The Bonus Side of Cabinet Cards

All of us have seen cabinet cards, those 19th century portraits on heavy card stock you find for a buck in almost every antique shop in America. Did you ever consider the backs of these cards? Almost all have beautiful and graphic typographic or pictorial examples that advertised the photo studio or photographer. While many cabinet cards portraits (the fronts) can be relatively bland, you might want to flip the card over. Like a second chance lottery ticket—you just might have a second chance at something wonderful. These images are from Luminous Lint, the most comprehensive Web site on photography in the world. Luminous Lint is a labor of love by Alan Griffiths. (alan@luminous-lint.com)

These cabinet card backs are from the private collection of Anthony Davis, and were part of an online exhibition on Luminous Lint.
Antiq-photo Rainbow Creations
(www.19cphoto.com)

An AM repost from 2/11/09

Three Things I Remember

(Above) A California license plate as I remember it, recreated here for you by piecing together letter forms from other license plates I found online.


(Above) The word “erase” painted on a parking garage floor.

I WAS RECENTLY IN CALIFORNIA FOR A MEETING. BEING A DESIGNER AND AN ARTIST, I NOTICE THINGS, sometimes too many things for my own good—especially if I am driving. I wanted to share with you three typographic things I felt worthy of sharing. Unfortunately, I only had my camera available for one of the three, and it’s the center, black photograph. The other ones, I recreated for you.

Let’s start with the license plate at the top. As I was about to cross a street, I noticed a man standing next to a car—it was something sleek and low to the ground. But it wasn’t the car that caught my eye, but the license plate. Whoa-a-a! I stopped to take a better look.

Since the owner of the car was standing there, I asked him about his license plate. I told him that I really “liked the design of the letters, the way he had created a pattern that became more than letters, but something rhythmic and patterned.” He looked at me like I was a little odd, but I went on to say how I had often thought about a vanity plate similar to his, something with a series of “W”s and “M”s that created a pattern... like making art from the letters and numbers. (Other examples might be a series like the letter “I” repeated, like this: IIIIIII, or a pattern like this: L7L7L7L, or VVVVVVV).

When I asked him why he made his plate the way he did, especially the fact that I noticed he had tucked the letter “N” in the series of “W”s and “M”s to break the pattern, he said he ordered the plate like that because “it would be difficult for the police to recall or focus on his plate as he drove by.” Wow! I thought. A pretty good idea! Especially with the letter “N” there, it was difficult to notice—sure to be wrong when recalled in court.

I was so focused on the man’s license plate that it wasn’t until later when my friend told me the car was a Ferrari. Now it all made sense— this was a perfectly legal way to be sure his license plate would not be remembered correctly as his speeding car sped by.

The center image: As I was walking through the parking garage at the San Jose airport, I noticed something rather cryptic painted on the floor of the garage. I stopped my fast pace for a better look and still confused as to what it said, I decided to take a photograph. It looked like a word of some kind, but was so odd. What did it say? Or was it a word at all? I wasn’t sure. After a minute, I figured out that it said “erase.” To erase what, I do not know. But I liked it.

Finally, in the bottom image, is the word “ELEVATOR.” This word was part of a professionally made logo on the side of a truck waiting at a stoplight, part of the name of a local elevator repair service. Graphically, I loved it. The actual company name is lost on me now as I was so fixated on the typographic treatment of the word “elevator.” Let’s just say it was part of something like “Acme Elevator Company” —for lack of a real name. This wonderful graphic treatment of the word “elevator” stuck with me. I hurried home and recreated it for you. It was really good, I thought.

Words, letters, fonts, symbols: they can be used to confuse, or to describe or to illustrate. They can instill mystery... and make you work harder to understand. All of these three typographic treatments were made for different reasons, all are visually compelling and I thought, worthy of sharing with you today.

More Than Words

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

HERE’S A WONDERFUL TYPOGRAPHIC ANIMATION BY A GUY NAMED RONNIE BRUCE, a film student at Temple University. I found this on Vimeo. Nicely done visual interpretation of a poem by Taylor Mali.

Freaks of Fancy

(Above) Cover of book, The Handy Book of Artistic Printing, published by Princeton Architectural Press, by Doug Clouse and Angela Voulangas.

(Above) Liberty Machine Works, advertisement, 1888.

(Above) Trade card of J. F. Earhart, 1883, employing elaborate color effects.

Click any image for larger view.

(Above) This 1881 cover of The American Model Printer most likely involved fitting together hundreds of individual pieces of type.

IN THE EARLY TO MID-1990s, WHEN THE MAC COMPUTER WAS GROWING UP AND DESIGN APPLICATIONS like Adobe Illustrator was gaining more users with strong creative proficiencies, I saw designers pushing the envelope of their design by building imagery (at times) with extraordinary complexity. The new technology was allowing them to flex their creative muscles, with instant drop shadows, backgrounds of .25 ruled lines stepped and repeated to create marvelous logos and magazine headlines. Fonts were now digital and plentiful, and I saw designers falling in love with the art of decoration. Many designs, which I still remember, were absolutely beautiful with Photoshop blends and other effects at work. I think all of us at the time, were mesmerized with our new found abilities for intricate and elaborate typographic fancies.

