A Deco letter all the way from LA

Actually, the title ought to read "A Deco letter all the way from LB", because the school is located in Long Beach. But... LA is far more known than LB, and the title was already in place so I'll leave it there. Long Beach is a little to the south of Los Angeles.


This letter was photographed by John Williams PhD from Los Angeles. The letter B stands for Buffum, as in Buffum Elementary School. The school was named after Dorothy Buffum Chandler (1901-1997) a Los Angeles cultural leader.
I saw the picture on Flickr and my first thought was: this should be mage into a font. Unfortunately there is only this B and nothing else. So the design will have to be made from scratch:


Well, what has to be done, has to be done. The frist thing to do is brush up the B a little, so that it may serve as a template for a complete alphabet. After some twiddling I arrived at:


This looks nice, although I may have tried to round the design a bit too much. For starters this seems OK, but I'll give it some more thought.
Update 1 The first glimpse of the new design. The H is too unclear and the I possibly a little too bold and that O should probably get rid of the flat top and bottom.



Update 1 - As promised the design has been simmering during the week and after a very interesting conversation about typography yesterday evening over a plate of perfect tempura, this is the 2nd result:


Maybe the E and F need some more width, I'll experiment a little with that option. A test with a middle stroke of the E sticking out was abandoned rather quickly. That meant I had to do someting similar to the F, making that character top-heavy.
And yes, I tested the new font with the dreadfull "HiHo", as sung by Snowwhite's 7 dwarfs. That looked like this:

Celebrations in Amsterdam

Today, July 3rd, marks the beginning of the 'Lustrumviering' (the 75 year jubilee) of the Amsterdam Old Course. This is a golf club that is wedged between railroad tracks, modern buildings and the Amsterdam Arena Football Stadium. The club is active since 1935 and not even the war could break the spirit of the members. It has been tried, though, by dropping a bomb almost on top of Tee 1 (transforming that spot into a huge bomb crater) and the digging of an anti-tank ditch by the German forces. This had a length of 1¾ miles, was some 40 feet wide and had a depth of 19 feet. And all that straight through the course.


Club member and graphics designer Lucy Prijs discovered the font Mokum Stad on the internet and decided that had the right character for this special occasion. The clubhouse was designed by architect F.A. Warners who has had a distinct influence on the housing in Amsterdam.


He was very fond of the concept of apartment buildings, the precursors to modern skyscrapers. He was one of the proponents of the Amsterdam School. He designed - among many other objects - the Atlanta Building and the Oldenhoeck complex. The latter is one of the finest examples of the mid-period of the Amsterdam School.


Yesterday (on the hottest day of the year so far) I got a sneak preview of how the font is used by the club. Score cards, invitations and even golf balls are adorned by the font. I'm holding one of them (topmost image), showing the usage of the font.

Practical application of the fonts (6)

Publishing house Ginkgo from Leyden, The Netherlands, just came out with a book called "Kijken naar Gebouwen", translated "Looking at Buildings". A great overview of the architecture in the southern part of Amsterdam. My font Mokum Tooneel was chosen as the font for the cover. And yes, I am pleased and honored.


Opening the book I got a nice surprise in the form of an architectural drawing for the Amsterdam Lyceum, a school that was built between 1918 and 1920. The architect was H.A.J. Baanders. The lettering on the drawing is - in my opinion - awesome, and the next project is to reconstruct and digitize it.


Further information about the activities of Ginkgo Publishers may be found on their website.

Practical application of the fonts (5)

Several times a week I pass the city of Gouda by train. Near the railroad tracks is a wonderful building, called De Kade. It used to be a school, but now it is being rebuilt to house a medical facility. The building was done in Amsterdamse School style, and guess what font is used now?


Yes, it is Mokum Stad. And yes I feel flattered! This is, after all, the reason I recreate the old fonts. Sometimes in the near future I will visit the building to take some more pictures. The picture above was made when the building was just finished, in 1930.