 As Jim says, I love lettering. It gives me out of trouble. Please welcome the legend Jim Parkinson. I was interested in doing some late 19th century script, some bottom-heavy script, and I decided I'd make a logo for myself. I started working on it, and I started working on it. I kept working on it, and I really was really wasn't thinking about it, but like during the course of doing this, I changed the name of my business to Parkinson type design. So here it is. It's an exercise. I finished it. I've been doing this for a long time. This is me in like 1945, sitting on the front porch of my house in Richmond, California. I crossed the alley from us. There was a lettering artist. His name was Abraham Lincoln Paulson. This is his business card, and he did like lettering on, you know, degrees from people graduating from high school and all that stuff, but then he had a show that he did upside down and backwards lettering, number lettering. It hardly made any sense to me because I was still learning the alphabet, but I would go over and sit in his studio and watch him work, and he would entertain me with it. So when I came away from Paulson with it, it was like I just thought it was fun. I thought it was wonderful, the stuff that he was doing. You can see numbers on the left, upside down and backwards. It's somewhat readable. Well, I was five, so everybody was old. I don't think so. I think he was probably just a regular middle-aged guy, but like I say, when you're four, you know. But anyway, I spent a lot of time watching him work, and I thought it seemed like a lot of fun. I didn't do anything with it. I went to Arts and Crafts, the College of Arts and Crafts. This is a woman named Carol Purdy. She taught the only lettering class that College of Arts and Crafts offered. She had been a merchandise illustrator at Livingston's department store before she became a lettering teacher. I can see that moment right there. We worked with carpenter pencils trying to reproduce the lettering on the Trajan column. Mrs. Purdy would come up and hover over you like that, and she would say, after a while, Jim, that E looks awfully sad, or that's a really happy S, and I love that. That's the only class that I had, and that's the only lettering class I had in all of college, but what she taught me was the personalities of letters. The way a letter stands upright or the way that letter slouches or the way a letter seems happy or the way a letter seems angry. So between Mr. Paulson teaching me that lettering was fun and Mrs. Purdy teaching me that they were all like little people, I was like ready to go. When I'd gone on Arts and Crafts, I went out with my portfolio to San Francisco and tried to get a job in an advertising agency or something, but the only things that were available were like a short man, some guy's pencil, or like pouring coffee for somebody, being some kind of assistant. I didn't want that, I wanted to do art. So I went to Kansas City and I took, they had an orientation class and I worked in the orientation class. I painted like rabbits, painted Santa Clauses, painted rural scene featuring a barn, painted all the things that they wanted me to paint. After about a month, the guy that ran the class called me up to the front and said, Jim, you're not cutting it. And I'm just going like, wait a minute, I just moved back here from California and you're telling me like I'm dumb. And he says, we think there might be a place for you in the lettering department. And I'm like, well, great, because I don't like the rabbit thing anyway. So I started working in the lettering department. And I could just do these little things, just like sketch them out in pencil and ink them on one piece of paper and do them like a half hour piece, an hour piece. And in the 1960s on greeting cards, it was just what they wanted. When I was there, my boss, Myron McVeigh, who was a fabulous lettering artist, managed to talk them into buying a typositor machine. It's a really a Rube Goldberg apparatus, all kinds of like handles to turn, things that move around and stuff. But it was a way to set tight. I started like getting like a little more serious. This is like a, what I used to call key line. It's like a piece of tracing paper that's got everything about as tight as I can get it before I ink it on the light table. This is Herman's Off. I wasn't in the lettering department for more than like a month before my boss had managed to convince Hallmark to bring Herman's Off in as a consultant. So I spent like about four months with Herman. It's just me and my boss and Herman. It was pretty cool. This is the typeface I was working on. It became, actually they still use it now. They've digitized it. But when I finished it, we didn't have any protocol for naming fonts or whatnot. So when somebody asked me what it was named, I told them, I don't know. I don't know. And so they called it, I don't know. And the one underneath it is, I don't know, fatface. So I remember this. This is how I met Herman. I was working on this and Myron said, Jim, I'd like you to meet Herman's Off. Show him what you're working on. So he looked, he was looking at what I was doing and like not laughing, you know, it was pretty cool. And he asked me what the name of it was. And I told them, and he gave me this little smile that meant we were friends. He understood. He understood. And so I've, you know, I still, well, I don't still know him, but I've been doing for many years after we left Hallmark. We'd run into each other to type conference or something. And I learned a lot from him. I don't like, I don't letter like he letters, but I learned a lot of, a lot of principles of lettering and type design from Herman. These are my tools from