Colophon
Colophon
Every essay on this site is set in the manner of a different designer, from Gutenberg's Mainz in 1455 to a gerobak painter on a Yogyakarta street. Here's who, and why.
A colophon is the note at the back of a book that tells you how it was made: the typeface, the paper, the printer, sometimes a little prayer. I’ve always read them first.
The site itself is set in three faces. Headlines are in Fraunces, a slightly wonky “Old Style” revival drawn by Phaedra Charles and Flavia Zimbardi at Undercase Type. Body text is in Newsreader by Production Type, made for reading long things on screens. Labels are in IBM Plex Mono by Mike Abbink and Bold Monday. The paper is warm, the ink is nearly black, and there’s one red, the colour printers have used for the important bits since the rubricators of the 15th century.
The essays each borrow from one designer, one place and one moment. The book that started this for me is Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style, which I’m not ashamed to say is about as close to a bible as I’ve got. Bringhurst writes that typography exists to honour content. I took that seriously and then, I admit, a little too far.
These are tributes, not reproductions. Most of the original typefaces are expensive, extinct, or both, so each page uses the nearest honest substitute from the open-source shelf, and says so. If you know these people better than I do, and some of you will, write to me and tell me what I got wrong.
The site is built with Hugo, hosted on Netlify, and loads no trackers. It has no comments section, on purpose. If something here moves you, write me a letter.
The specimens, in the order they were made
- 1455 · Mainz
Johannes Gutenberg
Movable type, black ink cooked from lampblack and linseed oil, and a red rubricator going over the capitals by hand afterwards. Gutenberg went broke doing it and his investor took the shop. Every book since owes him something; nobody paid him.
- 1501 · Venice
Aldus Manutius
Aldus had Francesco Griffo cut the first italic so he could fit Virgil into a book small enough to carry. The paperback, the anchor-and-dolphin colophon and the semicolon as we use it all came out of his Venetian shop.
- 1734 · London
William Caslon
Printers had a saying: when in doubt, use Caslon. It is the type of the first printing of the American Declaration of Independence, and it was chosen because it was trusted, not because it was clever. Good for a letter of thanks.
- 1880 · Two Rivers, Wisconsin
The wood-type poster printers
Metal type was too heavy for big posters, so in the 19th century people cut letters out of end-grain maple. Showmen set five typefaces on one sheet and shouted in every one. Taste had nothing to do with it. The type had to stop you in the street.
- 1891 · Hammersmith
William Morris
Morris looked at Victorian printing and hated it, so at 57 he started his own press: handmade paper, thick black type and vines climbing up every margin. He believed a book should be a whole object and that ugly things wear people down.
- 1924 · Moscow
Alexander Rodchenko
Constructivism: red, black, diagonals and a typeface built from ruler and compass. Rodchenko wanted art that worked for the people doing the work. His poster of Lilya Brik shouting ‘Books!’ is still the loudest page anyone has printed.
Read the essay set this way: We’re Gonna Be Okay, Just Don’t Go Full Mr. Krabs, Kay? →
- 1925 · Dessau
László Moholy-Nagy
Moholy-Nagy said typography is communication in its most intense form. He once ordered paintings by telephone, reading coordinates to a sign factory, to prove the idea mattered more than the hand. Primary colours, thick rules, and type as architecture.
Read the essay set this way: Three Months: A Field Note From a Small Company →
- 1927 · Paris
A.M. Cassandre
Cassandre painted trains and ocean liners as pure geometry: vanishing points, long shadows and gold lettering. His posters sold travel as a feeling. Thirty-four years later he drew the Yves Saint Laurent monogram, which is still on the bags.
Read the essay set this way: Why I Keep Coming Back to Yogyakarta →
- 1945 · Yogyakarta
The compositors of Kedaulatan Rakyat
Kedaulatan Rakyat was founded in Yogyakarta six weeks after independence. It was set in metal type and printed letterpress. The people who set it did not sign their work. This page is for them and for the city that has been reading them ever since.
- 1947 · Harmondsworth
Jan Tschichold
In 1928 Tschichold wrote that symmetry was dead. Twenty years later he went to Penguin, redesigned some 500 paperbacks and put the symmetry back. He kept and refined Edward Young’s orange-white-orange band from 1935, which is why a whole country associates cheap books with good taste.
