Sponsored by H&FJ. Novel Constructions

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Sponsored by H&FJ. A Pocket Cathedral

Sponsored by H&FJ. Type Matters

Sponsored by H&FJ. Make the margins bigger

The story begins in 2006 with a trip down Route 66. Day in, day out, I looked at U.S. traffic signs that were either set in the old, somewhat clumsy “FHWA font series” or the new Clearview HWY typeface. Approaching the signs, I would often test myself: which typeface works best from a distance, and [...]

Peter Biľak I remember a conversation from back in my student days where my typophile friends and I debated what the ultimate typeface of the twentieth century was, a typeface that summed up all of the era’s advancements and knowledge into a coherent whole, one that would be a reference for years to come. Helvetica [...]

The day before leaving for India I had a client photo-shoot — pretty simple, no lighting — to show that choosing your bike over your car is good for the world and is also safer. And then I got on a airplane, pretty much setting an entire gas station on fire to study typography at [...]

Based near Burford, Oxfordshire, Fergus Wessel is a letter cutter producing fine memorials that can be seen throughout the UK, including St Paul’s Cathedral. Naomi Chapple interviews him in his workshop on his love of lettering and, in particular, the relevance of good typography in his work. Why did you decide to become a letter cutter? My [...]

Save our signage Recently, I posted an interview with type designer Verena Gerlach in which she laments the disappearance of shop signage & lettering (sources she’d used to design FF Karbid). Shops change hands, old signs are taken down or painted over and, in the process, numerous examples of wonderful lettering are forever lost. And [...]

Honesty in form is one of the major tenets of modernism. In other words, a design should accomplish a narrowly defined function in the simplest manner possible. This belief is extolled in many design disciplines, including typography. In 1931, Eric Gill wrote: “The world is not yet clothed in garments which befit it; in architecture, [...]

Welcome to another ‘week’ in type. So much is happening, I can barely keep up. If you haven’t already read it, then head on over to Typographica for their brilliant list of 50 favorite typeface releases of 2011. A great list and some fine reviews. Really like Typographica’s use of FF Quadraat. I am working [...]

By Taro Yumiba How and when did you become interested in typography & type design? At university I majored in graphic design. I used to leaf through typeface catalogs in search of letters to use in my poster design assignments. However, I could never find any typefaces that matched perfectly what I had in mind, so [...]

By Ivo Gabrowitsch & Christoph Koeberlin After more than 10 years, Verena Gerlach has revised and extended her FF Karbid super family, an interpretation of German storefront lettering from the early 1900s. The new FF Karbid is a harmonized redesign of the original typeface. Rounder and less narrow letters lend the shapes more space and [...]

The Week in Type More than half a millennium has passed since the invention of moveable type in Europe. It’s now just about impossible to imagine a world without it. That very sentiment is set in ink in this new print collaboration with Stefan Hattenbach. A sumptuous screen-print of gold, white, and black inks on [...]