Frankenstein meets Frankenfont

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, reinvented from fragments of PDF fonts by the team at Fathom Information Design in Boston.
A team of visual storytellers from Fathom lead by data-viz wiz Ben Fry, recently recreated the entire text of Frankenstein using characters and glyphs from over 64,000 PDF documents obtained through internet searches. Precisely 55,382 different glyph shapes were extracted from 347,565 fonts in the PDFs, which were then coded and sequenced to fill all of the 342,889 individual letters found in the Frankenstein text. What emerges from this DNA-like sequencing is a new Frankenfont creation formed from font fragments by Fathoms' Fry and friends.
      The story opens with the display of the most common characters such as Arial, Helvetica and Times New Roman. As the story of the Frankenstein monster evolves, so does the text which is coded to completely devolve into grotesque shapes near the end. Familiar glyphs and fonts merge into obscure scripts; non-Roman fonts begin to appear; and even typefaces morph into pictograms. This Frankenfont transformation becomes the perfect metaphor for Shelley's classic tale of the deformed monster Frankenstein. 

While most books are typically designed to interpret the authors' words with little fanfare and with an obedience to convention as Stanley Morrison once put it, Fry's new Frankenfont edition plays with our sense of order, and the traditional design principles such as consistency, navigation and readability go entirely out the window. As a teacher of book design and typography for many years, I strongly advocate these principles of convention to my students. Afterall, books have been successfully published in this manner for over 500 years. Despite this endorsement, I'm also a big fan of innovation and experimentation in books. In Fry's edition of Frankenstein, a hallmark of book design and innovation has been reached with this conceptual approach to text layout.
      As a timely sidenote to this story, the topic of a frankenfont came up in my classroom just 2 weeks ago when Kevin Larson from the Advanced Reading Technologies Department at Microsoft, was speaking to my students about readability studies of various typefonts and individual characters. Larson is a text enthusiast and has published many studies on the science of word recognition and legibility of characters. The suggestion of a frankenfont was mentioned in jest as one which could build upon the best characters of many fonts in order to achieve greater legibility. The next day, my student Susan Schumacher added a post on our class Facebook page with a link to Fathom's new Frankenfont edition of Frankenstein.
      Copies of the Frankenfont project can be purchased in paperback or hardback editions on Blurb with all profits given to Donors Choose to buy books for students. Incidently, Ben Fry was recently awarded a National Design Award in Interaction Design in June from the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. 

All of the nearly 5500 unique words to be found in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. (Click image to expand). The key to any great novel is to put them all in the right place ; )
:: Thanks to James Gaddy of Co.Design for packaging this story so nicely.

Chip Kidd on New Murakami Book

The fewer books published, the better the content. When the book publishing and design bar continue to steadily rise, we all win.

Subtext: The Reading Experience Explained

:: Thanks for the link Matt Sowecke!

Lettres

Lettres by Jean Loisy, published in 1948 by Arts et Métiers Graphiques in France, and kindly provided by Michael Newhouse on Flickr. I love this cover design at top, but am seriously angsting over the lack of kerning in between that last pair of lettres. Many more interior pages filled with inspirational hand-lettering examples from 60+ years ago can be seen on his Flickr site.  

The L Book

A few vintage L Book yearbooks from Lawrence Tech in Southfield, Michigan. I'm hopeful Letterology may someday have its very own
L Book when I get a team of writers and photographers like this. 
::Via the Lawrence Tech University Library Flickrstream.

The Man With a Beard

The English translation for the title of this 1961 Czechoslovakian book, Monolecky, Muze s Plnovousem translates to Monolecky, Man With a Beard. It was written by Jiri R. Pick (1925-1983) and brilliantly designed by Milos Noll (1926-1998) who took great liberty with the display of the text.
      The book is quite small at 5x7 inches, and has 144 pages filled with such playful typography, one could easily mistake it for a children's book at first glance. Noll plays with combinations of advertising cuts and printers' ornaments throughout the book and manipulates the mostly sans serif letterforms in every direction to create his images. At times he even weaves the actual text into some of his illustrations. Everything was fair game to Noll. Even the publisher's logo, MF (Mlada Fronta), on the back of the dust jacket is taken hostage. The endflaps of the dust jacket as seen below are remarkable, if only for the challenge of setting large text in such narrow, justified columns (hence all the hyphens) and they boldly bookend the entire text quite nicely. Sorry, but I have no idea what the significance of the border of 8s are doing there on the endflaps. Matter of fact, I don't even know how to characterize this story, except that I've read that it's sort of a comic satirical verse about music, writing and theater. If anyone knows differently or can read and discern some of the story from the text in these images, please let me know.    

