Wang Laboratories was a renowned Massachusetts (USA) manufacturer of desktop computing and word processing technology through the 1970s and 1980s. Founded by Dr. An Wang in 1951, the company started out in typesetting and calculator equipment before becoming more successful and well-known for office computing equipment.

The Wang System 2200 was a series of desktop minicomputers with a built-in BASIC language, introduced in the early 1970s before the advent of popular microcomputing. The printed documentation for this line of systems employed a couple different design languages, but the style shown here with this typography was in consistent use through at least 1977’s PCS-II. 

Apparently – and according to Google’s AI Overview which we try not to read but are reading more and more – “Love Carefully” was a slogan used by Planned Parenthood in the 1980s, for promoting campaigns centered around National Condom Week. The Dartmouth Libraries has this in the John R. Scotford, Jr. collection of his work in the sub-category “Non-Dartmouth organizations and events, 1964–1983”. Stamped on the lower right portion of the ‘sign’, however, are the words “COPYRIGHT 1972” – which is one year before Roe v. Wade. So everything we typed above about the 1980s might be irrelevant. Not irrelevant is the good and important and diverse work of Planned Parenthood. That this poster is by our favorite Dartmouth designer and set in Helvetica and Avant Garde just makes it that much more special.

This is a late nineteenth-century business card for George H. Gage (1848–1931), who lived in West Boylston, Massachusetts, and was a sales agent for “the Patent Rug Machine.”

Perhaps “The Griffin” – an early punch needle – was the “Patent Rug Machine” that Gage represented as an agent. The text on the cover of a leaflet about The Griffin (see the History of Punch Needle on the Oxford Company’s site) provides the following details about the machine and its patents: “The Improved Griffin Rug Machine. Manufactured by G. W. Griffin & Co., Franklin Falls, New Hampshire. Patented Aug. 23, 1881, and April 13, 1886.”

Geo. H. Gage
Agent for the Patent Rug Machine
West Boylston, Mass.

The typography features two typefaces that have similar names and were both designed by Charles E. Heyer: the shaded caps used for the name are from Steelplate, patented Aug. 30, 1881, for Barnhart Brothers & Spindler. The job description is set in Copperplate Italic, cut by Heyer a decade earlier for the Boston Type Foundry. The caps for the location are from an unidentified Gothic.

The prominent F in the title is from Olicana, while the rest of the text is in Granjon.

Inky Fingers: The Making of Books in Early Modern Europe is a book by Anthony Grafton, a historian of the place and period. It was published by Belknap Press, an imprint of Harvard University Press, in 2020.

The cover was designed by Graciela Galup. The inset on the cover is a woodcut illustration depicting a printer’s shop from Jeremiah Hornschuch’s Orthotypographia (Leipzig, 1608), which Grafton says was the first handbook to be written on proof-corrections. You can see a scan of the print, from a second edition published in 1634, via the Saxon State and University Library Dresden.

The fuller dust jacket

Copyright page set in Trump-Mediäval, and the dedication set in Granjon Italic

The Community Classroom in Florence, Massachusetts, offers in-person tutoring, guided homework support, academic coaching, and other services.

Their website and physical space use Merriweather and Crimson Text to brand the business.

I was prompted into finishing this post which has been long-sitting in my drafts by Paolo Amoroso’s reminder that Common Lisp: the Language was published 40 years ago. Common Lisp is a programming language and was an attempt to synthesize out of the many similar-but-not-compatible languages in the Lisp family a ‘common’ Lisp which would help programmers, vendors, suppliers, textbook writers, and so on.

Affectionately known as CLtL (the 2nd edition being known as CLtL2), Guy L. Steele’s comprehensive work was a standard reference for Lisp programmers and helped organize the multi-year effort to make Common Lisp a standard. Some of the languages on which Common Lisp was built and drew (variously known as Lisps or Lisp-like languages) are featured on the cover of CLtL in Windsor’s Outline style. Common Lisp as a language was successful to the extent that of those, only Scheme and Common Lisp survive today in any recognisable form.

The first edition cover is entirely typographic, using Eras for author (in white) and the title (in teal and white), with “COMMON” being made large, and “LISP” very large. All on a silver background. The book design is credited to David Ford.

