I Love Typography I Love Typography

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  • October 29, 2014   Published ~ 10 years ago.

    This Month In Typography

    Welcome to this month’s roundup of type-related info and entertainment. Today, we learn some important typographic pronunciations, figure out how to work with layered web fonts, watch Mark Simonson talk about offset lithography, revisit the 1970 New York City Transit Authority graphics standards manual, see what medieval scribes were doodling in the margins of their […]




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    This Month In Typography


  • October 24, 2014   Published ~ 10 years ago.

    Why A Better OpenType User Interface Matters

    Most users are unaware of the sophisticated typesetting possibilities of today’s personal computers because they have to interact with fonts through a keyboard offering a minimal subset of the character set. It is as if they are looking at their fonts through a keyhole.




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    Why A Better OpenType User Interface Matters


  • October 22, 2014   Published ~ 10 years ago.

    Better UI for Better Typography

    Designers ask Adobe for a better user interface for type The introduction of OpenType fonts in 2000 offered designers a rich and sophisticated typographic repertoire. The number of fonts that support these typographic features has grown exponentially over the years. And yet, we – the designers, producers, and users of digital type – have observed with […]




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    Better UI for Better Typography


  • October 14, 2014   Published ~ 10 years ago.

    The First Female Typographer

    In the fifteenth century women had few career opportunities. Few, bar those in the higher social classes were even sent to school, and women were not admitted to universities (Oxford university didn’t permit women to matriculate or graduate until 1920). Their options were very limited and pessimistically and perhaps a little exaggeratedly summed up by […]




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    The First Female Typographer


  • October 12, 2014   Published ~ 10 years ago.

    This Week in Fonts

    A contemporary family from Commercial Type, a connected script by Lián Types, an ambitious sans from Hoftype, a roughed up family by Fontfabric, a hard-working serif from House Industries, a sophisticated sans by Typetanic, a historical stencil face from Storm, and an expressive family by Andinistas. Commercial Type: Darby Designed by Dan Milne & Paul […]




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  • October 8, 2014   Published ~ 10 years ago.

    The Questa Project

    The three members of the Questa family The Questa Project is a type design adventure by Dutch type designers Jos Buivenga and Martin Majoor. Their collaboration began in 2010 using Buivenga’s initial sketches for a squarish Didot-like display typeface as a starting point. It was a perfect base on which to apply Majoor’s type design […]




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    The Questa Project


  • October 3, 2014   Published ~ 10 years ago.

    Type on Screen

    By the 1990s, CD-ROMs and the Internet turned computer screens into the final display substrate. Those were the dark ages of on-screen typography. Designers traded in low-res compromise, bending to the will of fours, the tyranny of the pixel. Endless hours were spent on what my colleagues and I affectionately called “fat-bitting.” It was an […]




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    Type on Screen


  • September 26, 2014   Published ~ 10 years ago.

    This Month in Typography

    Welcome to a new monthly roundup of type-related info and entertainment. (This will be in addition to Sean Mitchell’s excellent This Week in Fonts feature.) This month, we have movies (about sign painters, and Eric and John Gill), books (about Porchez, Baskerville, Spiekermann, and typewriter art, as well as books by Steven Heller and Gail Anderson), a Flickr group that points at things, a free typography course with Ellen Lupton, ladies of letterpress, medieval marginalia, all sorts of lettering and typography, some fun new fonts, and more.

    Sign Painters: The Movie

    Click here to view the embedded video.

    Weathered by time, distinct characteristics shining through, hand-painted signs are a product of a fascinating 150 year-old American history. What was once a common job has now become a highly specialized trade, a unique craft struggling with technological advances. Sign Painters, directed by Faythe Levine and Sam Macon, stylistically explores this unacknowledged art form through anecdotal accounts from artists across the country including Ira Coyne, Bob Dewhurst, Keith Knecht, Norma Jeane Maloney and Stephen Powers.

    Check out the film’s website, or learn more over at IMDB.

    Manicules

    Manicules

    The term “manicule” is from the Latin maniculum, or “little hand,” and denotes the typographic finger-pointing hands you’ve no doubt seen on retro posters and other typographic paraphernalia.

    Here’s a lovely type specimen demonstrating a series of oversized manicules, as captured by Nick Sherman at the Flickr ☞ Manicule Pool.

    (As seen at Shady Characters. For more information on manicules, here’s a good article over at Slate.)

    New Book: Jean François Porchez’s Monograph

    porchez-500

    This monograph on the work of Jean François Porchez, published by Atelier Perrousseaux éditeur, features contributions by Karen Cheng, Aaron Levin, Muriel Paris and Sumner Stone. Porchez is a French type designer and founder of Typofonderie. He was president of ATypI (Association Typographique Internationale), the leading organisation of type designers from 2004 to 2007.

