Type Trends

All right, folks, we know you have been on the edges of your seats, but the wait is over. Yes, the latest Monotype Type Trends Report is now available! Says Print magazine:

Curated by Monotype Type Designers Jordan Bell and Damien Collot, this year’s report identifies ten trends in type and brand design set to shape the broader cultural zeitgeist. “In this, our fourth Annual Type Trends Report, we found a movement away from the trend of cuddly, squishy, empathetic fonts that many brands and creatives embraced after the alienation and stress of the pandemic,” said Bell. “This year, in a time that can feel nostalgic for the digital simplicity of the pre-smartphone, pre-AI world, we see designers returning to the heritage and comfort of more traditional serif fonts, and also finding new creative inspiration in ’90s and early ’00s scenes like grunge, jungle, and early rave culture.”

Oh, the irony:

As part of the report, the Monotype team reimagined each of the ten trends as worn vinyl LP covers, thus connecting each type of trend to a specific musical genre. Each vinyl cover was created through Midjourney AI to underscore the tension between our current nostalgia for the old analog world at odds with simultaneous immersion in a new AI-infused digital age.

 Yes, let’s have AI imagine a pre-AI world.

We won’t go through all 10 trends here, but in the event you were missing it, apparently the serif is back!

After a dominant phase of the streamlined cleanliness of sans-serif styles, serifs appear to be back with a vengeance. 

Vengeance? I shot the serif?

Chalk it up to nostalgia or the comfort of tradition, as more and more brands are looking to the delicacy and classic look of serif typefaces to elicit warmth and stand out in a field of minimalistic sans.

To add an extra dimension that ties in with the theme of the report, Monotype has also created Spotify playlists for each trend, if you’re really into it.

Bee is for Brand

What, you may ask, is the world’s oldest brand? Well, it’s a British brand of light treacle called Lyle’s Golden Syrup, and it has not changed its branding in 140 years ago—indeed, it was recognized by Guinness World Records as  the world’s oldest branding and packaging. Until now. Via CNN, the venerable brand is undergoing a major redesign.

The company said Its new visual Identity was designed to “refresh the brand’s legacy to appeal to a 21st century audience.”

And one can see why.

Golden syrup, also known as light treacle, is a sweet, amber-colored syrup made from refined sugar that was first produced by Abram Lyle & Sons in 1881. The company’s founder, the Scottish businessman Abram Lyle, chose a logo inspired by the story of Samson who, in the Old Testament, kills a lion with his bare hands only to later discover that honeybees have nestled in the animal’s carcass.

In the biblical tale, part of the Book of Judges, Samson eats honey from inside the lion, gives some to his parents and then presents 30 wedding guests with a riddle alluding to the encounter: “Out of the eater came something to eat; out of the strong came something sweet.”

Reworded “Out of the strong came forth sweetness” has this been part of Lyle’s logo since Day 1. Recognizing that perhaps scooping honey out of a lion’s carcass may not be the most appealing thing in the world, they went for a less graphic approach, although the original logo will still be used on the company’s classic syrup tin.

In a statement, brand director for Lyle’s Golden Syrup, James Whiteley, said that “consumers need to see brands moving with the times and meeting their current need.”

Were there any complaints? Hah! Is there an Internet?

the redesign was met with mixed reactions. On Instagram, designer Laura Evans described the new logo as “contemporary and clever.” 

…Others however, including several Christian commentators, were less complimentary. “This is what happens when brand managers get involved: take a story that has survived 2000 years and ‘refresh’ it (i.e. ditch it),” author Colin Freeman wrote on X.

There is no truth to the rumor that they also drew on the story of Samson for the logo for a line of hair care products.

