 for sure. This is fantastic. This is the first time I've been to Type-Con and I don't know how to process everything and I'm still in East Coast time so it's like really late and it's awesome. So this is basically the original pixel. This is a brick and that's part of what I had been looking at is radio bricks from chimneys. I need to make it clear that I will be using the term lettering to talk about chimney lettering. I understand that's probably totally incorrect for this audience. However the original engineering drawings all the engineers referred to the letter forms as lettering. So when I speak about lettering on chimneys that's the context that the lettering term comes from. So I grew up in Hershey, Pennsylvania which I realized doing this presentation that I think I grew up inside a brand. The whole town we have Hershey Park. It's an amusement park. The street lamps literally are shaped like Hershey kisses. So it's like the coated one and then the uncoded one and the coated ones have the flag sticking out. My mom is a sign painter so I grew up. Gemma mentioned last night about the pounce pattern. I used to take the little pounce wheel to get my mom's patterns traced when she had an oversized piece to do. So I grew up around this kind of iconic type from the Hershey bar. I also grew up in the town at a time when this factory was still active and I knew people who worked in the factory. And I found this image from the early 1920s where on the right side there's one chimney with the vertical lettering with Hershey. There's a second chimney that is there now and those two are still standing. Most of the rest of the factory has been raised. So most of this doesn't exist anymore. The other thing about growing up in Hershey in terms of type is the Hershey cocoa in the bottom portion of the image. That's actually shrubbery and that's still in place in Pennsylvania to this day. I think there are some legal requirements. This is like quite real that they cannot destroy the two chimney stacks that are there and they can never remove the Hershey cocoa shrubbery. So after college I worked in the Philadelphia area for a few years and then made my way to Lancaster, Pennsylvania and Lancaster is the actual home of Hershey's first candy company. And in Lancaster there's an interesting typographic history where the Hamilton Watch Company was primarily designing type for timepieces or watch faces and they had a fairly enormous place as well. So this factory is the Hamilton Watch Company. Most of this is actually still standing and like lots of these old factory buildings it's now mainly apartments and condos. The water tower, the Hamilton Watch on it, that's long gone and the vertical chimney with Hamilton lettering is also long gone. So for as much as I love growing up in Hershey and I love where I live now in Lancaster this is not the Hamilton that I was meant to meet. This is the Hamilton like many in this room that I was meant to fall in love with. I had a friend from grad school in 2012 who pretty much guilted me into going to the annual Waze Goose Conference. I love him for it. I think I've been there every year since but this was one of those moments when three days of great things happening and everyone was fantastic and at the very end the Moran's pull this weird move where they want 80 and they're like hey and have a safe trip home and before you go just we're getting evicted from the factories we might only have three or four months we don't know what's going to happen to the collection but maybe we'll see you next year. I was like totally panic-stricken so I quickly got in touch with them. I maybe shook hands with them and I said I need to come back and I need to photograph everything. So they allowed that to happen and I got a friend Ryan Heffernan who lives in New Mexico extremely gifted photographer somehow convinced Ryan he needs to come from New Mexico to Chicago to meet me and me and two of my students we rent a car drive to Two Rivers and start documenting the building. So we had access to every part of the the whole site. So Hamilton actually had a basement which was super creepy but really interesting to see. We also got all these really crazy views of things that for anybody who didn't have full access was these were probably way out of bounds. So we started seeing the chimney and ultimately on one of the upper levels of some portion of the factory site I found a window that we could crack open enough that we could get out onto the roof and ultimately this shot is from the roof of the original Hamilton factories and at this point I start realizing that these letters are actually composed of physical bricks. They're not painted and from a distance you really don't clue into the fact that these are individual bricks that have been placed. So I got curious and figured out that there was a company called Alfons Custodis. They had headquarters in New York originally founded in Germany in the 1860s and they had a Chicago office and the Chicago office is the location that had constructed the chimney. It now trades under Homo Custodis the company's headquartered in New Jersey and we get these original drawings from an engineer and we start learning about how these letter forms were created. So with Hamilton it's 13 course radio bricks and so that's the height 13 courses arose and when we drill down to the details we can start to see pretty clearly the brickwork and how the masons would have been following this pattern. So I go back then once we get that I'm really curious what else did I get at the 2012 Ways Goose that might inform what we were working on. We were trying to just understand this chimney lettering so effectively I was trying to create masonry lettering or some version of it from a place that was specialized in wood type manufacturing which made no sense but I had this brochure from the lighthouse in