I’m going to be hosting the next TAB Talks, featuring a presentation and Q&A with type designer Christian Schwartz. Christian has created custom typefaces for publications and companies like Esquire, Wallpaper*, The New York Times, Bosch and Deutsche Bahn. His typefaces for the Guardian were an integral part of the newspaper’s acclaimed redesign in 2005.

The talk will be held in English with Japanese translation, at Gotanda Sonic in Gotanda. Hope to see you there!

Stag is available for purchase at Village

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.

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.

Japanese print ads have always been more interesting to me than I remember American ads, though the reason probably says more about me than it does about the quality of the ads, namely that:

• I don’t watch TV: Many of these ads count on you having seen the TV version, so like an inside joke, they crumble into an innocuous or nonsensical collage of message and image when you haven’t seen it. My failure to recognize all but the most well known Japanese personalities doesn’t help things either.
• They’re not interested in me: Foreigners are simply too small a demographic for most advertisers to be interested in. The products they push and the arguments they use were created to manipulate a whole set of common beliefs, fears, tastes that I often don’t share.

In addition to keeping my discretionary spending on hair gel and trashy weeklies down, this total communication breakdown has made it easier to pass the time on my commute, deciphering and dissecting these ads. But one gaijin can only take it so far, so I’ve decided to share a few cases here, starting with this series from Mos Burger.

The New Mos

This campaign is running on the Tokyo Metro trains to promote new recipes on Mos Burger’s core products, the Mos Burger and the Teriyaki Burger.

The train ads are as simple as you can get: a product shot, 3 lines of copy, product name, and the company logo and tagline, but let’s try to pull this apart (click on the image to follow along):

The Teriyaki Ad (top)

• Introduced in 1973: In a country where some businesses last 1,400 years, longetivity counts a lot. From line 1, MOS wants you to know that this comparative blip of a burger has history, it’s been tested by the public, deemed trustworthy, and it’s still here.
• First in the world: Many westerners and even Japanese people characterize Japanese innovation as more refinement than invention. I’m not sure if a teriyaki burger is going to bust this myth, but it at least shows that being first means something here.
• self-confident work (自信作): Like the world’s best pancakes at countless diners across the U.S., many Japanese restaurants have one item they stand behind more than any other, the one you should try before anything else.
• æ–°. (new): This little beauty mark on the first character of the title really puzzled me at first, but Eiko explained that that little mark elevates the character from a description to a product name. When you consider the stream of products boasting newness, the distinction makes sense. This is not just a new teriyaki burger, it is the new teriyaki burger.

The Mos Burger ad (bottom)

• The Taste of Japan (日本の味): Later in the ad, Mos takes it a step further, stating “this burger matches the tastes of the modern Japanese person more than any other.” (Note: Apologies for the bad crop). This is one of those messages that shows up all the time, not only in ads, but in conversation: Japanese people have unique tastes, and foreign ideas often need to be reworked in order to meet these tastes, preferably by other Japanese people. To many foreigners, this belief rings with ethnocentrism and elitism, unfortunately justified by the occasional assertion that Japanese tastes are not only different, but more refined and sensitive.
• I’m in the mood for Mos today (今日、モス気分): This slogan seems modeled after the recent string of MacDonalds slogans: the vapid “I’m lovin’ it” in the US and “Got 100 yen? Let’s go to Mac” in Japan. All these slogans have two common qualities that are very 21st century. First, they are written from the point of view of the customer, Time Magazine’s “You”. Secondly, they are all in the moment. They’re about today, the money in your pocket and how you are feeling right now.

Though somewhat at odds with where these MOS ads started, with history, perseverence and reputation, this tagline is perhaps what fast food does best even if it’s for the worst. It places a solution within reach, to answer an urge from within, right now.