Plan Grotesque by Nikola Djurek
A new typeface available at Typotheque.
quote out of context
If a Press-man Takes too much Inck with his Balls, he Beats Fat.
Typeface as Program
In the workshop, besides using traditional tools, students were encouraged to create their own (programable) tools. Several programming scripts were developed and tested by the students, one of them, created by David Keshavjee and Julien Tavelli resulted in a text typeface that is featured in this book and displays the characteristics of the tool that generated it. The books presents some basic idea of automated type design, breaking down the design of letters to series of parameters.
Priori Acute by Jonathan Barnbrook, for Emigre
Priori Acute is the result of a series of experiments into three-dimensional letter form design inspired by 19th Century display and artistic printing types. However, instead of simply adding drop shadows or fake relief to create the illusion of depth, the designers at Jonathan Barnbrook’s studio took their cue from such diverse sources as the angles on the Stealth bomber and the visual conceit in the work of the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher.
The Ultimate Wayfinding Typeface
Ralf Hermann discusses his typeface design process for signs:
Many people I have talked to seem to believe that speed might be the most important factor for the design of such typefaces, but that is actually not the case. The speed of motorists only influences the duration in which you can read the text on the signs. But that can simply be compensated by the size of the signs. What makes road signs so different from books and magazines is the variable reading distance. So if you want to improve the legibility of a typeface used for signage, the most important task would be to increase the viewing distance. If you are about to pass a huge motorway sign that is 50 meters away, legibility is no problem at all—the letters are so large, they could be set in Comic Sans and could still be read without any trouble. Where you can make a different thru type design is the moment when the motorist is at a distance where the text is just about to become readable.
Lots of details in his discussion, pretty much a must-read for the font geek.
That’s it.
I’m moving to New Zealand.
(Via @thebookdesigner)
Readability
Readability is one of those incredibly powerful bookmarklets you either know about or you don’t. It reformats content into larger text and removes all ads, sidebars, and other unnecessary distractions. To return a page to normal, all you need to do is refresh. For example, this:
| At the end of my freshman year of college, back in 1936, I flunked five out of five subjects. Flunking three out of five would have made me eligible to report for an invitation to attend some other college in the fall. But men in this three-out-of-five category sometimes had to wait outside the Dean’s office as long as two hours. Men in my group – some of whom had big dates in New York that same night – weren’t kept waiting a minute. It went one, two, three, the way most men in my group like things to go. |
Turns into this:
There, now y’all know.
In the belly of the headless donkey piñata (Otra vista)
La venganza.
Looking for sweetmeats, are you, little greedy-guts?
Have a load of violence and scandal and grimy fingers for your pains.
That’ll learn ya.
the unhelpful phonetic alphabet
From The Ragbag
Daily Drop Cap
Daily Drop Cap. (Via Abigail Schilling)
Mr Eaves
Mrs Eaves, the font upon which my tattoo is based, has been released as Mr Eaves in Sans and Modern versions.
Not sans comedy
Visual Poetry
More here (via Snarkmarket)
Arial versus Helvetica
A nifty graphic that shows you how subtle differences make all the difference (via).
Cheese or Font?
Test your cheese and typography skills playing Cheese or Font?
The Mystery of Times New Roman
Mike Parker, the man who brought Helvetica to the Linotype library, set out to solve the mystery of Times New Roman.
Eighty-year-old Parker is one of the world’s leading experts on type. As the head of typographic development at the once-formidable Mergenthaler Linotype company in New York from the 1950s to the 1970s, he had enormous influence over the fonts available to the American public. [...] But ever since he received an invitation in the early 1990s to view some interesting archival material, Parker’s time has been consumed by the hunt to solve a mystery.
The invitation came from the late Gerald Giampa, an eccentric Canadian master printer who, in 1987, purchased the remnants of the Lanston Monotype company. Giampa delved into the company’s archive, where he claimed to have unearthed documents that refer to a typeface known only as Number 54 – the font, Parker says, that we now know as Times New Roman. Except that these documents dated from 1904, and bore the name of a different designer: William Starling Burgess.
A Trip to West Texas
We are back from Marfa and want to go back right away.
Read more
Jackdaw Love My Big Sphinx of Quartz
CATGUT Taco with all the Fixings
Next Sleepingfish Exit
I’m reading now for the next issue of Sleepingfish, issue 8, co-edited with Gary Lutz. All clusterflockers welcome, especially if goats & vampires are involved.
Typekit UI preview
Typekit is “a service enabling designers to build sites with web-native typography.” (thanks, Dale!)
Dear clusterflock,
The Bureau of Communication (via Lauren @ Enjoysthin.gs)
the slammer (for kelsey)
The exclamation mark was introduced into English printing in the 15th century, and was called the “note of admiration” until the mid 17th century. In German orthography, the sign made its first appearance in the Luther Bible in 1797.
The mark was not featured on standard manual typewriters before the 1970s. Instead, one typed a full stop, backspaced, and then typed an apostrophe.
the torture memos, party, 2
Comic Sans
“If you love it, you don’t know much about typography,” Mr. Connare says. But, he adds, “if you hate it, you really don’t know much about typography, either, and you should get another hobby.”