Obama is a central focus in this midterm election. Candidates associate themselves with the President or oppose him. So I would have thought the visual identity choices would reflect this relationship. Not so much.

Draw a letter, any letter! And so you did. We thank all of you at TypeCon who stepped up to our exhibit table in Los Angeles and participated in our letter-drawing collage.

It’s rare for Font Bureau to have an intern, but for three weeks we were delighted to have Louise Paradis intern with us in our Boston studio. She hails from Montreal, worked in Los Angeles for a time, and is now a graduate student in art direction at ECAL, Ecole cantonale d’art de Lausanne (University of Art and Design Lausanne) in Switzerland. I had a chance to talk with her before she left.

MLM: What led you to Font Bureau?
LP: Well, one project for a class of mine was by my professor François Rappo. He required us ...

The beginning of Chapter II is the fourth installment of Mike Parker’s Story of Type. Old style roman and italic typefaces are introduced, where capitals modeled after ancient Italian incised inscriptions are combined with a lowercase modeled on the forms of the Carolingian minuscule. The time period spans from the mid 15th century to the early 19th century and focuses on punchcutters of Italian, French, Dutch, British, and Hungarian origin.

II. Old Style Roman and Italic Typefaces

Nicholas Jenson (French, 1420–1480)

In Venice, the first great cultural center of the developing Renaissance, the blackletter used by the mediaeval ...

A very brief animated version history of the book, more or less.

Paul Shaw reviews Trilby in an article for Print magazine. “Although the sans serif was originally a bastard offspring of the slab serif, the latter has been copying the former for the past 80 years, and Trilby by David Jonathan Ross continues this trend.” Read more...

The following is the text from the presentation I gave at Matthew Carter’s AIGA Boston Fellows Award ceremony on September 24, 2010.

Accolades again to Matthew Carter! On the heels of receiving the AIGA Boston Fellows Award, he is among 22 others selected for the 2010 MacArthur Fellows, often referred to as the “genius award.” This year includes an impressive line up of recipients working across a broad spectrum of endeavors. Read more here about “a type designer crafting letterforms of unequaled elegance and precision that span the migration of text from the printed page to computer screens.”

The third installment of Mike Parker’s Story of Type completes the first chapter, I. Roots of Western Letterforms & Typography. Like the previous installment we remain in the 15th century, and while Gutenberg was making history with movable type, Mantegna was making his mark with monumental Roman capitals.

Roman Capitals: Andrea Mantegna (Italian, 1431-1506)

This Italian Renaissance artist was among of the first to study and revive the monumental capitals of imperial Rome, foreshadowing the development of typographic capitals to come.

When asked if he had any additional insight about Mantegna, Matthew Carter offered the following:

The study of classical ...

Led by Font Bureau and Ascender Corp., Webtype.com introduces a new range of web fonts optimized for high quality text rendering across browsers. Webtype.com launches an innovative web font service to improve web typography.