Category: typographyPage 2 of 3

When kerning goes bad

. via Cosmopoetica .

A Spanish Renaissance calligraphy manual

The resourceful peacay at BibliOdyssey, who seems to spend most of his waking hours rummaging through the online archives of libraries and museums searching for scans from old…

Fonts for sale at the Museum of Printing

If you’re anywhere around North Andover, MA, you might want to check these out. The sale runs through August 28. .

Ghost type: borated talcum toilet powder

I’m not sure how the advertiser managed to put this copy on a nearly sheer cliff high above the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac rivers near Harper’s…

Ghost type: coal tar products

Rightreading has been on the road for a while, and mostly without an internet connection. I’ve encountered some interesting ghost type on my travels, such as this example…

Helvetica clip

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

2002 honest fonts

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…

How have new technologies affected book design and typography?

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…

A quick history of typography

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,…

Better dot those i’s and cross those t’s!

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…

A rather difficult font game

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…

Insert tab A into slot B

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,…

Typographia

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…

Font stars

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…

Motion typography

This is brilliant.

Words fail …

via Hoefler & Frere-Jones

Trajan, the movie font

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…

The Plantin-Moretus Museum, Antwerp

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…

Vector Magic

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…

Leila and Massimo Vignelli on living by design

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….

Typographic illusions

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…

Thinking with Type

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…

Using Ampersands

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…

Do computers make students sloppy?

That’s what David Dabner of the London College of Printing says.