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Here’s a short section from the documentary Helvetica, by Gary Hustwit. This section features a brief interview with Erik Spiekermann.

Conceivably Related PostsHelvetica, the Poster

The official Helvetica movie poster.Invading LiechtensteinOn March 2 170 lost Swiss soldiers accidentally invaded neighboring Liechtenstein. But instead of cl…Helvetica Love/Hate Contest WinnersFunny the buzz about Helvetica lately. Over at Veer they [...]

Why pay for fonts when you can get them free, right?
This site features fonts that really stand out in a crowd. Honest!
But sometimes honesty can be harsh.
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Conceivably Related PostsFree Vista FontsIf you have a Windows system but you aren’t running Vista you can still legally install the new Vist…Font stars

FontShop has a nice offer for [...]

Caduceus asks that question at MetaFilter, and IndiaInk has started a thread in reply.
There have, of course, been many effects. some good, others not so good. Caduceus is probably asking for practical advice on using new technologies and media, but the question could also be answered in a broader sense. Following are a few consequences [...]

This image of woodtype figures sorts at the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, is from Nick Sherman’s photostream.
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Conceivably Related PostsPhoto Wednesday: abandoned books

This photo of books simply left behind after a St. Louis Public Library move comes from nathans…Photo Wednesday: Bringing it all back home

I studied comparative literature [...]

Working with Garamond Premier Pro for my book on Persian ceramics, I have been impressed by the range of sizes and weights the typeface includes. There are regular, medium, semibold, and bold weights for each of the sizes. In addition, the display size offers an extra-light weight in both regular and italic.
Different fonts are provided [...]

The Porchez Type Foundry has restored a former feature of its site, a whirlwind tour of the history of typography. It says on the site that “This history, normally told from the Anglo-Saxon point of view, is from a French perspective, allowing the reader to form one’s own opinion.” It’s not evident to me what [...]

Why? Well consider the case of Emine and Ramazan Çalçoban. Theirs was a fatal love affair. But it was hardly Romeo and Juliet.
In the beginning all was sunbeams and roses for this young Turkish couple. But then things started to go bad, and get worse, and finally they separated. A flurry of e-mail incriminations followed, [...]

Typeheads might want to try the Rather Difficult Type Game. I scored 32 out of 34 (didn’t notice which two I missed). Most of the questions can be figured out by elimination, but it kept asking me about typefaces like Affair and Yanone Kaffeesatz, about which I know nothing.
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Conceivably Related PostsTypographic humorA font walks [...]

How did the order of letters in the Western alphabet get so firmly established that there are more similarities than differences between such languages as Latin (a, b, c), Greek (alpha, beta, gamma), Arabic (alif, b?’, t?), Hebrew (aleph, bet, gimel), and so on? As Jonathan Hoefler at Hoefler & Frere-Jones observes, the order can [...]

Typographia: An Historical Sketch of the Origin and Progress of the Art of Printing was published in 1825, “Printed for Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy.” The author was Thomas Curson Hansard. The book is now available as a Google scan. Its musty pages contain some information that has been largely forgotten. Here’s a passage offering [...]

FontShop has a nice offer for anyone wanting to freshen up their typeface collection. Called FontStars 2007, it includes 29 OpenType fonts from 14 foundries at a discounted price ($599 for the lot). It’s a judicious selection that includes six text fonts and eleven display fonts. Shown below are Anziano from OurType, Amalia from Fountain, [...]

This is brilliant.

Conceivably Related PostsA quick history of typographyThe Porchez Type Foundry has restored a former feature of its site, a whirlwind tour of the history …Thinking with TypeContinuing our week of laziness link love while I’m on the road, I Love Typography has a review of T…The Aesthetics of ReadingKevin Larson (Microsoft) and Rosalind [...]

via Hoefler & Frere-Jones
Conceivably Related PostsFamous Last Words

I should finish up the press check I’m on tomorrow and have Thursday free, or maybe I’ll just pr…Refute vs. rebutWhen it comes to copy editing, I’m not particularly strict — let the author have some personal styl…Death of the Novel: A Literary CrosswordClick for larger version (pdf [...]

I don’t know why the Hollywood folks are so in love with Trajan, but it’s been a designer’s joke for years now — any Hollywood epic MUST use Trajan. I prepared a little talk on typefaces a while back for which I gathered together several movie posters that used Trajan. But this guy does me [...]

The Plantin-Moretus Museum, located at the Vrijdagmarkt in Antwerp, Belgium, is one of the prime pilgrimage sites for typeheads. It is is the only Renaissance printing office that has survived to the present. It houses some of he world’s oldest surviving printing presses as well as complete sets of early dies and matrices. And [...]

VectorMagic is an “online tool for precision vectorization.” In other words, it is an autotracer that converts pixel-based images (photos, screen captures, etc.) to vectors, which can then be scaled without loss of quality. You upload an original image and download the vectorized result. This would be a big time-saver if you wanted to manipulate [...]

Massimo Vignelli has been an influential promoter on Swiss industrial graphic design — design that tends to expose an underlying grid and often uses only Helvetica for type. He designed, for example, the New York City subway map shown above, in which the grid is apparent and is effectively used as a means of clearly [...]

Which eight from this group looks the most balanced? Most people whose eyes have been trained by long exposure to the conventions of the Western alphabet would probably choose the third from the right, or even the second from the right. But the third from the left is the one where the two component circles [...]

Continuing our week of laziness link love while I’m on the road, I Love Typography has a review of Thinking with Type by Ellen Lupton. I think you could say it’s a positive review. For example, “Thinking With Type is to typography what Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time is to physics.”

Conceivably Related Posts15th-Century [...]

Below are a batch of ampersands, arranged more or less chronologically, according to when the original model was created. (Can you identify the faces? They’re all ordinary faces that are among the “standard” repertoire of text faces.) On the left are roman versions and on the right italics.
The ampersand is a kind of ligature. It [...]