Urban Cross-Stitch
Thanks to all for the amazing work at our urban cross stitch workshop! The two teams tackled the basketball court wire fencing at Tompkins Square Park on a BEAUTIFUL spring day. In an epic battle of boys (“I Believe) vs. girls (“Your Magic is Real”), the girls kicked ass!!! Not only did the girls have the more difficult typeface (blackletter), but they also had more characters and detailing (highlighting!) to complete.
After spending a beautiful afternoon cross-stitching the fence with typography, this workshop makes me want to do more large scale and hands-on typography!
What did you think of the experience of crating large scale public typography?
It’s important to know the proper terms of typography, especially when we critique and review your typeface designs. Take a look and study these anatomy of type basics.
You can also read an article on the Basics of Typography: http://www.thefloatingfrog.co.uk/tag/typography/#ixzz0sxlHNtJQ
Fabian Gonzalez must love superheros more than the average man! His newest illustration shows us our ABCs in true superhero style. I got Batman, Superman and Zorro but can someone please name the rest?
Submitted by Brett P.
Some more inspiration for your project:
Sewing
Thread
This thread type is by designer and Cranbrook MFA graduate Elle Kim.
Found objects
Water
Food
Wire
What other artforms can you name which can be combined to create experimental typography?
For anyone doing stitching/sewing for your typeface, check out this work-in-progress of a stitched typeface.
Tools used: Couple of needles, yellow thread, thick carton, Black & Decker drill, a Mac, hours of designing and sewing!
Came across this fantastic artist doing typography related illustrations, thought it might be good for the Tumblr: http://www.fmagnotta.com/portfolio.html
Submitted by Az C.
Typographica is a great source that I like using for typeface reviews, inspiration, commentary on typefaces and typographic design. Bookmark this site and check it out.
What are some of your favorite typography resources online?
At long last, designers can use real fonts on the web. But what now? Where do we go from here? Tim Brown has been studying type on the web for seven years, and has lots of ideas to share. In this talk, Tim will guide you through using typographic tools and perspectives that will change the way you design websites. Typography is an ancient art and craft; we are merely its latest practitioners. By looking to our tradition for guidance, we might once more attain our finest typographic achievements in this new medium.
Tim Brown is Type Manager for Typekit. He studies, promotes, and advances the craft of web typography on a daily basis, and shares what he knows at Nice Web Type. Tim has written for A List Apart, and he helps web designers with tools like Web Font Specimen.
Massimo Vignelli only uses 12 typefaces, and claims that for design to work, ‘twelve typefaces is enough’. He says type is like a piano, the more you use them, the better you get at it. Vignelli is an exceptional designer, he’s also considered the ‘grandfather of modernism’. Most of his work’s beauty and simplicity can be attributed to the self-imposed type palette of twelve typefaces.
So here is a list of the twelve typefaces that you’ll ever need, according to Vignelli’s view:
THE CLASSICS
Caslon
Baskerville
Bodoni
THE SLAB SERIF
Clarendon
THE GROTESQUE
Akzidenz Grotesk
THE GEOMETRIC SANS SERIF
Futura
Gotham
THE NEO-GROTESQUE
Helvetica
THE HUMANIST SANS
Scala Sans
Frutiger
Meta
THE COMPREHENSIVE & UNIFIED SUPER-FAMILY
Thesis
There are undoubtedly many professionals in our field who share Vignelli’s views, but for me, although I understand limiting your type choices to achieve beauty in simplicity, I believe having such a limiting number of typefaces simply cannot work with the current demands of design—the technological progress in visual communication requires differentiation and a wider option for legible type for web, digital billboards, and now even hand-held mobile devices.
What are your thoughts?
A great video submitted by Michael Q. on Herbert Matter’s design process in approaching the New Havel Railroad. Check out the hundreds of typographic solutions Herbert created before arriving at the final logo. Thanks Michael!
I chose Herbert Matter, after watching the podcast and seeing his New Haven logo. I did some research online and found a video, (linked) of all the different sketches he made before settling upon the present. Watching the video, its seems that Matter played with a lot of very thin san serif types, many of them italicized or connected.
via Michael Q.
