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<description>H&Co designs fonts for print, web, and mobile environments.</description>
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<copyright>2024 Hoefler&Co. All rights reserved.</copyright>
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<managingEditor>info@typography.com (Jonathan Hoefler)</managingEditor>
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<title><![CDATA[Typography for NYC Pride]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typography-for-nyc-pride</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[It feels timely to celebrate H&Co’s partnership with Lippincott to help reimagine the brand identity for NYC Pride, the trademark event of Heritage of Pride, with a recognized legacy of unity, protest, advocacy, and fun. Our parent company, Monotype, provided two typefaces, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/knockout">Knockout</a> and <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham">Gotham</a>, from the Hoefler&Co library.
Knockout and Gotham lend a bold and direct yet warm appearance to the new visual identity, aligning with the group’s new brand purpose: “To inspire and empower every LGBTQIA person to proudly love and live their truth.” H&Co is thrilled to see these two expressive typefaces working on behalf of this cause.
40-plus years after the Stonewall Uprising in Greenwich Village, <a href="https://www.nycpride.org">Heritage of Pride</a> had arrived at a crossroads of sorts. Formed in the aftermath of Stonewall, the group’s legacy is woven into the full sweep of the modern LGBTQIA+ movement. As the organizer of the iconic <a href="https://www.nycpride.org/event/nyc-pride-march">NYC Pride march</a>, <a href="https://www.nycpride.org/event/the-rally">The Rally</a>, and other <a href="https://www.nycpride.org/events">marquee events</a>, Heritage of Pride has seen it all—from the early days of proudly defiant public demonstration through all the challenges, victories, and progress since.
Over the years, however, the organization never settled on a single, consistent brand identity for its centerpiece event, NYC Pride, choosing instead to change the visuals in keeping with each year’s theme.
The Heritage of Pride leadership team recognized it needed an enduring, resonant brand identity to help it drive equity and raise awareness around the organization’s incredible impact. <a href="https://lippincott.com">Lippincott</a> eagerly came on board to help Heritage of Pride develop a new brand identity for NYC Pride that would reflect the organization’s immense contributions to the LGBTQIA+ movement and the crucial role it continues to play. H&Co was honored to be a part of this project.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/NYCP_1-scaled.jpg">
The goal of the rebrand was to create a feeling of inclusivity and capture the spirit and importance of the organization’s home city. This is New York after all, and the significance of the city and its people to the LGBTQIA+ movement cannot be understated. Fittingly, the Heritage of Pride team chose two typefaces with strong NYC roots to represent the brand: Gotham® and Knockout®, both from H&Co and now part of the Monotype Library. More on them in a moment.
The project began with a new positioning that would act as a foundation for the brand and experience. The new brand purpose, to inspire and empower every LGBTQIA+ person to proudly love and live their truth, speaks to NYC Pride’s roots in protest, and the annual celebration’s power in unifying and advocating for its community.
The new visual identity is built around an inclusive, community-centric and truly identifiable flag emblem—one that draws from history and captures the full range of today’s movement. The iconic Pride flag, which has evolved into a universal symbol of safety, community, and allyship, is at the center of it all, capturing the organization’s spirit of celebration and activism. The flag subtly features the letters ‘NYC’, and features an adaptive gradient, providing storytelling flexibility and inclusivity for different subgroups within the LGBTQIA+ community.
{carousel_NYC_Pride_A}
Gotham and Knockout bring more than NYC street cred to the story. With its roots in the eclectic typography of 19th century broadsides, Knockout brings an enduring fighting spirit that honors the determination of Heritage of Pride’s decades-long push for equality and representation.
The unapologetically bold stature of Knockout perfectly counterbalances the friendly openness of Gotham, a contemporary take on a style of sign lettering found all over the streets of New York. Gotham’s elemental forms were made to express as broad a range of voices as possible. The prominent use of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/styles/gothamcondensed2">Gotham Condensed Extra Black</a> allows the organization to speak in a voice that is both bold and welcoming, assertive and inclusive. Heritage of Pride joins a long list of prominent uses for Gotham, famously including the <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/tag/Obama">Obama campaign</a>.
{carousel_NYC_Pride_B}
“I love seeing our typefaces put to use for such a meaningful cause and organization,” said Sara Soskolne, Creative Type Director at Monotype. “Knockout and Gotham are ideal choices to help tell the story of NYC Pride’s history and mission of inclusivity while conveying that it’s more than just an annual celebration—it’s a year-round commitment to equality.”
Jenifer Lehker, Partner, Design at Lippincott, added, “NYC Pride is recognized globally as a beacon of safety, community and allyship, but also as a symbol of protest and activism. Monotype understood this and beautifully contributed to our cause with the Gotham and Knockout font families, both of which truly convey the brand’s spirit and legacy.
“Pride began as a protest, and we wanted to capture a typographic voice reminiscent of bold, eye-catching posters used by protestors. Designed in NYC, Knockout and Gotham pay homage to the brand’s roots, while providing the visual boldness necessary to amplify the community’s voices.”
The fight for equality is never-ending, a fact that Heritage of Pride knows well. H&Co hopes this new identity for NYC Pride catapults the organization forward into a new era of advocacy and activism, and H&Co is proud to play even a small role in that effort. —MT]]>
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<pubDate>Thu, 30 Jun 2022 01:49:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typography-for-nyc-pride#2456</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Introducing Sagittarius]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-sagittarius</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Typeface designers spend a lot of time chasing down strange valences. We try to figure out what’s producing that whiff of Art Deco, or that vaguely militaristic air, or what’s making a once solemn typeface suddenly feel tongue-in-cheek. If we can identify the source of these qualities, we can cultivate them, and change the direction of the design; more often, we just extinguish them without mercy. Sometimes, we get the chance to follow a third path, which is how we arrived at our newest typeface, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sagittarius/overview">Sagittarius</a>.
During the development of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/peristyle/overview">Peristyle</a>, our family of compact, high-contrast sans serifs, I often found myself unwittingly humming <a href="https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6WvOFC2LevRNNoTy0c3FqK?si=QfHsFL58QXuyQPhiU43s4w&nd=1" target="_blank">space-age pop songs</a>. Nothing about Peristyle’s chic and elegant letterforms suggested the deadpan romp of “The Planet Plan” by United Future Organization, let alone “Music To Watch Space Girls By” from the ill-advised (but delicious) Leonard Nimoy Presents Mr. Spock’s Music from Outer Space, but there they were. Something in the fonts was provoking an afterimage of the otherworldly, as if the typeface was sliding in and out of a parallel universe of high-tech spycraft and low-tech brawls with rubber-masked aliens. It might have had something to do with a new eyeglass prescription. But I liked the effect, and started thinking about creating an alternate, space-age version of the typeface, one with a little more funk, and a lot more fun.
I wondered if softer edges, a measured dose of seventies retrofuturism, and some proper draftsmanship might produce a typeface not only suitable for sci-fi potboilers, but for more serious projects, too: why not a line of skin care products, a fitness system, a high-end digital camera, or a music festival? I put a pin in the idea, wondering if there’d ever be a project that called for equal parts sobriety and fantasy. And almost immediately, exactly such a project appeared.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/sagittarius-lowercase-specimen-2.svg">
<h2>The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction</h2>
<a href="https://www.jessesword.com/?" target="_blank">Jesse Sheidlower</a> is a lexicographer, a former Editor at Large for the Oxford English Dictionary, and a longtime friend. He’s someone who takes equal pleasure in the words ‘usufructuary’ and ‘megaboss,’ and therefore a welcome collaborator for the typeface designer whose love of the Flemish baroque is matched by a fondness for alphabets made of logs. Jesse was preparing to launch <a href="https://sfdictionary.com" target="_blank">The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction,</a> a comprehensive online resource dedicated to the terminology of the genre, whose combination of scholarship and joy was a perfect fit for the typeface I imagined. For linguists, there’d be well-researched citations to explain how the hitherto uninvented ‘force field’ and ‘warp speed’ came to enter the lexicon. For science fiction fans, there’d be definitive (and sometimes surprising) histories of the argot of Stars both Trek and Wars. And for everyone, there’d be the pleasure of discovering science fiction’s less enduring contributions, from ‘saucerman’ to ‘braintape,’ each ripe for a comeback. A moderated, crowdsourced project, the dictionary is now online and growing every day. You’ll find it dressed in three font families from H&Co: <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/styles/screensmart" target="_blank">Whitney ScreenSmart</a> for its text, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/decimal/how-to-use#decimal-symbol-boxes" target="_blank">Decimal</a> for its navigational icons, and <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sagittarius/styles/sagittarius">Sagittarius</a> for its headlines — with some of the font’s more fantastical alternate characters turned on.
{carousel_sagittarius_desktop}
{carousel_sagittarius_mobile}
<h2>The New Typeface</h2>
Sagittarius is a typeface whose rounded corners and streamlined forms give it a romantically scientific voice. In the interest of versatility, its letterforms make only oblique references to specific technologies, helping the typeface remain open to interpretation. But for projects that need the full-throated voice of science fiction, a few sets of digital accessories are included, which designers can introduce at their own discretion. There are <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sagittarius/how-to-use#sagittarius-stylistic-sets">alternate letters</a> with futuristic pedigrees, from the barless A popularized by Danne & Blackburn’s 1975 ‘worm’ logo for NASA, to a disconnected K recalling the 1968 RCA logo by Lippincott & Margulies. A collection of digitally-inspired symbols are included for decorative use, from the evocative <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sagittarius/how-to-use#sagittarius-micr-substitution-a">MICR symbols</a> of electronic banking, to the obligatory <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sagittarius/how-to-use#sagittarius-codabar-substitution-a">barcodes</a> that forever haunt human–machine interactions. More widely applicable are the font’s <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sagittarius/how-to-use#sagittarius-fist-arrow-substitution-arrow">arrows and manicules</a>, and the automatic substitutions that resolve thirty-four awkward combinations of letters with streamlined <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sagittarius/how-to-use#sagittarius-ligatures-a">ligatures</a>.
Sagittarius takes its name from the constellation in the zodiac, and home to some of astronomy’s most inspiring discoveries. In 1977, a powerful radio signal originating in the Sagittarius constellation was considered by many to be the most compelling recorded evidence of extraterrestrial life. Thanks to an astronomer’s enthusiastically penned comment, the 72-second transmission became known as the Wow! signal, and it galvanized support for one of science’s most affecting projects, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (seti). More recently, Sagittarius has been identified as the location of a staggering celestial discovery: a supermassive black hole, some 44 million kilometers in diameter, in the Galactic Center of the Milky Way. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 04 Feb 2021 00:03:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-sagittarius#2234</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Best News of the Week]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/biden-harris-logo</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[And the second best news is getting to see the logo I created for the ticket, a collaboration with Senior Creative Advisor to the campaign Robyn Kanner, which evolves the earlier mark by Aimee Brodbeck at Mekanism. What a wonderful and uplifting announcement this piece of typography gets to accompany: that the formidable Senator Kamala Harris will join the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee in a bid for the White House.
I can’t remember an election in which so much attention (and speculation) has surrounded the choice of a running mate, nor having such a large field of eminently qualified candidates to choose from. A consequential decision at an unpredictable time, conducted under absolute secrecy, poses an interesting dilemma to the typographer: how do you create a logo without knowing for certain what the words will say? Logos, after all, are meaningfully informed by the shapes of their letters, and a logo designed for an eisenhower will hardly work for a taft. The solution, naturally, involves the absurd application of brute force: you just design all the logos you can think of, based on whatever public information you can gather. Every credible suggestion spotted in an op-ed was added to the list that we designers maintained, and not once did the campaign even hint at a preference for one name over another.
While the press debated the merits of the candidates’ backgrounds, my discussions concerned the shapes of their names. Short names versus long ones; names that began with awkwardly-shaped letters; names with ornery kerning pairs. Names whose letters aligned strangely with biden, disqualifying entire categories of visual arrangement; names that run long, thanks to a W or M, or short because of an I, or all three at once. ‘Heterogrammatical’ names, which contain no repeating letters; names that are <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/text-for-proofing-fonts">schnapps-words</a>. One peculiar feature of political design is that each logo is beholden to the others, which allows the campaign to safely prepare an identity that anticipates last-minute developments. Another is how it affects the usual pattern of advocacy and critique: recommending a logo that works for only a specific handful of candidates, there’s no way of truly knowing what calculus will inform the feedback, because you never know if you’re working with placebos. By necessity, good political design is a rigorous, single-blind study.
As both a designer (second) and a citizen (first), I am immensely pleased with the news, and enormously proud to have worked with Robyn and her team to create the typography that befits these two extraordinary public servants. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2020 01:14:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/biden-harris-logo#2166</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Type Goes to the Emmys!]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/going-to-the-emmys</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[I’m thrilled to discover that my episode of the Netflix original documentary series Abstract: The Art of Design has been nominated for a <a href="https://www.emmys.com/awards/nominees-winners/2020/outstanding-main-title-design" target="_blank">2020 Primetime Emmy Award</a> for Outstanding Main Title Design. If ever there was a meaningful category for a typographer, this is it!
Designers know that typography plays a critical role in filmmaking, never more so than in a series like Abstract, and most especially in an episode devoted to typeface design. This is a documentary in which the visible typography of the city is overlaid with typographic annotations, seamlessly segueing into an opening credit sequence that’s used not merely to introduce the story, but to begin telling it. I’m overjoyed that this splendid piece of filmmaking has been singled out for recognition.
While I had the privilege of contributing the most atomic raw materials to the main titles, the nomination honors a sequence that’s the work of the Abstract team, beginning with Executive Producers Scott Dadich, Morgan Neville, and Dave O’Connor, Director Brian Oakes, Motion Graphics Producer Paula Chowles, Creative Director Allie Fisher, Motion Graphics Designer Anthony Zazzi, and Composers Timo Elliston and Brian Jones, to whom I am extraordinarily grateful. I’m equally honored to be in such fine company for the nomination, which this episode of Abstract shares with Carnival Row, Godfather of Harlem, The Morning Show, The Politician, Watchmen, and Westworld.
The 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards will be broadcast on September 20. (In an irresistible coincidence, the visual identity for the event uses our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/decimal/overview">Decimal</a> typeface, whose creation is the subject of this episode of Abstract.) If you haven’t seen it, I hope you’ll spend some time with the series: it’s still <a href="https://www.netflix.com/title/80057883?trackId=14277283" target="_blank">streaming on Netflix</a> in 190 countries, and available in thirty languages. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 03 Aug 2020 21:19:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/going-to-the-emmys#2164</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Introducing Sentinel Pro]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/meet-sentinel-pro</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[I’m delighted to introduce today’s expansion of our Sentinel family. Everything from ‘Fonts by Hoefler&Co’ to the headline above is set in Sentinel, making it one of the typefaces on which I depend the most — a distinction I share with the thousands of designers who’ve made Sentinel a part of their work. Today’s new <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/sentinel/overview">Sentinel Pro</a> includes a number of new features, including one that’s occasioned by our recent working-from-home, and another that’s been on the drawing board for nearly thirty years, a new personal record for the slow simmer.
<h2>What’s New</h2>
The new Sentinel Pro adds <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sentinel/how-to-use#sentinel-creating-contrasting-textures">small caps</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sentinel/how-to-use#sentinel-tabular-figures">tabular figures</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sentinel/how-to-use#sentinel-fractions">fractions</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sentinel/how-to-use#creating_charts_tables">numerics</a>, and more. We’ve updated the fonts with the newest members of the character set — the rupee and ruble symbols, the capital and small cap eszett, the numero — and designed two sets of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sentinel/how-to-use#sentinel-stylistic-sets">printers’ fists</a> (or ‘manicules’) that Netflix viewers will know <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/type-design-on-netflix">I can’t resist</a>. All of these additions have been created in both the multipurpose Sentinel Pro and the web-optimized <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sentinel/styles/screensmart">Sentinel ScreenSmart Pro</a>, an adaptation of the family that’s specially engineered for text sizes in the browser; you can see Sentinel ScreenSmart at work in the font’s <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sentinel/design-notes">Design Notes</a> section.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/sentinel-smart-fraction-sidebar.svg">
<h2>Only in 2020…</h2>
This season, while everyone at H&Co has been working from home, we’ve all been spending a little extra time with domestic projects. The hours we’ve logged with cookbooks, online recipes, woodworking plans, and patterns for sewing facemasks has reminded us just how many fractions there are in the world — and just how inconvenient they are to typeset. We’ve all seen instructions that backslide into the occasional ‘1/2’ where ‘½’ was intended, as well as countless improvisations for connecting whole numbers to their fractional parts. (The manuscript that reads ‘8-1/2’ often produces ‘8-½’ instead of the desired ‘8½,’ a slippery typo that’s hard to detect, and harder still to fix using a wholesale find-and-change.) In speaking with cookbook designers, we’ve come up with a new approach for typesetting fractions that we think might make them easier to wrangle, and we’ve baked this new mechanism directly into the new Sentinel Pro fonts. You’ll find more about how this works in the ‘<a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sentinel/how-to-use#sentinel-smart-fractions">Smart Fractions</a>’ section of Sentinel’s How to Use page, along with a few more automated features to help make fine typography that much more attainable in a production workflow.
{carousel_sentinel_desktop}
{carousel_sentinel_mobile}
<h2>Sentinel Ornaments</h2>
In the early nineties, I fell in love with a set of nineteenth century decorative printers’ dashes that were reproduced in a journal article. I went about faithfully digitizing them, as an exercise in understanding what made them tick, but quickly discovered just how unforgiving digital outlines can be when it comes to capturing the charming idiosyncrasies of metal type. Reducing some shapes to their underlying geometries made them sterile, but recording their every inconsistency made them awkward. Some shapes were so disfigured by the effects of printing that it was difficult to guess what the original typefounder had even intended. These ornaments have been my rainy day project for the better part of thirty years, and their solution only recently came into focus. I took the opportunity to prune the original set, and come up with nearly two hundred additional shapes in a sympathetic style. Their new form shares many of Sentinel’s motifs, so I’ve welcomed them into the family: these new fonts, <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/sentinel/styles/sentinelornaments">Sentinel Ornaments</a> Bright and Dark, are available as a package, and also included in Sentinel Pro. They’re exactly what I’d hoped for: not merely a means to reproduce some handsome historical artifact, but a robust and well-appointed toolkit for creating new and more relevant kinds of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sentinel/how-to-use#using_ornaments">typographic decoration</a>.
My thanks to the team at H&Co who contributed to this project, especially Colin Ford who took on the challenge of constructing and painstakingly testing Sentinel’s new fraction feature, and Sara Soskolne who joined me on my mad odyssey into ornaments and manicules. Whether you’re a designer who relies on Sentinel already, or are taking an interest in the fonts for the first time, I hope the new Sentinel Pro will find a welcome home in your own font library. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 15 Jul 2020 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/meet-sentinel-pro#2159</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typography for Biden]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/biden-fonts</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[On Independence Day, Vice President Joe Biden’s presidential campaign began rolling out a new visual identity built on two typefaces by Hoefler&Co: the sans serif <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/decimal/overview">Decimal</a>, and the seriffed <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/mercury-text/overview">Mercury Text</a>. We could not be more proud to see our work support a campaign of nuanced thinking and decisive action, in the critical election before us.
When I was approached by <a href="https://twitter.com/robynkanner" target="_blank">Robyn Kanner</a>, Senior Creative Advisor to <a href="https://joebiden.com" target="_blank">Biden For President</a>, she shared with me one of the campaign’s most interesting communications challenges: its reliance on sophisticated and irreducible messages, which would need the clarifying effects of typography. Kanner described this in musical terms, talking about the ways in which rhythms and harmonic resolutions can shape the contours of a long lyric. For me, this resonated with the typography of America’s revolutionary period, and its vogue for capitalizing significant words: “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” as these unalienable rights are famously styled in The Declaration of Independence.
Working together, we came up with some guidelines for the campaign’s typography, which would help articulate thoughtful messages with attentive typography. Words of action would be set in Decimal’s declarative small capitals, while the supporting syntax would rely on Mercury Text Grade Four. Both fonts are considered and unobvious choices for a national campaign: less than a year old, Decimal is a contemporary typeface, but one that’s rooted in the same traditions as our most enduring designs, while the time-tested Mercury is a stalwart but adventurous text face designed to take on any challenge. Both choices feel especially apt.
The words above come from the Vice President Biden’s <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CCOQXpXgX6v/" target="_blank">address</a> on the Fourth of July, a surprisingly candid assessment of the unfinished American project. We at Hoefler&Co are honored that our work is helping give form to these ideas, and serving a campaign of optimism, determination, and ideas. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 07 Jul 2020 05:46:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/biden-fonts#2122</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Text for Proofing Fonts]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/text-for-proofing-fonts</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Type designers love a good pangram. Pangrams, of course, are sentences that contain each letter of the alphabet at least once, of which the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog is surely the most famous. Lettering artists of the previous generation bequeathed us jackdaws love my big sphinx of quartz; puzzlers are fond of the impossibly compact Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx for its 26-letter world record. Sometime in the early nineties, I whiled away an entire afternoon in a San Francisco café coming up with a bunch of my own, honoring typeface designers (mix Zapf with Veljović and get quirky Béziers), and philosophers (you go tell that vapid existentialist quack Freddy Nietzsche that he can just bite me, twice), and the uplifting grace of a cosmos in balance (Wham! Volcano erupts fiery liquid death onto ex-jazzbo Kenny G.) Pangrams are unctuous little brain ticklers, challenging to concoct, droll to read, and immensely popular for presenting fonts.
I find them singularly useless in type design, and I don’t use them in my work.

<h2>The Problem with Pangrams</h2>
In years past, our proofs were full of pangrammatic foxes and lynxes and the rest, which made for some very merry reading. But invariably, I’d find myself staring down a lowercase J, and if I questioned the amount of space assigned to its left side, I’d set off in search of some confirmation in the proof. Each time, I’d be reminded that while pangrams delivered all kinds of jocks and japes and jutes and judges, even our prodigious list featured not a single word with a J in the middle.{footnote_1} I also started to notice that Xs had an unusually strong affinity for Ys in pangrams, because pangrams make a sport of concision. Words like foxy and oxygen deliver real bang for your buck if you’re out to craft a compact sentence, but to the typeface designer noticing that the pair XY looks consistently wrong, none of these words will reveal which letter is at fault. I’d find myself rewriting the pangrams, popping in an occasional ‘doxology’ to see if the X was balanced between round letters, or ‘dynamo’ to review the Y between flat ones.
The far more pernicious issue with pangrams, as a means for evaluating typefaces, is how poorly they portray what text actually looks like. Every language has a natural distribution of letters, from most to least common, English famously beginning with the E that accounts for one eighth of what we read, and ending with the Z that appears just once every 1,111 letters.{footnote_2} Letter frequencies differ by language and by era — the J is ten times more popular in Dutch than English; biblical English unduly favors the H thanks to archaisms like thou and sayeth — but no language behaves the way pangrams do, with their forced distribution of exotics. Seven of the most visually awkward letters, the W, Y, V, K, X, J, and Z, are among the nine rarest in English, but pangrams force them into every sentence, guaranteeing that every paragraph will be riddled with holes. A typeface designer certainly can’t avoid accounting for these unruly characters, but there’s no reason that they should be disproportionately represented when evaluating how a typeface will perform.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hco-proof-frequency-2B.svg">
 
<h2>A New Approach</h2>
In 2015, I dumped the pangrams we’d accumulated and rewrote our proofs from scratch, trading their wacky and self-satisfied cleverness for lists of words that are actually illustrative. My initial goal was to show each letter between flat- and round-sided neighbors, to illustrate categorically how each letter was spaced. (While drawing, type designers use strings such as nnsnonosoo to evaluate how a lowercase s fits between flat letters and round ones, judged by evaluating the fragments nsn and oso. Elsewhere in this string are three ‘control’ textures: the all-flat nn, the all-round oo, and the mixed-shape nono, which offer a baseline against which to measure any turbulence caused by the s.) Anecdotally, I know that the words “ensnare” and “boson” illustrate these same relationships, so I set about finding words that were similarly useful for the rest of the alphabet, using a combination of algorithmic dictionary searches and personal preference.
I also thought it might be useful if our proofs demonstrated each letter at the start of a word, and at the end, and also — crucially — doubled: letters like s and g take on mysterious properties once they start to accumulate, making words like “missing” and “buggy” often illuminating. (Some German-speaking typographers call these ‘schnapps-words,’ an endearing tribute to boozy double-vision. Satisfyingly, schnapps is itself a schnapps-word.) Even better than the schnapps-word “buggy,” which positions the gg pair next to an awkward y, would be something with a neutral context: the word “smuggle” does the job, with its flat-sided u and l.
But most importantly, I wanted to organize the text logically, so that instead of spending a whole afternoon stalking a wild K in the bush, I’d always know exactly where to find it. I thought I might further ease the process by choosing words that were familiar, comfortable to read, easy to remember, and easy to hear over the phone, to provide a little succor before the project of kerning individual pairs of letters would begin, and we’d find ourselves exiled to a bloodcurdling realm of Grijpskerks and Quijquemeyas.
Finally, I wanted the text to have the visual cadences of my native English, in which words of variable but digestible length are punctuated by shorter ones. Type, after all, should be something that you want to read.
Here’s the result:
<div class="addendum">
Hoefler’s Proof: Lowercase 1.0
Angel Adept Blind Bodice Clique Coast Dunce Docile Enact Eosin Furlong Focal Gnome Gondola Human Hoist Inlet Iodine Justin Jocose Knoll Koala Linden Loads Milliner Modal Number Nodule Onset Oddball Pneumo Poncho Quanta Qophs Rhone Roman Snout Sodium Tundra Tocsin Uncle Udder Vulcan Vocal Whale Woman Xmas Xenon Yunnan Young Zloty Zodiac. Angel angel adept for the nuance loads of the arena cocoa and quaalude. Blind blind bodice for the submit oboe of the club snob and abbot. Clique clique coast for the pouch loco of the franc assoc and accede. Dunce dunce docile for the loudness mastodon of the loud statehood and huddle. Enact enact eosin for the quench coed of the pique canoe and bleep. Furlong furlong focal for the genuflect profound of the motif aloof and offers. Gnome gnome gondola for the impugn logos of the unplug analog and smuggle. Human human hoist for the buddhist alcohol of the riyadh caliph and bathhouse. Inlet inlet iodine for the quince champion of the ennui scampi and shiite. Justin justin jocose for the djibouti sojourn of the oranj raj and hajjis. Knoll knoll koala for the banknote lookout of the dybbuk outlook and trekked. Linden linden loads for the ulna monolog of the consul menthol and shallot. Milliner milliner modal for the alumna solomon of the album custom and summon. Number number nodule for the unmade economic of the shotgun bison and tunnel. Onset onset oddball for the abandon podium of the antiquo tempo and moonlit. Pneumo pneumo poncho for the dauphin opossum of the holdup bishop and supplies. Quanta quanta qophs for the inquest sheqel of the cinq coq and suqqu. Rhone rhone roman for the burnt porous of the lemur clamor and carrot. Snout snout sodium for the ensnare bosom of the genus pathos and missing. Tundra tundra tocsin for the nutmeg isotope of the peasant ingot and ottoman. Uncle uncle udder for the dunes cloud of the hindu thou and continuum. Vulcan vulcan vocal for the alluvial ovoid of the yugoslav chekhov and revved. Whale whale woman for the meanwhile blowout of the forepaw meadow and glowworm. Xmas xmas xenon for the bauxite doxology of the tableaux equinox and exxon. Yunnan yunnan young for the dynamo coyote of the obloquy employ and sayyid. Zloty zloty zodiac for the gizmo ozone of the franz laissez and buzzing.
</div>
<h2>How to use this proof</h2>
The new proof begins with each of the capital letters bounded by flat-sided and round-sided neighbors: the capital A up against the flat side of the n, and then the round side of the d, in the pair “Angel Adept.” This pattern continues through the Z, with “Zloty Zodiac.”
From here, each sentence begins with a capital letter, in alphabetical order, making things easy to locate: everything connected with the lowercase K, for example, is in the “K-sentence,” which begins with the capital-K “Knoll.” The sentence includes examples of this letter at the head of a word, bordering flat and round neighbors (“knoll koala”), and then between flat and round letters (“banknote lookout”), where we can categorically see how they’re fitted with typographically-neutral forms. Each sentence proceeds to show the letter at the ends of words (“dybbuk outlook”), and concludes with a schnapps-word (“trekked”). I’ve sprinkled the proof with short fragments of connective tissue (and, of the, for the) to produce a pattern that’s plausibly comparable to real text, useful for those many times when the goal is not to evaluate the behavior of an individual letter, but rather to take in the text en masse, to appreciate its rhythm, its color, and its texture.
Because the text favors plain-sided letters for context — the hs and ns and ms delightfully known as “typographical sirloin{footnote_3}” — it consequently uses fewer characters with awkward silhouettes. This applies not only to the edge-case v, w, and y, with their diagonal profiles, but also the more common e, t, r, and c that are unavoidably cavernous on their right sides. (The omission of familiar letters always passes without notice, as lipogrammeur George Perec wickedly demonstrated in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void" target="_blank">La Disparition</a>, his 300-page novel written entirely without the benefit of the letter e.) Because the new font proofs overrepresent these neutral letters, they produce an unusually calm rhythm, which helps to cast into especially sharp relief any problems with individual letters. That is, any issues with the b should be immediately apparent from a mere glance at the B-sentence, where, amidst the agreeable sirloin, there is a concentration of the letter b nine times greater than statistics would suggest.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/pangram-frequency-1.svg">
 
<h2>Further Variations</h2>
Because upper- and lowercase letters have different properties — a lowercase d is round on the left and flat on the right, the exact opposite of a capital D — I’ve put together additional proofs for evaluating both capitals and small caps. These follow the same underlying scheme as the lowercase proof, and are designed to be used the same way: K-related issues are best evaluated by the K-sentence, which is alphabetized under K.
<div class="addendum">
Hoefler’s Proof: Uppercase 1.0
ABIDE ACORN OF THE HABIT DACRON FOR THE BUDDHA GOUDA QUAALUDE. BENCH BOGUS OF THE SCRIBE ROBOT FOR THE APLOMB JACOB RIBBON. CENSUS CORAL OF THE SPICED JOCOSE FOR THE BASIC HAVOC SOCCER. DEMURE DOCILE OF THE TIDBIT LODGER FOR THE CUSPID PERIOD BIDDER. EBBING ECHOING OF THE BUSHED DECAL FOR THE APACHE ANODE NEEDS. FEEDER FOCUS OF THE LIFER BEDFORD FOR THE SERIF PROOF BUFFER. GENDER GOSPEL OF THE PIGEON DOGCART FOR THE SPRIG QUAHOG DIGGER. HERALD HONORS OF THE DIHEDRAL MADHOUSE FOR THE PENH RIYADH BATHHOUSE. IBSEN ICEMAN OF THE APHID NORDIC FOR THE SUSHI SAUDI SHIITE. JENNIES JOGGER OF THE TIJERA ADJOURN FOR THE ORANJ KOWBOJ HAJJIS. KEEPER KOSHER OF THE SHRIKE BOOKCASE FOR THE SHEIK LOGBOOK CHUKKAS. LENDER LOCKER OF THE CHILD GIGOLO FOR THE UNCOIL GAMBOL ENROLLED. MENACE MCCOY OF THE NIMBLE TOMCAT FOR THE DENIM RANDOM SUMMON. NEBULA NOSHED OF THE INBRED BRONCO FOR THE COUSIN CARBON KENNEL. OBSESS OCEAN OF THE PHOBIC DOCKSIDE FOR THE GAUCHO LIBIDO HOODED. PENNIES PODIUM OF THE SNIPER OPCODE FOR THE SCRIP BISHOP HOPPER. QUANTA QOPHS OF THE INQUEST OQOS FOR THE CINQ COQ SUQQU. REDUCE ROGUE OF THE GIRDLE ORCHID FOR THE MEMOIR SENSOR SORREL. SENIOR SCONCE OF THE DISBAR GODSON FOR THE HUBRIS AMENDS LESSEN. TENDON TORQUE OF THE UNITED SCOTCH FOR THE NOUGHT FORGOT BITTERS. UNDER UGLINESS OF THE RHUBARB SEDUCE FOR THE MANCHU HINDU CONTINUUM. VERSED VOUCH OF THE DIVER OVOID FOR THE TELAVIV KARPOV FLIVVER. WENCH WORKER OF THE UNWED SNOWCAP FOR THE ANDREW ESCROW GLOWWORM. XENON XOCHITL OF THE MIXED BOXCAR FOR THE SUFFIX ICEBOX EXXON. YEOMAN YONDER OF THE HYBRID ARROYO FOR THE DINGHY BRANDY SAYYID. ZEBRA ZOMBIE OF THE PRIZED OZONE FOR THE FRANZ ARROZ BUZZING.
</div>
<h2>Best Practices</h2>
Because so many combinations appear more than once, it’s tempting to make notes wherever something is noticed, but I’ve found it useful to develop some discipline around this. If a rogue double O in “logbook” stands out, it’s best to confirm this observation in the O-sentence, where the word “hooded” unequivocally reveals whether or not these letters are behaving. This not only has the benefit of demonstrating the OO pair in a typographically neutral context, undisturbed by the open space of the B in “logbook”, it also helps you find your own notes, by keeping all your comments about the O together in the O-sentence.
Finally, there’s a proof for the small caps, whose text essentially duplicates the behavior of the capitals, with an additional section on top. In the words “Abide Acorn Anaheim,” we have not only a capital A next to flat and round small caps (B and C), but also the word “Anaheim” for comparing the capital and small cap forms in close proximity. These are included for every letter, i.e. “Babcock, Cocoon, Didion,” etc.
<div class="addendum">
Hoefler’s Proof: Small Caps 1.0
Abide Acorn Anaheim. Bench Bogus Babcock. Census Coral Cocoon. Demure Docile Didion. Ebbing Echoing Energetic. Feeder Focus Fiftieth. Gender Gospel Gogol. Herald Honors Hohokus. Ibsen Iceman Isinglass. Jennies Jogger Jejune. Keeper Kosher Kokopelli. Lender Locker Liliput. Menace Mccoy Mimosa. Nebula Noshed Nonesuch. Obsess Ocean Onondaga. Pennies Podium Popcorn. Quanta Qophs Queque. Reduce Rogue Reread. Senior Sconce Sesame. Tendon Torque Totality. Under Ugliness Usually. Versed Vouch Vivacious. Wench Worker Wowed. Xenon Xochitl Xerxes. Yeoman Yonder Yoyo. Zebra Zombie Zizek.
Abide abide acorn of the habit dacron for the buddha gouda quaalude. Bench bench bogus of the scribe robot for the aplomb jacob ribbon. Census census coral of the spiced jocose for the basic havoc soccer. Demure demure docile of the tidbit lodger for the cuspid period bidder. Ebbing ebbing echoing of the bushed decal for the apache anode needs. Feeder feeder focus of the lifer bedford for the serif proof buffer. Gender gender gospel of the pigeon dogcart for the sprig quahog digger. Herald herald honors of the dihedral madhouse for the penh riyadh bathhouse. Ibsen ibsen iceman of the aphid nordic for the sushi saudi shiite. Jennies jennies jogger of the tijera adjourn for the oranj kowboj hajjis. Keeper keeper kosher of the shrike bookcase for the sheik logbook chukkas. Lender lender locker of the child gigolo for the uncoil gambol enrolled. Menace menace mccoy of the nimble tomcat for the denim random summon. Nebula nebula noshed of the inbred bronco for the cousin carbon kennel. Obsess obsess ocean of the phobic dockside for the gaucho libido hooded. Pennies pennies podium of the sniper opcode for the scrip bishop hopper. Quanta quanta qophs of the inquest oqos for the cinq coq suqqu. Reduce reduce rogue of the girdle orchid for the memoir sensor sorrel. Senior senior sconce of the disbar godson for the hubris amends lessen. Tendon tendon torque of the united scotch for the nought forgot bitters. Under under ugliness of the rhubarb seduce for the manchu hindu continuum. Versed versed vouch of the diver ovoid for the telaviv karpov flivver. Wench wench worker of the unwed snowcap for the andrew escrow glowworm. Xenon xenon xochitl of the mixed boxcar for the suffix icebox exxon. Yeoman yeoman yonder of the hybrid arroyo for the dinghy brandy sayyid. Zebra zebra zombie of the prized ozone for the franz arroz buzzing.
</div>
 
I’m making these texts available with the hope that they’ll be useful to anyone looking critically at type, most of all the designers with whom I’ve been conducting <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/type-crits-on-twitter">free type clinics</a> on Twitter. I’d welcome anyone’s contributions or extensions, which you’re welcome to make on our <a href="http://github.com/hoeflerco/proofs" target="_blank">GitHub repo</a>: more than once, I’ve found myself wondering what speakers of other languages, and other script systems, might do with this approach.
My thanks to Lydia Hill for illustrating some of the beloved denizens of Camp Pangram, like the breezy kinkajou, piqued zebra, and warm-hearted hyrax above. I feel better about booting them from the font proofs, knowing that they’ll forever inhabit this dazzling realm of hyacinths, foxgloves, and jonquils. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 19 May 2020 10:34:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/text-for-proofing-fonts#2071</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Introducing Cesium]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-cesium</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[I always felt that our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/vitesse">Vitesse</a> typeface, an unusual species of slab serif, would take well to an inline. Vitesse is based not on the circle or the ellipse, but on a less familiar shape that has no common name, a variation on the ‘stadium’ that has two opposing flat edges, and two gently rounded sides. In place of sharp corners, Vitesse uses a continuously flowing stroke to manage the transition between upright and diagonal lines, most apparent on letters like M and N. A year of making this gesture with my wrist, both when drawing letterforms and miming their intentions during design critiques, left me thinking about a reduced version of the typeface, in which letters would be defined not by inside and outside contours, but by a single, fluid raceway. Like most straightforward ideas, this one proved challenging to execute, but its puzzles were immensely satisfying to solve.
Adding an inline to a typeface is the quickest way to reveal its secrets. All the furtive adjustments in weight and size that a type designer makes — relieving congestion by thinning the center arm of a bold E, or lightening the intersecting strokes of a W — are instantly exposed with the addition of a centerline. Adapting an existing alphabet to accommodate this inline called for renovating every single character (down to the capital I, the period, and even the space), in some cases making small adjustments to reallocate weight, at other times redesigning whole parts of the character set. The longer we worked on the typeface, the more we discovered opportunities to turn these constraints into advantages, solving stubbornly complex characters like € and § by redefining how an inline should behave, and using these new patterns to reshape the rest of the alphabet.
 
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/vitesse-vs-cesium.svg">
The outcome is our new typeface, Cesium®. It shares many of Vitesse’s qualities, its heartbeat an energetic thrum of motorsports and industry, and it will doubtless be welcome in both hardware stores and Hollywood. But we’ve been surprised by Cesium’s more reflective moods, its ability to be alert and softspoken at the same time. Much in the way that vibrant colors can animate a typeface, we’ve found that Cesium’s sensitivity to spacing most effectively changes its voice. Tighter leading and tracking turns up the heat, heightening Cesium’s sporty, high-tech associations, but with the addition of letterspacing it achieves an almost literary repose. This range of voices recommends Cesium not only to logos, book covers, and title sequences, but to projects that regularly must adjust their volume, such as identities, packaging, and editorial design. (Read more about <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/cesium/how-to-use">how to use Cesium</a>.)
{carousel_cesium_desktop}
{carousel_cesium_mobile}
As for its name: Cesium is a chemical element, one of only five metals that’s liquid at room temperature. Resembling quicksilver, cesium is typically stored in a glass ampule, where the tension between a sturdy outer vessel and its volatile contents is scintillating. The Cesium typeface hopes to capture this quality, its bright and insistent inline restrained by a strong and sinuous container.
Cesium is one of only three H&Co typefaces whose name comes from the periodic table, a distinction it shares with <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/mercury-display">Mercury</a> and <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/tungsten">Tungsten</a>. At a time when I considered a more sci-fi name for the typeface, I learned that these three elements have an unusual connection: they’re used together in the propulsion system of nasa’s Deep Space 1, the first interplanetary spacecraft powered by an ion drive. I found the association compelling, and adopted the name at once, with the hope that designers might employ the typeface in the same spirit of discovery, optimism, and invention. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 29 Apr 2020 15:37:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-cesium#2107</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Recommended Reading]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/recommended-reading-for-typographers</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[I suspect I’m not alone in my current appetite for reading: right now I’m craving things that are written with clarity, wit, honesty, and heart, and I very much need to hear from good-natured people of extraordinary ability who love what they do. Below are some of the books I’ve most enjoyed reading of late, three connected only tangentially with typography because their subjects are words, and two that are more expressly about design. All five share a sincerity, an attention to detail, and a sense of humor that has kept me smiling for weeks. I hope you’ll enjoy them as much as I have.

<h3 class="subhead-sentinel">Word by Word</h3>
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fatsis-word-freak.jpg">
Of the many books about words and dictionaries that I seem to have read, I can’t remember enjoying any quite as much as Word by Word, Kory Stamper’s account of life as a lexicographer. Stamper and her colleagues at Merriam-Webster write dictionaries, which surely bests my own weirdo profession for its ability to stump the uninitiated. You do what, now?
More than a mere tour of the scholarly work of gathering citations and writing entries, Word by Word is an exploration of the responsibilities of a working lexicographer, recounted from Stamper’s unique perspective and told with her delicious wit. There’s the business of engaging with the public: sure, politely declining your proposal for this kickass word that should totally be in the dictionary, but also answering the journalist who has found a moment of abominable racism casually lurking in a definition, and would like a statement fifteen minutes before airtime. There’s the ongoing project of revising the dictionary, from updating outmoded definitions (“marriage”) and confronting prejudice (“nude” colored stockings), to wtfing all manner of baffling weirdness, such as the children’s dictionary that merrily illustrates the word “up” with the sample phrase “blow up the bridge.” And then there’s the field research, collecting and reading everything, not just newspapers and novels, but advertisements, transcripts, pamphlets, liner notes, and the occasional unopened cardboard cylinder of oatmeal that someone brought in because it offered a promising citation for “steel cut.”
Stamper rejoices in the nuance of English and welcomes its expanding perimeter, steadfastly refusing to judge, and instead telling the truth about how language is used. She’s quick to deflate pompous fallacies, reminding us that Shakespeare employed double negatives and Jane Austen used “ain’t,” and that every standard for Good Grammar boils down to someone’s arbitrary ideas about style. “We think of English as a fortress to be defended,” she writes, “but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets.”
<h3 class="subhead-sentinel">Dreyer’s English</h3>
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/stamper-word-by-word.jpg">
If you are a compulsive oversharer and spoiler of the books you read — haha! listen to this, this part’s great: — and already too familiar with your loved ones’ scowls as they burrow deeper into their pillows, don their headphones, or simply take off for the goddamned living room, you might approach Dreyer’s English with caution. It is a style guide for writers, and while it’s demonstrably useful as a handbook, it’s also acidly funny, and a bonafide page-turner. Dreyer is joyously eclectic but unshowy in his anecdotage, that rarest of artists who likes to color with all the crayons in the box, and still manages to create something splendid. It’s difficult to resist quoting my favorite passages in full, but equally hard to limit myself to sharing only a few sublime moments, such as the interlude about thorny punctuation entitled The Possessivization of Donald Trump, Jr.: A Grand Guignol in One Act, the entries for T. S. Eliot and Alanis Morissette, and the section discussing the words come/cum, footnotes and all. Footnotes most of all.
Benjamin Dreyer is the executive managing editor and copy chief at Random House, and copy chiefs are a curious literary fulcrum: they may assist writers, but they serve readers, by working to make writing more clear. It’s a job that’s part lifeguard, part rabbi, part authority, and part best friend, requiring the ability to understand one’s authors so well that one can help them be better at being themselves. This may involve pencilling out a redundant word that was written without thinking (all-time record, hollow tube), or observing that a postcard from the fifties would have been addressed not “Boston, MA 02128” but rather “Boston 28, Mass.” It may involve asking whether you noticed, or are at all concerned, that the climactic scene in your book is shared by four characters whose names all begin with the letter M. Copy chiefs also know that Finnegan’s Wake doesn’t actually have that apostrophe, that Chewbacca was not a Wookie but a Wookiee, and that neither Alice in Wonderland nor The Diary of Anne Frank is the correct title of the book you’re thinking of.
Dreyer’s English is organized as a reference book but served like a feast, each course distinctive and exciting. Its author takes an unabashedly personal approach to style, candidly copping to his choices with a refreshing insouciance. (Each moment of subjectivity or contradiction is disclosed with an undercurrent of yup, that’s how I like to do it, whatcha gonna do.) I enjoyed the book first as a cover-to-cover read, later as an indispensable desk reference, and most recently as an intermittent literary refuge for these verbally tortured times.
<h3 class="subhead-sentinel">Word Freak</h3>
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/dreyers-english.jpg">
In the introduction to Word Freak, a man who plays professional Scrabble witheringly characterizes author Stefan Fatsis as “a good living room player.” This comes at a point where Fatsis is routinely finishing games with scores north of 400 — already better than I do today, and I always fancied myself a pretty good player — and this is our introduction to a realm of competitive play that transcends mere vocabularistic prowess. In one memorable exchange, a player opens a game with the word entasis, scoring a fifty point bonus for using all seven of his tiles; his opponent calmly counters by placing realise atop it, scoring not only for his own seven-letter word, but for the seven two-letter words it produces. This has yet to happen in my living room.
A longtime sports journalist, Fatsis has a natural gift for capturing the drama of the contest and the heroism of its contestants. We are introduced to one top-ranked player, so singularly devoted to the game that he’s never moved out of his parents’ house, where he tirelessly plays online for fourteen hours a day; we then meet another player, a stage performer who casually tried the game at a friend’s suggestion, and discovered a preternatural ability that landed him at the very top of the field as well. (Needless to say, a throughline of the book is how much the first guy hates the second guy, and their moments of conflict and cooperation are recounted with wicked delight.) These are players for whom words like haftarot and oxtering are common, as are scores in the high seven hundreds. Word Freak is not only a look into this peculiar alphabetical precinct, but a joyful chronicle of Fatsis’ own development as an accomplished player, a wordplay enthusiast, and a lover of words.
<h3 class="subhead-sentinel">House Industries Lettering Manual</h3>
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/house-lettering-manual.jpg">
I wonder what the elevator pitch was for Ken Barber’s new book. Because Ken and I have known each other for twenty-some years, its contents make perfect sense to me: it integrates hands-on instruction, case studies of his adept work at House Industries, photographs of the author in costumes and wigs, meditations on the practice of typography, and references to both Swedish and Norwegian black metal (pp. 15, 194.) It is embossed with a crocodile print, and has a foreword by Jimmy Kimmel. To someone who knows Ken and his work, this is all of a piece, a signature blend of serious artistry and not taking himself too seriously, the result of a career spent observing, teaching, laughing, and above all, drawing. Whether or not he slipped all this into the brief may never be known, but how lucky we are that he did.
Ken and his colleagues at House are famous for a sincere eclecticism that embraces Hot Wheels and Giambattista Bodoni with equal affection (pp. 162, 140), which makes the House Industries Lettering Manual doubly noteworthy: first for its willingness to draw upon so many different traditions, and second for its admirable restraint. For a book that straddles three genres — it is part manual, part monograph, and part essay — Ken has included the best of what each has to offer, and trimmed absolutely all of the fat. The case studies, concise rather than exhaustive, are chosen with care, which only serves to make the occasional forays into tracing paper iterations that much more satisfying. As a manual, the book focuses on genuine instruction, and resists the temptation to pad its pages with genre examples. (So many books about lettering are a few pages of tips, followed by a Bataan Death March of stock alphabets in styles from blackletter to sans serif — a practice that was arguably useful in the days before the internet, but is unforgivably pointless today.) Smartly, Ken has instead created focussed illustrations of typographic phenomena, offering practical advice about the shaping of letters and words, and employing a useful and intuitive nomenclature that goes far beyond x-heights and ascenders. The book’s differentiation between component, area, and perimeter drawings was new to me, as was its definition of rolling as opposed to arcing lettering, a byproduct of Ken’s collaboration with all manner of lettering artists. In a sidebar about energetic letterforms, I found his distinction between vertical, proportional, and rotational bounce to be useful handles for something I’ve viscerally felt, but never thought to dissect. Ken’s well-illustrated observations are easily understood and quickly absorbed, seeming completely second nature once you’ve taken them in, always the hallmark of the very best teaching.
<h3 class="subhead-sentinel">Designing Graphic Props for Filmmaking</h3>
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/atkins.jpg">
As a designer, it’s nearly impossible to surrender myself to the fantasy of a period drama, because I’m forever anticipating the moment when a ham-fisted prop will shatter the illusion. It’s not the anachronisms that trouble me — I try to distance myself from the pedantic dingdongs who complain about a 1958 magazine using a 1962 typeface — and moreover I’ve always felt that one of the strengths of a new typeface is its ability to pass for vintage when it’s <a href="https://discover.typography.com/theme/wanderlust/">artfully arranged</a> in <a href="https://discover.typography.com/theme/eyes-only/">period style</a>. Rather, it’s the category errors that wreck movies, those moments when the entire mode of communication is wrong: broadsheet newspapers with screamer headlines, Cold War identity papers that are typeset instead of typewritten, signboards outside Dickensian shopfronts that use lowercase letters, engraved invitations that are set in a font of any kind — the list goes on. Even the non-specialists in the audience can feel these mistakes, the way we all know when a hemline or a fender feels out of place. But somehow the cars and costumes get plenty of attention, and the lettering is so often neglected, unless someone like Annie Atkins is attached to the project.
Atkins creates the on-screen graphic art that contributes so powerfully to the atmosphere of a film. Her period work is pitch perfect, recreating Cold War New York for Bridge of Spies, and Victorian London for Penny Dreadful, and the mythical Kingdom of Zubrowka in Wes Anderson’s beloved fantasia The Grand Budapest Hotel. As much as the actors’ performances, it is Atkins’ props that sell the story, her pageant of banknotes and pastry boxes that so convincingly renders the bittersweet enchantment of a crumbling mitteleuropa.
Atkins’ delight in printed ephemera is alloyed with an incisive perception, and her work carries the conviction of an artist who has learned not merely to admire but to see. So many of her props are informed by an understanding of cultural context — nineteenth century invoices pierced by a needle instead of a punch, a background sign displaying the historically correct price for a haircut — and are equally shaped by the fascinating requirements of filmmaking. The parts of her book that deal with production are among my favorites, exposing an entire dimension of graphic art that’s designed to go unobserved. It’s not difficult to imagine that a set dressing, designed to be placed deep in an unfocussed background, will have different requirements than the “hero props” intended to be handled by actors and captured in close-up. But I’d never considered that paper is fragile, even without perspiration and hot lights, or that film shoots are given to multiple takes, or that many props are designed to be altered or destroyed by the action. I’ll be thinking of Atkins next time I see a character tear up a telegram, and I’ll wonder not only how many copies had to be fabricated for that single shot, but if it was her who managed to imprint each with an identical splash of coffee. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 16 Apr 2020 18:27:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/recommended-reading-for-typographers#2091</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typography for Warren]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/elizabeth-warren-logo</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Senator Elizabeth Warren withdrew from the presidential race today, having run a campaign of candor and intelligence that strengthened the debate, and having shared a wealth of original ideas that can only strengthen the nation.
We had the pleasure of working with Blue State Digital on the Warren campaign: they selected our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/ringside/overview">Ringside</a> and <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/verlag/overview">Verlag</a> typefaces for the identity, and commissioned H&Co’s Jonathan Hoefler and Sara Soskolne to refine the logo that they designed, one created to bridge and serve these two distinct typefaces.
We’re grateful to have again worked with Matt Ipcar and his team at Blue State Digital, with whom we collaborated on the <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/can-we-add-serifs-to-gotham">Obama-Biden 2012 logo</a>, and to have been afforded the chance to contribute to a campaign of ideas from an extraordinary thinker and leader. Senator Warren, thank you for raising the level of public discourse, for your continuing public service, and for your unwavering vision of a country that serves all the people. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 05 Mar 2020 05:21:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/elizabeth-warren-logo#2115</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Type Crits on Twitter]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/type-crits-on-twitter</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[From time to time, I’ve been invited to offer advice to designers wrestling with thorny letterforms, and have shared my observations on Twitter. Sometimes these are conversations with first time type designers, other times they’re with accomplished lettering artists who just need a second set of eyes. I love these exchanges (no surprise, this is my day job at Hoefler&Co), so I thought I’d make this a regular feature, open to anyone who’s interested in type.
{carousel_type_crits}
Above, excerpts of some of the conversations we’ve been having. I’m delighted by the range of projects people have been sending my way, and the opportunities they’ve provided to discuss all the factors that influence a typeface: not only local details (like ‘how to draw an S’), but philosophical topics as well. Swipe through and you’ll find links to each of these critiques.
If you’re a designer who could use a sounding board, send me a direct message and I’ll do my best to get in touch. I’m especially happy to hear from students, from anyone in under-represented communities, and from designers who don’t have anyone to bounce ideas off of — not just people working independently, but anyone who’s the lone type fanatic in their world. We’ve all been there! —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 24 Feb 2020 19:15:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/type-crits-on-twitter#2061</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[New from H&Co: Type Capsules]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/type-capsules</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Type capsules are a new and simple way to get started with fine typography. For students, they’re an affordable way to start using professional fonts; for practicing designers, they’re a new pathway toward building a library of fonts that will last a lifetime. And for non-designers, they’re an informed place to begin, offering not only suggestions about which fonts to start with, but ideas about how to get the most out of them.
Today we’re introducing three type capsules, each created for a different kind of communications: a Foundation capsule as a basic typographic toolbox, a Digital capsule for designer-developers, and a Literary capsule for publishing. I chose each of these fonts personally, by working in reverse: starting by designing the kinds of things that could most benefit from better typography, and selecting those fonts that best fit the bill — fine-tuning each selection along the way, to ensure that every type capsule stands alone as a complete, effective, and flexible tool for design. —JH
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/1920-white-rule-opacity_050.png">
<h3 class="subhead-sentinel xl"><a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/foundation-type-capsule/overview">No. 1: Foundation</a></h3>
The Foundation type capsule is a versatile toolbox for communications: a serif and a sans serif, plus an accent face to mark out guideposts that create points of entry.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/sidebar-stylelist-capsule-foundation.png">
Two of the families I find myself reaching for the most are the slab-serif <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sentinel/overview">Sentinel</a> and the sans serif <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/ideal-sans/overview">Ideal Sans</a>. Both are used throughout this website, whose recent redesign was a useful lesson in economy: with an eye toward bandwidth, we wanted to rely on as few fonts as possible, while creating templates that were varied and engaging. I’ve found this same thriftiness useful in other kinds of design work as well, and have discovered just how useful these particular fonts are in projects as wide-ranging as catalogs, product literature, and printed correspondence.
{carousel_capsule_foundation}
Designer Brian Hennings and I put together examples of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/foundation-type-capsule/how-to-use">nineteen different projects</a> built from the five styles in the Foundation capsule. Some show how the choice between fonts can change the voice in which text is read, others demonstrate ways in which these particular fonts can come together, to create unexpectedly sophisticated and multi-layered formats. As its name suggests, we think the Foundation type capsule is a great place to begin building a typographic library — or a great place to land, if you’re shaping all the communications for a small organization.
The $99 Foundation type capsule includes $125 in credits toward the purchase of its larger families: save $25 off <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/idlewild/overview">Idlewild</a>, $50 off <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/sentinel/overview">Sentinel</a>, and $50 off <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/ideal-sans/overview">Ideal Sans</a>.
The <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/foundation-type-capsule/overview" style="color: #ffffff;box-shadow: none;">Foundation Type Capsule,</a> $99 from H&Co.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/1920-white-rule-opacity_050.png">
<h3 class="subhead-sentinel xl"><a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/digital-type-capsule/overview">No. 2: Digital</a></h3>
A collection for designer-developers, the Digital type capsule features not only typefaces for creating finished products, but also the Operator Mono font for use in your favorite IDE.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/sidebar-stylelist-capsule-digital.png">
Developers have been overwhelmingly enthusiastic about the <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/operator/overview">Operator Mono</a> family that we created for programming. But not everyone needs all of the styles in its extended family, so we selected our two favorite fonts for the terminal — the screen-optimized Operator Mono ScreenSmart Book and Book Italic — as the core of our Digital type capsule, the second in the series.
{carousel_capsule_digital}
Working with Operator not only in the terminal, but while designing <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/digital-type-capsule/how-to-use">websites, apps, tutorials, and documentation</a> (not to mention what might be my favorite template for personal correspondence), I felt the need for another sans serif to use in counterpoint. The natural choice was <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/decimal/overview">Decimal</a>, our latest release, which itself was shaped by the input of web developers, who’d encouraged me to create the set of UI icons included in the fonts. We’ve paired these with a compact style of Gotham Extra Narrow that I’ve always found useful for headlines in sizes both large and small.
The $99 Digital type capsule includes $125 in credits toward the purchase of its larger families: save $25 off <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview">Gotham</a>, $50 off <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/operator/overview">Operator</a>, and $50 off <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/decimal/overview">Decimal</a>.
The <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/digital-type-capsule/overview" style="color: #ffffff;box-shadow: none;">Digital Type Capsule,</a> $99 from H&Co.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/1920-white-rule-opacity_050.png">
<h3 class="subhead-sentinel xl"><a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/literary-type-capsule/overview">No. 3: Literary</a></h3>
The Literary type capsule is designed with publishing in mind, its hard-working serif and sans serif crowned by a striking and articulate headline face.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/sidebar-stylelist-capsule-literary.png">
Where the Foundation capsule can handily render a catalog or a newsletter, I thought that designers tasked with more traditional publishing projects could benefit from a capsule of their own. For designers of books, magazines, and journals, we’ve created the Literary type capsule, with fonts up to the challenge of even the most complex and demanding editorial formats.
{carousel_capsule_literary}
The Literary capsule begins with our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/chronicle-text/styles/chronicletextprog2">Chronicle Text</a> typeface, originally designed for newspapers, and expands to include members of two less frequently seen families: the sans serif <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/ringside/styles/ringsideregular">Ringside Regular</a>, and the headline face <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/quarto/styles/quarto">Quarto</a>, both designs of recent vintage. We’ve designed <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/literary-type-capsule/how-to-use">eighteen examples</a> of formats that use these faces together, which range from a conservative opinion page to an energetic technology column, all the while explaining everything we’ve discovered about how to shape a flexible and powerful typographic palette.
The $99 Literary type capsule includes $125 in credits toward the purchase of its larger families: save $25 off <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/quarto/overview">Quarto</a>, $50 off <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/ringside/overview">Ringside</a>, and $50 off <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/chronicle-text/overview">Chronicle Text</a>.]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 05 Feb 2020 05:01:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/type-capsules#1948</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Inside “Abstract”]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/abstract-typography-episode</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[1. The most trivial parts take the most work. One of the most elaborate setups of the entire episode was the eleven second shot of me walking up Astor Place, which appears under narration during the opening credits. It took sixteen takes to get this right. As a typeface designer, I found this reassuringly familiar, thinking about the disproportionate effort that goes into drawing the rare bird §, compared with the everyday E.
2. Producers are skilled diplomats. Security guards don’t like television cameras, and they’re trained to move quickly. Twice, outside of midtown office buildings, I watched producer Sam LaCroix mollify some aggressive and twitchy enforcers in red jackets, who would have none of our nonsense about a font documentary or whatever. Each time, Sam’s calm and unhurried explanation was effective, insofar as it gave the crew enough time to surreptitiously get the shot.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/brian_oakes_jonathan_hoefler_2.jpg">
3. Focus engenders respect. Most reporting about typeface design devotes all of its energy to explaining graphic design, leaving little room for typography, and almost none for the actual typeface designer. I’m grateful that director Brian Oakes had the confidence to assume that anyone tuning in would already know what typography was, even if only in broad strokes, so we could use our episode to focus on shading in the details. I find myself yearning for this kind of respect in other kinds of reporting, and grateful whenever I encounter it.
<blockquote class="pullquote">
Rather than a profile, I wanted to be part of a documentary about typeface design itself.
</blockquote>
4. Even treasured memories are rarely enlightening. An early inquiry about whether I still had my high school yearbook helped clarify something up front: that what I wanted was less a biography, and more a documentary about typeface design that I could help create, and in which my work would be featured. I’m indebted to executive producers Scott Dadich and Dave “Doc” O’Connor for letting me so stubbornly argue this position, and for advocating it to the Netflix brass. As a result, we all got to spend more time on optical illusions and gothic alphabets, and less time on my regrettable senior year haircut. A win for everyone.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/netflix-cold-open-type-sites_6.jpg">
5. You don’t get to see the episode until it airs. Netflix takes the position that a biography should not be influenced by the wishes of its subject. I collaborated with the producers, director, and crew to create material for the episode, but had no control over its final outcome. With the episode now behind me, I can wholeheartedly commend their absolute adherence to the standards of journalism over entertainment, but it made for an anxious year: not because I ever doubted the team, but because the material was complex, and the process often opaque. How many of us would trust even our parents or our closest friends to accurately portray the nuances of what we do?
6. Designers regularly take leaps of faith. Taking part in a documentary means submitting yourself to a series of unordered vignettes that can seem disconnected, unpredictable, and rambling. You steel yourself with the hope that these will someday make sense in the hands of an able editor (who, it turns out, you’ll never meet.) Flying blind gave me a renewed appreciation for everyone who’s ever entrusted me to design a new typeface: having approved a handful of test characters, my clients have had to wait patiently while my team and I proceeded to draw the remaining five thousand glyphs, reassured only by my track record, their own optimism, and our mutual rapport.
7. Filmmaking is arduous. The day starts at 5:30 each morning, and wraps up thirteen hours later. It was taxing in every way, and I wasn’t even one of the many people carrying a flight case full of heavy and expensive equipment.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/blackletter-obelisk.jpg">
8. Great designers share. Biographies of creative people are notorious for slipping into the shopworn pattern of lionizing The Great Man, a lazy cliché that shouldn’t have survived into even the last century. In talking to Brian about my work at Hoefler&Co, and how it’s always a group effort, I was concerned that recounting an accurate story about teamwork might grate against a biography that was templated for a single subject. But he was confident that we could present things as they truly are, because…
<blockquote class="pullquote">
Making a film, like making a typeface, is collaborative work.
</blockquote>
9. Great directors are collaborative, not autocratic. Directors go into a project with what they hope is a clear vision, they entrust parts of it to people they respect and admire, they hold their ideas gently (eliciting input at every turn), and when outcomes are uncertain, they take the responsibility for making the call. I was enormously encouraged to see Brian working with his colleagues the way I work with mine. On our first day of shooting, I watched him rethink an entire sequence because sound recordist Brad Bergbom had concerns about how to mic the shot, and the resolution benefitted from the perspectives of director of photography Clair Popkin, and first assistant camera Graham Deneen, and even some suggestions from me, before Brian called the play.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/designers-at-hoefler-co.jpg">
10. Know for next time: study the shot list. The thing you wear to the first shoot on the first day will be the outfit you’re stuck with for the entire project, so that continuity can be maintained should an editor need to splice in footage from a different day. If shooting begins on the slushy hills of Green-Wood Cemetery, you’ll end up presenting yourself to viewers in 190 countries not wearing the English hand-lasted brogues that you bought for the occasion, but rather the muddy Timberlands that you keep in your car.
11. Expect friendly fire. When you’re shooting on city streets, curious onlookers have no compunction about walking right into frame, and asking you, right to your face, while the cameras right behind you are rolling, if you’re making a movie. This is how we lost many of those sixteen takes on Astor Place.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/clair_popkin_abstract_2.jpg">
12. Trained actors have skills that civilians don’t. Most of the takes were ruined not by pedestrians, but by me, because I couldn’t process my instructions about how to accommodate the steadicam operator and his fifty pounds of gear. “Walk slowly at first,” I was told, “so he can swing around you. And then speed up. But don’t change your pace, because of the music.” I found myself thinking about my actor friends, who in their college years always seemed to be either coming back from or heading off to a “movement class.” I was never really clear what went on in these classes, but I gather it has something to do with how to get shots like this in one take rather than sixteen.
13. Lighten up. In an early discussion about how we’d demonstrate the way large and small fonts differ, I brought up my favorite sight gag from the movie <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJoTBlDfVhk" target="_blank">Top Secret!</a>, and the possibility of using a lens called a ‘split diopter’ which I’d learned about from an equally beloved source, an irreverent but kindhearted Star Trek: TNG podcast called <a href="https://maximumfun.org/podcasts/greatest-generation/" target="_blank">The Greatest Generation.</a> More than just a chance to goof off with the director and dp over YouTube clips, our conversation helped set the tone for the episode, serving as a reminder that thoughtful critique doesn’t need to be deadly earnest, and that respectfulness doesn’t require taking yourself too seriously. I personally find design both meaningful and fun, don’t you?
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/split-diopter.jpg">
14. Storytelling needs editing, not embellishment. Anyone hoping to document typeface design learns quickly that behind this wonderful visual art are almost no visuals worth capturing. A typeface designer at work looks like a programmer or an accountant: we sit motionless before monitors, we tap at our keyboards, we confer with colleagues about esoteric problems that are invisible at a distance, we make our rounds to the laser printer. Most creative work is like this, which is why I suspect so many depictions of the creative process are so steroidally enhanced with theatrics: actual work is replaced with staged demonstrations, and ordinary challenges are whipped into existential crises. Everyone associated with Abstract was too smart for these kinds of histrionics, but it still left the question of how to turn what’s essentially quiet office work into compelling television. This is where filmmaking comes in.
15. Allow the storytelling to shape the story. Director Brian Oakes wisely kept an eye out for actual challenges — in both the design process and the filmmaking — that might precipitate a welcome change of scene. Our trip to the cemetery was prompted not by the development of the Parliament typeface, but by the need to demonstrate how gothic alphabets respond to shadows — and the obelisk we stumbled upon, quite by accident, really did alter the path I’ve decided to follow with the typeface. Our trip to the library was similarly motivated: after designer Sara Soskolne and I reached a dead end regarding the shape of the capital U in the <a data-event="click" data-event-category="navigation" data-event-label="Decimal" href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/decimal/overview">Decimal</a> typeface, it was Brian who prompted me to stretch my legs and let the camera follow. It’s not unlike the way presenting a typeface in a <a href="https://designshop.typography.com/collections/frontpage/products/specimen" target="_blank">specimen book</a>, or in <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/decimal/how-to-use">documentation</a>, has occasionally revealed the need to send a font back to the drawing board. An idea that can’t be elegantly presented might not be fully resolved, and I found filmmaking a valuable crucible for forging such ideas.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/netflix-cemetery-shoot_3.jpg">
16. Librarians are vital. The map division at the New York Public Library has an extraordinary collection{footnote_1}, but it was curator Ian Fowler and his staff who made the visit meaningful. I’ve spent enough time among special collections to know that the storyboard with a stick-figured JH pulling books from open stacks was never going to happen: we were instead going to consult with the library staff, submit a materials list in advance, and review each item individually. Ian’s knowledge of his subject and his collection turned what could have been idle tourism into a constructive and enjoyable morning, provoking some genuine exploration, and yielding some answers that measurably helped resolve the <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/decimal/overview">Decimal</a> typeface. Just as I hope this episode of Abstract helps to explain typeface design, I hope it helps dispel the notion that libraries are repositories of books, and librarians their mere custodians. It’s quite the reverse: it is librarians who are the invaluable resource, and books a mere part of their apparatus. Their insights cannot be googled.
17. Type designers lead the least glamorous lives. In the first season of Abstract, Nike’s Tinker Hatfield had delivered Michael Jordan for an appearance, and the episode about costume designer Ruth Carter in season two would feature Spike Lee, and Samuel L. Jackson, and Ryan Coogler. I may have done work for Barack Obama, Elizabeth Warren, Robert Redford, and Madonna, but I’ve never met any of them, so cadging a testimonial seemed unlikely. I am however grateful that Ryan Gosling made an appearance in my episode, even if we didn’t get to hang out on set.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/typography-complex-shots.jpg">
18. Practical effects are compelling. We spent a lot of time thinking about how to best illustrate different typographic illusions, and assumed at first that we’d make quick work of this with animation. But at some point we realized that only physical objects are unimpeachably honest, and manipulating them on camera might be as beguiling and astonishing as close-up magic. The tangible world remains more credible than the digital one.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/little_hand_twin.jpg">
19. Filmmaking has a lot of D-I-Y. For one of those segments, I designed a set of wooden props that were fabricated by the director himself. In another segment, we needed someone to serve as my hand double, and one of the show’s executive producers stepped up to fill the role. Everyone’s gumption, and everyone’s lack of pretense, really reminded me of home.
20. Documentarians are frugal. We are grateful to the unnamed big box store whose generous return policy made possible a surprising number of this episode’s lightly-used props and costumes.
21. Dress in layers. On that early December morning, I hadn’t expected the soundstage in dumbo to be unheated, especially given the open loading dock that admitted every fierce and freezing wind off the East River. But then I also hadn’t expected that lighting the set would require bridging ten circuit breakers to deliver 38,000 watts of illumination, effectively turning the room into a giant tanning booth.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/soundstage_2.jpg">
22. Nobody notices most of it, but everyone feels everything. I’m speaking of filmmaking, but I could just as easily mean typography. Color grading gives raw footage a mood and a point of view; foley work sells the action that cameras and microphones didn’t capture. And then there’s the soundtrack. There was a time when I aspired to write film scores, and I’ve been quoted as saying that “typography is the soundtrack of writing.” But I don’t think I fully appreciated the invisibilty of this art until watching the final edit, being asked what I thought of the soundtrack, and realizing that I hadn’t noticed it at all. It’s been a profound joy to spend time with <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/B4VUxWGBpCz/" target="_blank">the score</a> in the past few months, and to get to know composers Timo Elliston and Brian Jones — and to really savor the work of percussionist Jerome Jennings, whose explosive opening fanfare and poignant shuffle during the closing credits capture the mood of the episode with absolute and total perfection. (If you leave feeling energized, and that the creative journey continues, that might be as much Jennings’ doing as mine.) But I just didn’t notice at the time. It simply felt right. Like good type.
23. These aren’t the droids you’re looking for. The most extraordinary thing I saw during the project was producer Sam LaCroix persuading the entire construction crew of a downtown skyscraper to take a twenty minute break so we could record clean audio in my office.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/netflix_abstract_camera_crew.jpg">
24. Sound recordists carry gear worthy of 007. Speaking purely hypothetically here: If you are a loudmouth out-of-town dad, stepping out of the Public Theatre to call home during intermission, and you learn that your tween daughter has gotten her eyebrow pierced, and right before Thanksgiving no less, and you react colorfully and at great length, you might be interested to know that sound recordists generally carry a highly directional microphone called a ‘shotgun mic’ which is very effective at localizing sound at a distance, even across a busy urban thoroughfare. I’m just saying that you never really know if the tape is rolling, and also that DJs have to get their kooky samples from somewhere.
25. Check yourself before you wreck yourself. During a lunch break in the public atrium of a building on Madison Avenue, I went off in search of a restroom, reflexively turning off the lapel mic that I wore throughout the production. Someone directed me to an escalator, which I noticed was flanked by two nypd officers, uncharacteristically kitted out in body armor and assault rifles. Only as I descended into the basement, with its aggressive onrush of gold and crimson decor, and gold and more gold, and the best gold, believe me, did I realize that we were in the back of Trump Tower. Downstairs, two Treasury agents were checking IDs and xraying bags, and were unfailingly polite in asking me to please open my coat. Weren’t we all surprised to find that underneath, I was wrapped in wires that led down to a blinking radio transmitter in my pocket. Best to avoid doing this, if you can. —JH
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/abstract-final-photos_2.jpg">]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 25 Dec 2019 07:40:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/abstract-typography-episode#1802</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[The New H&Co Type Specimen]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-new-hco-type-specimen</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Even more fun than designing typefaces is getting to design with them, and no project is more gratifying — nor as challenging — as a type specimen. Presenting a typeface in its best light takes some thought about its virtues: choosing the sizes, cases, and measures at which each font looks its best, identifying those characters that exhibit a font’s signature moments, and finding ways to distill dauntingly large families down to clear and economical summaries. (And then, designing attractive pages. And trying not to repeat yourself.) Brian Hennings and I spent the summer on this very project, and are very pleased to present our first catalog in more than a decade: <a href="https://designshop.typography.com/collections/frontpage/products/specimen">New and Recent Typefaces by Hoefler&Co</a>, Eleventh Edition.
Catalog No. 11 introduces our new <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/decimal/overview">Decimal</a> family, and presents the <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/surveyor/overview">Surveyor</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/obsidian/overview">Obsidian</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/ringside/overview">Ringside</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/quarto/overview">Quarto</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/overview">Inkwell</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/operator/overview">Operator</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/isotope/overview">Isotope</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/peristyle/overview">Peristyle</a>, and <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/landmark/overview">Landmark</a> families for the first time in a type specimen. Sent free to some of the people who most recently joined our mailing list (<a href="http://typography.com/subscribe">sign up!</a>), the new catalog is $15 from the H&Co Design Shop, and includes both free shipping to most countries and a $15 credit toward your next purchase of fonts from H&Co. I hope you’ll find to be both a practical reference, and a source of inspiration in your work with typography. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 16 Dec 2019 23:36:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-new-hco-type-specimen#1807</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[WTF? STFU!]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/wtf</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<a href="https://woodtype.org" target="_blank">The Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum</a> in Two Rivers, Wisconsin is not only home to the world’s greatest collection of wood type, it’s a destination for anyone who loves typography, letterpress, or Americana. A few years ago, I had the irresistible opportunity to collaborate with the folks at Hamilton to create something for sale in their store, so I designed this set of wood type catchwords. I’m pleased to see that they’re back in production, and available from the Hamilton online shop for <a href="https://woodtype.org/products/wood-type-catchwords" target="_blank">ten dollars</a> a pop. One hundred percent of proceeds benefit the museum and support its excellent program of exhibits, workshops, and conferences.
‘Catchwords,’ of course, are decorative logotypes of common words and phrases, a lively typographic gimmick that probably found its way into American wood type via signpainting. I’ve always loved the flourished the, or, and, or for without which no nineteenth century was complete, so I felt that our modern utterances deserved some of this same pizzazz. Charming objets for any designer’s workspace, they’re also bonafide pieces of wood type, cut in end-grain sugar maple and planed type high (.918") — perfect for the letterpress printer eager to exclaim ‘Wood Type Forever!’ or identify Finely-Made Letters, or to remind readers that Studious Typefaces Fortify Us, and that Great Typography Flourishes Online. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Sat, 14 Dec 2019 15:46:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/wtf#1805</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Typographic Ticket Book]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-typographic-ticket-book</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Inspired by a brush with an inscrutable but no doubt revenue-positive New York City Traffic Regulation, I created my own set of ticketable offenses with which designers could return the favor, or at least have a convincing prop to flash around when they detect typographic trouble. By special issue, then, from the 100% totally real Typographic Violations Division, the Uniform Ticket Book is standard equipment for the modern design enforcer, and it’s now available for a mere $15 from the <a href="https://designshop.typography.com/collections/frontpage/products/ticket-book">H&Co Design Shop</a>. Lists thirty-two common design infractions, each with an appropriate penalty, with plenty of room for improvisation.
Authoritatively typeset in Helvetica to provoke maximum anxiety, and jarringly printed in retina-scorching orange, each Notice of Violation is sure to startle, striking an uneasy chill in even the most upstanding designer. Contains fifty tickets, each neatly perforated for a satisfyingly loud rrrip prior to presentation. Bound in soul-deadening municipal pressboard, with a heavy-duty 100pt millboard backing, and foil stamped with an official-looking clip art emblem in gold. Police uniform neither included, nor recommended. For novelty use only. —JH
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/ticket-book-product-shots.jpg">]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 03 Dec 2019 18:24:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-typographic-ticket-book#1804</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typographic Illusions]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-illusions</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[In my very first meeting with director Brian Oakes, we agreed that our episode of the Netflix documentary <a href="https://www.netflix.com/title/80057883?trackId=14277283">Abstract: The Art of Design</a> should be more than a profile of a working typeface designer: it should also offer viewers some practical insights into the mechanics of the craft itself. I loved Brian’s idea of periodically cutting away from the narrative to offer little lessons, and we both felt that manipulating physical props on a soundstage, rather than using computer animation, would be the most compelling way of demonstrating typographic principles.
The three resulting segments, titled These Are Letters! and heralded by an impish jingle, are the result. For the chapter about optical illusions, I wrote and storyboarded ten different examples, though in the end we whittled these down to a leaner set of four. Since a number of people who teach design have suggested that we manufacture these for use in the classroom, I thought I’d take the more direct approach, and make them available as a free download, as a <a href="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/blog/tools_for_teaching/Hoefler_tools_for_teaching_type_01_illusions.pdf">PDF</a> that can be printed on transparencies. This also felt like a good moment to publish the six additional lessons that didn’t make the cut, which are illustrated below. Whether you’re teaching typography, studying it, or just giving letters a closer look for the first time, I hope you’ll find these useful. —JH
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hoefler-props-illusions_002-overshoot-diagonals-2.png">
No. 1. Type design is a battle with optical illusions, which we only win through a complete surrender. We convince the eye to see things clearly not by creating rational drawings, but through irrational ones, by introducing strange distortions that outwit the eye: to shape not what we see, but what we think we see.
Even the alphabet’s simplest goals begin with some unexpected accommodations. Making all the letters appear the same height means drawing round characters to be measurably taller than flat ones, to counter our physiological tendency to see circles as smaller than squares of the same height. In a typeface, letters that are round at the top or bottom (such as this C) will need to project beyond the height of the flat letters (such as T), by an amount that type designers call “overshoot.” Overshoot will apply throughout the character set, to the lowercase, numbers, symbols, and punctuation — and devilishly, it won’t always have the same measurement. It’s not uncommon for the overshoot of an S and an O to differ, dictated only by how things appear to the eye.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hoefler-props-illusions_001-overshoot-rounds-2.png">
No. 2. Our misperception about circles and squares extends to triangles, too: letters whose strokes converge into a point are prone to appear smaller than they actually are. So type designers customarily apply some degree of overshoot to diagonal letters like A, V, and W, and often, if the design calls for especially sharp corners, the acute points of the letters N and M as well.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hoefler-props-illusions_003-balance-B-2.png">
No. 3. Another thing we consistently misjudge is balance. This may be a vestige of how humans have evolved to <a href="https://typography.com/blog/turning-type-sideways">process the physical environment</a>, intuitively recognizing that remote objects appear smaller than those nearby. Applied to typography, it means that making a letterform appear equally balanced requires drawing it to be measurably smaller on top. These expectations about “natural balance” are at work in letters like B, E, and S, which are visibly smaller above and larger below — and even in the letter H, which in order to appear symmetrical, needs a crossbar that’s just above center.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hoefler-props-illusions_004-TALL-balance-A-2.png">
No. 4. Curiously, a letterform’s construction can also influence how we perceive its equilibrium. Take the letter A, whose most basic recipe is “a delta with a horizontal bar in the center.” By rotating this letter about the center of the crossbar, we can see just how far below center this waistline really is. This is because perception is subject to context, and for the bar of the A, what we perceive as its relevant context isn’t the entire letter, it’s the much smaller region that’s inside the delta.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hoefler-props-illusions_005-balance-EF-2.png">
No. 5. Both kinds of typographic balance combine unexpectedly in the letters E and F, whose center arms appear identical, but in fact almost never align. Following what we know about natural balance, the arm of the E will be positioned just above center, in order to appear equidistant from the two other strokes. But owing to its relevant context, the arm of the F will be centered not on the height of the character, but in the void between the underside of the top stroke, and the empty bottom of the letter — making it lower than the arm of the E, its fraternal twin. Often, the arrangement of the F is a compromise between what its own construction suggests, and its need for compatibility with the frequently adjacent letter E.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hoefler-props-illusions_006-contrast-strokes-2.png">
No. 6. The simple letter T conceals one of typography’s great paradoxes: that lines appear thicker when oriented horizontally than vertically. Type designers call this property “contrast,” and because it behaves differently in different directions, it’s said to be “anisotropic.” To create letterforms that appear to have a consistent weight throughout, a type designer will make sure that vertical strokes are measurably thicker than horizontal ones; diagonal strokes, therefore, will fall somewhere in between.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hoefler-props-illusions_007-contrast-rounds-2.png">
No. 7. Anisotropic contrast affects not only weight, but also dimension: just as we perceive horizontal strokes to be thicker than they really are, we perceive horizontal distances to be longer than they actually are. To create what appears to be a perfect circle or a perfect square, a type designer will create a shape that’s measurably narrower than it is tall. Looking at the letter O, we can see two effects of anisotropic contrast at once: in its normal orientation, the stroke weight becomes steadily thinner as it reaches the top and bottom of the letter, and the letterform itself is taller than it is wide.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hoefler-props-illusions_008-bias-2.png">
No. 8. Complicating the way we perceive weight is the “calligraphic bias” that’s implicit in the Latin alphabet itself. The very shapes of our letters are the product of the broad-edged pen, held at an oblique angle in the right hand, which, as it moves rightward, produces thin upstrokes and thick downstrokes. This pattern of thins and thicks is apparent in many of the typefaces we read every day, but it’s also imperceptibly fossilized in even the most evenly-weighted design. Looking at a mirror image of the letter A reveals that its left leg is subtly lighter than its right, a necessary maneuver to satisfy our subliminal expectations about weight — all the consequence of ancient right-handed scribes.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hoefler-props-illusions_009-compound-2.png">
No. 9. To see all of these phenomena at work, look no further than the letter S: it only takes viewing the letter from a different angle to reveal all the sleight-of-hand that goes into making it appear balanced. Turning the S clockwise reveals the different proportions of its top and bottom halves, a necessity to maintain natural balance. In this orientation, the ends of the strokes appear to flare outward, a consequence of the anisotropic contrast that causes weights to thicken as they approach verticality.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hoefler-props-illusions_010-compound-2.png">
No. 10. Looking at its mirror image reveals an additional illusion: that the S is considerably thicker in the middle than above or below, a consequence of the calligraphic bias that expects downward strokes to be the heaviest. Nowhere is this more dramatic than in its lower left quarter, where the letter’s heavy spine rapidly thins out as it approaches the baseline, the combined effects of anisotropic contrast and calligraphic bias that are both undetectable in its normal orientation. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 05 Nov 2019 06:23:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-illusions#1786</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Introducing Decimal]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-decimal</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[One of the telltale signs of a vintage watch is its lettering. The unique markings on watch dials, surprisingly consistent from one manufacturer to the next, evolved separately from typography: these are forms unconcerned with the needs of type designed for printing words on paper, and unmoved by the changing fashions of graphic design. Instead, watch lettering has been shaped by the curious technologies of dial manufacturing, the demanding requirements of working in miniature, and the unusual commercial arrangements that first gave rise to these remarkable inventions.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/Omega_and_AeroCompax.jpg">
Watch lettering is printed through tampography, a technique in which ink is transferred first from an engraved plate to a spongy, dumpling-shaped silicone pad, and from there onto the convex dial of a watch. To reproduce clearly, a letterform needs to overcome the natural tendencies of liquid ink or enamel held in suspension: tiny serifs at the ends of strokes can create a larger coastline, to help prevent liquid from withdrawing due to surface tension; wide apexes on characters like 4 and A eliminate the acute angles where liquid tends to pool. In the two watches above, an Omega 30T2 (ref. 2186) and a Universal Genève Aero-Compax (ref. 22414), artists have taken different liberties with the figures 3 and 7, using different approaches to maximize the openness of these forms. But the peculiar figure 4 is identical, with a low crossbar and a wide apex designed to dilate the counter, defending clarity while producing a silhouette that balances comfortably the other numbers on the dial. How is it that two unrelated watches have the same figure four? How do nearly all vintage watches have it?
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/Horological_4s-1920.jpg">
For all the sophistication of a mechanical movement, it’s the dial that may be the most complex part of a watch. Creating a single dial may require more than a hundred different operations, as well as the expertise to work with materials from stainless steel to mother-of-pearl (to gemstones, to feathers, to wood.) A dialmaker must know how to galvanize, electroplate, varnish, lacquer, paint, stamp, engrave, solder, and drill, and all in miniature. Dialmakers routinely maintain and operate multiple generations of the same technology, using a laser cutter in concert with a centuries-old rose engine, to create a particular guilloché pattern specified by a manufacturer. The niche skills and equipment needed by these workshops encouraged dialmakers to specialize long ago, and for most of the last century, the same small handful of prestigious dialmakers supplied watch dials to nearly all of the major manufacturers. Stern Créations, established in 1898, provided dials to Audemars Piguet, Vacheron Constantin, Patek Phillipe, and Cartier; Singer, founded in 1919, created them for Rolex, Omega, Heuer, and Universal Genève. For all the ways in which watch lettering was a natural response to the measurable needs of the medium, it was also the product of a relatively small number of artisans, whose hands shaped the aesthetic of the entire industry. The wide-topped 4, the sharp-centered M, and the bulldog stance of the short-limbed R and K were among their mannerisms, a seamless blend of mechanical problem-solving and artistic intuition.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/Wittnauer_and_Seafarer.jpg">
Some signature gestures of the watchmakers’ alphabet were innovations that evolved to suit new technological features. The broad swing of the letter J, uncharacteristically topped by a serif, helps to make the letter wider, ensuring that narrow-lettered months like jul and wide-lettered ones like mar will occupy the same space on a calendar wheel. Elsewhere on a watch, alphabets are usually smaller, relegated to marking the scale of a tachymeter or telemeter, or identifying a watch as a chronograph or chronometer. The Swiss domination of the industry ensures the letters S and W on most dials (useful bellwethers for the typeface designer) but here the material ends. Few watches ever included lowercase or italics, save the occasional Km on a telemeter dial, or water resistance indicated in ft or m; punctuation beyond periods and ampersands is similarly absent. But even among the realm of garden-variety capitals, every watch reveals inherent contradictions and short-sighted decisions that limit the potential for a truly authentic typographic revival of the style, guaranteeing early that Decimal would be an interpretation and a celebration of the style, but not a replica.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/Watch-G-morphologies.jpg">
One of the charms of lettering is its inconsistency. Where a typeface is a fixed system designed to deploy in predictable ways, lettering has the flexibility to adapt to its circumstances. At the small scale of the wristwatch, these circumstances can be extreme: in this Brietling Top Time (ref. 810), the G on the top line has a curved construction, but the one below it — just 20% smaller — uses fully horizontal gestures to maintain an open aperture between the two nearby strokes. The dogged type designer may be left to choose between these two models, or to conclude that this beloved aesthetic is the product of these differences, and that no single alphabet could possibly deliver the attractive diversity of the vintage watch. For Decimal, we tried a third approach.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/Decimal-annotated-2.svg">
Instead of trying to reproduce the anarchic (and sometimes impractical) letters from actual watches, Decimal dissects the style into discrete themes, reassembling them in a different but more useful order. In the Breitling watch above, each model of letter G has its own merit: one is welcoming in its roundness, the other fierce in its geometry. Decimal applies these ideas in different places, so that they become less discordant, and more widely applicable throughout the typeface. In Decimal, open-armed roundness is evoked by curving the letter’s jaw, intensity by shearing its top stroke at a dramatic angle that ends in a sharp point. These decisions point the way to resolving the letter S (often awkward on watch dials), and the letter Q (generally absent.)
Wherever they could be employed consistently, and harnessed to serve a range of ten weights, idiosyncratic details have been retained, from the J with its unexpected serif, to the wide plateau on the A. The vestigial serifs on watch dials, never appearing with much consistency, are referenced in the angled arms of letters like E, reified into a subtle but perceptible motif that recurs throughout the design.
The word ‘Decimal’ has recurred throughout horological history. Decimal Time refers to an invention of the French Revolution, in which the project of revising the calendar to feature a ten-day week was expanded to include a ten-hour clock, composed of one hundred ‘decimal minutes,’ each with one hundred ‘decimal seconds’ — a well-intentioned but short-lived experiment. Decimal watches are those that feature an additional chapter ring divided into hundredths, making it easier to measure minutes or seconds in more mathematically relevant units: “2.5 minutes” instead of “two minutes and thirty seconds” was a boon to scientists, aviators, and statisticians, if not bakers and athletic coaches as well. The idea of the decimal watch appealed to me as a piece of simple technology, and resonated with the themes of the typeface: here is an additional system, designed not to supplant what’s useful and recognized, but to supplement it with a new and valuable way of looking at the familiar. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 24 Sep 2019 09:29:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-decimal#1779</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Type Design Comes to Netflix]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/type-design-on-netflix</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[I’m delighted to announce that I’m one of the six designers profiled in season two of Abstract: The Art of Design, the Emmy-nominated Netflix original documentary series that returns on September 25. The creation of <a href="https://godfreydadich.com/staff/scott-dadich" target="_blank">Scott Dadich</a>, <a href="https://tremoloproductions.com/tremolo-staff#morgan-neville" target="_blank">Morgan Neville</a>, and <a href="https://godfreydadich.com/work/abstract" target="_blank">Dave O’Connor</a>, Abstract explores design as a way of thinking, through the work of designers in different disciplines. For design practicioners, learning about different modes provokes new ways of thinking about the work we do; for design enthusiasts, it explains both the practice and the motivation behind our work.
For my episode, I had the extraordinary good fortune of putting myself in the hands of director <a href="http://brianoakes.com" target="_blank">Brian Oakes</a>, who came up through the ranks of graphic design (and was therefore no stranger to typography), and his creative team that included the award-winning cinematographer <a href="http://clairpopkin.com" target="_blank">Clair Popkin</a>. In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing a behind-the-scenes look at my work on this once-in-a-lifetime project.
I hope you’ll spend an hour getting to know me and my team at H&Co (and two of our unpublished typefaces) — as well as all of the other remarkable designers representing truly fascinating realms of design.

