I was excited when Taschen announced the first volume of Type: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles, described as “This exuberant selection of typographic fonts and styles traces the modern evolution of the printed letter” ^*. Such language, including the title, is disingenuous, because this book is not a history. Type does contain a short essay by coauthor/coeditor Cees W. de Jong about type history, but it is poorly written and riddled with inaccuracies. Similarly bad are the captions that introduce each specimen. Many are obvious or inane statements such as “It was an honor to have one’s name set on such a lovely publication.” (p. 88), “This printer from Amsterdam evidently had a lot of customers in the countryside.” (p. 100) and “Back in time! Two lines, two different typefaces in a fantasy world.” (p. 243). Overall the writing feels like a draft rushed to press; it should have been fact checked and edited by a historian.

If Type is not a history, then what is it? Type is a photographic odyssey through type specimens collected by the late Jan Tholenaar, a Dutch bibliophile who adored ornamental metal type. This volume, the first of two, covers the period 1628 – 1900. About two-thirds of the content is from the nineteenth century, with a heavy focus on the artistic printing movement. Most of the pages shown are cherry-picked for their ornamental letters and borders. For example, the photos of the very rare 1794 Fry and Steele specimen focus not on Isaac Moore’s classic interpretation Baskerville’s types, but on the fleurons.

You will not find many important text faces of 1600 – 1900 in Type. Baskerville’s work does not appear, Bodoni is only seen in Greek, and the didones shown are knockoffs. The walbaum, scotch, and scotch modern genres are ignored. As one might expect from a collection of metal specimens, wood type does not appear. Unadorned sans types appear when they are on a specimen page with ornamented types, but no effort is made to showcase them. While ornamental designs are certainly worth exploring, they are hardly the only type of the period. I know from firsthand experience that some of these specimens include a far wider variety of type then what is seen in this so-called history.

As a companion to Type, 1,000 images of type specimens can be downloaded for unrestricted use from Taschen.com using a key card. They are of excellent quality and high-resolution versions can exceed 300 DPI at real size. For some specimens the pages found online go beyond the ornamental focus of Type. These images alone are worth many times the cost of the book; if you download two of them you have broken even on the cost of paying a library for a high-quality book scan.

As an object, Type is a winner. There is only one bad reproduction in the book and every other image looks great. Luscious paper lends gravitas to even the most ridiculous artistic printing specimens. Layouts are thoughtful, considerate of content, and never become monotonous. Now and then a specimen is stripped down to just the letters and printed in gold, a treatment type does not get often enough. If the typesetters had used f ligatures this design would be exquisite.

That a respected publisher would represent a niche collection as a survey of typographic history is disturbing. Future editions should be titled Ornamental Type: Specimens in the Collection of Jan Tholenaar, Volume 1. It needs to be proofread and edited by an expert. That said, I do not know of a better tour of ornamented type specimens, and I doubt there will be one. If you like ornament, buy Type, but let those responsible know that they owe history better.

Notes:
* Type: A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles
Written and edited by Cees W. de Jong, Alston W. Purvis, and Jan Tholenaar
Published by Taschen, ISBN 978-3836511018
Design: Sense/Net, Andy Disl & Birgit Eichwede.
Amazon link.

James Puckett left a career in IT to study at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC, where he graduated with honors. While at the Corcoran he developed a passion for typography that resulted in a thesis on versatility in type design. The interest in type design sparked by his thesis led James to pursue commercial type design after graduation. James now resides in Manhattan where he designs type for release through his foundry, Dunwich Type Founders.

More book reviews on ILT.

Type: A Visual History of Typefaces & Graphic Styles

Welcome to a slightly later than usual week in type. Lots happening in the world of web fonts — links to the best content below. There’s also free stuff, so don’t click away.

I’m thrilled by the launch of a new type foundry, Mota Italic. Congratulations to Rob and Co.

As others have noted, the shopping cart is particularly novel and intuitive. Be sure to check out Vesper, their present flagship typeface; it’s bursting with lots of OpenType features, including numerous smart contextual alternates.

This article’s header is set in Vesper Pro Italic & Heavy Italic.

Inspiration

This wonderful invitation for Ale Paul’s TDC talk on November 3:

Nancy Harris Rouemy from the NYT Sunday Magazine designed it with ten (yes ten!) of Ale’s fonts. I wonder who can name them all.

Love this series of photos from Lajos Major:

A web site from Ascender Corp., dedicated to the Frederic & Bertha Goudy:

New Fonts: A Graphic Designer’s Perspective is a wonderful piece on the H&FJ blog. I’ve always loved their specimens (both on- and off-line). A must-must read:

It’s no secret that Trajan is the movie typeface. If you don’t believe me, then take a look at this Flickr pool:

Some fine alternatives to Trajan over at FontShop. — via @zeldman

Which leads nicely on to this great piece over at the FontFeed, about the making of the Typophile Film Festival 5 Opening Titles:

I’m sure you all know Nicholas-Felton. Now he has most of his portfolio on Cargo. Nice:

I think I’m going to be buying a copy of alphabeasties and other Amazing Types (I’m sure I’ll have children one day — when they come genetically engineered not to cause trouble and puke over one’s clothes):

You can read more about it at the brilliant Grain Edit. — via Christian Schwartz.

iA (Information Architects, Inc.) has posted a great piece about their pitch for the redesign of the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger. They’ve even posted the entire proposal online — a 95MB PDF:

I like their choice of Frutiger Next & Frutiger Serif (Meridien), and the idea of highlighting key words in blue to facilitate scanning. Be sure to follow iA on twitter.

Video

Typembrya by Oded Ezer from www.odedezer.com on Vimeo.

LAIKA, the dynamic typeface:

And a little more info about the project at Laika.ch.

I like this video promotion for Neuforma:

We’ve had Helvetica the documentary; now:

No comment. And, if that’s not enough Comic Sans for one day, here’s an entire book set in Comic Sans. Someone had to do it.

Be sure to check out Jos Buivenga’s Wild Type Gear:

New faces

At last, a sans-serif companion to Mrs Eaves. Meet Mr Eaves Sans:

And if that’s not enough, there’s Mr Eaves Modern. Thank you Zuzana Licko.

A redesign and update of Linotype Really. Meet Really No. 2:

This is fun. A slabby Western by the name of Cowboyslang, from Hype for Type:

Featured face

First up is the lovely Starling from Font Bureau:

An interesting back story to this typeface. You can read more about it over at FontShop (scroll almost to the bottom of the page).

The wonderful Aunt Mildred:

Specimen from FontShop’s Flickr stream.

Web fonts news

Lots to report. In addition to growing support for the new Web Open Font Format (WOFF) specification, there’s this wonderfully exciting taste of what the future holds, and how browsers will one day begin to take full advantage of OpenType features: read After Firefox 3.6 – new font control features for designers and be sure to watch the video.

WOFF sample page — you will need the latest development version of FireFox to actually see the fonts at work (or wait until FF 3.6). Let’s hope the other browser vendors get behind it, and start implementing support for WOFF.
Boing Boing Redesign Uncovers Web Font Ignorance

Where to get Web fonts

Better Postscript CFF font rendering with DirectWrite.

Typotheque has now released its Web fonts. Comes with a 30-day free evaluation, so why not give it a go:

I used it while they were testing the service, and It’s pretty easy to set up.

If you’re wondering how it all works, then watch the video:

They also have a comprehensive FAQ.

From Typotheque to Typekit — nice use of David Březina’s Skolar. Site designed by Jason Santa Maria for Liz Danzico:

Type links

An interview with Rob Leuschke
Ellen Lupton on 90s typography
Web typography techniques
Designing a font to preserve a vanishing language:

League of Type voting
The awful new Hilton logo
Covering the Good Books
Matthew Carter and Hamilton Wayzgoose
I have seen the shadow of the moon
Serene Infoboards
The Art Institute of Chicago — Pentagram
NBC Sued in Font-Related Flare-Up — via

Need a new wallet? Look no further than:

via @danoliver

Events

Type as Object — Oct 20 through Nov 20:

Typo Zürich
Typographic Exploration in Hangul
Adopt a Bodoni

On a lighter note

Think you can tell Helvetica & Arial apart? If you read my Helvetica versus Arial from the archives, you’ll be well-prepared for Ironic Sans’ Arial-Helvetica quiz:

via @typophile

And the winners are…

Congratulations to Dan Reynolds for winning gold in the Designpreis Deutschland for Malabar (his third award for this typeface):

And another three cheers for David Březina for winning first place at the Gransham International Type Design Competition for Skolar Pro (Cyrillic):

Available for purchase later this year from Type Together.

Free stuff

Seb Lester has kindly agreed to give away one of his wonderful prints. The winner gets to choose from Tits Arse or Hellfire.

To be in with a chance to win one of these great prints, simply be following @seblester and me, and tweet about this post. Be sure to add the hashtag #ilovetypography, then I can find you and enter you into the draw. I will announce the winner early next week.

