Tokyo-based designer and essayist Ian Lynam’s new column for SNOW Magazine debuts with a look at the future by way of the past, with a bit of Halcali, Chuck Klosterman, and type design thrown in for good measure.

I was interviewed recently for a small documentary about D.I.Y. self-publishing while in the U.S. over the holidays. Frankly, it was an uncomfortable experience. I had to talk about the work I did self-publishing in the mid 90s that the video-maker had deemed “important” in the continuum of punky zine development. It was odd to be on camera, as I am never comfortable in performative situations. (I do not kid myself that interviews are not at least part performative.) Interview subjects, no matter how trivial the topic, are expected to be entertaining. It was also off-putting to talk about a body of work from such a transitive period in my life, especially one that I view in retrospect as largely irrelevant. It was fun to make zines and I learned a lot, but I think the experience of making them was more important than the actual output (which was muddled and largely not very good). The interviewer did bring up a number of good points however, including the one question that always makes my stomach lurch: “What’s next?” 1

As a global society, we are overly concerned with what is next, and it creeps me out. I hear this question far too often in every sector of my life, most particularly from certain clients I work with in my graphic design practice. I find it too often be an unnatural, unhealthy exercise, though this may just show how unnatural and unhealthy my own mind-state is. As a culture, contemporary society is consistently running as far and as fast as possible with potentialities. At the same time, these kinds of questions help pay my rent and keep food in my refrigerator a decent amount of the time doing work for innovation research companies and the like, so I cannot complain too much. However, hearing it after having to exhume the dusty corpse of a lot of mediocre “work” that I did in my unstable 20s made the whole experience a bit more unsettling. I answered frankly: people are far too concerned about what is next. It is unhealthy to dwell on the future too much. A decent sprinkling of speculative thought on utopian/dystopian futures, as well as practical projected trending is fine, but more than that is bad for you.

In Chuck Klosterman’s latest book Eating the Dinosaur, he talks about time travel and how too much dwelling on projecting one’s self into the future is the work of the lazy and unimaginative. While Klosterman is talking more accurately about time travel, I think that this analysis applies to folks whose livelihood is dependent upon predicting the future of industry and commerce, as well.

An illustrated example: a few years ago, I was at a house party here in Tokyo. I watched a guy who works as a “trend scout” 2 get smashed and badger others about “what is next in Japan.” He made his way around the room, not-so-subtly asking folks what they thought was “next” in socioeconomic cultural development, all the while getting more and more frustrated (in a playful way) at the lack of coherent answers. It was humorous to see how few answers the “key influencers” 3 at the party had for him. No one really speculated, just shaking their heads and repeating the question back to him. When it was my turn, I answered:

“More Twitter, some nebulous online product that will utiilize Twitter in a nebulous fashion to expand its already dubious ‘functionality’ 4, and I hope, though it won’t happen, another decent Halcali album.”

“Halcali?”

“Halcali.”

“Who is that?”

“A duo of singer/rapper novices who were taken under the wing of a production company and a number of music producers to make one exceptional hip-pop album, followed by a bread trail of shit and garbage in its wake. Another decent album out of them is a statistical impossibility, though.”

“Man, I have to check them out.”

And he should. Or at least the album Bacon. The rest of their oeuvre is of highly dubious quality: over-produced mid-tempo beats (or under-produced midtempo beats, depending on your taste and point of view), off-key singing steeped in copious overdubs and subtle auto-tune refinements, boring songwriting, and general tedium.

This answer appealed to him on two levels — he heard about an album that I bet he won’t like, but will check out nonetheless, as well as a vague technological forecast. This is the issue at hand for me: people are too worried about the future without knowing something of the past, be it relatively old or relatively recent. I’m concerned with the past perhaps too much, but very particular slices of the past. I am far more interested in past bodies of work than in what someone will do in the upcoming year.

The few weeks leading up to the aforementioned video documentary interview were ones filled with exhuming and analyzing a body of work by someone else. This is the kind of situation I am much more comfortable with than predicting the future, but that’s because it is safe, in a way. The actual people from that time have died off and you are left with only the documentation to confront, as well as any resonant effects culturally.

