Typographic Abbreviations Series #2: VAG

This entry is the second in a series of short articles explaining exactly what all those mysterious abbreviations you come across in your typographic lives actually mean. In this installation, the abbreviation we’ll examine is VAG (as in VAG Rounded).

VAG Rounded is a typeface that was originally developed by Sedley Place in 1979 as part of the corporate branding for Volkswagen. The “VAG” stands for “Volkswagen Aktiengesellschaft” (which is German for “Volkswagen Incorporated”). In 1989, the font was published for public use by Adobe. Its designers were David Bristow, Gerry Barney, Ian Hay, Kit Cooper, and Terence Griffin.

VAG Rounded is one of many fonts which come bundled with several of Adobe’s industry-standard design programs, such as Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator. Because of the huge popularity of Adobe software (and subsequent proliferation of VAG Rounded), many designers have VAG Rounded loaded on their computers whether they know it or not. It is not surprising then, especially when considering VAG Rounded’s clean, simple, and friendly design, that it has become a very commonly used font.

While the type experts at Adobe identify VAG Rounded as “a variation on nineteenth-century grotesque sans serif designs”, its most obvious distinguishing factor is the use of rounded terminals. This design element gives it a uniquely soft and friendly feeling, making it popular as a choice for many modern logo designs and marketing campaigns (for more on this topic, see this entry on the FontShop blog by Stephen Coles).

In fact, the clean and friendly appearance of VAG Rounded earned it the choice for use on the keyboards of all Apple iBooks and 2003-and-later PowerBooks, further exposing the font to designers around the world.

Another indirect testament to the success of VAG Rounded when used in the context of corporate marketing is GE Inspira, an adaptation of VAG Rounded developed by Michael Abbink around 2002 as part of a visual identity system for General Electric. Some comparisons between the two fonts are made in the following image (from Wikipedia):

I still haven’t figured out how to pronounce VAG Rounded in my normal conversation. My immediate instinct is to make a word from the VAG initials and refer to it as something that would sound like “Vadge Rounded” or simply “Vadge”. But for obvious awkwardness-avoiding reasons I think I’ll just take the time to pronounce each letter: “Vee Ay Gee Rounded”.

Innocent vernacular or sick typographic joke?

In the font business we sometimes pour light-hearted scorn on those who would use Comic Sans, particularly when there’s no particularly light-hearted or funkiness in the subject matter. (When arriving in Lisbon airport, I was amused to see stern warnings about bringing Cholera into the country, set in Microsoft’s most popular font.) Are the people who use Comic Sans “inappropriately” actually worse than other kinds of amateur typographer? Perhaps not in general. At least they have discovered the font menu – one of the first steps on the way to typographic enlightenment.

But every now and then all one’s prejudices come fulfilled in one glorious moment! Recently I took a trip to Germany, taking in the city of Jena (home of Carl Zeiss lenses) as well as Berlin. In a Jena side street, we came upon this laundromat combined with an internet station, call shop and copy shop. There are frankly so many mistakes, even subtle ones like upside-down E’s and H’s, that I can hardly believe it is all an accident, a genuine piece of vernacular use of lettering.

What do you think? Witty joke by a talented typographer? Or not…?

Who says magnetic letters are just for kids?

Name that font.

Steven Hill’s amazing title screen pages

Anyone interested in lettering will probably enjoy shillPages—an amazing collection of movie title screen shots.

Here are just a few samples from his gigantic collection:

I also like to use WhatTheFont to test the title screens against what we have in the MyFonts database. I can get some interesting results too if i use titles that are obviously handlettered / not made with existing fonts (the simplest ones work best).

Type From The Crypt

Disclaimer: While the timing of this article seems fittingly close to Halloween, I genuinely just like horror-related stuff; I would just as soon have posted it on Christmas or Mother’s Day. With that being said…

I recently bought the complete Tales From The Crypt box set, and have since been reading through story after story, like a 10-year-old on a sugar high. Zombies, werewolves, murderous scandal and grave-robbing now fill my dreams.

Many people are unaware that Tales From The Crypt was originally a comic book published in the 1950s by EC Comics. It wasn’t until decades later, in 1989, that the popular HBO television series was launched.

Until Fredrich Werham’s Seduction of the Innocent and the subsequent establishment of the Comics Code in 1954, horror and crime comics were huge in the United States. Tales From The Crypt was one of many such titles, like EC’s Vault of Horror and Haunt of Fear, to fly off of newsstands and into the sweaty little palms of pre-pubescent boys all over the country.

One of my favorite elements of Tales From The Crypt (not surprisingly) is the amazing, exclamation-point-laden, hand-rendered lettering. It isn’t especially unique that a horror comic would have sensationalist type styles, but I still find myself getting super-excited whenever I think a character is about to let a blood-curdling scream loose…comic book characters’ words always look way cooler when they are being attacked or otherwise terrified.

