Communication

[Joel Thomas Runyan]

I’ll be blunt. Should the people at Lost Arts Press be considered as professionals in the book publishing field and held to the same standards of work as other book publishers such as Hartley & Marks? If not, why not?

I'm local to them. Tempted to drop off my copy of Tschichold's The Form of the Book.

[William Adams]

If it's the Hartley & Marks edition, you might want to sell it instead — last time I checked it was up over $100.

I really wish that my 401K had appreciated in value like many of the type and graphic design books I’ve bought had. I could retire.

You don’t need to inflict the dense Teutonic prose on them though, even something as simple as Robin Williams’ The Mac/PC is Not a Typewriter would address the majority of my concerns, or even her The Non-Designer's Design Book. That something intended for non-professionals would help them so much is kind of my point though.

[Malcolm Schweizer]

OK, I was holding my breath trying not to comment, but I will. At first when I saw William's post about font and other errors, I thought, "what a nut." (Hang with me, William, I am hopefully going to redeem myself.) On second thought, however, I actually have a love for fonts to the point that as an art student I used to design my own fonts, and once did a "painting" that was actually just different fonts arranged in an appealing manner to create movement. It won a national art competition in New York. I guess they liked it. Sadly, it was in a collection that was stolen from a gallery and I have no pictures of it to post.

Perhaps to William an improper use of a lower-case "x" or "orphans" in typeset are the equivalent of a 1/64-inch gap in either side of a dovetail, or a beautifully-executed piece of furniture with exposed end grain, and not as an intentional design element. A typesetter that is not a woodworker might say, "What's the big deal?" A woodworker might say, "Well that would have otherwise been a very nice piece."

I think Lost Art Press, judging by their chosen name, should appreciate William's feedback, even if the rest of us may think it a bit obsessive compulsive.

My Schweizer Surfboards logo was my own design (not my own font, but my overall design) and uses font as art, especially with the small, name-only logo. The large cross logo was very difficult to balance everything. Move the font up and it clashes with the crossbar of the cross. Move it down any further and it is unbalanced. The "Saint Thomas, Virgin Islands" is intentionally made to blend in because I wanted it known, but I did not want that to be the first thing you saw. I wanted the cross to be in everyone's mind, as part of my plan has been to create a line of surf wear, and I want people to see the cross and think "Schweizer Surfboards" much the same as when you see a white apple with a bite out of it you think "Apple Computers."

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I also modified an existing font for my daughter's cradle boat, making the "o" the sleepy moon. I actually think I could have done a little better with it. It's not as obvious as I had hoped. I share this one to show how subtle changes to font do make a difference. I also drew the "N" into the "o" because otherwise it looked like "N od" instead of "Nod."

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[Art Mann]

On first glance, I read "H6d".

[Scott Shepherd]

On first glance, I read "H6d".

Lol, me too. I also got SCHW=IZER

Had to double take on both of them. I like them a great deal from an artistic point of view. Nice work Malcolm, shame about having your art work stolen.

[Malcolm Schweizer]

Ah! See- I see "Schweizer" because of course it's my name and I have seen it for years. It's like the guy with the bike that goes opposite of where you turn it. ...and so we come full circle, pun intended. Well it's too late to change now, so it shall remain. :-)

[Scott Shepherd]

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE your boards Malcolm. Just gorgeous. Really loved the handboards. They are just beautiful.

[Caspar Hauser]

'a large plurality of the people on this and most other forums don't even know the difference between "quiet" and "quite"'


'A more often made error for this forum is "vise" and "vice." The both may have a strong grip, but they are different'.

jtk

The difference being that the former is the American spelling of vice, the Brtitish spelling of vise.

[Malcolm Schweizer]

LOVE, LOVE, LOVE your boards Malcolm. Just gorgeous. Really loved the handboards. They are just beautiful.

Much appreciated.

[Bill ThompsonNM]

Typography is the craft (or art) which exists to honour the text with an appropriate typesetting. Fine, well-done typography is pretty much invisible, but it will make a text easier to read and understand. See Beatrice Warde’s essay, “The Crystal Goblet” (written under the pen name Paul Beaujon) for an examination of this. As idealized writing, it also looks nicer. Virtusoso is a good looking book, it would’ve taken just a couple hours additional work to make it perfect typographically and potentially award-winning. The big problem is that when the desktop publishing revolution happened, the composition industry sold out for sinecures, rather than being involved in the new technology. This new technology can make most of this sort of thing automatic if one simply engages some sensible settings, and the other things are straight-forward search and replaces (which must be done by hand, since they require an awareness of the meaning of the text which machines don’t have). Naturally there are lots of books written about typesetting books, the problem is, few people bother to read them, and teachers either don’t know or gloss over “minor” things such as the correct symbols for minutes, degrees, feet and inches. Here are what should be salient points from the other thread: In a lot of ways, this exemplifies the XKCD comic on graphic design and the awkwardness of being aware of it (search for “xkcd kerning”, “If you hate someone, teach them to understand kerning.”) The sad thing is, graphic design and typography are idealized writing, so the school systems dropping cursive from the curriculum will likely make this sort of thing worse, resulting in a further diminishing of the public’s ability to appreciate visual design — which as people who make things which are differentiated by visual appearance we should probably be concerned about.