I spent four days in Chicago digging through the archives at the Newberry Library in December, digging through the archives of the work of the late Oswald Bruce Cooper, affectionately known as “Oz” Cooper to his colleagues behind his back. I’ve been interested in his work for over a decade, and have been wanting to get a more in-depth look at his work the whole time. I finally proposed a comprehensive article on his body of work for Idea Magazine this year and they went for it. So, off to Chicago I went. I wanted to look at his original drawings to see how off the contemporary interpretations are, try to find some unpublished work, excavate some clues as to his personality, and fill in some gaps that are missing in understanding his work in the context of typographic history.

I got a lot more than I could have ever expected as a result.

Cooper’s work is most widely known due to his design of the typeface Cooper Black, a font that defined the American advertising landscape of the 1920s and 1930s. It hung around for the next thirty plus years, getting a lot of relative use. It reappeared in popular consciousness in 1966 when a designer at Capitol Records used it for the cover of The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds LP. You can see Cooper Black daily throughout Tokyo and practically every metropolitan city around the globe, being used for business signage, airline identities, and dance club flyers.

Cooper Black is the formal inversion (and a precursor) to Helvetica. It is chubby and friendly and weird. A movie about Cooper Black existed online long before Gary Hustwit came up with his idea for a documentary ode to Helvetica. It has overt personality, a legacy of being ripped-off and copied, and there isn’t a whole lot known about the man who designed it. He was quiet and shy, devoted to his work, and generally steered clear of social gatherings larger than a few people.

One lone book on his body of work exists, The Book of Oz Cooper. It was published in 1949 in an edition of 2,000 copies. Nowadays, it’s a fairly rare book. You can find copies of it for relatively cheap, though I imagine that the publication of the article in Idea will drive the price up as today’s designers hunt down the few copies available online. Within, a dozen or so typeface designs of Cooper’s are illustrated. Half of them are no longer in circulation, having never made the transition from metal type to digital format. With the exception of Cooper Black, his other type designs have been sloppily digitized, additional weights extrapolated, and missing characters filled-in with designers’ guesses and wild stabs at what Cooper’s drawings of the characters might look like.

I know this because I have published digital versions of Cooper’s typefaces in the past. I’ve looked at the strata of interpretations of his work out in the world. I’ve seen firsthand how poorly the world has treated the work of this man and his efforts, how there was a rush in the 90s to churn out quick approximations of his designs.

My days spent poring over his drawings and printed samples resulted in the discovery of a handful of previously unpublished typefaces. I’ve taken these typefaces and created well-crafted digital versions of them over the past month.

A bit about them:

Cooper Italic Complete

The first is a set of swash capitals that were meant to be paired with Cooper Italic, Cooper’s lightweight italic typeface. The swash capitals are a lively interpretation of round serifed oldstyle caps mixed with classic Caslon italic forms. Cooper Italic was released in 1924, the swash capitals drawn in 1927, and the complete set was never released. Cooper Italic possesses “a most unusual swing” in a number of the characters, most specifically the scooped, pigeon-toed feet of the lowercase “n”, “h”, and “m”. These idiosyncratic characters are offset by more stately and assured capitals. Cooper said that his Italic is “much closer to its parent pen form than the roman” and “that freedom is almost the life of it.”

Cooper was a firm believer in creating humanist letterforms that echo the hand that created them, not wringing the life out of them through refinement and mechanization. In Cooper’s own words about Cooper Italic, “The designer is conscious of its crudity, and of its irreverence for the best traditions. But he believes that there are enough good types already– that the need is for poor types that can be used! And since he admits this to be a poor one, there now remains to be found out only whether it is usable or not.” Cooper was long a believer that good type should be homely — if too pretty or sleek, it’s lifespan would be exponentially shortened.

