Category Archives: typography

Big Is Beautiful

I like getting to play Dear Abby! Though lately my responses read less like sage advice and more like columns by The Non-Expert—only not funny. Yesterday Sarah wrote with some questions: Since 2002, I have been editor for our local historical society’s 20-page quarterly. When I first started, I did it in an old version [...]

Also posted in Accessibility, advice, books, Design, Typesetting | 3 Comments

Pinch on pages

Pinch, a design office in Portland, Oregon, have* shared a summary of their typographic standards for Hawthorne Books, a literary press also in Portland. And while I very much like the house design they’ve come up with, I have a few quibbles with their write-up of same. Pages are expensive, and here is where working [...]

Also posted in books, Design | 3 Comments

How to pick better fonts

How do you pick your fonts? It’s easy! Just look at type samples and find one that catches your eye. Throw that one out. All this month, Tom Christensen of the always interesting Right Reading has been guest-blogging over at ForeWord magazine. For his final post, he offers “a simplified speed course in making books [...]

Also posted in advice, books, business, Design, Reading | 7 Comments

Hitler’s subtitler starts moonlighting in Web development?

And, speaking of parodies, did anybody else just get this e-mail from FontLab?

Also posted in Tools, web development | 4 Comments

Hitler’s subtitler gets a cheap font CD

One of dozens of Downfall parody videos. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all, but if you haven’t been subjected to them yet, you may find this instance amusing. Update, 4/26/2010: Sigh. Well, the video’s been pulled, so in its stead, I give you the EFF‘s own Downfall parody:

Also posted in humor, Rants, Video | 3 Comments

“I’ve got science for any occasion
Postulating theorems, formulating equations”

This is so wonderfully geeky I can barely stand it: Last week I mentioned the atomic pen, which scientists used to construct some awfully tiny letters one atom at a time. These are small letters indeed: measuring two nanometers in height, they’re about 1/40000 the thickness of a human hair, which surely gives their inventor [...]

Also posted in technology | 1 Comment

Flattery Will Get You Nowhere

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so I should feel jazzed that a person I used to work with, who at that time did not know InDesign from Address Book, is still using my files as templates for new books today in his busy freelance design business. Being a spiteful, negative, [...]

Also posted in advice, books, Design, Rants, Typesetting, Work | 13 Comments

Make hay while you can still hit the nail on the head.

I spent most of last week TypeCon, where I took three classes and attended about half of the presentations. The highlights were, hands down, the day I spent making mudpies at Hal Leader’s aptly named Paradise Press and Erik Spiekermann’s obscenity-laced presentation on opening night (big, big crush). Overall, I think this was my favorite [...]

Also posted in books, letterpress, Typesetting, web development | 7 Comments

What does a type designer’s handwriting look like?

In case you haven’t seen it—I hadn’t—faithful reader Schizohedron points out the following fun thing to look at: There’s great power in a typeface, but what’s always interested me more than the typeface is the designer behind it – why did they create the typeface? Where did their inspiration come from? How did they start? [...]

Also posted in handwriting | 3 Comments

And attendance is the other 50 percent of your grade.

Fonts can shape reality in intangible ways, as Phil Renaud, a graphic designer from Phoenix, discovered when he studied the relationship between his grades and the fonts he used for his college papers. Papers set in Georgia, a less common font with serifs, generally received A’s while those rendered in Times Roman averaged B’s. —Peter [...]

Also posted in letterpress, Reading, technology | 7 Comments