Type Design

You may be wondering, ‘why Neue Haas Grotesk when we have Helvetica?’ To offer the best reason, and the one that’s the most interesting, we have to go back quite a few decades, to Switzerland.

Neue Haas Grotesk was the original name given to the typeface that Max Miedinger drew in the 1950s for Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas Typefoundry) in Switzerland under the direction of Eduard Hoffmann. It was designed to compete with the German-designed Akzidenz Grotesk and others. Shortly after release from Haas, the name was changed at the request of parent company Stempel to “Helvetica” (Latin for ...

Cyrus Highsmith designed Salvo Sans & Salvo Serif (originally called Boomer Sans & Boomer Serif) as one series for AARP. It’s been called “hopeful, informative, alive, embracing and delightful.” We couldn’t agree more.

“Ever since I started to draw type, one of the challenges that has intrigued me the most is figuring out how letters carry their weight,” David Jonathan Ross begins in his article for I Love Typography. He illustrates his exploration with three of his typefaces, Manicotti, Trilby (above), and Condor.

The Museum of Modern Art announced the acquisition of 23 new digital typefaces for its Architecture and Design Collection, including Font Bureau’s Miller by Matthew Carter and Interstate by Tobias Frere-Jones.

This acquisition is significant because generally graphic design has not figured prominently in the museum’s focus and has been historically limited to posters. Recognizing this, the museum set out to correct what was considered “a lacuna in the collection,” according to Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA, and typefaces were identified among the new categories to be addressed. In fact, only one other ...

What an extraordinary year in type and typography. And I am certainly not likely to be alone in observing this. After a decade and a half of struggle, “web fonts” finally took off and ran smack dab into issues of rendering, metadata, and licensing, while also running right through various font formats and cross-platform output-equivalence issues without stopping for a chat.

Font designers, web programmers, server specialists, standards organizations, applications developers, and psychologists swelled the ranks of great people who are now focused on issues like: networked, multi-platform, dynamic typography and layout; auto-hinting for rasterization across operating systems; and my ...

Part 2: Readability, Affability, Authority

On the i love typography blog, William Berkson, designer of Williams Caslon Text, posts part two of Reviving Caslon. He begins, “When their words are put into print, writers want the text to be inviting and welcoming, so that readers will read what they have written. And they also want the text to have an aura of credibility, so it will be taken seriously and maybe even accepted.” Read more...

[read Part 1: The Snare of Authenticity]

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.

My friend Joanna sent me an email a couple of weeks ago saying, “I heard a news blip this morning that I thought was sort of fascinating.” She went on to quote the news item about the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay’s decision to switch to Century Gothic as the default for all printed campus e-mails.

“You should design a ‘green’ font,” she urged.

I began to respond with a dissertation about how there are plenty of so-called “green” fonts already, but it got me thinking.

As some news articles have noted, most fonts that are light in weight or ...

At the heart of calligraphy is the stroke that comes from the pen, the brush or whatever tool you choose to dip into the black ink and pull across the white page. Type design can of course be looked at through the lens of the calligraphic stroke. And it often is.

But what interests me is what makes typography and calligraphy different. In movable type, each character has a certain amount of letter space, and a fixed amount of line space, that belongs to it. In foundry type this is becomes the body, it’s a physical thing. In my ...