- 1953 · Ivrea & Milan
Giovanni Pintori
Pintori ran Olivetti’s advertising for more than twenty years. He sold typewriters without showing much of the typewriter: numbers tumbling across the page, letters in red and yellow, a machine reduced to the joy of pressing keys. Olivetti also hired poets and architects. Their theory was that a machine for writing deserved to be beautiful.
- 1955 · Zürich
Josef Müller-Brockmann
Müller-Brockmann thought a grid was a moral position: objective, ordered, useful. He also said the grid is an aid, not a guarantee. Flush left, ragged right, sizes that move by ratio, and nothing on the page without a reason to be there.
Read the essay set this way: Memberikan Feedback - Tips Untuk Team Lead →
- 1956 · Frankfurt
Dieter Rams
Weniger, aber besser: less, but better. Rams put radios in white boxes with one orange switch, and spent forty years telling people that good design is as little design as possible. Apple’s calculator app borrowed from his Braun ET 66, and he said he took it as a compliment.
- 1968 · Amsterdam
Wim Crouwel
Crouwel left the grid visible on his posters, like scaffolding nobody took down. His New Alphabet (1967) was drawn for early computer screens and was nearly unreadable, which Crouwel thought was an acceptable price for the future. People called him Mr. Gridnik.
- 1968 · New York
Herb Lubalin
Lubalin set letters so close that they kissed, then let them overlap. He called it ’typographics’, type that acts the word out instead of only saying it. For him a headline was a picture you could read.
Read the essay set this way: Dwight Schrute Line di SoftwareSeni →
- 1972 · New York
Paul Rand
Rand gave IBM stripes, gave UPS a bow on a parcel, and showed Steve Jobs a 100-page book with one logo in it and no alternatives. He believed design is the method of putting form and content together, and that playfulness is serious work.
- 1972 · Munich
Otl Aicher
Aicher designed the 1972 Olympics to be the opposite of 1936: no red, no black, no gold, only sky blue, green, silver and a cheerful orange. He also drew the definitive set of stick-figure sport pictograms, the ones airports and stadiums still borrow.
- 1977 · New York
Massimo Vignelli
Vignelli said you need maybe five typefaces in a lifetime, and he mostly used two. The black band across the top of every National Park brochure is his. He hated vulgarity, loved discipline, and borrowed Ernesto Rogers’ line that design runs from the spoon to the city.
- 1979 · Manchester
Peter Saville
Saville put radio-pulsar data on a black sleeve with no band name and no title, and it became one of the most worn images in the world. Factory gave catalogue numbers to records, posters, a nightclub and eventually its founder’s coffin.
- 1983 · Cheshire, Connecticut
Edward Tufte
Tufte self-published his book because publishers would not print it to his standard. He asks for the most data with the least ink, notes in the margin rather than at the bottom, and no chartjunk. Wide margins are where a careful reader thinks.
Read the essay set this way: Annual Review 2020: 4 Hal Yang Saya Pelajari →
- 1984 · Cupertino
Susan Kare
Kare drew the happy Mac, the trash can and the command key on graph paper, 32 by 32 squares at a time. She proved a computer could have a sense of humour. The Macintosh shipped in 1984. It still says hello.
Read the essay set this way: Teknologi Bukan Kompetitif Advantage untuk Perusahaan Software →
- 1994 · Santa Monica
David Carson
Carson once found a Bryan Ferry interview so dull that he set the whole thing in Zapf Dingbats. Ray Gun broke every rule Müller-Brockmann wrote, and people read it anyway. He was a pro surfer before he was a designer. Don’t mistake legibility for communication, he said.
- 1996 · Cambridge, Mass.
Matthew Carter
Microsoft asked Carter for typefaces that would survive low-resolution screens. He drew the pixels first and the outlines second. Georgia and Verdana ended up on nearly every computer on earth, so this page loads no fonts at all. It is set in what you already have.
- 2003 · Tokyo
Kenya Hara
Hara photographed a man standing alone on the salt flats of Bolivia and called it an advertisement. For him emptiness is not nothing. It is a vessel the viewer fills. Muji means ’no brand’, which turned out to be a very strong brand.
Read the essay set this way: Muji Notebook + Uni-ball Signo UM-151 →
- 2024 · Every street in Java
Indonesia’s gerobak sign painters
No design school taught the people who paint BAKSO MAS GENDUT in red and yellow on a pushcart, and their work sells more soup than most agencies sell anything. Shadowed caps, a dropped stroke, and a phone number painted bigger than the menu.
Read the essay set this way: Sales Essentials for Directors →