typography

Foundation Rwanda’s latest fundraising initiative, “Color Rwanda with Hope,” comes with a typographic twist. The nonprofit organization, founded in 2008 by photojournalist Jonathan Torgovnik and former creative director Jules Shell, tapped members of creative agency LBi Syrup to design an original typeface for the multi-media campaign. Rather than whip up something in the studio, where they work on projects for artistically inclined brands such as Bottega Veneta and Puma, the LBi Syrup group traveled to Rwanda and used the artwork and writing of the children they met there as inspirational font fodder. The resulting typeface, “Color Rwanda,” appears on various campaign materials, including the limited-edition coloring books that are at the heart of the fundraiser. LBi Syrup also created a short film (below) for the campaign. All proceeds from the Color Rwanda with Hope effort will help to fund Foundation Rwanda’s work to provide secondary education for the 20,000 ostracized children born of rape during the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
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Create a social media strategy, launch your campaign, and track the results in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. The online event and workshop will feature speakers including The Onion‘s Baratunde Thurston (left), Facebook’s Morin Oluwole, and bitly’s Tim Devane. Register now.

Stimulation is always in store with the Guggenheim’s annual Hilla Rebay lecture, an endowed program named for the Strasbourg-born baroness and artist who made her mark as Solomon Guggenheim’s art advisor and curator. The twenty-fourth annual lecture is set for the evening of January 11 (admission is free, but get there early to stake out a seat) and has a distinct design angle, as Tom McDonough, associate professor and chair of art history at Binghamton University, will discuss the prominent role of typography in contemporary art. “The Artist as Typographer” will highlight the work of artists such as Dexter Sinister (the design and publishing collaborative’s 2010 unpronounceable glyph, “A skeleton, a script, or a good idea in advance of its realization,” is pictured at right) Shannon Ebner, and Janice Kerbel. Learn more here.

“People who love type have been known to confess to each other in secret that in certain moods they are emotionally moved by Optima. Its echoes of renaissance carvings evoke nostalgia for a lost and unrecoverable past. Its streamlined curves evoke the forward-looking hopes of the machine age. Like other great works of art it prompts intense mixed feelings, a double sense of loss and gain: it simultaneously portrays something that has receded into the abyss of time and something that is still emerging.

Helvetica is the ideal typeface for corporate logos and any other function in which individual persons have little value of their own. Optima, in contrast, is a typeface that can be put into service to indicate the unique value of individuals. When Maya Lin designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, she chose Optima as the face in which the names of the dead would be etched into the polished stone wall. Every name—each signifying a particular, irreparable loss—is recorded in letters that had been designed by one person’s singular hand.”

-Edward Mendelson on Hermann Zapf‘s Optima, “a face that is technically—but not in spirit—a sans-serif, and which seems to me one of the triumphs of twentieth-century art,” in The New York Review of Books’ NYRBlog

There’s been something of a buying spree within the business of type lately, with last month’s announcement that Adobe had purchased Typekit, and now the news from late last week that Monotype, which owns the rights to such typeface designs as Helvetic and ITC Franklin Gothic (among thousands upon thousands of others), is preparing to acquire Bitstream‘s font business. For an all-cash payout of $50 million, the purchase will give Monotype access to Bistream’s “89,000 fonts from nearly 900 foundries,” will make them the new owners of the popular What’s The Font” site, and will also bring over approximately 55 employees from Bitstream’s current roster (Bistream itself will continue as a company, just no longer working with type). Given the bulking up on type companies by both Monotype and Adobe, this recent purchase wasn’t exactly met with universal applause. Type designer Erik Spiekermann, never one to hold back on voicing his opinion, tweeted a number of responses to the sale, including that his company FontShop is now “the only major survivor outside the font monopoly” and asked, “Will Monotype Imaging be renamed Monopoly Imaging after buying Bitstream?”

It’s a done deal: Adobe has acquired Typekit, the much-loved provider of high-quality fonts for use on websites. The privately held company counts The New York Times and Conde Nast among the approximately 250,000 customers of its subscription-based cloud service. Adobe plans to offer TypeKit as a standalone service that will ultimately become part of Adobe Creative Cloud, an initiative announced today at the MAX 2011 conference in Los Angeles. “We are thrilled. There honestly is no better place for us to continue building our platform,” wrote Typekit CEO and co-founder Jeffrey Veen in a blog post announcing the acquisition. “But perhaps even more significantly, this represents a huge step forward in bringing fonts to the web.”

