Re: Typeface for wayfinding

Conrad wrote:

> Whether by co-incidence,
> commission or design,
> "Netto" is the name of a
> chain of cut-price, no-frills
> supermarkets, headquartered
> in Denmark, owned ultimately
> by the AP Møller- Mærsk
> Group, with stores in
> Denmark, Germany, UK,
> Poland and Sweden.

Oh, great ... so on top of Mr. Utz's various sins in the icon design
department, is he also in violation of some company's trademark?

(I don't suppose Netto-the-typeface was originally designed as part of
a corporate branding project? Does anybody recall what
Netto-the-store's logo and signage actually looks like?)

> the kind of lettering one
> used to make with tube-nibbed
> drawings pens and a matching
> architect's lettering
> template, such as Leroy.

Believe it or not, I used to do all my writing with a Rapidigraph.

I was a starving graduate student at the time, and couldn't afford the
fancy fountain pens sold at the university bookstore. But Rapidigraphs
were relatively cheap.

Even more important, you could get this totally cool purple ink for
them, and as soon as I saw that (a friend of mine, who shared my
pen-and-ink fetish, took me to the bookstore one day to show me her
discovery), I was sold....

No matter that I had to revamp my handwriting because the pen
wouldn't work (ink wouldn't flow) if you didn't hold it upright....

At the time, that was a trade-off I could live with if it meant I had
access to a veritable rainbow of cool-colored inks! (Truth be told, I
was never really a Mt. Blanc [sp?] kind of black-or-blue ink
traditionalist scholar. ;-)

Of course, I would never have made this connection if it hadn't been
for Conrad's and Gunnar's comments. (I really do marvel at how much
you 2 can see in a typeface!)

But now that I have made it, I can't help wondering if my
generally-positive response to Netto-the-type was because it triggered
subliminal warm-and-fuzzy associations with my Rapidigraphs and
playful purple inks of yore. <bg>


Re. the Netto icons, I probably wouldn't have paid them a whole lot of
attention (yes, I *still* privilege verbal over visual ;-) if it
weren't for the paragraph of marketing hype touting Netto-the-type as
geared for the very sort of "information design" which I find the most
objectionable (the quest for "clear" Platonic-style forms stripped of
"any historical detail").

Gunnar reminds us, correctly I think, that:

> The various "universal"
> symbol signs don't functions
> as Esperanto and don't try
> to. They are a pidgin.
> Inarticulate and not always
> precise but easy to learn
> for a broad range of people.

Which raises the whole issue of standards.

Daniel Utz strikes me a bit like Humpty Dumpty in _Through the Looking
Glass_

	"'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful
	tone, 'it means what I choose it to mean--neither more nor
	less.'"

with his idiosyncratic visual idiom that will never IMHO be
mainstreamed ... which, contrary to FontShop's newsletter hype, is
what it would take "for a broad range of people" to have enough
exposure to it that we eventually learn to read it.

In Southern California, our freeways (express ways) for intra- and
interstate travel via automobile now have traffic signs warning
motorists of unauthorized pedestrian crossings in certain areas. The
sign that's used for this depicts the stereotypical bourgeois family
(man, woman, and child) fleeing anxiously.

I suppose if we replaced the present sign with Daniel Utz's lurching
Everyman, and gave it sufficient exposure in a proper interpretive
context, motorists would eventually *learn* how to read it, too. Even
so, I doubt our visual literacy would develop at the same pace as it
does with the sign we now have; nor would the texts absorbed with it
be as poignantly felt.

... Which brings me back to something Alan said earlier about stereotypes:

> For example, there appear
> to be male and female forms
> shown, but they are
> represented by the most
> basic and stereotypical
> conceptions.

Aren't icons inevitably tied to stereotypes? (I.e., if an icon doesn't
represent/reinforce a cultural stereotype to begin with, it will
itself become one as soon as it becomes a fixture of our visual culture.)

When it comes to the need for signaling separate male and female
public bathrooms, I find most of the existing signs for this
incomprehensible. They only work because there's always 2 of them, and
if you assume the binary male-female posing to begin with, and study
the symbols long enough, you can usually figure out which symbol
represents which gender.

Of course, many of us are so used to the female in a triangular dress
as the visual term of differentiation (as always, the woman as "other"
and marker of difference ;-) that we don't have to study the known
stereotype as much as we do some of its updated and more
politically-correct versions.

Personally, I'd like to see the o with cross and o with arrow used to
identify gendered restrooms, but I don't suppose that's going to
happen anytime soon!

Deborah
_____

Deborah Taylor-Pearce
[email protected]

















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