And finally

If you haven’t already RSS-subscribed, then you can do so with a mere click of your mouse. Would be nice to see ILT squeeze past the 50,000 mark. Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed this week’s the week in type. Have a productive and happy week.

Sex, lies, & type

Let’s face it, most of the general public does not really understand typography. So when I first tell people that I attended something called ‘Type Camp’ this summer, I tend to garner a lot of puzzled looks. But, smiling bemusedly, the typographic outsider with whom I am conversing, is likely to then ask a question not so far off from my own the first time I heard about Type Camp: what, exactly, do you do there?

Well, explore typography, of course.

I signed up for Type Camp not quite knowing what to expect, but I knew one thing for certain: that the past two years at my in-house design job had burned my creativity to a crisp. There are many things I love about my work, but I was beginning to feel like I had settled into a rut. So when I found a link to the Type Camp website, my heart jumped. Started in 2007 by teacher and typographer Dr. Shelley Gruendler, Type Camp professed to be a living-learning creative retreat for designers and typophiles — a seemingly perfect way to escape my creative slump. It sounded absolutely glorious to travel to an island off the coast of Vancouver, BC to study typography with four inspiring teachers and a group of like-minded designers. I couldn’t wait.

And rightfully so. From the moment I stepped off the ferry onto Galiano Island, I felt as if I’d entered an impossibly magical creative dreamland. The chance to study typography with Shelley, Stephen Coles, Tiffany Wardle (aka Typegirl), and Marian Bantjes, seemed like a dream enough. But add that to a lovely landscape filled with fresh-scented pine, luscious blackberry bushes, and pristine sea air, and I was convinced that things couldn’t get much better.

And so, the adventure began. Any fears that I wasn’t typographically savvy enough to be a Type Camper were quickly wiped away with anticipation, curiosity and excitement as we piled into a mini yellow school bus and headed towards our home for the week. At the end of a very green, tree-lined, dirt road lay our forest retreat house on the water’s edge.  Abundant vines grew around the wooden porch, the kitchen overlooked the sea, and the billowing curtains lining my bedroom windows all made me feel as if I was living in my own personal Taj Mahal. This in contrast to dry, dirty Los Angeles instantly lifted my spirits. Half in disbelief, I realized that this environment — perfectly conducive to creativity — was where we would spend the entire week learning about type. Forget stuffy office cubicles and ridiculously tight deadlines, this was my chance to step away from reality and focus on my own work.

Our days at Type Camp were structured on themes, the first being perception. Looking closer, slowing down, turning it upside down — each lesson was a reminder that details matter. Unplugging the computer enabled me to plug into lost creative energy. Not to mention that the satisfyingly crinkly sound of tracing paper did something special to bring me back to simpler childhood days. Group critiques of our sketches provided a platform for dialogue and discussion, something that is so often absent from my daily routine in the office. Talking about why each hand-drawn exploration was or was not successful helped to focus my attention on the idiosyncrasies of each form. Such intense dissection of individual letterforms established a basis from which to recognize when and why one type style might be selected over another. This detailed analysis — the theme of day two — continued throughout the week in various conversations and exercises. We spent time looking at piles of newspapers and magazines from all over the world. We examined various examples of display type, body text, and line length and talked about how they were all used together to create strong or sometimes weak layouts. We thought about audience and cultural context. The analysis of typographic decisions in design became even more focused as we discussed how font selection boils down to three main categories of consideration: style, function, and size of family. While there is no exact magical formula for selecting a typeface, there are many variables to consider — the historical and cultural feeling it invokes, the font styling, and the language support, among other things.

If perception lead us to analysis, then analysis brought us to the theme of exploration. Typographic artist Marian Bantjes encouraged us to look for visual patterns within words and to think about letterforms graphically. By playing with the potential of nesting letters, looking at vertical and horizontal contrasts as well as upper and lowercase, we began to think about how individual letters themselves can make abstract shapes or form relationships. And it was from here that we began to experiment with the linocut printing process. As a group, we played with colors and patterns, collaborating to make take-home reminders of our time together.

Sadly Type Camp seemed to end too soon. I look at all the prints and sketches now, clumsily stuck to my office wall back home, and think about the creative rejuvenation from my time there. A framed poster — to which each fellow camper contributed a lino-printed mark — stands out among a handful of my own inked drawings of glyphs. It is this piece that reminds me most of the power and energy of our collective imagination. Sometimes, only by entirely stepping out of our familiar environment, are we able to truly reinvigorate creativity. Every so often we need to be reminded of the obvious, that which can become lost in the midst of our daily routine.

Type Camp gave me the chance to luxuriate in creativity and education, to reassess my professional and creative life goals, and to redefine my personal design process. It was a starting point for a new direction. Not nearly long enough to provide all of life’s answers, my precious time there gave me a new set of tools from which to draw upon. Perhaps one of the most important things I came to understand at Type Camp is that there is still a whole lot more out there to learn, and this is just the beginning.

Jessica R. Yurasek is a Creative Strategist and Visual Communications Designer. By day, she works at an in-house graphic design studio and by night she attends graduate classes working towards a Master’s in Communication Management and Brand Strategy at the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication. Find her on Twitter.

Type Camp

I’m struggling to keep up with all that’s new in type. Exciting times. Lots of great new releases, and some very novel and creative uses of type and lettering. Let’s jump straight in.

I am tempted to try something like this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Futura vs Verdana IKEA Smackdown:

Click here to view the embedded video.

From RocketBoom. Via @DesignObserver.

Something a little more serious: a short profile of the wonderful Gerard Unger, the designer of one of my all-time favourites, Swift:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And talking of Swift, Linotype has just released an updated version. Originally designed by Gerard Unger in 1985, in the mid-90s he redrew all the fonts with PostScript outlines. Swift Neue LT Pro (or Neue Swift), its latest incarnation boasts an expanded character set, and OpenType features. Long overdue for such a great face:

And from Dutch type to Dutch ads of the 40s & 50s, in this great little Flick set from Henk van het Nederend:

Another great Flickr set — Typographics from Trip Print Press.

This Blue Flickr set, doesn’t comprise type-related imagery only; however, there are some great ones in there, including this sign:

And this one from eyetwist’s signs+type set:

Like that 5.

Last week, I mentioned the release of Ale Paul’s latest script, Semilla. He’s teamed up with French photographer Stéphane Giber to bring us some wonderful specimens:

You can see the specimens on Behance, buy Semilla from Veer, and see more of Stéphane’s work on Flickr. — via @typegirl

Fell in love with this the moment I set eyes on it. The work of Matheus Barbosa:

Love these new business cards for Jos Buivenga’s exljbris foundry. Great idea, beautifully done:

Inspiration

The work of Jeffrey Osborne:

Lettrage by Marin Van Uhm. Seventeen geometric shapes used to construct an alphabet:

Via texturism.

Carolyn Sewell’s Pedestrian ‘Typography’ Flickr collection. No typography in there, but some lovely lettering:

Lovely cover for Illusive — Contemporary Illustration Part 3, from Gestalten:

This brought to mind the Guardian newspaper’s 1977 April Fool’s about San Serriffe. This is the work of the Verona-based Happy Centro design studio:

Via Jacob Heftmann.

I wouldn’t mind a few copies of TYP (not to be confused with the Czech title TYPO):

Anyone have a Flickr set of TYP spreads? I bet David Březina has a stack of them. — via @mmcgovern.

A fun Flash experiment from The Man in Blue. Bokeh Type:

Thanks to @haraya.

Can’t believe I haven’t featured Jonathan Barnbrook’s blog here before. Let’s fix that:

And here’s the latest from Jonathan’s Virus foundry, Hopeless Diamond:

Which leads us on to a raft of other new releases:

New type

This stunning ornament typeface from Jonathan Perez. Meet Cadence:

You really must see the Cadence PDF specimen.

From DS Type, Finura:

Kris Sowersby is an exceptional type designer, so I’m very pleased to get a sneak peak at his upcoming sans, Karbon:

The above scaled-down image doesn’t do it justice, so please visit Kris’ foundry site KLIM for a better view.
There’s also Karbon Slab Stencil, commissioned for Winegrowers of Ara via Parallax Design; though I’m no fan of stencil types.

Quatro available in Ultra Black and Ultra Black Italic. Like the italic k:

Interestingly, yet another to be spaced with Igino Marini’s iKern service.

Almost missed Alright Sans which was released in August. Drawn by Jackson Cavanaugh:

If you’re looking for a movie partner, a pal to watch a DVD with, then I suggest you do so with anyone but Mark Simonson. And if you do, then disable the pause button on your remote. Read The FontFeed’s post, Mark Simonson’s Changeling Stars In Star Trek to discover why.

A free Restraint letterpress print for one person who can name the character Mark replaces in my dreadful PhotoShop rehash, plus the name of the typeface used in the caption “Boldly Going”. Don’t write your answers in the comments; instead tweet & append your answers as hashtags; e.g. #Stanley_Morrison #Proxima_Nova. I’ll choose a winner tomorrow.

