Posts tagged ‘JY&A Fonts’


Type coverage—in 2012

11.10.2022

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 numerosas cuestiones sobre cómo afrontar el uso y la creación de la tipografía en un nuevo contexto, sometido a constantes transformaciones tecnológicas. Para muchos, los modos tradicionales de concebir la tipografía ya no funcionan en el mundo de la pantalla. Así, para el diseñador Jack Yan, la tecnología está cambiando tan rápidamente que la idea de que la tipografía se crea para imprimir está llegando prácticamente a su fin. Los nuevos dispositivos electrónicos empiezan a demandar tipografías específicas y no sólo meras adaptaciones de las ya existentes. Esto implica igualmente un adiestramiento por parte del usuario final, el lector, que no sólo debe familiarizarse con los nuevos dispositivos sino con los nuevos procedimientos asociados a la lectura dinámica.

This is pretty mainstream thinking now (and I would have thought in 2012, too) but also nice to be credited for saying it—I guess I would have first publicly pushed this idea in Desktop in 1996. But designers like Matthew Carter and Vincent Connare were already there …

Amazing what you can find in a Mojeek ego search, as opposed to a Google one.


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If you’re in the ‘New Zealand can’t’ camp, then you’re not a business leader

04.10.2020


Which club is the better one to belong to? The ones who have bent the curve down and trying to eliminate COVID-19, or the ones whose curves are heading up? Apparently Air New Zealand’s boss thinks the latter might be better for us.

From Stuff today, certain ‘business leaders’ talk about the New Zealand Government’s response to COVID-19.
   We have Air New Zealand boss Greg Foran saying that elimination was no longer a realistic goal for us, and that we should live with the virus.
   This is despite our country having largely eliminated the virus, which suggests it was realistic.
   No, the response hasn’t been perfect, but I’m glad we can walk about freely and go about our lives.
   Economist Benje Patterson says that if we don’t increase our risk tolerance, ‘We could get to that point where we’re left behind.’
   When I first read this, I thought: ‘Aren’t we leaving the rest of the world behind?’
   Is Taiwan, ROC leaving the world behind with having largely eliminated COVID-19 on its shores? It sure looks like it. How about mainland China, who by all accounts is getting its commerce moving? (We’ve reported on a lot of developments in Lucire relating to Chinese business.) The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has adopted policies similar to ours with travel and quarantine, and I’ve been watching their infection figures drop consistently. They’re also well on their way to eliminating the virus and leaving the world behind.
   We are in an enviable position where we can possibly have bubbles with certain low-risk countries, and that is something the incoming government after October 17 has to consider.
   We are in a tiny club that the rest of the world would like to join.
   Let’s be entirely clinical and calculating: how many hours of productivity will be lost to deaths and illnesses, and the lingering effects of COVID-19, if we simply tolerated the virus?
   Work done by Prof Heidi Tworek and her colleagues, Dr Ian Beacock and Eseohe Ojo, rates New Zealand’s democratic health communications among the best in the world and believes that, as of their writing in September, we have been successful in executing the elimination strategy.
   Some of our epidemiologists believe the goal can be achieved.
   I just have to go with the health experts over the business “experts”.