The Glue That Holds Reality Together

Our Mount Monadnock Media Maven points us to a new antitampering tag, developed by MIT, that can “reveal with near-perfect accuracy whether an item is real or fake.” It’s based on an earlier tag they had developed that utilized terahertz waves, which are smaller and have much higher frequencies than radio waves, making them superior to RFID. However, the devil is in the details: the tags, like RFID tags, were easily removable and ne’er-do-wells could take them off a real item and attach them to a fake—rendering the whole authentication system moot. The new tags, however, overcome this obstacle by improving the glue used to attach them. Says MIT News:

They mix microscopic metal particles into the glue that sticks the tag to an object, and then use terahertz waves to detect the unique pattern those particles form on the item’s surface. Akin to a fingerprint, this random glue pattern is used to authenticate the item, explains Eunseok Lee, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of a paper on the antitampering tag.

…The researchers produced a light-powered antitampering tag that is about 4 square millimeters in size. They also demonstrated a machine-learning model that helps detect tampering by identifying similar glue pattern fingerprints with more than 99 percent accuracy.

Terahertz tags are also cheap to produce, making it easy to scale up production. Interestingly, the idea came to Ruonan Han, an associate professor in EECS, at the car wash.

The business stuck an RFID tag onto his windshield to authenticate his car wash membership. For added security, the tag was made from fragile paper so it would be destroyed if a less-than-honest customer tried to peel it off and stick it on a different windshield.

But Han realized that that wasn’t particularly effective if someone managed to dissolve the glue without destroying the tag. Seems a lot of work to get a free car wash, but what do we know? Isn’t car washing what rain is for?

Rather than authenticating the tag, a better security solution is to authenticate the item itself, Han says. To achieve this, the researchers targeted the glue at the interface between the tag and the item’s surface.

Pretty neat.

3DVD

Ah, storage. Remember when all your files fit on one, maybe two 3.5-in. floppy disks? Remember the first computer you got that had a 1GB hard drive and you thought, “I’ll never fill that up”? Uh huh. Ever since the 1990s, every time we got a new computer with a higher-capacity hard drive, file and application sizes ballooned accordingly, so there was always a storage war.

Now, mind you, it’s probably only those of us who were buying computers in the 1990s that still store things locally, but even cloud storage is proving a challenge and it’s not uncommon to run out of space on your Google or iCloud account. As it happens, though, via Gizmodo, researchers at the University of Shanghai for Science and Technology have developed a way to fit one petabit of data onto an optical disc. What’s a petabit? No, not a brand of dog snack; rather, a petabit (Pb) is one quadrillion bits of data—or one million gigabits (Gb). There are eight bits in a byte, so that works out to 125,000 gigabytes (GB)—on one DVD-sized disc. How do they do it? By storing information in 3D, as described in a paper published in the journal Nature, using a technique that can “read and write up to 100 layers of data in the space of just 54-nanometers.” (DVDs and Blu-Rays use only one layer—“An equivalent array of Blu-Ray storage would be over 2 meters high.”)

The technique required the researchers to develop a brand new material, which has the easy-to-remember name dye-doped photoresist with aggregation-induced emission luminogens, or AIE-DDPR if you’re in a hurry. AIE-DDPR is a highly uniform and transparent film that lets researchers blast it with lasers at the nanoparticle scale with precision, allowing for an unprecedented storage method.

Nah, it still won’t be enough at some point.

Rongo Star

We are not especially surprised that an island nation with, essentially, a giant head-based economy would have a unique writing system. Rapa Nui—aka Easter Island—is known for its giant Moai statues. Entirely treeless, the volcanic island is a scant 63 square miles in size, lies 2,400 miles off the coast of Chile in the Pacific Ocean, and is the most remote populated island in the world. Although, via Atlas Obscura, apparently not remote enough.

People first came to live on the island in the 12th century. Europeans landed on Rapa Nui in the 1720s, and they brought diseases that devastated the population. Then in 1863, the island was raided by enslavers from Peru, and some estimates say only 200 indigenous people survived.

A year later, a missionary discovered that every home on the island had wooden tablets on which were inscribed words in Rongorongo, Rapa Nui’s traditional written language. Although at the time hundreds of them were seen throughout the island, a few years later, only a couple dozen could be found. Four of them were sent to Rome for preservation, and there they stayed for more than 150 years.

