Part 3: Siècle des Lumières
Welcome to part three of our Type Terms series. In part one we travelled all the way back to the 15th century to take a closer look at the Humanist or Venetian style types with their distinctive lowercase ‘e’ (remember that sloping crossbar?). In part two we considered the Old Style […]

Griffo to Caslon
In the first part of this series, we looked at Humanist typefaces; we considered them in their historical context, and took a closer look at some of their distinguishing features and modern-day revivals. Today we’re moving along the time line and will spend a little time familiarising ourselves with some wonderful Old Style typefaces.
Humanist […]

Typogrify Plugin
No, this is not one of those charity posts. It’s all about my favourite plugin. Imagine a plugin that could improve the typography of your page with no complicated setup. Controlling type online can at times be difficult. However, things have just gotten a whole lot easier with the release of the Typogrify plugin. Originally […]

kern baby kern
Warning: readers may find some of the images in this article disturbing.
It was 2am when the call came in over the radio. Italic rain lashed down against the wind shield, liquefying the neon sign’s reflection. Clarendon looks good in Neon, but perhaps…
The radio interrupted my thoughts, bearing a voice that had woven itself through distant thunder…
“We’ve got […]

fi fi fi, chuckled the ligature
Welcome to part three in our Type Terminology series.
If the ligature could speak, it might well ask, “Why does nobody love me?”. Well, let’s put the record straight, but before we do — just in case you’re wondering, what the hell’s a ligature, let’s take a brief look.

First, the typographic ligature should not be confused […]

Welcome to Part II
In part one, Who Shot the Serif?, we learned among other things that serifs — like milkshakes — come in many flavours: The main two flavours are Adnate and Abrupt; with Adnate serifs generally being more organic; Abrupt Serifs on the other hand are usually squarer, bigger, chunkier (the Arnold Schwarzeneggers of […]