   I’m not sure you could be described as a ‘business leader’ if you are a business follower, and by that I mean someone who desires to be part of a global club that is failing at its response to COVID-19. GDP drops in places like the UK and the US are far more severe than ours over the second quarter—we’re a little over where Germany is. Treasury expects our GDP to grow in Q3, something not often mentioned by our media. As Europe experiences a second wave in many countries, will they show another drop? Is this what we would like for our country?
   I’ve fought against this type of thinking for most of my career: the belief that ‘New Zealand can’t’. That we can’t lead. That we can’t be the best at something. That because we’re a tiny country on the edge of the world we must take our cues from bigger ones.
   Bollocks.
   Great Kiwis have always said, ‘Bollocks,’ to this sort of thinking.
   Of course we can win the America’s Cup. Just because we haven’t put up a challenge before doesn’t mean we can’t start one now.
   Of course we can make Hollywood blockbusters. Just because we haven’t before doesn’t mean we can’t now.
   Heck, let’s even get my one in there: of course we can create and publish font software. Just because foreign companies have always done it doesn’t mean a Kiwi one can’t, and pave the way.
   Yet all of these were considered the province of foreigners until someone stood up and said, ‘Bollocks.’
   Once upon a time we even said that we could have hybrid cars that burned natural gas cheaply (and switch back to petrol when required) until the orthodoxy put paid to that, and we wound up buying petrol from foreigners again—probably because we were so desperate to be seen as part of some globalist club, rather than an independent, independently minded and innovative nation.
   Then when the Japanese brought in petrol–electric hybrids we all marvelled at how novel they were in a fit of collective national amnesia.
   About the only lot who were sensible through all of this were our cabbies, since every penny saved contributes to their bottom line. They stuck with LPG after 1996 and switched to the Asian hybrids when they became palatable to the punters.
   Through my career people have told me that I can’t create fonts from New Zealand (even reading in a national magazine after I had started business that there were no typefoundries here), that no one would want to read a fashion magazine online or that no one would ever care what carbon neutrality was. Apparently you can’t take an online media brand into print, either. This is all from the ‘New Zealand can’t’ camp, and it is not one I belong to.
   If anybody can, a Kiwi can.
   And if we happen to do better than others, for God’s sake don’t break out the tall poppy shit again.
   Accept the fact we can do better and that we do not need the approval of mother England or the United States. We certainly don’t want to be dragged down to their level, nor do we want to see the divisiveness that they suffer plague our politics and our everyday discourse.
   Elimination is better than tolerance, and I like the fact we didn’t settle for a second-best solution, even if some business followers do.
   Those who wish to import the sorts of division that the US and UK see today are those who have neither imagination nor a desire to roll up their sleeves and do the hard yards, because they know that spouting bullshit from positions of privilege is cheap and easy. And similarly I see little wisdom in importing their health approaches and the loss of life that results.
   I’m grateful for our freedom, since it isn’t illusory, as we leave the rest of the world to catch up. And I sincerely hope they do.