Now let’s go back in time 110 years or so. It’s 1892 and letterpress printers, engravers and lithographers of the day were going through their own new design discovery. It wasn’t so much a discovery gained from new technology but a creative challenge to the traditional staid design of the day. What the public began to see in books, on cabinet card backs, business cards and other printed material were intricate and elaborate design where quirky type, ornament of all kinds, corner frills and border embellishments were the norm. Like many design fads we have seen come and go just in the last 50 years of our time, it wasn’t long before most of the lithographers and engravers of the day had jumped on the “freaks of fancy” bandwagon.

Graphic designer Doug Clouse and freelance writer/designer Angela Voulangas have teamed up to present a very solid history of this period of design in the late nineteenth century. Packed with great period designs (some of which are showcased for you above) and solid scholarship, this 224-page book by Princeton Architectural Press should be on the shelf of any designer, library or bibliophile.

Doug Clouse is a graphic designer. A graduate of the Bard Graduate Center in New York, where he studied the history of typography, he teaches graphic design and prints on nineteenth-century treadle-powered presses whenever possible.

Angela Voulangas is a freelance writer and designer. Her love of New York City history and nineteenth-century estoerica have lead her to work for institutions as the New-York Historical Society, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and the New York Public Library.

Handy Book of Artistic Printing, The: Collection of Letterpress Examples with Specimens of Type, Ornament, Corner Fills, Borders, Twisters, Wrinklers, and other Freaks of Fancy.

Doug Clouse, Angela Voulangas

ISBN 9781568987057
8 x 10 inches (20.3 x 25.4 cm), Paperback , 224 pages
185 color illustrations; 12 b/w illustrations

In print (publication date 5/30/2009) A PAPress publication; Rights: World; (1652.0)

Also available on Amazon.

The Process of Design

SURFING AROUND THE WORLD, LOOKING FOR THE COOL STUFF (so you don’t have to), I FOUND THE DESIGN WORK OF TAMER KOSELI, who was born in Courtepin, Switzerland in 1985. What I liked here was his display of his entire thought process—something that we might learn from.

Since 1994 Tamer has been living in Turkey. He works as a freelance designer and tries to mix East-West cultures in his works.

Koseli says “Since childhood, I was impressed by the Swiss Legacy, pictograms, posters and especially the font Helvetica.”

HIS PROJECT IS CALLED, WISHES OF 20th CENTURY and following is Tamer’s description (I have corrected some of his use of the English language for better understanding):

“Wishes happen... wishes not happen... Is there any century in human history without wishes? The students who take the occurence of wishes from (the 20th century) to days as a design problem, during the design phase of project they convert the project from surface of cube to 3 dimensional product. For these reason when I began to design the logo, poster, tee and tree I built everything on cubes. In our country people make a wish and attach a fabric on tree. We have a lot of wishes about past centuries but I think we must hope for the future... This tree came out based on idea, the visitors of our stand (Milano - Salone Satellite E37) write their hopes and post it on tree. I like that the tree turns green with hopes.”

Urban Letterforms

Click any image for a larger view.

Click any image for a larger view.

“TYPE THE SKY” BY LISA RIENERMANN IS AN ALPHABET FORMED OF SHAPES buildings make against the sky when photographed from below.

According to the original post on the German typographic blog Slanted, the alphabet was created by Rienermann while studying at the University of Duisburg-Essen.

“It began with the Q,” she tells Slanted. “I was in a kind of courtyard in Barcelona. I looked upward and saw houses, the blue sky and clouds. The more I looked, I saw that the houses formed a letter Q.”

“I set out to find more letterforms, spending weeks looking upwards. The more difficult letters such as Q and K were the easiest to find.”

Reinermann admits that the use of Photoshop “was a help, here and there.” The final alphabet was presented as a booklet, inside a slip case box.

YOGA

One of the things I like about writing this blog is that it gives me a place to put things that I have been carrying around in my head for a long time. Perhaps it’s presumptuous of me to think anybody out there cares what I think, or that what I have to say is even worthy of sharing. Given that, please consider this blog as an archeological site of beautiful, interesting and thoughtful things—all of which you are welcome to dig through, discover and take home if you want.

Two years ago I spent a few days in Brooklyn, NY on business. At the end of my visit, I was in a cab on my way to the airport when I spotted a simple, black and white sign for a yoga center. I wasn't able to photograph it, but I have never forgotten it for it’s simple and economical way of communicating what they do. I recreated it for you today from the font Futura, which to my recollection is closest to the font as I remember it. I really do not know if this is an original idea, or if it was ripped off from someone else’s ingenuity or from a back issue of Print Magazine, but it stuck in my brain permanently as wonderful. As the sign quickly passed my vision, I remember smiling and thinking, "Bravo!"