Category: typographyPage 1 of 3
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,…
The Font Shop plug-in allows trying before buying. According to the FS webpage, “The FontShop Plugin Beta allows designers and other type enthusiasts to try out FontShop fonts…
Gotta say, this is purrty well done. More like this over at Bombi(llo).
It’s unmemorable because it’s set in Georgia. Or at least that doesn’t help, according to Eightface, who cites a study that purports to show that students remember material better…
Google has quietly introduced an API (application programming interface) for web fonts. This could potentially result in better — and also worse — web typography — depending on…
You could do worse. Click the detail to view the entire chart at inspiration lab.
Who or what are Trilby, Allumi, Calluna, Giorgio, Leksa, and Catacumba? a. Captains of vessels in the fleet of the early seventeenth-century Dutch adventurer Joris van Spilbergen. b….
The latest iteration of this hoary shtick comes to us via Pentagram. To play along, use the password CHARACTER.
Yesterday I showed some ancient inscribed letterforms from Ostia Antica. Today we flash forward some seventeen hundred years to this inscription over a gate in the Vatican complex, which is dated 1831.
Here is some handsome lettering from ruins at the ancient port city of Ostia, west of Rome. I don’t know what period this fragment dates to, although the…
A friend and colleague, Will Powers, died suddenly of a heart attack on August 25. I had worked with Will when I was at North Point Press, employing…
Ikea has used the geometric bauhausesque Futura (left above), designed by Paul Renner around 1925, as its signature font for some fifty years. It’s a font that emphasizes the Platonic essence of letterforms in an interesting way but provides little forward-momentum, so to speak, for extended reading.
Verdana (designed by Matthew Carter around the late 1990s, I think; at right above) is a more “humanist” (the letterforms to some degree evoke traditional Renaissance pen letterforms) font that was designed for use at small sizes on computer monitors. To this end it has a large x-height, large counters (openings), broad character widths, and other features that help to identify letters and tell similar ones apart at small sizes.
Yes, if Comic Sans (I know, I know, it’s not really a comic book font) has lost its appeal, you now have a wealth of alternatives from which…
Right Reading was pleased to receive the following news brief via inter office mail from bittermelon: Extra-Slanty Italics Introduced for Extremely Important Words NEW HOPE, MN—In an attempt…
This site has been around, in various forms, for a long time. It began as an auxiliary to the Mercury House book publishing site that we put up…
. . . and here the font aids and abets. . via BuzzFeed (“I went to this store. It was a huge disappointment.”) .
A fellow called “the magic of chutney” sure knows how to dominate a board. Saying “Some of you is so down on fonts..I’m gonna get my man Johannes…
Because this cannot be said often enough. From Robert Bringhurst’s Elements of Typographic Style: In the nineteenth century, which was a dark and inflationary age in typography and…
Elsewhere I mentioned recently that the David R. Godine blog has been a dispirited creature, with few and meager posts. I am happy to report that it has…
Jan Tschichold is one of the inescapable figures in twentieth-century typoraphy. This photo was taken in 1926. Richard Hollis has written an appreciation, called “Jan Tschichold: Titan of…
“BALI” is a word that poses some problems typographically. The wide BA combination makes a lot of white space, while the LI tends to be narrow and sticklike….
This great photo is from a series by Andy Clymer devoted to Las Vegas’s Neon Beonyard, where neon signs go to die be preserved for posterity. The Boneyard,…
I wonder how old this ghost type is. Located on an old building in historic Sutter Creek in Amador County in California’s Sierra Nevada (the town takes its…