Categories: General updates, Inspiration, Rants
Poring over some photo-lettering specimens—one of my preferred pastimes—I stumbled upon an advertising postcard that had been mailed to the original owner of my Lettering Inc. book back in November of 1960. The postcard was exciting enough to me on its own; I presume very few examples of this kind of ephemera have survived, and […]
Categories: Rants
Mythbusters has been one of my favorite shows ever since it first made it to air. And I’ve been an Etsy seller since 2005, having been so fortunate as to witness its creation firsthand thanks to my fellow Gallatin alumni Chris Maguire, Haim Schoppik, and Rob Kalin. I was thrilled to see this post on the […]
Categories: Inspiration, Rants
While I’m on the topic of prop documents, this has been bothering me for months: a while back I was watching TV1, and I saw a poster in the background that looked quite a bit like Saul Bass‘s famous Vertigo one-sheet. The typography is almost identical in style. The colors too. The imagery and composition—same […]
Categories: Rants
After I posted my article about the Manzanar War Relocation Center’s entrance sign, I received this email: Josh: I ran across your Dec 24 entry regarding the Manzanar relocation sign. My father, who was interned there, painted the sign. He passed away four years ago but was a graphic artist who did a lot calligraphic […]
Categories: Rants
Update (January 5, 2010): After posting this article, I received an email from Mark Matsumoto, whose father, Akio Matsumoto, was a commercial artist interned at Manzanar during the War. According to Mark, Akio Matsumoto was the person who painted the sign. Needless to say, this information drastically affects my original theories about the sign’s lettering! […]
Categories: Rants
Just caught wind of this video posted two days ago on YouTube—a simultaneous parody of Lady Gaga and the font-of-the-decade, Neutraface. Nevermind the comedians’ unenlightened pronunciation1; it certainly proves that Neutraface has ascended to a cult status almost comparable to that of Helvetica. Thanks to Angela of Normal Modes for pointing me towards this. It […]
Categories: Inspiration, Rants
Avid readers of this blog will remember one of the first posts I made, over a year ago, about a redesign of the Star Waggons logo that I had completed at the time. There may have been some hubris, on my part, in comparing my work to that of the lettering genius Ed Benguiat, but […]
Categories: Rants
I love when I discover that two places, people, or things that I am interested in separately have something in common. I’m currently making my way through Life With Letters …as they turned photogenic by the late, great Edward Rondthaler, co-founder of Photo-Lettering, Inc. I came across this passage today (on page 60): … Occasionally […]
Categories: Inspiration, Rants
After my recent post on harmonographs, I ponied up for a copy of the Photo-Lettering Alphabet Thesaurus, Volume 2. And now that I can read the book in “full resolution,” I learned a bit more about these mysterious space drawings. The following is transcribed directly from the book: The figures on the following pages are […]
Categories: Inspiration, Rants
My path to discovering the world of “harmonographs” is slightly convoluted. It all began when House Industries announced that it would be digitizing and selling selections from the Photo-Lettering, Inc. type collection. Now, besides the fact that this will allow digital designers such as myself to take advantage of the analog type of yesteryear, House […]
Josh Korwin has been running Three Steps Ahead, a creative design studio, since the late 1990s. He has been a typography nerd for as long as he can remember, and rabidly collects (and sometimes sells) just about everything with neat type or lettering on it. While graphic design and web design fill most of his days, he dabbles in photography and letterpress printing.
