MetaFilter posts tagged with fonts

Easy As ABC

grumblebee — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:36:22 -0800

Modern Alphabets (Single Link Flickr Post)

It's Helvetica! I know this!

flatluigi — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 16:39:14 -0800

TypeWar: How well do you know your fonts?

Talking about Type

Mngo — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 11:42:41 -0800

Type Design on the Radio. TTBOOK (previously) does an hour-long program about typography (podcast here, RM stream here). Segments include interviews with Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones of Gotham fame (they say their "Obama Font" worked best of those in the campaign; others agree), a Verdana-centric interview with Matthew Carter (he comments on the IKEA kerfluffle), and interview Kitty Burns Florey, author of Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting . The podcast link will age out, but archives should be available here as a stream. The discussion is very non-technical.

Makes writing letters a breeze.

Korou — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:18:28 -0800

Make your handwriting into a font! Print out a template, scan and upload to fontcapture, et voila! your own personal font.

Ikea de-Futurafies

joeclark — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 05:26:20 -0800

Ikea de-Futurafies. You may have noticed something at once familiar and unfamiliar about the 2009 Ikea catalogue: The company switched from a custom variant of Futura to the font you stare at all day in your browser, Verdana. And type nerds are losing their shit! Verdana is now being used company-wide – even for double-page newspaper ads and illegal urban graffiti campaigns. “They want to be able to give the same visual impression both in print and the Web,” says a report.

iQ Font

billysumday — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 09:47:11 -0800

Cars + fonts = the iQ font.

The London 7/7 Memorial

joeclark — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 05:23:57 -0800

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.

Stereotypes -- "chop suey" and other "ethnic type"

cog_nate — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:33:52 -0800

Stereotypes -- Derided by typophiles as crass, "ethnic type" has a revealing taxonomy and, surprisingly, serves a purpose.

Custom Letters

minifigs — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 02:01:11 -0800

Custom Letters is an evolving category that includes calligraphy, sign painting, graffiti, stone carving, digital lettering, hand lettering, paper sculpture, and type design.

Spoiler: This time, Comic Sans does NOT save the day. Good.

wendell — Thu, 07 May 2009 20:55:24 -0800

FONT FIGHT! the long-awaited (by me and other fontaholics) follow-up to Font Conference. Better than the first IMO, but I'm sure we can still take issue with some of the 'characters'. Interestingly, in the previous thread, I suggested Tahoma as a Native American, along with a bunch of other font ideas they didn't use (they made Playbill a Cowboy? I can think of better Western-ish fonts - am I the only one who's heard of Gold Rush?). via Neatorama and Miss Cellania because I'm too cool to check out the videos at CollegeHumor.com myself.

The H&FJ Institute for Unapplied Mathematics

netbros — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 08:27:28 -0800

Joe Palca, a science correspondent for NPR's Morning Edition, was meditating on the best way to convey the magnitude of the world's largest known prime number, 2^43112609-1. He contacted H&FJ at Typography.com to discuss the implications of typesetting a number with more than twelve million digits. Crunching of numbers and fonts ensued.

You Are My Type

netbros — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 11:23:09 -0800

The Ministry of Type is a weblog about type, typography, lettering, calligraphy and other related things. The FontFeed, from the folks at FontShop, is a daily dispatch of recommended fonts, typography techniques, and inspirational examples of digital type at work in the real world. Articles of interest in the archives include: Passenger and pedestrian symbols created in the early 20th Century; as part of the Isotype project set up by Otto Neurath to provide information to the often-illiterate proletariat. Central to banknote designs are Guilloche patterns, which can be created mechanically with a geometric lathe, or more likely these days, mathematically. Travel posters promoting travel to exotic eras and destinations, such as the Crimson Canyons of Mars, Tranquil Miranda, or the Winter Wonderland of the Ice Age. It’s not just the latest font technology, but also the most advanced, poised to replace the old TrueType and PostScript formats. Embrace the open type hype. The best contemporary handwriting typefaces in various writing styles — from print to cursive, simple to swashy. Sometimes, flat just doesn’t cut it, and we need to find other, more attractive ways to present designs. Tutorial: Photorealistic Perspective

H is for Helvetica

wendell — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 20:04:43 -0800

The Periodic Table of Typefaces (fully-readable close-up) Two great nerd-memes (Periodic Tables and Font Collecting) that look great together. After looking it over, I'm happy to say it has no room for Comic Sans or Arial or Hobo, but sad to say it's also missing my personal guilty pleasure, Bookman. What's in it (or not in it) to your liking?

