The signage is even more beautiful … yeesh, need I write anything at all? Those colors, that texture, the Bauhaus-meets-the-Fifties vernacular letterforms … Just. So. Cool.

Because Berlin’s consciousness of its history is a bit on the hit-or-miss side, I’m ambivalent about this. Through ignorance or with deliberate intent, some of this renovation serves to erase the past, both the parts the city ought to be proud of and the more, well, “problematic” bits.

This sign for Holz Kohlen (Charcoal) is an example of the former; the owners of the building deliberately allowed this small patch of ancient paint to remain undisturbed while the remainder of the facade was completely updated. It’s a small gesture of appreciation and respect for those who lived here before.

Two-bit philosophizing aside, the real reason I snapped this shot was the rough charm of the ca. 1930s letterforms, and the contrast with the stunning texture of the wall. The sturdy weight of the verticals, the sprightly capital K, that jaunty little Z with just the suggestion of a crossbar … ain’t typography wonderful?

The “Dissolve-O-Matic” is the latest in the series of illustrations created for Havi Brooks’ self-work products, in the quirky style semi-officially dubbed “Steampunk meets Yellow Submarine.”

As I wrote about the first of these machines, they communicate a sort of alternate-reality functionality in a completely non-threatening way. This aligns beautifully with Havi’s brilliant copywriting and whimsically approachable brand, in both style and attitude.

This one is the metaphorical representation of a product designed to dissolve procrastination. You can almost hear the rattle and roar of this happy contraption at work … and if your curiousity is piqued by the rubber duckie, visit her other website.

In anticipation of my annual journey to Germany, an alluring photo of a partially obscured green and white S-Bahn sign — these ubiquitous, illuminated typographic symbols beckon Berliners towards the over/underground network which (along with the U-Bahn) connects the re-unified metropolis with shining, singing rails.

During my morning perambulations a car cruised past, blasting bass-heavy tunes from enormous speakers. The sub-sonic frequencies made the vehicle’s bodywork vibrate so loudly that the music itself was completely drowned out.

You probably hear this particular kind of sonic sandwich all the time. In fact, this combination — loud, heavy bass combined with an even louder rattling trunk — is ubiquitous: cars just aren’t constructed for this low-frequency assault; a couple of pieces of bodywork are always going to protest by making some extra noise.

The funny thing is, I’ve actually begun to associate the two sounds. Can it be that this awful rattling — a seemingly undesirable side effect — is developing its own positive aesthetic associations? Maybe I’m wrong about the inevitablity of rattling, and people have begun to make it happen as a conscious choice!

It wouldn’t be the first time that technology has influenced cultural aesthetics.

Rock …

Consider the guitar. Prior to electrically-aided amplification, clarity of tone was the norm. Early vacuum-tube driven amplifiers overloaded easily, though, and over time the distorted sound of those over-driven tubes became an essential component of blues (‘Muddy Waters invented electricity’), rockabilly, and the juggernaut of rock and roll.

This particular tube-distorted, once-unbearable sound has become beautiful. It’s now so essential to music that modern amplifiers strive to digitally emulate the sound of archaic tube technology, and vintage amps sell for a fortune on eBay.

…and Harder Rock.

Which led me, naturally enough, right to thinking about typography.

Serifs, the tiny “feet” that appear on many familiar typefaces, are another example of a technological necessity that evolved into an aesthetic standard. These little flourishes were born from the difficulties Roman stonecutters ran into chiseling letterforms into marble. Incising letters involved cutting a V-shaped channel along the length of a stroke, and finishing with a perpendicular cut to square off the end. Making those three planes intersect perfectly was really hard, so these artisans worked out a little trick: just extend the triangular shape past those corners, making any imperfection impossible to notice (an antique example of “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”).

So. Carving in stone was difficult, and the unintended consequence was that “serifs” have became embedded in aesthetic culture; it’s the way we think type oughtta look. And after centuries of technological repetition, from wood type to metal, to — well, chances are you’re reading this very post in serif type, on a digital display. These pixels are a long way from the stonecutter’s chisel, but here they are — a cultural transmission from Emperor Trajan’s time beamed right into your modern eyeballs.

Blackletter Blues

So here’s the final stop on the barely-sequitur train: since I’m thinking about typefaces, what about Blackletter?

Call it “Gothic” or “Old English”, split the family into textura, fraktur, bastarda and rotunda… the baroque curlicues, spiky facets, plunging verticality, the chiaroscuro effected by its thickest thicks and thinnest thins, the larger-than-life operatic drama of it all … these are the results of technology too. Those angled strokes, thicks and thins, and all the rest of it stem directly from the calligraphic scratching of a medieval scribe’s sharpened quill. Blackletter is the middle-ages, still redolent of parchment, candle-black ink and time a-plenty.

And I just love the face. There, I said it.