The second edition replaces teal with red, and silver with pale-cyan. Gone are the other Lisp-like languages (not just a whimsical design choice, by 1990 when the 2nd edition was published, Common Lisp had essentially won: every major Lisp vendor had or claimed to have an implementation of Common Lisp). The new graphic is an illustration by the author of the mathematical function (z-1)/(z+1) in the complex plane. There are similar graphics of several functions in the Numbers chapter. The graphics are all produced directly from PostScript programs and incorporated directly into the digitally produced camera ready copy (from the Colophon); the PostScript programs themselves are generated by a Common Lisp program which is listed in the book.

The colophon of the second edition also goes to some lengths to document the tweaks made to Letter Gothic, used for displaying code: the accents grave, acute, circumflex, and tilde have been borrowed from a larger font-size and shifted; /hyphen and /equal have been replaced or redrawn; and in #, /numbersign, the gap has been eliminated. The programming language Common Lisp has a fairly high frequency of such characters, and some of them can be seen in the program fragment.

The colophon also attests to the second edition being printed on a Linotron 300 (but sadly, not who designed the covers).

Detail of interior page showing a fragment of the Common Lisp program used to generate the PostScript program used to generate the diagrams (as seen on cover).

The crop-and-repeat move is a technique that modernist typographers keep coming back to since the late 1960s. Perhaps the most striking execution – if you want to fill an entire page with type – is the crop-and-repeat that starts from both the top and bottom and ends with a complete title in the center. So far, our earliest example of this on Fonts In Use is Mencken by Carl Bode, designed by George Lenox in 1969. This exhibition catalog cover by Jacqueline Casey is the second. Once you open the wrapper to reveal the back cover, you see Casey took the technique even further, continuing the repeat in the lateral direction.

A profile of Casey from Display, where I just acquired this item for Letterform Archive’s collection:

Casey headed MIT’s Office of Design Services from 1955 to 1989 where she and her colleagues played a critical role in popularizing functional Modernism and the International Typographic Style in the USA. “My work combines two cultures: The American interest in visual metaphor on the one hand, and the Swiss fascination with planning, fastidiousness, and control over technical execution on the other.”

She designed the poster (see last image) for this exhibition of which she said: “Golub used strong, sweeping, horizontal brushstrokes. I wanted the type to respond to his technique and the colors to his sober subject matter.”

David H. Ahl’s BASIC Computer Games—also known as 101 BASIC Computer Games—was published from 1973 and into the 1980s, and marked the first million-selling computer book. Ahl’s work influenced a generation of users new to computers. The book contained a plethora of different games and simulations that could be typed into a computer and used or played. David H. Ahl worked at minicomputer manufacturer Digital Equipment Corporation, and his first efforts in this direction were published by DEC and intended to be used with their time-sharing computer systems. The cover shown is from these early printings, and Bob Barner's illustration faithfully (if loosely) reproduces Marvin, the popular Letraset typeface.

Later, Ahl left to join the personal computer revolution and this book was reprinted by Creative Computing in new editions with different cover art Ahl remains best known as the publisher of Creative Computing magazine, a role he held for many years after leaving DEC.

Also shown is a short (and short-lived) companion volume titled Understanding Mathematics and Logic Using BASIC Computer Games (Nov. 1973) which also uses a hand-drawn Marvin for its title.

Outrider Beer Company, a brewpub in Amesbury, Massachusetts, is dedicated to crafting excellent food and beer for their community. When asked to design a merchandise item for them, I aimed to capture a rebellious, motorcycle-inspired vibe without coming across as overly serious or aggressively tough. The photo I selected, sourced from the Austrian National Library, perfectly embodies the company's spirit. This collaboration was a big success.

Source: archive.org Bitsavers. License: All Rights Reserved.

April 1970 issue ft. Amelia

Modern Data was a professional trade journal “for corporate and technical management, systems analysis, EDP managers, software specialists, and computer systems and operations managers.” It was published by Delta Publications, Inc., Framingham, Massachusetts, from around 1968 to 1976, initially with the subtitle “Products, Systems, Services”.

For the first volumes and at least until 1974, Optima was used for the logo, in tightly spaced caps. No art director is credited, but the cover art for most issues from this period is by William Kwiatkowski.

By January 1976, John W. Kelley, Jr. had assumed the role of art director and introduced a new logo based on Blippo Black (not shown here).

