the topic of typefaces (otherwise known as fonts) comes up frequently. In most cases, I'm a fan of sans-serif fonts--that is, fonts without the little 'feet'--like the one utilized in this blog, verdana. On the whole, they're cleaner, more modern, and easier to read. In certain cases, though, when I want to tap into various traditions or subconscious associations, I'll utilize serif fonts. Here's what I mean:

Trajan is 'the movie font'...and it has been heavily overused in motion picture advertising, especially with epic blockbuster summer tent-pole fare (which I have to admit, I hate). But if a typeface carries any sort of subconscious association that I want to tap into, then it might not be a bad idea to utilize that font. So in the case of Calling All Dawns, if I want to convey that the scope of the album is epic and cinematic in some way (which it is), I may consider using Trajan as the principal font.

On the other side of the coin, however, is my favorite font Helvetica--a modern classic sans-serif that is purposefully devoid of distraction and meaning, preferring to let the words express themselves without coloration of typographic associations. You've seen Helvetica everywhere; it's the default font for Apple Computers, used in countless corporate logos, and pretty much pops up in all manner of signposts and advertisements. So you can see just how pervasive it really is, here's another clip, from the documentary "Helvetica," created for the 50th-anniversary of the font:

And finally, just for fun, I'm posting this YouTube video of a tribute to Akzidenz-Grotesk, an early predecessor to Helvetica. Some people just really, really love their fonts.