I have spent the past 3 weeks trying to obtain every piece of information about Carol Twombly for a project in my typography class. I keep seeing things on the web about interviews with her.
If anyone knows where (website) I can find an interview with her it would extremely helpful.
I am also looking for information about her life today. Is she married? any kids? that kind of information. The last thing I found is that she retired from Adobe.
If you can't find this info elsewhere, you might try Chuck Bigelow, he's in Rochester too (at RIT), and I'm sure he could fill you in on the details - he must know what she's up to.
There's a decent interview of her in an old issue of Serif magazine. I myself have heard pretty much nothing of what she's done since Adobe. Question: will you be covering Mirarae well? It's a superb design, and proves ol' Blaise Pascal's maxim.
BTW, I'm curious, what made you take this on?
hhp
I have contacted Charles Bigelow but the only information he could give me I already knew. How would I go about finding the issue of Serif Magazine? Is it viewable online?
My professor gave us a list of type designers and when I looked up her info I was interested. It is our final project.
> How would I go about finding the issue of Serif Magazine?
By bartering with somebody who has it, hint hint? :-)
hhp
There's a bit of info on her in Adobe's old promo mag, Font and Function. I'll try to hunt it up this weekend. Still, this would be not recent info, perhaps 10 years old.
Here is a scan of the designer page in an old Adobe Trajan specimen from 1989:
I remember I read an interview by Tim Rolands, it might be online.
Heather:
When is your assignment due?
The last I heard about Carol was that she wasn't married but had a steady and had gone off to Nevada or somewhere like that to weave. She liked skiing. She hated working at Adobe. She was knowledgeable about type but obviously wasn't interested in it by the time I was spending time with her between 1996 and 1998. It's a little cruel to say, but anybody who thinks she made, on her own, an important contribution to type design simply doesn't know anything about Carol Twombley other than the public relations puffery that Adobe put out about her. At Adobe she was hemmed in by powerful figures like Slimbach and Stone, and never had a chance to express anything particularly original. I don't think she had any interest in doing so. If she had, we would have heard something from her in all the years after. Or perhaps her decades of corporate warfare at Adobe had bludgeoned the creativity out of her. Type wasn't a happy story Carol and she got out as soon as she could. For the gory details, assuming they would talk, and I don't think they will, E.M. Ginger in Oakdale or Linnea Lundquist were (and I imagine still are) good friends. When all is said and done, Adobe Caslon is a fabulous typeface, perhaps the best text typeface Adobe ever produced in the Originals series. How much of it was Carol's and how much of it was Sumner Stone's? ? ? ? Sumner was, after all, the art director, and Sumner knows a lot about type . . . . . . . That last big family she did -- what name was it called? named after some sort of desert grass -- was misconceived in my opinion. Carol's story at Adobe is a classic and ugly and common tale of male subjugation. Was she particularly vulnerable? Why did she put up with it for as long as she did? Was there a happy ending? Lots of interesting questions.
There definitely was a mystique attached to her. How much that was the creation of Adobe's brilliant PR people and how much due to Carol's own talent and innate glamour, is not immediately apparent. But it was there. I know a type-besotted fellow who, when he was a teen, had a poster of Carol in his bedroom. You can imagine the rest. Of course he also believes in UFOs, but then lots of people do.
What I'm trying to say is that the little that is known about Carol Twombley (does her name have an e or not?) is the result of a carefully constructed PR edifice. Arriving at the truth of what happened with her and type will bring you to some completely different places.
Heather, it sounds like you indeed chose an interesting candidate!
hhp
Twombley spaces much better than Twombly - but like Wembley it is hard for Americans to pronounce.
Hello Bill Troop !
I keep seeing things on the web...
Have you tried looking through those antiquated, old-fashioned things called books, like this one?
The world doesn't begin and end with the World Wide Web, y'know.
>The world doesn’t begin and end with the World Wide Web, y’know.
'begin', no, but 'end', let's wait and see.
Cheers, Si
Yes Ricardo, I have looked through books. The assignment is due Tuesday.
My apologies for the sarcasm, and good luck.
Mr. Troop, I don't want to sidetrack this thread, but something has been bugging me since I read your long and opinionated comment -- no matter how well you know someone, aren't they entitled to some privacy? Would you want someone writing about you this way, and with this much detail, on a public forum?
Just a thought.
If its factual, I say tell it and tell it some more.
Mike
BTW... I doubt your instructor knows more about her than you do. She has really been a silent figure in type. Bill Troops scandal is exclusive stuff there although I strongly disagree with his assessment of Chaparral.
The last I heard about Carol...
...we would have heard something from her in all the years after...
...assuming they would talk, and I don’t think they will...
...were (and I imagine still are) good friends...
Was she particularly vulnerable? Why did she put up with it for as long as she did? Was there a happy ending? Lots of interesting questions. [...] (does her name have an e or not?)
Lots of questions indeed. And comments bordering on the gossipy. Are these facts, or assumptions? And facts or no, if the subject herself and her friends are so quiet about it, maybe that means they don't want to talk about it.
I know a type-besotted fellow who, when he was a teen, had a poster of Carol in his bedroom. You can imagine the rest.
No, I can't. And what the heck is this comment supposed to mean???
this is a scream... i'm sure it's EXACTLY what heather's looking for.
i think typophile should open up an entirely new forum category for humorous tabloid scandals of all our favorite designers.
Heather:
Email me and I'll send you a scan of the Serif article, and another one from a 1994 Design Graphics magazine.
Would you want someone writing about you this way, and with this much detail, on a public forum?
I agree. If anything, its just in poor taste.
>a little cruel
I agree with Terry. I have no way of judging the accuracy of what Bill Troop writes, but whatever the truth it is not an excuse for cruelty. In traditional Jewish ethics this kind of thing is called lashon hara--the evil tongue--and is regarded not simply as in poor taste, but as seriously unethical.
There is enough cruelty in the world. Why add to it?
Chapparrall is a great face (although I always have trouble spelling it).
So she definitely quit at the top of her game.
Twombly has her own style that runs through Charlemagne, Nueva and Chaparal -- too bad she didn't stick with the tour, we're missing the sans.
Heather, you could simply use Dr Evil's background speach... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Evil and replace all Dr Evil references with Carol's name.
Chaparral is a warm yet strong slab. It fits in place nicely.
Here is wishing Carol both a happy and a private life.
ChrisL
Heather, I have a good interview with Carol from Design Graphics magazine, No. 4, 1994. I could send you a PDF if you want to contact me offline (if you haven't found it elsewhere).
>Mr. Troop, I don’t want to sidetrack this thread, but something has been bugging me since I read your long and opinionated comment — no matter how well you know someone, aren’t they entitled to some privacy? Would you want someone writing about you this way, and with this much detail, on a public forum?
Just a thought.
I think you go too far. Have you read any biography of anyone published in the last 30 years? Or indeed any good biography published after 'Eminent Victorians' which I take as the gold standard for modern biography? There is a dose of behind the scenes truth in what I wrote but it is hardly salacious. There is no point in pretending that Carol's life in type was some sort of idyll. If it had been, she wouldn't have quit it. The original poster did ask for some biographical information. I provided some. What is your sense of biography and what it should provide? Let us say you're going to treat a type designer seriously. You want to know what motivated them to work in the first place, what kept them there, how their career evolved. When the career ends quite prematurely, you want to know why. There is certainly an inextricable link between anyone's personal life and private life, and anyone whose achievements are in the least substantial is fair game for biography. And let's face it: when a career does end prematurely, there is usually to some extent a tragic explanation. What exactly are you looking for? Could we have your theory of biography? What biographers do you most admire? What is it you like about the way they cover their subjects? Precisely what do you think a biographer should not cover, and why?
I would say that a few dishy paragraphs of specious hyperbole do not approach any reasonable description of good biographical information.
I would say that a few dishy paragraphs of specious hyperbole do not approach any reasonable description of good biographical information.
Absolutely. There is a very large difference between divulging gossip, and chronicling one's life story. It seems pretty apparent who went too far here. I'd be very upset if I found a friend of mine sharing information like this on a public forum.
Bill, I agree with your rationale, but the tone of your original post is creepy.
You're also talking about someone who is not a public figure. Known in typographic circles, but to the general public - an unknown. And because you're talking to a relatively small group of people here it resembles gossip more than anything else.
Plus, Mr. Troop, I believe you have not stated any intention to write a biography of Ms. Twombly. As far as I know, a biography would go through an editor before becoming public.
Besides, a student asks for info for a school paper and you provide comments that are at best difficult to corroborate, as you yourself acknowledge... Where can she get a second opinion on what you say? I think it's pretty clear from some of your comments that you have some sort of beef against Adobe, as if you were defending Ms. Twombly, but then some of your other comments also make Twombly herself look bad...
I'm sorry, but I agree with William Berkson's earlier comment about cruelty, and with what Terry, Nick, Dezcom and Christopher have posted.
As far as I know, a biography would go through an editor before becoming public.
Not to mention fact checkers. And that interviews with all involved parties would at the very least be attempted...
Wow, I didn't mean to upset anyone by asking for information. I thought that perhaps there was more information out there that I could not track down. I was not trying to pry into Carol's life, only looking for noted facts.
Heather, I don't think it was your question that did any of the upsetting! :-)
Regarding the Design Graphics interview I mentioned (issue #4, 1994), I am surprised to see that it is still available here.
Who is to say, as Mr Troop has said about Ms Twombly, that a career has ended "quite prematurely"? Certainly not a person who has not even done the research necessary to determine the correct spelling for the name of the person under consideration.
Careers end for all sorts of reasons. People quit fine printing to do landscape work, or to become environmental activists. Peoples' interests and motivations change. A serious biographer does need to inquire about those changes. But no one in this discussion has done anything approaching a serious biography of Carol T. A little bit of sloppy innuendo, but that's all.
Let it be.
powers
These sanctimonious comments concern me. What do you complaining gentlemen want? The gospel according to the PR department? Is that where your heads are? In my view one should be glad, truly glad, to have done anything that warrants being talked about at all. My purpose here -- and it is a serious purpose -- was only to point out that anyone who wants to learn anything substantive about Carol will not find, in the sophomoric fantasies produced by PR scribes, anything that even tangentially approaches the truth. You cannot start with commercial material expressly designed to conceal a reality that almost rises to tragedy. Surely so much as that is evident? There is some sociologist of the 1940s or 1950s who wrote of persons who had important roles projected upon them -- for example, Marian Anderson, who wished to be a successful singer, not an ambassador for her race. Anderson nevertheless accepted this role when it was thrust upon her. In her way, I think Carol belongs to this type. The role of the successful, female, happy, fulfilled typeface designer was projected upon her because it was necessary for reasons of sentiment and commerce. It wasn't just Adobe that needed it -- so did the rest of us. Carol opted out. The reasons why are interesting and worth discussing; it would be a lovely subject for an above-average master's thesis.
There is some validity to the comments against Bill. His objectivity concerning anything related to Adobe is historically suspect (not that some people here can't be accused of the same thing, in the opposite direction). On the other hand, it wouldn't susprise me if Twombly actually appreciates seeing her story told in whatever way it can, whatever it is. Even if it's not fully accurate! It's a funny human reality, but sometimes you have to throw out conjectures to get the truth to come out, because some people don't speak out unless it's to defend themselves. And some people are too quiet for the own good, and sometimes they know it, and sometimes they appreciate the third-party expositions.
