[speaker001:] Perhaps I'll record this as well as play it.
[speaker002:] Al, that's a good deal.
[speaker001:] Look at this one. erm to do both of those and then it works.
[speaker002:] Does a light go on?
[speaker001:] Yes.
[speaker002:] Does it say record?
[speaker001:] It's flicking away.
[speaker002:] Oh yeah. Now it's totally happy about doing it. Okay. I mean part of it is what I think and part of it is that I think that I like it because it works, that these things — I basically am unconvinced much of the modern tradition. I like certain things ragged right for example, or fairly simple pages, but erm you can look back at the sixteenth century and find extremely simple pages, you know it's not a modern idea and the thing is that most of the eddies and currents of popular graphic design are little stylistic exclusions that never go anywhere. They're just fun, and I like them. I mean Neville Brody's work, I think maybe goes just a little deeper than just a, you know, flourish, but I am not sure where he's going with it. I'm not sure it has enough erm logic behind it to lead him inevitably onward.
[speaker001:] Yeah, I mean his work seems to be, his work seems to be a lettering artist's work, rather than a typographer's work. I mean erm he's going off in almost that sort of, almost a calligraphic way of putting pages together
[speaker002:] It's true, it's an illustration. It's erm — and another thing, I was delighted when John Dreyfus in the Type ninety lecture used these terms of Charles Peignot called typo lecture and typo visuel, which I mis-spelt on my closing slide!
[speaker001:] Was it typo vision, did somebody say it was?
[speaker002:] I don't know what it was. I thought it was visuel, but I don't know if is visual, visuel, vision or what it is, but my French is non-existent. Whatever those words are, the definition is clear. Neville is the typo visual type movement, which someone like April Grieman Type ninety is also in, and I admire this and I think that what Neville Brody did in the early issues of the Face you know just blew me away; it was the most exciting thing that anyone had done in years. What people like April Grieman did in the United States ten years ago — fifteen years ago — was also very interesting, very exciting, but I think that both of those people attracted an enormous number of followers and Brody now essentially occupies rock star status, witness the groupies at Type ninety.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes, and witness the 'I don't want to give a lecture'as well. [LAUGHTER].
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER] Exactly, I mean, give us a break [LAUGHTER]. But in any case, you wonder what they're going to do next. I know, I went through a period of a very much milder popularity in the United States in the seventies, nothing like what Neville has enjoyed or has been squashed by [LAUGHTER], which maybe is lucky for me, but the idea was that erm Rolling Stone, when I was doing it, became very heavily innovative and there was like countless magazines, you know weekly newspapers in different cities, sections of dailies, everything, that started looking like Rolling Stone there for a while. And my Rolling Stone was completely based on the previous era at Rolling Stone. I mean, I don't think anyone was aware when I arrived there, or when I departed, you know, actually, but there was something in the air at Rolling Stone, and it was really based on British typography and stolen from them [LAUGHTER]. I mean [LAUGHTER] at one time it was the Times Literary Supplement or something with an Oxford box around it.
[speaker001:] [LAUGHTER] I do remember that. When I was at college I did a pastiche of the student magazine, doing the fold, and it was called Shell, so we renamed it for that one issue Rolling Shell, and I ever so carefully did the lettering for both the title boxes, then I got really disappointed when it came to set the type for the front page article underneath the big photograph which we printed as duo tone, because I could do it on the I B M — I could actually do it in Times and I thought it was going to be really, you know, I'd have to really struggle and find
[speaker002:] It was really simple?
[speaker001:] ... some, some problem American typeface, and it was in fact it was great, it was straightforward.
[speaker002:] You should have brought it, but I erm, a friend of mine — he's a publisher in San Jose, California, and erm I designed his latest newspaper over the telephone. He was in a fix — he had bought two papers and merged them together, and I wasn't around, I was in New York, and I did the logo for him in a hurry, but I didn't have time to design a newspaper, nor was it the kind of thing for which he could pay a big design fee, so he described it on the phone and then he faxed me some pages of the existing papers, and I said well what you have to do is look at the old London Times and do that. So he got Times Roman headlines in, very simple layout, and he did some caps bold, and then he said to me he had done all the headlines ragged and I said you just missed one thing — centre the heads. He did that and it is very clean, but nowadays a very suburban tabloid, but it's fresh, it's pleasant as a result, and that when I quit Rolling Stone. Rolling Stone was originally a reaction to the underground newspaper look and bit by bit it got art direction and, you know, good illustration, good photography, for this and all that, and then I got in there and pushed the type stuff. We set everything in monotype, and all these display headline faces copied out of old type books and then I left and it was almost like people were saying 'now what', erm 'what are you going to do after that?'and I said 'what do you mean?'. This is particularly true, and actually is what I'm leading to in this story is that three years later, when Robert Priest hit Esquire two years later, the Rolling Stone look was supplanted by the Esquire look in terms of popular design and imagination, and I remember people said to me 'well Roger what are you going to do, your style is out of date'and my reaction to this was 'well, hold on a second, it's not my style for one, and number two this is just traditional style, this was never intended to be a trend', and fortunately it's sort of gone — right now it's back — so Rolling Stone even picked up the format that, you know, the Morris-Jenson typeface that we did for headline and stuff, and it's back in there. Everyone says its totally hip and it wins awards again. It's like what's going on. That's moving too quickly for revivals [LAUGHTER].
[speaker001:] But do you feel somebody wanted you to do that or has somebody just been watching the clock on the revivals and the clock's ticked round to a point in time now?
[speaker002:] Well, clearly the revival thing has moved up so that we're about to have Eighties revivals very soon.
[speaker001:] Well, I mean Brody may be able to survive by not actually only having a few months between doing it and being revived I think.
[speaker002:] Well, he's also actually very smart, so I think that he will do something, but I don't think that that kind of deco constructivist inspired pastiche of styles, all reactionary, adds much, but of course they probably think that just doing, you know, just being content with typefaces available in nineteen twenty-five ads [LAUGHTER], but I don't know. The other side of your comment was that you seemed to like these certain basic typefaces.
[speaker001:] Mhm. These ones.
[speaker002:] Well these aren't really my choices. These are Berlow's.
[speaker001:] No, I know, but there's, I mean, do they represent more him than you? I don't know.
[speaker002:] Actually the presentation is very much what I like. The A T F nineteen twenty-three book
[speaker001:] Mhm, yes.
[speaker002:] ... Or the nineteen thirties book is like one of the things that really inspired me because it showed me that you can do type that looks as though, I mean it can be composed as though in metal and not be boring — can not be, manufactured, you know hum drum, by varying the weights and by massing it, and also one of the things they do, that you see in those books that you didn't see in printing, was this size of type.
[speaker001:] Mhm, yes.
[speaker002:] You know, large text, because they couldn't afford it. There was nobody buying. You had to buy too many fonts, and it was too expensive, and people didn't want to by linotype matrices of that size.
[speaker001:] It's interesting. The best Centaur, I think, is the Bible Centaur that we've got, which okay it's Bruce Rogers — it's eighteen D on twenty-two, I think — it's Bruce Rogers, but it's also the monotype drawing office taking Centaur and doing things to it to make it work as a composition face at that size, beefing it up just enough so it actually holds, and that's what his Bible's in. And the figures in his Bible aren't Centaur figures, they are Monotype Plantin figures resized to fit with it and work with it.
[speaker002:] Well, this get's back to that, that typo-lecture, typo-visuel thing, the difference between reading type and illustration type, that if you're actually designing pages that people are going to read, then you have to start with the text. And you know one of the big tricks is to force the editors of magazines to write the headlines before you write the pages — that's something they hate to do [LAUGHTER], but in Rolling Stone that was one of the rules that we had. We wouldn't start the layout until the headlines were in. Then they could write any headline they want, but if the text is going to change dummying the design become
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] Without the massing of type and without the large text range, which is like free in the phototype era, as long as you're happy and content with the original drawing, or a version of that size, then you can do so much. It allows people to get into the story — to read, to read.
[speaker001:] Do you know that page of yours from upper and lower cases on display in the Design Museum, that looks very well there — apart from the fact that you can read it from across the room.