New books

From Hyphen Press, Modern typography in Britain: graphic design, politics, and society (Typography papers 8):

From the Dept of Typography at Uni of Reading.

Type links

Creative Characters — an interview with Jos Buivenga
10 ‘letterpress’ type tutorials — 6 Revisions
A magazine called Elephant
Type Design Competition — Modern Cyrillic 2009
Free copy Letterform with October issue of Grafik:

A great piece on the German MyFonts blog about the making of Tim Ahrens’ Facit:

Surprised not to see more of Facit; it’s a pretty special sans. Google translate will give you the gist.

Ah! Chocolate & type:

I actually remember this chocolate — at that price.

Be sure to read CR Blog’s piece by Gavin Lucas, on Maker Difference: pop-up letterpress studio:

Two new type- and lettering-related sites. First, Friends of Type from Aaron Carambula & co.:

Second, Type Goodness. Great little site; just a pity there are so many ad’s plastered everywhere:

And a nicely redesigned TypoJungle:

The beautiful Daily Drop Daily from lettering artist, illustrator, and creator of Buttermilk, Jessica Hische:

Via @shiflett.

Events

The Night of the Italians — Thursday, October 15, 2009.

What a line-up! On the panel: Louise Fili, Francesco Cavalli, Massimo Vignelli, & Matteo Bologna.

Free type

From the Open-Source foundry, The League of Moveable Type League Gothic:

I’ll conclude with my WLT pick of the week. A still life photo from Trevor Dixon:

Thanks for reading, and enjoy what’s left of your weekend.

Header type: P22 Allyson Pro.

Karbon type

Let’s begin with something tougher than steel from H&FJ. Meet the just-released Tungsten. [insert superlatives here]

Would be great to see a few more weights added. She’s condensed without feeling cramped, and described by its makers as a

compact and sporty sans serif that’s disarming instead of pushy — not just loud, but persuasive.

Erik Spiekermann remarked on twitter, finally an answer to Compacta! Much needed. Absolutely! In my own work, I can see Tungsten singing alongside something like Logo Jnr Black. If only Tungsten had been drawn before the release of Kill Bill. I haven’t spent long with Tungsten, but I’m fast developing a crush. Buy it, use it, love it.

This wonderful video from Brent Barson for Typophile Film Fest 5:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Type attire

Veer is giving away a zip-up iconic Kern top (worth £69) until the end of October (offer not valid in the US), when you buy any image or typeface at veer.com.

I bought one of these from Ugmonk:

Great project from Autobahn for the Leidsche Rijn festival. I think I’m going to be shopping for huge slabs of polystyrene.

The making of a type sample:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Audible type

Make yourself a fresh coffee, put your feet up, then click play. Jonathan Hoefler and Steven Heller on The Leonard Lopate Show:

Type links

Ikea Verdanarama
Dmig2 published
CSS text-area
VFB-QuickLook Plugin
Rendering Fonts in Today’s Browsers
Inset type in PhotoShop
Fun With Vintage 70s and 80s Porn Logos
Mixing type
An interview with Jason Santa Maria (Typedia)
10 Common Typography Mistakes
Continuing Studies in Typography
Bulletproof @font-face implementation
Video & audio from the the 2007 ATypI conference in Brighton

Some nice letter- & type-rich letterpress posters from Cloudy Collection — featuring designs by the likes of Marian Bantjes and Nate Williams:

An interesting project from Isaac Weeber. The Depth of Typography:

Events

September 29 Live Designcast: Fonts That Click: The Present and Future of Using Type on the Web, with Christian Schwartz.

The next Go Font Ur Self begins in October. See the site for specific dates and venues (Australia).

A pretty impressive sub-pixel typeface:

If you’re wondering how a font could possibly be sub-pixel, then just remember that each screen pixel comprises three subpixels (most often RGB).

What a team: Martin Majoor (FF Scala, FF Scala Sans, et al.) & Jos Buivenga (Museo and Calluna), working together on Questa, a ‘ballsy’ Didone:

New typefaces

Fertigo Pro Script from Jos Buivenga:

Vekta from Neil Summerour of TypeTrust. Three familes under one roof:

Climbing up MyFonts’ list of Hot New Fonts is Sascha Timplan’s St Atmos:

Semilla from Ale Paul of Sudtipos:

Cordial Bloom and its layers of OpenType goodness:

Be sure to watch the slideshow.

New from Fountain Type, drawn by Göran Söderström, is Heroine Pro.
Here’s the trailer (trailers for font releases — I like that):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Lovely, isn’t she:

Bonesana from the publisher Gestalten:

There’s also a very nice interview with Bonesana’s designer, Matthieu Cortat.

Web typography

Typekit + Outras Fontes. Lovely:

The Fonts Web Trend Map. Find out who’s talking about type:

Ascender Corporation announces that Georgia & Verdana are to be extended. Note the Georgia small caps (about time too):

We love typography

Interesting to read Ellen Lupton’s Type Hunger piece for Print magazine, and thrilled to see she’s a WLT visitor. However, I’m a little surprised by her criticism that we (WLT contributors) are confusing lettering and type.

It’s just about impossible to pick a single image from even the most recent WLT posts; but I’m going for this little gem from @stewf. What a fantastic logotype:

Be sure to check out the the Chromeography Flickr pool.

Ok, I can’t resist. Here’s one more, found by Paul Hunt, designed by Martin Plonka:

A few words on grids

My radar is picking up an increase in grid-based design chatter. The recent release of Stéphane Curzi’s Baseline CSS framework is part of that chatter. There’s nothing wrong with grids (on-screen or on-paper); in fact they are the invisible skeletons to which most good designs cling. However, it’s all to easy to take the grid is god route, sometimes forcing elements to stick to the grid when they’re not happy doing so. I have no intention of turning these thoughts into an essay; it’s just that the eye, not the pixel needs to be the final arbiter of what’s right. A classic example (there are many) where the grid (in this instance the baseline grid) fails us, is in a line of text with an unusually high proportion of letterforms with descenders (or ascenders); with all that extra ink below the baseline (or x-height), the interlinear spacing will appear shorter. In this instance it’s prudent to add a little more interlinear spacing (or leading) to compensate. Grids are guides, not ‘dictators’. Just a thought.

And on a lighter note, a variation on a Müller-Brockmann theme. (That will give Antonio, over at AisleOne, nightmares). And if that doesn’t tickle your fancy, then Cheese or Font? might do it.

Type education

I’m trying to set aside a little time each week to contribute to Typedia. Why not do the same. Even if it’s just 5 minutes — a Typedia Thursday (or Tuesday [though the day needn’t be dictated by alliteration]). Just browse through the Good Deeds, and select one.

You don’t have to be an expert to contribute; but if you do contribute frequently, you’re sure, not only to educate others, but to educate yourself. You can follow the hashtag #good_deed_of_the_day via Twitter.

Work with Kari & Justin on the upcoming iPhone & iPod Touch FontGame is going really well (though it’s much more work than I’d anticipated). More news on that soon. In the meantime, here’s a little sneak peek:

There are still some of the Typographic Restraint letterpress prints available. Hurry while stocks last; it’s a signed & numbered, limited edition of 99. I’m also working with Stefan Hattenbach on an upcoming screen-print. You’re going to love it. Anyone recommend an exceptional screen-printer in Japan?

Thanks for reading, and thanks for all your comments and emails. Apologies that I can’t respond to them all. Have a great, great weekend.

Tungsten type

“The truth of the terse but expressive ‘dead and forgotten’, comes home with peculiar force to the searcher after information about the individuals who have developed the art and craft of typefounding.”
– William E. Loy

The Industrial Revolution is often seen as a black hole in the history of typography. In that era the role of the punchcutter changed to that of a largely uncredited factory worker. Records of who worked on individual typefaces are sparse. Today it can seem as if there is practically no information left about the designers of the nineteenth century.

William E. Loy was a type vendor, printer, and writer. Loy was unhappy to see so little credit given to the designers of the types that he had spent decades using and selling. In 1896 he began work on a series of articles profiling type designers that appeared in The Inland Printer, the leading journal of the trade. Drawing on a lifetime of connections he obtained biographical information, photographs, and lists of designs to use in what he termed “sketches” about twenty-seven type designers. It was also his wish to include images of their work, but he was unable to do so for technical reasons.

Years in the business and use of firsthand sources make Loy a very credible source about the period, which spans the heyday of wood type and artistic printing. This credibility is so important because his articles identify the origins of important electrographic and pantographic techniques as well as the artistic printing movement (credited to use of John M. Wehrle’s Ornamented No. 1552, A.K.A. Ray Shaded). Loy’s biographies are brief but enlightening, examining the origins of nineteenth century American designers in England, Scotland and Germany and their subsequent immigration to the United States. The writing avoids speculation in favor of fact glazed with praise for the quality and importance of the type. Each sketch is brief, but packs a good deal of information by not dwelling on trivia.

