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Brooklyn-based type foundry Village has some really nice type faces available, all of which are loaded with character. They also have some nice goods up for sale featuring their uniquely vibrant brand of typography.
Vist the Source: Changethethought™
Never seen before outside the walls of Rajasthani village homes, the Mandana tradition of painting is practiced by the women of the Meena tribe. Handed down from mother to daughter, this stunning public art is a community tradition, done by women on the mud walls and floors of their homes, keeping time with recurring festivals and the changing seasons. via
The best part, Room and Serve and tarabooks.com
Vist the Source: Creativeroots
Remnants of the old village of Podaca near Gradac
In the old days Dalmatians used to live in the hills and only had some storage houses for fishing purposes near the coast. In such a way they could run away in case of a pirat attack, and also be able to spot it on time. Hundreds of such ruined vilages are scattered along Dalmatian coast.
Watercolour on a large WC
Vist the Source: ’skine.art
A village in the southern France.
Haven’t been there while painting it…
Watercolour on a large WC
Vist the Source: ’skine.art
Welcome to another roundup of what’s new in type. If you missed the interview with French type designer Alice Savoie, then be sure to take a look. Alice’s next typeface, Capucine will be released through the Process Type foundry. Follow them on Twitter, and you’ll be informed the moment it’s released.
Not quite sure how I failed to mention this before. Chester Jenkins & Kris Sowersby bring us Galaxie Copernicus:
the seriffed sister of Galaxie Polaris. And speaking of Kris Sowersby, I received this stunning KLIM type foundry specimen in the post. KLIM is Kris’ foundry. The specimen is really a well-designed book. (There should be a photo of it here, but I couldn’t find my camera’s USB cable). There are few foundries that actually produce good printed type specimens. H&FJ is one of the exceptions; Typotheque another. Can you name a few more? There are some. A limited number of Kris’ specimen books will be available on vllg.com.
Right now, Kris is on a speaking tour of Australia. Dates and venues can be found on the AGDA Web site. And here are the tour posters:
Designed by the talented Duncan of The International Office. The poster is set in National (Kris Sowersby) and Exotique (Kris and Christian Schwartz) for House Industries’ photo lettering collection. I’d love to get my hands on these posters.
If you like your type tight, then you might like this t-shirt:
Via @fontbureau.
First the eagerly anticipated Anonymous Pro:
I’ve been using Mark Simonson’s Anonymous for coding, for … a long time. The updated Anonymous Pro is a family of four fixed-width fonts. Oh, and did I mention, it’s free! (copyrighted freeware). Be sure to take it for a spin. I think you’ll be impressed.
Discovered this absolute gem of a script from @stwef. Linotype Gneisenauette. Here used in NewWork Magazine:
Fantastic, isn’t it. Available through FontShop.
The Axel family from FontShop AG comprises four fonts, and displays exceptionally well on screen.
The four fonts are just US$19. That’s a limited-time offer, so be quick. Also, see what Dan of TypeOff has to say about Axel. Also featured on the FontFeed.
Typonine Sans from Nikola Djurek:
A double offering from award-winning SuitCase. First up is the slab serif Kulturista:
And Nudista, proffered as an alternative to grotesques like DIN.
Rolet by Simon Page:
Not available as a font file, but available as vectors. There are many more interesting type treatments in Simon’s Typography is everything Flickr set, and on his blog. Via Paul D. Hunt on WLT.
Stefan Hattenbach has completely redesigned his Web site:
I’m still a big fan of Stefan’s Anziano and its lovely set of ornaments:
(The ornaments either side of the RSS feed count are Anziano).
Computer Arts devotes an entire issue to typography:
Be sure to visit Darren Scott’s Typographics blog:
ParaType announces the 2009 International Type Design Competition — Modern Cyrillic.
Open to Cyrillic typeface projects and completed typefaces created and/or
released after January 1, 2006. No other restrictions. No admission fee. Deadline is August 24, 2009.
Meet — yes, I’m not joking — Helvetica Pointed:
I shall say no more.
An interesting discussion on Typophile — initiated by Matt & Aaron of RBtL — on a donation-funded, non-profit, free font foundry.
