Historicist: Life in Wartime
Elsewhere in the Ist-a-Verse
In 1980, Toronto's Polish community—and the general public—got more than it bargained for. Six years previous, the Canadian Polish Congress held a meeting where, among other things, a decision was made to erect a monument in Beaty Boulevard Park (1575 King Street West) to the thousands who died at Katyń forest as part of the invasion of Poland. Back when public art was selected from a talented crop of international and local designers, Katyń's winning design was that of Tadeusz Janowski, a Polish émigré living in the United States. Janowski's background was in architecture, but his versatility, as evidenced by the intense, impacting silhouette created by his monument at King and Roncesvalles, speaks for itself.
Beyond the obvious significance, however, this sculpture offers what is one of the best-executed examples of custom type in the city. Combining artistic and technical dexterity, the text on each side of the monument—one side Polish, one side English—infuses the slab of bronze with a much-needed vitality. Type of this nature, in this context, is increasingly atypical, where text is set either by robots or by the inexperienced. While it's unrealistic to expect the public at large to ever truly give a hoot about the perils of using Zapf Chancery all caps (or Zapf Chancery anything, for that matter), or the importance of kerning, there is a reason designers should create and set type, all ego aside.
The results are obvious (and dreadful) when municipal governments recruit the Minister of Parking Meters to also handle road signage. For anything appearing along the side of a highway, federal governments usually undergo a series of type tests to see which faces are most legible during the day, when illuminated by headlights, or when backlit. However, as budgets tighten, the expertise of the typographer is suddenly seen as frivolous.
Just as owning a typewriter does not make one an author, or owning a camera make one a photographer, typesetting, or creating type (usually—incorrectly—referred to as "fonts") isn't something that just occurs because a copy of Microsoft Word is available. True, not all applications actually require any so-called expertise. Type is very often perfunctory and anything else is gravy. But in the case of something as necessarily stark as the Katyń cenotaph, the central crack notwithstanding, type is the only connection available to the audience. Like liturgical calligraphic titan Fred Peter (so old school, his web presence is crazy bad), Janowski's ability to push type to its limit, while maintaining a sense of structure or purpose is matched by few. The Pricewaterhouse Coopers logo, while obviously created by a typographer or designer, attempts what Janowski pulls off handsomely; only PwC's logo is weak and misguided: Yes, "waterhouse" looks like water, we get it. But "Coopers" doesn't look like... a cooper.
Of course, some will question why any of this is significant in the first place. After all, if a non-designer designs type, it's not nearly as disastrous as a typographer installing brakes at GM (yikes!). Dear reader, we need only consider the alternative.
Photographs by Jake Bauming
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Nice!
Any chance this could be the start of a Typographist series?
Toronto has some awesome type scattered about.
Wow, this brings me back to my desktop publishing days. This is an impressive monument, and I too would like to see a Typographist column.
Very cool. Thanks.
Dissent: at its worst, this is already a becoming a font blog (read any piece pertaining to the TTC or criticising the aesthetics of a particular peice of advertising). It doesn't need a separate column.
It was interesting to learn about the monument and its history. Why can't that be the series?
Typographist, Monumentist, Whateverist. I don't care what you need to call it or what the signifigance behind it is, I'd like to see more of it. Kernist Christ!
Great monument.
Check the back of Triumph's "Allied Forces" LP sometime... ARG!
Meh, the TTC gripes are generally pretty dry, if well intentioned.
One of the things I love about the TTC is the variety of type, and how much abuse some of it has taken. For example, the wall lettering at St. Patrick. Personally I love the fact that it's had graffiti etched into it over the years, and that's what gives the station some personality. Joe Clark used it as an example of what he feels is wrong with the TTC on last years type tour, at which point I stopped listening to him.
I guess I'm thinking more of shining a little light on typographic jems like the monument above, not necessarily bitching about shitty kerning. Although that can be entertaining in extreme cases.
Just one typophile's opinion.
Hehe I bought that LP at the Goodwill a few steps from the monument.
I don’t recall making anything resembling the statement mdwebb attributes to me. I brought people to St. Patrick to look at the curved metal signboards. I did say that decorating the station in shades of green was OK in an era in which the Irish were deemed “ethnic.”
Also, Jake Bauming has probably never seen the real Zapf Chancery.
mdwebb writes:
Personally I love the fact that it's had graffiti etched into it over the years, and that's what gives the station some personality.
mdwebb: Vandalism is not "personality". You are an idiot.
joeclark, you incorrectly assume that because I don't share what is likely your interest or fondness for Zapf Chancery, that I have never seen it. I have, in fact, seen the entire family and, with excepted details, i still think it's ugly.
Joe Clark is the only one who is allowed to appreciate typography.
If that were true, T-Rex, Bauming wouldn’t have gotten his own post.
So: You’ve seen the small caps, Jake?
joeclark, yeah, I'm familiar with the small caps, and you're absolutely right, out of the entire family, they'd be a good fit for signage, subhead copy and the like. It's also the one I dislike the least.
In the article, however, I'm using the term "Zapf Chancery" as a catchall, referring to the face in the (bastardized) pedestrian version because that has become the default and the only one that's used now. The original Zapf Chancery has all but vanished; it's used nowhere in public view. The very shitty version of Zapf Chancery, however, is prolific, used on garage sale flyers, as mastheads for community newsletters, and to solicit church bazaars and is exclusively used, for reasons I will never understand, in all caps. To use the term "Zapf Chancery" in the pejorative sense might be unfair and it's worth enlightening the public about things that have completely lost their meaning (when, for example, did "ironic" come to mean "clever", "annoying", or "coincidental"?), but the focus of the article deals with why the typesetting on Katyn works so well.
As fine as the typography is, I get this unfortunate case of the "Hewlett Packards" when viewing it today. (Darned trendy advertising eyeworms...)
Bauming: That’s more like it.
"mdwebb: Vandalism is not "personality". You are an idiot."
meh. so be it.
I should have known better than to post something regarding any type of graffiti on TOist.