Mucha Web Pages

Just posting for some quick webpage feedback. Thoughts are appreciated. FYI the gray body copy prints out darker (if I were designing for screen, I'd make the type a hair darker)

Willa Cather: Revived

So this is a kind of long post because I was hoping I could get a last opinion before going to print with my stuff. Does everything look ok design-wise? Does Willa Cather have enough of a presence now?

Student Publication: I have made the dandelions on the cover I made the dandelions larger, added a few pages including "A Note from the Founder," and played with the size of my fonts.

Website: Only a few minor changes

FB and Twitter: I changed some of the posts to be made by "Willa" and the center instead of solely the center.

What do you think? Any feed back would be so much appreciated!! Thanks

PS. I don't know some of the webpages are showing up with a gradient, so please ignore that because it will be fixed.

I can't do it...I tried to research something as thought provoking and well researched as all these great type discussions. But in my research I came across this gem and the next thing I knew I was copying and pasting from McSweeney.net and getting back to setting up a faux facebook page for Rachel Carson....:

I’m Comic Sans, Asshole.

by Mike Lacher

- - - -

Listen up. I know the shit you’ve been saying behind my back. You think I’m stupid. You think I’m immature. You think I’m a malformed, pathetic excuse for a font. Well think again, nerdhole, because I’m Comic Sans, and I’m the best thing to happen to typography since Johannes fucking Gutenberg.

You don’t like that your coworker used me on that note about stealing her yogurt from the break room fridge? You don’t like that I’m all over your sister-in-law’s blog? You don’t like that I’m on the sign for that new Thai place? You think I’m pedestrian and tacky? Guess the fuck what, Picasso. We don’t all have seventy-three weights of stick-up-my-ass Helvetica sitting on our seventeen-inch MacBook Pros. Sorry the entire world can’t all be done in stark Eurotrash Swiss type. Sorry some people like to have fun. Sorry I’m standing in the way of your minimalist Bauhaus-esque fascist snoozefest. Maybe sometime you should take off your black turtleneck, stop compulsively adjusting your Tumblr theme, and lighten the fuck up for once.

People love me. Why? Because I’m fun. I’m the life of the party. I bring levity to any situation. Need to soften the blow of a harsh message about restroom etiquette? SLAM. There I am. Need to spice up the directions to your graduation party? WHAM. There again. Need to convey your fun-loving, approachable nature on your business’ website? SMACK. Like daffodils in motherfucking spring.

When people need to kick back, have fun, and party, I will be there, unlike your pathetic fonts. While Gotham is at the science fair, I’m banging the prom queen behind the woodshop. While Avenir is practicing the clarinet, I’m shredding “Reign In Blood” on my double-necked Stratocaster. While Univers is refilling his allergy prescriptions, I’m racing my tricked-out, nitrous-laden Honda Civic against Tokyo gangsters who’ll kill me if I don’t cross the finish line first. I am a sans serif Superman and my only kryptonite is pretentious buzzkills like you.

It doesn’t even matter what you think. You know why, jagoff? Cause I’m famous. I am on every major operating system since Microsoft fucking Bob. I’m in your signs. I’m in your browsers. I’m in your instant messengers. I’m not just a font. I am a force of motherfucking nature and I will not rest until every uptight armchair typographer cock-hat like you is surrounded by my lovable, comic-book inspired, sans-serif badassery.

Enough of this bullshit. I’m gonna go get hammered with Papyrus.

Request for feedback

Sorry to interrupt the political flow, but I revamped the Mucha logo and am curious to see what people think. Whoever suggested the name change to Mucha Ink--I love it, Thanks!

RE: Political Typography

Impressively well-written post, Nathan!

Here's an interesting blog post by Michael Tomasky that appeared in The Guardian which comments on, among other things, the Democratic proclivity towards san-serif typefaces and the Republican fondness for serifs. He too comments on the political history of typography in Germany, and though he doesn't touch upon the great Fraktur debate specifically, he does make mention that under Hitler's regime modern san-serifs like Futura were dismissed as being "Jewish inventions."

