Reviewed by James Puckett

“The truth of the terse but expressive ‘dead and forgotten’, comes home with peculiar force to the searcher after information about the individuals who have developed the art and craft of typefounding.”
– William E. Loy

The Industrial Revolution is often seen as a black hole in the history of typography. In that era the role of the punchcutter changed to that of a largely uncredited factory worker. Records of who worked on individual typefaces are sparse. Today it can seem as if there is practically no information left about the designers of the nineteenth century.

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The Week in Type

It’s been a little while since the last week in type. I have so many links, so many new releases, so much news to share, I wonder where I should begin. I know, let’s start with a great site based on a very simple idea — Typedia is an encyclopedia of fonts, or in the words of its creator, a mix between IMDb and Wikipedia, but just for type. It’s not that the information is not out there; it is, but where this site, the brainchild of Jason Santa Maria and co., succeeds is in putting that information all under one roof, so to speak. My favourite feature is the Good Deeds page, which makes it really easy to contribute.

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Now we’re Talking

It’s been quite some time since I mentioned the brilliant Type Radio. It’s a podcast I’ve been listening to for ages, and they now have a huge archive of type-related interviews.

Thanks to Paul Hunt and Mark Simonson, I came across this wonderful little video, that I hope will have you racing over to Type Radio to listen to everything they have.

You can list podcasts by interviewee or even by font. You can also subscribe to Type Radio via iTunes. I’ve downloaded most of the archive to my iPhone, so now I have Type Radio any time, any place, any where.

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Related: Read Between the Leading podcast.
Up next: A gargantuan week in type.

By Ivo Gabrowitsch

Berlin-based Martin Wenzel might be best-known for his TDC-awarded sans serif family FF Profile. He runs his own studio, focusing on type and communication design and teaches type design at the Design Academy Berlin. Martin also runs his own shirt store WordsOnShirts that features some nice hand lettering designs.

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By Elliot Jay Stocks

When Johno first asked me to write about Typekit, I jumped at the chance. I’d received a beta invite to try out the service about a week before, but deadlines had got in the way of actually getting round to it. Now I had the perfect excuse to have a proper play, create a test site, and immerse myself in the technology that got the web design community frothing at the mouth when it was announced a couple of months ago.

However, as I started to experiment with Typekit, I realised that the really interesting thing isn’t the technology itself: it’s what Typekit — and other services in the same vein — mean for the way we experience type on the web. And I’m not talking about it from a user’s perspective, where they get to see the end results of using a variety of typefaces, but from the web designer’s perspective: the way in which we’re going to be using and paying for fonts.

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by Jos Buivenga

Calluna started out as a little test I did to see if I could add serifs to Museo, to make a slab serif. Because of its pipe bend serifs I suddenly saw the connection between serif and stem, and some sort of direction.

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Untangling the tangle

With all the talk about web fonts, I think it’s time I tried to outline the present situation. I’ve not attempted to do so before, owing to the complexity of some of the material, and the speed at which things are moving.

Web designers are generally not interested in technical specifications, TrueType Hinting instructions, and extended OpenType permissions tables. They have one pressing question: when can I use font x in my web pages? Today, in Atlanta, Georgia, at TypeCon 2009, the faithful met to talk about Web Font Embedding: The New State of the Debate. At the foot of this article, I’ve included highlights from the twitter feeds of @typographica (Stephen Coles) and @splorp (Grant Hutchinson). Many thanks to them for the great job they did in reporting.

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Driven by design

The week in type is coming very soon. In the meantime, I thought you might enjoy this video from Pierre Smeets and Damien Aresta.

More information about the project on Pierre and Damien’s web site, pleaseletmedesign.com. More images on Flickr. You can download the free iQ font from Toyota.

Great, fun project. If you decide to have a go, then please refrain from type design in built-up areas. Oh, and wear your seatbelt.