You Should Like Type Too

Hey man, it’s been a while!

Rob — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 10:37:15 +0000

A bit of an update / Excuses for not updating the site for a rather long time: Unfortunately, things has been hectic lately and this site has suffered. There are many updates waiting and plans for the future here, just no time to implement them (this is a common problem for most of us it seems). Since [...]

Museum of Things #2 [UPDATED]

Rob — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 17:02:02 +0000

16 more images from Berlin's ultra-cool Museum of Things!

Mota Italic: Now Open!

Rob — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 16:00:16 +0000

After many long months of coding, designing, and bureaucratic paper work, Mota Italic is finally online and open for business! We have worked hard to bring you some great font families and a special shopping experience. The website features numerous images and samples of the fonts and a totally unique shopping cart and checkout process. [...]

The Museum of Things ⇒ WOW

Rob — Sun, 06 Sep 2009 06:49:03 +0000

Oh my god Becky, seriously the Museum of Things (Museum der Dinge) is like totally the most raddest place in Berlin. If you thought the DDR Museum had some cool old stuff, then you will be blown away by all the junk at this place. It is a cross between a natural history museum, the Smithsonian, your grandma’s house, a garage sale, and a dump. It has an extensive collection of “things” from the 1800s through today – roughly sorted chronologically and also a bit categorically.
Its stockpile of ephemeral, everyday objects is amazing. Typoholics will find hours of pleasure simply staring at all the old logos and packaging. I ended up taking about 150 photos while managing to convince my friends I am nuts because of how overly excited I was.
For those of you who are maybe not impressed with *just* nice old type and objects, the museum has more attractions. There are also some big, powerful, loud, Mythbusteresque machines that smash, chop, stomp, and roll/crush/flatten. Visitors are invited to use the hydraulic beasts to annihilate some miscellaneous bric-a-brac. Mechanical thumps, shattering, screaming, and laughing can be heard echoing throughout the museum.
It is a great place. Plus there is a gift shop with some nice designer objects and some other old crap you can buy too!

Get all the type news at Type News

Rob — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 14:42:52 +0000

I know we both like type. If you are anything like me then you probably also have a slight addiction to following the latest updates and buzz in “the industry”. Us type geeks/nerds (pick your own adjective) tend to be rather social online – or at least interested in others’ posts. This leads to such a daily torrent of type news that it can become overwhelming to follow everything. Reading the important stories, then sorting through all the duplicate content to find those extra special nuggets is a chore. So a couple months ago Sonja and I started working on an aggregator to help deliver us the best type-related news with less work, in a way that is easier to skim and also more fun to browse. Meet Type News. The site runs on SweetCron, a system developed to painlessly publish a “life stream” of your online activities. I crudely adapted it to grab items from 50+ sites/feed I like to follow. Those of you who used it at typestream.youshouldliketypetoo.com know that it had some serious performance problems. The flood of items (but more importantly the method of fetching them) was too complex for the system to handle. This caused frequent, major server errors and rendered the site nearly unusable.
Eventually, we came up with a powerful and more intelligent solution to solve many of the performance problems. Using Yahoo Pipes we* were able to combine, filter, and reformat all the feeds into one massive RSS feed. This cut out several back-end hacks and many, many extra database requests. It is now much more stable and faster, even with a few unavoidable performance issues (like the number of http requests per page). Code is still being optimized and we are also looking into new hosting options - which will make a difference.

This is a section of our Yahoo Pipes setup which is responsible for grabbing all the type news. You can see the whole illustration here.
Type News is an autonomous aggregating site that grabs the latest type-related things from all over the internet. Every 5 minutes it sucks up new items and spits them out into three categories: images, tweets, and blog posts. From the main page you can skim through the timeline of news then hop over to the items’ original sites to read the whole posts. It also archives the permalinks and tags for later perusing and searching.
Hopefully you'll find Type News (beta) fun and useful to browse. Stay tuned for several new features that will deliver an even better experience. You will definitely be seeing them in action in the near future.
Also, please feel free to comment here, or e-mail me, with any thoughts or suggestions you may have regarding Type News!
Enjoy!
*Sonja deserves all the credit for the programming, coding, and figuring out exactly how to set up the complicated Pipes system perfectly.

Lauren DiCioccio’s Typographic, Type-Free Art

Rob — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 17:25:35 +0000

I love this work.
At first glance these pieces by Lauren DiCioccio might remind you of Christian Faur’s Color Alphabet.* However, this work transcends the results of his concept by being a more tactile/visceral/human version/object. Christian has conceived of a system, whereas Lauren has made a direct reaction and responded to an object and an idea. These are about the specific articles appropriated from fashion magazines, their titles, their compositions, the distinct color palettes, and the wonderful surfaces resulting from being hand-painted pieces.
I respond strongly to these images. The compositions (only creditable to Lauren insofar as she selected them) are well designed. The textures, created by the paints on the translucent mylar, are alluring. The color palettes are always well thought out. I find the selection of the articles of the utmost significance. This is not because I want to understand the coded text, rather, they serve to give an insight into Lauren’s decisions and a feeling of what is underneath the dots. Overall though, it is the typography that is my favorite facet. While there is neither text nor letters, you can sense how these pieces are undeniably typographic. Although abstracted, they remain one step away from being beautiful typography. Viewing these allows me to take a minute's pause of not looking at letters, but I don’t have to feel guilty about it.

An Evolutionary Leap in Indian Keyboards (?)

Rob — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:50:35 +0000

This topic might not be of interest to everyone, so feel free to tune out in just a moment if the next sentence doesn’t sound cool. Brahmi Computing has announced their new concept in Indian keyboard layout and functionality!

Ditchling Cemetery

Rob — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 08:58:05 +0000

These images come from a small cemetery in Ditchling, UK. There you will find several beautiful examples of headstones in a dilapidated, yet lush, setting. The greatest highlight here is the tombstone featuring metal inlayed blackletter and a super clean sans serif text.

Hot Typography Trends

Rob — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 05:00:01 +0000

This article examines the hottest new trend in typography. You don't want to miss this one!

TYPO Berlin 09…

Rob — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 14:19:44 +0000

Full Title: TYPO Berlin 09 Reminiscent of TYPO Berlin 08
Some photos and short thoughts on 2009's conference...