Title page.

Chapter opening which I believe translates to complex, or it's complicated.

The impressive Table of Contents which curiously appears near the end of the book. 

The copyright | publisher's page on last page. 

The hardcover binding which Milos Noll also designed.
:: Via the Letterology Archives.
Apologies for the lack of diacritical spelling in the Czech names. Blogger was choking on them today. 

Cover Curiosities

I've been cleaning out my attic and bookshelves lately and rediscovered some old forgotten books. Some of these gems are silkscreened trade bindings, while most are printed by letterpress which would technically make them cloth stamped bindings. Often they are designed by anonymous artists. My favorite is the book above, which is in lousy shape, sadly. I recall buying it years ago just for the cover design. The title appears to be all hand-lettered, and the copyright page is missing, but the owner boldly signed his name and date of 1917 in blackletter penwork on the endsheets. This was just a few years prior to the the time designer W.A. Dwiggins was credited for coining the term, graphic designer in 1922, which has since displaced the less descriptive label of commercial artist. I'll do my best to post all of these books on Flickr before long, with more information on each. 
Note to self: clean more often.

Book!s and More

Silkscreened title on cover of Book!s, designed by John Alcorn. Below are 4 interior pages.

I have no idea of the name of this funny words font from Books!, but I'll just call it Sixties Hallmark Card. Much of the Hallmark greeting card style of that era was heavily influenced by the Push Pin Studio culture which John Alcorn helped to create.

John Alcorn (1935-1992) is a member of an exclusive league of gifted illustrators who happen to also excel at design and typography, and his career crossed many varied paths. He worked briefly at Esquire magazine before joining the celebrated Push Pin Studios team of Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, Edward Sorel and Reynold Ruffins in 1956 and left his indelible mark on much of the Push Pin published works. In 1958 he joined Lou Dorfsman at CBS where he helped to define the brand of the iconic CBS eye logo. His accomplishments in the publishing world were many, including dozens of book cover designs for Rizzoli in Milan, and his playful, invented letterforms and illustrations adorned many children's books. In 1962 he illustrated and designed Murray McCain's book, Books!, which was selected as one of the AIGAs best fifty books of the year (50 Books | 50 Covers) in 1963. This book was followed up in 1964 with the children's book, Writing! In addition to book design, he went on to design posters and opening credits for several of Federico Fellini's legendary films. 
      Clearly, Alcorn helped to define much of the graphic look of the 1960s and 70s, influencing everyone from Mad Men advertisers, album cover designers, Hallmark card artists and numerous magazine art directors. Even Peter Max seemingly found inspiration in his work. He's not alone—as a young artist in the 60s, I myself, can recall being heavily influenced by Alcorn's flamboyant style as well—yet I never knew who to credit until now. Not until I picked up the book, Books! and did a little google-sleuthing, and I'm glad I did. Below are more images of his work, but you really must visit the John Alcorn Gallery archive to see far more. However, don't leave there without taking a look at this 1956 photo.

From Jan Wahl's book, Pocahontas in London, 1967, Delacorte Press.
::Via Oange's Flickrstream

John Alcorn's ironic instructions on how to create a Dadaist poem. Published in the Push Pin Graphic, No. 11, December 1957. Coincidentally, I came across a similar concept in a video on Beat poet and writer William Borroughs this past week.
::Via the Container List: Milton Glaser Archives.

The Push Pin Monthly Graphic cover, About Fishing issue, 1957.
::Via Animalarium

Poster design for Fellini's 1973 film, Amarcord.
::Via VinMag