Source: archive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

January 1970 issue with “Modern Data” in two lines and the subtitle “Products, Systems, Services”. “The Videofile System” is in Optima, too.

Source: archive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

June 1970 issue ft. Helvetica

Source: archive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

July 1970 issue ft. Folio

Source: archive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

November 1970 issue, again ft. Amelia

Source: archive.org License: All Rights Reserved.

December 1970 issue ft. Akzidenz-Grotesk extra and Helvetica

This picture book by celebrated children's author/illustrator Eric Carle (1929-2021), as the title suggests, is about a little girl named Monica who longs to play with the moon and asks her father to somehow get it. The book acts as a whimsical exploration of the phases of the moon.

All text - the title, the story, the copyright page, etc. - is set in Litera.

In what is probably the largest use of my fonts ever (and without a doubt the corniest ?), Mike’s Maze at Warner Farm in Sunderland, Massachusetts has debuted its Fall 2023 corn maze featuring Fit and Lab DJR.

Employing font sizes of up to 151,165pt (that’s a 44-yard / 40-meter cap height), designer Jess Marsh of Hired Hands Signs chose artificial intelligence as the theme of this year’s maze.

In a dense border around the edge of the maze, she asks the question, “In the age of artificial intelligence, what makes us human?”

As visitors wander Fit’s narrow corridors (reminiscent of the circuitry in a computer chip), they ponder this question and encounter tech trivia and decoding challenges along the way.

In the center of the maze, the space opens up and visitors experience the raster grid of the word “ThiNkiNG” set in Lab DJR.

In a field just to the northwest, a companion maze used for beer tastings features the word “DRINKING” set in a chunkier cut of Fit, with bubbles floating around it.

While designing the maze, Marsh used Fit’s variable width axis to subtly adjust the text to align with the rows of corn and fill the length of the field. She worked with Precision Mazes to execute the design with a combination of drones, GPS-guided tractors, and manual labor. Marsh and farmer David Wissemann had to clear out the thin strips of Fit’s counterforms using shovels and hoes, since those interior spaces could not be accessed by tractor. (I helped out a little in the field too, photo evidence below.)

Mike’s Maze was started by farmer Mike Wissemann (David’s father) and artist Will Sillin over twenty years ago, and each year’s maze centers on a different theme. The maze is a popular autumn destination for families in Western Massachusetts, and this year’s maze was front page news in the local paper. In addition to exploring the maze, visitors can eat cider donuts, play on giant slides and ropes, hang out inside a giant computer, and more.

Video by Dan Taibbi

A fisheye panorama showing the maze’s position in Massachusetts’s Pioneer Valley, with the Connecticut River and Sugarloaf Mountain behind it

A close-up drone shot, showing the rows of corn.

The “Drinking” maze set in Fit, used for beer tastings.

The maze as viewed from a biplane.

Designer Jess Marsh and farmer David Wissemann walk through the interior of the maze.

Me, helping out (a little) to define the edge of Fit’s A crossbar

A drone’s view of Jess Marsh, David Wissemann, and me standing inside of a recently-cleared counterform of Fit’s A.

Our view of the drone, hovering over the cornfield. Sugarloaf Mountain is visible in the distance.

The counterform of Fit’s A, shortly after clearing.

Maze founder Mike Wissemann and designer Jess Marsh with their thinking caps on. (Jess’s new one uses Lab DJR)

A giant computer complete with keyboard and mouse stands next to the eastern edge of the maze.

DO Drops sells “FUNctional gummies and chocolates that are low sugar and low dose, with just enough THC to lift you up or chill you out while you DO what you need to DO.” From logo to packaging and website, the visual identity of this manufacturer of slightly mind-bending candies uses Steradian by Emtype Foundry for all typography.

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Flyer for a poetry reading in Provincetown, Massachusetts. There is a decent amount of text to fit into this flyer legibly, so I was angling for typefaces that have narrower character widths…and particularly condensed variations for the headlines. Kapra is a great choice for this type of thing.

Suntup Editions is publishing a new printing of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five in three editions: the artist edition (1000 copies), the numbered edition (350 copies), and the lettered edition (26 copies). It features illustrations by Julian De Narvaez and a frontispiece by Edith Vonnegut.

