making da flomm: fonts, code + tumblr

A PERSONAL HISTÓRY oF FLOMM so far     PART 5 of 10 

Q.  If art as an ob­ject is dead, why is every­thing so expensive?
A.  Oth­er­wise, no­body would buy it.
—di­a­log, Max (2002)
 

I’d be ly­ing if I said FLOMM was the first thing in­spired by the Max movie.

Max was also part of the in­spi­ra­tion for a se­ries of fonts I’d been toy­ing with since 1997, when I saw some let­ter­ing on a book jack­et for ar­chi­tect Adolf Loos.
 

1919 ty­pog­ra­phy
In 1999, I re­mem­ber show­ing the let­ter­ing to Rod Cava­zos when we went to see the pre­miere of Star Wars Episode One at a small the­atre in Marin Coun­ty, one of the few places that still had tick­ets available. 

Since, I’d been col­lect­ing ma­te­ri­als sim­i­lar to the Loos lettering. 

Then in 2008, de­sign­er Je­re­my Mc­Cain hired me to draw some sim­i­lar let­ter­ing for a logo – with the nü logo de­sign for Kate Moss as ref­er­ence. By then I had got­ten my hands on draw­ings of Her­bert Bay­er’s Bay­er Type …

And with Max ‘WAT IF’ re­vi­sion­ary think­ing, I set out to make Jeanne Mod­er­no – named af­ter my wife – a font fam­i­ly that could have ex­ist­ed dur­ing the pe­ri­od of the Max movie (late 1918).
 

 

The fonts were re­leased Spring 2009, just about the time I start­ed talk­ing game de­sign.

I’d spent most of 2008 draw­ing the fonts while every­thing was falling apart around me. Fore­clo­sure, wife’s ill­ness (still not di­ag­nosed), and I was work­ing a ran­dom job I could not stand dur­ing the day.
 

“We just got 900 re­sumes for a jan­i­tor position.”
—Pret­ty much the work at­mos­phere at the time
 

Every day I came into work I’d hang a proof of the let­ters in my cube. No one there knew wat I was do­ing – nor did they care. Every one there was out for them­selves. And then a large cor­po­ra­tion bought every­thing, I found my­self fired (no one re­al­ly knew wat I was do­ing there any­way and you kno, nei­ther did I) and the job was over.

Draw­ing the fonts kept me sane – and col­lect­ing ma­te­ri­als for over 10 years helped. They hit the mar­ket and (luck­i­ly) were an im­me­di­ate hit – the in­come from them kept us go­ing for most of 2009.
 

“Those who do not want to im­i­tate any­thing, pro­duce nothing.”
—Sal­vador Dalì
 

nü from old
Recre­at­ing his­tor­i­cal ma­te­ri­als is some­thing I’ve been güd at. 

I had a friend who knew a Pi­cas­so forg­er and af­ter he de­scribed some of the meth­ods, my re­ac­tion was hmmm. I could quite pos­si­bly do that. And I loved Prove­nance: How a Con Man and a Forg­er Rewrote the His­to­ry of Mod­ern Art (2010), I’d say the only thing that kept me out of this lifestyle is:

It’s il­le­gal.

And af­ter watch­ing every sea­son of Oz (1997–2003) on HBO, I kno I would NOT do well in prison.

But – as a graph­ic de­sign­er – be­ing able to seam­less­ly fit into a cor­po­rate brand­ing sys­tem with­out muck­ing things up, de­sign­ing new ma­te­ri­als to fit with old, kept me em­ployed for most of my career.
 

“And they prob­a­bly re­designed the whole sick bay, too! I know [de­sign­ers] – they love to change things.”
—Dr. Mc­Coy, adapted
 

A güd graph­ic de­sign­er knows when not to. Work­ing for, say, TAR­GET and de­cid­ing to aban­don their red and re­place it with blue – sort of an am­a­teur graph­ic de­sign mis­take. Be­cause it would turn TAR­GET into their com­peti­tor, Wal­mart.

So artists can have per­son­al styles they work in – graph­ic de­sign­ers, should not. Should be able to adapt to wa­t­ev­er work­ing sit­u­a­tion they’d find them­selves in.
 

 

And his­toric recre­ations are my specialty. 

Just about all of my pro­fes­sion­al fonts have some sort of his­tor­i­cal pedi­gree – but for THE BAT­TLE For MOD­eRN 1923, I planned to go farther.

Not just recre­ate ear­ly Mod­ern era art­work – I was go­ing to cre­ate art that ‘could have been’ just a few years af­ter the Max movie took place. 

Be­cause in my warped dream world, my made up art move­ment should ex­ist in Max’s universe.
 

 

My fake art move­ment would have its own art­work, its own his­to­ry, its own char­ac­ters and it would be this sort of Spinal Tap-like sideshow thing that is out there with the Fu­tur­ists, the Cu­bists, the DADAists, the Sur­re­al­ists, etc. Only they were real, we’re not.

Tho late 2009, I still didn’t kno wat to call it.
 

re­lax, take your time
I’m used to tight dead­lines, but with THE BAT­TLE For MOD­eRN 1923 I was go­ing to take my time. And if a name didn’t jump out at me right away, that was okay.

1923 was a given. 

That was the year my dad was born, the movement’s ‘an­niver­sary’ would be his birth­day, July 28. Same time as the fa­mous Bauhaus ex­hi­bi­tion was go­ing on in Weimar.

Sev­er­al things hap­pened in ’23 – and in ’22 – it was a time Mod­ern was com­ing into its own.
 

