Happy New Year!

‘Ras as-Sana’ drawn in Kufic style lettering.

Our December newsletter’s holiday greeting of spreading hope in any language features Richard Lipton’s Sloop WGL. Allan Haley writes about the story of David Berlow’s Hutch for Rolling Stone. Adding to the buzz about fonts for the web is David Berlow’s interview on FontFeed, and Cyrus Highsmith draws an original scripty masthead for Rhode Island Monthly.

If you missed our November newsletter featuring decorated letters and more, view it here.

Hebrew lettering, inspired by Ben Shahn.

PARIS BEAUTY MEETS A ROLLING STONE

Hutch, from Font Bureau, is a modern interpretation of Cochin, another French typeface. Cochin was first released in about 1915 by the Peignot type foundry in Paris and was based on the lettering of late eighteenth-century French copperplate engravers.

Metal and phototype versions of Cochin were used in some of the first issues of Rolling Stone magazine. When Joe Hutchinson, the magazine’s current art director, approached famed publication designer Roger Black about creating a display typeface for the publication, Black immediately suggested Cochin.

David Berlow, Font Bureau founder, and Jim Parkinson, who drew ...

Drawing a masthead is a nice change of pace. While a typeface contains hundreds of different glyphs, a masthead is usually just several letters long. You even know what order they go in. In contrast, the parts of a typeface can be assembled in almost any sequence and the letter drawer must plan for that.

There are some folks who delight in obscure letter combinations, archaic diacritic marks, and other linguistic minutiae. And it is important to take care with such details. Sometimes, I also like to just draw though.

I had a great time drawing this masthead for a ...

“ATypI ambitiously billed this year’s Typ09 conference as the discussion epicenter for the future of fonts on the Web... The loudest — and often the most inter­esting — of these voices was unarguably David Berlow’s.” Read more by Stephen Coles...

That was the tweet at least — a tweet being a Twitter or Twitster writing a headline and delivering it globally at text size, accompanied by a big picture of themselves or something.

But what am I saying — I’m doing it again: Writing a blog. Writing a blog on web fonts. Writing a blog on web fonts for an audience so mixed that I have a choice of confusing some of you all the time, all of you some of the time, and time itself (which I lost a couple times this past week) all the time.

I tell people ...

Last week the venerable Washington Post unveiled its new design, eight months in the making. More a “tweak” than an extreme makeover, the redesign was accomplished by an in-house team in collaboration with Roger Black and his studio. Charles Apple presents a very thorough review of the newspaper’s structural and design changes on his Visual Editors blog, including ample links to other sources and a PDF of The Post’s own special section detailing the changes.

The obvious change to The Post’s body copy font gets noted in several articles. But some of the more subtle changes in ...

Packing is almost done. My presentation is saved in about 40 different formats and 8 different places (one can never be too careful). Before I am technically awake on Sunday morning, I’ll be getting on a plane bound for Mexico City. I’m excited, and I can barely wait for ATypI: The Heart of the Letter to begin.

This promises to be one compelling conference. Web fonts are on top of everyone’s mind. David Berlow will be speaking about his experience with developing them in relation to designing agate fonts. Attendees will get a rare glimpse into the ...