Hallmark. I still have them. If I ever do analog, I use them. The box is just a miscellaneous batch of pen points. The second thing down is a tube of replacement pencil lids. The third one down is my mechanical pencil, which in 1965, I taped it and taped it again and kept taping it until it fit my hand just perfectly. And it's still taped with the same tape. I can pick it up today, but I feel completely at home. Ah, this is my pencil. And the pen down below is a Herman's off gave, Myron and I, both one of these pens, which is what he was using. And I still have it. And that when I do anything analog that's ink, that's my pen. This is Robert O'Kelly. Robert O'Kelly happened to be in Kansas City at the same time that I was at Hallmark and Herman was at Hallmark. And there was a guy in our department, a Hallmark named David Noglet. And he and I became friends and we would sometimes walk home to work together because we lived near each other. And one after, after work one day, we were having a beer at his apartment. And he had some, a freelance job on a drawing board. And I went to look at it. And it was that book, American Wood Type. He was like freelance for Robert O'Kelly, pasting up his book. So I got to meet Robert O'Kelly. And I got to go over and see him at the Art Institute. And I got to go through his collection of type specimen books, look at his type. He wasn't very friendly, but he was like accommodating. And I just sort of fell in love with wood type. This is a, I would, there were lots of, I started driving around a little country, country shops, print shops and whatnot, trying to buy wood type. And there was never anything interesting that I could buy. But like I traced this out of some of, some of his specimen books. And I cut it out of a linoleum, just because I wanted to make it and see if I could make a print. So those letters are probably about an inch and a quarter high. I went, okay, I can do this. So, so I did it like crazy. These were all alphabets. I carved out linoleum. And pretty soon other people were coming over saying, what did you carve one of these for me? And it turned into a little business. When I left Kansas City, I was feeling the pull of like what was going on on the west coast. And there was really not much more that I was going to learn, learn a hallmark. I did this poster in Kansas City. It's like a kind of a mashup between Robert Kelly's wood type and some kind of like psychedelic, blah, blah. This is my first newspaper logo. I did this when I got back to the Bay Area. I ran into some hippies at a party and they were going to start a newspaper and they were only going to publish the good news. This part of my life was like really, really, really crazy. I was doing a lot of this and that and living hand to mouth and not knowing where to go for jobs. You know, like there was no internet. You know, you would look through the yellow pages listings and you don't know anything about who's in there or anything. So I started picking. I started going to parties and getting together with my old arts and crafts friends and stuff and just pitching myself to anybody who was drunk enough to listen. This job here, a good time manual, was a couple of guys who were like doing a listing of fun places for young people to go and party. And I've got the job out of a classified ad in the Oakland Tribune. I phoned these guys up and they gave me their address and said, come on over. I went over and it was a fraternity house at University of California and a guy's for two fraternity brothers. And they hired me to do the thing and I did it. And then they came back a few years later and I did another cover for them. They did a second edition. I don't know what happened to CJ Smith, but Russell Riviera saved up enough money to open his own restaurant on Solano in Berkeley for a while. This was just a guy I knew was doing some work for them and wanted some lettering. So I did it. They had a warehouse. The Creedence Clearwater had a warehouse on 4th Street near, forget the name of it, never mind. It's down in Berkeley where the warehouses are. They had like a nice little warehouse with like a basketball court on the downstairs and then upstairs like a pool table and all their gold records and some offices and stuff. So I would like take my sketches down there and shoot baskets and like, have them look at my work. And I don't know, this was made in parts so that they could use it in a bunch of different ways like with press kits and on posters and this and that. This is a typeface that I did for Adobe, but the reason I did it is I'm a lettering artist and there was no lettering artist at that particular time that didn't get asked to do this kind of lettering. So like I kept like I have a couple of characters from one job and a couple more characters from another job and eventually I had enough to like pitch it as a font that somebody at Adobe was interested. And so this font is called Mojo. This is like a really weird party when I don't remember where I met the guy. I don't remember where I met the guy that gave me the job. And I did meet the Doobie Brothers, but I was so screwed up that I don't really remember it. The type specimen looked down below the that lettering, that Nebula lettering down at the bottom is exactly where I got the Doobie Brothers' lettering from. I mean, it's a little bit of a stretch, but you know, you just kind of keep sketching until things start going right for you. So the thing about the hippie lettering is that like it didn't pay that well. The check was always in the mail. It just wasn't good business. But like the fact that these people were doing all these posters and attracting so much attention, jarred the art directors and