I think part of the problem is that it might have take more than "a few hours" to upgrade the book. The Lost Art press principles come from the magazine publishing industry. Magazine and Newspaper publishers take great liberty with publishing niceties and even grammar, because they have deadlines and they have to Fill the pages.

The publishing industry doesn't have one accepted standard, book print quality varies greatly even within a single category. It would be nice if the Lost Art Press evolved to the quality of publishing as I see with high end cookbooks, for example, but even if the software they're using has the capability to take care of the niceties (it may not if its magazine oriented) it is likely the editors and publishers are not familiar with higher quality standards.

[William Adams]

I think part of the problem is that it might have take more than "a few hours" to upgrade the book.

As I noted, I do this sort of thing for a living. Three parts to it:

- not setting proper defaults --- matter of a checkbox, a couple of minutes
- not reviewing the details of the setting of the text --- a couple of hours tops
- fixing the paragraph and object styles to be consistent --- this should have been built into the project from the beginning, but even doing it manually after the fact wouldn't've taken more than an hour or so to decide upon what was correct, look through the pages, then fix them by hand-tweaking

I guess that's the other part which rubs me the wrong way --- all of this is indicates a lack of rigor and good working practices. I don't understand how people can willfully choose not to use every feature w/in a program to its best ability to allow work to be done more quickly and efficiently.

They're either using InDesign or Quark XPress, those are the only two interactive page layout programs left. Probably this could've been done in Scribus, though it would've been a bit more work. If it were a longer book it might've been worth doing in a specialty typesetting tool such as 3B2 or XyVision or (La)TeX, but it's just not a very big project by typical standards for such tools (my first project was 2,200 pages and was considered small by the standards of the company which I was then working for).

Per: blog.lostartpress.com/2015/04/15/drowning-in-pixels-and-paper/ it's InDesign (see .indd in the filename in the slugline)

[roger wiegand]

You could argue that in making a drawer it is sufficient that the materials to be contained not fall out the bottom, and that it slide back and forth. You'd be right if all you care about is the most base level of functionality. Why do more than a nailed together box? Dovetails, elegantly carved handles, piston fit in the carcass are all extravagant frippery.

So too with language and typography. You can pay any amount of attention to grammar, word use, typography, and page layout in an effort to make a work of art out of a simple written communication.

I enjoy good typography and layout (though I know little about it), but am really irked when I have to read something where the layout impedes my ability to read the words (like the lousy MS Word right justification that creates all kinds of weird spacing). Just like when I make a drawer and want it to have more than the crudest functionality, I think it's worth investing time and energy in making my written documents look nice on the page. Is it necessary?, probably not; does it create a good impression and give better results? (i.e. a better reception to what I've written), yes, in my experience; does it make me feel better about my work? yes, absolutely.

[Pat Barry]

Lol, me too. I also got SCHW=IZER

Had to double take on both of them. I like them a great deal from an artistic point of view. Nice work Malcolm, shame about having your art work stolen.

Thats funny Scott! You were inconsistent in your comprehenshen of the = character. You really must have seen SCHW=IZ=R, but your mind made a correction to ZER in place of Z=R.
Anyway, its a cool, unique and memorable logo and that's really all you want. The swoosh doesn't actually spell Nike in any font that I know of

[Pat Barry]

What I have learned is that if I ever try to write something to be published I will certainly look to get someone like William to edit and typeset it for me. Reading should be enjoyable and enlightening and I can surely see the value in getting the edits and typesetting done properly. If I did it myself it would be a huge mistake.

[Rick Potter]

Malcolm,

I also got it as SCHW=IZER, and H6d. I get it now, but had to re-read the posting first.

Sadly, I have seen your cross avatar for some time. I now can make it out, but until today I always wondered if you belonged to some Satanic biker gang, or something . It looks like a cross made into a knife to my old eyes, and in the avatar size, I couldn't make out the writing. Not being aware of your surfboards, I had no idea it was a trademark.

Thanks for posting the enlarged pic so I could read it..