By: Neil Macmillan

Flying with Mylius
British Airways' corporate typeface Mylius has taken a fair old bashing from the typographic glitterati. I can understand this. Many exclusive corporate typeface designs are somewhat lacking in character and personality. As an ingredient in advertising typography such a typeface is a serious challenge to creativity. If this is the case with Mylius, Simon Warden, Head of Typography and Design at BA's ad agency M&C Saatchi, has risen to the challenge admirably. His solution to BA's media battle against the low cost airlines features cropped price boxes using Mylius numerals reversed white out of blue or red. Utilising the skills of LetterForms' Dave Bateman, Simon had the numerals and kerning subtly tweaked to ensure maximum impact and continuity in this format where one box can fill a poster and several can appear in a small press ad. This skilful manipulation of Mylius protects the integrity of BA's upmarket perception whilst giving the cheap and cheerless pricing solutions offered by EasyJet, Ryanair et al some serious competition.

Good photography with good typography
I recently enjoyed an exhibition of photography by the late John Deakin, the former Vogue photographer, friend of Francis Bacon and Soho of the fifties and sixties personality, at the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh. The choice of type, FF Sari, for the poster and supporting graphics was interesting and worked well. Introduced by Berthold as Barmen (now called Barmeno), the Edinburgh-based Tim Pethick Design Studio used the black weight and the old style figures of FF Sari to great advantage. Visitors to the Dean Gallery, one of the National Galleries of Scotland, with an interest in type will enjoy the brilliant use of FF Quadraat Sans by Robert Dalrymple for the signage and general information graphics. And no visitor should miss the wonderful recreation within the Dean Gallery of Leith-born graphic artist and sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi's studio.

Motoring with Verdana
A recent redesign of Emap's Car magazine introduces Verdana as the dominant display face. An unusual choice for an upmarket mag, Verdana was designed for Microsoft by Matthew Carter in 1996 to 'bridge the legibility gap between screen and paper'. Verdana's convenience as a free system font is probably responsible for its appearance in many areas of typographic communication. There's a stiffness about this sans serif type in large sizes, particularly in upper and lower case use, but, despite that, I've seen it at work branding several ad campaigns and corporate IDs. Car's designers have chosen FF Fago as the supporting sans for subheads and some text and the delightful Eldorado from Font Bureau for the majority of the text. Font Bureau revived and expanded Eldorado for American Premiere magazine in 1993-94 with great sensitivity offering display, text, and even a Micro version for six point and smaller. Mike Parker's biography on W A Dwiggins' development of Eldorado in Font Bureau Type Specimens 3rd Edition says, 'Of W. A. Dwiggins' wartime experiments, the most successful was Eldorado, released by Mergenthaler in 1953. With unusual fidelity, he followed an early roman lowercase, cut in the 16th century by Jacques de Sanlecque the elder, after Granjon' . The late Walter Tracy in his book Letters of Credit states that Dwiggins'efforts were inspired by a 1774 Spanish type from Antonio de Sancha of Madrid. This seems more appropriate to a type named Eldorado. I suspect that both are correct in that de Sancha's types were influenced by those of de Sanlecque. Readers fortunate enough to have access to Updike's Printing Types can compare the specimens of both against Eldorado; figure 149 in Volume 1 for de Sanlecque and figure 236 in Volume 2 for de Sancha.

Rolling Stone types identified
In my review of Rolling Stone's type use I'm surprised that I failed to recognise Portuguese designer Mário Feliciano's T-26 typeface Gazz (the distressed and stencil sans). I'm currently working on a Fontworks' T-26 library showing which includes Gazz and several other outstanding types by Mário. It was Rolling Stone art director Andy Cowles who got in touch about Gazz and also informed me that the dominant sans in his mag is Proxima, designed by Mark Simonson in 1994. Sure enough, I found the three weights with 'optically adjusted obliques' in Fontworks' Fonthaus booklet (now out of print unfortunately). Can't understand how I missed such a workable sans.

Cooking with type
Of the several cook books delivered to the Macmillan household by Santa, that of Naked Chef Jamie Oliver is of particular interest. Typographically it's no surprise that the bulk of the book, the text and recipes, is set in Interstate. This may be a subliminal attempt at association with Sainsburys. I'm not familiar with the other types used in this nicely designed and beautifully photographed book, an interesting stencil font for chapter intros and a geometric sans italic for recipe titles. The book complements the Channel 4 TV series, Jamie's Kitchen, where Jamie successfully attempts to create professional kitchen staff for a new restaurant from a team of unemployed kids. The restaurant called 15 is now so successful that it's booked for months ahead. Located in Shoreditch, London, attendees at Fontworks' Jeremy Tankard talk in November 1999 will remember 15's premises as the venue for that evening, The Gallery, Westland Place.

What Next?
Linotype Library continue to add reworked and expanded classic typeface families to their Platinum Collection . The most recent release is Linotype Sabon Next. The accomplished French type designer Jean-François Porchez has reinterpreted Jan Tschichold's Sabon thinking to offer a 47 font family which includes display cuts, regular, demi, bold, extra bold and black weights, alternates for each, ornaments, and, of course, euro symbols. Linotype Library's two part specimen includes an excellent historical perspective by Chris Burke and useful type showings and samples by Porchez. Tschichold supervised the production of two original versions of Sabon. The version we are most familiar with was produced for machine composition by Linotype and Monotype and the other, the roman of which is said to be slightly more faithful to its Garamond roots, for hand setting by Stempel. Linotype Sabon Next claims to be a hybrid of both. Maybe it's the familiarity factor but, to my eye, the technical restrictions which determined the character shapes for machine composition helped to create the dynamics responsible for the popularity of this typeface. It's disappointing to have to say that I don't sense these dynamics in the 'truer to Garamond' Sabon Next. Forthcoming from Linotype Library is Avenir Next, a collaboration between Adrian Frutiger and Akira Kobayashi, offering such variants as ultra light and condensed weights. Can't wait.

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