The way I look at it, it takes morally risky stuff like this to effectively
counter the PR hogwash that's become the mainstay of this society.
hhp
Heather, a bit late, but this may be relevant to your project:
http://vcj.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/4/2/186
>What do you complaining gentlemen want?
Well, that you and others not say negative things about other people, *particularly in a public forum*, unless there is a compelling reason to do so.
By the way, the same concept that it is wrong to disparage others, even if what you say is true, is also present in Buddhist ethics. So if I am being sanctimonious, at least it is in two religions!
Now what is a 'compelling reason' is, I admit, not always so easy to figure out. A lot of office gossip is prudent self-defense. But your comments about lack of originality are clearly to a big extent personal opinion--others in fact disagree--so that is not revealing helpful facts, but simply disparaging opinion and so is out of bounds by these standards.
I know there are arguments on the other side of this issue. Somerset Maughm said with his usual wit that an ideal friend has "a heart that is kind, a hand that is generous, and a tongue that is neither." But the reality is that toward the end of his life by following these standards he alienated and embittered his daughter and all his friends. Admittedly he was dotty by then, but still it clearly shows you what this kind of thing does.
People who are part of the establishment don't like negativity.
You see, it upsets the status quo that feeds them.
hhp
>part of the establishment
Hrant, if I am part of the establishment, you are the King of Armenia :)
Nobody is pure anything, but everybody is more something than some others.
hhp
I suspect Todd Rundgren must have been contemplating this very matter in his double album of the early 1970s, Something/Anything?
William, you are on thin ground here, and I doubt you have really read (why should you?) what I wrote or asked yourself how I could possibly be saying what I was saying. Very little of what I am saying is my opinion. How could it be? I make clear that to the extent I knew Carol at all, it was during her last couple of years at Adobe. So where does all of this come from? Well, obviously, from the people who were there at the time. Each one of course tells a different story. And I thought I was being terribly discreet at not going into any detail about who said what and what their possible motives might be. So who have I talked about Carol with? First of all with Carol. Second of all with Robert Slimbach, with Fred Brady, with Sumner Stone, with EM Ginger, with David Lemon, and with a lot of other people. They were all there; they each have a different story. I make a deduction when I say that Carol was a victim of the predominantly male culture in her environment, but I think it would be a safe deduction to make on far fewer facts. I don't think there's anything nasty in talking about it. It's simply what happened. I know perfectly well that Carol wasn't interested in doing type at the end, because she often spoke of it to me, and her wish to try out managerial projects instead --one of which was art directing me. I know there was a lot of tension. People really were saying, 'so-and-so is trying to stab me in the back -- please don't repeat this -- and don't think you can ever trust him/her/it --ever.' Good heavens, it was a viper's nest! On the tangential question of originality, you could learn much though far from all by digging through the archives of the type design list, which is where I think John Downer published a lengthy and I think quite convincing expose of the process that led to the creation of Trajan -- several years ago. An excellent piece of research on his part.
By the way, I have some reason to believe that some of my conversations with Carol were taped. Perhaps they still exist in some corporate archive?
The funniest remark she made is one I regret having made public, but since I have already long since done so, there's no harm in repeating it here. I had drawn her attention to the remarkable similarity between Robert's Cronos and Volker Kuester's celebrated Today Sans Serif.
'Not again!' said Carol.
Foolishly, I didn't ask her what she particularly meant by that. I really don't have the makings of a proper journalist.
Nobody has asked me what my personal feelings are in any of this. They're very simple. I was disappointed that Carol left Adobe without sorting out my project in the way she had promised, from the start, she would, if there was a problem. (She foresaw intractable problems from the start, and had candidly warned me that it was likely to end in tears, as it did.) On the one hand, I thought it was unnecessarily chicken-hearted of her. But by then I knew too much about what she was up against. It was impossible to blame her. I wasn't an angel myself at all times. There was an incident, when I was doing one of the first stories on OpenType, when Adobe PR wasn't I thought doing its job, and I exploded in a vile manner at one of the PR minions or product managers who I knew was a good friend of Carol's. Everyone was very polite about it -- they wanted a good story after all -- but I sensed I had done something awful not just to this woman but to all of her friends in similar positions there. I had taken unfair advantage of my position not just as a journalist but quite simply as a male, and it wasn't a good thing. Carol had to put up with this sort of thing for more than ten years. For me, being exposed to it for two or three years, part-time, and at the presumably safe distance of 3000 miles, was enough to wash me out for a decade as far as type was concerned. Carol tactfully put up with far worse for much longer. I have enormous sympathy with that.
And no, I don't think these are things that, like cancer decades ago, should 'never be talked about'. Air it all out, I say!
Very little of what I am saying is my opinion. How could it be?
Okay, so let's clarify (these are direct quotes from one of your previous posts):
1. At Adobe she was hemmed in by powerful figures like Slimbach and Stone, and never had a chance to express anything particularly original.
Subjective.
2. I don’t think she had any interest in doing so.
Opinion.
3. If she had, we would have heard something from her in all the years after.
Clearly an opinion.
4. When all is said and done, Adobe Caslon is a fabulous typeface, perhaps the best text typeface Adobe ever produced in the Originals series.
A nice compliment, but still your opinion.
5. That last big family she did — what name was it called? named after some sort of desert grass — was misconceived in my opinion.
I find this comment dismissive and insulting. And if you were truly concerned about documenting "truth" or "fact" you would have left comments like this out of your post. That seems like A LOT of opinions to me.
God this is boring. Do you have anything interesting to say about Carol or her work? And by the way has anyone here other than me said the slightest thing of interest about Carol or her work? For that matter, has anyone, ever, anywhere, treated her work in the last bit seriously? Has she ever had a Max Caflisch-quality critique? Probably not. If what I say about Adobe Caslon really is true (and I think it is), that's an example of blatant and hitherto uncriticized sexism on the part of the type community. What does Carol really mean to us then? What do we really want from her?
By the way, for a view of the early days at Adobe that enraged no less a personage than Hermann Zapf, see my Mac Directory article from a year or two ago on Sumner Stone's type:
http://www.macdirectory.com/newmd/mac/PAGES/REVIEWS/SizeDoesMatter/
Unfortunately, while the magazine has posted two pages of the article in pdf (links at the bottom of the article -- it was designed and set by Sumner) the most important part, a full page illustration of Cycles and some other fonts showing why size optimization is necessary -- was never uploaded although I suppose I could post it on some site or another of my own. For what it's worth, I couldn't get the page 1 pdf to display in Safari when I tried it just now, though page 2 worked. It really did look good. Cycles is a great typeface! This article was written for a coffee table 'Mac lifestyle' magazine so it is necessarily drastically simplified by type people standards . . . . .
Bill, thank you for reviving my dormant memories of that Trajan discussion on the TD list. There was more to it than Downer's commendable, if somewhat vigilante-style, research. I remember one of the keys to the somewhat, although not fully, damning conclusion was what Stone had revealed to somebody or other. I also remember that a person who was close to Stone at the time was also relatively open to me (at the time :-) so I asked him at an ATypI conference what the deal was, and he said it was a combination of a cavalier attitude at Adobe and stubborn intransigence on the part of the Catich estate. From the aggregate of what I had learned myself, I agreed. Most of all though, it's notable here that Twombly could only be assigned a very small part of the blame - she was pretty much following orders (although the fact that her bosses were male seems circumstantial).
BTW, something minor I forgot to mention before:
I happen to think Chaparral is a very good design.
hhp
I agree, Hrant. Chapparal is a good design. Perhaps, unless Ms. Twombly were to join us, this discussion should end on that note.
Perhaps. In any case, I now harbor a fair amount of hope and faith that Heather will somehow manage to get in direct contact with Twombly and deliver a gracious but probing interview.
hhp
maybe and maybe not. there have been times i've had the chance to meet leaders in their field, and my questions have even been really meaningful (and sometimes, the responses were even meaningful) and sometimes, unfortunately, i can look back and see my questions were inane and possibly so much as tiresome. we can always hope for the best.
but i can say this has been an interesting forum topic. a little bit of that is the same way we're drawn to the "katie feels trapped! tom has complete control!" headlines when we're buying our brocolli or gin or bread or whatever. but also because bt seems passionate about his assertions, and everyone else seems passionate about their responses. actually, i have always held ct up as one of the few celebrated (especially female) type designers of our time in my class lectures, but i never knew exactly what happened to her since she left adobe (i still don't, exactly). i do hope she's having fun and doing some cool things she's happy with. but then, i also hope my students will give lithos a rest for a while.
There are many female graphic designers in the world but... I can only name one female type designer in the world and that's Carol Twombly!
Mikey :-)
>Most of all though, it’s notable here that Twombly could only be assigned a very small part of the blame - she was pretty much following orders (although the fact that her bosses were male seems circumstantial).
That is the key motif that runs through Carol's history as a designer.
Now change the word blame to credit. Is the statement still true?
One would wish not. Let's put it this way: it _is_ true, in the view of most of the men she worked with. That view may be sullied. How can we ever know the truth? It was never Carol's way to speak out.
Tiffany, I can promise you faithfully that the very last thing in the world Carol would ever do is (a) either read typophile or (b) contribute any kind of response to it. She's in another world. This is absolutely meaningless to her. I really do know her well enough to say that.
Finally, I would offer the thought that the reason her Caslon is so good is precisely because she is exactly who she is. It is the the particular combination of strength in some areas, weakness in others, that led her to succeed in creating an enduring and much-used typeface where more talented and egostistical brother designers have failed. No true egotist can ever create a truly functional typeface. A successful typeface (by which I mean one which provides the most benefit and pleasure to the most number of readers) is by definition an object for the community and it must in some real sense be of the community and by the community. To go out on a limb here, it is not in the male nature to create an invisible work of art -- and a truly functional typeface _is_ invisible on some important level. It is at least conceivable for an oppressed person (who could be a woman or who could be an oppressed for a hundred other causes) to conceive, happily, an invisible work. There are those, other than Carol, who insist that they are responsible for what is good in the design. I accept that this is true, but I also accept that it is absolutely Carol's design and could not have come about unless she were exactly who she is. A painful birth!
I admire Adobe Caslon more every day. It is one of the very few typefaces that does not annoy me and I am constantly recommending it to people looking for something special. This is cruel but it is true: Carol does not like to annoy; it is entirely in her nature to create a typeface that does not annoy. What the rest of us have so much difficulty in realizing is that this is perhaps the most desirable feature a text typeface can have.
By the way -- in all Carol's letters to me -- it was always Caslon she used! I am sure it is her favourite.
>I can only name one female type designer in the world
Zuzana Licko of Emigre is one prominant woman type designer active today.
>my Mac Directory article
Bill you say in your article that the optical sizes of Adobe make compromises so that their sizes work also at other than the intended sizes. And you say that these compromises make the optical sizes of Adobe inferior to those of Font Bureau and of Sumner Stone.
I am interested: what specifically do you think is wrong with the treatment of the Adobe optical sizes? What adjustments to weights, contrasts, serifs, do you think are less than ideal?
