Karen Bartlett is a writer, journalist and film maker.
Karen writes for The Times, The Sunday Times,The Guardian, WIRED and Newsweek. In broadcast Karen has made documentaries for the BBC World Service, and directed a series on the economic meltdown.
Karen’s book 'Architects of Death' about Topf and Sons will be published in March 2018. She is also the author of 'After Auschwitz', a critically acclaimed biography about Dusty Springfield, and a book about disease eradication in the Twentieth Century.
Growing Up X
Fifty years after he was killed, the daughter of Malcolm X wants to make sure her father isn't written out of history Half way down a winding country road in New York’s wealthy Westchester County, one of America’s most famous revolutionaries lies buried under three feet of crisp white snow. I...
Newsweek
How one man gave Congo’s women hope
Life is hell for women caught up in the conflict in the Congo. But one remarkable doctor helps survivors to build a future Why are the lives of African women worthless? It’s a question that Denis Mukwege asks every day that he works with the raped and mutilated women of the Democratic Republic...
The Times - World
‘If they gave me a house, I’d take it tomorrow’
All I want is to die under this mountain.” Noor Ebrahim, a slightly-built former messenger for Reader’s Digest, has returned to the area where he grew up. Now retired, he likes to remember the old days; he can point out his school — “it was tough” — the mosque where his family prayed and the spot...
The Times - World
Momma D: Dionne Warwick, the Grande Dame of Divas
She learnt her stagecraft from Marlene Dietrich; 50 years on, she’s mentor to Whitney Houston and P. Diddy Dionne Warwick opens up her arms in a stage bow: “I’m looking pretty good, don’t you think,” she says. The singer seems slightly surprised to be turning 70, and, with pearly white teeth a...
The Times - Arts
India's Barefoot Revolution
What would it be like if women ran the world? In some parts of India, it’s already happening If all revolutions begin in unlikely locations, few could be as unpromising as Borda. It’s a poor village in the poorest district of one of the poorest states in India. Only the blasting from a nearby ...
The Times - World
It’s murder on your mobile, says The Killing’s Sarah Lund
Hit crime drama The Killing is back for a second series, and Karen Bartlett talks mobile phone forensics with actress Sofie Gråbøl Detective Sarah Lund is a Luddite. The loner heroine of Denmark’s hit crime drama The Killing is as much of a 70s relic as her Faroe sweaters: She makes notes by h...
Technology
Skateistan: How skateboarding took off with Afghan kids
It’s no surprise that in a world full of rules most kids want to do something with no organisation, and no adults. “This country has more restrictions than just about any other,” Oliver Percovich says, explaining how his own passion for freedom and fun led to groups of boys and girls flying acros...
The Times - World
Life and Love with 'The Greatest': Muhammad Ali
When Yolanda “Lonnie” Williams was six years old she looked out of her front door in Louisville, Kentucky, and saw an energetic young man holding court to a wide-eyed gaggle of neighbourhood boys, including her brother. “Who’s that big man?” she asked her mother, not knowing that the answer wo...
The Times - Arts
Polio's Last Stand
Eradicating the Last 1% of Polio Is Deadly But Essential When 40-year-old Liberian civil servant Patrick Sawyer died of Ebola earlier this year in hospital in Lagos, having carried the disease from his home country to Nigeria, global health workers feared the epidemic would spread in West Af...
Newsweek
Bringing Anne Frank Home – to Germany
Like many people in their seventies and eighties, Buddy Elias and his wife Gertie are downsizing – clearing out the attic and getting rid of several generations’ worth of papers, clutter and possessions from their family home in Basel, Switzerland. Unlike most other pensioners, however, Elias is ...
Newsweek
A Race Apart: the beauty queens of the apartheid era
The Miss World finalists are now at the World Cup, but the women who represented South Africa in its past have divided memories So far the game has not been beautiful for the World Cup’s “33rd official team”. They have gone largely unnoticed in South Africa’s impressive new stadiums, despite d...
The Times - World
Maki Mandela: “As Nelson's child, I can say I am proud of him”
In the week that London marks the statesman's 90th birthday, his daughter reveals how she overcame her resentment that he was a father to the world, but not to her Nelson Mandela arrives in London today for what is likely to be his last major public appearance; a 90th birthday charity concert ...
The Times - World
The Vagina Monologues turns ten
Eve Ensler transformed the New Orleans Superdome into ‘Superlove' for a celebrity-studded event to campaign against violence towards women Few people know that New Orleans is the vagina of America. Few would suggest it. “It is fertile. It's a delta. And everyone wants to party there,” explains...
The Times - Arts
Bruno Maag is the angry man of type. He hates Helvetica: “It’s vanilla ice cream,” horrendous, poorly crafted and American. A recent billboard for a chocolate bar made him lose the will to live: “This person should stop design and become a gardener, then he couldn’t inflict such terrible crimes on mankind.”
Maag is a hot metal man, starting his career as an apprentice typesetter back in Switzerland when newspaper offices were noisy, design involved putting pencil to paper and there was the smell of a hot press. Now his studio in Brixton, South London is a silent white temple to type where designers sit hunched over their computer screens with zen like concentration.
Working on type, day in and day out, can make you pedantic, and intolerant of imperfection:
“If you are really into type …well, we all suffer from a slight mental illness. Every single stroke has to be perfect.”
