Designing Typefaces

The question has often come up this quarter about how to design your own typefaces. My first thought is to ask, how experimental is this? Are you talking 26 letters, or 700 glyphs? A good place to begin would be to read this reference book, Designing Type by David Earls. Then sit down and begin drawing. Oh, and notice how the book title so nicely mimics the font in the title above it!

Marian Bantjes Business Card

She just continues to amaze!

Paper Letters of the Other Kind

London design consultancy, Johnson Banks, created a series of nice posters in the mid-nineties based entirely on letterforms made from folded or 'found' paper-related objects. Very inspired!

CD Album Cover Artwork Assignment

1. Go here and choose the third photo, no matter what it is, as your album cover.

2. Go here and select the last four words of the very last quote as the title of your album.

3. Go here and select the first article title on the page as the name of your band.

4. On a separate layer, produce all the text as either handmade letterforms or altered digital fonts. Merge layers together to complete your album artwork.

5. Send me a jpeg.

The Pursuit of Happiness

Maira Kalman is back on the nytimes.com blog with her charming handlettered paintings portraying her recent experiences at the inauguration in DC.

The Nose

The Nose No. 18 (published, illustrated, and conceived by Seymour Chwast, and edited by Steven Heller) is now online for the first time. The Nose is a publication designed to draw attention to relevant social issues as well as trivial ones. Each 24 page issue is designed and illustrated by Seymour Chwast, lovingly handlettered in his most charming and endearing style. This issue is devoted to "Cults and Superstitions". You'll love the new sustainable, digital version. Each page is worth the price--which, since it is online, is nada. So this is your lucky day! Join The Nose cult now. Or if you prefer the hardcopy subscription, order it directly from Seymour Chwast at Pushpininc.com.

The strange history of lorem ipsum (5:15) | On PRI's The World

The strange history of lorem ipsum (5:15) | PRI's The World

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Typography Is

Get your own - Open publication

From Spatium magazine comes a book about what typography means for various designers. Click on book for full screen.

The Average Day of a Design Student.

Find out how you stack up against your peers.

End Papers

Here is a nice collection of book endpapers to peruse.

Alphabet Soup

This is Where We Live

A wonderful little video about books by the film crew 25th Estate.

New From Penguin Books

Pentagram designer's, Angus Hyland and Fabian Herrmann have designed the hardback edition of Penguin Books Quantum of Solace: The Complete James Bond Short Stories. The book collects together all of Ian Fleming's Bond short stories in a single volume. Hyland created a cloth-covered hardback with cover imagery restricted to a silver foil stamped image of Bond's infamous Walther PPK. A subtle diamond pattern is debossed on to the boards, which combined with deep burgundy endpapers evokes the discerning elegance of Bond's world. An embossed manila bellyband with typewritten cover information on the label evokes the official documents of the period. Click on image to enlarge.

ObamaBats

Bring some change to your artwork. Download a free True Type set of Obama Dingbats and hope for some great designs we can all believe in this next year.

The Learners | Chip Kidd

Type Class Warfare

An international type conference gathers to consider the inclusion of Zapf Dingbats when the crooked, villainous, Ransom decides to hold Courier, and his daughter, Curls MT, hostage. Suspense mounts. Can't all types just get along?

An Evening With Hatch Show Print's, Jim Sherraden

Enjoy a lecture and exhibition tour with Hatch Show Print designer Jim Sherraden in honor of EMP|SFM's newest exhibition, American Letterpress: The Art of Hatch Show Print. Sherraden will lead a presentation on letterpress and the history of HATCH SHOW PRINT, America's longest-operating print shop. Following the presentation, guests are welcome to attend a special tour of the exhibition and a chance to meet Sherraden to continue the conversation about Hatch Show Print.

Wednesday, January 14, 2009 7:00 pm.
Experimental Music Project--JBL Theater
325 5th Avenue North
Seattle, WA 98109

Ticket Info:
Free to EMP|SFM and AIGA members; $5 general public, 206.770.2702 or 1.877.EMP.SFM1. Reserved seats unclaimed 10 minutes prior to the event are subject to be released to the wait list.

Type Goes Electric

Gather Gallery in Columbia City is having a show of Jeremy Bert's neon type. Bert has assembled a complete alphabet of abandoned neon letters which he acquired from old advertising signs. Each letter has been rewired and is available for sale. The show is up until November 23rd and you may go here for more info.

Tweak This

Before Robert Bringhurst, there was Geoffrey Dowding. U&lc online magazine recently listed Dowding's notable book, Finer Points in the Spacing and Arrangement of Type as one of the ten essential books on typography for a designer to own. Perhaps the designer of this cover may have benefitted from reading this treasured book.

Inhale Exhale

The work of artist and paper engineer, Matt Shlian intersects the disciplines of math, science and art. He is a master at creating kinetic art and folding paper. See many samples at his site and a video of his book, Inhale Exhale here And his links page shows a great sample of presenting navigation visually.

Vintage Typography Dig

Here you will find an archive of many beautiful examples of vintage and retro typography. It's like a graphic archeological dig! These 4 lovely examples of expressive typography are notecards of W.H. Page Wood Types. They are published by the RIT Cary Graphic Arts Press. and available for purchase.

The Next Page: 30 Table of Contents

Here is the link to the slide show of Table of Contents pages provided by Design Observer. This was originally produced as a book in response to AIGA's 12th Biennial Design Conference in Denver by noted designers, Michael Beirut, William Drentell and Jessica Helfand. In it, they considered how we all navigated through a book and how we each consider what we read next. In the realm of the printed word, they go on to explain how the humble TOC is our portal into a world of knowledge and heralds what comes next with its own peculiar prose and typographic conventions. Take a look at this collection and ask yourself what works and why.

The Fell Types

The Fell fonts from the 17th C are available free here. Well, nearly free. The deal is you should credit Igino Marini, the fellow who digitized them all. If you want to use any of them in publications of any kind of media you have to put in the following quote as a note: «The Fell Types are digitally reproduced by Igino Marini. www.iginomarini.com» and let the designer know where you used it. These are great fonts and beautiful ornaments but should be used carefully because of their historic nature. The original fonts, designed in the 1600's, were available in various point sizes. Now that they have been digitized by Marini, it is best to not stray from these intentional sizes too much, as it effects the readability of them. You can read more about the Fell fonts and download all of them in OpenType format at his website.

The Road to Clarity

Learn how readability effects all of our lives. Designer Don Meeker speaks with Kurt Anderson of Studio 360 radio program about the redesign of interstate road signage. Meeker set out to improve the readability of the signage by developing the new font, Clearview. By changing some of the stroke widths and opening up the counters in various letters, the face becomes far more readable at a distance and at night. This subtle change in typography will make a dramatic effect upon reducing the number of highway fatalities each year. Good typography can save lives! You can learn more about this story, Design for the Real World here and here.

InDesign Tips for Book Production

If you need more InDesign help with your book production, the Adobe InDesign Resource Center may be of great help to you. Here you will find links and videos and other great resources related to working on long documents. For instance, if you go to Text > Find/Change, you can even find a chart for performing GREP searches using Metacharacters. You can also download custom glyph sets by going to Text > Glyphs and special characters. If you need assistance for setting up page numbers in sections or your entire document, there is even a good video on this. It indicates a great way to update all the page numbers for each chapter or section of your book as you work on your document. However, you should disregard the last tip in the video on inserting variables to automatically update your various chapter numbers. According to Chris Sullivan, there is a glitsch in our InDesign CS3 over the network and it's best not to use this option for now.