By John Kehe
No - not the cowboy kind. We're talking about type here. The word is s-e-r-i-f , and it means the little feet that a letter sits on, an important element in the design of type. Want to know more? Here's a glossary of terms about type
Read more: There is a new serif in town
By Michael R. Fainelli
You've read their books, but you've never heard of them. You've probably read their magazines, newspapers, billboards, telephone books, and even their candy-bar wrappers. They're the people who design the letters that form the words you read. These "type designers" work in the shadows of the publishing world to invent new ways of writing our ancient alphabet. Different "types" or "typefaces," the term for a particular style of letters, can vary enormously in personality, as do the letters in the title of this article. But there can be subtler differences between type-faces as well, as you'll see when you compare the different sections of a newspaper page.
Read more: Man of Letters
An Interview With Stefan Hattenbach
Stefan Hattenbach started designing typefaces in 1996. In 2003, he established his own independent foundry and design studio, MAC Rhino Fonts (MRF). Proud A.S. Roma supporter and father of two, Stefan works his magic from a studio in the beautiful city of Stockholm.
Read more: Face to Face
Seconds Out, Round One
Every typeface, like every one of us, has its distinguishing features. You might be forgiven for thinking that some fonts are clones, or identical twins. However, closer inspection reveals subtle differences and nuances that simply escape casual perusal. Something that can really help to heighten our sensitivity to those differences is getting out our magnifying glasses and really taking a closer look. If you've forgotten to bring your magnifying glass, then don't fear for the Fontometer is here (we'll get to that in a moment).
Read more: Arial versus Helvetic
Arial is everywhere. If you don't know what it is, you don't use a modern personal computer. Arial is a font that is familiar to anyone who uses Microsoft products, whether on a PC or a Mac. It has spread like a virus through the typographic landscape and illustrates the pervasiveness of Microsoft's influence in the world.
Read more: The Scourge of Arial
Paul Shaw did a survey of readers to list the top typefaces of all time. Here are the results.
Read more: The Top 100 Types of All Time
Eurostile™ has been with us for decades. Its heritage is a bit obscure. Born in Italy, Eurostile had two designers, and two release dates, even if purists might insist that it really just had one of each. Without a doubt, the typeface has had two official names. Of course, the first of those two names – Microgramma™ – only refers to part of the final design. After many years, Linotype is releasing an extended revision and update, named Eurostile Next. Confused?
Read more: Eurostile Next
I have written before about my admiration for Web typography, and in that article I touched on the fact that many “Web safe” fonts can’t be applied to Linux. Linux distributions each ship with their own font libraries, but I’d like to focus on similar typefaces you can use within a font-family to help make your design bulletproof.
Read more: Linux Font Equivalents
To the average PC user, fonts may not seem like the most interesting of topics . However, there is more to the subject than many may think. Windows comes with a considerable assortment of different types of fonts and characters that allow for considerable flexibility in format and a wide assortment of distinctive and artistic effects in Windows documents. There is support for a number of languages and for many special symbols. In this article, I will cover some of the aspects of Windows fonts and some ways that you can liven up your documents or make use of the special symbols.
Read more: Fonts in Windows
Adjusting the spacing across a word, line, or column of text is called tracking, also known as letterspacing. It is common practice to letterspace capitals and small capitals, which appear more regal when standing apart. By slightly expanding the tracking across a body of text, the designer can create a more airy field. Negative tracking is rarely desirable. This device should be used sparingly, to adjust one or more lines of justified type.
Read more: Tracking
With thousands of different typefaces on offer, it's vital to have a select few that act as pillars in your collection. The following 13 typefaces (shown in alphabetical order) are ones that I believe every graphic designer should be familiar with.
Read more: 13 typefaces every graphic designer needs
With a nice 3 week vacation before starting school again, I've rationed a bit free time to get around to doing some things that I've been meaning to get around to. Part of this list includes putting up some recently acquired posters, reformatting my hard drive, and finally finishing up my portfolio section for this site.
Read more: A Man of Many Faces
While most of my design time is spent for on-screen endeavors, occassionally I'll take on a print project or two. I almost always find that there are such clear differences between the two, differences that make me believe that a great web designer can be a terrible print designer, and vice versa. The biggest difference for me is the limitation that each medium holds.
Read more: Know Limits
During a late night online conversation with another black, white, and orange website fan, it was decided that certain fonts should be retired. They've had a good run, but some things must come to an end. Whether, by overuse, obscurity, or just plain ugliness, here are some that just don't make the cut.