[speaker002:] Sadly, they didn't let me — you don't have to put this in here — but they didn't let me finish correcting the proofs, cos one of those things, four times is enough [LAUGHTER]. But I was rewriting that to try to get the lines to work and all of those things, and they mess it up a little bit, which annoyed me. Another funny story, also off the record is that that lay in a drawer for two years because they thought it was controversial, they thought it was [LAUGHTER] which I find hilarious [LAUGHTER].
[speaker001:] I mean it's interesting what you say about not having the text to work with. I mean that's our — we design books, and we design journals, and we set up and we take on new journals and can we ever extract any copy from the editorial board — we know it's going to be about Plant Sciences, but no idea what length of headline and how much technical gump is going to go into it, or we take something on
[speaker002:] Hey, what's the important stuff, you know. Are you going to be able to write a little precis, or is there some kind of list of data that should be up there.
[speaker001:] Exactly, yes, yes. Well, 'there might be'is the usual answer, you know. 'Well probably'
[speaker002:] Yeah, we'll do that.
[speaker001:] The worst one was when we were doing one on Women's Studies and I said look, let's have your title and let's have some kind of format. We'll set larger, we'll set in eighteen point, I mean you can say something about — not an abstract, because they didn't want to be academic. All that's great, fine, yes, lovely, and I said well can you write a few then, please, and we'll put some in. That was the crunch point, the writing and the doing of it — that didn't happen, so it hasn't got them, so it looks a bit blander than it should have been.
[speaker002:] But, go back here, it's interesting that you point out something I hadn't really thought about, which is why I tend to use typefaces that are sort of garden variety — printer's types, as opposed to the sweller Berthold revivals or whatever. And it is true that, I mean, well, you know, I've spent a lot of time reviving typefaces that are not around, I mean, you know, propping them up, creating a waxed edition [LAUGHTER], sort of Madam Tussauds version of Lucien or something, but it's very interesting — there is not, in type development terms, there isn't a whole lot that has happened after the Second World War that really turns me on. I don't know why that is. None of the, you know, certainly none of the Univers Helvetica stuff is remotely interesting — the Grotesque are all better than that. Did you see our grotesque that we did? They're fun, huh? They're really Stephenson Blake, with a twist.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] We're actually thinking of doing a real Stephenson Blake. These were done for a particular customer that wanted them buffed. So we may want to do an, you know, an accurate revival. We talked to them also about maybe doing an accurate size for size Caslon. A real Caslon. Faith full to the original. And
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] Weird. Even though its
[speaker001:] That would shock a lot of people who would say this isn't, because they know five hundred and forty, or they know
[speaker002:] Well, that's the problem with doing revivals. You get into this thing where you're suddenly influenced by Helvetica, or Univers, even though you don't think you are when you're redrawing [LAUGHTER]. When Adobe did Caslon I know that they had certain things in their minds they couldn't get out of and thus it's not real Caslon. It's an interesting typeface thought.
[speaker001:] The weighting just a bit too erm
[speaker002:] Anaemic
[speaker001:] Well, it's just not quite thin enough. It's a bit too even.
[speaker002:] Well, it's almost like Imprint or something.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes, yes.
[speaker002:] In the smaller sizes it's fine. That's almost what Caslon looks like. But without the letterpress push it looks sad.
[speaker001:] I mean what it needs it that random pixel degradation across the page to give you back the letterpress look.
[speaker002:] One set of typefaces that I like there are on the slightly goofy side are the Goudys erm and it took me a long time of, your know, hearing purists try to explain to me why before I understood the distinction. I mean he's really on the Ed Beugmot side of the fence and his typefaces are on the. It's too brilliant, you can't read it, but as advertising it's fine because it attracts your attention and you say 'what is this?'. It's type and it's shimmering in appearance, in a slightly violent way, but I still like those things. I mean I want to do Village back up.
[speaker001:] Yes, that would be nice.
[speaker002:] There is a Deepdene now somebody told me.
[speaker001:] There's a Berthold Deepdene now, isn't there as well, which looks a bit
[speaker002:] Oh that's what I was thinking about.
[speaker001:] Is it.
[speaker002:] Yeah. That's a little bit buffed.
[speaker001:] It looks a bit, yes, sort of polished to perfection.
[speaker002:] That's the way they do everything.
[speaker001:] I'm, I don't like that This is the Berthold specimen book and it worries me, because everything looks as if it's supposed to sit in a line of eighteen point display, you know, sort of specimen setting, saying this is
[speaker002:] But it's sad you that can't do [people talking] you know what I mean, they all start lumping together. So what I think, that's another thing about this, I have erm, there's something about the plainness of design that I like if it's erm the things that have been done that are erm like Adobe typefaces or Bertol typefaces, that are really beautifully, you know, sandpapered and finished to me are boring and when you get into, if you take a look at the schedule that A T F produce typefaces in it's not unlike it, I mean the modern equivalent is the Font Bureau do 'em and try to sell 'em. As a result there's some lumpy things in it and actually erm and the old foundries are the same way in the commercial.
[speaker001:] And the old foundries cut a face and a size for a specific use.
[speaker002:] Yes, that's also true, if they had an order.
[speaker001:] erm they never ran their sequence of sizes by starting with a five point through to seventy-two. The did Times Roman in what five and a half, seven and a half and nine and that was it. I don't think they even thought they would need to do any other sizes and they didn't proportion them so that you could interpolate. [people talking] I hope it's still running. It seems to be.
[speaker002:] Yeah it's still running.
[speaker001:] I wonder if it's really
[speaker002:] Why don't you try the earphones?
[speaker001:] No, I've got them, but I left them back there.
[speaker002:] Yeah, looks like it is.
[speaker001:] I'm convinced it's playing.
[speaker002:] Why don't you stop it and start again. Hello, the mike's on and its whirring.
[speaker001:] It's running [LAUGHTER]. We'll turn it over in a bit and then we'll have a problem.
[speaker002:] So, also there's something to be said for, I mean, a basic technical thing about the type is that you want to be able to tell the letter apart.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] You know, the simple notion has eluded the Neue-Helvetica crowd at Stempel Linotype. The original Helvetica was actually easier to read, I believe, than the Neue-Helvetica.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] And this wasn't that easy to read [LAUGHTER].
[speaker001:] And there are places which have been, I mean, Neue-Caledonia is not a patch on Caledonia, because, you can't, it's so difficult to track it down. You do blow-ups and you put the two characters side by side and you can't see the difference. You set a blurb or something in proper Caledonia and then in Neue-Caledonia and it hits you that the Neue-Caledonia has gone all sort of thin and sharp and it's the perfection of that shape there and the old one sort of boings about a bit and looks happy on the page.
[speaker002:] It's a very good point. The only good things you can say about some of these new series, like Matthew Carter's Cochin in fact that he did for Linotype are these other weights. On the whole I would prefer to have that Lanston Monotype's Cochin than Matthews, but when you get up to, I mean, you have to do that cochin black that's fantastic in display sizes.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] Huge display size. Wonderful. And that's one of the things that you came out right at the time, I needed something really swanky for a caption for Rolling Stone. I tried Cloister Italic and the Swash, Goudy italic and it was terrible. person and then that was too swell. Then I tried it Cloister and it was too boring, and then I saw that they had Lanston Cochin at Mackenzie and Harris in San Francisco, so we used that and when we moved to phototype I didn't really go with the whole Jenson thing at all. When we went to phototype Matthews came out right at the right moment, to the week!.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER] It was there. We started using it and interestingly enough that typeface is really popular now, you see it in the United States everywhere, it's all over the place. So that's one of the survivals for that. Yeah but I, part of this comes from my first real, my only training at all and my first real experience in printing was working for this guy called Robert Dothard. Dothard was a printer in Vermont, originally from Philadelphia. He had been doing Limited Edition Club books from the beginning.
[speaker001:] mhm, mhm.
