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Just up on Veer, this all-inclusive collection of my fonts is on sale at 30% off the total of what they would cost if purchased individually. Veer’s special promotion will be ongoing until the middle of May.

Getting it right means placing the many strips of 3M Controltac vinyl film in the right positions:

Louie Navarro is seen above carefully positioning the vinyl on the service side (the side from which the food will be served) of the truck. He must carefully gauge where to position the film at the back of the truck so that the graphics end up at the right spot by the time they reach the front.

Over on the driver’s side, Louie positions the main graphics. There are many ins and outs to the truck surface, and the Controltac film is flexible enough to conform to them all, ending up looking very much as if it had been painted on. It’s pretty amazing.

Here’s one photo of the driver’s side. I’ll post more photos from different angles as they become available.

In the meantime the  Canter’s Truck has begun cruising the streets of LA with Bonnie Bloomgarden at the helm. To find out when they’re going to be in your area you can follow them on Twitter.

Photo: Adam Stein

Above: Careful placement of my credit below the trash receptacle.

Yves mentioned the “Word Logos” I have thrown in, and mentions that they’re only in English and that there aren’t that many. I agree with this. I probably shouldn’t have put them in at all. I had literally been working for months on Deliscript, and really wanted to get it out for release, so I guess I rushed through their creation, thinking of them as just a small extra feature to include. They probably don’t add that much to the font, and I should have thought of the European market as well. The next time I do a feature like that I’ll definitely try to do it in a much more expansive manner.

Yves also mentions that he is “unsure about the finer details in the character shapes”, citing that “some curves and joins seem rather stiff, and the weight distribution and contrast in the character strokes appear a little off in some parts”. I’m not sure, but I think this perception on his part may stem from cultural differences that we share, and from a possible misunderstanding of what I’m referencing. What I’m going for is not really in the lexicon of classical font design—rather it is from the American pop culture vernacular—from all the (traditionally) untrained eyes that created all the wonderful signage and ephemera that I grew up with.

Coming to font design from that background, I can totally understand how what I’m trying to do can seem foreign to those who are trained to look at fonts from a traditional perspective. While I’m sure we all share some of the same font heroes (such as Morris Fuller Benton) I also celebrate those whose work joyously displayed a flagrant lack of regard for what some would consider to be “the formal rules of design”. It is to these designers whose names we’ll probably never know—and to their typographic “mistakes” and flourishes that I find so engaging—that I try to pay homage to in my lettering and font design work.

While they were in print, the three volumes of Eric Baker and Tyler Blik’s classic Trademarks series (which together sold 60,000 copies) were the authoritative books of logo design by decade. I had the distinct privilege of designing the covers for the first two. Many is the time that people have mentioned to me that they have those books, and had no idea that I had done the covers!

This definitive collection is now available from Chronicle Books in an expanded single volume with essays and samples of the work of 17 contemporary graphic designers (including myself), and with an introduction by Steven Heller. Over 1,000 iconic trademarks are packed into this extra-chunky paperback. While the original books have long enjoyed cult status, this attractive, updated edition will win legions of new fans among today’s ever-increasingly design-savvy public. So run don’t walk to your nearest purveyor of fine books, and snatch a copy before they’re all gone.

I set about to create the elements for the truck wrap, basing the graphics on the look of the Canter’s neon sign and my font Deliscript. I felt I needed to modify Deliscript a bit to make this a strong graphic statement—kind of like a logo for the truck. So I began by creating a large, circular initial “C” in Canter’s—and that became the basis for the look:

I also settled on a palette of colors that I felt would be attractive and reflect what I thought of as a Deli aesthetic. The unique double “SS” in “DELICATESSEN” was borrowed from the neon sign—one of many small details that I felt would help keep continuity between the restaurant and the truck. I added some other elements such as “Since 1931″ that Bonnie wanted. In my first iteration for the truck my feeling was that I’d try it as a white truck—a good clean look— and adjust the graphics accordingly.

I might’ve had the Good Humor truck from my youth in Brooklyn in mind:

Nevertheless, a white truck wasn’t exactly what Bonnie had planned on. I have to admit that I’m glad she pushed me to do a more colorful truck. Even though the truck was to be treated as a “vehicle wrap” by SignQuest, a process that is being more and more widely used, I decided to treat the truck as if I was designing a paint job in order to give it a look that was more in keeping with its mid-century heritage. Keeping the color palette that I had first come up with I created some mock ups that I thought would work even better for Canter’s than my all white version:

We also decided that it would be a good idea to have a slogan and, after much deliberation, settled on “…home of the Kibitz Room”. The Kibitz Room is the dive bar/cocktail lounge that’s off in a corner of Canter’s Deli. Like Canter’s, it’s an LA institution that just seems to keep going and going.

