Filmotype and the CBS Wall

I had planned to release a series of reflections on TypeCon 2009 immediately after the conference, but instead ended up in bed with pneumonia…

TypeCon featured lots of great speakers and projects about current typeface design, experimentation and challenges facing the community. And there were several sessions of note about historic preservation of some of type industries forgotten treasures.

The Filmotype

Stuart Sandler from Font Diner and Font Bros detailed the forgetton history of the Filmotype. The Filmotype was a portable photo typesetting machine that became popular in the 1950s. (Portable might be generous. The thing looked like it weighed a ton…)

Basically, it was used to set headlines without having to send the work out to a service. To support it, the Filmotype Company created hundreds of alphabets to their clients. Stuart has published a book on the Filmotype and purchased the rights to the font library.

He is working with a group of type designers to digitize the collection. Several of the typefaces have already been released.

The CBS Wall (aka, the Gastrotypographicalassemblage)

Rick Anwyl from The Center for Design Study in Atlanta detailed their efforts to restore the CBS Wall – also affectionately refered to as the Gastrotypographicalassemblage. It’s an amazing piece – and an amazing story. Basically, this inticate wall was created for the CBS cafeteria in New York by Lou Dorfsman and Herb Lubalin in a pre-computer, pre-laser fabrication era. It was dismantled and discarded… and rescued. And then sat in storage for decades.

The Center for Design Study in Atlanta is in the process of cordinating the resortation of the Gastrotypographicalassemblage. You can visit their site for details on the project.

More powerful text placement in InDesign

So let’s say you have a long text to place into InDesign – a magazine article or a training manual. In talking to some friends who are InDesign users, many of them place the text one frame at a time. But it can be so much easier than that…

Enlargements of InDesign’s text placement cursors. The cursors (and functions) change depending on what additional modifier keys are pressed. From left to right: Manual (default), Semi-Autoflow (Option/Alt), Autoflow (Shift) and Fixed-Page Autoflow (Shift + Option/Alt).

Default behavior…

When your cursor is loaded with text in InDesign, you can place the copy by clicking or by drawing a text box. You load your cursor by going to File>Place or by clicking on a text frame’s overset indicator (the red plus in the lower right “out port”).

If you click on the page, a text frame is created to fill either the page margins or a single column. (You set the margins and column settings when you open a new document.) If you draw a text frame, the text fills the new frame.

One more thing to note about the default behavior. When you are done placing the text, the tool reverts back to what it was before you went to File>Place. So if the Rectangle Tool was selected when you loaded your cursor, after you place the text, the tool becomes a rectangle again. Most of the time, that’s exactly the behavior you want.

Hold down the option key…

(Or the Alt key for you Windows users) If you are placing a long piece of text, you may want to draw a few text boxes and have the story flow between them. In this case, the default behavior of reverting back to original tool is irritating because it forces you to keep switching tools.

However, if you hold down the option key, the cursor stays loaded. You can continue to click or draw frames and the copy with automatically flow between them.

Or the shift key…

So let’s say you have a long training document that’s going to be several pages. When you place the copy, you keep having to add pages and link the text frames. If only InDesign would add the pages and frames for you…

Well, it can. Hold down the shift key when your text is loaded and click. InDesign will autoflow the copy, adding pages and text frames for the entire length of the copy.

Note: If you hold down the shift key and try to draw a text box, the default behavior kicks in and the tool reverts to what it was before you placed the text.

Use the shift key and the option/alt key together…

If you hold down the shift and option keys at the same time and click, InDesign autoflows the copy for that spread only, but it leaves the cursor loaded. If you draw a new text frame instead of just clicking, the copy doesn’t autoflow, but the cursor does stay loaded.

Reflections on the "Death of Handwriting."

Time has an article this week on “Mourning the Death of Handwriting.” It’s an interesting read…

People born after 1980 tend to have a distinctive style of handwriting: a little bit sloppy, a little bit childish and almost never in cursive. The knee-jerk explanation is that computers are responsible for our increasingly illegible scrawl, but Steve Graham, a special-education and literacy professor at Vanderbilt University, says that’s not the case. The simple fact is that kids haven’t learned to write neatly because no one has forced them to. “Writing is just not part of the national agenda anymore,” he says.

I have attrocious handwriting. I learned to print in kindergarten, first and second grade in North Carolina. And then we moved to Illinois for third grade. One small problem, though. In Illinois, students learned cursive in the second grade and required all third graders to write everything in cursive. So I was instantly behind.

My teacher basically forced me to learn cursive within a couple of weeks. The resulting script was never natural, always appearing forced. Eventually, I dropped the cursive for a somewhat illegible print-cursive hybrid. Other than a severe dislike of writing thank you notes and cards, I’ve never really run into a problem.

Despite the overhyped headline, I do not think handwriting will go away. People will write on paper for decades (and centuries) to come. But I think the art of handwriting is out of fashion, in the schools and with children. Formal handwriting is simply not a priority at this point in time for either.

As for me, I will always wish my handwriting was a little better.