[speaker002:] He took over his own printing company called E L Hildreth in the forties and in the fifties sometime sold that out and set up a design shop to produce books and magazines, near Brattleboro, Vermont, and the prep school that I went to had retained him for many years as their printing adviser and, you know, he did the catalogues. I had a project as a student. They had a catalogue that had to be printed. There was an art exhibition and because the school was spending money to print it he had to get involved. It was like they didn't want anything that looked un-Derefield. He brought me this type book. It was all Monotype.
[speaker001:] mhm, mhm.
[speaker002:] He asked me which typeface I would like to set it in. He was like just being an adviser, he wasn't like trying to design it, and I looked at it all for a long time and I said Bembo, which I had never heard of.
[speaker001:] That was the right answer.
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]. So then at the end of that year he offered me a summer job, a kind of an apprentice job and that was it. And it worked for him and we set type by hand and pulled proofs. Everything was metal type and most things were printed off, but at least I got to learn, you know, what it is to lock up a page.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] And why.
[speaker001:] And what it takes to fits word together, to fit letters together.
[speaker002:] And then why the regiment of this recti linear world works, why it feels good, you know, there's a structural, architectural thing about when it's in three dimensions. It occurred to me later that there's something almost, that there's a cultural imprint, not to make a pun, of this letterpress image of a page in the structural necessities of locking a page and having even gutters and relatively rectilinear forms that creates a feeling of reliability, security and permanence.
[speaker001:] mhm.
[speaker002:] And if you do pages that could be done in metal, they are more convincing than pages that cannot be done in metal.
[speaker001:] That's what I meant about the meta-metal, if you took it back to metal you couldn't make up a page like your upper and lower case with a big R, unless you spent three years chiselling and fitting the thing, but somehow it looks as if it ought to have been possible to have done it in metal because that's where it took its springboard from.
[speaker002:] So the thing is that the erm, at Rolling Stone we actually called the paste-up people. We had to explain to them what a three-dimensional, you know, lock-up page was and why, you know, gutters were a certain width and if you had column rules and gutters, you know, why they were centered [LAUGHTER] and why you couldn't, if you had a wide margin below three columns of text why you didn't move the gutter beyond where the text wasn't so white, or why you didn't move it down and have it join a rule here because it would have been a real pain in the arse to have to do that in metal, so you just sit and do it.
[speaker001:] And somehow it looks right when you don't do it.
[speaker002:] Yeah. Better. And then I got into this whole thing about what I call the invisible descender theory, which is a joke in my studio but it's been going on for, you know, nearly twenty years [LAUGHTER] so it's become a law.
[speaker001:] Tell me about the law, then.
[speaker002:] Well the theory is that you don't, in metal type if you have a line of caps you can't just jamb another line right under the baseline because there has to be room for the ascenders, descenders. That in fact you exaggerate that space a little bit, you add a little bit more space to help out that line and that's why if you have a headline you put a little extra space. It's sort of descender protection. And you can mass type, erm mass headlines, and we do negative type leading and all the rest, but you have to add up that extra descender space and put it at the bottom of the headline. So there has to be — and we always exaggerate that space a bit.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] It's like — take a look at this bag! [LAUGHTER].
[speaker001:] Yes.
[speaker002:] The space under the the 'ninety'when David Plain remade that for the stickers that went out he took it out, he took half of it out, and that really infuriated me. It's not really enough the way it is, it wouldn't fit on the bag if I made it any more! [LAUGHTER].
[speaker001:] Instead of letting the G there overprint the red rule, which
[speaker002:] Up there too, at the top, there's space. And that's more space than a lot of people would like. A lot of designers would say no that should be floated, it should be visual centre, which is maybe just above centre. I'd say visual centre plus. So that's just a little design style, very simple, to get people to understand. Once they've got it, they can do my layout and I don't have to be there [LAUGHTER].
[speaker001:] That's what I was going to ask you on those things. When do you do a newspaper — I've just written down here — you provide a dress and provide a grammar. And erm and I think these are the two things we are talking about, the typo visual is the dress and the typo, what is it, logic, typo lecture is the grammar. The options that they've got for actually saying things, what they can say. At least that's why it's so important to know the sorts of things they are going to say before you can specify for that. But it seems that, I mean, redressing a paper that you know what it says is one thing erm so something like Hillman's Guardian, he knows what words they are going to use in those headlines and he provides them with a new look for saying those words in, but in many ways his redesign of that paper was erm it was an undynamic one in the sense that he was still providing them with elements which they could bolt together to make a page in a classic broadsheet newspaper way. There was gradings of headings and gradings of weights, but it seems to me that you're more interested in sort of through reading and doing, I mean, particularly on the tabloid size newspapers, doing different things.
[speaker002:] Did you get an El Sol. I should have brought some of these things.
[speaker001:] No, I've seen one, but I haven't actually
[speaker002:] I'll mail you one.
[speaker001:] That'll be great.
[speaker002:] From the hotel. It'll get there.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] It works beautiful over here. That mailing thing in the United States. You look at a mail box in the United States and it looks like it's been abandoned, just barely bolted to the ground any more. I thought, actually, what you were going to ask is how you then get people to follow that style.
[speaker001:] That is the follow up, yes.
[speaker002:] Because that's, that's really the trick, and if you have, if you have a style that is fairly simple, then it's easier to explain. I mean I don't think that many people can do convincing Neville Brody pages, presumably he has three of them — the three- or ten, or however many he has, to be able to turn them out with him being around, but as soon as he walks away it's not as good. And the real test if you're designing what we call formats in the United States — sometimes in Europe format means just shape and size — but the underlying design of a newspaper or magazine. The trick is if you go away it doesn't look like you have, and erm the same thing happens in a design studio, or if you're the art director of a publication or of a book publisher, that everybody works together so it looks like it's not all the same person doing everything. I mean it's a team of people who get along and it's very, very hard to do. A lot of his personality, you know you have to like jolly people into liking and sublimating what their own inclination would be to some kind of group style. It's the same job as an editor of a publication has to get writers to go along without it all sounding like he wrote it or she wrote it, and the, but a good editor can figure out how to do that and a good writer likes it because it means erm they'll go together or work better and readers will like it, understand it. So, I would say that the design, the actual literal design, the graphics part of the projects I work on, is twenty percent of the work and the rest is all trying to explain and get it understood. We've started it in our studio, bringing their people into the city or setting up a kind of branch over there where people can work together and so you don't get the political problems of ownerships, of people saying well that's your idea, you know, it's the old thing of as soon as the client thinks that it's his idea then he wants it [LAUGHTER], and it's very hard. It's a difficult thing to do. Within the Rolling Stone thing, I mean, part of it has you as the chief designer and you have to accept the notion that two heads are better than one, which means designers cannot
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] The plates are over scale! [people talking] In Rolling Stone we used to, you know I've never been one of the designers who erm sketches little thumbnails and makes people, makes assistants follow them through. Basically what I like to do is have a conversation about the project and then get the designer to come up with an answer. A good deal of the time he or she can get it the first time. You know, if you work together a little bit. Sometimes if it's completely wrong you start over, or you have to get in and actually wade into the paper and do some design work on it, but the other thing is allowing a certain sense of experimentation. Then you say okay, let's try this. Being able to print the experiments, or at least get them out there somehow, is really important because they get the thrill of the designer and your colleague really gets the thrill of working out without a rope, without a net.
[speaker001:] And then that's where the Mac comes in so importantly, because it gives you that straightaway.
[speaker002:] Right. And it think that — I mean I like to have, if you go back and look at a Rolling Stone when I was doing it, there are pages in there, I would say one third of all the pages in there, you would not even want to print today. I mean, within the context of the publication the quality range is so wide that it's shocking. Everything else — the floor has been raised, so all publications at the consumer level are slick and there is no bad, just bad layout. There may be badly thought out things, but there is not just clumsy stuff, but there is also isn't any wild card. The Brody image really was much wilder in the beginning, I mean it had
[speaker001:] Oh that's why it had so much impact, because it really was different on that.
