Ian Whiteman

I discovered the other day, as one does, a web site called http://www.cybergrot who are/were selling an old used box of Abdullah cigarettes. It was empty except strangely, for one remaining cigarette. Really quite a work of art. I find this interesting as when I was a student in London in the early 1960s I used to buy these oval section cigarettes as a kind of indulgence although I wasn’t really a smoker. Odd, as I could barely afford food let alone smokes.

In the modern western world, where even public spaces are being sterilised of smokers, it has all got out of hand. Ironically, the tobacco companies, who have done their best to get the whole population addicted to tobacco, are themselves responsible for destroying the market and virtual prohibition, as it was they who made it no longer an aesthetic and beneficial enjoyment for the populace but a chemical addiction from which BAT and Phillip Morris et alia made fortunes for their shareholders. By the addition of chemicals to preserve the tobacco and to help it burn better they created tasteless and poisonous sticks of nicotine. I’m not a smoker but I do think people have a right to smoke if they want to, but not from addiction. These older Turkish cigarettes were very powerful and I remember a few puffs and you would almost pass out from the effect or worse, turn green and throw up. It kept one from ever becoming addicted – an effective aversion therapy .

I’ve introduced this subject into my blog as I have many friends who are either Turkish or connected to Turkey for whom smoking is almost a religious sacrament. These are often connected to the sufi orders of that country and also of Bosnia, and I imagine all the rest of the post-Ottoman Balkans. It was the Ottomans who must have introduced smoking into the west as a socially acceptable habit and it prompts me to look into it as it was always accepted in Britain that Francis Drake, the sailor, introduced it from the Americas. There must be extensive histories on this subject. I’ve attended some of the meetings the local Jerrahi sufis hold in my neck of the woods here in Andalusia and their visiting Turkish and American teachers, to a man, usually chain smoke through their hours of shorbets (discourses). And often it’s from a packet of Marlboros, not exotic (illegal) organic Turkish tobacco which they do use on occasion. Personally I find it really choking and unpleasant if the smoking is indoors let alone the smell it leaves on your clothes. But I do believe that it does activate something in the brain of the smoker which is of some benefit. Others have told me the same. In a way it’s all got out of hand and the baby has been thrown out with the bath water. Most of the muslim scholars as well as the medical profession pronounce against tobacco and I’m with them because of what I say above, but it is not a black and white issue. It’s just that the art of smoking has been lost. Intelligent people should be able to make up their own minds on these things. Unfortunately the modern chemicalised cigarette and its relentless promotion (now increasing in the undeveloped world) has spoiled it for everyone.

A couple of quite different books just completed. The Abrahamic Archetype was commissioned by Archetype publishers in London for whom I have worked for many years. Archetype appreciate nice typesetting and have an experienced eye for detail. Baskerville is a typeface which never fails either as a display face or for text. In this case Baskerville was used on the cover and my own edited pro font of Bembo for the inner pages.

The second book was designed for Awakening in Swansea and is by Professor Tariq Ramadan. Hard not fall into clichés with emotive words like Jihad and Violence in the title. I dodged the obvious and ended up with an image of what happens after war and violence has left its mark. This image is of a wall in Berlin with bullet marks from the last war. If you walk round Berlin you will still see such traces of the last world war on bridges and walls. As there were so many words in the title it was straightforward to make a feature of it with a classic Roman typeface. I was quite pleased with this having almost given up trying to find a solution. It’s suitably sober but a nice image nonetheless.

Anyone who is familiar with typefaces (it’s my job) will know the name Bembo. It is probably the most elegant of book text faces that I use and only aficionados will know of its curious provenance. Although Bembo looks as fresh as a daisy and is quite at home in a newly printed book it is in fact over 500 years old. It comes from the time of Aldus Manutius, a powerful renaissance scholar, printer and publisher in Venice who employed a genius punch cutter named Francesco Griffo who in turn was responsible for creating a new alphabet of moveable type designed specially for an essay written by the literary scholar Cardinal Bembo which Aldus Manutius was publishing. He based it on pure Roman forms and also introduced for the first time an italic form based on a cursive handwritten style. The essay became very popular but it was the typeface which became much more famous, in use right up to the present day. Unfortunately Griffo, the creator of this typeface, had an unfortunate end and was arrested and finally executed for killing his son-in-law with an iron bar.

Most users of type are largely unaware of where they originated and how the best of these text faces are more than 500 years old (Jenson, Baskerville, Garamond etc) and that even so called modern faces like Rockwell and the famous London Transport typeface of Stanley Morrison and even Cooper Bold, the Easyjet typeface all date from very early in the last century. Also that they were initially hand drawn and later picked up by the font foundries. I’d like to deal with this in another post in which I can explore the origins of writing and lettering in both roman and arabic scripts –  rather a large subject. Understanding the sources of our civilisation is one way to help cure some its ills and a place to find new inspiration.

Read more about Aldus Manutius and Bembo at www.http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2010/10/typefaces-as-history-aldus-manutius-and-the-noble-bembo/

The most difficult design assignment I’ll ever get is to design a logo or logotype. These can often be so baffling and can cause me to wake up in a sweat in the night as my sub-conscious runs interminably through possibility after possibility. Such a design can happen quickly or take weeks or months which is why in the last few years I have cranked up the price for designing them. Imagine if Van Gogh had to paint a masterpiece with the client commenting at every turn – I don’t like that tree or that sun you’ve painted looks too wobbly. He would have lost his mind a lot earlier than he did and probably lopped off the other ear.

But clients come in all shapes and sizes and I have learnt over the years not to discount clients’ ideas and not about just logos. It’s often an alchemy between your own ideas and the seemingly impossible ideas a client might have. The good design (logos included) is always something beyond what you initially envisioned.  But it’s in the realm of typography that I feel like pulling rank sometimes although I have never actually said yet “you know nothing about typography or typefaces do you?” I’ve certainly been tempted. In fact as everyone knows the way you craft an email can be the difference between getting or losing a client. Who hasn’t laid  in bed regretting the email that  just got sent in a fit of pique. Of course the English language allows for one to express all kinds of subtleties which I just don’t think eg Spanish, allows for, so one can infer, suggest, imply and prevaricate in all manner of ways to avoid outright hostility. The golden rule is never send an email in anger and if you have to express something difficult, write it then wait till the morning before sending it. A lot happens with a night of sleep. It’s real art as it’s all so quick…no heaps of screwed up letters in the wastepaper basket.

Although many of my clients I have known personally for many years, the advent of the website has meant that I often have commissions now from clients I have never physically met. This is good for business but challenging in many ways. It’s not so much that they don’t know me and that I don’t know them, what they look like and their tastes and preferences etc., but that there isn’t that eye to eye chemistry which is more important than you might imagine.  Inevitably one does get a picture of a client as the project unfolds – or in some cases doesn’t. I have several large projects which have almost reached completion but which have gone quite dead as if the client had died. As I normally take a 50% advance on all projects from new clients I avoid being totally out of pocket but frustrated that hours of work has just been done with seemingly no outcome. You might say skype should give you that vital eye to eye contact. I do skype with clients, in fact in an emergency some years ago I had a skype chat ongoing for a whole day with California from Spain, where I live, as it was the only way a long brochure could be corrected to meet a deadline. But skyping can be invasive like a phone call and takes over too much. No, I’m quite happy in fact with doing business with emails – lets face it they are amazingly useful and I’d rather have an invisible client than none at all.