    (Found at: Typofonderie.com. Preview the book at Calameo.com, or purchase at Adverbum.fr.)

    Bart Vollebregt Lettering

    bart-vollebregt-500

    Bart Vollebregt is a typographic designer based in the Netherlands. His work is characterized by lively experimental typography. He strives to tell stories with pure letterforms often with a poetic approach.

    The OpenType Cookbook

    open-type-cookbook-500

    The OpenType Cookbook is a creation of font creator and software developer Tal Leming. OpenType features allow fonts to behave smartly. This behavior can do simple things (e.g. change letters to small caps) or they can do complex things (e.g. insert swashes, alternates, and ligatures to make text set in a script font feel handmade). This cookbook aims to be a designer friendly introduction to understanding and developing these features.

    Yves Peters: Sexy Type

    Yves Peters at CreativeMornings in Minneapolis, April 2014, talking about how typography can, er, service erotic movie poster design. One of his key conclusions: “Cooper Black is one of the sexiest typefaces ever.”

    Gill & Gill: a film comparing bouldering and stone carving

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    A visual essay exploring humanity’s relationship with stone by juxtaposing two masters: one of rock climbing, the other of letter cutting. The film looks at the way these two seemingly very different practices, united by a common material, share basic principles such as: creativity, discipline, dedication, muscle memory and balance. Created by Louis-Jack Horton-Stephens, an artist and filmmaker working in London.

    Internet Archive Book Images

    internet-archive

    A vast new resource of images including many typographic gems, thanks to Kalev Leetaru, a Yahoo! Fellow in Residence at Georgetown University. Head over to Flickr and search through an archive of 2.6 million public domain images, all extracted from books, magazines and newspapers published over a 500 year period. The Flickr project draws on 600 million pages that were originally scanned by the Internet Archive. And it uses special software to extract images from those pages, plus the text that surrounds the images.

    (Found on OpenCulture.com.)

    At The Caslon Letter Foundry

    caslon-500

    A collection of photographs of the Caslon Letter Foundry in the St Bride Printing Library, found while researching the work of William Caslon, the first British type founder.

    Kansas Casual — A New Font

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    Kansas Casual offers a more upright, gothic, and modern alternative to the conventional sign painter’s one stroke. Kansas provides a completely unique take on a overdone classic with proportions and crossbar heights inspired by the more friendly Chicago style.

    Free Online Typography Course with Ellen Lupton

    lupton-500

    Have you checked out Skillshare? It’s an online learning community to master real-world skills through project-based classes. They have a bunch of typo-centric courses, but one in particular stands out: a free course from world-class typographer, designer, and educator Ellen Lupton. The course is titled “Typography That Works: Typographic Composition and Fonts”, and delves into typographic terminology, practice, and artistry through lectures and design projects.

    Typographic Universe — New Book

    heller-500

    Typographic Universe by Steven Heller and Gail Anderson. Unlike most books on typography that present the “best” and most refined examples, the object here is to reveal the “lost” or “unseen” typographies in nature and our cities. From machine-made and sculptural forms to flora and fauna, from the fading ghost types on buildings from a pre-digital age to the subterranean forms found beneath our urban centers, from crowd-sourced creations to the popular vernacular, there is a universe of letterforms all around us.

    Steven Heller is co-chair of the MFA Design: Designer as Author program at the School of Visual Arts, New York. His many previous books include New Modernist Type and Scripts. Gail Anderson is creative director of design at SpotCo, New York, and a former senior art director of Rolling Stone magazine.

    Ladies of Letterpress

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    Ladies of Letterpress is an international trade organization for letterpress printers and print enthusiasts. Their mission is to promote the art and craft of letterpress printing and to encourage the voice and vision of women printers. They strive to maintain the cultural legacy of fine press printing while advancing it as a living, contemporary art form, as well as a viable commercial printing method. Membership is open to both men and women. This is a community where you can read about adventures in commercial, fine press, art and zine printing, ask for advice and learn from other printers, share resources, and get inspiration for your own business and work — all for the love of letterpress.

    Affinity Designer

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    In open beta for Mac, Affinity Designer touts itself as an incredibly accurate vector illustrator that feels fast and at home in the hands of creative professionals. It intuitively combines rock solid and crisp vector art with flexible layer management and an impressive range of high quality raster tools for finishing. With accuracy, quality and speed at the heart of every single design task, and the ability to finesse designs without switching apps, this fresh-faced multi-discipline illustrator lets creatives shine.

    With full OpenType support, Affinity Designer just might be able eventually to dent the Adobe vector editing monopoly.