Since the announcement of TypeKit, the Web has been awash with talk of Web fonts. The following will bring you up to speed:
Typekit blog:
Examining TypeKit
Why TypeKit will change everything
TypeKit — another layer of complexity
My thoughts (briefly):
I’ll be outlining my thoughts about Web fonts in my upcoming (yes, I know it’s been a long time coming) Why type matters article. Right now there really isn’t that much information available. We don’t know how many foundries will be involved, and we have no idea of the pricing structure, so I’m ‘waiting and seeing’. What I am happy about, is that the years of hot air are finally beginning to condense. That someone has the gumption to actually make this happen — that impresses me. Ultimately, if you don’t like the idea of paying for an additional or extended license for Web embedding, then the solution is pretty simple: don’t buy it.
And it looks as though Typekit already has a competitor (though at this stage they are merely competing ideas, rather than competing services). It will be interesting to learn more about Richard Rutter’s solution. In all of the discussions about Web fonts, the only thing that annoys me (and I don’t lose any sleep over it), is that some feel that they somehow have a right to use fonts for Web embedding. I think it’s important to put oneself in the shoes of a type designer who makes his or her living from selling fonts. Type designers should be no more obligated to give away their fonts, than Lexus should be obliged to give away their cars. Anyway, this year could prove to be something of a watershed for type on the Web. All in all, very exciting.
After an initial ban by the silly Victorian prudes at Apple, Eucalyptus is now available from the app store. It’s an iPhone e-book reader with access to some 20,000 English-language titles. The text displays beautifully:
At $9.99 it’s not cheap, but I do think it provides the best reading experience for the iPhone. Pocket Picks has a good review. 20% of gross profits from Eucalyptus are paid as a royalty to the non-profit Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.
TypeDrawing is another iPhone app:
Not revolutionary, but for $.99, it’s fun. There’s a Flickr group too.
Typography’s Role in the Newspaper Recession
Register for TypeCon
Type for the Web — RBtL podcast
Fresh & refreshed — FontShop news
MyFonts — Rising stars
Keith Morris
Royal Mail’s Royal Insignia
Eurostile vs Bank Gothic: This Time It’s Personal
WLT’s co-creator, Kari is working on a raft of new and brilliant features. Our aim is to get more people involved. But rather than open it up to everyone (which invariably will dilute its strength), we’ll be enabling a secondary kind of contributor account. Stay tuned for more news on that. And while I’m the subject of WLT, here’s my WLT pick of the week:
My first ILT poster should go on sale some time next month. A fairly simple affair. A screen-printed poster, set in Restraint, and printed on A2 black Plike paper. Limited edition of 150. This is not the final design, but it will resemble this:
I’ll also be giving two of them away. My second poster will be of my own lettering. There are still several of Seb Lester’s Mightier posters available from the ILT store. More designs coming soon.
I’ll soon be launching ILT’s gargantuan give-away. 40 wonderful prizes from the likes of Veer, FontShop, and House Industries, plus books, t-shirts, software, posters, and much more besides. 30 of the 40 prizes will be distributed via Twitter, so be sure to follow ILT. You can always unfollow afterwards. I won’t be offended.
Have a great week.
Vist the Source: i love typography
I had intended to publish my review of Theo’s The Typographic Desk Reference today. I’ll publish that next week. And, I missed out on April Fool’s. I had so many ideas, from the new and free Adobe fonts with embedded ad glyphs (the humour’s in the execution!) to the … well, I’ll save that for next year. In the meantime, here’s plenty to keep you busy. Everything from new typefaces, interviews to … well, you’ll see. A little later than usual owing to days and nights spent on a soon-to-be-launched type-related site that I’m pretty excited about, and hoping will inspire.
OK, let’s get started with some seriously gorgeous book covers from Louise Fili Ltd:
Where type meets art. The Dreamweaver from Nina Jua Klein:
FF Seria Arabic by Pascal Zoghbi:
Good to see that FF Milo and FF Balance have been exapanded to support more languages. Nothing more frustrting than finding the right type, only to discover it doesn’t support the languages you’re setting in. For more, see the April FontShop newsletter.
Updates to Typonine’s Tempera Biblio:
A new microsite devoted to FF Dingbats:
Some beautiful spread and covers from IL magazine:
The typeface is Christian Schwartz Publico. Be sure to take a look at the other wonderful spreads and covers on Flickr.