Read more: Typobituaries
You don’t often see “CSS” and “typography” used in the same sentence—and for good reason. Traditional typography is a very subtle and beautiful form of design, with thousands of variations and choices. Unfortunately, with CSS that's not quite the case. Don't lose hope just yet, though. CSS can do more than you might think.
Read more: CSS Typography
By Jonathan Nicol
Typography is a sadly neglected aspect of the web design process, an oversight traditionally blamed on the technical limitations and unpredictability of the medium. While it is true that the web may not offer designers the same typographic freedom as print, all it takes is careful consideration and a little typographic fine tuning to bring website layouts to life.
Read more: Fine Tuning Web Typography
Let's be frank right off the bat: I don't presume to be a typographer, or even anything close to an expert with a replete knowledge of typography and its history. Instead, I take a more practical approach to typeface selection, given the environment I'm generally in rarely requires that I need to complicate the process further.
Read more: The non-typographer's guide to practical typeface selection
By Jacob Cass
Do you know what a font flag or font / type specimen sheet is? Here are the answers as well as an example made by myself for typography class at university.
Read more: What is a Font Flag? What is a Font Specimen Sheet?
By Jacob Cass
Here are 30 of the Best Fonts / Typefaces that every designer must own sorted by alphabetical order. There are 15 serif fonts and 15 sans-serif fonts. These fonts will last you your whole career!
Check out fonts like Adobe Caslon, Garamond, Bembo or Gill Sans!
Read more: 30 Fonts that All Designers Must Own
By Stephen Coles
Helvetica is a classic. Helvetica is played out. Each of these statements is true to an extent. The world's most recognizable typeface will soon star in a new film that documents both its omnipresence and its timelessness.
Read more: Helvetica and Alternatives to Helvetica
Award season continues on Unzipped - albeit somewhat delayed. February traditionally is Oscars month, and in the type world it is the time of year the TDC2 winners are announced. TDC2 is the annual type design contest organized by the Type Directors Club. I was hoping to receive some images of the judges at work but unfortunately that never materialized, and I'm still missing descriptions of some typefaces.
Read more: TDC2 2008 winning entries
By Stephen Coles
Typographica's fourth annual review showcases the best in new typeface design. Twenty-five of the world's brightest graphic and type designers selected their favorite font releases of the year. We welcome to our regular cast of contributors: David Berlow, Ellen Lupton, and Erik Spiekermann, among others.
Read more: Our Favorite Typefaces of 2007
A very powerful image graces the movie poster for J.J. Abrams monster/horror flick Cloverfield. While de billowing smoke towering over Manhattan recalls the tragedy of 9/11, the beheaded Statue of Liberty is reminiscent of a promotional image for the dystopian movie classic Planet of The Apes, where the top half of the Statue is sticking out of the sand on a deserted beach. By the way, I never understood why that image was introduced at some point, because it, like, gives away the ending of the movie and completely ruins the surprise. Ah, the stupidity of certain breed of marketing people never ceases to amaze me...
Read more: Characters On The Silver Screen
Interview, Ellen Lupton with Tobias Frere-Jones
How did you get involved in type design?
I went to RISD in their undergraduate program. I finished in 1992. It became difficult there for me, because I wanted to learn to design type, which was hardly the focus at RISD. We were taught to use type, how to think with type, but not how to design type. There's no place really in this country where you can do that. Inge Druckery and Matthew Carter's course at Yale is good, but it's for grad students only, and it's just one course.
Read more: Frere- Jones, Tobias
By Ellen Lupton
Despite heroic efforts to create a critical discourse for design, our field remains ruled, largely, by convention and intuition. Interested in alternative attitudes, I recently set out to examine the scientific literature on typography. From the late nineteenth century to the present, researchers from various fields - psychology, ergonomics, human computer interaction HCI, and design - have tested typographic efficiency. This research, little known to practicing designers, takes a refreshingly rigorous - though often tedious and ultimately inconclusive - approach to how people respond to written words on page and screen.
Read more: Science of Typography
By Peter Bil'ak
The size and complexity of recently-developed type families has reached unprecedented levels. Look, for instance, at United, a recent release (2007) from House Industries. The family includes 105 fonts composed of three styles (sans, serif and italic), available in seven weights and five widths. It takes a couple of minutes just to scroll through all the variants listed in the font menu. For a further example of this trend, Hoefler & Frere-Jones have just released their Chronicle type family (2002-2007), the range of which extends through widths (from regular to compressed), weights (from extra light to black), and optical size (from text to headline). In terms of sheer size, Chronicle comprises 106 fonts and beats the rival United by a single stylistic variant.
