 very happy to be here. Especially given that I've been giving lectures at design conferences since the early 1980s. Please don't do the math. And so, design conferences from the 1980s, what was that like, you might ask? Well, I can tell you, it was kind of like this. I think you're all familiar with this famous painting entitled, Token Woman in Room Full of White Men, which is why I would like to thank Type-Con for turning the tables on this injustice and for taking us from here to here. Now, let's go to Italy, which is my biggest source of inspiration, both typographic and gastronomic, for as long as I can remember. Although, because I couldn't live there, I had to learn to make my own typographic oasis in New York. So I worked for Herb Blue Ballon, who as you could see was not afraid of hiring women. And then I went from there to become Art Director of Pantheon Books, where I had the great luxury of being able to experiment with a different period of design and type history on a daily basis. And I was on a mission, well, at that time in publishing, there were no risks being taken. Everyone seemed to think that Type-On covers had to be big and vulgar. But I was on a mission to prove that you didn't have to shout to capture someone's attention. And the cover I did for The Lover, I think is the best example of that. Marguerite du Rah, although a celebrity in France, was relatively unknown in the US. And in spite of that, and in spite of this very understated book cover, it became a runway bestseller, Pantheon's first, since Dr. Givago in 1958. So I think I proved my point. So the other thing that was going on in publishing at that time was that all the art directors in the industry were so poorly paid that they all had to freelance for one another. So I got a call one day from a publisher whom I had never worked with before, nor had I ever met, who said, we have an Italian Nazi fascist homosexual novel. It's just perfect for you. So that's how it was. One day it would be a fascist type. The next day, the universe died. The other thing that was going on was that there were really no reference books available on design or type history because Steve Heller, who was not yet my husband, hadn't written them yet. So I had to learn to create my own archive to draw from and I would do anything I had to do to avoid using traditional fonts. So basically I just sort of made them up. And this is arguably the worst book title in the history of book publishing, I think. The thing happens. 30 years later, I still can't tell you what this means, but it was actually a good book of essays by the then film critic of the New Yorker magazine. So I decided to use these little plaster letters that were designed to make your own home movie titles in the 40s and 50s. And you'll see this coming back again later. So little by little, I began to realize that there was, in fact, life after book publishing. And this was a call for entries that I did for Society of Publication Designers, which was done gratis, of course, in exchange for creative freedom. And since I'd always wanted to design an eye chart, this was the perfect opportunity for that. So 2,000 book jackets and 11 years later seemed to be as good a time as any to start my own design studio. And I quickly learned the two important lessons of having your own firm. One is that you should never depend on any one type of work or any one client. And two, you should never sit and wait for the phone to ring with the perfect job because there is no perfect job. The perfect job is the one that you make for yourself. And as a designer, you really have to create your own personal projects. It's really, I think, the only way that you'll ever grow and find your own design voice. So I started with what was closest to my heart, which was Italian art deco, which I had been collecting for decades. And this became a series that I did with my husband, Steve Heller, that was on Art Deco Graphic Design, starting with Italian and going from there. So the way we would work together is that Steve and I would collect and select the work together. He would do the writing and then I would design the book in the studio where I had two rules. One is that we would always put a woman on the cover, which was easy enough. And secondly, we would always design a typeface that would be drawn from one of the images in the book that had a unique letter form. So the books did very well, but eventually drifted into remainder purgatory. And eventually we decided to take a section of each of the books and put them into this compendium, Eurodeco, which had everything except a streamline, of course. And that was until recently, still in print. And then from there we did typology, type design from the Victorian era to the digital age and whatever didn't fit in there went into design connoisseur and many, many others. But in the meantime, after having focused on book covers for so long, I thought it was time to look inside a book and deal with the interior design. But there was one aspect of book design that always really bothered me and that was the copyright page. As you probably know, it's one of the first type treatments that you see when you open a book. It's usually on page four and it's all of this dreadfully dull, legal and technical information that has to be set line for line exactly the way it's given to you or so they say. So the first book I worked on was a gardening