POTN G-Series Speed Challenge #33: Typography

[Bryan Bedell]

Typography isn't something most people think about very often so maybe it was a tough subject. I was hoping to see interesting typography photographed in an interesting way, and while everyone nailed one or the other, a few people managed to do both.

Apologies in advance if my comments are long and not entirely focused on photography, I tend to ramble and go off subject, ha.

As I mentioned before the contest, I'm a graphic designer, and while photography is tangential to my work and I've always dabbled in it, my comments will be more along the lines of "this is pretty" rather than "nice use of Muybridge's fifth theorem." Forgive me if I use layman's or designer's terms for photography concepts, and please don't take anything personally, I'm no photo expert.

Here's *everyone* in order of appearance, I'll list the finalists at the end with additional comments.

RAW "Guided by Signs"
Nice composition, perhaps a bit of a comment on how cluttered our life is with signs, but it's more a photo of signs rather than the type therein. the color is interesting, is that a result of the flash on reflective paint, or are these the new self-illuminating NYC street signs I read about a while back? The sky is kinda washed out, maybe a night shot would have displayed the lit-up backgrounds better. That's Frutiger 65 on the street signs (tell all the NYers their signs are French!), and USDOT Interstate Mono on the other signs. Just tonight I saw that someone had messed with a similar sign near my house so that two "One Way"arrows were pointing opposite each other, and I thought of your photo. So don't let it be said this contest wasn't on my mind all week!

AgentNox "No Admittance"
Our second entry, and I was reminded of it as well, on Friday when a Toronto photographer named Marshall Sokoloff stopped by our office to show us some new prints (we've been online buddies with him for a while, check out his stuff at http://blurbism.com ) His "thing" is to go to boatyards and photograph rusty hulls with years of paint peeling off, and random markings and blotches and such. (and he uses a Pro-1!) He had some recent photos of an artist's wooden workbench with all the layers of paint and stickers and stuff and i thought of this photo. The sign itself is great, I wonder if it was handmade, or cut with metal stencils on some sort of router. While it's a photo of a sign, the composition is nice with all the lines being nice and straight and the context and decay all add up to a great shot.

Zakabog (No title, but I'm not a fascist about that)
This is one of my favorite shots of all the entries, I love the composition and the saturated colors (though i bet it would look great if you saturated that blue sky a bit). Could be any corner anywhere in America. I'd say the subject isn't the type at all, though, outside of the context of the scene, (Clarendon Bold in red and it looks like maybe Eurostyle under it) Obviously since it's an old shot you didn't have the contest in mind, but I'd love to see a detail of that "RT" with the crack in the sign and the uneven backlighting. I know, I have peculiar tastes.

KC Jewel "Made in Japan"
There's an inside-POTN reference here, I know, though I was just joining the list then so I was a little out of the loop at the time. I remember someone posting a photo of japanese carp windsocks and a long discussion about where to find them, so I imagine this is related to that discussion. I'm assuming this is a crop of the packaging for said windsocks, and the design is great, though the crop could be more interesting I guess, as it is, it's too much a product photo (it almost looks like a scan) I love the exclamation points after the line of type at the top (using two in a row is a big no-no in advertising) and the logos and large gold figure are neat. I'd like to see a tighter crop focusing on less, or the package as a whole from an interesting angle, maybe.

mp2k-net "The Way Out"
I ride the train to work some days, and the train I ride still has red letters on the exit windows.On the Metra, though, they are boring crisp industrial helvetica vinyl letters, these are lovingly hand painted and beautifully faded. This is another case where it's pretty much just a photo of a sign, but the composition and lighting transcend the message of the sign, and the aging of the lettering and the colors of the photo also add a story. I love the subtle hint of detail (a coat hook?) in the lower right. The photo looks like a painting, maybe if Ed Ruscha and Edward Hopper (or Rembrandt) were locomotive buffs.

