I Love Typography

On the rare occasions I get to peruse paper and ink books in a brick and mortar bookstore, after a brief flirtation with the cover and blurb, I will scan the table of contents, then gently – for the book is new, the clean pages crisp – thumb through the final leaves until I locate the index, where, if I am familiar with the subject matter, I expect to find, at the very least, the usual suspects. Their absence might well be symptomatic of more profound flaws between the covers; for example, a book titled The History of Psychology, whose index fails to reference, say, Freud, Jung and Mary Whiton Calkins, could safely be passed over in favor of something better. Once a book is finished, its index remains invaluable in tracking down partially or half-remembered facts and phrases. In many digital books, the index has been replaced by search but, whereas a full-text search of a digital book often requires one to know precisely what one is looking for, in an alphabetical subject index, a half-remembered name, or even the first letter of an otherwise forgotten word, is usually sufficient. It is for this reason that the designers and editors of digital books should not be in a hurry to do away with the index, for it remains an indispensable, simple and intuitive means of making texts, most especially lengthy texts, more accessible.

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Incunabula type history typographic firsts

Humans have written about war and warfare since writing was invented. One of the best known from antiquity is Flavius Vegetius’ late fourth-century, De re militari or ‘Military Science’, repopularized throughout the latter Middle Ages and first printed in c. 1473–74 by Nicolaus Ketelaer and Gerardus de Leempt in Utrecht in the central Netherlands. This edition is entirely without illustrations. It was first published in English translation, in print, by William Caxton in 1489. But despite its early resurgence in print, the sixteenth century saw it replaced by more up-to-date treatises, like, for example, Machiavelli’s The Art of War, first published in Florence in 1521. Machiavelli felt that Italy had, militarily, fallen behind many of its European neighbors, and like all good fascists, he looked back to the revered golden age of Graeco-Roman antiquity for models on the proper conduct of war. His work is especially indebted to that of Polybius (c. 203–120 BC), who in his The Histories described the political and military institutions that had made the Romans so successful.

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Incunabula typographic firsts

In late August 2015, Korean type designer Minjoo Ham arrived in Berlin to figure out if the city could offer her an interesting new phase in her life. Minjoo was a fresh graduate from the TypeMedia program at The Hague’s KABK (Royal Art Academy). Berlin, possibly the world’s capital of independent type design, was an agreeable surprise to her. “I came to Berlin for a three months’ trial. I had never thought about moving to Berlin before. What I like most here is the type community and its gatherings, such as the “Typostammtisch” meet-ups. In Korea I barely had friends who were type designers or type geeks; here in Berlin that is very different. Most of my friends here are type-related people. Besides, the Berlin society is quite international. For a foreigner it is very easy to go out and meet new people.”  She decided to stay, and is now a hard-working member of the Berlin type scene. And the first 5 months she was a guest at Fust & Friends headquarters, aka Jan’s home office, and designed a display script we called Teddy.

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make a font new fonts

Our earliest ancestors, from deep prehistory, gazed up at the sky in awe. We soon determined through repeated observations that the celestial bodies appear to follow prescribed paths and that their positions in the sky coincided with or produced effects on earth. For the Egyptians, Isis’ tears over the death of Osiris made the Nile rivers swell but this annual flooding could be predicted with considerable precision based on the heliacal rising of the sky’s brightest star, Sirius. Moreover, the sun determined days and nights and years and seasons and regulated the plantings and harvests of agricultural civilization. If the sun, for most of history considered a planet, had such profound effects on the earth and its inhabitants, then it followed, quite reasonably, that the other wandering stars or planets produced similar effects too.

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In February of 2016 designer and photographer Alistair Hall tweeted an image of a vintage luggage tag from the Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company. I was struck by the type used for the word CABIN. It was heavy and compressed with straight sides and asymmetric stroke contrast reminiscent of American wood type. I saw in it potential – the beginnings of a typeface.

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Notes on Designing and Producing the Typeface Wind

Hansje van Halem is a graphic designer who works with type. She blurs the boundaries between type and image, between foreground and background, often creating seductive patterns that only reveal their texts only when viewed from the distance, making the reader work hard to decode their message. I’ve been following her work for a long time, and about a year ago I went to a lecture in Amsterdam where she presented her latest projects.

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make a font new fonts type design

Sandro Botticelli was born in Florence about 1445. In 1470, aged just 25, and shortly after printing was introduced to Italy, his prodigious talent led him to open his own studio. He flourished under the patronage of the Medici family and was invited by Pope Sixtus IV to paint frescoes in the recently restored Sistine Chapel of the Apostolic Palace, almost three decades before Michelangelo wielded his brush and brilliance to the chapel’s ceiling.

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Incunabula typographic firsts

Just to be clear from the start: I don’t speak Hebrew. When I first started working with Hebrew type, I couldn’t tell one letter from another, or even whether the page was right-side-up or upside-down. In short, I was completely unqualified to work with the Hebrew alphabet.

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make a font new fonts

Since before agricultural civilization, humans have used plants for their special properties – to nourish and heal, to harm and to poison. The earliest written compilations of plants can be traced back to the second millennium BC, with early traditions in Egypt, Mesopotamia, China and India. In Greco-Roman antiquity, the Athenian, Theophrastus (c. 371 – c. 287 BC), a contemporary of Aristotle and Plato, is often considered the father of botany; his Historia Plantarum (‘Enquiry into Plants’) proving influential right through to the Italian Renaissance. Books dedicated to describing herbs and plants and their properties and uses are known as herbals. Such books proved popular with doctors and apothecaries throughout the entire Middle Ages.

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Incunabula typographic firsts

I started the Endangered Alphabets Project in 2010 when I discovered that about a third of the world’s 120-plus writing systems may become extinct within the next one or two generations.

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alphabet