> it is not in the male nature to create an invisible work of art
This is a very interesting point, but there are a problem and a paradox. The problem is that any face (even a text face) also needs to not be transparent in some ways; and the paradox is that, in some ways besides transparency, the male nature seems more conducive to type design - and this I feel is a big reason why we have such a huge disproportion in gender (although social/conditioning issues are always a huge reason too). The same is true in philosophy (noting that there has been only one notable female philosopher, and quite interestingly she was not heterosexual) and possibly stand-up comedy (where it seems a disproportionate proportion of female performers are not heterosexual).
Hmmm, so maybe the Ideal Type Designer is bisexual! :-)
--
Concerning optical sizing, a separate thread would be smart.
hhp
H.P. -- The same is true in philosophy
Who?
B.T. -- Has she ever had a Max Caflisch-quality critique? Probably not.
In fact, Herr Caflisch reviewed Adobe Caslon in TM 3/1992.
> Who?
Sappho: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho _
In fact the term "lesbian" is derived from the name of her
home island: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesbos_Island
hhp
As the wiki article says, Sappho was a lyric poet, not a philosopher, though her poetry was admired by Plato. Even in translation, the greatness of her poetry is evident.
Oh, you go far back in history!
Karsten, what magazine is 'TM'? I'd like to read that review.
In the world of Ancient Greece poetry and philosophy were closely tied. Terminological pedantry shouldn't prevent us from seeing that what Sappho was doing was thinking about existence, and that's essentially philosophy in the useful sense of the term (as opposed to the over-formalized contempoarary Western sense).
> you go far back in history!
And part of my point is, you have to.
BTW, there was also a Serif Magazine article comparing various Caslons, including I believe Twombly's. Maybe John has the time and kindness to send that along to Heather as well.
hhp
i thought there is almost no poetry by sappho that remains - translated or not -- beyond incomplete fragments.
BTW, something interesting to contemplate here is how "lesbian" possibly became derived from the name of her island. If her work was so ill-preserved, and the references to lesbianism in it so indirect, how could it have prompted the derivation? It's not like she invented it! And for one thing, the Ancient Greeks were much more open to homosexuality than even we are today, so that aspect of her work couldn't have been so extremely in focus. On the other hand, maybe her spoken efforts (a mainstray of Ancient Greek philosophy) were what did it (especially if she travelled a lot), and the paucity of lesbian references in what has survived from her work is just the tip of the iceberg. But I think more probable is that the island of Lesbos had over the centuries or at least decades become a hub of lesbian activity and thought, and Sappho herself was a product of that. She was educated and drawn to compose poetry, so she became the transcriber of sorts. In this scenario, the derivation of "lesbian" would predate (or at least supercede) Sappho.
hhp
>Terminological pedantry
I don't think Sappho would have been thought of as a philosopher in ancient Greece, as lyric poetry it seems was a recognized category, different from philosophy.
>incomplete fragments
There was enough from Sappho that I remember being impressed in my college poetry class. It seems that the complete works were extant for many hundreds of years, until they were ordered to be burned by a series of Popes. [Edit: the wikipedia article linked below says that this story does not have historical foundation.]
I found the one I remember on the internet, as translated by Julia Dubnoff:
Some say an army of horsemen,
some of footsoldiers, some of ships,
is the fairest thing on the black earth,
but I say it is what one loves.
It’s very easy to make this clear
to everyone, for Helen,
by far surpassing mortals in beauty,
left the best of all husbands
and sailed to Troy,
mindful of neither her child
nor her dear parents, but
with one glimpse she was seduced by
Aphrodite. For easily bent...
and nimbly...[missing text]...
has reminded me now
of Anactoria who is not here;
I would much prefer to see the lovely
way she walks and the radiant glance of her face
than the war-chariots of the Lydians or
their footsoldiers in arms.
This is a philosophical poem.
hhp
>Karsten, what magazine is ‘TM’? I’d like to read that review
Bill, TM is the short title of the Swiss journal Typographische Monatsblätter. In 2003, shortly before he died, Max Caflisch put together many articles from the excellent long series on type history and modern revivals that he had contributed to this journal over many years in a two-volume edition that he designed himself (beautifully), with the title Schriftanalysen: Untersuchungen zur Geschichte typographischer Schriften (St Gallen: Typotron, 2003). They are all in German, but well worth looking out for the illustrations alone. The Adobe Caslon piece is on pages 200–214 of volume 2, and it is followed by one on Carter's Big Caslon.
> They are all in German
Why, since everything in TM has been trilingual (including English), no?
Maybe he only had the publication rights to his original German writings.
hhp
> everything in TM has been trilingual (including English), no?
In some Swiss books, maybe, but not in the TM I know, so the Caflisch pieces were only in German, but well worth trying. (TM absorbed a French-language trade journal, so some pieces are just in French.)
Thanks, James!
I can manage to read German with the aid of a dictionary. I see that the Library of Congress has the Typographische Monatsblätter, though I'm not sure whether it has the complete run. It doesn't have the books of collected essays, alas.
So if you have access to the TM, the Big Caslon article is in TM 4/1995 (4 pages, 2 of them with a great showing of the glyph set).
Unfortunately, I still don't have the Untersuchungen zur Geschichte typographischer Schriften. I rely on the nice collection of offprints which was published some time before the book.
K.L. -- you go far back in history!
H.P. -- And part of my point is, you have to.
And I thought you'd offer a contemporary philosopher home story. Much neglected genre. :)
>contemporary philosopher home story
I know lady philosophers. Lady philosophers are friends of mine. That's why I don't mention them here :)
Actually, for a women philosopher, you don't have to go back any farther than G.E.M. Anscombe. She did smoke cigars, but as we all learned, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
James, weren't some of the TM Caflisch pieces in English? For example, the one on George Abrams's Venetian? I have a copy of that he gave me and I'm sure it was in English. Neither my German nor French is good enough to remember as much as I do of it.
Hrant, it is totally demented to say there are no woman philosophers. Perhaps not until the 20th century but good heavens, in France there is a whole school, in America -- are you mad? You really should read Avital Ronell's The Test Drive which as far as I am concerned is the most important book on philosophy written since Der Fall Wagner. There is a wonderful passage where Ronell suggests, in a play on Jenseits von Gut und Boese, that we are finally Jenseits von Mann und Frau. I think she is right. And she is by the way rather famously not that way inclined, or at least has been.
William, the historical problem with Adobe's optical axes was that they were implemented such that a 72-point master would be printable, without dropout, at six points, and a six point master would be usable at 72. There is a valid commercial reason for this, but it led to mediocre designs. This was an intractable source of friction between me and the type group when I worked with them in 1996-8 or whenever it was. Happily, as shown in some recent work, they have acknowledged that I was right, and their optical axes have finally improved in some of the 'opticals' released after the catastrophic decision to end the multiple master format. (Just look at any street map of London, and you'll see at once that it is a design problem crying out for multiple master fonts and a program such as Lari Software's LightningDraw that knew how to let users work with MMs.) But Adobe's optical work still fails to approach the heights scaled by the Mono/Lino designers of the 1920s and 1930s, or the work of such contemporary designers as Stone and Berlow or, of course, to the extent he works with them, Matthew Carter. Stone's work, as Matthew Carter so generously says, is in a category of its own. I'm sorry if I'm still speaking in generalities; I don't want to cop out of this, but I don't have time right now to show in detail what is right and what is wrong about these typefaces. I have been hoping for some time to write a book about type that would go into these issues. It has got to the point where I have a willing publisher and a willing co-author, but it is still a long way away. In the meantime, just look at a lot of type. I learn something every time I look at a good book published between 1920 and 1970. Just take the example of a government usage guide printed in Monotype 12 point Baskerville with long quotations in 10 point Baskerville. The only way you could even approach the perfection of color in digital is by using Stone's Cycles. By the way, I owe the existence of the offer to write this book to Carol Twombly. She was approached by Godine in the mid-90s for ideas on someone who could write something he envisaged as a successor to Talley of Types. Carol suggested me, and I have not been writing the book ever since, but we try to keep the flame alive.
Hrant, regarding the theme of women in type design, don't forget the hundreds of drawing office girls. Were they mere, low executants, or did they have creative input? I have been trying to test the theory for years that some unsung woman is the true hero(ine) behind the perfection of Monotype metal Bembo. I haven't got very far, though I have identified a possible candidate, thanks to David Saunders. The next clues would lie in the initials on the original drawings. But it is already clear that nobody will ever know who really designed this typeface.
I must discuss the matter with Saunders again, but my hopes for any revelations are not great. David and Pat Saunders know more than anyone else living what actually took place in the Monotype drawing offices, but they came much later, after the War, and they don't know in any real detail what actually happened in the interwar period.
>I don’t have time right now to show in detail what is right and what is wrong about these typefaces
Ok, how about one character in one typeface, at three optical sizes? Or just take those two 'e's from Cycles in your article, and compare those to the Minion e in Adobe's 'note' and 'display' sizes.
I know that from Minion to Minion Pro Slimbach improved it significantly by slightly fattening the serifs, and IIRC narrowing the round characters. But I can't identify a theory at work here. Maybe freed from the multiple masters he was able to refine the characters by proofing them at different sizes and altering them. Or is there a theory at work?
William, analyzing Minion over its many permutations would require thousands of words. A nice use of one version of it is the shown in the hardcover edition of Sereny's Speer/Struggle with Truth. The heavy flat paper thickens everything up a necessary trifle. But it is noteworthy that the extremely careful book designer turned kerning off, because using Minion with kerning can create more problems than it solves. It is nice that the typeface is being constantly improved. I have not spoken to Robert Slimbach in almost ten years but when last I did he disliked the face.
I have reached a point where I am not really interested in studying anything but the finest work. For me that constitutes Zapf, Frutiger, Carter, Stone, Berlow. Of these five, only the last three know much about actual typeface design implementation, and they each know a very great deal. Outside of these people I find a lot of interesting and lovely work, but it is all too problemmatical for me to get too involved in it. I must say, in the end, that I think a tyepface can only be properly evaluated when used for the kind of purpose it is intended, a book or a magazine. Of course I am only talking about text type.
I don't think it's right to say that Robert is 'free' from multiple masters. The last I heard, fairly recently, all of his work internally is designed in MM format, and he believes that the format is going to come back, as well it should. However, it is true that, without some sort of substantial intermediate technology, and even that has some limitations, it is seldom possible to do the entire optical range justice with simple interpolation. For that reason Garamond Pro is designed as a multiple master that goes from 6 to 18 points, and another multiple master that goes from 24 to 72. I know that Sumner Stone has worked in even finer gradients. I have never been able to identify a theory in Robert's work. I think he is less intellectual, more intuitive, than people would like to think. I don't like him although I once did very much, and I have yet to find a single person who does like him. But I admire him for pursuing a lot of projects -- such as Garamond Pro -- that he has had to do in his spare time. It is not commonly known, but a lot of big projects that have come out of Adobe have been created in the teeth of managerial opposition. One shudders to think what he is actually obliged to do in working hours -- the things he doesn't want to be working on. Carol wasn't the only person to have problems at Adobe.
You can isolate a single letter and study it and identify good things and bad things in different implementations. But I don't think this is a good way to look at a type. You have to look at it in its totality, and that takes a lot of time. Well, you have to do both. And more!