[speaker002:] By allowing the experiments you get to the next stage. In a group effort, like a publication or a magazine, you know, you don't have to hold people back, they'll go all the way. There's this guy I'm hoping to see in Paris this week is Vincent Winter who is the designer of Rolling Stone and we worked the best of everybody here off of each other. He really liked my style, but he wanted to push, he wanted to go beyond that. He didn't think it was enough. He thought is was too flat, too dated for nineteen seventy, or whatever year it was [LAUGHTER]. And so he's the one who started doing this — I don't know if you remember Rolling Stone during that period he started getting slight, not really new wave, but we used some of the constructivist thing of breaking pages somewhat and pushing things on angles or erm My favourite was his Bob Dylan spread which actually I did, but it was based on what he was trying to get me to do, where everything read left to right and everything was, you know, point sizes lined up and everything was on a column grid, but it was, when you looked at it you had to, you know, like focus on it. It was more of a slap in the face and then you started to look at it, rather than, you know, a traditional page. And it was really fun that way. I think that's what Priest, I mean I don't know, Priest probably has a whole history of how he got is Esquire style, but Vincent went over there and had something to do with it, and I really think that taking the old style stuff and giving it a new spin helped, and the difference between what we're doing and what the California crowd was doing — and this was also the time of punk rock — was that we were using traditional typefaces and they were
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] Univers or something. I mean the constructivist would never Univers
[speaker001:] They'd have used Venus. They'd have used anything. Or actually no they wouldn't, they were bold Egyptians, they'd have used all manner of things that they could
[speaker002:] Some damn printing shop or some job shop that hadn't bought a new type since nineteen fifty or eighteen ninety.
[speaker001:] Yes, I think, I mean I think that's partly why the English reaction was against you on all manner of grounds. But no doubt just sheer distaste of the actual typefaces used, which were the winkle-bag was the description they used to be given.
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]
[speaker001:] I'm going to see if this thing is still erm Yep, we've still got some on that side, so that's okay.
[speaker002:] Anyway, so that gets back to the thing over policy. If you're really rocking and rolling in the art department and you're allowing some of the experiments to see their way into print, even if they're not so, they don't have that slick veneer that people seem to want in the marketing department, progress results and the rawness helps and the thing that makes Jack Stoffagers pages so wonderful is that they are unfiltered, you have the feeling that it's the printer talking to you, determining something that he's read, you know, he wants you to read.
[speaker001:] And that communication is the more direct for that. It hasn't been turned into a
[speaker002:] T V commercial. And it goes back to what we were saying about why some of these founders types which are somewhat slapdash are more readable and more interesting and get your attention.
[speaker001:] Yes, every now and then the temptation to do something sort of very cool and very sort of ten point Univers and you do it for a bit, and you've done it and then you use some proper faces instead.
[speaker002:] The English advertising agencies started getting into a very interesting style about three years ago and then they kind of blew it away, they forgot [LAUGHTER] which started letter-spacing upper and lower case. That was when they started sliding downhill again.
[speaker001:] Yes, the whole, I mean, that seems to have stopped I hope, but it was a real problem area that, I mean
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]
[speaker001:] When Perpetua came back it was really bad news.
[speaker002:] Yah, letter space, lower case and bold italic.
[speaker001:] I don't know, I felt that was, I mean, erm it's so easy to be snobbish, but if the problems of experimentation that comes out of accident because you want to achieve an accident and you want to achieve the fall of things on the page, and the accident that occurs because, as you say, nobody's ever told you that you're not supposed to do that, so the accident isn't a case of reacting against a rule to test it, to see whether it would stand up to being broken, the one that's just happened I think, I
[speaker002:] There aren't very many, I mean, it gets back to the other thing which is underlining my thinking about this stuff because erm you're dealing with cultural form. Some of the communication work is done for you. The problem with The Guardian is that it doesn't look like a newspaper any more.
[speaker001:] mhm, mhm.
[speaker002:] And thus the reader has to go more than the usual way he goes to understand what he's looking at. It may be a reader of The Guardian today after two years of seeing it now gets it.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] But it's not good for new readers.
[speaker001:] I'm, I think, I think I've got a different criticism which is that much of it is still too much like a newspaper erm that it's, as I say, that the modular structure of the news pages is too relentlessly like, almost like, the Times of eighteen twelve, I mean too relentlessly little blocks that sort of sit there and although there's Helvetica bold in the headlines, it's, somehow the relationship and flow of stories in many ways doesn't seem to have changed, it's the presentation
[speaker002:] Well, I think, erm
[speaker001:] I also don't like to text face. I mean I love Nimrod
[speaker002:] It looks like there is some kind of compromise going on between really nineteen sixties modern and a traditional newspaper. I mean it didn't really break
[speaker001:] The compromise, I think, was really on the format because he really wanted to go tabloid erm and
[speaker002:] Did you see the Minneapolis Tribune like the early sixties?
[speaker001:] Mhm, yes.
[speaker002:] I mean that was really a breakthrough.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] Maybe not a good one, but it was
[speaker001:] That's what I meant about
[speaker002:] He went all the way through.
[speaker001:] That was the equivalent of Matthew's point about the design being locked to the technology. It was easy to cast a slug that was of the body size, therefore your paragraphs were separated by a slug that was the body size, you didn't put a three point which is what you'd have probably wanted. If you'd wanted to separate off your paras, you'd put in a full size slug because it was easy to make up and the whole thing was absolutely modular erm but perhaps it would have looked better if it had been A four, or you know, Swiss in some way.
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER] Yeah, it would have. I mean it was taking that whole Swiss thing and saying that okay these are the new rules, whereas The Guardian accepts some of the old rules.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes. I mean I think
[speaker002:] I think there's something really dated about it too. It's funny. This
[speaker001:] It's very funnily printerly about it in its odd way. I mean the textface, which is Nimrod, is a drawing office typeface and a printer's typeface, and it's there because, I don't know, it
[speaker002:] If somebody said they wanted Ionic number five slightly different
[speaker001:] Why is it still there I kept asking? And eventually they said well the stereotype is basically sort of like the equivalent in litho plate making really said that this was, no of course it is metal, sorry it's not metal, it is letterpress The Guardian and it is, they make these Nyclopone plates or something and they really wanted to keep it for that reason....
[speaker002:] It's great.
[speaker001:] I think that's still doing. Yes, yes. Let's go back to
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER]
[speaker001:] Do you have a problem erm you've dropped out of the Sunday Correspondent have you?
[speaker002:] No, I'm going there on Friday.
[speaker001:] Are you doing the tabloiding?
[speaker002:] I don't think so. It's possible. I was going to do the tabloiding then they fired Peter Cole.
[speaker001:] And he was the connection with you.
[speaker002:] But they've done a tabloid internally and they've asked me to come to take a look at it.
[speaker001:] I couldn't understand the type choices on that newspaper. It started off all in Melior, with the text — the text I think was in Melior or Melior tells me that the text was originally in Melior with ordinary Melior headings, then when it appeared it was Nimrod with Melior bold.
[speaker002:] Was it Nimrod or something else?
[speaker001:] Oh, it's the other one, is it Clarion?
[speaker002:] Clarion.
[speaker001:] That's the one with the curly R, as opposed to the Nimrod which is straight.
[speaker002:] Yes, not much different, same idea. Ionic number five sort of redone.
[speaker001:] Then you erm had them put in Modern number seven. [both talking]
[speaker002:] That wasn't me.
[speaker001:] That wasn't you?
[speaker002:] That was Fiona, Fiona Hill, who was there at the. She couldn't stand the Melior and they said well give us something. She said it isn't English and they said okay let's have something English, and so she used this Modern number seven. It's thin or it's boring, take your choice.
[speaker001:] But it's exactly what those aint. It wasn't customised. It would have been great to have done. I mean we've got a font called Dryden, which is Scotch-Roman as Monotype call it and it would do it. That done to Scotch would have been great.
[speaker002:] When a first digitise something like
[speaker001:] You show them that it doesn't work.
