In my recent article on The First Book Printed in Italy, I introduce the first books printed by Sweynheym and Pannartz in the Subiaco monastery complex in the Sabine hills to the west of Rome from 1465. On Twitter, in a great deal more than 140 characters, I received this enthusiastic barrage of Tweets: I […]

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Notes on the first Books Printed in Italy

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Welcome to this month’s roundup of type-related info and entertainment. Today, we make Helvetica cookies, tumble for ligatures, uncover a longstanding typesetting mistake by the New York Times, ponder typefaces for cities, get reacquainted with ASCII art, prognosticate about responsive fonts of the future, get to know font designer Carlos Fabián Camargo Guerrero, talk about […]

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This Month in Typography

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Most will be familiar with the name Francesco Griffo, born in Bologna in 1450, and forever associated with the Venetian printer-publisher Aldus Manutius for whom he designed and cut roman, Greek, and the first italic fonts. Their partnership was an especially fruitful one and their collaboration at the end of the fifteenth and beginning of […]

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Murder in Italic

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GT Sectra is a serif typeface combining the calligraphic influence of the broad nib pen with the sharpness of the scalpel. This sharpness defines its contemporary look. The GT Sectra subfamily was originally designed for the long-form magazine Reportagen, a publication with interesting stories from all around the world. The Zürich-based studio Moiré designed the […]

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Making Fonts: GT Sectra

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Welcome to this month’s roundup of type-related info and entertainment. Today, we delve into endangered alphabets, examine the best book covers of 2014, revisit Æsop’s fables, ponder automotive text interfaces, salivate over chocolate typography, greet the new Swedish national typeface, lament a famous neon sign, review Chip Kidd teaching kids about graphic design, and much […]

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This Month in Typography

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Sweynheym and Pannartz are credited with introducing printing to Italy via their press at the monastery of Santa Scolastica at Subiaco, outside of Rome in 1465. They appear to have been relatively successful, even sending quite a number of their books to Rome itself. However, in 1467 they move their press to Rome, where by […]

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The first Bible set in roman type

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Welcome to this month’s roundup of type-related info and entertainment. Today, we dip our toes into some controversial typographic decision making over at Apple; we talk about typography as a societal problem solver (or not); we discuss the evolution of emoji and the invention of the octothorpe; we show you type made out of hands, […]

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This Month in Typography

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St. Catherine, bad feet, & the first italic Whenever we think about the invention of the italic typeface we invariably think of the year 1501, when the italic type, commissioned by Aldus Manutius and cut by Griffo, was employed to set a new series of small pocket books, first published in 1501. Aldus, writing to his […]

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Notes on the first Italic

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Although I’m always dealing with letters in my work, embarking on a type design project is rather the exception. My main occupation, ‘Lettering’, varies from commission to commission and projects tend to last for short periods of time with widely different outcomes. Type projects normally extend for a longer period of time and, from my […]

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Letters in Wonderhand

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It’s been a good couple of months for font releases. And there are many more than I could list here (and many more that I am, unfortunately, blissfully unaware of). I can hardly keep up. Anyway, here are eight typefaces (comprising a total 126 fonts) that caught my eye. I no longer do comments on […]

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New Fonts 1

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