Does Robert have a theory? I don't really think so. Does anyone, really? Look at the way Carter's spacing evolved from Galliard to Miller. But I'm sorry, I'm just blathering. You've asked for something serious that I just can't give right now.
I _am_ glad Carol got her Caflisch moment!
Calling yourself a philosopher is easy*. Getting like-minded people to call you a philosopher isn't too hard either. Heck, I've been called all kinds of nice things by people who agree with my more "rousing" ideas - but I have to suspect they're essentially seeing what they want to see, and what I really am will be (or much more likely not be) remembered far into the future. Because what's hard to pull off is being called a philosopher a couple of millennia after you're dead. Of those, the only female we seem to have is Sappho.
* http://www.flickr.com/photos/48413419@N00/416819792/
Anyway I didn't say there were no women philosophers. I was leading off from Bill's interesting view that men are inferior text face designers and implied (among other things) that the degree to which a woman becomes a timeless* philosopher might be tied to her sexual orientation. Of course, I have no Proof.
* Practically speaking, since nothing really is.
> I am not really interested in studying anything but the finest work.
Fine, but from what I've seen of you Bill you're too conservative, too cynical when it comes to the possibility (I myself would even say unavoidability) of fundamental improvement over precedent. You think that dropping the lefthand bar in the "f" and "t" (à la Vafflard) is a big deal (and in this you are very much like Slimbach, William, and many others), while I think it's cosmetic. If I ask you to study Bloemsma's Legato and see the pivotal virgin territory it forges into, you would surely balk. But consider that in nicely stating that "you have to look at [a type] in its totality", you should take that far enough to see that everybody is sill making bunches of glyphs that get shoved together, and the really good stuff has yet to be designed.
hhp
>Isolate a single letter... I don’t think this is a good way to look at a type.
I don't think it is that great either. However, because a good typeface has an iron consistency, in a really good face the 'DNA' will show itself in every character. And so will optical sizing. So discussing one character in several sizes will tell a lot, inspite of its limitations. But you don't want to go there, which of course is your prerogative.
> a good typeface has an iron consistency
This is entirely superficial - a classical deluded Westernism.
hhp
I like "Philosopher Mechanic" a storefront to wrench the mind :-)
ChrisL
My, this post has gotten long! Still trying to read everything. In the meantime, I'd like to add to this:
S.U.F.: I can only name one female type designer in the world
W.B.: Zuzana Licko of Emigre is one prominant woman type designer active today.
Here's some more, in no particular order... Just the first ones that came to mind:
Andrea Tinnes
Margo Chase
Sylvia Janssen (more here)
Sibylle Hagmann (more here)
Nina David
Natalia Fernández
Seonil Yun
[Edit: I added the links on April 9]
Now weed out the ones that cannot really make text faces...
To me the woman-killer seems to be spacing - what makes
type design more like engineering and less like painting.
hhp
wb-
i just finished reading "If not... Winter..." by ann carson.
http://www.amazon.com/If-Not-Winter-Anne-Carson/dp/1844080811/ref=pd_bbs...
it's the first book to "restore" sappho's poetry back to the existing, incomplete fragments. most of the 'complete' work we've read in the past has been the result of modern scholars ffilling in the blanks to suggest what sappho MIGHT have written.
at least that's what i got from the book.
in any case, this seems to be getting far from the point...
The wikipedia article on Sappho says that most are fragments, but there is one complete poem and two others pretty complete, including the one I quoted.
No journeyman or woman poet could patch that together. It's pure genius, speaking with a stunning freshness, honesty and eloquence.
...Garamond Pro is designed as a multiple master that goes from 6 to 18 points, and another multiple master that goes from 24 to 72.
In fact, Garamond Premier (in its present form) was created as four separate, single-axis (weight) MM fonts for each of its optical sizes.
But technically those can be spliced together into a single MM font, no?
It's just that it would be a waste of effort since MM is no longer supported.
hhp
No. They are now completely separate designs. Long ago, it was planned as a single MM design with intemediate masters (like Kepler MM), but during the evolution of the design, Robert split it into separate MMs. Now, each MM is sufficiently evolved that they could not be re-joined.
>To me the woman-killer seems to be spacing - what makes
type design more like engineering and less like painting.
Well, this stereotype kind of falls apart when you consider the female hinting experts, Diane Collier, Geraldine Wade, Sue Lightfoot and Glenda de Guzman to name just four. Also on the engineering front I'd credit Judy and Carolyn on my team and Aida Sakkal as knowing more about complex script OpenType engineering than any reasonable person would ever want to.
I thought I remembered David Lemon once revealing that the MM format can accomodate abrupt shifts at given point sizes (and that this can even be done on individual glyphs), which is a special kind of intermediate design; mathematically speaking, it's not just non-smooth, it's discontinuous. If this is true, then the four MMs could indeed be joined (unless I'm missing something). Which is not to say there's a practical reason to do so, at least not how things stand right now.
hhp
Spacing and hinting are entirely different types of tasks. That said, certainly stereotypes are meant to fall apart now and again, otherwise they're be boring -and in the end useless- truisms. Stereotyping (which is a result of the mind's natural, and useful, tendency to generalize) is a tool, and like any tool can be used well or poorly, for helping people or for harming them.
hhp
Sure, maybe "spacing" is special. It was the engineering vs art comment that got my goat.
I think Engineering and especially Art are over-loaded terms that are very difficult to use well, and are prone to promoting disagreement where all there really is is lack of clarity, intellectually and/or communicatively.
hhp
Ricardo Cordoba> I have never heard of those women before- this of course is due to my own ignorance but also the fact that type design is not something that appeals to many woman. When I said Carol Twombly is the only designer I know, I meant this in the sense of who is immediately important and I consider her the most important female type designer ever. Zuzana Licko and Veronika Elsner are others.
But probably the lest appreciated woman in type who is also one of the most important is Cherie Cone! Behind the greatest living type designer (???) is Cherie- the brains behind the operation who allows Mr. Carter to focus on what he does best while she whips deals into shape!
There are not as many women graphic designers as men- computer technicians, software designers, chip designers, hardware engineers etc.
Does that mean this is wrong? Not always. Women have a choice now (in the usa- elsewhere???). And that includes 'this career sucks!' But what Bill talked about Adobe being a boys club is a very common thing in so many professions its gross- and in 2007 too!!!
In ages past the man worked and the woman tended to the family. Hence the long legacy of male type designers... women type designer from way back when- I for sure never heard of one. So also in that sense of women having very few role models is a stumbling block. But the roads are more open now and there are so many wonderful new ideas flowing from both men and woman in type design.
As far sexuality is concerned, I think a woman can crossover into a typical male role without having to be lesbian. But as the more physically demanding the career get (pro sports, correctional/police officer, industrial, firefighter) you start to see more lesbian women because they these women operate like men. They have heavy builds, deep voices, and dress the part. Another words- they will kick your ass!!!
Not so much for men. Fashion designers, hair stylists, interior decorators, dancers and the like are like 99.99999999% gay and that's the way it is. But wait- those are are gay man roles period... there is no crossing over.
True story:
I sat in mall hair salon waiting for a lady friend of mine to get her do done and the lady stylist was complaining that new clients call up and ask if a man is available, then the nest question is 'is he gay', the receptionist say no but he does great hair. The client might accept. And if only a female is available they just hang up, reschedule or wait till a gay man is available. Carltons Hair Salon if you must know!!!
Welcome to 2007!
Mikey :o)
Hey Bill, the "drawing office girls" prefer to be called women.
And, there are plenty of women type designers. It does no one any favors to presume that women don't want to become type designers or that their natures don't support it. It only reinforces outmoded stereotypes.
Look at the recent years' TDC winners, for example, and you will see a number of women's names producing award-winning work. There are even some text faces in there.
Veronika Burian.
Women are under-represented in most professions, not just type design. I think we can take it as a given that this reflects social pressures, not their "feminine nature". (Can't we?)
Sorry, Nicole, I'm speaking historically. Those women are all most unfortunately now dead (the great drawing office ladies of the 20s and 30s) and they were all called girls in the manner of the day, even though some were far from young.
The problem with getting to the bottom of anything at Monotype with regard to the women is that they were not the only class of people treated like dirt. Morison hated all the engineers. It is terribly sad but we are all thirty or forty years too late in trying to get at this history. At least with David and Pat Saunders, we can learn something about the practices of the 40s and 50s -- but that's not what we really want to know.
Speaking of girls and fitting, I think Carol did all her fitting by eye, and believe me she knows what she's doing. Robert, however, has a more scientific way of doing it, especially the italics -- and Carol was the one who wrote up his method -- at my request. It's a method of using slanted guidelines not unknown to others, which Fontlab somewhat facilitates. I believe that until the end, Carol used FontStudio for her work.
I didn't know that Garamond Pro or Extra Fancy or whatever it's now called had got to the point of constituting four separate multiple masters. Doesn't that kind of indicate that you might just as well design each optical size separately, as Stone does most of the time? It's the only way to free yourself . . . . that said, I do like the simplicity of an optical axis going evenly from 8 to 72, and I do think it can be accomplished with something pretty close to perfection. Perhaps I am deluding myself however.
Ultimately I don't think it's gender that's important in type, I think it's teamwork.
>it was planned as a single MM design with intemediate masters (like Kepler MM), but during the evolution of the design, Robert split it into separate MMs.
That is what I meant, Bill T, by being 'freed' from MM--not that it wouldn't be used in production, but that there was no requirement that the user be able to output a whole range of sizes from a single MM font.
>It’s a method of using slanted guidelines
Are you referring to the technique explained by Mark Simonson here:
http://typophile.com/node/19788 ?
Nicole, I think what does no one any favors is refusing to think; in this case about the relevance of gender. One thing that seems impossible to refute to me is that physical differences exist (including in the brain's structure). What do those differences translate into? I don't pretend to really know myself, although I can be sure that we are better at different things. In any case I refuse to avoid thinking. It's what actions you take with your thoughts that counts. And political correctness is for politicians.
On the other hand I do realize now that "woman-killer" was
way too strong; better would have been... woman-slower-downer. :-)
BTW, from the enrollees in my typeface design class I certainly know that women very much want to be type designers - in fact they seem to outnumber men in that now (although part of it must be a "fallout" from the much greater proportion of women in graphic design as a whole, and the general perception that type design is a subset of graphic design).
> I think we can take it as a given that this reflects
> social pressures, not their “feminine nature”.
Certainly (and I mentioned that myself previously). Like I happen to know that as of a few years ago there were only two women tow-truck drivers in the state of California*, and social expectation must be like 90% of the reason.
* BTW, I discovered this because one of them was Armenian. :-)
> I do like the simplicity of an optical axis going evenly from 8 to 72
But -as you used to say, and I've come to realize- the desirability of that depends on the nature of the design at hand. Think of making even a moderately faithful revival of Caslon in MM, which naturally includes optical scaling - especially in things like the italic "Q": http://themicrofoundry.com/other/caslon_q.gif _
It's not only non-linear, but actually exhibits a -sensical- topological difference!
hhp
"Nicole, I think what does no one any favors is refusing to think"
I couldn't agree more. But, sometimes people think out loud before they have something useful to say (that's not a dig, just a comment...).
Discussions around women's achievements too often include wild (WILD!) speculation about why women are or aren't involved. I don't discount gender difference, but prefer to see it is just one of many factors that go into someone/anyone choosing type design as a career. It's important to look at a number of factors (notably the system through which typefaces get created and published and how a career in type design is formed) and not just what inner qualities women may or may not possess.