Another unique chance for the creepy lettering styles to shine is on the title page for each story. Generally these pages have a large, horrific image with big title lettering to get you psyched up for the “yarn” which is about to unfold.

I can’t help but wonder how these sensational displays of lettering were affected, if at all, by the Comic Code’s assertion that “…words or symbols which have acquired undesirable meanings are forbidden”. I may just be reading too far into things, but it does seem to me that the lettering on story title pages became slightly subdued in Tales From The Crypt as the censorship pressures began to build.

These kinds of comics have influenced many modern-day type designers in creating their own digital fonts. While working on the MyFonts site, I often search for things like horror and monster to test different functions. In doing so I’ve inadvertently become quite familiar with this genre of fonts.

One of the main problems in emulating hand-lettering with a digital font comes about when spelling out words, like HORROR, that have multiple occurrences of the same letter. If all the Rs are exactly the same, it will become obvious that a digital font was used. Most of the better examples of hand-lettering fonts retain some of their organic quality by including alternate versions of the same letter. This allows for more of the variation which occurs naturally in true hand-lettering.

Some fonts, like Typodermic’s Croteau, take advantage of some of the more advanced features in the OpenType font format by offering a large amount of custom letter-pair ligatures. These allows an even broader range of variation, further helping to prevent obvious letterform repetition.

While many foundries offer fonts similar in style to the lurid horror comic style of the ’50s, there are a few foundries that focus specifically on comic lettering. Comicraft and Blambot are excellent examples of font foundries who offer more than just one or two variations on this theme.

Below are a few samples of some of the fonts I’ve come across on MyFonts that I think speak the same or similar language to the Tales From The Crypt style of the ’50s.

If you like these and want to see more, check out the album of related fonts I’ve put together at MyFonts. Also, check out this gallery of Classic Crime & Horror Covers (highly recommended!).

PS: Happy Friday the 13th!

Type on the Japanese Street

I’ve been living in Japan for a few months now (my wife is an English teacher here) and it’s been very interesting getting familiar with the complex Japanese writing system. There are three “alphabets” (not counting the Roman characters used in many places) which are intermixed freely everywhere you look.

Japanese signage and writing style are fascinating in their variety. As in any other language, the styles vary from antique brush strokes to kitschy 50s sci-fi abstract to handwritten “cursive” that’s all but unreadable to the foreigner’s eye.

I’ve taken a few shots around town with my mobile phone camera to capture some of the interesting typographic tidbits I’ve noticed. I haven’t been as industrious as I had hoped, so I will also note here an interesting site that was pointed out to me by a Japanese friend who is one of the very active font identifiers on our WhatTheFont Forum.

Taquet’s Hatena Diary (English translation) is a Japanese blog devoted to showing photographs of type use in Japanese signage. Some notable recent samples:

	Typical boring sans combining all four alphabets: hiragana, katakana, kanji, and English.
	Rustic harvest font. This is katakana, the alphabet used for onomatopoeia and words of foreign origin. This one just says Harvest Fair: haabesuto fea.
	Avant garde “stylish” style. This is also katakana (”teatoru taimuzusukuea”) for Theatre Times Square.
	Kind of rough old-printing-press style being used to advertise… a banana dessert. Vertical Japanese is read top-to-bottom, right-to-left. The first two kanji (top right) are east and capital, otherwise known as Tokyo.

And now a few of my own from around town.

	Six renditions of the kanji for “eternity” — very similar to “water” 水.
	This ubiquitous sign is the brand of a delivery service. I enjoy how the cat logo at the top is simultaneously cute and disturbingly evil. Note the clever representation of the middle kanji (”hurry” 急) with the lower strokes turned into little running feet.
	Water 水 and tree 木 are drawn quite differently and normally look nothing alike. But in this blocky type, the only difference between them is the thin separation between the central vertical stroke and the “arms” — a clever representation.

Typographic Abbreviations Series #1: OCR

This entry is the first in a series (at least that’s the plan) of short articles explaining exactly what all those mysterious abbreviations you come across in your typographic lives actually mean. The first abbreviation we’ll examine is OCR.

OCR (as in OCR-A) stands for Optical Character Recognition. Optical character recognition is a technology which essentially allows machines to extract digital text from images. OCR is commonly used to extract information like addresses from letters, text from old books, or even letters and numbers from license plates(!). Many commercial desktop scanners are sold with OCR software.

OCR technology is even used on MyFonts! Our WhatTheFont typeface identification tool incorporates OCR technology when guessing which letters appear in a submitted image.