Comic book grammatical and aesthetic traditions

Brandon Blatcher — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 13:31:38 -0800

Comic book lettering has some grammatical and aesthetic traditions that are quite unique. What follows is a list that every letterer eventually commits to his/her own mental reference file.

I had always wanted to do this

Rinku — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:26:48 -0800

Make your handwriting into a font with Yourfonts. Download the PDF, draw your alphabet, scan and upload, then download the finished result. Examples. Via Drawn!

In case your system's fonts don't support the snowman.

TheOnlyCoolTim — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 18:15:23 -0800

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. I hear if you know the secret hexadecimal number you can find an Obama glyph. Comment with the funniest candidate wins the internet.

succinct

plexi — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 15:42:59 -0800

If you're feeling guilty about that long flight from San Francisco to Berlin you can use EcoFonts (which is created by omitting parts of the letter) to assuage your carbon-heavy guilt.

Yes, even MS Comic Sans

slater — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 21:32:04 -0800

Enter some text and see it written in all the fonts installed on your system

Cartype - gives a whole new meaning to E-type

1f2frfbf — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 12:51:30 -0800

Cartype has a huge repository of vehicle logos and other related typography. In addition, you can see collections such as shield and crest emblems, emblems with animals, and hand-painted type on cars. They cover European automotive history from the near mythic to the exotic. They also cover American iron from the old to the malaise years to the cutting edge of new.

Your favorite typeface rocks.

ardgedee — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 18:22:15 -0800

Your favorite rock typefaces. [previously]

The wrong fonts in ‘Mad Men’ (and sometimes the right ones)

joeclark — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 21:18:48 -0800

Definitive guide to fonts on Mad Men. Mostly the fonts that didn’t exist during the time of the show. Not every single thing is “historically accurate,” apparently. Improves on the various blog posts (and Flickr photos, like mine) on the topic, as you’d expect from Mark Simonson, ace spotter of typographic ahistoricism.

The state of hipster typography

mediocre — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 04:20:25 -0800

Ever since Napoleon Dynamite became a surprise hit in the summer of 2003, and the subsequent rise of Judd Apatow a trend in sentimental but cynical film comedy was born. But this post isn't about the comedy.. Napoleon Dynamite was a film dominated by artwork, specifically the pencil sketches of the protagonist. The child-like scrawlings meant to incite the memories of unbridled enthusiasm that youth brings. Moreso then any other specific typography, the words in the film were either a crude script of dubious penmanship or something akin to Action Jackson. Variants are seen, but it is most often seen as a hand-drawn, blocky font, often shadowed for added awesome. Soon, more movies with similarly quirky characters started coming out. The colored-pencil scrawl style has become a means of pandering to a specific demographic. The hip ster. When your movie poster needs to convey a youthful romanticism, go for Action Jackson. When you need to appeal to the ironic sentimentality of your late teenage years, Action Jackson is where it's at. It doesn't stop at movies and television either. Are you a comedian and need to convey cynicism but with a childlike wink and a nod? Go for Action Jackson. Or just write it poorly, possibly with the wrong hand. What does the future of Action Jackson hold? Only time will tell..

Empire Poster Thread.

daHIFI — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 07:02:36 -0800

Can you guess these movies from just one letter of the poster? Empire has put together a little quiz to test your movie font knowledge. Guess the movies from just one letter in the film's poster title. Via Neatorama

Fonts Personified.

jacquilynne — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:19:16 -0800

Font Conference. A video from CollegeHumor which made me laugh more than a video from CollegeHumor really should.

the quick brown fox

oneirodynia — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 17:19:11 -0800

The handwriting of typographers.