Until now, it was presumed that the Rongorongo script was composed of elements introduced by foreigners. But a team of scientists from Italy and Germany recently found reason to believe the elaborate language predates any European colonization, and it comes with extraordinary anthropological implications.

…[R]adiocarbon dating analysis of the wood suggests Rongorongo is an ancient language completely indigenous to Rapa Nui and perhaps even that it was intentionally kept secret from outsiders until the mid-19th century. If so, this would be an example of a previously unknown language—a rare writing system invented without any influence or prior knowledge of other writing.

Dating the development of Rongorongo as a form of writing has proven because no one knows exactly what it is.   

It’s unclear whether Rongorongo is a form of proto-writing or a fully fledged system. It contains an astounding number of pictographic characters—more than 15,000—depicting animals, plants, geometric shapes, and anthropomorphic figures. It’s written in horizontal lines resembling sentences, but in a unique style called reverse boustrophedon, where every other line is upside down.

Primitive AI, maybe?

To this day, Rongorongo is considered undecipherable. Its use was mostly restricted to Indigenous priests, who were eventually captured in the Peruvian invasion, and no one familiar with reading the scripts has since been found.

Trouser Press

If you are going to drupa in May for the duration, this might be worth looking into. Via Laughing Squid:

Finnish couple Lauri Vuohensilta and Hanna Korpisaari of the Hydraulic Press Channel used their 150-ton hydraulic press to tightly condense a week’s worth of clothes so that they all fit into a small carry-on suitcase. This method certainly worked for getting there, but may present challenges when packing to go home.

Fair point.

Also, if one is going to drupa for the duration and working on the show daily, that bottle of whiskey will also need to be packed somehow.

The Queen’s Gambit

We’ve always been daunted by the concept of speed chess; indeed, we are fairly daunted by chess in general. But, via Core77, a new chess set makes speed chess kind of mandatory: the pieces are made of candles. Produced by Faum, an Australian manufacturer of beeswax products, the pieces were designed by sculptor Tatsiana Shevarenkova.

 The raison d’être:

“Over the past year, beeswax has been a primary medium of my practice. The immense beauty of this material is captivating: the natural colors and gentle aroma are unparalleled. While sculpting chess pieces in clay, I found myself drawn to envisioning them in beeswax. What truly fascinated me was the prospect of transforming an already dramatic game into something ritualistic—the inevitable losses, and the act of lighting the pieces one by one, culminating with the burning of the Queen.”

Or the King, we would think.

The chess set will set you back $800 AUD (USD $518). Rather a lot for what would really only be a single game. Replacement pieces go for $20 AUD (USD $13) each. We wouldn’t want to get rooked…

Put Off

LiveScience asks, “Why do we procrastinate?”

[Commentary TK]

Meat the Graphene

Was it a good week for graphene news? It’s always a good week for graphene news! New graphene-based sensors accurately test meat freshness. From (who else?) Graphene-Info:

Researchers from the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology, VNU University of Science, Hanoi University of Science and Technology and the Russian Academy of Sciences have developed a biosensor that uses graphene electrodes modified by zinc oxide nanoparticles to measure Hypoxanthine (HXA), a material that can be used as a marker for the freshness of meat. The team demonstrated the sensor’s efficacy on pork meat.

… “In comparison to modern food-testing methods, like high-performance liquid chromatography, gas chromatography, mass spectrometry, atomic and molecular spectroscopy, and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, biosensors like our sensor offer superior advantages in time, portability, high sensitivity, and selectivity,” said author Ngo Thi Hong Le.

Speaking of zinc oxide, we all know how important that is:

Someday, there’ll be documentaries like that about graphene.  

Roomba, Come Home!

We confess: an animated movie from the 1980s that sounds utterly ludicrous but is actually strangely touching is The Brave Little Toaster, with its cast of anthropomorphic household appliances. It’s not difficult to imagine, then, that the next animated hero may very well be an anthropomorphic Roomba.