One of the most tantalizing parts of being filmed for Abstract was hearing from the crew about the other episodes they were working on, every one of which sounded captivating. Learning about my fellow subjects kept the bar challengingly high, demanding that we share only the most interesting, provocative, and relevant parts of typeface design. Joining me in the new season are:
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/abstract_season2_subjects-positive2.jpg">
<a href="https://ruthecarter.com" target="_blank">Ruth Carter,</a> costume designer. For a year I’ve been hearing about how thrilling it was to document Carter’s costumes, which comes as no surprise: her work was my favorite part of <a href="https://www.pri.org/stories/2019-02-21/looking-marvel-ous-designing-costumes-black-panther" target="_blank">Black Panther</a>, and for me the high point of the film’s art direction. (I wish the camera had lingered on her work even more, but costumes, like typefaces and soundtracks, are there to support the story.) I’m very excited to learn more about her work this week, and see what other projects have benefitted from her unique vision.
<a href="https://casholman.com" target="_blank">Cas Holman,</a> toy designer. I don’t think I’ve ever met a category of people with more joyful world views than toy designers, who bring a thoughtfulness and perspective to their work that could put a sociologist to shame. I’m really eager to spend some time with Holman and her ideas, knowing how much heart and imagination goes into her work at <a href="https://rigamajig.com" target="_blank">Rigamajig</a>: there’s a philosophy at work in her toys that I’m eager to hear her share.
<a href="https://neri.media.mit.edu" target="_blank">Neri Oxman,</a> material ecologist. If you’re as devoted a Björk fan as I (she maybe the only member of the avant garde whose work I don’t merely respect, but consistently love), you may remember Björk’s <a href="https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/rottlace/overview/" target="_blank">Rottlace</a> mask, which was one of Oxman’s creations. Some of the most intriguing images that flashed through the Abstract trailer are hers, inventions from her work at the MIT Media Lab: I’m looking forward to spending an hour with her work when there’s a pause button handy.
<a href="https://www.olafureliasson.net" target="_blank">Olafur Eliasson,</a> artist and architect. Eliasson insightfully articulates the role of context in design, highlighting how our encounters with the world are shaped by our perspective, our neurology, our assumptions, and our expectations. (These are themes that resonate with me as a typeface designer, which so often is about drawings things to be <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/turning-type-sideways">different</a> so that they appear the same.) I’m really curious to see more of his studio’s work, and learn about his process: I suspect that many of his ideas might be directly applicable to the work that I do with typography.
<a href="http://www.ianspalter.com" target="_blank">Ian Spalter,</a> digital product designer. If you spend as much time as I do on <a href="https://www.instagram.com/hoeflerco/" target="_blank">Instagram</a>, you’re living in a world that’s been shaped in no small part by Ian Spalter. As one of the stewards of a worldwide social media platform, Spalter may be the designer whose work has had the greatest impact — and the most significant consequences — of any of us. It’s going to be interesting to see how the series captures the nuances, and the import, of his work. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Sat, 21 Sep 2019 18:24:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/type-design-on-netflix#1726</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Confidential: EYES ONLY]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/confidential-eyes-only</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[████ ██ ████ ████ █████ ███ ██████ ██ █████ ███ █████ ██████ ████ █████ ██ antidote ███ ████ ██████ ████ ██████ ████ ██ █████ ███ █████ ████ ██████ █████ █ ███ ██ ████ ██ ██████ █████ ███ ████ ████ ███ ███ ████ ██████ ████ ████ ███ ██ ████ ██ ██ █████ ███ ██████ ██████ ███ ███ ████ ██ ██ ██ █████ █████ █ █████ ██ ███ ██ <a href="https://discover.typography.com/theme/eyes-only/" target="_blank">typography of intrigue</a>, ████ ██ ███ ██████ ██ ██████ ███ ████ ██ ██ ██████ ███ ███ ███ ██████ ██ ██████ █████ ██ ███ ███ ██ ████ ██ █████ ████ ██████ █████ ████ ██ ██████ ██████ █████ ███ ████ ████ ███ ███ ████ ██ █████ █ █████ ██ █ █████ ██ █ ██████.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/eyes-only-collage-4.svg">]]>
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<pubDate>Tue, 11 Jun 2019 06:48:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/confidential-eyes-only#1714</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[How We Use Type.]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/how-we-use-type</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Q: If you’re using a style named ‘extra light,’ which weight do you select for emphasis?
The answer’s contained in a simple rule that governs all H&Co typefaces. But it’s a rule we’ve somehow never thought to share, leaving even the most astute designers to grope through a fog of Mediums and Semibolds in search of a solution. Starting this month, we’re changing all that: on today’s typography.com, you’ll find 46,987 words devoted to <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/ideal-sans/how-to-use">How to Use</a> every typeface in our library.
These are the things we’ve learned in our years of both designing typefaces and working with them. The new How to Use pages illustrate all the undocumented features in our library of more than 1,500 fonts, and explain the built-in behaviors that make the fonts perform the way they do. But most of all, they begin the project of recording our institutional memory, illustrating the subtle ways in which the typefaces express their designers’ intentions, and chronicling the many inside tips that our visual designers and developers have devised along the way.
How to Use will be an ongoing project, a place to continue to collect the things we learn, the things we remember, and all the things we discover about using type. Here’s a taste of what’s in store…
 

<h2>Meeting the Family</h2>
We always say that a type family should have “as few styles as possible, but as many as necessary,” yet somehow their numbers always manage to grow. To wrangle the matrix of weights, widths, postures{footnote_1}, and optical sizes included in our fonts, we’ve created for every family a feature called Pairing Styles that explores how different familial relationships are specifically designed to provide emphasis, distinction, or decoration. The feature for exploring weights illustrates something we’ve never thought to mention: that in H&Co font families, the intervals between weights are chosen to <a href="http://typography.com/fonts/ideal-sans/how-to-use#ideal-sans-emphasizing-text">work in parallel</a>, so that any pair of styles separated by the same number of steps will have the same degree of contrast. The <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/ideal-sans/how-to-use#ideal-sans-emphasizing-text">interactive version</a> explains it best:
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/how-we-use-2-inkwell-styles.svg">
For our many families whose members have more unorthodox relationships, such as <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/how-to-use#inkwell-creating-contrasting-textures">Inkwell</a> and <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/landmark/how-to-use#landmark-creating-contrasting-textures">Landmark</a>, we’ve created miniature laboratories to explore some of the style pairings that we’ve found most effective in Creating Contrasting Textures. These neither prescribe what you must do, nor illustrate everything you can do, but they’re a quick way to cut down a long list of permutations to the ones with which we’ve had the most success:
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/how-we-use-3-inkwell-line.svg">
 
<h2>Techniques</h2>
We created How to Use not simply to document what’s inside a typeface, but to illustrate some of the less obvious things that are made possible by different designs. A typeface like <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/how-to-use#inkwell-normalizing-stroke-weights">Inkwell</a>, for example, invites compositions in which large and small letters appear to have been made with the same pen, an effect that’s easily achieved once you figure out a comfortable relationship between point size and stroke weight. In a feature called Normalizing Stroke Weights, you’ll find our formulas for creating this effect, freed from the Post-It Notes where they used to live:
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/how-we-use-1-ideal-sans-weights.svg">
You’ll find tips for effecting similar techniques throughout our library, whether you’re using the delicate hairlines of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/archer/how-to-use#archer-normalizing-stroke-weights">Archer</a> or the even-tempered strokes of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/how-to-use#gotham-normalizing-stroke-weights">Gotham</a>. A related feature explores the Optical Sizes in fonts that are sensitive to the effects of scale, such as the hairline serifs of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/chronicle-display/how-to-use#chronicle-display-using-optical-sizes">Chronicle</a> and <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/requiem/how-to-use#requiem-using-optical-sizes">Requiem</a>.
For fonts with chromatic layers, such as <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/obsidian/how-to-use#obsidian-chromatic-layers">Obsidian</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/peristyle/how-to-use#peristyle-chromatic-layers">Peristyle Stencil</a>, and our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/shades/how-to-use#shades-chromatic-layers">Shades</a> collection, a feature called Working with Color demonstrates different configurations of foreground and background layers. Their illustrations cover solutions to some of the more common challenges of two-color typography, such as <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/obsidian/how-to-use#obsidian-ligatures">overlapping</a> letters in a ligature, or the <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/peristyle/how-to-use#peristyle-color-balancing">clustering</a> of letters of a single color:
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/how-we-use-5-surveyor-swash.svg">
 
<h2>Automation</h2>
Since so much of what happens in a typeface goes on behind the scenes, we’ve illustrated and explained how a font’s Automated Features work — and described situations in which typography can be improved by overriding a font’s natural behavior:
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/how-we-use-7-requiem-chars.svg">
In the sections that eliminating collisions and achieving consistent spacing, you’ll find more than forty different examples of why you should <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/idlewild/how-to-use#idlewild-kerning">never ever use so-called ‘optical kerning’</a>, especially in <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/inkwell/how-to-use#inkwell-kerning">script faces</a>, most especially in <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/obsidian/how-to-use#obsidian-kerning">chromatic faces</a>, but moreoever anywhere that you <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/archer/how-to-use#archer-kerning">care what letters look like</a>. Share these with your colleagues, your freelancers, your interns, your boss, and most of all, your clients. Mention this in your brand identity styleguides: it’s an easy way to protect against the kind of mischief that destroys logos.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/how-we-use-4-obsidian-color.svg">
 
<h2>Customization</h2>
A feature called Using Special Characters contains organized lists of all the characters unique to each typeface, including descriptions of what they’re for, and how they’re most easily activated:
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/how-we-use-6-idlewild-kerning.svg">
In addition to the tour of special characters you’ll find in collections such as <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/how-to-use#numbers-additional-characters">Numbers</a> and <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/hoefler-text/how-to-use#hoefler-text-graphic-characters">Hoefler Text</a>, each font’s How to Use section includes full documentation for its Stylistic Sets{footnote_2}, which allow related substitutions to be activated with a single control — still the best, easiest, and most powerful way to change the temperament of a typeface:
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/how-we-use-8-whitney-chars.svg">
Once you’ve taken a tour of How to Use, pop over to our redesigned <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/ringside/overview">Overview</a> pages, where you can try all of these techniques for yourself, right here in the browser. As always, I look forward to seeing how our work can play a part in yours! —JH
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/how-we-use-9-ringside-overview-v2-1_RAW.svg">]]>
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<pubDate>Tue, 21 May 2019 05:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/how-we-use-type#1711</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Introducing Inkwell Condensed]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/inkwell-condensed</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Today, we’re publishing a new family of typefaces called <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/overview/">Inkwell Condensed</a>. These six new styles are part of the Inkwell universe of ‘handwritten typefaces,’ designed to have the informality and expressiveness of writing, but the credibility and ease of type. We’re rolling them into the Inkwell Complete package, so they’ll be a free download for existing licensees of those fonts, and available to purchase individually if you’re new to Inkwell.
But first, an observation about size and shape that has me wondering if everything I’ve ever learned about optical size is wrong.
A typeface’s optical size is the scale at which it’s intended to be used. When a display face is redesigned for smaller sizes, its thin strokes are thickened, its gestures are amplified, its proportions are adjusted to favor small shapes (the entire lowercase usually gets substantially bigger), and additional white space is added wherever it can help relieve congestion: counters are enlarged, apertures opened, and inter-character fit is loosened. The net effect of these changes is an overall widening of letterforms as they get smaller, as a quick comparison of related text and display faces will confirm. Our tidy conclusion is that at small sizes, wider letters are easier to read.
And while this is demonstrably true, it conceals a cunning logical fallacy. We can’t prove its reverse statement (its ‘contrapositive’), that at large sizes, narrower letters are easier to read, and wider ones harder. This is observably not true, so something’s up.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-condensed-release_responsive-03.svg">
When Jordan Bell and I first began drawing Inkwell Condensed, we had a hard time keeping the design from looking too slick. Inkwell is a collection of informal, unmannered designs, expressly designed to <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/meet-inkwell">reveal the presence of an author</a> behind the words. Yet our earliest drawings for the Condensed were almost instinctively polished, like the lettering of signs in supermarket windows (whose bouncy nonchalance belies the practiced hand of a master signpainter.) Somehow the other Inkwells had succeeded in feeling less like the work of a commercial artist, and more like the patient block lettering of a competent and determined doodler. But the Condensed was going its own way.
What neither of us noticed was that we’d been drawing at a larger size than usual, where it was easier to control the design’s steep angles and compact curves — and this is where size, proportion, and style begin to connect. The other Inkwells had been drawn at handwriting size, where the fingertips can comfortably guide a pen in circular motions. But these new drawings came from the wrist, which is given to large, fluid curves — and, because its <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/036350239190006W" target="_blank">functional range of motion is twice as vertical as horizontal</a>, it draws shapes that are taller than they are wide. Our wrists are more flexible with up-and-down extension and flexion than with side-to-side ulnar and radial deviation. Try it: with a stiff arm and loose wrist, draw wide circles in the air with your index finger, and notice how much easier it is once you compress the circle into an upright ellipse. This fact of our physiology may be part of our comfort and familiarity with condensed letterforms at display sizes: it’s not that they’re easier to read, but that at large sizes, narrower letters are easier to write.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-condensed-release_responsive-02.svg">
If Inkwell Condensed has the same optical size as the other members of the Inkwell family, it might be said to have a larger carpal size, feeling most natural when it’s taller than the handwriting-like typography it accompanies. We’ve worked to ensure that it has the same candor and lack of pretense as the rest of the Inkwell family, and feels like the product of the same capable but unstudied hand. Because we’re used to seeing tall writing in public, Inkwell Condensed ably handles the kinds of lettering that once went only to signpainters: price lists, placards, covers and posters seem to be its métier.
With the hope that Inkwell fans will want to use the fonts immediately, I’ve decided to make it a <a href="https://www.typography.com/account/your-account.php#font-library">free download</a> for anyone who’s already bought Inkwell Complete. If you’re new to Inkwell, you can pick up the six-style <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/styles/inkwellcondensed">Inkwell Condensed</a> for $129, or the fifty-four style <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/styles/inkwellcomplete">Inkwell Complete</a> for $399. I hope they’ll make a valuable addition to your collection! —JH
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-condensed-release_responsive-04-2_4040px.png">]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 13 Feb 2019 06:44:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/inkwell-condensed#1698</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[What’s New in Web Fonts from H&Co]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/hoefler-self-hosted-web-fonts-and-full-library</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[A lot has changed since we launched Cloud.typography. Browsers have gotten smarter about type, mobile devices have gotten clearer, and everyone’s learned that a website’s fonts play a critical part in making a good first impression. And all the while, we’ve been learning from tens of thousands of designers, developers, agencies, brands, and businesses about how they work, what they need, and how typography needs to work for them. So we’re very pleased to offer two new major upgrades that make it easier than ever to step up to web fonts by H&Co.
<h2>Cloud.Typography, now with all the fonts.</h2>
For years, Cloud.typography has included any five fonts of your choosing, and the rest available to purchase. Today we’re making things a lot simpler, a lot more flexible, and a lot more valuable: every Cloud.typography subscription now includes access to our complete library of fonts to use on the web.
If you’re an existing subscriber, log in today and start developing with our ever-growing collection of more than 1,500 original fonts. And if you’re not yet using Cloud.typography, <a href="http://typography.com/webfonts/">subscribe today</a> for as little as $199/year.
<h2>Self-hosted web fonts!</h2>
We’ve been listening: to developers who like to work offline, to website owners who prefer to serve from their own architecture, and to organizations who need to publish without third-party integrations. So today, we’re pleased to introduce self-hosted web fonts from H&Co.
Whether you’re a Cloud.typography subscriber or not, now you can license any of our fonts for self-hosting, and download them as both woff and woff2 files. In place of Cloud.typography’s <a href="https://dashboard.typography.com/user-guide/font-features">Character Set</a> panel that manages complex character sets, H&Co’s self-hosted web fonts use the same OpenType features as our desktop fonts, so that typographic features like small caps or tabular figures (or <a href="https://www.typography.com/faq/question.php?faqID=157">Stylistic Sets!</a>) can be implemented even more easily, using the CSS font-feature-settings property supported by all modern browsers.
Self-hosting licenses are priced by pageviews per month, and designed to be scalable and affordable for organizations both large and small. And we’re offering self-hosting licenses as either a fixed-cost annual subscription, or a one-time perpetual plan. You’ll find these options available on every font’s <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/ringside/styles/ringsidewide">product page.</a>
<h2>Thanks.</h2>
On behalf of all of us at H&Co — the type designers who bring you the fonts, the development team that builds and runs Cloud.typography, and the business group that’s always finding new ways for us to give people more — I want to thank you for making our typefaces a part of how you communicate. We’re committed to making it as easy as possible to speak consistently, clearly, and professionally across all channels, and grateful to have the chance to support your work through ours. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 23 Jan 2019 06:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/hoefler-self-hosted-web-fonts-and-full-library#1697</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Turning Type Sideways]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/turning-type-sideways</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Typeface design has a lot of discarded bycatch: small discoveries and observations that aren’t large enough to develop, but are nonetheless interesting and useful. Instead of allowing these ideas to perish, I’d like to preserve and share them, with the hope that they’ll be helpful, diverting, or inspiring to other designers.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/turning-type-sideways_responsive-01.svg">
This month, researchers made official something that typeface designers have long known: that horizontal lines appear thicker than vertical ones. At left, a square made from equally thick strokes; at right, the one that feels equally weighted, its vertical strokes nearly 7% thicker than the horizontals. This phenomenon, central to typeface design, has implications for the design of logos, interfaces, diagrams, and wayfinding systems, indeed anywhere a reader is likely to encounter a box, an arrow, or a line.
Published in the journal Vision, this <a href="https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5150/3/1/1/htm">peer-reviewed paper</a> confirms that most people overestimate the thickness of horizontal lines. This is the very optical illusion for which type designers compensate by lightening the crossbar of a sans serif H, an adjustment that’s easily revealed by looking at a letter sideways. When rotated, the evenly-weighted <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/">Gotham</a> is revealed to have thicker verticals than horizontals; try the same in <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/ideal-sans/overview/">Ideal Sans,</a> a typeface designed to push against the boundaries of what we normally notice when we read, and it becomes clear how little we actually see of what is there.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/turning-type-sideways_responsive-04.svg">
This new study by de Waard, Van der Burg, and Olivers explores different theories as to why we see these things the way we do. Cultural forces presumably play some part: Western typeface designers have long been taught that our bias about weight and directionality stems from the role of the broad-edged pen in European calligraphy, which still underpins our expectations about what letters should look like. (Even the most monolinear letter A has a thin side and a thick, an enduring vestige of calligraphic patterns.) Intriguingly, the divergent traditions of Arabic and Latin calligraphy have a detectable influence on perception, for which the authors offer some interesting statistics.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/turning-type-sideways_responsive-02.svg">
But they go further, to offer some compelling physiological explanations for the phenomenon. One possibility, proposed in an article from the <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/record/1959-00403-001">Journal of Experimental Psychology</a> cited by the authors, suggests that our field of vision — more horizontal than vertical — has an effect on the relative perception of size. Also mentioned is a 2002 article by Catherine Q. Howe and Dale Purves, published in the <a href="https://www.pnas.org/content/99/20/13184.short">Proceedings of the National Academy of Science,</a> which hints at a larger explanation for all optical illusions, a theory to which I’ve long subscribed but never seen argued: that, because our brains evolved to reckon with the three-dimensional world, the expectations that bring to bear upon two-dimensional forms often don’t apply. When there’s a disconnect between what we see and what we expect to see, we experience this as an optical illusion.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/turning-type-sideways_responsive-03.svg">
Is it possible that all of typography’s many optical illusions can be correlated with misapplied learning from our experience of the real world? So much of perception involves reflexively adjusting for the effects of context, light, or perspective, in order to make quick judgments about size, distance, color, or mass. Do we perceive round letters as shorter than flat ones because we intuitively understand something about the weight of cubes and spheres? Is it a lifetime of looking at foreshortened things above us that leads us to expect a well-balanced letterform to be smaller on top than on the bottom? These are half-thoughts that I’d love to see explored by further research. In the meantime, it’s a good reminder to design not for what we expect to see, but for what we actually believe we’re seeing. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 16 Jan 2019 06:19:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/turning-type-sideways#1696</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Fast Fonts]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/fast-fonts</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Typeface designers frequently speak of curves being fast or slow. We’re often talking about the kind of motion that we imagine having created a shape, whether something feels like the product of a relaxed wrist loosely holding a pen, or pinched fingers meticulously turning a compass. A common topic is changes in speed, whether throughout a curve, an alphabet, or even a family of typefaces. There are curves that breathtakingly decelerate in exciting ways, letterforms that employ different strategies (so that a boxy W feels as nimble as a sinewy S), and the constant battle to ensure that lithe alphabets aren’t paired with sluggish boldfaces. Here are some of the techniques we use to convey speed in our letterforms, and some things that you as a designer can do when choosing and applying typefaces. —JH
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fast-fonts-isotope_1920px.png">
Relieve the corners. Above, in the <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/isotope/overview/">Isotope</a> N, the font’s energetic movement comes from the placement of its curves and corners. In a typeface that generally has sharp edges, subtle curves on the outside diagonal corners help to heighten the momentum through the line.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fast-fonts-idlewild_1920px.png">
Choose extreme proportions. <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/idlewild/overview/">Idlewild’s</a> pronounced width is accentuated by gestures that extend outward, like the elongated tail of this capital R. A typeface originally inspired by lettering on cruise ships and jet fuselages, these proportions have long been used to symbolize the perfect balance of speed and control.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fast-fonts-vitesse_1920px.png">
Look for controlled dissonances. Even unexpected genres like the slab serif can achieve a feeling of speed. Above: more sophisticated than a simple rounded rectangle, the <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/vitesse/overview/">Vitesse</a> typeface contrasts round sides and flat bases to introduce a dynamic tension. Even the simple letter O has moments in its ‘corners’ where its material seems to bend almost to the point of breaking, adding a little drama to what could otherwise be a unadventurous letterform.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fast-fonts-tungsten-compressed_1920px.png">
Tighten the curves. Letters in the <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/tungsten/overview/">Tungsten Compressed</a> family take every opportunity to square up against their sides, to convey a clean, engineered feel. Instead of slowly moving through a graceful curve, the spine of Tungsten’s S has tight turns that quickens the movement, creating a brisk, staccato tone.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fast-fonts-peristyle_1920px.png">
Turn up the contrast. In the <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/peristyle/overview/">Peristyle</a> typeface, the stark contrast of thicks and thins is never more dramatic than in its letter M, which cycles rapidly between quiet and loud timbres. As the font gets heavier, and the distinction between dark and light strokes becomes more pronounced, adding a little letterspacing helps make the font rev louder.]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 23 May 2018 20:44:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/fast-fonts#1695</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Fonts for Complex Data]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/fonts-for-complex-data</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Type designers work with a diverse clientele, and yet common themes always seem to emerge in our conversations. This seems to be the season of complex typography, in which designers everywhere are faced with the challenge of presenting different and competing kinds of information to readers. An agency we’re working with is designing a demanding identity for a fast-moving consumer goods brand; an in-house art department is creating a responsive website for complex financial disclosures; a freelance graphic designer is doing the identity for a local coffeeshop, and discovering the joys and perils of digital menu boards. As always, the wrong fonts can lead designers into sticky dead ends, but the right ones can be immeasurably helpful. Here are some of the things our clients consider when faced with complex typography, and some of the typographic strategies that can be the quickest routes to success.
<h2>Strategies for Small Sizes</h2>
Information can often be divided into data and annotations. A web form needs a way to distinguish entry fields from labels; a graph needs not only labels for its x and y axes, but most crucially a verifiable reference for the source of its data. (#fakenews, I’m looking at you.) The most familiar and obvious way to establish this hierarchy is through type size, using palpably smaller type to distinguish the content from its notes. But at smaller-than-text sizes, even the most lucid typefaces can become difficult to read, their spacing overly tight, their counters congested, and their x-heights measly. Compare the tiny type in these two examples.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fonts-for-complex-data_responsive-2@2x-8.png">
Helpfully, there’s an adaptation designed for the web that proves useful in any medium: a typeface’s <a href="https://www.typography.com/collections/screensmart/">ScreenSmart</a> fonts, which are designed to compensate for the effects of scale. Above, two compositions using the <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/overview/">Whitney</a> typeface, the one at the right substituting <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/styles/screensmart/">Whitney ScreenSmart</a> for the tiny annotations below the graph. ScreenSmart fonts always deliver greater clarity and more comfortable reading at smaller-than-text sizes, making them a useful companion to a multipurpose typeface for setting the fine print.
<h2>Dealing with Lists</h2>
Fine print is the bugbear of typography not only for its tiny size, but often its prodigious length. Disclosures, disclaimers, and lists of ingredients may be the sections that readers most often ignore, yet they’re among the most heavily regulated part of any typographic object, and therefore the content that’s most heavily scrutinized by an alarmingly large portion of an organization. Hands up if you’ve ever received a request from Legal to fit in a few more sentences once a design has been approved. Hands up if this wasn’t exactly a “request.”
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fonts-for-complex-data_responsive-3@2x-8.png">
A non-designer’s first impulse is often to reach for a condensed typeface, on the principle that narrower letters take up less space. Yet it’s almost always a better option to make the counter-intuitive choice of a wider typeface, and to set the type in a smaller size with tighter leading. Wider letters have more comfortable proportions, they’re more generously spaced, and they have more ample counters, collectively making them the more legible choice. Above, two ingredient lists in Gotham: at left the passable <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/styles/gothamcondensedbundle">Gotham Condensed</a>, but at right the far more inviting <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/styles/gothamnarrowbundle">Gotham Narrow</a>, a family that’s two steps wider. TIP: Use not only a wider font, but a wider ScreenSmart font as well, for maximum clarity.
<h2>Working the Character Set</h2>
The humble annotation can give designers the chance to flex their creativity, and an excuse to explore the more colorful quarters of the character set. <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/house-of-flying-reference-marks">Reference marks</a>, starting with the asterisk and dagger, are sometimes a welcome grace note whenever the subject matter becomes dry, but beware their use if there are more than three notes in a document. Readers can be counted upon to recognize the cycle of *, &dagger;, and &Dagger;, but probably not the longer series of **, &dagger;&dagger;, and &Dagger;&Dagger; — or §, || and #, depending on your house style. If there are more than three footnotes, stick with unambiguously numbered superscripts instead:
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fonts-for-complex-data_responsive-4@2x-8.png">
Superscripts are included in every H&Co font that has a <a href="https://www.typography.com/collections/charts-tables/">Pro</a> edition, as well as <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/features/gotham-numerics">Gotham</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/ringside/features/ringside-numerics">Ringside</a>, and <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/features/inkwell-numerics">Inkwell</a>. TIP: In the text, mark your footnotes with superscripts, which ascend above the cap height. But in the notes themselves, use numerators instead, which are lower on the body. This connects them more clearly with the explanations that follow, and gives them greater clearance from the preceding lines.
<h2>Numerics, Numerics, Numerics</h2>
The same <a href="http://www.typography.com/collections/charts-tables/">Pro</a> packages that contain superscripts and numerators contain tabular figures, the most vital part of any composition that includes numbers. Unlike a font’s traditional proportional figures, whose widths vary with the natural shape of each number — from a narrow 1 to a wide 0 — tabular figures are all built on the same horizontal measure, ensuring that columns of data always align correctly.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fonts-for-complex-data_responsive-5@2x-8.png">
Tabular figures have a second and equally important characteristic: they maintain their equal widths across a range of weights. (This runs counter to the typical behavior in a typeface, in which heavier weights become progressively wider.) Known as “duplexing,” this is one of the essential characteristics of tabular figures, because it allows designers to highlight individual lines in boldface without disrupting the width of the column.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fonts-for-complex-data_responsive-6@2x-8.png">
TIP: The word “tabular” may imply the dense tables that are annexed to annual reports and financial disclosures, but don’t forget how often stacks of numbers appear in other contexts. Tabular figures are essential in menus, indexes, and directories, and anywhere that a design includes prices, statistics, account numbers, or scores — or any kind of dynamic data online. Any digital experience that shows changing numbers such as stock prices, sports scores, product skus, exchange rates, flight numbers, timetables, or membership points will absolutely demand tabular figures. Design your projects with tabular figures from the outset.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fonts-for-complex-data_responsive-7@2x-8.png">
<h2>Making Creative Choices</h2>
Advanced numeric characters like tabular figures and superscripts aren’t the exclusive province of workhorse type families, and not every project demands a sober serif or sans. When a project’s complexity requires a hard-working typeface, but its subject matter invites a more individual tone, look for unexpected typefaces that feature extended numerics. The handwritten <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/features/inkwell-numerics">Inkwell</a> contains all the features needed to articulate demanding content, but its relaxed demeanor has a natural affinity for entertainment, retail, food services, the arts, hospitality, pediatric care, and even philanthropy:
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fonts-for-complex-data_responsive-8@2x-8.png">
TIP: If your tables will use only a single weight, consider a typeface whose numbers have equal widths without the regular-and-bold duplexing of true tabular figures. The <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/inside/indicia">Indicia</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/inside/claimcheck">Claimcheck</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/inside/revenue">Revenue</a> and <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/inside/greenback">Greenback</a> typefaces in our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/overview/">Numbers</a> collection are designed on a fixed width, as are the cheeky digits in each weight of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/inside/inkwell-blackletter">Inkwell Blackletter</a>.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fonts-for-complex-data_responsive-9@2x-8.png">
<h2>Branding Custom Collateral</h2>
The last mile of visual communications are often the things created not by designers, but by software. It’s frequently the operators of word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation packages who need to speak in the organization’s voice, but lack the tools to do so properly. For these projects, we’ve created <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/office-fonts">Office Fonts</a>.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fonts-for-complex-data_responsive-10@2x-8.png">
Office Fonts are adaptations of H&Co’s <a href="https://www.typography.com/collections/office/">hardest-working typefaces</a>, specifically engineered for use in business packages such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. These are the same families whose ScreenSmart fonts invite use at small sizes, and whose Pro character sets can tackle complex data. Reimagined for the non-designer, Office Fonts are limited to a familiar four styles per family (roman, italic, bold, and bold italic), and feature exclusively tabular figures, to avoid typographic mishaps that might go undetected. (And they ship in TrueType format, for maximum backward compatibility with even the most antiquated operating systems.) TIP: If a brand’s communications will ultimately include custom collateral like reports, proposals, statements, and presentations, design these documents from the outset using Office Fonts, to take advantage of their unique characteristics. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 13 Feb 2018 14:07:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/fonts-for-complex-data#1202</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Meet Isotope]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/meet-isotope</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[If your idea of a luxurious product is one that’s stainless steel rather than gold, you may be a Functionalist. Functionalism is an approach to design that gained popularity in the decade after World War II, especially among German manufacturers of consumer goods, for whom a thing’s visual design was the natural expression of how it was meant to be used. In their desire to be intuitive and straightforward, the designers of a generation of unobtrusive radios, bathroom scales, and turntables would define a new aesthetic, one that still resonates with us as useful, well-built, honest, and timeless.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/german-logos-2-plus-top-padding-2.png">
In the years that followed, the Swiss International Typographic Style would supply the letterforms for this philosophy, and industrial design would forever be associated with Helvetica and Univers. But briefly, before Swiss typography swept the continent, there was a strikingly beautiful species of letterform that arose in Germany — never produced as a typeface, but popular among lettering artists, through whom it became fossilized in company logos. For their precision-built products, companies like Sennheiser, Liebherr, Soehnle and Leifheit would adopt this new style of letterform, to convey the solidity, reliability, and practicality of products from kitchen appliances to bulldozers. It’s this style that we’ve explored in Isotope®.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/isotope-release_responsive-02-2.svg">
Where Functionalist lettering was limited to boxy capitals, Isotope reimagines the style across a full <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/isotope/styles/">range of weights</a>, and a complete character set including a lowercase. The broadest strokes of the style have been preserved — contrasting vertical and horizontal weights, complex letters like S reduced to their most linear essence — to which Isotope brings new subtleties that help make the design not just purposeful, but luxurious and elegant. Corners are intermittently softened, to heighten the momentum through letters like A, M, N, V and W; in the numbers, strokes are sheared at unexpected angles to give them a welcome liveliness. From the initial Ultra at the heaviest end of the spectrum, Isotope descends through eight discrete weights down to a sinewy Thin, where subtle details rescue the design from sterility, to create a typeface that’s smartly clinical, and reassuringly exact.
My thanks to our typeface designers Troy Leinster and Sara Soskolne, who joined me in developing this idea into a fuller and more practical family of typefaces than any of us ever imagined. Their backgrounds in graphic design helped keep the project focused on its end uses, and prompted an ongoing conversation about what the fonts were for. In lesser hands, this lettering might have remained a nostalgic curio — or worse, veered into the sort of streamlined lettering that’s the exclusive province of science fiction. Instead, we found ourselves able to steer Isotope towards associations of luxury, fitness, health, fashion and beauty, as well as engineering, technology, and industry. We’re looking forward to seeing what designers will do with it. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 09 Jan 2018 11:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/meet-isotope#1221</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Introducing Peristyle]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-peristyle</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[So many of a typeface’s attributes have obvious associations for readers. Extreme weights can suggest delicacy or strength; extreme widths can be bustling or contemplative. Even the size of the lowercase sends a quick signal to the reader: a small lowercase can read as precious, and a large one can feel gentle and good-natured. Rare are those typographic qualities that have an immediate effect on readers but are open to interpretation, and chief among these is contrast, the quality we’re exploring with Peristyle®.
Contrast, the relationship between an alphabet’s thickest and thinnest strokes, is present in all typefaces. It’s a vestige of calligraphy, revealing the distant influence of the broad-edged pen, and it appears in even the most mechanical geometric typefaces. Amplifying a design’s contrast makes it less familiar, and therefore more dramatic, most often in the service of some kind of exoticism: there’ve been high-contrast faces that are newfangled, old-fashioned, futuristic or retro, ones that evoke the mechanized clichés of science fiction, or the streamlined motifs of Art Deco. With Peristyle, we wondered: could we turn up the contrast without looking either backward or forward, to create a typeface for today? Could we use this drama to create a strong personal style that was chic, fashionable instead of fussy, and elegant instead of eccentric?
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/peristyle-release_responsive-02.svg">
Peristyle explores the effects of contrast across six weights, from a vertiginous Light to a groovy Black. In place of the repeated gestures that are common to condensed typefaces — a pattern that quickly becomes tiresome — we’ve added a couple of supplementary motifs to keep the design engaging and upbeat. Circular ‘ball terminals’ on letters like y and r help drive them apart from their cousins u and n, and vigorous wedges on letters like k and g help distinguish them from the workaday h and q. These dynamic shapes recur throughout the character set, and across the full range of weights, creating an effervescent rhythm everywhere the font is used.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/peristyle-release_responsive-01.svg">
Having distilled Peristyle down to a sufficiently expressive set of parts, we couldn’t resist further reducing the design down to its parts alone, so we added a stencil design to the family. It’s included as three styles: a standalone Peristyle Stencil font, and two bicolor layers that can be tinted differently and stacked together. (Letters that can be divided into left and right halves irresistably invite the use of color, to create a secondary rhythm of alternating hues.) Peristyle Stencil’s two layered fonts make settings like these easy to design — and an additional piece of back-end logic, built into the fonts themselves, makes it easier than ever to create two-color typography that’s balanced and consistent.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/peristyle-release_responsive-03.svg">
Separating a character into two colors works intuitively when the letterform has two equal halves, but becomes trickier in letters with one stroke (like i, l, and t) or with three (such as m and w) — not to mention more complex characters like g, Ǿ, or %. Without carefully managing which shapes get which color, two-color typography quickly develops unwanted concentrations: above, the sequences Illu, stra, and tio are overwhelmingly blue. Peristyle Stencil solves the problem by automatically reversing the color orientation whenever necessary, in order to maintain an even rhythm of color throughout the line, and a better balance of both colors everywhere.
The three-minute film above introduces Peristyle and the team behind it. Troy Leinster and I worked on the typeface together from its earliest stage, and H&Co’s Sara Soskolne provided valuable insights along the way. Our designers Andy Clymer, Colin M. Ford and Graham Weber helped bring the typeface home, and throughout the project, no one was more enthusiastic about Peristyle than our Creative Director, Brian Hennings. Brian found in Peristyle some unexpected affinities with a few truly far-flung species of typeface, and takes the time here to share the useful perspective of someone who uses fonts. We hope you’ll find Peristyle as practical, as companionable, and simply as enchanting as we have, and we look forward to seeing how it serves you. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 24 Oct 2017 04:36:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-peristyle#1220</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Loveliest Living Fossil]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-loveliest-living-fossil</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[The ocean of ideas, teeming with words and numbers, is underpinned by a vast tectonic plate that’s powerfully transforming the language. It’s the force that gives rise to new continents of meaning, while it inters the remains of countless extinct species. We know its name, but we rarely think about it, and we certainly never visit. It’s just there, helping to clarify our words and numbers in an invisibly supportive way. But it’s one of the culture’s most unstoppable forces. It’s called Punctuation.
At its leading edge, punctuation is volcanically active, giving shape to concepts that move far faster than words. Anyone communicating today has seen #topics and #themes and #categories identified this way, using a symbol that was intuitively understood and replicated even before it was first called a hashtag in <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hashtag" target="_blank">2007</a>. The symbol and its meaning are now universally recognized, transcending even the locality of language, but their use is scarcely a decade old — an astounding accomplishment for a bit of lexical fluff, when you consider that the newfangled OMG was first recorded in 1917 (and in a letter to <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/the-first-use-of-omg-was-in-a-1917-letter-to-winston-churchill-145636383/" target="_blank">Winston Churchill</a>, no less.) Similarly meteoric is the rise of @, not only in its initial evolution from grubby commercial symbol to digital thingum, but in its latest metamorphosis, which has left it poised to become a bonafide verb. Formulations like “write in or @ us on Twitter”{footnote_1} may seem casual, or may be arch, but since they’re easily understood by the initiated, they’re grammatical fair game. Punctuation FTW!
As it advances, punctuation leaves behind a sepulchral physical record, an ocean floor littered with the remains of creatures that didn’t make it. English-speakers who live with Imperial measurements can probably guess the meaning of ℔ from lb., but most have never encountered that symbol, and fewer still have run into a wild ℥, long since replaced by oz. (There may be pharmacists among us who know this one, but they are the same mysterous guild that traffics in ℞s and c̄s and other things that aren’t on the keyboard.) The ellipsis (…) drove out the asterism (⁂) to signal breaks in text, and the decimalized percent (%) eliminated the need for a permille (&permil;) — not to mention something called the “basis point,” also known as the per-ten-thousand, which naturally, and horribly, looks like this: ‱. As a typeface designer, I am not sorry to see these go. Drawing a character is one thing, but adding a character to a family that requires twenty-four variations, including an Extra Bold Compressed Italic, is another story. Especially if there are nearby lining figures and old-style figures and tabular figures to consider. So R.I.P., basis point. Or as a typographer would say, “<a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/house-of-flying-reference-marks" target="_blank">&dagger;</a>.”
Between the symbols we live with and the symbols of yore is a third category, characters that are no longer considered ‘standard’ (by someone’s arbitrary standard), but are nonetheless still meaningful, and immediately understood. If you’ve ever addressed correspondence to someone in the care of someone else, you might have used ℅, a pretty hanger-on that I think has a place in the right kinds of typefaces, but one that should by no means be considered a typographic requirement. But the best and most active of these living fossils is a personal favorite: it’s the Numero, known to us by the monogram Nº.
Nº was the number sign before # became a number sign, and it refreshingly serves this one and only purpose. Compare the #, which when preceding a number is read as “number” (“#1 in my class”), but when following a number means “pound” or “pounds”{footnote_2} (“70# uncoated paper”), leading to printshop pile-ups like “#10 envelope, 24# bond.” To programmers, a # can mean either “ignore what follows” (as in a Python comment) or “use what follows” (when referencing a page fragment, or a Unicode value in html.) To a proofreader, a # means “insert space,” so in the middle of a numbered list, the notation “line #” does not mean “line number,” but rather “add a line space.” Because of #’s resemblance to the musical symbol for “sharp” (♯), it’s a frequent stand-in for the word “sharp,” and often the correct way of rendering a trademarked term such as The C# Programming Language. The # is rapidly assuming musical duties as well, especially in online databases, leading to catalog collisions like “Prelude & Fugue #13 in F#.” How fortunate a designer would be to have a numero symbol, with which to write “Prelude & Fugue Nº 13 in F#,” or “Nº 10 Envelope, 24# bond.”
The Chicago Manual of Style unequivocally favors ‘no’ over ‘#’ when listing the issue number of a periodical: “When the issue number is given, it follows the volume number, separated by a comma and preceded by no.”{footnote_3} And this introduces an interesting complication for Russian language periodicals, or those published in any language that uses the Cyrillic alphabet, because Cyrillic does not contain the letter N. It’s for this reason that typefaces that include Cyrillic alphabets always include the numero symbol, which is why you’ll find them in both <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/overview/">Whitney</a> and <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/">Gotham</a>.
But the place you’ll find the greatest concentration of numero symbols in our library is in the <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/overview/">Numbers</a> collection, where I insisted upon them simply because they’re delightful. The typefaces in this collection interpret many different traditions in lettermaking, including <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/inside/indicia">rubber stamps</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/inside/revenue">cash register receipts</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/inside/depot">railway car numbering</a> and <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/inside/strasse">street signs</a>, and in each of these environments you’ll find the numero. Many of these styles trace their origins to the nineteenth century, when numbers were more commonly introduced by Nº than #; others in the collection never used this symbol, but their styles seemed ripe for decoration. We recently had this same impluse with the <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/overview/">Inkwell</a> collection, which includes pen-drawn numeros in all forty-eight of its styles.
It’s this desire to decorate that shapes expectations about what should be in a typeface. On your keyboard next to the return key are the brackets [ ], and atop these are the braces { } that are sometimes — tellingly — called curly brackets. In theory, braces exist to present things on an equal footing: in music they connect staves that are played simultaneously, in genealogy they relate siblings, and in drama they group characters that move or speak as a unit (such as a nobleman’s Attendants in Shakespeare.) But braces are graphic rather than typographic forms, seldom meant to be used at the same size as the type they enclose, making them a questionable member of the character set. Frankly, they endure because they’re fetching, a spicy alternative to the humdrum geometry of square brackets, and these days they’re almost always used decoratively. Designers love to use braces, and type designers love to draw them, and it’s this unspoken bond that keeps them in the character set. Like the braces, the Nº is a reminder that typography exists to serve readers, and that readers do not live by semantic punctuation alone. There’s a place for variety and richness in typography, for colorful and engaging creatures that live at abyssal depths. Bring them up for a closer look: they’re splendid to behold. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 02 Aug 2017 11:23:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-loveliest-living-fossil#662</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Nicely Done: Tré Seals]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/nicely-done-tre-seals</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[It’s always thrilling to see designers combining type in interesting ways, an excitement that’s amplified when a designer uses an exceptionally large set of fonts in a single project. But it’s icing on the cake when that designer shows you ways of combining fonts you’d never have expected. Designer <a href="https://www.sealsbrand.co">Tré Seals</a> accomplishes all of these things in his new portfolio site, which uses a whopping six font families from our collection: <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/obsidian/overview/">Obsidian</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/surveyor/overview/">Surveyor</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/ideal-sans/overview/">Ideal Sans</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/ringside/overview/">Ringside</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/operator/overview/">Operator</a> and <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/tungsten/overview/">Tungsten</a> are daringly diverse choices, which Seals uses to great effect, in clever and delightful ways. He takes a methodical, systems-based approach to select and deploy his type: most of the typefaces are only used in one context, others on just one page in the site. Finding them all is a bit of a typographic scavenger hunt, and a rewarding one for the design-minded.
For his project, Seals took inspiration from vintage postal labels, choosing the engraved Obsidian as his cornerstone when creating the type system for the site. Like Obsidian, the Surveyor, Tungsten and Ringside families have historic roots that connect with the traditions of stamps and labels, an assortment to which he added two novel ingredients: the quirky Operator, which serves as a bridge between the old and the new, and for a neutral voice, the clean, Humanist lines of Ideal Sans.
But Seals’s work isn’t only exciting because of the number of faces he uses or the themes they share. What makes it truly special is his creative eye in deploying the fonts in unexpected ways. When many people think of Tungsten, they immediately recall the robust bolder weights with their industrial presence, but Seals opts instead for a lighter weight that achieves an elegant and refined tone. Ringside is a similarly surprising choice: in less careful hands, its Grotesque construction might feel out of place next to Humanist designs like Operator and Ideal Sans, but Seals makes it work by using only uppercase letters, which naturally have simpler and clearer shapes. Overall, the site is a typographic delight that gives the audience a glimpse of Seals’s design inspirations, his systems-based problem solving abilities, and his creativity. He uses each of these six typefaces thoughtfully and with restraint to create an experience that shows off his work in the best possible light. — Bethany Heck]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 31 Jul 2017 09:40:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/nicely-done-tre-seals#1219</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Uncharacteristic Characters]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/uncharacteristic-characters</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[I recently had the privilege of speaking at the third annual <a href="http://2017.typographics.com" target="_blank">Typographics</a> conference, an event organized by the <a href="http://coopertype.org/nyc" target="_blank">Type@Cooper</a> program at The Cooper Union, to share a new project with fellow designers. While visually this new typeface would be unlike anything we’ve ever done before, in many ways it’s the quintessential H&Co project, taking on many of the themes that have characterized our work over the past twenty-eight years. It pokes at the perimeter of the “type family” as it’s commonly understood (much like <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/hoefler-text/overview/">Hoefler Text</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/the-proteus-project/overview/">The Proteus Project</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/knockout/overview/">Knockout</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/overview/">Numbers</a>, and <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/nitro-turbo/overview/">Nitro</a>), it meditates on the relationship between formality and informality in typography, like <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/ideal-sans/overview/">Ideal Sans</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/historical-allsorts/overview/">The Historical Allsorts</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/archer/overview/">Archer</a>, and <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/operator/overview/">Operator</a>; it looks for clues in the observable world about how people interpret letterforms, like all of our typefaces, from <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/shades/overview/">Shades</a> to <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/">Gotham</a>.
The conference has just posted the video of the talk, which I’m pleased to share with those who were unable to attend. And attached below are my lecture notes, which may make up for my double-time performance: already someone who speaks too quickly, I’d mistakenly planned a forty minute lecture for a twenty-five minute slot! —JH

