During a recent visit with type designer Christian Schwartz, he described his encounter with original Granjon type with the awe and adoration usually reserved for great works of art or architecture.

My own exposure to metal type has been limited to the small collection at my design school in Illinois. At the time I was immaturely suspicious and disinterested in anything that wasn’t made tomorrow, so regrettably I never got around to rummaging through the cases. At the time, my only other exposure to older type was the frustration of trying to design with digitizations, an experience that turned me off to serif faces for years.

Thanks to a great new article explaining why “digital classics” like Bembo underperform compared to the originals, I’m relieve to know that my distaste was at least partially because of the digitizations themselves.

This is a pretty smart re-ordering of comment fields.

Classic Comments Form interaction:
“I have something to say about this!”
“Okey Dokey, just fill out these thr. . ”
“Argggh!”

So let people get the thought in their mind on screen first and take names later. (Although the traditional ordering could be seen as the comment form equivelent of the Brady Bill.)

In case you haven’t heard, the prime minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe resigned last week, three days into the new parliamentary session, and way to far into a comically long string of corruption scandals. He immediately checked himself into a hospital for “stress related stomach problems”, neatly avoiding the inevitable shitstorm.

Aera, a weekly general interest magazine, managed to capture all this in one gutsy crop. Now that’s editorial design!

You may have seen the series of interviews we’re doing with typeface designers over at the AQ blog. We just released the fourth today, and we probably have another two or three in us before we retire (in the Jay-Z sense) the series.

O-bon gave me a few moments to reflect on what I’ve learned about type designers, the state of type, and interviewing. Incomplete and in no particular order:

• With output of just a few fonts a year, it may not seem like it, but type designers are very busy people. In addition to actually designing fonts, there’s research, customer support, gathering of specimens, website maintenance, customizations for special clients, teaching, conferences, type history consulting for movies, newspaper articles, not to mention all the usual office b.s. we all deal with.
• Like great artists of any kind, ability/interest in talking about their work is not always proportional to the quality of the work itself.
• The best typeface designers generally love and know type history, but don’t let it stop them from searching for entirely new forms, made by manipulating just a handful of variables within fairly-tight constraints of acceptability.
• Asking type designers to pick their favorite letter is just barely easier and smarter than asking a composer to pick their favorite chord, but the non-compliant answers reveal as much about type design as the compliant ones.
• The technology of type design is still changing. The adoption of OpenType and new time-saving software like Superpolator seems to be resulting in bigger, more complete font families, with more weights, better multilingual support, small caps, ligatures, and alternates. But chatting last week, Craig pointed out the possibilities that programming may open up for type in the coming years. The movement he described vaguely resembling what’s happened with software synthesizers. The re-introduction of chaos into clean forms in a much subtler way than the grunge fonts of the 90s, in persuit of the tasty imperfections of past technology to “warm” up the cold consistency of high-definition screens and the flatness of offset.
• Type designers are as susceptible to fashion or suspicion of fashion as any other creator. As far as I can tell, grunge fonts are equivelent to hypercolor t-shirts, and Dutch-inspired humanist sans serifs are foie gras.

Okayama Prefecture took over the Ginza line a few weeks ago with these ads. The concept is simple. They asked a bunch of locals and visitors what they want to “push” about Okayama. Each was presumably given one of these big posters and a handful of markers.

I really like the series for a few reasons:

• They’re authentic. I walked up and down the carriages and couldn’t find any duplicates. Some are even signed: “A. Maeda, age 80″. Because of the gloss of the paper, it was hard to tell if the handdrawn designs were scanned and offset printed, but it sure didn’t look like it.
• The choice of markers that were passed out (mostly black and red) was just enough to establish some aesthetic consistency across the series, without the need for a designer to rein in the personal drawing and writing styles with heavy handed graphic effects.

My first article for TABlog was just published: a review of the Tokyo Art Director’s Club exhibition at Ginza Graphic Gallery, in the form of 6 suggestions.

“Award shows are tough to get right. They have no over-arching narrative, no common aesthetic, and enjoyment by the general public is only one of their purposes. But they are also a great opportunity to put the current thinking and values of an industry on display, improving awareness of how design works, and when it’s working.

The ADC and Ginza Graphic Gallery could be doing a lot more to embrace this opportunity. Here are a few suggestions on how.”

We released two and a half updates to TAB this week, our biggest push so far this year. Some design notes:

TAB T-shirt Shop

The E-commerce system is a familiar design problem for web designers. Though there are still plenty of sites that get it wrong, sensible conventions have been in place for a while. Still, when it came time to design this years TAB t-shirt shop, we took the opportunity to explore what else e-commerce could look like.