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More Wikiality—and this time it’s about me!

13.08.2020

Goes to show how seldom I ego-search.
   Here’s something a Wikipedian wrote about me in a discussion in 2010:

Jack Yan is not a notable typeface designer. He has never laid a hand on mouse or trackball to operate a font editing application. He tells some graphic designer employees of his what he wants them to draw with software, and has them do all the work of drawing and solving all the design problems involved in creating and designing a typeface and its fonts. As a professional typeface designer myself, Yan’s involvement in type design and font production does not qualify him as a typeface designer. Not even close.

   The user is called James Arboghast, whom I’ve never heard of in any of my years in the type design business.
   Now, you can argue whether I’m notable or not. You might not even like my designs. But given that Arboghast has such a knowledge of our inner workings, then maybe it would suggest that I am?
   Based on the above, which is libellous, let me say without fear of committing the same that, in this instance, Mr Arboghast is a fantasist and a liar.
   I’ve no beef with him outside of this, but considering that I was the first typeface designer in this country to work digitally—so much so that Joseph Churchward, who is indisputably notable, came to me 20 years ago to see if we could work together—there were no ‘graphic designer employees’ around who had the skills. At least none that I knew of when I was 14 years old and deciding which bitmaps to light up on an eight-by-eight grid.
   There were still no such people around when I began drawing stuff for submission to ITC, or when I began drawing stuff that I digitalized myself on a hand-held scanner. I certainly couldn’t afford employees at age 21 when I asked my Mum to fork out $400 to buy me a really early version of Fontographer. And there were still no such people around when I hand-kerned 1,000 pairs into my fonts and did my own hinting. Remember, this was pre-internet, so when you’re a young guy in Wellington doing this work in isolation, you had to know the skills. I might even have those early drawings somewhere, and not that long ago I found the maths book with the bitmap grid.
   If I didn’t know about the field then I certainly would have been found out when the industry was planning QuickDraw GX and I was one of the professional typeface designers advising on the character sets, and if I didn’t know how to solve design problems, then the kerning on the highway signs’ type in this country would not comply with NZS. (The kerning is terrible, incidentally, but government standards are government standards. It was one of those times when I had to turn in work that I knew could be far, far better.) I’d also have been seriously busted by my students when I taught the first typeface design course in New Zealand.
   Every single retail release we have has been finished by me, with all the OpenType coding done by me. All the alternative characters, all the ligatures, all the oldstyle numerals and accented characters in languages I can’t begin to fathom. Latin, Cyrillic and Greek. I’ve tested every single font we’ve released, whether they are retail or private commissions.
   The only time a team member has not been credited in the usual way was with a private commission, for a client with whom I have signed an NDA, and that person is Jasper Luki, a very talented young designer with whom I had the privilege to work at the start of his career in the 2010s.
   The fact that people far, far more famous than me in the type field around the world, including in his country, come to me with contract work might suggest that, if I’m not notable, then I’m certainly dependable.
   And people wonder why I have such a low opinion of Wikipedia, where total strangers spout opinions while masquerading as experts. The silver lining is that writing the above was a thoroughly enjoyable trip down memory lane and a career that I’m generally proud of, save for a few hiccups along the way.


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Neil Gaiman on JY Integrity on his UK paperbacks

09.07.2018

When Neil Gaiman pays you a compliment about one of your typeface families (JY Integrity, which I designed in 1993), you gratefully accept.


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Finishing off 2011 with the most fun radio interview I have ever done

31.12.2011

Photo by Xavier Collin/Snapstar Live

Friday morning’s interview with Sonia Sly on Kiwi Summer was the most fun I have ever had on radio.
   Radio New Zealand National was the most fair and balanced medium I dealt with when running for Mayor of Wellington in 2010, and I was glad that Sonia thought of me for its summer programming this year.
   I joked to friends prior to the interview that 2011 was much like 2010: go on to National Radio to dis the Wellywood sign in the first half of the year, and have a fun interview in the second half.
   This was a casual, fun interview thanks to Sonia putting me at such ease. It goes on for a healthy 17 minutes, covering my involvement in Lucire, judging the Miss Universe New Zealand pageant, my branding work, including the Medinge Group, and my typeface design career. The feedback I have had is that people enjoyed it, and I’d like to share it with you all here.
   Here’s the link, and you can always find it at the Kiwi Summer page for the day, where other formats are listed.
   And if you’re wondering where the opening reading comes from, it’s taken from this review of the Aston Martin V8 Vantage I penned many years ago.


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The minutiæ of 2011

18.12.2011

As some of you know, I have been using Tumblr since 2007, and when Vox died (at least for me) in 2009, I began using Tumblr more. It was good to record brief thoughts of little consequence, but as I hunted through the archive for 2011, I realized it was quite a good way to see what little thoughts crept up during the year.
   I had blogged less on Tumblr in the last few weeks, just out of sheer busy-ness, and because Facebook’s Timeline has been quite a compelling way to get instant gratification from posts from people I know. But Tumblr has its uses.
   In the spirit of my ‘History of the Decade’ series, here are the unimportant—and some very important—things that piqued my interest during 2011.


January: The Hustle crew is back in Brum, but without the ‘created by Tony Jordan’ credit on some episodes.

January
   Why is Tony Jordan’s name missing from these episodes of Hustle?
   We put JY&A Consulting on to the jya.co domain.
   Zen is awesome, even if the male cast largely speaks with English accents and the female cast speaks with Italian and French ones.
   John Barry dies. My favourite composer. RIP.

