We have received complaints from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Letters about the previous post, A Typical Day at the Office, depicting a member of Font Bureau’s design staff threatening a letter with a whip. Font Bureau would like to assure everyone that no letters are harmed in the creation of any Font Bureau typefaces. Font Bureau strongly condemns the mistreatment of any glyph. We apologize to anyone who may have been offended.

Creating typefaces isn’t as easy as you might think...

July 3, 2007. Boston

Font Bureau, Inc. is proud to present two new script families for summer, whether you are celebrating a friend’s wedding or a baseball season:

CASEY - a fat-bottomed Script in 3 weigths

Casey, Leslie Cabarga’s latest script, recalls Casey at the Bat, Enerest Lawrence Thayer’s vivid old baseball poem. Once, fat-bottomed scripts like Casey were everywhere but they barely survived as logos for Campbell’s soup, Ford, Coca-Cola and, of course, the Dodgers. In 2000, Emigre’s logo brought one back and popular use was on again. Cabarga’s splendid take on the swinging ...

I will do a presentation at the HOW conference in Atlanta on Monday, June 11. This is what it will look like. You don’t want to miss that now, do you?

A drawing from a sketchbook, exploring the possibilities of the phonetic alphabet...

Pelle Anderson invited me to Stockholm to give a presentation about my work. It will happen this Friday, April 20 at the Royal Library. Come check it out if you are in the neighborhood!

Here is more information in English and Swedish.

Steven Heller, art director/author/co-author/editor/etc, asked me some interesting questions about type design. I mumbled some responses. Somehow he was able to edit it all into a coherent interview for the online publication Voice: AIGA Journal of Design. Check it out!

One of the things I have struggled with as a type designer is explaining what I do for a living. This was especially true when I was starting out. I might be at a party with my girlfriend, now my wife, and we would be meeting some new people for the first time. At some point, one of these people would ask, “So Cyrus, what is your job?” I lived in particular fear of this question. I knew it would involve a lot of explanation about what a typeface is, how drawing them really is my job, and that it ...

The history of screen fonts is also the history of electronic authoring, design and publishing on computers. For over 30 years, from early electronic publishing, to the Internet of publishing today, screen fonts have proved of growing concern to users and publishers. What’s good? Or more appropriately: What are good options that should be available to users? Or to “Our” users?

Personal computers began with aliased screen fonts, otherwise known as black and white, or just plain bitmaps. In the mid-90’s Adobe introduced a version of Adobe Type Manager which produced anti-aliased type. Then in 1999, as Apple released its tenth operating system, anti-aliased type came to the Mac. Microsoft announced its own anti-aliased type rendering in 1999, then included various anti-aliasing options in Windows starting in 2002, and now, Microsoft’s most recent OS release contains anti-aliased type by default and a collection of fonts made especially for the purpose.

January 4, 2007. Boston.

Happy New Year from Font Bureau, Inc. To ring in 2007, we are proud to present two new families by Cyrus Highsmith:

ANTENNA - a Sans Serif in 28 styles

The calm and deliberation of Antenna offers further development to the excitement and mobility that we have come to expect from the hand of Cyrus Highsmith. Beyond the tension of his normal line, Highsmith places a new emphasis on the repeat and variation of counter shapes with the spaces between characters. Antenna’s rhythms project business-like subtleties through seven weights in four widths, with matching italics; FB ...