For the first 9 months of my life I lived in a really safe place. It was warm, quiet and my own. But then on September 28, 1991 my landlord

got sick of me freeloading and kicked me out into the world, specifically in San Jose, California. This place was loud and everything was gigantic. I didn’t like it so I cried, a lot. I went home with these pretty chill people named David and Teri, but they weren’t expecting me so soon and didn’t have a bed for me. I spent the first week of real world-living sleeping in a drawer. I also didn’t have eyebrows... I guess I must have looked pretty ridiculous because when my older brother Danny met me, he knocked me over. This experience left me so traumatized that I didn’t speak for 2 years. All I did was ride around in Danny’s plastic firetruck and wear Batman pajamas. Eventually I got over my fears and started talking to everyone, I found out I really liked it and it was all downhill from there. I was nicknamed 7-11 by my dad cause my mouth was always open. Several relatively boring years passed by, I went to elementary school, cut along lines and learned things like the ‘g’ is silent in ‘gnat’, graduated to middle school where I developed a love for reading and beat up a foreign-exchange student from Sweden. Around this time I went ‘goth’ and shopped at Hot Topic a lot. I thought I was really cool and dyed my hair purple. I also caused a lot of trouble for my parents and was sent to a boarding school in Oregon. It was pretty much in the middle of nowhere and on top of a giant hill. The upside? It looked like Hogwarts.

It was there that I finally started to get my act together... you know, after a year or two of causing trouble and having a permanent seat in the principal’s office that literally had my name on it. Turns out it’s pretty hard to ditch class when you live at school. I began to discover the majestic world of graphic design and Adobe programs. I fiddled around with Illustrator, but lacking proper guidance and instruction I got frustrated and gave up. I also suffered through a particularly heinous internship at a local design company in Oregon. After spending a week folding shirts and watching them create a complex and extremely boring fish in Illustrator consisting of over 60 layers I was totally put off of graphic design. I left boarding school and came back to San Jose, spending the next year getting my diploma from home and working at a skate shop in the mall. I did some traveling and went to Colombia and Israel, befriended some cows at the latter and decided it was time to go to school. Enough time had passed that the horrors I had suffered while pursuing an interest in graphic design in high school had faded and I found FIDM. The rest, as they say is history. However, if you’re curious about the future. It probably goes something like this: I graduated FIDM, started up my own company with some sort of awful, hipster name, became super successful, bought a baby otter to raise in my bath tub, eventually met a gentleman with nice teeth to settle down with, had some kids and adopted way too many cats.

BRANDING

LOGODESIGNS

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Typography makes at least two kinds of sense, if it makes any sense at all. It makes visual sense and historical sense. The visual side of typography is always on display, and materials for the study of its

visual form are many and widespread. The history of letter- forms and their usage is visible too, to those with access to manuscripts, inscriptions and old books, but from others it is largely hidden. This book has therefore grown into some-thing more than a short manual of typographic etiquette. It is the fruit of a lot of long walks in the wilderness of letters: in part a pocket field guide to the living wonders that are found there, and in part a meditation on the ecological principles, survival techniques, and ethics that apply. The principles of typography as I understand them are not a set of dead conventions but the tribal customs of the magic forest, where ancient voices speak from all directions and new ones move to unremembered forms. One question, nevertheless, has been often in my mind. When all right-thinking human beings are struggling to remember that other men and women are free to be different, and free to become more different still, how can one honestly write a rulebook? What reason and authority exist for these commandments, suggestions, and instructions? Surely typographers, like others, ought to be at liberty to follow or to blaze the trails they choose. Typography thrives as a shared concern - and there are no paths at all where there are no shared desires and directions. A typographer determined to forge new routes must move, like other solitary travellers, through uninhabited country and against the grain of the land, crossing common thoroughfares in the silence before dawn. The subject of this book is not typographic solitude, but the old, well- travelled roads at the core of the tradition: paths that each of us is free to follow or not, and to enter and leave when we choose if only we know the paths are there and have a sense of where they lead.That freedom is denied us if the tradition is concealed or left for dead. Originality is everywhere, but much originality is blocked if the way back to earlier discoveries is cut or overgrown. If you use this book as a guide, by all means leave the road when you wish. That is precisely the use of a road: to reach individually chosen points of departure. By all means break the rules, and break them beautifully, deliberately, and well. That is one of the ends for which they exist.