txfirebug "SH-53D Sea Stallion"
I'm not a military type guy but I've always been interested in military insignia, and I used to build model kits of WWII-era planes (I would kill to fly a spitfire someday). it fascinated me how in spite of the fact that there were probably thousand-page decrees from Washington or London or Tokyo about the placement and size and color of military vehicle markings, the pilots and mechanics and commanders always found a way to sneak in their own personal touch with nose art and shark teeth and D-Day stripes and such. Good to see they're still doing it, but it appears that stenciled letters and handpainted insignia have been replaced with vinyl decals. The lettering is neat, but the photo could use a little more 'oomph,' I'm sure you had little time and little access, but the crop is awkward, I think showing the entire helicopter, or zooming in closer, would have been helpful.The lack of motion in the rotors (there's a hint, though) is made up for by the thumbs-up from the guy in the hatch- was he waving at you, or is he signalling someone?

nactos (I'll assume the title is "hiking taggers…")
Yep, sad that someone would tag a hiking trail, but nature's loss is photography's gain. I live in chicago and there's graffiti everywhere. there's a wide range, from stuff that I wouldn't at all hesitate to call "art" down to the crude magic-marker tags that appear on my garage door from time to time. It bums me out that these days you usually just see halfhearted names and gang symbols scrawled without any sense of pride. Even the taggers are lazy these days. you can see the degeneration of styles as people copy other people and don't get as creative as they used to. Anyway, this is a great shot of some individually lackluster tags, luckily the overlapping of the colors and tags makes them a good deal more interesting, and the composition and sky are nice. I guess this is the 2005 version of "ED! '84" carved into a park bench next to a Van Halen logo. Nice shot.

Boutty "Outback Fonts"
Boutty, thank your lucky stars you don't live in America where the very word "Outback" conjures up either A) a horrible chain restaurant found in shopping mall parking lots, or B) the image of a smiling Paul Hogan selling you a Subaru station wagon. I saw your photo and imagined a mom-and pop supply store dating back to the early days of the colonization of Australia, and was excited to see the pioneer spirit is still alive in the outback, and to find out more I did some research on Misters Burke and Wills and found out they were, in fact, early explorers in Australia (You know all this, of course) but from what I can tell, the Burke and Wills line of camping gear does not trace it's lineage back to the men themselves, but probably to the mid 1980s and an advertising agency in Melbourne, heh. So maybe America and Australia aren't that different after all. I'm guilty of creating logos like this, too, and manufacturing artificially-distressed signs to invoke a feeling of history, so to the creators of this sign, I say "Well done, you fooled me!" They seem to have evoked a period in time accurately, which is hard to do. As far as the photo, it's another where I'd rather see an interesting detail or see the sign with a little (though not enough to detract from it) context.

Marie "a page from St Matthew's Gospel ( photographed from the Book of Kells)"
Not to be outdone, Marie thought to herself "I live a kilometer away from the public display of one of the most famous and loved works of calligraphy and illumination in history!" so she headed over to Trinity College, to get a shot of the Book itself. Well done! I saw it a couple years ago (the colonnade room in the old library was also incredible) and I'm amazed you got a decent shot of it through the crowds and glass. (or did you cheat a bit and take a photo of a display in the museum?) The photo isn't perfect, it's hard to see the gold leaf and it's a bit distorted, but it couldn't have been easy to get a photo in there, and you'd have a hard time finding a better subject, so cheers and thanks to your city for the best vacation of my life that I think of every time I'm disappointed with a Guinness at an american bar.

Hungry Writer "Pre Digital Typography"
Digital type sure makes typesetting a lot easier, but as HungryWriter has noticed, it also has allowed a lot of unskilled typographers into the field and led to widespread homogenization. Up until the late 80s, typesetting or signpainting or comic book lettering was a trade that took years to master, and had strange tools and jargon that kept amateurs out and kept the quality high. When laser printers, postscript fonts, and imagesetters became widely available in the mid-80s, however, anyone could typeset and even though there are thousands of new typefaces designed yearly, you tend to see the same six or eight fonts everywhere you look, and the attention to detail is totally gone. Everything here is hand-lettered and beautiful, look at the "Ds" in "daredevil"... they're different, but consistent. you never see that anymore, in a font that's supposed to look like handwriting or paint or whatever, if you have two 'Ds" in the same word, they look the same and that always bums me out. As a photo, I like that's it's cropped in, but i'd like to see a little closer detail (maybe a macro shot showing the halftone pattern) and maybe some crisper focus, some of the black lines are getting lost, or maybe that's just sloppy comic book printing?

