“In this edition we’re getting down among the serifs, fiddling about with fonts and dabbling in Qwerty as well as trying to make sense of the Myers Briggs test and where it’s usefully employed. How has the idea of the book and the mechanical printing press fared since Gutenberg’s great idea?”

Check out the sonic collage that is The Night Air podcast.

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 ...

I will be in America’s dairyland on the 14th to give a talk, sponsored by Design Madison. They suggested that I come in March when it’s warmer but I said no way I grew up in Wisconsin, I am coming in January. Doncha know.

Happy New Year!

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

Hebrew lettering, inspired by Ben Shahn.

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 ...

I sent Brent Barson an email to tell him how much I enjoyed the opening titles for the fifth Typophile Film Festival made by him and his students. It happens to feature Scout and Dispatch but for me that was just a bonus. The animation is really amazing. Barson replied that it turns out Scout and Dispatch were just asking to be cut out of wood, metal, and plexiglass. Who knew? Christian Schwartz’s handsome Farnham also shows up, among others.

Scout also shows up in the inimitable Laurie Rosenwald’s animated chaos. Keep your eyes peeled for Loupot, me ...

A common maxim among type designers is that drawing a typeface isn’t about drawing beautiful letters: drawing a typeface is about making beautiful words. A typeface is a collection of separate parts that have to work together in every possible combination to form unified words.

Words can be very different from each other. A word can be as short as a single letter, or a word can be incredibly long. A word can be all lowercase letters, or a word can be all uppercase letters. A word might be a combination of both upper and lowercase letters. A word ...