<h2>1</h2>
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-intro-maps.jpg">
Sixteen years ago this September, I got married at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. Like all designers, I designed my own wedding invitation. The invitation itself was set in type, and the outer envelopes were addressed by a calligrapher. But the thing I had the hardest time with was the map, which would show our out-of-town guests how to find the venue. Anything set in type seemed too institutional, as if I was creating the map for the Botanic Gardens itself, rather than my own wedding. But anything rendered in calligraphy seemed absurd: to me at least, calligraphy seems like the stuff of historical maps, not contemporary ones; the only contemporary maps I can think of that have a genuine claim on calligraphy are from the fantasy realm, and alas I was getting married in Prospect Park, not Mordor. So neither typography nor calligraphy had the right tone. I wanted the versatility of type — after all, I had to create an elaborate map with parking instructions, nearby subways, and so on — but I wanted it to have the warm, natural, genuine feeling of something that came from people — something that was recognizably not from an institution, but rather from the two of us.
Around that time, my friend Jesse Sheidlower called me to ask a piece of typographic advice. Jesse has one of the most fantastic jobs in the world, and if you think being a typeface designer is esoteric enough to rope you into long conversations on airplanes, Jesse has it far worse, because he does something even more exotic: he’s a lexicographer, who writes dictionary entries for a living. At the time, Jesse was the Editor at Large of the Oxford English Dictionary, specializing in North American English, which meant that he supervised a staff who pored over TV scripts, hip-hop albums, and Usenet posts to come up with things like an accurate definition for chillax, or the definitive early citation for BFD.
Jesse was writing a book called <a href="https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195393112/typographycom-20">The F-Word</a>, which would be a dictionary dedicated to — well, the F-word — and its many colorful variations. He’d called to ask my advice about a suitable typeface for the project, and a lot of this conversation was also about tone: he and his editors wanted the tone to be casually blithe — “insouciant” was the word he used — but also to be underpinned by a foundation of scholarship that readers would recognize by the typography. While the book was inherently entertaining, it was also going to be a dictionary, and needed to present as such. This conversation about tone echoed many of the open questions I had about my wedding invitations, and what sort of typography might be at once casual and serious. But it also raised the question of whether such a typeface could be up to the functional requirements of serious content: dictionaries after all are incredibly sophisticated typographic projects, that use a surprising number of different typographic dimensions to articulate different kinds of information.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-dictionary.png">
<blockquote class="pullquote">Sophisticated typography helps educate people about how things work.</blockquote>
Thinking about Jesse’s dictionary, and our wedding map, as likely applications for such a typeface, was intriguing. Like dictionaries, maps are sophisticated objects, and one of my favorite examples of how design can use typography as a vital part of the user interface. Maps use different styles of lettering to connote different kinds of information, helping users to intuit what each data point means. Spending time with a map like this [slide], it soon becomes clear that towns and bodies of water use different styles, and the distinctions run deeper still. One lovely mapmaking tradition that I always like is the way sites from antiquity are identified using blackletter, which blends right in with its background unless you’re specifically looking for it.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/map-closeup.jpg">
I often use printed maps as an example of how sophisticated typography can educate users about how something works, without the need to refer people elsewhere for instructions. Certainly every map has a legend that resolves any questions, but it’s rarely necessary to consult it. At a certain point, simply by using a map, you just figure it out.
So, like all the most interesting projects, it seems, Jesse’s dictionary didn’t have the time to consider a custom solution. But the idea of creating a typeface that was both informal and highly functional stuck with me — I could see it being useful to have a typeface that was serious in the sense of thorough, but not serious in the sense of earnest; to have a typeface whose voice was unmistakably personal, rather than institutional.
<h2>2</h2>
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-peanuts.png">
When I started designing typefaces professionally, back in 1989, I spent a lot of time advocating for custom typography as a way to end the monoculture of early digital fonts. An analogy I used a lot was to compare the potential for typography to the abilities of scribes, who could adapt their lettering at will. I wasn’t just thinking about formal calligraphy — Renaissance writing masters, for example, who could move effortlessly from one hand to another — but also contemporary artists who use letterforms in their work. One that I always loved growing up — and for all I know, this may be the very thing that got me into typeface design — is the work of Charles Schulz. Everyone recognizes the iconic lettering of Peanuts, but one of the things that I especially loved as a kid was what would happen when Snoopy sat down at the typewriter: the lettering would shift to something typewriter-inspired — which is funny, and unexpected, and a really effective way of immediately signaling that what you’re reading is no longer dialog, but something being written.
I loved the way Schulz used different styles of lettering to gently, almost subliminally, connote different kinds of language. And on reflection, I realize that it’s something that he had in common with another artist who I grew up with, the inimitable Edward Gorey. (For those of you who don’t know Gorey’s work, you’re in for a treat. His stories are great: they’re elegant and deeply subversive, marvelous dark fantasies set in a vaguely Victorian universe full of mustached gentlemen and ladies with parasols. They generally involve people being driven insane, or hapless infants coming to some grisly fate.)
Gorey was a master lettering artist, and I’m not talking so much about his skill as a draftsman, but rather his perceptiveness about what letters can mean. The title pages for his stories always reveal a deep love for lettering, and he works these different styles of letter into the stories themselves, in ways that are always apropos, from the slab serif [in this slide] that signals “old-time baseball uniforms” to the blackletter that identifies a proverb.
<blockquote class="pullquote">Illustrators and artists instinctively use the traditions of typography to confer legitimacy on the fantasy, to speak to readers in the same ways that graphic designers do.</blockquote>
But I especially love the way he uses lettering not only for display, but for text. When we designers at a type conference talk about “lettering,” we’re almost always talking about large, solitary things: logos, headlines, things that are grand, and have a great opportunity for pyrotechnics. And don’t get me wrong, I love this kind of lettering, but I also love the rarer species of lettering that’s used for text. Gorey’s illustrations use all kinds of tropes and clichés to good effect, and his lettering does too. He uses the traditions of typography to confer legitimacy on the fantasy, whether it’s the bookish presentation of a caption that uses romans for text and italics for titles, or an epigram whose attribution is set in small caps, in just the way that a graphic designer might do. Gorey was obviously a keen student of typography on three different levels: what letters look like, what different kinds of letterforms connote, and how typography can be used to articulate content. Typeface designers think constantly about these three different perspectives, and how their unity can yield typefaces that are not only interesting, but also useful.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-proof-drawing.jpg">
I find myself using lettering to shape content every day, and not just in my role as a designer. Rather, it’s in the proofs that I exchange with the designers at Hoefler&Co: my job is to oversee the design of typefaces at the company, and one of the ways that our team communicates is through marked up proofs.
There are times I find myself indulging in lettering that’s more enthusiastic than it really needs to be, sometimes to relieve the tedium of working through a 240-page kerning proof. But I also do what many of us do instinctively, which is to reach for natural ways to highlight different kinds of information in distinct ways. There’s not really an organized system at work here [in this slide], but clearly there’s some attempt being made to ensure that key details don’t go unnoticed.
<blockquote class="pullquote">Style is incidental to what handwriting is. Principally, informal writing is simply the record of an author’s words.</blockquote>
This [slide] was a note to Sara Soskolne, one of our senior typeface designers, who has always had kind things to say about my scribblings. And perhaps as with Edward Gorey, it’s less about the lettering itself (which is pretty ghastly) and more about my affection for using different typographic styles together. I suppose you could dissect a note like this to say that it’s generally set in script, with occasional highlights set in sans serif small caps; a sort of wide, decorated inline; and even a pen-drawn bold. But I think it presents to the reader differently, as simply a single statement that uses noticeable styles the way a typographer might employ bold or italic. And to me, that’s the most interesting thing about handwriting, as opposed to calligraphy: calligraphy formalizes its mannerisms, and the qualities of its tools, and refines them into a particular style. But handwriting is less conscious, and therefore has more freedom to move between different styles. Style is incidental to what handwriting is: handwriting is principally the record of an author’s words, and only incidentally possessed of style in the typographic sense. I realized that this is what I wanted all those years ago, when designing that map, and also what I wish I’d had to recommend to my friend’s dictionary: something that had the style-less-ness of handwriting, but the versatility of a modern type family.
Or to put it another way, I wanted something that borrowed the best parts of type, calligraphy, and handwriting. I wanted the versatility of type, but none of typography’s artificiality: type after all is synthetic, institutional, more anonymous than personal, which as a communication tool is generally its strength. But instead of artificiality, what I wanted was something from calligraphy: its organic quality. Calligraphy is genuinely hand-made, warm and natural — it’s the product of the wrist, the elbow, and the shoulder — but it’s too mannered for what I had in mind, since by design it coalesces into a formal style. An antidote to this formality is found in handwriting, which is as informal as letters can be — and I really love the way handwriting reveals authorship, instead of concealing it, but then handwriting can often be disorderly, if not downright sloppy. So my question was whether it might be possible to strain out the virtues of these three kinds of lettering, and eliminate their shortcomings, and that’s what we’ve been trying to do with a new project called Inkwell.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-initial-drawings.jpg">
<h2>3</h2>
Inkwell is an attempt to create a family of fonts that feels like hand-written text: how you might letter the entire contents of a book, if you had infinite time, patience, and skill. It began with a set of drawings that I created around 2004: initially sketches on paper, and later a set of digital fonts, to serve as a “proof of concept” for the idea, and see if it was worth undertaking what I imagined could be a much larger project. In addition to wanting the design to feel personal — authorial — I wanted the design to have the versatility of a hard-working type family. This meant obvious things like a sophisticated character set, but also a set of varied, expressive styles that would have recognizable relationships for writers and designers, whatever handwriting’s equivalent of “bold” and “italic” might be.
Like handwriting, I wanted to make sure it wasn’t related to any particular typeface, or even a particular style. The last thing I wanted this to be was “hand-drawn Gotham,” but I also hoped that it would escape classification altogether, so that it didn’t feel like an Old Style, a Venetian, or a Slab, but simply felt like “neatly printed letters.” These are some of my drawings from 2005, to explore how the basic design might develop. As with handwriting, I found myself reaching for styles that aren’t technically connected with what a proper typeface would do: here after all is a <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/inside/inkwell-serif">seriffed text face</a>, whose small caps happen to be <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/inside/inkwell-sans">sans serif</a>. As a typeface designer, beginning this way means one of two things: either convincing everyone that it’s OK for these two morphologically dissimilar styles to share the same typeface, or doubling the work to create both a serif and a sans.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-blackletter-open.jpg">
I found myself wanting to do more with the typeface than just a <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/inside/inkwell-serif">handwritten serif</a> or a <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/inside/inkwell-sans">handwritten sans</a> — let alone both — and noodled out a couple of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/inside/inkwell-blackletter">blackletter</a> characters to see how they might work. And I liked the idea, that this typeface could conceivably have both roman and gothic letterforms, that are related only because they’re made by the same hand, and with the same tools. I hoped this might go in even more directions, maybe including the kind of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/inside/inkwell-open">open capitals</a> that my father used to use on blueprints — he was a theatrical set designer, and was always lettering the headings on shop drawings in a style like this one. It’s an engineer’s letter that you’ll find on blueprints and patent diagrams, and while he used to draw his freehand, I think they were probably an approximation of what a lettering template could produce.
If the typeface was going to have not just sans serif letters, but a more stylized degree of sans in the form of these open capitals, then perhaps the serif ought to have a fancy cousin as well, perhaps a <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/inside/inkwell-tuscan">Tuscan</a>, one of my guilty typographic pleasures. I always really liked the capital H [in this slide]; the A was more of a placeholder for an idea that I wanted to come back to later. The thought that all these styles might work together reminded me of the way engravers — or Edward Gorey, for that matter — could create these riotous collages of letterforms that always felt unified, because they were all the product of the same tools.
<blockquote class="pullquote">Inkwell advances the idea that the same tools can help unify divergent styles of letterform.</blockquote>
And I think there’s a real value in being able to work with disparate styles in the same piece of design, without it feeling cacophonous. Here’s an example [in this slide] I snapped years ago: I’m certainly seduced by what this piece of typography is going for, but it’s somewhat undermined by the divergent traditions of its fonts. The Spencerian script at the top is pretty solid, and below that is an engravers’ letter from turn-of-the-century business cards; fair enough. But the third typeface is inspired by classical roman inscriptions, and the fourth one is an especially Victorian interpretation of an Anglo-German fraktur. It seems to me that this lettering might have been more attractive in the mockup, when everything was drawn with the same marker, and by the same wrist. And that’s what I hoped Inkwell might do: it might unify these different styles by rendering them with a common formal vocabulary.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-bickham.png">
I put this project away in 2006, to focus on other things. Matthew Carter once commented that he’s never regretted stepping away from a typeface, and I agree: time confers a valuable critical perspective on our work, and can exert an evolutionary force on typefaces, too, to thin out the herd.
<blockquote class="pullquote">Two of the best ways to improve a typeface are to set it aside, and to share it with another typeface designer.</blockquote>
But besides time, the other thing that makes every typeface better is sharing it with another designer, and that opportunity presented itself last year, in the person of Jordan Bell. Jordan’s a typeface designer who joined us three years ago, and among other things, I think it’s safe to say that he’s a compulsive, and chronic graphomaniac. Here [in this slide] are some of his more exuberant notes from the Inkwell proofs. Some of them are of notes to me, others are notes to himself, others are perhaps notes for posterity.
When Jordan started, we put him through the traditional hazing of drawing a difficult project. Jordan worked with Andy Clymer and me to create three <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/archer/styles/archer3pro">heavier weights of Archer</a>, of which one of the most excruciating parts was extending the fonts’ tabular figures into this new territory. Tabular figures of course need to have the same widths throughout a range of weights, which fights against the natural tendency of letters to get wider as they get bolder. But Jordan came through with flying colors, making these terrific additions to Archer.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-bible-4up.png">
Something that’s great about working with another designer is that it forces you to articulate your own position, which in turn can reveal inconsistencies in your own thinking, or tendencies that you hadn’t thought to examine. When Jordan and I began working together on Inkwell, one of our first conversations was about how serifs should connect, which meant dissecting my drawings to see how they worked, then abstracting from these a set of rules, and then seeing if any characters didn’t fit the mold. This was the beginning of the “Inkwell Bible,” a long and growing collection of guidelines about what Inkwell should do. (Of course, it never looked this good until I put these slides together — most of what we recorded were one-off Illustrator files, or notes in e-mail, or Slack, or Trello.)
One of the ways we tried to keep things from becoming monotonous was to try and apply these strategies differently throughout the character set, so that things like caps and small caps don’t follow the same underlying design. In many ways, Inkwell became about doing the things that you typically don’t do in a typeface, since our goal was to introduce not consistency but variation, up to the point where it becomes noticeable.
Another thing I love about collaborating with other designers is that they inject unexpected and valuable ideas into every project. Part of this is the natural tendency to grow tired of your own work and see the work of others with fresh eyes, and part of it is that every designer has different talents, instincts, and interests. I’d had this idea that even though the design was a serif, it might have sans serif small caps, because this is how I write. Of course, this in turn would have meant having a secondary set of sans serif caps, to accompany these small caps, which in turn would have meant two set of caps in the font, one with serifs for the lowercase, the other without, for the small caps. This started to feel complicated, and felt likely to either confuse people or actually thwart their expectations — in any case we weren’t sure it would be possible to engineer things so that they’d behave as people expected, so in the end we did the thing that would be better for designers, if more labor-intensive for us, which was to do two typefaces, both a <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/inside/inkwell-serif">serif</a> and a <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/inside/inkwell-sans">sans</a>.
Of course, since there was going to be a serif italic, we’d presumably need to do a sans serif italic as well, and this wasn’t part of the family that I’d explored. And this was another place that it was great to collaborate with another designer, because while a sans serif italic isn’t a style that I naturally write with, it’s very much one of Jordan’s favorites. So here’s the sans serif italic that Jordan designed, which is has a real flavor of signwriting that I love. This one quickly became one of my favorite parts of the family.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-blackletter-sketches.jpg">
I was really happy that Jordan was enthusiastic about the <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/inside/inkwell-blackletter">blackletter</a> that I’d been tinkering with, especially after the ridiculous amount of time I’d spent trying to figure out what “informal blackletter caps” might look like, most of it scrawled on the back of restaurant checks and junk mail. We spent last summer trying to find the right way of dressing down the gothic style, so that it still felt ceremonial, but not twee. I really wanted it to feel more special than the roman, but not necessarily more buttoned-up — and that really emerged as a key part of the Inkwell family, that all the styles should feel as close to the center as a traditional family’s bold or italic.
<blockquote class="pullquote">Dressing down the gothic style, so it’s ceremonial, not twee.</blockquote>
The line quality was a big part of this, as were the constructions we chose for the caps, which borrow pretty freely from Regency Blackletter, Kanzlei, and Engravers’ styles. For instance, since the traditional gothic N and E are a little too archaic, even indecipherable these days, we dropped them in favor of a more contemporary construction, the kind that we all know from newspaper flags.
Part of the fun of a typeface like this is figuring out what the back end of the character set might look like, and we had a lot of fun here. The figures alone are always a challenge, since they have neither a historical nor a cursive foundation. Jordan drew these, and I really love them. And either because I traumatized him with Archer, or just to flex a little bit because he could, he designed these on tabular widths. I say with both fondness and admiration that Jordan’s a sick bastard.
In the middle of all this, we started to talk about the idea of weight. I’d originally imagined Inkwell as a collection of alphabets that could all be the product of the same pen, and therefore all with a consistent stroke width. But a companion boldface is obviously a valuable thing for a designer to have. And even if the design were to stick to a single weight, it seems to me that choosing that weight is important — I wouldn’t be surprised if Inkwell brought out the kinds of red-hot feelings that designers have about writing instruments. So we decided to expand the family, from a single weight into a range of weights, bounded by a technical pen Thin and a graffiti marker Black.
As useful as these weights are in the more sober styles — and they really do introduce some nice flavor in their more cursive moments, especially — for me it’s the blackletter where things really start to cook. I mean, I’m a blackletter fan in general, but this typeface is really just having a good time.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-tuscan-sketches.jpg">
The style we hadn’t really spent much time with was the <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/inside/inkwell-tuscan">Tuscan</a>. My drawings were still pretty embryonic, and though I’d been sketching these incessantly for more than a decade, there were key characters that were starting to feel impossible to resolve — like the capital O. (No Tuscan typeface has a nice O.) Now that we’d added a weight axis to the project, it seemed likely that a style this intricate simply wouldn’t survive getting so much extra weight, so we shelved it. I found myself doodling all kinds of things in an Inkwell style — here’s a little monogram [see slide] that, for a time, I thought we might include in the fonts — and at some point, we both realized that this sort of construction might be a more fertile direction for the Tuscan. It delivered on the underlying premise that Tuscan alphabets have bifurcated serifs, and it seemed as if this sort of design might work in a range of weights. It also invited, at last, a solution to that impossible letter O. I did some sketches to propose the basic morphology for the character set, and drew a couple of control characters in Robofont, and Jordan took things from there, creating a really beautiful and expressive family of fonts. This one interpolates really interestingly: it goes full-on circus poster in the Black weight, but as it gets lighter, it takes on a sort of rustic, woodsy feeling, which I’ve been finding really useful.
By last summer it felt like the more Inkwell we drew, the more Inkwell we wanted to draw — a bracing change from the usual pattern, in which you get sick of a typeface three quarters of the way through. Here [in this slide] is the <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/inside/inkwell-open">Open</a> that I’d wanted to do, which we redesigned as two extreme weights that would interpolate. Jordan brought some of that signwriters’ fluidity to these letters that I really like.
<blockquote class="pullquote">Inkwell’s broader mission is to expand the very idea of the type family.</blockquote>
Early in the project, I’d wondered what the italic should look like: whether it should be a fully cursive script, as handwriting probably should be, or whether it should be a carefully lettered typographic italic in the Edward Gorey tradition. We could make arguments for both, so we decided to do both, wrapping up the project with a <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/inside/inkwell-script">script</a>. People have been asking us for a script for ages, and I’m really happy that our first one isn’t just a typeface, but has the broader mission of being part of an experiment in growing the type family.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics.jpg">
The notion of the type family, to me, is really what type design is about. Some of the most significant moments in type history have been not about typefaces, but about the expansion of the type family as we understand it. Aldus’s italic isn’t just significant for being a new kind of typeface, it’s important because of what it made possible: the marriage of romans and italics that have endured for five centuries. Italics aren’t just part of typography, they’re part of language — especially English, in which it’s common to write sentences that can’t be properly understood without them. Here’s a good one [in this slide], in which the presence of italic clarifies the meaning, and the placement of the italics gives rise to nearly as many meanings as there are words in the sentence. Even The Chicago Manual of Style, which urges authors to avoid italics, admits that they are often crucial to comprehension, and irreplaceable parts of the language.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/boldface.jpg">
So this is the significance of Aldus, I think, not just making a font, but helping the language and the culture grow. And nineteenth century slab serifs had a similar legacy: these are typefaces that grew out of the tradition of novelty typography for display sizes, and like the Aldine italic, they were imagined as standalone typefaces. But once they were produced in text sizes, they found a role in dictionaries, being used to highlight headwords, a role they still play today. So here again the definition of the type family expanded, to include an entirely new typographic dimension — boldface — with which authors could articulate content, and which upon which designers have relied ever since.
The typographic family tree is forever growing. In <a href="https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0881791326/typographycom-20">The Elements of Typographic Style</a>, Robert Bringhurst diagrammed its relationships this way [shown in this slide], which reveals the perspective of a book designer about how styles relate. My hope is that Inkwell helps to push this definition further, in order to better serve both designers and readers.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-types-of-content.png">
I’m especially curious to see how designers will use Inkwell’s unusual family tree to render different kinds of information — especially new kinds of information. Wikipedia’s a great example of how text can be subtly shaded — but right now, typography isn’t one of the tools it uses to assist readers. It uses bolds and italics for all the usual purposes, but doesn’t use type to distinguish between “articles,” “past versions of articles,” and “commentary.” But what if it used a typeface that had built-in voices that could help readers distinguish these three kinds of content, styles with strong associations — even for non-designers — that are understood to mean “<a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/inside/inkwell-serif">writing</a>,” “<a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/inside/inkwell-blackletter">old things</a>,” and “<a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/inside/inkwell-script">notes</a>?”
And for that matter, why not use typography to separate the site’s content and its architecture, or find a typographic way, instead of a color, to identify a link? In discussing Inkwell with Barbara Glauber last week, I raised Wikipedia as an example of a place where typography wasn’t being used to really provide depth to these new kinds of content, and she wondered, tongue-in-cheek, what Wikipedia might look like in Inkwell. I couldn’t help but oblige, just to see if the fonts are up to the task. And I do like the idea that I can finally see the difference between articles, commentary on articles, and history.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-wikipedia-2.png">
I want a special mode for people who aren’t intimidated by typography, that looks like this. (But that’s probably just for us.) In the meantime, I’ll settle for seeing the fonts wherever designers can use them, hopefully one day in dictionaries, and perhaps, someday, someone’s wedding map. Thank you very much! —JH
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-thanks.png">
Jonathan Hoefler 
16 June 2017 
The Cooper Union, New York]]>
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<title><![CDATA[Meet Inkwell]]></title>
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<![CDATA[Sixteen years ago this week, I was designing my wedding invitations. The invitations were set in my typefaces, and printed by a friend who runs a letterpress shop in Berkeley, and the enclosing envelopes were hand-addressed by a calligrapher. Each kind of letterform served a different purpose: the type was dignified, and the calligraphy was personal. But I never really figured out what to do with the map.
Out-of-town guests would need a sophisticated map of the venue, explaining how to get there by road, rail, and air, where they might park, and some sort of assurance that it really was safe to take the subway. Set in type, this looked too institutional: it didn’t feel like it came from the bride and groom, but rather from someone’s marketing communications department. But rendered in calligraphy, it looked ridiculous. I felt like I was directing my friends and relatives to a wedding in Middle Earth.
My dream was to letter this myself. Not in fussy, mannered calligraphy, but in simple block printing, something that was an extension of my own handwriting. I’d have done this, had I the time, skill, and patience. Instead, I filed away an idea for later, that somewhere there might be a useful intersection of type, calligraphy, and handwriting, that might one day become a typeface. Something with the versatility of type, not only because it could be summoned from the keyboard, but because it would have methodical drawings and spacing, a proper character set, and the kinds of relationships that designers depend on — italics, small caps, and so on. But it would also have the expressive dimension of handwriting, with writing’s ability to fluidly change styles to suit the message. (When something is important, I find myself dropping my longhand script in favor of letterspaced capitals, but still punctuating these with the occasional cursive “of” or “for.”) I imagined that a sufficiently large family of types could do the same thing, so I set to work on a prototype as a proof-of-concept for the idea. After simmering for more than a decade, we picked up the project last year, with H&Co typeface designer Jordan Bell leading the charge, and our Andy Clymer graciously lending an indispensable assist. Today we’re very pleased to introduce the result: Inkwell®, a collection of typefaces for expressive writing.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-release_responsive-02.svg">
Not quite a typeface, or even a family of typefaces, Inkwell is more like a family of families, featuring a Serif, a Sans, a Script, a Blackletter, a Tuscan, and a set of Open capitals. While it’s designed for serious content — it can effortlessly dispatch detailed maps, complex reference books, or anything displayed in a digital app — Inkwell wears its attitude lightly. It’s “serious” in the sense of thorough, rather than earnest, speaking in a decidedly personal, authorial voice.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-release_responsive-03.svg">
Inkwell explores six different genres of type with which readers already have strong associations. It begins with <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/inside/inkwell-serif">Inkwell Serif</a>, a book face for text, designed to avoid any obvious typographic style and simply look like “plainly lettered text.” It’s provided in romans and italics, with small caps in both postures, with a few unexpectedly sophisticated touches like tabular figures, fractions, and symbols. These styles feature both swash caps and swash small caps, making it possible to dial up the typography’s whimsy in subtle increments.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-release_responsive-04.svg">
<a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/inside/inkwell-sans">Inkwell Sans</a> is the companion sans serif, provided in the same twelve parallel styles, again with small caps and numerics throughout. Its capitals are reminiscent of inscriptional lettering, taking nicely to letterspacing, and its lowercase is again designed to be unmannered in style. Where the sans roman was based on my handwriting (or rather, an idealized version of what I might be able to print with great care), the sans italic is the product of Jordan’s hand, and brings a touch of signpainting to the Inkwell family, especially in its heaviest weights.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-release_responsive-05.svg">
Designers have been asking us for a script since we first opened for business in 1989, and we’re very pleased to answer with <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/inside/inkwell-script">Inkwell Script</a>. Like the rest of the family, Inkwell Script strives to be informal, avoiding the fussiness of the studied calligrapher, and speaking instead with the confidence and joy of an enthusiastic writer. We’ve included small caps in all of its weights, so that acronyms and abbreviations can be set more easily, something you might appreciate if your name ends with “iii.”
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-release_responsive-06.svg">
I’ve always had a deep fondness for gothic forms, and couldn’t resist making <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/inside/inkwell-blackletter">Inkwell Blackletter</a> a part of the family. It’s tempting to write off the blackletter as an archaic style, but it’s very much alive today, and remains the easiest way to signal gravity in anything you do. It’s ceremonial for weddings and graduations, and adds a dash of tradition to the rustic and highbrow alike. Law journals and heavy metal bands both rely on blackletter typefaces for their gravitas, in admittedly different directions. Inkwell Blackletter is happy to serve both masters.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-release_responsive-07.svg">
Because written letters can often take a turn for the fancy, we’ve designed <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/inside/inkwell-tuscan">Inkwell Tuscan</a> as the decorative member of the family. Tuscan faces are nineteenth century inventions that feature fishtailed serifs, an idea that we’ve implemented in an unusual way to ensure that even serif-free letters like O can be fully embellished. As it progresses from light to dark, Inkwell Tuscan takes on very different flavors, from sweet and bucolic to boisterously burlesque.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-release_responsive-08.svg">
The final style is <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/inside/inkwell-open">Inkwell Open</a>, a set of capitals inspired by the sorts of letters used by engineers. My father was a theatrical set designer, and I remember his titling his shop drawings in a style like this. I’ve since seen letters like these on blueprints, patent applications, and technical drawings, and even reduced to geometry on a lettering stencil. Open capitals are a useful way to identify something as a heading, or to indicate that something is otherwise elevated above the text.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/inkwell-release_responsive-09.svg">
The entire Inkwell family is designed to be used interchangeably, which opens up some interesting opportunities for designers. At the scale of the paragraph, it means that designers who are accustomed to shifting roman type to italic or bold will have new options, and can move from serif to sans, or script, or swash small caps, or blackletter, to achieve different distances from the center. At the scale of the word, it means that letterforms from different styles can be juxtaposed in unexpected ways — sometimes invisibly, other times with great flourish — making Inkwell a powerful tool for creating logotypes. Included in the <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/inkwell/overview/">Inkwell gallery</a> you’ll find artwork that mixes blackletter capitals with the roman lowercase (and vice versa), script capitals with sans serif roman small caps, blackletter caps with tuscan caps, roman swash caps with the blackletter lowercase, and more. Each of Inkwell’s styles is provided in the same six weights, from Thin to Ultra, yielding a total of 48 font styles, which today we’re introducing at a special price, for those designers looking add something new to their stables. On behalf of everyone at H&Co, I hope you’ll find a place for Inkwell in your collection, and I look forward to seeing how it serves you! —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Thu, 22 Jun 2017 10:10:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/meet-inkwell#1217</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Typographic Doubletakes]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-doubletakes</link>
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<![CDATA[<h3 class="subhead-sentinel">1. Avoid the Obvious</h3>
When reaching for a different weight, turning to a sympathetic but distinctively different typeface can add drama to a design. <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/sentinel/overview/">Sentinel</a> and <a href="http://typography.com/fonts/archer/overview/">Archer</a> are two slab serifs with very different origins — one a nineteenth century ‘Antique,’ the other a twenty-first century invention full of circular ‘ball terminals’ — but using them together adds visual interest to an otherwise muted composition. Among sans serifs, <a href="http://typography.com/fonts/verlag/overview/">Verlag</a> and <a href="http://typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/">Gotham</a> are two plainspoken typefaces whose unique flavors are sharpened by the contrasting of their details, Verlag’s pointy apexes (in its A, N, and W) offering a sparkling counterpoint to the upright candor of Gotham.
TIP: Changes in both weight and scale help to accentuate the differences between these pairs, and draw out the unique character of each design. Used together, Sentinel seems especially prudent and Archer especially happy; Verlag seems doubly elegant and Gotham twice as direct.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/typographic-doubletakes_responsive-02.svg">
<h3 class="subhead-sentinel">2. Create Practical Pairings</h3>
No task is more familiar to a designer than selecting two typefaces that can work hand in hand, each chosen to present a similar but distinctive kind of content. Text-heavy applications, whether printed or digital, often need two contrasting faces to highlight different kinds of information. A practical text face with a large x-height, such as <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/mercury-text/overview/">Mercury Text</a>, can be usefully matched by a sans serif with similar proportions, such as <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/ideal-sans/overview/">Ideal Sans</a>. (Try a <a href="https://typography.com/collections/screensmart/">ScreenSmart</a> font, even if you’re working in print: their generous fit and open gestures make ScreenSmart fonts especially readable at text sizes — and at sizes smaller still.) And don’t be bound to the convention of pitting serif against sans: if your body face is a sans serif workhorse like <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/whitney/overview/">Whitney</a>, try a more colorful sans serif alternative for contrast, such as <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/operator/overview/">Operator</a>. Operator’s taut curves and punchy gestures offer a nice counterpoint to the sobriety of Whitney, and the fixed-width <a href="http://typography.com/fonts/operator/styles/operatormono">Operator Mono</a> can introduce a strikingly different rhythm that usefully contrasts with the text.<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/typographic-doubletakes_responsive-06.svg">
TIP: A fixed-width typeface like <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/operator/styles/operatormono">Operator Mono</a> helps to quickly identify something as a computer program. But when the manuscript calls for highlighting a code fragment in the middle of a paragraph of text, switch to the font’s natural-width cousin, <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/operator/styles/operator1basic">Operator</a>. Since Operator shares the same underlying design as Operator Mono, these bold keywords are instantly recognizable as pieces of code. But their more traditional rhythm of wide and narrow letters makes for a more comfortable read.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/typographic-doubletakes_responsive-03.svg">
<h3 class="subhead-sentinel">3. Strike Subtle Contrasts</h3>
Sometimes the most engaging combinations are the ones that aren’t immediately apparent. Even though <a href="http://typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/">Gotham</a> and <a href="http://typography.com/fonts/vitesse/overview/">Vitesse</a> are manifestly different typefaces — one a sans based on the circle, the other a slab rooted in rounded rectangles — both fonts are equally dramatic in their use of geometry, and can be rendered in very similar weights. But typefaces don’t need to share a common weight to be good comrades, especially if they’re used at different sizes. Compared with the smaller <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/sentinel/overview/">Sentinel</a>, the stems in <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/quarto/overview/">Quarto</a> are nearly twice as heavy, and its hairlines one-fifth as wide, differences that disappear when the reader sees each at its own set of sizes.
TIP: Rendering two contrasting typefaces with a similar fit can help close the distance between them. In both the examples above, careful thought has been given to the tracking of each typeface, with the intention of synchronizing the rhythm of letters and the spaces between them, even as the fonts themselves change.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/typographic-doubletakes_responsive-04.svg">
<h3 class="subhead-sentinel">4. Assemble Elegant Duets</h3>
Whether a sans serif with finely-drawn strokes or a serif face with delicate hairlines, light typefaces have long been a mainstay of fashion and luxury typography. Many species of hairline fonts pair handsomely together, especially when additional motifs reinforce their elegance. Here, the “low-waistedness” of <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/landmark/overview/">Landmark</a>, clearest in its A, R, and K, gives the design a deco-era elegance, a smart counterpoint to the crisp and evenly balanced <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/chronicle-display/styles/chroniclehairline">Chronicle Hairline</a>. Another strategy is to match faces with both common weights and a common approach to construction, like the starkly geometric <a href="http://typography.com/fonts/vitesse/overview/">Vitesse</a> and <a href="http://typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/">Gotham</a> — which careful readers may have noticed, reversed, in the section above.
TIP: When working with <a href="https://typography.com/collections/hairline/">hairline fonts</a>, decide early what size each font is suited for: some can perform at large text sizes, others are best used only for the largest display typography. When evaluating a serif face such as Chronicle, look not only at the weight of its hairline strokes like the crossbar of its H or the thinner arm of its Y, but also the weight of its serifs. Serifs are often considerably thinner than hairlines, and it’s these delicate gestures that will define how small the font can go.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/typographic-doubletakes_responsive-05.svg">
<h3 class="subhead-sentinel">5. Introduce Strange Bedfellows</h3>
Some of the most dazzling typographic pairings — and certainly my favorites — are those that use unexpected fonts together. At left, the grey flannel suit that is <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/tungsten/overview/">Tungsten Compressed</a> is paired with crimson silk doublet of the <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/historical-allsorts/overview/">St. Augustin Civilité</a>, a fiery sixteenth century typeface that demands a good foil. The contrast between Tungsten’s restraint and the swashbuckling Civilité makes for a marvelous palette, and the contrasting proportions of these faces emphasizes the solemn verticality of one and the racy horizontality of the other. At right, the unconventional <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/acropolis/overview/">Acropolis Italic</a>, made only of straight lines, meets the energetic <a href="https://typography.com/fonts/surveyor/overview/">Surveyor Display Italic</a>, a typeface without a single straight line. Lending the fonts extra cohesion is their insistent angle of incline: both lean forward considerably more than a typical italic.
TIP: Keeping eccentric typefaces at arm’s length helps accentuate their uniqueness, something that’s easiest to do by segregating each font by size. In these examples, each typeface is assigned a specific range of sizes that’s free of other fonts, a clear and inviolate ‘altitude’ that further distinguishes its role in the design. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Tue, 28 Mar 2017 08:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-doubletakes#1216</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Matchbox First!]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/matchbox-first</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[“Mobile First” is an indispensable approach for designing digital experiences. The idea is to first consider the restrictions and expectations of the handheld browser, and thereby identify and distill our very best ideas. For designers working on broader identity systems, I propose a parallel rallying cry: matchbox first.
A matchbox might be a charming memento of an evening well spent; a matchbook an ersatz way to share a phone number or jot down an idea. But materially, these tiny pieces of cardboard are usually the most reduced manifestations of an organizations’s visual identity. Only the best parts of a resturant’s front window, its menu, or even its business card will make it to the matchbox, so it’s here that both design and designers must be at their best. When it comes to working with limited resources (both space and budget), it’s often typography that comes to the rescue, and sometimes typography is the only ingredient. One de-prioritizes the mission statement and thought leadership/heritage backstory right off the box, and discovers the freedom to also leave them off the website, the billboard advertising, and the rest of the business. If the matchbox doesn’t need them, nobody does.
Today at <a href="http://discover.typography.com/theme/its-a-match/">Discover.typography,</a> thirty-nine small-scale identities reduced to their very essence. We love the way these tiny tableaux rely on the smallest type to do the heaviest lifting, and the joy of seeing how the right fonts can communicate all the essentials at a single glance. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 01 Mar 2017 03:06:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/matchbox-first#1215</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Thanks, Obamas.]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-obama-typefaces</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Today, as the saying goes, is the first day of the rest of your life.
For the exiting President and First Lady, who for eight years have represented this nation with dignity, and led it with courage, today begins the next chapter in their lives as public servants, as stewards of the new Office of Barack and Michelle Obama.
We at Hoefler&Co have had the extraordinary privilege of seeing our typefaces accompany the Obamas on every step of their journey. A typographic chronology appears below, beginning with the moment in 2007 that Congressman Barack Obama announced his campaign for the presidency, with the call for change that resonated so powerfully with the American people. The campaign’s decision to use Gotham Bold would forever cement the font’s association not only with the President, but with the presidency itself, and make Gotham the aspirational choice of everyone who is driven to seek higher office through a desire to serve.
It is therefore especially meaningful to me that our typefaces will continue with the Obamas. <a href="https://barackobama.com" target="_blank">The Office of Barack and Michelle Obama</a>, its website designed by Blue State Digital and premiering this morning, will be the first organization to use a new H&Co typeface named <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/ringside/overview">Ringside</a>, which will launch later this week. Ringside is our most ambitious typeface to date, our largest and most inclusive family ever, reflecting the handiwork of the entire type design team at Hoefler&Co. I could not be more proud to see it debut here. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Fri, 20 Jan 2017 19:27:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-obama-typefaces#2113</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Introducing Chronicle Hairline]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-chronicle-hairline</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Fashion changes, yet fashion typography endures. Ever since Alexey Brodovitch adorned the pages of Harper’s Bazaar with high-contrast ‘Modern’ typefaces more than eighty years ago, typefaces with billowy curves and fine hairlines have remained a signature of the fashion industry. More recently, as typography has begun to play a more central role in visual storytelling, these typefaces’ exquisite details and proud features have invited larger-than-life applications, allowing them to create the same kinds of enticing visual fantasies as enthralling fashion layouts and well-dressed windows.
Because readers can identify the style at a glance, high-contrast faces are widely used for fashion titles from the newsstand to the web. But Modern typefaces in the elegant and formal <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/didot/overview/">Didot</a> style aren’t the only option for creating stylish, transporting typography. To offer designers a new voice to work with, we’ve taken our Chronicle Display family, a smart and newsy design in the ‘Scotch’ style, and extended it into this new collection of bright and graceful typefaces for creating grand, expressive, and picturesque typography. Meet Chronicle Hairline®.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/chronicle-hairline-release_responsive-01.svg">
In contrast to the steely detachment of a Modern, Chronicle Hairline is direct and welcoming: a tweed to the Modern’s silk, a Savile Row to its Place Vendôme. Its subtly shaded curves and neatly bracketed serifs give Chronicle Hairline the kind of warmth normally associated with <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/quarto/overview/">Old Style</a> typefaces. But the clear geometry of its beaks and terminals, its unfussy numbers, and its alert and practical italics, mark Chronicle Hairline as an indisputably contemporary design.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/chronicle-hairline-release_responsive-02.svg">
Perhaps most usefully for anyone who works with big type — whether on book covers, posters, banners, architectural lettering, or identity programs — Chronicle Hairline is designed in three different widths: an approachable Hairline, a cosmopolitan Hairline Condensed, and a dignified Hairline Compressed, each in both roman and italic. Together with the <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/chronicle-display/styles/chronicledisplay">Chronicle Display</a> headline faces, the <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/chronicle-display/styles/chronicledeck">Chronicle Deck</a> series for subheads, and the <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/chronicle-text/styles/chronicletextcomplete">Chronicle Text</a> collection for text, the new <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/chronicle-display/styles/chroniclehairline">Chronicle Hairline</a> adds an extra helping of sophistication to one of our most versatile and hardest-working type families.]]>
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<pubDate>Tue, 04 Oct 2016 10:49:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-chronicle-hairline#606</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Type and Wine]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/type-and-wine</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[When exploring how new fonts work together, we always find ourselves talking about dinner. The world of cuisine offers so many natural parallels for typography, and a robust vocabulary that we’re quick to borrow: What does this font taste like? Is it a garnish, or the entrée itself? Is it adding heat, or sweetness, or spice? What might it go with? Food and dining offer indispensable reference points, which by analogy can make it easier to communicate what we see in a piece of design. One designer to another, we’ve described fonts as “somewhere between the small batch <a href="http://discover.typography.com/theme/barrel-proof/" target="_blank">bourbon</a> made in Brooklyn, and the one your granddad drank,” or “the <a href="http://discover.typography.com/theme/whats-cooking/">menu</a> for an oyster bar, but reimagined without a New England accent.”
<blockquote class="pullquote">If the type is right, you’ll know what you’re getting into.</blockquote>
Add wine to the mix, and whole new dimensions open up. There’s the balance of old and new, and the stance that every winemaker takes toward tradition. A label communicates at once whether a wine is trading on its heritage, or interpreting it in a new way; perhaps it’s standing apart from convention, or thumbing its nose at history. Wine labels succeed when they play with the instantly recognizable tropes and clichés of typography, from the engraved foofaraw of an old Bordeaux, to the haute modernism of a New World white. As with all packaging, if the type is right, you’ll know what you’re getting into.
For <a href="http://discover.typography.com/theme/cheers/">Discover.typography</a>, we challenged ourselves to see just what kinds of flavors we could coax out of unexpected pairings. Could a pair of brutalist sans serifs be paired with a pattern of renaissance arabesques, to evoke the kind of bottle that your favorite Italian restaurateur brings out at the end of a gathering? Could we project a flavor using just one font, or crashing six families together? Could we take typefaces that we’ve never seen used on wine bottles, and use them to evoke recognizable flavors? You’ll find twenty-two different studies for <a href="http://discover.typography.com/theme/cheers/">typographic wine labels</a> today at Discover.typography. Cheers! —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 10 Aug 2016 17:59:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/type-and-wine#601</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Office Fonts from H&Co]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/office-fonts</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[You know this company: their identity is consistent across their website, their marketing, and their facilities. Yet the material prepared by their sales associate is set in Arial, your sign-up contract is in Times Roman, and your monthly statements use some typeface picked by the lettershop — the same motley palette used by competitors a hundredth their size. It’s tragic, because typography is the least expensive and most effective way of reinforcing a brand, and it’s the easiest thing to get right. All it takes is making sure that the fonts that business users need are ones that support the brand. Enter Office Fonts™ by Hoefler&Co, designed to harmonize all of a brand’s communications.
<h2>The right fonts for business users.</h2>
Most typefaces are made for design professionals and the sophisticated software they use. But overwhelmingly, brand communications don’t come from designers: they’re the product of word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation packages, software that has a limited facility with type, made for users who shouldn’t have to contend with complex design decisions. To meet their needs, we’ve created Office Fonts: adaptations of our most popular and hardest-working typefaces, specifically retooled for business software. With Office Fonts, business users can reliably use the templates you create in programs like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, to ensure that everyone who speaks for the brand uses the same consistent voice.
Office Fonts by H&Co are designed with the features that business people need, and business software expects:
<h3 class="subhead-sentinel xl">Intuitive Families</h3>
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/office-fonts-release_responsive-05.svg">
Designers love H&Co fonts for their robust and expressive families. But non-designers should never be faced with Book or Medium when they just want regular type — and plenty of programs can’t cope with esoteric names, or families that contain anything more than four styles. Office Fonts are arranged into the standard four-style schedule of regular, italic, bold, and bold italic that’s familiar to users, and reliable in all business software. Bold and italic styles are mapped to the familiar keyboard shortcuts B and I, to stop unsavvy applications from faking their own bolds and italics by smearing or slanting roman letters.
<h3 class="subhead-sentinel xl">Enhanced Clarity</h3>
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/office-fonts-release_responsive-06.svg">
Office Fonts are optimized for small sizes, and engineered for superior rendering on screen in even the most unforgiving environments. Each has an amplified lowercase, a more generous fit, and clearer gestures, which combine to promote legibility at text sizes. The intervals between their regular and bold styles are adjusted to provide optimum contrast at text sizes, to ensure that emphasized lines are never overlooked. Most of all, Office Fonts are designed and engineered with ScreenSmart™ technology to render crisply and clearly on Windows, handily surpassing shopworn favorites like Arial and Times.
<h3 class="subhead-sentinel xl">Numbers for Business</h3>
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/office-fonts-release_responsive-07.svg">
Only a designer should have to decide between old-style figures, lining figures, and tabular figures. Office Fonts have one and only one set of numbers, built on a fixed width to ensure that columns of numbers always align correctly. Because they’re designed on the same width across all members of a family, switching to bold or italic styles will never disrupt the grid — a feature that extends to the monetary symbols, commercial marks, and punctuation that accompany numerical data.
<h3 class="subhead-sentinel xl">Compatibility</h3>
Office Fonts are produced in TrueType format, to support even the simplest (and oldest) business applications. The same font files can be installed on both Mac and Windows operating systems, making asset management and deployment easy. And each of H&Co’s Office Fonts supports the complete range of languages available in our multipurpose fonts, covering more than 500 languages worldwide.
We’ve created Office Fonts to match all of our most popular typefaces for branding, including sans serifs like <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/styles/gothamoffice">Gotham</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/styles/whitneyoffice">Whitney</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/ringside/styles/ringsidenarrowoffice">Ringside</a>, and <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/ideal-sans/styles/idealsansoffice">Ideal Sans</a>, and serifs like <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/archer/styles/archeroffice">Archer</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sentinel/styles/sentineloffice">Sentinel</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/chronicle-text/styles/chronicleoffice">Chronicle</a>, and <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/mercury-text/styles/mercuryoffice">Mercury</a>. Below are just some examples of what Office Fonts can do for you.]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 13 Jul 2016 09:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/office-fonts#2171</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Introducing Whitney Narrow]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-whitney-narrow</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[The Whitney typeface has always been an adroit multitasker. Having grown out of a commission from New York’s Whitney Museum, the typeface was designed to serve two masters: the museum’s publications department, which needed a design both compact and energetic, and the facility’s public signage, which above all required legibility and sturdiness. A later addition designed for headlines, the six-style <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney-condensed/overview/">Whitney Condensed</a> family, made Whitney an even more valuable tool for both publishers and brands.
But one challenge that Whitney has never confronted is the narrow column. As editorial designers know, narrow columns are the bugbear of typography: they’re hostile to wide typefaces, perverting text with overzealous hyphenation, and often demanding that headlines be craftily written. Designers, developers, publishers, and brands now face the challenge of narrow columns every day in the form of the mobile phone: with the ascendancy of apps and the mobile web, fonts are routinely set on a two-inch measure. For these applications — as well as the narrow columns that permeate magazine sidebars and captions, paper packaging, data visualizations, and product literature — we’ve created the compact and economical <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney-narrow/overview/">Whitney Narrow®</a><a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney-narrow/overview/">.</a>
Whitney Narrow was designed to thrive at sizes both large and small. At small sizes, it excels not only in text and informational typography such as charts and graphs, but for rendering the growing universe of fine print that’s often required but infrequently read: the ingredient lists, nutritional information, regulatory notices, disclaimers, and copyright legends that attract compact typefaces. In print, Whitney Narrow renders this fine print with clarity and warmth. For the screen, we’ve created the companion <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney-narrow/styles/screensmart/">Whitney Narrow ScreenSmart</a> family, a collection of twelve screen-optimized typefaces that’s designed and engineered to perform at sizes as small as nine pixels.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/whitney-narrow-release_responsive-02.svg">
At headline sizes, Whitney Narrow makes a hale companion to the regular-width Whitney. It preserves Whitney’s angular motif (originally inspired by the iconic geometry of Marcel Breuer’s Madison Avenue museum), and features an option to disable these details when they’re not wanted. Above, Whitney Narrow Bold in two different moods: jaunty with its angled stroke endings, and sober without them. These gestures appear in 231 different characters, but can be quieted with a single setting in any application that supports OpenType <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney-narrow/features/whitney-narrow-stylistic-sets">Stylistic Sets,</a> such as Adobe InDesign, and the <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/webfonts-with-stylistic-sets">Cloud.typography web font dashboard.</a>]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 21 Jun 2016 10:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-whitney-narrow#596</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[How to Use Clashing Fonts]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/fonts-that-clash</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[As powerful as typography can be in setting a reader’s expectations, it’s often the dialogue between typefaces that most effectively communicates how information is meant to be understood. Dictionaries use bold <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/sentinel/overview/">Antiques</a> and delicate <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/chronicle-text/styles/chronicletextpro/grade-four">Ionics</a> to distinguish their headwords and definitions; wayfinding systems use different fonts to identify routes and destinations. Find the most monotonous piece of design you can, and it’s still likely that its logo, headlines, and text are wearing different typographic dress.
It’s therefore customary for designers to reach for palpably different typefaces when assembling a palette. If not, why use more than one font in the first place? It’s hard to imagine the design that truly needs both Univers and Helvetica, and designers who mix both fonts indiscriminately do so at their own peril. Think of a trustworthy website, whose login page is one day mysteriously rendered in Times Roman. Even the most visually indifferent readers feel these disruptions.
But just as the most stylish person you know can pull off wearing four different kinds of check, or live in a room painted six different shades of orange, there are techniques for successfully bringing together typography’s first cousins, its doppelgangers, and its long-lost twins. Here are three types of font pairings that are traditionally scorned, but when used with purpose, can be supremely successful. We’ll be retiring that old chestnut “don’t use fonts that are too similar” in favor of a more constructive philosophy: “make each font’s purpose clear, and use every one consistently.”
<hr style="display:block; height: 14px; border: 0; border-top: 14px solid #308cc4; margin: 72px 0px 0px 0px; padding: 0;" />
<h3 class="subhead-sentinel">1. Two Fonts in the Same Category</h3>
Designers contemplating two different fonts of the same general style often limit their choices to designs that have distinct personalities and pronounced characteristics. No one would consider “two serifs” likely to clash if one were tall and lithe, and the other a stocky text face. But few would consider pairing two different Old Style faces, let alone two Dutch Old Styles with the same large x-height and dark strokes, and many similar details. <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/quarto/overview/">Quarto</a> and <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/mercury-display/overview/">Mercury</a> are two such typefaces, and while their differences are clear enough to the typographer, we should assume that the vagaries of serifs and ball terminals are lost on the average reader.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/quarto_and_mercury_responsive.svg">
Curiously, it’s this very ambiguity that suggests a union of the two typefaces, in which each is free to assume the role for which it’s best qualified. Quarto is a display face, with the snug fit, delicate hairlines, and discreet serifs that recommend it specifically to headline sizes. The Mercury family contains two kinds of faces for smaller sizes, each with the generous fit, thicker hairlines, and clearer gestures necessary for reproduction at text sizes: <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/mercury-text/overview/">Mercury Text</a> was designed for print, and <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/mercury-text/webfonts/mercuryssm-book/">Mercury ScreenSmart</a> was designed and engineered for the screen.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/not_to_scale2.png">
On their website, filmmakers <a href="http://nottoscale.tv/" target="_blank">Not To Scale</a> pair Quarto and Mercury ScreenSmart beautifully, by assigning each font a specific and exclusive range of sizes. Quarto is restricted to headlines, with Mercury ScreenSmart supplying everything else. The relationship between these two designs is further articulated by the designers’ use of Quarto’s heaviest weight and Mercury’s lightest, and by routinely pairing one font’s roman with the other’s italic — something the designers archly do in both directions.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/quarto_and_mercury_roles_responsive.svg"><img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/quarto_and_mercury_more_responsive.svg">
WHY IT WORKS: Related typefaces can be successfully used together if each inhabits its own altitude, one at text sizes and the other at display. For this to work, each typeface must have the visual characteristics appropriate for its size range, with the hairlines, proportions, and fit that are tuned for either text or headlines. For large sizes, look for serif fonts with <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/surveyor/styles/surveyorfinepro">Fine</a>, <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/chronicle-display/features/chronicle-optical-sizes">Display</a>, or <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/hoefler-titling/overview/">Titling</a> in their names, as well as sans- and slab serifs with extreme weights such as <a href="http://www.typography.com/collections/hairline/">Hairline</a> or <a href="http://www.typography.com/collections/ultra/">Ultra</a>. For small sizes, look for print fonts named <a href="http://www.typography.com/collections/text/">Text</a>, and web fonts that are specifically built for small pixel sizes, such as the <a href="http://www.typography.com/collections/screensmart/">ScreenSmart</a> collection.
TIP: Explore the contents of the text and headline faces you choose, reviewing both their styles and their character sets. <a href="http://www.typography.com/collections/display/">Display faces</a> often have a broader range of weights to choose from, offering subtle shadings that come alive at large sizes. Text faces often contain features such as small caps, <a href="http://www.typography.com/collections/charts-tables/">tabular figures</a>, fractions, or <a href="http://www.typography.com/collections/symbols-technical/">symbols</a>, which can help both articulate and decorate text at small sizes.
<hr style="display:block; height: 14px; border: 0; border-top: 14px solid #fd5050; margin: 72px 0px 0px 0px; padding: 0;" />
<h3 class="subhead-sentinel">2. Fonts with Similar Drafting Styles</h3>
Typefaces that have similar mannerisms, if they’re intended for the same range of sizes, can make truly ponderous companions. Sometimes such fonts are the work of the same type designer, who exhibits a strong personal style; other times the resemblence is coincidental. The following two typefaces are each the product of a radically different brief: <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/ideal-sans/overview/">Ideal Sans</a> is a sans serif that renders a Humanist framework with handmade gestures, and <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/operator/overview/">Operator</a> is meditation on the technical aesthetic of the typewriter. Yet both faces meet at some unforeseen crossroads, sharing the same motifs of angled stroke endings and asymmetrical curves, similarities that would seem to disqualify them from ever being used together.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/ideal_sans_and_operator_responsive.svg">
For the publication of his longform essay The First Roman Fonts, author and publisher John Boardley chose this very pairing for his website, <a href="http://ilovetypography.com/2016/04/18/the-first-roman-fonts/">I Love Typography</a>. Both faces, in their ScreenSmart versions, are used at small sizes, Ideal Sans for text, and Operator for the supporting footnotes and commentary. That both fonts were designed and engineered for small sizes might make either one a good choice to satisfy both functions, but Boardley’s selection of different fonts for different textual roles helps formalize the site’s distinction between text and annotation.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/ilt_early_romans2.png">
On the site, each typeface serves a function that’s sympathetic with its origins. Ideal Sans, with its large vocabulary of <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/ideal-sans/features/ideal-sans-texture">organic shapes</a>, produces the kind of complex texture traditionally associated with seriffed text faces. Operator, with its roots in <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-operator">typewriting</a>, can effect an authorial, academic voice, the perfect choice for the commentary that surrounds the text itself.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/ideal_sans_and_operator_roles_responsive.svg"><img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/ideal_and_operator_more_responsive.svg">
WHY IT WORKS: Instead of dividing the typography by type size, these typefaces have been assigned different semantic functions. The choice of typeface is prompted by the structure of the content itself, with each selection informed by both the fonts’ abilities and their intentions. Spending time with the fonts’ <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/operator/characters/operatorbookitalic">character sets</a> revealed that their superficial resemblence goes no deeper than a handful of letters in a few core styles, and uncovered some useful textures in the auxiliary styles, such as these very different forms of italic.
TIP: Remember that even fonts that share the same visual cues can have wildly different proportions, which affect the leading, column width, and tracking they require. Compared with Ideal Sans, Operator has narrower letters, a larger x-height, and dramatically shorter ascenders, descenders, and caps, which together invite much tighter settings. Varying these parameters can help play up the differences or similarities between the two typefaces.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/ideal_sans_and_operator_leading_1920px.png">
<hr style="display:block; height: 14px; border: 0; border-top: 14px solid #f4cc25; margin: 72px 0px 0px 0px; padding: 0;" />
<h3 class="subhead-sentinel">3. Two Revivals of the Same Source</h3>
To many designers, historical revivals are the core of the typographic canon. Those who depend on these classics are tasked with the duty of presiding over many different revivals of the same original, and choosing a single correct version for every project. (To see something beautifully set in Adobe Garamond, with a late addition hastily added in itc Garamond, produces a special kind of dissonance. Typography is that art in which the tiniest errors are always the most conspicuous.)
Many consider the idea that revivals aim to be definitive — that history is heading toward one ultimate Garamond revival — to be outmoded. Instead, contemporary designers often approach historical material in a more interpretive way, finding qualities in historical artifacts that resonate with ideas and requirements of their own. Some of the most interesting contemporary typefaces are those that are grounded in historical forms, but are less “recreations” of old typefaces than “occasioned by” them. This invites the possibility that a type designer might revisit the same historical source many times during his or her career, and produce many different interpretations that have both differences and similarities. Sometimes these designs will conflict with one another, other times they’ll be compatible. Most often, they’ll do both.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/champion_and_knockout_responsive.svg">
An example from our library is the pairing of <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/champion-gothic/overview/">Champion Gothic</a> with <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/knockout/overview/">Knockout</a>, two divergent type families created years apart, and both inspired by the same historical source. Champion Gothic was my first typeface, designed in 1990, and intended to be a modern interpretation of nineteenth century American wood types. Designed for Sports Illustrated, its sentimentality is checked by the needs of an energetic editorial art department, and its design shaped by a magazine format that required five closely-related condensed faces plus one heavy outlier.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/champion_vs_knockout_responsive.svg">
A few years later, I revisited these typefaces with different goals in mind, thinking about how this material might be rationalized into a larger grid of both widths and weights, to ultimately produce the 32-member Knockout family. Above are nine of Knockout’s styles, alongside all six of Champion’s, showing the common ancestor that both fonts share.
Just as a designer might pick the most appropriate Garamond revival for a project, most designers can evaluate Champion and Knockout’s merits and decide which fits the project at hand. But some designers use styles from both families together, and sometimes to great effect: the example below is a favorite, pairing two styles of Knockout with Champion Gothic Heavyweight.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/champion_and_knockout2_responsive.svg">
WHY IT WORKS: When working with two different families built on the same historical ground, look for points of overlap and differentiation beween them. If both families have the same range of styles, and include the same kinds of features and character sets, stick with the one that feels best for the project. But if there are outliers in one family that aren’t represented in the other, try using them together. This design works because its central style, Champion Gothic Heavyweight, is the farthest afield from the styles in Knockout, not only in weight and width, but in character. Similarly, the two weights of Knockout used here are ones that have no analogue in Champion, whose weights never go this wide, this narrow, or this light.
TIP: Look first to the extreme ends of a family to see what makes it unique. Many historical revivals take on the challenge of adapting traditional models to new purposes, often including the weights, widths, or optical sizes for which the original source wasn’t intended. Also spend some time with both fonts’ character sets, looking for any points of departure. Subtle adjustments like the <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/knockout/characters/knockoutno-34juniorsumo">alternate </a><a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/knockout/characters/knockoutno-34juniorsumo">R</a> in the top line here serve to heighten the differences between this font and its neighbors, further ensuring that these closely related designs never clash. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 10 May 2016 06:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/fonts-that-clash#595</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Italics Examined]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/italics-examined</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[For as many kinds of typefaces as there will ever be, there’ll be even more kinds of italics. Nothing in the design of a roman typeface dictates what its italic will look like, and since the role of an italic is to be not only sympathetic with its roman but visibly different from it, italics are often free to explore unexpected constructions, or divergent visual traditions.
More so than romans, italics have a close connection with handwriting. Like handwriting, which can be as casual as a shopping list or as formal as a calligraphic invitation, different italics can express profoundly different moods. Understanding what goes into these many kinds of italics can make them even more valuable tools for designers.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-02-2.svg">
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-11-2.svg">
Some calligraphers believe that cursive letters reached their finest form in the sixteenth century, in a style known as the chancery italic. These are calligraphic letters, their thick and thin strokes and sharp upward angles a product of the broad-edged pen. Chancery italics have long signaled magnificence, expressing the joy of a wedding invitation or the pathos of a book of verse. We explored this lovely style in Requiem Italic, and outfitted the design with an extended set of decorative ligatures to <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/requiem/how-to-use#requiem-ligatures">attractively resolve collisions</a> such as the “s–t–f–l” above.
TIP: Because chancery italics have elegant, long-limbed ascenders and descenders, they need ample leading. Consider a font like Requiem when the format has lots of space — or for projects in which the text needs to be inflated to fit the format.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-03-2.svg">
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-12-2.svg">
Many boisterous italics are made in a postmodernist style, freely borrowing from different genres. This design riffs on the various fixed-width letters found on typewriters, taking cues from both upright and script alphabets, and emerging with a welcoming and <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/operator/overview/">informal</a> tone. This type family extends to nine different weights, with the extreme Thin and Ultra styles having especially distinctive personalities.
TIP: The eclecticism of Operator’s italic letters is echoed by the family’s many different and varied styles. Shifting between its small caps and lowercase, or its lighter and bolder weights, can be as striking as switching between romans and italics. And don’t be afraid to set whole paragraphs — or even whole texts! — in the italic.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-04-2.svg">
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-13-2.svg">
These sinewy letters in the english vernacular style come not from the history of typefounding, but from map engraving, where they were traditionally used to label bodies of water. In place of serifs, they have long and fluid “exit trails” at the bottom, which help them follow curved baselines like the meandering paths of streams and coastlines. For designers, this makes them a great choice when wrapping type on a curve, especially in logos and seals that need to reproduce at small sizes.
TIP: Control the delicacy of Surveyor’s lines by matching its <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/surveyor/how-to-use#surveyor-using-optical-sizes">optical size</a> to the circumstances. Surveyor Text was designed for small sizes, Surveyor Display for headlines, and Surveyor Fine for sizes larger still. Using the Text font in display sizes can be useful whenever you need heavier hairlines, such as when dropping type out of a photograph, and even the Display font can be helpful at smaller sizes, in situations where the hairlines will naturally gain weight, like when printing letterpress.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-14.svg">
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-17.svg">
Typefaces in the dutch old style manage to be dark and bright at the same time, like a rousing symphony in a minor key. An invention of the seventeenth century, when the airy types of the Garamond style gave way to a darker, northern European fashion, these faces are useful when typography needs both a <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/quarto/overview/">dense color and a classical air</a>. Their dark color can be especially useful if display type will appear against a non-contrasting background, like the white-on-grey above.
TIP: Bold strokes and ample curves make a typeface like Quarto a good candidate for thoughtful tracking, either tight or loose. Loose all caps settings like this one are stately and monumental, while a tightly tracked upper- and lowercase setting can be warm and accessible.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-15.svg">
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-18.svg">
The arrival of the mass-produced poster, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, gave rise to typography’s first expressly eye-catching italics. These typefaces, unsurprisingly called fat faces, can be equally effective at <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/surveyor/styles/">sizes both large and small</a>, provided the design has been correctly drawn. This family features three optical masters for Text, Display, and Fine typography, sturdy enough to withstand small sizes, and delicate enough to thrive at large ones.
TIP: This typeface, Surveyor Fine Black Italic, has a <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/obsidian/how-to-use#working_with_color">decorative counterpart</a> in the Obsidian family. Obsidian Italic features the same deep <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/surveyor/characters">character set</a> as Surveyor, full of small caps, alternates and swashes, all drawn with vibrant shading that comes alive at large sizes.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-16.svg">
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-19.svg">
An italic’s angle shapes its personality. A font with a gentle slope of just six degrees can be lovely and lyrical; fifteen degrees and it’s positively brisk. This powerhouse superitalic achieves its speed and urgency with a 28° slope, making it our most italic typeface ever. Useful in everything from political campaigns to motorsports, it’s a typeface that designers call upon whenever typography needs to communicate raw power. And it’s supplemented by a <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/nitro-turbo/how-to-use#nitro-turbo-creating-contrasting-textures">backslant</a> with contrary motion, offering an intriguing alternative to simply “roman or italic?”
TIP: Although it’s tightly fitted by default, the Nitro typeface responds beautifully to letterspacing. Its insistent lean provides more than enough momentum to carry the eye forward on the line, ensuring that even dramatically tracked type remains coherent and legible.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-06-2.svg">
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-20.svg">
Swash capitals, which have been part of typography since the very earliest italics, came to full flower in the french old style types of Garamond and Granjon. This family of typefaces, designed for display sizes, celebrates this tradition with a frolicsome set of swash caps that introduce each word with grandeur. Though swashes are customarily used only at the start of a word, many typefaces include swashes that work mid-word as well, when setting italics in all caps. Look for letters without elaborate curlicues on the left side, to ensure that they don’t interfere with their neighbors.
TIP: In Hoefler Titling Italic, the swash C, E, J, K, Q, S, T, X, Y, and Z are designed to avoid neighboring letters. Other typefaces with medial swashes are Hoefler Text Italic, which also features a few <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/hoefler-text/how-to-use#hoefler-text-decorating-text">swash italic small caps</a>, and Surveyor Italic, whose swash caps and small caps are managed by an automated <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/surveyor/how-to-use#surveyor-smart-swashes">collision avoidance system</a>.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-10-2.svg">
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-21.svg">
Some italics are cursive, following the natural motion of the hand; others are oblique, designed to look like slanted romans. Typefaces in the modern style often have elements of both, pairing a fluid lowercase with highly rational caps. This balance of mechanical precision and artistic brio has made them a popular choice in the applied arts, often providing the signature typography for cultural institutions, architectural practices, and most famously, fashion.
TIP: Fashion typography, both editorial and commercial, has long relied on the precision and delicacy of this typeface, HTF Didot. In addition to its famous romans, try the family’s rarer italics: they provide the same keenness with an extra dash of grace, and some welcome moments of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/didot/how-to-use#didot-creating-contrasting-textures">wit</a> in the lowercase, figures, and punctuation.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-05-2.svg">
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-22.svg">
Typefaces in the antique style have blocky, unbracketed serifs — or at least their romans do. Equally distinctive is the far rarer Antique Italic, whose swelling curves and staccato ball terminals deliver a contrasting texture to the roman, but with the same dependability and courage. The most versatile Antiques are not only sober and trustworthy, but warm and lively, with <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sentinel/styles">extreme weights</a> that are bright and alert.
TIP: Though they’re often thought of as display faces, typefaces like Sentinel are tremendously useful in <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sentinel/how-to-use#sentinel-emphasizing-text">text</a>. Across their entire range of weights, the fonts’ clear gestures and careful fit recommend them to even very small sizes. Depending on your taste, the family’s Light, Book, or Medium might all serve as the “normal” weight for text.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-07-2.svg">
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-23.svg">
Many sans serifs, in their rationality, have dispassionate italics that simply look like slanted romans. But typefaces with a humanist inflection can take a different approach, using the kinds of cursive forms more commonly found in seriffed designs. A sans serif whose roman has organic qualities, like these flaring strokes and gently bowing lines, invites an italic with a similarly handmade feel.
TIP: A sans serif with a flowing italic can be an asset at <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/ideal-sans/how-to-use#ideal-sans-emphasizing-text">text sizes</a>, where it produces a texture that’s distinctly different from its roman. Ideal Sans Italic has not only cursive gestures and an elliptical motif, but a narrower gait than its roman, giving it a recognizably contrasting rhythm in text.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-08-2.svg">
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-24.svg">
One way to bridge the gap between the formality of print and the informality of writing is to create hybrid letterforms, in which typographic and calligraphic elements are fused together. Archer Italic, a cursive slab, uses this approach to satisfy a set of oppositions that were part of the design’s brief: the typeface was created to be instructive but not priggish, pretty but not overindulgent, and sweet but not saccharine, a balance it strikes by featuring both rigid serifs and flowing exit trails on the same letters. Many of the cheerful details in the design’s lowercase, such as the ball terminal on its lowercase C, have been imported into the caps, an unusual move that further softens the tone of an otherwise tough slab serif.
TIP: Slab serifs with ball terminals can be tricky in their extreme weights, often losing their balance at the light end of the spectrum, and becoming gawky in their heaviest weights. Look for a design in which the lightest weights are both <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/archer/how-to-use#archer-emphasizing-text">crisp and measured</a>, and the heaviest ones are both <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/archer/styles">steady and exuberant</a>. A typeface that performs at small sizes can be useful as well, since it sidesteps the need to look for a coordinating serif text face.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-09-2.svg">
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italics-examined_responsive-25.svg">
Some of the most interesting italics have no historical precedents. This one, exploring the idea that cursive typefaces don’t need to be curvy, was invented to accompany a grecian roman, a nineteenth century style of wood type with angular corners. Taking a more interpretive approach to type design can yield fonts whose styles aren’t readily identifiable, making them useful in projects that need to avoid specific historical associations or visual clichés.
 
TIP: Italics with unexpected design motifs can be most dramatic when used in small doses. Some of the most arresting applications of this typeface are those where it’s used most <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/acropolis/overview/">sparingly</a>, from logos and monograms to solitary drop caps. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 07 Apr 2016 06:55:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/italics-examined#593</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Introducing Operator]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-operator</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[About two years ago, H&Co Senior Designer Andy Clymer proposed that we design a monospace typeface. Monospace (or “fixed-width”) typefaces have a unique place in the culture: their most famous ancestor is the typewriter, and they remain the style that designers reach for when they want to remind readers about the author behind the words. Typewriter faces have become part of the aesthetic of journalism, fundraising, law, academia, and politics; a dressier alternative to handwriting, but still less formal than something set in type, they’re an invaluable tool for designers.
I acutely felt the need for such a typeface, and immediately thought of places I’d want to use it on <a href="http://discover.typography.com" target="_blank">Discover.typography</a>. And while I liked the idea of creating a new typeface that would have this kind of voice — minus the nostalgic clackety-clack look of an actual typewriter face — I wondered if we could achieve these results without the many compromises required of a fixed-width design. Fixed-width faces force every character into a box of the same size, creating charmingly long serifs on the capital I, but tragic, procrustean disfigurements of wider letters like M and W. So I suggested that we relax the system, to create a font that feels monospaced, but behaves more professionally.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/operator-release_responsive-02.svg">
Andy made an equally compelling counterproposal, reminding me that the command-line editor — these days, home to so many people who design things — could really be improved by a fully fixed-width typeface. What if, in addition to shedding the unwanted baggage of the typewriter, we also looked to the programming environment as a place where type could make a difference? Like many screen fonts before it, Operator could pay extra attention to the brackets and braces and punctuation marks more critical in code than in text. But if Operator took the unusual step of looking not only to serifs and sans serifs, but to script typefaces for inspiration, it could do a lot more. It could render the easily-confused I, l, and 1 far less ambiguous. It could help “color” syntax in a way that transcends the actual use of color, ensuring that different parts of a program are easier to identify. Andy hoped this might be useful when a technical pdf found its way to a black-and-white laser printer. It was an especially meaningful gesture to me, as someone who, like three hundred million others, is red-green colorblind.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/operator_ide2.png">
So with designers, developers, and most of all readers in mind, we decided to design it both ways. Operator Mono® is our new family of fixed-width typefaces, with a broader range of weights than a typical typewriter face, and an italic that positively shines in code. Its more editorial companion is the natural-width Operator® family, which offers the voice of typewriting but none of the compromises. Operator extends to <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/operator/styles/operatorcomplete">nine weights</a>, from Thin to Ultra, and includes both roman and italic small caps throughout. Both families are supported by companion <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/operator/styles/screensmart/">ScreenSmart</a> fonts, specially designed and engineered for use in the browser at text sizes.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/operator-release_responsive-01.svg">
In developing Operator, we found ourselves talking about JavaScript and css, looking for vinyl label embossers on eBay, renting a cantankerous old machine from perhaps the last typewriter repair shop in New York, and unearthing a flea market find that amazingly dates to 1893. Above is the four-minute film I made, to record a little of what went into Operator, and introduce the team at H&Co behind it. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 09 Feb 2016 10:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-operator#591</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Introducing App.typography]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-app.typography</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[App developers lavish such care creating thoughtful, lovely experiences, places where users can return again and again, and always feel at home. For all the time we spend browsing the web, we’re spending more and more time using our devices’ native apps, a trend that’s poised to continue with the arrival of mobile-minded projects like Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News. The one thing that all mobile experiences have in common is type, making it more important than ever to get the type right — to use the right fonts to create the sophisticated, expressive environments that users deserve.
We’ve long worked with our clients to bring typography into the mobile space. For some, it means developing cross-channel typography that aligns their print, web, and mobile products; for others it means choosing fonts that solve problems, and help shape the user experience from the outset. We’ve found that the needs of designers, developers, publishers, news organizations, institutions and brands are all a little different, but what everyone wants is for type to be functional, and for licensing to be painless. We want these same things, and more: we want to furnish app developers with the same high-quality tools available to print and web designers. We want developers to have access to everything that a font family has to offer, to be free to match the font to the medium and the experience, and to be relieved of having to count styles, platforms, or downloads. In short, we want to do everything for app developers that <a href="http://www.typography.com/webfonts">Cloud.typography</a> did for web developers, allowing people to use their existing H&Co libraries in a whole new way.
<h2>Meet App.typography.</h2>
App.typography is a service that enables you to publish apps, digital publications, or eBooks that incorporate any of the H&Co fonts you’ve bought for your computer. It’s a new model for licensing fonts, one that’s based not on the number of font styles that you choose to embed, but the number of titles that you publish.
For developers, App.typography means the freedom to choose from whichever fonts you’ve bought, including as many styles as necessary to create the perfect experience. We’ve defined “an app” in the broadest possible way, so that the product you create for iOS, Android, and Apple TV — even if the versions for the Apple Watch and the Samsung Galaxy Tab don’t share a single line of code — is covered by a single App.typography subscription.
For publishers, App.typography offers the ability to port your existing typography to digital publications and eBooks, to distribute these in a vast array of different formats, and to cover all of the books that you publish under a single imprint. Use as many fonts as you’ve purchased, to publish as many books as you like, and see them downloaded as many times as possible, all with a single App.typography subscription.
<h2>The Fonts</h2>
An App.typography subscription covers all the H&Co fonts you’ve purchased for your computer, and all the fonts that you buy in the future. This extends to the entire H&Co library of more than 1,300 styles, including our nineteen families of <a href="http://www.typography.com/collections/screensmart/">ScreenSmart</a> fonts that are specially designed for the screen. You’ll find countless solutions for app design in the H&Co library: fonts with <a href="http://www.typography.com/collections/charts-tables/">tabular figures</a> for game scores and activity timers, <a href="http://www.typography.com/collections/condensed/">compact fonts</a> for narrow columns, and high-performance <a href="http://www.typography.com/collections/text/">text faces</a> for extended reading. Spend some time at <a href="http://discover.typography.com/theme/made-for-mobile/" target="_blank">Discover.typography</a> if you’re looking for inspiration, or get started with <a href="http://typography.com/apps">App.typography</a> today.]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 09 Dec 2015 13:34:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-app.typography#588</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Use Fonts in Email]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/fonts-in-email</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Designers who love type want to use it everywhere. And that’s an obsession that perfectly aligns with what clients need: why not brand all of a company’s communications consistently? Subscribers to our <a href="http://www.typography.com/webfonts">Cloud.typography</a> service, who use H&Co fonts for their web and mobile communications, have recently begun asking about extending their typography to email as well. So we’re delighted to announce that starting today, all Cloud.typography subscriptions now include the ability to use fonts in email campaigns. We’re pleased to offer yet another way to use the power of typography to extend a brand’s voice.
<blockquote class="pullquote">A distinctive, high-quality typeface helps email stand out.</blockquote>
For many companies, email is the most direct way to communicate with their customers. It’s a critical part of any marketing strategy, but still a tough puzzle to crack: while people check their email <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/how-often-do-people-check-their-email-2015-8" target="_blank">constantly</a>, and one-third of marketers say their subscribers read most of their email on <a href="http://www.pardot.com/blog/the-2015-email-marketing-landscape/" target="_blank">mobile devices</a>, nearly two-thirds of companies are looking for new ways to <a href="http://www.pardot.com/blog/the-2015-email-marketing-landscape/" target="_blank">improve email personalization</a>. It’s harder than ever to make email stand out — which is where the right typeface, chosen with care, can help. Now, your email campaigns can take part in everything that makes your brand unique, including its typography.
With Cloud.typography, readers of email can experience the same high-quality screen typography that they’ve come to expect from H&Co fonts on the web. Because email uses type at text sizes — and often, features so much text — email campaigns are the perfect place to use H&Co’s <a href="http://www.typography.com/cloud/the-fonts/index.php#screensmart-fonts">ScreenSmart fonts that are optimized for reading at small sizes</a>. Take a look at our growing <a href="http://www.typography.com/collections/screensmart/">collection of ScreenSmart fonts</a> specially tuned for text sizes, and then log in with your Cloud.typography subscription, where you’ll find an option for “email campaigns” included in all of your web font projects.
<blockquote class="pullquote">Now, your email campaigns can share the same branding as all of your other communications.</blockquote>
Email is still a new frontier for typography. On the reader’s side, support for fonts is limited, but growing: many desktop and mobile apps like Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook support web fonts, but most browser-based clients like Gmail don’t. In other words, a branded email sent to a gmail.com address will render with web fonts if it’s being read in an application like Mail or Outlook, or on the mail app on the owner’s iPhone, but it won’t show the branded fonts if it’s being read inside a web browser. But as always, Cloud.typography won’t interfere with your message getting through: when someone reads a branded email in an application that doesn’t support web fonts, they’ll simply see it appear using the same system fonts that you’re using today.
Cloud.typography uses your available pageviews to satisfy email opens, with each open counting as a single pageview. You’ll find more information in our <a href="http://www.typography.com/faq/question.php?faqID=137">email FAQ</a>, and some <a href="http://www.typography.com/cloud/user-guide/fonts-in-email">best practices for using fonts in email</a> in the Cloud.typography user guide. If you’re using H&Co fonts in your other communications but aren’t yet a Cloud.typography subscriber, <a href="http://www.typography.com/cloud/pricing/">join today</a> and you’ll have instant access to all the H&Co fonts you’ve ever purchased in the past, without the need to buy them again. Subscriptions start at $199/year.
We’re excited to offer designers a new tool to both elevate their typography and expand their reach. Fonts are the foundations of so many memorable experiences, and we’re glad to see H&Co fonts playing yet another role in the ways that successful and timeless brands communicate. —H&Co.]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 04 Nov 2015 14:58:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/fonts-in-email#587</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[The New Archer Heavyweights]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/archer-heavyweight</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[We’ve seen designers choose Archer for everything from wedding invitations to <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_eye/2013/10/14/grand_budapest_hotel_poster_and_typeface_futura_is_out_and_wes_anderson.html" target="_blank">movie titles.</a> Archer has a natural affinity for book jackets and product packaging, and developers have made great use of <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/archer/webfonts/archerssm-book" target="_blank">Archer ScreenSmart</a> on the web. And some of Archer’s most unexpected performances have been among its best, delivering brand identities for news outlets, department stores, and multinational banks. The more designers have done with Archer, the more they’ve wanted to do with it, and the more we’ve wondered what else might be possible. So eighteen months ago, we returned to the drawing board.
<h2>New Voices</h2>
Archer was designed to be charming, a delicate book face that never raises its voice. Increasingly, we’ve seen designers coaxing new moods out of Archer, tightly letterspacing its boldest weights to achieve a more boisterous tone. Seeing the potential for a more graphic Archer, we explored how heavy the fonts might go; the answer is a lot heavier. So today we’re introducing <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/archer/styles/archer3pro">Archer Black, Extra Black,</a> and <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/archer/styles/archer3pro">Ultra,</a> each in roman, italic, and small caps, pushing the Archer family to a total of eleven weights. These new styles offer a wealth of new voices: now the ever-polite Archer can be exuberant, adamant, jolly, rustic, solemn, sporty, and vibrant.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/archer-heavyweights_responsive-01.svg">
<h2>New Textures for Text</h2>
Archer has always performed in both text and display sizes, a tradition we’ve continued with today’s new styles. The new Archers are vivid at large sizes, and clear in text — and they’re outfitted with all the trimmings needed to articulate content. The new <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/archer/styles/archer3pro">Archer 3 Pro</a> contains small caps, tabular figures, fractions, and even numerical indices. And if you’ve been using Archer’s heavier weights for text, now you use these heaviest weights for emphasis: just as you’ve paired Archer Book and Bold, you can now pair Archer Bold and Ultra.]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 15 Sep 2015 13:54:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/archer-heavyweight#577</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Inside Obsidian]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/inside-obsidian</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[We’re delighted that Fast Company has recognized our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/obsidian/overview/">Obsidian</a> typeface in this year’s <a href="http://www.fastcodesign.com/3049904/innovation-by-design/the-2015-innovation-by-design-awards-winners-graphic-design" target="_blank">Innovation by Design Awards,</a> and thought we’d mark the occasion with a behind-the-scenes look at some of the technology, history, and design thinking that went into this one-of-a-kind typeface.

