UnBeige logo design by Angela Voulangas and Doug Clouse, as part of our regular <i>design our logo</i> feature
UnBeige logo by Angela Voulangas and Doug Clouse, as part of our regular design our logo feature

typography

Ink-Saving 'Ecofont' Does More with Less

ecofont.jpgIs conserving printer ink and increasing environmental awareness as easy as switching fonts? So say the Dutch creators of Ecofont, a "green" typeface. The font—a modified version of Vera Sans—consists of characters that are full of tiny holes and so requires an estimated 20% less ink to print, according to research that compared the average black surface occupied by Ecofont characters to that of the source font. Ecofont is available as a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux. For those who want to create Eco-versions of any typeface, the creators have introduced Ecofont Professional, software that they claim "has an inspiring effect on both employees and customers." It's a hole new way to look at font choice.

Type Directors Club Prez Charlie Nix Seeks Marathon Sponsors from A to Z

5772_nix_photo_01.jpgTwenty-six miles. Twenty-six letters. Coincidence? Type Directors Club president Charlie Nix thinks not, and so when he decided to run this year's New York City Marathon (his fifth) to raise money for design scholarships, it was just a matter of going from A to Z. Nix, a partner in the publishing firm Scott & Nix who has taught design and typography for over 15 years, is seeking marathon sponsorships by the letter. Donors at various levels can "buy" uppercase and/or lowercase letters of their choice.

Writer, curator, and graphic designer Ellen Lupton is on board, throwing her support behind Nix and the uppercase and lowercase "E," Pentagram's Luke Hayman called dibs on the interrobang, and typographer Gary Munch has invested in both cases of the letters "G" and "M." Munch and James Montalbano of Terminal Design are among Nix's "Hot Metal"-level supporters; having pledged $104 or more, they get special recognition with the coveted Ampersand Award. Meanwhile, we're about to donate on behalf of UnBeige, as the letter "U" is proving unpopular. So far, Nix has raised a total of $2,335.97, all of which will go toward TDC scholarships. You have until race day (November 1) to be the generous type. Click here to donate.

Typeface Lift Underway for Georgia, Verdana

georgia_verdana.bmpGeorgia and Verdana are getting a face lift. Commissioned by Microsoft in the mid-1990s as ideal for on-screen display, the typeface families were designed by Matthew Carter and hinted for screen legibility by Tom Rickner of Ascender Corporation. Now Carter, Ascender, and Font Bureau are working with Microsoft on a project to expand and enhance Georgia (once described by Microsoft's Simon Earnshaw as "effectively the more generous cousin of Tahoma") and Verdana (conceived as "a serif alternative to Times") for new applications, both on the screen and on the page. Look for new weights and widths as well as extended character sets. "The new additions to the font families are a natural and timely progression," noted Carter in a statement released by Ascender. "They offer a wider range of typographic versatility...while remaining consistent with the originals." The first of the new fonts will be released early next year.

Taschen Takes on Typography

Taschen Type.jpg"Plenty of white space and generous line spacing, and don't make the type size too miserly," wrote Giambattista Bodoni in the early 1800s. "Then you will have a product fit for a king." The royalty-ready work of Bodoni ("the king of typographers and the typographer of kings") and hundreds more lettering legends is collected in Type. A Visual History of Typefaces and Graphic Styles by Jan Tholenaar, Alston W. Purvis, and Cees De Jong. The first in a two-volume set from Taschen, the book is a lush index of type specimens dating from 1628 to 1900, accented with the borders, ornaments, and graphical flourishes of the day. The evolution of the printed letter is traced through the work of typographers such as William Caslon, John Baskerville, and Claude Garamond, who claimed he could cut printed stamps in "Cicero size" (12 point) at the age of 15. Brush up on your Victorian fonts in preparation for volume two, which will be published early next year.

Oldies But Goudys: An Online Tribute to Type Couple Fred and Bertha

goudyfonts.jpg

We'll admit to a protracted love affair with Goudy Stout (Jason Castle's recreation of the typeface that Frederic W. Goudy admitted to having created in "a moment of typographic weakness") that endowed all of our high school papers with a festive circus air. Now typographer Goudy and his graphic designer wife, Bertha, are a few giant steps closer to immortality thanks to Goudy Fonts, a new web site that pays "tribute to two former bookkeepers who impacted American design and typography for all time."