Ok, enough chatter, I've got to get back to designing type. :)
Hmm. Intresting to hear, as a newcomer to the forum, where I am most likely lacking some designer qualities because of my gender... Although I am happy to realise, that should I ever want to better my performance, I could consider lesbianism or bisexuality. :) (This is the year 2007, isn't it?)
Just wait and see, we are not in a status quo. The more evolved the society, the more there will be women in traditionally male occupations and vice versa. And the differences talked about will not be those between sexes, but those between individuals. The latter part should be true already, but unfortunately isn't, since people seem to love the stereotypes to great extent.
Hrant, having followed a little bit the brain research and also the studies on what constructs a gender, I can affirm that – despite the efforts – there has not been any findings to support what you are hinting (about the differences between sexes due to brain or other factors). The current paradigm is that one's intrest and talent in engineering, mathematics, painting, typography, graphic design, or what ever else has been mentioned, are for the most part due to culture and upbringing, that is socialisation. Not to brains, hormones or even genetics. Any other paradigms remain to be proven.
And this was first concluded in 1949 by the famous French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir.
My daughter seems to be able to do whatever she sets her mind to despite her gender. I wonder what my wife and I have done wrong since she doesn't seem to know about all of these shortcomings?
ChrisL
> sometimes people think out loud before they have something useful to say
Better than the opposite in my book!
BTW, it's quite interesting that nobody seems to mind Bill's view concerning the inferiority of men in designing text faces - which I actually think has some validity. If this seems confusing, it might be because some people want to think in absolutes, not nuances, ambivalence and complexity.
> The more evolved the society, the more there will be
> women in traditionally male occupations and vice versa.
I would be cautious in calling it "evolved". In my view women were "liberated" from parenting essentially to become slaves for the rich. And compulsory public education (which is essentially a free brainwashing and babysitting service) goes hand-in-hand with that.
> there has not been any findings to support what you are hinting
Except for plain old common sense, which in this male-dominated society
has been demoted. What's most sad is whem women join in to this delusion.
> for the most part
You said it, not me.
Chris, your attitude is a classic deluded Americanism, designed to keep the peons merrily voting.
hhp
Can't argue with well substatiated logic like that.
ChrisL
Over-reliance on Logic is how peons are kept in line.
hhp
Always entertaining that it is the boys discussing how or what the girls are capable of doing.
>BTW, it’s quite interesting that nobody seems to mind Bill’s view concerning the inferiority of men in designing text faces - which I actually think has some validity
Well thanks Hrant for the compliment of elevating anything I might innocently say into a 'view'. I'm much too impulsive to have views by and large. I do think men tend to be more egocentric than women, less able to share achievement (though obviously not, for example, Japanese men) . . . . and I think type is best done co-operatively. That really is a view. It has been evolving for a long, long, time. Yet Matthew Carter criticizes me for what he regards as my excessive dependence on other peoples' opinions. 'When are you going to learn to fly solo?' he asked me -- twelve years ago. I have only gotten more neurotic since.
I really also sense that we are on the verge of true changes in gender equality. I do think that women growing up now -- many of them -- will be able to think and do as well as men -- and perhaps men growing up now will be able to do likewise?
Again I really do recommend Ronell's 'The Test Drive' as a foundational thought provoking book for this era.
One thing I would like to point out about Adobe is that Carol had problems, and some of them had to do with the fact that she was a woman and had been trained to be compliant. However, the men had their problems too, and some of them were the same problems. So to a certain extent, it's unfair to bring gender into it, yet you certainly can't leave it out either. It's the corporate control structure that was the cause of all these problems. Yet without the corporate control structure, and all that entailed, you would not have had these designers working in a somewhat collaborative environment, which is good. Apparently there are no right answers. So maybe I've been asking the wrong questions?
>always entertaining
Harvard's faculty was less than amused when President Larry Summers raised this issue.
He was ultimately forced to resign, in circumstances explained in this article by Alan Dershowitz.
>Over-reliance on Logic is how peons are kept in line.
Randomly quoting from Star Trek does little for your credibility. Although I think it was Vulcans not peons. :-)
Always entertaining that it is the boys discussing how or what the girls are capable of doing.
Yes it is! You beat me to it, Tiff. :) I was next waiting for the discussion on the merits of natural childbirth.
Also check out this thread for more on female type designers. Please add to the list.
William: Yes, the tyranny of silencing anti-establishment thought now extends even to the highest echelons of US education. You have made your system hermetic; which means however than when the time comes your fall will be gargantuan. As it was with Rome.
Terry, childbirth is actually a central key to this discussion. Let's see Chris deliver... BTW, I remember when my wife was pregnant, seeing her delight when the baby started kicking, deep down I was envious (if otherwise I was relieved to be well clear of bearing children :-) which was a jolting and bitter-sweet realization for me. But anyway it is not meant to be. And that sort of human reality permeates everything.
--
BTW, something that's even more relevant than social "conditioning" and certainly gender in terms of what we end up doing in life is Circumstance, what life throws at us. Would Carter have ended up designing type if his father wasn't involved in type? And what about his father's father's circumstances? It all blends into the dark strands of history, and we have no control. This BTW is something the West has great trouble with.
hhp
"Over-reliance on Logic..."
Well that is one thing Hrant will never be guilty of :-)
ChrisL
Fake smile[y]s are disgusting.
And tellingly, middle-aged white males use them a lot.
hhp
Thank god I am well past middle age then :-)
ChrisL
Feeling the strongest feminine instinctual urge (or would that be desire? or hysteria?) to quote Woolf and her "on women" library list as well as the bit about Shakespeare's sister.
Would have loved to have been able to present this thread in my writing by women class (offered as part of the Simone de Beauvoir Institute...)
There really should be studies to look at the phenomena of men who try to solve the "Feminine problem." It sounds like often the "feminine problem" exists because men have assigned it that label, and acted accordingly.
Keep it up, the discussion is interesting and provoking.
Those of us who try to "solve" it are simply being
our dumb males selves - please forgive our nature.
hhp
>Fake smile[y]s are disgusting.
So are you asking me to insert real smileys into Georgia? You know I can do that.
Live long and prosper, Si
I love Typophile. Something must be very wrong with me :)
The scene fades as we watch Si singing his rendition of "Georgia on My Mind" and putting a yellow smiley face sticker from Walmarts on Hrant's door...FTB
ChrisL
Little known fact: "Live long and Prosper" is a loose translation of the traditional Jewish greeting "Shalom U'vracha". It is accompanied in Star Trek by Leonard Nimoy giving a hand sign with the four fingers divided in the middle into a 'V', the sign indicating a Hebrew letter 'Shin', abbreviation for one of the names of God, and used by those in the Priestly class--cohanim--to bless the congregation.
And subsequently Leonard Nimoy, who is Jewish, showed his devotion to his faith by publishing a book of photos of young naked women wrapped in transparent prayer shawls.
All true!
And that's why Hrant is such a trekkie! (not true :)
"transparent prayer shawls"
That creates a strange image.
Fran Drescher in Saran Wrap :-)
ChrisL
I like the original Star Trek series, but none of the newer ones. And to make a Trekkie comment that's not a self-aggrandizing distraction from the topic(s) at hand, I would point out that Kirk's behavior towards women is now considered politically incorrect, which to me is most of all an indication of how shallow and coercive we've become. Bill, "on the verge of true changes in gender equality"? Equality is death - the great dehumanizer.
hhp
Cleo Huggins (or did someone already mention her?)
Gudrun Zapf von Hesse
A 22-page (!) article on Carol Twombly and her type design work at Adobe in the early 90s can be found in Design Graphics magazine, issue #4. What's amazing is that you can still buy this back issue direct from the magazine in Australia.
http://www.designgraphics.com.au/issues/backissues.php
I read this at the time and it was one of the things that seriously cemented my interest in type design back then. Good article.
Thanks to Christopher Slye for digging this up. I still have it around here somewhere as well.
Cheers,
T
This is becoming an awfully long thread AND completely off topic — but today (when looking for FontStudio software) I found this:
http://faculty.mdc.edu/earteaga/gra1206/1206l10.html
May be of interest to the original poster.
Note: That piece incorrectly credits Carol with designing Pepperwood, Rosewood and Zebrawood. These were designed by other women in the type group at Adobe.
Pepperwood, Rosewood and Zebrawood were initially released in 1993, and designed by Kim Buker Chansler, Carl Crossgrove and Carol Twombly.
>but today (when looking for FontStudio software)
If you're looking for FontStudio, you're looking in the wrong place. You want the latest beta, the PPC/FPU version if you're on a reasonably modern Mac. Works fine last time I tried it. I got my copy from Harold Grey when he was still the bootblack at ITC and passed it on to Lucas de Groot . . . and Carol Twombly.
I don't think I like the metrics editing, which I admit I can't figure out, but I love the fact that if a point is selected, tab/shift-tab brings you to the next/previous handle, node -- it's much more useful than what we now have in Flab, and of course far more useful than Fog in this respect. This is a beautiful fine tuning tool. You're on a handle, you adjust with the cursor; you tab over to the next handle on the path, adjust, tab to that next node, adjust, tab to its handles, tab to the next node's handles . . . . etc. What an exquisite way to fine-tune an outline, and you never have to do something so inane and cumbersome and time consuming, and interruptive of your creative flow as look for your mouse cursor, fiddle with it, etc. etc. This is how it should be. It is creative heaven, provided by machines. Yuri, instead of having tab (a character whose significance you too often ignore) move you from handle to node to handle, and back again, it would be wonderful if you let tab take you to the next node, just as FontStudio does. This tab action, of course, will only take place when a node is selected, and it will only, as so elegantly implemented in Font Studio, work for selected nodes. You have what seems to me rather a wrong thing going on, which is that handles can't be edited while several nodes are selected, since navigating to a handle automatically deselects the selection. Why is that? FontStudio doesn't seem to have a problem with it. And by the way, am I the only person who thinks that the use of Tab in the Flab glyph window when nothing is selected -- turning on and off the rudimentary and useless character selection panel -- is a waste of a good control character?
Didn't FontStudio fade away into oblivion years ago?
ChrisL
> These were designed by other women in the type group at Adobe.
Funny.
"Yeah, one o'thems wimins done did it."
BTW it's sounding like Carl's story would be even more interesting than Carol's... Hey wait, look at their names... maybe they're the same person?! ;-)
hhp
But plenty of people have seen me and Carol in the same place at one time. Sorry. ;)
However, lots of non-native English speakers seem to think the 2 names are the same....
Kim Buker Chansler did the design of the Woodtype 3 package, and I filled out the character set and finished the outlines and spacing, under Carol Twombly's direction. So, each of us were involved, but not in the same capacity. You could call the roles Designer, Production, and Art Direction. I needed a lot more direction then, and Carol was very encouraging and reassuring to work with.
Ah, twins then. Which however doesn't resolve the gender suspiciousnesseses...
hhp
>Didn’t FontStudio fade away into oblivion years ago?
There are those who still use it. The main reason is that there is NOTHING that will let you gracefully flit from point to point, handle handle, using just the tab keys and cursor keys, while you perfect your curves. It is one of the most powerful creative experiences the computer allows. If you are really interested in perfecting your letter shapes, FontStudio's mechanism is glorious. Yuri, is there any reason not to put this into Fontlab?