<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/asher_adams2.jpg">
1. The roots of the Obsidian typeface begin with <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/surveyor/overview/">Surveyor</a>, a family of fonts designed at H&Co which revive the style of roman and italic letterforms native to engraved maps of the nineteenth century. The more time we spent with this historical material, the more charmed we were by engraved title pieces like the one above, in which letters are decorated with elaborate hatching on their faces and in their shadows. This example, from Asher & Adams’ New Topographical Atlas and Gazetteer of New York (1881) is typical of the period: only the list of cities is set in movable type, the rest was lettered by an engraver, working by hand, at actual size, in reverse, with a burin on a copper plate.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/bruce_decorative2.jpg">
2. In response to the rise of commercial engraving, which provided new and sophisticated ways to dress letters, nineteenth century type foundries introduced ever more decorative typefaces to mimic this new style. The typefaces above, made by Bruce’s New-York Type-Foundry and shown in their voluminous type specimen book of 1883, reveal some of the limits of typefounding. Where engravers were free to vary their letters to best suit a single situation, typeface designers have always been tasked with creating a group of consistent letters that can be used in different combinations, without manual intervention. Above, each letter E used in “Gutenberg” is identical; compare this with the subtle variations in each of the three letter As used in the “Asher & Adams” engraving (figure 1.)
As we explored this fertile period in lettering, we came away with five goals for our project. The first was to create a new typeface which evoked these styles, without referencing any one specific artifact. The second was to deliberately create a design that would be of service to contemporary designers, and not merely a museum piece. The third, most practically, was to ensure that we wouldn’t have to spend the rest of our lives working on so elaborate a project. So the fourth was to come up with a new set of tools, which would help us both explore new directions and execute our drawings. The fifth and final goal was the most challenging: to ensure that the tools we created would produce letterforms that looked warm and organic, not mechanically processed.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/obsidian_1_beziers_4040px.png">
3. Modern typeface designers draw fonts by manually plotting every line and curve in every letterform. Even simple shapes require complex geometry: above left is a straightforward ampersand, constructed of 36 connected curves. Elaborate typefaces like <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/obsidian/overview/">Obsidian</a>, at right, are unmanageably tortuous: this ampersand alone would require the designer to draw and coordinate 284 different curves, defined by placing more than 1,100 points. Early in the development of the project, it was clear that even the process of sketching possible directions would need the help of a new and heretofore unimagined set of tools.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/obsidian_2_panels_4040px.png">
4. Building on a font whose exterior outlines had been completed, H&Co Senior Designer Andy Clymer created a suite of proprietary tools to help apply complex decorations to font outlines. The process begins by dividing each of the more than <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/obsidian/characters/">1,400 characters</a> in the family into individual “panels” (above right), each defined by western and eastern edges, shown here in green and orange. These panels would serve as the foundation of the ornamentation to follow.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/obsidian_8C3_interface.jpg">
5. Once the panels are established, a script divides each panel into slices, giving the font’s designers their first glimpse of what a “hatched” version of the typeface will look like. The number of slices for each panel can be adjusted independently, to give the resulting letterform a more consistent texture: at right, different parts of this ampersand are divided into four, five, or six slices.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/obsidian_3_slices_4040px.png">
6. Having chosen the number of slices for each panel, the tools then divide each slice into a series of shorter segments. The angle of each segment is compared to the direction of an imagined light source, to determine how “bright” it should be. Segments on the western and eastern faces are oppositely illuminated, to create the illusion of dimensionality.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/obsidian_4_raytracing_4040px2.png">
7. Finally, in its most complicated bit of mathematics, the software interprets the brightness of these connected segments as a set of continuous curves, and generates its first draft as a working font. This font is used to create proofs that demonstrate the design in a variety of contexts, which the project’s designers review together.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/obsidian_5_shading_4040px.png">
8. During a font’s development, some of the biggest steps forward happen during the exchanges between designer and editor. H&Co founder Jonathan Hoefler serves the company’s designers as editor-in-chief, working with designers to refine and articulate a font’s goals, identify its most successful features, and recommend strategies to improve its look and performance. Some of these comments inspired Clymer not only to try new things with the design, but to build new features into the underlying font tools themselves.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/obsidian_6_proofs.png">
9. A refined version of the tools allowed different parts of a character to be illuminated differently, to achieve a more consistent overall effect. (1) A raked light from above gives a ‘ball terminal’ greater clarity; (2) rotating the light source provides more balanced illumination to the banana-shaped bowl on the left side; (3) sidelighting the main diagonal stroke gives it a defining contrast. The final character (4) is a composite of these different highlights.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/obsidian_8B_stems_4040px.jpg">
10. Above left, the first draft of Obsidian’s ampersand, compared with the final version at the right, reflecting ten months worth of revisions. Still another generation of Obsidian’s tools made it possible to vary not only the angle of each light source, but also its intensity, to help the designers better accentuate those details that best conveyed the illusion of dimensionality. Small details, like the tight interior corners, were refined by hand.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/obsidian_9_characters.svg">
11. Surprisingly, it was the plainest letters in the alphabet that proved the most difficult to shade. Above left, the first draft of the capital D: its rounded bowl catches the light nicely, but its straight vertical stem has a dull, uniform color. Hoefler and Clymer tried a number of solutions, ultimately deciding to enliven these gestures by subtly brightening their highlights at the top and bottom, and having them get progressively thicker as they move from left to right. As always, these new rules were baked into the software itself, and used to regenerate the entire character set anew.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/obsidian_7_lighting_4040px.jpg">
12. Some characters revealed the need for entirely unique approaches. Serifs like those on the capital E couldn’t be extruded into a plausible three-dimensional form, so a new policy was needed to shade the font’s many triangular shapes. Overlaps in joined characters, like the æ diphthong and the ffl ligature, presented additional opportunities to heighten the illusion of dimensionality. Some characters were redesigned completely, to catch the light in more interesting ways: the flat crossbars on the 7, 2, 5 were replaced with flowing curves, and the linear dagger and double-dagger were refashioned in a more ornamental style. The shading of the circumflex (Ê) follows a recipe not used anywhere else in the typeface.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/obsidian_10_collage.svg">
13. A humble user interface conceals complex inner workings. Clymer’s shading tools were written in <a href="https://www.python.org" target="_blank">Python</a> — long the language of choice for managing font data — and built as an extension for the <a href="http://doc.robofont.com" target="_blank">RoboFont</a> font editor. Intuitive, modular libraries for <a href="https://github.com/typesupply/vanilla" target="_blank">building interfaces</a> and <a href="http://www.drawbot.com" target="_blank">rendering shapes</a> on screen make RoboFont a wonderful environment for invention, and the tool of choice for all the typeface designers at H&Co. Shown above, in color, are the tools’ best attempts to apply shading, based on the the designer’s inputs. The black outlines reflect manual adjustments after the fact, made to improve the appearance of this letterform.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/obsidian_8_before_after_4040px.png">
14. Characters from the finished typefaces, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/obsidian/styles/">Obsidian Roman</a> and <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/obsidian/styles/">Obsidian Italic</a>. H&Co Creative Director Brian Hennings made this collage, choosing from some of Obsidian’s more obscure and lovely forms (including, front and center, its alternate italic ampersand.) For a decorative typeface, Obsidian contains an unusually broad range of characters, with roman and italic small capitals, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/obsidian/how-to-use#obsidian-decorating-text">swash caps and swash small caps</a>, and accents for more than 140 languages. Both fonts are also provided in “chromatic layers,” so that designers can independently control the color of the background and foreground.]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 14 Sep 2015 16:14:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/inside-obsidian#562</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Discover.typography: an Innovation by Design]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/discover-typography-innovation-design</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[It’s lovely to see <a href="http://discover.typography.com">Discover.typography</a> recognized by the <a href="http://www.fastcodesign.com/3049904/innovation-by-design/the-2015-innovation-by-design-awards-winners-graphic-design">Innovation by Design Awards.</a> While the story of H&Co is usually the story of our fonts, less visible is the project of working with the fonts, and creating the kinds of experiences in which we can share what we find so exciting about type in the first place.
Thank you to Fast Company for highlighting an innovative piece of technology that’s been one of our most satisfying creative outlets. And thank you to the development team at H&Co, the eleven designers, developers, engineers, and project managers who work so hard to ensure that Discover.typography continues to fully capture, and fully express, everything that we love about type on the web. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 14 Sep 2015 14:01:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/discover-typography-innovation-design#580</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Pull Quotes]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/pull-quotes</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[It’s surprising how much writing that isn’t about design turns out to be about design. For years, I’ve been squirreling away sentiments that resonate with me, scribbling them into sketchbooks or thumbing them into many generations of smartphone. Their sources vary: a hard-boiled mystery that I read on vacation, an in-flight magazine interview with a restaurateur, a book about viniculture, Twitter. One is attributable to a cartoon character. CEO Marissa Mayer adroitly captured what connects geeks and designers, and Jay-Z perfectly articulated something I’ve always felt about typeface design. Taken together, they’re ultimately about the same things: the role of design, the creative process, entrepreneurship, and the significance of tradition and style. These are all things central to life at H&Co, both to us and our clients, and to lovers of typography everywhere. I thought you might enjoy them. —JH
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/discover_pull-quotes_responsive.svg">]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 28 Jul 2015 09:31:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/pull-quotes#579</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Choosing Fonts for Tight Tracking]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/fonts-for-tight-tracking</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Lately, we’ve been developing a taste for tight letterspacing. Our clients have been doing the same: designers know that tight tracking is an effective way to make any message seem more immediate and energetic. But not every typeface is designed for close quarters, and the wrong font can ruin the effect. Here are a few things to consider when setting type tightly.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fonts-for-tight-tracking_responsive-02.svg">
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fonts-for-tight-tracking_responsive-06.svg">
We often reach for a condensed sans when looking for a typeface that can be mortared into a solid wall, but the right serif typeface can be just as successful — and sometimes a lot more lively. Serifs introduce a level of variation that helps relieve typographic monotony, and they can fill awkward spaces around curved letters. A typeface with unusually short serifs, such as <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/quarto/styles/">Quarto Black,</a> can be tracked especially tightly before its characters begin to touch. But don’t eliminate overlaps, since they contribute to giving typography an even rhythm: track your type so that lowercase Ns and Os nestle comfortably together, and let the others fall where they may.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fonts-for-tight-tracking_responsive-07.svg">
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fonts-for-tight-tracking_responsive-08.svg">
Many typefaces make use of the superellipse, a shape based on the ellipse but with fuller curves. <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/styles/gothamcondensed2">Gotham Condensed Ultra,</a> shown here, is one such design: notice the way its upper- and lowercase O are drawn, with squarer “shoulders” than a regular ellipse, shown here as a dotted line. The extra weight in the corners helps letters take up as much space as possible, and further squares them against other letters’ vertical strokes. In the headline above, I’ve also added Gotham’s alternate lowercase A, which huddles more tightly against its neighboring letters. (This character is available as a <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/webfonts-with-stylistic-sets">stylistic set,</a> both on the desktop and on the web.) Keep an eye out for typefaces that use superelliptical curves: you’ll find them at work in many of our <a href="http://www.typography.com/collections/ultra/">boldest fonts.</a>
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fonts-for-tight-tracking_responsive-09.svg">
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fonts-for-tight-tracking_responsive-03.svg">
Because flat and unbracketed serifs intersect more predictably on a line, <a href="http://www.typography.com/collections/slab-serifs/">slab serifs</a> are some of the best choices for tight tracking. Pay attention to the tops of the lowercase F and R, and the concluding strokes of the lowercase A and T, which in most typefaces will feature rounded terminals and curved tails that add to a font’s variety. For even greater visual consistency, choose a slab serif like <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/vitesse/styles/">Vitesse Black,</a> which streamlines these details into horizontal strokes. Vitesse’s boxy serifs lock neatly together, long before the letters themselves collide, helping preserve the legibility of the type.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fonts-for-tight-tracking_responsive-04.svg">
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fonts-for-tight-tracking_responsive-05.svg">
While typefaces with flat sides seem like obvious choices for tight tracking, take care: these can be among the most perilous fonts to use. Serifs can help a letter keep its neighbors at arm’s length, and letters with plump curves can be legible even when partially obscured. But flat-sided letters, when set too tightly, meld into a single, indistinguishable mass. When using a flat-sided sans, look for one that’s specifically fitted for display sizes, such as <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/tungsten/styles/tungsten">Tungsten Bold.</a> And if you’re considering a typeface with rounded corners, look for one that automatically resolves awkward collisions, such as <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/tungsten-rounded/features/">Tungsten Rounded.</a>
Our taste in type is always evolving. Keep an eye on <a href="http://discover.typography.com">discover.typography</a> to see what we’re thinking about, or join our <a href="https://www.typography.com/account/login.php#new-account">mailing list</a> to keep up with what we’re working on. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 10 Jul 2015 11:24:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/fonts-for-tight-tracking#576</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typography on Instagram]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typography-on-instagram</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Over instant messaging at our office, the typographic obsessions of our typeface designers, graphic designers, web developers and businesspeople have lately coalesced into a game of photographic oneupsmanship. We thought it time to share with the rest of the world, so pop over to <a href="https://instagram.com/hoeflerco/">Instagram</a> and you’ll find the goods. Included are some <a href="https://instagram.com/p/3jvd2qzesP/">typographic artifacts</a> that have escaped scholarship, a few excerpts from our <a href="https://instagram.com/p/3ZFsLkTepa/">studio library</a>, and some <a href="https://instagram.com/p/2iwonlTepg/">typographic moments</a> that we’ve encountered in our travels from Havana to The Hague. Later this week we’ll be posting a peculiar bit of Americana that I’ve been holding on to for years, just in time for Independence Day. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 01 Jul 2015 08:19:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typography-on-instagram#575</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Nicely Done: Epicurious]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/epicurious</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[A welcome bit of seasonal fare is the redesigned <a href="http://www.epicurious.com">Epicurious</a>, a hub for recipes, how-to articles, and inspiration for all things gastronomic. Building on the site’s massive recipe database, the Epicurious team took on the challenge of improving accessibility and adding new ways to discover content, two goals in which web fonts play a central part. The new Epicurious offers a fluid experience for visitors, with a more prominent and functional search mechanism, and new editorial features to accompany all the site’s content. We’re especially pleased to see our narrowest ScreenSmart font, <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/styles/gothamcondensedscreensmart">Gotham Condensed ScreenSmart</a>, play such a prominent role: it’s a smart choice to convey an authoritative editorial voice, without competing with the site’s hunger-pang-inducing photography. —NW]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 01 Jun 2015 19:02:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/epicurious#564</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[An Essential Calligraphic Facsimile]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/an-essential-calligraphic-facsimile</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[If you know Zapf Chancery and Zapf Dingbats, you know the faintest shadow of the work of Hermann Zapf. If you know exquisite mid-century books printed in Palatino, you’re getting closer; I never did, having come of age with the brutish digitization of Palatino that shipped with my first laser printer (along with other notable Zapf faces such as Optima and Melior, both too subtle to survive the barbarity of toner at three hundred dots per inch.) People under the age of fifty likely know Zapf only as a typeface designer, and while a deeper study of his typefaces will lead to such treasures as Hunt Roman and Saphir, even this is only half the story. Zapf is a consummate calligrapher — he has been for eight decades — and he is about to share with the world one of his private treasures.
My introduction to Zapf the calligrapher was Feder und Stichel (Pen and Graver), a monograph of 1950 featuring twenty-five calligraphic studies cut in metal by August Rosenberger. They show not only Zapf’s mastery as a shaper of letters, words, and paragraphs, but a catholic taste for historical forms that live apart from his commercially-produced typefaces. There are rustic capitals that date to the third century, two interpretations of the 16th century Civilité, and a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/23njXMTepp/">spectacular alphabet of inline Fraktur capitals</a>. Zapf and I have a mutual close friend, who recently mentioned an even more exotic bit of Zapfiana, the sketchbooks that Zapf carried with him after his conscription into the German Army at the outbreak of World War II. Only reproduced in excerpt, and never seen outside of Zapf’s home, it is these that the Kelly-Winterton Press is undertaking to produce in facsimile.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/zapf2.png">
<h2>Behind the Facsimile</h2>
The proper execution of such a project will require an editor with a deep knowledge of letters, a printer intimately familiar with the demands of reproducing complex artwork, someone with long-established relationships in the fine press community, and a designer up to the challenge of presenting this work in an appropriate typographic context. This project has all of these contributors in the form of Jerry Kelly, a designer, printer, and professional calligrapher, who studied under Zapf in 1979. Kelly is a lover of letters: he wrote the introduction to The Art of the Type Specimen in the Twentieth Century (and designed it beautifully using a typeface to which I’d never given a second thought); he designed The Practice of Letters, which presents The Hofer Collection of Writing Manuals from the Harvard College Library, still an indispensable reference on the evolution of letterforms. Books-on-books can sometimes, cruelly, be careless in their details; this will not be such a project. The facsimile edition will cost $65, though a range of deluxe options include such premiums as additional enclosures and fine bindings. I’ll be adding one of these to my bookshelf, and I’d encourage you to do the same, both to encourage the preservation of this important work, and to enjoy the fruits of this wonderful labor of love. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 19 May 2015 12:28:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/an-essential-calligraphic-facsimile#573</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Adventure Typography!]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/adventure-typography</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Among the contributors to <a href="http://discover.typography.com/theme/trail-mix/">Discover.typography</a> are a couple of serious campers, a few people who enjoy a good hike, and at least one fledgling birdwatcher. At least one of us may have been involved in scouting as a kid, where the pursuit of such outdoorsy merit badges as Indian Lore, Basketry and Leatherwork pointed damningly to a future as the proprietor of a type foundry. But even for an indoorsy designer-to-be, there was much to love about camping: compact kits where things cleverly nested together, secret codes involving flashing lights or colored flags, the iconography of uniform badges, and multi-functional Swiss Army knives that prepared gutsy woodsmen for fixing eyeglasses or opening bottles of wine on the frontier. There was also the night sky, the joy of telling a chestnut tree by its leaves or a cottontail rabbit by its tracks, and the discovered pleasures of both camaraderie and solitude. It was with all this reverie in mind that we set to work on <a href="http://discover.typography.com/theme/trail-mix/">Trail Mix,</a> a meditation on the outdoor life, in type.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/discover_controller_2692px.png">
 
<blockquote class="pullquote">The new controller.</blockquote>
Trail Mix includes a couple of unexpected type treatments for the web, from type wrapping a three-dimensional object, to letters rendered in embroidery. But the most significant change is to the controller, which identifies which fonts are used in each piece of art. Now you’ll see more detailed information about the fonts that go into our work — for example, not just that we used “Gotham,” but which specific styles we chose from the <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/styles/gothamnarrow1">Gotham Narrow 1</a> package. We’ve also made the controller and the artwork mutually interactive, so you can select a font’s name to see where it appears in the art, and vice versa. And as always, there are a couple of easter eggs in store for the eagle-eyed, Eagle Scouts among you. Be prepared. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 06 May 2015 09:23:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/adventure-typography#571</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[What’s New in Gotham]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/whats-new-in-gotham</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[H&Co is delighted to introduce a massive expansion of our Gotham family. With the addition of more than 29,000 character drawings, all 66 styles of <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/styles/">Gotham</a> — plus all 48 <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/styles/screensmart/">Gotham ScreenSmart</a> fonts, specifically designed for the web — now feature the Cyrillic and Greek alphabets. These characters are now included standard in all Gotham packages.
<h2>The Languages</h2>
Today’s Gothams tackle sixty additional languages, including Greek, Russian, and a host of languages that use variants of the Cyrillic alphabet. Featuring H&Co’s <a href="http://www.typography.com/faq/question.php?faqID=12">Expanded Cyrillic</a> spec, the fonts can render not only the major Balto-Slavic languages (Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Belarusian, Bulgarian and Macedonian), but also many of the more widely-spoken and under-served languages of Asia, from Abaza (48,000 speakers) to Uzbek (27 million.) In all, today’s enhancements help designers communicate with more than one quarter of a billion new readers worldwide.
<h2>Got Gotham?</h2>
For those designers who have already purchased Gotham, we’re delighted to make these upgrades available free.
We’re rolling out these upgrades today, so if you’ve purchased Gotham for your computer, sign in and visit your <a href="https://www.typography.com/account/your-account.php#font-library">Font Library</a>. You’ll find a list of all your H&Co fonts, along with links to download their latest versions. If you’re using any of the Gotham web fonts via <a href="http://www.typography.com/cloud/pricing/">Cloud.typography</a>, you’ll see an option within your project dashboards’ <a href="http://www.typography.com/cloud/user-guide/font-features">Character Set</a> panel to add Greek, Basic Russian, or the full Extended Cyrillic set.
<h2>Get Gotham!</h2>
And if you haven’t yet made Gotham a part of your collection, now’s the perfect time. Packages begin at $169, with savings of $69 when buying specially-priced <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/styles/gothambundle">Gotham Bundles</a> — and an additional $100 when buying bundles <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/styles/">together</a>.]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 22 Apr 2015 05:31:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/whats-new-in-gotham#569</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Fonts in Fiction]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/fonts-in-fiction</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Typefaces occasionally escape into the wild, sometimes to find themselves in unfamiliar literary climes. No designer has ever read <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/015603297X/typographycom-20">Foucault’s Pendulum</a> by Umberto Eco without being startled by the arrival of a certain Mr. Garamond early in the story; even the most pedantic typographer can’t help but love this delicious scene in <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cISYzA36-ZY">American Psycho,</a> in which jousting arbitrageurs boast about their business cards, all of it in nonsense designerese. (The cardstock? “It’s Bone. The lettering is something called Silian Rail.”)
While type designers are accustomed to seeing their work appear in fictional settings — movie props, mostly, many of them anachronistic — there’s a special strangeness that comes from reading about one of your fonts in a work of fiction. Having just tucked into <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00N6PCZO0/typographycom-20">A Little Life,</a> a novel by Hanya Yanagihara, H&Co’s Carleen Borsella shot bolt upright when she saw our <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/archer/overview/">Archer</a> typeface namechecked on page ten. I can only imagine that the fictional Jasper, who’s “using Archer for everything,” even body text, is himself a graphic designer: those of us on the inside know that Archer is indeed a text face, one that’s fitted with all kinds of <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/archer/features/archer-numerics">features</a> designed with text in mind. We’ll have to keep an eye on Jasper, remembering what happened <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/the-murderer-wore-serifs">last time</a> an H&Co typeface enjoyed a brief literary interlude. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 19 Mar 2015 15:20:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/fonts-in-fiction#567</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Inspiring Everyday]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-inspiring-everyday</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Whether they’re typeface designers, graphic designers, web developers, or part of our business group, nobody at H&Co is immune to the charms of found typography, and we’re all compulsive sharers. Recently, our chief operating officer paid a visit to the garage to have her car serviced, and returned with a souvenir that made us smile: a paper tag left dangling from the rear view mirror, designer unknown, indifferently printed with a giant number in four inch block type. It prompted a conversation about the pleasures of anonymous typography, and how even the humblest bits of ephemera can suggest visual strategies for solving far more complex design challenges. So for those who take pleasure in life’s little typographic moments, we’re pleased to share a few of ours, today on <a href="http://discover.typography.com/theme/take-a-number">Discover.typography</a>. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 25 Feb 2015 15:59:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-inspiring-everyday#565</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Introducing Obsidian]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-obsidian</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[I’ve always wanted to create a decorative display face in the <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/sham-rock" target="_blank">Regency style</a>, one of those stout, industrial alphabets enlivened by bright, detailed illumination. Toward the end of our <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/surveyor/overview" target="_blank">Surveyor</a> project, a deep exploration of engraved map lettering, this idea started to feel especially relevant: engraved maps were often badged with <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/fantasy-league-typography" target="_blank">elaborate title pieces</a>, and the more time we spent with these hatched and shadowed letters, the more we could imagine how some of their visual qualities could be successfully interpreted in a contemporary typeface — and one that would be useful and relevant to designers today. But then there was the matter of draftsmanship: how do you do it? Type design is still largely a manual art, and the thought of devoting years of our lives to drawing tiny curlicues was a bleak prospect indeed. Like the best of dead ends, this was where things started to become interesting.
I’d been discussing this puzzle with Andy Clymer, a senior typeface designer at H&Co. As part of the Surveyor design team, Andy had spent a lot of time with the heaviest members of that family, the ones most closely connected with the Regency style. An accomplished programmer and a procedural thinker generally, Andy had taken a short sabbatical in 2013 to attend the first class of the <a href="http://sfpc.io" target="_blank">School for Poetic Computation</a>, an artist-run school in New York that explores the intersections of code, design, and theory. Returning with some fresh ideas about particle studies and 3D modeling, Andy and I met to reframe the project: what sorts of rapid prototyping tools could we build to help explore different options, and how might these help us execute our ideas across the massive scale demanded by a contemporary typeface? Not content to be a mere set of decorated capitals, our typeface would need 1,400 glyphs spanning both roman and italic styles, bringing its esprit to the most esoteric of punctuation marks and accents.
Ultimately, Andy’s scripts would become an entire suite of proprietary tools for interpreting two-dimensional letterforms as three-dimensional objects, through the application of virtual light sources that vary in position, angle, and intensity. Like the best projects at H&Co, the typeface was shaped not only by exchanges between designer and editor, but by the iterative cycle of what the tools can do, what we need the tools to do, and what the tools turn out to be able to do that we didn’t foresee going in. After 53 weeks in development, I’m proud to present a project that seemed unattainable just 54 weeks ago: the new Obsidian® typeface, from the designers at H&Co.]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 22 Jan 2015 12:47:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-obsidian#561</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Web fonts with Stylistic Sets]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/webfonts-with-stylistic-sets</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[In search of the perfect form for each of a font’s thousands of characters, typeface designers sometimes encounter questions that have more than one answer. Perhaps a flowery capital Q captures a font’s elegance, but one with a shorter tail is more practical when there’s no room for flourish. Perhaps a smart and serious typeface suddenly becomes cool and playful, with a subtle alteration to its lowercase a. H&Co loves making typefaces that offer different voices, and ones that anticipate and solve problems, which is why we’ve long furnished our desktop fonts with alternate characters that offer designers stylistic and functional options. Starting today, <a href="http://www.typography.com/webfonts">Cloud.typography</a> users can achieve this same sophistication on the web, fine-tuning web fonts using a powerful OpenType feature called stylistic sets. Uniquely, we’ve implemented this feature so that it works not only in cutting-edge browsers, but in all browsers that support web fonts, so that your typographic preferences can be a fundamental and consistent part of the way you work with type.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/webfonts-with-stylistic-sets_responsive-05.svg">
At its simplest, a stylistic set replaces one character with an alternate form, such as the optional “single-storey” lowercase a available in <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/">Gotham</a>, above. Activating this option affects not only the letter itself, but all of its related forms, including the à accent seen here. Usefully, Cloud.typography automatically makes this same change across all of a family’s styles, a welcome bit of housekeeping in a sixteen-style family like Gotham:
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/webfonts-with-stylistic-sets_responsive-04.svg">
These adjustments are known as stylistic sets because they allow related transformations to be grouped together and controlled by a single switch. The “curly commas” option in the <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/overview/">Whitney</a> typeface affects not only the comma, but the semicolon, and both the open and closed forms of the single quotes, double quotes, and baseline quotes. The ability to manage complex adjustments with a single checkbox makes it easy to ensure consistency across your typography: not everyone would guess that turning on Whitney’s flat-sided M would change not only the capital and small cap forms, but also the symbols for trademark (™) and servicemark (℠).
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/webfonts-with-stylistic-sets_responsive-03.svg">
Each of our type families has different stylistic sets, inspired by the natural properties of the design. There are versatile typefaces such as <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/surveyor/overview/">Surveyor</a> in which common characters like f and g can be dramatically reshaped, straightforward headline faces like <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/tungsten-rounded/overview/">Tungsten Rounded</a> that let you fine-tune details as esoteric as the percent sign, and exuberant display faces such as <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/landmark/overview/">Landmark</a> that include five different mechanisms for managing accents. Our <a href="http://www.typography.com/faq/question.php?faqID=157">Stylistic Sets FAQ</a> details the things that await you in the H&Co library, a few highlights of which appear below. On behalf of our type designers who devise these characters, and the Cloud.typography team who brought this work to the web, I look forward to seeing what you build with these new tools! —JH
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/webfonts-with-stylistic-sets_responsive-02.svg">]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 09 Dec 2014 13:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/webfonts-with-stylistic-sets#560</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Introducing Quarto]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-quarto</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Meet Quarto, a new family of display faces.
Dutch Old Styles are marvelous and versatile typefaces, and one of typography’s dominant species. The style, which dates to the late sixteenth century, features a large lowercase, compact descenders, and a dense texture, together making them an excellent choice for setting headlines. We had the opportunity to explore the style when we were commissioned to create an original typeface for Portfolio magazine, a business title launched by Condé Nast, and designed by Robert Priest and Grace Lee. From out of this work comes Quarto®, a new family of display faces for print and web.
In reviewing the historical artifacts that served as a foundation for the project, we decided that Quarto should not record this period style, but rather interpret some of its more intriguing and open-ended ideas. In one typeface, created by a Flemish punchcutter 444 years ago, we found a compelling tension between opposing qualities: dark, gothic strokes were offset by bright, crisp serifs; a forest of vertical stems was punctuated by moments of lavish roundness. This controlled tension became a theme for the project, and would serve us when Quarto left history behind — which would be sooner than usual.
<a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/quarto/overview/"><img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/quarto-release_responsive-02-2.svg"></a>
The typeface that inspired Quarto included only a roman alphabet, so beyond the usual effort of designing plausible numbers, punctuation, and symbols, H&Co Senior Designer Sara Soskolne was faced with inventing a sympathetic and historically appropriate italic. (Our Flemish punchcutter, Hendrik van den Keere, worked in a range of styles throughout his career, but apparently never created a single italic.) Also unsupplied by the historical record were any suggestions about how to design additional weights: “boldface” is a nineteenth century concept, unknown to sixteenth century typefounders, and one of the reasons that contemporary Old Style faces often have either a small range of weights, or none at all. Quarto pushes beyond bold into black, offering a spectrum of styles that preserves the design’s fire and intensity throughout.]]>
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<pubDate>Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:30:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-quarto#553</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Toward a Philosophy of Web fonts: A Lecture at Beyond Tellerrand, Berlin]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/toward-a-philosophy-of-webfonts-beyond-tellerrand-2014</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[If you’ll be in Berlin next week, I hope you’ll join me and my fellow speakers for <a href="http://beyondtellerrand.com/berlin-2014/">Beyond Tellerrand,</a> the design technology conference that’s quickly become a favorite locus for interesting design thinking. Equal measures of visual design and web technology always combine for an inspiring and provocative couple of days.
I’ll be talking about web fonts, and a critical framework that I’ve found useful in understanding their intentions and assessing their quality. And if all goes well this week, I’m hoping to have the opportunity to introduce some new features that we’re developing for Cloud.typography, our second such announcement this month. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 29 Oct 2014 17:48:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/toward-a-philosophy-of-webfonts-beyond-tellerrand-2014#557</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Cloud.typography Browser Support Now Goes to 11]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/browser-support-goes-to-11</link>
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<![CDATA[Cloud.typography is designed to identify the type of browser viewing a web page, and to respond with exactly the right kind of fonts. This offers advantages in terms of both render quality and filesize: IE6 for Windows gets the additional help it needs to render small type crisply, and Safari for iOS gets fonts that aren’t encumbered by excess data. Now, we’ve supplemented Cloud.typography’s long list of browsers and font types with a safety net, designed to deliver industry-standard woff files to any browser it doesn’t recognize. As a result, you’ll now see web fonts in new places, from the browser built into the Google app for iOS, to the preview tool inside <a href="http://panic.com/coda/">Coda</a>, the great web development app from Panic.
Best part: there’s nothing you need to do. All of these updates are already online, and delivering for every Cloud.typography project. Enjoy! —NW]]>
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<pubDate>Mon, 27 Oct 2014 09:57:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/browser-support-goes-to-11#556</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[What’s Cooking]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/whats-cooking</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[If you’ve ever dated a graphic designer, this has likely happened to you. You’re seated comfortably at a charming restaurant, presented with menus, and you watch as your companion scans up and down the entrées. Menus are flipped over, brows furrow; eyeglasses are lifted as eyes squint at the details. You catch an occasional “huh” that suggests the discerning judgment of the true connoisseur, and think you’re in for a treat. “See anything you like?” you ask innocently. “I like the italic small caps on the wine list,” comes the response, “but they used Arial for the bottom two lines.” It’s amazing we get invited anywhere.
Lunchtime at H&Co tends to provoke these conversations, and with no civilians in attendance, we’re free to nerd out. We’ve been thinking a lot recently about the different typographic idioms that restaurants use to telegraph what’s in store — how the folksy barbecue joint distinguishes itself from the faux French bistro, or the more-Brooklyn-than-Brooklyn sandwich shop — and have been looking for ways to help designers communicate a restaurant’s culture without resorting to shopworn clichés. No wood type with the pulled pork, or belle epoque frippery with the poached eggs: you can definitely use modern, relevant, and satisfying typography, and still set the right tone.
<a href="http://discover.typography.com/theme/save-the-date/"><img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/discover_save-the-date_4040px-2.png"></a>
You’ll find a few of our suggestions at <a href="http://discover.typography.com/theme/whats-cooking/">What’s Cooking</a>, a collection of thirteen typographic menus (plus a few amuse-bouches), today at Discover.typography. These autumnal settings are a follow-up to <a href="http://discover.typography.com/theme/save-the-date/">Save the Date</a>, our summertime celebration of the invitations that turn into cherished keepsakes once the first chill of fall enters the air. We hope you’ll enjoy them both. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Mon, 20 Oct 2014 19:40:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/whats-cooking#555</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[New from H&Co: Tungsten Rounded]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/new-from-hco-tungsten-rounded</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[There’s a wonderful materiality about rounded letters. Their lighter weights have an engineered quality: for me, they always bring to mind the controlled movements of a router, steadily cutting channels in brass or steel and leaving behind a spray of metal shavings. Their heavier weights are the stuff of the roadside, both the vacuform plastic letters that advertise gas stations and motels, and the painted signs that herald this week’s prices for groceries or liquor. Applying these tactile qualities to our suave Tungsten family gives us Tungsten Rounded, a new family of six fonts that’s at once earnest, energetic, and wry.
A common dilemma when working with rounded typefaces is what to do when two adjacent letters overlap. For the signpainter, the tiny divet created by two intersecting curves is quickly dispatched with a brush, but the letters in a typeface usually go unsupervised:
<a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/tungsten-rounded/overview/"><img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/tungsten-rounded-release_responsive-03.svg"></a>
In Tungsten Rounded’s heaviest weights, we addressed this problem with a set of 151 alternate characters, designed to interact in more predictable ways. An OpenType feature automatically engages these characters when needed, to ensure that all of the 548 potential collisions are managed correctly, from common pairs like AX, to truly exotic ones such as KÆ.
<a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/tungsten-rounded/overview/"><img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/tungsten-rounded-release_responsive-02.svg"></a>]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 14 Jul 2014 21:24:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/new-from-hco-tungsten-rounded#548</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Football as Football]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/football-as-football</link>
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<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/football_as_football_500.png">
As the World Cup winds down, many Americans will turn from the excitement and agony of football to another beloved pastime: football. American football, to be precise. This year, six Minneapolis co-workers have combined these obsessions with their love of design into a single experience called <a href="http://www.footballasfootball.com/">Football as Football</a>, which reimagines the logos of American football teams in the heraldic language of the great European football clubs. Watch as the mascots and monograms of the NFL take on German, English, Spanish and Italian accents: the design is both hilarious and spot-on.
<!--<aside class="sidebar-content">
Made something special using Cloud.typography? <a href="https://twitter.com/hoeflerco">Let us know!</a>
</aside>-->
While the crests are the star of the show, their designers lavished just as much care and attention on the site that presents them. “We wanted a brand for the project to wrap around the experience,” said Garrick Willhite, one member of the team. “We started with an icon, that lead to a logo, that guided the overall look and feel.” To support its vivid and varied imagery — and typography that includes fonts as far afield as <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/">Gotham</a> and <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/hoefler-text/overview/">Hoefler Text</a> — the team chose our <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/knockout/overview/">Knockout</a> family to use for the site’s web fonts. Originally inspired by sports ephemera, Knockout’s strong and athletic character makes it an apt choice for the project, and applied in a studied and subdued way, it supports the art instead of competing with it — just as a good team player should. —NW]]>
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<pubDate>Thu, 10 Jul 2014 10:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/football-as-football#547</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Thank You!]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/thank-you</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[One of the great joys of designing typefaces is seeing them in the wild, and discovering what new voices people have coaxed out of your work. A year ago today, we launched Cloud.typography, and had no idea that we’d be presented with these delights so deeply, so rapidly, and so often: for twelve months, we’ve watched designers sign up for the service one day, build things the next, and deploy their sites the following morning. We’ve seen our letters come to life in ways we’d never imagined, on the sites we use every day, and in new settings that push the boundaries of possibility. It’s been a deeply gratifying experience for everyone who worked to build Cloud.typography, so we owe you our thanks for making our work a part of yours.
Thank you to the designers and developers who have put Cloud.typography to the test, using all the features we labored over, and reaching deep into the furthest recesses of our font library. Thank you to the organizations who have trusted their communications to our fonts, from the institutions who use our web fonts to bring their identities online, to the new businesses who have found their voice using H&Co fonts. Thank you all for a wonderful first year together — we are so looking forward to the next! —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Tue, 01 Jul 2014 09:01:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/thank-you#546</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[New from H&Co: Nitro & Turbo]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/new-from-hco-nitro-turbo</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[In contrast to our last release, a hundred-style family inspired by tiny engravings on vintage maps, today we’re introducing a two-style family of forward-looking, stadium-sized letters: meet Nitro & Turbo.
The irrepressibly energetic Nitro grew out of a commission from Michael Bierut at Pentagram, to create an original typeface for the New York Jets. An unusual project, Nitro started not with a moderate weight roman, but with a black italic, usually the most peripheral member of a type family. Instinctively we felt that Nitro could benefit from a companion design, but what? What additional style could offer a visual counterpoint, while sharing the design’s explosive energy and unstoppable momentum?
In place of a companion roman or a set of lighter weights, we decided to explore one of typography’s less obvious directions: the backslant. Like every project that begins with an unvoiced “how hard can it be?”, the answer came back, “harder than you think.” Backslants are eye-catching because they confound expectations, but tricky to draw because they go against the natural motion of the hand, the pen, and the alphabet itself, making them a design challenge as formidable as it is irresistible.
The result of the project is two fonts, the forward-leaning Nitro, and the backward-leaning Turbo. Both fonts have the versatility of a good hot pepper: they add a useful dash of fire to a surprisingly wide range of recipes, and in the right setting, they’re fantastic on their own.]]>
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<pubDate>Tue, 03 Jun 2014 09:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/new-from-hco-nitro-turbo#544</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[A New Way to Discover Typography]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-new-way-to-discover-typography</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Something new from the designers at H&Co.
A font’s shapes might be designed, but its personality is discovered. It’s only in its natural habitat, surrounded by other typefaces, that a font truly develops a unique voice. For the designers at Hoefler&Co, designing with a font — even while it’s still being drawn — is a vital part of the creative process: seeing how a font performs, especially in the company of other typefaces, helps us better understand its character, articulate its purpose, and perfect its voice.
<a href="http://discover.typography.com"><img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/discover_wanderlust_responsive_ol.svg"></a>
Starting today, we’re going to be sharing some of these explorations on a new site at <a href="http://discover.typography.com">Discover.typography.com</a>. You’ll find typography that’s inspired by the things that delight us, and typography that reveals the techniques we’ve learned for achieving different moods. Discover.typography is a new way to experience type, an environment that makes it easy to identify typefaces, see them up close, and get to know their many subtleties. Check it out, on your phone, tablet, or computer, and let us know what you think! —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 14 May 2014 05:01:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-new-way-to-discover-typography#541</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Use Fonts on iOS!]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/use-fonts-on-ios</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Now you can install H&Co fonts on your iPhone and iPad, and use them in applications that support fonts.
Great mobile apps like Pages, Numbers, and Keynote make it easier than ever to use your iPad and iPhone not just to consume content, but to create it. Typography, a long-missing piece of the puzzle, just got a lot better: starting today, your iOS 7 devices can use all the Hoefler&Co fonts you’ve ever purchased, and you can install them directly from this site. Free.
Using Safari on your iPad or iPhone, head over to your <a href="https://www.typography.com/account/your-account.php#font-library">Font Library</a> page. You’ll see a list of fonts you’ve licensed for your computer, each with an add to device link that installs them directly into your mobile device. Managing fonts on iOS is easy — you’ll find more information about it in our <a href="http://www.typography.com/faq/question.php?faqID=156">FAQ</a>. Enjoy!
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hco_fonts_for_ipad_final.png">]]>
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<pubDate>Tue, 06 May 2014 14:40:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/use-fonts-on-ios#538</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[USPS Stamps]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/usps-stamps</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Even when “communications” meant an e-mail campaign delivered to 317 readers, <a href="http://journeygroup.com">Journey Group</a> of Charlottesville, VA recognized that stamps have a story to tell — and not just to collectors. Stamps are built on typography, making the web a natural place to share their rich visual heritage, and making web fonts an important part of the experience.
Though postage stamps can pass unnoticed, their typography is wonderfully playful, and the new <a href="http://uspsstamps.com">USPS Stamps</a> website strikes this balance with aplomb. It delights readers with its typographic grace and wit, but relies on web fonts to perform in a diverse set of circumstances, accompanying an unforeseeable collection of images, and rendering seamlessly across all the browsers used by the site’s vast audience.
For the site’s typography, Journey Group chose our Verlag and Chronicle web fonts. Instead of merely styling the site’s headlines, they implemented web fonts for all of the site’s type, using <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/verlag/overview/">Verlag</a> for both headlines and annotations, and <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/chronicle-text/webfonts/chroniclessm-book">Chronicle ScreenSmart</a> for text. Using a <a href="http://www.typography.com/cloud/the-fonts/index.php#screensmart-fonts">ScreenSmart</a> font ensured that the site’s text would maintain its visual integrity at even the smallest sizes, so that all of the site’s readers are presented with crisp, legible type.
“I’ve always admired Verlag for its modernist swagger,” said Senior Designer Seth Nickerson. “My feeling was that it could carry a page when needed, but also be objective enough to live comfortably with disparate elements, without looking out of place. Chronicle ScreenSmart seemed the obvious choice to pair with it: it has a crispness that matches Verlag, and just seemed to invite long-form reading when we looked at it in the design, which is paramount.”
The site’s typographic sophistication goes far beyond its palette. CSS transforms and <a href="http://uspsstamps.com/stories/remembering-ellison">subtle animations</a> play a gentle but effective role in bringing the type to life, and the site is filled with gracious nods to philately (including our favorite, the perforated edge in the main nav.)
We’re proud to feature Journey Group’s work for the USPS as our first profile of a website using Cloud.typography. When we return, we’ll introduce you to a site that uses meticulous type and illustrations to strike the right tone for an international company. In the meantime, if you’ve made something special that uses Cloud.typography, let us know: we’re on Twitter at <a href="https://twitter.com/HoeflerCo">@HoeflerCo</a>. —NW]]>
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<pubDate>Mon, 31 Mar 2014 14:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/usps-stamps#526</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Introducing Surveyor]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-surveyor</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[We’re delighted to introduce Surveyor, a new family of fonts for print and web, and sizes large and small.
I love maps, and not just for their vintage charm. I admire them as highly functional pieces of design, packing extraordinary amounts of information into small spaces, and invisibly educating readers about how they’re meant to be read. Spend a few moments with a map, and you’ll find that you’ve learned to distinguish counties, cities, and towns by the styles of type they use, without ever checking the legend. And these are just three of a typical map’s two dozen styles of lettering.
Surveyor® is a new family of fonts inspired by the traditional mapmaker’s letter. It revives a style of lettering that’s unique to cartography, one that evolved in the early nineteenth century and endured for as long as maps were printed by engraving. Beyond reviving the shapes of these alphabets, Surveyor celebrates what maps do best, by providing an expressive typographic vocabulary to help designers articulate many different kinds of information. A peek at Surveyor’s <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/surveyor/styles/">style list</a> hints at what’s possible.
<a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/surveyor/overview/"><img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/surveyor-release_responsive-02.svg"></a>
We’ve designed Surveyor in three optical sizes: a Text version for body copy, a Display cut for headlines, and a Fine for sizes larger still. Surveyor goes beyond the mapmaker’s roman and italic by including five weights, each of them outfitted with both roman and italic small caps, swash caps, and swash small caps. In its Text size, Surveyor features tabular figures, fractions, and symbols, to help it conquer the most demanding content. And for Cloud.typography users, we’ve created Surveyor ScreenSmart, a family of web fonts for text that contains all of these advanced typographic features, engineered to work in the browser at sizes as small as nine pixels.]]>
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<pubDate>Tue, 25 Mar 2014 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-surveyor#522</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[The Making of Neon Signs]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-making-of-neon-signs</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Every neon sign has a “start and stop position,” a point on each letter where a tube begins and ends. I’ve just learned how a signmaker chooses this point, and it’s something I’d never have guessed. It is fascinating.
It’s nothing to do with a letter’s traditional form, or its cultural dimensions. These are the first ways that neon speaks to us, whether it’s the plainspoken sans serif on a liquor store or the elaborate fantasy of a Las Vegas casino. In The Making of Neon Signs, an eleven minute film produced by Cpak Studio for M+, Hong Kong’s museum for visual culture, we’re introduced to a craftsman who first approaches signs from the their cultural angle: the bank that wants something honest, the restaurant that wants a simple semi-cursive script, or the sports club that uses the strong and powerful Northern Wei style. But none of this affects a letter’s start and stop position.
It also has nothing to do with neon’s visual aspects, how single-line letters work in small sizes, but different kinds of intricate doubling are used as letters get larger. Nor does it have to do with the physical considerations of the medium, the ways that inert gases combine with different kinds of colored glass to produce efflorescence, or the ways that glass can bend, or the order in which pieces can be attached. Even as I watched men without gloves hold incandescent glass rods over an 800°C flame, the obvious didn’t occur to me, which is this: you design the letter so that it’s possible to bend it into shape without burning your hands.
There are other great moments in the film that I won’t spoil, and some terrific footage of vintage sign maquettes that designers will love. Spend eleven minutes with it today. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Sun, 23 Mar 2014 15:22:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-making-of-neon-signs#524</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Fonts by Hoefler&Co]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/fonts-by-hoefler-co</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[We’re marking the change to H&Co with some updates to our font library, some new features on the site, and some good news for app developers.
<h2>Improved mobile fonts</h2>
We’ve remastered all 1,094 fonts in our library to deliver even more consistent performance across desktop, web, and mobile environments. In the past, we’d supplied app developers with special “mobile” versions of fonts built for iOS and Android — but starting today, any fonts you purchase for your computer will be the same ones you’ll use when developing mobile apps.
<h2>Free updates for desktop fonts</h2>
We’re building a new feature for the site that makes it easy to download your past purchases any time you need them, and to ensure that you always have the latest versions of our fonts. Today we’re rolling this out to our Cloud.typography subscribers, and soon we’ll be making it available to everyone. If you’re a Cloud user, log in and go to <a href="https://www.typography.com/account/your-account.php#font-library">Your Font Library</a> under the “Welcome” menu, and you’ll be able to see your entire font collection, and download the latest versions of any fonts you’ve licensed for your computer.
<h2>Streamlined app development</h2>
We’ve changed our licenses to make life a little easier for app developers. In the past, developers needed two kinds of licenses: an End-User License to use fonts on their computers, and a separate App License to embed these fonts in their apps. We’ve rewritten our EULA so that anyone buying a computer license can now use these fonts to develop apps, without any separate paperwork — and once you’ve designed your app, publish it using these same fonts with an <a href="https://www.typography.com/apps">App.typography</a> subscription, from just $299.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/Apps-using-HoeflerCo-Fonts_4-750.png">
We’d like to thank all the designers and developers who’ve made our typefaces a part of your fantastic work. As people who are obsessed with designing fonts to solve problems, we love seeing all the ways you’ve used our fonts to improve familiar experiences, and create entirely new ones. We can’t wait to see what’s coming next. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Tue, 18 Mar 2014 13:21:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/fonts-by-hoefler-co#520</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[New at Typography.com]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/new-at-typography-dot-com</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[We’re starting off the new month with some enhancements to site, and some good news for web developers. Here’s what’s happening.
<h2>Answers: Search and FAQ</h2>
We took the occasion of writing a new <a href="http://www.typography.com/faq/category.php?topicID=16">Web font FAQ</a> to polish up our site search tools: you’ll find both resources available <a href="http://www.typography.com/faq/">here</a>. In addition to some guided tours of topics like <a href="http://www.typography.com/faq/category.php?topicID=10">licensing</a> and <a href="http://www.typography.com/faq/category.php?topicID=9">troubleshooting</a>, you’ll find updated answers to questions about <a href="http://www.typography.com/faq/question.php?faqID=147">publishing apps</a>, <a href="http://www.typography.com/faq/question.php?faqID=16">making PDFs</a>, and more. Since the tool searches across the entire site, look for some colorful surprises, in case you just happen to be searching for <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/his-name-was-almost-legion">poodle’s paws</a>, <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/a-secret-universe-in-your-desk-drawer">lightning bolts</a>, <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/hco-crime-fighting-division">Tupac Shakur</a>, <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/the-voynich-manuscript">Zipf’s Law</a>, or any of the three places we mentioned <a href="http://www.typography.com/search/?searchString=mcqueen">Steve McQueen</a>, which science can’t explain.
<h2>Larger Desktop Licenses</h2>
We’ve been delighted to see organizations of every size adopt <a href="http://www.typography.com/webfonts">Cloud.typography</a>, from independent developers subscribing at $199 to high-traffic websites who measure visitors in the billions. In keeping with the range of web font subscriptions we offer, today we’re expanding the range of desktop licenses that can be purchased online: starting today, you can license fonts online for as many as 250 computers. As always, our <a href="http://www.typography.com/about/contact.php">sales office</a> is happy to assist organizations who need even bigger licenses. Drop us a line.
<h2>Web font Domains</h2>
One of Cloud.typography’s highlights is that it lets you deliver web fonts to an <a href="http://www.typography.com/cloud/user-guide/managing-domains">unlimited number of domains</a>. We’ve heard from designers who enable a single domain such as example.com that traffic to www.example.com is blocked, because the www hasn’t been explicitly included. Starting today, every time you add a domain, the www subdomain is automatically whitelisted, and vice versa: adding www.example.com whitelists example.com as well. If you’re grappling with an especially gruesome list of subdomains, you can use the asterisk as a wild card to authorize them all, by adding *.example.com. There’s more about this in the <a href="http://www.typography.com/cloud/user-guide/">Cloud.typography User Guide</a>.
<h2>We’re hiring!</h2>
The best news of all: <a href="http://www.typography.com/about/careers.php">we’re hiring</a>! With Cloud.typography up and running, and the next generation of web applications in the works, it’s a great time to join a small and dedicated team of obsessives, and to build things for an audience who appreciates good design. This is a full-time position in our New York office, open to US citizens and others with authorization to work in the US. <a href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Hey NYC software engineers: @HoeflerCo is hiring: http://www.typography.com/about/careers.php">Tell your friends</a>. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 04 Nov 2013 16:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/new-at-typography-dot-com#473</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Fonts For The Web: Two Lectures by Jonathan Hoefler, November 2 & 14]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/fonts-for-the-web</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[What makes a good web font? Before we wrote the first line of code for <a href="http://www.typography.com/webfonts">Cloud.typography</a>, or lit the first pixel of our first <a href="http://www.typography.com/cloud/the-fonts/index.php#screensmart-fonts">ScreenSmart</a> font, we began the search for a solution to this riddle. The answers are unexpected: a good web font is more than just legible, and more than just attractive, and some provocative solutions come from some unexpected places. Web fonts can learn a lot from nineteenth century engraved maps, twentieth century dictionaries, and twenty-first century authors.
If you’re in New York this month, join me at <a href="http://nyc.ampersandconf.com">Ampersand NYC</a> this Saturday, November 2, or at a special lecture for <a href="http://aigany.org/events/fonts-for-web-with-jonathan-hoefler">AIGA/NY</a> on November 14, for an exploration of what constitutes fine typography on the web. I’ll be sharing a behind-the-scenes look at how we brought our library of fonts to the web, and some new ways of looking at type that are useful for every cross-disciplinary designer. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 28 Oct 2013 10:03:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/fonts-for-the-web#472</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Making One’s Own]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/making-ones-own</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[“I never wanted to draw typefaces, I wanted to have typefaces.” I found myself uttering these words to a <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/hco-the-video">filmmaker</a> this past spring, who shared them first with an audience of <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/hco-awarded-the-2013-aiga-medal">design luminaries</a>, and then with the entire internet. It’s a strange sentiment, but one that’s familiar to anyone who makes things: as a designer, I couldn’t find the tools I needed, so I made my own. I designed typefaces to fill measurable holes in my palette, and to help me do things that other fonts couldn’t. As it turned out, the business of identifying these opportunities and inventing things to satisfy them became a project unto itself, which is how this company came to be, working to create the typefaces that help designers do more.
My work at Hoefler&Co gives me the chance to contribute not only to the fonts themselves, but to a range of communications that use them, from paper invoices to type specimens to web applications. Each of these projects invites different ways of using type, and each raises different questions about what kinds of tools might help designers like us do our jobs more effectively. As someone who came to design through programming, I especially love the web: I find it satisfying to experience and rewarding to design for, even if I’m impatient with the pace of its growth as a typographic medium. Having outgrown an infancy of core web fonts that were high in quality but few in number, the web moved squarely into its adolescence, full of exuberant but badly behaved fonts that have yet to live up to their potential. Most web fonts are hard to read at text sizes, especially on Windows. Type is often broken, congested, or muddy; font families available for the web regularly include styles that are untenable on the screen. Indispensable tools like small caps and tabular figures have been ignored, limiting the ways in which designers can organize and articulate information. In response to these challenges, and in keeping with our tradition of helping designers solve problems, we created <a href="http://www.typography.com/webfonts">Cloud.typography</a>, a web font solution for design professionals. Like the fonts themselves, Cloud.typography is a tool, built to provide everything you need to create online experiences with the level of quality you’ve come to expect from us.
<blockquote class="pullquote">Typefaces are designed to solve problems. A good web font should take on the biggest challenges of all.</blockquote>
Our goal wasn’t just to port our library of fonts to the web, but to create a new typography that suits this medium — not just fonts on the web, but fonts for the web. These are our <a href="http://www.typography.com/cloud/the-fonts/index.php#screensmart-fonts">ScreenSmart</a> fonts, designed from the pixel up, and built to perform at text sizes as small as <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/webfonts/gothamssm-book/">nine pixels</a>. One rewarding milestone in designing a typeface is getting to use it yourself, which we’re doing today: the redesigned blog you’re reading features three of our new ScreenSmart families (<a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/mercury-text/styles/screensmart">Mercury SSm</a>, <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/styles/screensmart/">Whitney SSm</a>, and <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/styles/screensmart/">Gotham SSm</a>) as well as our multipurpose <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/sentinel/overview/">Sentinel</a> family for headlines. ScreenSmart fonts give us the opportunity to be as expressive online as we are in print, and Cloud.typography ensures that this same experience is delivered to readers on all browsers and all platforms. We’ve taken the opportunity to rework all six years’ worth of blog entries, to take advantage of all things we can now do with Cloud.typography: jump in and you’ll find exotic <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/house-of-flying-reference-marks">punctuation marks</a>, extended <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/the-living-glagolitic">accent sets</a>, obscure and typographically complex <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/the-hco-institute-for-unapplied-mathematics">numbers</a>, unexpected <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/adventures-in-kerning-part-ii">kerning pairs</a>, and letters brought back from <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/happy-typographic-holidays">extinction</a> — all rendered using ScreenSmart fonts that are specifically designed for online text. These are the tiny moments in which a good web font shines, and where typography proves its value to authors, designers, and readers.
The launch of Cloud.typography means a return to the blog, which has long been dormant while we’ve worked to complete this four-year project. There’s much to discuss, and a lot of surprises from us in store: I hope you’ll keep us bookmarked. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 21 Oct 2013 11:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/making-ones-own#470</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[H&Co Supports Hamilton]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/hco-supports-hamilton</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Wood type is a vital part of our visual culture. Its riot of technological and typographic innovations remains as relevant as ever to modern typographic practice: whether your favorite font comes in <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/knockout/styles/">multiple widths</a>, or features <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/knox/features/knox-chromatics/">chromatic layers</a>, it owes a considerable debt to its wood type forebears. H&Co has always believed that the preservation and study of historical typography serves even the most progressive experiments, so we’re proud to support Hamilton, not only in its curatorial mission, but for the relevant and exciting programming it provides to both the community in Two Rivers, and the design community at large.
This Sustainability Grant kicks off a new fundraising chapter for the museum, to help secure the future of its new home at 1816 10th Street. If you love typography, we hope you’ll <a href="http://woodtype.org/home/support" target="_blank">join us</a> in supporting their wonderful work. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 01 May 2013 05:40:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/hco-supports-hamilton#459</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[The AIGA Video]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/hco-the-video</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<div class="embed-wrapper"><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="281" mozallowfullscreen="" src="//player.vimeo.com/video/67817714" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="500"></iframe></div>
As part of the presentation of the 2013 AIGA Medal, the American Institute of Graphic Arts commissioned this short video about type designers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones. In addition to offering an intimate glimpse at some recent works-in-progress, the video features an inside look at the company offices in a moment of rare repose.
Thanks once again to the AIGA for recognizing our work, and to Dan and Andre at <a href="http://www.dresscodeny.com/about/" target="_blank">Dress Code</a> for presenting typeface design with such thought, care, and wit. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 23 Apr 2013 05:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/hco-the-video#458</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Introducing Landmark]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-landmark</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[In 1999, we received an irresistible commission from Michael Bierut at Pentagram: to design a typeface for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lever_House" target="_blank">Lever House</a>, one of New York’s most significant architectural landmarks. In a neighborhood of skyscrapers designed simply to warehouse the maximum amount of rentable real estate, Lever House is a rare building with thoughtful urban values, featuring a grand public colonnade, a welcoming sculpture garden, and an enormous setback that showcases that rarest of midtown luxuries: the sky.
The typeface we created was an airy sans serif, patterned after the existing lettering on the building’s Park Avenue window, and related to the style of its cornerstone inscription. The project revealed some interesting discoveries about <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/landmark/features/landmark-dynamic-capitals/">the way architects use capital letters</a>, and how a typeface designed specifically for architecture could serve designers especially well. A decade after completing the project, we set about creating a collection of decorative variations inspired the material and environmental qualities of buildings: the interplay of structure and surface, the effects of shadow and light, and the transformative power of perspective. Bringing typographic qualities to mechanical forms turned out to be a <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/landmark/features/landmark-perceptual-shading/">formidable challenge</a>, but a fascinating one, ultimately absorbing our designers for more than a year. The result is the family of four new typefaces that we’re delighted to introduce: Landmark Regular, Inline, Shadow, and Dimensional.]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 11 Feb 2013 06:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-landmark#457</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[The AIGA Medal]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/hco-awarded-the-2013-aiga-medal</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[The American Institute of Graphic Arts has announced that Jonathan Hoefler will receive the 2013 AIGA Medal, the profession’s highest honor.
“In recognition of their contributions to the typographic landscape through impeccable craftsmanship, skilled historical reference and insightful vernacular considerations,” the award celebrates the body of work created by the company over the past twenty-four years.
Since 1920, the AIGA Medal has been presented annually to innovators who set standards of excellence for design. Past recipients have included Charles and Ray Eames, architect Philip Johnson, publisher Alfred A. Knopf, photographer Richard Avedon, and artist Saul Steinberg. Typeface designers to have received the award include W. A. Dwiggins, Frederic Goudy, Stanley Morison, and Jan Tschichold, as well as contemporary designers Matthew Carter, Zuzana Licko, and Rudy Vanderlans.
Eight designers will receive the 2013 Medal: John Bielenberg, William Drenttel and Jessica Helfand, Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, Stefan Sagmeister, Lucille Tenazas and Wolfgang Weingart. The awards will be presented at a celebration in New York City on April 19.]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 05 Feb 2013 13:37:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/hco-awarded-the-2013-aiga-medal#456</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Plastic Wood Type]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-plastic-wood-type</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/dribbble-knockout_500.jpg">
One of the joys of designing typefaces is seeing the flavors that designers coax out of your work. A fair amount of exploration always goes into our own process: Gotham wouldn’t be Gotham were it not able to look simultaneously <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/features/gotham-voice/">young and old</a>, and one of Idlewild’s virtues is the range of <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/idlewild/features/idlewild-companionability/">wildly different qualities</a> that emerge in company of friends. But type designers never have the final say on what’s possible: it’s always the graphic designers who use our work who deliver the greatest surprises.
Over on <a href="https://dribbble.com/hoefler/buckets/95565-Made-with-H-Co-Knockout">Dribbble</a>, I’ve been collecting some of my favorite projects that designers have created using our <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/knockout/overview/">Knockout</a> type family. Some dial up the typeface’s wood type heritage, evoking either vintage warmth or the charm of anonymous commercial printing. Others update the genre more subtly, using Knockout to give a little traditional depth to an otherwise contemporary design. Some unexpected moments await you, in which this typeface with nineteenth century roots becomes futuristic, atmospheric, or in one moment, simultaneously festive and earnest. Check it out. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 14 Dec 2012 03:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-plastic-wood-type#455</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[An H&Co Type Tasting]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/an-hco-type-tasting</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hfj-toast-pumpkin-cake_500.jpg">
We keep a running tally of the interesting media in which we’ve seen our fonts used, from <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/g-thing">corrugated cardboard</a> to <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/ten-foot-gotham-topiary">topiary</a>. The designers who choose our fonts often share their more startling experiments on our <a href="https://www.facebook.com/HoeflerCo" target="_blank">Facebook</a> page, including more than a few typographic tattoos. But with the holiday season upon us, things have taken a decidedly gustatory turn.
Designer Luke Elliott kicked things off over Halloween with his Gotham jack-o-lantern, to our knowledge the first example of in-gourd typography featuring an H&Co design. An anonymous designer followed over Thanksgiving with a beautiful collection of Gotham cakes that revealed the challenge of inlining a sans serif, in fondant no less. The latest contribution to the genre came last night, with designer <a href="http://www.zachhiggins.com" target="_blank">Zach Higgins</a> tweeting his exploration of the Sentinel Light Italic lowercase z rendered in toast. We’re left to wonder if our graded faces, such as <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/mercury-text/features/mercury-grades/">Mercury Text</a> or <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/chronicle-text/features/chronicle-grades/">Chronicle Text</a>, might provide designers with micro-fine control to adjust the relationship between color and burn. Please help us with this important research and share your findings. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 07 Dec 2012 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/an-hco-type-tasting#454</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Giving Thanks]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/giving-thanks</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/dribbble-hfj-1_500.jpg">
One of the things we’re grateful for at H&Co are the designers who treat our typefaces with such extraordinary care. These days, some of the most exciting work that we get to see is on Dribbble, where designers of the highest caliber share their works-in-progress with the world. This weekend, I gathered some of my favorite fragments that designers have created using our typefaces: here are three new Dribbble collections using <a href="https://dribbble.com/hoefler/buckets/92973-Made-with-H-Co-Proteus-Project">The Proteus Project</a>, <a href="https://dribbble.com/hoefler/buckets/92991-Made-with-H-Co-Sentinel">Sentinel</a> and <a href="https://dribbble.com/hoefler/buckets/92986-Made-with-H-Co-Shades">Shades</a>.
It’s fascinating to watch the creative processes unfold, and heartening to see our typefaces along for the ride. (It’s also a welcome surprise to discover that the polished work you’re admiring comes from the hand of a second-year student, an experience that’s more common than you might imagine.) So herein you’ll find some of our favorite picks: from Roger Dario’s <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilloché" target="_blank">guilloché</a> treatment of Saracen, to Trent Walton’s use of Sentinel for charity:water (itself a rebound of an earlier version in Vitesse), to Andrew Power’s rendering of one of my favorite Steve Jobs quotes using our Cyclone typeface.
We’ll be updating these collections and creating new ones in the coming weeks, so if you’re posting to Dribbble, make sure to tag your own work with the names of any of our fonts that you use. Until then, thank you from all of us at H&Co for making our work a part of yours. We’ll be thinking of you this Thanksgiving. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 19 Nov 2012 05:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/giving-thanks#453</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Introducing The New Tungstens]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-the-new-tungstens</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/tungsten-new-2012-release_responsive.svg">
A good type family balances cohesion and diversity. Its styles need to feel related, but each is entitled to its own personality. Nothing’s worse than paying for a collection of two dozen fonts, only to discover that each speaks in exactly the same voice.
Tungsten began as a focussed set of styles that aspired to being disarming instead of pushy. “Smart, tough, and sexy” was how we described the design, a brief that gave us enough latitude to create four distinct designs: a sporty Medium, an articulate Semibold, a stylish Bold, and a persuasive Black. We stopped at four, discovering that so many of the strategies that served the design in these proportions became impractical at lighter weights. Tungsten is all about the interplay between positive and negative space, a relationship that disappears when the strokes become thin, and the spaces cavernous. So while we could make the design perform mechanically at lighter weights, it no longer felt like Tungsten.
But then we discovered something interesting. We found different strategies to use at these proportions, which could make the design look familiar but feel different. We created new designs whose forthrightness came through in different ways: some were elegant, others earnest. And when we started exploring different widths, we found we could gradually turn up the volume, and watch Tungsten go from cool to vibrant to ecstatic.
So today, we’re delighted to introduce The New Tungstens, a set of four different widths, each in eight weights, starting at $199. The full collection includes Regular, Narrow, Condensed and Compressed, and right now you can save $300 when you buy the <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/tungsten/styles/">complete collection</a> of 32 styles.]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 14 Nov 2012 06:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-the-new-tungstens#451</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Good Fonts, Bad Fonts, and the Presidency]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/good-fonts-bad-fonts-and-the-presidency</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/political-typography-3.svg">
Somehow we’ve let the election season come to a close without thanking both parties for making this an 100% H&Co election. Continuing the signature voice of its 2008 campaign, Obama for America kept <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/">Gotham</a> as its typographic keystone, this year adding our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sentinel/overview/">Sentinel</a> typeface as a companion slab serif. The GOP chose fonts from us as well, the Romney campaign settling on <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/mercury-display/overview/">Mercury Display</a> for its serif and <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/overview/">Whitney</a> for its sans.
We’d especially like to thank the teams at Obama for America and Blue State Digital for making us a part of their outstanding work on <a href="http://www.barackobama.com">Barackobama.com</a>. Eagle-eyed viewers may have noticed that web fonts from H&Co made their first appearance on that site earlier this year, an especially meaningful milestone for all of us. It’s not often that your first beta tester is the President of the United States.
If the coming days bring a bitter electoral challenge, or the next four years bring the nation continuing deadlock on Capitol Hill, Americans will know exactly who to blame: typeface designers. According to <a href="http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/11/121102151946.htm" target="_blank">this study</a> by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, bad typography may be useful in softening the stance of the politically extreme. The theory is that awkward or uncomfortable typography disrupts a reader’s “confirmation bias,” one’s tendency to only see things that are agreeable. What amateur typography might do for a candidate’s credibility is anyone’s guess, and whether the study’s choice of Times Bold really counts as an acceptable control for “good typography” remains an open question. But I look forward to the 2016 election, in which the honorable grunge candidate will face off against his esteemed colleague using Comic Sans. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 05 Nov 2012 07:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/good-fonts-bad-fonts-and-the-presidency#452</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Introducing Idlewild]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-idlewild</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Type designers are plagued by visions, recurring images which can only be exorcized by turning them into letters. For years we’ve been consumed by a particular quality of curve, overstuffed at the corners and punctuated by sharp edges, and gradually over time we’ve been able to give these apparitions form: first as unrelated characters, later as an alphabet, and finally as a family of fonts.
As these designs developed, we recognized them as something we’d often reached for in vain. There was a vacancy we’d noticed in the typographic spectrum, for a sleek sans serif that’s not only spare, determined, and tranquil, but satisfying. Not just gratifying, like an indulgent dessert or an extravagant gift, but viscerally satisfying, like a precision tool whose form both invites the touch and rewards the hand.
Today we’re very pleased to introduce Idlewild®, this new font family in five weights. For all its distinctiveness and personality, Idlewild delivers an unexpected dividend: it accessorizes with other fonts amazingly well. Idlewild can be approachable, earnest, bright, or cultivated — read on to see how this wide font can yield a wide range of moods.]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 05 Jun 2012 07:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-idlewild#450</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[In Today’s Mail]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/in-todays-mail-2</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hfj-white-house-invitation-2011_500.jpg">]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 29 Aug 2011 18:18:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/in-todays-mail-2#463</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[An Appearance on PBS]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/hoefler-frere-jones-on-pbs</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[“Off Book” is a series from PBS Arts dedicated to documenting the creative process, and expanding the definition of art. Produced by New York filmmakers <a href="http://kornhaberbrown.com/" target="_blank">Kornhaber Brown</a>, the series premiered with an exploration of “light painting”, and the intention to explore a new artistic genre every episode. Episode two focusses on typography, with our own Jonathan Hoefler representing the sub-sub-sub-genre of typeface design. Pentagram partners Paula Scher and Eddie Opara discuss their unique perspectives on typographic identity (in both senses of the word), and designers Julia Vakser and Deroy Peraza of Hyperakt discuss the range and reach of data visualization, a genre unto itself. And kudos to Kornhaber Brown for wrapping up with the one-minute segment, “How to talk about type like you know what you’re talking about.” Required pre-holiday watching for our families. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 17 Aug 2011 07:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/hoefler-frere-jones-on-pbs#449</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typefacial Recognition at H&Co Labs]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typefacial-recognition-at-hco-labs</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fontface2_500.jpg">
We’re generally content to control font outlines by pushing points around on a screen, but an intuitive interface for managing the entire gestalt of a type family remains elusive. Andy Clymer at H&Co tends to develop fonts and tools together (one always seems to be the excuse to create the other), and this is his latest exploration: using <a href="http://vimeo.com/26188365" target="_blank">facial recognition to control the basic parameters of a font’s design</a>.
Behold Andy modeling his latest creation, which employs Kyle McDonald’s FaceOSC library, GlyphMath from RoboFab, and Tal Leming’s Vanilla to mutate the geometries behind our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/ideal-sans/overview/">Ideal Sans</a> typeface in realtime. I’m intrigued by the potential to control local and global qualities of a typeface at the same time: fingers and mouse to design the details, faces and cameras to determine their position in a whole realm of design possibilities. I wonder about the possibilities of a facial feedback loop, in which one’s expression of wonder and delight could instantly undo a moment of evanescent beauty. And then there are the possibilities of environmental pathogens affecting letterforms: what might too much caffeine, air conditioning, or ragweed pollen do to a typeface? Listening to Louis C.K.? Too many whiskey sours? —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Fri, 08 Jul 2011 21:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typefacial-recognition-at-hco-labs#448</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[The 2011 National Design Awards]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/hco-honored-by-the-2011-national-design-awards</link>
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<![CDATA[We’re very proud to be among the honorees of the 2011 National Design Awards, announced this morning by the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.
An official White House project created to increase national awareness of the role of design, the National Design Awards are given annually in recognition of excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement in design. Now in its twelfth year, the award celebrates the achievements of designers in ten categories from architecture to fashion. In 2009, we became the first type foundry ever to be recognized by this prestigious award, celebrated at a <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/in-todays-mail-2">special luncheon at the White House hosted by first lady Michelle Obama</a>. It is a great privilege to return to the White House once again, to accept this award on behalf of our entire team.
We are once again honored to be in such distinguished company at the National Design Awards. In recognition of his extraordinary influence on both the study and practice of graphic design, Steve Heller will receive the 2011 Design Mind award. Ben Fry, co-architect of the Processing programming language, will be recognized for his groundbreaking work in data visualization with the award for Interactive Design. And of special significance to everyone in our industry is the 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award, which this year will be presented to our longtime friend and colleague, type designer Matthew Carter. These are extraordinary times for typeface design.]]>
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<pubDate>Thu, 26 May 2011 06:40:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/hco-honored-by-the-2011-national-design-awards#447</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Introducing Ideal Sans]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/ideal-sans-a-new-font-family-from-hco</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/ideal-sans-release_responsive.svg">
Typefaces are born from the struggle between rules and results. Squeezing a square about 1% helps it look more like a square; to appear the same height as a square, a circle must be measurably taller. The two strokes in an X aren’t the same thickness, nor are their parallel edges actually parallel; the vertical stems of a lowercase alphabet are thinner than those of its capitals; the ascender on a d isn’t the same length as the descender on a p, and so on. For the rational mind, type design can be a maddening game of drawing things differently in order to make them appear the same.
Twenty-one years ago, we began tinkering with a sans serif alphabet to see just how far these optical illusions could be pushed. How asymmetrical could a letter O become, before the imbalance was noticeable? Could a serious sans serif, designed with high-minded intentions, be drawn without including a single straight line? This alphabet slowly marinated for a decade and a half, benefitting from periodic additions and improvements, until in 2006, Pentagram’s Abbott Miller proposed a project for the Art Institute of Chicago that resonated with these very ideas. As a part of Miller’s new identity for the museum, we revisited the design, and renovated it to help it better serve as the cornerstone of a larger family of fonts. Since then we’ve developed the project continuously, finding new opportunities to further refine its ideas, and extend its usefulness through new weights, new styles, and new features.
Today, we’re delighted to introduce Ideal Sans®, this new font family in 48 styles. Ideal Sans is a meditation on the handmade, combining different characteristics of many different writing tools and techniques, in order to achieve a warm, organic, and hand-crafted feeling. It’s distinctive at large sizes and richly textured in small ones, and available today in packages starting at $149.]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 04 May 2011 06:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/ideal-sans-a-new-font-family-from-hco#446</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Can We Add Serifs to Gotham?]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/can-we-add-serifs-to-gotham</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/obama_biden_gotham_serif_500.svg">
For the President of The United States? <a href="http://www.barackobama.com/" target="_blank">Yes We Can</a>. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Mon, 04 Apr 2011 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/can-we-add-serifs-to-gotham#445</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Things We Love]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/things-we-love3</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[In a manner more typical of the corporate than the corporeal, designer Nicholas Felton marks the passage of each year with an annual report. Past editions of the Feltron Annual Report have ranged in sensibilities, from his editorial <a href="http://feltron.com/ar06_06.html" target="_blank">2006</a> (smarter than the smartest magazine) to his diagrammatic <a href="http://feltron.com/ar09_03.html" target="_blank">2009</a> (which out-Tuftes <a href="http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_ei" target="_blank">Tufte</a>.) While the very concept is arch, making the Feltron Report a beloved fixture in the offices of so many graphic designers, I really have to hand it to Nicholas for never stooping to the obvious and allowing his yearly record to become a mere send-up of the annual report form. This year’s report, awash in our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/tungsten/overview/">Tungsten</a> typeface, is no exception: it uses the tools of data visualization and typography to tell a compelling story, and color a narrative that might so easily have been reduced to a mere family tree or a timeline.
Spend some time with <a href="http://feltron.com/ar10_01.html" target="_blank">The 2010 Feltron Annual Report</a>: I think you’ll find it smart, touching, and inspiring, an uncommon trifecta. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Mon, 07 Feb 2011 17:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/things-we-love3#444</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[H&Co Typefaces Join the MoMA Permanent Collection]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/hco-typefaces-join-the-moma-permanent-collection</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[The Museum of Modern Art has announced the acquisition of four type families by Hoefler&Co — HTF Didot, Gotham, Mercury and Retina — for its permanent collection.
In designing new typefaces, we’ve has long been consumed with the interpretation of historical artifacts, the implications of cultural expectations and mechanical requirements, and the invention of new techniques. Four type families that embody our approach to type design are <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/didot/overview/">HTF Didot</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/">Gotham</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/mercury-display/overview/">Mercury</a> and Retina, and we are honored to have these designs selected by the Museum of Modern Art for inclusion in its permanent collection.
This acquisition marks an important expansion of MoMA’s design collection, which includes historically significant objects ranging from Frank Lloyd Wright’s model for Fallingwater to the original Macintosh 128K computer, into the category of typeface design. “Type design is an essential dimension of the history of modern art and design,” writes Senior Curator Paola Antonelli. “The best typefaces belong in MoMA’s collection.”
The typefaces chosen for the MoMA collection have been selected for their social relevance, the ways in which they reflect technological progress, and their importance to cultural history. “Each is a milestone in the history of typography,” writes Antonelli. Alongside our typefaces are major works by a number of our friends and colleagues, including Matthew Carter, Erik van Blokland and Just van Rossum, and the many contributors to Emigre. H&Co is proud to be in such distinguished company, and to be a part of MoMA’s recognition of our industry’s craft.]]>
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<pubDate>Mon, 24 Jan 2011 06:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/hco-typefaces-join-the-moma-permanent-collection#440</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Legacy of Letters: An Italian Tour]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/legacy-of-letters-an-italian-tour</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/legacy-of-letters_500.jpg">
So enormous are the contributions of the Italian people to typography that they often pass unnoticed. The words you are reading may be written in the English language, but they are rendered in the Latin alphabet, which comes to us via Roman ancestors. We celebrate these same ancestors in the name of our upright Roman alphabet, and we remember their country of origin in our slanted Italics. If you ever use our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/requiem/overview/">Requiem</a> typeface, take note: taxonomically it is a Venetian Old-Style, its letterforms modeled on the work of a renaissance Roman calligrapher, who was inspired by the inscriptional lettering on a classical Roman monument, which was dedicated to a Roman emperor. The emperor’s name was Trajan, an Italian name you may recognize from your font menu; he is immortalized there alongside dozens of his compatriots, including Aldus, Arrighi, Bodoni, and Jenson.
Since Italy has remained a cradle of letters and literacy since classical times, it makes an excellent destination for any lover of typography. This June, design historian and calligrapher Paul Shaw will be leading Legacy of Letters, an eight-day typographic tour of some of Italy’s most typographic destinations. Including both Emilia-Romagna and the Veneto, the tour includes stops in twelve typographic capitals including Parma, Mantua, Verona and Venice. Registration is now open for a limited number of spaces.]]>
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<pubDate>Sat, 22 Jan 2011 09:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/legacy-of-letters-an-italian-tour#442</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[For Immediate Release]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/for-immediate-release</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/a-rigatoni_500.jpg">
October 25 has been designated <a href="http://www.pasta-unafpa.org/pasta-day.htm" target="_blank">World Pasta Day</a>, and as part of typography’s contribution to this important initiative, we’re pleased to share the following: an excerpt from the typeface “Nr. 941. Dubbelmittel (corps 28),” as it appears in Berlingska Stilguteriet Stilprof, a type specimen book from the Berlingska type foundry of Lund, Sweden, circa 1900. It is a dimensionally extruded ring accent, shaped like a piece of rigatoni.
This concludes our contribution to World Pasta Day. See you in 2011. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Tue, 26 Oct 2010 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/for-immediate-release#443</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[The Finishing Touches]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-finishing-touches</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/finishing-touches_1920.png">
In the middle of Gotham, our family of 66 sans serifs, there is a hushed but surprising moment: a fraction whose numerator has a serif. So important was this detail that we decided to offer it as an option for all the other fractions, a decision that ultimately required more than 400 new drawings. Why?
Join us for <a href="http://www.typography.com/email/2010_10/index_bi.htm">The Finishing Touches</a>, a behind-the-scenes tour of some of the invisible details that go into every font from H&Co.]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 13 Oct 2010 13:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-finishing-touches#441</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Now Hiring: Web Developer & Programmer]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/now-hiring-web-developer-programmer</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hfj-personal-ad2_500.png">
So you love HTML5. You’re psyched that the IE9 beta looks so promising, because you’ve got enough IE6 war stories, though personally you’re rocking the latest Firefox nightly. Sometimes you can’t remember what life was like before jQuery, but in a pinch you’re prepared to roll your own library. (Which, let’s face it, makes you feel a little like MacGyver, and you like working with folks who notice.) And you’ve spent a lot of time noodling with @font-face. A lot. Is this you? Come and work among kindred spirits: H&Co is looking for a full-time front-end developer to make a significant contribution to the ever-evolving typography.com. Position filled!
You can feel when things are built correctly, and can smell a kludge at fifty paces. You know how to run a test and assess its results, and how to shepherd your source-controlled code all the way from development to release. You’re someone who likes to reduce a problem down to a set of tasks, and you’re intimately familiar with the sense of accomplishment that comes from seeing all the parts come together. You write modular code because you hate doing the same thing twice, but you’re always up for doing something five different ways just to be sure. And your middle name is LAMP. If this is you, come join us as a full-time web programmer at Hoefler&Co Position filled!]]>
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<pubDate>Fri, 24 Sep 2010 09:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/now-hiring-web-developer-programmer#439</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[New from H&Co: Forza]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/forza-a-new-font-family-from-hco</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/forza-release_responsive.svg">
There are stylized typefaces that speak in a singular, powerful voice, and there are versatile ones capable of expressing many different moods. We feel the pull of both extremes, and are especially fascinated by the typographic styles caught in between. Sans serifs based on the rounded rectangle are an interesting study: they’re adaptable enough to have survived almost two hundred years, but in every incarnation they return with a new but overly specific agenda. The ones on enamel railway signs are charming, but a little sleepy; the ones on battleships are somber, if a little aloof. We’ve long wondered if this style could be harnessed to create a more expressive family of types, and recently had the opportunity to find out: Wired commissioned us to design a square sans as their editorial workhorse, one that could handle everything from philosophical essays to down-to-earth service pieces.
The result is Forza®, a new family of sans serifs from H&Co. Forza’s sophisticated visual vocabulary makes it alert and engaging, and its broad palette of weights ensures that Forza can meet the needs of the most demanding designer, from painterly display typography to text-heavy listings. Ardent, disciplined, shrewd, and commanding, Forza offers a range of voices to choose from, and is now available in twelve styles, from $199.]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 04 Aug 2010 13:20:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/forza-a-new-font-family-from-hco#438</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Lettering of the WPA]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/lettering-of-the-wpa</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hco_wpa_lettering_collage_500.png">
Our creative director Brian Hennings stumbled across a great resource this morning: on the website of the Library of Congress, a collection of <a href="https://www.loc.gov/collections/works-progress-administration-posters/about-this-collection/" target="_blank">926 posters from the Works Progress Administration</a>. The LOC has done a nice job with this collection, providing for each poster not only the relevant archival information, but high-resolution TIFF files that are free to download.
I’ve yet to meet the designer who doesn’t have at least a little affection for optimistic lettering of the WPA. We’ve stopped short of ever developing a full-tilt Art Deco revival, but many of our sans serifs undeniably feel the pull of the Machine Age. Verlag’s stark geometries include a conscious nod to the bold logo of the National Recovery Administration, while Tungsten is a modular typeface that resists the retro vibe of WPA “gaspipe” lettering. The Library of Congress collection offers a rare opportunity to see rarer styles still, perhaps ones that might obliquely inform some future font from H&Co. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 23 Jun 2010 08:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/lettering-of-the-wpa#437</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Learning Typeface Design]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/learning-typeface-design</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/sara-fi.png">
Learning to draw letters is hard enough, but learning to create typefaces is something else entirely. For those with an interest in both, H&Co’s Sara Soskolne will be teaching “Turning Letters into Type,” a week-long workshop at New York’s School of Visual Arts, July 12–16. <a href="http://www.schoolofvisualarts.edu/ceCourseFinder/app?sDay=0&sTime=0&sLoc=&sDept=&sCourse=GDC-4458-A+&sInstructor=&sKeyword=" target="_blank">Registration is now open</a>, and seats are limited.
Soskolne, who has contributed to some of our most exhaustive projects (<a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/verlag/overview/">Verlag</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/chronicle-text/overview/">Chronicle</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/">Gotham</a>) and some of its snappiest (<a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/tungsten/overview/">Tungsten</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sentinel/overview/">Sentinel</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/overview/">Numbers</a>) will introduce the tools and principles of digital typeface design by working with students individually on projects of their own invention. “Be it systematizing your own lettering, imagining a complete alphabet from a found fragment,” she says, “articulating that ideal set of forms in your mind, or reviving a non-digital typeface you love,” letters will come alive as type. The workshop will foster a critical eye for shapes and spacing, and a deeper understanding of how typefaces work, all skills critical to both type design and typography. Prerequisites include experience with Bézier drawing (know Illustrator?), and either lettering or typography. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 17 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/learning-typeface-design#436</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[The Murderer Wore Serifs]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-murderer-wore-serifs</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/scarpetta_500.png">
Typeface designers live with the permanent possibility of encountering their work at unexpected moments. Your old college now uses a font that you designed; in a movie, whose story takes place before you were born, your typefaces are used for prop newspapers and storefronts; the intimidating signs that scold you in public places now address you in your own handwriting. These odd social dislocations have lately been compounded by an additional weirdness, the phenomenon of the literate non-specialist. There are now celebrities and politicians who know fonts by name, so off-duty type designers run an increasing risk of hearing their typefaces mentioned by talk-show hosts or newscasters — to say nothing of seatmates on long airline flights, or anyone desperate for conversation at a family funeral.
None of these strangenesses prepared me for learning this morning that in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0399156399/typographycom-20" target="_blank">The Scarpetta Factor</a>, a crime novel by Patricia Cornwell, there is a plot point that revolves around our Gotham typeface. The font first makes an appearance on page 400, when it’s name-checked by an FBI document specialist during the delivery of an expert opinion, but it returns on page 415 for a two-page discussion about the typography of a suspicious package. “Gotham is popular,” says the computer-whiz niece of our sleuth, Dr. Kay Scarpetta. “It’s supposed to suggest all the right things if you want to influence someone into taking you or your product or a political candidate or maybe some type of research seriously.” Our clients have always known as much; we can only assume that one of them is the murderer. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Tue, 15 Jun 2010 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-murderer-wore-serifs#435</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[New from H&Co: Whitney Greek & Cyrillic]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/new-from-hco-whitney-greek-cyrillic</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/whitney-multiscript-release_responsive-2.svg">
We’re pleased to introduce an expansion of our <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/overview/">Whitney®</a> typeface, for our friends in Greece, Russia, Bulgaria, and the Commonwealth of Independent States.
We’ve taken the fonts that already serve more than 140 languages, and extended them into the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets to satisfy sixty more. All editions of Whitney now feature both the Greek alphabet and our <a href="https://www.typography.com/faq/12">Expanded Cyrillic</a> character set, accommodating not only major Slavic languages such as Russian and Ukrainian, but other important populations less well served by digital typography, like the 65,000,000 people who speak Azeri, Kazakh and Uzbek. For designers whose projects have an international scope, Whitney now covers all three official scripts of the European Union.]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 10 Jun 2010 09:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/new-from-hco-whitney-greek-cyrillic#434</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[An Enchanted Alphabet]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/an-enchanted-alphabet</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/jeanie-jewell.jpg">
I have a special affection for decorated letters, especially the ornamented designs of the nineteenth century. You know the kind: they’re chubby <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/the-proteus-project/overview/">Regency</a> typefaces, slab serifs or high-contrast ‘Fat Faces,’ mostly, whose surfaces are emblazoned with intricate patterns or pastoral scenes. The collection of <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/sham-rock">L. J. Pouchée</a> contains some genuine masterpieces that I’ve long admired, letters festooned with grapevines or peonies or cobblestones, or illuminated with bucolic vignettes of farmer at the plough. “We should really do something in this vein,” I once said to one of our designers. “Covered in fax machines, or pigeons?” he quipped. I dropped the topic.
Designer Jeanie Nelson has picked it up. On her blog <a href="http://jeanieandjewell.blogspot.com/2010/03/abccest-finis.html
" target="_blank">Jeanie & Jewell</a>, she’s exhibiting a wonderful collection of ornamented capitals of her own invention, and they are absolutely enchanting. There are so many things to love about these that I hardly know where to begin: the cheery colors whose roles change from letter to letter, the witty imagery that conceals more than a few oblique puns, the whimsical way she tweaks the nose of typographic convention whenever the spirit moves her. (Most type designers start with the sober letter H that serves as a template for the rest of the design; Jeanie Nelson’s H, right now, is having more fun than any H that’s ever lived.) I’m delighted by this design not only because of its squirrels, dragons, pineapples and ice cream cones, but because it pays homage to a potent and beloved historical style without ever becoming a stuffy museum piece in period dress. That the koala bear in the K is climbing a letter made of wood just makes it doubly fantastic. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 11 May 2010 14:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/an-enchanted-alphabet#433</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Typography Shared]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typography-shared</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/made-with-hfj-collage_500.jpg">
Designers who use our fonts have been sharing their work on our <a href="http://www.typography.com/facebook" target="_blank">Facebook</a> page, much to the delight of both the designers at H&Co, and our followers online. Some recent lovelies, clockwise from top left: <a href="http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=4612042&op=1&o=all&view=all&subj=12904695995&aid=-1&oid=12904695995&id=633681760" target="_blank">Christopher Simmons</a> designed this cheerful festival poster using Ziggurat, Leviathan, and a little Hoefler Text; a corporate identity that uses Archer (and a clever emboss) by <a href="http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=4612042&op=1&o=all&view=all&subj=12904695995&aid=-1&oid=12904695995&id=633681760#!/photo.php?pid=1008868&op=1&o=all&view=all&subj=12904695995&aid=-1&oid=12904695995&id=1522715354&fbid=1399553038507" target="_blank">Mike Kasperski</a>; Gotham in a terrific typographic abecedarium by <a href="http://www.facebook.com/posted.php?id=12904695995&share_id=116142248416421&comments=1#s116142248416421" target="_blank">Paul van Brunschot</a> and his students; a lovely collection of journals by <a href="http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=5355347&o=all&op=1&view=all&subj=12904695995&aid=-1&id=680416799&oid=12904695995#!/photo.php?pid=2783804&o=all&op=1&view=all&subj=12904695995&aid=-1&id=720323274&oid=12904695995&fbid=111122773274" target="_blank">Jodi Storozenko,</a> featuring Archer in a moment of quiet repose; and a bit of Gotham in <a href="http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=2642355&op=2&o=all&view=all&subj=12904695995&aid=-1&oid=12904695995&id=577310052#!/photo.php?pid=2642355&op=2&o=all&view=all&subj=12904695995&aid=-1&oid=12904695995&id=577310052&fbid=159780670052" target="_blank">Anna Farkas</a>’ exhibition identity for The renaissance of letters. Feel free to share your own creations: more then 6,500 other designers are tuned in. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 06 May 2010 03:05:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typography-shared#432</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Things We Love]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/things-we-love2</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/grip-screenshot_500_1.png">
When we designed the Knockout type family, which celebrates the exuberance of nineteenth century wood type, we wondered: what designer would knowingly use the fonts to recall a world of quack medical cures and traveling vaudevillians? The answer, as it so often turns out to be, is “smart aleck Canadian advertising agencies.” Behold the truly excellent <a href="http://www.griplimited.com/#/grip/navigation/" target="_blank">Grip Limited</a>, who have created a typographic tour-de-force in Knockout (and a little <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/archer/overview/">Archer</a>) that really repays scrolling in all directions. I especially like the end of the second column. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Sat, 24 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/things-we-love2#431</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Ask H&Co: Mixing Fonts]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/ask-hco-mixing-fonts</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Every font shown on this site is accompanied by a set of suggested pairings. These are all personal selections (would that they could be automated!) and we’re often asked about our methodology for deciding what fonts go together. The truth is that these are intuitive choices: since we design all the fonts ourselves, we’re intimately familiar with their visual, functional, cultural and historical qualities, and just have a general sense of “what goes.” And yet there are always surprises: I’d never have guessed that the geometric sans serif <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/">Gotham</a> had any affinity for the humanist sans <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/overview/">Whitney</a>, nor that <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/vitesse/overview/">Vitesse</a> and <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/archer/overview/">Archer</a> — two slabs serifs with dramatically different personalities — could get along so well.
Lately I’ve been wondering if it might be possible to abstract from these examples some generalities about font pairings, and have come up with a couple of thoughts. Curiously, everything seems to revolve around a single idea about how fonts relate: you’ll find the whole story below. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/ask-hco-mixing-fonts#430</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typography Delivered Fresh]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typography-delivered-fresh</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hfj-emails-2009_500.jpg">
A friend who teaches typography to undergraduates recently asked an unexpected favor: “can my students browse the e-mails Hoefler&Co sends out?” Apparently he’s in the habit of circulating printouts with his students, when they raise questions that we’ve recently discussed with our readers — <a href="http://www.typography.com/email/2009_07/index_bi.htm" target="_blank">how to choose fonts</a> for information-heavy projects like annual reports being an especially hot topic, though he also encourages his students to dig deeply in the <a href="http://www.typography.com/email/2009_12/index_bi.htm" target="_blank">character sets</a> of their fonts, and to <a href="http://www.typography.com/email/2009_11/index_bi.htm" target="_blank">look for value</a> when building their own font libraries. So posted herewith is <a href="http://www.typography.com/email/2010_01/index_bi.htm" target="_blank">last month’s e-mail</a>, at the bottom of which you’ll find a link to the previous issue. And if you’d like to get next month’s, we encourage you to...]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typography-delivered-fresh#429</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Tablet Magazine]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-tablet-magazine</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/wired_tablet2_500_1.jpg">
<a href="http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/02/the-wired-ipad-app-a-video-demonstration/" target="_blank">Wired gets it</a>. Today they’re going public with the prototype they shared with us a few weeks ago, and if you’re like me, your reaction will be an instantaneous “neat!” followed immediately by “well, isn’t it obvious it was supposed to work this way?” When something creates and fulfills expectations at the same time, you know you’ve got it right. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 16 Feb 2010 11:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-tablet-magazine#428</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[The 21st Century Object Poster]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-21st-century-object-poster</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/exergian_posters_500_b.png">
In 1906, the Priester Match Company held an open contest for the design of a poster. Art Nouveau was in full flower, so surely the judges expected to receive decadent renderings of languid smokers, things perhaps in the style of Toulouse-Lautrec or Alphonse Mucha. What none of them expected was a shockingly bold drawing of two matchsticks, almost antagonistically free of nuance: this <a href="http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic-art/1080361/67520/Plakatstil-poster-for-Priester-matches-designed-by-Lucian-Bernhard-1905" target="_blank">winning entry</a>, by a twenty-three year old designer named Lucian Bernhard, would come to be recognized as the world’s first Sachplakat, or “object poster.” It was arguably one of the most important design artifacts of the twentieth century, and came to define an entire approach to design that lives on in everything from corporate logos to desktop icons.
104 years later, Austrian designer Albert Exergian has explored this ever-modern idea in the creation of a marvelous set of <a href="http://www.blanka.co.uk/Art/Exergian/Iconic_TV" target="_blank">posters</a> offering witty reductions of television shows. Some of them have Bernhard’s brash disregard for subtlety (Twin Peaks is a pair of mountains), most are considerably more sophisticated and wry (I hadn’t considered how essential the red and blue stripes are when representing a Ziploc bag: see Weeds, above.) Each matches the cleverness of the show it portrays: Exergian’s X-Files is a not merely an X, but the secret signal masking-taped to Special Agent Mulder’s window. Is it possible not to love an interpretation of Charlie’s Angels that features not the girls, not the guns, but the speaker on Bosley’s desk? Is there any better symbol for MacGyver than a bent paperclip? Some of my favorites are above, but the entire collection is worth a look: if nothing else, you’ll be delighted by Exergian’s interpretations of Boston Legal, Miami Vice and Lost. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 05 Feb 2010 09:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-21st-century-object-poster#427</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[New from H&Co: Vitesse]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/vitesse-a-new-font-family-from-hco</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/vitesse-release_responsive-4.svg">
Please welcome Vitesse®, a new slab serif in twelve styles.
Slab serifs are one of typography’s most vibrant categories, yet they remain dominated by two ancient forms: the nineteenth century Antique, and the twentieth century Geometric. Both are vital and living genres — we’ve explored each of them, in our <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/sentinel/overview/" target="_blank">Sentinel</a> and <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/archer/overview/" target="_blank">Archer</a> type families — but what of the twenty-first century slab? Vitesse revels in the tension between organic letterforms and mechanical grids, and offers designers a distinctive new voice that’s suave, confident, and stylish. Engineered for responsive handling and a sporty ride, Vitesse is now available, starting at $199.]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 13 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/vitesse-a-new-font-family-from-hco#426</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Because We’re, You Know, Cyborgs]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/because-were-you-know-cyborgs</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/robocoffee_500.jpg">
Odd choice of fonts. Only <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/two-fools">one way</a> to improve on it. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 07 Jan 2010 07:08:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/because-were-you-know-cyborgs#425</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Uptown App, for iPhones]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/uptown-app-for-iphones</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/up-up_500.jpg">
Manhattan’s urban grid is a vaunted model of simplicity, a rectilinear plan of numbered streets intersecting numbered avenues. Never mind that West 4th Street crosses West 10th, that those walking from Fifth Avenue to Third Avenue will seldom encounter Fourth Avenue, and that “North” in the New York sense differs from conventional “North” to the tune of 29°. It’s this kind of accuracy, transparency and accountability that makes New York the perfect home for Wall Street.
A fixture of the corner of Broadway and Houston, where H&Co makes its home, is a tourist population forever asking that question of the ages, “which way is uptown?” I can’t entirely blame them: in the math of the NYC grid, Houston is 0th Street, and local signs wickedly conceal the real names of avenues below fake labels that are designed specifically to ensnare tourists. (Watch the meter when you ask a taxi driver to take you anywhere on “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixth_Avenue_(Manhattan)" target="_blank">Avenue of the Americas</a>.”)
To the rescue comes our own Andy Clymer, whose joint interests in typography, programming, and human decency are combined in <a href="http://www.uptownapp.com/" target="_blank">Uptown App</a>, his new utility for the iPhone 3GS. Andy’s thoughtfully used some of our fonts on what’s actually a pretty handy app: because it uses the iPhone’s built-in magnetometer, it can give you a quick read on “uptown” in places where GPS signals and cellular networks are unavailable or slow to come online, like when stepping out of freezing cold subway stations. Compared to the inconvenience of frostbite, 99¢ is a genuine bargain. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 21 Dec 2009 07:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/uptown-app-for-iphones#424</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typographic Gifts for Designers, Part 17]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-17</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/data_posters_500.jpg">
I wonder what sort of psychological profile one could draw from my favorite childhood possessions. I neither played nor followed football, but clung to my NFL lunchbox that showed all the team helmets with their different insignia. I had no special interest in English History, but was fascinated by the chart in our living room that traced the succession of British monarchs from William the Conqueror to Queen Elizabeth II. A kindergarten teacher gave me a chart of rocks and minerals found in the northeast; a kindly docent at the South Street Seaport Museum gave me a diagram showing how to communicate the alphabet using morse code, semaphore, and maritime signal flags. The list goes on and on, and only a graphic designer will understand the common thread: I had a thing for data visualization.
Whether these objects provoked my interest in design or simply resonated with it, they were marvelous things to have around as a kid. I’m therefore delighted to see that a company called HistoryShots is offering for sale a similar collection of visually engaging prints, not merely suitable for framing but actually framed. Clockwise from top left: The History of the Union Army and Confederate Army, The Conquest of Mount Everest, Visualizing The Bible, Death and Taxes, The History of Political Parties (Part II), and the Race to the Moon. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 17 Dec 2009 06:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-17#423</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typographic Gifts for Designers, Part 16]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-16</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/the_big_three.jpg">
“Modern Gaspipe” is the charming taxonomic name for this kind of letterform. We’ve explored the style in our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/tungsten/overview/">Tungsten</a> type family — itself a fine holiday gift, ahem. But for those with a hankering for decor, the always fruitful Three Potato Four has this unlittle item for sale, a huge handpainted wooden figure three (34" / 86cm), perfect for your living room, studio, or threearium. Thanks to Brian Hennings for finding this one: frankly <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/new-fonts-a-graphic-designers-perspective">I’m amazed that he hasn’t had his fill of these kinds of letters</a>. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 16 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-16#421</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[G Thing]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/g-thing</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/g-thing_500.jpg">
An <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/acropolis/overview/" target="_blank">Acropolis Italic</a> sighting is a rare event, so even at 48 pixels I couldn’t help but notice that George Garrastegui used the font’s letter G in his Twitter icon. George was kind enough to send me the original file, though it’s not the mere design fragment I’d assumed: it’s a photo of a foot-high sculpture in corrugated cardboard, made manifest by fellow designer Maurizio Masi. Thank goodness George’s name begins with a letter that can stand on its own, for had he been ‘Frank’ or ‘Peter’ he’d have been doomed to the Sisyphean life of forever righting his own lopsided initial.
Is it me, or is there something vaguely menacing about the typeface when it’s enlarged to these proportions? Maybe it’s a byproduct of being given material form; curiously, this is <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/ode-on-a-grecian-kern">not the first time</a> Acropolis Italic has gotten a spooky 3-D treatment… —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 10 Dec 2009 06:40:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/g-thing#422</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typography Without Ink]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typography-without-ink</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/perforated_500.jpg">
This weekend, I replaced a DVD player that finally conked out after eleven years. Whatever delight I once took in acquiring a new piece of electronics has long been eclipsed by the responsibilities of dealing with its byproducts: its packaging, thankfully limited to recyclable cardboard and <a href="http://puffystufftn.com/" target="_blank">biodegradable packing peanuts</a>, and also the carcass of the old device itself, which this year a local <a href="http://www.escrapdestruction.com/" target="_blank">equipment recycler</a> will be disassembling and recycling as responsibly as possible. Even the best process is not a perfect one, as industrial designers and packaging designers will be the first to admit, but every little bit helps.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/perforated_accessories_500-2.jpg">
The supplied accessories came in this cardboard box, which made me smile. Rather than print the cardboard before it’s cut and folded, whoever was responsible for this piece of packaging realized that the die-cutting step offered a no-cost opportunity to mark the sheet at the same time, by shaping the strikeline into letters that partially perforate the box. That I’m charmed by this solution probably comes as no surprise, since I have an admitted love of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/inside/dividend/">perforated letterforms</a>, but I admire any effort that makes design more honest, easier to produce, and less wasteful to consume.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/perforated_sku_500-2.jpg">
Because cutting dies can’t be curled too tightly, the medium demands big letters and brief messages, which I especially appreciate. Missing from this box is all the bumf to which we’ve become accustomed, but never needed in the first place: a reprise of the manufacturer’s name and motto from the outer box, a fuzzy rendering of the product that by now is on the coffee table, a wordy title like ETS1041E-ACC Supplied Accessory Parts Kit (US/120V), a list of serial numbers for other compatible components that you didn’t choose to buy, and finally a numbing set of bullet points that patiently explains in eight languages what you already know, which is that the box contains the power cord, a remote, and two AA batteries. “Accessories” says it all, and is a welcome relief to anyone now facing an evening of plugging it all in. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 07 Dec 2009 08:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typography-without-ink#420</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typography at the Cooper-Hewitt]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/an-hco-lecture-at-the-cooper-hewitt</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/thinking-in-type3_500.jpg">
Continuing its celebration of the tenth anniversary of the National Design Awards, The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is offering a wealth of excellent programming this season. On display through April 4, 2010 is Design USA: Contemporary Innovation; if you’re planning a visit soon, make it next Tuesday evening, when you can also attend <a href="http://events.cooperhewitt.org/?date=2009-12" target="_blank">Thinking in Type</a>, a lecture by Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones. Registration is required, and seats are limited.
 