But maybe that is the kind of man you want to design your typeface. “To get it right you need to be a master craftsman,” Maag says. “You need to be a designer to know how color flows, where the stresses are. People appreciate the beauty of simple shapes. You can create something which is beautiful, but also highly functional.”
For the last ten months the team at Dalton Maag have been redesigning the Nokia font, creating a new font face versatile enough for all digital media. The result is Nokia Pure, a font which reflects the Finnish tradition of simplicity and clarity, but can also support scripts as diverse as Cyrillic and Devanagari. The font also had to be fully hinted to give the best screen view on a handset.
How much of the old font did Maag incorporate in the new design?
“Actually we completely scrapped the old Nokia font,” he says. “We didn’t take it into consideration at all. Its a good font but I think it had outlived its purpose and it was difficult to work with because it was so strong and expressive. It had too much personality. The desire was to have a bit of a bland font, a font that functions.”
Designing a font starts with setting the four control keys, H-O and N-O. Maag despairs of young designers who rush in, bursting with enthusiasm, and start designing willy nilly with other letters – only to discover a fundamental error that leads them back to the drawing board. “Start with an e or an f and it’s never going to work,” Maag says. “The four control characters define 70% of the process. They give you the proportions. Once you’re happy with those you can add a few more characters and maybe start working with a group of eight letters. For a long time you will go backwards and forwards between those characters. After that you can design everything in between.”
Each font starts with some sketches on a piece of paper, and then moves quickly onto ‘fontlab’ software, before undergoing a long and complicated technical process to make sure it can be used on all computer systems. Hinting is the final, and longest, part of the process as the font pixels for each character are lined up on a grid to get rid of that ragged look letters sometimes have when you see them on a small screen.
The first phase of Nokia Pure will support languages using the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, and Hebrew alphabets, as well as the Devanagari and Thai scripts.
Amelie Bonet has a pile of cracked and dusty books in Hindi and Bengali beside her in the Dalton Maag studio. Most of them come from research trips to India – and she seems to be as much a font-archaeologist, as a designer. Building hundreds of conjuncts and the adjuncts is the most painstaking task, especially if you don’t speak the language. “The stress and the axis is a different way around. If we get it wrong it will look very odd to a native reader.” She traces a series of letters, “Devanagari is blocky, but Bengali is spiky and rounded. Unlike the latin alphabet, there’s not much literature about these typefaces so we are trying to normalize something that is very fluid.”
Across the desk veteran designer Ron Carpenter is working on the Arabic alphabet, and an Urdu version. Like Amelie Bonet he often refers to native speakers to make sure that the font looks right and is easy to read. The Arabic font is in the ‘Kufi’ style more commonly seen on signs and billboards, rather than the cursive classic style that you might see in newspapers. “There’s a demand for convention in Arabic type, but the consultant who has helped us design this takes a more forward thinking view,” Carpenter says. Unlike the latin alphabet, the width of the characters conveys meaning, so a lot of work has to be corrected by hand.
A large sheet showing the Arabic alphabet is completed with hundreds of Koranic markers. A pair of annotated brackets signify a quote or reference to the Koran, and a series of characters grouped together spells out the salutation – Peace be upon him.
Nokia Pure has been specifically designed to accommodate the Koran in Arabic, and the Torah in Hebrew, reflecting the fact that in many parts of the world mobile devices have become an important religious resource.
Now with the first phase of the project near completion, Bruno Maag is looking ahead to the next set of languages. He has started working on Armenian. “Not many people speak it,” he says dryly.
The result of all their efforts, Nokia Pure, is a humanist sans face font – without serifs but with different weights and thickness on the strokes. Maag points out the small details that make the font unique:
“The K just comes in at the stem. And look at the M – the two diagonals don’t go all the way to the baseline. Tiny little elements distinguish this font,” Maag says. He compares the line of two letters that only he might notice: “The strange stress in the curve of the e and the c. It doesn’t feel like its a nice flowing curve, there’s a stress pulling you towards the bottom left. Those tiny little details make this font different.”
Then he sits back, satisfied: “Its not trying to scream, its not trying to be something that it isn’t. That makes it so perfect. It looks good, its simple, it reads well – it does the job.”
This article was written for Republic Publishing for Conversations by Nokia
Welcome to my website. I hope these pages give you a flavour of some of my work in books, print, onl…
Last week I was in Istanbul attending a Youth Forum for teenagers from around the world. But not eve…
When Nelson Mandela retired after serving one five-year term as President of South Africa in 1999 he…
I’ve just returned from China, after a gap of about 16 years, and I met these undergraduates – comin…
Eradicating the Last 1% of Polio Is Deadly But Essential
When 40-year-old Liberian civil servan…
When Yolanda “Lonnie” Williams was six years old she looked out of her front door in Louisville,…
She learnt her stagecraft from Marlene Dietrich; 50 years on, she’s mentor to Whitney Houston and …
What would it be like if women ran the world? In some parts of India, it’s already happening
If…
*Life is hell for women caught up in the conflict in the Congo. But one remarkable doctor helps surv…
All I want is to die under this mountain.” Noor Ebrahim, a slightly-built former messenger for Rea…
Hit crime drama The Killing is back for a second series, and Karen Bartlett talks mobile phone foren…
It’s no surprise that in a world full of rules most kids want to do something with no organisation…
Fifty years after he was killed, the daughter of Malcolm X wants to make sure her father isn’t writt…
Like many people in their seventies and eighties, Buddy Elias and his wife Gertie are downsizing –…
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