Also nice is the 800% zoom. Not even FontLab has that, though Fog5 went to 3200% and I sometimes wished it would do more.
The main limitation of FontStudio for me, for the project that I would most have liked to use it, was that it only worked in integer point units and I wanted the extra precision that Fog 4/5 (or Ikarus/whatever DTL calls it now) allow.
Carol used to say she could not bear to draw in anything else.
I believe the code is owned by Adobe now . . . . which swallowed up the brilliant engineers who did that (and Chameleon, etc. etc.) and were never heard of again -- was Russ McCann the lead? Yes, see http://www.ucmsds.com/company/who_officers.cfm for what has become of him. I wonder who actually does own the code still? But I'm pretty sure it's Adobe. Hey, does anyone have a Chameleon beta 2?
Somewhere I might still have my copy of FontStudio but I cannot imagine it would run on current systems. I remember liking the way the nodes would turn to large black circles just as they would join, indicating a proper connection.
ChrisL
> I wanted the extra precision
But it's a deceptively dangerous precision, since when you generate a font it all gets rounded to integers anyway. If you want more precision you use a larger EM, but that limits you to TT fonts, in which case your precision is toast if you draw in cubic beziers (since they get converted, not supremely faithfully, to quadratics).
hhp
You can draw type 1 otf flavored fonts at greater than 1000 units. I have used both 2000 and 2048 without issue. This may not have been true a few years ago pre opentype but I am not sure about that part.
ChrisL
But the point is no size of integer EM during output is going to match a floating-point scheme during design. With floating-point you're always working with a degree of precision that will get amputated, unmanageably.
hhp
Yes, but you are not stuck with 1000 units in type one and the floating point issue still holds for TrueType as well. FontLab takes away the options that can get badly missrepresented with rounding but it makes the drawing "seem" too coarse.
ChrisL
Those quotes being critical there.
> you are not stuck with 1000 units
It depends who you're designing for.
hhp
>> I wanted the extra precision
>But it’s a deceptively dangerous precision, since when you generate a font it all gets rounded to integers anyway. If you want more precision you use a larger EM, but that limits you to TT fonts, in which case your precision is toast if you draw in cubic beziers (since they get converted, not supremely faithfully, to quadratics).
You're missing the point, Hrant. How type gets processed today is a temporary thing; PostScript and TrueType weren't the first digital systems for processing type, and they won't be the last. There are designers who are unhappy about the current limitations of PS and TT. (Just think about a sans Z -- you may want it raised it 1/2 or 3/4 of a unit off the baseline; you don't want it by a full unit, to give a very simple example; you may take that if it's all you can get, but you know it's not the ideal.). Just ask Bitstream if they're going to throw away their master data at 15,000 units just because an inferior system has sway for this decade and last decade, but certainly not the next, or the one after that, unless it gains a little more precision. You want the satisfaction of knowing that, however you output your type today, you can design it to higher resolution and you can confidently hope that one day it will be possible for it to be outputted at higher resolution.
The other overwhelming reason for higher precision is to avoid the round-off errors that often occur during transformation operations. Serioius Fontlab and Robofab users now have some facility for doing this, but it all seems kludgy.
Chris, I am running FontStudio 2.02 Beta 1 Plus under Classic on OS 10.4.8, and don't seem to notice any problems. All this and the code is just over 1MB.
Berthold had the same concerns about the PS conversions of their full-res Ikarus data, and their concerns were essentially laid to rest. Adapting type designs to fit an 18 or 24 unit system is a problem; 1000 units really isn't all that shabby. And, as has been pointed out, you're welcome to work at any scale you want. Keep the data and see what happens. I just think that whatever design you come up with, fitting the curve elements onto a 1000-unit grid is not much of a compromise. It's simply one of the challenges of the current format, and given all the other advantages we have (wild kerns, contextual substitution, excruciating precision, huge character sets, limitless design options, overlapping shapes), it's not a deal-breaker.
> How type gets processed today is a temporary thing
Temporary? For an oak tree maybe. For actual users it's Reality.
> Just ask Bitstream if they’re going to throw
> away their master data at 15,000 units
Please re-read what I wrote about large EMs vs floating point.
> 1000 units really isn’t all that shabby.
It's not shabby as a design space, but it's very
much problematic as a "blind rounding" space.
hhp
Hrant: Because what’s hard to pull off is being called a philosopher a couple of millennia after you’re dead. Of those, the only female we seem to have is Sappho.
There are actually quite a lot of female philosophers of antiquity, of whom Hypatia of Alexandria is probably the most famous; during her life, she was considered by many the most important neo-platonist of either sex. Sappho was a lyric poet, and while you might find some of her verse 'philosophical' -- which is today used as a synonym for thought-provoking -- it generally does not fit the classical understanding of philosophy. It is significant that Sappho's name does not appear in this list, for example,
By the way, speaking of women philosophers of antiquity, the one who should be best known to typographers is Diotima, after whom Gudrun Zapf von Hesse named one of her typefaces.
> it generally does not fit the classical understanding of philosophy.
It doesn't fit the contemporary mainstream formal Western definition of philosophy.
And it remains that Sappho is the only one familiar to most people. This is something everybody, including people immersed in formal philosophy, need to come to grips with.
hhp
Hrant, do you mean this?
>But the point is no size of integer EM during output is going to match a floating-point scheme during design. With floating-point you’re always working with a degree of precision that will get amputated, unmanageably.
I think you are wrong but don't worry, nobody expects you to admit it. I suspect that when we speak of floating point points, we are in practice still speaking of a limited degree of float. I doubt the Fog database format stores data to more than two decimal places. Suppose there was one decimal place: that would be a space of 10,000 units; if there were two decimal palces, that would be 100,000 units. Yuri would know.
Postscript will sooner or later move to floating point because it has nowhere else to go -- in fact, David Lemon has explained that to a certain extent it already has done so. (I don't recall exactly how to get it to work, but apparently it _can_ work.) I can see all kinds of benefits to this precision even where there the output cannot resolve the available precision. For example, hinting algorithms could be much more accurate, couldn't they?
Sure, if the decimal places are severly limited it would be the same (and I do mean the same - as in no point doing it!) as a large EM - although as you see even two decimal places is equivalent to an EM much bigger than anybody uses. But it's probably not limited to anything that small, because of the way floating point numbers are typically represented in computers (what they sacrifice is precision in very small differences).
Now if I'm wrong, I'll have no problem admitting it. In the interim though I think you might want to admit that a lack of mathematical affinity is most likely causing you confusion. :-)
> I can see all kinds of benefits to this precision
There are hypothetical benefits, but practical drawbacks.
You choose.
hhp
BTW, I just noticed something interesting about the sexual orientation business: opposition to the philosophy angle is rife, but nobody seems to mind the stand-up comedian angle! :-)
hhp
But Hrant, who are these people who think of Sappho as a philosopher rather than as a poet? I simply have not come across this view before. It seems to me both highly unlikely and unsupported by a) the relatively few and fragmentary surviving writings by her and b) her reputation in classical Greece. Her writing is lyrical poetry mainly concerned with love. Hence, she is known as a lyrical poet. And a very fine one. This isn't in any way do dismiss her wisdom, which Aristotle acknowledged, but the ancients made a distinction between philosophy and wisdom literature that our language doesn't reflect very well.
Just to be clear: I'm not saying Sappho was any the less for being a poet rather than a philosopher. Heck, I'd rather read poetry than philosophy any day of the week.
Forget Sappho - she is many degrees of relevance away from all this.
Think instead of why most people cannot name a female philosopher.
Is it all due to institutionalized chauvinism and/or gender-based social
expectation? I don't buy that.
hhp
I don't either Hrant.
There is much crossover but there are also pursuits where gender difference is more clear cut.
It makes the dance more interesting…
…and I'm about to get slaughtered. :)
peace
This thread had some interesting comments that helped me to go trough all of it's lenght.
Which are those professions or occupations where women outnumber man? Dance would be one of them, maybe education, fashion, interior design and graphic design (there were at least twice woman than man when I was at design school). What else?
In Mx figures show that women are starting to slightly outnumber man on may careers at the universities with better grades also. This trend will show in a few years on the professional world.
I must admit this pleases me because it's a sign of reivindication but also scares a bit the little macho in me... I guess many man live these times with the satisfaction of knowing that a fairest world is being achieved for woman and man but also with the slight fear of lossing ground. I don't know, maybe it's just me exposing my own prejudice.
Héctor
>But Hrant, who are these people who think of Sappho as a philosopher rather than as a poet?
Ah.
>Think instead of why most people cannot name a female philosopher.
Maybe they're confusing them with poets.
Hrant: Think instead of why most people cannot name a female philosopher.
I imagine a lot of people can't name a philosopher of either sex. If they can, chances are that it is a long-dead philosopher. If you take into account that women were excluded from the institutions of higher education for so long, that the university, for most of its history, was a specifically masculine academy, while at the same time the university became the seat of philosophy, I think it is pretty obvious why most people cannot name a female philosopher. The framework within which philosophy has been predominantly pursued in the west for seven or eight hundred years has only relatively recently been open to women.
By the way, on the subject of lesbianism and its connection to the island of Lesbos, I chanced to receive via an ancient near east listerve today a review of a new book on 'sex and gender in ancient Greece and Rome', which included these interesting comments:
Regarding the toponymic Greek verb lesbiazein "to perform ****," Krenkel is misled (p. 207) by the prejudice, as old as Hesychius, that the verb etymologically means "to act like a woman from Lesbos," while the ancient testimonia rather indicate that the euphemism rather means to act like "a person (i.e. either man or woman, indiscriminately) from Lesbos." A small point, true, but perhaps one that may throw light both of the verb itself as well as potential biasses in the glosses of Hesychius. On the next page, Krenkel also incorrectly states that the Greek verb phoinikizein (etymologically, "to act like a Phoenician") also means "to perform ****," when it actually means "to perform ****." Again, a point like this matters, not only for lexicographers who collect such things, but because it bears on the interpretation of literary texts; thus, for instance, when we find that a prostitute in Plautus' Pseudolus is named "Phoenicium," (Phoinik-ion) her name does not really imply "Miss Suckly" (as once suggested by W. M. Calder III in CP 70 [1975] p. 147, and quoted with approval by Krenkel p. 208 n. 8), and thereby indicate that **** is the special services which she performs for her clients; Plautus is rather openly and constantly advertising the predilections of her rival clients Calidorus (cf. his snivelling in Scene 1) and the Macedonian soldier ("dentatus" [!], v. 1040), and the privileges for which they are all too happy to pay her. (One could perhaps compare the famous fresco from the apodyterium of the terme suburbane in Pompeii, reproduced as fig. 14 in Antonio Varone's Erotica Pompeiana [Rome, 1994], p. 207.)
So there you have it: Lesbos wasn't known for its lesbians, but notorious for its fellatalists of both sexes.
[I've only skimmed this long and bizarre thread, and I still don't quite understand how Sappho and the Lesbians/lesbians got involved!]
> I imagine a lot of people can’t name a philosopher of either sex.
