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From a blog critical of typographic faux pas comes this handy rhyme for remembering the difference between apostrophes/quotation marks and foot/inch marks: “Straight up and down you’re in foot mark town! / A contraction you say? Use apostrophes every day! / You want to say ‘Hi!’ to a chum or a neighbour? / Use inch marks and everyone will think you’re an idiot!” Guilty as charged.
List of the 7 worst fonts. What, no Hobo or Brush Script? Comic Sans is, of course, #1 with a bullet. (via wider angle)
Typography language pedantry: font vs. typeface. “‘Fonts’ and ‘typefaces’ are different things. Graphic designers choose typefaces for their projects but use fonts to create the finished art.”
Helvetica, The Movie! “The film is studded with the stars of typography: Erik Spiekermann, Matthew Carter, Massimo Vignelli, Michael Bierut, Wim Crouwel, Hermann Zapf, Stefan Sagmeister, Jonathan Hoefler, Tobias Frere-Jones, Experimental Jetset.”
Regarding the doublestrike on the Guggenheim, Design Observer has a little more information about it. “I don’t think [Frank Lloyd Wright] ever floated text.”
The IHT on a resurgence in popularity of the Georgia typeface online. (thx, newley)
Great detailed post about how the inside of a book is designed. Page counts are determined for business reasons so the designer has little choice but to find the proper font to make the given text fit in the given space…readability is a secondary consideration. (thx, susan)
They’re refurbishing the outside of the Guggenheim and stripping away the facade reveals a doublestrike on the “T” in “The”. It’s like they started putting the printing on the building and then the architect stops by and says, whoa! that text is supposed to be lower, you morons.
Verlag is a new modernist typeface from Hoefler & Frere-Jones designed for the Guggenheim Museum. More on Verlag from Typographica.
The Type Museum, located in London and housing “one of the world’s best typographic collections”, is being shut down due to lack of funding. The folks in the TypeMuseumSociety GoogleGroup are trying to find a way to save it. (thx, mark)
In the beta version of Office 2007, a font called Calibri is the default font instead of Times New Roman. The end of a typographic era.
In an astounding display of typographic nerdiness and obsessiveness on a level to which I can only aspire, Andrew Hearst walks us through the anomalous digital clock on the popular TV show 24. “The onscreen time sequences are dictated partly by the typographic limitations of the clock font.”
Currently coveting: the Galaxie Polaris type family from Village type foundry. Beautiful.
Typographica reports on a food + typography event going on in San Francisco today on cookbook design. Someone do a similar event in NYC, please.
Typographica identifies all the fonts in the font-o-riffic opening titles for Thank You for Smoking.
Lamenting the sad state of the typography on girls’ asses. “This booty type is in fact similar to public signage that I’ve worked so closely with over the years: it’s meant to be seen, it’s communicating important and relevant information, it can be used to alert people of a problem (“SLUT!”), or it can simply be pointing out a scenic overlook.”
A list of the best license-free quality fonts. From a few months ago, but still useful.
In Five Steps to Font Freedom, Adrian of Be A Design Group suggests some ways to improve typography on the web, noting that you don’t need to own the fonts in books, movies, newspapers to view works in those media. The fifth suggestion is interesting, even outside of that particular goal:
5. Build Free Versions of the Classic Fonts
If we can’t convince the font companies to set their versions of classic fonts free, we will recreate them ourselves. The great fonts are based on designs that are centuries old that can’t possibly be protected by copyright law. Although it would be a major task, the collective power of the online community could create quality versions of classic fonts. Little by little, we can build an open source classic font library! Does anybody have a complete set of the original Garamond that I can borrow? Let’s get started…
Applying the open source development process to make freely available and modifiable versions of classic fonts like Garamond, Caslon, Bodoni, Baskerville, etc. is a fantastic idea.
The typography of the logos of Web 2.0 companies. (via waxy)
A lesson in sports uniform typography: vertically arched lettering versus the easier-but-cheesier radially arched lettering. (via do)
“Inside C” logos are those where the second letter of a word (usually an “o”) is tucked inside the initial capital C. Examples: Coca-Cola, Carnation, and Coffee-Mate.
In Meet the Fockers, the sign on a terminal at the O’Hare airport is typeset in Chicago, an old Macintosh system font. Har har. (via mark)
The Folk Typography Pool contains photos of type made by people who are not designers, typographers, or calligraphers. (thx, paul)
The designer of Comic Sans on how that beloved font came to be. Photos of Comic Sans in the wild.
Erik Spiekermann explains how Nokia’s corporate typeface came to be. Looks like it was based on one of Nokia’s onscreen bitmap fonts. I’ve always wanted to create a “real” version of Silkscreen like that.
Typographica’s favorite fonts of 2005, part 1. Arrival and Vista look nice.
Watch the kids get into a good old fashioned font fight in the comments about fake signs on the NYC subway. Don’t miss your chance to read “it’s Helvetica, bitches” in a context where it makes complete sense. (thx, j guns)
Fontographer, a once popular font editing program, has been updated for the first time since 1996. (via df)
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