by Taro Yumiba 2010年の九月から約一年間、オランダ、ハーグにある王立芸術アカデミー、通称KABKのTypemediaコースに留学されたタイプデザイナーの岡野邦彦さんに卒業制作で取り組まれた書体Quintetを中心にインタビューさせて頂いた。 どのようにしてタイポグラフィとタイプデザインに興味持ったのですか？ 大学ではグラフィックデザインを専攻していました。ポスター制作などの課題が出た時に、使う文字を調べるために書体のカタログを見たりしてたのですが、なかなかイメージにぴったりと合うものがありませんでした。だったら自分で好みの書体を作ってしまおうと思ったのが始まりでした。 また運のいいことに、当時まだ高価だったMacintoshとFontographer3.1が大学の研究室にあったんです。Macintoshがまだそれほど普及していない頃で、誰も使い方がよく分からなかったのですが、これは面白そうだと思って手探りでフォントをつくり始めました。パソコンで文字を描くのに慣れるまで時間が掛かりましたが、初めて画面にフォントが出てきたときの興奮が忘れられなくて文字作りにのめり込みました。

By Taro Yumiba How and when did you become interested in typography & type design? At university I majored in graphic design. I used to leaf through typeface catalogs in search of letters to use in my poster design assignments. However, I could never find any typefaces that matched perfectly what I had in mind, so […]

By Ivo Gabrowitsch & Christoph Koeberlin After more than 10 years, Verena Gerlach has revised and extended her FF Karbid super family, an interpretation of German storefront lettering from the early 1900s. The new FF Karbid is a harmonized redesign of the original typeface. Rounder and less narrow letters lend the shapes more space and […]

by Ludwig Übele A line of text is like a silhouette on the horizon. Closer inspection reveals the detail, the trees, bushes, rocks; details that, though only vaguely perceivable from afar, create both rhythm and variation. The beauty of this landscape is born of both regularity and variety.

BY NICK SHINN There are many OpenType features that can be built into a font, but Contextual Alternates is something special. Swash characters, ligatures, small caps and figure variants are all very well, but they merely duplicate cleverness that was available prior to digital type. The Contextual Alternates feature however, in which the choice of […]

By David Jonathan Ross Ever since I started to draw type, one of the challenges that has intrigued me the most is figuring out how letters carry their weight. Arranging thicks and thins and determining the contrast between them is crucial in assembling the systems of shapes that form a type design. Historically, a letter’s […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

By William Berkson Part 1: the snare of authenticity How much should a revival of a typeface look like the original? Well, just as with performing an old song—an analogy Matthew Carter has made—there is something you have to like in the original in order want to revive it. And you can’t depart from the […]

Type @ Cooper Starting in the fall of 2010, the Continuing Education Department of The Cooper Union, in conjunction with the Type Directors Club, offers a Certificate Program in Typeface Design. Very nice web design by Nick Sherman.

Linotype’s type director via Fonts.com

by Carl Crossgrove A biome in nature is essentially an ecosystem. It’s also the name for my new typeface family. The 14-weight Biome™ Wide family is now available on fonts.com. Now that the design is complete, I’m able to look back on the process. The drawings that led to Biome (previously known as Nebulon) were […]

Video Feature Read ILT’s Interview with Alice Savoie. You can follow Alice on Twitter.

By Martin Martin Wenzel & Christoph Koeberlin I have published this article as a page. You can read it here. Right now I’m unable to get the JavaScript working within a WordPress post. Once fixed, the page will redirect to a proper WordPress post. In the meantime, if you’d like to comment, then you can […]

Dan Reynolds’ review of Bibliothèque Typographique’s first book, José Mendoza y Almeida

By Gerry Leonidas Teaching on a postgraduate course feels very much like a spiral: the annual repetition of projects, each a vehicle for a journey of education and discovery for the student, blurs into cyclical clouds of shapes, paragraphs, and personalities. There seems to be little opportunity for reflection across student cohorts, and yet it […]

By James Puckett This is the doorway to The Claremount, an apartment building in Manhattan. I think that it was built in the 1890s. Those letters over the door just reached out and grabbed me from across the street and I had a typeface coming on.

By Rob Keller Vesper was developed over the course of almost three years. For this article, I’ve divided the process into two stages: #1 during my studies at the University of Reading; and #2 After Reading. Hopefully through this highly-condensed-yet-still-rather-wordy account of this project you will learn some interesting bits regarding my first major type […]

By Nadine Chahine Nadine Chahine is a type designer for Linotype GmbH, where she is also Branding & CI Manager, and Arabic Specialist. She designed Frutiger Arabic with Adrian Frutiger and Palatino Arabic with Hermann Zapf, for which she won the Certificate of Excellence in Type Design from the TDC. Today I’m excited to announce […]

By Abi Huynh Last year Mathieu Christe and Berton Hasebe wrote a very thorough article detailing the general day to day of the Type and Media masters program. With this article we hope to outline an historical overview of the course and provide a brief look at the final project typefaces from the 08/09 class. […]

By Jessica R. Yurasek Let’s face it, most of the general public does not really understand typography. So when I first tell people that I attended something called ‘Type Camp’ this summer, I tend to garner a lot of puzzled looks. But, smiling bemusedly, the typographic outsider with whom I am conversing, is likely to then […]

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. […]

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.

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.