I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK:  SLAYER-Live from Sonisphere 2011 (Palladia TV 2012).

Did I get into heavy metal because I loved typography or was it the other way around?  All metal bands love creating logos, and images that resonate with their music.  Nearly every metal band that I liked had a logo, easy to identify from a distance.  Perfect for marketing.The Metallica logo is pretty iconic, but the Slayer logo moves it up a step–crazy lettering with swords that almost make a pentagram.

When I was a young metalhead, Slayer was like forbidden fruit–so evil it was scary.  I love how this video dispels this image of the band.  Kerry King talking about “the kids,” and look how much Tom Araya is smiling through the whole set.  Never has anyone been happier singing the word “eviscerated.”

This show was during the Big 4 tour–Megadeth, Anthrax, Slayer and Metallica.  So Slayer performs a few of their more popular songs.  I actually don’t know how long their set was, but this thirty show must have contained about half of it.

And the band sounds really good–still playing really fast (Dave Lombardo on drums is a madman).  It also makes me laugh to think of Kerry King back in the early days having a leather bracelet with 4 inch ten-penny nails sticking out of it.  Now he’s just got a huge chain hanging from his belt (and a shaved, tattooed head and a very very long goatee).  Gary Holt from Exodus is replacing Jeff Hannemann for this tour because Jeff has Necrotizing fasciitis (which sounds like a Slayer song anyhow)

The Palladia show isn’t online, but there’s another show from this Big 4 Tour recorded in Chile that’s online.  And the interview with Tom Araya at around 11:30 is amazing,  Tom is such a nice, soft-spoken guy–and he was given the key to the city!  Incredible to hear him scream like that.  (And I see that Kerry has the nail bracelet on for the first song in this show too).

I’m also very pleased to see how many fans are wearing earplugs.  Not metal, but sensible.

[READ: September 10, 2012] Just My Type

A few months ago, Karen wrote posts about this book (links are below).  All I need to do was to read her first paragraph to know that I wanted to read this book.  I love typography.  I took a typography class at the School of Visual Arts and I have always been fascinated by logos and text.

This book is an awesome book for anyone who loves fonts but who doesn’t want anything too heavy.  There is some history of the various type creators, but for the most part this looks at type faces in the past and in popular culture.   Chapter 1, for instance, is called “We don’t serve your type” and is ll about the overused and much derided Comic Sans.

Karen wisely spread her review over five posts because there was so much in the book.  Looking at her review now, I had already forgotten these two things that she mentions: “the quandary Westminster Abbey was in when it was discovered the designer of the signage at the Stations of the Cross was an incestuous pedophile (among other things).  Or the story of the font that was drowned to keep it out of the wrong hands.”

Each chapter (about 8-10 pages) follows the adventure and misadventure of a font,  a series of fonts or the creator of said fonts.  In between chapters we got Fontbreaks, two or three pages about a specific font.

There’s also a lot of unexpected fun in here, like the history of the ampersand (and why it looks the way it does!), the craze of the interrobang?!, how and why subway systems look the way the do (the uniformity of the London Underground vs the playful all over the place-ness of the Paris Metro), and why the heck Helvetica is everywhere.  We also see some test sentences that display letters of fonts very nicely.   He even mentions a video about the world’s most famous pangram:

There are  few chapters in the middle that aren’t quite as much fun as the rest (which is understandable as the fun chapter are super fun and the less fun ones are a bit more technical), but it’s hard to resist this book as a whole–if you get a little bored, plow through those three pages because fun is on the way.

Inevitably there is a chapter on the worst fonts in the world (which are less egregious than some that I hate), but it’s a thoughtful look more at bad design than bad taste.  And then there is the psychology of fonts.  What fonts say about you, and what you communicate with the fonts you use.  I would have loved if this chapter was longer as it’s an interesting subject, but I’m sure it’s covered elsewhere as well.

Garfield mentions lots of wonderous websites as well.  Although Pentagram’s What’s Your Type? proves to be a little disappointing as the font it gave me is gawdawful.

There’s also this hilarious video

I’ve written quite a lot about this book, but really you should really Karen’s posts about it.  She loved this book so much she didn’t want to finish writing about it.  She wrote 5 posts about a book that’s barely 300 pages.  Now that’s love!  Read these….

Part 1.  Part 2.  Part 3.  Part 4. Part 5.

And holy cow, how much fun is this game: I Shot the Serif.  And I’ll give Karen the final word as well, she Karen mentions a great blog  I Love Typography.