This Week in Type: (((BROTHERS)))

joeclark

My week is looking up. And – I can say this as a Maritimer – now so is all y’all’s.

1. ENERG

   1. Y
   2. IJA
   3. IE
   4. IA

2. Graphic Designer:

   here's a mini website and incredibly boring essay about our typeface no thx

3. “This wall” (not White Pass’s) “is reading my mind.”

4. (REPRISE w/ UPDATE) Hobo. (Hobeaux!) Hobo!

5. Worst nonsense I’ve ever read about Univers, and almost as grave a desecration of Frutiger as posthumously diagnosing him as trans*. Or swapping out Univers for Helvetica and/or Arial, as the City of Toronto actually does on “Thursday’s.”

6. You’ve heard of 88 (⑧⑧? ⓼⓼? ❽❽?) and 14. New! Neo-Nazi parentheses (“echo”).

7. Are you as bored with reading about Avant Garde as I thought I was? (“Mother [HEROIC EMBRACING AMPERSAND] Child.”) Hi-res sidescrolling scans made it interesting again, and recalled Leonidas’ dictum that one must always inspect the original object (even if here one is not).

8. Unsympathetic Michael Everson dukes it out over Georgian majuscules (mtravuli). Days later, they show up on Wheel of Fortune.

   (Somebody here write “mtravuli” in Georgian for me, please. I looked and I can’t find it.)

9. Журнальная рубленая, the poor man’s Futura. I don’t see anybody trying to transgender this one.

10. “ОУР ЦЛУЕ ИС WРИТТЕН ИН ТХИС АЛПХАБЕТ.” Meanwhile, Jeopardy type actually looks better on Black Jeopardy.

11. 😜: First emoji on a death notice? (Discussion.)

    (“Emoji are not worth the forced line[‑]height increase.”)

12. “[S]ome Tweets [sic] suggest that Tarek Atrissi Design agency [sic] is the designer of the new Arabic font being used on Apple.com[/ae‑ar/],” declares credulous Apple blog without bothering to use Web Inspector to identify the typeface used as Gulf (which in turn identifies as five genders weights).

13. For the love of G‑d don’t ax Adam Curtis about fonts.

14. Trump Mediæval(l)ed. Ax me sometime about how I schooled the highly receptive late artiste Félix González-Torres about the fake italic Trump on his stacks.

    Such “LTypI,” an acronym you couldn’t even typeset behind the Iron Drapery of Bringhurstian party ideology, is derided as unimaginative, including by one great mind. I shatter consensus. In point of fact Ell Type Eye never gets better than with Brothers.

    I used to have a lousy photo of George Howe Colt’s Brothers. I could easily borrow that (audio)book from the library and take another couple of lousy photos. But I would direct your attention to a phenomenon that 88ers would seek to eradicate from the earth: Gay rugby.

    Every team consists of gay males trying to be men and seemingly every team has an awesome name. (Spot the name in Occitan [mtravuli?].) One of the Top 3 feared gay ruggerses, Muddy York here in Toronto, just had personalized jerseys produced. Typeset, obviously, in Brothers.

John Hudson

(Somebody here write “mtravuli” in Georgian for me, please. I looked and I can’t find it.)

მთავრული

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

Don't forget to capitalize it!  :-P
Because that's what Georgian youth will actually start doing –in emulation of Latin, but also because it's functional– the moment you give them two cases (as opposed to [just] shouting). The elephant in the room here –persistently, although perhaps also deftly, ignored by the proponents of adding an uppercase to Georgian encoding– is that Georgian schools don't teach casing, and will not at all appreciate being "hacked". Make some khachapouri and watch the fireworks.

On #10: Oh. Em. Gee. And I rarely say that. They even went with straight letterwise transliteration (plus reversion when missing) without bothering with Ф and such.

On #11: Emoji are not worth the pixels they're rendered on.

On #12: Gulf is far more progressive than Myriad (its Latin companion chez Apple) hence not a harmonious match.

Ray Larabie

How about a calt rule that turns ((( or ))) into cute little hearts?

Robin Mientjes

I’m still trying to parse the ‘gender as type as gender’ thing. The most clear-headed of all is, thankfully, our own @samarskaya – the ‘live and let live’ of gender politics, perhaps.

I know I’m particularly sensitive to the topic as genderqueer/gender-nonconforming myself, but at least it’s placed in a reflective frame. I think I prefer that to another fifty pieces of churnalism on ‘male vs. female fonts’.

Russell McGorman

Ray Larabie said:

How about a calt rule that turns ((( or ))) into cute little hearts?

Or replace spaces with  ))) (((. When all of us and everything else is a target, nothing is.

Marc Oxborrow

"Churnalism" is a brilliant neologism.

John Hudson

At root, gender's just a fancy word for category, so I just assume that categorising typefaces by gender makes about as much or little sense as other classification schemes; i.e. do it if it is useful to you in some situation, but don't imagine that it describes a reality external to the classification.

joeclark

Marc Oxborrow said:

"Churnalism" is a brilliant neologism.

Not actually a neologism.

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

John Hudson said:

At root, gender's just a fancy word for category, so I just assume that categorising typefaces by gender makes about as much or little sense as other classification schemes; i.e. do it if it is useful to you in some situation, but don't imagine that it describes a reality external to the classification.

To me gender actually makes more sense that those boxes; because it's not a box, it's an axis, which I believe is the key to mapping typefaces.

Marc Oxborrow

Hey Joe, I was using neologism in the sense of "a relatively new or isolated term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use, but that has not yet been fully accepted into mainstream language." (Wikipedia)

Perhaps I wanted portmanteau, "a word or morpheme whose form and meaning are derived from a blending of two or more distinct forms (as smog from smoke and fog)"? (Merriam-Webster)

Hrant Հրանդ Փափազեան Papazian

What's a portmanteau of "neologism" and "portmanteau"?

joeclark

The word “churnalism” was not coined on this page and has been around for a while.

John Hudson

It's damn hard to invent a word that no one else has already coined. I thought I'd done really well with emojigeddon, but a hashtag search on Twitter revealed that someone else had beaten me to it. I can, however, take credit for it being popularised in a Buzzfeed headline. How's that for churnalism!