I had envisioned that we would somehow use my very graphic take on the neon baker sign on the service side of the truck. So I put him on the door and let the steam from his platter trail back along the length of the truck towards the menu. Along the top of the truck yet another version of the Deliscript/Canter’s logo:

In “Art Imitates Life…Imitates Art #3″ I’ll post photos of the actual truck wrapping, and also of the finished truck.

At any rate my good fortune with Deliscript began about two months ago when I learned that it been selected by the Type Directors Club in NYC for inclusion in their annual show. About a month later I got a call from Bonnie Bloomgarden, the great-granddaughter of Ben Canter—one of the original Canter Bros. She and her sister Dena were trying to do a few things to gently update the Deli, while still respecting its heritage. One of their ideas was to create a “Canter’s Truck” and take advantage of the recent mobile gourmet food trucks craze. A lot of the newer trucks have been completely “wrapped” with colorful graphics using fairly new printing technology.

She told me that they had started looking for fonts to design the wrap for the truck themselves, but then realized it might be a little difficult for them without having a lot of graphic design experience. Then fortune smiled on Bonnie and Dena when they did a web search Googling “Deli” and “Font” and ran smack into Deliscript (probably because of the Canter’s mention in this blog) and then in turn found, and contacted me.

It has been a real pleasure working with Bonnie, a young person with good entrepreneurial instincts that are combined with a keen sense of what is worth keeping in the Canter’s visual vocabulary, and what perhaps should be let go. We both concurred that the truck identity should be based on that neon sign, and that I should use Deliscript as the starting point. I also suggested that we somehow should try to incorporate into the truck design their famous neon chef, who for years has been carrying that platter of freshly baked bread:

At first I tried to graphicallyt recreate him pretty much as he was for the side of the truck. I soon realized that my rendition seemed far too literal for the look I was going for. Then, in an old matchbook catalog, I found a cut of a little round chef carrying a platter of turkey, and decided to use that as the basis for creating my updated baker (a little slimmed down) for the door of the truck:

In “Art Imitates Life…Imitates Art #2″ I’ll discuss how we created the design for the truck.

I recently contributed an ampersand design to the Font Aid IV project to help raise funds for Haitian earthquake relief. The Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) has just announced the release of “Coming Together”, a font created exclusively for Font Aid IV to benefit the victims of the recent earthquake in Haiti. The font consists entirely of ampersands, to represent the idea of people coming together to help one another. Nearly 400 type designers, graphic designers, and other artists from around the world contributed artwork to the font.

The font will be sold for $20 starting on Monday, February 15, 2010. It is now available through font distributors Veer and Ascender Fonts. It will be available on FontShop on Tuesday, February 16, 2010 and on MyFonts later in the week. All proceeds from the sale of the font will go to Doctors Without Borders, to help with their relief efforts in Haiti.

The “Coming Together” font contains over 400 glyphs and is supplied as a single, cross-platform OpenType font. All glyphs are accessible using OpenType-savvy applications, Unicode-savvy utilities, the Character Map utility on Windows, and FontBook on Mac OS X.

My contribution to the project (bottom center, above) was based on some lettering I did in a poster I designed for an exhibition of music industry related graphics called “Revolutions“. I would have credited the other eight designers whose ampersands are depicted, but I didn’t know who had done them.

]]> http://blog.alphabetsoupblog.com/?feed=rss2&p=636 http://blog.alphabetsoupblog.com/?p=619 http://blog.alphabetsoupblog.com/?p=619#comments Wed, 10 Feb 2010 06:15:42 +0000 Michael Doret http://blog.alphabetsoupblog.com/?p=619 I was extremely excited to learn recently that my Deliscript font family (Alphabet Soup’s major font project of 2009) was chosen by the Type Directors Club to receive their prestigious “Certificate of Excellence in Type Design” in the display fonts category for their TDC² 2010 Typeface Design Competition. Deliscript was one of only 16 designs chosen from the many typefaces entered from 29 countries.

Deliscript will be showcased in TDC² 2010, will be on display in New York City throughout the summer of 2010, and will be published in TDC’s Typography 31, the Annual of the Type Directors Club. The exhibition will then go on tour traveling throughout North and South America, Europe, and East Asia.

Once again I’d like to extend my thanks to the very talented Patrick Griffin of CanadaType for his invaluable help with Deliscript’s OpenType programming.