Archive for Typography
Today I learned that people whose job was to align the type bars in typewriters (during manufacture) used this quasi-sentence to test the alignment: Amaranath sasesusos Oronoco initiation secedes Uruguay Philadelphia An explanation, from Darren Wershler-Henry’s 2005 book The Iron Whim: A Fragmented History of Typewriting: “Amaranath,” the misspelled name of an imaginary flower, checks […]
Many years ago, I read and enjoyed Richard S. Grant’s 1987 novel Rumors of Spring. But it had one flaw that lessened my enjoyment: the typeface that it was printed in. (At least in the mass-market paperback edition; I don’t know about other editions.) The letters of the typeface were fairly attractive. But the punctuation […]
Interesting article (from 2016) by John D. Berry about creating and refining the Bickham Script typeface. (via KTO)
I’ve been hearing about The Mac Is Not a Typewriter, by Robin Williams (no, not that Robin Williams), more or less since it came out in 1990, but I never got around to reading it until now. A quick look at the table of contents makes clear that I probably already know everything in it, […]
I’ve linked in the past to Indentifont, which asks you a series of questions about a font to help identify it. But I only just found out that there are several services that can identify a font based on an image of characters from the font. In particular: WhatTheFont, from MyFonts. Finds matches among their […]
Some Tolkien-related fonts: Tolkienesque Regular and Tolkienesque New (scroll down on page) Two fonts inspired by Tolkien’s calligraphy. The Regular version “has a slightly distressed feel, with uneven edges”; the New version “remade the entire font from scratch, in order to clean up all the outlines (to remove the ‘distressed’ quality) and give it a […]
Here’s a detailed look at the typography in the movie Alien. (Published in 2014.) (I posted this link on Facebook in 2015, but am recycling some of my old links from elsewhere to have them all in one place.) That same blog, Typeset in the Future, also has writeups of typography in 2001, Moon, and […]
Nifty and informative article about the process of designing Pitch, a monospaced typewriter-like typeface from Klim Type Foundry.
Fascinating article (from 2012) about a German map that showed “the distribution of typefaces across Europe in 1901.” Article goes on to discuss the political significance of the Fraktur style of typefaces, and the ways that the Nazis first embraced and then rejected that style.
My favorite Unicode character name is LATIN SMALL LETTER P WITH SQUIRREL TAIL (U+A755). The character itself is pretty cool too. If you're viewing this page in one of the...