Typeface based on sculpture becomes motorized sculpture. The (European) typeface
Jigsaw, “which was inspired by sculpture,” finds a use in typesetting the names of donors to a (U.S.) regional arts council. “A motorized disk contains approximately 2,000 names.... Pushing an initial letter on the control panel allows the viewer to find a particular name. The disk rotates and stops at the requested letter and displays all the names corresponding to the requested letter by backlighting them with white LEDs.” (
Gallery;
Vimeo video.)
[more inside]
posted by joeclark
on Jul 10, 2011 -
12 comments
The Museum of Modern Art
announced this week it would induct 23 digital-era typefaces into its permanent collection (
Times coverage). But what do the
designers of these fonts
look like? Pics or it didn’t happen:
first set;
second.
posted by joeclark
on Jan 26, 2011 -
34 comments
The Art of Hermann Zapf film "was produced in 1967 at Hallmark Cards in Kansas City and in my design studio in Dreieichenhain, Germany... After long discussions and the help of a lot of alcohol
we started late in the night. I was sitting at a slanted glass table with a hot spotlight in my neck. Frank Robinson was lying on the floor with the camera ready for a frog-view shot. My task was to write beautiful letters with ink which dried as soon the pen touched the slippery surface of an astralon sheet." —
Hermann Zapf
posted by netbros
on Jan 23, 2011 -
16 comments
Fraktur mon amour: Ruud Linssen’s
Book of War, Mortification and Love is a collection of “essays on voluntary suffering” that works as a specimen of the
Fakir blackletter typeface issued by merry pranksters Underware. Bored already? Well, try this on for size: It’s “printed in the author’s blood.”
posted by joeclark
on Aug 18, 2010 -
12 comments
John Mayer gets some really bitchin’ typography. House Industries (last MeFi mention:
1999!) designs a limited-edition tour poster for the crooner who constantly steals the show on
TMZ. “[U]ntil they come up with a JPEG format that makes metallics shimmer like a
Solid Gold dancer’s outfit, there just isn’t a substitute for physically walking around a serigraph and watching the light bouncing off metallic and fluorescent inks.”
[more inside]
posted by joeclark
on Feb 25, 2010 -
35 comments
Stelae for 7/7. The London 7/7 Memorial consists of “52 pillars (or ‘stelae’), cast in rough textured stainless steel, each representing one of the victims” of the 2005 terrorist bombing attack. Typographer Phil Baines (
profile) explains the development of the rough-hewn yet “British” typeface, based on “the 19th-century, untutored signmakers’ sansserif you see on buildings around the city,” that is moulded into the living steel.
posted by joeclark
on Jul 8, 2009 -
15 comments
Stereotypes -- Derided by typophiles as crass, "ethnic type" has a revealing taxonomy and, surprisingly, serves a purpose.
posted by cog_nate
on Jun 19, 2009 -
66 comments
Decodeunicode.org has a useful and full-featured search for the names and glyphs for those Unicode characters that display as a plain box full of despair. It is presented by the Department of Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Mainz. Roll the dice
⚅⚄ and try it out.
[more inside]
posted by TheOnlyCoolTim
on Jan 23, 2009 -
25 comments
It’s easy to talk about
Adrian Frutiger in the past tense, since his most influential fonts –
Univers,
Egyptienne, and the eponymous
Frutiger – are all at least thirty years old. But
he is still alive, and in the summer of 2006, as he was presented with the
Society for Typographic Aficionados’ annual
Typography Award, type designer
Mark Simonson gave
a presentation on how Frutiger [pdf, 18 MB] affected, and continues to affect, him and all others who benefit from good typography.
posted by tepidmonkey
on Oct 3, 2007 -
14 comments
Not My Type - An office and its occupants, made entirely of typographic characters, create a theatre of emotion. View the separate animations (Flash)
1,
2,
3 and
4. Also,
visit an article on the work's concept development and storyboarding process. And
there's more via Google.
posted by sjvilla79
on Aug 16, 2005 -
11 comments
Are you a typoholic? It starts so innocently. One day you're mildly interested in the difference between display and text typefaces. Soon you can distinguish between teardrop and beak terminals. Suddenly you're annoying everyone in the movie theater by yelling out the names of all the fonts used in the credits. What's so scary is that you never saw it coming. You, my friend, are a type freak.
posted by ColdChef
on Apr 29, 2004 -
36 comments
