When telling the story of the Holocaust, one effective way to overcome our sheer inability to comprehend the scope and scale of such atrocities is to zoom in on one or two stories: share one particular experience, in all its brutal specificity, and we have at least a small way into the event—the small details illuminate the larger whole.

One theatre company from the Netherlands, Hotel Modern, takes a related approach in KAMP (CAMP). The production depicts a typical day at the Auschwitz concentration camp, but instead of zooming in into a closeup, it shrinks everything down, literally, into miniature. It’s the accumulation of thousands of small details that has the impact in this case.

Eleanor McMahon thinks it’s time to change the conversation around cycling in Ontario.

McMahon is the founder of the Share the Road Cycling Coalition, who will be hosting the fifth annual Ontario Bike Summit this week in Toronto. She says that we need to stop talking about things like bike lanes and other bicycle infrastructure as a zero sum game between cars and bikes.

“We do polling, and our polling tells us that 89 per cent of Ontarians are both drivers and cyclists,” she says. “The notion that it’s cars versus bikes is overblown, and it’s really not working anymore. Deciding to change the conversation means going out of our way to poke holes in that idea and say from the get go ‘We don’t buy into that philosophy, and just because you say it, doesn’t make it true.’ ”

Even with the success of acts like Lonely Island and Flight of the Conchords, people still tend to view musical comedy with some suspicion, and not without reason. Those high-profile success stories aside, at the club level, musical comedy is too often the province of people who aren’t quite good enough to make it as musicians, but not quite funny enough to make it as comedians.

Two local comics, Robert Keller and Rush Zilla, are out to change that perception with their show, Off Key Comedy, which features a wide variety of acts whose only commonality is that they combine music and comedy in one form or another. The third edition of the monthly show will take place on May 23, at Comedy Bar.

Despite the fact that the last show in Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s 2012/2013 season is titled Of a Monstrous Child: A Gaga Musical, Lady Gaga herself takes a secondary role. There are no homages to raw-meat dresses and gold-plated wheelchairs here. Instead, writer and director Alistair Newton uses the House of Gaga as a pathway into the history of the notable performance-art stars that came before her in the pantheon of queer iconography, and how she is and isn’t a construct of all of them put together.

Ben Brommell's typographic map of Toronto.

It may be a little hard to see in the image above, but that entire map of Toronto, incredibly, is made of words. Different colours and font sizes define the different roadways, neighbourhoods, and landmarks. And the typeface appears to be one in the Toronto Subway series. [UPDATE, 1:57 PM: It's Futura.]

It’s the work of Ben Brommell, a local film and television student who says he devoted as many as 100 hours of his spare time to the project. He made the map manually in Adobe Illustrator, using a screencapped Google Map as a guide. You can buy prints here. (There’s also a roads-only version, which you can see/get here.)

After the jump, we’ve got a more detailed view of the image:

But let’s get back to the matter at hand. A short walk up Roncesvalles brings you to Piast Travel & Forwarding. Piast sports some interesting custom type, and while it’s perhaps not the most elegant sign on the strip, it’s at least legible. The Piast wordmark is, in fact, so distinct, you won’t find a comparable example anywhere.

…That is, until you walk two blocks north to Krak Restaurant. The two examples might not be the Chang and Eng of typedom, but their inherent similarities are obvious.

And then there’s this. For years, Torontoist has been trying to decode this mysterious nugget, at the same time, not wanting to labour over it too long, for it seems knowing what it says would spoil the surprise. If you know where you’re going and you’re looking for some Polish pop, you’ll end up here, regardless. But imagine you’re looking for an album for a friend and you don’t have the address to this place. Or if English wasn’t your first language. Or Polish. Or whatever language this sign is written in (the capricious language of music, apparently). The Novum Moul…t…… sign is one of those curiosities we hope never goes away. We’re just thankful it’s not a road sign.
Photographs by Jake Bauming

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