February
   The Christchurch earthquake and stories of tragedy and heroism.
   The fall and fall of Charlie Sheen, and if recasting Two and a Half Men, put Martin Sheen in it and set it in 2040.
   Mad Dogs begins.


February: Mad Dogs: great British telly. Philip Glenister adopts a Gene Hunt pose, but with Marc Warren instead of John Simm.

March
   Firefox 3 crashes a lot.
   Kelly Adams is off the market, boys.
   Mad Dogs finishes.
   The Americans make William & Kate with Los Angeles and Hollywood standing in for Buckingham Palace, London, Klosters, St Andrew’s and other locations.

April
   I go on telly to dis the copyright amendments in a new bill, which has been spurred on by Hollywood lobbyists. Farewell the presumption of innocence and due process.
   Elisabeth Sladen dies.
   Everyone talking about Pippa Middleton’s rear end.


April: This seems to be the enduring image of the UK Royal Wedding.

May
   Cheryl Cole goes to America for X Factor USA. Then she comes back.
   Karen Gillan films We’ll Take Manhattan with the first on-set photo released.
   More post office closures.


June: Australians unite against homophobes who pressure a billboard company to take down a safe-sex ad.

June
   Australians unite against a billboard company that takes down an ad featuring a gay couple. The CEO responds within the day, which is a contrast to how Wellington Airport conducted itself over public outcry over ‘Welly-wood’ Part II.
   MSG is evil.
   A redhead wins Miss USA.

July
   People go on to Google Plus to talk about Google Plus.
   The Murdoch Press phone-hacking scandal.
   UN: internet is a human right.

August
   I think the movie The Avengers is about John Steed and Emma Peel.

September
   The Unscripted exhibition and I get photographed with Jekyll himself, James Nesbitt. Oh, and the Mayor.
   Nigerian con-men send me a 419 scam—in hard copy.
   Facebook Timeline.
   Old School, New School exhibition has Joe Churchward and Mark Geard’s typeface designs.


October: The Russian Sam Tyler.

October
   Rugby.
   Russians remake Life on Mars.
   More ‘nek minnit’.
   Gaddafi owned a Toyota (just like bin Laden).

November
   Mongrels is back.
   Ricky Gervais will be back for the Golden Globes.
   The Sweeney will be back.

December: Britney Spears gets engaged again. A few years ago, The Times of India talked about her first marriage to Jason Alexander—and finds the wrong photo.

December
   My roses are blooming.
   Facebook Timeline gets rolled out to the public, so they make it worse.
   Occupy continues.
   Britney Spears gets engaged: remember that time she married George Costanza off Seinfeld ?


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Intellectual property doesn’t deserve a black mark, but some powers-that-be do