With OCR, the more distinct each character is from the others, the less likely the machine is to mistake similar shapes, such as 3 and B, or 1 and I, etc. Thus, several fonts have been developed specifically for use with OCR technology. The two most popular of these are probably OCR-A (released by American Type Founders in 196 and OCR-B (its European counterpart, developed that same year by Adrian Frutiger for Monotype). OCR-A is easier for machines to read, while OCR-B is easier for humans to read.

Similar to OCR fonts in their necessity for uniquely distinguishable letter shapes are MICR fonts. MICR stands for Magnetic Ink Character Recognition, which is a technology similar to OCR, but instead of extracting information from an image, it extracts it by reading specially printed magnetic ink. The most common use of MICR printing is for routing and account numbers on the bottom of bank checks.

Since OCR and MICR fonts are more closely related to technology than typographic beauty or human legibility, they are frequently used outside of their intended function to suggest a “technology” aesthetic, as with this album cover for the German electronic music group, Kraftwerk:

Inherently, OCR and MICR fonts have distinctly recognizable formal qualities that have been associated with technology and all things digital. Because of this, many typeface designers have borrowed these formal qualities when designing typefaces that may not be intended for use with OCR or MICR technology, but are simply meant to evoke certain feelings via association. Some examples are Data 70 by Bob Newman and Fiber Eno from Behaviour.

To see more fonts like these, try a search for “OCR” on MyFonts.

If you know any more info on OCR or MICR fonts, or spotted an inaccuracy in my article, please post it as a comment.

TypeCon 2006

TypeCon has come to an end. The week was extremely interesting, especially for a first-timer like myself.

I won’t go on forever detailing every session and social event, but suffice to say that I am very glad to be a part of such a great group of people that make up the type community. To be totally honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect when interacting with people from other companies who might be considered “the competition”, but I quickly learned that most everyone on the scene seems to be more of a family than anything. Everyone is related somehow, and the majority of people seem to focus more on a love for typography than anything else (either that or I’m just happily naïve).

I’m sure there were all kinds of business talks going on behind the scenes but, as a designer, I was glad to find most of the events and conversations focusing on the art of type more than anything else (ie, the fun stuff!).

The materials I designed for MyFonts seemed to go over well. For those of you who attended and took some of the buttons, but weren’t sure if you got the full set, I’m including an image of all 13 designs here:

I also set up an album on MyFonts of all the fonts I used for the buttons.

Similarly, I’ll include a photo of our tablecloth. We had a contest going to see if anyone could identify every font in the alphabet, but as of now we have still not met anyone who can ID all 26 (so far, Stephen Coles from FontShop and Typographica has come the closest). Feel free to give it a shot yourself… a helpful hint is that each font name begins with that letter of the alphabet (eg, “C” is for “Clarendon”).

I’ll end by saying that the final event at the Museum of Printing was the perfect way to close the week. Hearing Larry Oppenberg and Mike Parker talk about Chauncey Griffith and his contributions to the Mergenthaler Linotype library, and then flipping through all the actual drawings (some older than 80 years!) in person was quite an experience.

Hearing old anecdotes from Howard Hansen was priceless, and it will certainly be hard to top the reaction from John Collins (my boss) when he unexpectedly ran into an archaic (and bright pink!) “MVP” peripheral that he built decades ago to run the Mergenthaler “VIP” photo-typesetter.

In case you haven’t done so already, I will direct you to become a member of the museum so that more people will be able to experience stuff like this in the future.

Looking forward to next year’s TypeCon in Seattle!

“The Da Vinci Code” font in book and movie titles

Contemplating life with my next wife, the French actress Audrey Tautou, got me thinking about fonts again. Typeface designs used in book titles and movies tend to be overwhelmingly big, bold, and sans serif, but some publishers and studios buck the trend, providing us with some typographic relief. For example the font used in the original hard cover version of The Da Vinci Code book is a big, bold gothic style font:

However, the studios went with a more elegant copperplate gothic font in both the movie poster – which features the lovely Ms. Tautou – and the new mass market paperback edition of the popular novel, featuring a stylistic rendering of the cap “A”:

The font used in the new rendition is similar to “Elan,” which I discovered by uploading the cropped movie poster GIF to WhatTheFont on www.myfonts.com. I like the design of the font. It’s a clean substantial design appropriate for a lofty message.

So I wondered how the title of a recent Oscar-winning movie would look like when rendered with the Elan font, with my own clumsily reworked version of the cap “A” and a similar gradient fill treatment as was done for The Da Vinci Code:

ORIGINAL MOVIE TITLE REVISED MOVIE TITLE

The Da Vinci Code may not be getting the best reviews from the critics, but this critic sure likes the font they use in the movie title! I hope to see more variations from the usual big, bold, sans serif fonts in the future.

Yours in font land,

–Bob Thomas