Brand new Cooper revival out as of 5 minutes ago!

http://new.myfonts.com/fonts/wordshape/cooper-highlight/

Cooper Hilite Complete is a complementary set of two fonts- Cooper Black and Cooper Hilite. Either typeface can be used alone, or as a stackable, multi-colored set.

 The history of these typefaces:

Jonathan Ive, Apple’s senior designer (iPod, iPad, iTouch, et al) likes the YACHT logo so much that he and the Apple design team dropped some free custom laser-engraved iPods on the YACHT team last week.

I wrote a 10,000 word essay called “Heft, Gravy, and Swing: The Life and Times of Oswald Cooper” for the latest issue of Idea. The essay serves as the definitive biography of the Chicago type and lettering designer, famed for his Cooper Black typeface.

The essay is the result of a long-dreamed of trip to Chicago to sift through Cooper’s original drawings, scarce writings, and working papers. Copiously illustrated with proofs of Cooper’s work, unpublished typefaces, and photographs of rare design work, his legacy is brought into contemporary focus. New biographical information about Cooper, his work, and his associates is discussed within.

An excerpt:

Bertsch & Cooper was a visionary commercial art service. They were one of the first shops in Chicago that offered to create layouts, compose artwork, and typeset text all under one roof. They continually added staff, resulting in a scattershot assortment of illustrators, draftsmen, and compositors peppered throughout the same building in a variety of rooms. At their first location, Bertsch was famous for his “inter-office communication system” which consisted of yelling upstairs and down from the inner balcony of the building to professional associates. Cooper was ensconced in the “bull pen”- a room with a half dozen or so other commercial artists scratching away at the jobs of the day. Cooper was renowned for his “filing system”- a towering, dusty, haphazardly curved pile of layouts, proofs, notes, and other assorted papers that loomed over his desk, each day’s ephemera separated by a newspaper from that date.

This pile grew in relation with Bertsch & Cooper’s increasing roster of clients, which included a number of local Chicago businesses including doctors’ offices, legal firms, coffee shops, and banks, New York’s Marchbanks Press, the department store Marshall Fields, Strathmore Papers, Red Book Magazine, American Printer Magazine, and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. Cooper’s distinctive lettering can be found on a series of public service announcements for the United States government’s Food Administration, exhorting the public to eat less and conserve rations during World War One.

The article was jointly designed by myself and the Shirai Design Office, the esteemed designers of Idea. It contains the first public showing of Cooper Italic Complete.

Oh, and it’s in both English and Japanese.

I’ll be exhibiting a number of illustrations drawn for the recent Blunt Mechanic CD on Barsuk Records on February 13th at the Sakura Gallery in Nakameguro.

The exhibition is an all-day art party and exhibition, running from noon until 10pm.

Sakura Gallery
Meguro-ku
Nakameguro 2-5-28 1F
Tel. 03-6277-2100

Supported by Niigata Beer, Chazymo, Aroma Tea Ale, and Mooring Deck.
map here.

My latest print project, a double poster set called “Poster Initiative 004A” will debut at Grasshut in Portland, Oregon in the show “Staying Put”. The show opens tomorrow, February 6.

The show is a collection of prints from folks such as Yellena James, Tim Biskup, Scrappers, Chris Johanson, APAK, Mauro Gatti, Shawn Wolfe, The Little Friends of Printmaking, Studio Folk, and others.

Work from the show is available online here.

Location:
Grasshut
811 East Burnside
Portland, OR 97214
503.445.9924

Just released via MyFonts, my latest typeface release is the definitive version of Oswald Bruce Cooper’s great lost typeface Cooper Fullface Italic.

At the end of 1927, Oswald Bruce Cooper yearned to create a heavy “modern” face- akin to Broadway and other display types in height and proportion, but more nuanced while being a dense, black type. The Barnhart Brothers & Spindler foundry, for whom Cooper had designed a number of typefaces, saw the potential of the typeface as a big seller. Richard McArther, General Manager of the foundry, referred to it as “the hotsy stuff”, though he was highly critical of a number of characters in the original design. He requested a successive number of modifications, including the addition of Dwiggins-inspired serifs to the face to make it stand apart from similarly-weighted typefaces then on the market. He wanted to imbue the face with a considerable amount of “old-timey” flavor in order to impart a sense of originality to the face and have it sell across both Modern and Bodoni/Didot market segments.

The resulting typeface was called Cooper Fullface, a jaunty and swollen caricature of a Didone with great potential for display advertising work. The final form of the face was a regulated and consistent balance of cartoonishness and earnest visual braggadocio, the bouncy, circus fairway-like swing of the original drawings of the letters taken down considerably and figures redrawn and redrawn for maximum readability.

A specimen sheet was mailed out in 1929, and generated moderate sales, but too late- Barnhart Brothers & Spindler closed its foundry division shortly thereafter as part of ATF’s corporate roll-up of manufacturing. The American Type Founders continued to produce the face and sell it at a decent pace, renaming it Cooper Modern.

Cooper designed a matching italic for Cooper Fullface, but it was never released. The BB&S foundry closure resulted in the foundry equipment being shipped to New Jersey a few weeks shy of the typeface’s completion. It is unfortunate, as the accompanying italic is perhaps Cooper’s masterpiece, a lively Bodoni-esque italic with more than a bit of influence from 19th Century display types, particularly in the treatment of the ball serifs on the uppercase “A”, “J”, “M”, and “N”. Cooper Fullface Italic stands as the until-now missing bookend to Cooper’s career as a type designer.