22.11.2011

After being interviewed about the outcome of the ‘Wellywood’ sign vote yesterday (a summary of what I told Newstalk ZB can be found on my Facebook fan page) I was reminded about how a few Wellingtonians, who supported my quest to stop the sign in 2010 and 2011, were not that thrilled that I used intellectual property law as my technique.
   Those following this in 2010 and 2011 might remember that I was the person who called up the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and the Hollywood Sign Trust, and was, last year, the mayoral candidate most active in trying to stop Wellington Airport from erecting the sign at the Miramar cutting. This year, with no local election to be concerned about, I remained active, more so upon seeing just how arrogant the Airport’s “leadership” was, before it flip-flopped again by saying that it should consult with the public (the same public it called insignificant weeks before).
   And yet, months later, I was also miffed about the Copyright Act amendments and the introduction of the “three strikes” law, one which the Government seems to be uncertain about as it supports it at home, and opposes it at the United Nations.
   This is not a populist about-turn on my part. I have a view of intellectual property which was refined in part by my time at law school, where I sat the first IP paper offered formally by Victoria University, and my work for TypeRight, the advocacy organization, which wound up winning an award from Publish magazine in the US. This experience leaned toward copyright, more than trade mark and patent, though I secured reasonable experience in TMs working in brand consulting and acting as an expert witness. Through that exposure, I began with the classical argument that the protection of authors, and rewarding them, are good things. No protection, no incentive.
   But, this must be balanced by the rule of law. What we had before the latest amendments to the Copyright Act already worked. Copyright owners could, indeed, pursue infringers, and a plaintiff and a defendant could fairly be represented in a tribunal. It would be up to the copyright owner to front up with a statement of claim, and they had better be ready with sufficient proof to make the case air-tight—just as any other plaintiff in a New Zealand court would require. That seems fair. I have relied on American law often when it came to pursuing piracy of our articles, and, again, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act there worked well in giving both sides a fair hearing without the presumption of guilt.
   As argued in some depth in 2009, and again in 2011, the three-strikes law—which, I might note, the PM was against before he was for, as was the Hon Peter Dunne MP—puts the power firmly in the hands of the copyright owner, so that a defendant has to discharge the presumption of guilt. A copyright owner, as we have learned, can get an ISP to do its dirty work in New Zealand, sending out infringement notices to its customers. Whatever I learned in that IP class at uni, I had always believed the law would take place in a fair forum, and that the common-law presumption of innocence would always stand. What is happening here runs counter to that idea.
   To be fair and balanced here, I should note that the law was proposed under Labour, and received the support of Labour when argued in Parliament, which makes me wonder whether the duty of being Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition was fulfilled properly during the debates.
   Such laws, unfortunately, do the idea of copyright no credit. They have sullied the good work that copyright has done in most of our recent history by protecting those who sought it, and deserved it. I think of those who were in the typeface design business with me, who opted to protect their works. Some designers only make a few dozen dollars per annum from a font that might have taken them six weeks to produce. Typically, $300 is a figure I hear for a design that doesn’t make the big time—and the majority do not, just like in music.
   European Commission VP for the Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes, told the Forum d’Avignon on November 19 a similar story: ’97·5 pe rcent of one of the biggest collecting society’s members in Europe receive less than … €1,000 a month for their copyright works.’
   As reported in The Register, ‘Kroes said, copyright as it now stands is failing to deliver the economic rewards that are supposed to be its aim. At the same time, “citizens increasingly hear the word copyright and hate what is behind it. Many see the current system as a tool to punish and withhold, not a tool to recognize and reward.”’
   The Register concludes:

In the context of the public’s increasing resistance to punitive measures such as America’s SOPA, New Zealand’s three-strikes disconnection notice regime, the acrimonious “iiTrial” in Australia (backed by the MPAA via its local sockpuppet AFACT), it’s also interesting to note that Kroes mentions the intermediary business just once in her speech – since, at least to The Register, it seems that most of the public’s hatred of copyright appears to stem from how the intermediaries approach it.

   The distinction needs to be drawn. We shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. What we should be weary of are not just the intermediaries as The Register notes, but some of the parties who inspire, lobby and even offer to draft these laws. It seems those parties are often those who care little for the thoughts of the community, whether it be an Airport CEO, or politicians who are so inept at understanding their subject they confuse fact with fiction.
   While I will not be drawn on who will get my electorate and party votes for this General Election, the behaviour of some of the powers-that-be seem to support those who claim that we no longer live in democracies in the occident, but plutocracies.


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A few more swashes for JY Pinnacle Italic

15.07.2011

Pinnacle Italic Pro

JY Pinnacle Italic will be re-released as a Pro version shortly, and above are some of the extra characters we’ve added.
   I know the swash k still needs work, and it will be fixed up by the time of release.
   Pinnacle always had a decent bunch of ligatures, but if you have the chance to add more thanks to OpenType, then why not?
   Hard to believe I originally drew this over 15 years ago—it really doesn’t seem that long ago.


