The Week in Type

Before I dive into this week’s the week in type, I’d like to tell you a little more about Codex, the journal of typography. First, I’d like to introduce the Codex team: the Editor in Chief, Carolyn Wood and Assistant Editor, Allen Tan. It’s a joy to work with them — a mixture of many late nights and hard work with laughter and occasional obsessive-compulsive behavior. It is without a doubt the most incredible, most rewarding project I’ve ever worked on. Working Format in Canada is designing the magazine, and the latest proofs I saw are wonderful. The supporting cast includes H&FJ’s Knockout and Commercial Type’s Lyon, gracing 144 full-color pages. The magazine measures about 8″ by 11″, (approx A4).
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The week in type

Hope you enjoy this week’s week in type. To kick things off, lets all give a warm hand to the makers and bakers of the fonts that made it into MOMA’s permanent collection. Particularly happy yo see Barry Deck’s Template Gothic in there — one of my all-time favorite quirky display types.

Be sure to read Jonathan Hoefler’s thoughts over at the exceptional Kottke. H&FJ see four of their types added to the collection: HTF Didot, Gotham, Mercury and Retina.

New types

The lovely new Carter Sans from Matthew Carter. Available from Linotype:

Looks especially good in all-caps settings.
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The Week in Type

Two thousand and ten has been something of a blur, but it’s been a good year. It’s been another good year for type design and typography, with some great new work, and some wonderful new type designs. So, to ease you into 2011, and the wonders that await, I present to you the week in type.

New Type

Ardoise from Jean François Porchez. Wonderful:

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the week in type

Perhaps you thought ‘The Week in Type’ was dead. Well, this post marks its resurrection. It won’t be weekly just yet, but from 2011 it will be: a weekly roundup of new releases, type and lettering to inspire, type tips, videos, and lots, lots more. If you haven’t yet subscribed to ILT, then do so now — that way, you’ll never miss a thing. So, ladies and gentleman, without further ado, I present The Week in Type. Enjoy.
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help make a movie

Doug Wilson has just opened a Kickstarter project to raise funding for Linotype, the movie. Here’s the new trailer:

You can help by donating big or small via Kickstarter.

Doug is also writing about the Linotype machine and his movie for issue one of Codex. All very exciting stuff.

3 new limited edition prints by Seb Lester

I released three new limited edition prints today, ‘Dreams’, ‘Stars’, and ‘So Much To Do’. I’ll show all three prints in this article, but for practical purposes I’ll focus primarily on ‘Dreams’, one of my most ambitious prints to date. What follows is an outline of what I wanted to achieve, the lettering styles I developed, and why I produced it.

I guess it’s because of my design background that I always write a brief for myself before I start a print — a distillation of everything I want the print to say and do. I always try to aim as high as possible. Shoot for the stars and you might hit the ceiling, as they say.
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by William Berkson

Part 2: Readability, Affability, Authority
[read part one]

When their words are put into print, writers want the text to be inviting and welcoming, so that readers will read what they have written. And they also want the text to have an aura of credibility, so it will be taken seriously and maybe even accepted.

When I read Einstein’s Autobiography many years ago, as both a writer and a lover of type I noticed and remembered that the font it was printed in seemed extraordinarily approachable and easy to read—even while projecting strength and authority. James Mosley reports that printers used to say, “You can’t tell a lie in Caslon.” And then he adds wryly: or is it that you won’t get caught? When I started my revival of Caslon, I set out to revive these qualities I had seen in its letter press Linotype Caslon Old Face: readability, affability, and authority.
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by Stefan Willerstorfer

After five years of intensive work, my type family Acorde is finally on the market. It is a reliable workhorse for large, demanding design projects. The typeface’s name is derived from a corporate design typeface. However, Acorde is not only suitable for corporate design programmes but for information design and editorial design too.

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By Martin Wenzel

When designing a typeface, I prefer to explore a construction principle rather than revive an existing typeface idea. These principles or writing models are based on the tools and techniques originally used. Understanding these workings are often a great source of inspiration for me.

The starting point for my latest typeface Ode was the Textualis, one of the various broken script writing models. It has a strong modular build suggesting that it’s easily constructed. Albrecht Dürer further reduced it in his Underweysung der Messung, mit dem Zirckel und Richtscheyt, in Linien, Ebenen unnd gantzen corporen.

Albrecht Dürer’s visualisation of the contemporary broken-script construction (Nuremberg, 1525).

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Where does our alphabet come from?

We see it every day on signs, billboards, packaging, in books and magazines; in fact, you are looking at it now — the Latin or Roman alphabet, the world’s most prolific, most widespread abc. Typography is a relatively recent invention, but to unearth the origins of alphabets, we will need to travel much farther back in time, to an era contemporaneous with the emergence of (agricultural) civilisation itself.

Robert Bringhurst wrote that writing is the solid form of language, the precipitate.[1] But writing is also much more than that, and its origins, its evolution, and the way it is now woven into the fabric of civilisations makes it a truly wonderful story. That story spans some 5,000 years. We’ll travel vast distances, meet an emperor, a clever Yorkshireman, a Phoenician princess by the name of Jezebel, and the ‘purple people’; we’ll march across deserts and fertile plains, and sail across oceans. We will begin where civilisation began, meander through the Middle Ages, race through the Renaissance, and in doing so discover where our alphabet originated, how and why it evolved, and why, for example, an A looks, well, like an A.
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