free variable

Consider the swash capitals pictured above: from Estupido Espezial and from Comic Sans. You might assume that both of these saw their genesis as elaborate inside jokes within type foundries. You would be half right.

Delightfully, the press release announcing a font package including a swash-enabled Comic Sans includes the following surely spontaneous and heartfelt quotation:

“The new versions of Comic Sans and Trebuchet have a lot of great OpenType features” said Vincent Connare, the original designer of the fonts. “My hat’s off to Ascender for creating swashes and other delightful flourishes that give these fonts a breath of fresh air.”

I have to assume that this statement isn’t something Connare merely “said” so much as something he snickered, wept, or spit out from behind bitterly-clenched teeth. But I suppose that press releases are typically imprecise about the delivery of quoted utterances.

(Ascender press release link via DF.)

Like a lot of other fussy nerds, I typically use properly spaced small capital letters when typesetting acronyms. The reason for doing so is simple: large capital letters are designed to appear next to lowercase letters, and are not designed to appear in sequence. As a consequence, strings of large capitals, as might appear in an acronym, are jarring to the reader and can disrupt the color of a page. Small capital letters, on the other hand, are designed to appear next to other small capital letters.

I didn’t think that setting acronyms in this way was controversial, but yesterday John Gruber linked to Toronto author Joe Clark’s mildly-amusing but wrongheaded tirade against the use of small caps in typesetting acronyms. Roughly, Clark’s argument is that:

1. Small caps fare poorly when applied in a host of pathological cases (like camel-case abbreviations, portmanteaus, or other similarly wretched feats of orthographic gymnastics), and
2. Only (putatively) pedantic commentators like Robert Bringhurst insist upon using small caps for acronyms, anyway.

I believe that the first claim is the best part of his argument. Indeed, small caps can be applied in the service of careless typography just as well as ordinary Roman capital and lowercase letters. If someone were advocating the universal application of small caps as a panacea, then Clark would really have a point. However, I’ve not seen any well-regarded commentators recommend slavish devotion to small caps, even when amateurish settings result (Bringhurst certainly does not). The second claim strikes me as irrelevant, and I’m disinclined to address it further here.¹ Judging by his writing elsewhere, Clark takes some delight in the “fusillade of defamatory comments on pipsqueak blogs” that appear in response to ad hominem attacks on Bringhurst; I like Bringhurst’s work a great deal, but decline to join the fusillade.

Of course, it’s far easier to point out the flaws of others than it is to identify something that actually works, and where Clark’s argument really falls apart is in his proposed solution, which we’ll get to after a bit of background. Recall that real small capitals must be designed separately from large capitals; thus, not every typeface has them. You’ve probably seen “fake small caps” before, which are simply regular large capitals that have been automatically compacted by a word processor.² Fake small caps look terrible, and Clark himself points this out in his piece (as well as elsewhere on his site). It is thus at least a little ironic that Clark’s recommended solution to the problem of setting acronyms involves making your own fake small caps and then setting them properly spaced: “What works nicely, though? Knock the size down a point, add a few units of tracking, and equalize spacing.”

¹ Since I started writing this post, Gruber has also linked to a piece that treats the ersatz anti-bourgeois sentiment of Clark’s second point more directly. (I describe this attitude as ersatz because, honestly, it is hilarious to consider the mere prospect of an anti-bourgeois opinion about typography.)
² On this matter, Bringhurst says “Any good set of small caps is designed as such from the ground up. Thickening, shrinking, and squashing the full caps with digital modification routines will only produce a parody.”

In what is surely an act of cosmic retribution for Jay Leno’s increased profile, The Font Bureau has filed suit against NBC for copyright infringement. I don’t know what’s more implausible: that NBC somehow doesn’t have a creative-department-wide license for Interstate, or that, as Chris Foresman implies, the incidence of copyright infringement (which is currently handled properly by the courts) somehow could be construed as a reason to break every application and operating system that can currently use OpenType fonts in order to enfeeble the format with DRM.

This video is pretty lowbrow, and some of the subtitles are in poor taste, but it did make me laugh until I cried. (Via Hoefler & Frere-Jones on Twitter.)