Love these pieces from Stefano Lionetti’s Portfolio on Behance:
Set with Seb Lester’s wonderful Soho. Great display face.
Some wonderful letterpress minature books:
Architecture meets typography in these clever Ikea ads:
Typographic bling, anyone? From Amsterdam-based tjep:
Like this packaging concept from Hattomonkey studio:
No counters, please. Drop poster from Jonathan Looman, AKA Lowman:
Intro for Web09 from John Ballinger:
Thanks @bboybri.
Love this kind of experimentation. Shadow type. Pretty complex to actually set this up:
Learn more about the project here. Thanks, Max.
Next, a promotional video for James Puckett’s Black Monday, demonstrating the wonders of OpenType:
A forceful political message through the medium of kinetic type:
Thanks to @marcocardenas.
The making of a letterpress poster:
Via Inspire Me. And it was the discovery of Inpsire Me, that led me to this lettering by illustrator Daren Newman:
There are also many other videos from Robothon 2009, especially useful for type designers. There’s even a video on the joys of kern table overflow issues — fascinating.
And from video to audio. Type Radio interviews type designer Kris Sowersby at TypeShed11 in Wellingtonon. Do be sure to check out all the other interviews there. Should keep you entertained and informed for weeks to come.
I mentioned the brilliant Book Cover Archive some time ago. There’s now another great book cover resource in Faceout Books. This is one of the gems I discovered there:
Cover design by the very talented Helen Crawford.
Like this rather elegant use of H&FJ’s Gotham in this identity piece for Cruet & Whisk. Designed by Allison Newhouse:
Tobias Frere-Jones presented this stunning enamel sign to Wim Crouwel, winner of the 2009 Gerrit Noordzij Prize:
It features numerous styles of Gotham. Jonathan Hoelfler writes that the sign features 64 of the 66 styles of Gotham. I wonder who can name the two styles that are omitted! Thanks to H&FJ for permission to use the above photo.
Johnson Banks was comissioned to turn crop circles into lettering. For Quaker Oats:
Came across this on one of my favourite type blogs, Ministry of Type:
If you haven’t already subscribed to Ministry of Type, then do. The Cooper Typography blog, from which the above image (Alfred Mahlau) was sourced is another to add to your feed reader.
Keyboards for typographers
Arial is everywhere
A natural history of the @ sign
The Palatino story
Metrics Machine 4 (video)
Smoking type
Love, romance, and a little controversy?
The Alphabet: A Dramatic Reading
26 symbols
Downloadable font formats for the Web
The most beautiful alphabet?
Wood type collection for sale (373 fonts +)
White space — how to get it right
Letterpress Things — equipment & resources
Interview with Font Bureau’s Dyana Weissman
Looking for a theme for your next party. Follow Anne Ditmeyer’s lead, and make it a type-themed birthday party:
And if you’re wondering what to do for entertainment at such a party, then why not steal some sheep with Erik Spiekermann.
Fred Smeijers on legibility
I hate ITC Garamond
Bohemia available through Linotype:
From a great serif to a great sans: Apertura, a rounded geometric by Christian Robertson of BetaType:
A great PDF specimen too.
Since my interview with RBtL, I received several emails about Comenius, a crisp and lovely text face from Hermann Zapf. Someone asked where they can find a good example of Comenius in use. One of the best examples is to be found in Type & Typography: Highlights from Matrix — The Review for Printers & Bibliophiles. Besides looking beautiful set in Comenius, the handsomely bound book is a wonderful read.
Perhaps MyFonts wins the April 1st prize with its Interview with Eric Gill. It is, however, worth reading! Both funny and informative.
Apologies if you have mailed me recently, and I haven’t replied. Each week, the number of mails I receive through iLT is growing. Be assured, I read everyone, but it’s now impossible to answer them all. I will be creating an FAQ page; perhaps that will help.
Thanks for reading, and have a great, great week.
Vist the Source: i love typography
I remember clearly the day I was waiting for the 6 train at 33rd Street and Park Avenue in New York. I had taken pictures of type on the street for some time, but there was something here that caught my eye. There was a plastic sign on a door with letters and numbers routed out of plastic, and I noticed a couple of characters in particular: the way the 8 curved back into itself, the charming tail of the a. And then I realized that the lowercase e’s were all different. This had been done by hand and therefore wasn’t an existing typeface. I knew then that I could actually make this into a font.