In fact, a screenwriter wouldn’t have to expand too much on an actual incident, when, via Boing Boing, a household’s Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner apparently ran away from home.

Residents of this home were baffled after reviewing their Ring camera footage to find an unexpected culprit in the dead of night: their very own Roomba vacuum cleaner making a run for it. After searching for the missing Roomba for two days, all they were left with was this footage of the sneaky vacuum rolling off into the distance.

Two days? Sounds like the makings of a modern Incredible Journey.

Door Jam

Now this is just unnecessary. Via CNN: “American Airlines flight forced to return to Albuquerque after a man tried to open the emergency exit.” It really demonstrates a poor choice in airline, as some will just have the door fall off automatically during the flight. Also: when evaluating airlines, also be sure to pick the ones that don’t charge a fee for explosive decompression.

Meet the Meat

Last week was Ash Wednesday and, for those who observe, we are in the midst of Lent, a time for forgoing various luxuries or things that one usually enjoys (sort of a religiously sanctioned “dry January” for some). There is also the tradition of not eating meat on Fridays. While fish has been the go-to Friday meal during Lent (and if you are in the Syracuse, N.Y., area we highly recommend the Fish Friar), via Food & Wine, there are other options—which have even been approved by various religious authorities. For example, take alligator (please!):

[I]n 2010, one inquisitive Catholic in Louisiana wrote a letter to his local archbishop to ask …if he could continue to enjoy alligator meat on Fridays. 

“Concerning the question if alligator is acceptable to eat during the Lenten season ... yes, the alligator is considered in the fish family,” Archbishop Gregory M. Aymond wrote in his return letter.

And a million herpetologists and ichthyologists cried out in pain. But, then again, Stephen Jay Gould once famously said “There is no such thing as a fish” so who are we to judge?  We continue.

Aymond also noted his agreement with the letter sender’s love for alligators, adding, “I agree with you, God has created a magnificent creature that is important to the state of Louisiana and it is considered seafood.”

There are other options as well.

But as the Catholic News Agency explained, turtles, snakes, iguanas, and tortoises should be fair game too. And, according to Scientific America, in the 17th century, the Bishop of Quebec told everyone they could eat beaver meat on Fridays too, since they swim a lot in rivers (along with capybara for those living in South America). And snails fall under the same shellfish category as above, so here’s an escargot recipe that will get you through the Lenten season. Apologies, as we don’t have a beaver recipe on Food & Wine … yet. 

Dam!

This Week in Printing, Publishing, and Media History

February 19

1473: Polish mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus born.

1847: The first group of rescuers reaches the Donner Party. They politely decline a dinner invitation.

1878: Thomas Edison patents the phonograph.

1949: Ezra Pound is awarded the first Bollingen Prize in poetry by the Bollingen Foundation and Yale University.

1951: French novelist, essayist, and dramatist, Nobel Prize laureate André Gide dies (b. 1869).

1952: American novelist, essayist, and short story writer Amy Tan born. Much joy luck.

1953: Georgia approves the first literature censorship board in the United States.

1956: American singer-songwriter and guitarist Peter Holsapple born.

1963: The publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique reawakens the feminist movement in the United States as women's organizations and consciousness raising groups spread.

2016: Italian novelist, literary critic, and philosopher Umberto Eco dies (b. 1932).

2016: American author Harper Lee dies (b. 1926).

February 20

1792: The Postal Service Act, establishing the United States Post Office Department, is signed by United States President George Washington.

1816: Rossini’s opera The Barber of Seville premieres at the Teatro Argentina in Rome.

1872: The Metropolitan Museum of Art opens in New York City.

1877: Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake receives its premiere at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.

1902: American photographer and environmentalist Ansel Adams born.

1926: American author and screenwriter Richard Matheson born. He was legend.