This digital release is the revival of that lost Cooper typeface, Cooper Fullface Italic. Within are two typefaces- Cooper Fullface Italic and Cooper Fullface Italic Fancy. The two faces span the range of Cooper’s original drawings- the Fancy typeface utilizing a number of alternate characters.

These two typefaces are the result of researching Cooper’s original drawings and series of engraved proofs for both typefaces. The typefaces include the original ligatures, original Oz Cooper ornaments, fancy swash characters, and a range of punctuation and diacritics, et al, that fill out a full character set. The typefaces have been lovingly kerned for the smoothest result in text setting.

Available via MyFonts.

Two new font releases on MyFonts this week.

The first is the definitive version of Oswald Bruce Cooper’s classic typeface Cooper Italic.

1924 saw the release of Cooper Italic, the italic companion to Cooper Oldstyle. Cooper Italic possesses “a most unusual swing” in a number of the characters, most specifically the scooped, pigeon-toed feet of the lowercase “n”, “h”, and “m”. These idiosyncratic characters are offset by more stately and assured capitals. Cooper said that his Italic is “much closer to its parent pen form than the roman” and “that freedom is almost the life of it”.

Cooper was a firm believer in creating humanist letterforms that echo the hand that created them, not wringing the life out of them through refinement and mechanization. In Cooper’s own words about Cooper Italic, “The designer is conscious of its crudity, and of its irreverence for the best traditions. But he believes that there are enough good types already– that the need is for poor types that can be used! And since he admits this to be a poor one, there now remains to be found out only whether it is usable or not.” Cooper was long a believer that good type should be homely- if too pretty or sleek, it’s lifespan would be exponentially shortened.

Cooper designed a set of swash capitals to pair with Cooper Italic in 1927 that had not been released until now. The swash capitals are a lively interpretation of round serifed oldstyle caps mixed with classic Caslon italic forms.

These two typefaces are the result of researching Cooper’s original drawings and series of engraved proofs for both typefaces. The typefaces include the original ligatures (never before released digitally), the previously unreleased Swash characters, and a range of punctuation and diacritics, et al, that fill out a full character set. The typefaces have been lovingly kerned for the smoothest result in text setting.

Cooper Italic Complete is available from MyFonts here.

The second typeface release is called Stacker. Stacker is a display gothic typeface with three weights of extruded typefaces that can be used to project the main typeface spatially.

Originally designed for Beautiful/Decay magazine, then picked up for Nokia’s 2006 Europe campaign, Stacker is a bold, lively, attention-grabbing display face.

The extruded faces can be used in a standalone manner, as they have been by electronic musicians such as YACHT and E*Rock.

Stacker is available from MyFonts here.

Last chance to sign up for Typography 101 at Temple University Japan.

The course has been expanded to include designing custom typefaces and programming digital fonts from them.

Clobber Grotesk Stencil Bold is a new typeface I designed now available through MyFonts. Clobber marries crude stencil forms with extreme legibility/readability at small sizes.

The Peace Sweater project that I worked on with Ryo Chikushi Bordini, Stefan Sagmeister, Oded Ezer, Dainippon Type Organization, and many others is now available online.

In TAB’s words:

Typography meets fashion with this limited edition sweater with a simple message. Top designers from around the globe contributed the word Peace in their own language, woven together into a harmonious typographic pattern and then printed on a beautifully tailored organic cotton sweater. More than a fashion item, it is an environmental and uplifting statement for a brighter future.

Next Mammal live show: Pecha Kucha Night Tokyo on December 2nd at Super Deluxe.

My new band Mammal with Mari Kojima will debut next week at Tokyo Art Beat’s 5th Anniversary party at SuperDeluxe in Tokyo.

I’ll be debuting and giving away installment #3 of my Poster Initiative offset-printed poster series at Super Deluxe this Wednesday during my Pecha Kucha Night presentation. The posters are produced in editions of 1,000 and distributed around Tokyo. Not advertising- just free design for the people.

I’ll be doing a glib presentation on the “The Year in Review”- a look back over highlight projects for my design studio in 2009.

at SuperDeluxe
1000yen /1 drink
B1F 3-1-25 Nishi Azabu, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-0031
+81 (0)3-5412-0515
http://www.super-deluxe.com

I have the dubious honor of being the very first Pecha Kucha Night presenter to have a presentation presented online at PKN’s new Presentations section of their website, designed by UltraSuperNew. You can listen to me sputter, babble, and throw out half-truths here, as recorded 2+ years ago.

I’ll be presenting again this Wednesday, doing my “Year in Review”, updating interested folks (and uninterested folks schmoozing over drinks) about what my design studio has been up to in 2009. Come on down!

at SuperDeluxe
1000yen /1 drink
B1F 3-1-25 Nishi Azabu, Minato-ku, Tokyo 106-0031
+81 (0)3-5412-0515
http://www.super-deluxe.com

Scion Installation 5: Self Portrait - Final Show & Online Art Auction Trailer from Scion ART on Vimeo.

All of the work in Scion’s latest Installation tour is available for public auction here. All artwork sale proceeds go to funding Creative Capital, a non-profit organization benefitting artists.