Nineteenth Century Designers and Engravers of Type republishes Loy’s entire series of articles about America’s type designers. Editors Alastair M. Johnston and Stephen O. Saxe have furthered Loy’s work by using patent records to track down more typefaces not in Loy’s lists. Paired with the articles are images of over 800 typefaces by the designers reproduced from period specimen books. Annotations provide additional information and note typefaces not originally attributed by Loy.

In addition to Loy’s articles the introduction provides a biography of Loy and some of the letters he sent out to launch the project. Loy’s letters can be enjoyable reading, particularly when they turn to gossip about piracy by the Barnhart Bros. & Spindler foundry.  An appendix guides researchers in the process of finding type patents and lists the patents and specimens that contributed to this book.

The importance of this book cannot be overestated. Nineteenth century typeface designers have too often been written off as hacks chasing novelty. Loy’s articles, published alongside specimens of the design, allow us to examine the quality and innovativeness of the type these men designed as well as how they appropriated and advanced each other’s ideas. Nineteenth Century American Designers and Engravers of Type belongs in every type aficionado’s library.

“Readers of The Inland Printer have undoubtedly felt under obligations to Mr. Loy for placing on the record the history of these men, and will appreciate the help he has been to the craft in searching out this information and presenting it to them in such a readable and careful manner.”
— Attributed to the Editor of The Inland Printer

Nineteenth Century Designers and Engravers of Type
By William E. Loy
Edited by Alastair M. Johnston and Stephen O. Saxe
$59.99 Published by Oak Knoll, ISBN 978-1-58456-261-0

Typeface designers covered in Nineteenth Century American Designers and Engravers of Type are: Charles H. Beeler, Jr., Henry Brehmer, David Bruce, George Bruce, William F. Capitain, John F. Cumming, Andrew Gilbert, John Graham, John E. Hanrahan, Julius Herriet, Julius Herriet, Jr., Charles E. Heyer, Herman Ihlenburg, William W. Jackson, Alexander Kay, Samuel S. Kilburn, George B. Lothian*, H.T. Lounsbury, Berne Nadall, William H. Page, Alexander Phemister, Edward C. Ruthven, Gustave F. Schroeder, Henry Schuenemann, Henry Starr*, Edwin Starr*, John M. Wehrle, James West, Nicholas J. Werner, Elihu White*, August Woerner
*Indicates a designer who receives only brief coverage in an article on early punchcutters.

James Puckett left a career in IT to study at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington, DC, where he graduated with honors. While at the Corcoran he developed a passion for typography that resulted in a thesis on versatility in type design. The interest in type design sparked by his thesis led James to pursue commercial type design after graduation. James now resides in Manhattan where he designs type for release through his foundry, Dunwich Type Founders.

Nineteenth Century Designers & Engravers of Type

It’s been a little while since the last week in type. I have so many links, so many new releases, so much news to share, I wonder where I should begin. I know, let’s start with a great site based on a very simple idea — Typedia is an encyclopedia of fonts, or in the words of its creator, a mix between IMDb and Wikipedia, but just for type. It’s not that the information is not out there; it is, but where this site, the brainchild of Jason Santa Maria and co., succeeds is in putting that information all under one roof, so to speak. My favourite feature is the Good Deeds page, which makes it really easy to contribute.

Type Daily is a new site from ILT. It’s simply a aggregation of type-related content on the Web:

I will be organising the feeds a little, and adding a number of personalisation features in due course.

New fonts

There have been so many releases since my last week in type, so here a just a few to whet your appetite. A sans to begin with:

Organic from Neil Summerour. I think this is one of my favourites to come from Neil’s hand:

There’s also a brief write-up about Organic on the MyFonts blog.

Always excited to see a new release from Mark Simonson. Here’s something inspired by Italian Art Deco posters of the 30s. Meet the wonderful Mostra Nuova:

Joining FF Unit and FF Unit Rounded is the new FF Unit Slab:

There’s a great article on The Making of FF Unit Slab, on the FontFeed. Well worth reading. There’s also an exceptionally creative digital specimen on Issu. The PDF version is here.

Inspiration

Absolutely love this piece by Joseph Newton of Veer. The type is P22 Kilkenny by Paul D Hunt. Two great talents, and a wondrous result:

Not a fan of the blurb — Merging the concept of typographic narrative with the dimensionality of paper,… — but like the concept, and love this piece from Ryan Riegner:

Via @elliotjaystocks

Some good work from JHQ. Like this ad they did for Veer:

Name the typeface!

I love to ‘paint’, so this scene is heaven, but wish I could produce something like this:

More here.

Came across the work of Tania Alvarez, via Ministry of Type. Fabric Type:

Like the Letter Playground from Nate Williams:

Nate has plans to open the site up for submissions.

I have a hard time keeping up with the posts on we love typography. Here’s just one of my recent favourites: Suitcase’s Tabac carved in stone:

Video

Fans of Helvetica, reach for the Kleenex, and watch Helvetica Destroyed:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And in honour of the brilliant Ed Rondthaler, who died last week at the age of 104. Here he is poking fun at English spelling:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Type links

Type Online — Ministry of Type
Jan Tschichold — Master Typographer (book review)
A lost Caslon type: Long Primer No 1
The different faces of type
What is Typekit? — Typophile
Collection of apothecary inspiration
Jack Pierson — neon signs
The making of Phaeton
CSS text rotation
Beautiful fonts with @font-face
Granshan 09 Type Design Competition
‘Punctuation hero’ branded a vandal
Blanka: Müller-Brockmann
Focus on FontStructors – Paul D. Hunt
More reasons to get excited about Typekit
Automatic page numbering
Typekit pricing
T Magazine
Typemytype.com font creation tools — via
IKEA opts for Verdana
New fonts & typographic features in Snow Leopard

Study terms and type anatomy while drinking your coffee from this Font me typography mug:

New foundries

Typejockeys, a new foundry from Austria. Setup by Anna Fahrmaier, Thomas Gabriel, and Michael Hochleitner. Beautiful looking Web site, and some lovely types too:

Be sure to read the article about them on TypeOff.

The second is BAT, a new French foundry set to launch very soon. BAT (The Bureau des Affaires Typographiques) is Jean-Baptiste Levee, Bruno Bernard, Patrick Paleta, and Stéphane Buellet. Leave your email and they’ll shout the second they’re open for business. And, of course, they’re on twitter too.

Letterpress

I recently commissioned Paperedtogether to print my ‘business’ cards. Printed on 300gsm Lettra, set in Skolar regular and italic:

And Justin at Typoretum in the UK, has letterpress-printed a limited edition of my Typographic Restraint piece:

I must say that credit should go to the designers of Restraint, namely Ross Mills and Marian Bantjes. I simply set the type. And that’s one of the wonderful things about this typeface — it’s such a joy to set and to play with. It should be in everyone’s type library. It’s available through Tiro Typeworks (brief review of this TDC 2008 winner over at Typographica). The print is now available from the ILT shop. Use the code “twitter” for a 10% discount (available for the first few days). And, if you’re looking for great people to work with on your letterpress projects, then I recommend both Krista of Paperedtogether and Justin of Typoretum — they both have ink in their veins.

Fontgame app

The Fontgame has proven hugely popular, so it’s about time we gave it a complete overhaul and release it as an app for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The app should launch next month. 700 type samples, three levels of difficulty — from somewhat difficult through exceedingly difficult —, plus many other features. And, we’re already thinking of new stuff for version two.

My co-conspirators (the guys who do all the hard work) are Kari (creator of the original fontgame, and co-creator of WLT) and Justin of the iPhone Typography app.

And finally…

The above is just a fraction of the links I collect, so I’m going to try to incorporate a sidenotes feature on the home page. Not sure where it will go; will probably end up redesigning ILT completely. Anyway, thanks for reading and thanks for sending in links. Enjoy type, and enjoy your week.

Encyclopædic type

It’s been quite some time since I mentioned the brilliant Type Radio. It’s a podcast I’ve been listening to for ages, and they now have a huge archive of type-related interviews.

Thanks to Paul Hunt and Mark Simonson, I came across this wonderful little video, that I hope will have you racing over to Type Radio to listen to everything they have.

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can list podcasts by interviewee or even by font. You can also subscribe to Type Radio via iTunes. I’ve downloaded most of the archive to my iPhone, so now I have Type Radio any time, any place, any where.

________________
Related: Read Between the Leading podcast.
Up next: A gargantuan week in type.

Type Radio

Berlin-based Martin Wenzel might be best-known for his TDC-awarded sans serif family FF Profile. He runs his own studio, focusing on type and communication design and teaches type design at the Design Academy Berlin. Martin also runs his own shirt store WordsOnShirts that features some nice hand lettering designs.

Martin has just released a highly typographic handwritten family for professional use: FF Duper. This typeface is a reaction to the projects he concentrated on before: text families, text families, and text families.