book and I set the copyright page in centered lines and I looked at it and I thought, with a few changes, this could look like a tree. So I tried it out on my son who was two years old at the time and he got it. So I figured I was home free but not when you're dealing with a copy editor who likes to play by the rules. So she was apoplectic at the idea of this typographic blasphemy and she said, no, no, no, it can't be done. I countered her with examples of historical reference because I certainly was not the first designer to ever contour type before. It still fell on deaf ears. Finally, I got the publisher on my side and I was able to get it through. And if it weren't for her, I wouldn't be showing you all of these now because once I had this one under my belt, it was much easier to convince the next publisher who tried to say no, which was this one. This was Poems to Edward Lear. A strange book called You Can't Be Too Careful, it was an Englishman who had collected newspaper clippings of strange ways that people had died. A pair of teeth. This was done with Art Spiegelman who I hadn't collaborated with on mouse. This was called Wild Party. Guidebook to the Best Tea Shops in the UK. Lost Words of Love. Writing New York and I was very lucky to have the Empire State Building right outside my window when I was working on this. And I'd always wanted to build the Eiffel Tower out of type. So this was perfect for the historic shops and restaurants of Paris. Photographs of the Twin Towers. And I think the only reason I agreed to design this book of photographs of volcanoes was so I could design the copyright page. Cuban Deco and a series of cookbooks, one on chilies and one on beans. And that was followed by these two for my client, Sarah Beth, a baking book and a breakfast and brunch book. And this is a book that I wrote and designed on artisan shops in Florence. Essays on Baseball. I don't know if you could see the gray stitching on the baseball, but it's there. And this was a strange one. This was the book about the effects of Nazism on the practice of dermatology. What it made for an interesting copyright page. So having grown up in an Italian-American household where the main topic of conversation every morning was what to make for dinner, it should have come as no surprise to be that I would end up working in the food industry. And this was actually a poster that I had designed for a talk I gave in Cincinnati many years ago. I had been to Cincinnati one time before this. It was a design competition. And I remember I had to fly out there very early in the morning, they picked me up at the airport and whisked me away to a beautiful art deco office building to the basement where the judging was being held. And I kept asking if I could get a cappuccino and it sort of became a running joke because there was no cappuccino to be had in that time in Cincinnati. So a couple of months later, I got a phone call from the president of the Cincinnati Art Directors Club to invite me to come out to give this talk. And the first thing he said when I answered the phone was, Louise, we have cappuccino in Cincinnati now. So I decided to make that the theme of my poster. And looking back at this, I realized what an artifact it actually is because not only was this done pre-photo shop, and if we had an extra hour, I could explain to you exactly how we did this poster. But some of you might be able to guess that in brief, I had to print out the type in what we used to call repro, cut it all apart, letter by letter, and paste it onto a saucer, have it photographed in black and white with all the cut marks, then have a black and white print made, send it to my retoucher who had to airbrush out all the cut marks and on and on. And so basically what took two weeks or more then now could be done in about five minutes. So not only was this done pre-photo shop, but it was also pre-Starbucks. Also hard to imagine, right? So I decided to embrace the curious world of restaurants. And I quickly learned that in New York City, restaurants are the number one business most likely to fail. I also found myself dealing with a class of client that was about this far from Gangsterdom. That's the first time I ever saw a real gun. But on the other hand, I always had a table. Until the restaurant closed. So in the beginning, most of the restaurants I was working on all had unpronounceable French names and were owned by people who were neither French nor could they even speak French. Like a spas. And I decided to design this to look like a classic French enamel sign. And I actually convinced the client to let me have an enamel sign made for the restaurant. So when the restaurant closed, which is of course the punchline you're gonna be hearing a lot today. When the restaurant closed, I got to keep the sign in my kitchen. So it was win-win. This is a good example of what I call a default name because most restaurateurs think that they needn't be bothered with spending any amount of time coming up with a good name. They think any old name will do because the logo will make it look and sound good. So this is in the hotel Metro. So they came up with a very creative name, Metro Grill. And it didn't really have much going for it this place. It's on a very nondescript block in the West 30s, but it did happen to be in the garment district of New York. So I decided to make the most of that. And I had, I designed