Gone are the days of having to fall back on web-safe typefaces. Cutting edge web design is now typographically sophisticated, powered by web-served typefaces. This seminar gives a good overview of what is now possible, and easily accessible to those who are not elite designers. It touches on type selection, readability, editing and other issues.
One of a series of four textbook covers. Bold, simple, picking up on the tool theme without going too far over the top.
fonts.com has put together an excellent resource for those interested in learning more about type design and typographers. An exacting, precise craft, high-level type design requires extreme attention to detail and the ability to slog through endless iterations, individual kerning pairs, multiple weights, extended character sets and nowadays, the promotion of one's work. The best type families combine beauty and workaday functionality, and if admired and appreciated, will often enjoy a life far longer those that of their creators.
For print-oriented graphic designers, posters are an opportunity to abandon restraint and strive for high impact. While still a lively area of contemporary practice, some of the most striking and memorable poster design graced walls many decades ago and is now in the public domain. This site has curated hundreds of very high quality vintage posters, most of them suitable for print. Every single one was created without the aid of computers and collectively they are a testament to very high levels of craftsmanship and imagination.
To get an idea of the amount of time that goes into the design of a large font family, check out this promotional site. FF Mark is the result of a long-term collaboration between some of the brightest lights in modern European typography. The designers are intimately aware of typographic history and prepared to slog through the minutiae of sketching, adjusting and kerning thousands of characters in ten weights.
An excellent blog dealing with the history and culture of the dark art (for the grammatically challenged, at least) of punctuation. Learn about the secret life of ampersands, pilcrows, interrobangs and much more.
We've been designing for this event for some years — when the weather gods are benign, a good time is had by all...
Our client wanted a business card and letterhead that conveyed the warm feel of the acoustic guitar and a distinctly pre-modern look. We used Cheap Pine, images of our client's guitar and a faded paper background.
The last couple of years have seen a quiet revolution for web designers. Once limited to the small number of typefaces that 'everyone' had installed on their machines, designers have been completely liberated from that restriction by web-served typefaces. Now it no longer matters what the user has installed -- the website renders typefaces from a remote server. If you'd like to see what your website (or someone else's) would look like using the new web font services, try this neat little demonstration from type purveyor FontFont. Instead of bland patches of Arial or Verdana, imagine your site decked out with typefaces designed for the screen.
Though it could be an obscure indie band, TFL is actually a website that follows through on the promise (or threat) of its title. America's lawyers produce gargantuan piles of poorly formatted documents and in the process communicate rather poorly. Matthew Butterick makes a persuasive argument for the importance of the considered use of type and page layout (especially using Word or Excel). His website and book are rich in practical examples and of course apply to anyone producing documents, not just the legal set.
In combining prettiness and practicality, Archer is a rare typeface. With idiosyncratic letterforms and cute little ball terminals, this friendly slab serif has been spotted all over the web and and in hundreds of publications. As with other HF&J typefaces (especially Gotham), it has been (over)used, but in the right caring hands, it still has the capacity to give shine and personality to many kinds of print and web design.