and this aerial shot of the town included the chimney but it also seemed to have a second chimney on the site and at closer inspection and we scan this in we started realizing there actually was a second chimney and at first we thought this is another this is like the long-lost Hamilton chimney no one knows like no one knows we found it and it turns out that it's actually Eggers which is great so they did primarily wood veneer furniture production so Eggers has 11 course lettering height once we knew that we had this engineer on the hook at homo and costotus we were able to get all kinds of drawings so we would discover the internet for images and see anything that had lettering on a chimney we would try to figure out if that was built by Alfons costotus in the early 20th century the one on the left is in Valmont Colorado it's basically just this emblem the next one Illinois glass company it's misleading this is actually in New Jersey it's not in Illinois this is one of the rare instances where there's a lowercase letter form and it also includes a rare instance that there's any sense of horizontal use of the glyphs and then the one on the right is in Reading Pennsylvania and this is one of the times that we start understanding the patterning or the ornamenting around the chimneys we get the Heinz 57 that there are these twin chimneys at the Heinz location in Pittsburgh and then the next one over is a different course height for the lettering for Heinz this is from a plant they had in Indiana 1922 and 57 are the core chimney designs that had numbers 1922 is in Nashville New Hampshire and Art Loom is from Philadelphia it's a tapestry mill so this gets me back to Hershey realizing I grew up with these two chimneys this is pretty much the way the factory looked when I was a kid you can see the shrubbery in the foreground again spelling out Hershey Coco so long before Sagmeister was doing his thing Hershey did it in like the 1920s so I start asking the engineer do you happen to have anything from the Hershey stacks and they in fact had constructed the Hershey chimneys the one on the left is for what we believe had been the milk processing facility in Myers town Pennsylvania which was about 10 to 15 miles from Hershey it has nine course lettering the two in the middle are the two chimneys that still stand on the site these are 21 course letter heights which equals about nine feet in physical dimension so each of these letters reaches a height of nine feet one of the ways we were also sourcing reference material most of the chimneys were at sites of large manufacturing facilities and if you're a large manufacturer you're producing some amount of product with product comes promotional elements so postcards and advertising art and collateral so we were sourcing all manner of those kinds of materials as well my dad so once people know that you're working on this kind this is a side project at our studio so this is not what we typically do but my dad who still lives in Hershey he my mom were at brunch at hotel Hershey and he calls and he says hey I think the chimneys at the Cuba facility for Hershey had lettering and we get back in touch with Hamon and they in fact had constructed the chimneys at the Havana Cuba sugar refinery plant for Hershey but this is when it gets kind of interesting there's ornamenting around the tops of the chimneys in Cuba but then the ERNS are the clearest examples where the lettering style differs quite a bit from what we see in Pennsylvania our only conclusion from this is that there had to be some degree of cultural shift in aesthetic sensibility that these letter forms change given that the same company had constructed all these chimneys once people know you're working on this kind of project it becomes that that notion that this is a hobby I didn't realize I had and people send images so anytime someone would travel they'd snap a shot out of their car and so this one on the left is a designer in Philadelphia we know he happened to be on a train platform and had passed this chimney for years and never paid attention to it and now he saw it and asked us if we could source the original drawing which we were able to find Susquehanna University in Pennsylvania we had the creative director give us a shout and she said there's a pile of bricks behind the building and I think they might be from the chimney do you have any idea if that would be the case so she sent us an image and we circled what appeared to be radial bricks so these chimneys are constructed with radial bricks which I'll get to in a minute they are not house bricks which we originally thought they were like the standard house bricks you can get at the hardware store we are working on a museum design in a small town called Biglerville in Pennsylvania and this is the Musselman applesauce factory this still stands we can get right this is interesting because it's not behind any amount of fencing it's not it's not really protected in any way you can literally walk off the street right to the base of the chimney so in this case we were able to physically touch the chimney and measure things and I put my key fob in as a scale reference so after we start on the lettering then we became really curious about the engineering aspects and we sourced this catalog from the 20s the custodists had produced and part of what we learned at that point is that there were these five core chimney sizes all of them are these wedge shapes these are all referred to as radial bricks they're all perforated radial bricks the perforations are the spaces for the mortar to get down in to get a stronger hold all the faces are the same dimension so all the faces the outer edge there they're all a consistent six and a half by four and five eight the image on the right we source from a different place and that shows how these training sessions would take place you can see