Decoding the Decodex (to the Codex Seraphinianus)
For those interested in Luigi Serafini’s Codex, I posted a hack translation of the accompanying «Decodex» that came with the most recent edition.
Emigre Web Fonts
The Emigre Font Library is now available for the web.
The combination of WOFF and EOT formats allows the Web Fonts to function on most currently used browser types.
They’ve also done a good job of showing which fonts look good at what sizes, and on which platform:
The “Type Director’s Picks” is a selection of fonts from our web fonts library that perform well at all sizes. All of our web fonts have been optimized for web screen display, but we recommend that only the Type Director’s Picks be used at small text sizes.
The Typographic Desk Reference
This looks beautiful. It’s meant to be an instant reference for all things typographic. You can order one from Amazon or Oak Knoll.
from the comments
Still need the last $15? Send me an email and I’ll donate the last $15 by way of coupon code. — the designer of Elena…
quick update
I’m going to send Sarah the money for Elena tonight. If you want to contribute, there’s still time.
Font for Sarah
We haven’t given anything away in a while, and yesterday Sarah mentioned being in love with this font. I set up a PayPal donation button you can contribute to below. The font family is $199. What we contribute more than that we can use to buy someone else something. (If you want something, let us know in comments, and we’ll see what we can do.) Happy Monday.
Update: $159 $84 $65 $55 $40 $20 $15 to go.
headline of the day, II
Bad Handwriting Foils Bank Heist
kill comic sans
I
a dull yet cathartic first-person shooter for the casual type geek
emigre font catalogs as downloadable PDFs
Emigre’s award winning type specimen catalogs are now available as downloadable PDF files. Many have been long out of print and some have reached collector item status. So if you haven’t received these in the past, or have lost your copy, here is your opportunity to receive these beautifully designed type catalogs delivered directly to your computer for immediate typographic perusal.
I’ve wanted the Cholla one for a long time.
a quick and comprehensive guide to type
Cliff Kuang at Fast Company Design discusses an infographic on type design:
Created by someone who only calls themselves Noodlor, it does a pretty superb job laying out the basics of typography, such as the common types of faces, ranging from regular to condensed, and the anatomy of letterforms, which includes ascenders. There’s also the very keen nugget of wisdom that 95% of graphic design is actually typography. But where it gets really good is in the “What It’s Saying” section –
(thanks, Lex)
That’s a lot of points
To mark the resignation of Sir Paul Stephenson as head of the Metropolitan Police, the London Times used a record-breaking 164-point bold headline:
via Ben Schott and Jon Hill.
from the spam
Well as someone once said, “When the word is out it belongs to another.”
Typeface for Dyslexics
via @jmoc
START TODAY
MAKE NO DELAY
TRUTH will out!
This is Mr Curtis’s shop window in Barrack Street, Waterford, dressed for a competition. (Circa: 1930.)
Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.
Thomas J. Wynne advertising his Photographic Studio, Castlebar, County Mayo
Taken circa 1880 and presented by the National Library of Ireland on The Commons.
The New Old Helvetica
A restoration of Helvetica called Neue Haas Grotesk will be released by Monotype June 7.
“The biggest difference,” Schwartz explains, “is that I made separate versions for text and display, which allowed each to do what they need to do in order to work best at their respective sizes without becoming clogged and spotty in texture at text sizes, or overly loose at larger sizes.” For the non-type person who may be reading this, this is not the equivalent of angels on the head of a pin. These are essential design issues. Neue Haas Grotesk, the original name for Helvetica, was initially produced for typesetting by hand in a range of sizes from 5 to 72 points, but Schwartz notes, “the digital Helvetica has always been one-size-fits-all, which leads to unfortunate compromises.”
Elementar
Gustavo Ferreira’s new font system for Typotheque.
Elementar was designed to bring more typographic flexibility to digital screens. It increases the available range of possibilities by exploring the pixel grid systematically using combinations of basic parameters. This parametric approach enables the generation of thousands of single fonts in different styles, heights, weights, widths, element shapes etc.