[speaker002:] And then we're going to do a new Dow text and a new Scotch-Roman for their headlines and I've always wanted to do that. I love Scotch. I like Monticello do you know that.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] Have you ever seen that used in display. It's amazing.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes. That's what
[speaker002:] I even had to hand letter it to get it to get it to look like itself. There's something really interesting in doing that Bell-Scotch look, but erm well I also like to just plain Miller and Richard old style. [LAUGHTER] They could have done worse at the Correspondent, but they couldn't get it. And I, yah, it doesn't work very well as a headline face. I think that will go. All I did was to tell them to get rid of the Helvetica but. I said and they said.
[speaker001:] Yeah. I think at the moment it, The Correspondent, looks like a rather bad advertisement for monotype typefaces. And I always feel it's a reverse situation, you know, about Stanley Morrison saying he would prefer to pay Monotype not to put an ad in, erm to pay The Times not to put an ad for Monotype. It's almost as if Rene Kerfante were to say that he ought to tell The Correspondent not to use his typefaces, but they need to get something, I don't know, more coherent though.
[speaker002:] What they need is life. The whole thing is just — it looks like a motion picture art director's. Someone said well we'll just have a generic British paper because, you know, we're going to do a story about a newspaper office and we need something like a newspaper but isn't actually one. Oh, desert time, are you having any desert?
[speaker001:] Mmm.
[speaker002:] Where am I looking?
[speaker001:] Right at the bottom here.
[speaker002:] Do you want to split it?
[speaker001:] I think that's a good idea, actually, two plates and two spoons and in we go.
[speaker002:] So, the, erm yah, I'd like to do, I mean, the notion of having a tabloid here that's, you know, like a hip tabloid, like mid. In Britain I don't think the time is right for it.
[speaker001:] No.
[speaker002:] I'm not sure that The Correspondent came first, no I'm not sure that anybody came first. I think if you're
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] ... and colour and had a real youth kick to it.
[speaker001:] Yes.
[speaker002:] That was sort of like forties and under.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] Baby boom and below. And you'd covered the acid house and you'd covered AIDS and you'd covered all the social issues, 'cos that's was missing from the British press — it's all like conventional politics as usual, or you get the
[speaker001:] Or it's, or it's
[speaker002:] Just sex and scandal.
[speaker001:] Yes on top.
[speaker002:] I think that you could do something in between here, but I don't know the country well enough to say exactly that mix would be.
[speaker001:] It's funny 'cos, I mean, the T V news actually provides that function in this country, I think, of the middle ground, whereas it seems to me on a very limited sort of reading that the T V news erm provides a different sort of service in the States. It seems to provide, I don't know, the erm almost the opposite way round, it provides you with really heavy stuff or with the sort of daytime chat shows, just the sort of tabloid equivalent. And the newspapers are a operation.
[speaker002:] I'm not sure you could take a tabloid in this direction I'm about to propose that would also appeal to some popular customers, but it's like, last night everyone was reminiscing about Type ninety and the high points and one of the things that came out in conversation was that there was enormous amount of sex going on [LAUGHTER] which I suppose there is at all conferences, you know, but this one seemed to be, you know, the randiest conference in recent memory.
[speaker001:] [LAUGHTER]
[speaker002:] And why is that? I mean everyone was really charged up, there were a lot of — nobody got some sleep.
[speaker001:] Mhm.
[speaker002:] Completely zonkered. [LAUGHTER] The speakers, you know, certain unnamed speakers were like on the prowl [LAUGHTER] and the mild mannered Georgiana Greenwood, the calligrapher, was having orgies in her rooms at Christ Church every night. At three o'clock in the morning you could look up and their windows were blazing with light. [both talking] [LAUGHTER] And, you know, lots of thumping in the hallways and stuff. It's like, you know, a lot of people who were at the conference were completely unaware of all this because they were working so hard.. But, okay, so everyone is interested in that, you know, and particularly if it's sex in high places. They love it, it's perfect, so then you get to, you know, pop culture in general and the British press does a better job of covering rock and roll and, you know, social life than the American press does. I mean all the good papers have several pages every Sunday in the Times and the Telegraph. The Independent do some incredible in the dailies. The following stuff, you know, like the pirate radio station goes legit, they do a page on. In America we'd get like a column, and erm, but I think you could even do more, that the real life, the people, you know, is in the high street and the shopping malls and, you know, there's a lot of kind of horoscope and gossip and stuff that could go into a paper that could be fun.
[speaker001:] And things like Time Out and so on, and City Limits, tried on the listings in the culture front seem to be seduced by, on the one hand, the need to simply provide information in terms of the listings, or then they felt some kind of twinge of conscience and had to be counter-balanced by radical politics on the other side, which produced a completely split, a paper that you could tear in half and read it as two sort of separate things, and erm and they always erm and something like that always felt
[speaker002:] That's definitely a fuel, I mean that's conversation for things missing in and those listings.
[speaker001:] Mhm.
[speaker002:] We don't have a Time Out in New York because
[speaker001:] It's all in there in the Times.
[speaker002:] But, anyway, I think there is room for that and I think basically what I would propose is forget the tabloids and do an A four newspaper.
[speaker001:] It's big enough to do anything on?
[speaker002:] Yeah, do a daily magazine.
[speaker001:] Mhm.
[speaker002:] All colour and make it really easy for people to read [LAUGHTER], like A B C, abz as they say in Madrid.
[speaker001:] sorry that was
[speaker002:] It's hideous, except for the logo which they've almost destroyed. There's a little tiny so you can imagine what it might have looked like in the old paper. They used to have a every day, eight pages round the outside. It had in the front all news pictures, in the back all gossip and [LAUGHTER] pictures. And the inside had no pictures at all, still doesn't, drawings like, you now, Le Monde, or. Anyways it kept sort of almost conventional and now it's essentially A four.
[speaker001:] Crickey.
[speaker002:] And erm it's wonderful. You don't have to like, make any room for it at all, and you can start doing paint layup and but you can do magazine pages.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] text, picture, and it's still smaller than the pictures that run every day in these oversize English papers.
[speaker001:] It's interesting, the English sort of
[speaker002:] Staple of.
[speaker001:] That's important. I mean erm the, I mean, erm the closest I ever get to sort of news design is redesigning the Oxford University Press Gazette, and one of the first things when they said it's got to go A four was well in that case you've got to staple it, because you can't have thirty-two, sixty-four pages A four sort of doing that.
[speaker002:] out. Float out.
[speaker001:] It's, it's erm enough of a shock changing it to A four without stapling it, you know. People like to pull out the job supplement in the middle and, you know, they've got to be able to do that easily 'cos they throw the rest away, you know, and read the job supplement and they well.
[speaker002:] Why don't they just print the job supplement [LAUGHTER]?
[speaker001:] It's going to be [LAUGHTER].
[speaker002:] You're wasting your money.
[speaker001:] That was
[speaker002:] Did you see this thing that they printed at Type ninety in letraset. Oooh that gets d.t.p. a bad name.
[speaker001:] Letraset? I know we got a mention in it for the museum and that was, oh did you get your keepsake? Did somebody collect it for you?
[speaker002:] No. I don't think so.
[speaker001:] 'Cos there was an envelope there for you with your name on and it had been ransacked.
[speaker002:] Ah. Too bad. Gone.
[speaker001:] If you want it I'll send it to you.
[speaker002:] I'd like to have it.
[speaker001:] erm I erm
[speaker002:] I did get — did you take a good look at the, yes, wasn't that beautifully done?
[speaker001:] Yes, yes, yes. I thought it was lovely. It was just so nice. What impressed me was the design was great, but the objects, the books as things.
[speaker002:] They really did it well.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes. And the one thing that's so difficult
[speaker002:] Have you ever been to his home? No, no, no. I was just there for Type ninety, and he has a wall of books in his living room that — the shells are some kind of Danish wall system from nineteen fifty-five and it seemed, you know, that the shelves were slightly saggy, a few nicks and scrapes, so it's not new looking at all. Great fifties design. And books were stacked, you just can't believe it. I don't know where he puts the bad ones [LAUGHTER]. Everybody has some books that they want to hang on to that.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] Every single book is beautiful. Amazing things. And then he has a study that has a similar wall of reference set of shelves and then I guess that maybe his bedroom has of this, but it's erm and such a nice guy, a pleasant kind of man. His life is, somehow he's managed to bring it all around so that everything is perfect. [LAUGHTER] Did you meet his daughters? Two daughters were there.