3Dart "the photo of a sing"
As far as a straight-up photo of a sign, I like it, there's an even amount of blurred out background as a border, all the edges are parallel to the border, and the dented-up corners of the sign are really interesting. The sign is interesting too, I guess it probably says "Beware of Dog" because in America anyone would assume a picture of a dog with red writing around it always means "Beware of Dog." So it would be funny to learn that it means something else. (Let us know!). The typography isn't all that interesting other than being in Greek (that's good old Helvetica Bold, Switzerland has conquered the world in a way only designers understand). Still, the focus of the photo is the illustration of the dog and the sign as an object, not the type.

BottomBracket "Love in NYC"
Ah, the famous Robert Indiana statue. I'm familiar with the one in Philidelphia (it's famous as a skateboard hangout, aside from a pop-art masterpiece) but it appears NYC has one too. BottomBracket milks the social commentary for the second challenge in a row and comes up big. (Note that "LOVE" is in Clarendon, the same typeface as RAW's entry). I was expecting more photos of 3-d letters (such as those attached to buildings) but this is (so far) the only one to feature type with any dimension. A great photo, the only fault I see is the sky being washed out, but it's not a big deal. Maybe not "arty" but I can see this photo on the front page of the NY Post with a big melodramatic headline next to it. Nice integration of type and subject, the "LOVE" is certainly the focal point of the photo but there's so much more there.

partridge9 "The Gazette"
I spoke too soon, here are some more architectural letters. The letters themseves are very interesting, probably cut from wood, but I'd love to see them closer up, to see the texture and detail (and I'm sure that if you'd had a personal jetpack, you could have obliged me). The sky's washed out which is a shame because with all the blue in this photo, the blue of the sky would really look great, and the simple shape of the roof and angle of the shot would allow you to drop in just about any sky photo, if you were into that sort of thing. Is this the home of the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette? (My wife is from Indiana). It definitely evokes the age of small town independent newspapers, Walt Disney World couldn't even manufacture a facade like that. : )

rpolitsr "Early Writing"
I laughed when I saw this because I have an almost identical bookmark that my 19-month old daughter made for me. She can't write yet, so it's just sort of scribbles and my wife forged "Daddy" on it in fake-kid-handwriting. I love how the "S" is backwards, as you'd expect, and the "N" runs to the next line and into the "POLIT." It took hundreds of years of graphic design evolution for David Carson to get away with breaking up a word like that, but your son, unrestrained by the constraints of typographic theory, legibilty, or the edges of a bookmark, came to the same conclusion in only four! And as a bonus we get a bit of Tolkien lovingly typeset in Garamond. The background is appropriately simple and a nice color and the red of the ribbon is beautifully vibrant. The composition's pretty solid, but I'd like to see variations, or more depth somehow.

Zero "A Strife of Tags"
In a similar fashion to nacto's photo, Zero has taken a bunch of individually sort-of-uninspired graffiti tags and framed them in a way that makes them far more interesting. from a design perspective, it's all there, contrast (large tag in background balances out the smaller ones) color (the large area of blue balances the small area of gold, and texture (the black and white tags) and there's an interesting sense of depth and balance of positive and negative (black vs. white on a colored background) The sticker in the top right bothered me a bit at first, but without it, this would almost look composed for the sake of art, so the sticker kind of brings it back to earth, sort of like if you looked at what you thought was a Jackson Pollack painting, then saw a paint stirrer in the middle of it and realized it was just accidental. Seeing beauty in chaos is difficult enough when it's already labeled as "art" for you, it's nearly impossible when it's outside of an art context, so props to Zero.