After reading this, I saw the tendency for san-serif type to be linked to progressiveness... the mortal enemy of all things fascist. Curiosity for the veracity of this theory led me to an excellent article by another Nathan (Francis, not Rosen) appearing on the InstantShift web development site. Here, Francis discusses how certain typographic milestones have contributed to various political events and cultural identities. He talks about Johnston Sans, the typeface developed for the London Underground in 1913 by Edward Johnston:

On the eve of the Great War in Europe, Germans were making great design innovations. British designers and politicians became concerned that elements of the new German style would infiltrate their own graphic arts in a form of subtle cultural invasion. Johnston's block typeface was a reaction against that, with it's clean geometric forms drawn directly from the stone-cut Roman Letters of Trajan's Column, itself a symbol of imperialist strength and fortitude.

Francis continues by discussing Paul Renner, the typographer, artist, and author who developed Futura. He was exiled from his own country during the Third Reich, a regime responsible for eradicating cultural innovation of every and all kinds. In Type 1 here at UB, I made a poster devoted to him, in part because I found his proto-Futura letterforms so fascinating:

Renner was close friends with fellow typographer, Jan Tschichold, who wrote The New Typography in 1928. Together, they maintained the need for a clear, unadorned san-serif for improved legibility, one modeled after Russian Constructivism. Unfortuately, this allusion to their communist neighbors to the east made Renner and Tschichold easy targets for the German nationalists, who quickly labeled them Bolshevists. In what Francis describes as a "an act of moral courage that staggers belief," Renner expressed his displeasure at Nazi racism and prejudice by publishing the booklet "Kultur-Bolschewismus?" ("Cultural Bolshevism?"). Soon after, Tschichold and his wife were detained in a concentration camp (luckily both were soon released and fled to Switzerland), and Renner was removed from his teaching post and placed in internal exile. Thankfully, Renner continued living and working until his death in 1956, and Futura long outlasted the Fascist regime and the war.

Francis continues with his linkage of san-serif faces with important political shifts: Helvetica and post-war global economics, Gotham and Barak Obama's campaign of change and hope. This trend is interesting, and it leaves me with a question: are the political implications of serif vs san-serif faces strictly contextual? Is it only a matter of new vs classic? Change vs status quo? Or is there something in the very shape and design of the letterforms that speaks to a particular ethos?

Re: Political Type

I found this interesting for the fact that it is from ABC News and their particular viewership.

Political Fonts: ABCNEWS.COM - What candidates say with words -- and typefaces.

RE: political typography

Wow, Nathan!  What a comprehensive and well researched post, kudos!

When thinking about typography and political/cultural movements, I thought of the Iconoclast movement in Muslim societies. Images of people and animals were viewed as being sacrilegious idols and therefore banned from the religious text (quran), so scribes and authors found creative, ornate ways to incorporate beauty with typography. They experimented with different materials, layouts, patterns, textures, etc. Check out these examples from different qurans throughout the years:

 

Political Typography

Nathan, thanks for sharing such an interesting post! While I don't have any knowledge in my head on this subject, I did find a great article about the politics of typography. I will summarize one font in particular: Johnston Sans, or Underground Railway Block-Letter, created by Edward Johnston for the London Underground system during the Great War of 1914-1919.

According to the article, Britain felt a compelling need to stay ahead of German innovation for fear that rival German designers would infiltrate their industry as a cultural invasion. It is interesting to even consider this because as a designer, this need would never occur to me in the 21st Century. So Johnston created his typeface with stone cut Roman lettering on Trajan’s Column as inspiration to reassure the London citizens that the British Empire was strong and unmovable. Johnston helped establish the popularity of sans serif typefaces in modern typography with his typeface, which is an important milestone in 20th Century design. (Credit: Nathan Francis)

Check out the article for four other great examples of the politics of type, including President Obama's use of Gotham in his campaign.

Literal Font Nazis

I've heard the term "Font Nazi" applied to anyone who decries the use of Comic Sans or vehemently argues the superiority of Helvetica over Arial, but here's a true story about literal font Nazis.

Fraktur is a Gothic blackletter calligraphic hand developed in Germany, circa 1500. Modern forms are often mistakenly called "Old English" or similar names. (The Old English language predates blackletter, and was written in Insular script or Futhorc runes.)