Never mind the bollocks and never mind the provenance. Imagine you’re an auction house selling off a flyer for a Sex Pistols show from 1978. Now imagine that said flyer has a huge chunk of Comic Sans (designed by V. Connare in 1994) in it. The thread on typophile that presents this sad case is the sort of thing that you’ll love if you’re the same kind of nerd I am.

Unlike the infamous forged Killian documents, which were clearly the product of a delusional and careless conspiracy theorist’s extended reverie, some effort clearly went into this Sex Pistols forgery. The creator of this fake flyer didn’t merely dump some text into Microsoft Word’s AutoAnarchy Wizard (see below); he or she was obviously concerned with aping at least the most basic characteristics of the form. The fact that the flyer included four consecutive characters in Comic Sans makes me wonder if the creator wanted to be caught, whether he or she intended such flagrant anachronism to be a John Lydon-style two-finger salute to the sorts of people wealthy enough to buy old punk rock flyers at auction.

RIYL: See my take on the Killian scandal and consensus genres, which is the source of the above image; see also my post on Nike and Minor Threat, in particular the humorless, outraged comments from (I assume) suburban kids who were born years after Minor Threat broke up.

I’m really growing to like Warnock for the text of my dissertation, but my longtime complaint with it — I find the capital “W” sort of distracting — hasn’t gone away. I guess people with other names are probably more likely to notice different letters….

(Click to see the whole page at lower magnification — I think the “W” is still obvious!)

I’m wondering why the clocks in Unit 2 of the CS building at Wisconsin use the MICR font. Are there that many check-processing machines from the mid-1960s that need to be able to tell what time it is in the department? Is the clock face printed in magnetic ink? Was it too expensive to license a slightly less inappropriate face, like Comic Sans or Papyrus? Should they have gone with OCR-A, instead, to allow a readily-available fancy clock option?

When you consider that these clocks were probably approved by a committee — and that there are almost certainly laws and regulations governing the appearance of clocks in state buildings — their bizarre design is even more baffling.

What I saw on television last night was thrilling, well-produced, and inspirational — and it left me eager to see more. I truly have something to be excited about this fall!

Of course, I refer to televised football (real college players and soon-to-be-unemployed pro players), and to our introduction to the first season of AMC’s Mad Men on DVD. (Friends of this site know well that your humble scribe has far better things to do than see a tedious political infomercial full of the same whorish rhetoric we’ve heard for this entire interminable election season.)

Mad Men is great so far in almost every way that matters. I noticed, though, that the closing credits rubbed me the wrong way. I elected not to point out the details to Andrea (since I fear she is quite weary of this specific branch of my nerddom), but then I noticed this article in my RSS reader this morning. Yeah, what he said.

Well, if you needed any further evidence for my claim about Myriad, I’m happy to oblige; Wal-Mart’s new branding eschews the hyphenation and is obviously based on a certain ubiquitous typeface:

Armin Vit is, I think, essentially right about the effect of removing the hyphen and all-caps:

[W]ith no reasoning or no explanation of what the new star burst stands for, or why the decision to change to a single word, all we have to go by is the logo that replaces the 16-year-old sans serif that was as thick and heavy as the beige boxes it adorned for so long…. The change to title case helps humanize Walmart with a name that reads more like John, Albert, Sarah or Wilbur….

It will be interesting to see how, or if, this new branding affects public perception of Walmart over time. I don’t have the sense that Walmart is a particularly image-conscious company — all of their current branding seems clumsily transparent and rhetorically amateurish to me. Will a new logo steer Walmart’s brand away from its current association with philistines who don’t mind melamine pet food?

In any case, removing the hyphen from “Wal-Mart” is far less jarring than it was when “Kmart” did the same thing. Honestly, “Kmart” seems like the name of a talking duck from a fake Icelandic children’s book: “Kmart was sad, because he had no more cookies and couldn’t play with his brothers and sisters. Suddenly, a friendly dog arrived!” “Walmart” at least looks like a string of letters that could be pronounced “wôl-märt” and might naturally occur so ordered in American English.

(via DF)

I completely agree with the folks at bancomicsans.com, who claim to provide “the source for anti-comic sans propaganda.” Comic Sans is facile, ugly, and immediately casts a pallor over any work typeset with it: “this is the product of an unserious human.” Few fonts make me so angry.

[thanks to H., via M.]