Thinking in Type 
Tuesday, December 8, 2009, 6:30–8:30pm
The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum 
2 East 91st Street 
New York, NY 10128]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 01 Dec 2009 09:20:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/an-hco-lecture-at-the-cooper-hewitt#419</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Things We Love]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/things-we-love1</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/mark_weaver_500.jpg">
This morning’s post by the always-fertile <a href="http://grainedit.com/2009/11/12/mark-weaver/" target="_blank">Grain Edit</a> reminds me that I’ve wanted to write something in appreciation of <a href="http://mrkwvr.com" target="_blank">Mark Weaver</a>. As with so many things I like, Weaver’s work is difficult to classify: design? illustration? art? The term “collage” might do as a formal description, but it’s a shabby word to describe Weaver’s mysterious inventions, which so successfully bypass both the senses and the intellect and go straight to the mid-brain. His tableaux that simultaneously evoke grange exhibits, Japanese consumer goods, early David Bowie, and recent Wes Anderson — without ever quoting any of them literally — are worth experiencing up close; spend some time with his Make Something Cool Every Day series, and I think you’ll leave intriguied, delighted, and inspired. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 13 Nov 2009 06:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/things-we-love1#405</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Down Mexico Way]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/down-mexico-way</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/wooden_gotham_500.jpg">
An enchanting bit of Gotham seen en route to ATypI Mexico: timbered lettering, on the storefront for Guru, a gallery and design emporium in Cuauhtémoc owned by graphic designer Quique Ollervides. Thanks for sharing this, Nick! —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 12 Nov 2009 05:10:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/down-mexico-way#404</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[A Type Tablet]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-type-tablet</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/ziggurat_stencil_500.jpg">
When <a href="http://www.abihuynh.com/" target="_blank">Abi Huynh</a> sent me this image, I thought at first that it was a website graphic in the prevailing style: a digital rendering of high-gloss black acrylic, against a reflective white surface, in that “web 2.0” style that will not go away. But no! It’s an actual artifact, and a lovely one at that. Dominic Hofstede and Wendy Ellerton designed this <a href="http://www.hofstede.com.au/folio/type-tablet" target="_blank">limited edition stencil</a>, a lovely laser-cut thingum at A5 size, produced as a promotional gift for the Australian studio Hofstede Design. Front and center here is our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/ziggurat/overview/" target="_blank">Ziggurat</a> typeface, the lone representative of roman capitals to join a great typographic crew: among others, the design features one of the world’s best ampersands (from Caslon), along with sundry other punctuation (you know I love <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/pilcrow-capitulum">paragraph marks</a> and <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/house-of-flying-reference-marks">daggers</a>), and a Fraktur capital S. —JH
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/ziggurat_stencil_parts_500.jpg">]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 11 Nov 2009 08:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-type-tablet#418</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Sure, I Guess That’s My Final Answer]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/sure-i-guess-thats-my-final-answer</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/aiga_type_is_right_500.jpg">
I have a friend, a renowned philologist, who is one of the world’s foremost authorities on the English language. He is my go-to man for typo-lexico-philological questions, like whether there’s an English word that contains the adjacent letters h and x (<a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/adventures-in-kerning-part-ii" target="_blank">there is</a>); he’s the sort of gent to casually drop the words “insouciant” and “dope-ass” in the same sentence. It was therefore with great temerity that I once challenged him to a game of Scrabble, which to my surprise and relief he declined. “I hope you understand,” he said, “I can’t. What would happen if I lost?”
This allegory was far from my mind when I agreed to captain Team C at “<a href="http://www.aigany.org/events/details/10TR/" target="_blank">The Type is Right</a>,” the AIGA/NY’s first-ever typographic game show. Join me and H&Co designers Andy Clymer and Sara Soskolne, along with nine other nerds and nerdesses, as we go for the gold tonight in Brooklyn. The contestants’ range of interests and inclinations suggests a fun evening, probably one rife with withering embarrassments that you won’t want to miss. So come and join us this evening at Galapagos in DUMBO, and see which lucky typographer gets the chance to go all Kanye on the actual winner. —JH
 
The Type is Right 
Monday, November 9, 2009, 6:30–8:30pm
Galapagos Art Space 
16 Main Street 
DUMBO, Brooklyn
<div class="addendum">
Update: Team H&Co clinches the vaunted title! Assisted in no small part by our fourth contestant, selected from the audience by random draw: typomaniac <a href="http://www.bodytypebook.com/ina/index.html" target="_blank">Ina Saltz</a>. (Which is a little like learning that “one of the dads,” who has volunteered to fill in at a Little League game, turns out to be Barry Bonds.) Thanks to the AIGA/NY, emcee Ellen Lupton, host Matteo Bologna, puzzlemaster Paul Shaw, and all the other participants for making it a fun evening. And please never remind us that we mistook a line of Zuzana Licko’s Filosofia (1996) for a line of Giambattista Bodoni’s Manuale Tipografico (1788). Our only explanation is that the venue boasts very bright spotlights, and an enviable collection of pale ales.
</div>]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/sure-i-guess-thats-my-final-answer#417</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Fonts in Time and Space]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/fonts-in-time-and-space</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/gretel_500.jpg">
By the way, that tiny screen grab below — which even fixed in time is so charmingly reminiscent of that <a href="http://www.aiga.org/content.cfm/rebuilding-a-legacy-the-gastrotypographicalassemblage" target="_blank">CBS cafeteria</a> designed by Lou Dorfsman — is but part of a captivating typographic video designed by <a href="http://gretelny.com/" target="_blank">Gretel</a>. Greg Hahn was kind enough to share with me <a href="http://gretelny.com/quicktimesv2.php?clip=YahMOVIESuniversalAud1.mov&projID=10&subID=0&id=16" target="_blank">the original</a>; I hope you enjoy it as much as I do. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/fonts-in-time-and-space#416</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Lubalin’s Legacy]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/lubalins-legacy</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/lms-3st_500.jpg">
Leonardo da Vinci might have made scientific studies of the vascular system and designed the steam cannon, but today he’s best remembered as the painter of the Mona Lisa. Some identify Johann Sebastian Bach with his concerti, cantatas, and brilliant fantasias for the keyboard, but most know him only as the tunesmith behind that staple of afternoon weddings, “Air on the G String.” It’s a cruel fate, to be remembered only for your least ambitious work, as type designers from Frederic Goudy to Ed Benguiat can surely attest. But none has suffered more than the estimable Herb Lubalin, a situation which the Cooper Union will begin to correct tonight.
Lubalin’s name has become convenient shorthand for his eponymous family of typefaces, ITC Lubalin Graph. The design, an okay slab serif in seventies dress, was in turn an adaptation of his sans serif design ITC Avant Garde — itself an adaptation of his earlier logotype and lettering for Avant Garde magazine. For many, Lubalin’s body of work ends here, a tragedy that eclipses a whole universe of letters that came from the hand and mind of one of typography’s most significant practitioners.
Tonight, the Cooper Union in New York opens <a href="http://lubalincenter.cooper.edu/" target="_blank">Lubalin Now</a>: the inaugural exhibit at the Herb Lubalin Study Center of Design and Typography. The exhibit, curated by Mike Essl and Alexander Tochilovsky, celebrates not only Lubalin’s work but that of contemporary designers who channel the Lubalinesque. Just a very few of my favorites appear below; the show promises lots more, as well as an answer to an age-old question: it’s Loo-bal-in, not Loob-a-lin. —JH
 
Lubalin Now 
Opening Reception Thursday, November 5, 2009, 6:00–8:00pm 
Exhibit on view through December 8, 2009
The Cooper Union 
41 Cooper Square 
New York, NY 10003 
 
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/lubalin_500.jpg">
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/jtk-mo_500.jpg">
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/at-g_500.jpg">]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 05 Nov 2009 09:48:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/lubalins-legacy#415</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Titles & End Credits]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/titles-end-credits</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/movie_titles_small.png">
Changing fashions in movie titles are one of the richest veins in typography’s fossil record. On his website, graphic designer Christian Annyas has put together a nice collection of <a href="http://www.annyas.com/screenshots/#at" target="_blank">movie title stills</a> — both opening and end credits — offering a handy synopsis of twentieth century lettering. Rather than an exhaustive survey, Annyas has curated a small and personal collection that’s conveniently organized by decade: dipping into any period offers a convenient way of getting a taste for the lettering of the era.
Keep an eye out for “in-camera” lettering, in which lettering is incorporated into on-screen props. The book in <a href="https://www.typography.com/images/blogImages/jeux-interdits-title-still.jpg">Jeux Interdits</a> uses a popular trope; the telephone in <a href="https://www.typography.com/images/blogImages/dial-m-for-murder-title-still.jpg">Dial M for Murder</a> and the playing cards of <a href="https://www.typography.com/images/blogImages/roman-d-un-tricheur-movie-title-screen-shot.jpg">Le Roman d’un Tricheur</a> have become classics. Truly stirring is the occasional title that feels jarringly modern: <a href="https://www.typography.com/images/blogImages/fly-movie-title-screen.jpg">The Fly</a> has the sort of purposeful unease that still strikes a chill, fifty-one years later. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 03 Nov 2009 09:40:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/titles-end-credits#414</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[To the Best of Our Knowledge]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/to-the-best-of-our-knowledge</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/wisconsin_public_radio.png">
Since you’ll be at home tomorrow anyway, hopped up on leftover miniature chocolate bars that you couldn’t pawn off on discerning neighborhood kids, tune in to Wisconsin Public Radio to hear To the Best of Our Knowledge: tomorrow’s program will be about fonts. Join me, Tobias Frere-Jones, and Matthew Carter for an hour of typography, either on the air or <a href="http://wpr.org/book/091101b.cfm" target="_blank">online</a>. Other guests include Kitty Burns Florey discussing handwriting, Tracy Honn on the work of the Silver Buckle Press — and discussing the Amazon Kindle, one of <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/books-as-furniture">my favorite</a> people, Nicholson Baker. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Sat, 31 Oct 2009 11:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/to-the-best-of-our-knowledge#413</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Teens, Typography, and Tim Gunn]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/teens-typography-and-tim-gunn</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/ndw_logo.png">
“Designers…”
I knew I wanted to work with type by the time I turned eleven. Back then, my curiosity about letter-making could only be satisfied in oblique and solitary ways, most of which involved borrowed sheets of Presstype, and goofing off with the family <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/selectric-days">typewriter</a>. The Mac couldn’t have come soon enough.
Young typophiles today have more outlets for their enthusiasm (you are here), but next Monday will gain rare access to the profession as well: National Design Week begins October 18, when the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum will inaugurate the festivities with its <a href="http://www.nationaldesignawards.org/2009/nationaldesignweek" target="_blank">2009 Teen Design Fair</a> in New York. Teenagers with an interest in design are invited to learn about type design — as well as graphic design, fashion, industrial design, and architecture — by chatting one-on-one with dozens of <a href="http://www.nationaldesignawards.org/2009/teen-design-fair" target="_blank">practitioners</a>, including me. And Project Runway host Tim Gunn emcees the event! —JH
 
Teen Design Fair 
Monday, October 19, 4:00-6:30pm
The Times Center 
242 West 41st Street 
New York, NY 10018]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 12 Oct 2009 06:30:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/teens-typography-and-tim-gunn#412</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[New Fonts: A Graphic Designer’s Perspective]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/new-fonts-a-graphic-designers-perspective</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/tungsten-title_500.png">
Most graphic designers choose the fonts that best fit their projects. Brian Hennings does the opposite: he chooses the projects that best fit the fonts. A resident designer at Hoefler&Co, Brian shares with me the responsibility of creating all of the sample art you’ll find on this site. His is a strange universe of the fictitious: signage programs for mythical cities, book jackets for unwritten novels, product literature for items you cannot buy, broadcast graphics for live sporting events that you can’t quite identify. (They might have a ball, horses, cars, rifles, or all of the above.) His fake cookbook recipes have immaculate typography, but I wouldn’t recommend trying to cook from any of them.
Two weeks ago, we released our new <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/tungsten/overview/">Tungsten</a> font family, accompanied by an unusually large collection of sample art: Brian and I just couldn’t put the new fonts down. The feedback we received was extraordinary in both its kindness and its volume, and I was especially happy to see so many designers specifically mention the art that we’d worked so hard to create. Since Brian’s job gives him a unique perspective on typography — plus enviable access to fonts that the rest of the world won’t see for years — I asked him to share some of his observations about the process: what it’s like to use a new font that no one’s ever used, what it tells you about itself, and what it reveals about typography in general. Without further ado, <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/new-fonts-a-graphic-designers-perspective">here’s Brian</a>. —JH

<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/tungsten-caps-small_500.png">
<h2>A blind date with Tungsten</h2>
“When I started to see the first proofs of the Tungsten family floating around the office, I knew that I’d someday want to use the fonts for something epic. I imagined the font looking its best in bold capitals, tightly tracked, and set as large as possible. When I did finally get my hands on beta versions of the fonts, this was just as satisfying as I imagined — using Tungsten this way is a lot of fun. So the first things I explored with the fonts were the kinds of settings that invited painterly typography: I used Tungsten’s heaviest weights for posters, magazine headlines, retail store logos, and signs, anywhere that I could show off the fonts’ broad shoulders. All of these settings looked great, and were just as energetic and arresting as I hoped they would be. But it was when I started to try out the family’s lighter weights that things really started to cook.”
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/tungsten-mini-combined.png">
“At first, I thought Tungsten’s Medium and Semibold would be most useful for supporting copy. On an <a href="http://cdn.typography.com/assets/images/blog/tungsten-editorial2-large.png">editorial opener</a> set in the Bold, we used the Medium for a byline; on a <a href="http://cdn.typography.com/assets/images/blog/tungsten-motorbrochure-large.png">brochure cover</a>, I started with Semibold for the caption, but then liked it for the larger headline as well. When Jonathan and I made a <a href="http://cdn.typography.com/assets/images/blog/tungsten-musicfestival-large.png">poster for a music festival</a>, we both assumed that the open counters of the Medium would make it the best choice for the smaller type (dates and times, opening acts, etc.), but were surprised to see how legible the Bold caps were — even at 11 point. With these kinds of sizes available to us, I started thinking about other kinds of applications that might work, and all kinds of Tungsten projects came to mind: print packaging, broadcast graphics, branding guidelines, videogames, books, websites…”
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/tungsten-weights-small_500.jpg">
<h2>Four-in-one</h2>
“I often think of Jan Tschichold’s advice, that designers should stick to using a single font wherever possible. I discovered when I was working as a book designer just how hard it was to follow this rule, and would often find myself having to mix lots of styles from related faces just to achieve a consistent tone across a single page. Tungsten’s one of the few type families I’ve worked with that seems to be able to bend Tschichold’s rule without breaking it: each of the fonts manages to produce a different color, but they all have a similar texture. It’s as if each weight has a different voice, but they all share the same accent.
“Working with Tungsten definitely made me think about how coherent I really need a type family to be. There are families I’ve used in which different weights don’t seem to be related at all, where using even the Light with the Bold manages to upset Tschichold’s rule. There are also condensed faces that never quite seem to be the right width, always feeling too condensed, too wide, or only working at a specific size. I find that fonts with too small a “sweet spot” can be really frustrating to use: if they can’t perform while a single design evolves, they’re going to be even harder to use on multiple projects — and as someone who buys fonts, that’s especially important to me. It was really nice to prepare a range of projects with Tungsten, and never once feel that the fonts limited my options. Whenever we needed to make the type bigger, we just did.”
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/tungsten-sculptural-small_500.png">
<h2>Secret weapon</h2>
“A lot of condensed sans serifs look great when set in all caps, but some of them have lowercases that never quite click. Many of these faces seem to have very rigid capitals, but very fluid lowercases, which can distractingly make them feel like two separate fonts. In the past, I’ve developed stylebooks that call for capitals, and watched with horror as some later need for lowercase totally transformed the texture of the page, in a really unwanted way. Comparing the caps and lowercase has become another kind of “coherence” that I now look for when choosing a font, especially a condensed sans.
“Initially, I was so fixated on Tungsten’s caps that I didn’t even think about the lowercase. It was only after noticing how the font performed in smaller sizes that I began to use it to set lengthier copy, which of course meant using the lowercase as well. And once I’d used the lowercase in small sizes, it started to creep into my work in larger and larger sizes. At headline sizes, the interaction between lowercase letters is really engaging, even hypnotic. (In Adobe Illustrator, staring at the machined quality of those letterforms at 3200% size, I found myself thinking of that car commercial where the marble glides along the groove between two panels of bodywork...) By the end of the project, I was surprised to find that almost two-thirds of the artwork I’d created favored Tungsten’s lowercase, rather than its caps. And in many of these, the fonts were used very small, at sizes where I didn’t expect their flavor to even come through. It was definitely nice to see that even in straightforward settings, Tungsten always remained inviting to read, and it always felt like itself.”
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/tungsten-cap-hyphenation_500.png">
<h2>The little things</h2>
“Jonathan often says that a type family should be “as small as possible, but as big as necessary,” though the H&Co library does seem to favor thoroughness over brevity. Tungsten has just four weights, making it the smallest type family I’ve worked with this year: I’ve also been working with <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sentinel/overview/" target="_blank">Sentinel</a> (12 styles) and the new <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/" target="_blank">Gothams</a> (66 styles.) Tungsten’s not the kind of family that really needs pyrotechnics — no swashes, old-style figures, or optical sizes here — but it’s definitely not lacking features.
“One finishing touch that I especially appreciated was a set of alternate punctuation, designed to align with the numbers and the caps. In most fonts, the dashes and the colon are positioned to align with the lowercase; in some fonts they’re raised, so they center with the caps. Tungsten includes both kinds, accessible not only through the “all caps” OpenType feature, but through the “stylistic alternate” feature as well. I found this especially easy to use when setting complicated situations like the one above, where the colon is centered on the height of the figures, but the en dash aligns with the lowercase. How nice to be able to do this without single-character baseline shifts, or any of the other unmentionable crimes that bad fonts demand of good designers!”
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/tungsten-motion_500.png">
<h2>What I really want to do is direct</h2>
“When we finally had to put the artwork to bed, I still hadn’t finished doing everything I wanted to do with Tungsten. (In the Illustrator screen capture above, you’ll see scraps of half-finished pharmaceutical packaging, a science textbook, onscreen graphics for an awards show, an infographic from a snowboarding magazine...) What I wanted to try with Tungsten most of all were motion graphics: specifically, animated movie titles. We all agreed that the font just demands to be used for the opening credits of a Hollywood blockbuster, though we never did agree on the genre. A spy thriller seems like a natural, or anything with a criminal theme for that matter: is Tungsten the hard-boiled detective in a shearling coat, the English dandy with a walking stick and a vintage convertible, or the small-town judge who delivers a very personal style of justice? It could certainly be a straight-faced stoner comedy, a slasher film, or anything from the sci-fi realm. Next summer I expect to see Tungsten on the side of a battleship, a Formula One race car, or a star destroyer. Or in the opening credits of that new crypto thriller TUN65T3N. Starts Friday, theaters everywhere. This font is not yet rated.” —BH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 30 Sep 2009 13:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/new-fonts-a-graphic-designers-perspective#411</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Introducing Tungsten]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-tungsten</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[A few years ago, we started wondering if there was a way to make a flat-sided sans serif that was disarming instead of brutish, one that employed confidence and subtlety instead of just raw testosterone. It was an unusual design brief for ourselves, completely without visual cues and trading in cultural associations instead: “more Steve McQueen than Steven Seagal,” reads one note; “whiskey highball, not a martini” suggests another.
The result is Tungsten®, a tight family of high-impact fonts in four weights: muscular and persuasive, without sacrificing wit, versatility, or style. Now starting at $99.]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 16 Sep 2009 07:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-tungsten#408</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[“Someone Found a Letter You Drew Me, On the Radio…”]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/someone-found-a-letter-you-drew-me-on-the-radio</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/wnyc_logo_500.png">
This afternoon, typography joins the ranks of the wonderfully obscure on Please Explain, my favorite segment of the <a href="http://www.wnyc.org/shows/lopate/explain.html" target="_blank">Leonard Lopate Show</a>: Steven Heller and I will be on hand to discuss, if not actually explain, typography. If you’re in the New York area, join us around 1:20pm EST at WNYC-FM 93.9 or AM 820, or follow the podcast at <a href="http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast/podcast_detail.php?siteId=4819409" target="_blank">wnyc.org</a>. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 11 Sep 2009 07:11:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/someone-found-a-letter-you-drew-me-on-the-radio#410</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Mortal Enemy of the Hyphen]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/mortal-enemy-of-the-hyphen</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/wolfe-585_responsive.svg">
Above, the full name of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolfe%2B585,_Senior" target="_blank">Philadelphian typesetter</a> who was otherwise known as “Wolfe+585,” or less mercifully, “Hubert Blaine Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff, Sr.” to his friends. Could there have been many? —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 28 Aug 2009 10:10:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/mortal-enemy-of-the-hyphen#407</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Inside the H&Co Drawing Office]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/inside-the-hco-drawing-office</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/drawing_office_500.jpg">
A View of the Drawing-Office of Hoefler&Co, Manufacturers of Phonograms & Allophones. Special Designs & Estimates Submitted on Enquiry. Write: H. & Co., Houston-Street, New York.
Just kidding. Thanks, Eric Baker, for the photo! —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 19 Aug 2009 04:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/inside-the-hco-drawing-office#409</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[These Aren’t The Fifty States You’re Looking For]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/these-arent-the-fifty-states-youre-looking-for</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/us-border_4_500.jpg">
In <a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/blog/ellen-lupton/design-your-life/when-design-too-good" target="_blank">Fast Company</a>, Ellen Lupton writes:
<blockquote class="excerpt">The graphic designer Michael Bierut, a partner working in the New York office of the firm Pentagram, designed a 21-foot sign for the new U.S.-Canada border crossing at Massena, New York. The sign, as well as the building, which was designed by architects Smith-Miller & Hawkinson, has received substantial praise as a bold and daring piece of federal design. Too daring, perhaps. The sign is being dismantled by the Customs and Border Protection Agency for fear that it will be a target for terrorists.</blockquote>
I share Michael Bierut’s hesitation in second-guessing the seasoned professionals at the Department of Homeland Security, who surely know more about armed extremists than I would ever want to. Still, I think there’s a compromise to be struck: if the goal is to create a typographic fig leaf that disguises one’s arrival at our 9,161,923 square kilometer nation, why not change the inscription to “Bienvenidos a México?” —JH
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/us-border_1_500.jpg">]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 13 Aug 2009 10:30:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/these-arent-the-fifty-states-youre-looking-for#406</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[“Curved, Pointy, and Nervous-Looking Types”]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/curved-pointy-and-nervous-looking-types</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/rob-roy-kelly-chromatic_500.png">
It is 1953, and you are a graduate student at the Yale University School of Art. Alvin Eisenman has just established a new discipline called “graphic arts,” in which you are studying — under the legendary Josef Albers, Herbert Matter, and Alvin Lustig — a new approach to design, which will come to be known as Modernism. Five years from now, the world will witness the birth of Helvetica and Univers, typographic milestones that will forever affirm the ascendancy of the Swiss International Style. It is amidst this visual culture, with its disciplined sans serifs, rationalized grid systems, and asymmetric layouts, that you discover your deep love of typography. So you dedicate yourself to the study of its most unfashionable, shadowy, and anarchic tributary: nineteenth century American wood type. You are Rob Roy Kelly.
Today, Kelly’s name is synonymous with <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0306800594/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=typographycom-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0306800594&linkId=04a482f3c62b5f1424a5914202bdc6ed" target="_blank">American Wood Type: 1828-1900</a>, his 1969 opus that remains the standard desk reference on the subject. Forty years ago, the manuscript was the result of a long and difficult search for answers. After leaving Yale, Kelly went to the Minneapolis School of Art to establish a graphic design department, and his attempt to procure a collection of material for the school press revealed at once how moribund wood type had become, and how neglected it remained as an area of study. Beginning with a collection of ephemeral type specimen books, and ultimately growing to include several hundred full fonts of type, what quickly became “The Kelly Collection” served as a working library for Kelly’s own research. Between 1966 and 1993, the collection passed through the hands of several individuals and institutions, finally finding a home at the University of Texas at Austin. During this time, Van Nostrand Reinhold’s publication of American Wood Type went out of print; Da Capo Press introduced a paperback version, which also went out of print; what designers and scholars have been left with is the diluted and incomplete 100 Wood Type Alphabets produced by Dover Editions in 1977. Happily, the University of Texas has adapted the original work for the web: <a href="http://www.utexas.edu/cofa/a_ah/rrk/index.php" target="_blank">The Rob Roy Kelly American Wood Type Collection</a> is now available online, featuring much of Kelly’s scholarship, and many of the illustrations from the original work.
In keeping with the traditions of the trade, Kelly’s enthusiasm for wood type was obsessive. Chronicling his work on American Wood Type in the book’s introduction, Kelly wrote, “my reputation as a bore at cocktail parties grew immeasurably during these years,” a sentiment doubtless familiar to anyone connected with type. Like many enthusiasts, Kelly’s devotion to typography was deep, sincere, and consuming, but it was also mercurial. In 1990, when I went to the Modernism & Eclecticism symposium to hear Kelly deliver a lecture entitled “Cast-Iron and Brass Trivets,” I learned along with hundreds of other graphic designers in the audience that “trivet” was not an obscure term of art from the golden age of wood type: Kelly had concluded his study of wood type, and had simply moved on to another area of scholarship, namely cast-iron kettle stands. Somewhere, I hope there is a blog devoted to trivets that will include the opposite anecdote, the story of the eminent trivetologist who was once, bewilderingly, a leading authority on wood type. I suspect Kelly would love it. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:30:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/curved-pointy-and-nervous-looking-types#403</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[John Downer at The Propagandist]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/john-downer-at-the-propagandist</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/john-downer-letter_500.jpg">
Twenty years ago, John Downer and I were introduced by a mutual friend. He’d introduced us as “type designers,” a flattering description of my professional achievements to date (I was a recent refugee from graphic design), and a somewhat elliptic summary of John’s credentials. Whether or not he was intentionally vague, I’ll never know, but it set me up for a very entertaining afternoon.
John visited my studio, where I was working on a set of roman capitals that would ultimately become the <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/requiem/overview/">Requiem</a> typeface. He had some suggestions about the design, which like most critiques were especially hard to articulate; typography suffers from a poverty of terminology. Eyeing two bottles of Rich Art poster paint in my taboret, John reached for these along with a sheet of typing paper, and the cheap plastic paintbrush that I kept for dusting my keyboard. In a few effortless strokes of black, he perfectly reproduced Requiem’s capital S, waited a moment for the paint to dry, and then reloaded the brush with white to render his corrections. The whole shebang couldn’t have taken fifteen seconds, most of it spent waiting for paint to dry. I just stared: it was like watching someone fold a paper napkin into a remote control helicopter, and then pilot it around the room. The detail our mutual friend had neglected to mention, of course, is that John came to type design through his other profession: he is a master sign painter.
Type design has always been a wonderfully polygenetic field, and a random sampling of practitioners is likely to include calligraphers, graphic designers, stonemasons, letterpress printers, engravers, graffiti artists, and programmers. This mixture produces a marvelous synthesis of perspectives in terms of both technique and culture, and serves to make type design a vigorous and exciting discipline. But few type designers I know bring this particular experience to bear on their work:
<blockquote class="excerpt">I began graduate studies in painting at The University of Iowa in 1973 after working at sign shops in Des Moines for about a year. The chairman of the painting department at the UI was Byron Burford, proprietor of The Great Byron Burford Circus of Artistic Wonders — a traveling art show and circus, in one. It included moving cutouts of exotic animals, motorized trapeze artists, contortionists, and acrobats...</blockquote>
This is from Freshjive’s <a href="http://www.freshjive.com/propagandist/25/john-downer?page=7&clean_url=1&gallery_id=25&gallery_url_name=john-downer&total_records=26" target="_blank">The Propagandist</a>, which today is presenting a nice slideshow of John’s work in connection with a line of lettered <a href="http://www.freshjive.com/propagandist/25/john-downer" target="_blank">t-shirts</a>. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 05 Aug 2009 12:15:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/john-downer-at-the-propagandist#402</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Ask H&Co: Fonts for Financials]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/ask-hco-fonts-for-financials</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/askHfj-annualReports_1920.png">
Annual reports offer designers a marvelous opportunity to strut their stuff. In the hands of a thoughtful typographer, a dense volume of technical text can become warm and welcoming, its changing rhythm of introductions, statements, analyses, and disclosures calling for a beautiful typographic system to help organize the text. Financial data can be uniquely satisfying to design, offering an irresistible opportunity to work with large type families in intricate ways. There are tables both long and short, as well as charts, graphs, and diagrams, all studded with headings, footnotes, and legends that defy even the most ingenious grid.
Each of these details places a special burden on the fonts, making it especially important to choose the right palette up front. We’ve gathered some thoughts about choosing fonts for annual reports for our Techniques library, here you’ll find four things to think about when considering a typeface — and a collection of font families specifically designed to meet these unique challenges.]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 30 Jul 2009 05:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/ask-hco-fonts-for-financials#401</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[In Today’s Mail]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/in-todays-mail</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hfj-white-house-invitation_500.png">]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 14 Jul 2009 18:11:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/in-todays-mail#462</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Made With H&Co]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/made-with-hco</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[An optometrist’s business card, the packaging for a rubber band gun, a basketball court, a scented candle, the concrete signage markers for subtropical hiking trails: these are just a few of the marvelous projects for which designers have chosen fonts from Hoefler&Co They’re sharing their work over on our <a href="https://www.facebook.com/HoeflerCo/photos_stream" target="_blank">Facebook photo page</a>, where more than 3,000 fans are currently perusing the collection. If you’re a Facebook user and an type enthusiast, come by and share the typographic masterpieces that you’ve made with our fonts.
New on the blog this morning, the tag “<a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/tag/Made+with+H&Co">Made with H&Co</a>” marks some of the great things we’ve seen done with our work, which we’ve written about here on the blog. Hiding among the publications, identities, posters, illustrations, and presidential campaigns are a few unexpected delights, including one typeface bedecked with icicles, and another fashioned into a ten-foot topiary. This week promises two more typographic extravaganzas: a brilliant but unclassifiable magazine, and a roving cupcake purveyor. Stay tuned. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:30:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/made-with-hco#400</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[What Was Next]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/what-was-next</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hoefler-frerejones-denver_500.jpg">
Most of the <a href="https://www.typography.com/about/press.php" target="_blank">talks</a> that we’ve given are lost to the sands of time, but this afternoon I was happy to discover that one of our favorite presentations lives on. For the AIGA Design Conference in Denver, we were asked to meditate on the topic of “What’s Next,” for which we presented a study of typographic history — and why the ‘historical revival’ might be a twentieth century idea whose time has passed.
The AIGA has posted the audio of our talk, which tracks with the images above; it runs about 45 minutes, including some questions from the audience, in which we reveal some of the unpublished developmental names of <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/" target="_blank">Gotham</a>. Also keep an ear out for two provocative concepts: a French wine scholar offers a pithy gloss on experimentalism, and a certain type designer defines “the underpants-on-the-head school of revivalism.” —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 24 Jun 2009 14:30:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/what-was-next#399</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Don’t Believe the Type!]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/dont-believe-the-type</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/italica-typography-com_500.png">
We will, we will Rockwell. Rock the Caslon. I Meta Girl. ITC Clearly Now. Tempted by the Frutiger ’nother. Weiss Do Fools Fall in Love? Rockwell Amadeus. Dax The Way (uh huh, uh huh) I Like It. Please Mistral Postman. If I Could Turn Back Times. Gill Sans in a Coma. Get Down Onyx. Myriad a Little Lamb. Clarendon (I Know This World is Killing You.) On the Wingdings of Love. I Wanna Bold Your Sans. Some Like it Haettenschweiler. Janson Queen. I Do Not Want I Avant Garde. Scenes From an Italic Restaurant. Hang On to Your Eagle. Take a Janson Me. My Name is DIN (and I am Fonty.) Font Like an Egyptienne. Hotel Caledonia. Electra Avenue. Garamond (My Wayward Son.) My Tahoma. Fear of a Black Italic. I’m So X-Heighted. Nothin’ V.A.G. Thing.
Twitter is reaching a cultural apotheosis right now with the <a href="http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23fontsongs" target="_blank">#fontsongs</a> topic, still trending strong. (Ms. American Typewriter Pie, Burning Down the House Gothic, Love Me Two Times Roman, Ring My Bell Gothic...) Special thanks to everyone who included an H&Co font in their title (We Are The Champion, Knockout on Heaven’s Door, Whitney Baby One More Time, Dirt Didots Done Dirt Cheap, Auld Verlag Syne, It’s a Hard Knox Life, Chronicle Man…)
Yesterday I asked — rhetorically, I thought — “who can work <a href="http://images.google.com/images?rls=en-us&q=arnold%20bocklin%20font" target="_blank">Arnold Böcklin</a> into one of these?” Meeting the challenge triumphantly came @mattwiebe with It’s Arnold Böcklin Roll (But I Like It), @mlascarides with Keep Arnold Böcklin (In the Free World), @angvalenz with Block Böcklin Beats, and @e_limbach’s No Sleep Till Böcklin. (I would also have accepted They Say The Arnold Böcklin Roll Is Still Beating.) Anyway, next challenge: “Figgins’ Two Lines Pica Antique No. 2.”
The thread’s still running if you want to join in. And if you really love me, darling, bring me Exocet. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Sat, 06 Jun 2009 19:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/dont-believe-the-type#398</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[House of Flying Reference Marks]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/house-of-flying-reference-marks</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/daggers_responsive-01.svg">
Last spring, when answering a reader’s question about our favorite characters to draw, I got to spend some time with some of our beloveds: the <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/pilcrow-capitulum" target="_blank">¶</a> and <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/the-sulzbacher-eszett" target="_blank">ß</a> that rarely see the light of day, as well as H&Co’s middle name, <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/our-middle-name" target="_blank">&</a>. It took great self-control not to spill the beans about another pair of favorites, the dagger and double dagger, for already waiting in the wings were my favorite daggers to ever come out of H&Co. They’re the ones in our just-released <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/sentinel/overview/">Sentinel</a> family, seen here.
Daggers come from that archipelago of typographic symbols known as reference marks, which refer readers elsewhere for explanatory or exegetic notes. The traditional first-order reference mark is the asterisk{footnote_1}, a longtime favorite: in The Elements of Typographic Style, Robert Bringhurst observes that asterisks have been in continuous use for five thousand years. Asterisks can take countless forms, though custom favors ones shaped like stars, flowers, or bathtub faucets; any number of petals is permissible as well, with five-, six-, and eight-lobed asterisks being most common. [Clock starts now in anticipation of the world’s first seven-lobed asterisk. —Ed.] [<a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/decimal/characters">Update</a>. —Ed.] The approach that a designer follows in the asterisk is usually echoed in the typeface’s second-order reference mark, the dagger (also known as the obelus, obelisk, or long cross), and its third-order mark, the double dagger (a.k.a. diesis or double obelisk.) Both characters have functions in genealogy and other life sciences, where the asterisk indicates the year of birth (*1499), and the dagger the year of death (&dagger;1561). There are standard fourth-, fifth- and sixth-order reference marks, too: they are the section mark (§), parallels (||), and number sign (#), after which the cycle repeats with doubles, triples, and so on: *, &dagger;, &Dagger;, §, ||, #, **, &dagger;&dagger;, &Dagger;&Dagger;, §§, ||||, ###, ***, &dagger;&dagger;&dagger;, &Dagger;&Dagger;&Dagger;, etc. Beyond three, numbered footnotes are always preferable, even if you are David Foster Wallace.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/daggers_responsive-02.svg">
Daggers afford the type designer a rare opportunity to quote from more widely recognized visual languages, such as architecture and other applied arts. The daggers in our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/didot/overview/">H&Co Didot</a> family echo the kinds of details common in period decoration, and those in <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/overview/">Whitney</a> evoke the simplified asterisk of the typewriter, its center removed to prevent the buildup of ink. In Sentinel, we wanted the design’s industrial brawn to be mellowed by some lyrical flourishes, which in the daggers produced a ‘twisted quillon{footnote_2}’ that you’ll find in another place slab serifs traditionally reside: find a pack of playing cards, and look closely at the dagger of the “<a href="http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playing_card" target="_blank">suicide king</a>.” —JH
  
  
 ]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 04 Jun 2009 13:03:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/house-of-flying-reference-marks#397</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Introducing Sentinel]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-sentinel</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Is any typeface more in-the-know than a Clarendon? These smart looking slab serifs have the timeless style of a charcoal gray suit, or a well-chosen pair of horn-rimmed glasses: they’re approachable, welcoming, and effortlessly persuasive. Yet they’re tough to use — out of the question for setting text — because they lack italics.
Enter Sentinel®, a new slab serif from Hoefler&Co A new take on this lovely and useful style, Sentinel is a refreshingly complete family in twelve weights (Light through Black, with italics throughout) that’s designed to shine in sizes both large and small. Featuring text-friendly features like short-ranging figures, and our Expanded Latin character set for extended language support, H&Co is delighted to present the entire Sentinel family for just $199.]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 13 May 2009 05:41:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/introducing-sentinel#396</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Guggenheim Redux]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/guggenheim-redux</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[For one quarter of its lifetime, the Guggenheim Museum has enjoyed the use of a signature typeface created by H&Co. The project originally commissioned by <a href="https://www.pentagram.com/about/abbott-miller" target="_blank">Abbott Miller</a>, a sans serif in six styles called Guggenheim, has since grown into a family of thirty styles, now known as Verlag. This expanded set of fonts, now including five weights in three different widths, is <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/verlag/overview/" target="_blank">now available from H&Co</a>. And gratifyingly, it’s still being used by the Guggenheim — now more than ever.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/am_guggenheimfoundation_04.jpg">
If the fonts’ thirteen years of continuous use can be attributed to anything, it’s the careful formulation of the original brief. The iconic lettering on Frank Lloyd Wright’s <a href="https://www.guggenheim.org/the-frank-lloyd-wright-building" target="_blank">famous rotunda</a> furnished the seed for the project; unchecked, this might have grown into an overly stylized typeface, too eccentric to be of much use. A more short-sighted designer might have made the easy play for nostalgia, but Miller took a more thoughtful approach, envisioning all the different applications that the typeface would come to serve. The family of types we created was therefore more interpretation than facsimile, a versatile family that we all hoped would evoke the qualities of the museum without simply replicating its signature. It was the right call: the fonts once used only by the Guggenheim New York’s publication department now serve the signage programs of four museums, the institution’s Webby Award-winning website, and now the new identity for the <a href="https://www.pentagram.com/work/the-guggenheim-foundation-1?rel=search&query=guggenheim%2520&page=1" target="_blank">Guggenheim Foundation</a>, also designed by Miller, and premiering this year as part of the Guggenheim’s fiftieth anniversary. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 07 May 2009 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/guggenheim-redux#395</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[The National Design Awards]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/hco-honored-by-national-design-awards</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[An official White House project created to increase national awareness of the role of design, the National Design Awards are given annually by the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in recognition of excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement in design. A highlight of the award has traditionally been <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/in-todays-mail">a reception for honorees at the White House, hosted by the first lady</a>.
Now in its tenth year, the National Design Awards are given in ten categories from architecture to fashion, and past winners include iMac designer Jonathan Ive, fashion designer Isabel Toledo, and industrial designer Bill Stumpf, co-inventor of the Aeron chair. Congratulations to all of this year’s honorees, especially our colleagues in Communication Design: finalist Project Projects, and the category winner, the Graphics Department of The New York Times. —H&Co]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 30 Apr 2009 09:15:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/hco-honored-by-national-design-awards#394</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Join us on Twitter]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/join-us-on-twitter</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/littlebird.png">
More than a thousand people have tuned in to our 140-character quips on Twitter. Won’t you join us? —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 27 Apr 2009 09:01:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/join-us-on-twitter#393</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[A Treasury of Wood Type Online]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-treasury-of-wood-type-online</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hamilton-woodtype-02-640px.jpg">
The Hamilton Manufacturing Co. traces its roots back to the very first wood types made in the United States. Darius Wells produced the first American wood type in 1828; his business was reorganized into Wells & Webb, then acquired by William Page, later passing back to the Wells family, and finally sold to Hamilton sometime before 1880. The product of this consolidation was a type specimen book issued in 1900, Hamilton’s Catalogue No. 14, which offers a good survey of American display typography of the nineteenth century.
Open to the public is the <a href="http://www.woodtype.org/" target="_blank">Hamilton Wood Type Printing Museum</a> in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, a collection of 1.5 million pieces of wood type maintained by volunteers of the Two Rivers Historical Society. For at-home viewing, the calendar printer Unicorn Graphics has just launched their <a href="http://www.unicorngraphics.com/wood%20type%20museum.asp" target="_blank">Web Museum of Wood Types and Ornaments</a>, which offers a sundry collection of scans and photographs of American wood types — including every page of the great Catalogue No. 14.

