There have always been ghosts in the machine. Random segments of code, that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols. Unanticipated, these free radicals engender questions of free will, creativity, and even the nature of what we might call the soul. – Quote from I, Robot (2004)

Glitches are described as “sudden, usually temporary malfunctions or irregularities of equipment” and have been embraced and turned into art, both musically and visually, for at least the last two decades or so. What is it that lends such an aesthetically pleasing quality to electronic error? Maybe it’s the notion that computers are meant to run on pure logic, so when they produce something random or unexpected, our inborn curiosity is awoken. Or maybe we momentarily recognise our own flawed human nature, and it freaks us out just a little. Who knows!

Jennifer Daniel, designer for Bloomberg Businessweek recently reported that their Docucolor 240 conked out whist printing proofs for the magazine. The resulting artworks were posted on Flickr. I remember spending hours as a student, trying to emulate this exact look for my projects!

There are currently 12 units listed, and you can even download them all in a single bundle:

• Meet Your Type
• The Typographer’s Glossary
• Erik Spiekermann’s Typo Tips
• Type Anatomy
• The Right Font for the Job
• Figuring It Out
• What Is OpenType?
• Styles, Weights, and Widths
• Helvetica
• Webfonts
• Licensing 101

Go to: FontShop Education.

See more at ednacional.com.

The photos are intriguing enough and certainly provide excellent fodder for reblogging and pinning enthusiasts, but what really makes this project worth a closer look is that each photo can be “flipped over” to inspect the back. What could possibly be of interest on the back of a photo you ask? Well, you would be surprised!

Layer upon layer of stamps, scribbled annotations and clippings offer a haphazard roadmap to the photo’s history. Things to look out for include subject codes, what the photographer was paid, details of when and how many times the photo was published and of course the accompanying captions.

Call me strange, but I find these way more exciting than the photos themselves:

Read more about this project on the NYT Lens blog.

Designer and illustrator Simone Massoni sent me a copy of his latest project – this very cool A-frame 2012 calendar entitled Chicks & Types.

I know, it’s already March, but let’s just say our postal service isn’t exactly renowned for its efficiency… Anyway!

Each month is represented by a well respected typeface, accompanied by a whimsical pin-up girl. This quirky match perfectly captures the dilemma we type-lovers face: how do you choose! They each have their own unique personality and their own sexy curves, it’s easy to end up falling in love with a different one every week… I’m talking about the typefaces of course.

A few of my go-to faces are featured, such as DIN, Avant Garde, Rockwell, Helvetica and Bickham.

See more of this calendar and the rest of Simone’s great work on Behance, as well as on his site SketchThisOut.

The video from Jonah Kessel is dated September 2011, but I only discovered it now. Take a look:

Just Because: Tricycle Calligraphy 水书法器 on Vimeo.

Kaiser, Zizou Sans and Zizou Slab were all commissioned  from Commercial Type by Fast Company’s creative director Florian Bachleda as part of a design overhaul. Co. Design, one of the magazine’s online counterparts launched their redesign four months later, using specially hinted versions of Kaiser and Zizou Slab to great effect.

Kaiser:

Conceptualised by Christian Schwartz and Florian Bachleda as a hybrid of a condensed sans they discovered in an old German specimen book and Paul Renner’s Plak, it was expanded into a full range of widths by Vincent Chan.

Zizou Sans:

Christian Schwartz gives us a glimpse into his Zizou Sans design process:

It originally began as my attempt to draw Antique Olive from memory, but ended up with its own distinct personality. I surprised myself with what I remembered correctly (i.e. the swing to the top of the bottom bowl in the lowercase a, and the distinctive top of the lowercase t), but was impressed by just how wrong I was able to get certain things. So much for my photographic memory for type!

Zizou Slab:

Schwartz on the design of the slab serif version:

I decided to start from the simplest place I could – snapping rectangular slabs onto the sans with a minimum of contrast – to see what that would yield before I tried to be any more clever with the design.

Almost too easy!

I always find it fascinating how a font looks exponentially more interesting and lively seen in use compared to a plain specimen, don’t you think?

Chocolate

Soap

Via the Collection category on Pan tu nie stał.

Bonus! Vintage Polish public transport tickets:

But wait, there’s more!