advertising agencies around here, and pretty soon they wanted fancy stuff, you know, they didn't want like any more universe or they wanted lettering of personality. And it was all like basically like charged from the kind of the kind of reception that the hippie lettering was getting. So this is a, I think this is for some kind of carnival ride or something. I don't even know. You really, I don't like to go out and see people, you know, like I don't want to go like driving around and talking to people about jobs. So when it's all over, you just go like, oh, I wonder what they used that for. And I like Google it. This is for a, this is a logo for a hardware store in my neighborhood in exchange for hardware. This is just, this was just, I had a teacher in art school that called this stringing beads. But what I did is I just did the Merry Christmas and Happy New Year without any banners, penciled out and started drawing on it. And then as I was drawing I was thinking, well, maybe I should, maybe I could do this or maybe I could do that. And it adds a little bit more. I kept adding more. It was just like, it's such an experiment that like, it kind of kept going. And I never like really did it. I mean, none of the lines are ruled or anything. They're all kind of like wobbly and screwed up because I was just kind of like sketching away to see what would happen. But anyway, there it is. This is for an advertising agency. It was for posters and whatever else. When I first started, when I first got back from Kansas City in 1969, I started going to like Mother Jones. I did a couple of logos from Mother Jones, but I like worked at Clear Creek Magazine, the environmental perspective. People didn't know what an environment, people didn't know what that word meant back in 1969. So the Clear Creek went out of business, but Rolling Stone is one of the first places I went. In 1969, I met Bob Kingsbury, who was the first art director, and Jan Winner, the owner's brother-in-law, I think. And I started getting little spot illustrations and stuff. Then I started getting to do little lettering jobs for the magazine and it could all be better, but like things are done in a hurry. This was for straight-arrow publications. I think the name of the book was the Rolling Stone Style. I never did see the completed book cover. It's really funny. Without the internet, you really had to touch with people. If there was a book cover, you got to like phone them up and they've got to say, come on over. We might have somebody that knows where there is one. You just don't see stuff when it's printed. Roger Black came to Rolling Stone in about the early 70s, 74, 75, and he got my name from Dan Solo, the guy that used to be a typographer in the open hills. He sent me a letter and asked me if I'd be interested in doing some typefaces for the magazine. He wanted them based on this ATF version of Nicholas Jensen. I didn't know what the hell I was doing. The last thing I did was like a cartoon lettering for greeting cards. My first sketches were really pretty clunky. Those are Roger's comments. But I kept sketching and sketching and finally it started to come together a little bit. That's just a, what do they call those, panogram? Yeah, it's got all 26 letters in it. These are ink letters. They're like probably, caps are probably about three or three and a half inches tall. They made transfer type for it. Later they put it on typositor. Now it's digitized. They're called Parkinson. They're owned by the Farm Bureau. The reason they're called Parkinson is because they phoned me up one night. I was up in the mountains, in the cabin in the mountains, sitting in a little campfire and there was a little tweet, tweet, tweet noise coming from the cabin. I looked around inside and it turned out to be the telephone, which hadn't been wrong because it was only there for emergencies. It was somebody from Rolling Stone and somehow they'd got that number and they wanted to know if I'd help them with the name because they were getting ready to release it. I'm not sure if we want to call it Jagger or Elvesser. They had all these names of entertainers and I went out and talked to my friend at the campfire and said, what do I do? She said, Collet Parkinson, nobody in the Javier doesn't need any help from you. So I did and now they've been like, I've had a chance to refine them when they were at the font bureau and I had some more fonts so there's now 10 of those fonts. The top is the first Rolling Stone logo. It was done by Rick Griffin, one of the really famous poster artists in San Francisco. And when the magazine was about to come out, they talked to Rick and they said, we're going with it. And Rick said, well, wait a minute, it's just a sketch. And they said, no sweat, this is what we're using. So they used it and they paid him sketch money for it. Then in I think 1972 or 73, the second logo was done. That was done by John Pastelli, who did the typeface Pastelli Roman. So Roger said, we're going to have you do the logo. And I freaked out. It's one of those kind of like, oh, this is going to kill my career. I'm going to like screw this logo up, you know. So you can see that I was scared. It's just like my sketches were horrible. And Roger knew it. Roger said, just go back to working on the fonts for a while and then start using the fonts for your logo sketches. So the one on the bottom, here's another more elaborate one, but that one on the bottom was the one they picked for. They write about the 10th anniversary. They moved back to New York City. They introduced their new logo on their 10th anniversary issue. They introduced the type basis on their 10th anniversary issue. And they were in New York and I was in Oakland. I got a