The elegant book design was done by Michael Russem of Katherine Small Gallery fame. Toshi Omagari’s revival of Berthold Wolpe’s Sachsenwald is used for title and chapter numbers, and Gimlet Text is used throughout. Gimlet Display is also peppered in for subtitles and lead-ins. As Gimlet’s designer, I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to see how it looks with the letterpress “bite” on the Stonehenge paper created by Bradley Hutchinson’s Heidelberg Cylinder press.

Logo

MIT Economics is a department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, located in the Morris and Sophie Chang Building in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Since 2023, Roboto Serif is used for the MIT Economics logo as well as for headlines on the website. It is paired with Nunito Sans for text.

Homepage

Brochure cover with Neue Helvetica

The Calendarbook 2013 is a mobile consisting of round disks, strung together with wrapped cotton thread. Each disk includes two months, one on either side. The calendar is stored in a white translucent paper envelope and fastened with a pin.

The calendar is designed and hand-made by Silvana Amato, Rome, Italy, and Angela Liguori, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, in collaboration with Marta B Dau. The illustrations, titled Men Diving into Time are by Steven Guarnaccia, Brooklyn, New York. Printed by Futura Graphica on Fedrigoni Old Mill white paper.

The calendar is type set in Cholla Slab a sub-family from the Cholla typeface family. Designed in 1998–99 by Sibylle Hagmann, it is named after a species of cactus indigenous to the Mojave Desert.

From kensfoods.com:

Ken’s is a family business that traces back to the basement of Ken’s Steak House, a restaurant in Framingham, Massachusetts that became known for its delicious salad dressings.

As of 2023, they offer more than sixty different flavors, from Apple Cider Vinaigrette to Zesty Italian. The “Ken’s Steak House” logo is in some Bookman with swashes. Judging from the a’s bowl and other details, it’s not Bookman Swash a.k.a. “Sixties Bookman” as offered by Letraset, VGC and others, though.

“Steakhouse Dressing” is in all-caps Goudy Oldstyle, with Futura for “1941”. The product names are shown in Raleigh. Ken’s uses these typefaces at least since 2008, and probably a lot longer than that. On current labels, the product category (like “Dressing”, for example) and other additional text appears to be in a squooshed ITC Berkeley Oldstyle Italic with swash caps and modifications.

Atlas Farm makes great use of Dapifer Black as display typeface.

Founded in 2004, Atlas Farm is a family business in Deerfield, Massachussetts, selling its certified organic produce throughout New England. The website is designed using two sturdy slab-serif typefaces.

Darden Studio’s Dapifer was conceived as an unbracketed “Old Style”. The family spans six weights, in upright and italic (plus Stencil styles). Atlas Farm recognized the potential of its boldest weights for creating impactful headlines. Dapifer Black is used for page titles and, in reverse, for text graphics that help to navigate the site. Body copy is rendered in Sanchez, a low-contrast slab with wider proportions.

This Is Boston Not L.A. 12″ cover.

This is Boston Not L.A. and the follow-up EP Unsafe at Any Speed are hardcore punk compilations released in 1982 on Modern Method Records. The compilations feature songs from early Boston hardcore bands, namely: Jerry’s Kids, The Proletariat, The Groinoids, The F.U.'s, Gang Green, Decadence, and The Freeze. Decadence was the only band that didn’t appear on both compilations (their track, “Slam”, on This is Boston Not L.A. was the only song they ever released).

The covers of both records feature mosh pit photos by Phil in Phlash accompanied by large titling typeset in the extra-bold Berthold Block Heavy. The back covers also feature the condensed variant of Block.

The track listing for This Is Boston Not L.A. is set in ITC Avant Garde Gothic, with the inner sleeve / lyrics sheet and vinyl labels set in what appears to be Spartan Condensed. Unsafe at Any Speed uses mostly Helvetica for its track listing and other ancillary text.

[More info at Discogs]

This Is Boston Not L.A. 12″ back cover.

This Is Boston Not L.A. 12″ inner sleeve / lyrics sheet.

This Is Boston Not L.A. 12″ inner sleeve / lyrics sheet.

This Is Boston Not L.A. 12″ side 1 label.

This Is Boston Not L.A. 12″ side 2 label.

Unsafe At Any Speed 7″ front cover.

Unsafe At Any Speed 7″ back cover.

Unsafe At Any Speed 7″ side A label.

Unsafe At Any Speed 7″ side B label (with a photo of producer Mike Bastarache).