Read more: Family planning, or how type families work
By Emily King
The naming of typefaces has never been dictated by a single convention. In the days of proprietary type, when type was made by the manufacturers of type-setting machines, there was some coherence amongst the names within a single library. Now that typefaces from many different periods and sources can be united upon the desktop, the list of typefaces used in even a single piece of contemporary design can make fairly extraordinary reading:
Abbess, Altoona, Acropolis, Dolmen Decorated, Egbert, Enlivan, Falstaff, Garage Gothic, Helvetica, Melody, Monster, Narly, Pinwheel, Phrastic, Siena
Read more: Thirty-six point Gorilla
By Emily King
The relationship between art and typography is long-term and ongoing. For around a century, type has been appearing in art works and the incidence of type in art is certainly on the increase. Broadly speaking artists who use typography fall into two camps: those who use type as language and those who use type as image. Artists in the former camp are likely to be called conceptual. They tend to employ only a single "neutral" font with the purpose of communicating in pure language, language that floats free of specific application. The typefaces used by these artists vary widely: Joseph Kosuth favours Sabon, Douglas Gordon goes for Bembo, Lawrence Weiner chooses Franklin Gothic Condensed Caps and Simon Patterson opts for American Typewriter. Of course these faces do flavour language and in practice, after having been associated with the work of a single artist for some time, they become a de facto typographic identity for that artist. Paint a sentence on the wall in Sabon and you have yourself a DIY Joseph Kosuth.
Read more: The Last Supper
By Andy Crewdson
In a 1992 survey of Dutch type design, Robin Kinross observed that Martin Majoor’s first published typeface was ‘beginning to be used quite widely.’ Scala had at that time only been available for a year, and though Kinross saw the type’s popularity increasing, he could hardly have predicted how prevalent it would soon become. The way Scala captivated some designers during that period was recently illustrated when an American designer made reference in a magazine interview to his ‘Scala Years.’ Toward the end of the last decade, writing of Scala’s ‘increasing ubiquity,’ Emily King noticed that the type’s ‘correspondence with the cultural mood of the mid-1990s has been remarkable.’ It now looks as if Scala’s popularity was not relegated to the 1990s, as Majoor’s large family of types is still ever-present.
Read more: Seria's motives
By Martin Majoor
About 15 years ago I graduated from the High School of Arts with a seriffed type design. It was never released and I now realize it was a sort of preliminary study for my later typefaces. I subsequently designed three major families, Scala & Scala Sans, Telefont and Seria & Seria Sans. Looking back, I now see that my ideas about type design have not changed fundamentally. Maybe it is time to set down some impressions on my type design philosophy.
Read more: My Type Design Philosophy
By Andy Crewdson
Implicit in Fred Smeijers’s best known typefaces, Quadraat and Renard, and explicit in his 1996 book Counterpunch, are arguments for a more rigorous, craft-centered approach to type design. Building on his research into the methods of sixteenth century punchcutters, Smeijers has not only advocated forgotten practices, but has shown with his type designs how these ideas, when applied, can yield impressive results.
Read more: Fred Smeijers Arnhem typefaces
By Mark Thomson
One of the surprising things about researching a new dictionary design was to discover just how little it had changed – on a macro level – over the last 250 years. There is quite a difference in feeling between Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755 and today’s Collins English Dictionary, but the structure of information and the way in which it is made visible are identical. The two- or three-column grid with its three-letter column headers, the outdented headwords, the cascade of entries and quotes; all these are familiar elements of contemporary dictionaries.
Read more: Microtypography, Designing the new Collins dictionaries
By Ben Archer
Gill Sans: Pride of England?
Gill Sans is the Helvetica of England; ubiquitous, utilitarian and yet also quite specific in its ability to point to our notions of time and place. As a graphic designer’s in-joke once put it ‘Q. How do you do British post-war design? A. Set it in Gill Sans and print it in British Racing Green’. As the preferred typeface of British establishments (the Railways, the Church, the BBC and Penguin Books), Gill Sans is part of the British visual heritage just like the Union Jack and the safety pin.
Read more: Re-evaluation of Gill Sans
By Peter Bil'ak
It is generally acknowledged that it was Gutenberg who invented movable type printing in 1436. It is generally forgotten that what is missing in that statement is the necessary qualifier “in Europe”. Thanks to the present-day dominance of Latin script we have largely forgotten that there are parallel histories outside of Europe, but the first recorded movable type system was more likely created in China around 1040 AD by Bi Sheng. His early type was made of wood, which was later abandoned in favour of baked clay, which produced smoother imprints. Unlike Latin script which uses 26 letters, Chinese script uses thousands of characters, making type composition particularly complicated. Nevertheless, movable type has been in continuous use in China since the 11th century.
