I love old type specimen books. Any foundry, any period, it doesn’t matter. They will have me hypnotized. But I don’t usually linger at the title pages. Who would, really? All the fun and exciting stuff comes after that: the impossibly small text faces, the spectacular display faces, all the sample uses variously dowdy and natty.
We all love stories about teenagers schooling the government, but sometimes we get schooled, too. Last week, we wrote about 14-year-old Suvir Mirchandani’s research project that suggested the government would save $400 million by switching from Times New Roman to Garamond. Turns out, it’s a little more complicated than that.
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If you’re a beard lover—and, hey, these days who isn’t?—then here’s the font for you, because it’s made exclusively from images of facial hair.
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While we now take crisp-looking typography for granted, it wasn’t always that way. Back in the 80s, low-res fonts looked dreadful—but fortunately two men changed all that.
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Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is visually stunning. And the closer you examine, the more exquisite details you’ll find. That’s what Dave Addey has done in his in-depth, scene-by-scene examination of how this cinema masterpiece used typography to create a familiar yet still distant future.
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There was a time when well-traveled luggage looked like the suitcase above: covered with travel stickers, trophies of every adventurous explorer. My father, who spent his youth traveling across Europe in the 60s and 70s kept his weary suitcase for a long time; as a child, I admired all those well-aged little pictures of remote hotels and places I’d never been to.
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Chances are you’ve looked at the work of Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones at least one time today. The type designers are behind many of the world’s most-loved fonts, like Gotham, made famous by Obama’s 2008 campaign. But according to a nasty legal document making the rounds today, the duo has parted ways
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If you’ve ever thought Twitter was a silly name, be grateful that’s what they settled on. During the research for a new book about the site, Nick Bilton has unearthed some of the early name and logo ideas, and they… they aren’t pretty.
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For people with dyslexia, relating their struggle with reading to the general population can be a seemingly impossible and frustrating task. Graphic designer (and dyslexic) Sam Barclay, though, hopes to finally bridge the gap between those with reading difficulties and those without using his new book—a visual experience of what dyslexia actually entails.
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When architects and designers want to make a point, they certainly love to spell it out for us. So check out these buildings, statues, and sculptures made from letterforms, from Lettering Large: The Art and Design of Monumental Typography, a new book by Steven Heller and Mirko Ilić.
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This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