The time was ripe for something casual, a typeface with a home-made touch but just as complete and rich in features and character set as everyone would expect from an OpenType font family.

The special extra: All weights contain three versions of each glyph that are used in succession, treating vowels and consonants separately and recognizing even spaces between words for a lively and hand-made appearance of the typed text via an OpenType loop. This makes for individual results each and every time you type. In the end, FF Duper became an extensive type family, that can even be used to set body text. The video below gives not just an impression of how time-consuming type design is, but also demonstrates how a modern OpenType font family is created.

Click here to view the embedded video.

FF Duper consists of Regular, Bold, Regular Italic, and Bold Italic, and supports 40 languages (FF Duper Pro supports 64), has several figure sets and fractions and includes alternative forms for a, g, and y as well as a set of arrows, bullets, and ornaments. A great alternative to…?

The making of FF Duper

When Johno first asked me to write about Typekit, I jumped at the chance. I’d received a beta invite to try out the service about a week before, but deadlines had got in the way of actually getting round to it. Now I had the perfect excuse to have a proper play, create a test site, and immerse myself in the technology that got the web design community frothing at the mouth when it was announced a couple of months ago.

However, as I started to experiment with Typekit, I realised that the really interesting thing isn’t the technology itself: it’s what Typekit — and other services in the same vein — mean for the way we experience type on the web. And I’m not talking about it from a user’s perspective, where they get to see the end results of using a variety of typefaces, but from the web designer’s perspective: the way in which we’re going to be using and paying for fonts.

Let’s get some of the nitty-gritty out of the way first: if you’re unfamiliar with Typekit, there are plenty of blog posts out there that will get you up to speed very quickly. A logical place to start would be the official release announcement on the Typekit blog. Done that? Jolly good. Now you can peruse the various opinion pieces: Andy Clarke offers a very thorough walk-through of the service, and Mike Davidson examines (among other things) the question of Typekit’s compatibility reach. Because of these posts (and others, of course), there seems little point in me repeating the content here. However, it’s worth noting some of the details, because it’s in the details that Typekit differs from the other solutions gradually coming out of the woodwork (more on them in a minute). The biggest detail that detractors seem to be focusing on is that its delivery method relies on Javascript; not for the font display, of course, but for the domain authentication. Naysayers point out, therefore, that no font replacement will happen if Javascript is turned off (although it’s debatable how much of a concern this actually is) and it also means that it takes a while for the correct fonts to appear while the Javascript loads; an effect often seen on sites that use sIFR.

There are more drawbacks, too. While testing the service I found it simple but not necessarily straightforward, and although much of this can be attributed to its beta status, there’s an important point to consider when using Typekit: you’re defining your font stack via its online admin interface — not in your own CSS files. For me, this was the moment I really developed my doubts about the service, since that kind of separation feels very unnatural to me and acts as a major disruption to my workflow. And I won’t even go into some of the specificity issues this can arise, except to say that you should ensure the Javascript links appear after your stylesheet links, lest you want to screw up your font stacks completely.

To jump back to Typekit’s positive features, however, one of the most overlooked features is that it offers a fall-back for Internet Explorer by serving up an .eot file. Why this is important is because it simultaneously solves two major problems: the availability of multiple typefaces and an integrated delivery method that copes with cross-browser (in)compatibility. Briefly put, it means @font-face is more readily available on IE than it has ever been before because we designers no longer need to worry about all of the fiddly workarounds. This is great news for everyone.

But what about the Typekit alternatives? There are some to get very excited about. Take Typotheque’s bespoke solution, for instance. The foundry have released their own alternative to Typekit and Andy Clarke has a thorough write up of that, too. One key difference is that the authentication is done via PHP instead of Javascript, which is sure to appease those who’ve criticised Typekit on that point. But let’s not forget that this is a foundry-specific solution, and I agree with Andy that it’s sure to pave the way for other foundries to do the same; it makes a lot of sense (to them) to create their own delivery solutions and maintain control, but it’s possibly not the best solution for web designers who have to jump between a variety of systems and pricing models. Wouldn’t a standardised system be better? Haven’t the last few years of web design practice taught us that unification far outweighs the benefits of proprietary solutions?

Of course, it takes a while to reach one unified model and firstly there’s the small matter of fighting it out in the web design community’s playground. The most successful model will be the one with the biggest support from the community (and funding), and ideally it’ll be one that supports multiple foundries. So let’s consider Fontdeck: another multi-foundry solution, the development of which the Typekit guys will no doubt be watching with eagle eyes. Little is currently known of this mysterious creature, but the really exciting stuff, in my opinion, is the people behind it. Spearheaded by Jon Tan and Richard Rutter — and behind them the funding and support of Clearleft and OmniTI — it’s hard to imagine how this could go wrong from people who have already done so much for bringing solid typographical learning closer to the web design masses. Unlike Typekit, and similarly to Typotheque’s service, authentication will not be done with Javascript, and the word on the grapevine is that we’ll be able to work with CSS in a way that’s closer to our regular workflow. If this means something like putting a Fontdeck-generated font stack directly into our own stylesheet, then this, for me, will be a very major advantage.

Rumour has it that the Fontdeck team are also considering free support for rare script typefaces, providing a way of getting these lesser-used languages on the web, where currently they are invisible. It’s a noble cause and a great example of why proper typography on the web is more important than just pleasing the tastes of us poncey designers.

With Clearleft handling the UI of Fontdeck, we know it’ll look great and have a strong focus on usability. With OmniTI handling the security, we know it’ll be as tight as a safe. The company’s track-record in online security is flawless, and with reliable sources claiming that Typekit’s security has already been hacked with relative ease, it’s natural that foundries will be more interested in signing up with a provider that can guarantee the safety of their fonts.

And make no mistake: this is what it really comes down to. A very large part of @font-face’s painfully slow adoption has been down to the font foundries and their concerns over font piracy, and rightfully so. Microsoft’s EOT format in its current state is far from ideal, but because of its potential to offer DRM, it’s the format that foundries have been happy to support, albeit half-heartedly. Now, with services like Typekit and Fontdeck, foundries finally have a reason to embrace type on the web: to open their product to a whole new audience without fear of their typefaces being stolen by anyone adept enough to click ‘view source’. Unfortunately, though, the pricing structure of these new services is still a mystery. With Typekit already in public beta, it’s likely that we’ll find out sooner about its price plans than Fontdeck’s, but right now all we can do is speculate. Undoubtedly the various services will price themselves competitively, but there are so many concerns that go way beyond the service itself: ultimately, with large foundries’ support being such a huge factor in the success of any given service, the price has got to be right for the foundries, not just the service providers or consumers.

And it’s not just a case of deciding on a figure, either. The choices of pricing models are potentially endless. Do you charge the user (that is, the web designer) per typeface? Per family? Do you offer a font purchase with an extended license for web use? Do you charge a subscription for a certain amount of service? Do you charge by the quantity of typefaces needed (5 families for $X a month, 10 families for $X a month, etc.)? Do you offer some for free and reserve some weights (or even glyphs, like ligatures) for paid customers? With the amount of questions that need to be answered and the the amount of question-askers who need to be appeased, I wouldn’t wish that kind of decision making upon anyone!

But, whatever the details of the exact services that end up being offered, one thing will be true: unlike ever before, where previously we had only purchased a font as a closed, finite, singular product, we are now entering the age of the font-as-service: where the font becomes synonymous with web hosting, mobile data plans, and movie rentals. No longer fixed, fonts will be borrowed, subscribed to, removed, expanded upon, and provided on-the-fly.

In his comment on Mike Davidson’s post, Jeff Croft raises the important question about the reliability of the service; not from the view of security I mentioned previously, but from the view of scalability:

When Doug Bowman decides to implement Typekit on Twitter, will Typekit go straight to hell, ruining it for the rest of us? Will we start seeing Typekit-powered sites hanging as we wait for the Javascript bits and font files to load?

With font files being delivered by third-party services, it’s a big concern, and another reason I feel reassured that a company like OmniTI will be looking after the infrastructure behind Fontdeck.

I praised Typekit when it was first released, and although we won’t know what the best solution will be for quite some time, I stand by my original message: it deserves praise because it was one of the first solutions to a long-standing problem; it got out there and said, ‘we can do this,’ when most other people were content to sit there and complain about it. But really this isn’t about what Typekit does, what Fontdeck does, what the various bespoke foundry solutions do, and how each of them does it better or worse than the other. Nor is it about the specifics of formats like .ttf, .otf, or the recently-proposed .webfont (which was summarised very neatly in Johno’s recent post). It’s about how service-based models are finally allowing typography to grow up and take its rightful place on the web.

Are we just hacking away to find a solution that satisfies our demands until a workable standard like .webfont or WebOTF is eventually approved and we can all hold hands and sing songs? Probably, yes. But as Mike Davidson said, “the entire world wide web is a hack.”