phone call from Roger saying, we need a great big X. I said, well, four of all, they were doing this 10th anniversary issue and they couldn't figure out who was it going to be. Elvis on the cover. Was it going to be like the Beatles on the cover? Who was going to be on the cover? Finally, like Roger convinced them, it would be just a great big X for 10. And they just told me it's going to be about eight and a half inches square. Make it like the logo. So I just drew it. Had no idea, you know, exactly how it was going to come out. But there it is. So when the issue came out, I was back in New York at Rolling Stone and we were all sitting around a conference table. It was kind of really kind of cool because it was like the 30th floor or something. You look out the window and there's a plaza hotel and the limousines and stuff. I'm like, oh, cool. This is great. And we were all looking at the magazine and patting ourselves on the back. And I scooted one across the table to Yon and asked him if he'd sign it for me. And he put these little curly cues on it. I said, Jim Parkinson, thanks for the logo. Best Yon PS, alterations included. See, it hasn't been, it's just off the presses. It hasn't even been like out of the office yet. And Yon's already got like plans for like making it different. So about two years later, he called me out in California and asked me to do the fancy one. And I did the fancy one. And it just turned out that this was the issue that debuted on. It's the only issue that they've ever published that didn't have any cover lines. Fred Woodward was the art director on the 20th. He asked for two Xs. Actually, it wasn't that simple. I did a bunch of sketches with two O, all different kinds of two O, all different kinds of skinny Xs next to each other. And this just sort of happened by accident. Some Xs from the old 10th anniversary cover like accidentally fell on top of each other on my desk. And I went, oh, here's a couple copies of the magazine, a couple covers. And all the type on those covers is from the series of 10 fonts that I did for them. And they, it's been like 40 or almost 50 years and they still use it a lot in the magazine. And that's the logo. I finally got to clean it up. Somebody like, I inked it and somebody went not too long ago, like 40th anniversary, sent me their mock-up for the cover. And the Rolling Stone logo is just going to be a big RO. And it was all chopped up and stuff. I thought, well, what's wrong? What's going on there? And it looks like what they did was like auto traced. So it looked horrible. And even like, it was like even horrible at the small size that they've been using it on the magazine. But like nobody paid any attention. If you look at it with a loop, it was horrible. So I talked them into like, let me draw the RO. And then something else came up. And I talked them into let me draw the R-O-L-L. You know, it just kind of kept on going until I redrew the whole thing. This is an ongoing obsession. I've got a couple ongoing obsessions I'll mention. Spergothics, like styles like this that are in old sign painters books. For me, this was like a very comfortable style to work with. It was very elastic. You could do different things with it. It was like my kind of go-to font when I was like getting low on ideas. I would like to use a little of that, the word pharmacy for instance. This is a book cover. Then one day I got a phone call from Roger and he's like in Washington, D.C. and he says, Jim, we're going to do the circus logo. I'm going like, oh great. You know, he's pulling my leg. I didn't believe him. And he said, he told me the story of the circus and every year they had a different logo. They didn't really know the whole concept of logos. Like each season they'd have a sign painter, paintings and posters and whatever lettering used on the sign. That was their logo for the season. So when the logo came to me to do, I figured it was going to last like a season. And Roger said the ringlings and the Barnums and the Baileys all had some influence at the circus. And every year a new logo came out. The three families would like getting a knock down drag out because somebody's name was bigger than somebody else's. So I knew that everybody's name had to be the same size. The one that preceded the one I did was a serpentine. And not so, instead of a serpentine, I decided I'd do something centered. So, and I told Roger I was only doing one sketch because it's a lot, it's a lot of sketching and I still didn't believe it was a real job. So that was my sketch. And when Roger called me, he talked, he said they liked the logo. We want a couple little changes. And then he said, they really liked the way it looked like the circus tent. And I went, of course, yeah. So this is the way it wound up finished. Over the years it's been, it's been to a bunch of different lettering artists, different years and changed a little bit and changed a little bit. And then it came to me one time and I digitized it. So the circus has been very, very good to me. There's some more of that lettering. And the same spurgothic, except it's become now a typeface called Modesto. So I get something like that in my head and I just kind of stick with it like over the decades and stuff. And this happens to me all the time. I'll do something, I'll have some success with it like 10 years later or somehow it'll just like pop up again. The Orange County Register is in Modesto just just set right off of the computer. I didn't do anything except maybe track the Orange County lettering out a little bit. Excelsior is a daily newspaper in Mexico City that had kind of like crashed and burned. And then they started it up again. And they started out again with this logo. And