[speaker001:] No, no, I didn't.
[speaker002:] Angela erm. Let's see, take this, go easy on the strawberry.
[speaker001:] A bit of colour coding on that. No, I mean, I wrote down here what tone of voice — English obsession with newspaper class, which is what I was talking about format which you covered, and I said that I felt that in the States that seems to an outsider only the New York Times, but even that sort of, as you say, covers a whole range of non-quality, from a British point of view non-quality, press.
[speaker002:] We have an anti-tabloid bias too. It's very hard to get away with doing a tabloid in the U S. It's not, I mean, we don't have the class potential you guys have.
[speaker001:] Mhm. I know. You see this is the thing that worries me because, you know, when I stand up and say I like what John Dreyfus did and I think his looks very good and I maintain the traditions of the Oxford University Press, I can suddenly feel that I'm being typecast as being in the English tradition of typography as a revered art and the Morrisonian thing and the whole thing separate from, you know, a culture within a culture and a separate thing. And, I don't know, it seems that actually you've got a very good sense of using all those traditions to inform things that happen, things that you do and erm you're not locked in being regarded as in that sort of tradition and the pressures that result from that.
[speaker002:] Yeah, well, I don't like that either. There was Morrison phrase that was quoted in the play — did you go to the play? Prissy private press.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] Or private pressiness, something like that.
[speaker001:] Yes, that was interesting, I mean several of the people who came to see the
[speaker002:] I mean that Updike, of all people, was the worst [LAUGHTER].
[speaker001:] Mhm, mhm.
[speaker002:] There is that kind of, sort of long-necked attenuated of that style [LAUGHTER] it's very boring. Updike was really a two-dimensional typographer. He had, he knew his stuff obviously, but he — I mean the fact, the way looked on Goudy and that whole thing, he just couldn't take himself beyond that certain. Of course Morrison is not [LAUGHTER] unlike him, but, I don't know, it's interesting, I mean Bruce Rogers I think is my hero in terms of designers, but at the same time, I mean, the nineteenth century stuff, I like even this ornamented stuff that they're doing. That's a great turn up. I mean there is grotesque — Bruce Rogers was doing grotesque when I was only two feet tall [LAUGHTER] Did he ever use a grotesque any time in his life?
[speaker001:] Sorry, did
[speaker002:] Did Rogers even use a sans serif?
[speaker001:] I doubt it.
[speaker002:] Dwiggins did. We're doing some new Metros.
[speaker001:] Design, yes a Metro, I've always wanted to like Metro, but never quite managed to. I was put off it from an early age because it used to be used in the by-lines in the Daily Telegraph and it sort of and it looked a bit wrong. It always looks as if I've gone along with a sort of scalpel at the bottom of the letters as well, a sort of shaved off
[speaker002:] But also, I did, I did something that [both talking] There's something very sort of loose.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] never still together and then fit together. The shapes are correct.
[speaker001:] Yes, they sort of
[speaker002:] Bong off together like beads that have gotten loose of the string [LAUGHTER] so, but Parkinson — did you meet him?— he was, Parkinson was the guy who did the Rolling Stone typeface and he was here. He has a new.
[speaker001:] Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, I did, sorry.
[speaker002:] He had the first near violent encounter at Type ninety — did you hear about this, the fist fight with Benguiat.
[speaker001:] No, no.
[speaker002:] The first day Benguiat accused him — Parkinson printed up this sheet as a handout with which the finished examples had the logos that he was exploring in the lectures and one of them was the New York Times magazine, and of course Benguiat had done the original job for the New York Times and the magazine, the other magazine, so he thought that what Parkinson was showing was an example of a redesign, relettering of an existing logo, and perhaps he shouldn't of said that, you know., but Benguiat took it as like a threat to and went after him in the lobby of hall and they had to be prised apart. Parkinson didn't enjoy it, but the story is not over. I got to, Benguiat's girlfriend and told her the whole story and told her to explain to Benguiat and calm him down and he had like threatened to come to Parkinson's speech and disrupt it and scream liar and things like that at him. She stayed on at the hotel and distracted him and then the next day other people got to him and explained that Parkinson was really a nice guy and that it was like painting and. The real story is that the logo was originally designed, was drawn, but Lou Silverstein. He took a piece of tracing paper over the old one though and Germanicised it and took it away from what we call Old English.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes, yes.
[speaker002:] And made it more black letter.
[speaker001:] Mhm, mhm.
[speaker002:] And it up and Benguiat did the final. And then another part of the story is he made a whole alphabet without telling the Times and they. Anyone can set his newspaper in the New York Times lettering style without paying the Times a nickle [LAUGHTER]. In fact at times the Moonie, the Reverend Moon newspaper, did so [LAUGHTER]. Their lawyers are not, but they had a promotion out.
[speaker001:] And the Times stepped on them?
[speaker002:] The New York Tribune set exactly like the Times. Anyway, Benguiat made up to him and gave him a big kiss and then the next day things got bad again because Parkinson was going to in room number two above this floor to sort out his slides and Benguiat had been in there and evidently he had just decided to tuck his shirt in and loosen his trousers and while he was tucking his shirt in Parkinson came in and says aha, caught you with your pants down, and Benguiat storms out of the room [LAUGHTER]. I mean none of these people are like, you know, like wallflowers. People would imagine that a type conference would be an extremely dull affair, but in fact it was like, barely able to control himself at any one time. Did you hear about the Apple party?
[speaker001:] Yah I've heard various references to this [LAUGHTER].
[speaker002:] I didn't make it over there because I was at another party, but after the dinner, the night before last, they all went over to the Apple Playroom and started drinking, ordering from room service and making more. They all got totally zonkers and were like running from machine to machine making and Benguiat the, not Benguiat, Brillo, was yelling it should be like this all the time [LAUGHTER]. Everybody like — so Brody was over there making erm what was he trying to do — I can't remember, some character, three hours, he wasn't. I went over and looked at some of the characters. Did you go in that room?
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] Some of the characters that people produce from this and they did them like Parkinson did, a Rolling Stone ball J, but outlined in drop shadow. In fact we made rubber stamps for people in the office — the departments to go in, the bureau, and the stamp was the J because they were all photostated to that made this stamp just loved it. It was already long anyway, so that's where he got that I think, but there were others, you know, beautiful. Cleo Huggins made a tree that had another little notch on top, so it had this kind of Arabic feel.
[speaker001:] With a.
[speaker002:] Very beautiful. Everybody
[speaker001:] Are they going to appear?
[speaker002:] They say they are going to ship them with every System seven, you get this. So I went in there and I thought oh God, I mean I could, if you gave me, if I did a nice sketch and worked on it, if I spent a day a might
[speaker001:] Yes, yes, yes, yes.
[speaker002:] But against these guys.
[speaker001:] Yes.
[speaker002:] So hopeless. So what I did was I used Illustrator and did a, used a free hand tool and drew a really sloppy dollar sign which looked kind of dangly dinosaurish, only with the inside with a nice curve, so they could see that I wasn't a complete
[speaker001:] You tried at that point.
[speaker002:] Then I put a little like a slobber drip mark, with a little window
[speaker001:] A petro dollar.
[speaker002:] Yah, like an ailing petro dollar [LAUGHTER]. They didn't, the Apple didn't like it [LAUGHTER], they didn't want to put it in the font. Yah, it was a fun conference, quite nuts, glad it's over [LAUGHTER].
[speaker001:] [LAUGHTER] Let's see what's going on here. I think we've covered all this. Closed systems, black boxes, text formats, oh what's this, oh yes, this was talking about the people you put in. Oh yes, I thought, I had thoughts about the tabloid format and requiring more creative day to day input if you're running stories across page and setting up sequences.
[speaker002:] Yah. More of an art department.
[speaker001:] And it's more of an art department.
