Rick Poynor on the end of Emigre
I heard Rudy VanderLans speak at ACAD many years ago. Rudy said something to the effect that if you didn’t design the typeface you used, can you really say you designed the [at the time, printed] piece?
This morning started out with a simple question: What are the font variants after some of the font names in Font Book on Tiger e.g. Lucida Grande CY and CE? This led me on a fascinating journey through the Apple Human Interface Guidelines; onto a sort of strange but complete and nicely designed listing of resources by Luc Devroye; then naturally the Mac OS X 10.4: Fonts list; and perhaps most inspiring, a simple and informative discussion of the entire Lucida family of harmonized typefaces from the font designers themselves, Charles Bigelow and Kris Holmes Notes on Lucida designs; and finally, a sidetrack onto the code style font sampler. The web can be like that sometimes - taking one on unexpected and fascinating adventures.
Fascinating material and a lot to think about the next time you’re reading a web page. BTW, CY is a font that contains Cyrillic characters for Eastern European Slavic languages.
I started this blog without a clear vision of what I wanted to do with it. The challenge I set for myself was simply to post rather than to constantly redesign it.
The clearest vision might be to post my own artwork but I find myself posting links to things I want to remember and to things I find important or interesting. These things include design (I worked as a designer and art director in Calgary for 15 years), other artist’s perspectives, and various web applications that I use on a daily or weekly basis.
As I stick with this blog over time, I am learning that it can be much more than a personal bookmarking tool, it can be a place for:
With these things in mind, I’d like to make the following New Year’s blog resolutions:
And, finally, because I can’t resist:
Emigre: An Ending by Rick Poynor, U.K. (reprinted from Design Observer, November 2005)
Design blogs generate a lot of noise and they sure do love their own hype, but nothing produced in this area has so far equalled the concentrated documentary achievement and design culture transforming impact of Emigre and if you doubt this, just go and look at the magazine. Emigre had a clearly defined purpose. It involved contributions by many talented people, but the conduit for all this fervour and brain power was provided by one unusually astute editor. Emigre emerged at a time when technology was changing design forever and the magazine sizzled with this energy and excitement. Nothing so momentous or contentious is happening in graphic design today. Blogs, on the other hand, lack the focus of an overriding design mission. They are places for chatter. They are about anything, everything and often about nothing of any great consequence. No one, so far, has used the medium to stake out an urgent critical position comparable to Keedy’s or Blauvelt’s in the pages of Emigre in the 1990s. Nor have blogs proved to be the medium for exploring new design aesthetics. In Emigre, form itself became a means of debate. What the magazine said was inseparable from how it looked.
I heard Rudy VanderLans speak at ACAD many years ago. He said something to the effect that if you didn’t design the typeface you used, can you really say you designed the work? That always stuck with me.