this is also just Modesto. And all I did is like tinker around with the ease a little bit. The bottom picture is a picture of the the railroad station in Modesto, California, where my mother grew up. Another obsession. Roger mailed me this. No email. I mean like folded up in an envelope. And he said he wanted a whole alphabet of it. I got the thing like Wednesday or Thursday. And they didn't need it until Monday. They're in Los Angeles. I'm in Oakland. Didn't have any. And by the time I started on I was like Friday afternoon I have stat people or anything. So I went to a day and night drugstore in downtown Oakland that had like a couple different sizes that you get on your Xerox machine. And I like kept like jogging it around until I had like enough things that were sort of similar in size that I could like try to fake an alphabet. I did this. I saw this the other day and I thought where the hell did I get that J? It's horrible. But these letters are about three and a half inches tall. And I just inked and inked and inked. I don't think I like I mean I drank and I did drugs and I didn't sleep and I just like worked and worked and worked and like Sunday night I packed it all up in a box and drove out to the Oakland airport off into the dark to the cargo area to a warehouse knocked on the door. They let me in. That was like their version of federal express. So I dropped it off with them and I was like I said it'll be in LA tomorrow. And they said absolutely. And I remember driving home. And I was like the sun was coming up. I was just a zombie. I was just thinking this is unbelievable. It's going to be in LA tomorrow. I was thinking like I'm moving in a modern world. So this is what they did with it. This is what Roger wanted to for in the first place. And when I saw that I saw that the ease were all the biggest letters that I had done. They were bigger than the rest of the lower case. But nobody was interested in correcting it. So it just went that way. And back in back in those days before digitizing and stuff alphabets were just fair game. Like this was just be like a set of negatives sitting in a flat file in some magazine. And some guy who's like an associate art director goes like I could use those if I was like working on my own magazine. So like you know negatives of alphabets would kind of slide out of offices. This one turned out the cover of Inside Sports magazine was this lettering. I could always tell because they always kept the big E. It's almost like a secret signature. Here's some more slab syrup. You know starting with that kind of Igiziano idea and like pushing it and squeezing it. Doing a lot of things in pencil laboriously that you can do on a computer in just a few moments. Now I would get these back in the mail from Roger pieces of Newsweek note paper with like instructions. When the logo started to come together this Roger did these tests. The one on the left being the old typography and the old logo. The one on the right being the new typography and the new logo. Roger wanted to use Stevenson Blake number nine but he felt the headline face on the one on the right is too light. So I drew a font called Newsweek number nine which is Reagan's prognosis all that is like the typeface I did for Roger for Newsweek and that lasted for it was used in all their headlines and whatnot for a while. That's the logo. That's the size of the logo. The SWK on other board and then like get them shot way down and paste them into a word. Here's some more slab syrup. Now this digital like I decided I wanted to try it again. So I made these fonts. Magazine logos. This is one of the first Esquire logos on the left. What I think of like the golden age of Esquire in the middle of the middle sixties and what happened afterwards on the right. This was with Roger. It's a lot of pencil sketches. Roger wanted like the cursive from the first one. This is the first logo I did on a Macintosh and I did it in a single character space a fontographer. And the way I would do these things would like I'd print them out and mark them up like the teacher corrected somebody's homework and then put it back in front of me and like work on it again. So this one is sort of like the weight of the classic one and the cursive of the original one. Sometimes one of the things like this comes you go like holy cow this is a slam dunk. I got it better than this. It's like Los Angeles magazine but it turned out to not be a slam dunk. I think I did like 150 sketches or something. And sometimes when you start feeling the sketches coming on like that, at least me, I start pulling stuff from my font ideas file and like maybe I'll try this and add a couple more and sort of work on some of my fonts when I'm putting together sketches. These guys, I think we're up around 150 or something. I finally wrote them a letter saying, look, this is two people. I do the sketches and you pick one. And since your turn, you know, and they didn't respond to me for a little while, a couple, about a week or something. And then I finally they said, would I sketch number 12? You know, could have told me that like a month ago. So anyway, the logo on top is the logo that I got out of that. But the orange coast logo came along during that. And it came from one of the sketches I did for the Los Angeles logo. So you can always like, you know, don't throw anything away. Here's a logo. An art director sent me the logo on top. So I just started working in Minutes Journal. This is the logo. I hate it. I want to do something new. And I said, well, I'm your man. I'll be happy to do it. I thought, this is not a good time to tell him that I did the logo on top. So anyway, there's that. Here's one that's like, it's a new fashion magazine. It's