Miscellany № 37: welcome to :Düsseldorf

Departure board in Düsseldorf Airport
Departure board in Düsseldorf Airport. (Photo by the author.)

I must apologise for the radio silence this past weekend; my wife and I were visiting Düsseldorf in Germany for a few days of archaeological sightseeing, museum going, and tasting of regional beers. One thing caught my eye as soon as we arrived, as you can see above: the city’s new logo, designed by advertising agency BBDO, could be seen from the airport to the Altstadt. The Local reports that BBDO head Frank Loetze said: “We wanted an over-arching symbol which exudes the feeling of living in the city — the grinning D is concise and appealing. And we decided on red and white as they are the colours of the city.”1

Though it isn’t explicitly mentioned, I feel certain that BBDO must have been inspired by the umlaut over Düsseldorf’s ‘u’. Certainly, at a time when some German businesses are abandoning their umlauts for the sake of clarity in international business dealings,2 Düsseldorf’s new logo positively celebrates it, and the sans-serif Ü in :DÜSSELDORF is as cheery as the :D with which it starts.

In other news, I somehow managed to miss Tom Humberstone’s punctuation support group comic strip in the New Statesman when it was first published back in July. Very remiss of me, but here it is nevertheless. Better late than never!

Nick Sherman is on the hunt for a monospaced typeface that contains a manicule, or “monocule”, as he has it. Can you help?

Manicule in an undated printed book. (Image © 2013 Special Collections and Archives, Cardiff University Library. All rights reserved.)
Manicule in an undated printed book. (Image © 2013 Special Collections and Archives, Cardiff University Library. All rights reserved.)

Also on the subject of the manicule (and arriving late to the party yet again) I recently came across an excellent post on the subject of the manicule from Cardiff University Library’s Special Collections and Archives. In it Ken Gibb presents a bevy of manicules to ogle, including the lovely printed example shown here. Take a look!

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading!

1.
“Düsseldorf Mayor Launches ’friendly’ Logo”. The Local.

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2.
“German Firms Ditch Umlauts for Global Trade”. The Local.

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Unboxing

Hello! (Image by the author.)
Hello! (Image by the author.)

Two long-awaited parcels — one from W. W. Norton, the other from Particular Books — arrived this week. With just less than a month to go before publication, I now have some copies of the finished books! They’re both rather amazing.

Above left is Jason Booher’s* cover for W. W. Norton. My shoddy photographic skills don’t really do it justice at all: there’s some very subtle embossing in there that gives the cover design extra depth, and the matte finish is just lovely. I keep wanting to run my hands over it. Also not visible from the photo are the spine, back cover and flaps, all of which carry on the orthographic theme and which look great in their own right.

On the right is Matthew Young’s cover for Particular Books. One pleasant surprise for me was the way in which the front and back covers match up — you don’t have to buy two copies, of course, but they’ll look sharp together if you do! Very nifty. I also love Matthew’s use of what I believe is P22 Johnston Underground, the modernised, licensed version of Edward Johnston’s 1916 London Underground typeface. I’ve always wanted to use that typeface but never quite got it to work the way I imagined it should. Here, though, it is fantastic.

Needless to say, if either of these editions take your fancy then you can pre-order the book today!

*
I earlier (and erroneously) said that Judith Abbate designed this cover. Judith is instead responsible for the excellent internal design of the book. My apologies to Jason! On a serious note, I’m afraid to say that Judith is currently undergoing treatment for cancer of the appendix. Go here if you’d like to help defray the quite staggering medical costs that she and her family are facing. ↢

Miscellany № 36: the rarity of the shady character

A short but sweet entry today, I’m afraid. Don’t worry, though; with a bit of luck, I should have something rather special for you next week. For now, though, on with the show!

First up is an article on Samuel Arbesman’s Social Dimension blog over at Wired, entitled “The Rarity of the Ampersand: Frequencies of Special Characters”.*

USASCII code chart
USASCII code chart.

Arbesman is an applied mathematician, and he writes about an experiment carried out by Michael Dickens to determine the relative frequencies of characters in a variety of contexts such as prose, casual writing, and programming. Dickens confined himself to the component characters of the now decidedly old-school ASCII code, but the results are instructive nonetheless. There are some familiar faces at the bottom of the list: &, <, %, @, #, ^, `, and ~ bring up the rear for both punctuation characters only and all symbols combined. Perhaps the tilde, percent sign and caret should be in the running for Shady Characters 2!