Antiqua, by contrast, is a very different script developed slightly earlier in Italy. Antiqua fuses Roman capitals with some characteristics of Carolingian minuscules and is the direct ancestor of many fonts, such as Times New Roman, that are still common today.

Both Fraktur and Antiqua spread throughout the Holy Roman Empire, but over the centuries Antiqua grew more predominant, not least because it was easier to write and more legible than Fraktur. By the end of the 18th century, Fraktur was on the verge of extinction almost everywhere... except for Germany, where it was still going strong. And thus began the Antiqua-Fraktur dispute.

At first, Fraktur and Antiqua coexisted in peace. Fraktur was used for text in German, and Antiqua was used for text in Latin. At left is a document from 1768 showing the two side by side. This began to change in the early 19th century when Napoleon invaded Germany and dissolved the Holy Roman Empire, and nationalists emerged who attempted to define a German national character. Partisans arose on both sides, and the debate raged through the 19th century and well into the 20th. Some argued that Fraktur was old-fashioned and out of date in a world in which most countries relied on Antiqua. Others retorted that Antiqua, being derived from Roman letterforms, was the obsolete one, and that Fraktur was natively and distinctively German. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the famous writer and politician, favored Antiqua despite the objections of his mother, while Otto von Bismarck was so dedicated to Fraktur that he refused to read books printed in Antiqua. In 1910 Adolf Reinecke published Die deutsche Buchstabenschrift (The German Alphabet), which went so far as to claim that Latin script caused eyestrain and nearsightedness, and ascribed almost magical properties to Fraktur.

 A vote was taken in the Reichstag on May 4, 1911, on a proposal to make Antiqua the national typeface. The debate was long and emotional, and the proposal was narrowly defeated by a vote of 85-82.

In 1934, Führer und Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler himself (I told you we'd be hearing about literal Nazis) denounced Fraktur in a speech before the Reichstag, published in Völkischer Beobachter, the official newspaper of the Nazi Party, on September 7 of that year:

"Your alleged Gothic internalisation does not fit well in this age of steel and iron, glass and concrete, of womanly beauty and manly strength, of head raised high and intention defiant [...] In a hundred years, our language will be the European language. The nations of the east, the north and the west will, to communicate with us, learn our language. The prerequisite for this: The script called Gothic is replaced by the script we have called Latin so far..."

Finally, the debate was settled by fiat in 1941, in an edict signed by Martin Bormann, private secretary to Hitler. The edict banned Fraktur once and for all, on the grounds that it constituted "Schwabacher Judenlettern" (Jew-letters from Schwabach). Fraktur was to be phased out of use immediately in all Nazi territory, to be replaced by the "modern," "normal" Antiqua. In a grand feat of irony, the letterhead of that edict was printed in Fraktur.

After the Second World War and the overthrow of the Nazi government, Fraktur made a small resurgence, but was ultimately unable to stand up to the global Latin onslaught. Fraktur is no longer taught in schools, and now appears almost exclusively on beer labels, on pub signs, or in similar contexts in which it is meant to convey a rustic, old-fashioned attitude. Even then, it often contains mistakes made out of ignorance, such as a lack of ligatures or incorrect characters in place of similar-looking ones.

That concludes the story of the Antiqua-Fraktur dispute, but that wasn't the only time that heads of state have become involved in typography. Hangul, the alphabet in which the Korean language is written, was devised (some say singlehandedly) by Sejong the Great in 1443, out of concern that his country lacked a native writing system and that Chinese writing was both unsuited to the language and too difficult for many common people to learn. Hangul was such a success that to this day, South Korea has one of the highest proportional literacy rates in the world.

Even the British Isles have seen "executive meddling" of this sort. In 1571, the first Gaelic typeface was developed under orders from Elizabeth I, who commissioned a new catechism to convert Irish Roman Catholics to Anglicanism, and needed it to be legible by the masses (no pun intended). Over the years, that typeface evolved into decorative "Irish" fonts, which redraw Latin characters in the style of native Insular script, making a uniquely British style of type.

I hope you've learned something interesting; I certainly had a good time researching all of this. As discussion, can you think of any other periods in which typography has played a major political or cultural role?