<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hamilton-woodtype-03-640px.jpg">
Above, a neat synopsis of the three major approaches to creating ornamental type. At the top right, surface decoration adorns a conventional design, in this case a condensed Gothic of the kind that inspired <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/knockout/overview/" target="_blank">Knockout.</a> Left center are some concave letters that introduce systemic morphological changes to the design of the alphabet, in this case turning the curves inside out. And finally, an emulative approach at bottom left, which imitates foreign materials or techniques. (This log type is a ham-fisted imitation of Vincent Figgins’ Rustic of 1845.) I find the geometric letters more successful than the fluid ones; the lugubrious vines in the lines BIE and SIT can’t hold a candle to the work of the <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/sham-rock" target="_blank">Master of the Creeping Tendril</a>.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hamilton-collage-640px.jpg">
Some letters made with greater competence. Type makers in search of novelty found countless ways to vary the designs of serifs, brackets, and stems, and cross-pollinating these techniques produced an endless number of new styles. I especially like the two in the upper-right corner, which combine outwardly flared strokes, nodules congregating around the midline, surface ornamentation, a vertical drop shadow, and trapezoidal serifs that master signpainter and type designer John Downer has termed “The Detroit Serif.”
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hamilton-woodtype-04-640px.jpg">
A riot of inlines, outlines, and drop shadows. The white drop shadows in MATCH (center right) are innovative, as are the effervescent circles in RIMED, which echo the painted and lithographed letters of the Belle Époque.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hamilton-woodtype-05-640px.jpg">
“<a href="https://www.typography.com/collections/outline-cameo/" target="_blank">Cameo</a>” typefaces, featuring letters inscribed in ornamental <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/requiem/features/requiem-ornaments/" target="_blank">cartouches</a>. Even in digital fonts, these are notoriously hard to space: the lack of kerning kerning between the letters L and Y in FAMILY (top left) illustrates why. At bottom left, the word SHINE points to a common pitfall in planning an ornamented typeface: this design focusses all of the action on its beaked serifs, giving S and E considerably more esprit than their plain Jane cohorts.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hamilton-woodtype-06-640px.jpg">
The “French Clarendon” in the left column is a style that combines three nineteenth century innovations: it features supercondensed proportions, bracketed serifs, and a foreshortening which inverts the customary relationship between thin serifs and heavy strokes. This is an especially nice one, and rare in its inclusion of a lowercase. I would not relish having to improve on the tortured lowercase g in the top line.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hamilton-woodtype-07-640px.jpg">
More morphological experiments, eccentricies which look sober in this dizzying context. I like all three of these designs, especially the one at lower left, which combines concave stems with chamfered corners and inverted stress: there’s surely a way of interpreting this idea in a more modern context, which I hope someone explores. The design on the right is also witty, its soft and unthreatening corners wonderfully juxtaposed with menacing thorns.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hamilton-woodtype-08-640px.jpg">
Backslanted typefaces are another nineteenth century novelty, as are designs that emulate the brush or the graver. Above, the top two lines recall the handmade annotations on photographic negatives, their swelled strokes, trailing serifs, and soft edges clearly imitating pen-drawn forms. The lowercase g is great: that its lower loop is inflected in the wrong direction is a clever way of reinforcing the backwardness of the entire design.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hamilton-woodtype-09-640px.jpg">
At right, more variations on the theme of softness and thorns. It’s surprising how a subtle relocation of the spikes and knobs can so profoundly change the tone of the design: reading down from the top right, HUN has an indisputably aggressive tone, while CINDERS and BIRGE are sleepy and bucolic, and RIG has all the bombast of industry in full flower.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hamilton-woodtype-10-640px.jpg">
Big types customarily bring up the rear of a type specimen book, and Catalogue No. 14 does not disappoint. The book reaches an explosive crescendo with this design at 864 point, in which just two letters fill the entire page. This typeface, which Hamilton called “No. 266,” is the design that inspired our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/knockout/overview/" target="_blank">Knockout No. 66</a> font. It appears on p. 119 of Hamilton’s Catalogue No. 14; check out <a href="http://www.unicorngraphics.com/wood%20type%20museum/hamilton14/hamiltonfourteen.asp" target="_blank">page 120</a> for the biggest type of all. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 23 Apr 2009 09:01:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-treasury-of-wood-type-online#392</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[The H&Co Institute for Unapplied Mathematics]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-hco-institute-for-unapplied-mathematics</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[We’ve received our share of <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/hco-crime-fighting-division" target="_blank">intriguing questions</a> over the years, but this one takes the cake. On Monday, a correspondent called from National Public Radio to discuss the implications of typesetting a number with twelve million digits.
The number in question is 243112609-1, which holds the title for World’s Largest Known Prime Number. Mathematicians have known since at least the third century BC that for many values of n, the formula 2n-1 produces a prime number. When it does, the result Mn is called a Mersenne Prime, after the seventeenth century <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mersenne" target="_blank">French mathematician</a> who calculated the first 257 of them by hand — quite something when you realize that M257 has 78 digits. (And, so very cruelly, it’s not prime.) The search for prime numbers, an esoteric pursuit that rivals typeface design for its cultishness, has continued ever since; these days it’s assisted by the <a href="http://www.mersenne.org/" target="_blank">Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search</a>, a project that organizes the downtime of almost 90,000 volunteers’ computers into a collective effort to find the next great prime.

Monday’s call came from Joe Palca, a science correspondent for NPR’s <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/rundowns/rundown.php?prgId=3" target="_blank">Morning Edition</a>, who was meditating on the best way to convey the magnitude of this number. Scientific notation is designed to reduce astronomically large numbers down to more manageable ones, which obscures the enormity of numbers like 243112609-1. What does it mean for a number to contain 12,978,189 digits? For comparison, the total number of atoms in the universe is often estimated at 1080, a mere bagatelle of just 81 digits.
Joe liked the idea of measuring how long this number would be if it were set in type, which immediately called into question the choice of font. The number’s length would depend chiefly on the width of the font selected, and even listener-friendly choices like Times Roman and Helvetica would produce dramatically different outcomes. Small eccentricities in the design of a particular number, such as Times Roman’s inexplicably scrawny figure one, would have huge consequences when multiplied out to this length. But even this isn’t the hairy part. Where things get difficult, as always, is in the kerning.
Kerning pairs mitigate the space between awkwardly fitted characters, and numbers contain one of the deepest kerns in a font: the pair 74, whose slanted profiles need to be specially accommodated. H&Co’s Andy Clymer, always up for a programming challenge, wrote a script that examined all twelve million digits (download them <a href="http://prime.isthe.com/chongo/tech/math/prime/m43112609/prime-c.html" target="_blank">here</a>), and concluded that “74” appeared 129,818 times. If we were to set our target number in 12pt Gotham Book, this kern alone would account for a variance of more than 150 feet. So to account for this and all the other 100 possible inter-number kerning pairs, Andy wrote a script that quietly chewed away on the big number with a handful of fonts in mind. The results?
<table>
<thead>
<tr>
<th> </th>
<th>Length</th>
<th>Kerning Dividend</th>
</tr>
</thead>
<tbody>
<tr>
<td>12 point <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/" target="_blank">Gotham Book</a></td>
<td>20 miles 
3,131' 1-3/4"
(33.14 km)
</td>
<td>1,015' 5"
(309.38 m)
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>12 point <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/overview/" target="_blank">Whitney Book</a></td>
<td>18 miles 
1,884' 9-1/4"
(29.54 km)
</td>
<td>328' 8"
(99.99 m)
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>12 point <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/" target="_blank">Gotham Narrow Book</a></td>
<td>17 miles 
4,097' 3-5/8"
(28.60 km)
</td>
<td>944' 3-1/4"
(287.94 m)
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>12 point <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/mercury-text/overview/" target="_blank">Mercury Text</a></td>
<td>17 miles 
202' 1-1/2"
(27.96 km)
</td>
<td>315' 8-3/8"
(96.21 m)
</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
Of course, the math gets quite a bit easier in fonts with <a href="https://www.typography.com/collections/charts-tables/" target="_blank">tabular figures</a>, where all of the digits are the same width, and as a bonus there’s no kerning to deal with. (All of the above fonts feature tabular figures as well, but what fun is that?) In the end, we thought that a calculation in 12pt Courier would be most evocative to listeners, and the easiest for NPR fact checkers to confirm as well. So for the record, 243112609-1, set in 12pt Courier, runs to 20 miles, 2,569 feet, and 1-3/4 inches (32.96 km).
In case you’re wondering, prime numbers aren’t just the stuff of academic longhairs: like typefaces, they have interesting properties that make them strangely useful. The classical example comes from mechanical engineering, where two meshed gears will wear most evenly if each has a coprime number of teeth, since this evenly distributes the possible ways in which they interact (thereby minimizing the effects of any irregularities.) Some have suggested that 13- and 17-year cicadas each follow prime numbered life cycles in order to ensure that their populations compete as little as possible, coexisting only once every 221 years. As for the larger primes, the challenges of quickly factoring large numbers makes large primes indispensable for securing online data, so they’re one of the cornerstones of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSA_(cryptosystem)" target="_blank">public key cryptography.</a> Large primes are acting behind the scenes when you’re online ordering fonts, for example. When you’re online <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/">ordering fonts</a>. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 09 Apr 2009 11:11:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-hco-institute-for-unapplied-mathematics#391</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Alphabet: A Dramatic Reading]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-alphabet-a-dramatic-reading</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[This clip of James Earl Jones reciting the alphabet is so disturbing that I can’t believe it actually aired on the Sesame Street of my youth — not without dissuading me from my current career, anyway. All I can say today is that I wish he’d included an “and,” so that I could cobble together a sample of “This... is H&Co” for my ringtone.
Other videos I’d like to see include Christopher Lloyd reading “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum" target="_blank">lorem ipsum</a>,” and Christopher Walken performing the 1940 type specimen of the Linotype company: “How, is one... to assess, and evaluate, a type face in terms. Of ITS esthetic. Design.” —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:20:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-alphabet-a-dramatic-reading#390</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Breaking News!]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/breaking-news</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/grecian-bandit_500.jpg">
We’re resisting the temptation to go against <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/two-fools" target="_blank">last year’s declaration</a> that April Fools’ Day website goofs are <a href="http://www.dashes.com/anil/2006/03/your-april-fool.html" target="_blank">inherently unfunny</a>, so it pleases me to instead have an genuine update regarding someone else’s typographic silliness.
Eighteen months ago, we reported on a <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/ode-on-a-grecian-kern" target="_blank">mysterious typographic gift</a> that materialized outside the H&Co offices. Today, I am delighted to report that the culprit (artist) has come forward! Rob Keller — who may well be a typeface designer graduated from the University of Reading, but will always be known to me as The Grecian Bandit — apparently included us on his rounds when distributing ceramic letter sculptures throughout the city, as part of a project called <a href="http://www.youshouldliketypetoo.com/art/left-out-letters/" target="_blank">Left Out Letters</a>. Check out the collection of photos on his blog: in addition to Plaintiff's Exhibit A documenting his <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/acropolis/overview/" target="_blank">Acropolis Italic</a> h and fj, there’s a fantastic tableau showing a French Clarendon lowercase m being <a href="http://www.youshouldliketypetoo.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/m.jpg" target="_blank">worshipped by a field of dairy cows</a>. Which is exactly how type designers like to imagine our planet looks like from outer space, at least metaphorically. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 01 Apr 2009 22:37:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/breaking-news#389</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Laminitis, or English As She Is Drawn]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/laminitis-or-english-as-she-is-drawn</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/oath_500.png">
Some would argue for Bleak House, others Middlemarch. The Great Gatsby has its proponents as well, along with Lolita and Heart of Darkness. But for me, it is none of these: there is a clear winner in the category, a single book that is the finest work of literature written in the English language. It is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1932416110/typographycom-20" target="_blank">English As She Is Spoke</a>, an 1853 phrasebook by Pedro Carolino, offered to Portuguese speakers as a guide to the English language. Uniquely, Carolino spoke not a word of English, and was not possessed of an English-Portuguese dictonary.
He overcame this disadvantage through the clever combination of a Portuguese-French dictionary and a French-English one, through which the entire corpus of English idioms was dragged, backwards, screaming. Thanks to Carolino, Portuguese readers of the nineteenth century might have learned such workaday English expressions as “to look for a needle in a hay bundle” and “the stone as roll not heap up foam.” Other timeless chestnuts include “take out the live coals with the hand of the cat,” “he has fond the knuckle of the business,” “he has a good beak,” and, bewilderingly, “to craunch the marmoset.” Mark Twain said of the book, “Nobody can add to the absurdity of this book, nobody can imitate it successfully, nobody can hope to produce its fellow; it is perfect.” Twain wrote the introduction to the American edition, which was first published in 1883 and has remained in print ever since. It is a classic.
Our industry’s standard-bearer seems to have gotten the Carolino treatment this morning. This profile of <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/18/AR2009021803330.html" target="_blank">Matthew Carter</a> that ran in the Washington Post has somehow found its way into and out of another language, presumably courtesy of some cruelly indifferent software. Of the craft of type design, our subject is quoted as saying, “the options are rattlingly limited. I can’t determine one forenoon I’m fatigued of the ‘b’ and I’m attending redesign it from excoriation. There holds defeat and captivation.” (What type designer has not experienced this?) Pay special attention to the passage in which Carter designs “the lowercase hydrogen,” whose ascender, of course, distinguishes it from the lowercase nitrogen.
Even we weren’t spared offering up an encomium or two. “He holds the footing to be sort of haughty or elitist,” begins one observation, “but that ne’er haps to him.” And I obligingly identified Matthew as “the bozo who formulated brown.” But in any language, I think we all agree that Matthew Carter is “the Jehovah of Georgia.” —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 30 Mar 2009 22:38:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/laminitis-or-english-as-she-is-drawn#388</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Sham Rock]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/sham-rock</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/shamrock-type_500.png">
I have for <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/st-patricks-type" target="_blank">exactly one year</a> been waiting to open up the monumental copy of Ornamented Types of L. J. Pouchée that we have in the office, to find the example of the delicately curlicued shamrock type that historian James Mosley attributed to an unknown punchcutter he designated “Master of the Creeping Tendril,” and to post it here.
This is not that type. It turns out that Pouchée never made a shamrock type: what I was remembering was this, the Eight Lines Pica Egyptian Ornamented No. 2 of Bower & Bacon (1826), illustrated in Nicolete Gray’s Nineteenth Century Ornamented Typefaces. It is surely not the work of any Master, though perhaps it lends credence to the widely-circulated tale which holds that Mrs. Gray illustrated parts of her book by hand, rather than reproducing the work photographically. I’ve never heard an explanation for why this should be so, but there’s no denying that the bluntness of these forms suggests the pen more than the graver.

<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/creeping-tendril_500.png">
This is the work of the Master: Pouchée’s Sixteen Lines No. 2, complete with eponymous tendrils. These are large types: “sixteen line” is what we would know as 192 point, making this letter 2.6" (66mm) high. What I find so extraordinary about this work is not merely its technical finish — these are shockingly crisp letters, even by modern standards — but its depth, the range of colors that its maker was able to coax out of black and white. Where Bower & Bacon’s clovers were merely symbolic, and applied to the face of a <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/ziggurat/overview/" target="_blank">classical letter</a> in a somewhat obvious way, Pouchée’s grapevines fully inhabit their alphabet, achieving a remarkable depth that somehow manages to remain firmly typographic, without becoming illustrations. Pouchée’s are among the most evocative illustrated types of the nineteenth century; I don’t know that they’ve yet been surpassed. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 17 Mar 2009 07:10:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/sham-rock#387</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Gerrit Noordzij Prize, Part 2: Incoming]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-gerrit-noordzij-prize-part-2-incoming</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/noorzijprijs-frere-jones-to-crouwel_500.jpg">
Type designers are accustomed to approaching the line between homage and parody with great care. It’s especially daunting when its subject is a living colleague, as was the case last Friday when our own Tobias Frere-Jones presented an award of his own design to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Crouwel" target="_blank">Wim Crouwel</a>, winner of the 2009 Gerrit Noordzij Prize. (In keeping with the <a href="http://typography.com/blog/the-gerrit-noordzij-prize-part-1-outgoing" target="_blank">tradition</a>, the current holder of the prize designs the award given to its next recipient.) To design an award for Crouwel, a Dutch icon who is indelibly associated with a strong and recognizable personal style, takes great sensitivity: imagine having to design a business card for Piet Mondrian, or select a ringtone for Igor Stravinsky.
If there is anyone able to see past the obvious, it is Wim Crouwel. In the 1960s, Crouwel’s fresh yet doctrinaire approach to graphic design earned him the pejorative nickname “gridnik,” which Crouwel, with typical flare, adopted as a moniker, and later chose as the name for his best-known typeface. In his acceptance speech on Friday, Crouwel described his decades-long disagreements with his friend Gerrit Noordzij — in whose name the award is given — and both men reflected gleefully on their continuing philosophical differences. This fruitful synthesis has colored both the study and the practice of graphic design, and it’s satisfying to see it recognized. This is what awards should be for.
In keeping with the custom, Tobias designed an award that uses one of our typefaces, but includes a nod to Crouwel’s own work. In celebration of the pre-history of the <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/history/" target="_blank">Gotham</a> typeface, Tobias arranged for the fabrication of a traditional enamel sign, featuring an abundant grid of Gotham’s many styles (64 out of <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/features/gotham-four-widths/" target="_blank">66</a>, to be precise.) Hearing Crouwel speak with such good humor at the presentation ceremony, I was almost tempted to reveal Tobias’s original idea, which was to find a way to bridge the Dutch tradition of chocolate letter-making with Crouwel’s arresting <a href="http://www.papress.com/thinkingwithtype/teachers/type_lecture/history_crouwel.htm" target="_blank">new alphabet</a> of 1967. (“I probably could have done it with Kit-Kat bars,” Tobias mused.) I am certain Crouwel would approve. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 12 Mar 2009 15:16:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-gerrit-noordzij-prize-part-2-incoming#386</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Gerrit Noordzij Prize, Part 1: Outgoing]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-gerrit-noordzij-prize-part-1-outgoing</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/noorzijprijs-spiekermann_to_frere-jones_500.jpg">
One charming aspect of the Gerrit Noordzij Prize is the design of the award itself. By tradition, it’s something created by the current prize holder, and presented to the incoming awardee. Past winners have used the occasion to create something that not only encapsulates their own work in some personal way, but postulates some connection to the interests of the next designer in succession. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erik_Spiekermann" target="_blank">Erik Spiekermann</a>, winner of the 2003 award, presented the above to our own Tobias Frere-Jones in 2006: it’s a witty rendering of his twentieth-century Meta typeface, produced in the distinctly nineteenth-century technology of wood type. As a gift to a type designer whose work regularly engages with historical form, I thought it was especially poignant.
The set was made by <a href="http://www.pqcc.net/woodtype.htm" target="_blank">Scott Polzen</a>, who began exploring the resurrection of wood typemaking while still a student. His latter-day wood types are lovely artifacts, cut from cherry and finished with sandpaper and file, as Polzen explained in an essay in <a href="http://www.tdc.org/downloads/tdcletterspace2006summer.pdf
" target="_blank">Letterspace</a>, a journal of <a href="http://tdc.org/" target="_blank">The Type Directors’ Club</a>. As intriguing as the how of this project is the why: “I’ve come to understand,” Polzen writes, “that my real motivation for this project was to gain a greater sense of participation in the culture of reading and writing: making wood type forced me to think quite literally about how the written word works.” I thought this sentiment nicely echoed Noordzij’s own philosophy about the primacy of written, not printed, words; it makes Polzen’s connection to the award even more apt.
Wim Crouwel will receive the 2009 Gerrit Noordzij Prize on Friday, when we’ll have the first photographs of the award that Tobias designed for him. I will miss seeing it around our office. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 06 Mar 2009 00:03:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-gerrit-noordzij-prize-part-1-outgoing#385</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Tobias Frere-Jones: An Exhibit at the Royal Academy of Art]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/tobias-frere-jones-an-exhibit-at-the-royal-academy-of-art</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/frere-jones-kabk6.jpg">
Tobias is the fourth and current holder of the Gerrit Noordzij Prize, which was presented to him in 2006. Every few years, the <a href="http://www.kabk.nl/" target="_blank">Royal Academy of Art</a> in The Hague celebrates an individual for his “unique contributions to type design, typography, and type education,” qualities which honor both the recipient and the prize’s namesake: Gerrit Noordzij, as an instructor, a designer, and a type designer, has influenced generations of typographers, and has been singularly instrumental in establishing typography as a realm for disciplined, critical thinking.
This Friday, the prize passes to the next recipient, an occasion marked by two festivities: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Crouwel" target="_blank">Wim Crouwel</a> will receive the 2009 prize, and the Royal Academy will open an exhibit of Tobias’s work. If it’s any indication of the scope of the show’s contents, let me just say that even I was surprised by some of the things Tobias pulled from the files; it is an exhibit not to be missed.
The exhibit opens this Friday, March 6, and runs through Saturday, March 28, in the <a href="http://www.kabk.nl/nieuws/index/-/_sid-69bf01c94a92509deac67ca52a98648fb0f6ae9f.0/news_showpublished-8405" target="_blank">KABK Galerie</a>. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 03 Mar 2009 11:13:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/tobias-frere-jones-an-exhibit-at-the-royal-academy-of-art#384</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Things We Love]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/things-we-love</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/recife_500.jpg">
I’ve always had a thing for collage. If I was more highfalutin, I’d claim some childhood fascination with <a href="http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=joseph+cornell&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2" target="_blank">Joseph Cornell</a> or <a href="http://www.jimrosenquist-artist.com/" target="_blank">James Rosenquist</a> — both of whom I love, but didn’t discover until adulthood. The truth is that I probably developed a taste for collage listening to <a href="http://images.google.com/images?gbv=2&hl=en&safe=off&q=pixies+albums&btnG=Search+Images" target="_blank">The Pixies</a>, and reveling in all those magnificent album covers designed by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaughan_Oliver" target="_blank">Vaughan Oliver</a>. Oliver’s work for the record label <a href="http://www.4ad.com/" target="_blank">4AD</a> was for me an incandescent highlight of the early nineties, and his enigmatic album covers for The Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance and Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares always left me shaking my head in wonder, asking “where does this come from?” Sometimes the music inside would echo an answer.
One of Oliver’s regular collaborators was the Japanese collage artist <a href="http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=shinro+ohtake&btnG=Search+Images&gbv=2" target="_blank">Shinro Ohtake</a>, whose work came to define the art form for me. His incorporation of type made his work irresistible to a typographer; I archly enjoyed watching it come full circle, as his works of fine art gradually came to be used as pieces of commercial art themselves. (The Bill Laswell album <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Seven_Souls.jpg" target="_blank">Seven Souls</a> uses an Ohtake collage, full and unaltered, for its cover.) Because collages pose an energetic dialogue between high and low art, they’ve always been fertile ground for graphic designers, as demonstrated by the dominating “<a href="http://images.google.com/images?gbv=2&hl=en&safe=off&q=chip+kidd+book+cover&btnG=Search+Images
" target="_blank">Knopf style</a>” of the nineties. Knopf designers Carol Carson, Barbara de Wilde, Archie Ferguson and Chip Kidd proved two things: first, that collage was not only dynamic and intriguing, but inviting and literary; second, that it required a dab hand. Things that look easy have a way of being difficult to do well.
Wandering online this weekend, I came across the site of <a href="http://www.eduardorecife.com/" target="_blank">Eduardo Recife</a>, whose work includes the piece I’ve reproduced above. To me, this is what collage aspires to be: a motley company of ordinary performers choreographed into something that expresses the ineffable. I especially admire Recife’s ability to crash incongruous elements with elegance and wit (q.v. the donuts, above), as well as his egalitarian affection for all kinds of typography, from engravings to parking tickets. Spend some time with Recife’s work this afternoon: it’s a delight. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 02 Mar 2009 12:01:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/things-we-love#383</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Wearable Rococo]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/wearable-rococo</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/brooches_500.jpg">
Look up and you’ll see the floriated, ornamented, shaded letters of our logo (l. gravura tuscana), as well as an italic cousin used for the News, Notes & Observations nameplate. I have a special fondness for these kinds of letters, which reflect a synthesis of traditions from both typemaking and engraving. Is it therefore any wonder that I love these alphabet brooches from Bena Clothing, spotted by our friends at <a href="http://www.designspongeonline.com/2009/02/alphabet-brooches.html" target="_blank">Design Sponge</a>? They’re made from laser-etched cheery veneer over mahogany, thoughtfully offered as set of 53 pieces with duplicates of popular letters. (I wonder how the <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/four-shortage-strikes-nation" target="_blank">frequency distribution</a> of initials differs from that of other kinds of words: extra Js, I imagine?) —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Sat, 28 Feb 2009 03:15:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/wearable-rococo#382</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[The New Gothams: 46 New Fonts from H&Co.]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-new-gothams-46-new-fonts-from-hco</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Fans of our Gotham typeface will be pleased to find that as of this morning, there are three times as many Gothams in the world as there were yesterday.
Designers who work with Gotham have enthusiastically deployed the fonts in a range of environments. We’ve seen Gotham on soda cans, boarding passes, billboards and banner ads; we’ve seen it engraved in marble on a cornerstone, and cast in rubber on the sole of a shoe. One newspaper used Gotham for financial listings, another for saucy tabloid headlines. But what we see the most are designers facing the challenge of making one typeface work across all channels. Last year saw one of the most remarkable examples of this: journalists couldn’t stop writing about something that designers have always known, which is that a candidate for president should use the same font for everything, from lawn signs and flyers to the campaign’s website.
Making a font work everywhere is a tall order. H&Co’s designers love these kinds of challenges, and are driven by an incurable compulsion to make fonts that can answer everyone’s needs. But designing a typeface is an arduous process requiring serious commitment, and we realized early on that if we weren’t careful, there could suddenly be an endless number of very specialized Gothams. The prospect of a “Gotham for embroidery” collection and a “Gotham for box scores” was daunting, and ran counter to one of H&Co’s core philosophies: that type families should be as small as possible, but as large as necessary.
So we organized all of these ideas into a coherent design brief, mapped out a way to bring a larger Gotham family to life, and then devoted years to drawing the new fonts that we’re delighted to present today. Today’s Gotham contains a total of 66 styles, neatly organized into four widths: regular Gotham, the new <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/inside/gotham-narrow/" target="_blank">Gotham Narrow</a> and <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/inside/gotham-extra-narrow/" target="_blank">Extra Narrow</a>, and the newly-expanded <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/inside/gotham-condensed/" target="_blank">Gotham Condensed</a>. They’re all now available, in packages starting at $169, exclusively at H&Co.]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 20 Jan 2009 11:30:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-new-gothams-46-new-fonts-from-hco#380</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typographic Gifts — for You.]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-you</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/gothamFlakes-5_500_X.jpg">
Our workshop, now elf-free due to labor regulations, has been hard at work on a couple of goodies that we’re looking forwarding to bringing you in January; watch this space. Until then, best wishes for the holidays and a happy new year — see you in 2009! —H&Co]]>
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<pubDate>Thu, 25 Dec 2008 04:04:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-you#379</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typographic Gifts for Designers, Part 15]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-15</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/snd-cards.png">
If you’re an editorial designer, chances are that you’re familiar with the <a href="http://www.snd.org/" target="_blank">Society for News Design</a> through its workshops, its excellent international conferences, and of course its annual. What you might not know is that SND operates the non-profit SND Foundation, which provides college scholarships, research grants, and travel stipends to help students attend its events. Did I mention the <a href="http://www.snd.org/about/fnd5.html" target="_blank">college scholarships for designers?</a>
For last year’s conference in Las Vegas, SND Foundation President Bill Gaspard orchestrated a terrific keepsake: a deck of Custom Illustrated Playing Cards, for which 54 illustrators volunteered their time and talent, contributing one card each. Guessing correctly that H&Co has a thing for <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/inside/deuce/" target="_blank">the typography of playing cards</a>, I was invited to design the packaging, affording me a chance to two of our best wedge-seriffed typefaces, <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/saracen/overview/" target="_blank">Saracen</a> and <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/mercury-text/overview/" target="_blank">Mercury</a>. And naturally Gaspard and fellow designer Tyson Evans used our <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/inside/deuce" target="_blank">Deuce</a> font on the cards themselves.
For those who weren’t able to make it to Vegas, SND is now offering sets of these commemorative cards for sale, for a tax-deductible contribution of $20.00. All proceeds go to support the work of the SND Foundation; did I mention the <a href="http://www.snd.org/about/fnd5.html" target="_blank">college scholarships for designers?</a> —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Thu, 18 Dec 2008 15:18:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-15#381</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typographic Gifts for Designers, Part 14]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-14</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/berenice-abbott.jpg">
Hot on the heels of my open question about <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-11" target="_blank">artists and fives</a>, I came across this marvelous photograph by Berenice Abbott featuring a pair of gorgeous fives in starring roles. Abbott is best remembered for Changing New York, her seminal collection of photographs that documents New York of the 1930s; it’s both an inspiration and a great resource for designers, especially typeface designers whose work is <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/history/" target="_blank">influenced</a> by the public sphere.
For eighty years, the A. Zito Bakery stood at 259 Bleecker Street, a short walk from the H&Co offices. In a street now dominated by bar room neon and vacuform plastic, Zito’s window looked in 2004 much the way it did when Abbott photographed it in 1937. Bread Store is among a collection of Berenice Abbott Photographs now available from AllPosters.com as high-resolution Giclée prints, lovely not only for the glimpses they offer into a grander New York, but for some marvelous lettering as well. These barber shop windows (<a href="http://www.allposters.com/gallery.asp?startat=/getposter.asp&APNum=4325626&CID=6E0937B31D0C4560AF64B54B97029C14&PPID=1&search=berenice%20abbott&f=t&FindID=0&P=1&PP=3&sortby=PD&cname=&SearchID=" target="_blank">1</a>, <a href="http://www.allposters.com/gallery.asp?startat=/getposter.asp&APNum=4325674&CID=6E0937B31D0C4560AF64B54B97029C14&PPID=1&search=berenice%20abbott&f=t&FindID=0&P=1&PP=3&sortby=PD&cname=&SearchID=" target="_blank">2</a>) must be tremendous up close, and the humble decals in Zito’s window above have long been a favorite of ours: our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/inside/delancey/">Delancey</a> font is based on them. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Mon, 15 Dec 2008 07:23:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-14#378</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typographic Gifts for Designers, Part 13]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-13</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/lettermix_500.jpg">
The disappearance of wood type has something to do with the slow fade of letterpress from the world of commercial printing; it also has something to do with that dude at the flea market who sells hot-glued wood type sculptures on the weekends. And the Dust Bowl didn’t help: seventy years ago, Americans throughout the Great Plains discovered that blocks of hardwood impregnated with linseed oil could be very useful in a whole new way, so into the furnace they went.
Uppercase Gallery in Calgary has collected some wood type that’s been removed from circulation, and is offering it as the cheerfully packaged Authentic Vintage Woodtype Lettermix. We’re delighted that they chose our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/knockout/overview/">Knockout</a> font family for the packaging, a typeface founded in the very sans serifs that their package contains. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Fri, 12 Dec 2008 07:34:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-13#377</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Typographic Gifts for Designers, Part 12]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-12</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/totebags.jpg">
I liked <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampler_(needlework)" target="_blank">samplers</a> as a kid. In the fictional account of my life, I could trace this affection to my dear great-grandmother Abigail, who spent hours embroidering by candlelight (when she wasn’t busy repairing uniforms for returning Union soldiers.) But having grown up in New York in the seventies, it’s more likely that I first noticed the style while watching Family Feud, and that a steady diet of Atari 2600 and NAMCO simply predisposed my developing brain to a sympathy for bitmaps.
<a href="http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?ref=sr_gallery_5&listing_id=18073075" target="_blank">Etsy</a> is carrying a charming little bag that pays homage to the cross-stitch, a gusseted Canvas Tote silkscreened in orange or blue. At 11" × 14" (30cm × 35cm) it’s big enough for the usual junk that designers lug around, and is of course a sound alternative to grocery store plastic, whether you’re ecologically responsible or just self-righteous. Either way, be stylish. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Thu, 11 Dec 2008 07:04:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-12#376</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Typographic Gifts for Designers, Part 11]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-11</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/ziggurat-five-poster2_500.jpg">
Picking up where we left off <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-10">last year</a>, we thought we’d round out 2008 with some holiday ideas for the recovering typophiliac in your life.
I’m intrigued by Jen Bekman’s <a href="http://www.20x200.com/" target="_blank">20x200</a>, which every week produces small runs of small works on paper, at prices to match. Among their collection of prints and photographs is this limited edition print by Superdeluxe, the studio of designers Adrienne Wong and Karin Spraggs. The appropriately named Ziggurat 5 is a happy riot of color and type, featuring of course the figure five from our own <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/ziggurat/overview/">Ziggurat Black</a> typeface. (What is it about artists and <a href="http://images.google.com/images?um=1&hl=en&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en-us&q=I+Saw+the+Figure+Five+in+Gold&btnG=Search+Images
" target="_blank">fives</a>?) The print is produced in three different editions: a small 8½" × 11" (22cm × 28cm) in archival pigments, a larger 17" × 20" (43cm × 51cm) that includes a letterpress impression, and the largest 30" × 40" (76cm × 102cm) which combines printing and silkscreening. Collect all three. Fives. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 10 Dec 2008 06:10:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-11#375</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Blog Tags]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/blog-tags</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/blog-tags-graf_500.jpg">
Regular readers of H&Co’s blog will notice a few changes to the blog today, chief among them the addition of tags.
Some items are identified by visual labels (<a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/tag/Blackletter" target="_blank">Blackletter</a>, <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/tag/Punctuation" target="_blank">Punctuation</a>, <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/tag/Calligraphy" target="_blank">Calligraphy</a>, <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/tag/Lettering" target="_blank">Lettering</a>), others are organized conceptually (<a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/tag/Behavior" target="_blank">Behavior</a>, <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/tag/Puzzles" target="_blank">Puzzles</a>, <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/tag/Satire" target="_blank">Satire</a>, <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/tag/Unexplained" target="_blank">Unexplained</a>); most tags have a little bit of both (<a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/tag/Modular+Letters" target="_blank">Modular Letters</a>, <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/tag/Process" target="_blank">Process</a>, <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/tag/Paradoxes" target="_blank">Paradoxes</a>). At least a few categories might be unexpected (<a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/tag/Food+and+Drink" target="_blank">Food & Drink</a>, <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/tag/Gifts" target="_blank">Gifts</a>, <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/tag/Onomastics" target="_blank">Onomastics</a>, <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/tag/Asemic+Writing" target="_blank">Asemic Writing</a>), and at least one is probably confounding. But I’ll leave it to you to find it. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Mon, 08 Dec 2008 14:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/blog-tags#374</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[His Name Was Almost Legion]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/his-name-was-almost-legion</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/lettersnijder-mats_500.jpg">
<a href="http://typefoundry.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">James Mosley</a> shared with me this striking photograph of some of the world’s oldest type-making material. These brass matrices, made by a Dutch punchcutter in 1508, are now in the collection of the <a href="http://www.museumenschede.nl/" target="_blank">Enschedé Museum</a> in Haarlem. It’s remarkable that they’ve survived long enough to celebrate their 500th birthday.
Especially enthusiastic type buffs might recognize these as the Great Primer Uncials that we adapted for our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/historical-allsorts/inside/english-textura/" target="_blank">Historical Allsorts</a> collection, but even the most devoted connoisseur is unlikely to know the name of the man behind them. It’s amazing that we don’t, given his significance: historian H. D. L. Vervliet identifies an entire historical period with the designer’s name alone, noting that as many as half of all books printed in Holland in the first half of the sixteenth century featured this one man’s typefaces. This was an extraordinary achievement for a man less famous than his contemporaries Garamond, Granjon or Plantin, so we have to ask — doing our best <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYMRjnM6j6w" target="_blank">Graham Chapman impression</a> — why is it that the world has forgotten the name of Henric Pieterszoon Lettersnijder?

The polysyllabic moniker couldn’t have helped, any more than it helped save the two other typographic Lettersnijders from obscurity (it’s not a last name, but rather an appellation meaning ‘letter-cutter’), though Henric Pieterszoon was likely a victim of the style in which he worked. Typography confers immortality upon those whose designs are successfully adapted by others, and enduring names such as “Garamond” are known to us thanks to an unbroken chain of homages — concluding finally in a century’s worth of historical revivals that populate our font menus. Whatever their aesthetic virtues, what most immediately qualified Garamond’s types for revival was their familiarity: the Garamonds we know today are romans and italics, two universal species of letter in which Henric Pieterszoon Lettersnijder never worked.
The styles for which Lettersnijder was best known were a <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/historical-allsorts/inside/english-textura/" target="_blank">textura</a> of the Northern European style, and these marvelous uncials. Uncials are rounded Gothic letters of Lombardic origin, used mainly for initials, and Lettersnijder’s uncials are of a Germanic strain identifiable by the knobby serif endings that Vervliet colorfully calls “poodle’s paws.” After dominating typography for half a century, Lettersnijder’s designs began to fade from view only when the types themselves began to physically deteriorate, but ultimately it was the ascendancy of humanism that drove all of the gothic styles from favor. Gothic types appeared in nearly every book printed at the beginning of the sixteenth century, but almost none of those printed at the end. In the twenty-first century, texturas and uncials live on as interesting typographic curios, trotted out for newspaper flags, diplomas, and other special occasions. A “happy 500th birthday” card would surely qualify. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 03 Dec 2008 07:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/his-name-was-almost-legion#373</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Change We Somehow Can’t Quite Believe In, Though We Just Can’t Put Our Finger On It]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/change-we-somehow-cant-quite-believe-in-though-we-just-cant-put-our-finger-</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/changeling.png">
Every four years, the month of November tenders an exciting opportunity for financial speculation, this year offering an almost practical alternative to your lending institution of choice (still solvent as of presstime) or your flameproof mattress. Behold the high-stakes world of political memorabilia, now doing brisk business on the internet.
To my surprise and delight, this year’s “process pieces” about the election included <a href="https://www.typography.com/about/press.php" target="_blank">dozens of articles</a> about the Obama campaign’s exceptional graphic design standards, none of which failed to mention <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/">Gotham</a>, the campaign’s official typeface. Obviously not every piece of Obama paraphernalia featured the font — organizations unaffiliated with the campaign certainly produced their share of ad hoc design, and this was a candidate who attracted a tremendous number of independent enthusiasts — but the typography employed by the campaign itself was remarkably consistent, which is what made it newsworthy.
A search for “Obama” on eBay yields more than twenty thousand items, including these three pieces of questionable Obama memorabilia (Fauxbamarabilia?), none of which features the campaign’s signature typeface. First and last are rally signs set in Gill Sans, which is close to Gotham, but no cigar. At the top it’s paired with Lucida, at the bottom with Times Roman; let me suggest to anyone interested in counterfeiting printed ephemera that you look a little further than the fonts that came with your computer. The middle one has a certain primitivist charm that suggests the work of a cheerful amateur, but the legend “Paid for by Obama for America” marks it as a likely fraud: if it’s not, it’s the only piece of American political printing I’ve ever seen that doesn’t also include a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_label
" target="_blank">union bug</a>.
Anyway, if you’re hunting for genuine souvenirs, try the campaigns themselves. Both the <a href="http://store.barackobama.com/Office_s/600.htm
" target="_blank">Obama</a> and <a href="http://www.johnmccain.com/storelanding/" target="_blank">McCain</a> organizations are still unloading their extras. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 26 Nov 2008 05:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/change-we-somehow-cant-quite-believe-in-though-we-just-cant-put-our-finger-#372</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[On the Death and 441-Year Life of the Pixel]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/on-the-death-and-441-year-life-of-the-pixel</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/ostaus.png">
The struggle to adequately render letterforms on a pixel grid is a familiar one, and an ancient one as well: this bitmap alphabet is from La Vera Perfettione del Disegno di varie sorte di ricami, an embroidery guide by Giovanni Ostaus published in 1567.
Renaissance ‘lace books’ have much to offer the modern digital designer, who also faces the challenge of portraying clear and replicable images in a constrained environment. Ostaus’s alphabet follows the cardinal rule of bitmaps, which is to always reckon the height of a capital letter on an odd number of pixels. (Try drawing a capital E on both a 5×5 grid and a 6×6, and you'll see.) Ostaus ignored the second rule, however, which is “leave space for descenders.”
I’d planned to introduce this item with a snappy headline that juxtaposed the old and the new — for your sixteenth-century Nintendo! — before reflecting on the pixel’s moribund existence. Pixels were the stuff of my first computer, which strained to show 137 of them in a square inch; my latest cellphone manages 32,562 in this same space, and has 65,000 colors to choose from, not eight. Its smooth anti-aliased type helps conceal the underlying matrix of pixels, which are nearly as invisible as the grains of silver halide on a piece of film. And its user interface reinforces this illusion using a trick borrowed from Hollywood: it keeps the type moving as much as possible.
Crisp cellphone screens aren’t the end of the story. There are already sharper displays on handheld remote controls and consumer-grade cameras, and monitors supporting the tremendous WQUXGA resolution of 3840×2400 are making their way from medical labs to living rooms. The pixel will never go away entirely, but its finite universe of digital watches and winking highway signs is contracting fast. It’s likely that the pixel’s final and most enduring role will be a shabby one, serving as an out-of-touch visual cliché to connote “the digital age.” —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Thu, 20 Nov 2008 07:02:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/on-the-death-and-441-year-life-of-the-pixel#371</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[To Paraphrase Alasdair Gray]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/to-paraphrase-alasdair-gray</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/work_500.png">
You are. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 05 Nov 2008 09:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/to-paraphrase-alasdair-gray#370</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Voting Irregularities Already!]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/voting-irregularities-already</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/election-typecuts_500.jpg">
The donkey is universally recognized as the symbol of Democratic Party of the United States. Except inside voting booths in New York State, where affiliation with the Democratic party is marked by a five-pointed star. Midwestern voters indicate the Democratic ticket with a rooster, except in Missouri, where the symbol has traditionally been the Statue of Liberty — coincidentally also the symbol of the Libertarian party, which appealed to use the symbol when they joined the ballot in 1976. They’ve settled for using the Liberty Bell instead, though some Missouri Libertarians also use the symbol of the mule. Not the Democratic mule, mind you, the Missouri mule. The mule is the state animal of Missouri.
Those who suspect that Republican iconography will show the same mastery of political organization as the rest of that party are correct: Republican candidates are always signified by an elephant, except inside voting booths in Indiana, New York, and West Virginia, where an eagle is used instead. And in these states, as well as the 47 others, the eagle is also the national symbol of the United States itself.
The Chicago typefoundry of Barnhart Brothers & Spindler showed these “Election Typecuts” in their Catalog 25-A, published around 1930, and 78 years later I think my district is still using this same art. Cheerily Barnhart Brothers accompanied their samples with this legend:
<blockquote class="excerpt">
When changes in the political situation — the birth of new parties, revision of election laws, or other causes call for new emblems or characters other than shown above, our facilities enable us to produce the material promptly at moderate cost.
</blockquote>
I’m ready. You? —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 04 Nov 2008 08:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/voting-irregularities-already#369</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Find us on Facebook]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/find-us-on-facebook</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hfj-facebook-friends_500.jpg">
Yesterday, our 1,000th Facebook friend became a fan of H&Co. <a href="https://www.facebook.com/HoeflerCo" target="_blank">Won’t you join us?</a>
Fellow typographers have joined us on Facebook to start conversations, share links of interest, and post photographs of things made with H&Co fonts. (Now showing: group member Rick Griffith’s typographic stencils made from Gotham, in which the scale isn’t immediately apparent; “it’s about eight feet long,” says Rick casually…) Bring your favorite work featuring H&Co fonts and share it with the class. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 28 Oct 2008 07:22:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/find-us-on-facebook#368</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Atoms & Aldus]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/atoms-aldus</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/aldine-italic_500.jpg">
Last week I mentioned <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/a-typographic-challenge-at-0.000007086614175-points" target="_blank">the atomic pen</a>, which scientists used to construct some awfully tiny letters one atom at a time. These are small letters indeed: measuring two nanometers in height, they’re about ¹&frasl;₄₀₀₀₀ the thickness of a human hair, which surely gives their inventor sufficient authority to issue the casual throwdown that “it’s not possible to write any smaller than this.” But it is, of course, and the technique for doing so has been known to typefounders for more than five hundred years.

The issue of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/mercury-text/features/mercury-efficiency/" target="_blank">space-efficiency</a> is one that’s <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/features/whitney-economy/" target="_blank">very dear</a> to type designers, and the tradition of designing around spatial limitations is one that dates to the very earliest printed books. The name most commonly associated with compact typography is Aldus Manutius (1449–1515), the renaissance printer who produced the world’s first <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octavo_(book)" target="_blank">octavo</a> edition in 1501, a book small enough to be carried in the pocket. Aldus is remembered for a second important innovation as well: it was Aldus’s punchcutter, Francesco Griffo, who cut the world’s first italic typeface in 1499. Below is this italic as it appears in the oldest book in the H&Co library, a small volume of verse by the humanist poet Giovanni Aurelius Augurello published in 1505. Not coincidentally this is a very small book, measuring just 3½" × 6¼" (89 × 159 mm); italics and small books have something in common.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hoeflers-patent-italic-atoms_500.png">
Before the italic evolved its modern semantic function as an auxiliary to the roman, it was simply a different vernacular style. Some suggest that Aldus’s selection may have had a cultural component — that just as early Venetian printers used roman types to distinguish secular works from religious ones (which were set in blackletter), Aldus may have chosen italic letters to distinguish verse from prose (which was set in roman.) In any case, a demonstrable benefit of italics that Aldus exploited was their economy: italics are narrower than romans, and more compactly fitted, which allowed Aldine editions to carry more words per page than books printed in comparably-sized roman types.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hoeflers-patent-italic-atoms2_500.png">
Just as the hypotenuse is always the longest side of a right triangle, an angled letter I will always be longer than an upright I of the same height. This can be a nuisance when designing type families, since an especially slanted italic will have ascenders and descenders that feel too long, and shortening them would undercut a fundamental visual relationship with the matching roman. But where there is no matching roman, as in Aldus’s case, these strokes can be retracted at will, offering the additional benefit of shortening the alphabet’s overall height. And it’s this technique that suggests a solution to the atomic alphabet challenge: by reckoning letters on a rotated grid, in which there are upright vertices instead of horizontal ones, it’s easier to make letters that can be both shorter and more tightly fitted. A final benefit of the rotated grid is the ease with which it can render horizontal strokes, which are crucial to the Latin alphabet, and otherwise impossible in a hexagonal matrix. —JH
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/atoms-n-aldus_500.jpg">]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 21 Oct 2008 08:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/atoms-aldus#367</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Neon Boneyard]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-neon-boneyard</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/clymer-neon-boneyard_500.jpg">
Our own Andy Clymer as returned from a trip out west with some <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/andyclymer/tags/neonboneyard/
" target="_blank">fine photos</a> of Las Vegas’s infamous neon boneyard. A project of the <a href="http://www.neonmuseum.org/boneyard.html" target="_blank">Neon Museum</a>, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the preservation and study of one of the nation’s great lettering traditions, the neon boneyard is of course located in the Las Vegas desert: an ideal climate for preservation, and convenient to the center of the energetic neon carnage of the 21st century.
Years ago I enjoyed a tour of the boneyard during a visit with Yesco, the Young Electric Sign Company, who are responsible for the haberdashery of a significant number of megawatts on the Vegas strip. It was with a combination of pride and horror that I discovered how many H&Co fonts were being used on the new digital signs that were fast replacing the old neon: even today, Yesco’s <a href="http://www.yesco.com/" target="_blank">own site</a> advertises their digital abilities using a little <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/knockout/overview/" target="_blank">Knockout</a>. For a type designer with a love of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/history/" target="_blank">signs</a>, it’s a very odd feeling. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 20 Oct 2008 13:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-neon-boneyard#366</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[A Typographic Challenge at 0.000007086614175 points]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-typographic-challenge-at-0.000007086614175-points</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/atomic-type.jpg">
With what is delightfully being called “The Atomic Pen,” a team of researchers has created what are likely the world’s smallest letters. At left is an array of silicon atoms measuring two nanometers in height, or a little less than one hundred thousandth of a point.
Their technique, documented in today’s issue of <a href="http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/322/5900/413" target="_blank">Science</a> magazine, makes use of an earlier discovery: that within a certain proximity, individual atoms from the silicon tip of an <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_force_microscope" target="_blank">atomic force microscope</a> will exchange with tin atoms on the surface of a semiconductor. “It’s not possible to write any smaller than this,” said researcher Masayuki Abe, which sounds like a challenge to me: I can already think of one way to make letters that are 8% smaller, using the team’s own technique. Can you? <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/atoms-aldus">Answers next week</a>. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 17 Oct 2008 11:38:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-typographic-challenge-at-0.000007086614175-points#365</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[For America.]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/for-america</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hoefler-obama-poster4_500.png">
This summer, the Obama campaign asked me to design a typographic poster for the Artists for Obama series. It’s now available sold out at the Obama for America website, in a numbered edition of 5,000. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 15 Oct 2008 12:14:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/for-america#364</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Collection of the Day]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/collection-of-the-day</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/typewriter-tins_500.jpg">
I am not wistful for the days of carbon paper and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correction_paper" target="_blank">Ko-Rec-Type</a>, and the era of the typewriter ended before I ever figured out what to do with those <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/67324926@N00/23137756" target="_blank">wheely-eraser-brush-things</a> that populated my parents’ offices. But a truly grand leftover from the vanished world of the typewriter is the ribbon tin; my friend <a href="http://www.talleming.com">Tal</a> sent me <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/uppercaseyyc/sets/72157603733873729/" target="_blank">this collection</a> of product packaging shots on Flickr, which are resplendent with lovely lettering. Some are <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/uppercaseyyc/2198753866/in/set-72157603733873729/" target="_blank">sweet</a> and others <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/uppercaseyyc/2198756370/in/set-72157603733873729/" target="_blank">serious</a>, some are <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/uppercaseyyc/2198757728/in/set-72157603733873729/" target="_blank">frank</a>, and some are simply <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/uppercaseyyc/2197966579/in/set-72157603733873729/" target="_blank">fantastic</a>. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 13 Oct 2008 07:42:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/collection-of-the-day#363</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[The World’s Most Perfect Script]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-worlds-most-perfect-script</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hangul2.png">
Typographically, the Republic of Korea has much to celebrate. The world’s first typefaces cast in metal were made in Korea: a fourteenth century book in the collection of the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris establishes Korean printing from movable type at least as far back as 1377, though <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_typography_in_East_Asia#Movable_type_in_Korea
" target="_blank">Korean typefounding</a> may date to 1234, some 221 years before Gutenberg. An impediment to early printing was the complexity of Chinese characters, then used to render the Korean language, which further stifled national literacy. But in 1446, an undertaking by King Sejong the Great addressed both problems, through what is surely one of the greatest inventions in the history of typography: the Hangul alphabet. On October 9, Korea celebrates this incredible innovation as Korean Alphabet Day, better known as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_Day" target="_blank">Hangul Day</a>.
The invention and reform of alphabets has a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_of_writing_systems" target="_blank">long tradition</a>, though its efforts are rarely successful. Generally speaking, script systems with <a href="http://www.omniglot.com/writing/conscripts.htm" target="_blank">highly scientific foundations</a> go completely unrecognized, the typographic equivalent of Esperanto. And among the world’s most successful script systems are some of its most arbitrary: nothing in the design of the Latin A suggests its sound or meaning, and even scripts with pictographic origins such as Chinese are usually <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_character_classification#Pictograms
" target="_blank">abstracted</a> to the point of unrecognizability. But Hangul, Korea’s “Great Script,” is perhaps history’s only effort at alphabet reform that is both scientifically rigorous and universally successful. As a result of careful planning, Hangul is easily learned, comfortably written, and infinitely flexible.
Hangul is comprised of 51 jamo, or phomenic units, whose shapes are highly organized. Simple consonants are linear (ㄱ, ㄴ, ㄷ, ㄹ, ㅁ, ㅂ, ㅅ, ㅇ, ㅈ, ㅊ, ㅋ, ㅌ, ㅍ, ㅎ), vowels are horizontal or vertical lines (ㅏ, ㅓ, ㅗ, ㅜ, ㅡ, ㅣ), glottalized letters are doubled (ㄲ, ㄸ, ㅃ, ㅆ, ㅉ), and so on. But more interestingly, Hangul’s characters are featural: their shapes are related to the sounds they symbolize, each representing a different position of the mouth and tongue. Pay attention to the curvature of your lower lip when you form the sounds buh and puh, and you’ll begin to see the logic of Hangul’s B (ㅂ) and P (ㅍ). Notice how your tongue interacts with the roof of your mouth when you say sss and juh, and you’ll understand the design of its S (ㅅ) and J (ㅈ). Hangul’s ability to represent an especially wide range of sounds makes it easy to render loan words from other languages, a challenge in many Asian scripts (but an entertaining hazard to <a href="http://www.snopes.com/cokelore/tadpole.asp" target="_blank">reckless Westerners</a>.) Typographically, I envy my Korean counterparts who get to work with Hangul, with its letterforms that always fit into a square, and can be read in any direction (horizontally or vertically.) And best of all: no kerning! —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 09 Oct 2008 02:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-worlds-most-perfect-script#360</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Finds from the NYPL]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/finds-from-the-nypl</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/nypl-overview-640px.jpg">
Some lovelies from the New York Public Library.  —JH

<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/nypl-2-640px.jpg">
No. <a href="http://tinyurl.com/53jphw" target="_blank">819191</a>. Petits Genres, a lithograph by J. Midolle, 1834-1835.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/nypl-1-640px.jpg">
No. <a href="http://tinyurl.com/4jl8zv" target="_blank">419695</a>. Photographs of British Algae, Vol. 1. A volume of cyanotypes by photographer Anna Atkins, 1843-53.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/nypl-3-640px.jpg">
No. <a href="http://tinyurl.com/4ydf5v" target="_blank">481256</a>. Three several alphabets of the Japanese language, by Engelbert Kaempfer, 1727.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/nypl-4-640px.jpg">
No. <a href="http://tinyurl.com/3ru6y2" target="_blank">818525</a>. The Prang examples of historic ornament: Arabian. L. Prang & Co.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/nypl-5-640px.jpg">
No. <a href="http://tinyurl.com/3maws6" target="_blank">1207546</a>. Past and present yacht clubs of New England, L. Prang & Co., c. 1887.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/nypl-6-640px.jpg">
No. <a href="http://tinyurl.com/3nuexv" target="_blank">1221613</a>. A color combination chart for layered clothing, by Yoshiyuki Hagino, 1868.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/nypl-7-640px.jpg">
No. <a href="http://tinyurl.com/4szajm" target="_blank">94915</a>. Poster in Chinese from the New York Public Library Chatham Square Branch, a lantern slide.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/nypl-8-640px.jpg">
No. <a href="http://tinyurl.com/4ad8fj" target="_blank">1619655</a>. Entwicklung der Ägyptischen Schriftzeichen, 1880.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/nypl-9-640px.jpg">
No. <a href="http://tinyurl.com/4gy8rd" target="_blank">1221632</a>. An illustration of writing brushes, by Yoshiyuki Hagino, c. 1868.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/nypl-10-640px.jpg">
No. <a href="http://tinyurl.com/3p4afc" target="_blank">426192</a>. Compotus, Quadrans, De Sphaera, Algorismus, Cautelae, by Joannes de Sacro Bosco, c. 1260.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/nypl-11-640px.jpg">
No. <a href="http://tinyurl.com/3wvjfy" target="_blank">1152273</a>. Interpretatio I. qua Characterum Sinicorum, qui in Monumento Sinico continenturpronunciatio genuina per Ltinos Characteres exprimitur, by Athanasius Kircher, 1667.]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 08 Oct 2008 05:54:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/finds-from-the-nypl#362</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Six Hundred Thousand Images]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/six-hundred-thousand-images</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/prang_alphabets3.png">
Discovered: the New York Public Library’s gallery of prints, drawings and photographs is now available <a href="http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/" target="_blank">online</a>. I recommend some keyword searches with typographic terms: ‘lettering’ yielded <a href="http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/dgkeysearchdetail.cfm?trg=1&strucID=299804&imageID=486088&word=alphabet&s=1&notword=&d=&c=&f=&lWord=&lField=&sScope=&sLevel=&sLabel=&total=74&num=60&imgs=12&pNum=&pos=62#" target="_blank">this little number</a>, a scrapbook of late 19th century advertising cards in resplendent Victorian style. A search for ‘<a href="http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/dgkeysearchresult.cfm?keyword=cyrillic&submit.x=0&submit.y=0" target="_blank">Cyrillic</a>’ is equally beguiling! —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 07 Oct 2008 09:47:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/six-hundred-thousand-images#361</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Ten Foot Gotham Topiary!]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/ten-foot-gotham-topiary</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/gotham-topiary_500.jpg">
Not really much to add to that. It’s <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=houston+and+lafayette+streets,+new+york&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=87.574623,85.78125&ie=UTF8&ll=40.725153,-73.995259&spn=0.005391,0.005236&t=h&z=18&iwloc=addr" target="_blank">here</a>, one block east of the H&Co offices. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 03 Oct 2008 07:08:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/ten-foot-gotham-topiary#359</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Now Hiring]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/now-hiring</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/jobs-graphicdesigner.png">
There are those designers in the world whose idea of design begins and ends with typography. I’m obviously one of them: before founding H&Co, my graphic design portfolio included book covers with carefully worked lettering atop “illustration TK,” and editorial design in which main features were ignored in favor of type-rich pages like the table of contents, where I really got to flex my muscles.
If this sounds familiar, and you’re a graphic designer in the New York area seeking full-time employment, take a look at our <a href="https://www.typography.com/../about/careers.php" target="_blank">careers</a> page: we’re looking for a very special typomaniac graphic designer to join us. Position filled!—JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 25 Sep 2008 07:19:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/now-hiring#358</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Never Looked Better]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/never-looked-better</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/wired-gothamrounded-collage_500.jpg">
In the year and change since we released the <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham-rounded/overview/" target="_blank">Gotham Rounded</a> family, I’ve noticed an unusual paradox at play. Some designers choose the fonts because of their high-tech associations, and can coax out of them an “engineered” quality that evokes the engraved markings on keyboards and camera lenses (both prime ingredients in Gotham Rounded’s design.) Others choose the fonts because they’re friendly, and use them to achieve a playful tone that’s somewhere between a kids’ science book and a Japanese synthpop single. But every once in a while, someone chooses the fonts for both reasons, finding a way to reconcile these seemingly contrary intentions in a single piece of design. Scott Dadich, the Creative Director of Wired, has a knack for making type do two things at once, but only when he’s not making it do twelve things at once. (He’s one of those publication designers who makes me glad I stuck with type design.) Together with his dream team, designers Wyatt Mitchell, Margaret Swart, and Christy Sheppard, Scott introduces in the September issue of Wired a redesign that features Gotham Rounded, in what I think is an incredibly smart application.
The magazine’s Play section, once home to gadgets and new technology, now exhibits more of the broadly philosophical thinking that distinguishes the very intriguing Wired of the 21st century. The addition of Gotham Rounded is just part of a design strategy designed to give the section a more distinct voice and a clearer point of view: another smart device is the yellow “progress bar” that tracks the movement of the section, and makes for some marvelous visual serendipity when it intersects both type and image. But positively brilliant are the dominating initials that form a sort of periodic table of themes: a general topic is abstracted from each article, which is represented by a two-letter abbreviation, which signals the nature of the writing to follow. It’s a very clever way of reinforcing the magazine’s editorial range — and reminding readers that Wired is not about things but about ideas — and it excitingly builds anticipation for next month’s issue: will it cover these same topics? New ones? It’s one of the most striking and original solutions I’ve ever seen for building a genuine section-within-a-section, a daunting challenge for any magazine. Wired achieves it with spectacular success. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 19 Aug 2008 06:36:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/never-looked-better#357</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Obnoxious Character Recognition]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/obnoxious-character-recognition</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/captcha_500.png">
At the heart of the game of cat-and-mouse played by bloggers and spammers is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha" target="_blank">Captcha</a>, purveyor of those staticky demands to enter the code exactly as shown above. Captcha is premised on the idea that brains are still better than machines at reading text, and that by forcing visitors to decipher a distorted piece of typography, the system can successfully distinguish between humans and robots. Of course, ongoing advancements in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition" target="_blank">OCR</a> technology have sparked a proportionate response in the impenetrability of Captcha, provoking an arms race whose chief casualty is the quality of life online. Next time you’re submitting to some real-world indignity — say, stripping down to your underwear at an airport security screening — try to look forward to the geniality of the virtual world, in which your own computer, from the comfort of your own home, will upbraid you for mistyping B89gqlIIl. And this after it went to all the trouble of obscuring the type using a three-dimensional distortion matrix, edge softening, gaussian interference, random occlusion, and your least favorite font. Puny human.
But happily — brilliantly! — Captcha’s inventor, Luis von Ahn, has inverted his own technology in the service of something grand. Von Ahn’s latest project, reCaptcha, replaces Captcha’s random gobbledygook with actual snippets of digitized books that computers have so far been unable to decipher. ReCaptcha uses each individual human intervention to improve the quality of digital literacy, a welcome relief for readers of this 1861 text that mentions <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=3C9_ZGzx6ooC&pg=PA59&dq=%22modem+art%22+date:1400-1899&lr=&as_brr=0&ei=KO-kSM_fC5X4iQGd78n6BA#PPA26,M1" target="_blank">modems</a> (“modem art” is a common flub.) National Public Radio has the full story in this <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10936942" target="_blank">four-minute interview</a> with the inventor himself. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:01:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/obnoxious-character-recognition#356</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[A Secret Universe in Your Desk Drawer]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-secret-universe-in-your-desk-drawer</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hfj-pencil-lettering_500.png">
My weapon of choice is a Pilot Precise rollerball, but I keep a General’s Sketching Pencil below my monitor. I don’t write with it: it’s not sharpened; it’s there because I admire its typography, which in less than four inches goes from italic small capitals to a cheery script, to a pair of unrelated sans serifs in two different sizes. It is eclecticism incarnate, and it’s got a lot of heart.
Once you start to notice their markings, pencils draw you into a beguiling world of exotic lettering. With color unavailable to their designers — absurdly, the color of a pencil either definitely indicates the color of its lead, or is completely arbitrary — pencils have historically expressed their identities through playful typography. The range of information they need to convey (manufacturer, product name, grading and classification, place of origin) calls for a self-contained system of semantic distinctions, and the unforgiving process by which tiny letters must be hot stamped into soft pine demands durable letterforms of considerable ingenuity. These conditions recall the challenges of designing <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/mercury-text/overview/" target="_blank">newspaper text faces</a>, which must first and foremost be legible. But where expressiveness trumps clarity, things get interesting.
Bob Truby’s <a href="http://www.brandnamepencils.com/" target="_blank">Brand Name Pencils</a> offers an inviting tour of his collection, complete with closeups of each and every specimen. The brief sampling above already reveals more kinds of script, blackletter and tuscan than can even be categorized, and these are among the collection’s more conservative members. Check out the <a href="http://www.brandnamepencils.com/types/WWII-era.shtml" target="_blank">Dixon Aerial 2280 No. 2</a>, whose logotype might be classified as “open Lombardic capitals with terminal lightning bolts.” Definitely not a species you see every day. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 07 Aug 2008 09:18:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-secret-universe-in-your-desk-drawer#355</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[In Situ]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/in-situ</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/janno-hahn_500.jpg">
A beautiful installation by <a href="http://www.jannohahn.nl/" target="_blank">Janno Hahn</a>, for <a href="http://www.atelierreneknip.nl/" target="_blank">Rene Knip</a>. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 06 Aug 2008 07:08:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/in-situ#354</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Data Visualization of the Day]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/data-visualization-of-the-day</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/moviechart_500.jpg">
<a href="http://www.kottke.org/08/08/2008-movie-box-office-chart" target="_blank">Jason Kottke</a> turned me on to this fantastic <a href="http://xach.com/moviecharts/2008.html" target="_blank">data visualization</a> by Zach Beane, showing this year’s box office gross for American movies. Like this related graphic at <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/02/23/movies/20080223_REVENUE_GRAPHIC.html" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>, it uses the x-axis for time and the height of each node to indicate revenue, but presents the data in a way that allows readers to infer four additional kinds of information — without having to complicate the graphic:
The position on the y-axis represents each film’s rank, revealing the importance of a strong opening weekend (but begging the question of how The Bucket List, which opened in 23rd place, became the #1 movie in America the following week; something to do with New Year’s Day?) The slope of each line conveys the distinction between films with a slow burn (Juno) and those that flamed out (Cloverfield.) Beane makes a rare and non-gratuitous use of color to distinguish individual data lines, where the occasional dissonance identifies films with box office longevity: the thread of mint green running through the purple of early May highlights the inexplicable endurance of Horton Hears a Who. And the height of the y-axis overall charts seasonal trends in the industry at large, confirming that July is considerably more important than April.
Finally, I appreciate the way Beane used rollovers to reveal the names of the films themselves. A lesser designer would have given this information primacy, but Beane recognized that the titles, while crucial, are not the story themselves. Isn’t it nice when a bold decision is demonstrably the right one? —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:15:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/data-visualization-of-the-day#353</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Type Night at Delta House!]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/type-night-at-delta-house</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/kernlager.jpg">
Describing the sand casting method for making type, <a href="http://typography.com/blog/curved-pointy-and-nervous-looking-types">Rob Roy Kelly</a> quotes eighteenth century printer Christian Friedrich Gessner thus:
“The ingredients of casting sand are fine sand, to which is added calcinated baking-oven glue, the redder the glue the better. This mixture is finely pulverized and passed through a mesh sieve. Thereupon the mixture is placed upon a level board. The center is hollowed out and good beer is poured into the cavity — much or little according to the sand used. This is well stirred with a wooden spatula.”
Both H&Co’s recycling bin and our expense reports are testament to the importance of “good beer” in the type design process, but to have this connection documented in the literature? The potential tax write-offs are positively off the chart. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:20:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/type-night-at-delta-house#352</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Objectified: A New Film by Gary Hustwit]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/objectified-a-new-film-by-gary-hustwit</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/dieter_500.jpg">
Ever since director Gary Hustwit invited me to appear in his film <a href="http://www.helveticafilm.com/" target="blank">Helvetica</a>, life has changed for me in two ways. First, I get recognized on the street from time to time (always with the implied aren’t you that type dork) — but second, and more rewardingly, I periodically find myself sitting on a panel with the director. It was at just such an event last autumn that Gary mentioned his new project, a documentary about industrial design. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise: earlier in the evening, our conversation had touched upon a mutual appreciation of the IWC Portuguese wristwatch and the Porsche 356 Speedster. But I was thrilled and delighted nonetheless, and have been looking forward to the project ever since. The film is <a href="http://www.objectifiedfilm.com/" target="blank">Objectified</a>, its website is up, and I am counting down the days until its 2009 premiere.
I’ve always loved industrial design, but I don’t think I’d measured the depth of my affection until I took a spin through the movie’s <a href="http://www.objectifiedfilm.com/category/production-stills/" target="_blank">production stills</a>. I knew I could look forward to hearing more from <a href="http://www.marc-newson.com/" target="_blank">Marc Newson</a> and Apple’s <a href="http://www.jonathanive.com/" target="_blank">Jonathan Ive</a>, but I hadn’t anticipated so many other wonderful participants: <a href="http://www.jongeriuslab.com/" target="_blank">Hella Jongerius</a> is featured, whose work I’ve always found brilliant, witty and uplifting, and I’m especially looking forward to the segment featuring <a href="http://www.designboom.com/eng/interview/rams.html" target="_blank">Dieter Rams</a>, chief of design at Braun from 1961 to 1995. Beyond being one of the most <a href="http://www.spiekermann.com/mten/2007/08/braun_apple.html" target="_blank">influential designers</a> in the history of his craft, Rams is simply a cool cat: that’s him above, with what looks to be his <a href="http://www.vitsoe.com/" target="_blank">606 Universal Shelving System</a>, and a modular hi-fi that I physically crave. Look at it: it’s smart, stylish, functional, and badass; it’s the Steve McQueen of audio equipment. And it’s just the beginning. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 30 Jul 2008 09:45:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/objectified-a-new-film-by-gary-hustwit#351</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Heavy Metal]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/heavy-metal</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/didot-gothique-mat-type_500.jpg">
Four hundred years after Gutenberg’s death, “metal type” was still being made the way he made it. Using files and gravers, a steel rod was cajoled into the shape of a backwards letter; this steel ‘punch’ was struck into a brass blank, called a ‘matrix,’ which would serve as a mold for the casting of individual pieces of lead type. (The term ‘lead type’ is a convenience: the material of printing type is more accurately called ‘type metal,’ as it contains a special typefounders’ blend of lead, tin, and antimony.)
This elaborate pas de cinque requires five different materials, each chosen for a different metallurgical property. Steel’s tensile strength helps it hold small details and resist the blow of the hammer; the malleability of brass makes it a good candidate for receiving the steel; lead, cheap and abundant, has a low melting point; tin is more fluid than lead when molten (yet more durable than lead when it hardens); and antimony is highly crystalline, giving printing types more crisply defined edges.
The few typefaces that have departed from this process have done so for very good reason. Common were large typefaces that would have been impractical to cut in steel (and impossible to strike into brass) which were instead made as wood forms, which were pressed into sand molds from which metal type was cast. But a lingering mystery are the Chalcographia in the collection of the Enschedé foundry in Haarlem, said to have been made with ‘brass punches.’ James Mosley corrects the record on his <a href="http://typefoundry.blogspot.com/2008/07/cast-brass-matrices-made-for-pierre.html" target="_blank">Typefoundry</a> blog, explaining the types’ unusual gestation through a convoluted five-part process. The photographs, like the types themselves, are marvelous. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Tue, 29 Jul 2008 09:51:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/heavy-metal#350</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[A Word For That]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-word-for-that</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Is that the sound of a designer waiting for Adobe Updater to complete? No, just a brief response to a question on <a href="http://www.docspopuli.org/articles/CartoonCursing.html" target="_blank">Docs Populi</a>, via <a href="http://coudal.com/archives/2008/07/_that_cartoon_c.php
" target="_blank">Coudal Partners</a>:
<blockquote class="excerpt">
“What does one call the use of random non-alphabet characters to indicate cursing? It’s a universally understood device, and is applied in both graphic and textual settings. It is such a commonly accepted staple that I assumed it must already be defined and described — but apparently it’s not.”
</blockquote>
But it is! The term is grawlix, and it looks to have been coined by Beetle Bailey cartoonist Mort Walker around 1964. Though it’s yet to gain admission to the Oxford English Dictionary, Editor at Large Jesse Sheidlower describes it as “undeniably useful, certainly a word, and one that I’d love to see used more.” As the author of the grawlixy compendium <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0571197302/typographycom-20" target="_blank">The F-Word</a>, Sheidlower’s perspective is unique — and unassailable, if you’re wise, since he and his cronies have the power to immortalize naysayers as expletives themselves. (Don’t laugh: such was the fate of philistine <a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bowdlerize" target="_blank">Thomas Bowdler</a>, miser <a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/boycott" target="_blank">Charles Boycott</a>, and jingoist <a href="http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chauvinism" target="_blank">Nicolas Chauvin</a>, to say nothing of famous typeface designer <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/a-word-for-that">James W. Scumbag</a>.)
Until its OED entry is solemnized, we’ll have to settle for this definition on <a href="http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/grawlix" target="_blank">Wiktionary</a>: “grawlix, n. A string of typographical symbols used (especially in comic strips) to represent an obscenity or swear word.” I don’t think I’ll ever look at a character set quite the same way again. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 16 Jul 2008 08:06:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-word-for-that#349</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Four Shortage Strikes Nation]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/four-shortage-strikes-nation</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/nyt_4shortage.jpg">
<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/nyregion/15four.html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1216134102-jULpKDNZ/UQsdUXiBK8m8A" target="_blank">The New York Times</a> reports on crippling shortfalls in the nation’s strategic four reserve:
‘With regular gas in New York City at a near-record $4.40 a gallon, station managers are rummaging through their storage closets in search of extra 4s to display on their pumps. Many are coming up short… “Typically, we have a lot of 9s and 1s, and we had a shortage of 3s before we got a lot of 3s in,” Mr. Nair said.’
Welcome to the world of frequency distribution. The popularity of different letters is familiar to anyone who’s ever watched Wheel of Fortune, as well as anyone who’s ever seen a Linotype keyboard (where the confounding qwerty is replaced by the ranked-by-popularity <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETAOIN_SHRDLU" target="_blank">etaoin shrdlu</a>.) But numbers, counterinituitively, have their own frequencies as well: a simple example of this is to write out the numbers from one to twenty, and notice that while most digits are used twice, the two appears thrice, and the one appears twelve times.
Different applications have their own unique frequency fingerprints. North American area codes traditionally favor zeroes and ones, retail prices favor fours and nines ($49.99); Golan Levin and Jonathan Feinberg explored the topic beautifully in their Java applet <a href="http://www.turbulence.org/Works/nums/" target="_blank">The Secret Lives of Numbers</a>. There’s also a lot of occult numerology in the background of our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/overview/" target="_blank">Numbers</a> collection, in which everything from <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/inside/revenue/" target="_blank">cash register receipts</a> to <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/inside/trafalgar/" target="_blank">monuments</a> reveals something about the culture of numbers. Of course, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/inside/premium/" target="_blank">gas pumps</a> are in there too, fours and all. And fives. And sixes… —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 15 Jul 2008 09:01:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/four-shortage-strikes-nation#348</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Spotting the Long-Necked Kern]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/spotting-the-long-necked-kern</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/arabic-shaded-no-50_500.jpg">
This publicity photo, from the Berthold foundry’s Specimen No. 525B (late 1950s?) shows the foundry type for Arabic Shaded No. 50. In addition to demonstrating the maker’s facility with both non-Latin scripts and elaborate ornamentation (this is an outline face with a drop shadow, produced at 30pt), this diagram shows an interesting technique for kerning Arabic’s many delicate features.
A kern, in the literal sense, is any part of a character that extends beyond the body. The more delicate a kern, the more likely it is to break off during use, and Arabic is among the world’s most sinewy scripts. To compensate, this typeface was cast with an especially long neck — the distance from the top-most printing surface (the face) to the non-printing surface below (the shoulder) — so that kerns would be stronger, and more fully supported by adjacent characters. A clever, simple solution.
Pop quiz: Arabic reads from right to left, and printing type is always reversed. Which end is the start of the line? If you’re disoriented, imagine the sixteenth century French and Flemish typefounders who produced some of the world’s finest Arabic typefaces, three hundred years before the invention of the mass-produced silvered-glass mirror. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Mon, 14 Jul 2008 08:09:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/spotting-the-long-necked-kern#347</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[The OED in Limerick Form]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-oxford-english-dictionary-in-limerick-form</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/oedilf_2021.svg">
Nineteen years of designing typefaces has amply proven H&Co’s Third Law, which states that for every act of exhaustive research, there is an equal and opposite act of total silliness. This principle extends from typography into other disciplines as well: behold — no kidding — the <a href="http://www.oedilf.com/" target="_blank">Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form</a>.
Precisely the kind of project that the internet was made for, the OEDILF{footnote_1} has brought together contributors from around the globe for the purpose of rendering every entry in the OED into a-a-b-b-a form. The fascicle A-Cr is well underway, with <s>45,297</s> 109,743 entries so far, making this a site you don’t want to stumble upon when you’re up against a deadline.
As if the premise wasn’t mad enough, many contributors have taken a shine to words that offer a chance to demonstrate their meaning within the construction of the limerick itself. Above is <a href="http://www.oedilf.com/db/Lim.php?VerseId=796" target="_blank">abecedarius</a>, a literary work in which lines begin with successive letters of the alphabet, by author Jo. Here’s <a href="http://www.oedilf.com/db/Lim.php?VerseId=29031" target="_blank">acrostic</a>, by Holger Martin:
<blockquote class="excerpt">
At the tip (acro-, Greek) in each line: 
Crossing words as in Scrabble design. 
Reading columns’ extension 
O, second dimension! 
STIC means “line,” so this fits rather fine.
</blockquote>
Those with a taste for wordplay might know the mind-bending <a href="http://www.oedilf.com/db/Lim.php?VerseId=101994" target="_blank">autogram</a>, a self-referential paragraph which describes an inventory of its own contents. Chris Doyle offers this autogrammatical limerick, one of <s>four</s> <a href="http://www.oedilf.com/db/Lim.php?Word=autogram">five</a> autograms contributed so far:
<blockquote class="excerpt">
My autogram has seven T’s; 
Five A’s; three U’s, W’s, V’s, 
M’s, F’s, I’s, Y’s, and G’s; 
Twenty S’s; eight E’s; 
Four H’s, N’s, O’s, R’s; two D’s.
</blockquote>
<a href="http://www.oedilf.com/db/Lim.php?VerseId=256655" target="_blank">Collinear</a>, which means the positioning of many items along the same line, naturally calls for a one-line limerick. OEDILF Editor-in-Chief Chris J. Strolin contributed the following:
<blockquote class="excerpt">
Asked speller Iago LaMar, / “A · r · e · Y · o · u · F · o · r / W · h · a · t · I / M · e · a · n · B · y / C · o · l · l · i · n · e · a · r?”
</blockquote>
Strolin continues with <a href="http://www.oedilf.com/db/Lim.php?VerseId=212439" target="_blank">ampersand</a>, leaving it to readers to imagine what was so scandalous about Brandon and Mandy’s handstand:
<blockquote class="excerpt">
H& in h& on the C&yl& b&st&, 
D&y Br&on & M&y R& gr&st&. 
W&a’s husb&, a b&it, 
Is c&id: “Unh& it! 
Ab&on your sc&alous h&st&!”
</blockquote>
In conclusion, from author Judah:
<blockquote class="excerpt">
That which suddenly comes to an end, 
Like a greeting too brief from a friend, 
Or flat ground, at steep rises — 
An end by surprise is 
<a href="http://www.oedilf.com/db/Lim.php?VerseId=5481" target="_blank">Abrupt</a>
</blockquote>
—JH]]>
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<pubDate>Thu, 10 Jul 2008 10:40:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-oxford-english-dictionary-in-limerick-form#346</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Learn Typeface Design with H&Co’s Sara Soskolne]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/learn-typeface-design-with-sara-soskolne-hco</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/typeschool-2_500_1.jpg">
Hands-on instruction in typeface design is notoriously hard to come by. Those interested in learning the craft have either to content themselves with a one-hour workshop at a professional conference, or commit themselves to a year of graduate school abroad. But this month, the Book Arts Center at Wells College Summer Institute is hosting a <a href="http://www.wells.edu/bkarts/courses_2008.htm#session_three" target="_blank">one-week class in typeface design</a> with <a href="https://www.typography.com/about/biographies.php#soskolne" target="_blank">Sara Soskolne</a>, Senior Typeface Designer at H&Co. The class is limited to ten students, promising a rare chance to work with a professional type designer one-on-one.
The facilities boast large classrooms dedicated to lettering arts and digital imaging (all blissfully air-conditioned), and those with broader interests in the book arts will find two binderies, two press rooms, and seven Vandercook proofing presses. Those with broader interests still will find Wells College handsomely placed on New York’s <a href="http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=wells+college,+ny&sll=42.91887,-76.72702&sspn=1.209821,0.98877&ie=UTF8&ll=42.741686,-76.703711&spn=0.017461,0.019162&t=h&z=16" target="_blank">Lake Cayuga</a>, suggesting post-typographic swimming and birdwatching, magnificent sunsets, and fireflies by the kilowatt. Bring your “Co-Ed Naked Intramural Kerning” t-shirt.
Registration is now open: contact <a href="http://www.wells.edu/bkarts/institute.htm" target="_blank">Nancy Gil</a>, Summer Institute Director. And soon! —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:15:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/learn-typeface-design-with-sara-soskolne-hco#345</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Type in Three Dimensions]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/type-in-three-dimensions</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/type-form.jpg">
Taking a break from my top secret Independence Day project that combines typography and patriotism (more about this <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/for-america">later</a>), I came across something marvelous that I had to share.
The August 2008 issue of Print has this arresting image on the cover. I recognized that the typography grew out of our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham-rounded/overview/">Gotham Rounded</a> font, which is the magazine’s signature typeface, and had assumed that this treatment was a clever and curious bit of digital rendering on someone’s part. It is and it isn’t: designer Karsten Schmidt used software of his own devising to give Gotham Rounded’s polished letterforms these intriguingly organic roots (using a branch of mathematical modeling called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction-diffusion_equation" target="_blank">reaction diffusion</a>) but then fed these digital inputs into a <a href="http://www.zcorp.com/Products/3D-Printers/138/spage.aspx" target="_blank">3-D “printer”</a> in order to produce a physical object.
I’m fascinated by 3-D printers (read: want one.) They’re essentially inkjet printers, but instead of rendering an image using a grid of ink splatters on a page, they produce successive cross-sections of an object by strategically injecting liquid binder into a polymer powder. Taken together, these high-resolution cross-sections form a dimensional object, like the one Schmidt produced here. Print is running an article describing the <a href="http://www.printmag.com/design_articles/building_the_cover/tabid/388/Default.aspx
" target="_blank">making of the cover</a>, and its designer has detailed the entire process, step-by-step, in this illuminating <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/toxi/sets/72157604724789091/" target="_blank">Flickr set</a>. Check it out! —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Fri, 04 Jul 2008 15:41:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/type-in-three-dimensions#344</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[The Smallest Letter in the World]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-smallest-letter-in-the-world</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fry-1785-diamond_500.jpg">
A nice surprise: inside a folder of oversize type proofs, I found a stowaway: A Specimen of Printing Types by Joseph Fry and Sons, Letter-Founders, 1785. Like many contemporary type specimens, it separates dinner from dessert: on the front are romans and italics, in sizes from Long Primer (10pt) to Four Lines Pica (48pt), and on the back are all the specialty types. The latter category includes types for Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Greek, and Samaritan, a collection of ornaments and coats of arms, a blackletter in nine sizes, and the above, a roman cut in the Diamond size (4pt) and identified as “The Smallest Letter in the WORLD.” It looks pretty good for a 223-year-old! —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:50:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-smallest-letter-in-the-world#343</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[The Living Glagolitic]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-living-glagolitic</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/djurek-glagolitic.png">
Last month’s post about <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/happy-typographic-holidays" target="_blank">Cyrillic and Glagolitic Alphabet Day</a> prompted some great responses from our Croatian colleagues, where the Glagolitic alphabet, a national treasure, lives on. Vjeran Andra&scaron;ić wrote from the island of <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/invasion-of-the-glagolites" target="_blank">Krk</a>, home to some of Croatia’s most significant Glagolitic inscriptions, and this morning I learned of this marvelous Glagolitic font, made by designer <a href="http://www.typonine.com/t9site/typonine/Glagolitic.html" target="_blank">Nikola Djurek</a> during his time at the <a href="http://www.kabk.nl/English/masters/-/nl" target="_blank">Type & Media</a> program at KABK in Den Haag.
Many of the world’s less common alphabets have been rendered digitally by enthusiastic philologists, but it’s refreshing to see one that’s been so expertly made by a trained professional. And kudos to Nikola not only for presenting his work in an intellectually substantial context, but for offering to share the font with interested scholars! —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 16 Jun 2008 10:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-living-glagolitic#342</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[My Thoughts Exactly]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/my-thoughts-exactly</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/50000-free-fonts_500.png">
Hey where can I get that Brady Bunch font. Hey where can I get that Star Wars font. Hey where can I get that Red Dwarf font. Do you have font that looks like bird feet? Do you have font that looks like cat paws? Do you have any “futuristic” fonts? Do you have any “hip hop” fonts? Do you have any “retro” fonts? Do you have fonts that are retro but don’t look retro? Where are all the graffiti fonts. Where are all the funky fonts. Do you have any fonts that are totally extreme. Do you have any fonts that say “comic book.” Do you have any fonts that are high style art deco of the twenties? What fonts are good for computers? What fonts are good for MySpace? What fonts are good for LiveJournal? What fonts are good for Twitter? What fonts are good for nothing?
Why, it’s those attractive, useful, well-produced, intellectually rigorous, and definitely not at all copyright-infringing <a href="http://www.somethingawful.com/fakesa/fontsite/" target="_blank">free fonts on the internet</a>, of course! —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Sat, 14 Jun 2008 00:41:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/my-thoughts-exactly#341</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Letterror at the Graphic Design Museum]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/letterror-at-the-graphic-design-museum</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/letterror-in-breda_500.jpg">
When we first met at the <a href="http://www.atypi.org/" target="_blank">ATypI</a> conference in 1989, <a href="http://www.letterror.com/" target="_blank">Erik van Blokland, Just van Rossum</a> and I were branded the “young turks” of typography, presumably because we were fifteen years younger than ATypI’s next-youngest member. Erik and Just were already notorious for their Beowolf project, which hacked the PostScript format in order to produce self-randomizing letterforms; this mischievous bit of culture jamming was enough to endear them to me, and to a generation of designers who have followed their work ever since.
Beowolf (and its sister font, BeoSans) are now an established part of typographic lore, and both rightfully received attention in the opening exhibit of the world’s first <a href="http://www.graphicdesignmuseum.nl/" target="_blank">Graphic Design Museum</a> in Breda. The place is swimming in typography (like the Netherlands in general), but it’s especially gratifying to see that in this new installation, visitors can experience BeoSans’ two-dimensional letterforms with the benefit of the fourth dimension as well. The addition of a timeline makes the faces’ randomness seem as natural an attribute as size, color, weight, or width, hinting at a future in which our screen-driven civilization could come to regard mutability as an integral part of the typographic experience. As always, I’m curious to see where Erik and Just’s original thinking will ultimately take us. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 12 Jun 2008 09:39:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/letterror-at-the-graphic-design-museum#340</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Favicon Unmasked]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/favicon-unmasked</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/sort.jpg">
Designer Randy Pfeil wrote to ask the burning question, “what the heck is the favicon for typography.com? All I can see is a pixelated masked-man. What’s the story?”
In a signature bit of H&Co atavism, it’s a sort, otherwise known as a piece of printing type, seen in profile. The printing surface — uncoincidentally called the “type face” — is at the top. Below are the “feet,” separated by a “groove,” accentuated in our tiny icon. At left is the “nick” that appears on the front edge of a piece of type, a detail that helps establish that type is correctly oriented in a composing stick. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 11 Jun 2008 11:32:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/favicon-unmasked#339</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[The World’s First Graphic Design Museum]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-worlds-first-graphic-design-museum</link>
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<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/graphic-design-museum-breda.jpg">
On my first trip to Amsterdam in 1992, I spent a couple of hours having lunch at a pleasant café on Willemsparkweg. I’d come from seeing an exhibit of the year’s best book covers, and planned to spend the rest of the afternoon exploring the city’s many graphic design bookshops. A passing waiter, noticing my open sketchbook, idly asked me what I was designing. I took note that he’d said “designing” rather than “drawing,” and on his return trip he surprised me further: “are you designing a typeface?”
A nation whose visual literacy is such that the lay public is familiar with the concept of typeface design is surely a designer’s paradise. And if there were any doubt that Holland is the world’s preeminant design capital, tomorrow will see the opening of the world’s first <a href="http://www.graphicdesignmuseum.nl/" target="_blank">graphic design museum</a> in Breda. There’ll be live coverage on the museum’s website, emceed by none other than Queen Beatrix! I love the Dutch. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Tue, 10 Jun 2008 09:04:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-worlds-first-graphic-design-museum#338</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[What’s in a Font Name]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/whats-in-a-font-name</link>
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<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/serie-gutenberg-640px.jpg">
For as long as fonts have had names, they’ve had bad names. Historical inaccuracies have been common for two hundred years: typefounders of the Industrial Revolution groped for historical labels to apply to newly-invented styles (<a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/ziggurat/overview/" target="_blank">Egyptian</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/leviathan/overview/" target="_blank">Gothic</a>, etc.), and it wasn’t long before typefaces began to bear the recognizable names of unrelated historical figures. Alongside the very un-Dutch Series Rembrandt, a nineteenth century French specimen book shows the Series Victor Hugo, unconnected with the author but doubtless hoping to cash in on his celebrity; Hugo was still alive at the time.
But most entertaining are faces like this one, which honor prominent figures from typography’s own history. This charming face is from the 1928 type specimen of the Nebiolo foundry in Torino, and here we have a typeface full of Art Nouveau vigor, fresh from the window of a chic gelateria, or a cinema marquee. And what famous early twentieth century figure is it named after? Why, Johannes Gutenberg of course (d. 1468), father of movable type. Can’t you just see Gutenberg stepping out of his Fiat gp racer, his handsome olive complexion set off by a rakish tweed cap?
It seems that most of the world’s typefounders have suffered this cruel fate. Here are some especially juicy mistreatments.