 

Time­wise, I spent most of 2009 and 2010 just de­sign­ing the back­ground art­work that would scroll be­hind every­thing in the game, each rep­re­sent­ing a dif­fer­ent style of Mod­ern Art.
 

 

I came up with the back­sto­ry that my move­ment would ac­tu­al­ly be a copy of the oth­er, MOR pop­u­lar art move­ments – a piece of pas­tiche – that at­tempt­ed to be like the oth­er move­ments, but was nev­er fa­mous for it.

It be­came a run­ning gag – so much I even­tu­al­ly in­clud­ed it in the ‘stu­dent’ ver­sion of FLOMM’s his­to­ry, post­ed here.
 

 

Then the name show’d up. 

Kin­da ran­dom­ly. MOR info on that avail­able to any­one who do­nates on our Pa­tre­on.

I ran into 2010 with the name FLOM – then I added a sec­ond M some­where along the way – ready to re-skin that ex­ist­ing game with all nü Mod­ern Art im­ages. But …

The re-skin­ning part didn’t work.
 

wat do you mean it won’t work?
This was af­ter John was, 

“What is all this? Why are you do­ing this? I said what?”

Then he start­ed the con­ver­sa­tion from scratch ‘so you want to make your own video game, huh?’ even though I had a bunch of im­ages all to­geth­er and was set to re-skin his game.

Once I con­vinced him we had this dis­cus­sion be­fore, con­ver­sa­tion turned to game play and sprites and powerups and mock­ups and every­thing one needs to build a game. 

John has lots of ex­pe­ri­ence and end­ed up leav­ing teach­ing to run his own gam­ing em­pire – so his ad­vice helped me fo­cus on game de­vel­op­ment, tak­ing wat I knew about ar­cade games and bring­ing all that into the 21st Century.

It’s a lot.
 

 

And yeah, it turned out his code would not work with my im­ages.

There were a bunch of rea­sons – in­clud­ing a soft­ware up­date – we were us­ing the Uni­ty Game En­gine, a 3D plat­form to build a 2D game; which was wonky with his side shoot­er but MOR wonky with wat I was about to attempt. 

As I was cre­at­ing the vi­su­al el­e­ments of the FLOMM uni­verse, we found our­selves in the po­si­tion to start over. No re-skin­ning, nü skin­ning.

I in­vit­ed pro­gram­mer Dar­cy ‘Moki’ Nel­son on board. 

Moki is an awe­some ac­tive Navy re­servist, game art stu­dent and grad­u­ate of my rather dif­fi­cult be­gin­ning Ty­pog­ra­phy course. Her spe­cial­ty then and to­day: Com­plex bat­tle scenes. 

We set about cre­at­ing a to­tal­ly nü FLOMM! THE BAT­TLE For MOD­eRN 1923 sideshoot­er from scratch with a slew of de­tailed vi­su­als that were go­ing to take years at this point.
 

 

Moki in­tro­duced me to Google docs (fi­nal­ly! I got to aban­don MS Word!), and we set about craft­ing a game doc­u­ment out­lin­ing every­thing that would be in FLOMM.
 

all those ‘dis­cov­ery’ materials
In ad­di­tion to all the books I was bounc­ing thru, dig­i­tal­ly, I had a very big file of jpegs. 

This was be­fore Pin­ter­est was a thing, so my FLOMM ‘scrap file’ had lots of im­ages found around the in­ter­webs, from pho­tos, scans from books, mag­a­zines. And not all of them came from Art History.

It was my birth­day, 2012 – we were on va­ca­tion in Uki­ah, Cal­i­for­nia. I couldn’t sleep, so I sat at an old lap­top with the jpegs and de­cid­ed to check out tum­blr.

I had seen tum­blr be­fore, but wasn’t to­tal­ly into tum­blr. That changed when I start­ed the first FLOMM blog.

The first im­age I post­ed was Picasso’s world-chang­ing Cu­bist paint­ing Les Demoi­selles d’Av­i­gnon (1907):
 

 

Every­thing else built off that first post, and I de­cid­ed the blog would be or­ga­nized by top­ic and colour – which I al­ready knew is the best way to or­ga­nize an art exhibition. 

My goal be­came to post about four or five times a day, Art His­to­ry sub­jects, plus re­lat­ed con­tem­po­rary works. 

Be­cause every­thing in­flu­ences everything. 

Tum­blr was also to­tal­ly un­cen­sored. Which is güd, cause if you’re do­ing ANY­thing with Art His­to­ry, nudes will be every­where. Just get used to it.
 

 

And so Tum­blr be­came my ‘fid­get spin­ner,’ a bunch of years be­fore those were a thing too. And I dis­cov­ered some­thing I share with my stu­dents today:
 

“If you want to learn some­thing, start a blog about it. Over time, you’ll learn a LOT mor than you thot you knew JUST BY putting to­geth­er the blog.”
—Me, again
 

I mean, this is how teach­ers build les­son plans – but in blog form. It works.

To­day, I’m still learn­ing from tum­blr – es­pe­cial­ly thru the FLOMM músik and Pol­ish art blogs. 

And back in 2012 – while Moki prod­ded – I found my­self build­ing out the com­plex FLOMM game uni­verse one piece of art at a time – with hun­dreds of el­e­ments com­ing to­geth­er from check­lists that nev­er seemed to end.

con
tinue
read
ing —

                   forward to  PART 6   • • •

· · ·  back to  PART 4

—steve mehal­lo

Flom­mist Steve Mehal­lo is a graph­ic de­sign­er, il­lus­tra­tor, font de­sign­er, ed­u­ca­tor, food­ie and gad­fly. He is the cre­ator and founder of FLOMM!

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