The AIDS Memorial in Cawthra Square Park behind the 519 opened in 1993. On its concrete stelæ are affixed brass plaques listing the names of persons who died of AIDS in specific years.
Someone wrote a comment on an Xtra article complaining about the type size used for those names. “Would those involved with the Memorial… care to defend its use of teeny tiny unreadable typeface?” (Xtra doesn’t bother to print actual letters to the editor, preferring to copy and paste blog comments. The author of that comment was listed as Ken Kaukola in the print newspaper, a name that seems to have no public profile attached. Now it does.)
If ever there were a question with my name written all over it, this is it. I was walking by the 519 and, not having my pica rule handy, simply asked the desk if I could borrow their ruler. Typeface has consistently been Univers Condensed (typical for the city of Toronto). Cap height for names was 6 mm through 1989 and 3.5 mm from 1990 to present.
Cap height maps only irregularly to point size, a fact even lawyers can’t get a grip on sometimes, but here we don’t actually need to know the point size. Current type size is a shade bigger than half the old size. So yes, it’s smaller, but I dispute that it’s “teeny tiny.” (You can see that the type size changed by comparing it to the fixed dimensions of the bolts in the picture above.)
(The manager in charge of the Memorial didn’t respond to my mail.)