Category: Humor

Typography

Fontgate: Foiled by a Font

By Delphine Hirasuna |


Pakistan’s ousted Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif thought he had “dotted all the i’s and crossed the t’s” when he presented Pakistan’s Supreme Court with supposed exculpatory documents that disproved corruption charges against him. The seemingly ironclad evidence was signed and dated February 2, 2006. The fake document would have been credible, except for a subtle oversight that forensic experts quickly spotted. The text was printed in Calibri, a font that was not widely available until 2007 –a full year later.

Created by Lucas de Groot, a Dutch type designer based in Berlin, Calibri had been around for a number of years, but was little known until Microsoft adopted a modified version of it to be the default font for its MS Office suite. After that, Calibri had become so ubiquitous that it probably didn’t even occur to the forgers to change the font. That likely was the case in Turkey too when the government accused about 300 people of plotting a coup, based on documents printed in Calibri and back dated to 2003.
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Advertising

This Is No Yolk! Humpty Dumpty Was a Cannon, Not an Egg!

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Most of us grew up believing that Humpty Dumpty was a big clumsy egg that fell off of a wall and couldn’t be put together again. This notion was drilled into our consciousness by illustrators who came up with their own interpretation of what Humpty Dumpty looked like. But when you go over the actual words of the 18th century rhyme, nowhere does it state that Humpty Dumpty was an egg.

That depiction was introduced in 1872 by John Tenniel, who drew Humpty Dumpty as an egg in Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking-Glass.” The egg characterization was picked up in the 1902 “Mother Goose” storybook illustrated by William Wallace Denslow and in the 1916 version of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by artist Milo Winter. Maxfield Parrish even painted a Humpty egg on a 1921 cover of Life Magazine. Pop culture came to embrace the persona of Humpty Dumpty as an egg — but it wasn’t.

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Publishing

Making of a Magazine Icon

By Delphine Hirasuna |

With the exception of The New Yorker’s Victorian dandy, Eustace Tilley, American magazines haven’t had any memorable mascots. The haughty fop, peering at a butterfly through a monocle, debuted on the cover of The New Yorker’s very first issue in 1925. He was drawn by Rea Irvin, the magazine’s first art director. Irvin, who also designed the New Yorker’s distinctive font, based his illustration on an 1834 caricature of the notorious social gadfly, Count Alfred d’Orsay.

The New Yorker’s icon acquired the name, Eustace Tilley, from a series of tongue-in-cheek articles called “The Making of a Magazine: A Tour through the Vast Organization of The New Yorker,” written by Corey Ford in 1925. Ad buys were slim in The New Yorker’s early years (along with subscribers), and Ford’s humorous articles published in 20 installments were used to fill pages that advertisers weren’t buying. Ford named his fictional expert on magazine-making “Tilley” after his maiden aunt and “Eustace” because he thought it sounded good with Tilley. In time, Eustace Tilley and the top-hatted dandy on the cover of premiere issue became identified as one.

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Global Trends

Are You Fluent in Animal?

By Delphine Hirasuna |

When I was a toddler, my grandmother, who spoke mostly Japanese, taught me how to mimic the sounds that dogs, cats and horses make. So imagine my confusion when my kindergarten teacher asked what a dog says, and I quickly raised my hand and said, “Wan, wan.” She shook her head and asked the class, “Does anyone else want to guess?” All of the other 5-year-olds yelled out, “Bow wow” and “woof woof.”

It was then that I realized that every culture has its own impression of how animals sound. As graphic communicators, we should be mindful of this when translating a book into another language. It’s not just words that differ; it’s how sounds are heard too. Manchester, UK- author James Chapman made this point in a charming illustrated book called Soundimals, presenting 19 animals “speaking” 32 different languages.

View James Chapman’s language based art on his Tumblr and purchase his work on his Etsy Store.

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Humor

GQ’s Trump Fashion Critique

By Delphine Hirasuna |

Most magazines post editorial mission guidelines to define their target audience for advertisers and content contributors, explain their editorial focus and how it differs from other magazines in the same category, etc. Vogue, Elle, Marie Claire, and Glamour fall into the women’s fashion and style category, but each has its own unique perspective and tone of voice. Outdoor, Runner’s World, and Sports Fitness each cater to a specific demographic. Occasionally, a magazine will fudge its guidelines – like Sports Illustrated’s “swimsuit” edition, which is a stretch to claim that it has anything to do with sports or swimming, but would leave muscular jocks in tears if that issue was ever cancelled.

Lately it has been interesting to observe that a lot of magazines have strayed from strict adherence to their editorial guidelines and run articles touching upon Presidential politics. Teen Vogue, Scientific American, and Allure are just a few publications that found a way to fit a Trump story into their story format. GQ (Gentlemen’s Quarterly) recently came up with a clever way to stay true to its editorial position as the premier authority on men’s fashion and style by critiquing Donald Trump’s attire — a twist on the “Emperor has no clothes” tale, but in this case, the “President wears the wrong clothes.”