A little known fact about ampersands

Did you know that an ampersand is actually a ligature (two or more letters joined together to form one glyph or character) for the French word 'et' or 'and'?

Letterpress added to the National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage

What wonderful news to see the traditional craft of letterpress printing being officially added to the National Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage

Read more here…

It seems everyone loves Helvetica… except me

Created in 1957 by Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann Helvetica has taken over the world. It is everywhere and yet almost invisible due to its sheer familiarity and it comes in a huge variety of weights.


But there were a couple of niggles which I always hated about it, chief of which was its upper case 'R' with its odd, wobbly little foot at the end of the leg. Pedantic as I can be, this alone would often be enough for me to rule it out. So imagine my surprise at the recent overhaul of Helvetica by Montype, the first since 1982, and the discovery that this new version contains alternate glyphs for many characters. Not least that pesky upper case 'R'! There's also a rather lovely alternate '1' which has more than a touch of that other classic Franklin Gothic about it.

I feel somewhat vindicated, although it is still an extra glyph and not the default so I can't see myself manually editing large amounts of text. However, no longer will Helvetica make me squirm when there's an upper case 'R'… well, in headlines at least!

Read more here…

Redacting your PDF properly

In light of the news stories from the US about Paul Manafort's lawyers submitting a redacted PDF that could actually still be read, it might be no harm to dig a little deeper.

The PDF in question featured black boxes over the redacted text intended to obscure it, which can be done in any number of ways depending on the software you use. But the text underneath these boxes is still there and can still be copied/pasted to another application to be read. Some suggest that if you then 'flatten' the PDF that this will solve the problem, but that's not always the case. The same is true if you are working in MS Word and just change the background colour of the text to black.

Adobe's pro version of it's popular PDF reader Acrobat Pro contains a redaction tool (https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/removing-sensitive-content-pdfs.html) but I haven't tried it and would be wary of any software solution for something as sensitive as legal documents.

I would prefer a lo-tec but bullet proof solution like either taking a screenshot/s of the newly redacted document and saving those as a new PDF or printing the document out, going through it and redacting passages by hand with a black marker, scanning that and saving those as a new PDF. Both of these ways produce an image file rather than a text file so there is no actual text for someone to copy. One caveat if you are going the marker route - make sure its a good solid black as image enhancement software could be used to 'rescue' the text from beneath a nearly black or drying out marker stroke. Finally I would also save the resulting scan as a 'bitmap' rather than a 'greyscale' image, if your software will let you, as this will be just pure black and pure white with no greys at all.

Scan before and after image enhancement

Jamie Hewlett

A great article on Jamie Hewlitt. He of Gorillaz fame, who's art I have loved since the days of 2000AD and Tank Girl. Worth a read.

https://wepresent.wetransfer.com/story/jamie-hewlett-gorillaz/

Google Fonts

Usually when designing one might go to some trouble to choose an interesting main font to achieve some uniqueness for the job, but the temptation once one starts setting swathes of type can be to fall into a rut of using and reusing the same, favourite fonts, e.g. gill sans, palatino, frutiger etc.

But Google do a huge range of (mostly beatutiful) free to use, free to share open source fonts, most with many weights, many of which look very similar to some classic ones but are subtly different. So using Google's 'Lato' instead of 'Gill Sans' or 'Nunito' instead of 'Futura' will give your text a fresh look. Plus, should your printer ask you to supply the font you can simply direct them to Google's page to download them with no need skirt the law.

Fint them here https://fonts.google.com/

InDesign black plate separation issues

When you're working in InDesign it is important to remember that it automatically sets black to overprint. That is the '[Black]' swatch that comes preinstalled on every new document. For the most part this is of little consequence. But occasionally, for example when doing a spot metallic ink that has to overprint, no matter how hard you try your plates won't work out.

These two crests are in an InDesign document and are meant to print as a black shape with overprinting gold foil filigree.  They are stacked as follows… A large outer gold shape, a smaller black shape over this and overprinting gold filigree on top of everything.

As you can see they appear identical onscreen, however the one on the top uses InDesign's '[Black]' swatch whilst the other uses a newly created swatch which is just 100% black.

When you view the separations you get two very different results. They both generate the same, correct black plate, a solid black shape.

But two very different gold plates…

Because InDesign sets its '[Black]' swatch to automatically overprint EVERYTHING the black shape on the top didn't knock out the gold underneath resulting in a solid gold shape with no filigree. But the one below which was coloured with the new 100% black swatch DID knock out and everything separated as expected.

Note the new colour swatch does not generate a new black plate, the way using Pantone Black would for example.