Don Ellis didn't have a title in the subject line. Didn't you WRITE the rules, Don?
You've recused yourself from eligibilty, but thanks for entering anyway! I was expecting to see more neon, but this is the only one, and it's nicely done, an interesting crop, good detail and exposure, and a visually interesting character with an interesting etymology. I, also, hope to never pawn anything! I've always been fascinated with the bright neon signs of Hong Kong and Japan, I remember looking at the cover of PiL's "Live in Japan" album with Johnny Rotten standing in a square in Japan with hundreds of signs around him, thinking in America (where I could read all the signs) I'd think of them as ugly, but when they're meaningless as words, they somehow seemed more beautiful. Sofia Coppola apparently had the same impression, if you've never seen "Lost in Translation," please check it out, it's one of my favorite films.

In Japan "Signs of Autumn"
Again, it's neat to see a word as a figure that means nothing to me until explained. I remember in the 80s there was a fad of wearing japanese character t-shirts and lots of people wore them without having any idea what the t-shirt said. Since then I've seen photos of japanese kids trying to look "american" wearing t-shirts with nonsensical english phrases, so I guess we're even. This lantern makes me think of all the Zatoichi movies, where the blind swordsman invariably comes upon a friendly inn or restaurant, and I see the lantern sign but need to wait for the subtitle to find out what it says. I always wish I could read and understand japanese because I'm sure there's a whole level I'm missing because I'm stuck with subtitles. Again, beautiful characters and a lovely composition. The style of the lettering seems to be a bit informal, but still fairly traditional, (the japanese version of Cooper Black?) so perhaps it's a small, family-run restaurant, am I right? To me, the style of text often says as much as the words, and I often spend hours at the asian grocery in chicago looking at the packaging designs for design inspiration.

Nice work everyone! Thanks very much for indulging my weird interest, and I hope my comments were somewhat insightful.

We're all winners, right? But I guess we need a judge for next week... so...

3rd place: BottomBracket
for keeping type as the focus, but building a story around it.

2nd place: mp2k-net,
(with an honorable mention to AgentNox, I'd say these two photos handled the subject in a similar way and both were great, but mp2k just barely nudged Nox.)

1st place: Zero.
(with an honorable mention to nactos: again, two photos with similar subject matter but I just found Zero's to be a bit more visually interesting.)

Also, cheers again to Marie for possibly violating the rules of the Old Library of Trinity College for the sake of a POTN challenge photo. : )



-------ORIGINAL POST---------
POTN G-Series Speed Challenge #33: Typography

Challenge #33 is Typography

As graphic designer, I'm fascinated with type. I'd like to see photos that explore any sort of type: signage, handwriting, books, or anything where the subject is letterforms or the suggestion of letterforms.

Remember, it's the letterforms i'm interested in, not the source or the content. I'd rather see an interesting photo of an average sign than an average photo of an interesting sign. With the worldwide scope of this list, I look forward to a wide variety of languages and subjects.

You all know the drill, I'll pick the winners next Monday.

To submit, click "Post Reply" and put your Photo Title in the Subject Line. Don't forget your Camera Model!

Post until Monday noon GMT, Sept. 26, 2005.

