Glog

Glenn Fleishman Interrogates the Past

Design

Toshi Omagari, Type Designer and Video Game Font Historian

podcast

Toshi Omagari, Type Designer and Video Game Font Historian

Toshi Omagari (Photo: Yasuyuki Omagari)
Toshi Omagari (Photo: Yasuyuki Omagari)

Toshi Omagari studied Visual Communication Design at Musashino Art University, Japan, and then got his master's in Typeface Design at the University of Reading in England. From 2012 to 2020, he worked at Monotype, one of the leading digital type foundries, with roots that date back well over a century. During that time, he created his own faces and revivals, including a major reworking and expansion of five typefaces created by Berthold Wolpe. Toshi runs his own font studio now, and lectures and teaches.

His 2019 book, Arcade Game Typography (find it at a bookstore), is an incredible deep dive into the 8-by-8 pixel fonts used in early video game systems and arcade consoles. Just a few days before we spoke, he posted a blog entry about ink traps and light traps, which has the kind of obsessive detail that appeals to someone like me,

podcast

Amy Redmond and Jenny Wilkson (The Tiny Typecast)

One of the heavily used presses at the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle
One of the heavily used presses at the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle

In this installment of the Tiny Typecast, I speak with artists, designers, and educators Amy Redmond and Jenny Wilkson, who work primarily in letterpress. Jenny founded the letterpress program at the School of Visual Concepts in Seattle, Washington, and Amy studied typecasting, typesetting, and letterpress printing in an apprenticeship with Chris Stern and Jules Faye.

The vibrant local community of printers keep traditions alive while also stoking the fires of a new generation and trying new kinds of printing, mixing different techniques onto the press, and new methods of making material for press, like laser cutters.

This episode was recorded before the pandemic. Letterpress will rise again, just as it has before.

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Amy Redmond and Jenny Wilkson
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Crowdfunding

Order Your Museum and Follow its Progress

The Tiny Type Museum & Time Capsule crowdfunding campaign funded magnificently—thank you to everyone who backed the campaign and the larger number of people who provided moral support and design suggestions!

I’m now taking direct pre-orders for elements of the project. Most museum are now spoken for (about two-thirds of the edition of 100 I’m making), but you still have time to order one, as well as pre-ordering separately the book I’m writing for it, Six Centuries of Type & Printing, which will be typeset in Monotype hot metal and printed by letterpress. The museum and book are in preparation for delivery in January 2020.

Here’s where you can order the various components:

Crowdfunding

The Tiny Type Museum and Time Capsule

Update: The project was wildly successful, and I’ll be making elements of it available for separate order soon at tinytypemuseum.com.

My latest typographic project is now live: I’m raising funds to build up to 100 tiny type museums and time capsules! These little museums will comprise actual historical and modern type artifacts, replicas, and printing samples—like a real museum—and the case and its components will be designed to last for centuries—or longer—like a real time capsule.

The cost isn’t low, but I tried to balance the authenticity and lifespan of the project, to give it substance and longevity, with the budget. I hope you’ll take a look at the main reward of the museum, and other campaign items, which include a book and a Linotype “slug” of type.

Design

Live Podcast Taping at Ada’s on January 23: Life of a Letterpress Printer

Join me January 23 from 6:30 to 8:30 as I host an episode of his podcast The New Disruptors live at Ada's Technical Books and Café in Seattle with three letterpress printers as guests to talk about making some or all of their living in the 21st century by working in the past with techniques, equipment, and type that date as far back as the 19th century and earlier.

My panel discussion features Demian Johnston, Sarah Kulfan, and Amy Redmond, and we’ll talk about their work and practices, and how they make the past mesh with the present, especially at a time when authenticity is highly prized. The event will end with a Q&A and informal discussion. The printers and I will have some of their work on hand and available for purchase. (Note that this live event will be taped for later online audio

Podcasting

2018 Creative Year in Review

Last year was hard to top. I had a designer in residence position at the School of Visual Concepts, printed a book by letterpress, traveled to New York for a Kickstarter event, Wisconsin for the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum Wayzgoose, and to London to research a book.

2018 started weakly. I got the flu on Christmas Eve, recovered briefly, and then was so knocked out with secondary illnesses that it took me about four months to recover fully. During that time, I was also writing a book, finding new publications to write for, and figuring out what I would do across the year.

It turned out pretty well in the end.

In the first part of the year, I finished researching and writing London Kerning, and then designed the book and had it printed—and then shipped it out to hundreds of people. I undersold myself on demand

Design

The Passing of Roland Hoover, a Design Mentor

Roland Hoover, 1929–2018 (photo via APHA Chesapeake Chapter )
Roland Hoover, 1929–2018 (photo via APHA Chesapeake Chapter )

Just got the news yesterday that Roland Hoover, a design mentor from college passed away at the age of 89. He was a letterpress printer and designer, known for his fine book and other printing. I knew him as my boss at the Yale University Printing Service where he was the University Printer. He was cranky and demanding, but generous and supportive—you know: a designer!

I learned an enormous amount from him, but my big failing was not studying letterpress printing with him. I thought at the time letterpress was going to be relegated to re-enactments, because of the end of metal-type production and spare parts. I’m so glad I was wrong, and we’re living in a renaissance of craft letterpress printing. (I wrote last year for Wired about why that’s happening.)

Very little of Roland's work

Design

California Case Dreaming

I’m working on designing a small reproduction of the California job case, the classic compartmentalized drawer designed to hold a full font of metal type. Below is a first pass, and I’m working my way through prototypes.

Patrons can read the whole story (and get early access to buying one) at my Patreon campaign.

(For those in the know: the job case never included the layout guide within the compartments, showing which characters go where. For the version I'm making, however, I'll be engraving those to make it more meaningful to the non-metal-typesetting eye.)

Design

Type Geek Lanyard

Back when I started out in typesetting, production, and graphic design, we used X-Acto knives, wax, and layout boards to put the pieces together for printing. And we all, every one of us and every shop, had a variety of measuring tools that we used all the time. The type gauge and the line gauge were key ones!

As the paste-up era ended, and we moved into full pagination output and then ultimately eliminating most or all intermediate steps between digital design and the press.

But this year, in which I've spent hundreds of hours in a letterpress shop, I remember how useful it is as a designer to always have measurement tools nearby. Also this year, I met the folks at Buttonsmith, a local worker-owned, unionized, made-in-the-U.S. company that produces buttons, magnets, lanyards, and reels both in mass quantities of their own designs and custom one-off or larger

Design

Dash-dash it all! Apple’s bad beta decision on em and en dashes

Terrible news. Apple is replacing the long-running convention of typing two hyphens to obtain an em dash or “long dash.” That is, if you type --, many places in the interface in which autocorrection is enabled or third-party software takes advantage of autocorrection, it’s turned into —.

Instead, two hyphens become the shorter en dash, or –, which you may never have heard of if you’re not a print or Web designer or otherwise interested in the intricacies of formatting things. To get an em dash, you will have to type ---, a convention that also appears in TeX, a mathematical formatting language developed by Donald Knuth.

Update: In the release version, Apple contextually replaces -- with — (em dash) to connect words when you type with or without spaces on either side. If you type a number and two hyphens, it turns into a – (en dash).

Why is this terrible