I know, I know … most of the planet still despises it. I ran across a gratuitous attack just yesterday — Steven Heller sideswiped it as “ugly and graceless” in one of his historical graphic design collections. It’s hard to read. It has fascist connotations. And worst of all, it’s … ugly.

HARD TO READ: Bah! As Emigre founder and typographer Zuzana Licko succinctly put it, “we read best what we read most”. The first newspaper was set in blackletter, as was the first printed Bible. It’s only difficult to read because it’s gone out of fashion, and our eyeballs don’t know what to make of its spiky, faceted forms. Practice makes perfect, as has been empirically demonstrated, so let’s just toss that one out.

FASCIST: It’s long been damned by association with Hitler and the Nazi regime. And of course they used it, and so did the Bolsheviks, along with everybody else in Germany. It is, of course, an essentially German creation.

What few know, thought, is this: the Third Reich itself banned the typeface as grotesque and decadent, going so far as to issue a official order to use roman type only in all official communications. Ironically, this document itself featured a blackletter headline (stupid Nazis).

UGLY: I’ve think I’ve probably already made my feelings clear on that point.

The Pendulum Swings…

So. Is the resuscitation of blackletter (my fondest hope) actually possible? It’s still way out of fashion, except in the vernacular ghettos of heavy-metal band names, newspaper mastheads and skateboard graphics.

As a teensy glimmer of hope, though, there’s a movement to rehabilitate the maligned typeface already underway in Germany. In Berlin last fall I noticed a good half dozen fancy-pants design books devoted to the subject, with more on the way. I’ve also started to see it popping up in both high-end fashion magazines and in graffiti (the bleeding edge of design gentrification). So I believe it’s about to make a comeback. Of course, I also believe that one day, the San Francisco Giants will win the World Series.

More to the point, if human ears can learn to perceive the sound of a rattling car trunk as aural bliss, anything is possible.

Gorgeous modernist signage for a cabinet maker’s shop in the Bergmannstrasse, Berlin, dating from (I believe) the late ’20s — early ’30s. The typography, the colors, the arched entryway and even the textures of the metal and painted surfaces … beautiful.

I can’t get enough of photographing signs, type, and even graffiti in Berlin … the whole city is alive with hieroglyphs, and I can’t wait to return this summer for more.

The fabulous commie sign over “Alex”, the famous train station in east Berlin more properly known as Bahnhof Alexanderplatz. It’s a beautiful sign, severely elegant — installed (I believe) during a retrofit in 1964.

This style of 3-D illuminated letterform is seen all over Germany’s capital city, a look that’s so appealingly tactile that I just can’t resist ‘em. I’ll be in Berlin again this summer, snapping up a storm.

The station’s name is perhaps most familiar as the title of the early 30s novel by Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz — the novel inspired a pair of films, but today’s post-war, post-wall Alex bears little resemblance to the densely active nighborhood that was.
]]> http://calyxdesign.com/2008/01/29/alexanderplatz/feed/ 0 http://calyxdesign.com/2007/09/02/asdfasdfasd/ http://calyxdesign.com/2007/09/02/asdfasdfasd/#comments Sun, 02 Sep 2007 18:49:06 +0000 richard http://calyxdesign.com/wordpress/2007/09/02/asdfasdfasd/

One of the pleasures of strolling the streets of another city is the discovery of visual quirks native to that spot. Berlin is one of my favourite places to play this game. There are lots of examples in Germany’s densely layered Hauptstadt, and exhibit A can be seen just about everywhere — it’s the striking form of the esszett as it appears on the city’s street signs.

The esszett (or scharfes S) is a character unique to German — it’s the one resembling a weird-looking “B”. The simplified version of the story is that it represents a double “S” ligature, specifically between the now-extinct “long s” (which you’ve undoubtedly noticed and pronounced as an “f” when perusing the Declaration of Independence) with a standard “s”. The esszett is used throughout the German language, but this particular form of it caught my eye because of its ubiquitous presence in the word for street: “Straße”, or “Strasse”.

This typographic mark’s history is long and a bit complex. It’s been represented in any number of variations, from its calligraphic origins as ink scratched onto parchment, through blackletter at the dawn of European printing, then finally bursting onto the international stage from Germany as a modern, streamlined typographic style in the 1920s.

Berlin’s street signs date from that golden, modern, serif-less age, an era dedicated to linking form to function, to divorcing itself from an antiquated, overwrought past. Letterforms became clean of line, rational, and geometric. Thank goodness it was (and is!) impossible for designers of any era to extricate themselves completely from environment and cultural context … that sharp-edged blackletter style still managed to creep in, and it’s nowhere more apparent than in this emphatically angular esszett.

The street signs vary on the eastern and western sides of Berlin, thanks to the forty years that the city spent divided, and this particular incarnation of the character is more often seen in the western part of the city. Berliner type designer Verena Gerlach has made a study of street signage on both sides of the city — the resulting typefaces (Berlin West, Berlin East) are well worth a look, and are available from Fontshop.com.