This moment of inspiration in a subway station was the beginning of the year-and-a-half process of designing my first typeface, and the start of an obsession that would permanently change the way I experienced the world. I thought I knew a lot about type as a graphic designer, but I soon realized that the art of typography went much further and deeper than I could have imagined.
Having photographed the subway sign, I fired up Illustrator, and later FontLab, and started putting down points and pulling away at the beziers. One thing that really helped early on was opening up some of my favorite fonts in FontLab. I would look at how the points were arranged and the forms were constructed, and would flip and rotate the drawings to see what sort of optical corrections had been made. I found it intriguing to see that many glyphs that appeared symmetrical, like the O in Gotham, were subtly lopsided.
Though I was learning a lot on my own, I needed something more structured. I enrolled in a type design class at Cooper Union, but just days before it was to start it was cancelled. So, I contacted the instructor, Hannes Famira, and started taking private lessons. Hannes had studied at the Royal Academy in the Hague, where he was exposed to the Dutch school of type design. He taught me about Gerrit Noordzij’s Stroke of the Pen theory, the idea that there are two fundamental categories of lettering based on the broad-nibbed and pointed-nibbed pens and that serifs are just an expression of contrast. I did calligraphic exercises based on these ideas as well as drawing experiments with Frank Blokland’s Lettermodel modular type system.
This is how I first learned to evaluate drawing in type design. I went to Hannes’ once a week for the better part of a year, spending two and a half hours with him at a time. Every week I would show Hannes the progress on my typeface, which I was calling Router. He’d get out his red pen, and we’d go through and mark up the drawings. We’d talk about the things he was seeing, and the things I was trying to do. I was initially focused on some of the quirkier aspects of the subway sign, like the narrow f and t, and the strange r. I eventually abandoned those elements as I realized that Router was about something else. As other type designers have noted, self-editing is a crucial part of the process.
But then a funny thing happened. I kept correcting and correcting, and all of a sudden I had sanitized the font and there was almost no personality left in it. What I was left with might as well have been VAG Rounded. In a very early draft, I had played with the idea of exaggerating the swellings in the strokes from the original sign. Now I resurrected that, and found the true character of the font.
In addition to working with Hannes, I reached out to other type designers whose work I admired. One of the first people I contacted was Chester Jenkins at Village. I liked that his company was set up as a co-op, run by designers who all did great work.
I also posted my designs on Typophile, and was encouraged to submit my font to FontFont. I worked feverishly toward their May 15 submission deadline, preparing the book weight in roman and italic. I also showed Chester where my work was heading, and he suggested that there might be a home for Router at Village. The royalty percentage at Village was higher, but total sales would probably be less. I heard back from FontFont, and they were interested. I took a few days to think about it, but then let them know that I was going to proceed with Village and release my font in their new foundry, Incubator.
What made the difference was that Chester was willing to work with me and give me the time and attention to help make Router the best it could be, offering drawing feedback and sharing production tips. FontFont is a much bigger organization with a lot more releases, and they would have put me on a much faster timeline.
Once I had decided to release with Village, I started working toward a full draft of the family. Chester sent me files of Apex to show me the character sets they required. At first I was overwhelmed. I didn’t think I could possibly draw a font with about 1000 glyphs in each style. Fortunately, a lot of those are accented characters which can be created through components (linked references to other glyphs), but there are still several hundred original drawings in each of the styles. I had a lot of fun drawing some of the peripheral characters and finding ways for everything to follow the rules of the font, asking questions like “How can a triangle be routed?”
I spaced the font using the control characters ‘H O n o.’ Once I had the correct sidebearings for these characters I applied those values to all the glyphs that have straight or round sides (with some adjustments). Then I placed each character in the string ‘HHAHOAOO’ for uppercase and ‘nnanoaoo’ for lowercase, where ‘A’ or ‘a’ is replaced with the current glyph. Spacing the italic was a counterintuitive mystery — the only character that has the same sidebearings on both sides is the lowercase o, and you build everything off that.