Created by a team of Goudy fans at Ascender Corporation," the site is much more than a virtual storefront of Goudy fonts and their derivatives. There's a blog for Goudynews (including a downloadable version of Steve Matteson's recent TypeCon talk on the couple's work) and a slideshow of Goudy artifacts, among them a rather creepy plaster cast of Fred's right hand. In the collection of historical press clippings, we found a 1933 Time magazine report from a gala celebration in New York City to honor Goudy as the country's greatest type designer.

continued...

NY from A to Z: Rachel Young's Google Map Alphabet

birdseye NY.jpg

How do you pass the time when laid up with an injury? If you're British researcher Rachel Young, you scour Google Maps for letterforms in the satellite imagery. Inspired by the Google Maps typography of Australian graphic designer Rhett Dashwood, Young searched for days to assemble map alphabets of Britain and then, New York. She created the latter set, entitled "Alphabet State," at the suggestion of her employer. "It was more challenging since I've never been there," Young told The New York Post. So next time you're home sick, skip the daytime television in favor of the healing powers of found typography.

Tiny Toyota iQ Comes with Custom Font

toyota iq.jpgFollowing in the sponsored tire tracks of artist Robin Rhode, who recently used a BMW Z4 as a 300-horsepower paintbrush, Brussels-based graphic designers Pierre Smeets and Damien Aresta have created a typeface using an iQ (pictured at right), Toyota's answer to the Smart Car. Smeets and Aresta teamed up with interactive artist Zach Lieberman and seasoned racecar driver Stef Vancampenhoudt to trace and digitally map letters and characters on the floor of an airplane hangar (watch the design process in the below video). The result is iQ Agility, a Eurojaunty typeface that reveals the iQ's incredibly tiny turning radius.

iq font.gif

Next up for Smeets and Aresta? The pair are at work on a typeface inspired by the title sequence of Antonioni's Eclipse and another one for a club. In the meantime, they have a ongoing project to spot first names—from Adam to Zorba—in commercial signage. Both Stephanie and Steve remain elusive, but check if they've found your name here.

continued...

The Case of the Mystery Font—Solved!

whoknows.jpgYou can spot Helvetica a mile away and have an entire theory as to why Woody Allen can't bear to make a film without Windsor Light Condensed, but where do you turn when flummoxed by a mystery typeface? Try Identifont, the Web's largest independent directory of typefaces. Among the site's multiple ways to sift through information from 558 font publishers and 149 vendors is by answering a series of illustrated multiple-choice questions about the appearance of a particular font, even if your sample is restricted to a handful of letters in a logo or heading. What type of tail is the uppercase "Q" sporting? Is the question mark dotted with a circle, square, or diamond? Click your choices and before you can say "ascender serif oblique," Identifont has winnowed down the set of nearly 7,000 possible fonts to your mystery font.

Typeface the Music and Dance

I could have danced all night.jpgLucida Sky with Diamonds. Bauhaus (in the Middle of Our Street). Rock the Caslon. I Wanna Bold Your Sans. Nope, this isn't the set list from designer/rock star Chip Kidd's latest Artbreak gig, they're fontsongs, a Twitter thread (#fontsongs) that challenges pun-loving design types to insert typeface names into popular song titles. Call it Textual Healing. The typographical phenomenon is going strong with recent gems such as Goudy My Dreams, Get into my Car and Garamond (My Wayward Son), but don't delay in tweeting a fontsong of your own today, before the trend changes cultural course. One Twitter user is advocating a switch to fontfilms. First on the list? Back to the Futura.

Neville Brody and Crew Create Font for Upcoming Public Enemies

0428brodypublic.jpg

Finally, we finish off this writer's day in Chicago and, fortunately, no longer talking about museums. Though we aren't really, truly ending in Chicago, but more of Chicago-by-way-of-the-UK, with some interesting information about famed designer Neville Brody and Research Studio's typography work on the upcoming Chicago-based-gangster film Public Enemies. Brody and his crew came up with all of the type treatments used throughout the film and its marketing, creating a font named "New Deal" which the firm explains was commissioned straight from the film's director, Michael Mann:

'It was a fairly loose brief to evoke the era of the 1930s, with streamlined shapes of cars and trains, and the architecture of the period,' says the spokesman.
We like Brody's work here and we're hoping it means good things for the film. After having sat in countless traffic jams last summer while they were shooting here in Chicago and then seeing the truly awe-inspiringly awful trailer, we think we've earned the right to be pleasantly surprised.