Elliot Jay Stocks is a designer, illustrator, speaker, & author of Sexy Web Design.
@elliotjaystocks

The Font-as-Service

Calluna started out as a little test I did to see if I could add serifs to Museo, to make a slab serif. Because of its pipe bend serifs I suddenly saw the connection between serif and stem, and some sort of direction.

I’d always wanted to make a serious (book) text typeface, and I thought that the direction idea might be a nice theme to shape it. So I constructed — with the help of components — a number of characters in FontLab to see if I could get this to work. The whole process happened directly on the computer. No analogue sketching involved this time.

During the design process, I frequently flipped the font preview vertically to have a better look at the flow — the one-way direction leading to the upper right corner of each glyph — that I wanted Calluna to have. Where possible, I created or adapted shapes and serifs to fit this flow idea. Of course I didn’t restrict myself 100% to this idea. When things didn’t work in words or sentences I did change them.

For more than 1.5 years I worked on Calluna and reworked each glyph many, many times. The goal was to make a text typeface, but one with enough interesting details that would come into their own when used a little bigger. I had to strike a balance between robustness of function as a text face and refinement, to look good as a display typeface. And that certainly took me some time. For example, I changed the weight of the stems at least three times before I thought they were (really) to my liking. It felt like it had to mature — a bit like wine. Usually I start thinking about the italics at a very early stage, but with Calluna some 6 months must have passed by before I got to them. However, when I began drawing them, they evolved very naturally.

In the end Calluna grew into a family with 8 styles. At first I only planned 6 styles — with the semibold and semibold italic interpolated — but after some testing, the light and black extrapolations looked very good and only required minor corrections. The workflow was a little different than for my previous typeface (Museo Sans); this time I used Prepolator, Superpolator, and the Adobe Font Developer Kit OpenType (AFDKO). It takes a little time to set it all up, but it’s really worth the effort. Especially because I also want to make Calluna Sans and probably also a slab serif (from the sans). Igino Marini did the spacing and kerning of Calluna with his iKern service.

Did you know I like choosing names for my typefaces? It didn’t take me long to come up with Calluna. The street I live on is a one way street called Callunastraat.

Calluna is a very complete typeface with lots of OpenType goodness, and offers broad language support.

Be sure to check the carefully designed PDF specimen and, of course, the free regular weight. You can download Calluna at MyFonts.com.

Related: An interview with Jos

Calluna — a text typeface with flow

With all the talk about web fonts, I think it’s time I tried to outline the present situation. I’ve not attempted to do so before, owing to the complexity of some of the material, and the speed at which things are moving.

Web designers are generally not interested in technical specifications, TrueType Hinting instructions, and extended OpenType permissions tables. They have one pressing question: when can I use font x in my web pages? Today, in Atlanta, Georgia, at TypeCon 2009, the faithful met to talk about Web Font Embedding: The New State of the Debate. At the foot of this article, I’ve included highlights from the twitter feeds of @typographica (Stephen Coles) and @splorp (Grant Hutchinson). Many thanks to them for the great job they did in reporting.

What web designers want

Web designers want more options, they want more fonts. sIFR, Cufón, and numerous other replacement techniques permit web designers to go beyond the so-called web-safe palette of fonts. However, all those techniques are, fundamentally, hacks. Moreover, their practical use is limited to headlines, or short bursts of text.

What type designers & foundries want

Foundries do not want their raw (.ttf and .otf) fonts uploaded to Web sites where they can easily be downloaded (stolen). @font-face permits linking directly to the raw font file. When I say raw, I mean an uncompressed, unprotected font file, just like you’d find in the font folder on your computer. [see also Stephen’s comment below.]

Downloading those font files would be as easy as downloading an image. For obvious reasons, foundries don’t want that. In fact, no-one wants that. Here, the music industry comparison doesn’t work. The type industry is in fact, not an industry; it’s not regulated by any kind of governing body, and the industry comprises thousands of small players — the vast majority of type foundries have a staff of one. Font piracy hurts them.

Solutions

Way back in 1997, Microsoft developed its proprietary EOT (Embedded OpenType Format — basically a compact version of OpenType, that permits sub-setting), that only supported Internet Explorer. Hoping for widespread adoption, Microsoft opened it up for all, and in 2007 submitted their EOT proposal to the W3C (for inclusion in CSS3). Later that year, the proposal was rejected, for, among other reasons, security. In 2008, the proposal was resubmitted:

The Embedded Font Format (EOT) was developed by Microsoft to enable OpenType fonts to be linked to web pages for download to render the web page with the font the author desired. This appendix specifies the format of the .EOT file so that User Agents can download, extract and temporarily install fonts of the .EOT file suffix that are included in the @font-face definition of a CSS style sheet. Example pages can be found at the Microsoft Typography site on Font Embedding for the Web.
Downloaded fonts are only temporarily installed on the user’s machines for use by the particular web page while the page is actively being used.

I once heard EOT described as DRM icing on an OpenType cake. Once EOT was associated with DRM (and whether it’s strictly DRM is debatable), then EOT was doomed. For all the technical features of EOT, see the W3C’s Embedded OpenType (EOT) File Format. So what happened to EOT? To cut a very long and complicated story short: it didn’t gain the necessary support from foundries. [I was wrong; see Richard Fink’s comment, & Thomas Phinney’s comment.] Remember, the W3C is not mandated to push these formats through, to run around drumming up support. The consensus must come from the foundries, and from distributors.

.webfont

Recently, two highly respected type designers, Tal Leming & Erik van Blokland (they are programmers too) proposed an alternative to EOT. It’s not proprietary, and its implementation is relatively uncomplicated. Via twitter, H&FJ described the .webfont proposal as:

Smart, compact, open, elegant, forward-thinking, realistic. — source.

Basically the .webfont font is a compressed file (perhaps .zip), comprising two files (the actual font data, plus info.xml). The embedded permissions or meta data are then read by supporting browsers, that could determine whether the font should be downloaded and displayed.

With such huge support from type foundries and many in the type community (even TypeKit supports it), the dot webfont proposal could well be a winner. So, we’ll all be using .webfont by this time next year, right? No. First, the W3C needs to be convinced that the majority of type vendors support the .webfont format. Then, and only then, will its slow wheels begin to turn. Then the browser vendors need to come aboard the .webfont ship, and build support for this new format into their respective browsers. Though the .webfont format is, in my opinion, the best proposed solution, don’t hold your breath. It will be years before we can start to link to .webfont files in our CSS.

If you’re not already confused, then let me introduce you to David Berlow’s (The Font Bureau) Permissions Table for OpenType proposal. (Technical specification here). Without getting too technical, I think Berlow’s proposal can be summed up thus: embed ‘meta data’ in the OpenType font file. These data will be information about the permissions for which the font is licensed. For example, the permissions table (not separate from the font file, but embedded) would include information about permitted use; e.g. whether it can be used on a web site — previewable for web.

The proposal does not require any change in font format; it only requires that more data (about permissions) be stored in the font file. Some have pointed out that its greatest strength — XML to describe the permissions — is also its greatest weakness. What’s to stop users from opening font files and editing the permissions? Another of its obvious strengths is that it does not require any kind of wrapper, and can be used with @font-face, which will soon be supported by most, if not all browsers.

In the meantime

While we’re waiting on .webfont et al., there’s Typekit, a simple solution that involves web-only font linking licenses. Basically, a font file, or a subset of the font is stored on a third-party server.

You pay a subscription to Typekit to rent (not buy) the font. The rest is simple enough. Include a call to a JavaScript file (that handles delivery of the font, I guess), and simply include your ‘subscription font’ in your fontstack, like:

#introduction .one p {
font-family:"skolar-1","skolar-2","Palatino","Georgia","Times","serif";
}

Great to see David Březina’s Skolar on screen. Go to for a beautiful web to see Typekit in action. Typekit is still in beta, but it looks very promising.

One of the most exciting aspects of the Typekit solution is best described by Thomas Phinney:

…the most interesting thing about Typekit & Kernest is they provide a service, a subscription, a brand new model for font licensing.

Multiple jars of jelly

We need consensus. They only way a consensus can be reached is through compromise. There exists no governing body of type, so there can be no democratic vote. The closest thing we have to consensus is the list of foundries that support the present .webfont proposals.

Despite concerns about the security of the .webfont format, most of the larger and important foundries have come out in favour of the .webfont proposal; and that’s what really matters. See @typegirl’s Most of the important foundries are supporting #webfont list.

If no consensus is reached then .webfont will forever remain a proposal. If there is consensus, then perhaps at the very soonest we’re looking at .webfont in our browsers by 2011-2012 at the earliest. @splorp sums it nicely in <140:

We just need to have one #webfont initiative to start solidifying. That’ll help. Right now, we’re tip-toeing around multiple jars of jelly.

Regardless of which format or proposal actually wins the fight, type designers are going to be very busy indeed. Most fonts are not optimised for on-screen viewing, so, if they are to compete with those that already are (e.g. Verdana), then they have lots of work ahead of them. (Type Designers have the joyous prospect of mastering TrueType hinting instructions).

