As the warn­ing above says, I shall now and again pub­lish what­ever I feel like. Just found these images from my last trip to Zaragoza and Barcelona a few months ago. A 120-gig hard drive offers a lot of sur­prises…

If you ever trav­elled through Spain, you would have noticed these gigan­tic metal sil­hou­ettes on the moun­tain tops. Orig­i­nally these images of bulls had the expla­na­tion next to them: they were larger-than-life adver­tise­ments for Osborne brandy.

After many years, the added brand name had become as super­flu­ous as putting Mer­cedes Benz under the star. Now, how­ever, these giant sculp­tures are being taken down, at least in Catalu­nia. Appar­ently they are still con­sid­ered a sym­bol of Franco’s Spain – from a time when this region was not allowed its lan­guage, nor its other cul­tural expressions.

I can­not help the impres­sion that it might also have played a role here that it is def­i­nitely a male ani­mal. In these polit­i­cally cor­rect times, that seems unac­cept­able. Too bad.

The author­i­ties are much less con­cerned with typo­graph­i­cal cor­rect­ness. Offi­cially, Spain uses the US alpha­bet on its free­ways, in spite of that one being badly leg­i­ble and totally out of date. But it stems from a time when every import from the States was con­sid­ered supe­rior and beyond crit­i­cism.

It is quite appar­ent that the author­i­ties have no idea about typog­ra­phy – just like every­where else. Every other sign in the region uses good old Hel­vetica, which is just as unsuited for this pur­pose, but so eas­ily avail­able and thus ubiq­ui­tu­ous.
I have been demand­ing a Minstry for Typo­graphic Affairs for decades. In vain, obviously.