Previously

Chip Kidd on 'the Typographical Equivalent of Bad Toupees'

Wear Your Love/Hate of Comic Sans on Your Sleeve

Forget Ringtones, Now Switch Up Your Cell Phone's Font

Name Game: Honorable Mentions

In a World...Torn Apart by Typefaces

Ricky Gervais: 'People Don't Watch Films That Have the Wrong Font'

In Olympic Opening Ceremonies, Small Victory for Futura Bold Italic

design mind Has Got Erik Spiekermann's Number(s)

The Growing 'A Unique Font for Every Project' Movement

Snow Job: Chank Designs Typeface at Sub-Zero Temperatures

Calligraphy Explored...

Hoefler & Frere-Jones Weigh In Directly On Campaign Typography

Hoefler and Frere-Jones on Gotham, Obama's Font of Choice

Judging the Candidates' on Their Type Choices: Obama Wins Again

Bierut On Modern Typesetting For Designers: Like Having "As Much Sex As They Wanted"

Banking on Call-Outs and Pull-Quotes

Get Carter: Pentagram's 2008 Calendar Features Matthew Carter's Typefaces

Please Tell Us That Diesel Has a Sense of Humor

Test Your Knowledge of Fonts, Jeopardy-Style

Wheel of Type

Comic Sans, the Drunk Bastard Left-for-Dead Child of Helvetica. No, Really.

The Mighty Hands of Bernard Maisner

Apparently We're Also Marrying Phil Patton

For Freeway Signage and For Design Coverage, Finally a Clearview

Rob Giampietro Is Summer Lovin' Grouch

Vinh and Coles Talk FontBook

Newsweek Copy Editors Invent New Typeface

The Best of '06 from the Business of Type

Helvetica Declared a Cult, If So, We're In

The Faces of Businesses

Helvetica Endorsed As "Top-Selling" Typeface By BusinessWeek

The Helvetica of Mexico

Type Directors Club Award Winners (Panel Worries About What Typeface to Use for the Certificate)

The Trouble with Gill

Helvetica Coming Soon To a Theater Near You

Alternatives to Ol' Helv

Amy Papaelias Handwrites Her Way Into Our Hearts

Thoughts on Rimmer and All He Stands For

A Rose is a Rose, and Type is Type

Typecast: The Director's Cut

One Gotham That's Not Rough Around the Edges

Types of Perception of Type

Figuring Out What Makes Bollywood Bollywood

Ideas on a Full Year of Type

Your Best Bets for Type in '06

Things Are a Bit Crooked at 10 Downing Street

The Times They Are A Changing Because of Neville Brody and Company

Type, All Up In Our Face

Taking the Type from Your Streets

Helv Yeah!

Mind the Type

Requiem For a Mistral

The Face That Launched A Thousand...Um...Signs

More Cooper, and It's Super

Scandalous Cooper Black

Wrangling In The Managers, One Typeface At A Time

The Type of Typefaces In Blueprint

Likely The Best Part of the Whole Program

It Was the Best of Times, It Was the Worst FOR Times

The Letterpressed Writing Was On The Wall All Along

Emphasis Would Be Lost Without Him

The Grandest Hoax of All Time (or of this week)

The Typographer's Biography

Typecast Takes Top Honors

jlkdasjiodwa (We Suppose This Only Works If You Do It Correctly)

Thank You For Stephen Coles

Be A Design Group Plays Gill Sans Island

Do Designers Dream of Helvetica, Bold?

For the Love of Goudy

Typographer Laureate, Rod McDonald

Pride Yourself on Your Leading!

Of All Shapes and Kernings

Straight from The Cheese Monkeys

Handmade Typography's Got A Little Something To It

Wait, It's NOT Helvetica???

Fie, Helvetica, Fie

The Alphabet, Now In New Moving Gifs

You Want Our Words To Be A Little More Stylish? So Do We

Cheap Fonts

Just In Case You Wake Up Bored Of Times New Roman, Boy Have We Got News For You

So, Uh, You Like Type? OMG, Me Too!!!

Fonts Fonts Fonts

TypeCon is Coming!

Awkwardly Designed Cards for Awkward Moments

Name That Font

Download or Die (well, not really)

Typogra-funny (ouch)

Did you say FREE??

Now You Know: @

You Got Faced!

New From House Industries: Paperback

A Bit of Tibor for You

Ooh! Ooh! Typography Picking!

Quayle is to Kennedy as Arial is to Helvetica

On Fonts, In Good Company

More On Blackletter: A Reader Responds

Blackletter: Nazi Hip Typeface

Font Essentials

Absolute: Fabulous

Typographic Amateur Hour

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