When it comes to what I said, most, you imagine wrong.
hhp
Yes, but my basic point remains: philosophy has for a very long time been pursued almost exclusively within the context of institutions that were not open to women*, so the reason why most people can't name a female philsopher is linked to the fact there have not been very many women philosophers until recently, and they are still a minority in the philosophy departments of universities. [I happen to know some female philsophers personally.]
Most people cannot name any female soccer players either. But of the people who can name an opera singer I'm sure all could name a female opera singer, and pretty much everyone can name a female pop singer.
*There is, by the way, a significant body of 'philsophical' writing, in the broader sense encompassing wisdom literature, by women that comes out of monastic institutions, and this includes works of philosophy as well as theology. Edith Stein is a good recent example of someone who studied philosophy (specifically, phenomenology, within the context of the monastic life.
You're consistently skirting my basic premise: that social "role-pressures" cannot fully account for the lop-sidedness. Which is unsurprising based simply on the conviction that it does not make sense for there to be no fundamental differences between men and women. What does your religion say about this?
hhp
Think instead of why most people cannot name a female philosopher.
I hope I've done my bit to help with that, by naming my new typeface after one. :)
Regards,
T
This is the craziest thread ever.
You've been here for 27 weeks 3 days - give it some time… :)
My theory is that men live in a more artificial universe.
peace
Maybe it's time to start posting more names of type designers who happen to be women.
Gayaneh Bagdasaryan.
http://www.myfonts.com/person/bagdasaryan/gayaneh/
hhp
Carol Twombly and Marion Anderson recently sang a duet from "Der ShrifterSinger" at a meeting of the "Philosophers Society and Typographers Union" to a standing ovation. Jesse Norman was quoted as saying, "Now THAT is what I cal a DEBUT!"
ChrisL
Hrant: You’re consistently skirting my basic premise: that social “role-pressures” cannot fully account for the lop-sidedness. Which is unsurprising based simply on the conviction that it does not make sense for there to be no fundamental differences between men and women. What does your religion say about this?
I'm not skirting your basic premise. I think 'role pressures' is to vague a concept to which to nail anything, so I was looking at concrete systemic reasons that might account for the relatively few number of women in the history of philosophy. And it seems to me that the fact that there are now considerable numbers of women in the philosophy departments of universities does suggest that the previous barring of women from such positions is a contributing factor. As I wrote, I know some women philosophers.
Yes, there are fundamental differences between men and women, but before one can assume a causal relationship between these differences and particular social phenomena one must also look at potential social causes.
> I was looking at concrete systemic reasons
Yes, I know, that's always the problem.
> one must also look at potential social causes.
Obvious and moot.
hhp
Yeah, like Hrant would ever admit that.... ;-)
Aren't there like seven intelligenceses or something? How many you want lady?
hhp
>>> I was looking at concrete systemic reasons
>>> Yes, I know, that’s always the problem.
Lol. So you're suggesting intuition, gut instinct, or a message from the Virgin Mary as better methods?
The subject of what drives people to make the choices they do, or be interested in particular pursuits/careers/hobbies is so wide, deep, and encompassing that I am certain we will not be able to reduce it to either social pressure or innate, gender-determined preferences to the exclusion of other motivating factors. Nor will we arrive at a definitive conclusion in this thread. People are a helluva lot more complex than that--women too. Arguing for or against either position is just ridiculous, ignorant, or playing devil's advocat. Oh wait! Or men being typically (naturally?) pig-headed. (oops, did I say that out loud?) ;)
C'mon! Give it up already.
I find, going back to the original post, that the whole concept of wanting to know if a type designer is married or has children somewhat suspect to begin with. Who cares? Is it really pertinent to the validity or success of the typeface, or to the designer's ability? Not so much. Incidental, environmental. Ok sure, we could say some things about overcoming obstacles and the demands of raising a family or the sacrifices required by certain social situations. We could also draw some very nebulous conclusions about soft lines and sweet bezier curves or hard angular lines and gender preference, we could even get into the length of the descender, the shape of the bowls and counters... but would you really reduce a person's professional achievements to such inanities? And if so, they must be equally pertinent when looking at male designers, although I would suspect in their case, the family/gender/sexuality issue is generally entirely ignored.
Start first by looking at the artist's art, not at the artist.
The things that make me tick, you would never entirely -- not even largely -- deduce from my gender. The reasons I have made the choices, had the successes, had the failures that I have in my life are far too varied and layered to be reduced to merely my gender or my social environment. To suggest that they might be somehow dulls the human experience, don't you think?
Discussing gender theory, identity, sexual politics, and societal-gender factors is great, but let's not confuse it with making sweeping generalizations about either sex based on feelings or impressions. Perhaps we could even discuss it for what it is, without using our generalizations, assumptions and hearsay to draw conclusions about a specific person.
/grumbles off to bed.
> I am certain we will not be able to reduce it to either
> social pressure or innate, gender-determined preferences
> to the exclusion of other motivating factors.
Not more certain than I am.
> Start first by looking at the artist’s art, not at the artist.
First, shmirst. You look at as much as you can.
hhp
Yeah, like Hrant would ever admit that…. ;-)
:-D
Kristina, everything you said... hear, hear!
And Hrant, you were only able to come up with one female type designer? Come on, make an effort, man!
I just want to make a scientific argument that, before our gender is determined, four weeks after fertilization, we are all the same.
P.S. No one noticed that I set the word balloon of the caveman drawing in Lithos... *sigh*
Yay, let's hear it for three-week-embryo type designers!!
> I set the word balloon of the caveman drawing in Lithos…
Shame on you - you must have meant that all Greeks are cavemen.
hhp
>This is the craziest thread ever.
Christopher, do a typophile search on "Fidel" and "Rolex" ;-)
Ricardo,
I noticed that the caveman baloon was in Lithos but did not get it beyond that. I guess I am losing it to a senior moment :-) Care to "Splen it to me Lucy?"
ChrisL
Hrant: Aren’t there like seven intelligenceses or something? How many you want lady?
ROFLMAO! "Self-referential" doesn't count, though.
Ricardo: P.S. No one noticed that I set the word balloon of the caveman drawing in Lithos… *sigh*
waving hand
Me, me, I did: just thought it was so obvious that it would have been poor form on my part to point it out.
No, really....
Yeah, you're right Linda... It was too obvious to be mentioned.
I noticed that the caveman baloon was in Lithos but did not get it beyond that.
Chris, the caveman thing needs some explaining because I was trying to be subtle and go easy on the people airing their views about the supposed differences between men and women... I was trying to say that these views of man's supposed superiority have been superceded, proved wrong, et cetera! I was originally gonna look for a picture of cavemen arguing, or maybe even a caveman dragging a woman around by the hair... :-D
In the end I went with the idea that even a caveman sees that women are superior... Trying to make my point without hitting anybody over the head with my club, so to speak... ;-) But probably I was too subtle or obscure... And, uh, should I also say that the caveman is quoting an old song that both Harry Belafonte and Robert Palmer used to sing? :-)
> these views of man’s supposed superiority
Nobody ever said that here, least of all me!
Just because such idiocy has been common, and in fact often institutionalized, doesn't make it a good idea to lash out blindly. You'll hit friendlies.
What I'm trying to fight is idiocy in an opposite extreme: that there are no differences between men and women. This is an increasing problem, especially in the West, and it's turning us all into objects - machines for making the rich richer.
hhp
Hrant: Seconding that!
Hrant is spot on - no one said one gender was superior. That is your inference and hence, perhaps your bias.
We should celebrate the difference, not hide it…
peace
"But probably I was too subtle or obscure… And, uh, should I also say that the caveman is quoting an old song that both Harry Belafonte"
Ricardo,
I understood the cartoon right away (and I know the Belafonte song too "Smarter than the man in every way"). I just did not get what was significant about the choice of Lithos as a typeface. I know Lithos means stone but beyond that, is there something more?
ChrisL
Hey for a rousing feminist you sure don't know your women!
Lithos was designed by Twombly.
hhp
I know it was designed by Twombly but this thread hasn't been talking about her for days so It never occured to me (he said while trying to figure out what a rousing feminist was and how he got to be one all of a sudden).
ChrisL
PS: I know that I don't know women. I am not that naive. I also know that there are no women who are "My Women".
Yeah, she's only in the title of the thread.
Just be a man ;-) and admit you missed it.
hhp
Why do I even bother to feed the Troll.
ChrisL
This is an increasing problem, especially in the West,
To me, it seems that things are going backwards since 20/30 years ago, with sexual identity in the West becoming more polarized and cliched, and that surely is far easier for capitalists to manipulate and objectify, as sex sells. Just track the increasing sexualization of My Little Pony over the years, or compare Barbie with Bratz. Pretty soon Mommy will be putting makeup on baby girls, and giving Jnr a military buzzcut every bathtime.
So while not denying that there are innate physical differences between people, I'd prefer to ignore them, especially in the professional world.
> sexual identity in the West becoming more polarized and cliched
True, but this is largely superficial. When it comes to "serious" social debate the total lack of poles is even more worrisome. As for what capitalism leverages, selling more products thanks to gender difference is one thing, making slaves more plentiful and more pliant is another.
> I’d prefer to ignore
Won't be the first thing [in type].
hhp
Won’t be the first thing [in type].
Wait till you see my Bulgarian Cyrillics.
Yes, I trust that true to form you've firmly ignored any advice from Bulgarians. Except that guy you had lunch with once, although these days he calls himself Canadian.
hhp
If they have Canadian French, there is no reason for them not to have Canadian Bulgarian. I'm looking forward to seeing it :)
A.
i'm quite certain that Nick's Bulgarian Cyrillics will be well-informed, and he'll probably be the first western type designer to even take Bulgarian preferences into consideration!
There is quite a big Greektown in Toronto as well, Adam :-)
ChrisL
i’m quite certain that Nick’s Bulgarian Cyrillics will be well-informed, and he’ll probably be the first western type designer to even take Bulgarian preferences into consideration!
No not the first. Luc(as) de Groot has holidayed in Bulgaria and I believe has incorporated Bulgarian variant forms into some of his fonts.
More interestingly, although contentiously, there is some evidence that those Bulgarian preferences were actually invented by a western type designer. Albert Kapr, from the Hochschule in Leipzig, was very involved with the development of design education in Bulgaria in the 1960s, and according to Maxim there is some evidence that at least some of the Bulgarian variant letterforms originate in Kapr's ideas. Some, like the ascending lowercase zhe, are also found in certain styles of Russian script types, but the application of these features to all styles of type, as in Bulgaria, seems to be a novelty.
http://typophile.com/node/4933 _
Search for "Bulgarian".
BTW, I think Bulgarians consider themselves "westerners".
On the other side of the coin, some people would claim that
Leipzig is on the border. :-)
--
BTW, with this new Central European digression I now agree with Christopher: although a lot of threads have been crazy, this one, with its combination of sex, contentious claims and very broad spectrum just might be the craziest (so far).
hhp
I think Bulgarians consider themselves “westerners”
I'm sure they do. I met a Polish woman once that explained how Poland was the center of Europe. i'm still not quite sure i buy it... but if you include Russia in Europe, it might be true.
If you include Russia friggin' Kazakhstan is the center of Europe.
hhp
Everyone knows the center of Europe is Thessaloniki :-)
ChrisL
> these views of man’s supposed superiority
Nobody ever said that here, least of all me!