The first rule of Type Camp is, you do not talk about Type Camp. Oh wait, that’s Fight Club. What a relief, as we’re itching to tell you about what next year holds for the burgeoning series of immersive design workshops for those who like to debate kerning whilst scarfing gourmet s’mores. Type Camp has big, global plans for 2012, beginning with day camps in New Zealand (January 22-26), Australia (February 3-7), and Mumbai (February 23-28). Then, in April, it’s off to Rio. Type Camp returns stateside in June for hardcore letterfests in California wine country featuring expert instruction by a teaching team including Ken Barber of House Industries, Type Camp founder Shelley Gruendler, and Apple’s Antonio Cavedoni. A planned August installment will explore modernism in typography and design in—wait for it—Weimar, Germany. That’s right, font fans, Type Camp Bauhaus. Start saving your Euros now. And the band of nomadic type junkies will return to India next December for a cultural crash course in Chennai. Morning studios will focus on Tamil typography and design, while afternoons will be spent visiting local publishing houses, street typographers, ancient and modern Hindu temples, and local markets. It’s the perfect way to spice up your design perspective. Stay tuned to the Type Camp website for details on upcoming camps in Asia, Africa, and South America.

“Peter Saville‘s album covers for Manchester’s Factory Records in the ’80s and ’90s were a true revelation to me, especially his work for New Order. When I was a sophomore in college, the group soon became one of my favorites and remain so to this day, but what was truly striking was that while they more or less a rarified synth-disco band (though a truly great one), Saville’s cool and clasically modernist sleeves didn’t reflect at all any of the expected visual clichés of dance music. No mirror balls, no platform shoes, no ‘groovy’ lettering, and most notably—no discernible emotion. The result is a brilliantly nuanced balancing act between form and content, in which one is so totally at odds with the other that they ultimately complement each other with unique juxtaposition. The design doesn’t have to try to get your toe tapping, because that’s the the music’s job. The lettering is clean, beautifully proportioned, easily read, and, well, ordered. Saville didn’t so much have a style as he did a sensibility—one that consistently defied prediction—and that’s what he made me want to achieve too.”

-Design rockstar—and all-around rockstar—Chip Kidd in one of the essays that comprise his foreword to Simon Garfield‘s Just My Type (Gotham)

“I first became interested in type when I bought David Bowie‘s Hunky Dory album in my teens. Taking it home on the upper deck of a London bus, I remembered staring intently at the sleeve for clues to what might lie inside. Hunky Dory offered its wares in a type called Zipper, a classic bit of buzzy sci-fi text that suggested something spacey and robotic (the songs were actually spacey and vulnerable).

It soon became clear that type was strong stuff, able to confer emotion and mood in the most direct ways. The bus I was riding had its destination letters in less imaginative type, but they were no less functional (they were in the ultra-clear Johnston font that also adorned the London Underground). Like reliable architecture, form followed function: The bus letters had clarity while Bowie’s had intrigue.”

-Simon Garfield, author of Just My Type: A Book About Fonts (Gotham), in an essay published in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal

If Simon Garfield‘s book Just My Type isn’t already on pre-order or included somewhere on your wish list, then it’s likely that you just hadn’t heard about it. The book, which tells the story of typefaces, typographers, fonts, and everywhere in between, was a fairly substantial hit in the UK (how many books about type can say that?), and as of September 1st, will be ported over into a US version, with a new forward by Chip Kidd. Our pals at Pentagram just released a book trailer for the US edition, directed by Naresh Ramchandani and Michael Bierut (the latter of whom also blurbed the book):

Is there still any social cache in saying that you watch PBS now that there are a billion television outlets available and not just a couple of networks that you could dial in with the careful repositioning of some rabbit ears? We would assume, however slight, there surely must be (all our smart friends, for example, kept babbling to each other and everyone we met how great that new Sherlock Holmes show was). That in mind, PBS still seems to know how to get it done, even when they venture online. Such can be witnessed with the recent launch of Off Book, a 13-part, bi-weekly web series “focused on experimental and non-traditional art forms.” It launched back on July 20th, with an interesting episode on photograph that uses painted light, but they seem to have really hit their stride with this week’s release of “The World of Typography,” which features interviews with the likes of Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones, Paula Scher, and Eddie Opara. It’s great and you’ll find it below.

The previous episode, “Light Painting Photography,” can be found after the jump…

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