dot-font: Judge for Yourself
|
dot-font was a collection of short articles written by editor and typographer John D. Barry (the former editor and publisher of the typographic journal U&lc) for CreativePro. If you’d like to read more from this series, click here.
Eventually, John gathered a selection of these articles into two books, dot-font: Talking About Design and dot-font: Talking About Fonts, which are available free to download here. You can find more from John at his website, https://johndberry.com.
Last week the winners of the Type Directors Club‘s annual competition—TDC47—were shown for three days during the HOW Design Conference in San Francisco. This coming week, the TDC47 exhibition opens in New York. It showcases the best typographic designs of the past year.
Gail Anderson designed the TDC47 call for entries, including the “Submit” mosaic from the Call Mailer Poster.
Tracking Type Since 1954
The TDC competition has been an annual event since its inception in the early 1950s, during a typographic era very different from today. When the competition began, phototypesetting was just beginning to appear; virtually all type was set in metal, most of it on hot-metal typesetting machines but some of it still by hand. Today, metal type is a conscious anachronism, and even phototype has had its day and passed into the shadows. Almost all the type for the winning entries this year was set digitally, in easily available programs such as QuarkXPress and Adobe Illustrator.
TDC47, like its predecessors, was a competition in typography—the art of using type in graphic design, whether in a magazine ad, in a book, in a video, or on a wine label. For the past four years, the main competition has been supplemented with a newer, smaller competition—TDC2—for the best new typeface designs. While both competitions reflect what’s new in the field of type and graphic design, and each year has a new set of judges, there’s also a continuity that comes with the longevity of the Type Directors Club. In fact, the chair of next year’s competition, TDC48, will be Klaus Schmidt, who helped found the club in the 1940s.
This year, I was chair of the type-design competition; Ronn Campisi chaired TDC47. The judges for TDC47 were Richard Baker, of “Premiere” magazine, Jonathan Hoefler, of the Hoefler Type Foundry; Gary Koepke, co-founder of Modernista!; Robynne Raye, co-founder of Modern Dog design studio; Wendy Richmond, educator and columnist for “Communication Arts“; Paul Souza; and Lynn Staley, of “Newsweek.” The judges for TDC2 were Robert Bringhurst, author of “The Elements of Typographic Style“; Tobias Frere-Jones, a type designer for the Hoefler Type Foundry; Helen Keyes, creative director at Enterprise IG in New York; and Carol Twombly, former type designer at Adobe. The TDC47 call for entries was designed by Gail Anderson, of “Rolling Stone,” who is also designing the annual book that shows the winners. (I designed the call for entries for the type-design competition.)
Give My Regards to Bryant Street
The official opening of the TDC47 Show exhibition is in New York next Wednesday, June 27, and the exhibition will be on display from June 28 to August 15 at the Parsons School of Design (2 West 13th Street). But since TDC always has identical traveling exhibits in addition to the stationary one that’s shown in New York, this year’s show actually opened first in San Francisco.
It was shown as part of the HOW conference, although like several parts of the conference, which had grown so big that it was bursting the bounds of its hotel, the TDC exhibit was offsite. It found hits home in a large, well-lit space (a former photographer’s studio) that’s part of the newly opened south-of-Market office of ArtSource, a Seattle-based company that specializes in “digital media staffing” (that is, connecting companies with digital artists and other highly skilled workers). The ArtSource space was right next to South Park, the leafy oval that’s at the heart of San Francisco’s design district.
Although the flyers promoting the exhibit said, “See them before they go to New York,” technically speaking the actual physical objects in the San Francisco show were not on their way to New York; they’re headed to Kansas City for their next gig. A separate show with identical copies of the same winning entries stayed in New York, and that’s what will be on the walls at Parsons next week. (This is why TDC asks the winners to send multiple copies of their work.) Another copy of the exhibit will be touring Europe this fall.
Seeing What’s New
Some rule of the universe dictates that when you attend the opening of a exhibition of any kind, you never get a chance to look at the work on display; you’re too busy schmoozing with the other people who came to the opening. Visiting an exhibit later, when it’s not so crowded and you’re not so distracted, gives you time to actually see what the winning entries look like.
The winning designs this year were diverse. There’s no one “look” that the judges are searching for—just the most successful use of type in the context of the given project. There was elegant, subtle typography and blaring, over-the-top lettering. The variety of typefaces used was tremendous, although after reviewing the show FontShop co-founder Joan Spiekermann observed, “Clearly the typeface of the year was Trade Gothic,” having noted that the font was used by several winning entries. This year’s show is smaller than those of years past—not because there were any fewer entries, but because the TDC47 judges were harder than usual on their contemporaries and colleagues.
Members Only
The annual, “Typography 22,” which goes free to TDC members, will reproduce all the winners and will be a permanent record, as previous annuals have preserved the typography of their respective years. (The annual also includes judges’ comments, which are not part of the exhibition.) Each year a different designer is asked to design the annual, which makes for variety in the presentation (and also, inevitably, controversy). When this year’s annual comes out, you’ll want to see the amazing things Gail Anderson does with bottle caps.
But there’s no substitute for seeing the pieces in real life—viewing the posters at full size, picking up the books and riffling through them. Come and take a look for yourself.
 |