it and then I had it made into an actual stitched clothing label. Minimum quantity, 5,000. So then I had to find a few more uses for it because all restaurateurs wanna hear is this isn't gonna cost you anything extra. So I said, okay, well, now that we have these labels, we can use them on the menus and we'll use remnants from the upholstery fabric and it won't cost you anything. So of course they love that idea until we found out that there were no remnants. But by then it was too late, so. And Metro's were wasn't until fairly recently in Grand Central Terminal on the Mezzanine. So it was right below the beautiful constellation ceiling they have there. Now is an Apple store, unfortunately. But it was named after a trade line along the French Riviera. So I decided to make the business card into a luggage tag. So this was letter pressed on both sides of the card, which I tried to do whenever I'm designing restaurants because I think the tactile quality is something really important to communicate appetite appeal. And so that was the easy part. Letter pressing on both sides. The hard part was getting someone to put in that grommet and a string. But, so here's another restaurant with an unpronounceable name. A lot of people seem to think that the correct pronunciation here was art is anal. At least that's a way to remember it. So this is a French bistro specializing in cheese and I wanted it to look like a cheese label which are usually round, but this was too long a word to fit comfortably around the circle. So this was actually the business card that was die cut into the oval and I had to humiliate the client to go along with duplex stock, so it was extra thick. So that in the end, a lot of people thought that this was a coaster and they put their drinks on top of it. Here's another default name. It was called 92. Can anybody guess what street it was on? So when I went up for the first meeting at the construction site, I was paying extra careful attention to the subway mosaics which I've always been very fond of. And I went back with my camera and I photographed every nine and every two. And then we Photoshopped them together to make the logo. And of course, outside of New York City, you wouldn't be expected to know that this is a visual metaphor for the subway system. But there actually are people in New York who don't even know that there's no 90 second street stop. But by the time I finished working on this, I was convinced that there was one. And when I looked at the Photoshop file and I saw that there was a layer and outline, I realized that we had our children's menu. So this was given to every kid in the restaurant with a red, yellow and green crayon. And the client was very happy. He said, this will keep them busy for a long time. And it did. So remember that book with the bad title? So wasn't I happy when I got a call about this restaurant and cinema with a 40s theme? But unfortunately, the people who were making those little plaster letters finally went out of business. So I had to order these in plastic and ended up having to spray paint them and sand them down to make them a little less perfect. And I worked with the same photographer who did these photo montages. My favorite is the one in the middle. That's the dessert menu, fa. So this is my favorite Italian restaurant. It happens to be in Seattle. Has anybody ever been there? Yes. Yay, okay. Isn't it great? It's quite a lively atmosphere there. That's the only restaurant I know of that has a trapeze in the main dining room. So on any given night, there'll be a trapeze act and a cabaret and a fortune teller. So I wanted to convey that lively atmosphere in the design. This is the business card, which of course was printed in letterpress. So I was inspired by a collection of pasticceria papers that I'll show you in a moment. And I decided to insert all of these Italian verbs into the design. So it says things like cantare, balade, divertir si festeggiare, which is sing, dance, have a good time. And then I was approached by these people who said, we want to open up a restaurant that feels like a seafood shack that you would stumble onto while you're walking along the beach in New England, except that you happen to be in the east village of New York. So, and this is something that I would never do ordinarily, because from my book jacket days, my mantra always was never illustrate the title. You don't need to show a mermaid and say mermaid. But in this case, I wanted to break all the rules, so why not? And speaking of breaking the rules, I would never hyphenate a word in a logo like that, but this was the time to do it. So then when I opened a sister restaurant a few years later called Mermaid Oyster Bar, we flipped her and put a pearl choker around her neck. And then, and then they opened one pizzeria next door, pizzeria sireneta, sireneta means little mermaid, so we couldn't show her breasts. So an apron and a rolling pin had to cover them up. And here we get a double hyphenation, no less. So I love using mermaids in restaurant logos whenever possible. Spolia's a pasta restaurant that was originally in Nantucket and then decided to open another one in Manhattan. And when I first talked to the clients, they told me how much they loved heraldry. And I have a book of heraldic symbols that I love to look at whenever I need an idea. So I started looking through it and I found something with two mermaids and