    Elise — A New Font

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    Elise is a sweet natured, layered display typeface, with a few layers but a wealth of options. From the feminine to the fun to the nostalgic, Elise is a capable and personable set. Best used big and with color, you’ll always find an occasion for Elise’s charm.

    John Baskerville: Type-founder and Printer, 1706-1775 (Google eBook)

    baskerville-500

    This short biography of John Baskerville was published in 1914 by Josiah Henry Benton, an American lawyer and author. Baskerville, born in Worcestershire, set up as a writing-master and letter-cutter in Birmingham, but later built up a business in ‘japanning’, the imitation of Japanese lacquer work, from which he made his fortune. He began working as a type-founder and printer around 1750, and made innovations not only in typefaces but also in paper, ink and printing machines. The quality of his books made them collectors’ items.

    If you want a hard copy of the book, Cambridge University Press is planning to publish one in October.

    Antonio Basoli’s Alfabeto Pittorico

    basoli-500

    Antonio Basoli was an Italian artist that lived during the 18th and the 19th century, and worked mostly in Bologna. Among other things, he created these beautiful architectural alphabet engravings called Alfabeto Pittorico.

    The Neon Museum of Las Vegas

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    The Neon Museum Boneyard in Las Vegas has a two-acre campus which includes an outdoor exhibition space, known as the Boneyard, featuring more than 150 signs, a visitors’ center housed inside the former La Concha Motel lobby, and the Neon Boneyard North Gallery which houses additional rescued signs and is used for weddings, special events, photo shoots and educational programs.

    Arabic Lettering on Instagram

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    Cataloging arabic typography from all corners of the world.

    Sumner Stone on Trajan

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    Type designer Sumner Stone has a new blog — and the first post details the creation of Adobe Type’s Trajan.

    Erik Spiekermann on Letterpress

    Letterpress printing in Berlin, with the illustrious Erik Spiekermann.

    A New Book About Erik Spiekermann

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    The visual biography Hello, I am Erik is the first comprehensive exploration of Spiekermann’s more than 30-year career, his body of work, and his mindset. Contributions by Michael Bierut, Neville Brody, Mirko Borsche, Wally Olins, Stefan Sagmeister, Christian Schwartz, Erik van Blokland, and others round out this insightful publication.

    A Visual History of Typewriter Art from 1893 to Today

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    A fascinating chronicle of the development of the typewriter as a medium for creating work far beyond anything envisioned by the machine’s makers, embedded in which is a beautiful allegory for how all technology is eventually co-opted as an unforeseen canvas for art and political statement.

    Medieval Marginalia

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    Word and images are often found in the margins of medieval books, placed there by scribes and readers. In most books, there was ample room to add such details, because on average a stunning fifty percent of the medieval page was left blank. It is in this vast emptiness, so often overlooked in editions of texts, that we may pick up key information about the long life of the book.

    Dan Rhatigan on type… Type on Dan Rhatigan

    Monotype’s Dan Rhatigan on his passion for typography — and the fonts he loves so much he’s had them tattooed onto his body.

    Scarlett Naming Fonts

    A precocious typographer!

    From Compressed Light to Extended Ultra

    typesystem-500

    A great article on visual systems in type designs: anything from a series of widths to a typeface with a spectrum of more than two or four weights (regular, bold and respective italics used to be common) to establishing parameters which allow for an interrelated combination of different styles (mixing sans with serif or with slab or any other hybrid version of these).

    Commercial Type Webfonts Showcase

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    A really lovely (and useful) webfonts showcase of 16 microsites, to try to show Commercial Type’s webfonts in a different context and do something different from the usual ‘interactive type specimen’.

    KaTeX — math typesetting for the web

    katex

    Do you need complex mathematical expressions rendered on your web pages? There are a few options out there, but KaTeX claims to be the fastest math typesetting library for the web. A free and open source Javascript library, it does indeed render beautiful output.

    Adventures in Roller Calligraphy with Mark Simonson

    simonson

    Type designer and self-proclaimed calligraphy avoider Mark Simonson traveled to the Gutenberg Museum’s print shop and created some lovely calligraphic pieces, using inking rollers. Read all about his adventure on Mark’s blog.

    An interview with stone cutter Fergus Wessel


    The Spirit of Letter Carving

    There’s also an interview with Fergus here on ILT.

    A Refutation of the Elements of Typographic Style

    bringhurst-refute-500

    A long read, but worth it, is this treatise critiquing Bringhurst’s seminal reference text.

    It’s the typography reference book you’ve heard of. The one everyone recommends to everyone else. If you’re a student it’s probably at the top of your list of resources; if you’re a teacher, you probably put it there. But is it a good book?

    Five Beautiful Endangered Alphabets

    burmese-aphabet-script

    Check out Felipe Sant’Ana Pereira’s take on, what for some, will be unfamiliar scripts.