Just because such idiocy has been common, and in fact often institutionalized, doesn’t make it a good idea to lash out blindly. You’ll hit friendlies.
But Hrant, all of your arguments made it sound -- to me at least, granted -- that you were implying that... If all you wanted to say was that men and women are different, you should have just said so. :-)
This is typical. The more angry somebody is at something* and the more powerless he is against it the more he imagines its presence, in order to be able to react to the perceived injustice instead of looking at the sad scene in the mirror.
* In your case, men?
> you should have just said so.
You sound like Inspector Clouseau.
If you're serious, think deeply (and to yourself for
a while) about what this Difference truly implies.
hhp
Ooooooh, hitting below the belt.
That is completely uncalled for, Hrant. OK, so now you're saying not-very-nice things about me... Whatever lets you come out on top, I guess...
Thanks a lot for getting nasty with me.
Work on your apology skills (not to mention your reading skills) and things are likely to improve for you.
hhp
Yes, I trust that true to form you’ve firmly ignored any advice from Bulgarians.
I'm assuming that the alphabetic forms represented in the fonts published by Hermes Soft are correct. In general, I favour doing research over getting advice, although I did attend the Maxim Zhukov TDC seminar on Cyrillics earlier this year.
Poland is in the geographical centre of the European continent. This is largely due to the fact that the European part of Russia is quite large (though of course it's nothing compared to the Asian part of Russia).
If you look at this map (which correctly shows the European part of Russia) then Poland really looks like being very much in the middle (along with Germany):
This is the reason why the Polish (along with the Czechs, Slovaks and Hungarians) like to insist that they're "Central European" and not "East European" countries. I believe after the extension of the EU this distinction is actually bearing some sense — one can reserve the term "East European" for Cyrillic-written countries such as Russia, Ukraine or Belarus, while the Central European ones are those that used to be Eastern, aspire to be Western but aren't quite there yet.
Of course, if you exclude Russia from Europe completely, and disregard the notion of "Central" Europe, then even Hamburg is an Eastern European city. ;)
A.
Yes, 'mental geography' vs real geography is amusing. Here in the US we tend to think of South America as directly South of the US, but in fact the bulk of it is east of Boston.
We think of Stockholm and Vienna as 'Western' and Prague and Gdansk as 'Eastern'. But actually Stockholm is pretty much straight north of Gdansk and Vienna is pretty far East of Prague.
And Africa is six times the size of Europe.
And Chicago is further from San Francisco than London is from Moscow...
I don't know, Adam. It looks like Slovakia edges out Poland for center--and it's a "green" State :-)
ChrisL
Hrant: If you include Russia friggin’ Kazakhstan is the center of Europe.
I don't think anyone seriously considers including all of Russia in Europe. Russia is perhaps unique in occupying two continents. Europe stops at the Urals.
The problem is people seriously try to figure out where the center of Europe is at all. The concept of "Western" is very valid; trying to nail down its geography is not.
hhp
Hi, Hrant. I come in peace.
I just want to say that I was not trying to offend or anger you. Should I avoid generalizations? Yes! Should I read more carefully? Yes!! Is this an apology? Yes!!!
Still friends? No hard feelings?
Ricardo
Thanks for apologizing. For my part, I was too harsh - I'm sorry.
That said, please don't stop generalizing! :->
hhp
This thread was one of the longest and most fascinating and delightful threads I've ever read at Typophile.
Most of the topics are rightly about the minutiae of type design and the finer points of typography, layout, design, readability, and legibility. And there are the inevitable poseurs and posturers that come out of the woodwork (my font, idea, opinion, my [fill in the blank_____] can beat up yours, was there first, etc.).
But it sure is nice to read about the trials and tribulations of real people in in the workaday world and what they go through to bring us the type we use. I thank all who contributed to this thread. But I especially want to thank Bill Troop. I tried to contact him outside this forum, to no avail, so the only way I can convey my gratitude for his contribution is via this forum.
He might or might not see this soon, so if you give me your email
I'll pass it along to him. Mine is: hpapazian_at_gmail_dot_com
hhp
Sans commentaire:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6634255.stm
hhp
It's good to read typophile again :-)
(That smiley stands for a real smile.)
If it's still relevant, Adobe Caslon is one of the two digital types I find most endlessly enjoyable to look at. I'd rather see headlines in it than in Big Caslon. (Does anyone else dislike both Big Caslon and Caslon's large sizes? I hope they weren't by Wm Caslon I, whose text sizes were inconsistent in everything but their excellence.)
It’s good to read typophile again :-)
Access denied during term?
According to James Mosley's notes to the reprint of Caslon's 1766 specimen book, most of the large sizes were done by Caslon I, though some are by others.
Of course Big Caslon has a lot of Matthew Carter in it also. Another take on the large sizes is Caslon 540, originally from ATF. Do you dislike that as well?
Caslon I has much more logic to his alphabets and different sizes than is obvious; it has only taken me a couple of years full time to figure this out :)
I don't agree with your assessment of Adobe Caslon, and in particular that it does well at large sizes. Carol Twombly herself said it shouldn't be used at large sizes. For starters, at large sizes the flat-top serifs on the Roman have a 'bone effect' that I find unattractive.
Hi Nick, I've been increasingly unwell, and had to quit Reading. Things may be looking up, but I'm getting on a bit and should probably earn some money at some stage. I've had a set of ideas for what I hope could be a really worthwhile text face, now a very long way from Griffo; but (a) I still can't draw and (b) I don't know FontLab well enough to do the necessary OpenType stuff for context-sensitive serifs; there's also (c) of course, which is that, as a first type, it's going to be ****, though a long crit-tweak cycle might help.
Thanks William, though there goes my hope. (No, I don't like 540 either.) When you say Caslon I has much more logic to his alphabets and different sizes than is obvious, do you mean his text sizes too? I'd love to hear more about that. As for Adobe Caslon, I don't mean to say that it "works" at large sizes, just that it gives me an always-pleasant opportunity to admire its design. Your own work on Caslon must have made you more discriminating. Will you write up, or have you already, your thinking about Caslon, and about the development of your Caslon Next?
>Will you write up, or have you already
I did talk about it at TypeCon last summer. It has changed significantly since then as well as expanded. I hope I when I next talk or write about it, it will be finished.
And yes, the text sizes too. There is also a lot of just random variation too, so that makes it harder to pin down what makes it great, and separate the logic from what was a case of needing to get it out the door--which I am increasingly appreciating :)
Very sorry to hear that you had to drop out of Reading. I do hope you are well now.
Does anyone know how i can get a hold of softbluecries1? I have to do a presentation on Carol as well for my typographic class and would like to compare research. I'm new to this website and can't figure out how to get in touch with her
Lindsey you can contact softblue through their profile
So what about that stand-up comic business after all, eh?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/7153584.stm
hhp
Hrant! Long time no.
Happy New Year, Hrant!
ChrisL
> A 22-page (!) article on Carol Twombly and her type design work at Adobe in the early 90s can be found in Design Graphics magazine, issue #4.
Has anybody still got that article? Looks like DG has removed the back issues offer.
About one year after your first post on this thread, I find myself researching the very same Carol Twombly for typography class... Thanks, Heather, for what you started here, I'm new to design altogether and type is something I have grown to love in the last couple of weeks. Reading all this about her and other random things makes me realize I have so much to learn, and it's exciting :]
.m
wow..
It seems as if I'm not the only one in search of the mystique that is Carol Twombl(e)y.
Its been a VERY interesting, educating, and opinionated thread to have read through.
Im currently in a design program and studying typefaces in a Typography design class. If anyone else has relative information factual or fictional, please post a link or share indeed.
and if BOJEV is still out there pleeease contact me (twentysix26@juno.com) so I can possibly get the scan of Carol you have with the vertical Trajan alphabet. Trajan is the particular font Im studying and that scan would prove amazing for my poster design ideas.
Thanks
Damm you!!!!!
Mikey ;O)
Just to be crystal:
1) I don't necessarily believe every word of that.
2) I'm not claiming one is better; I'd simply like to see
more people acknowledge -and even relish- differences.
Equality is death.
hhp
Wow, the thread that wouldn't die gets yet more surreal.
The thing that tends to get overlooked when scientists discover a natural cause for a particular sexual attraction or predilection, as with observation of the occurrence of various kinds of sexual activity among other species, is that natural cause doesn't imply anything about morality. There's a romantic tendency to assume that everything that is 'natural' is morally good or at least morally neutral, which misses the point that morality can only be connected to nature via metaphysics, e.g. through a theology of creation; without such a metaphysics, morality is confined to the human social realm. The fact that some people appear to be genetically predisposed to be attracted to the same sex doesn't imply that sex between people of the same sex is moral, any more than the fact that very large numbers of men are apparently genetically disposed to be attracted to dozens women in the course of the average day (presuming they live in a sufficiently large urban evironment) doesn't imply that promiscuity is moral. Nor does the fact that homosexual behaviour is observable among other species mean that it is morally neutral: gang rape and necrophilia are also observed among other species. Which is not to equate these things, only to point out the fallaciousness of making moral arguments from nature.
You remind me of a cartoon I saw in my college paper in the previous century where during a fair the Gay & Lesbian Club attacks the Necrophilia Club for being immoral and disgusting. However this, sadly, is not a cartoon.
hhp
Hello All.
I was looking for Carol, too.
Carol and I atteneded the same High School
and many of the same Art classes.
I think of her often and her nick name for me....."fung"
If anyone knows where I might reach her,
please email me at mbmudgett5@gmail.com
Mary Beth (Mudgett) ODonnell
I hope to get back here soon, but if anyone would like to email me, or her,
that would be so appreciated,
Thanks so much,
Mary Beth Mudgett ODonnell
Massachusetts
I've sent your note/info to Carol. I hope you are able to reconnect!
Cheers,
T
It would be nice if Carol would pop in Typophile every once and while. Her lauded Chaparral is still such a hot topic.
:-) Mike
Carol is even more reclusive and private than Robert Slimbach (which is saying something), and has moved on to other crafts, so I think the odds of that are, mmm... about zero. A shame, but there you have it.
Cheers,
T
Thanks Thomas for the info.
Mike :-)
Hello,
I have been hoping to reach Carol, a Classmate from High School.
I am registered here and have a post with some contact info,
but I am unable to get to it. If anyone knows where Carol Twombley is,
and is in touch with her, her old friend Mary Beth ( Fung)
is just wanting to say hi. emailmb@mac.com
Thank you,
Mary Beth
My interest is different in that I just want o say hi to an old classmate.
Thanks!
Hi Mary Beth. I'll forward your message to Carol.
Hannah Arendt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt), despite her disavowal of the term, was nevertheless one of the greatest twentieth-century philosophers. Thanks to her work in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, she was a household name for a while, but even better is her work in Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought and in The Human Condition. A few samples:
"But it could be that we, who are earthbound creatures and have begun to act as though we were dwellers of the universe, will forever be unable to understand, that is, to think and speak about the things which nevertheless we are able to do."
"Modern politics is at war with truth."
“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill conviction but to destroy the capacity to form any.”
“It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives.”
. . . just to do my part in aiding and abetting the thread that would not die . . .
Awesome stuff. Never heard of her (my point).
hhp
I think it is safe to say that, "Carol can't help."
Point taken.
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