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Archæological evidence that QuickDraw GX existed

09.06.2011


Here’s a glyph inside JY Integrity that never got used beyond the original publicity in the mid-1990s.
   Before there was OpenType, there was QuickDraw GX, and I was part of the consortium trying to sort out the character set, along with Allan Haley and others. We were using this newfangled collaboration tool called the internet. Cheekily, I did a gx glyph so we could tout the Integrity family as GX-compatible. It was in the original brochures in 1993 or thereabouts.
   As history tells us, QuickDraw GX never took off, but the glyph is still inside the font family. Just for fun, we’ve kept it in the Pro version of the fonts, out later this year. It’s not linked to any alternative sets in OpenType, but it is accessible as part of the character map.


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What others write about their Firefox crashes; Chrome is the oddity with font-face

16.12.2010

Mozilla Crash Reports

It has been interesting reading the comments from other disgruntled Firefox users over the ‘unmark purple’ error (nsXULControllers::cycleCollection::UnmarkPurple(nsISupports*))—now that I can trace the majority of my crashes to this.
   Yesterday, Mozilla’s Crash Reports’ site crashed (rather fitting), and today, the CSS wouldn’t load, which allowed me to read what others wrote on the Crash Reporter dialogue box.
   Unhappy Firefox users who are finding our favourite browser plagued with endless problems. As there was no mention of ‘unmark purple’ in the 3·6·13 change-log, I presume we’re going to continue to suffer till Firefox 4 comes out. (Beta 8 is due out around the 21st now, delayed by several weeks.)
   Here is a selection of comments, complete with typos. One is from me (guess which one; no prizes offered):

why is this happenign so much lately…at least once a day..I get disconnected from Firefox

Really got fed up with this. Why this is happening again and again?

Yet again…c’mon Mozilla!!!!

and again

god .. whats wrong with mymozila .. ???

i CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’VE DONE THIS!

Two crashes in two days. Nothing unusual at all. Flash, of course.

After the update.. this is 3. crash.. // güncelleme sonrası 3. oldu çöküşü oldu.

it just went off air

Well, looks like your 3·6·13 update didn’t solve the crashes. Plug-in container crashed at the same time.

boom goes the dynamite

   The positive Firefox news today is that we implemented our first font-face, at the Lucire website. We’ve been experimenting with font embedding ever since Microsoft WEFT at the turn of the century, and the results were always variable.
   They are by no means consistent today, because I’ve noticed that it works in Firefox, IE8 (before it crashes, but, then, it is Microsoft; and without kerning) and Opera 11 Beta (also sans kerning). Despite the presence of SVG files and references to them in the stylesheet, and the assurance that it is now switched on by default, it does not work on Chrome. No surprises there, with Google’s ever-buggy, typographer-unfriendly browser, though I am willing to accept the possibility that we mucked up on the CSS spec.
   It’s the Royal Wedding headline that has a font-face spec, set to JY Fiduci:

Lucire with font-face
Firefox 3·6·13

Lucire with font-face
Chrome 8

Lucire with font-face
Opera 11 Beta

Lucire with font-face
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8

   Big thanks this week to Andrew, who installed some of the Lucire font family to see if he could experience what I do with these browsers. Interestingly, he did not encounter Opera’s ligature and quotation-mark bug (where any word containing a ligature changes font, and where quotation marks and apostrophes display in another font altogether) on any browser, though we did learn that Firefox 4 and IE8 were the only two browsers that picked, on his computer, the right weight for some of the specified type. He could see the installed fonts in his Chrome menu, unlike me. However, he was able to confirm that soft hyphens were not being picked up by Chrome—they were being displayed as regular hyphens, mid-line. (You can see this in the Chrome screen shot above.)
   Another friend, Steven, was able to confirm Chrome’s failure to switch fonts when it encountered a change in language. Thank you, gentlemen, and for those who called to help earlier, for giving me the benefit of the doubt.


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