U B I Q U I TO U S T Y P E

“Typography is the c ra f t of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence.”

Letterforms change constantly, yet differ very little, because they are alive. The principles of typographic clarity have also scarcely altered since the second half of the fifteenth century, when the first bookswere printed in roman type. Indeed, most of the principles of legibility and design explored in this book were known and used by Egyptian scribes writing hieratic script with reed pens on papyrus in 1000 B.C. Samples of their work sit now in museums in Cairo, London and New York, still lively, subtle, and perfectly legible thirty centuries after they were made. Writing systems vary, but a good page is not hard to learn to recognize,whether it comes from Tang Dynasty China, The Egyptian New Kingdomtypographers set for themselves than with the mutable or Renaissance Italy. The principles that unite these distant schools of design are based on the structure and scale of the human body - the eye, the hand, and the forearm in particular - and on the invisible but no less real, no less demanding, no less sensuous anatomy of the human mind. I don’t like to call these principles universals, because they are largely unique to our species. Dogs and ants, for example, read and write by more chemical means. But the underlying principles of typography are, at any rate, stable enough to weather any number of human fashions and fads. Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form, and thus with an independent existence. Its heartwood is calligraphy - the dance, on a tiny stage, of It is true that typographer’s tools are presently changing with considerable force and speed, but this isnot a manual in the use of any particular typesetting system or medium. Isuppose that most readers of this book will set most of their type in digital form, using computers, but I have no preconceptions about which brands of computers, or which versions of which proprietary software, they may use. The essential elements of style have more to do with the goals the living, speaking hand - and its roots reach into living soil, though its branches may be hung each year with new machines. So long as the root lives, typography remains a source of true delight, true knowledge, true surprise.

“The artist is not a different kind of person, but every person is a different kind of artist”

Gill was born in Brighton, the son of non-conformist minister. While apprenticed to an architect in London, he became smitten with the world of calligraphy, which he entered by attending classes given by Edward Johnston. He was profoundly influenced by Johnston’s dedicated approach to work and decided to join the world of the Arts and Crafts. During his lifetime he set up three self-sufficient religious communities where, surrounded by his retinue, he worked as sculptor, wood-engraver, and type designer. He also wrote constantly and prodigiously on his favorite topics: social reform; the integration of the body and spirit; the evils of industrialisation; and the importance of the working man. He converted to Catholicism in 1913 and this influenced his sculpture and writings. He designed his first typeface, Perpetua, for Stanley Morison who had badgered him for years on this matter. Of all the 11 typefaces that he designed, Gill Sans is his most famous; it is a clear modern type and became the letter of the railways. Gill also contributed to book design and illustration, most notably The Four Gospels which he illustrated beautifully. Though he was a deeply religious man, Gill led an unconventional, alternative, often monastic lifestyle, including taking on many lovers and producing erotic engravings. But, he is still best remembered for his contributions to typography.

First unveiled in a single uppercase weight in 1928, Gill Sans achieved national prominence almost immediately, when it was chosen the following year to become the standard typeface for the LNER railway system, soon appearing on every facet of the company’s identity, from locomotive nameplates and station signage to restaurant car menus, printed timetables and advertising posters. Other users included Penguin Books’ iconic paperback jacket designs from 1935, Railtrack (and now Network Rail), which used Gill Sans for printed matter, the Church of England, and the British Government, which formally adopted Gill Sans as its standard typeface for use in all communications and logos in 2003. Saab Automobile adopted the font for almost all of its advertising and marketing communications. Gill Sans became Monotype’s fifth best selling typeface of the twentieth century. The typeface continues to thrive to this day, often being held to bring an artistic or cultural sensibility to an organization’s corporate style. Monotype themselves use it in their corporate style. “The shapes of letters do not derive their beauty from any sensual or sentimental reminiscences. No one can say that the O’s roundness appeals to us only because it is like that of an apple or of a girl’s breast or of the full moon. Letters are things, not pictures of things.”

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