Final thoughts

In my opinion, EOT is as good as dead. [Cf. Tiffany’s comment below; and Thomas Phinney’s.]

EOT may be dead, but Ascender Corporation is proposing EOT Lite — think of it as a less restrictive implementation of the original EOT. In what way is it less restrictive? Well, the new EOT Lite does away with URL binding (limiting use to a specific domain or URL), and proprietary compression technology (MTX compression) — the two principal objections to the original EOT specification. Ascender hopes to have it up and running within months. [added July 21, 2009].

Will .webfont ever come to our browsers? Who knows. But with the backing of the majority of influential type foundries, it could. In the meantime, TypeKit appears to be a viable, workable solution. And Typekit is now. I know I’ve omitted mention of other proposals like EOT Lite or Kernest from Ascender Corp., etc., but this article is intended as a non-technical, brief [laughs] overview. If you have questions or comments, then please leave them below.

[Update (July 21): fontdeck joins the fray.]

_______________
Highlights from TypeCon 2009’s Web Font Embedding panel discussion, courtsy of @splorp and @typographica

Eleven font nerds and a microphone. @typographica is live tweeting from the huge #webfont panel discussion this morning.
Audience unrest already. Only one web designer on a panel of 11. Via @nicewebtype — @splorp
Using a service like @typekit or @kernest is similar to buying/selling faces through distributors like @myfonts.… except that you’re not renting the typeface via a modified license. It’s not yours to use perpetually. — @splorp
@opentype They don’t want fonts that users currently have to be used as web fonts. Should be a separate license and product. — @typographica
“… the thinness of the wrapper is disturbing …” — John Hudson on the .webfont format. — @splorp
“Any new font format we come up with … takes years to be implemented.” — Bill Davis, Ascender — @splorp
Dewitt: Foundries, if you don’t have a license that addresses the web, do it. Have a position that allows for some of these things. — @typographica
Bill Davis — “I think we’re on the cusp of something happening very quickly here …” That’s because web designers are frustrated. — @splorp
There’s a big ostentatious EOT Lite petition at the door. Presumably placed there by Bill Davis. Waiting to hear his invitation to sign it. — @typographica
John Hudson of Tiro Typeworks is explaining @typesupply’s .webfont format. “… super easy to implement … ” — @splorp
Mason: The W3C doesn’t lead, it follows. It takes steps once groups find consensus. — @typographica
Hudson explains the problem with a new format: IE is slooooow. IE users are slooooow to update. (Could take years for .webfont to be real.) — @typographica
Bill Davis — “I think we’re on the cusp of something happening very quickly here …” That’s because web designers are frustrated. — @typographica
@_Baylink I don’t think that’s the case. The foundries aren’t terrified, they’re cautious. None of these solutions will ‘eliminate’ misuse. — @splorp
Thomas Phinney: URL binding was a non-starter because vendors don’t want to enforce that. Worse, users might be open to DMCA liability. — [see Thomas Phinney’s comment for clarification.]
Basic Q. What happens when any of these schemes don’t work? A. You’ll get the fallback font. Whatever specified in CSS, what you see today. — @typographica
Verdana is still a pretty good typeface. — John Hudson — @splorp
Gabrowitsch (F[ont]F[ont]): We support .webfont and “EOT Lite, Medium, or whatever”. As long as there’s no chance to use existing fonts on the web. — @typographica
Relevant commentary from Tim Brown @nicewebtype: Type sellers, web fonts, and Typekit. link — @typographica
Typekit is willing and excited to incorporate .webfont proposal in their product. — @typographica
Final question from moderator: how urgent is it?
A. Garrick Van Buren (Kernest): We’re 10 years behind.— @typographica
Hudson: You can say yes to .webfont or EOT. It’s not an either or situation. But foundry weight behind one format will influence browsers.
End. Applause. Matthew Carter first to stand. Maybe wants out of here. — @typographica
Looks like everyone is walking out without batting an eye at the giant petition. Not sure the pen has been touched. — @typographica

_______________

Further reading:
@font-face in IE: Making Web Fonts Work
Web fonts now (how we’re doing with that)
Web font licensing: the basic idea
Type sellers, web fonts, and Typekit
List of foundries supporting .webfont
Typophile
@typegirl @splorp @typographica @nicewebtype
@font-face in action
Jeffrey Zeldman Questions The ‘EOT Lite’ Web Font Format
Audio from the Web Fonts Panel at TypeCon2009

Web fonts — where are we?

The week in type is coming very soon. In the meantime, I thought you might enjoy this video from Pierre Smeets and Damien Aresta.

Click here to view the embedded video.

More information about the project on Pierre and Damien’s web site, pleaseletmedesign.com. More images on Flickr. You can download the free iQ font from Toyota.

Great, fun project. If you decide to have a go, then please refrain from type design in built-up areas. Oh, and wear your seatbelt.

iQ font

Let’s jump straight in with some great photos from the Type & Media graduation exhibition. Really impressed, not only by the quality of the types, but by the specimens. Here’s a detail from the graduation poster:

And here are a few of my favourites types (by no means all of them):

Arietta by Abi Huynh:

Preto by Ján Filípek:

Malausséne by Laure Afchain:

Abi, a graduate of the Type and Media Masters program, has kindly agreed to write a piece about the class of 2008-09. What’s more, he’s sending me a couple of the above graduation posters, that I will be giving away here on ILT, via Twitter.

Tokyo based designer Craig Mod sent me a link to this Web page demonstrating the potential of @font-face.

The page also lists numerous @font-face related resources and articles. You’ll need a @font-face friendly browser like the new FireFox 3.5 (Safari and Opera seem to have some problems with @font-face referencing in conjunction with CSS pseudo selectors…). I like that even the Hedera used in the background (top-right) is text. What do you think?

Type news

Small Batch Inc., the company behind TypeKit has secured funding from some pretty big names. Among them: Twitter CEO & co-founder Evan Williams, Flickr founder Caterina Fake, and Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg. It’s good news, but ultimately the success of TypeKit will hinge on its ability to broker deals with the foundries and distributors. Unfortunately I’ve heard nothing about who, if anyone, is on board. One of the problems is that the font industry can hardly be described as such. Perhaps the only way forward is for the larger distributors like MyFonts (Bitstream), FontShop, LinoType, and Veer et al. to broker deals with the people at TypeKit. Then the foundries (there are thousands) who sell their fonts through those distributors have the option to opt-in to the scheme, thus making their fonts available for TypeKit and its implementation of @font-face. But then that still leaves big and important and independent players like H&FJ. Interested to hear what you think.
via typographer.org.

New fonts

Kevin Cornell is one of my favourite illustrators. Insanely talented (& perhaps insane) and very funny to boot, you perhaps know him by his illustrations for A List Apart, or through his Web site Bear Skin Rug. I’m surprised he hasn’t done this before. Anyway, better late than never. He and Randy Jones, designer of Olduvai (see below), have turned some of his lovely Victorian flavoured lettering into a font. Meet Phaeton:

Comes with a pretty extensive character set for this style of font, and numerous ornaments and dingbats, or miniature illustrations. This is going to find its way onto a book cover soon. Stay tuned for more from Cornell and Co.

And here’s Olduvai I mentioned above. Not new, but I like it:

Be sure to take a look at the Olduvai PDF specimen too.

The latest addition to my own font library, Fugu, drawn by Neil Summerour and available though TypeTrust:

And a lovely script with countless intelligent alternates — Liza Pro from Underware:

Whatever you call it — 42-line Bible, B42, Mazarin Bible, Gutenberg Bible — you can now view most of the two volumes online, thanks to the Harry Ransom Center.

The images are from the University of Texas copy that was purchased back in 1978 for a cool $2.4 million.

Great piece over at LetterCult on the making of Mark Simonson’s Kandal.

If you think working with FontLab is a chore, then step away from the computer, and take up your pencil, French curves and tracing paper.

You’ll want this

until you see the price. Via @SuzanneLemon, who wrote, I want it so badly I’m thinking of selling my soul to buy it. Can you buy souls on CraigsList? (Gogol-List, perhaps).

Nice die-cut stationery from Hyperkit:

Via Do it for the fame.

Experimental type design from Friday Fonts:

Via @designworkplan

Events

Seb Lester will be holding an exhibition of new work at the Electrik Sheep gallery in Newcastle (UK) next month. I’ve been lucky enough to have a sneak peek. One of the new pieces is certainly his best piece yet.

If you have a type-related event that you’d like to share, then simply send it to johno@ilovetypography.com, with type event in the subject line.

Letterpress

I’ll let you into a little secret. I have a thing for girls who print. An ink-smeared girl with dungarees— OK, I’d better stop there. Let me introduce you to the ultimate male (or gay girl) type nerd fantasy, Ladies of Letterpress:

There are a number of Ladies who print on Twitter too. Here are several I know of:
dolcepress dingbatpress, kristaprints, and moontreepress.