new. It's fresh. It's now I found it. I found the logo in a 1895 American type founders specimen book. And there's like, there's like a fontographer proof with my markup on it. There's the logo. The first logo they had. And I think they still use it. 25, 26 years. Okay, this, here's a logo I had to do. I never, you know, I've never, the guy said, it's like, I said, what's the name of the magazine? He said 5-5-2-8-0. And I said, well, what's that? He says, that's the elevation of Denver, Colorado. It's the city magazine for Denver. But the reason I'm showing you this is that like I've been doing sketches all my life and I like put them out on these boards like A, B, C, D, or one, two, three, four. And I'm just a guy sitting alone and my mind starts watering. And I start thinking, if the sketch number one, does he think it's my favorite? Or does he think it's the first one I did? Then I moved to letters and I go, well, letters, still the same thing. So I started naming them. And not only did that like make it harder for them to figure out which one was my favorite, but it like lightened the whole conversation. The guy phones you up and says, I really like Roberto, you know. It's hard to be serious when that's happening. The Chronicle, I've got a job at the San Francisco, actually what happened was digital was replacing analog. And I was like an analog guy. I didn't know anything about computers. My work was getting slimmer and slimmer. And I want to be a painter so I thought, I'll get a job. I signed up for the post office exam and I was going to be a mail carrier. And I was at dinner with some friends one night. I told them, tomorrow I'm taking the test. And they're like, you're nuts, Parkinson's. And they worked at the newspapers. And so they said, why don't you go over and talk to them. So I got a job at the Chronicle. And we managed to work it out to where I was doing like three days a week. This is what the Chronicle looked like, leading up to a project a bunch of us did in-house at the Chronicle. But it was sort of like, I'm from the Bay Area. And I always wondered, it was always the same layout. It was always like a picture in the middle surrounded by stories. And the job was still like, what story does the picture go with? So I was sitting in the back of the art department. I was like doing really important news stuff. And the art director at the time, Dennis Gallagher, managed to like give me a copy of Fontographer to play with in the office. And the managing editor was across the old dude that started off as a copy boy. And it's now like in charge. And at one point in his life, he did these things he called rack cards. And that card there would sit on top of a newspaper rack, a metal newspaper rack. And each day they could put like a new card up there. He was like really proud of those. And when he found out that somebody in the art department was doing typefaces or couldn't do typefaces or was trying to learn how to do typefaces, he sent somebody over to my desk with a big stack of these rack cards. And he wanted this typeface. And of course, I couldn't do it because it was really ugly. And B, I think it was like, you know, bad sorting. I think that there's more than one typeface there, you know? So I went here, found something that was like close enough, added a little weight to it. The first time they used it was on this headline. The first time they used any of my computer type on the Chronicle. And when this happened, there was no electricity at the Chronicle. We had like a gas generator running in the art department. We had two Macintoshes running off of it. The screens are going bright, down and bright. And everybody was going, save, save, save. So I think like, I remember riding home from work with some people from the art department that lived in the East Bay. And we had to go across to go on Gate Bridge in Richmond Bridge because the bridge was down. We were so proud of ourselves because we like beat the odds. We got an eight-page newspaper out. It turns out that the editor, who was kind of asleep at the switch, misestimated the death toll. But like it was 67 people, which is a lot of people. But like hundreds did, a huge quake sounds better, right? So it's funny when the Chronicle wants to celebrate their performance during your earthquake. They used the second day headline, which is devastation throughout area or something. So I started doing more fonts for the Chronicle. And like somehow somebody there, Dennis, Eric Youngerman, somebody in our department managed to convince people at the Chronicle that maybe we should be headed towards like an in-house redesign, which meant that like Dennis would be working really hard. There'd be like a lot of politicking going on. Eric was like beat his brains out, like figuring out how all the type was going to fit together and asking me to do this font and asking me to do that font. And here's some of the fonts. I did a couple condensed metros. I did there's just a sampling of them. I think I did like different weights and maybe some small caps and stuff. A banner, which was the hundreds did and huge quake. I did a few versions of banner. Roswell, ITC Roswell was like, I did what I wanted to do to the hundreds did and huge quake type face, which is like foot terminals like Stevenson Blake number nine has. If you see the ends of the C's, the E's, the S, it has like it's like most of its personality comes from parts of Stevenson Blake number nine. And later on I did the same thing to like more of it. I did Balboa. ITC said we only want these many. Okay, I'll do the rest somewhere else. So I did the Balboa. It's like more of it. And you can see on the cap on the lower case A is exactly how I was like