NYTimes: ‘Ballot Design With Todd Oldham’

In an Op-Docs video, the designer Todd Oldham reviews the design of election ballots from across the United States.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/opinion/ballot-design-with-todd-oldham.html

Type Trends: Hipster Design « FontShop Blog

"…So, in an attempt to appear established, perhaps winking at the irony created by the freshness of their look, small businesses today sign off on the work of graphic designers whose aim is to present them as having existed before design as we know it."

Type Trends: Hipster Design « FontShop Blog

Voters Annoyed by Hard-to-Read Ballots

In New York City, you may want to bring a magnifying glass.

Voters who trekked to the polls for Thursday’s primary races were handed ballots with candidates’ names printed in an eye-straining 7-point type, akin to the ingredient list on the side of a cereal box.

Read the article

Meet Your Type: A Field Guide to Typography

Why settle for casual flirtation when looking for a long-lasting relationship? Finding the perfect match is easy if you know the rules. Meet Your Type will help you overcome common obstacles, and keep your heart thumping for your one true love: typography.

Education | FontShop

How To Choose The Right Face For A Beautiful Body | Smashing Magazine

What is it that makes a typeface into a text font, instead of a font for larger sizes? The answer differs slightly, depending on whether one aims for print or Web-based environments.

How To Choose The Right Face For A Beautiful Body | Smashing Magazine

“I am not a type designer. This is the story of the creation of a new font, Avería: the average of all the fonts on my computer.”

Avería – The Average Font, via Adam G.

http://www.typeconnection.com/index.php

Type Connection is a game that helps you learn how to pair typefaces.

Yay!

Sarcastic Font

Manifesto

For too long e-mails, instant messages, web pages and documents have been unable to fully communicate the subtleties of sarcasm. Text delivered without intonation fail to represent the rare form of language where the intended meaning is the opposite of the written word.

Over the internet we yell at each other with ALL CAPS and emphasize with bold and italics, but where is sarcasm? Where is the nuance, the elegance? We say it is time for a change. It's time for a revolution. It's time for a new font style!


  Bold
  Italic


http://glennmcanally.com/sarcastic/index.htm

FUSE Returns

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.

read the article on UnBeige

Exhibition: Types We Can Make

Types We Can Make: Opening Reception — swissnex

This exhibition, curated by ECAL/University of Art and Design Lausanne, presents a selection of new typography works from Switzerland, where type design has had the status of a high art form for generations.

Swissnex

730 Montgomery St. San Francisco

from 04 May 15 Jun 2012

9:00 AM to  at 5:00 PM

Opening Reception
May 3, 2012, 6:30 pm
Presentations from ECAL Director Alexis Georgacopoulos and Head of the Masters Program in Art Direction at ECAL, François Rappo

the Typecast app

Typecast by FRONT is a tool for creating your CSS code with webfonts directly in the browser with a true WYSIWYG view. It’s an online service for developing the typographic layout of websites directly in the browser. You can style your headlines and paragraphs in an easy and intuitive way, without the need for writing and changing CSS values over and over again. Once you are satisfied with the results you can just grab the CSS code and put it in your project.

The Typecast app is currently in Beta, but you can already play with fonts from Typekit, Fontdeck and the Google Webfonts directory.

read the article
From the Opentype Blog

Stefan Sagmeister: The Happy Show - ICA - Institute of Contemporary Art - Philadelphia, PA

"I am usually rather bored with definitions," Sagmeister says. "Happiness, however, is just such a big subject that it might be worth a try to pin it down." Centered around the designer's ten-year exploration of happiness, this exhibition presents typographic investigations of a series of maxims, or rules to live by, originally culled from Sagmeister's diary, manifested in a variety of imaginative and interactive forms.

Stefan Sagmeister: The Happy Show - ICA - Institute of Contemporary Art - Philadelphia, PA

Can a Font Help a City Make a Comeback?

Chatype came about when D.J. Trischler, a brand consultant, discovered he'd been sitting next to typeface designer Jeremy Dooley at their local coffee shop. The two became fixated on a question: What if Chattanooga had its own typeface? The idea may sound strange from an American perspective, but it's actually the norm throughout Europe, where even small cities employ unique typefaces to distinguish themselves.

Read the article in Good Magazine

Exhibition: THE ART OF LETTERPRESS

February 11th-March 25th, 2012

Opening Reception:
Saturday, February 11th, 6-9pm

Closing Tea: Sunday, March 25th, 3-6pm

Co-curated with Rebecca Peters

The Compound Gallery & Studios
1167 65th st. Oakland, CA 94608
510.601.1702

OPEN:
Thursday-Sunday 12-6pm and
First Fridays until 9pm
Map

'Comic Sans Project' Seeks to Save the Web's Most Hated Font

Some fonts get no respect. This is true of Comic Sans, the ’90s-era Microsoft typeface that sought to emulate comic book text and failed miserably, by most accounts.

The font’s childish, unsophisticated scrawl and overuse by armchair designers has rendered it taboo in most artistic circles, and the sophisticated web at large enforces a moratorium on its use. Some have even campaigned to rid the web of it forever.

But despite the haters, French designers Thomas Blanc and Florian Amoneau have sought to spark a movement. Their new Tumblr, entitled the Comic Sans Project, tries to re-imagine the much-maligned font by posing a simple aesthetic question: What if the world’s most recognizable logos used Comic Sans?

'Comic Sans Project' Seeks to Save the Web's Most Hated Font

Erler Dingbats [free]

For the first time in the entire history of Unicode standard, the full encoding range for dingbats (U + 2700 – U + 27BF) is now covered by a complete, contemporary quality font. Erler Dingbats is a spin-off of the distinguished FF Dingbats 2.0 family, and was designed as a special collaboration between designers Johannes Erler and Henning Skibbe.

http://ffdingbatsfont.com/erler/index.html

Type. A Visual History of Typefaces & Graphic Styles, 1628-1900

Wow - what a book and a second volume as well. Includes exclusive access with TASCHEN keycard to online image library: over 1000 high-resolution scans of type specimens downloadable for unrestricted use.

Check it out.

Thank you James Van Kriedt for the reference.

Making Faces: Metal Type in the 21st Century: Film Screening with director Q&A

Come join us at Typekit's headquarters on Tuesday October 4, 2011 for a more personal look at Richard Keglers' new documentary on metal typefaces. We'll open the doors at 7:00pm for drinks and begin the screening at 7:30pm followed by a Q&A at 8:30pm.

Making Faces' is a fascinating design documentary by Richard Kegler that captures the personality and work process of the late Canadian graphic artist and type designer Jim Rimmer (1931-2010).

https://makingfaces.eventbrite.com/

Emigre Fonts PDF Catalogs

Emigre's award winning type specimen catalogs are now available for free as downloadable PDF files. Many have been long out of print and some have reached collector item status. So if you haven't received these in the past, or have lost your copy, here is your opportunity to receive these beautifully designed type catalogs delivered directly to your computer for immediate typographic perusal.

Confessions of a Typomaniac

By SIMON GARFIELD
Essay in WSJ

"Of all the truly calamitous afflictions of the modern world, typomania is one of the most alarming and least understood. It was first diagnosed by the German designer Erik Spiekermann as a condition peculiar to the font-obsessed, and it has one common symptom: an inability to walk past a sign (or pick up a book or a menu) without needing to identify the typeface. Sometimes font freaks find this task easy, and they move on; and sometimes their entire day is wrecked until they nail it."