These two digital typefaces are the result of researching Cooper’s original drawings and series of engraved proofs for both typefaces. The typefaces include the original ligatures (never before released digitally in other folks’ versions of Cooper Italic), the previously unreleased Swash characters, and a range of punctuation and diacritics, et al, that fill out a full character set. The typefaces have been lovingly kerned for the smoothest result in text setting.

Cooper Fullface Italic

At the end of 1927, Oswald Bruce Cooper yearned to create a heavy “modern” face — akin to Broadway and other display types in height and proportion, but more nuanced while being a dense, black type. The Barnhart Brothers & Spindler foundry, for whom Cooper had designed a number of typefaces, saw the potential of the typeface as a big seller. Richard McArther, General Manager of the foundry, referred to it as “the hotsy stuff,” though he was highly critical of a number of characters in the original design. He requested a successive number of modifications, including the addition of W. A. Dwiggins-inspired serifs to the face to make it stand apart from similarly-weighted typefaces then on the market. He wanted to imbue the face with a considerable amount of “old-timey” flavor in order to impart a sense of originality to the face and have it sell across both Modern and Bodoni/Didot market segments.

The resulting typeface was called Cooper Fullface, a jaunty and swollen caricature of a Didone with great potential for display advertising work. The final form of the face was a regulated and consistent balance of cartoonishness and earnest visual braggadocio, the bouncy, circus fairway-like swing of the original drawings of the letters taken down considerably and figures redrawn and redrawn for maximum readability.

A specimen sheet was mailed out in 1929, and generated moderate sales, but too late — Barnhart Brothers & Spindler closed its foundry division shortly thereafter as part of ATF’s corporate roll-up of manufacturing. The American Type Founders continued to produce the face and sell it at a decent pace, renaming it Cooper Modern.

Cooper designed a matching italic for Cooper Fullface, but it was never released. The BB&S foundry closure resulted in the foundry equipment being shipped to New Jersey a few weeks shy of the typeface’s completion. It is unfortunate, as the accompanying italic is perhaps Cooper’s masterpiece, a lively Bodoni-esque italic with more than a bit of influence from 19th Century display types, particularly in the treatment of the ball serifs on the uppercase “A”, “J”, “M”, and “N”. Cooper Fullface Italic stands as the until-now missing bookend to Cooper’s career as a type designer.

This digital release is the revival of that lost Cooper typeface, Cooper Fullface Italic. Within are two typefaces — Cooper Fullface Italic and Cooper Fullface Italic Fancy. The two faces span the range of Cooper’s original drawings — the Fancy typeface utilizing a number of alternate characters.

These two typefaces are based on Cooper’s original drawings and a series of engraved proof prints for both typefaces. The typefaces include the original ligatures, original Oz Cooper ornaments, fancy swash characters, and a range of punctuation and diacritics, et al, that fill out two full character sets, as well.

It was these revivals of lost work and the research experience behind them that have really helped shape my goals for the upcoming year. I’m going to continue not worrying too much about the future, except in how it is relative and of real worth. I will not worry about technology (unless my computer dies). I will take the upcoming essay and turn it into a book (though that’s not such an unlikely prediction, as I have already started). I will take these items of beauty and craft forward with me into the future, creating versions for contemporary society that are useful and accurately represent their creator’s original intentions.

Perhaps this is the best way to forecast the future — making it in realtime.

Notes:

1 What he was asking was, more succinctly, “What is next for D.I.Y. self-publishing?”

2 What exactly does a trend scout do? I want a detailed list of the merit badges involved. Potential examples: Fabric of time knot-tying merit badge, social development parameter measuring badge, etc.

3 Drunken jerks

4 I wasn’t predicting the future here. I just happened to be designing a logo for a service that expanded the functionality of Twitter that would launch within the next year (as long as a nuclear bomb didn’t drop on San Francisco). By using the vague language required by non-disclosure agreements with clients, graphic designers can often come off as future-predicting gurus. Chalk one up for mystique points if you are a graphic designer.

Ian Lynam is a graphic designer, art director, typographer, professor, and performer with the unit MAMMAL.