I thought, oh, two islands meant Nantucket in Manhattan, two mermaids, that makes sense. So I had an illustrator put this together with pasta on the shield and wheat in their arms. And Chiquito is a Basque restaurant in Manhattan and I was always looking for an excuse to use this style of lettering that was influenced by Spanish signage of wrought iron scripts. And Bedford Post is a restaurant in Nantucket owned by the actor Richard Gere. And I noticed from the first time I heard about it that it was located on the old Post Road, which I knew was the old mail delivery route between New York and Boston. So I finally had an excuse to design a logo like a postage stamp, I was very happy. So when I went to the first meeting, I brought some printouts of old postage stamps to show as reference and they loved the idea. So I said, okay, let's talk about imagery. And Richard Gere leapt to his feet and he said, oh, I've got a great photograph of my grandfather standing in a wheat field. And he acted it out. He said, he's standing like this and he's putting his arms back like this and everyone was transfixed, except his wife who just rolled her eyes and said, do you know where that photograph is? And he said, yeah, I know exactly where it is. So sure enough, the next day they emailed it to me. And it was exactly what I expected. It was a small, grainy, gray, blurry snapshot. But that's why we have illustrators. So I hired Mark Summers, who's a wonderful scratch board artist who I've worked with for years. We put together the whole composition for him and then he scratched out the borders and everything. And then I showed it to the client in these four different color options, but they liked all of them. So we decided to print the series of business cards in all four colors so they would be collector's items. And Pearl was actually the original authentic oyster bar in New York City, which I didn't realize until after I had done Mermaid Inn, which turned out to be one of the copycats. But she never had a logo. She had been in business for 15 years with no logo. She just had a hanging sign in black and white that a sign painter had done. And so I decided that the only way to approach this correctly would be to design it in the same colors, black and white, same proportion and size of the sign, and make it look like it had been designed by a better than average sign painter. So that's what we did. And in this case, Claudette is a Provençal restaurant on Fifth Avenue and when I first met the clients, they said they really wanted to have a sign that was in raw iron. Now how often does that happen? So we actually had to design the sign first and then work backwards to make it into the logo. And Via Carotta is my favorite restaurant in New York, my favorite Italian restaurant rather. And it's owned by two very esteemed women chefs, one of whom is Italian and grew up on Via Carotta in her little town in Italy, which means Carrot Street. And they made it very clear at the first meeting that they were not interested in seeing a carrot or a street sign in their logo. The carrot I could do without, but the street sign I thought was a real missed opportunity, but I got over it. And instead I was looking at letter forms that I've always been enamored of from the Stile Liberti period, that's the Italian Art Nouveau period from the early 1900s. So this is the logo and the business card, which was die cut. And these are some of the other components. These are the coasters with the monogram. And this is the oversized menu, which just happened to fit perfectly into the back of these chairs. These are chapel chairs that the clients found online and ordered them from England without ever having sat on one. But it just so happens that they have a pocket in the back which was meant for a Bible, but it works very well for a menu. And this was one of the other options that I had proposed when I had the first meeting with them. I've been trying to use this device for a long time. It started with the Harrison in 2001. I thought it was a great idea. They liked it, but they said they really weren't the pasta-centric restaurants. So I just kept trying. And this was a proposed Italian restaurant in the IFC cinema didn't go for it. Svolia was a pasta-centric restaurant, but better that they went with the Heraldry. Friuli was, I just kept going. This was a, I believe that whenever you have a good idea, don't let go of it. Just keep recycling it. And eventually somebody will want to use it. So this was a celebration of the Friuli region of Italy in New York. This isn't even worth discussing. So if anybody in, if anyone is opening a pasta restaurant anytime soon, please see me at lunch. So when I was researching the Italian art deco book in Milan, I just happened to find myself one stifling afternoon in a Magazzino, a storage room that was filled with packing boxes and each box was filled with hundreds of little pieces of paper that were all printer's proofs from the 1930s. So needless to say, I was in a very happy place. And that's when I discovered these, the series of pasticidia papers. And these were just used to wrap pastries in the shops. And each one had its own distinctive design and they were really beautiful. And that's what made me wanna become a package designer. So when my first clients just happened to be Bella Cucina, which are all Italian inspired products, even though they're American and