In order to generate the in-between weights (extralight, light, and medium), I made interpolation tests. I did all of the drawing of the thin, book, and bold in Fontlab and then used Robofab (python-enabled Fontlab) to generate UFO masters (Unified Font Objects). Then I opened the UFOs in Prepolator to make sure all of my characters were interpolatable and used Superpolator to do the actual interpolation. Finally, I re-imported the UFOs back into Fontlab and checked each glyph for errors. It’s a lot of steps, but it’s superior to using either the Multiple Master or ‘blend’ action within Fontlab because it’s much more flexible and precise, capable of generating instances that require minimal redrawing.
During this time I kept showing my work to Hannes, as well as having meetings with Chester. I also got great feedback and guidance from Village member Christian Schwartz.
I could have kept fiddling with it forever, but a date had to be set. I was moving to Providence, R.I. in the summer and didn’t want to take an unfinished font with me.
The last minute drawing and spacing changes were very important. The final steps were to build the accented characters, and then use Metrics Machine to kern the six masters (thin, book, and bold in roman and italic). I finally sent the files to Chester. There was some back and forth over the next week — he caught some mistakes and I rethought a couple of things. Then he mastered it and launched the Incubator foundry on Bastille Day, July 14, 2008, coinciding with Village’s three year anniversary.
A year and a half after I first started, and a world away from my first draft, I had finally published a typeface.
I’ve worked on a few custom type commissions since Router’s release as well as projects with my friends at The Design Office, a collaborative office of independent designers here in Providence. Most importantly, I am working on more uncommissioned designs that will eventually become commercial releases. But it hasn’t been as easy as I thought it would be. Just because I have an idea doesn’t mean I can pump it out right away. As Chester told me, “you still have to go through the same snakes and ladders.” The production side of type design is much easier though, because I’m not figuring it out for the first time.
I’m trying to push myself and expand the ways I think about letterforms. In addition to drawing type, I’m taking a calligraphy workshop and later this year a stonecutting class. I’ve been spending a lot of time at the Providence Public Library where they have D.B. Updike’s collection of type specimens and books on printing. And I’m still taking lots of photos of signs and things I see on a day-to-day basis, and reading all the books I can find.
But no amount of research or theory is a substitute for the most important thing: drawing as much as I can.
Several designers have told me how important it is to have a specific use and point size in mind. The idea is that if you try and design a font that’s good for everything, it might not be REALLY good at anything. But if the font works really well for one specific use, then it can probably work well for lots of others. I’ve heard the example of J.K. Rowling writing her books for her daughter. If she tried to write books that everyone would like, they might be too general to connect with anyone.
When you’re drawing a character and it’s taking up the full size of your screen, it’s easy to forget how it will look when you print it at 12 pt. In order for your decisions to have a real impact, the drawing has to be a caricature. It’s okay for details to disappear in text. But only by printing specimens at different sizes can you see the real effect of your actions. And only by looking at the individual letters in words, sentences, and paragraphs can you understand how all of the glyphs work together.
Draw the black and the white shapes. Many designers will say that the white shapes are more important to the overall harmony of the letterform. Just like turning the glyph upside down or looking at it sideways, concentrating on the white shape lets you understand the form from a different perspective. And balancing the white with the black helps you with the spacing and understanding the overall weight of the forms.
Optical corrections are key. It’s been said that type design is the art of making unequal things appear equal. Noordzij’s theory of the Stroke of the Pen is apparent even in monoweight sans-serifs. Flip Helvetica’s A, V, or W sideways, and you’ll see that the diagonal strokes are slightly unequal. Rotate the O in Futura, which I was always told was a perfect circle, and you’ll see why that’s not true.
The most helpful sites for basic type info:
Underware’s typeworkshop
Briem’s Notes on Type Design (disregard the site design — the information is great)
Hannes Famira’s www.typedu.org
And the most informative (and often out-of-print) type design books:
A Book of Type and Design, Oldrich Hlavsa
Counterpunch, Fred Smeijers
Dutch Type, Jan Middendorp
Fontographer: Type by Design, Stephen Moyer
Adrian Frutiger — Typefaces
The Stroke: Theory of Writing, Gerritt Noordzij
Many thanks to Chester and Tracy Jenkins, Hannes Famira, Christian Schwartz, and everyone else who helped me along the way.
Vist the Source: i love typography
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