John D. Berry Design

writing: extracts

 
 

from U&lc: influencing design & typography

Nothing that we did in my tenure as editor created as much of a stir as changing the logo. Readers were outraged. Many of them had been reading U&lc since their student days, and in their nostalgic eyes the old logo had become one of the eternal verities. Some even referred to it as "classic" – though that description might have caused Herb Lubalin to laugh. Lubalin had been an iconoclast, someone who shoook things up; our remaking of U&lc was entirely within that changeable tradition. Nonetheless, the new logo (though appreciated by some) was a bone of contention to the end.


from Contemporary newspaper design

Getting the right look in the type on a newspaper page is a hard task. It not only has to convey the actual information, it has to promise the kind of reading experience that the reader expects and that the paper does, in fact, deliver. Nothing is more disruptive of reader loyalty than a redesign that changes the terms of the transaction between paper and reader: that promises something different from what it delivers. The Times Classic typefaces, and the redesign that they were a part of, had to deliver, in essence, "more of the same,
only better."


from "Being a typographer"
(Creativepro.com)

Once everyone began using the same tools – PCs and Macs, Photoshop and QuarkXPress, PageMaker and Illustrator – the division of labor changed again. Graphic designers took on the task of setting their own type or hoping that the programs' defaults would magically do the job for them. Since most modern-day graphic designers have never sat at a production keyboard (much less picked up a composing stick and set foundry type by hand – a much older production method), they have never had the opportunity to learn how to handle type on a day-to-day basis. But there are fewer and fewer trained typesetters or type houses that they can turn to for practical help.