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San Francisco walks, 7.

Today is the last day here in San Francisco for a few months. Just enough time left to go down to my favourite newspaper shop and get tuesday’s edition of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The coffee house opposite offers free internet, monday through friday. As I went in to get a coffee, I counted 12 people in there, each one in front of a computer. I couldn’t really take a proper photo without it being embarrassing for myself or the guests, so I just shot one from the hip without looking at the camera or the subjects. It shows five people and five computers on one side of the room.

Starbucks across the street also has online access, but only if you have a T-online account. The city of San Francisco plans to have free online access across the city very soon, so people can once again pick a café for the quality of the food and drink offered.

San Francisco walks, 6.

There are a lot of places in California named after saints. And since the Spanish missionaries were here well before any English-speaking Americans (or the Russians, who came down from Alaska and left their mark on place-names like Russian River), these towns start with San or Santa, depending on the saint’s gender. As in San Jose, Santa Barbara, San Rafael, Santa Clara, and, of course San Francisco. This one I found on a shop sign near Washington Square.

Never heard of that Saint.

San Francisco walks, 5.

Today was a pink day.

San Francisco walks, 4.

One thing that never fails to amaze me on the streets in California are the classic European cars that are around – not in showrooms, but driving around or parked on the streets. Like this ca. 1969 Mercedes 280SE with a 4.5 l engine. Those cars were hardly ever sold in Europe, because we have always paid more for petrol than here in the US. You can buy one of these classic cars for less than $5000 here, because with gas at $4 in San Francisco, some of the original owners are beginning to feel the disadvantage of these fantastic, powerful, indestructible, thirsty engines.

San Francisco walks, 3.

Amongst the things threatened with extinction for a long time has been the apostrophe. Not a big loss for mankind probably, but too bad for the typographically educated amongst us. The apostrophe is neither a foot mark nor a sharp (as in acute) accent. It is shaped like a comma, but raised to the top of the cap height. Very simple.
I’m happy to report that my favourite ice cream shop in San Francisco also has good typographic taste. The fact that the apostrophe in Swensen’s is not only typographically correct and good-looking is, unfortunately, due to the fact that it was put up there by a signwriter a long time ago, when craftsmen still had to learn a trade in order to practise it.

Gutenberg, the movie

The BBC movie by Stephen Fry has finally arrived on YouTube. It was broadcast last week but is only available online in the UK. This is the link to the first part:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91smRXrEPRs

San Francisco walks, 2.

I always carry a camera, but the extremely sunny weather (and the sun is brighter here than anywhere in Northern Europe) makes it difficult to get some motives. It is, for example, almost impossible to photograph shop windows because there is so much reflection in the glass.

I was initially only interested in the typography in this window. It may be a little over-designed in its nostalgic style, but it is a 100% fit for the subject matter and the clientele in this neighbourhood. That also clearly shown by the type of dog displayed in the window next to it, which I had not seen at first. Poodles are almost cartoons of dogs in the first place, but three of them in lightblue, pink and white certainly make a statement.

San Francisco walks, 1.

In San Francisco I walk a lot. Some of the hills are too challenging for my simple road bike, taking the car out just to get to the newspaper shop is stupid, and I have never worked out how the bus system works here.

I do, however, see people – usually older women with shopping bags – hanging around near street corners a lot. While enjoying my Swensen’s ice cream the other day, I saw them again: more and more women gathered by a shop on a corner. Then, suddenly, they were gone.

I waited a few more minutes, eating my ice cream, and more people appeared. Then I saw what brought them to that corner: it was actually a bus stop. As I walked over, I noticed that there was a yellow band painted onto a lamp post. It actually had two numbers stencilled onto it, obviously the numbers of the busses that stop there.

With this attitude towards passenger information I am not surprised that people in the US stick to their cars as much as they do.
The stop on the other side of the street at least had the words BUS STOP painted on the lamp post, but nothing else. No timetables, destinations, routes, fares. A closely guarded secret for the natives. Nobody seems to want more passengers.

34th Williams A. Dwiggins Lecture

It’s already a week ago that I held a lecture at the Boston Public Library. It was the 34th. William A. Dwiggins Lecture. As lectures go, it wasn’t all that special (apart from it being a great honour to be asked to speak in front of all those dignified printers and historians), but it was the first time that I had a lecture interrupted by a fire alarm. I just had the first slide up (see small picture) when the alarm went off.

We actually all had to move out into the street. There was the usual display of emergency hardware (I always find that on those occasions in the US they really like to show everything they have) – big trucks with and without ladders, ambulances, patrol cars, dozens of firemen (who like to be called Firefighters these days) with helmets and axes – until it transpired that it had only been a malfunctioning microwave somewhere that caused all this fuss!

Nick Sherman had the presence of mind to film the moment when the alarm went off. He also took the little picture here that I just downloaded from his flickr site. I designed a poster and an invitation for the evening. The card is shown below.

I’ve also added a download for the pdf that was sent to the printers: dwiggins_sheet.pdf.

San Francisco

Not every city has a landmark, but San Francisco has more than its fair share of them. And I can see one of them from our window – if only the very tip of it.
Last night on my way to the mailbox (April 15!) I took some photographs of the Transamerica building. For snapshots of that size in good weather the iPhone turns out to be perfectly adequate.

Less is more

This is my first post on my MacBook Air. The photo of the new computer on the kitchen table was shot with an iPhone. Not the best quality thinkable, but adequate for this type of message. I’m waiting for blogging software for the iPhone. The update to 2.0 in June should bring some cool stuff.

Red is the Helvetica of colours

Saw this in London recently. Not the best spelling, but a valid observation nonetheless. The construction fence it was sprayed on was painted solid red – more than anyone would need for warning purposes.

Rub downs

Can anyone remember Letraset and other dry-transfer type? A few years ago, I threw away hundreds of sheets of it, which I now regret. Younger designers might find this type of lettering funny, perhaps even informative. Technology has, after all, always influenced design, if not defined it.

Friends in The Hague gave me a few sheets of transfer type featuring LoType, which I had never seen before. The manufacturer obviously didn’t have a license contract with me, or they might have spelled my name right.

Friekermann

I see many versions of the spelling of my name, which in German is quite ordinary. A phonetic equivalent like Speakerman is the most frequent one. Last week in Boston, however, the lady at reception may have wanted to make a statement. Or she simply couldn’t read the type in my passport.

Helvetica can be nice

Every typeface needs its own layout that will make it look good and appropriate. An Italian producer of plastic furniture with a showroom in an old industrial building in San Francisco could do worse than displaying its name in large Helvetica letters. Rotis or Meta would have been totally wrong there.

News from SF

I haven’t been to San Francisco since January, and I have not published anything on this blog since then. There is just too much going on in Berlin: the office has more than 30 people now, we have a new house, thousands of books that need sorting, a lot of travel...
Here in SF there are only two people in the office and I can finally get down to some writing.

Around the corner from our little house here is the office for Dwell magazine that publishes under the motto “at home in the modern world”. And by the door I finally found an example for the stainless steel house numbers I designed for DWR last year. These are the “TECH” numbers without any diagonal lines. Design Within Reach has them discounted – apparently there is no market for “designer numbers” in the USA. Luckily, I have the rights to my designs and will be selling them myself very soon, also in Europe.