Introducing Boring Typography
It was in 2006 when I first noticed that I was going to used bookstores and purposefully looking for books with black sentence-case (only the first letter of the first work is capitalized) sans serif type on a white spine. This method of selecting books to browse through actually turned out to be fairly productive in that I ended up with a couple of books that I absolutely love. Later as I was teaching at MCAD I blew many lunch breaks just browsing the stacks randomly picking up books and judging them by their spines. It was a long-running joke that I was going to make a book called Boring Typography and it would just be a thousand pages of architecture and engineering books from the 1960s with left-justified Helvetica on the cover.
Well, I finally did it. Except its a blog. We set up a copy stand in the studio. I’ve been checking out books by the dozens from the MCAD Library. I’ve spent hours driving around the Twin Cities tracking down every last remaining International Style sign. And I’ve been posting images daily for the last few weeks.
So, to celebrate the launch of Boring Typography, here’s the MVA crew with their favorite covers.
Namdev with Ad Reinhardt (1966)
Kim with Signs in Action (1965)
Our daughter Patience with Creative Playgrounds and Recreation Centers (1969)
Zoey with The Nature of Recreation (1972)
for $26.73!