    Photo credit: Yoann Gruson-Daniel.

    Martina Flor on Lettering Techniques

    Martina Flor’s short and instructive video demo on lettering sketching techniques.

    Caslon Invaders

    And to conclude, something completely different and rather silly. Caslon Invaders.


    Edited by Alec Julien




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    This Month in Typography


  • September 9, 2014   Published ~ 10 years ago.

    This Week in Fonts

    A highly functional sans by HVD Fonts, a powerful script from Dai Foldes, a hard working slab by Fort Foundry, a charming script from Drew Melton, an energetic script by Laura Worthington, a unique text face from Canada Type, a versatile sans by Stone Type Foundry, and an ambitious slab from Hoftype.

    HVD Fonts: Brix Sans

    Designed by Hannes von Döhren & Livius Dietzel

    Brix Sans is a family of 6 weights with matching italics, which works perfectly for corporate & editorial design. Combined with Brix Slab, high and complex typographical challenges can be solved.

    Dai Foldes: Globe Script

    Designed by Dai Foldes

    With tenacious rhythm and dynamic connections, Globe Script gives power to your headings and overlays.

    Fort Foundry: Factoria

    Designed by Mattox Shuler

    Born out of Industry, Factoria is a geometric, square slab. The hard-working family can jump from the side of an industrial building and into a sports magazine in a jiffy.

    Drew Melton: Ballpoint Script

    Designed by Drew Melton

    Ballpoint Script’s smooth, single-weight lines and charming variations provide the ideal balance of humanity and clarity.

    Laura Worthington: Voltage

    Designed by Laura Worthington

    Voltage is an unexpected and energetic standout in the world of script fonts, breaking free from formal classifications while retaining the degree of personality we treasure in hand lettering.

    Canada Type: Dokument Pro

    Designed by Jim Rimmer

    Dokument Pro’s range of weights, styles and features allows for multi-application versatility and clear, precise emotional delivery.

    Stone Type Foundry: Magma II

    Designed by Sumner Stone

    Magma II is a rare sans serif typeface family designed explicitly for use in both text and display applications.

    Hoftype: Orgon Slab

    Designed by Dieter Hofrichter

    Orgon Slab consists of 16 styles and is well suited for ambitious typography.




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    This Week in Fonts


  • August 18, 2014   Published ~ 10 years ago.

    This Week in Fonts

    A fast moving script by Process Type Foundry, a versatile sans from The Northern Block, a decorative serif by Zeune Ink, an energetic script from Sudtipos, a characterful grotesque by Commercial Type, a harmonious slab from Dada Studio, a comfortable sans by Font Bureau, a spirited grotesque from Latinotype, a condensed sans by MCKL, and a neutral face from Type Dynamic.

    Process Type Foundry: Pique

    Designed by Nicole Dotin

    A script with a crisp energy and buoyancy that only the collaboration of paper and screen can lay claim to.

    The Northern Block: Loew

    Designed by Jonathan Hill

    Loew is a versatile sans serif with simple and honest geometry aimed at a wide range of modern applications.

    Zeune Ink: Wallington

    Designed by Sandi Dez

    Wallington is a decorative serif embodying vintage & elegant curves with functional structure.

    Sudtipos: Horizontes Script

    Designed by Panco Sassano & Alejandro Paul

    Relaxed, energic and very natural. With different alternatives of proportion, a wide range of ligatures, initial letters, terminals, floritures, Horizontes Script comes in two weight for large and small formats.

    Commercial Type: Marr Sans

    Designed by Paul Barnes & Dave Foster

    Marr Sans revels in the individuality of the nineteenth century, and is like an eccentric British uncle to Morris Fuller Benton’s Franklin and News Gothics.

    Dada Studio: Servus Slab

    Designed by Michał Jarociński

    The light and bold weights are perfect for display use and the regular weights create a harmonious structure that provides good legibility in long texts.

    Font Bureau: Apres

    Designed by David Berlow

    The plain-spoken geometry is regular and balanced, without being static or mechanical, for a friendly and forthright familiarity.

    Latinotype: Grota Sans

    Designed by Eli Hernández & Daniel Hernández

    A complete family of 40 fonts, 10 different weights and their respective cursives, and an alt version, Grota Sans is a grotesque font with a latin spirit.

    MCKL: Fort Condensed

    Designed by Jeremy Mickel

    Neutral enough to take on information design, corporate identity, and small text sizes, the refined details and personality of Fort Condensed shine in display.

    Type Dynamic: Sailec

    Sailec is a low contrast, neutral typeface that includes 7 weights, from hairline to black, with corresponding italics.




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    This Week in Fonts


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