Letterpress: An Instructional Video
Helvetica Standard
The level of confusion will match the level of delight.
Matthew Carter, Type Designer
A short video of 2010 MacCarthur Fellow, Matthew Carter.
From the video’s comments:
Times New Roman walks into a bar and the bartender says, “Hey, we don’t serve your type!”
Previously, on clusterflock.
Apparent ‘fucking’
I suspect that what Joel noted in his comment on Ngram’s revelation of apparent early uses of the term meme might reflect the limitations of current OCR technology.
Related: this letter written by Henry Phillips and published in the LRB of March 3, 2011:
Jenny Diski is mistaken in implying in her piece on Google’s Ngram Viewer that there was a golden age of swearing (LRB, 20 January). The apparent prevalence of the word fuck in the period before 1820, and its complete disappearance for more than a century thereafter, can be explained by the end of the use in printing of the ‘long s’, which modern optical character recognition sees as an ‘f’. All the apparent ‘fucking’ before then is actually just ‘sucking’. Diski is also mistaken is saying that there is no way of telling how the words were used. All the scanned, digitised books are fully searchable by date range: a single click on the ‘fuck’ search page would have taken her to several examples that would have made her realise her initial error. Needless to say, there are hours of adolescent fun to be had with this.
I do think that perhaps not all of the apparent ‘fucking’ was in fact ‘sucking’, but the point is nonetheless sound.
Carter Sans, a comparison
This might be a little far-afield if you’re not a typography nerd, but in an interview with Matthew Carter about his new font, Carter Sans, Carter and the interviewer, Paul Shaw, get into an interesting discussion about flare-serifs, or the fonts that live somewhere between serif and sans serif. Here’s Shaw’s set up:
The typefaces I mentioned above would have been classified as “Flareserifs” by Bitstream, but I think this is a misnomer because they don’t really have serifs as such. I rather like the term flare serif. But there is always the sticky question as to where the dividing line lies between a sans serif such as Optima with flared strokes and a flare serif such as Icone or your new Carter Sans Pro. Some people get around this slippery slope by declaring that any deviation from a straight stem or stroke disqualifies a letter as a true sans serif. Do such classification quibbles bother you or do they provide you an opportunity for a new design? Are there specific examples of inscriptional lettering that sparked Carter Sans Pro in the same way that the lettering on the reliquary of Justin II provided the basis for Sophia?
From Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style
‘But the academic habit of relegating notes to the foot of the page or the end of the book is a mirror of Victorian social and domestic practice, in which the kitchen was kept out of sight and the servants were kept below stairs. If the notes are permitted to move around in the margin – as they were in Renaissance books – they can be present where needed and at the same time enrich the life of the page.’
—pg 62, version 3.2
‘Apostrophes are needed for some plurals, but not for others and inconsistency is better than a profusion of unnecessary marks. Thus: do’s and don’ts; the ayes have it but the I’s don’t; the ewes are coming but the you’s are staying home.’
—pg 88, version 3.2
New Unicode Emoticons
Finally! (via The Atlantic)
There’s a pretty complete “cat faces” category, except there’s no kissing cat with open eyes. That’s the one I’d use most.
Five Fonts from the Emigre Library in MoMA
In early January 2011, The Museum of Modern Art in New York made curatorial history when it acquired 23 digital typefaces for their Design and Architecture Collection. Besides such classics as Erik Spiekermann’s FF Meta and Matthew Carter’s Verdana, the acquisition also included five font families from the Emigre Type Library: Keedy Sans by Mr. Keedy; Mason Serif by Jonathan Barnbrook; Template Gothic by Barry Deck; Oakland by Zuzana Licko; and Dead History by P. Scott Makela.
The book commemorating the acquisition is here. For a limited time, you can buy all five fonts and the book for $160.
