Typosphere, forecasted in 1969

In grad school, I'm currently reading about the late communications theorist Marshall McLuhan, he of "the medium is the message" and other prescient quotations (one of my favorites: "The future of the book is the blurb." How did he know?).

McLuhan had our number, we typecasters, long before we even existed. In this interview from 1969, he explains exactly what drives us to type, scan, and post:

Most people... still cling to what I call the rearview-mirror view of their world. By this I mean to say that because of the invisibility of any environment during the period of its innovation, man is only consciously aware of the environment that has preceded it; in other words, an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world. Because we are benumbed by any new technology — which in turn creates a totally new environment — we tend to make the old environment more visible; we do so by turning it into an art form and by attaching ourselves to the objects and atmosphere that characterized it, just as we’ve done with jazz, and as we’re now doing with the garbage of the mechanical environment via pop art.

... and with typecasting. Touché.

Handwritten typefaces

Mike Rohde does some cool stuff with handwritten fonts that I'd like to imitate. Problem is, my handwriting basically comes in a single flavor. Ever tried to change your handwriting? It's hard.

Somewhere in recent days I read online that our brain processes characters the same way it processes pictures, because they are pictures. So each character of the alphabet is a picture we learned how to draw, and if we want to change our handwriting, we have to learn how to draw each character another way.

(As an aside, I think I modeled my handwriting after my dad's. I used to love to see his notes on graph paper, where he used to map out new arrangements for the house or yard with his drafting pencils:)


Consider me deeply ignorant on the matter of typography, a subject that, for all I can tell, you need to be a professional designer to understand, although this site looks like a good start. All I know is, it would be cool to have typewritery handwriting. Don't you think?

Richard Polt has you covered if you want typewriter fonts for your computer, but here's my first try at handwriting a couple typewriter typefaces, which was about as easy as learning to draw some new stuff. (Not easy.)



The lower case letters g and a on the Lettera typeface in particular just seem like foreign characters to me, like something I might find in Kana Can Be Easy:



Does anyone handwrite g and a that way? I'm going to need tons of drawing practice before I get the hang of it.

You are an artist

Collage: untitled (Mod Podge experiment)

Until just now I thought Mod Podge was called Modge Podge, you know, like hodge podge. ANYway, it is a sort of crafter's varnish that you might paint over any manner of paper-y art things, like tacky collages. Behold:

Silent Type 3, and bonus wall collages

It will be a small zine, smaller than the last one perhaps, dimension-wise, so there's going to be some serious restrictions about the content submissions. Got to think this one out more. Nothing happening yet, just thought I'd throw that traffic jam vision out there... but that said, who's in? Can I get a witness?

Here are some crappy photos (why don't I ever take pictures during the considerable part of the day where there is natural light in the room?) of two wall thingies in my office, one of them a cork board collage, and the other a shadow-box, of things typospherian. Surely some of you mail art types have something similar, yet vastly superior, to share.