September 2, 2014 at 1:00 pm
Still struggling with the intricacies and nuances of FontLab and Opentype as I build my own font, my mind is completely blown at seeing over 30,000 ligatures in this ornamental Japonisme type family. I can’t wait to try a few words and see how they turn out.
August 27, 2014 at 1:00 pm
My productivity and time management for the day were just dealt a crushing blow. Sevanti Letterpress digitized an entire copy of the 1148-page tome that is the 1923 American Type Founders Specimen Book. Then released high-resolution PDFs of the massive work for free.
So much type. So many great layouts and examples of type in use. So many ornaments. So many great quotes. So hard to pick pieces to highlight. Just check out the whole thing.
After all is said and done, the printer’s work is judged chiefly by the type faces used in it. A good type face may make poor paper and cheap inks passable, but the best qualities of papers and of inks are incapable of giving even a semblance of quality to printing executed with type faces of inferior designs.
- American Type Founders Specimen Book (1923)
August 25, 2014 at 1:15 pm
On Friday I mentioned the Golden Typography Calculator in my redesign post. Well, sure enough, I ran across another great typography tool over the weekend. Gridlover is a handy web app to help you establish a typographic system with modular scale and vertical rhythm.
Adjust the values for your base font size and line-height then pick a scale — like the golden ratio. Gridlover then spits out the CSS, SCSS, LESS, or Stylus for font sizes, line heights and margins to keep your paragraphs and headings on a pixel perfect baseline grid.
Ah, two of my favorite things together — the golden ratio in typography and computers doing math for me.
August 19, 2014 at 10:15 am
The Newberry, an independent research library in Chicago, is cataloging and processing over 29,000 printed items that had been backlogged. Type specimens, frontispieces, illustrations, and advertisements from the John M. Wing Collection are seeing the light of day and the scanner. The library started a tumblr to help expose the work to the world.
One of my favorites so far is this wavy wood type specimen sheet from the Morgan Press.
(via @okaytype)
July 17, 2014 at 10:47 pm
As a kid who always had Lego sets on my Christmas list — and immediately put them together first thing Christmas morning — this “hack” absolutely made my day. There’s also a fun time lapse of the construction.
September 26, 2012 at 10:39 pm
One Tuesday every month, I’m going to round up a couple (maybe a few) awesome display typefaces to showcase and give a little breakdown on each one. If you have a suggestion you want me to take a look at, drop me a line. Let’s jump straight into some headline goodness.
January 10, 2012 at 10:31 pm
One Tuesday every month, I’m going to round up a couple (maybe a few) awesome display typefaces to showcase and give a little breakdown on each one. If you have a suggestion you want me to take a look at, drop me a line. Let’s jump straight into some headline goodness.
November 9, 2011 at 8:14 pm
One Tuesday every month, I’m going to round up a couple (maybe a few) awesome display typefaces to showcase and give a little breakdown on each one. If you have a suggestion you want me to take a look at, drop me a line. Let’s jump straight into some headline goodness.
