Designing my personal logo has been a chance to explore things I’m curious about (design, typography) as well as a chance to reflect on who I am. I went through three concrete steps in this process: choosing a font for my name, choosing a symbol to go beside my name, and getting them to match. In this post, I’d like to tell you why I chose Daisy Wheel as my font:
Daisy Wheel is a typewriter font that Volker Busse created from the Dual Gothic typeface used in some IBM daisywheel typewriters.
The first thing that appeals to me about Daisy is its “tactile clarity” – it looks clear to my eye, and also gives me a sense that I could reach out and touch it with my fingers. (This, incidentally, is the same feeling that I try to achieve in my photographic work.) The letters look like they’ve been reduced to their bare essences, on the one hand, but there’s also roughness and aberration in the texture. I get the sense that the letters are machine made, but the distressed quality of the font also makes them seem natural or organic, and I’m intrigued by that tension. It’s also interesting to me to recall the days of manual typewriters, and to think how this font came to us through a digital reconstruction of the output of a manual process–a long “distance” to travel.
I could talk much longer about the aesthetics of the font–why I like it on an abstract level–but there’s a more basic reason why it captivates me, a reason from my past. Daisy reminds me of the first book I ever wrote.
The book I’m talking about is a journal that I kept in kindergarten and first grade. Once a week, a typist would come to class for “story time.” Every kid got a turn with the typist–you’d sit down beside her and tell her a story off the top of your head, and she’d type as you spoke. Then you’d take the typewritten page and paste it into your Steno book, along with a drawing if you wanted to do one. In all the years since then, I never forgot the look of that book–specifically, how the letters looked on the page as the typist transcribed my words, and how they stayed around on the page for me to see again later.
I don’t think Daisy Wheel is identical to the font from “story time,” but there’s a good resemblance, and that’s why Daisy calls to me whenever I see it. (Interestingly, this resemblance only occurred to me on a conscious level after I’d been working with Daisy for some time. At first, I wasn’t really sure why I liked it so much until: “Oh that’s why…”)
Here’s a page from the book, which my mom kept safe for me through several moves and many years:
It says:
December 22, 1981
I Set Up My Christmas Tree
I helped my daddy set it up. I got something for it. I got a star for the top and it blinks.
Story by,
Rudi
Today I took the book out to my deck to take these snapshots in late afternoon light with my “ancient” iPhone 3S (and these images are what came out of the phone, without any color transformation). Here is the book on my deck with some melting snow:
I got a star and it blinks ■