they live in Atlanta. But they're very good about hand labor, which is what I always try to do in package design. But most of the food packaging I do are makeovers because usually when someone starts with a food product, they don't have the budget or the know-how to hire a real designer. They usually hire an art student who is the daughter or son of a family friend or whatever. And then after a year or five years or even 25 years, they'll reach a point one day when they realize that the quality of their graphics doesn't measure up to the quality of the product. And that's when they call me. And I've learned, well, two things. One is that clients get very nervous at the idea of making a change. But I've also learned that you can change a lot as long as you keep one or two key elements, which is what I always tell them to make them less nervous. So in this case, it was just keep the rectangle and keep the color sort of. So we made this change. Then they sold the company for $100 million and they changed the packaging. Sarah Bess had been in business for 25 years and she was understandably very nervous about making a change. But I took one look at this label and I knew that the printer had been designing it. It reeks of Microsoft's word. I mean, why else would it say spread the word under Sarah Bess? And it's, look at that. It's italicized, underscored, ending quotes and it means nothing. So we, this was very, this was common sense. We kept the oval, we kept her name in upper and lower case and we just upgraded everything else. It was much better typography. We put her name on there, embossed on the glass rather than Mason, which made a difference. And then this carried over to her other products as well. And American Spoon had also been making jam for 25 years and but it's a different kind of company there in Northern Michigan. It's a family business and they have an intimate relationship with their fruit growers. So if the black raspberry crop is in good one year, they just won't make the jam. So I really wanted to communicate that human interaction into the logo. So I hired a wood engraver to do this image of a man shaking apples out of a tree. And then I hired another illustrator to do all the botanicals for all their different product lines. So I thought it was ironic that it took two British illustrators to convey this very American brand. And then one more, Bonnie's, who was making these in small batches and copper pots so they really taste like homemade jam. And Bonnie had designed this label herself using a free font. So, but I thought the sentiment was right. She said she wanted it to feel like a jar of jam that you would buy in a market in the South of France except that, except that it wasn't. Except, and something that a French grandmother would have made and written on the label with her charming French handwriting. So I said, well, we can, we'll keep it in handwriting, but we'll make a font for you that was based on handwriting samples from the 1940s. And it got her into Whole Foods. So when I met this gelato maker, I told him that I would never walk into a gelato via with a logo like that. And it was true. And he's from Sicily. And I said, look, gelato is all about nostalgia. It makes everybody happy. And I showed him those pastichetti of papers and he got it. So that's what we went with which was adapted to the bags and these carts that they have all over the high line. And then they even imported a vintage fiat from Cinquecento from Sicily, which we decorated. So the only thing better than having a gelato client is having two gelato clients. And this also illustrates why I love doing makeovers because it gives me enormous satisfaction to clean up after someone else's mess. And that's what this was. I tried to talk them out of the name because this name is bad in both Italian and English. And they would hear nothing of it. But the only thing I think they were doing right was that they were putting it in this clear container. Although right there at the meeting, I scooped out all the gelato from this container and I put it into this one and I said, it looks a lot better, right? So I wanted to keep it in a clear container so you could see the beautiful colors of the product. And I also thought it was important to keep the label in more of a shape like this so you could see even more of the color. And then we color-coded the bands at the top. And this is what the freezer looks like in my studio on any given day. And I always make sure whenever I give a client presentation, if I'm showing a logo, I always schedule it in my studio in the afternoon and I serve gelato first and then I show the logo and it always works. And this was the first organic cracker on the market and the client amazingly enough was open to the idea of a vintage looking package. So everything that you see on this package is hand lettered, even the net weight at the bottom. Although what you see the stores now is not because we had an amicable divorce but that's how it goes sometimes. And this is an interesting lesson in package design. These two products were the best-selling products in William Sonoma for the nine years straight that they were carried in the store. These were sold exclusively in William Sonoma. And what I find fascinating is that this salt represents 12 cents worth of salt and it's sold for $7. What does that tell you about package design? And this is a series of