Posts tagged typography
Suit Yourself
Or Shit Yourself as the mirrored text might say.
Choice is yours. We’re going with the former.
Via Reddit.
Handcrafting Type, Literally
Graphic designer Tien-Min Liao created Handmade Type, a “typographic experiment that explores the relationships between upper-case letters and lower-case letters, and also records the transformation between them.”
In this experiment, I drew shapes with ink on one or both of my hands, manipulating my gestures into the corresponding shape to signify an upper-case letter. Then, using the same shape on my hands, I manipulated my gesture or changed the perspective through which the shape is viewed in orderto transform the upper-case letter to a lower-case of the same letter. Removingor redrawing the darkened shape on my hands is not allowed in the experiment. The only way to make the model transform from an upper-case to a lower-case (orvice versa) is changing the gestures or the perspectives.
Click through for more animated letters and a video of the making.
H/T: Colossal.
The AP Gets a New Look
Late last week the Associated Press announced that they’re rolling out a new visual identity system that’s “designed for the digital era.”
Central to the changes is a new logo.
The new branding was created by Brooklyn-based Objective Subject, who detail their processes here. The video above shows the iterative process Objective Subject took en route to the final logo.
Via Brand New:
The previous logo has been around for so long that it’s hard to imagine anything new taking its place. It also happens to be a perfectly decent logo — easily recognizable and simple. Its main problem, whether on the web or in ink-clogging newspapers, is the thinness of its counterspaces, being too small to hold legibility at smaller sizes. Citing “designed for the digital era” in the press release, the new AP logo is clearly a more multi-platform-friendly rendition that will hold up well at different sizes. It’s easy to miss the nice rhythm and Gestalten-ish ligature of the old logo and it’s quite possible that the logo could have simply been redrawn for better performance but, let’s face it, that thing is thirty years old and I think it’s more disposable than a consumer brand icon like UPS or AT&T. The new logo may feel simple and slightly generic, but it’s concise and strong, especially with the red underscore which I feel will become more identifiable — perhaps almost like National Geographic’s yellow frame — than the “AP” characters.
Men’s Journal: Now Extra Manly
Wenner Media’s Men’s Journal hits the stands with a new logo.
Via Armin Vit:
The new logo abandons the outlines, shadows, and dimensionality in favor of a bad-ass, bold, and condensed treatment. The combination of hard angles in the “S” and “R” coupled with the barely round corners gives the logo an extra masculine whiff that the previous logos lacked. The tracking and kerning is quite impeccable too and it looks great emblazoned across the width of the magazine’s cover.
Image: Old logo on left, new on the right. Via Under Consideration.
The Big Book of Fonts, 1912 Edition
Via Kottke.org:
The Internet Archive is hosting a copy of the American Specimen Book of Type Styles put out by the American Type Founders Company in 1912. It’s a 1300-page book listing hundreds of typefaces and their possible use cases.
I Shot the Serif.
Via M Monica.
It’s not just for Kogi BBQ anymore…
Introducing the Moveable Type Truck!This is such a fantastic idea by letterpress printer, Kyle Durrie. She combined her love of travel with her love of type to craft a workstyle that was satisfying in mind, body, and soul. Last November she launched a Kickstarter project to help fund her dream of driving around the country and teaching people about letterpress from a mobile print shop in the back of a truck. Less than a year later, the Moveable Type Truck was born!
It’s really inspiring to watch her kickstarter video and know that she and everyone who supported her made her idea a reality. Her project was not only funded, but the amount of her goal was doubled, and it only took two months.
Kyle is on her cross-country tour now, and the Moveable Type Truck is coming to LA this coming weekend for the Renegade Craft Fair, July 16-17, at the Los Angeles State Historic Park. I’m definitely going to check it out!
Finally a food truck that satisfies an intellectual hunger.
Fascinating profile on the Musalman, a daily, handwritten newspaper.
David Carson, radical editor of experimental music magazine Ray Gun, lent the font a degree of notoriety in 1994 when he printed an interview with Bryan Ferry in the magazine entirely in the symbols-only font – the double-page spread was of course, quite illegible and would have to be interpreted like a cryptogram for those unfamiliar with the font. He said he did it because the interview was “incredibly boring” and that upon searching his typeface collection for a suitable font and ending at Zapf Dingbats, decided to use it with hopes of making the article interesting again.
Not a quibble but he was the art director not the editor. Some years later I got to work with him a bit when I was an editor at Blue which was great. — Michael
The look of nicely printed text in thick paper excites me so much. | Buzzfeed
Is the letterpress dead? Nope, it was just waiting for a designer, a Kickstarter project and some digital re-imagination.
John Bonadies was looking for $15,000 via Kickstarter to bring his prototype to market and has already passed $26,300. The money’s to be used to purchase vintage cuts and authentic wood type from foundries that closed in the 70’s and 80’s.
So what will the app do? As Bonadies describes it:
The design process is the same as the letterpress process—you place and arrange type and cuts on a press bed, lock the type, ink the type, and print. You will be able to create unlimited designs, with multiple colors, using authentic vintage wood type and art cuts. And you can print your design directly from LetterMpress or save it as an image for import it into other applications.
H/T: Laughing Squid.