<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/caxtonian-640px.jpg">
This is the Caxtonian typeface, produced by the San Francisco type foundry of Palmer & Rey, and appearing in their 1889 catalog. Its name presumably honors <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Caxton" target="_blank">William Caxton</a> (c. 1415–1492), best remembered as England’s first printer, though this design suggests a gold rush pioneer, or a Dodge City vaudevillian. (Or perhaps your local watering hole has Caxtonian Stout on tap?)
Moving along through type history, we come to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garamond" target="_blank">Claude Garamond</a>, the great French typefounder of the sixteenth century, immortalized here by the Fonderie Typographique Française around 1920:
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/francaise-garamond-640px.jpg">
Garamond’s name has long been surrounded by a scholarly fug — there are many typefaces called “Garamond” which unwittingly revive the work of other typefounders, from Robert Granjon to Jean Jannon. But this is beyond the pale: here in the Album d’Alphabets is the proud declaration “garamond,” atop a showing of the late ninteenth century American typeface known today as Bookman. I’d love to use this face for the cover of an album called “Berlioz,” which contains nothing but marches by John Phillips Sousa.
The eighteenth century printer-typefounder <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Baskerville" target="_blank">John Baskerville</a> lent his name to a number of solid revivals, none of which includes:
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/caslon-baskerville-640px.jpg">
Baskerville’s chief contribution to typography was the introduction of gestures from engraving, which gradually moved letterforms away from calligraphy and toward rationalism. The swooshy business above, taken from the 1919 specimen of the Caslon typefoundry, represents the very opposite of Baskerville’s approach, like a thatched cottage attributed to Mies Van der Rohe. In an offhanded moment, Roger Black once called this face “Caslon for lovers,” which pretty much retires the trophy for withering typographic sobriquets.
Of course, not to be outdone by the British,
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/atf-baskerville-640px.jpg">
Here’s “Baskerville” rendered by the American Type Founders company (atf), as shown in their type specimen book of 1896. Like the Garamond-that-eats-like-a-Bookman, this is simply the Latin Elongated typeface billed as “Baskerville,” for reasons unfathomable. (It couldn’t have been a very successful marketing gimmick: as well known as the name “Baskerville” was the style behind it, so I can’t imagine this label fooling anyone.) I’m reminded of Jack Summerford’s fantastic <a href="http://designarchives.aiga.org/entry.cfm/eid_7076" target="_blank">Helvetica T-Shirt</a>, though unlike Summerford, I doubt atf was in on the joke.
Finally, here in the 1888 specimen book of the Cincinnati foundry, we have an American adaptation of the work of the Neoclassical giant, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmin_Didot" target="_blank">Firmin Didot</a>:
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/cincinnati-didot-640px.jpg">
Having done my own <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/didot/overview/" target="_blank">Didot revival</a> some years ago, I think I can safely say that our two different approaches suggest ample opportunity for further exploration. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:43:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/whats-in-a-font-name#337</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Springtype]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/springtype</link>
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<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/nebiolo-iniziali_500.jpg">
I’ve been trying to find a type specimen book from the Italian foundry of Nebiolo for twenty years, and this morning one finally turned up: the Campionario Caratteri e Fregi Tipografici of 1928. Here’s a sample of what’s inside, perfect for a beautiful spring day in New York! —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Mon, 02 Jun 2008 10:45:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/springtype#336</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Invasion of the Glagolites]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/invasion-of-the-glagolites</link>
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<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/invasion-of-the-glagolites2.jpg">
Above: the sole surviving classified photo of the landing craft spotted hovering over a Nebraska cornfield? Below: gift of the alien emissary, a plaque declaring peace between our two worlds, now in possession of the U. S. Army?
Yes! No. Prompted by my recent post on <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/happy-typographic-holidays" target="_blank">typographic holidays</a>, a colleague in Croatia, Vjeran Andra&scaron;ić, sent word that he’s enjoying his own typographic holiday in the Adriatic, on the island of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krk" target="_blank">Krk</a>. Among its other features, Krk is home to some of the world’s oldest inscriptions in the <a href="http://www.omniglot.com/writing/glagolitic.htm" target="_blank">Glagolitic</a> alphabet, where it flourishes still. I’d written that Glagolitic was largely eclipsed by Cyrillic in the 13th century, without mentioning that it survives as a national treasure in Croatia. Vjeran points me not only to the <a href="http://www.croatianhistory.net/etf/baska.html" target="_blank">Baska Tablet</a>, one of the great monuments of medieval literacy, but to <a href="http://www.croatianhistory.net/glagoljica/izleti.html" target="_blank">this site</a>, which has some eye-opening photographs of Glagolitic in modern use. I direct you especially to the mind-bending <a href="http://www.croatianhistory.net/gif/gl/baska_franica_spec.jpg
" target="_blank">multilingual menu</a> set in Glagolitic and Comic Sans. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Thu, 29 May 2008 11:42:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/invasion-of-the-glagolites#335</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Happy Typographic Holidays]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/happy-typographic-holidays</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/glagolitic_500.png">
This weekend, many of us celebrated a beloved national holiday. Perhaps you enjoyed a porterhouse steak off the grill, or played touch football with the kids; perhaps the local marching band led your town in a rousing patriotic medley. But amidst the fanfare and the bunting, did you take a moment to reflect on what this holiday was really about? Did you really pause to remember that May 24 was Cyrillic and Glagolitic Alphabet Day?
On Saturday, readers throughout the Slavic world celebrated <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saints_Cyril_and_Methodius_Day#Saints_Cyril_and_Methodius_Day" target="_blank">Saints Cyril and Methodius Day</a>, a bonafide public holiday in Russia, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. The holiday honors Cyril and Methodius, the Byzantine brothers whose missions to the Slavs, beginning in AD 862, culminated in the invention of the <a href="http://www.omniglot.com/writing/glagolitic.htm" target="_blank">Glagolitic Alphabet</a>, which was used to render Christian texts in the <a href="http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ocslavonic.htm" target="_blank">Old Church Slavonic</a> language. Glagolitic’s sister script, <a href="http://www.omniglot.com/writing/cyrillic.htm" target="_blank">Cyrillic</a>, prevailed during the 13th century, and Peter the Great canonized Cyrillic in essentially its modern form in 1708. Cyrillic has survived largely intact, despite the orthographic reforms and political purges of the last century: among the reforms of 1918 were the deprecation of the yer (ъ), and removal of the yat (ѣ) and izhitsa (ѵ), this last letter rumored to have been used for only two words in the entire Russian language at the time of its expulsion (мѵро, сѵнодъ.) But the issues are deep, and with the dissolusion of the USSR, the story is by no means over: Wikipedia devotes an entire section to the burning issue of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_Russian_orthography#Yat-reform" target="_blank">Yat-reform</a>.
The celebration of the alphabet is by no means limited to the Slavic world: another nation with great typographic traditions celebrates its own Alphabet Day this fall, and I’m working on the blog post already. I promise to give you a little more notice next time — I know how hard it can be to get those Alphabet Day cards out on time. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Tue, 27 May 2008 15:16:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/happy-typographic-holidays#334</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[A Parisian Palimpsest]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-parisian-palimpsest</link>
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<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/cochin_500.jpg">
This one took me a minute.
Gustave Peignot spent the last four decades of the nineteenth century acquiring small French typefoundries, which by 1899 were formally organized into the firm of G. Peignot & Fils. Twenty-three years later they would merge with the venerable foundry of Laurent & Deberny, and Deberny & Peignot would be born. Soon after, this collaboration would produce the most significant typefaces of the Art Nouveau period, designs by Eugène Grasset and Georges Auriol, and later, Machine Age masterpieces by A. M. Cassandre. There would be historical revivals in the manner of Garamond and Didot, new work by Imre Reiner and Maximilien Vox, and in 1952, a series of faces by a new Swiss designer named Adrian Frutiger. Five years into their collaboration came Univers.
A design long associated with Peignot — but not attributed to any particular designer — is the typeface Nicolas Cochin. Named after an eighteenth century French engraver (but not especially representative of his work), the Nicolas Cochin typeface was advertised in a lovely little booklet produced by Peignot & Fils around 1920, a copy of which survives, barely, in our library. After an introduction and a number of settings in period dress, the specimen unfolds into an album of blue kraft paper pages, framing a charming collection of printed ephemera. There’s a menu, a calendar, a business card; one delightful page is an interior decorator’s invoice. And then there’s this.
Aside from the fabrication technique — the checkered background has the smoothness of offset lithography, and the image appears to be impossibly continuous-tone (!?) — there’s the design, which looks about sixty years ahead of its time. The atmospheric quality of the background reminds me of a Vaughan Oliver album cover for 4AD, and the deconstructed typography-in-motion feels very much like something Pierre Bernard might have made with Grapus. The explanation, of course, is a happy accident: the page was originally a pink and lavender parquet, parts of which have oxidized through eighty years of contact with the facing page, but the result is simply beautiful. I’m hoping that whoever designs the poster for the next Peter Greenaway film keeps this typographic ambience in mind. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Sat, 17 May 2008 00:01:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-parisian-palimpsest#333</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Taxonomy Meets Typography]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/taxonomy-meets-typography</link>
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<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/decoylab.jpg">
Tina at <a href="http://swissmiss.typepad.com/" target="_blank">Swissmiss</a> turned me on to this lovely poster by <a href="http://www.decoylab.com/" target="_blank">Decoylab</a>, which wouldn’t you know it makes lovely use of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/styles/" target="_blank">Gotham Extra Light</a>. I’m amazed that designer Maiko Kuzunishi came up with so many recognizable silhouettes, more so that she found so many that are sympathetic with the shape of their initials. (The B is almost a butterfly already, but who’d have seen the J in jellyfish?) Maiko imagines her poster as a fine addition to a child’s room, and I agree: it’s cheerful, engaging, and subliminally inculcates in tomorrow’s animal lovers a taste for fine typography. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 14 May 2008 13:25:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/taxonomy-meets-typography#332</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Remembering Rauschenberg]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/remembering-rauschenberg</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/rauschenberg-2_500.jpg">
If you draw a line from <a href="http://images.google.com/images?q=shinro%20ohtake" target="_blank">Shinro Ohtake</a> to <a href="http://images.google.com/images?q=joseph%20cornell" target="_blank">Joseph Cornell</a>, and another from <a href="http://images.google.com/images?q=ed%20fella" target="_blank">Ed Fella</a> to <a href="http://images.google.com/images?q=william%20harnett" target="_blank">William Harnett</a>, you will find yourself at a monumental, unavoidable intersection. At this great pinnacle sits Robert Rauschenberg, who died yesterday at the age of 82.
I would have liked to have known him. His sincere appreciation for the pedestrian, which energized modern art, ultimately came to inform a major theme in modern typography as well. “I really feel sorry,” he once said, “for people who think things like soap dishes or mirrors or Coke bottles are ugly.” This sentiment applies equally to the once-maligned universe of vernacular lettering: how many of our typefaces born of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/history/" target="_blank">humble origins</a> would have happened without Rauschenberg?
Most especially, I think I would have enjoyed his sense of humor. His famously <a href="http://www.sfmoma.org/msoma/artworks/93.html
" target="_blank">Erased de Kooning Drawing</a> merely hinted at the wickedness in store: the obituary in today’s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/14/arts/design/14rauschenberg.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp" target="_blank">Times</a> describes a fine exchange with fellow troublemaker John Cage. Once, while staying at Cage’s apartment,
<blockquote class="excerpt">“[Rauschenberg] decided he would touch up the painting Cage had acquired, as a kind of thank you, painting it all-black, being in the midst of his new, all-black period. When Cage returned, he was not amused.”</blockquote>
Maybe this was a prank born of the same exuberance that inspired his earlier work, with its bicycle tires and taxidermied eagles, or maybe it was a concise way of unseating a highflown comrade’s hypocrisy with a couple of merry brushstrokes. (It was probably a little of both, which makes it all the more delightful.) Whatever it was, I’m glad that it nourished the decades of unforgettable work that followed. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Tue, 13 May 2008 15:53:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/remembering-rauschenberg#330</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[For Your Next Type-Themed Party]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/for-your-next-type-themed-party</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/conor-david_500.jpg">
Apparently we’re not alone in our <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/our-middle-name" target="_blank">love of ampersands</a>: dig this lovely work by Dublin designers <a href="http://www.conoranddavid.com/archive.html" target="_blank">Conor Nolan and David Wall</a>, now available as an A1 poster (23" × 33") from <a href="http://www.workgroup.ie/store/" target="_blank">WorkGroup</a> for the princely sum of €10. The WorkGroup site includes a quick process video that I take to be highly abridged! —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Tue, 13 May 2008 08:54:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/for-your-next-type-themed-party#331</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Answers to Frequently Asked Questions]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/answers-to-frequently-asked-questions</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/schelter-giesecke_500.jpg">
Just kidding. A beauty though, isn’t it? This page of tastefully arranged number signs comes from a type specimen book issued by the Schelter & Giesecke foundry of Leipzig, around 1900. In a good type specimen, no piece of typographic material is too insignificant to merit proper attention, but to see such a peripheral symbol treated with this kind of thought and artistry is really touching. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Thu, 01 May 2008 11:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/answers-to-frequently-asked-questions#329</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Unicode Poetry Slam]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/unicode-poetry-slam</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/unicode-poetry-slam2.png">
I feel certain that I’ve seen the logo for Fermata Festival on canvas totebags at the greenmarket, and that Fox Fraction is part of the Action 10 News Team. I’m equally convinced that Falling Family and Feathered February are Lifetime Original Movies, and that Fit Fita Five once opened for Afrika Bambaataa at the Mudd Club. Legendary turntablist Fricative Fritu was the driving force behind that act, before leaving to found Forward Fostering Four in 1979; signed to Furx Records, they were one of my favorite bands, along with Flexus Flight Flip and Facsimile Factor — who these days you can catch on Fly FM, home of a great morning drivetime show hosted by Fongman Foo…
Novelists and MCs seeking inspiration are hereby directed to the <a href="http://www.unicode.org/charts/name/" target="_blank">Unicode Character Name Index</a>, once a mere reference for cosmopolitan type designers, but now also a wellspring of found poetry (and a sure-fire way to blow an entire afternoon.) The above nonsense comes from adjacent entries on the <a href="http://www.unicode.org/charts/name/chart_F.html" target="_blank">F</a> page, and other letters are no less fertile: doesn’t the <a href="http://www.unicode.org/charts/name/chart_M.html" target="_blank">M</a> page make you yearn for the comeback of wrestling legend “Manacles” Manchu? —JH
<div class="addendum">
Eric Siry adds: You neglected gangsta rap legend Fat Fatha, Thai-Senegalese throat singer Fthora Fu, and goth pioneers Functional Funeral — as well as the front man’s solo excursion into atonal noise rock, Fwa Fwaa Fwe Fwee.
</div>]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 30 Apr 2008 05:20:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/unicode-poetry-slam#328</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Our Middle Name]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/our-middle-name</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Last month’s posts about the <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/pilcrow-capitulum" target="_blank">¶</a> and the <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/the-sulzbacher-eszett" target="_blank">ß</a> prompted a flurry of e-mail inquiring about other special favorites in the character set. Matt McInerney guessed correctly that the ampersand is one for which we have special affection, and asked if there was anything else we could say about it. How could we not? Ampersand, after all, is H&Co’s middle name.
Though it feels like a modern appendix to our ancient alphabet, the ampersand is considerably older than many of the letters that we use today. By the time the letter W entered the Latin alphabet in the seventh century, ampersands had enjoyed six hundred years of continuous use; one appears in Pompeiian graffiti, establishing the symbol at least as far back as A.D. 79. One tidy historical account credits Marcus Tullius Tiro, Cicero’s secretary, with the invention of the ampersand, and while this is likely a simplified retelling, it’s certainly true that Tiro was a tireless user of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/historical-allsorts/features/historical-allsorts-special-characters/" target="_blank">scribal abbreviations</a>. One surviving construction of the ampersand bears his name, and keen typophiles can occasionally find the “<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tironian" target="_blank">Tironian and</a>” out in the world today.
As both its function and form suggest, the ampersand is a written contraction of “et,” the Latin word for “and.” Its shape has evolved continuously since its introduction, and while some ampersands are still manifestly e-t ligatures, others merely hint at this origin, sometimes in very oblique ways. The many forms that a font’s ampersand can follow are generally informed by its historical context, the whims of its designer, and the demands of the type family that contains it: below, a tour of some ampersands and the thinking behind them, along with an explanation of the storied history of the word “ampersand” itself.

 
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/ampersand-mercury.png">
1 — The ampersand in <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/knockout/overview/" target="_blank">Knockout</a> follows a construction that’s been common to commercial sans serifs since the nineteenth century. At least some of this form’s popularity must come from its elasticity, for variations on this design can be found in almost any proportion. This is certainly what recommended it to Knockout, where the design would have to survive an especially ambitious range of <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/knockout/features/knockout-nine-widths" target="_blank">weights and widths</a>: this ampersand works as well in light compressed fonts as it does in ultrabold wide ones.
 
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/ampersand-whitney.png">
2 — <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/knockout/features/knockout-nine-widths" target="_blank">Hoefler Titling</a> includes one of my favorite ampersands, a lyrical italic with a palpable “et.” Typefounders as early as Griffo (1499) and Arrighi (1523) used ampersands of this basic shape — and calligraphic forebears date to the fourth century — but it was in the early seventeenth century that the shape flowered into this wonderfully baroque form. The triplet of circles that float along the ‘mean line’ (at the top of the lowercase) is charming in text; I’ve always found that these kinds of ampersands are particularly comfortable alongside roman small caps.
 
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/ampersand-requiem.png">
3 — As part of its commitment to being over-the-top, <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/hoefler-text/overview/" target="_blank">Hoefler Text</a> includes no fewer than seven different ampersands in each of its weights. Along with roman and italic ampersands of more straightforward constructions — each supplied in sizes to match both the lowercase and the small caps — this alternate is included, modeled on a famous ampersand made by William Caslon in 1732.
 
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/ampersand-chronicle.png">
4 — <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/chronicle-display/overview/" target="_blank">Chronicle</a> has distant roots in the early nineteenth century, a time when typefounding was beginning to show the influences of other disciplines, signwriting foremost among them. The unusual ‘ball terminal’ on Chronicle’s ampersand is very much a sign painter’s gesture, though this one was inspired by a more recent sign of a different medium: a former bank on lower Broadway features a similar ampersand, cast in bronze and probably designed in the early twentieth century.
 
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/ampersand-archer.png">
5 — As infrequent as ball terminals are on roman ampersands, they’ve always been common in italics. The ampersand in <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/archer/overview/" target="_blank">Archer</a> has the requisite ball on its italic ampersand, but borrows this feature back for many of its roman letterforms, giving many of its roman capitals the esprit of a cursive italic. (Check out Archer’s C, G, and S for some unexpected ball terminals.)
 
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/ampersand-hoeflertext.png">
6 — As a typeface based on calligraphic sources, <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/requiem/overview/" target="_blank">Requiem</a> offers an interpretation of a bonafide written ampersand. This form of ampersand would ultimately become enshrined in type, and would later evolve into the baroque ampersand of Hoefler Titling, above. In its calligraphic dress, this type of ampersand presents an especially thorny challenge for type designers, as it includes one of the few moments in which two thick strokes meet at a right angle.
 
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/ampersand-knockout.png">
7 — A different take on the literal “et” appears in the italic for <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/mercury-display/overview/" target="_blank">Mercury</a>, where the join between cursive E and constructed t makes for some fierce geometry, reinforcing the themes of the font’s roman and italic. A testament to the permissiveness of the ampersand is how inconspicuous this form is, its overall silhouette sufficiently ‘ampersand-like’ as to pass unnoticed in text.
 
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/ampersand-hoeflertitling.png">
8 — <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/overview/" target="_blank">Whitney</a> features a contemporary ampersand that first gained popularity on the typewriter. Letters on typewriter hammers took every opportunity to repel ink, and breaking the tiny upper counter of the ampersand provided a clever way to avoid clogging without affecting the character’s recognizability. Whitney’s use of this shape underscores the font’s businesslike overtones, and it serves the design in situations where space doesn’t permit extraneous gestures: Whitney’s weights run to a very dense Black, where the small-cap-sized ampersand couldn’t exist without some degree of simplification.
As for the word “ampersand,” folk etymologies abound. The likeliest account, offered by the OED, is explained by early alphabet primers in which the symbol was listed after X, Y, Z as “&: per se, and.” Meaning “&: in itself, ‘and’”, and inevitably pronounced as “and per se and”, it’s a quick corruption to “ampersand,” and the rest is history. Though I do like one competing explanation offered by a retired signpainter I once met, who insisted that the symbol got its name from its inventor, and was henceforth known to the trade as Amper’s And. This Mr. Amper has never surfaced, nor have any of his contemporaries who lent their names to competing models; I would have liked to see Quick’s And, on which this tale is surely built. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 28 Apr 2008 16:11:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/our-middle-name#327</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Adventures in Kerning, Part II]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/adventures-in-kerning-part-ii</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/Yq-kerning_500.jpg">
A kerning table, which makes special allowances for characters that don’t fit together naturally, can reveal a lot about the personality of its designer. Every font pays special attention to the pair Va, but the font that includes Vr suggests a familiarity with French (vraie) or Dutch (vrouw). Pairs like Wn or Tx hint at an even broader perspective (Wnetrzne, Poland; Txipepovava, Angola), and the designer who kerns the ¥4 has presumably spent some time thinking about finance. Including ÅÇ is the mark of someone who’s trying too hard: these letters don’t nest together naturally, but nor do they appear together in any language.
When I first learned about kerning, mystifying to me was the presence of Yq in almost every one of Adobe’s fonts. Adobe’s early faces sometimes neglected far more common pairs, or even whole ranges of the character set — many fonts didn’t kern periods, dashes, or quotation marks — but Yq was ever-present. When I met him in the early nineties, Adobe’s Fred Brady hinted at why: located in northern California, Adobe’s designers often had a thing for viniculture, and one of the world’s most famous dessert wines is produced by Château D’Yquem.
We’ve included Yq as a standard kerning pair ever since, though I’d never gotten to see it in action until yesterday. Here, in the window of Sotheby’s on Bond Street, is our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/verlag/overview/">Verlag</a> typeface, Yq kern and all. There are kerns obscurer still that we’re waiting to see in public, though I don’t suppose I’ll be seeing the 9th century Old English word wihxð (wax) in the window of Sotheby’s anytime soon. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 10 Apr 2008 03:16:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/adventures-in-kerning-part-ii#326</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[How We Know Our ABCs]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/how-we-know-our-abcs</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/a-b-c-instructions_500.png">
“Collation” is the technical term for the order in which the letters of the alphabet are arranged. Anyone who’s ever glanced at a foreign alphabet has noticed the consistencies that have been preserved over the millennia: our Latin “A, B, C” resembles the Greek “alpha, beta, gamma,” as well as the Arabic “’alif, bā’, tā” and Hebrew “aleph, bet, gimel,” all of which are traceable to the Phoenician “’āleph, bēth, gīmel.” By the time we’ve passed through the Proto-Canaanite “’alp, bet, gaml” to the Ugaritic “alpa, beta, gamla,” we’ve travelled back 3,500 years; what's interesting is that the <a href="http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ugaritic.htm" target="_blank">shapes</a> of these letters are unrecognizable, but their order is utterly familiar.
I came across a passage last night that speaks to the significance of alphabet collation. I’d always imagined that the modern practice of labelling parts for assembly using the alphabet — insert tab A into slot B, etc. — must be a post-industrial innovation, one which relied upon modern standards of literacy. Not so:
<blockquote class="excerpt">Ancient Near Easterners used fitters’ marks, single letters of the alphabet apparently used to indicate the order in which various building materials are to be assembled. Various decorative ivory pieces from Nimrud, Iraq, were letter-coded to show the order in which they were to be inserted into furniture. In a temple at Petra, Jordan, archaeologists found “large, individually letter-coded, ashlar blocks spread along the floor of [a] room ... in the temple structure.” In a 1971 salvage expedition of a ship downed off Marsala, Italy, Honor Frost discovered “letters at key places where wood was to be joined ... the ship assembly [was thus] a colossal game of carpentry by letters, like a modern paint-by-numbers project.”</blockquote>
This is from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0195079930/typographycom-20" target="_blank">The World’s Writing Systems,</a> edited by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright. Oxford University Press, 1996. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 08 Apr 2008 02:34:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/how-we-know-our-abcs#325</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[It’s Alive!]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/its-alive</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/estupido-lives_500_1.png">
I should have <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/two-fools" target="_blank">known</a> it would come to <a href="http://www.ministryoftype.co.uk/words/article/robot_poetry/
" target="_blank">this</a>. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 03 Apr 2008 06:30:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/its-alive#324</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Type Tour II]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/type-tour-ii</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/hfj-walking-tour08_500_2.jpg">
If you missed Tobias’s Typographic Walking Tour last September, and weren’t one of the 22 lucky callers to register for his <a href="http://aigany.org/events/details/08A2/
" target="_blank">2008 encore performance</a>, you’ve one more chance. Come to the 2008 <a href="http://www.iirusa.com/fuse/fuse-overview.xml" target="_blank">FUSE conference</a>, April 13–16 at the Chelsea Piers, where Tobias joins Malcolm Gladwell, Stefan Sagmeister, Debbie Millman, Chip Kidd and other sharp tacks for a three-day exploration of design and culture. The Type Tour begins April 13 at 11:00, and places are limited! —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 03 Apr 2008 01:51:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/type-tour-ii#323</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Change We Can Believe In]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/change-we-can-believe-in</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/royal-mint_500.jpg">
Above, the new face of British currency, announced by the <a href="http://www.royalmint.com/newdesigns/designsRevealed.aspx" target="_blank">Royal Mint</a>. The striking new designs, selected from an open competition that attracted four thousand entries, are the work of a 26-year old graphic designer named Matthew Dent. They are Mr. Dent’s first foray into currency design.
Below, the new five dollar bill, introduced last month by the <a href="http://www.moneyfactory.gov/newmoney/" target="_blank">United States Department of the Treasury</a>. The new design, which features a big purple Helvetica five, is the work of a 147-year-old government agency called the United States Bureau of Engraving and Printing. It employs 2,500 people, and has an annual budget of $525,000,000. —JH
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/five-spot_500.png">]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 02 Apr 2008 21:33:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/change-we-can-believe-in#322</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[London Calling]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/london-calling</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/edo-poster2.png">
Just a quick note to let Londoners know that the <a href="http://www.editorialdesign.org/?p=19" target="_blank">Editorial Design Organization</a> will be hosting an evening of editorial typography, featuring Janet Froelich of the New York Times Magazine, and Jonathan Hoefler of H&Co. Free to EDO members, £20 for non-members, £5 for students.
American Night at the EDO 
Wednesday, April 9, 6:00-9:00pm
Rootstein Hopkins Space 
London College of Fashion 
20 John Princes Street, W1G 0BJ 
Inquiries to Gill Branston, 020 8906 4664]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:08:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/london-calling#321</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Two Fools]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/two-fools</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/estupido_500.png">
I pretty much agree with <a href="http://www.dashes.com/anil/2006/03/your-april-fool.html
" target="_blank">Anil Dash</a> on the topic of wacky April Fools’ jokes for websites, so instead I thought that today might be a good day to share a piece of genuine idiocy from the archives.
By the time Tobias and I began working together in 1999, we'd been friends for a decade, and had spent most of the previous years in close contact by phone. Our biographers will report this as a period of august correspondence in which we developed the philosophical framework that would inform our later collaboration, but the truth is that much of this time was spent goofing off, and naturally the arrival of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_Trilogy" target="_blank">the internet</a> helped this project immensely.
Since we’d always been the types to tackle exhaustive projects, we both spent most of the nineties utterly exhausted. Many of our late night conversations were wits-end grievances about the impossibility of doing something or other, and these commonly degenerated into a discussion of Dumb Ideas for Typefaces. One of these, which I suggested in 1995, was that the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OCR-A" target="_blank">OCR-A</a> font — used on bank statements and designed for optical character recognition — really needed to be outfitted with a set of swashes. Using Adobe Illustrator, I ginned up the image above in about ten minutes, and sent it to Tobias. His response, which arrived within the hour, was a file named ¡¡¡Estupido-Espezial!!!.sit, which contained the following:

<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/estupido_ezpecial_500.png">
The full set of swashes are nice, but for me it’s the archaic long s that really takes it home.
I tacked this specimen of Estupido Espezial!!! to my wall, where it immediately became a litmus test for visitors. Most people would say nothing, but woe be unto anyone who admired the thing in earnest: “hey, cool font!” would immediately land any visitor on the Suspicious Persons list. The best were those who would stare for a moment with bafflement before bursting out laughing, a few of whom became good friends, good clients, or both. Unique among these was my friend Eric Siry, himself late of The Hoefler Type Foundry and by then working at Rolling Stone, where he had soberly convinced the magazine to license Estupido for an upcoming issue. “Get yourself a copy of OCR-A, and Estupido’s yours for five hundred bucks,” I must have said, for a few weeks later I received a check from Wenner Media.
To this day it’s unclear whether Eric had recommended the font with or without irony — he’s tight-lipped on the subject — but a few months later appeared the Rolling Stone Technology Issue, its entire feature well brilliantly festooned with the font’s <a href="http://ericsiry.carbonmade.com/projects/4219657#6">nightmarish tentacles</a>. I knew that Tobias would be deeply horrified that our antics had seen the light of day, and wondered about the best way to break the news to him; after much thought, I decided that the best way would be to tell him immediately before he went on stage at the AIGA National Conference in New Orleans.
Knowing that the two of us were scheduled to appear together on a panel discussion, I’d come to New Orleans with three numbered envelopes for Tobias. The first contained a check for $250, offered without explanation, at which he arched an eyebrow. At the second envelope, all the color drained from his face, as it contained a copy of a license to Rolling Stone for “one-time use of the typeface Estupido Espezial.” The third envelope, of course, contained a copy of the issue itself, its pages annotated by hundreds of tiny Sign Here flags signalling the most delightful of its many typographic atrocities. During the Q&A session after the talk, I noticed Tobias staring intently into a notebook, and I thought for a moment that he was shaking his head in consternation. Later I learned that he was drawing the following, the final chapter in the Estupido saga. —JH
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/estupido-fleuron_500.png">]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:39:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/two-fools#320</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Entire 1980s in Three Minutes]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-entire-1980s-in-three-minutes</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/DVNO_500.jpg">
Totally loving today: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GiDsLRQg_g4" target="_blank">This video</a> for Justice’s DVNO, designed by <a href="http://machinemolle.com/" target="_blank">Machine Molle</a>. It just gets better and better; wait for the very end. The very end. —JH
<div class="addendum">
Update: DVNO logos <a href="http://www.last.fm/user/syturvy/journal/2008/03/3/664466/" target="_blank">explained</a>.
</div>]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 27 Mar 2008 09:46:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-entire-1980s-in-three-minutes#319</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[H&Co Crime-Fighting Division]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/hco-crime-fighting-division</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/smoking-gun_500.png">
It was not a dark, stormy night at the H&Co offices, and she was not a dame in a red dress who spelled trouble with a capital T. It was last Friday afternoon, and the caller was Bill Bastone, founder and editor of The Smoking Gun, with a question about forensic typography.
The story begins with last week’s report by the Los Angeles Times that murdered rapper Tupac Shakur was assassinated by associates of Sean “Diddy” Combs. The Times appears to have relied heavily on a set of FBI reports — 302s, in the argot — which cannot be found in the FBI’s own files. This morning, <a href="http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/0325081sabatino1.html" target="_blank">The Smoking Gun</a> suggests that these may be the work of an accomplished document forger named James Sabatino, who conducted his hoax from within the walls of the Allenwood Federal Correctional Complex in Pennsylvania.
We’re not experts in forensic typography or document authentication, but were able to point TSG’s specialists toward one subtle typographic clue. To untrained eyes including ours, the three 302s look like genuine bureaucratic dross: form elements are typeset in a proportionally-spaced font that appears to be Times Roman, and the body of each document is filled in with a typewriter. (The occasional overstruck letter, as well as some very erratic line endings, suggest a typewriter rather than a word processor; never mind that the Bureau stopped using typewriters “about 30 years ago,” according to an FBI supervisor.)
But a telltale gaffe appears at the top of one document, in which the date is rendered in the proportionally-spaced font. The “advance width” of the periods are demonstrably narrower than that of the numbers around them (typewriter periods are famously aloof from their neighbors), suggesting that at least this part of the document was prepared digitally — but only this part of the document, and only this one document from the set of three. The Smoking Gun has all three documents online: compare them <a href="http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/0325081fbione1.html" target="_blank">here</a>, <a href="http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/0325081fbitwo1.html" target="_blank">here</a>, and <a href="http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/0325081fbithree1.html" target="_blank">here</a>. You owe me, Diddy. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 26 Mar 2008 08:24:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/hco-crime-fighting-division#318</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Selectric Days]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/selectric-days</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/selectric-days_500.png">
My reputation compels me to deny that I ever spent adolescent weekends hanging out at Tannen’s Magic Shop or The Compleat Strategist, and I certainly never wasted sunny afternoons playing with the Ohio Scientific computer downstairs at Polk’s Hobby Shop (even if it did have Lunar Lander in 16 colors.) But having burnished my nerd credentials through a career as a type designer, it seems safe to admit that, as a teen, I sported an enviable collection of <a href="http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/vintage/vintage_4506VV2122.html" target="_blank">golf balls</a> for the family typewriter, a beloved IBM Selectric II.
Yesterday, a conversation with my friend <a href="http://www.talleming.com/" target="_blank">Tal</a> induced a Proustian flash in which I recalled — and was actually able to find in the studio’s library — the above: entitled “GP Technologies Typing Element Handbook,” it’s a brochure from the early eighties that shows the complete range of styles available for the IBM Selectric typewriter. Sure, I had Courier, Orator, and both Prestige Pica and Prestige Elite, but it was more exotic numbers like these that I really went in for. A major coup was scoring Olde English, warts and all (let’s talk about that capital H some time), but my unattainable Philosopher’s Stone was Oriental, which no office supply shop in the five boroughs seemed to carry. What I would have done with the typeface is anyone’s guess (utility isn’t always relevant to the completist), but I can only imagine, given the font’s facile design and appalling intent, that it would have been something spectacularly ghastly.
Still, there are things to admire in old Oriental. Its ampersand is a model of efficiency, and the economy of its at-sign (@) is downright clever. That this goofball font was outfitted with such serious accessories as a paragraph mark and a set of fractions hints at the work of a wicked mind, not unlike that of the latter-day typefounder who soberly includes an <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/requiem/features/requiem-italic-ligatures/" target="_blank">fffl ligature</a> in text face. Perhaps these are subtle absurdities that lie in wait for attentive eyes, or perhaps they really are useful things to have in a font. In either case, it seems evident that type designers of all ages are, in their hearts, completists. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 19 Mar 2008 11:56:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/selectric-days#317</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[St. Patrick’s Type]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/st.-patricks-type</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/roman-scherer-1_500.jpg">
Three of my favorite things are <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/indy-boys-fly-the-biggest-heds" target="_blank">big type</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/shades/overview/" target="_blank">chromatic type</a>, and <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/grecian-fonts-a-miscellany" target="_blank">type specimen books</a>, and St. Patrick’s Day offers the perfect occasion to bring all three interests to the table, literally. Parked here at our conference table is the 1904 type specimen of the Roman Scherer company, a wood type manufacturer in Luzern who specialized in two-color type. This page shows the shamrocked “Serie 5401” in the gargantuan size of 40 ciceros — that’s a cap height of almost seven inches (173 mm) — which cleverly gives the illusion of a third color by overprinting red and green to produce a perfect black.
The font was manufactured in at least six sizes, none of which have we ever seen in the wild: like the rest of Roman Scherer’s other chromatic faces, which I’ll post later, these seem to have vanished into obscurity. —JH
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/roman-scherer-2_500.jpg">]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 17 Mar 2008 09:09:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/st.-patricks-type#316</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Digital Analog]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/digital-analog</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/digital-analog_500.jpg">
Writing about the glories of the <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-7" target="_blank">nixie tube</a> last December, I wondered aloud whether there’s anyone alive who has any affection for the ubiquitous <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven-segment_display" target="_blank">LED display</a>. Today I have my answer.
At RISD, BFA candidate <a href="http://alvinaronson.com/" target="_blank">Alvin Aronson</a> has made the witty and beautiful “d/a clock,” in which seven-segment LED numbers are made manifest in Corian and wood. There’s something irresistable about digital artifacts come to life; watching this <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQWmiSLYVaQ" target="_blank">mesmerizing video</a> of Aronson’s functioning clock, I’m reminded of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchestral_Game_Concert" target="_blank">Game Music Concerts</a> in which the Tokyo Philharmonic performed the themes from Super Mario Brothers and The Legend of Zelda. Like these, Aronson’s work is certainly mordant and entertaining, but it’s undeniably Art. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 13 Mar 2008 17:53:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/digital-analog#315</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[A Font Tip for Leopard Users]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-font-tip-for-leopard-users</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/font-quickview.png">
A nifty feature of Mac OS X 10.5 (“Leopard”) is <a href="http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/quicklook.html" target="_blank">Quick Look</a>, a tool in the Finder that allows you to preview collections of files at a glance. Popular for images, Quick Look is useful for fonts as well, as it allows both styles and families to be examined without leaving the Finder.
In the Finder, select a bunch of fonts and hit the space bar. Shown here is the result for <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/archer/overview/">Archer</a>; clicking any individual style reveals the core character set for that font, along with buttons for paging through the collection one font at a time. There’s even a slideshow mode, and the obligatory animation when switching modes that’s completely gratuitous but charming nonetheless. Check it out! —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 13 Mar 2008 15:08:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-font-tip-for-leopard-users#314</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Pilcrow & Capitulum]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/pilcrow-capitulum</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[My <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/the-sulzbacher-eszett" target="_blank">last post</a> made passing mention of the pleasures of designing the paragraph mark, prompting one reader to rightly ask, “how much fun can it really be to draw a backwards P?” [No more fun than it is to draw the rest of that font you’re using, matey. —Ed.] It may not seem obvious, but the lowly paragraph mark really does offer ample opportunity for invention.
Like most punctuation, the paragraph mark (or pilcrow) has an exotic history. It’s tempting to recognize the symbol as a “P for paragraph,” though the resemblance is incidental: in its original form, the mark was an open C crossed by a vertical line or two, a scribal abbreviation for capitulum, the Latin word for “chapter.” Because written forms evolve through haste, the strokes through the C gradually came to descend further and further, its overall shape ultimately coming to resemble the modern “reverse P” by the beginning of the Renaissance. Early liturgical works, in imitation of written manuscripts, favored the traditional C-shaped capitulum; many modern bibles still do. A capitulum is by no means out of place in a modern font, either: top row center is <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/didot/overview/" target="_blank">H&Co Didot</a>, whose neoclassical origins suggested the inclusion of a shape from antiquity.
Above, a pageant of pilcrows from some of our fonts, suggesting that the possibilities are indeed endless. There seem to be eight fundamental questions that inform the shape of the pilcrow: (1) Should the form be P-like or C-like? (2) Should there be one stroke or two? (3) Should the bowl be solid or open? (4) Should the bottom of the strokes be plain, seriffed, or flourished? (5) Should the top right corner finish with a serif or not? (6) Should the bowl exhibit contrast to match the alphabet, or be monolinear like the mathematical operators? (7) Should the bowl connect with the first stroke, the second stroke, both, or neither? (8) Should the character align with the capitals, or descend to match the lowercase? Together these simple decisions offer 768 possible outcomes, none of which even begins to anticipate the stylized can-opener of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/overview/" target="_blank">Whitney</a> or the bent paperclip of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/cyclone/overview/" target="_blank">Cyclone</a>. [Or the post-mounted mailbox of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/idlewild/overview/">Idlewild</a>, or the ski rope handle of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/landmark/overview/">Landmark Dimensional</a>, now included above.]
In any case, Pilcrow & Capitulum would make a fine name for a pub, and a grand place to host a typographers’ <a href="http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-way1.htm" target="_blank">wayzgoose</a>. Or perhaps it’s a buddy movie about crime-fighting bibliographers: Capitulum wears cable knit sweaters and drinks single malt, and Pilcrow is a ladies’ man who drives an Austin Healey. Catch their zany antics and madcap adventures, etc, etc. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 12 Mar 2008 09:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/pilcrow-capitulum#313</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[The Sulzbacher Eszett]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-sulzbacher-eszett</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[Our designers are often asked if there are particular letters that we especially enjoy drawing. Office doodles testify to the popularity of the letter R, perhaps because it synopsizes the rest of the alphabet in one convenient package (it’s got a stem, a bowl, serifs both internal and external, and of course that marvelous signature gesture, the tail.) A quick straw poll names a, r, f and e as popular letters too, as well as the figures 2 and 5, and our resident Cyrillist admits a soft spot for the swash capital dje (Ђ.) The back end of the character set definitely invites invention as well: steely designers always appreciate a well-made paragraph mark or double dagger, and we certainly have our fun drawing them.
One character that’s especially gratifying to get right is the eszett, if only because it so stubbornly resists being figured out. Eszetts can follow any number of constructions, from the romanized long-s-short-s of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/archer/overview/" target="_blank">Archer</a> to the more Teutonic long-s-meets-z of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/verlag/overview/" target="_blank">Verlag</a>. Most fonts strike some balance between these extremes, introducing internal shapes that echo other parts of the character set (as in <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/mercury-display/overview/" target="_blank">Mercury</a>) or using simplified geometries that reinforce the philosophy behind the overall design (as in <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/" target="_blank">Gotham</a>.)
Historian James Mosley has posted an essay about the eszett to his indispensable <a href="http://typefoundry.blogspot.com/2008/01/esszett-or.html
" target="_blank">Typefoundry</a> blog, which sheds some light on the character’s checkered past. (The eszett lives in contemporary German as a ligatured form of the double s, but its very name means s-z; Mosley explains why.) An especially welcome gift from the essay is the correct technical name for the romanized ß: it is the “Sulzbacher form,” after Abraham Lichtenthaler, the seventeenth century printer denizened in the Bavarian town of Sulzbach, who is credited with introducing the character to roman printing type. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Sat, 08 Mar 2008 03:32:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-sulzbacher-eszett#312</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[All The News That’s Fit To Write]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/all-the-news-thats-fit-to-write</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[The distance between handwriting and typography is at its greatest in the West. It’s been more than five centuries since the Latin alphabet, as we experience it in type, looked anything like letters made with a pen; the very anatomy of our alphabet, with its stonemason’s “serifs” and printer’s “cases,” has come a very long way from writing indeed. It can hardly be surprising that as type has come to represent the official, the sanctioned, and the eternal, handwriting has become an almost trivial appendix to our notion of what letters look like.
It’s especially easy for Westerners to forget what a minority opinion this is. Most of the world attaches special significance to the hand-written, and lives with an intimate knowledge of its forms and an appreciation of its cultural and social dimensions. A Chinese businessperson of stature can be expected not only to admire the calligraphy in a colleague’s office, but to correctly identify it as the work of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Huizong_%28Song_Dynasty%29" target="_blank">Song Huizong</a>, and to discuss its virtues with erudition. Contrast this with his American counterpart, who can go an entire career without needing to learn the name of his corporate typeface.
Both senses of the word “writing” remain united in the Arab world, where calligraphy and literacy are at times inseparable. Nowhere is this more evident than in the offices of The Musalman, a Chennai newspaper published since 1927, which has the extraordinary virtue of being the world’s last surviving newspaper written entirely by hand. “We somehow manage to make ends meet,” says one of the newspaper’s four calligraphers (or katibs) who every day devotes three hours to a single page. “There’s no monetary benefit for us, we are just here to learn Urdu.”
The handwritten newspaper gained wider attention last summer when <a href="http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/multimedia/2007/07/gallery_calligraphers" target="_blank">Wired</a> dispatched photojournalist <a href="http://www.scottcarneyonline.com/photos/Musalmaan%20Paper%20Photos/album/" target="_blank">Scott Carney</a> to document The Musalman’s inner workings. Later this year, we may learn more about the paper’s inevitable entanglement with digital typography, when Premjit Ramachandran releases his documentary film <a href="http://musalman.100hands.net/" target="_blank">The Last Calligraphers</a>. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Fri, 22 Feb 2008 10:42:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/all-the-news-thats-fit-to-write#311</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[…and Non-Fontogenic…]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/and-non-fontogenic</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/typography-com_mccain-hillary-640px.jpg">
A journalist recently asked what it is about Gotham that we think suits the Obama campaign. We’ll defer to designers John Slabyk and Scott Thomas to make that call — they selected the font for Obama for America, we merely provided it — but one thing we can say as type designers is that <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview">Gotham</a> isn’t pretending to be anything it’s not, which makes it an unusual and refreshing choice for a campaign. Political typefaces have a way of being chosen because they underscore (or imagine) some specific aspect of a candidate, working hard to convey “traditional values” or “strength and vigilance,” or any number of graspable populist notions. The only thing Gotham works hard at is being Gotham.
2008 is clearly a year of unusual thinking in political circles, because none of these familiar approaches can explain the utterly confounding typographic dress chosen by Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Hillary’s snooze of a serif might have come off a heart-healthy cereal box, or a mildly embarrassing over-the-counter ointment; if you’re feeling generous you might associate it with a Board of Ed circular, or an obscure academic journal. But Senator McCain’s typeface is positively mystifying: after three decades signifying a very down-market notion of luxe, this particular sans serif has settled into being the font of choice for the hygiene aisle. One of McCain’s campaign themes is “Making Tough Choices:” is this the one you would have made? —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Fri, 22 Feb 2008 03:35:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/and-non-fontogenic#310</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Fontogenic]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/fontogenic</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/change-08_500.jpg">
Veteran campaigners know that the best way to gain someone’s vote is to be photographed holding their baby. It seems that the same goes for fonts: it’s hard to take a non-partisan stance when one of the candidates looks so good standing in front of your typeface. Helvetica director Gary Hustwit shared this image with us, along with a hopeful observation about both the candidate and the typeface behind him:
<blockquote class="excerpt">“I think it’s interesting that the design of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/" target="_blank">Gotham</a> was influenced by early Modernism, another movement that was about change and social idealism. And I like that the design aesthetic that may help move Obama into the White House was inspired by the humble <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/history/" target="_blank">NY Port Authority Bus Terminal sign</a>.”</blockquote>
<a href="http://www.helveticafilm.com/blog/2008/02/19/a-font-we-can-believe-in/" target="_blank">A Font We Can Believe In</a>, from the Helvetica Film Blog. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Fri, 22 Feb 2008 03:34:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/fontogenic#309</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Stupendo Memento Mori]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/stupendo-memento-mori</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/wrong-font_500.jpg">
BREAKING — <a href="http://www.theonion.com/content/from_print/wrong_font_chosen_for" target="_blank">Wrong Font Chosen for Gravestone</a>.
And it’s <a href="http://www.marksimonson.com/article/19/HowDidHeDoIt" target="_blank">not the first time</a>. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 20 Feb 2008 08:46:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/stupendo-memento-mori#308</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Fantasy League Typography]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/fantasy-league-typography</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/duke-sheet-music-1_500.jpg">
One of the things I most love about the design of the late nineteenth century is its unpredictability. Across all of the decorative arts there was a strong emphasis on novelty, and a succession of new technologies made it easier than ever to execute these strange and untested ideas. (You can see this in the terra cotta work of architect <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Sullivan" target="_blank">Louis Sullivan</a>, or the elaborate inlays of furniture designer <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herter_Brothers" target="_blank">Gustav Herter</a>.) The period was a riot of ornament, and to be sure, much of the work was awful: most of what we remember today is hopelessly cliché, or cloyingly overwrought. But then there are moments like these.
Above is a piece of nineteenth century engraving, which looks as if it might have been the product of a CalArts group project by Wim Crouwel and Louise Fili. (The rest of my fantasy league is no less oddball; images after the jump evoke Jonathan Barnbrook vs. John Downer, and Max Kisman vs. Marian Bantjes.) These excerpts come from an incredible collection of American sheet music from the period 1850-1920, currently being <a href="http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/hasm/browse/1870-1879
" target="_blank">exhibited online</a> by Duke University. The documents from the 1870s are my favorites, many of which are from the hand of an engraver named Reed (note his signature hiding in the fourth image below.) His stylistic pairings are among the more remarkable — above, the constructed sans serif and swelled rules are unexpected bedfellows. But some of my favorite moments are those in which unrelated visual agendas collide in the letterforms themselves. Is there anything more fabulous than the monoline blackletter of “Mazurka Elegante” below, or the squared-off shapes of the final line, “Tiny Birdlings of the Air?” Will you check out that lowercase g? —JH
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/duke-sheetmusic_500.jpg">]]>
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<pubDate>Tue, 12 Feb 2008 07:12:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/fantasy-league-typography#307</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Politics Without Gotham]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/politics-without-gotham</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/fairey_500.png">
Not all <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/a-change-we-made" target="_blank">political typography</a> has to be set in <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/" target="_blank">Gotham</a> (though it <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/a-banner-day" target="_blank">seems</a> that way) — here for example are some calls to action by Shepherd Fairey that don’t use any Gotham at all. They use <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/knockout/overview/" target="_blank">Knockout No. 48</a>.
Designers in Louisiana, Nebraska, Washington, and Maine have primaries this weekend; Virginia, Maryland and DC, you’re up Tuesday. This means <a href="http://exceptyou.org/participate.asp" target="_blank">you</a>. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Fri, 08 Feb 2008 06:29:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/politics-without-gotham#306</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[The Evolution of Tech Logos]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-evolution-of-tech-logos</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/nokia-logo.gif">
It took a visit to Finland in 1996 to realize that Nokia the cellphone company and Nokia the tire company were one and the same. Apparently these are merely the latest stops on a very long journey: Nokia was founded in 1865 as a wood-pulp mill, on a channel of rapids between two Finnish lakes, all of which goes to explain why the company’s original logo was this slightly alarmed salmon.
Neatorama is running a very entertaining look at the <a href="http://www.neatorama.com/2008/02/07/the-evolution-of-tech-companies-logos/" target="_blank">evolution of tech companies’ logos</a>, which includes such well-known corkers as IBM’s grand typographic <a href="http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/logo/logo_5.html" target="_blank">globe</a>, and the short-lived <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Apple_first_logo.png" target="_blank">Apple</a> logo (that still makes me hear strains of “Carry On My Wayward Son.”) Less publicized, with good reason, is the original Canon logo — née <a href="http://www.canon.com/about/mark/origin.html" target="_blank">Kwanon</a> — which had all the worldly sophistication of a Charlie Chan movie. I’m gravely concerned for the Motorola logo, though: it’s memorable, distinctive, and typographically lovely; there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it, which means it’s probably next in line for the ax. (Xerox, I’m looking at you.) So I'm adding this one to the H&Co Endangered Logo Watchlist, and offering 3:2 odds on a tragic redesign before the decade’s out. —JH.]]>
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<pubDate>Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:53:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-evolution-of-tech-logos#305</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Indy Boys Fly The Biggest Heds]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/indy-boys-fly-the-biggest-heds</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/indy-super.jpg">
Now that’s what I call a banner headline. Yesterday’s Indy Star had a nice enough 180pt <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/inside/gotham-condensed" target="_blank">Gotham Condensed</a> on page one, but it took a win for the Colts in Superbowl XLI to produce this whopper: a 9,800pt headline emblazoned on the outside of the newspaper’s offices. Biggest Gotham ever?
Eli Manning’s got to be wondering why, after quarterbacking the Giants to a victory in Superbowl XLII, he hasn’t gotten the same reception as his brother Peyton here. Every single one of the New York dailies uses an H&Co font, and our office buildings are considerably taller: couldn’t <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Building" target="_blank">620 Eighth Avenue</a> or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daily_News_Building" target="_blank">220 West 42nd Street</a> manage a Gotham Condensed headline in 50,000pt? (Where’s that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gates" target="_blank">Christo</a> guy when you need him?) —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Thu, 07 Feb 2008 07:42:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/indy-boys-fly-the-biggest-heds#304</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[A Banner Day]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-banner-day</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/banner-heads_500.jpg">
Primary season means banner headlines, and banner headlines mean <a href="https://www.typography.com/collections/condensed/" target="_blank">condensed fonts</a>. Above, some of our favorite Gothamophiles working hard to cement Gotham’s connection to <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/a-change-we-made" target="_blank">politics</a>; here’s <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/styles/" target="_blank">Gotham Condensed</a> being put through its paces at a range of sizes. Scott Goldman wins the size prize at The Indianapolis Star — and his state wasn’t even voting yesterday!
We’ll post some political front pages from the New York papers, provided they ever stop talking about the Superbowl. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 06 Feb 2008 17:30:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-banner-day#303</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Not Playing at a Theater Near You]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/not-playing-at-a-theater-near-you</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/saved_by_wireless3.jpg">
Now appearing at Vanity Fair is a great exhibit of <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/02/lobbycards_slideshow200802" target="_blank">lobby cards</a> from the collection of the late <a href="http://www.leonardschradercollection.com/" target="_blank">Leonard Schrader</a>. From Schrader’s collection of 8,462 items the editors have chosen an attractive and representative set of 36 that celebrates the golden age of lettering, before its ultimate fall to typography.
At left, an excerpt from Saved by Wireless, Joe and Mia May’s 1919 epic about which the IMDB is strangely <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0562069/" target="_blank">silent</a>. (Judging from the cavemen, presumably it does not deal with the convenience of 802.11; been there, though.) Other highlights include MGM’s <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/02/lobbycards_slideshow200802?slide=36" target="_blank">The Devil Doll</a>, whose inside-out lettering prefigures Roger Excoffon’s Calypso typeface of 1958, and Fritz Lang’s <a href="http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/02/lobbycards_slideshow200802?slide=13" target="_blank">Metropolis</a> rendered in a whimsical style of lettering that befits the movie’s cheery themes of dystopianism, technological isolation, and internecine strife. For ages six and up. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 06 Feb 2008 11:18:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/not-playing-at-a-theater-near-you#302</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Introducing Archer]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/archer-a-new-font-from-hco</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/archer-release_responsive-2.svg">
We’re delighted to introduce Archer®, a new slab serif in forty styles. Sweet but not saccharine, earnest but not grave, Archer is designed to hit just the right notes of forthrightness, credibility, and charm. Romans and italics in eight weights each, including a delicate hairline for display work, and featuring small caps, fractions, tabular figures, and our Expanded Latin character set for extended language support. Now shipping in OpenType, with prices starting at $149, plus special savings when you order two or more Archer packages.]]>
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<pubDate>Mon, 28 Jan 2008 08:06:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/archer-a-new-font-from-hco#301</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Elliott Puckette at Paul Kasmin Gallery]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/elliott-puckette-at-paul-kasmin-gallery</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/puckette_500.jpg">
If you suspect that my typographic leanings affect my taste for other visual arts, it will come as no surprise to learn how much I love the work of Elliott Puckette. There’s a show of her recent work at <a href="http://www.paulkasmingallery.com/artists/elliott-puckette/
" target="_blank">Paul Kasmin Gallery</a> in New York, which runs through February 23: do not miss it.
An interesting counterpoint to the works themselves is Judith Goldman’s interview with the artist, published in the exhibition catalog. Puckette counts Oleg Grabar’s study of <a href="http://www.riifs.org/journal/essy_v2no2_grbar.htm" target="_blank">Islamic calligraphy</a> among her influences, along with the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asemic
" target="_blank">asemic writing</a> of artists such as <a href=" http://www.herenow.com.au/asemic.net/" target="_blank">Henri Michaux</a>. She mentions other influences that are further afield, and less directly evident in her work: the physiognomical portraits of <a href="https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp63867/johann-caspar-lavater" target="_blank">Johann Caspar Lavater</a>, the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Alphabet" target="_blank">Celestial Alphabet</a>, and the <a href="http://www.flavinscorner.com/fellegypt.htm" target="_blank">Walam Olum</a>, among others. But most striking to me was this comment, in which Puckette describes how she began using a razor as a tool:
<blockquote class="excerpt">I warmed up to it slowly. I was looking at penmanship books and doing paintings of the letter O and A, and I thought about making the image negative by painting around it.... I thought, if I scratch it out, that would be easier, and I’d get there faster. Cutting and scratching was a way to slow the line down. In the end it wasn’t about adding; it was about subtracting.</blockquote>
What’s remarkable is that this is exactly how typefaces are designed: not by constructing letterforms in black, but by drawing counters in white. That Puckette chose an implement for stripping away, rather than building up, is also fascinating: files and gravers, the traditional tools of typemaking, are tools for creating whitespace. (Their profound affect on type design, which cannot be underestimated, is the central thesis of Fred Smeijers’ excellent <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0907259065/typographycom-20
" target="_blank">Counterpunch</a>.) I can’t help but wonder what a Puckette-designed typeface might look like; perhaps we’ll someday find out? —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Sat, 26 Jan 2008 09:55:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/elliott-puckette-at-paul-kasmin-gallery#300</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Precisely What the Author Had in Mind]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/precisely-what-the-author-had-in-mind</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/finerpoints_hoefler_500.jpg">]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 16 Jan 2008 19:08:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/precisely-what-the-author-had-in-mind#461</guid>
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<title><![CDATA[Groovy Tech]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/groovy-tech</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/mark_richards_500.jpg">
Spy shots from Macworld! If only. This is one of Mark Richards’ spectacular photographs from Core Memory Project, his terrific survey of vintage computers. Mark’s sexy shot of the DEC PDP8/F explains all those day-glo set dressings in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner" target="_blank">The Prisoner</a> and The Time Tunnel, both worlds in which the higher the technology, the brighter the orange. Like the steampunks who reimagine today’s aluminum boxes as a festival of valves and gears and brass, when will we see the Modpunks, who will wickedly return us to a world of ochre cabinets, spooling tapes, and knobs that reassuringly click? (Or are they here <a href="http://www.brionvega.it/" target="_blank">already</a>?) —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 14 Jan 2008 05:15:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/groovy-tech#299</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Large Hats & Small Caps]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/large-hats-small-caps</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/riordan_americana.png">
Having begun the week with Senator Barack <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/a-change-we-made" target="_blank">Obama’s typeface</a>, it seemed appropriate to look back at the typography of campaigns past. Here’s a splendid piece of Americana that will be at auction at <a href="http://www.christies.com/features/jan08/2095/overview.asp" target="_blank">Christie’s</a> next week: a carved polychrome and gilt political hat, dated 1872, from the collection of Marguerite and Arthur Riordan. It captures a number of quintessential period styles: bold sans serifs in caps and small caps, “catchwords” festooned with calligraphic flourishes, and two styles of lettering interrupted by medial spurs. Measuring 25" deep and 18" wide, it’s a perfect fit for the head of any 21st century politician. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 11 Jan 2008 08:16:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/large-hats-small-caps#298</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Powers of 41]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/powers-of-41</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/eames_stamps_500.jpg">
Ours isn’t a government that holds designers in especially high esteem; a glance at the back of the <a href="http://www.moneyfactory.gov/newmoney/main.cfm/currency/new20" target="_blank">$20 bill</a> says as much. So it was with both delight and surprise that I learned this morning that the U. S. Postal Service is scheduled to roll out this set of <a href="http://www.usps.com/communications/newsroom/2007/sr07_084.htm" target="_blank">stamps</a> next summer, honoring the great contributions of Charles and Ray Eames.
Our entire profession owes thanks to USPS designer Derry Noyes, not only for raising the public profile of design with this marvelous project, but for answering its unique design problems so expertly. The Eames Office worked in two, three, and four dimensions, and to meet the challenge of representing their body of work so concisely — at the size of a postage stamp (a rare, non-metaphorical use of the phrase) — takes tact and aplomb of Eamesian proportions. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 09 Jan 2008 11:46:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/powers-of-41#297</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[A Change We Made]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-change-we-made</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/obama_gotham_500.jpg">
Literally: that’s our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/" target="_blank">Gotham</a> typeface, as used by <a href="http://www.barackobama.com/index.php" target="_blank">Senator Barack Obama</a>. Curiously, <a href="http://www.johnedwards.com/" target="_blank">John Edwards</a> is also using Gotham, giving the font a combined 68% of the vote in Iowa! —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 04 Jan 2008 06:46:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-change-we-made#296</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[High Scores for Service and Style]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/high-scores-for-service-and-style</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/zagat_whitney_01_500.jpg">
With the arrival of a new year comes a new <a href="http://www.zagat.com/" target="_blank">Zagat Survey</a>, and with this year’s edition comes a special typographic surprise: a complete redesign using our <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/overview/" target="_blank">Whitney</a> family. The indomitable Zagat team has given the fonts one of their most rigorous workouts ever, using Whitney’s many special features to excellent advantage — here’s some of what’s inside.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/zagat_whitney_02_500.jpg">
Pocket guides have an especially compelling need to keep page count low and legibility high, making Whitney’s <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/features/whitney-economy/" target="_blank">compact</a> forms a good match for the project. In its pro edition, Whitney contains a set of even-width <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/features/whitney-numerics/" target="_blank">tabular figures</a>, which the Zagat team used for this very clear and sensible wine vintage chart, above.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/zagat_whitney_04_500.jpg">
Since guidebooks feature both maps and numbered lists, a set of numbered <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/features/whitney-indices/" target="_blank">indices</a> is often useful. Here, Zagat’s heavily-automated pagination system is able to call upon the pre-built <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/styles/whitneyindex" target="_blank">Whitney Index</a> font, rather than demanding the intervention of a designer for every single table. (If you’ve ever tried to make numbers in circles yourself, you know how treacherous they can be — especially when lists spill over into double digits!)
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/zagat_whitney_03_500.jpg">
Newsprint is an appropriate choice for a pocket guide, since it helps reduce both weight and cost, but it’s an especially hostile environment for typography. To survive newsprint, letterforms need to have <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/features/whitney-clarity/" target="_blank">clear gestures</a> and open apertures, to prevent their forms from clogging up at small sizes. And because type on newsprint can gain weight unpredictably, sans serifs with a broad range of weights are especially useful. Whitney has <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/styles/" target="_blank">six weights</a>, each of which makes an appearance somewhere in the 2008 guide. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 03 Jan 2008 06:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/high-scores-for-service-and-style#295</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Coming Attractions]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/coming-attractions</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/gator_gotham_500.png">
Sure, Kim Hastreiter knows her typography, but how did she manage to so accurately foresee a <a href="http://www.mediabistro.com/unbeige/urbanity/kim_hastreiter_predicts_gatorladen_gotham_in_2108_73954.asp?c=rss" target="_blank">top-secret font release</a> not scheduled for another hundred years? —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 31 Dec 2007 08:39:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/coming-attractions#294</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typographic Gifts for Designers, Part 10]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-10</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/transitmaps_500.jpg">
Harry Beck’s map of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tube_map" target="_blank">London Underground</a> is one of those seminal information graphics that has come to define an entire category. It must be as widely recognized as Mendeleev’s design for the periodic table of the elements; it’s surely been as influential, and as widely imitated and spoofed.
What makes both diagrams significant is that they bravely dispense with information traditionally thought to be crucial. Mendeleev described matter without any of its physical characteristics, which freed scientists to infer more significant information purely from the table itself. And Beck realized that the scale of a city was irrelevant to a commuter (as well as difficult to draw), so he bent the shape of Greater London to meet the needs of the map, in what’s technically called a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartogram" target="_blank">cartogram</a>.
Mark Ovenden’s Transit Maps of the World is a terrific and well-illustrated tour through the world that Beck created. It’s interesting to compare the choice of cartograms and equal-area maps in different cities, and at different times: Beck’s diagrammatic plan for the Paris Métro was rejected in favor of a beloved but impenetrable drawing, which is just the kind of Gallic gesture that has been confounding the English for centuries. The images in Ovenden’s book make it tempting to make inferences about the cultures behind the maps: the diagrams for Moscow, St. Petersburg and Nizhiny Novgorod have an undeniably Suprematist bent, and those for Beijing and Guangzhou look as if they could actually be the Simplified Chinese ideogram for “subway.” Closer to home, the map of Los Angeles looks likes an Anasazi petroglyph, and that of Washington, D.C. resembles nothing more than a pit of highly partisan snakes. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 20 Dec 2007 11:15:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-10#293</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typographic Gifts for Designers, Part 9]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-9</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/shorpy_print.jpg">
A visit to <a href="http://www.shorpy.com/" target="_blank">Shorpy</a> inevitably lasts the rest of the day. This tremendous archive of hundred-year-old photos has much to recommend it to anyone interested in period typography: the optimistic lettering of the <a href="http://www.shorpy.com/node/2093?size=_original" target="_blank">New Deal</a> is well represented, and there’s an excellent cross-section of <a href="http://www.shorpy.com/node/80" target="_blank">sidewalk Americana</a> as well; entertainingly, the whole collection is leavened by an undercurrent of <a href="http://www.shorpy.com/node/2154?size=_original" target="_blank">quiet menace</a> that I find delightfully surreal.
There are impossibly old photos from Antietam and significant ones from Kitty Hawk, but it’s candid images like <a href="http://www.shorpy.com/node/2162?size=_original" target="_blank">this</a> that I find the most striking. For while it’s their farmers and seamstresses and street urchins who draw focus and take center stage, the true subject of these photographs is the lettering in the background, and the thousands of invisible hands responsible for every single letter.
To my delight, Shorpy is now working with the Juniper Gallery to produce reproductions of some of their most evocative Vintage High-Resolution Photographs. Produced as eight-color giclee prints on a variety of archival stocks, Shorpy’s photographs are available in sizes from 19" × 13" (48cm × 33cm) to 47" × 34" (119cm × 86cm). Order by December 18 for Christmas delivery. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 17 Dec 2007 07:01:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-9#292</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typographic Gifts for Designers, Part 8]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-8</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/Calendar_Wrap_Sm.jpg">
The arrival of a new year means it’s time for a new Pentagram Calendar. We’ll forever be partial to the 2006 edition, for which Pentagram commissioned us to design <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/overview/" target="_blank">twelve new fonts of numbers</a>; we subsequently added three additional styles, anticipating of course the post-revolutionary 15-month calendar under which all earthlings will unite in observance of Hoefluary. (Reminder: font licenses must be paid in full by Tribute Day, Hoefluary 15.)
But until the revolution comes, enjoy your quaint 12-month ways with the stylish 2008 Pentagram Typography Calendar. 2008 looks like it’s going to be a vintage year, for this year’s edition is designed exclusively using the typefaces of <a href="http://www.designmuseum.org/design/matthew-carter" target="_blank">Matthew Carter</a>. Few things can make January more exhilarating than a brace of <a href="http://us.st11.yimg.com/us.st.yimg.com/I/kenknight-online_1975_1319821" target="_blank">Galliard old-style figures</a>, and the appearance of the scarce Walker typeface in February hints at many more treats throughout the months to come. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:05:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-8#291</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typographic Gifts for Designers, Part 7]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-7</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/nixieclock_59_500.jpg">
It’s hard to begrudge the polish and flexibility of a good pixel, but I’ll always have a soft spot for the earlier technologies. Mechanical and electronic displays with fixed images were somehow knowable in a way that screens are not, lending a palpable something to the things they inhabited. Has train travel been the same since the disappearance of the thip-thip-thipping <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-flap_display" target="_blank">flap display</a>? Didn’t buses seem more resolute when emblazoned with hand-lettered <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollsign" target="_blank">roll signs</a>, before today’s dot-matrix mayhem doomed them to speak in half-hearted and confounding abbreviations (or cheerily exclaim Out of Service as they malingered along?) Has the person yet walked the earth who has fond feelings for the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteen-segment_display" target="_blank">starburst display</a> of a credit card terminal?
One of my favorite outmoded technologies is the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixie_tube" target="_blank">nixie tube</a>. A tiny vacuum tube containing individual glowing cathodes for each digit, nixies were once a staple of high-end office calculators and measuring devices. Every few years, someone unearths a cache of virgin nixies and brings a nixie clock to market, which promptly sells out; this year’s offering is the Chronotronix V400 Nixie Tube Clock, an especially attractive contender in a polished cherry case, candidly offered in a limited edition. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 12 Dec 2007 06:48:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-7#290</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typographic Gifts for Designers, Part 6]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-6</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/gifts_brooklynmap_500.png">
I’ve yet to meet a designer that didn’t have a thing for <a href="https://www.typography.com/collections/cartography/" target="_blank">cartography</a>. In any medium (to this day, maps are printed, engraved, drawn and painted) cartographers have to be excellent and inventive typographers, and mapmaking has given typography some of its most interesting styles. Some of the more exotic letters we’ve drawn certainly owe something to mapmaking, in <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/oakleaf-behind-the-scenes" target="_blank">this case</a> the engraved maps of the very fertile Age of Enlightenment.
Equally interesting are the artists and designers who interpret maps. I hope to someday own one of Paula Scher’s fantastic <a href="http://blog.pentagram.com/2007/11/paula-scher-recent-paintings.php" target="_blank">paintings</a> (which incidentally are on display at New York’s <a href="http://www.mayastendhalgallery.com/" target="_blank">Maya Stendhal Gallery</a> through January 26), but in the meantime I might outfit myself with one of the five City Neighborhood Posters from Ork Design. Chicago, San Francisco and Boston are represented, as well as Manhattan and Brooklyn; gift certificates are available for the itinerant among us. Hand screen printed, and signed and numbered, $22 each. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 10 Dec 2007 11:36:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-6#289</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typographic Gifts for Designers, Part 5]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-5</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/gifts_diamonds_500.jpg">
If there’s one thing that says Gotham Fabulous, it’s rhodium-plated silver with a hit of CZ. <a href="https://www.typography.com/about/biographies.php#soskolne" target="_blank">Sara</a> found these Initial Pendant Necklaces online, each offering 0.2 carats of genuine cubic zirconium in a tarnish-free setting. A full alphabet’s available, though sadly no ampersand, otherwise the whole H&Co posse would be rolling in style.
A classier alternative is this <a href="http://www.iloveblocks.com/wishlist.html
" target="_blank">stunning diamond necklace</a> by Irina Block. But either option requires a primo backup gift. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Sat, 08 Dec 2007 07:17:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-5#288</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typographic Gifts for Designers, Part 4]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-4</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/gifts_minard_poster_500.png">
Every design studio has at least one of Edward Tufte’s books. They’re traditionally distributed during the sacred initiation ceremony through which one becomes a Graphic Designer: a cloaked celebrant makes the sign of command-option-escape and anoints the novice with toner, the congregation recites the paternoster from Paul Rand’s Design, Form, and Chaos, and the now-ordained Designer is presented with the Holy Relics that will form the heart of his or her own workplace: a manga-inspired wind-up toy, a framed fruit crate label with a smutty pun, an overwrought and temperamental stapler with a European pedigree, and a copy of <a href="http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi" target="_blank">Envisioning Information</a>.
Whether you share Tufte’s love of clarity, or haven’t read his books and simply want the shortcut to intellectual street cred (I’ll deal with you later), you’ll want a copy of this poster showing Napoleon’s March to Moscow, which Tufte correctly calls “probably the best statistical graphic ever drawn.” Designed by Charles Joseph Minard in 1869 and now reproduced by Graphics Press, the diagram simultaneously shows the position, direction, and strength of Napoleon’s army, as well as the time and temperature at each turn — a remarkable amount of information for such an intuitive and tidy diagram. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Sat, 08 Dec 2007 02:27:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-4#287</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typographic Gifts for Designers, Part 3]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-3</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/gifts_chocolate_1_500.jpg">
Much nattering takes place on this blog about the distinction between lettering (letterforms rendered for a particular situation) and fonts (sets of type designed for reproduction.) Edible lettering is an <a href="http://www.groningermuseum.nl/index.php?id=1166
" target="_blank">ancient tradition</a>, but edible fonts may be something new: our designer <a href="https://www.typography.com/about/biographies.php#soskolne" target="_blank">Sara Soskolne</a> discovered this marvelous set of Movable Type in Chocolate, created by Sandra Kübler and Christine Voshage.
I have to commend the duo for including a <a href="http://typolade.de/bestellung-m.html" target="_blank">broad character set</a>, including accents and punctuation. (The Droste company, which makes the <a href="http://www.dereuze.com/pimarket/dept.asp?s_id=0&dept_id=3087&WT.svl=deptnav1" target="_blank">chocolate initials</a> given to Dutch children for Sinterklaas Eve, doesn’t produce even the letter I, presumably because it’s challenging to design a chocolate I that matches the weight of the M or W.) As we know, children are a stickler for fairness, especially when it comes to chocolate, just as typographers are a stickler for fidelity, especially when it comes to chocolate. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 06 Dec 2007 10:27:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-3#286</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typographic Gifts for Designers, Part 2]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-2</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/gifts_cards_500.jpg">
A few weeks ago, I posted some <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/grecian-fonts-a-miscellany" target="_blank">scans</a> of nineteenth-century wood types by William Page, from the rare specimen book Wm. H. Page & Co. Wood Type of 1872. The designers at the Cary Graphic Arts Press (Rochester Institute of Technology) apparently share my love of Page's colorful woodtypes, for their lovely Wood Type Notecards reproduce some pages from the exceedingly rare Specimens of Chromatic Wood Type, Borders, &c. of 1874. I don’t imagine I’ll need much of a pretext to send these to my favorite typophiles; I think I’ll save the SIN cards to send to clients who don’t correctly use small caps or smart quotes. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 05 Dec 2007 10:19:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-2#285</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Typographic Gifts for Designers, Part 1]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-1</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/gifts_mugs_500.jpg">
Since the countdown to the holidays has begun in earnest, we thought we’d dedicate the rest of the week to recommending typographic-themed holiday gifts for the designers in your life.
Our own Ksenya Samarskaya liked these Alphabet Mugs from <a href="http://www.fishseddy.com/browse.cfm?viewfrom=22&catid=46&step=2" target="_blank">Fishs Eddy</a>. The monograms draw from different decorative traditions: the <a href="http://www.fishseddy.com/browse.cfm/4,1241.htm" target="_blank">A</a> and <a href="http://www.fishseddy.com/browse.cfm/4,1243.htm" target="_blank">C</a> are from decorated American wood types (and you know we love <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/knox/overview/" target="_blank">those</a>), the <a href="http://www.fishseddy.com/browse.cfm/4,1260.htm" target="_blank">T</a> from signwriting, and the <a href="http://www.fishseddy.com/browse.cfm/4,1251.htm" target="_blank">K</a> and <a href="http://www.fishseddy.com/browse.cfm/4,1265.htm" target="_blank">Y</a> from nineteenth-century lettering manuals. (That I love the baroque <a href="http://www.fishseddy.com/browse.cfm/4,1255.htm" target="_blank">O</a>, <a href="http://www.fishseddy.com/browse.cfm/4,1257.htm" target="_blank">Q</a>, and <a href="http://www.fishseddy.com/browse.cfm/4,1258.htm" target="_blank">R</a> should come as no surprise; they’re close cousins of our own logo. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 04 Dec 2007 10:48:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/typographic-gifts-for-designers-part-1#284</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Aesthetic Apparatus Explained]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/aesthetic-apparatus-explained</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/Aesthetic_Apparatus_collage_500.jpg">
I started a typeface called Feldspar some years ago, which I’ve yet to complete. After eight years, most such projects would have lost their inertia, but this one’s moving steadily along, driven by a single, fervid dream: I am determined to one day see it in the hands of Dan and Mike at <a href="http://www.aestheticapparatus.com/" target="_blank">Aesthetic Apparatus</a>.
Aesthetic Apparatus is one of those studios we love to see using our fonts. It’s not merely because they’re fans of our more American-inflected designs (above, some AA posters featuring <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/cyclone/overview/" target="_blank">Cyclone</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/acropolis/overview/" target="_blank">Acropolis</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/" target="_blank">Gotham</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/knockout/overview/" target="_blank">Knockout</a>, <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/ziggurat/overview/" target="_blank">Ziggurat</a>, and <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/giant/overview/" target="_blank">Giant</a>), it’s because they put the screws to the fonts: they juice them for every last drop of flavor, and then come back to coax still more out of every design, creating new and unexpected textures that you wouldn’t think possible. The driving philosophy behind the studio’s work is — well, here: let’s let Dan and Mike explain the process in their own words:
 