cheese related for Marcus Samuelson, who's a very high profile chef in New York who has a great backstory. He was born in Ethiopia, was adopted by a family in Sweden and grew up there and then went to Switzerland to do his internship and then ended up in coming to New York and opening a restaurant in Harlem. So I had to find a pattern that would play out over that whole combination of nations and adapt the colors accordingly. So there's always something to drink in the studio. These wines were all imported from Italy and I wanted them all to look again like the Stile Liberty posters and actually make them like miniature posters themselves. And these are also all imported from Italy. Sfida was an interesting episode. Sfida in Italian means challenge and that's exactly what it was to design this label because it had all this copy on it which all had to go on the front and it had to be this very specific size and shape. So every now and then we have to design something that's not food related which is much less interesting to me. Although this was kind of nice. This was a monogram for Tiffany where they wanted, they said they needed something to be used as small as the winder of a man's watch or as large as a construction ship. And this is an Italian hosiery maker and the first thing I told them was, you can be like everybody else would do a paper label on your socks and tights but why don't you do something different and we can get a stitched clothing label because I have a source and it made a big difference. And Hanky Panky needs no introduction I believe. This is my dentist who has a very fancy practice on Madison Avenue with state-of-the-art equipment and he offers a free foot massage with every visit. So I decided he needed an elegant logo and this was a redesign for Paperless Post. I'm sure everybody's gotten an invitation from them. And then I use every opportunity to travel to Italy. So this was a little guidebook that I wrote and designed and photographed of artisan shops and restaurants in Florence and I've updated it twice now because all those stores go out of business by the time the book gets published. And then Italianissimo which is everything that we love and sometimes love to hate about Italy mostly love of course like hand gestures. And whenever anybody asked me why I've never moved to Italy I said I can answer that in three words. Fade la Coda which is the Italians inability to form a line as illustrated here. And this was actually a great project it was for Rizzoli International it was for the 150th anniversary of Italy and they chose the 10 great books that shaped the nation that they wanted all redesigned. So these are all mostly done in wood type in three piece cases. And these are some more recent books I've done with Steve we call this the S series. These are all images from our collection so it's script shadow type and wasn't I lucky that I found these a set of these letters in an antique shop just when we were doing this cover. Stencil and slab serif. And then I've been teaching at the School of Visual Arts for quite a long time. And this is something that they do every year it's a senior library so it's the work of all the graduating seniors in the graphic design department and every year they ask a different instructor to design the book. And it's carte blanche which is always really hard. So I decided to do it like a beautiful box of chocolates and boy did I fool a lot of people. Because those weren't chocolates in there that was a book cover. I also teach every summer in Rome it's a master's workshop in typography also through the School of Visual Arts. And Gemma was in the program a couple of years ago and so is Jan Ballard. This was the first subway poster that I did for SVA and I thought it'd be great to do it in mosaics and I thought well we did 92 so we know how to do it. But a 13 word poster is a lot harder than a two digit number. So and this was done in Photoshop tile by tile by the time my staff was finished with this we all agreed that it would have been much easier to have done the whole thing in real mosaics. But and after a two month run in subway it came above ground and was blown up to 38 feet tall to go on the side of the main building where it just so happened that the yellow arrow here points not only to the building but also to my studio. So that was the year of the biggest thing I've ever designed and the smallest thing but in the biggest print run. This love stamp was less than an inch tall and was printed in a run of 250 million. And I've yet to find one in register. And Jessica Hish was my senior designer when we worked on this. We did three of them at that time but it took them a long time to issue all of them. This came out the following Valentine's Day and for some reason the third one took another six years to be issued. And then the next subway poster was this one and since I knew that it was coming out in April and by then I knew that after another bad winter in New York everybody would be creating a dose of spring. I decided to make it into a seed package and it gave me a good opportunity to bury the SVA logo. Can anybody see where it is? Yeah, right, right there. So for the next poster I thought, because I hate working with somebody else's logo. Everybody does. So for the next poster I thought maybe I should just start with the logo and design from there. So I thought what would the logo look good in