When you click, a little window opens up with information about the font stack, size, line-height, colour and even the web font service provider. Sure, you can find out all you need to know about fonts on a web page by inspecting the code with Firebug or the likes, but the WhatFont bookmarklet makes font snooping super easy. And hey, if you want to tweet about the font discoveries you make, there’s a button for that too…

Whether you are old enough to have used a Grapho-Scope, Shading Film, Non-Repro Blue Pencils and Letraset, or whether your first introduction to design was Adobe CS5, check out the online Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies curated by Lou himself. It will either fill you with nostalgia or puzzlement!

A few examples from the museum’s Artifacts Gallery:

Found via CreativePro.

1. HandpaintedType

The initiative of Delhi based designer Hanif Kureshi, HandpaintedType is a collaborative project aimed at capturing the rapidly-disappearing lettering styles of street painters across India.

The idea is to document the particular typographic style of individual sign painters. Each artist pruduces a character set on canvas, which is redrawn digitally and eventually released as a commercially available font. Apparently 50% of the proceeds from every font sale goes to the painter and the other half is invested in the continuation of the project.

Here’s an example of an original character set, hand painted in Old Delhi by an artist called Kafeel:

Due to the multicoloured nature of the Indian street typography, once digitised, each font consists of different layers; a base shape with shadows and highlights. These can then be used in different colour combinations to create the full effect:

Find out more from handpaintedtype.com.

2. Hand drawn movie posters

“Dean Pickles” of Asia Obscura came across a factory north of Bangalore, where a man called Ramachandraiah prints movie posters for a living, using a lithographic press from 1901.

His [posters] are five-color, hand-drawn, and measure just 20 inches by 30 inches. They’re printed on thin paper, and illegally slapped up on building sites and highway overpasses late at night. They cost pennies to print. And they’re absolutely gorgeous.

The artist, Raju, speedily draws these posters at a  small desk on the sidewalk – about one artwork every three hours!

These are the result:

Amazing, aren’t they? For more on the subject, see part one and part two of the story on Asia Obscura.

There are currently over 400 typefaces in the Google web fonts directory. Many of them are awful. But there are also high-quality typefaces that deserve a closer look.

Beautiful web type is a growing showcase of the Google web fonts Chad finds most deserving. You can click each specimen to find the font in Google’s directory.

Turns out I was just uneducated. The title refers to a motion picture film format introduced by Kodak Eastman in 1965. Following it’s 8mm predecessor, this bad boy featured smaller perforations allowing for a larger exposure area, hence the superness.

History lesson aside, during the movie (set in 1979) I noticed the unmistakeable yellow Kodak film packs and it inspired me to look for some more film and camera packaging examples from that period. Fortunately I came across a nice little collection at The Medium Control’s inspiration blog, have a look:

Is that some Eurostile I spy on “INSTANT CARTRIDGE LOAD MOVIE CAMERA”? Also note the little SUPER 8 to the right of the camera.

I love the condensed fonts used on this instamatic camera packaging combined with the extended font used for the model number. Any idea what they are? Those slanted terminals on the S and C of INSTAMATIC are quite distinctive…

According to BiblyOdyssey, there is not much information available online about Johann Hering or his work as scribe, but what we do know is the majority of this writing is in German (with occasional Latin) and many of the pages contain texts from The Bible.

Aren’t these amazing?

Find out more on BibliOdyssey.

It turns out Nice Type is a channel moderated by Matthew Buchanan where he collects all the best typographic videos from around Vimeo. Now isn’t that nice?

Here’s a little something to whet your appetite:

If you can’t see the video here, watch it on Vimeo.

What you see above is a demo for an animated typeface called Binary 2.0 created by Dutch studio Calango in collaboration with Maria Jose Torrero Heredia of Mexico:

What the bleep is an animated typeface you ask? I have to be honest, this is the first time I hear of the concept too. Apparently it comes with pre-animated characters of which you can edit the colors, duration, easing and line thickness in Adobe After Effects. This definitely calls for some further investigation…

I really like the way the bright yellow and white smeared lettering creates a perfect visual paradox: clean yet grimy. As the days go by and the relationship of the main characters becomes strained, the build-up of tension is reflected in the lettering – another clever touch by Erik:

Found via Typeverything.