
A list of all items tagged with type design
A short and strong statement of position by a type designer. The book takes a wide view, taking in the business of present-day font production, and the technics and the ethics of type as software. As always, Smeijers’s arguments are informed by a strong historical sense. The book also shows his own work as a designer, and is published as a conclusion to the award to him of the Gerrit Noordzij Prize.
Out of print. Find out moreCounterpunch is packed with ideas. It is both an investigation into the technics of making metal type by hand, and a consideration of present questions in type design. The discussion takes in the fundamentals of designing and making letters, so that the book can be read as a guide to type and font construction in any medium. Lively, pointed drawings and photographs complement an equally fresh text.
Out of print. Find out moreThis occasional, book-length work is edited and produced at the Department of Typography, University of Reading, and is now published by Hyphen Press. It publishes extended articles on its subject, exploring topics to the length to which they want to go. Its scope is broad and international, its treatment – serious and lively.
Out of print. Find out moreThis latest issue of the series of Typography papers opens with a beautifully illustrated article by the type designer Gerard Unger on ‘Romanesque’ letters. A further installment of Eric Kindel’s pathbreaking history of stencil letters is published in contributions by him, Fred Smeijers, and James Mosley. Maurice Göldner writes the first history of an early twentieth-century German typefounder, Brüder Butter. William Berkson and Peter Enneson recover the notion of ‘readability’ through a history of the collaboration between Matthew Luckiesh and the Linotype Company. Paul Luna discusses the role of pictures in dictionaries. Titus Nemeth describes a new form of Arabic type for metal composition. The whole gathering shows the remarkable variety and vitality of typography now.
Find out more and buyWe are publishing here materials from the ‘Typeform dialogues’ project carried out at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, London, in 1994–8 and afterwards. This is the second edition of the document first published on this website in 2012. The main change in this new edition is the addition of essays by Eric Kindel (‘Eminents observed’) and Catherine Dixon (‘Systematizing the platypus’). As in the first edition, the document contains the User’s Manual for the CD-based interface, which was the project’s main focus, together with various supporting materials that describe the project. The work is edited by Eric Kindel, with contributions throughout from Catherine Dixon.
Find out more and buyIn connection with his forthcoming book Active literature, Christopher Burke will be talking on 19 June at the St Bride Printing Library in London on ‘Jan Tschichold: the missing typefaces’. An exhibition at the Library of work by Tschichold, curated by Christopher Burke and Robin Kinross, will open then and be on display through to 23 August. Go here for more information.
Robin Kinross / 2009.03.25
2011.06.07
Fred Smeijers interviewed, as OurType makes a deal with WebInk: here
Fred Smeijers / 2011.11.01
On 13 October in Antwerp Fred Smeijers spoke some words of introduction at the opening of the exhibition ‘The Most Widely Read Man in the World: Matthew Carter’, on show until the end of the year at the Catapult gallery. We are glad to publish the text here, both for its homage to Matthew Carter (son of Harry Carter) and in its own right, as a piece of writing. If you like this, you may also enjoy Smeijers’s meditations on ‘what is a classic typeface?’. (For their advice and help in publishing this, thanks to Fred Smeijers, Matthew Carter, and Eric Kindel.) Read more
We have today posted – free to download – a document that gathers materials from the Typeform dialogues project, carried out by Eric Kindel, Catherine Dixon, and others at Central Saint Martins, London, in 1994–8 and afterwards. (Update: this document is here.)
Last month we uploaded a second, much extended, edition of the ‘Typeform dialogues’ document, first published here in 2012. Read more