Type coverage—in 2012

11.10.2022/09.50

I’m not sure why I didn’t spot these back in 2012. This was very high praise from Cre8d Design, on ‘What is New Zealand’s iconic font?’ So nice to see JY Décennie in there. Still on type, the fifth Congreso Internacional de Tipografía in Valencia cites yours truly. Como consecuencia de todos estos cambios, surgen […]

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Windows 11 22H2 arrives; now for the usual post-upgrade tweaks

02.10.2022/09.29

Windows 11 22H2 arrived for me yesterday, and the first order of business, as always, was to sort out the typography. This earlier post is roughly right: make the registry hacks, then change the properties of the fonts in C:\Windows\WinSXS (namely by giving them administrator access) before deleting them. However, I needed one extra step […]

When the oldest looks the freshest

02.08.2022/04.16

Here are three Elle covers that I uploaded to last month’s gallery, from 1991, 2007 and 2022. Which looks the most modern? To me, it’s the 1991 US one. The Futura Light type is calm, it all looks rather balanced, and the photograph is well lit and composed. From memory, it was commended by […]

Here’s the latest book I worked on: Panos: My Life, My Odyssey out May 26

17.05.2022/10.31

[Originally posted in Lucire] Toward the end of next week, Panos Papadopoulos’s autobiography, Panos: My Life, My Odyssey, comes out in London, with an event in Stockholm following. This is an intimate memoir about Panos’s rise, from childhood poverty in Greece to the ‘king of swimwear’ in Scandinavia. Not only do I have an […]

Opera GX wins over Firefox in typography; Über’s still a lemon

/10.13

I’ve had both Firefox and Opera GX running as replacements for Vivaldi, which still crashes when I click in form fields, though not 100 per cent of the time. It’s running at about 50 per cent, so the fix they employed to deal with this issue is only half-effective. I see Firefox still doesn’t render […]

Vivaldi 5.2’s bugs: time to go back to Opera GX?

08.04.2022/11.30

Above: Vivaldi appears for less than a second; each entry then disappears. One of the bugs from last night. Vivaldi updated last night, and nearly instantly shut down. Sadly, there’s a bug which shuts the program down the moment you hit a form field (filed with them, and they are working on it), and […]

A smooth upgrade to Windows 11 (so far)

01.11.2021/00.27

The Windows 11 upgrade arrived on my desktop machine before my laptop, which was a surprise. Also surprising is how uneventful the whole process was, unlike Windows 10, which led me to become a regular on the Microsoft Answers forums. A few tips: (a) do back everything up first; and (b) do take screenshots […]

Spacing in French: figuring out how to punctuate professionally

22.09.2021/13.35

With the French edition of Lucire KSA now out, we’ve been hard at work on the second issue. The first was typeset by our colleagues in Cairo (with the copy subbed by me), but this time it falls on us, and I had to do a lot of research on French composition. There are […]

Title design in 1970: big geometric type rules

11.08.2021/10.49

There is something quite elegant about title typography from the turn of the decade as the 1960s become the 1970s. There is 1971’s Diamonds Are Forever by Maurice Binder, which apparently is one of Steven Spielberg’s favourites, but I’m thinking of slightly humbler fare from the year before. I got thinking about it […]

Helvetica in metal, 1985

03.03.2021/22.49

This was the back of Mum’s 1985 tax assessment slip from the IRD. Helvetica, in metal. The bold looks a bit narrow: a condensed cut, or just a compromised version because of the machinery used? Not often seen, since by this time phototypesetting was the norm, though one reason Car magazine was a good […]