First, we did away with the shopping cart page, instead, using the right column of the site to handle the entire transaction, save a brief detour for PayPal users. Each step of checkout, which on Amazon would be a separate page, is handled using some light AJAX.

Visually, our checkout takes the offline metaphor literally, with large, plastic-wrapped product thumbnails appearing on a pixel-idealized conveyor belt, inspired by American supermarket checkout lines. The reference was lost on our Japanese users during testing (there are no conveyor belts in Japanese stores), but since it didn’t interfere with their ability to purchase a shirt, we went with it anyway.

Admittedly challenging user expectations of how familiar, critical tools should look is a risky indulgence. It required and will continue to require careful testing and refinement. In the past, it would have been hard to take the same risk with clients, who usually value predictablity over innovation, but as AQ settles into its third year, with more experience, confidence and programming power, some of our clients trust us enough to take these risks together on the way to something a little more special.

We relaunched AQ’s website a few weeks back.

This website was long overdue. Although the old site neatly summarized what we do in 4 pages with no navigation, the flat architecture and minimal design gave our audience few visual clues on what kind of site they were looking at, how to interact with it, or what kind of people were behind it.

With the new site, we filled in these blanks, and indulged in some features that will inspire us to be a bit more talkative: a CMS, a blog, and dynamic language management.

We have a few exciting posts cooking up for the blog, so don’t forget to grab the rss feed!

Big thanks to Christophe for fighting the WP beast into bilingual submission, Eiko for the sweet illustrations, and Paul for guidance and proofreading.

I had dinner with Paul and Craig at the New York Bar and Grill at the top of the Park Hyatt in Tokyo, a planned indulgence, after a rocky start to 2007. I lost all sense of time and place. My first steak in almost a year, and I’d wait another year for the next one if I can have it there again.

I think there are two reasons: First, being the client is tough work. It’s easy to take for granted how much client’s have to do to keep a project moving: gathering and editing content, scheduling photo shoots, building consensus. When we become our own clients, we are effectively doubling the workload we are used to for a website, and often chipping away at this workload off hours.

Secondly, good design projects are conversations between client and designer, who check and balance each other, propelling the project forward in the process. Without another team on the other side to volley back, you have to continually step under the net, adjust your perspective, pick up the ball and hit it back over.

While there are always one or two beauties, with the iPhone on its way, it’s become even clearer to me that the Japanese carriers release way too many phones. Their approach seems to be to split up the market into as many demographic segments as they can, and give each their own phone with it’s own brand message, form, color and feature set. This seems like a slightly more evolved variation on the “spray and pray” approach that you see with a lot of less fashionable Japanese consumer electronics, for which they long ago gave up on searching for names that don’t read like serial numbers.

Maybe this makes business sense, but it’s sure is dispiriting if you look for an aesthetic coherency from model to model, season to season.

Photo by Paul.

As far as I can tell, it’s generally considered bad manners in Japan to eat, and to a much lesser degree, drink outside.

There are of course several allowances. Anything served at outdoor festivals, quick shots of canned coffee. But outside of these, you just don’t see Japanese people put much to their mouth outside of homes and restaurants.

This makes perfect sense to me. When they can, the Japanese like to take their time with meals. They fuss over presentation, balance and sequence. There is a whole vocabulary for eating that spans past the easy senses of taste and smell, into touch and hearing. How could any of this possibly be enjoyed wedged between meetings on opposite sides of town?

Besides, in many less restrained cultures than Japan, eating is the most flamboyant bodily function that humans can engage in with mixed company. Eating outside imposes all kinds of potential irritations on strangers. Maybe they haven’t eaten yet today, so your soft bite into an onigiri taunts them. Maybe they just ate, so the smell of your everything bagel nauseates them. Or maybe they’re just having a really bad day, and the last thing they need is for you to spray droplets of melted banana java chip Frappucino onto their suit jacket while they hang from the hand straps in a Ginza Line subway car, gently swaying.

But this has been a tough adjustment for me. I survived the last eight or so years of my schooling eating chunks of bagels in the back of math class, food that requires utensils while driving, and entire fast food meals while jogging across campus. In Japan, I struggle to delay gratification until I find a quiet, stationary stage for the performance of a 3-part symphony of mixed sandwiches.

Which is why this ad in Kudanshita station touched me so. A single line of copy and a simple photograph together defy all this nonsense and make it ok again for me to inhale soft serve in front of ampm.