A LITTLE LIGHT READING.....

IS THIS THE END OF RICO?

       .....or the ramblings of a
    sometimes lucid type designer

We entered the enduser business.  Our first product was a bitmap generation system tailored for use on the PC.  I always thought we were trying to sell into the homes of middle class Americans, but most of these people (myself included) were buying other computer products, mostly games.  I had a Commodore 64, Zork and Zaxon.  If I wanted to 'publish' a letter to Mom I could always use a pen and a pad of paper.  Maybe I was missing something, Could it be?  Back in the mid 80's I remember stopping by the office of a midwestern fella by the name of Dave.  He wanted to show me this Mac application called Fontographer.  I didn't think it would fly.  You needed years of experience and tons of direction to design type.  Besides, there are only about 300 of us doing this work and I think we're all working.  Who would buy this thing?  My brother could have told me and Dave already knew.

What really is taking place in this business?  We have major corporations with no history in the printing arts, no typographic knowledge selling fonts at less then a dollar each.  Small digital foundries seem to be springing up like gas stations on Long Island (one on every corner, four to an intersection).  An associate told me that he found someone selling bootleg fonts on the streets of New York alongside the guy with the cheap sunglasses.  It has been estimated that there are at least 10,000 PostScript fonts available for sale.  Did that 300 type designers make all of these fonts?  I doubt it.  The difference between 'hot metal' and digital type is that the digital fonts will outlast disposable diapers down at the local dump.  I don't believe Morison (Stanley, not Jim) expected hundreds of thousands of laser printers to have Times as the premier utility text font.  Jim probably didn't either.  For centuries the 'cream' of the typographic arts lived on as the less readable, less popular fonts fell by the wayside.  With a click of the return key those 10,000 PostScript fonts are becoming TrueType data.  As we move into the 21st century this data will follow in whatever font format is in vogue, the garbage isn't being taken out by the technology anymore.  Its stacking up on some 1.3 gigabyte disk somewhere waiting to be inflicted on the reading public.

Well, how do we get the serious designing of type back on track?  How do we purge the industry of this weak typography?  More importantly, how can anybody make a living designing type?  I've considered a high altitude nuclear blast over Seattle or Cupertino but that would make such a mess.  I am, after all, asking that we try cleaning things up.  Maybe Stormin' Norman would come out of retirement.  He's real good at this kind of thing.  He'd know what to do.  I can see it now, columns of black acid smoke rising up from piles of burning floppies and hard drives darkening the sky's over northern California.  Maybe that's a little extreme, too.  I guess the only alternative is to get with the program.  Maybe I'll design another Garamond or Caslon.  That hasn't been done for at least six months, or, how about a Bembo Sanserif?  Now that's original.

This article was written back in the early 90's.  Its now tens of millions of laser printers, 30,000 or 40,000 postscript fonts and the industry is moving to Opentype as a standard.  Also, 1.3 gig disks are now considered to small so those fonts would be found on something more contemporary, like an 80 gig drive.

Today, we find that every major industry has been changed by these sophisticated counting machines.  Every time I turn around I bump into some process that is controlled, monitored, or modified by a computer.  Banking, travel, entertainment, security, credit, taxes, food production, television, war, peace, advertising, education, printing, publishing, caloric intake, weather, street lights, trash removal and telephones- these are all within the computers domain.  Seventeen years ago my brother, who always wanted to be a catholic priest, told me that one of his computers could and would run the printing press I operated.  Ha!! Bovine pasture patties, I said.  My girlfriend's father, who carried cards from three of the 'big' printing trade unions, told me that it was getting so that all they had to do was push a button on the press and sit back.  The machines did the rest.  This guy owned property in three states.  Two years later I left my job as a pressmen.  I felt that sitting back, collecting dust and a paycheck would become boring fast.

In 1978 I went to work for a large foundry operation on Long Island.  I told my brother that his machines couldn't touch me here.  He laughed and said, "god is everywhere." When I started the job I took a short tour of the plant to meet people and see the equipment.  The only peculiar piece of gear I saw was something called 'the scanner'.  It looked like something out of a Japanese monster movie, very big and very ugly.  This was the mother of all scanners.  At least 12 feet tall.  It was run by the union.  These guys belonged to the UAW.  They weren't sitting back after they hit the buttons.  I figured that they would keep us safe from the 'beast'.  I worked on a light table, using french curves, triangles and mechanical pencils.  It was my task to create 'typographic works of art'.  My boss had been in the business for over 30 years.  He was a true craftsman.  He tried to teach me everything he knew.  He told me that I was going to learn a craft that was practiced by less than 300 people worldwide.  That sounded like job security to me.

I worked for one of the big boys.  we made our own equipment and sold our own fonts.  A Filmstrip with Times Roman on it cost about $125.00 and they got scratched and worn, they needed to be replaced.  They could be used on one machine at a time and you had to buy that from us.  Then I realized what the rest of the equipment I had seen on my tour was.  I became familiar with CRT tubes, bitmaps, vector dot patterns and line and arc data.  No problem, the mighty 300 and I were still the only port in the typographic storm.

I began to notice that everything we did was controlled by the engineers who built the equipment.  We had very little control over our destiny.  In the middle of all this I received a job offer.  This was turning into a career.  After the appropriate amount of fence sitting, I moved to Boston.  We were to be the first independent digital type foundry.  We were to be in control of our own destiny.  We were building a modern digital font library.  We were rocking the typographic boat.  We had it made.