[speaker002:] Then it should be a magazine. I think that erm what I'd like to do is an A four daily that's all colour, all digital, so that you get picture syndrome moments before you go to press you can get them to print. The San Francisco Examiner, which is a paper I did, I started using digital photography for local news coverage. They had Nelson Mandela giving a rally at two in the afternoon on the steps of City Hall or wherever it was, and at three they had a colour photograph of him out on the streets.
[speaker001:] The edition was out on the
[speaker002:] Yah, in colour. Now that's, that's a very interesting for a homeward bound commuter, you know, getting into the tube and you grab one of these papers and you read it and in fifteen minutes you get to Oakland fifty minutes, why turn on the news? You have it. It's particularly easy in California where we have a great time advantage. Three hours
[speaker001:] Yes, yes, 'cos you're catching all
[speaker002:] Nine hours in Europe. So the whole day is done by the time you get started, so you can close out the foreign and even the U S domestic edition, domestic news, before you
[speaker001:] And leave your city news on the front and put that in as the
[speaker002:] That's only live stuff, really live, the night crew can do the rest, just about. So then you're up to date, but three in the afternoon you've got the C B S evening news, 'cos they're also three hours earlier. Most of their stuff is pretty dated. And it's in print form.
[speaker001:] What, what time erm although I've been to San Franciso, I've never worked out what time the evening news is there. Is it delayed?
[speaker002:] Everything's changed. Oh, you mean how does the national news work?
[speaker001:] How does the national T V news work.
[speaker002:] They have erm in breaking new situations, if there is something big going on, you know, or during the democratic convention or whatever it is, or this Iraq thing, the anchors stay around the studio and then maybe do a replay, so to speak. It's actually a whole new edition.
[speaker001:] For each time zone, or for
[speaker002:] They do it a half hour later or an hour later and if that holds, erm I think they usually, you know, it's always at least an hour
[speaker001:] So if it holds they'll replay it and if it breaks
[speaker002:] But if it doesn't hold, at the very end what they'll do is break in on it 'and now the special report from Dan Rather in Baghdad, and then you see Dan Rather and when he's done there's a commercial and then it goes back to whatever they were doing on tape.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] But it's confusing now because they put the news on and you can watch the evening news on the first feed at five o'clock in the afternoon now in San Francisco.
[speaker001:] Oh, 'cos they're taking it from the East Coast feed.
[speaker002:] Yah, they're taking it off the satellite [LAUGHTER] and it used to be there was always the seven o'clock news, except in central side when it was always the six o'clock news, but now it's on at like any old time, five thirty, six thirty, seven.
[speaker001:] I get totally confused because I end up watching C N N anyway, so it's
[speaker002:] C N N is good. C N N are particularly good at the Iraq thing, they're the only ones to watch. They were there. But I think you could do, see the whole great thing about what's happening in this electronic change in print is that broadcasting's advantage has been almost completely wiped out. They are crippled by the number of people it takes to get something on the air, whereas in print, I mean it's still a lot of people if you're doing a daily paper, but one reporter can write a story and get it on the air, or get it in print.
[speaker001:] So the relative cheapness of having correspondence in string with just a fax machine dotted around the place instead of having machines and cameras and sound crews.
[speaker002:] Yah. Well yes you see, yah, or they use electronic mail to bring it in. Type it in and it's captured, done, and they use digital photography or remote scanners. It's amazing what could happen. So you do that and then you do it, you art direct it like a magazine. You have certain formatted sections that are the news, straight stuff, or running tabular matter or whatever, but then somebody weighs in on each section, at El Sol we have a graphics person on each desk, but they're divided into work groups so different work groups do different pages. So everybody, it's sort of like miniature, it's like desk top publishing.
[speaker001:] Right.
[speaker002:] It's like twenty desk top publishing teams brought together.
[speaker001:] Mhm.
[speaker002:] And so, you know, on the business desk you might have three teams and the first team is only doing the first page and the opinion and the second team is doing a large amount of financial news and the third team is doing the company news, and then the erm there's a graphics person who's working on charts and stuff. The data comes in almost without intervention, fills in the pages, and someone just checks it to make sure it fits [LAUGHTER] and erm that's a great system. So you could actually, if you've got, if you then put, if those graphics people were fairly high powered art directors and they didn't, they didn't, they weren't like, didn't have to show all their stuff, that they had enough news sense to not make any more mistakes than most layout people do on newspapers, which are sometimes colossal, like burying the lead or putting the big story on page thirty-eight, you know. Then you could like start attracting, I think, younger people to read newspapers again.
[speaker001:] Mhm.
[speaker002:] I don't, I mean, we're still a relatively literary society. There's no reason why you couldn't appeal to people and erm for reading, you know, I mean it's like well don't make it in T V, put text in there, but also make it visual.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] Visual information and not just, you know, kids and or whatever the popular press thinks you are.
[speaker001:] I think that's, I mean I think that's why the, the two interesting ends of the U K press are the tabloid end, because it looks, it looks as if it's sort of forged in the heat of hot metal and steaminess and erm the top end and things like the Express and The Mail seem to be entirely flabby in the middle.
[speaker002:] Yah.
[speaker001:] They're floating around in a very, I mean Today was the worst. When it first appeared it was absolutely parochial. It looked like the Oxford Mail on a bad day. Again it was how not to use the monotype library. Again it was Nimrod. It was Nimrod, it was Nimrod with Univers, it was, except occasionally there'd be Grot nine, not because you felt they wanted to use Grot nine, but because they'd said well what's this one that hasn't got serifs. I mean it had that sort of look to it.
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER] Yeah, it probably was.
[speaker001:] They seem to drift about in the middle and good grey columns or rudeness at the other end of the market. I wish the London Times got better.
[speaker002:] Yah, it is sad. It did, just a few years ago, it was a good.
[speaker001:] I mean I think shrinking the broadsheet width has spoilt it a lot.
[speaker002:] But there's something very pro forma about it and also the fonts are, they're not display fonts, they're using fonts.
[speaker001:] No, again it's not quite Times, which is the pity, because it was the last repository of hand-set monotype, I mean individually cast monotype display headlines erm and Fi ligatures.
[speaker002:] What so they now just use Times Bold for a headstyle?
[speaker001:] And it's just the text. I mean they did have it redrawn from the
[speaker002:] You see if I would go back, if I were doing it, to Times Heavy Titling or one of those do it all caps forget that.
[speaker001:] The titling is absolutely lovely, I mean just wonderful. The worst thing they ever did was on the leader page, the last one they got rid of the Extended Titling on. And I remember the day it went from Extended Titling to three three four and it was just three three four, it didn't look as if it had ever been intended to set these lines. That was a great, those were great, those were great faces.
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER] Well the other thing is they could use, I mean, Monotype should bring out the whole. Where is Times book, Times Wide?
[speaker001:] And Times Light Caps, which is even better.
[speaker002:] There you go. Let's go over there and beat the shit out of them [LAUGHTER].
[speaker001:] They did bring out Times Small Ads and I did try and do a Bible in it but it didn't work.
[speaker002:] Oh you gave up on that?
[speaker001:] I gave up.
[speaker002:] Why?
[speaker001:] I used Swift instead.
[speaker002:] [LAUGHTER] What made you give up?
[speaker001:] They didn't erm the Monotype, bless them, stayed too true original drawings and didn't put any thickening on thins. I mean there was no ink squash.
[speaker002:] Oh, so it was anaemic?
[speaker001:] It's, it's, it's, I mean it's like your Modern Number One again, I mean although the character shapes are lovely, I mean although your G looks like that, is exactly the shape you want it to be, these thins here are real hairlines and that's exactly what you don't want it to be in six point, so I stretched the Swift by ten percent.
[speaker002:] You extended it, or?
[speaker001:] Extended it.
[speaker002:] Interesting. I hadn't counted that idea, possibility, you talked about condensing it.
[speaker001:] Yes. I rang Gerard up and said I think I'm going to condense your typeface and he said yes, yes, condense it by seven percent, I don't mind, which I thought
[speaker002:] Yah. He says that publicly.
[speaker001:] erm but then I sort of thought, no, well let's expand this one.
[speaker002:] To add weight, is that why you did it?
