typography

Will Avenir live happily after in the strong yet graceful arms of Adobe Garamond Pro? Can Martha Stewart-y Archer ever make it work with Eurostile? See for yourself by playing Type Connection, a fontastic online dating game created by Aura Seltzer, an MFA student in graphic design at the Maryland Institute College of Art. “Type Connection stems from an idea I had that typefaces’ personalities on paper are really very similar to those of people,” Seltzer told Mohawk Fine Papers’ Felt & Wire blog recently. “Typefaces also have certain physiques, voices, and virtues, and in certain designs, they would benefit from companionship.” Choose a single and get ready to mingle by selecting one of four strategies for finding a good match for your bachelor or bachelorette typeface. In addition to honing typeface-pairing skills, players explore typographic terminology and brush up on type history. Meanwhile, you’ll never look at Gil Sans the same way again—the British octogenarian is revealed to be an emotional eater who wears quirky spectacles.

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

Neville Brody and Jon Wozencroft ignited FUSE in 1991 as a “dynamic new forum for typography that [would] stimulate a new sensibility in visual expression, one grounded in ideas, not just image.” More than a decade since its last issue, the influential publication (which commissioned original, “experimental” fonts from type gods such as Erik Spiekermann, Peter Saville, and Tobias Frere-Jones, and provided them to readers on a disk) returns in FUSE 1-20, out this month from Taschen. The deluxe box set includes all 18 out-of-print issues compiled into a book designed by Brody as well as two never-before published issues, complete with posters and access to an online library of 24 fresh fonts, including eye-popping creations from Stefan Sagmeister, eBoy, and Lucienne Roberts. “The computer will encourage designers to create new ways of using the alphabet—but first we must clear the cobwebs that cover the type that has so quickly been digitized and dumped in the system folder,” wrote Wozencraft in his introduction to the debut issue. “Otherwise we will be left deeper in a digital nightmare, plundering as many hot metal typefaces as possible to compensate for our lack of imagination. We will pretend to be in command of our language, but will actually be locked in a museum.”

Better living through typography? See it, believe it, achieve it at The Happy Show, an exhibition of Stefan Sagmeister’s work that opens Wednesday at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania (it will travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles early next year). “I am usually rather bored with definitions,” says Sagmeister. “Happiness, however, is just such a big subject that it might be worth a try to pin it down.” The fruits, both literal and figurative, of the designer’s ten-year exploration of happiness will be on display through August 12.

The ICA promises a portal into Sagmeister’s mind as he experiments with potential happiness inducers ranging from from meditation and cognitive therapy to mood-altering drugs and maxims spelled out in jaw-dropping flights of typographic fancy. Visitors will also get a sneak peek at the Happy Film, his still-in-the-works documentary (check out the titles in the below video). Slated for release in 2013, the feature will offer “a proper look at all the strategies serious psychologists recommend that improve well-being,” according to Sagmeister, who decided to do the project as a film in part to stave off the complacency that can come from working in familiar media. “It might fail miserably,” he says. “But if I’ve gotten a hair happier in the process, it might have been worth my while.” Until you can make it to Philadelphia, check in with the ICA’s Happy Show Tumblr, which chronicled the preparation of invitations to next week’s opening party: slices of bologna laser-cut to reveal the word “HAPPY.”

Years ago, in those golden days of our youth, our favorite section of the now five-year defunct magazine Premiere was called “The Gaffe Squad.” A small box tucked away on some single page, it picked apart movies for those little mistakes here and there, be they continuity or a distracted grip accidentally being spotted hiding behind a curtain. The section was successful, we think, because not only did it give you the smug satisfaction of knowing that these big shot movie people were in fact fallible, but it also gave you a little peek behind the canvas in a way a PR firm never could. Fortunately, now that our lives are so steeped in the design world, we can still occasionally revisit those feelings when it comes to what’s become a standard on the internet: the dissection of type design in period films. Enter the great Christian Annyas, who invited type designer Mark Simonson to carefully analyze and critique the typography and lettering of the recent Oscar winner, and movie your friends won’t shut up about when you tell them you haven’t seen it yet, The Artist. In general, Simonson gives the film relatively average marks, noting that some of the type they’d selected looks passable for the era, whereas others, such as using typesetting instead of the hand-written or painted style that would have been the method of the day. There’s of course also the usual “that type didn’t come out until 60 years after the movie is supposed to take place!” talk, but we love it as always. In the end, with both this latest type-on-film analysis and back in the good ol’ days of Premiere, it isn’t so much even the careful dissection, as it is knowing that someone took all that time, and their years of knowledge, to lend us a little inside look at something that, for many of us, we might have otherwise had just wash right over us.

Letterpress lives on in this documentary short by U.K. filmmaker Danny Cooke, who offers a glimpse inside the movable-type printing workshop at Plymouth University. “This is a 500-year-old process, and it moves like a 500-year-old process,” says Paul Collier, a typography and letterpress technician at the school. “If you set up a paragraph or sentence, if you get wrong or if you haven’t planned your way forward…then you just have to take it apart and start all over again.” At the same time, he describes letterpress as calm, therapeutic, and “a very enjoyable process.” Sure, there’s a whiff of masochism that comes with watching a film about letterpress on a computer loaded with hundreds of font options—akin to reading about the glory days of ocean liners while on a transcontinental flight—but that’s all part of the fun, so get off “the lithography bandwagon” (as Collier calls it) and join the ink-rolling revival.

(Photo: Bill Simone)

Never underestimate the power of license plates (as Cosmo Kramer once reminded us). They did the trick for the Society of Design (SOD). When the Lancaster, Pennsylvania-based nonprofit wanted an effective and memorable way to invite letterer, illustrator, designer, and Daily Drop Captain Jessica Hische to be a part of its 2012-13 speaker series, they looked no further than the Department of Transportation. SOD members researched the state’s custom license plate program (eight characters max, including one space), convinced 34 people to change their vehicle registrations, and mapped out a multi-plate message to Hische, a Pennslyvania native who is now based in San Francisco. After filing and re-filing oodles of paperwork over the course of several weeks, they finally had their invitation, in the form of 27 freshly pressed license plates.

The next step was to take the charming analog project to the digital realm. A website was created (invitinghische.com), and called to the attention of Hische via Twitter. “Pennsylvania misses you tremendously,” tweeted SOD to the designer. “Please come home.” Her response was immediate, heartfelt, and, fortunately for those who are now driving around with the plates on their vehicles, in the affirmative. “I am crying at my desk. I’ve never been so touched by a group of people I don’t even know!” Hische tweeted in response. “And the answer of course is YES! I will marry you! I mean come to Pennsylvania.” And she’s bringing presents. Each of the SODers involved with the project will receive a delightful drawing: Hische’s hand-lettered version of his or her name.

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.
Read more

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?”