Boston too? Maybe chocolate. So we made a poster into a chocolate bar of course. So everything that you've seen here and more is in elegantissima, my monograph. Why did I do this book? So that I could do this copyright page. And from there I did these pencils that were inspired by my collection of Italian pencil boxes from the 30s. I especially liked the double-sided pencils that were usually red and blue for teachers to correct homework, but I much prefer red and black. And that was followed by colored pencils called tutti frutti and then brilante or metallic colored pencils. In the meantime, for all the years that I've been a designer I've been obsessively photographing signage all over Italy and sometimes in France and other places. And it was never meant for anything more than just for my own reference and enjoyment because of course I started shooting these in 35 millimeter slides and then I graduated to point to shoot snapshots. But as the digital technology got better and better I finally began to realize that I could consider putting these into a book. So I went back and I re-photographed as much as I could find and for everything else we had Photoshop. And when I went back I brought my secret weapon. No, it's not a selfie stick. It's a telescoping pole that gives me what I always wanted in life. Another three feet of height. And I went back to Venice to re-photograph all of these mosaics on the pavement. And before I even finished that one I was already planning the next because all of these signs were disappearing in an alarming rate and I felt like I had to document all of these before they would all be gone. So the next one was Paris and I thought that'll be much easier as just one city in the whole country but it's a big city and they have a lot of beautiful script neon that is disappearing very rapidly. So I had to try to track down as much of that as possible and then there are the mosaics which were much more difficult for them to remove so I concentrated on those a lot too. And the last chapter in the book is called Samo, Wordless Signs, which I've always been a big fan of and this is one of my favorites. It's a Lichienki fume, the smoking dog which inspired me to do this logo recently for a rotisserie chicken restaurant. And then finally I figured I had enough energy to do one more of these books and I had to do Barcelona because it's a modernista and deco paradise. And whereas in the other books I was concentrating more on just the sign, just the typography, but in Barcelona the whole facade was just so beautiful. And this is one sign that I was really looking forward to photographing. I had only seen it in a book and I had been checking regularly on Google Street View and I spent a lot of time with these books on Google Street View because I just sit in my desk in New York and I just go up and down every single street and you can find a lot of signs that way. So I went, as soon as I got to Barcelona I literally ran to this location to see the sign and this is what I found. That's what I said. I was devastated. I felt like I had missed the removal of this by a matter of minutes. So the next day I was interviewed by a reporter from El País, the Spanish newspaper and I was so, I was still so upset. That's all I wanted to talk about. And two days later the article came out and of course he mentioned it and a week later when I was back in New York I got an email from Angel Lopez who was the grandson of the original founder and he said, my family and I were very moved by the article. We just want you to know that if you ever come back to Barcelona we will remount the sign for you to photograph. So I went back immediately. The whole family came out for the event and I dedicated the book to them. So one thing I said I'd never do was design a font because for all these years I just designed the letters that I need for the logo or the book title or whatever and I have no interest in doing the whole alphabet or the numbers or the punctuation or the diacritics but how do you say no to the Hamilton Wood Type Museum and the Moran Brothers? Right? So this was, yes. And if you haven't been there you must go. So this was a future, an Italian futurist font that I developed into this which they made as a wood type and also it was issued in digital. And it was named Mardel after Mardel Dubek who was the longtime pantograph operator there who came out of retirement to cut this font and I actually got to see it in action which was very exciting. And this was a series of posters that we did that were printed there in letterpress. And then at the same time I was getting ready for my retrospective exhibition at the School of Visual Arts last year and there was this eyesore of a staircase that had to be covered in some way. So I realized that all I had to do was come up with 12 pasta names that were all of equal length and it works very well. And that was followed by a Montocatini which again was inspired by the Art Nouveau Italian posters that always featured this style of hand lettering with lots of ligatures. So we ended up doing 200 different ligatures for this typeface which was really fun. And then finally Marseille which is an Art Deco inspired, French Art Deco inspired font that is based on the original letter forms that I used when I designed the cover for The Lover oh so many years ago. So we have come full circle. Thank you very much. And see you next year.