Design News & Articles

For graphic designers beginning to experiment in type design, a geometric or modular typeface is a natural starting point. Illustrator and other programs offer a simple collection of elements such as circles, squares, and triangles which can be combined to create a passable alphabet. This is the same route I took when dissatisfied with the [...]

Fraktur Mon Amour is the work of Judith Schalansky, written while she was a student of the Communication Design program in Potsdam. She developed a serious passion for blackletter and was disappointed to find all the reference books about this fascinating genre are very dated and often quite staid, and in many cases not easily [...]

Special thanks to Gestalten for sponsoring the Typographica nameplate for October, 2009 with Bonesana. Gestalten is known for very contemporary designs — the modular and the post-mod — so this tribute to the 18th century is quite a departure. Designed by Matthieu Cortat of Switzerland, Bonesana was initially developed for the new edition of the book [...]

Yesterday at TypeCon2009 in Atlanta, 11 representatives from the type community packed a stage to discuss the controversial and convoluted issue of licensing fonts for the web. The full two hours of audio is now online.

Marlene is an elegant, high contrast Egyptian face with a distinctive and contemporary calligraphic flourish. When I first saw it I was impressed at how incredibly crisp it was, as if drawn with a pen so sharp it could just as easily cut the paper as leave ink there. The italic expresses this sharpness with [...]

A slew of slab serifs were released in 2008. Most of them continuing last year’s trend of following the cute and chunky approach, often to delicious effect. But as marvelous as so many of those slab serifs were, sadly they were let down when it came to lighter, or more usable text weights. For me, [...]

“How do you know you should start a blog? Because people keep telling you to shut up. You just won’t shut up about a subject.” — Merlin Mann, SXSW Interactive 2009 “Obsession times voice” is what luminary bloggers Merlin Mann and John Gruber offer as a simple formula for successful writing. It’s exactly these qualities that Joshua [...]

Long before there were hi-res laser printers in every design firm and PDF specimens on every foundry website, typographers discovered, compared, and selected type using specimen books. There is too much separation from the display to the printed page for a designer to see how the curves, the straights, and the joins truly interact. The [...]

Contrasting sharp serifs with rotund ball terminals, Portuguese designer Dino dos Santos evokes the vibrant work of 18th-century punchcutter Johann Fleischman with his 2008 release of Glosa. Dos Santos is clearly aiming for something beyond a revival though, and introduces enough contemporary flair and personal quirk to do so successfully. Designed as an extended series of [...]

When it comes to the number of type designers per capita, the Netherlands can be challenged by only a few countries — but the Czech Republic is a close runner-up. One of the country’s most prolific digital typefounders is František Štorm. Throughout all his work, František has been constantly applying a vibrant, individual style to the [...]