the thickness of the walls these are deep in terms of how many rows deep these bricks are the typical thickness would have been about three to four feet thick at the base the largest chimney that is still standing there's actually a state park the anaconda state park the chimney base is 84 feet in diameter and the upper diameter is something like 60 feet it's just this massive structure so they would typically build from the inside out the scaffolding would go up the middle and they'd work from the middle and lay the brick starting at the outside and working their way in this chimney is still standing in Omaha Nebraska Marta Dawes was kind enough to allow us to use this image this is the most radical expression of type that we found so this is the stores brewery they have these kind of striped letter forms and you can see here a pretty clear indication of the individual bricks or pixels as we were trying to understand how to make sense of all of this the catalog on the left is actually from a competitor to Alphonse Custodis this is from MW Kellogg and these charts became kind of curious to us the upward pointing arrow is what we assumed happens in these structures we thought they were pretty passive static things that there's a burn at the bottom to generate the power and whatever needs to be exhausted travels up the chimney and gets carried away by the wind currents which is in fact part of what happens but the other thing we didn't really pay attention to initially was there's down draft so this chart on the left is actually there's a correlation between the wind speed at the top of the chimney the chimney diameter and the chimney height when you factor all of those in and you know how to do the engineering you can max out the efficiency of the down draft creating the burn at the base to power the plant so most chimneys are 150 to 250 feet high not just because they want to brand themselves and have this really prominent vertical lettering that can be seen from miles but they're actually driving power to the entire plant with the down draft that's being created we also looked at course comparisons so on the left is nine courses up to 21 courses we see three different expressions number two is this kind of filled version number four is we see the individual bricks and number seven we start to see these horizontal lines designating the courses so once we start thinking about this in terms of pixels we start to wonder and we looked at some early emigrate pixel based fonts to see what changes occurred as we increase in height so we're back to our original pixel or a brick this is slightly wider than the proportions of the radial brick face we made it wider to get it into the digital space that it could work both vertically and horizontally and we're no longer viewing it from miles away and just this curved surface on a chimney so if we look at a nine course high letter form if we just do a straight eye this is structurally a mess because all the vertical joints align which means the things going to implode so this would be a nine course high letter I so we decided to look at a 15 course letter height which puts us right in the middle of that nine to 21 course range that we had references for and so we began with the individual bricks to understand how the bricks would be composed if we were making the different glyphs then we looked at removing the vertical mortar joints and so now we just see the courses and then we moved to the fill which would be the inclusion of the mortar and the bricks and then we looked at what we call mortar bricks so it's just the mortar around the individual bricks and then mortar courses so in the end we end up with five different versions of this vertical lettering that we had seen on chimneys so 15 course height for all of these what we've done and this is James Holquist Todd who was unable to be here James has been digitizing and bringing this to life in an actual working font we do not do that at my studio and so James has built out were probably more than 800 glyphs the fonts available on his website and so we had some characters glyphs that we didn't really have a reference for in any of the images that we had sourced ampersand was one although maybe Monday or Tuesday this week we actually sourced an image of a chimney in Europe that has an ampersand it's really cool unlike either of these another thing that's part of the fonts we did some of the patterning that we had seen so we created some new patterns I think there are about three or four in the fonts and we at my studio we've worked on maybe a couple dozen more so our plan is that we will be putting together a book hoping to preserve this because a lot of these chimneys get torn down now it's really rare that anybody spends the money to keep these standing they get torn down for liability reasons or the cost of repair is so huge that they just they can't justify the cost of keeping them up so you see lots of interesting YouTube videos of people cheering as these things get imploded and fall to the ground including the Hamilton one which is a really great video that shows the Hamilton stack coming down to the earth again which is kind of distressing if you have questions for anything related to the research the background the design all of the kind of behind-the-scenes stuff and how we got to the project you can direct those to me or you can send them to Jenna Flickinger I need to thank Jenna at my studio it's Jay Flickinger she was great on the research and then James Helquist Todd you can get in touch with James for any of the more technical font design elements of what's been put together I wish everyone well this has been a great time I can't wait to hear what the other speakers and presenters have to share safe travels to everyone and I'm looking forward to all the other things that will happen during type con thank you very much