Things that make me happy.
I guess, for a self-confessed junkie, happy moments come when something on the wishlist appears out of nowhere. Last week I found Bello Opentype on one of those newsgroups unexpectedly. That made a very uplifting end to an otherwise depressing week.
Bello is by Underware, a remarkably young dutch design team that has created a number of beautiful typefaces, including one of my favourite serif - dolly. Bello is amazing for not only reflecting hand-sketching and lettering (tried by many, including the well-known House Industries), but also showing the capabilities of Opentype technology.
I have been known to be notoriously selfish when it comes to typefaces. Sitting on my hard-drive is a huge treasure chest of typefaces. Not the typefaces from 5000-freefonts.com, but a collection of really amazing stuff from the list of who’s who in type business. Many had tried to get typefaces from me, and most of the time I would politely declined. I won’t care if it is from Adobe Font Folio, since it is available at RM5.00 anyways, but anything other than that - oh, sorry, no.
I once "shared" my precious Linotype Frutiger with a friend, whom I assumed had the same passion over fine typography. Later I discovered a press ad in Star for a direct selling company, using a bastardized version (horizontally compressed!) of that typeface. I was upset - very upset. I queried.
"No, we didn’t do the ad, another agency got it from our color separator."
"But in the very first place, it shouldn’t even be spec’ed in the corporate Identity…"
"Oh, I am sorry. The designer working on it didn’t know."
That was the very last time I shared a typeface with another designer.
I get upset when beautiful type gets used and abused. 95% of my collection will remain in the harddrive, used only occasionally for self-indulging projects and never used for any commercial jobs. I reckoned Bello would be one of them - to be loaded occasionally to type a few sentences for fun, then control-w-close-window. For commercial jobs I will stick to the normal typefaces - garamond caslon helvetica universe frutiger etc etc.
A little sidenote on typography: over the years I have done many sketches for different typefaces. I would like to translate these ideas to real digital type but I know I will never have the time for doing this. Anyone out there interested in working with me on this?