terminating the round characters. Here's a picture of the chronicle when it looked better than it like used to look. It looked a lot better. Thanks mostly to Eric and Dennis. But my little my little pride part was that there was like a period of four or five years where I think every typeface in a chronicle was designed by me like stock quotes, news, shipping and receiving everything. It was great. And I think the first few like we tried to have almost nothing above the logo, the chronicles always favored like pounding their logo as far down close to the fold as possible like there's some kind of shame or something. And so we first couple I think there were a lot of we did a lot of Eric did a lot of layouts with the logo on top. And then then there was like there was a bunch of just like one headline of the X ref. But it just kept creeping down, you know, when I got done when I got done with the fonts, it was like there was really nothing left for me to do with the chronicle except to to like perform maintenance duties on some some page, you know, like the editorial page or food page or something. So I decided to take off. I was only working three days a week anyway. It wasn't like a big deal. But after I left the chronicle, I did Richmond, which was what I would have liked to have done with Metro. And the National Post in Canada asked me to do a geometric gothic. And I did. I did for another couple of newspapers, too. There was like for a while, there was a little surge of people that liked that newspaper name plates. It's just like guess where I asked people for the for the for the history of their logo. And I'm hoping that I can find something in it that like, you know, something I could grab on to go go ahead and make them a logo and like not get further and further away from who they are, but like maybe get a little closer to who they are. So I did this one, took a few sketches and like two of the last two sketches were this one. And one just like it except with the in lines filled in so it was black. And I heard afterwards that there were like two factions, there were the factions that said we like the black because Detroit's a gritty city, you know, and the other ones were saying, well, we like the one with the in line because Detroit's coming back. So apparently the in line one, these people from upstate New York, they like wanted they were they were really thrilled they were changing their name to the citizen. They were it was going to happen in a hurry and they wanted like sketches as fast as they could get them and the tighter the better. So I did these five sketches for the citizen. I sent them sent them off. This is like digital now so I like email them off. I didn't hear from I didn't hear from finding like I sent them an email asking them how it's going. And then somebody phones me up and says, Jim, didn't we tell you? I guess not. What? What? We didn't we decided not to change the name of the logo. We're not using the citizen. So I said, could you redo the logo we're using? And I said, you just pay me for the citizen and then I'll do the one you want, you know. And it they did it. But it's crazy like the logo when they order a logo and then cancel it wouldn't the logo designer be in that loop? A lot of logos just get retouched in the art department by people that like don't want to do it and claim to not have any talent at doing it. Logos go downhill by accident because editors are not good art directors. I don't know how that how that top one came together. These are two kind of elegant ones that San Francisco examiner was one of the first ones I did besides the good times. And I did the black letter and then I did I did an eagle and I did the banner and it was like all just like right where I wanted. But the eagle was like looking more like Donald Duck. And so they they found some guy that did like did good eagles. So I don't know I over the years I've run into three different people that said, Hi Jim, I'm the guy that did that eagle. So three guys Los Angeles Times I did a couple logos for the Los Angeles Times and they were like very stiff like what the logo was originally like. And then the last time I did it for them I don't know what something was going on down there. But the art director just said Michael Woodley said just just just make it as good as you can just do what you want. I did that and they just kept it. They like the way they use it really big on top of the page. I just like expanded that the A a little bit to make the LA logo with a Sunday paper. What Sunday magazine. So anyway like magazine magazines are like maybe the people that work on city magazines like kind of know each other but like magazines aren't really a community like like newspapers are a community. So like I didn't know you know like all of a sudden I started getting emails from like out of town you know like versus like you know Dallas and Miami and stuff like that but then it starts Ilta Santa Mont is from Finland and it was just like a kind of a wobbly it had been retouched and re-photographed too many times so it was really just a kind of restoration. Elegraphico is a sports magazine from Argentina. It's a brand new logo. They had some some was a lot stiffer before. I think it was like maybe a slab syrup. I forget. And the sport tally is from Poland. It's a sports magazine in Poland and the sport tally was like so weird because it was like every letter was a different weight. And so I kept playing with it and I started realizing that there's like there's two consonants. There's an O. There's two consonants. There's an O. There's two consonants. It's got rhythm you know. So I just made this I just made the O's a lighter weight rather than everything a different weight. But