<div><iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YyQemBVZJYw" width="560"></iframe></div>
 
A transcript is not yet available. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 03 Dec 2007 07:25:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/aesthetic-apparatus-explained#283</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[An Early Snowtype]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/an-early-snowtype</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/schneekoenigin.gif">
The snow-themed alphabets below all belong to the world of lettering rather than typography, but typefounders have made their share of snow-covered fonts as well. Some of these go back quite a bit further than I imagined, as I learned this afternoon: at lunch, Tobias mentioned offhandedly that he remembered being surprised to see a snow-covered typeface in a specimen book from Weimar Germany. “I don’t remember which book it was,” he added, a sure-fire way of triggering a typographic wild goose chase at the office.
Half an hour later, and covered in dusty fragments of brittle yellow paper, we found it. Naturally it was in none of the specimen books that we thought to check first, from the Bauer, Berthold, Klingspor, Ludwig and Mayer, Schelter & Giesecke, Schriftguss, Klinkhardt, C. E. Weber, or Flinsch foundries. It was lurking on page 120p of Die Haupt Probe, otherwise known as The Behemoth: the 1,478-page, six-kilogram, scanner-breaking type specimen of the Stempel Foundry, issued in 1925, and thought to be the largest typefoundry specimen book ever produced. Behold Schneekönigin, a snow-capped adaptation of the Fette Teutonia typeface. Like the book that contained it, it is equal parts delightful and menacing. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 30 Nov 2007 11:01:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/an-early-snowtype#282</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[More Wintry Gotham]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/more-wintry-gotham</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/snowflake_gotham_500.png">
Over at <a href="http://www.saksfifthavenue.com/Entry.jsp" target="_blank">Saks Fifth Avenue</a>, they’ve decked out their signature <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/" target="_blank">Gotham Medium</a> in snowy finery for winter. The snowflake treatment is a nice counterpoint to the icicled Gotham <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/ice-ice-typeface">below</a>, conveying luxe rather than hypothermia; in any case, it’s the second seasonally-themed Gotham I’ve encountered this week. Any others? —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 29 Nov 2007 09:44:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/more-wintry-gotham#281</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Holiday Gifts for Typophiles]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/holiday-gifts-for-typophiles</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/dresserjohnson_arrowring_500.jpg">
An office full of type designers is already a dangerous a breeding ground for the highly contagious <a href="https://www.typography.com/collections/symbols-technical/" target="_blank">chronic arrowmania</a>, but H&Co alumnus Kevin Dresser has taken things to the next level with the DresserJohnson <a href="http://dresserjohnson.com/arrowring.html" target="_blank">Arrow Ring</a>. A chic adaptation of one of the duo’s great icons (their logo for <a href="http://www.bklynbunny.com/home.html" target="_blank">Brooklyn Bunny</a> is a cheerful highlight in modern logodom) the Arrow Ring makes possible marvelous moments of unwitting self-annotation such as <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/andyclymer/2067588504/" target="_blank">this</a>. A great stocking-stuffer, available in sizes 2–13. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 28 Nov 2007 12:31:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/holiday-gifts-for-typophiles#280</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Ice Ice Typeface]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/ice-ice-typeface</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/sno-gotham.gif">
I’ll admit it: snow-covered typography is a guilty pleasure, and one I get to enjoy throughout the year. Summertime icicle fonts are never hard to find, once soft-serve ice cream trucks establish strategic flanking positions on either side of our office. And in the winter, their appearance on the sides of HVAC trucks heralds the return of seasonal boiler problems, a cherished part of the winter experience in New York.
Although all H&Co fonts are guaranteed frost-free for easy maintenance, the wags at <a href="http://www.deitch.com/" target="_blank">Deitch</a> have come up with this seasonal adaptation, in keeping with their site’s summer delight theme. Under these snowcaps is our very own <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/">Gotham Bold</a> font, artful iciclized by <a href="http://www.rickfroberg.com/" target="_blank">illustrator</a>/<a href="http://www.hotsnakes.com/" target="_blank">guitarist</a> Rick Froberg. So great! —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 26 Nov 2007 11:10:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/ice-ice-typeface#279</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Helvetica for the Holidays]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/helvetica-for-the-holidays</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/helvetica-dvd.gif">
Christmas is about more than just eggnog and carols and sitting by the tree. It’s about having to explain to your family yet again what exactly it is that you do for a living, and suffering through comparisons with your cousin who’s “also into computers.”
If there’s anything that mom and dad truly need this holiday season, it’s to be tied to the andirons and belabored about the head with a copy of Jan Tschichold’s collected essays in the original German (still available in hardcover.) But in the spirit of giving, as well as various local ordinances, get them instead a copy of Gary Hustwit’s <a href="http://www.helveticafilm.com/shop.html" target="_blank">Helvetica</a> on DVD, which goes on sale today. It’s smart, engaging, witty, and a great introduction to graphic design for the non-designers who spawned you. It also affords ample opportunity to use the phrase “that’s Hoefler&Co: I buy fonts from those guys all the time,” which mom and dad might remember come next year. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 20 Nov 2007 10:36:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/helvetica-for-the-holidays#278</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[I, Calligrapher]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/i-calligrapher</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/calligraphy_robot_500.jpg">
Robots have long been useful in completing challenging or hazardous tasks: dismantling explosives, assembling automobiles, winning chess tournaments, etc. <a href="http://www.robotlab.de/index_engl.htm" target="_blank">Robotlab</a> in Karlsruhe, Germany, is training them for another purpose: calligraphy. Above, an articulated limb renders the Luther Bible in a primitive but serviceable version of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwabacher" target="_blank">schwabacher</a> script.
This innovation can’t come a moment to soon. For thousands of years, human calligraphers have subjected themselves to years of difficult study, exposing themselves to demanding physical conditions in the service of the written word. Even with the advent of non-toxic ink and cruelty-free vellum, calligraphy is not without its hazards: in addition to carpal tunnel syndrome and asthenopic eye strain, careless practicioners often suffer the socially sclerotic effects of Renaissance Faire attendance or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Middle-earth
" target="_blank">absorptive Tolkienism</a>. Most chillingly, mounting evidence suggests that even in industrialized nations, calligraphy is becoming a popular pastime among <a href="http://books.google.com/books?q=+subject:%22Calligraphy%3B+Juvenile+literature.%22" target="_blank">children</a>.
Thankfully, technology is coming to our rescue. As <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/marcwathieu/sets/72157601299541354/" target="_blank">these photos</a> suggest, robot calligraphers may soon be employed to create that common household object, the hand-lettered bible in roll form. And overhead, without any fuss, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_God
" target="_blank">the stars are going out</a>. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 12 Nov 2007 10:28:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/i-calligrapher#277</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Fonts on Television]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/fonts-on-television</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/cbs_sunday_morning.jpg">
Thanks to a few well-traveled blogs, <a href="http://tinyurl.com/2ocyde" target="_blank">this clip</a> has been getting some traffic lately: it’s a segment about typeface design that ran on CBS Sunday Morning last summer, featuring us. Correspondent Russ Mitchell spent some time at our offices, and speaking with Steve Heller, to introduce non-designers to the strange world of font design.
Now that the clip is easily freeze-framed, a few designers have written to ask about the fonts themselves. (The opening montage features our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/shades/overview/" target="_blank">Shades</a> and <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/didot/overview/" target="_blank">Didot</a> families, and the fonts created for People magazine are part of <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/verlag/styles/" target="_blank">Verlag Compressed</a>.) But two frighteningly hardcore individuals have outdone themselves, writing to inquire about the font shown at left. In this candid scene, which is definitely not staged at all, the camera captures Tobias and I discussing a font proof. Gentle stalkers, you are correct! What appears here is part of our work for The Nature Conservancy, and you’ll find a more extensive look at it <a href="oakleaf-behind-the-scenes" target="_blank">here</a>. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 06 Nov 2007 13:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/fonts-on-television#275</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[A Living Fossil on the 1 Line]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-living-fossil-on-the-1-line</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/art_nouveau_tile_500.jpg">
Passing fancies in lettering often vanish without a trace, and no style has died a harder death than Art Nouveau. Even in its heyday, the style’s contributions to typography were slight: there were never many Art Nouveau typefaces, and the few eccentrics that have survived may owe something to a resurgence in the sixties, when their smoky and vegetal forms found favor among the psychedelic set. It was not typography but lettering in which Art Nouveau reached full flower — sometimes literally — famously in the posters of <a href="http://www.muchafoundation.org/MGallery.aspx" target="_blank">Alphonse Mucha</a>, and the Paris Métro signs of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hector_Guimard" target="_blank">Hector Guimard</a>.
Parisians have guarded their Art Nouveau treasures well; New Yorkers less so. New York was no stranger to the style — two blocks south of our office is Ernest Flagg’s splendid <a href="http://www.nyc-architecture.com/SOH/SOH001.htm" target="_blank">Little Singer Building</a>, and it was in the borough of Queens that <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Comfort_Tiffany" target="_blank">Louis Comfort Tiffany</a> established his factory — but lettering from the period has become scarce. This morning, David W. Dunlap writes in <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/02/nyregion/02plaque.html?_r=1&oref=slogin" target="_blank">The New York Times</a> of a new piece of lettering that has surfaced, in of all places, the uptown platform of the No. 1 subway line at Columbus Circle. A visit is yours for $2.
Dunlap’s <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/02/nyregion/02plaque.html?_r=1&oref=slogin" target="_blank">article</a> contains the full and fascinating story, including this irresistable opener: this lettered encaustic tile, specially created for the station, is somehow older than the trains themselves. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 02 Nov 2007 10:01:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-living-fossil-on-the-1-line#274</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Timeless Typography of Harper’s Bazaar]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-timeless-typography-of-harpers-bazaar</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/harpers_bazaar.png">
ASME has announced its winners for <a href="http://www.magazine.org/editorial/24689.cfm" target="_blank">Best Cover of 2007</a>, and we’re thrilled to see that of the six covers that feature typography, five are clients of H&Co. You’ll see <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/chronicle-display/overview/" target="_blank">Chronicle</a> on the cover of O, and our forthcoming <a href="http://typography.com/fonts/sentinel/overview/">Sentinel</a> font on the cover of Texas Monthly. But especially gratifying is the 2007 award for Best Fashion Cover, which went to Harper’s Bazaar: it was Bazaar who commissioned our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/didot/overview/" target="_blank">HTF Didot</a> typeface in 1992, and fifteen years later, they’re still winning awards with it.
The flagging magazine that Liz Tilberis and <a href="http://www.baron-baron.com/" target="_blank">Fabien Baron</a> reinvented in 1992 has earned a place as one of the most significant redesigns in modern history. It debuted with an iconic cover that ASME ranks as one of the <a href="http://www.magazine.org/Editorial%5CTop_40_Covers%5C
" target="_blank">top ten covers in history</a>, memorable not only for its striking portrait of Linda Evangelista, but for its arrestingly simple typography: in a font commissioned to be as <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/didot/features/didot-optical-sizes/" target="_blank">crisp</a> as possible, there appeared the single headline “Enter the Era of Elegance.” In an age when it’s not uncommon to run the entire table of contents on the cover, this was a brave and startling move. It’s telling that this same strategy is still serving Bazaar after all these years, and it speaks to the strength of the magazine’s editorial vision and the thought that went into its typography. So thanks to Stephen Gan and Glenda Bailey for including us in your continuing tradition, and to Fabien Baron and the unforgettable Liz Tilberis for making us a part of this extraordinary institution. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 01 Nov 2007 10:45:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-timeless-typography-of-harpers-bazaar#273</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[But Wait, There’s More:]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/but-wait-theres-more</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/make_my_logo_bigger_500.png">
It’s <a href="http://www.makemylogobiggercream.com/" target="_blank">too good</a>.]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 31 Oct 2007 17:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/but-wait-theres-more#272</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[BOO!]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/boo</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/tarbe-pompadour-1839_500.jpg">
The “Pompadour” typeface, from the 1837 specimen of the Tarbé foundry. Happy Halloween!]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 31 Oct 2007 11:00:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/boo#271</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Love Letters from Plum Press]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/love-letters-from-plum-press</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/plumpress_500.jpg">
You can always tell when a typeface designer is involved. Some unseen force summoned me across the room to this beautiful set of greeting cards, resplendent in rich stochastic color, and bearing a wonderful assortment of letterforms. The choice of typeface for the letter K was enough to identify their designer as a connoisseur: it’s Sapphire, a rare and underestimated typeface by none other than Hermann Zapf (1953), and one of my personal favorites. The others in the series have their own stories, as I would soon learn from their designer: it’s our very own <a href="http://www.typography.com/about/biographies.php#soskolne" target="_blank">Sara Soskolne</a>, who designed them for <a href="http://www.plumpress.com/" target="_blank">Plum Press</a>.
The P is modeled on a Photo-Lettering face called Johnson Grafin Hedda, and the F and C are adapted from an 1884 set of French signpainter’s specimen sheets titled Modèles de Lettres. In nice counterpoint to the luscious outside, inside each is an inscription set in our own <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/didot/overview/" target="_blank">HTF Didot</a> font. The complete collection features eight cards, covering for a range of appropriate occasions; I’m stocking up on the the apology card, K is for Knucklehead, in anticipation of future bad behavior. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 30 Oct 2007 16:48:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/love-letters-from-plum-press#270</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Fonts in Space]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/fonts-in-space</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/deseret-plan10_500.jpg">
Our erstwhile <a href="http://typography.com/faq/question.php?faqID=12">language researcher</a> and font developer Luke Joyner (not pictured) files this dispatch from the campus of the University of Chicago:
A recent late-show at U. Chicago’s <a href="http://docfilms.uchicago.edu" target="_blank">Doc Films</a> was Plan 10 from Outer Space, a stinker of a B-movie that’s somehow unrelated to Plan 9 from Outer Space, Ed Wood’s better-known cult classic. Plan 10 includes the standard staples of the genre: extraterrestrials with beehives for heads, musical numbers, an assassin in the employ of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, and a major plot point involving typography.

The story rests on the contents of an ancient text written in the <a href="http://www.omniglot.com/writing/deseret.htm" target="_blank">Deseret alphabet</a>, a bonafide orthography developed in the nineteenth century under the direction of Mormon leader Brigham Young. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_reform" target="_blank">Spelling reform</a> has a long history, as does the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_of_writing_systems" target="_blank">invention of writing systems</a> by those with missionary ambitions; these goals came together in the person of Young, who sought a new phonetic alphabet that would more unambiguously render the sounds of the English language.
Like most phonetic alphabets, Deseret was doomed to reach only a limited audience — but perhaps one that’s now expanding, thanks to the 80-minute Plan 10? The font debuts in the film’s opening credits, and goes on to appear on a metal plaque, and finally on a vintage green-on-black CRT monitor operated by the protagonist (it was 1994, after all.) In any case, Deseret seems poised to enter this century in earnest: the Unicode Consortium, whose character encodings form the underpinnings of today’s OpenType fonts, has included <a href="http://unicode.org/charts/case/chart_Deseret.html
" target="_blank">all 80 Deseret characters</a> in its established specifications. If you can read that page, you’ve got Deseret on your computer. And if you’ve got Deseret on your computer, can the hiveheads be far behind? — LJ]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 29 Oct 2007 13:57:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/fonts-in-space#269</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Grecian Fonts: A Miscellany]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/grecian-fonts-a-miscellany</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/bountiful_500.jpg">
I thought I’d bid farewell to H&Co Greek Week with a glimpse inside some of our library’s more exotic type specimens. After the jump, some stellar Grecian typefaces which have yet to be properly revived, and the type specimen books in which they’re showcased so well.
The above is unusual: it’s the 10-Line Grecian Double Extra Condensed of William Page (1872), and eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that it’s printed not in black and white, but in retina-searing magenta. Why? It’s because this specimen, the rare Wm. H. Page & Co. Wood Type of 1872, was a joint venture to promote both wood type made by Page, and printing inks made by H. D. Wade & Co. of New York. Even at the age of 135, the book’s colors are alarmingly bright and rich, doubtless because they contain unlawfully toxic levels of cadmium and other heavy metals.

<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/grecian-page-1872-B_500.jpg">
Above, the expanded showing of Page’s Grecian Double Extra Condensed in the 8-line and 10-line sizes (“line” essentially translates as “pica.”) The different shapes of the capital and lowercase S are interesting: the diagonal spine in the lowercase is attractive and legible, but it’s the horizontal form that’s survived, probably because it’s more successful in other weights and widths. The top of the lowercase t, and the dot of the lowercase i, seem over-bevelled; the question of how many times you apply the process is one that plagues many Grecians, as we’ll see below. Note also that whoever composed these pages chose sample words with no descenders, a sneaky way of making the settings as dense as possible.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/grecian-page-1872-A_500.jpg">
More from the Page company, showing Grecians in a range of different proportions. The different treatments of the serifs on the arm of the capital E reveals different approaches in the execution of the style, its length and thickness varying from size to size. At top left are three beefy designs simply called Grecian; it’s on these that our <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/acropolis/overview/" target="_blank">Acropolis</a> font is based. The fourth line, showing the Grecian Condensed No. 1 typeface, has extra bevels on the interiors of the cap R and U — again, raising the question of how far to take the theme. To my eyes, these additional lines compromise the style rather than reinforcing it: it’s the tension between a square inside and an octagonal outside that gives the style vigor.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/grecian-bruce-1882_500.jpg">
George Bruce was a prolific American typefounder, and the firm directed by his heirs produced in 1876 an epic type specimen book that’s the size of the New York Yellow Pages. This is the Ornamented No. 1,001 that appeared in the Specimen of George Bruce’s Son & Co., which reimagines the Grecian as the shadow of some other form — not unlike the <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/mrs-gray-and-the-mystery-of-the-grecian-italic" target="_blank">Thorowgood italic</a> that I posted on Monday. In <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0306800594/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=typographycom-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0306800594&linkId=04a482f3c62b5f1424a5914202bdc6ed" target="_blank">American Wood Type, 1828-1900</a>, Rob Roy Kelly shows an earlier face after which this one was probably patterned, a wood type made by Wells & Webb in 1846. (Bruce’s faces were metal.)
Interesting details include the capital S in the largest size, in which the attachment of the serifs shows two different approaches (antique upstairs, mod downstairs.) Also note the lowercase s at the end of the second line, whose serifs just don’t know when to stop turning. Again the question of how far to take the theme; I think that s takes it too far.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/grecian-peignot-1896_500.jpg">
The Grecian style was essentially an American invention, but within two years of its arrival, European typefounders were producing Grecians as well. Identified only as No. 1229, this is a typeface from the French typefoundry of Peignot, as it appeared in their Lettres Fantaises of 1896. Most of the typefaces in this specimen book are in different fin-de-siecle styles: by 1896, the Grecian style was already 55 years old, and long out of fashion. Peignot seems to have attempted to reinvigorate the style with an unusual side shadow, a tradition from sign writing rather than typefounding. This subtle detail transplants the design from a world of gunslingers and railroad tycoons to one of music halls and absinthe drinkers.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/grecian-conner-1876_500.jpg">
In the nineteenth century, James Conner was known as an adroit businessman, but today we’d call him a pirate. His firm engaged the engineer William Starr to devise a process known as “electrotyping,” by which fonts of lead type could be purchased from type foundries, and then subjected to chemical electroplating in order to produce brass negatives, from which additional lead type could be cast. As a result, the 1876 <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/time-traveler" target="_blank">Compact Specimens of James Conner’s Sons</a> features an incredible assortment of typefaces from an unknown number of authors, including this accumulation of unrelated Grecians organized under a single heading. The ten point design shown here, obviously unconnected with its neighbors, presumably came from a different source. But it’s an interesting caricurature of the truism that in order for a font to be legible, it must get <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/chronicle-display/features/chronicle-optical-sizes/" target="_blank">wider</a> as it gets smaller. — JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 26 Oct 2007 21:33:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/grecian-fonts-a-miscellany#268</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Ode on a Grecian Kern]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/ode-on-a-grecian-kern</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/acropolis_statues.png">
Greek Week Continues!
Like all good New Yorkers, we know how to respond to unattended packages: with deep dread and unbridled panic. Yet despite our daily diet of <a href="http://www.mta.info/mta/security/images/?file=ssss3.jpg" target="_blank">Orwellian public service announcements</a>, a devil-may-care attitude moved someone at our office to immediately open the unmarked brown paper parcel that was left outside our door (candy!), inside which were these: a pair of fired clay sculptures in the shape of — what else? — the h and fj from our very own Grecian italic typeface, and this week’s cause célèbre, <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/acropolis/overview/" target="_blank">Acropolis Italic</a>. Bookends? Graven images? Anyone care to fess up? Whoever you are, you’ve earned your stripes for ginning up an ‘fj’ ligature where there was none; that takes both thoughtfulness and pluck. So thank you for the gift, secret admirer! Do get in touch so we can send you a proper thank-you note, or a restraining order. — JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 25 Oct 2007 07:23:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/ode-on-a-grecian-kern#267</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[My Big Fat Grecian Lettering]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/my-big-fat-grecian-lettering</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/sandler-brau.gif">
Greek Week Continues!
Making good on his standing promise to rid the world of enamel signs, and warehouse them in the office for our personal amusement, Tobias came across this little bit of heaven in a local antique shop. The full image features a stalwart gent in lederhosen hoisting a beer stein, but for typophiles, this is where all the action is: cousin to the Grecian italic, it’s a (1) faceted (2) chromatic (3) blackletter that would have made a nice auxiliary to our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/knox/overview/" target="_blank">Knox</a> typeface. Three great tastes that taste great together! — JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 24 Oct 2007 06:35:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/my-big-fat-grecian-lettering#266</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Greek Week Continues]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/greek-week-continues</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/swing_U_500.png">
Right on the heels of yesterday’s post about <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/mrs-gray-and-the-mystery-of-the-grecian-italic" target="_blank">Grecian italics</a> comes this, a reminder that Swing University is back in session. <a href="http://www.jazzatlincolncenter.org/jazzed/subs/swing_u.html" target="_blank">Swing U</a>, a production of Jazz at Lincoln Center, is a terrific series of courses directed by jazz authority Phil Schaap. Design Director Bobby Martin Jr. developed this identity for Swing U using none other than <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/acropolis/overview/" target="_blank"> Acropolis Black Italic</a>, what was heretofore the world’s only Grecian italic typeface, and certainly one of the most exotic faces in the H&Co collection. Every octagonal typeface has a collegiate quality, and Martin cleverly teased this out of Acropolis by adding a double outline that’s right off a varsity jacket. That he’s got the swash T in there adds a nice note of syncopation — a great way of marrying academics and bop. It makes perfect sense and looks great; to paraphrase Count Basie, “if it looks good, it is good.” — JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 23 Oct 2007 09:22:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/greek-week-continues#265</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Mrs. Gray and the Mystery of the Grecian Italic]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/mrs-gray-and-the-mystery-of-the-grecian-italic</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/thorowgood_6line_rev_eg_500.png">
“Grecians” are slab serif typefaces in which curves are replaced by bevelled corners. The fashion for octagonal letters took off in the 1840s (the style may have begun with an American wood type, produced by Johnson & Smith in 1841), and by the end of the decade there were all manner of Grecians on the market: narrow ones, squat ones, light ones, ones with contrasting thicks and thins, and ones without. It’s unusual that the rather obvious “square-proportioned” Grecian didn't arrive until 1857, and that no one thought to add a lowercase until 1870. It’s this very center of the Grecian universe that our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/acropolis/overview/" target="_blank">Acropolis</a> typeface occupies, which includes an additional feature of our own invention: a <a href="https://try.typography.com/?font=100000" target="_blank">Grecian italic</a>, something that no Victorian typefounder ever thought to create.
Or so we thought. This is the Six-Line Reversed Egyptian Italic of William Thorowgood, which sure enough qualifies as a Grecian italic. It has many peculiar features, but the most unearthly is its date: 1828, thirteen years before the first Grecian roman appeared. What’s the story?

In <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0571102174/typographycom-20" target="_blank">Nineteenth Century Ornamented Typefaces</a>, Nicolete Gray reproduces the Thorowgood face alongside a collection of other cameo alphabets. She writes: “The peculiarities of this design anticipate the Grecian.... is the idea again derived from the visual effect of contemporary three-dimensional letters with a canted return?”
It’s an interesting idea, and perhaps the one that explains one of the design’s strangest features: the disagreement between the forward angle of its stems, and the backward angle of its serifs. (Thorowgood’s other faces exhibit strong convictions, suggesting that this could hardly have been an accident.) Following Mrs. Gray’s idea to its logical conclusion, it’s interesting to imagine these white shapes as the shadow of some absent form: I wonder if this is what Thorowgood intended?
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/thorowgood-chromatic_500.png">
Had two-color “<a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/shades/overview/" target="_blank">chromatic</a>” types been invented, I would have liked to see these foreground shapes rendered as their own alphabet (minus the awkward M, which is presumably a casualty of the drop shadow.) If this was what Thorowgood had in mind, it’s stirring to think that he was indeed the inventor of the Grecian, and a cameo, dimensional, high-contrast, italic Grecian at that. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 22 Oct 2007 15:24:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/mrs-gray-and-the-mystery-of-the-grecian-italic#264</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[You talkin’ to me?]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/you-talkin-to-me</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/checkercab_1920.png">
Thankfully this was published after my cab ride back from the airport, after AIGA Denver:
<blockquote class="excerpt">
“Whatever design changes befall the yellow taxi, in my mind they’ll forever have checker striping, double headlights, and a rate card posted on the front doors that’s quirkily lettered and reckoned in fractions of a mile. (But then, I also believe that ‘The Train to the Plane’ is still in operation, because its noisome jingle has never stopped playing in my head.)”
“It’s hard to argue with the principles behind the <a href="http://www.nyc.gov/html/tlc/html/safety_emissions/taxicab_logo_main.shtml" target="_blank">solution</a>, but with so many different ideas at work it’s not surprising that the final form feels kind of unfinished. I do have to admire Smart Design for trying to introduce a form of lettering that evokes the old computer-printed hack licenses, since for me this is the defining typography of the backseat. But divorced from the puzzle of spending an entire ride trying to decipher a name like ‘rnprowit sj,’ I don’t know that everyone will get the connection. Perhaps they could have sealed the deal with ‘nyct axi,’ accompanied by a photo of someone who's clearly not the driver?”
</blockquote>
That’s me, one of eight designers invited by <a href="http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/18/dreaming-of-a-blank-yellow-slate-on-wheels/" target="_blank">The New York Times</a> to critique the new NYC Taxi logo. (And I wonder why they don’t go to Brooklyn…) —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 18 Oct 2007 16:48:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/you-talkin-to-me#263</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Rocky Mountain Type High (.9186 inch)]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/rocky-mountain-type-high-.9186-inch</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/aiga_denver_hfj_500.jpg">
A quick invitation for everyone who’s coming to Denver this weekend for <a href="http://designconference2007.aiga.org/" target="_blank">Next: the AIGA Design Conference</a>: Jonathan Hoefler will be speaking on Friday at 2:15, discussing how recent changes in the profession have brought about what might be the end of historical typography, and what this means for designers going forward. (He’ll also be offering a rare sneak preview of some projects that will debut in 2008.) A conference schedule appears <a href="http://designconference2007.aiga.org/dc-affinity-session-presentations" target="_blank">here</a> — come and join the conversation!]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 10 Oct 2007 09:30:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/rocky-mountain-type-high-.9186-inch#262</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Guerilla Anagrammer]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-guerilla-anagrammer</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/guerilla_anagrams_500.jpg">
One of <a href="https://www.typography.com/about/biographies.php#clymer" target="_blank">Andy’s</a> <a href="http://www.andyclymer.com/foto/archives/000255.html" target="_blank">photographs</a> features his friend Albert walking before a giant FU on a Williamsburg sidewalk. “The letters used to spell out You Are Beautiful,” Andy explained, “before someone started moving them around the neighborhood…” It reminded me of a similar bit of guerilla anagramming in my neighborhood: a few years ago, our local movie theater finally gave up the ghost after 93 years. During the brief interregnum between tenants, someone had a few weeks of nighttime fun with the marquee.
For a while, I got most of my news from this sign, whether it was the looming <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jackszwergold/1646172067/in/set-72157602543648274/" target="_blank">SARS epidemic</a> or the equally ominous appointment of <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jackszwergold/1647031386/in/set-72157602543648274/" target="_blank">Chief Justice Roberts</a>. Jack Szwergold has collected them all on <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/jackszwergold/sets/72157602543648274/" target="_blank">Flickr</a>; the ones that make the least sense are among the most entertaining. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 08 Oct 2007 16:35:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-guerilla-anagrammer#261</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Books as Furniture]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/books-as-furniture</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/english_specimen_books_500.jpg">
Years ago, I walked into a used book store in Chicago, and beheld an astronomically unlikely thing: a run of pristine leather books, each stamped “caslon” in gold letters, each in a typeface of a different vintage. These were type specimen books from the Caslon foundry, and to see them in such quantity was a singular experience. Type specimens are usually accumulated individually, painstakingly, and expensively, from antiquarian specialists or the occasional flea market. Only rarely do they surface in sets, and when they do it’s usually at a private auction, not on the shelf behind the counter at a bookshop that also sells gum.
Noticing the tag marked “sold,” I asked if perchance they’d gone to a fellow type designer. The shopkeeper replied that they had not: they’d been sold to one of the store’s regulars, a philistine decorator who’s always on the lookout for clean leather bindings, for use simply as a background texture in someone’s living room.

This was my first brush with “books by the yard,” a hot topic last week. At <a href="http://www.designobserver.com/archives/028168.html" target="_blank">Design Observer</a>, Steve Heller unearthed a copy of 65 Ways to Decorate with Books in Your Home; in <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2007/10/01/071001ta_talk_kelley" target="_blank">The New Yorker</a>, Austin Kelley wrote about the bookshelves of one Dr. Indiana Jones, furnished by the <a href="http://www.strandbooks.com/app/www/p/bbtfoot/" target="_blank">Books-by-the-foot</a> service at New York’s Strand bookstore. But neither article mentioned my favorite work on the subject, the achingly funny Books as Furniture by Nicholson Baker.
Baker, the unchallenged master of profound minutiae, takes a loupe to a collection of mail-order catalogs and returns with some outstanding notes about the handsome books that populate their pages. A favorite moment:
<blockquote>
In one of the latest J. Crew catalogs, there is a literary interlude on page 33: a man in shorts and plaster-dusted work boots, sitting in a half-remodeled room — on break, apparently, from his labor of hammering and gentrifying — is looking something up in what close inspection reveals to be a Guide Bleu to Switzerland, probably from the forties, in French.
</blockquote>
The essay appears in <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005GFIIUS/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=typographycom-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=B005GFIIUS&linkId=c852d30c34555640cb03132dbcf06744" target="_blank">The Size of Thoughts (and Other Lumber)</a>, a rewarding collection of Baker’s writings that everyone should have. Typophiles will appreciate Baker’s article about obsolete forms of punctuation, the climax of which is a sentence that can’t be written without using a specific extinct species. And designers will enjoy his “predictive matrix of swear words that don’t exist but should,” created for a review of the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0394544277/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=typographycom-20&camp=1789&creative=9325&linkCode=as2&creativeASIN=0394544277&linkId=d70215073f715b8faf0cd7d4ae89e966" target="_blank">Historical Dictionary of American Slang</a> (Volume 1, A-G.) It’s something out of a parallel universe, in which Edward R. Tufte was the art director of Mad. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Sat, 06 Oct 2007 13:29:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/books-as-furniture#260</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[The Voynich Manuscript]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-voynich-manuscript</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/voynich.jpg">
Only if Umberto Eco, Jorge Luis Borges, J. R. R. Tolkien and Will Shortz clubbed together in a moment of wickedness could humanity produce a more vexing object: behold the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript" target="_blank">Voynich Manuscript</a>, a puzzling artifact from the late fifteenth century written by an unknown author, in an unidentified script, in an unknown language. Since 1912, cryptographers, palaeographers, and others with time on their hands have failed to decipher this mysterious document; naturally one theory is that it’s a monstrous hoax, though its text seems to bear the hallmarks of a genuine language (note the cross-references on <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law" target="_blank">Zipf’s Law</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_entropy" target="_blank">information entropy</a>, and the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardan_grille" target="_blank">Cardan grille</a>). Any theories? —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 03 Oct 2007 13:35:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-voynich-manuscript#259</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[More Type Tour Photos]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/more-type-tour-photos</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/typetour-johnkwo_500.jpg">
John Kwo posted this <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/14341566@N07/sets/72157602208508126/" target="_blank">Flickr set</a> with some beautifully crisp photos from the type tour. Don’t miss some of the great inscriptional lettering to be found on lower Manhattan’s municipal buildings, including <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/14341566@N07/1463749820/in/set-72157602208508126/" target="_blank">these</a> spirited NH and TT ligatures.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/typetour-villatype_500.jpg">
Over at <a href="http://villatype.blogspot.com/2007/09/nyc-type-walk.html" target="_blank">Villatype</a>, Joe Shouldice has assembled some instructive comments to accompany his photos. Points for relating why signpainters’ dropshadows point left instead of right, and defining the term “gaspipe lettering.”
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/typetour-mattsung_500.jpg">
More goodies from Matt Sung, again on <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/cleverclever/sets/72157602202256436/" target="_blank">Flickr</a>. Matt definitely shares our thing for <a href="http://flickr.com/photos/cleverclever/1459859673/in/set-72157602202256436/" target="_blank">distressed</a> typography!
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/typetour-surtees_500.jpg">
You’ve got to admire the rudeness of the above, from Michael Surtees’ <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelsurtees/sets/72157602237414901/" target="_blank">Flickr set</a>. Michael captured some other excellent moments, including this unlikely but fabulous set of <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelsurtees/1467947795/" target="_blank">inscriptional, inline, sans-serif, old-style figures.</a> —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 01 Oct 2007 11:07:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/more-type-tour-photos#257</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Type Tour Photos]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/type-tour-photos</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/typetour-photos_500_2.jpg">
For those of you who missed last weekend’s AIGA/NY Typographic Walking Tour, designer Karen Horton has uploaded a <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/8790226@N06/sets/72157602200897216/" target="_blank">Flickr set</a> containing some of the highlights. There are a couple of treasures here that aren’t to be missed, including at least one rare <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest#Decipherment_in_architecture" target="_blank">architectural palimpsest</a> that won’t be visible for long. (Demolition in the city regularly exposes sudden windows into the the past, as in 1998 when Times Square was suddenly home to a <a href="http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9906E7DE173DF93AA35757C0A96E958260&n=Top%2fReference%2fTimes%20Topics%2fSubjects%2fO%2fOutdoor%20Advertising" target="_blank">121-year-old advertisement</a> for “J. A. Keal’s Carriage Manufactory,” painted in 1877.) Some of the lettering on the type tour is older still, and some of the newer signs may find themselves covered up by adjacent construction. So catch them while you can, or wait another 121 years to see if they resurface in 2128. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Sun, 30 Sep 2007 09:12:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/type-tour-photos#256</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[The One Ill Building]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-one-ill-building</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/theoneillbuilding.png">
When I first saw the banner unfurled on Sixth Avenue, I figured The One Ill Building was a Beastie Boys’ foray into urban planning. (Long overdue, if you ask me: if Jade Jagger can be an <a href="http://jadeny.com/" target="_blank">architect’s muse</a>, why not the King Ad-Rock?) If not a real estate development, then surely theoneillbuilding.com was promoting a documentary about sick building syndrome, narrated by, say, Al Gore.
Turns out it’s neither. So what is The One Ill Building?

In the early nineties, no interview with a typeface designer was complete without the obligatory question about “intercapping,” the practice of using a capital letter in the middle of a word. [The redacted conversation was always: Q: What do you think of intercapping? A: I have no opinion about intercapping.] Intercapping first became fashionable in the seventies as a branding gimmick, used to cherry up faded brand names: Compu-serv became CompuServe in 1977, Master Charge became MasterCard in 1979. In 1984, Apple cleverly used intercapping to promote the first suite of applications for the Macintosh: riffing on a genuine piece of Scottish <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onomastics" target="_blank">onomatology</a> (“Mac” means “son of” in Gaelic), programs like MacPaint, MacWrite, and MacDraw seemed as natural on the tongue as the surnames MacDuff, MacTavish, and MacAlpine. Programs produced outside of Apple followed suit, dropping the “Mac” prefix for trademark reasons (FullPaint, ComicWorks, PageMaker.) And by the end of the eighties, intercapping had become an established cliché for signifying anything that was high tech, as it remains today (PlayStation, TiVo, BlackBerry, LiveJournal, MySpace, YouTube...) Intercapping also proved an irresistable solution to the branding of mergers and acquisitions among equals, thus ExxonMobil, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, and the spectacularly Klingonesque GlaxoSmithKline.
So here we are in the twenty-first century, and intercapping is beginning to fall out of favor at the precise moment when it might actually prove useful. HTTP has become the lingua franca of commerce, and the pecked syntax of the URL profoundly affects the way we interact with brands. (Will brands like “AT&T” and “L’Oreal” forever retain their punctuation, once they’re chiefly experienced as att.com and loreal.com?) The good news for brands with compound names is that domain names are case-insensitive, so a URL styled <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_Building" target="_blank">theONeillBuilding.com</a> will obligingly take users to the correct place. Suddenly, intercaps have a genuine purpose: invisible to machines, they aid human comprehension, which is ultimately the goal of all typography.
A few years ago, urban legends began to circulate about the accidentally funny URLs of Powergen Italia, Pen Island, and Therapist Finder (you do the math.) To this day, those hoping to connect with their favorite Hollywood starlets can do so at the alarming website <a href="http://www.whorepresents.com/" target="_blank">whorepresents.com</a>. All of these mixups could have been avoided — or amplified — by a little creative intercapping.
So along with mayonnaise, diesel engines, and high-waisted pants, we think it’s time to bring back the intercap. Give it a new name if it’s good for business (aioli worked wonders for the egg lobby): perhaps intercapping in 2008 will be about caseTransparency or serverBranding. If after all this you’re still uncertain about whether you prefer caps or lowercase letters, maybe it’s time for a <a href="http://www.graphicartsexchange.com" target="_blank">graphic art sex change</a>. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 27 Sep 2007 08:14:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/the-one-ill-building#255</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[A Treasury of Hollywood Lettering]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-treasury-of-hollywood-lettering</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/the_end_small_2.png">
Lettering buffs and cinephiles alike may enjoy this lovely <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/fliegender/sets/1161829/" target="_blank">Flickr set</a> containing final frames of classic films. Romantically, these hearken back to an age before typesetting replaced hand-lettering as a matter of convenience, but sociologically they tell another interesting story as well. A movie concluding with “The End,” perhaps followed by a list of its major players, definitively dates a film to before the rise of the unions, which now negotiate on-screen credits for even off-screen contributors. Best Boys and Key Grips are old hat: today it’s Mouse Wranglers and Assistant Caterers who are the little people, along with the occasional Compositing Inferno Artist. (But where are the type designers, hm?) See this fascinating <a href="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2004/01/11/movies/cred_graph.gif" target="_blank">infographic</a> in The New York Times, comparing the length of the credits in Casablanca with those in Lord of the Rings. —JH]]>
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<pubDate>Wed, 26 Sep 2007 09:49:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/a-treasury-of-hollywood-lettering#254</guid>
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<item>
<title><![CDATA[Oakleaf: Behind the Scenes]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/oakleaf-behind-the-scenes</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/requiem-swash-1-onscreen_500.jpg">
The typeface we designed for The Nature Conservancy is an extension of our <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/requiem/overview/">Requiem</a> font, which explores the work of sixteenth century scribe Ludovico Vicentino degli Arrighi (1480–1527). Arrighi is best remembered as an exemplar of the written italic, but his upright roman capitals capture an interesting balance of calligraphic and typographic traditions. The three variations of the capital T on the left offer different ways of reconciling the influences of the seriffed inscriptional letter and the swashed written one, and it was this kind of tension that we hoped to explore further. On the left screen is an enlargement from Arrighi’s 1523 writing manual Il Modo de Temperare le Penne, and on the right are two variations of the capital E in the font we designed. The cursive form on the left was one of the first digital drawings made by designer Andy Clymer, and we all thought it was immediately successful. In the final font, it’s almost perfectly preserved from this initial stage.

<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/requiem-swash-2-sketches_500.png">
Fonts whose designs pose a lot of stuctural questions usually start with a lot of sketching. We don’t tend to devote much time to the details at this stage, instead focussing on the overall gestures that will suggest the form that the letters will ultimately follow. Above are some of Andy’s early sketches for the font, which are beginning to grapple with the same question Arrighi faced: which part of a letter can best support a decorative flourish? The three designs for the H at the lower left all echo historical examples that we found, reproduced in Kathryn Atkins’ <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0879235942/typographycom-20" target="_blank">Masters of the Italic Letter</a> and Oscar Ogg’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0486202127/typographycom-20" target="_blank">Three Classics of Italian Calligraphy,</a> two indispensable surveys of renaissance calligraphy.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/requiem-swash-3-sketches_500.png">
Calligraphers have the advantage of creating letterforms that need only work in one situation, but a character in a font must anticipate every possible neighbor. A long-tailed K may run into a capital J or Q later in the word, or any lowercase letter with a descender. These are some of Jonathan’s early sketches that begin to consider the implications of letters as ingredients in words. At the top right are three constructions for the capital V, each of which is plausible on its own, but not necessarily in combination with other characters.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/requiem-swash-5-arrighi_500.jpg">
This page is from the first round of proofs of the new typeface. At this point we’re starting to evaluate more local details like the form and balance of each character, as well as how it gets along with its neighbors, and we’re starting to think more concretely about rules for the behavior of the font: when should each version of each character put in an appearance? Inevitably at this stage, we start to question some fundamental things about the design, such as its color or its proportions. One of the crucial purposes of this proof was to help evaulate the fit of the design: whether it was uniformly too tight, or too loose.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/requiem-swash-6-sign-book_500.jpg">
Arrighi made letters not only with the pen and the graver, but with the punch: this is an example of Arrighi’s first italic printing type, as it appeared in the Epistola de la Lettere Nuovamente of 1529. While Jonathan appears here to be throwing up a gang sign (Westside Kerning Lords; represent), he’s in fact pointing out an unusual feature of this typeface: what appear to be two different forms of the lowercase e in the same word. The first is actually a Greek epsilon, for the Epistola was a letter from Giovanni Giorgio Trissino to Pope Clement VII, advocating an orthographic reform of the Italian language, including the addition of the Greek omega and epsilon to the Latin alphabet. Some of his more successful ideas were the replacement of the consonental i and u with visually distinctive forms, which we know today as the letters j and v.
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/requiem-swash-7-signs_500.jpg">
Even in the development of a typeface that has specific roots in the history of printing, we try not to be prejudiced towards ideas from other media. Books make up the core of our studio’s reference library, but a growing collection of other kinds of lettered artifacts offer different ways of thinking about typeface design that can often be instructive. At left is Tobias with a recent highlight from his ever-expanding collection of antique enamel signs. (This particular sign didn’t play a part in the Oakleaf project, but photographers can’t resist them any more than we can.) Below are just a few of the other signs in the collection, many of which will be getting their own close-ups in future posts. Eagle-eyed readers may in the meantime notice connections between some of the signs below and our drawings for the <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/inside/depot/">Depot</a> and <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/numbers/inside/strasse">Strasse</a> fonts. —JH
<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/requiem-swash-4-proofs_500.png">]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Sat, 22 Sep 2007 06:01:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/oakleaf-behind-the-scenes#253</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Oakleaf: Glyphs Gone Wild]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/oakleaf-glyphs-gone-wild</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/requiem-swash-oakleaf_500.png">
This weekend, 107 news outlets around the world picked up this <a href="http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iV4x0FA76SFNihyFnV5wOSQ7sKQA" target="_blank">AP story</a> about the custom typeface we designed for one of our favorite organizations, The Nature Conservancy. “What it looked like,” writes journalist Erin McClam, “was not so much an alphabet but a masquerade ball for 26 capital letters that had arrived early, stayed late and gotten into the good liquor.”
The font, which we’ve been calling “Oakleaf,” is a cousin of our <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/requiem/overview/">Requiem</a> typeface. (These characters aren’t currently available for sale, but keep an eye on this page for updates.) The AP should be posting has just posted <a href="http://www.typography.com/blog/oakleaf-behind-the-scenes">more illustrations</a> of the font, but in the meantime here’s the money shot to which the article alludes: the word “Koninklijke,” H&Co designer <a href="http://www.typography.com/about/r" target="_blank">Andy Clymer’s</a> homage to his alma mater, the Type & Media program at the Royal Academy of Art (Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten) in the Hague. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 17 Sep 2007 12:50:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/oakleaf-glyphs-gone-wild#252</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Time Traveler?]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/time-traveler</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/connor-serif-sans-long_500.jpg">
Except in the most conservative of settings, there’s nothing unusual about freely mixing serifs and sans serifs in text. This technique might still be unexpected in a novel, or in the main text of a newspaper, but otherwise it’s a familiar device that designers have employed for decades. This image could be a piece of printed ephemera from the thirties — a legal notice on a train ticket, perhaps, or a gummed label from an appliance box. It’s really only the loose spacing that marks this as an antique at all: track everything in a little, and brighten up the paper, and this could easily be a front-of-book service piece in a magazine.
Where it’s completely unexpected is in the pages of a 131-year-old type specimen book. This example, showing the eleven point Law Face in combination with an eerily Helvetica-like Gothic No. 7, is from the Compact Specimens of James Conner’s Sons (United States Type Foundry) issued in 1876. Conner’s foundry offered a promiscuous collection of fonts, and the layouts of his specimen books were pretty anarchic, so perhaps this setting was simply an accident of probability. Still, it’s odd to imagine this very modern piece of typography sharing a world with Wyatt Earp and Jesse James. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Fri, 14 Sep 2007 11:01:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/time-traveler#250</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Gotham Now 100% Batman-Compliant]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/gotham-now-100-batman-compliant</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/gotham-signal-medium.png">
Oh come on. People have been trying to make this headline work for years.
Working on a book for DC Comics last year, our friend <a href="http://mike.essl.com/" target="_blank">Mike Essl</a> encountered two non-standard accents in the name of bat-nemesis <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ra%27s_al_Ghul" target="_blank">Rā’s al Ghūl</a>: an a-macron, and a u-macron. Mike’s the kind of guy to roll his own (a lesser man would have called tech support), but we’re happy to announce that the new OpenType edition of Gotham contains these accents and more, as part of H&Co’s <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/features/gotham-language-support/">Latin-X character set</a>.
Gotham contains all the accents for Turkish, too, in case you’re visiting that <a href="https://maps.google.com/maps?q=batman+turkey&ll=37.88488,41.135902&spn=0.166102,0.135612&client=safari&oe=UTF-8&hnear=Batman,+Turkey&gl=us&t=m&z=13" target="_blank">other Batman</a>. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Thu, 13 Sep 2007 07:22:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/gotham-now-100-batman-compliant#249</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Reconstructing Harry]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/reconstructing-harry</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/harry_carter.jpg">
One of the best things about the type community is the way in which attitudes seem to transcend its generations. It’s heartening to be at a professional event, and see that the exciting new idea that’s being embraced by art school undergrads is also received with equal enthusiasm by, say, Max Kisman, Wim Crouwel, and Adrian Frutiger. But I’ve experienced one clear division in typography that’s drawn along generational lines, and it’s this: typophiles above a certain age know the type historian Harry Carter, and his son who’s also involved in type; and those below that age know the distinguished type designer Matthew Carter, and perhaps also that his dad was in the business. A recent book points out what woefully insufficient descriptions these are.

I’m of the younger camp, and therefore knew <a href="http://www.designmuseum.org/design/matthew-carter" target="_blank">Matthew Carter</a> and his work long before I began to notice the name “Harry Carter” appearing with any regularity on my bookshelves. I first encountered Harry’s name on <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0907259219/typographycom-20" target="_blank">A View of Early Typography Up To About 1600</a>, a small book that collects the series of insightful lectures he delivered at Oxford University in 1968. (The original edition is hard to come by, having been pulped nearly in its entirety thanks to some inventory mishap, but <a href="http://www.hyphenpress.co.uk/" target="_blank">Hyphen Press</a> has recently reissued it in paperback, with notes and an introduction by James Mosley. It is very much worth having.)
Last weekend I read <a href="http://www.theoldschoolpress.com/oldschoolpresslist.htm#carter" target="_blank">Harry Carter, Typographer</a>, a new appreciation by Martyn Thomas, John Lane, and Anne Rogers (The Old School Press, 2005.) I’ll admit that I was struck first by the puerile thrill of seeing Matthew Carter, the standard-bearer for typeface design, recorded in two childhood photographs showing him in short pants (pp. 17, 26), but I’m happy to have returned to the text in earnest. It’s an illuminating profile of a genuine polymath: typefounding has long attracted people with diverse but converging interests, though Harry’s were unusually well-explored professionally. He worked as a translator, a book designer, an archivist, a designer of patterned papers, a punchcutter, and a graphic designer in His Majesty’s Stationery Office, while widely contributing typographical oddments that include lettering for the London buses and the BBC. This work was in addition to (or in support of) his greatest legacy, a collection of writings about typography that reflect his first-hand knowledge of the crafts of typefounding and printing. Harry Carter’s most widely-quoted aphorism, “type is something that you can pick up and hold in your hand,” is a useful reminder that type is not an abstraction but a thing; recognizing that this is the observation of a punchcutter, a compositor, a designer, and a historian gives these words a special potency, and a unique richness.
For a man I know so little about, it’s striking to see how often Harry Carter’s name appears on the pages of this site. It’s in the description of our <a href="fonts/historical-allsorts/inside/st-augustin-civilite/">Civilité</a> font, which was made possible by one of his books, and again in connection with the <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/historical-allsorts/inside/fell-types/">Fell Types</a>, about which he wrote the definitive work in 1970 (though credited as a mere contributor.) Our recreation of the oldest living <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/historical-allsorts/inside/english-textura/">textura</a> was researched in two of typography’s masterworks, and I see now that Harry Carter was a major force behind both: H. D. L. Vervliet’s Sixteenth Century Printing Types of the Low Countries records a busy period of scholarship at the Plantin-Moretus Museum (Antwerp) which was largely Harry Carter’s project, and the monumental Typefoundries in the Netherlands, all 477 pages of which Carter revised, annotated, and translated from Dutch, might never have come to pass without his energies. Even the historical backstory on the <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/hoefler-titling/overview/">Hoefler Titling</a> page, regarding the true history of the “Janson” typefaces, states its observations as known facts: today they are, but first they were Harry’s. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Wed, 12 Sep 2007 07:47:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/reconstructing-harry#248</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Eight Screenings; Five Degrees]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/eight-screenings-five-degrees</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[<img src="https://d31td5fkd89rr1.cloudfront.net/assets/images/blog/helvetica-film.gif">
The New York premiere of <a href="http://www.helveticafilm.com/" target="_blank">Helvetica</a> sold out so quickly that we almost didn’t get seats, and we’re in the film. So get your tickets <a href="http://www.movietickets.com/house_detail.asp?house_id=9598&rdate=9%2F14%2F2007
" target="_blank">now</a> for the NYC cinema run, which starts Wednesday at the IFC Center in Greenwich Village. Director Gary Hustwit will be on hand for a few of the screenings, as will Tobias Frere-Jones and Michael Bierut — check the film’s <a href="http://www.helveticafilm.com/screenings.html" target="_blank">calendar</a> for the full scoop.
BREAKING — It’s through Helvetica that we’re connected to David Carson, through Addicted to Love that he’s connected to Matthew Broderick, through War Games that Matthew’s connected to Maury Chaykin, and through Where the Truth Lies that Maury’s connected to Kevin Bacon, bringing the H&Co <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon_number
" target="_blank">Bacon Number</a> to a sizzling four. —JH]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Mon, 10 Sep 2007 20:02:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/eight-screenings-five-degrees#247</guid>
</item>
<item>
<title><![CDATA[Welcome!]]></title>
<link>https://www.typography.com/blog/welcome</link>
<description>
<![CDATA[
<h2>The New Font Pages</h2>
We’ve completely reconceived the way our fonts are shown online. Hardcore type fanatics might enjoy reading our expanded font family descriptions, and those hoping to make the most of their fonts can explore the font feature pages that illustrate what’s inside each package from H&Co. But the rest of us can sit back and enjoy the show, because today’s typography.com debuts a collection of “visual tours” that demonstrate what’s inside even our most comprehensive font packages — including today’s new release, the 106-style <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/chronicle-display/overview/" target="_blank">Chronicle</a> family.
<h2>Collections & Suggestions</h2>
An easy way to explore our library is through the “<a href="http://www.typography.com/collections/serifs/" target="_blank">Browse Collections</a>” menu, top right. We’ve organized these by both style and function, and carefully curated each collection so you’re not left wading through every single weight of every single text face looking for just the right one. At the bottom of each font page, you’ll also find some suggestions of which fonts we think work especially well together, accompanied by illustrations that hint at what’s possible.
<h2>The New TestDrivers</h2>
Eight years ago we developed the first fully-interactive way to try fonts online, and now we’ve gone a few steps better. This year’s <a href="https://www.typography.com/testDriver/index.php?productLineID=100031&styleID=600466" target="_blank">TestDriver</a> allows you to compare as many fonts as you want, making it easier to find the perfect font pairing of your own. To see a font’s entire character set, click the <a href="https://www.typography.com/testDriver/index.php?mode=characters&productLineID=100017" target="_blank">Characters</a> button in any TestDriver, and scroll away.
<h2>Ask H&Co</h2>
Because so many of the topics we’ve explored with our clients are of value to everyone, we’ve decided to gather this experience into a new column called Ask H&Co. Inside you’ll find some of the things we’ve learned about typography over the past nineteen years, starting with two of today’s most important topics: whether <a href="http://www.typography.com/techniques/opentype/" target="_blank">OpenType</a> is right for you, and how to get the most out of fonts with <a href="http://www.typography.com/techniques/mastering-grades/" target="_blank">grades</a>. Also in this section you’ll find our new FAQ, which covers everything from <a href="http://www.typography.com/faq/category.php?topicID=10" target="_blank">licensing basics</a> to <a href="http://www.typography.com/faq/category.php?topicID=9" target="_blank">technical help</a>.
<h2>OpenType</h2>
Speaking of OpenType, it’s here. Oh boy is it here. Today we’re launching twelve of our most hard-working font packages in OpenType, including <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/gotham/overview/" target="_blank">Gotham</a>, <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/whitney/overview/" target="_blank">Whitney</a>, <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/verlag/overview/" target="_blank">Verlag</a>, <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/knockout/overview/" target="_blank">Knockout</a> and <a href="http://www.typography.com/fonts/mercury-text/overview/" target="_blank">Mercury</a>, and of course our new <a href="https://www.typography.com/fonts/chronicle-text/overview/" target="_blank">Chronicle</a> collection. Designers with international ambitions will be happy to hear that these — and all of our OpenType fonts — meet H&Co’s new Latin-X® language standard, which covers more than a hundred languages including all of those in <a href="http://www.typography.com/faq/question.php?faqID=12" target="_blank">Central Europe</a>. Our OpenType program has drawn on the experience of every one of our <a href="https://www.typography.com/about/biographies.php" target="_blank">designers</a>, ensuring that the fonts available from H&Co in 2007 are unquestionably our best ever.
<h2>The Blog</h2>
It’s called News, Notes & Observations, and you’re reading it. <a href="https://www.typography.com/blog/">Stay tuned</a> for new releases, and other updates from H&Co; grab our <a href="feed://www.typography.com/blog/rss" target="_blank">RSS</a> feed, if that’s your scene
<h2>Keep in touch!</h2>
Join our <a href="https://www.typography.com/account">mailing list</a> to keep up with H&Co on new font releases. We’ve got a lot in store for the coming year. ]]>
</description>
<pubDate>Tue, 04 Sep 2007 16:06:00 +0000</pubDate>
<guid>https://www.typography.com/blog/welcome#460</guid>
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