Continuing with the theme of character frequency analysis, I recently came across a site called Context of Diacritics, whose creator Ondrej Jób describes it as “an analysis of diacritics made to help type designers with refining the character sets of their fonts.” Ondrej and his collaborators have mined Wikipedia articles written in a variety of different languages to derive a list of frequencies for characters with diacritic marks (ä, ř, đ, and so on) and pairs of letters with diacritics (çõ, ół, and so on). And though CoD is ostensibly a tool to help type designers focus on the most widely used combinations of characters and diacritics in their target languages, it’s a visual and typographic treat even for non-type designers like myself. Take a look! What’s your favourite diacritic/letter pair?

*
Arbesman also links to a new article on the Apple command symbol, or ⌘. We’ve talked about this before on Shady Characters, of course, but new material on unusual symbols is always welcome and Mike Wehner’s article “Mac 101: The history of the Command key ‘pretzel’” is still worth a read. ↢

Miscellany № 35: Jay (±-) Z

This week, there is one punctuation-related news story that towers above all others. In the world of musical name changes, Prince’s adoption in 1993 of an unpronounceable glyph called only “Love Symbol #2” must surely retain the crown for sheer outlandishness, but Jay-Z’s reported un-hyphenation has nevertheless set the music press and mainstream media ablaze.12 It all started on the 18th of July when Billboard editor Joe Levy tweeted:

Breaking: Jay Z has dropped the hyphen from his name, according to his label. I am not kidding. (Wish I was.) Copy editors: take note.3

Within days, the story had been picked up by The Atlantic, Pitchfork Media, and many other respectable news outlets, with The Huffington Post running a tongue-in-cheek “Obituary for Jay-Z’s Hyphen”.456 @JayZsHyphen, a parody Twitter account (“Hey @WuTangClan are you guys hiring?”), appeared the very same day Levy broke the news, while Funny or Die ran a spoof Craigslist advert a few days later (“Hardworking SBL [Straight Black Line] seeking immediate, full or part-time employment [see recent photo between the words ‘part’ and ‘time’].”).78

Was it a slow news day? Certainly, the eagerness with which reporters fell on the story seems rather premature in the light of the fact that the rapper and producer had actually dropped the hyphen — or at least tentatively begun to do so — two years previously. Brian Mansfield’s 19th July article for USA Today, entitled “Jay Z’s missing hyphen? It’s been gone for two years”, rather gave the lie to Joe Levy’s excited, day-old tweet.9 Opening with the line, “This is what happens when newspapers cut back on copy editors”, Mansfield went on to explain that Jay-Z had been credited as “Jay Z” on his 2011 collaboration with Kanye West, and that the hyphen is similarly gone from Magna Carta Holy Grail, his current effort.

Less than two weeks on the furore has more or less burned itself out, with only a few laggards such as CNN bringing up the rear with posts that have rather missed their window of opportunity.10 As much as I love the hyphen and its bithorpe siblings, I can’t help but feel rather unmoved by the whole episode. What do you think? Is this a misplaced storm in a teacup, or a genuinely worthwhile news story?

In other news, David Sudweeks continues his excellent series of posts at the FontShop blog with a new treatise on Whitespace and invisible characters. This post is a little more technical than previous entries, focusing on the ins and outs of Adobe’s InDesign software, but it’s still very much worth a read. Over at the Washington Post, Ron Charles looks at the difficulties that David Gilbert’s new novel, & Sons, is causing Amazon’s search facilities.

Thanks for reading!

1.
Greene, Andy. “The 25 Boldest Career Moves In Rock History: Prince Changes His Name to an Unpronounceable Symbol”. Rolling Stone. Accessed July 28, 2013.

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2.
Prince Vault. “Album: Symbol”. Accessed July 28, 2013.

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3.
Levy, Joe. “Breaking: Jay Z Has Dropped the Hyphen from His Name, According to His Label. I Am Not Kidding. (Wish I was.) Copy Editors: Take Note”. Twitter.

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4.
Kornhaber, Spencer. “Jay-Z Joins To-Day and Ice-Cream in the Hyphen Graveyard”. The Atlantic.

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5.
Battan, Carrie. “The Artist Formerly Known As Jay-Z Removes Hyphen From His Name”. Pitchfork Media.

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6.
Duca, Lauren. “An Obituary for Jay-Z’s Hyphen”. The Huffington Post.

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7.
Morrissey, Josh. “Hey @WuTangClan Are You Guys Hiring?”. Twitter.

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8.
O’Brien, Pat. “Jay Z’s Hyphen Is Looking for Jobs On Craigslist”.

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9.
Mansfield, Brian. “Jay Z’s Missing Hyphen? It’s Been Gone for Two Years”. USATODAY.com.

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10.
The Marquee Blog. “JAY Z’s Hyphen Looking for Work”.

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