Read more: A View of Latin Typography
By Peter Bil'ak
Very few terms have been used so habitually and carelessly as the word ‘experiment’. In the field of graphic design and typography, experiment as a noun has been used to signify anything new, unconventional, defying easy categorization, or confounding expectations. As a verb, ‘to experiment’ is often synonymous with the design process itself, which may not exactly be helpful, considering that all design is a result of the design process. The term experiment can also have the connotation of an implicit disclaimer; it suggests not taking responsibility for the result. When students are asked what they intend by creating certain forms, they often say, ‘It’s just an experiment…’, when they don’t have a better response.
Read more: Experimental typography. Whatever that means
By John Downer
Caslon types have been in existence now for about half as long as the art of typefounding has been practiced in the western world. The first Latin types produced by William Caslon in England around 270 years ago were made the way virtually all movable types had been made up to that time: they were cast one character at a time, each by hand. But typefounding has never been just a simple matter of molding hot metal. In fact, the production process that was used in Caslon's time was painstakingly intricate and included no fewer than four distinct tasks, each involving a separate set of skills.
Read more: The Art of Founding Type
By ALexander W. White
“Advertising on the web is so different than print. It has to contend with tininess, limited bandwidth, banner ad shapes, being shoved into sidebars…no one even wants to see our ads!”
Read more: Typography and Web Advertising
By Joel Sacks
If your font collection is out of hand, it's time to learn how to manage it.
Whether you are a graphic designer, typographer, or a hobbyist, you'll benefit from better management of your fonts. Experimenting with fonts, downloading free fonts, and purchasing new fonts all contribute to a growing collection and, before you know it, you have more fonts than you know what to do with. Even without the potential for confusion, all of these fonts can drain your computer's resources—in short, you need a solution to manage your collection.
Read more: Better Font Management
By Adam Tschorn
IT'S one of the most visible choices Sen. Barack Obama has made, and it's burning up the blogosphere and YouTube, being debated on the radio, even parodied.It's a typeface, of all things, one called Gotham that the Illinois Democrat chose for his rally banners and campaign signage, a collection of letter shapes some typographers are calling the hot font of 2008.
Read more: The Character Issue
By John D. Berry
Versatile, readable, well-designed typefaces for text are hard to come by. In 1990, lettering expert John Downer designed a deceptively simple-looking family of serif typefaces, called Iowan Old Style, that should have become a workhorse text type for book and magazine work. But when the face was released in 1991 by Bitstream, it was missing the expert sets and related typographic refinements that Downer had designed to make it a complete type family. Now, nearly a decade later, Bitstream has finally released them, making Iowan Old Style usable at last in the way its designer intended.
Read more: An American Typeface Comes of Age
By Jos Buivenga
When I was asked by Smashing Magazine (SM) in 2007 if I could release a free font to celebrate their first anniversary I first thought that the release of Museo could very well be that font. However, it was nowhere near ready and, not wishing to rush things, I started to play around with some sharp elements I liked to see if something could grow out of it.
Read more: Anivers- birth of a typeface
By John D. Berry
When Jean-François Porchez handed me a copy of a Japanese graphic-design magazine, "Idea," while I was visiting him in Paris last month, my first impression was that it featured a very nice article about Jean-François's work as a type designer, and a cover that used one of his more unusual typefaces. The cover, it turned out, was designed by Jean-François himself, and he was the subject of an extensive, well-illustrated article, but the 200-page issue is essentially the equivalent of a short book on its topic: "Type Design Today." There are many books that don't give as thorough a snapshot of the state of modern type design as this issue of a magazine does.
Read more: Type Design Today
Have you ever heard a conversation between two type designers? Even the most patient, well-intentioned outsider might find himself smiling embarrassedly, excusing himself and looking for an exit, dumbfounded. Type designers, like computer programmers, clinical biochemists, entomologists and agricultural scientists are marked by an unintelligible jargon and slavish devotion to their pursuits; what sets them apart, however, is the seeming unimportance of their discussions. We type designers might be convinced that our profession is vital to society, but we wouldn’t risk going on strike to test how indispensable we really are. Like printer cartridges or pen refills, fonts are undoubtedly very practical and serve their function, but the public seems to take them for granted and largely ignores them.
Read more: In Search of a Comprehensive Type Design Theory
August marks it's first birthday, and I'd like to ask you all for suggestions on how we might celebrate. I have begun organising some prizes, so if you can think of a competition or whatever, then let me know in the comments below. Don't be shy.