If you know of more, then leave them in the comments and I’ll add them here later. No stalking, please.

And some work: this simple and lovely card from Dingbat Press:

Discovered WoodTyper while listening to Nick Sherman on the RBtL podcast. A site dedicated to wood type (something Nick knows a thing or two about):

There are business cards, and then there are business cards. Half-inch thick, and made from recycled CDs and water containers:

Be sure to subscribe to FPO — great content.

Love this cover from USSR in Construction, a Soviet propaganda journal:

Via @iamkhayyam

Like this cover and spreads by Stockholm-based Frankenstein:

Ballets Russes The Stockholm Collection, published by Dansmuseet & Langenskiöld.

Font picks

My first typefaces of the week is a sans called… wait for it… Fishmonger. Love the tapered joins in the lowercase:

It’s available in numerous weights and styles (50 fonts!). Among other things, I think it would make a great logotype choice; or used to set an Architectural journal or magazine. [PDF specimen]

From minimalist sans to something strongly calligraphic. Vatican by Alan Meeks:

Type links

An interview with Nick Sherman of MyFonts — RBtL
The art of the carved letter (video) — via
Go Font Urself 2
What was next (audio)
Fixing Futura
Revised Web fonts proposal
New work on fonts at W3C
An interview with Canada Type’s Patrick Griffin
Angles of acuteness
Wedding invites — design sponge
The Questa project
First Saarbrücken Typostammtisch

Gargantuan give-away

I’ve decided to move the give-away to the beginning of next month, because ILT will turn 2 on August 8. So the give-away will celebrate ILT’s second birthday, and is ultimately a way of saying thank you to ILT readers.

I won’t list all the prizes here (there are more than 40). But these should whet your appetite:

$200 font voucher from FontShop, Fonts & merchandise from Veer and House Industries, a limited edition Flames print by Seb Lester, free hosting from Fused Network, plus lots of Field Notes, limited edition screen prints, letterpress stuff, books, CDs, DVDs, and much more. Most of the prizes will be given away via Twitter, with a couple of the larger prizes going to the winner of a competition (yet to be arranged). I will begin the give-away on August 8, and will publish more details then.

But why wait for next month! Today I’d like to give away three letterpress prints by Kevin Cornell, and available exclusively through Coudal:

Just include the hashtag #ilovetypography in a Tweet, and you’re automatically entered into the draw. I’ll pick three winners (one letterpress print per winner), and announce them in 48 hours. I can ship anywhere.

Have a stupendous week.

Who can name the fonts and styles used in the gratis, free, nothing graphic?

Mojo Type

Welcome to another roundup of what’s new in type. If you missed the interview with French type designer Alice Savoie, then be sure to take a look. Alice’s next typeface, Capucine will be released through the Process Type foundry. Follow them on Twitter, and you’ll be informed the moment it’s released.

Not quite sure how I failed to mention this before. Chester Jenkins & Kris Sowersby bring us Galaxie Copernicus:

the seriffed sister of Galaxie Polaris. And speaking of Kris Sowersby, I received this stunning KLIM type foundry specimen in the post. KLIM is Kris’ foundry. The specimen is really a well-designed book. (There should be a photo of it here, but I couldn’t find my camera’s USB cable). There are few foundries that actually produce good printed type specimens. H&FJ is one of the exceptions; Typotheque another. Can you name a few more? There are some. A limited number of Kris’ specimen books will be available on vllg.com.

Right now, Kris is on a speaking tour of Australia. Dates and venues can be found on the AGDA Web site. And here are the tour posters:

Designed by the talented Duncan of The International Office. The poster is set in National (Kris Sowersby) and Exotique (Kris and Christian Schwartz) for House Industries’ photo lettering collection. I’d love to get my hands on these posters.

If you like your type tight, then you might like this t-shirt:

Via @fontbureau.

New fonts

First the eagerly anticipated Anonymous Pro:

I’ve been using Mark Simonson’s Anonymous for coding, for … a long time. The updated Anonymous Pro is a family of four fixed-width fonts. Oh, and did I mention, it’s free! (copyrighted freeware). Be sure to take it for a spin. I think you’ll be impressed.

Discovered this absolute gem of a script from @stwef. Linotype Gneisenauette. Here used in NewWork Magazine:

Fantastic, isn’t it. Available through FontShop.

The Axel family from FontShop AG comprises four fonts, and displays exceptionally well on screen.

The four fonts are just US$19. That’s a limited-time offer, so be quick. Also, see what Dan of TypeOff has to say about Axel. Also featured on the FontFeed.

Typonine Sans from Nikola Djurek:

A double offering from award-winning SuitCase. First up is the slab serif Kulturista:

And Nudista, proffered as an alternative to grotesques like DIN.

Rolet by Simon Page:

Not available as a font file, but available as vectors. There are many more interesting type treatments in Simon’s Typography is everything Flickr set, and on his blog. Via Paul D. Hunt on WLT.

Stefan Hattenbach has completely redesigned his Web site:

I’m still a big fan of Stefan’s Anziano and its lovely set of ornaments:

(The ornaments either side of the RSS feed count are Anziano).

Computer Arts devotes an entire issue to typography:

Be sure to visit Darren Scott’s Typographics blog:

Cyrillic typeface competition

ParaType announces the 2009 International Type Design Competition — Modern Cyrillic.
Open to Cyrillic typeface projects and completed typefaces created and/or
released after January 1, 2006. No other restrictions. No admission fee. Deadline is August 24, 2009.

Typographic sins

Meet — yes, I’m not joking — Helvetica Pointed:

I shall say no more.

Type talk

An interesting discussion on Typophile — initiated by Matt & Aaron of RBtL — on a donation-funded, non-profit, free font foundry.

Web fonts

Since the announcement of TypeKit, the Web has been awash with talk of Web fonts. The following will bring you up to speed:
Typekit blog:

Examining TypeKit
Why TypeKit will change everything
TypeKit — another layer of complexity

My thoughts (briefly):
I’ll be outlining my thoughts about Web fonts in my upcoming (yes, I know it’s been a long time coming) Why type matters article. Right now there really isn’t that much information available. We don’t know how many foundries will be involved, and we have no idea of the pricing structure, so I’m ‘waiting and seeing’. What I am happy about, is that the years of hot air are finally beginning to condense. That someone has the gumption to actually make this happen — that impresses me. Ultimately, if you don’t like the idea of paying for an additional or extended license for Web embedding, then the solution is pretty simple: don’t buy it.

And it looks as though Typekit already has a competitor (though at this stage they are merely competing ideas, rather than competing services). It will be interesting to learn more about Richard Rutter’s solution. In all of the discussions about Web fonts, the only thing that annoys me (and I don’t lose any sleep over it), is that some feel that they somehow have a right to use fonts for Web embedding. I think it’s important to put oneself in the shoes of a type designer who makes his or her living from selling fonts. Type designers should be no more obligated to give away their fonts, than Lexus should be obliged to give away their cars. Anyway, this year could prove to be something of a watershed for type on the Web. All in all, very exciting.

iPhone

After an initial ban by the silly Victorian prudes at Apple, Eucalyptus is now available from the app store. It’s an iPhone e-book reader with access to some 20,000 English-language titles. The text displays beautifully:

At $9.99 it’s not cheap, but I do think it provides the best reading experience for the iPhone. Pocket Picks has a good review. 20% of gross profits from Eucalyptus are paid as a royalty to the non-profit Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.

TypeDrawing is another iPhone app:

Not revolutionary, but for $.99, it’s fun. There’s a Flickr group too.

Type links

Typography’s Role in the Newspaper Recession
Register for TypeCon
Type for the Web — RBtL podcast
Fresh & refreshed — FontShop news
MyFonts — Rising stars
Keith Morris
Royal Mail’s Royal Insignia
Eurostile vs Bank Gothic: This Time It’s Personal

Other news

WLT’s co-creator, Kari is working on a raft of new and brilliant features. Our aim is to get more people involved. But rather than open it up to everyone (which invariably will dilute its strength), we’ll be enabling a secondary kind of contributor account. Stay tuned for more news on that. And while I’m the subject of WLT, here’s my WLT pick of the week:

My first ILT poster should go on sale some time next month. A fairly simple affair. A screen-printed poster, set in Restraint, and printed on A2 black Plike paper. Limited edition of 150. This is not the final design, but it will resemble this:

I’ll also be giving two of them away. My second poster will be of my own lettering. There are still several of Seb Lester’s Mightier posters available from the ILT store. More designs coming soon.

I’ll soon be launching ILT’s gargantuan give-away. 40 wonderful prizes from the likes of Veer, FontShop, and House Industries, plus books, t-shirts, software, posters, and much more besides. 30 of the 40 prizes will be distributed via Twitter, so be sure to follow ILT. You can always unfollow afterwards. I won’t be offended.

Have a great week.

KLIM Type