Host: Bryan Bedell____________________________________________ _


#033 - Typography - Zero, mp2k-net, BottomBracket
#032 - Point/Counterpoint - Bryan Bedell, BottomBracket, InJapan
#031 - Hobby - MegaTrixel, Zero, abat
#030 - History - Boutty, abat, teekay
#029 - Toys - In Japan, HungryWriter, Don Ellis
#028 - Taken Within 50cm of the Ground - BottomBracket, Marie, Megatrixel
#027 - Self Portrait - abat, rpolitsr, HungryWriter
#026 - Personal Treasures – Boutty, in Japan, HungryWriter
#025 - Wheels – Zero, Boutty, Teekay
#024 - Street Candids - rpolitsr, in Japan, txfirebug
#023 - Religion - marie, in japan , megatrixel
#022 - Animals - monkey_wrench, jesshen, fooboy
#021 - Night Shots - bang, KingSize, abat
#020 - Food - sara, abat, gewb
#019 - Shoes – Boutty, partridge9, morrisman
#018 - Blowing in the Wind - In Japan, Txfirebug, Gewb
#017 - Rain - marie, Boutty, Tonyq
#016 - Reflections - abat, Boutty, IainB
#015 - Spheres - digidog, (2) Boutty, (2) Thefly, (2) Bottombracket, (3) marie, (3) gkunning
#014 - Trees - partridge9, cyclone, Boutty
#013 - Body Language - digidog, Dchemist, Bottom Bracket
#012 - Light & Dark - IainB, cyclone, (3) teekay, (3) bottombracket
#011 - Transportation - 4nr, digidog, IainB
#010 - Making Music - Bottom Bracket, gkuenning, (3)Alexandre Gabriel, (3)pushtoexit
#009 - Hands - IainB, txfirebug, Dbump
#008 - Stop Action - Partridge9, Marie, Bottom Bracket,Thefly
#007 - Red - Pushtoexit, Marie, IainB, Megatrixel
#006 - Pencil - theFly, am_pitbull_terrier, bottombracket
#005 - An Egg - Don Ellis, Megatrixel/Samerj, Rich Lawrence
#004 - Old People - teekay, raj, thefly
#003 - Passage of Time - Booyah, Don Ellis, Rich Lawrence
#002 - Joy - TeeKay, Rich Lawrence, Pradeep1
#001 - Speed - BottomBracket, SmartImport, Rich Lawrence

[RAW]

I have been away and I have missed being part of this challenges...If you don't win, you learnd something new, and the comments made by the judges are just a pleasure to read.

Enjoy my photo as I share it with you...


Canon PowerShot G6
Shooting Date/Time : 6/14/2005 3:59:50 PM
Shooting Mode : Manual
Tv (Shutter Speed) : 1/250
Av (Aperture Value) : 5.6
Light Metering : Evaluative
ISO Speed : 50
Lens : 7.2 - 28.8mm
Focal Length : 9.1mm
Image Quality : RAW
Flash : On
Flash Type : Built-In Flash
Shutter curtain sync: 1st-curtain
White Balance : Day Light
AF Mode : Single AF

[AgentNox]

Canon Powershot G6. Shot approximately 2 months ago south of Calgary, Alberta at a WWII British Commonweath Air Training Program aerodrome.

Definitely a sign worth listening to, on the other side of the door I found WWII era furnaces insulated with more asbestos than most people want to get close to. The lesson here: always carry your P100 asbestos mask when exploring old military sites.

[zakabog]

I took this picture some time last year with my powershot g3. I was in the car with my friend who was waiting for the bus and I just took some random pictures.

[KC Jewel]

G6

[mp2k-net]

Taken with a G1 at the railway museum in Squamish, BC, Canada.

[txfirebug]

Three of these landed the other day, to refuel on the way to Louisiana probably.

[nactos]

hiking taggers...
shot this yesterday with my G6 in the Hollywood hills trails. Who tags on a hiking trail?

[Boutty]

G6

[marie]

http://celtdigital.org/CeltArtKells.htm

http://www.irishclans.com/articles/bookofkells.html


G2
macro
1/50
f/4

photographed today

[HungryWriter]

Canon G6
Speed: 1/10
Aperture: 2.2
Exposure Compensation: -1/3



From my comic book collection:

Amazing Spiderman #16 (1964)
Cover Price .12 cents
Grade: VG-
Aprox Value $100

[3Dart]

a sign in greek

G3

[BottomBracket]

G6
Altruism on a busy street.

[partridge9]

G3

[rpolitsr]

early writing

Powershot Pro1 Shooting mode: Av, 1/13 sec. f 5.0, Vivid, ISO 50



An old Book Marker, gift from my son when he was about 4 years old.
I
love you
so much
daddy
Juan Esteban
Polit