Read more: Sunday Type: garbage type
By Thomas Phinney
What makes for quality type? What's the difference between typeface quality and font quality? Who makes quality typefaces/fonts? Today's post is partly an education for the beginner, but also a plea to my colleagues at other companies for more testing.
Read more: Quality in Typefaces and Fonts
By Peter Bil'ak
The Netherlands is a small country with some 15 million inhabitants. It is flat, and has no geographical particularities. It is situated on the western border of Germany, the north of France and Belgium, and the east of England across the North Sea. As a comparatively small country, the Dutch people have always felt the influence of surrounding countries. If they attempted to be a part of international styles, they risked dissolving the national characteristics of the small nation. On the other hand, if they tried to stay untouched by foreign influence and keep to themselves, they could easily fall into provincialism. However, they have succeeded in creating one of the most remarkable and outstanding cultures.
Read more: Dutch type design
By Andy Hume
If one aspect of design has suffered most in its transition to the Web, it is the art of typography. For years, Web typography involved little more than choosing a typeface and font size. Unstyled Times New Roman was the norm, and the integration of established typographical techniques and rules was unimagined.
Read more: The Anatomy of Web Fonts
By Michael Bierut
For the first ten years of my career, I worked for Massimo Vignelli, a designer who is legendary for using a very limited number of typefaces. Between 1980 and 1990, most of my projects were set in five fonts: Helvetica, naturally, Futura, Garamond No.3, Century Expanded, and, of course, Bodoni.
Read more: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Typeface
By Peter Gabor
How many times have you heard someone exclaim “Isn't a Garamond such a beautiful thing!”... Without a doubt, it's a beautiful typeface, even if I hate to use that expression. You could just as easily say a car is beautiful and immediately ask yourself why. Of course the answer is in the way one approaches type creation. There is that method of painstakingly drawing by hand (handtooling) that gives characters that crafted aspect that gives off an air of the terroir and rural furnishings; and then there's the modern method, far more conceptual, contemporary art in such a stark break with tradition and received wisdom — which isn't to say that they are any less beautiful: But their raison-d'être is no longer simply to be so [beautiful], but to arrest, and even shock.
Read more: Garamond v Garamond
By Ryan Bigge
Celebrating its 50th birthday, the ubiquitous typeface has played a crucial role in providing shape and tone to the modern visual landscape. But are its days numbered?
Read more: The official typeface of the 20th century
"Which typeface should I use" is a very frequent question. A 'simple' guide simply doesn't exist but some very simple concepts do.
For years I've made only two points about headline or display fonts in my Creative layout techniques workshops:
1) use typography voice, and
2) exploit typography message.
Read more: The voice of typography
Alejandro Lo Celso and Gabriel Martínez Meave interviewed by Jean François Porchez
As France is categorized as Latin country, we're always interested to see what happens in other Latin countries. It looks like we have something in common, culturally, with respect to Italy, Portugal and Spain, perhaps; but in fact less with Latin America countries.
Read more: The Latin Alphabet in Latin Hands
No designer's work has been more often imitated than that of Giambattista Bodoni. This is hardly surprising. Bodoni was a genius who created some of the most beautiful and majestic typefaces ever produced. Yet the designs of this 18th century master are also among the most difficult to accurately revive.
Read more: ITC Bodoni Pro
This month’s interviewee is Tomáš Brousil of Prague. His Suitcase Type Foundry is one of those great one-person font foundries that have been instrumental in raising the bar for emerging type designers. Brousil's fonts are intelligent and original, well-made and useful. He also masters a amazing range of styles. Meet Tomáš Brousil, a man of many faces.
Tomáš, were you always interested in type and lettering? Or did you have in mind a completely different kind of career when you began your design education?
Read more: Creative Characters: The faces behing the fonts
Usually the Creative Characters interviews are conducted by e-mail, in a series of back-and-forth exchanges. Nick Shinn, an Englishman in Canada, prefers the old-fashioned way: the immediacy and natural flow of a real conversation. This approach seems to relate to how he makes type. Not that Shinn’s type designs are old-fashioned… they’re simply different. And yet, as Shinn would say, all wickedly usable.
Read more: Creative Characters: Nick Shinn
by Ilene Strizver
The Helvetica® design can be seen virtually everywhere: in print, on the web, in the news and even in the movies (Helvetica, the film, is a must see!). Since its release in 1957, Helvetica has steadily been one of the most popular typefaces.
Read more: Helvetica: Old and Neue
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