Keith Chi-Hang Tam

Keith Chi-hang Tam
Typography
Hong Kong

Last month I gave a talk on signage typography to a third year typography class at the Emily Carr Institute. They were working on a signage assignment for the Vancouver General Hospital. I licensed Arrival for one of the groups for the assignment. Last week I went back and had a critique with the students. Here’s a shot of what the group did. They used Arrival Normal Italic for the main direction info (!). Who would have thought...



Another update on the Arrival typeface: I’ve recently designed a 54" × 52' typographic mural for the Science World in Vancouver, using the Arrival typeface. It’s currently in production. Watch this space...

There seems to be continual debates about Quark vs. InDesign these days. Some (if not many) graphic designers are reluctant to make the switch, which I can totally understand: the bottom line matters. They need a program that’s fast. InDesign is slow. Who cares about the typographic details? The slowness of InDesign is too high a price to pay for the rather ‘invisible’ features. Perhaps 99% of graphic designers don’t even know optical margin alignment existed. I wonder how many graphic designers are using OpenType, and how bright the future of OpenType will be as a format when most people don’t make the effort to switch to InDesign. Quark has no intention of supporting anything remotely related to Adobe, and it seems like Quark is trying a bit too hard to cater for web designers rather than typographers. PageMaker was the first ‘desktop publishing’ program I learned, and I must admit I had been quite happy with it. Quark was something I had to force myself to learn just because it’s supposedly the ‘industry standard’, a ‘neccessary evil’. But we don’t have to live with this evil any more – we have something quite unprecendented and far superior. Read what Dean Allen has to say, and an amusing ‘translation’ of Quark’s press release for Quark 6. From typographi.ca.

Arial or Helvetica? This quiz quite old, but it’s fun. I got 7 out of 10 when I did it for the first time, and I just did it again and still didn’t get it all right (9 out of 10). It’s quite tough, especially when it comes to the caps. And I can only tell from the R, G, r, t, a, c and s. Try it if you haven’t already.

4/17/2003 01:42:00 AM

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