[speaker001:] It adds weight, I mean it's just to make the letters bigger. It's simply to make the letters bigger and try and get some sense of flow
[speaker002:] He did it as a very narrow face.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes. It's not quite but it's more of
[speaker002:] Expanding you can always do, it's condensing that's tricky. I mean I remember when I was at the New York Times and I wanted to use Cheltenham wide for a headline, Cheltenham bold well sort of bold wide, but it's just called Cheltenham wide in the book, and because Cheltenham was always part of the New York Times library, whatever you call it, in the composing room. And when I took over the magazine I said let's just use the typefaces that they use in the newspaper and supplement them for some headlines, but try to make it belong in the New York Times. So I expanded to thirty percent on the, they had a Metroset in those days, and I said, you know, this is not likely to work so I'm sending it out getting handset phototype, so I did. It came back and it was exactly the same. I mean it was unbelievable, it was uncanny, because all they had done at A T F was, you know, gear it on the pantograph and there was no redrawing or adjustment whatsoever [LAUGHTER].
[speaker001:] I mean usually that just doesn't work because I mean the Guardian, they used to be more bold expanded in the Guardian except for and it was gross. It was a. When they tried to set it by setting and him out
[speaker002:] It was horrible.
[speaker001:] Because it was that point that erm David Berlow made about howthe Condensed Century was done, where he took the Torino serifs and put them on. It was exactly that problem. The original had, although it was a very broad face, actually had very finely tuned serifs, and that was, they just got crude when you pulled.
[speaker002:] Jim Parker
[speaker001:] If it was it wouldn't matter because he's got such a on it anyway.
[speaker002:] It's a horrible typeface. I still like it [LAUGHTER]. Jim Parkinson did a logo for a magazine called Ocean, where he took Times Bold, widened it slightly and then thinned the serifs and thinned the horizontals way down, and it was wonderful. You know as a big word 'Ocean'it looked fantastic. It made Times just look super elegant, you know, and yah I, that's what's wrong with all the foundries now, they forgot where they came from. They've lost sight of there — oh, I've got to get going, what's your schedule. What did you do to your finger? You ran into something?
[speaker001:] I ran into a earlier on and it's just opened again. My exciting schedule this afternoon is the knobs and knockers meeting at four o'clock.
[speaker002:] The what?
[speaker001:] Where we decide what colour the formica in the lavatories in the new building is going to be.
[speaker002:] You're kidding?
[speaker001:] I'm not kidding.
[speaker002:] Why are you on that committee? [LAUGHTER] Because of your exquisite taste, right?
[speaker001:] My exquisite taste in lavatory fittings [LAUGHTER].
[speaker002:] It seems to me to a be a great joke — do they call it the knobs and knockers committee? You do, you call it that?
[speaker001:] The members of the committee call it the knobs and knockers committee.
[speaker002:] They do [LAUGHTER] that's wonderful.
[speaker001:] Christ Church are slamming us because we haven't got the stuff out of there fast enough.
[speaker002:] They're not a very pleasant lot to deal with.
[speaker001:] We had to change the lock on their door, and the bloody lock cost thirty seven quid and each key cost five quid to cut, so we're giving them fifty seven quids worth of security for nothing and they complain because I'm not out by twelve o'clock.
[speaker002:] They were not happy with the Type ninety group. Georgiana Greenwood may have been partly to blame, but it had to do with the fact that we really weren't running the conference out of the college. They like it everyone is sort of their trundling around, the library is showing up for lunch. There are wild variations where one lunch was scheduled during ATyp — can we have our checks and bills please — one lunch was estimated at seventy people, seventy-eight people and one hundred and fifty came [LAUGHTER]. And then another lunch was estimated at two hundred and eighty and forty-five came [LAUGHTER], and it kept swinging like that all week and they never knew what the hell was going to happen so they got really aggravated and then we had, you know, some of the kids, the Ban-the-Bezier group were wandering around with their face masks and their Type ninety bags over their heads and were saying crude things over a megaphone in Tom Quad, right [LAUGHTER] and then these bowler hatted policemen, whoever they are, were patiently explaining to a number of girls who were sunbathing on the lawn [LAUGHTER] that this wasn't done quite that way here [LAUGHTER]. There was a lot of that [LAUGHTER].
[speaker001:] You're exactly right. You can imagine two hundred. Another punt to the left you know. I think they quite enjoyed it.
[speaker002:] Michael Gough, my editor, works for me in New York and he said he went to get a key to get back in after they had closed and they said why and he said because I think that I will be back later than your gate is locked. What are you going to do. And he said it's none of your business [LAUGHTER]. They were like — this was not a convincing argument. They said there's nothing to do after eleven in Oxford [LAUGHTER]. And he said something which even annoyed them more, which is something like there is nothing going on in Oxford before eleven that I'm interested in doing [LAUGHTER].
[speaker001:] The one thing that was going on in Christ Church was good — did you see the exhibition, the exhibition
[speaker002:] The what?
[speaker001:] The exhibition at the Picture gAllery.
[speaker002:] What was going on there?
[speaker001:] There was a little exhibition called The Nude and basically they've got a nice little Picture Gallery there with sort of various things in, but they also had some lovely anatomy books beside it and so on, some amazing engravings, you know, entire body structures, skeletal man, muscular man,. I was quite interested 'cos we're actually doing a book on the history of anatomy at the moment, but there was, it was, again that was a nice little theme in the middle of everything else. It's called the Picture Gallery.
[speaker002:] Yes, yes.
[speaker001:] Proper Renaissance, proper Baroque pictures
[speaker002:] Yes, they have them here at Oxford.
[speaker001:] It's wonderful.
[speaker002:] They drag them back from Italy at various times.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes.
[speaker002:] What your A Y things that you are drawing there?
[speaker001:] Oh that was when you were talking about your imaginary descenders.
[speaker002:] Ah.
[speaker001:] I need to see some papers though.
[speaker002:] Some newspapers? Do you have a card on you? Or where do I — can I write down an address on a piece of paper and I will try to mail them from the hotel. I've got to get back there and start arranging my erm Well I wasn't very scintillating, I'm sort of tired. Hope you've got enough.
[speaker001:] Thank you.
[speaker002:] That's okay. Yah, all those Grots which were done for El Sol.
[speaker001:] Yes, yes, is seen the outline
[speaker002:] No that's
[speaker001:] It's the PostScript generated outline?
[speaker002:] Yah.
[speaker001:] It's not a custom outline, or maybe that is
[speaker002:] It's not a font. If he says it is, maybe he made a font.
[speaker001:] Well maybe he did tweak it. The one I've seen was that one on the front page.
[speaker002:] Yah, I didn't know, that, I mean, maybe this is a font. How could it work though? No, it's knocking itself out. No you can do white faces of it. How would it knock out though?
[speaker001:] Well you could do an outline and then you could shadow it.
[speaker002:] Yah, but see it's overlapping, like there. How can you make that happen as a font. I think he fakes this, just because they had them in the books [LAUGHTER].
[speaker001:] Maybe erm oh not they're not just butting are they? That would work with the T H U R
[speaker002:] I'll have to find out what he's done.
[speaker001:] But it wouldn't work with the
[speaker002:] See in my
[speaker001:] Yes, yes, I know what you mean, yes, yes, in there and certainly
[speaker002:] What I keep trying to tell him is that if you do something like this, this space underneath has to be at least as much between the top of the S as the and the baseline and they sell them. Young designers don't get that. May be the lot does [LAUGHTER].
[speaker001:] Well, thanks for having put up with this thing.
[speaker002:] Oh, my pleasure, I forgot it.
[speaker001:] I think it's probably worth it.
[speaker002:] But call me up if you don't have enough.
[speaker001:] Yep, yep.
[speaker002:] Great. Thank you for lunch.
[speaker001:] I'll get everything together.
[speaker002:] You've got to take your card back.
[speaker001:] They want to do something with it maybe.
[speaker002:] No, you just have to sign it and take your receipt. They did it.
[speaker001:] They did it?
[speaker002:] It's a nice little place.
[speaker001:] It is, it is, it's re-opened about a week ago, having been shut for re-doing.