typography

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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In a collaboration that is just our type, Target has teamed with Wisconsin’s Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum—dedicated to the preservation, study, production, and printing of wood type—on a collection of graphic gear. The t-shirts, hoodies, leggings, sweatshirts, sweatpants, and totes feature images from the museum’s Globe Printing Plate collection. Part of Target’s Vintage Varsity line, the items arrived in select Target stores yesterday and will be available for purchase online beginning July 17.

The idea for a partnership was sparked when a Target designer caught a screening of Typeface, Justine Nagan‘s 2009 documentary about the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum. Members of the megaretailer’s design team later visited the institution to select antique woodblocks (Hamilton is home to 1.5 million pieces of wood type) ripe for Americana-infused apparel. They worked closely with museum staff to create more than 100 different hand-pressed prints before toying with scale, layering, and color. Look for the collection and the museum to be spotlighted in Target’s “Cool Never Fades” campaign, which will celebrate “timeless locations” such as Nashville’s Fry Recording Studio and Gruene Dance Hall in New Braunfels, Texas. Meanwhile, type nuts can wear their Target togs to Two Rivers, Wisconsin, this November, when Hamilton holds its annual “Wayzgoose” type conference. Confirmed speakers include Tracy Honn of Silver Buckle Press, Stan Nelson, and Matthew Carter, who designed Carter Latin—his first wood typeface—especially for the museum.

P.S. We Love You Looks from the fall 2011 Proenza Schouler collection.

“One of our biggest regrets is the name of our company. It’s like alphabet soup. There are so many letters. Even coming up with a font was a mission. We had to do these fine, little letters. We couldn’t do strong, bold letters because it would be, like, out to here….We like ‘P.S.,’ but Paul Smith has taken it. It’s trademarked.”

-Fashion designer Jack McCollough, who in 2002 co-founded Proenza Schouler with fellow Parsons grad Lazaro Hernandez. The womenswear and accessories label incorporates their mothers’ maiden names.

It’s mid-week and we’re already beat, so best to let someone else do the talking. The good people at Gestalten have visited Erik Spiekermann, founder of MetaDesign and FontShop, and of course, one of the world’s most famous typographers to “listen to the design genius talk about new visual languages, design processes, the analogies of music and typography, and why we need better client culture.” The bonus? We still think he has one of the best German accents. It’s nearly 15 minutes of quality watching, so get to it:

Following their high-profile acquisition of artist David Wojnarowicz‘s controversial A Fire in My Belly, the MoMA has just added some more to its collection, with these pieces a bit easier to interpret (or at least, easier to read). This week, the museum announced that it has acquired twenty-three digital typefaces for its Architecture and Design Collection, ranging from Erik Spiekermann‘s FF Meta to Neville Brody‘s FF Blur (and before you wonder, yes, of course Hoefler & Frere-Jones‘ Gotham is in there too). Previously, as Alice Rawsthorn points out, Helvetica had been the only piece of type the museum had picked up for the department, lonely among a collection of nearly 30,000 objects, so it’s nice to see they’ve see the typographic light. Here’s a bit from the official statement, as well as some quick info on what they have planned for the new acquisitions:

This first selection of 23 typefaces represent a new branch in our collection tree. They are all digital or designed with a foresight of the scope of the digital revolution, and they all significantly respond to the technological advancements occurring in the second half of the twentieth century. Each is a milestone in the history of typography. These newly acquired typefaces will all be on display in Standard Deviations, an installation of the contemporary design galleries opening March 2 on the third floor.