1933: The U.S. Congress approves the Blaine Act to repeal federal Prohibition in the United States, sending the Twenty-first Amendment to the United States Constitution to state ratifying conventions for approval. And there was much rejoicing throughout the land.

1943: The Saturday Evening Post publishes the first of Norman Rockwell’s Four Freedoms in support of United States President Franklin Roosevelt's 1941 State of the Union address theme of Four Freedoms.

1946: American singer-songwriter and guitarist J. Geils born. No anchovies, please.

1962 : While aboard Friendship 7, John Glenn becomes the first American to orbit the earth, making three orbits in four hours, 55 minutes.

February 21

1804: The first self-propelling steam locomotive makes its outing at the Pen-y-Darren Ironworks in Wales.

1821: American publisher and founder of Charles Scribner’s Sons Charles Scribner I born.

1828: Initial issue of the Cherokee Phoenix is the first periodical to use the Cherokee syllabary invented by Sequoyah.

1842: John Greenough is granted the first U.S. patent for the sewing machine.

1848: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish The Communist Manifesto.

1874: The Oakland Daily Tribune publishes its first edition.

1878: The first telephone directory is issued in New Haven, Conn.

1903: French-American essayist and memoirist Anaïs Nin born.

1925: The New Yorker publishes its first issue.

1947: In New York City, Edwin Land demonstrates the first “instant camera,” the Polaroid Land Camera, to a meeting of the Optical Society of America.

1958: The CND symbol, aka peace symbol, commissioned by the Direct Action Committee in protest against the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment, is designed and completed by Gerald Holtom.

1962: American novelist, short story writer, and essayist David Foster Wallace born.

1967: American author and screenwriter Charles Beaumont dies (b. 1929).

February 22

1632: Galileo’s Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems is published.

1857: German physicist, philosopher, and academic Heinrich Hertz born.

1878: In Utica, N.Y., Frank Woolworth opens the first of many of five-and-dime Woolworth stores.

1924: U.S. President Calvin Coolidge becomes the first President to deliver a radio address from the White House. We bet it was riveting.

1925: American illustrator and poet Edward Gorey.

1983: The notorious Broadway flop Moose Murders opens and closes on the same night at the Eugene O’Neill Theatre.

February 23

1455: Traditional date for the publication of the Gutenberg Bible, the first Western book printed with movable type.

1633: English diarist and politician Samuel Pepys born.

1821: English poet John Keats dies (b. 1795).

1898: Émile Zola is imprisoned in France after writing J’Accuse…!, a letter accusing the French government of antisemitism and wrongfully imprisoning Captain Alfred Dreyfus.

1904: American journalist and historian William L. Shirer born.

1927; U.S. President Calvin Coolidge signs a bill by Congress establishing the Federal Radio Commission (later replaced by the Federal Communications Commission) which was to regulate the use of radio frequencies in the United States.

February 24

1582: With the papal bull Inter gravissimas, Pope Gregory XIII announces the Gregorian calendar.

1607: L’Orfeo by Claudio Monteverdi, one of the first works recognized as an opera, receives its première performance.

1711: The London première of Rinaldo by George Frideric Handel, the first Italian opera written for the London stage.

1854: A Penny Red with perforations was the first perforated postage stamp to be officially issued for distribution.

1921: American actor Abe Vigoda born.

1955: American businessman and co-founder of Apple Inc. and Pixar Steve Jobs born.

1968: American comedian and actor Mitch Hedberg born.

1989: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issues a fatwa and offers a USD $3 million bounty for the death of Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses.

February 25

1644: English pastor, engineer, and inventor of the first practical steam engine Thomas Newcomen born.

1899: German-English journalist and businessman, founder of Reuters Paul Reuter dies (b. 1816).

1928: Charles Jenkins Laboratories of Washington, D.C. becomes the first holder of a broadcast license for television from the Federal Radio Commission.

1943: English singer-songwriter, guitarist, and producer George Harrison born.

1983: American playwright, and poet Tennessee Williams dies (b. 1911).