the thing about newspapers is you never can't tell where the next job's coming from and you got to be careful when you say yes. The one on top is a Malayalam manorama from northern northern India. And when I got it I didn't have any idea what to do with it but I phoned up a friend who had been a language guy at one of these far companies and said can you tell me what this is and he goes oh yeah it's Malayalam I mean like faxes me like pages and pages of Malayalam in different typefaces you know so I could like work out that logo. The one below is a newspaper in Hindustan and this was mostly like salvaged job retouch so I didn't have to do too much research but it really surprised me like well that the top one I like so I finally sent them I sent the logo out I'm going oh man thank god I'm done this is great and then I got a couple seconds later I'm going oh my god I sent that I can just see them and I can see them in the newsroom like holding their stomachs and laughing and kicking and going this is the craziest thing you've ever seen but they didn't. They just they just came back with one little correction. They circled one thing it was the bottom of one of the characters they circled it and I came up and said no so I so I undid that when I do sketches I do like tons of sketches and I sketch really tightly now so these are sketches sketch for the Miami Herald that sketch I showed you earlier from Orange County Register like these are the kind of things that like people I spend time on people then they go into some conference room and somebody says you know okay we saw that 30 seconds okay next 30 seconds they don't you know these these logos don't get to see the outside except for just a few moments and then they're then their history so I just wanted to show you that I've got like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of like logos that are just as good or better than the ones that are on the newspapers just rejects the PI they were like don't tell anybody don't tell anybody we might call the PI I'm going like everybody in Seattle already calls it the PI you know what are you talking about the citizen of course is the people that didn't change their name so fonts I always wanted to do fonts started fonts and at Hallmark but now I always liked Speedball I always liked show card lettering there's some lettering for a magazine article there's some lettering for a book of chicken drawings when I was at Hallmark I was like working not only with Myron and Robert Kelly was there and Hermann Zoff was there but Brad Holland was there we were good buddies Charlie Barsotti the illustrator cartoonist for the New Yorker was there Russell Myers was there did Broom Hilda I mean it was just like filled with talented people but one weekend Brad and I had a roll of butcher paper and one other guy you had Peltier and we just got a bunch of booze and a bunch of snacks and we spent the whole weekend unrolling this roll of butcher paper and drawing chickens I don't know why they got weirder and weirder and finally like we did a book of chicken drawings and called it chicken shit and I started started applying the show card stuff to like fonts this is like the first digital font I think I had published was published by the font bureau show card gothic thing about it is like thing when I did this I was thinking like I don't I have no idea if anybody's ever going to buy any of these things or anything so why waste the time to do a lower case you know like in a sense of doing like too much work if nobody's going to pay for it so anyway a lot of these things only have caps the comic modern and the lower right is Jimbo which was for Adobe and it was when they were making multiple master fonts big foot sightings is El Grande from I did this for the font bureau here's a here's a wood type based one that has my like fascination for the terminals from Steven singlet desk featured again it is a black litter done about three black letters I think ITC badoni I'm like specialized for like 40 years and doing like great big type and they say we'd like you to work on the tiniest badoni so this is like now I'm kind of off into like a layered fonts color stuff like that this is like I think this is like about five layers down below you can see sort of the options of the ways it can go together here's another one I think this might have six layers there might be a lot of options for them this is Balboa plus so sutro shaded I think yeah with with blah blah this is one I'm working on right now which is going to like it's going to be like my Winchester mystery house it's going to keep going and going but but I was really wanting to get it get the phonetics thing going which is you can use it or you don't have to use it it's up to you but there's going to be all kinds of interior and exterior and shadow treatments to this thing when it gets done and I went to school to be a painter so but all the time I was doing analog I couldn't paint because analog and painting and like not that much different you can't like ink a lettering all day long and then like go pick up paint brush and like paint all day all night long so I didn't start painting until digital came along and that's mostly signs mostly it's entirely signs these are all oil paintings they're like from like a foot and a half to two by two feet to like five feet five six feet you know this was in downtown Oakland Elsa Bronte New York Farmington New Mexico and Silicon Arizona I love that this this downtrodden neon signs from like out in the four corners out in the desert places that like was there was somebody's grand idea at one time and now it's just like dusty and I like these things so anyway this this is my talk thank you very much