August 21st, 2009 by owentroy It’s not new but people who aren’t type geeks may never have seen it. Quietly, unassumingly, and for years on and off, thirsttype founder Rick Valicenti, along with young designers Robb Irrgang and Satoru Nihei have been curating The Playground.
Mike Essl
Andrea Tinnes
Guang Yu
Rick Valicenti
Marian Bantjes
Paula Scher
Ed Fella
The interface/navigation is one of my favorites ever, and the concept simple. Each project’s designer makes an alphabet of 26 characters (or sometimes more; Paula Scher did like a dozen alphabets). The letters, some details about the alphabet and its designer, and in many cases a few designs using the type, are available to explore. Recent designs are available for download, though this is disabled after time. Type lovers: take some time to play.
August 14th, 2009 by owentroy There’s a finite amount of woodtype out there in the world; nobody’s making the stuff anymore and haven’t for a while. Not only was some of it never produced in quantity, but much was lost over time, discarded when the letterpress era seemed over, burned during the Dust Bowl or (most aggravatingly) made into knickknacks or sold one piece at a time at antique fairs. It also represents a distinct (and distinctly American) transitory moment in typography, where all number of styles were flourishing – condensed and extended, bold slabs and tuscans, rough sans, display faces of all sorts.
Luckily, in this information age, some typographic/historicalminded sorts have put together some fantastic resources to keep woodtypes from fading into the dustbin of memory.
The Rob Roy Kelly American Type Collection digitized. What Harry Smith did for American Folk Music, Rob Roy Kelly did for woodtypes. His book is by all accounts the one to get, (sadly we have yet to pony up for a copy). His 150+ specimens, plus copious information about the manufacturers and history, are all archived and well-organized at this University of Texas site.
Unicorn Graphics’ Wood Type Museum has scans of type specimen books, in their entirety, plus pictures of every piece of numerous full typefaces. Yes, the letters themselves. They seem interested in collecting and preserving more, so if you have drawers of woodtype lying about, you could do worse than to contact em to get it preserved digitally before selling it off piecemeal.
August 11th, 2009 by owentroy Here’s ten things found on But Does it Float, my new favorite blog that A) posts things no one else is posting, B) refrains from saying nearly anything about them, and C) allows them to fade in from white, forever, as you scroll down. The cumulative experience, with these disparate and abstract fragments seeming to delineate some great mystery fading in, feels positively dreamlike, if bordering on Lovecraftian.
Well, eight more after the jump. We can’t all have stream-of-forever after all.
Continue reading But Does it Float?
August 7th, 2009 by owentroy
August 5th, 2009 by owentroy  
 
 
Mmmm, overprintalicious. Credits and comments after the jump.
Continue reading Etsy-Schmetsy: This is only a test
July 31st, 2009 by owentroy 
Linzie Hunter‘s handlettered spam subject line series made a lot of buzz in the blogs a year back (and are now available as a postcard book from Chronicle Books) but we’ve recently rediscovered more examples of her awesome lettering. More images and words after the jump.
Continue reading TypograFriday: Linzie Hunter
July 24th, 2009 by owentroy 
Whether or not you’ve read Slaughterhouse Five, with its four-dimensional Tralfamadorians who can see every instant of their lives at once, I think we can all appreciate the marvelously interesting dimensional typography Alida Rosie Sayer made using bits of its text.
A recent graduate of the Glasgow School of Art, her work is thoughtful and interesting. There’s a short interview with her over at Yatzer. A few more of these Slaughterhouse Five pieces, a design for film titles, a beautifully reconfigured Yellow Pages, plus a of her influences after the jump.
Continue reading TypograFriday: Alida Rosie Sayer
July 10th, 2009 by owentroy 
Type designer Mark Simonson’s 2001 Art Deco type Mostra has been in our sights for some time now, ever since we got a few weights with our Indie Fonts 2 book (probably the only type we’ve used from the book.) The classic elegance of a Futura, Nobel or Kabel but with far more deco/period display quirkiness: it looks fantastic and interesting from light to black. Now he’s expanded the family into Mostra Nuova, not only OpenTyping his bevy of alternates into single typefaces but adding a fashionable hairline thin weight and a lowercase (imagineered without too much help from his original Italian poster sources, which rarely had lowercase.)
Simonson was smart to revisit this type. Since his original release of Mostra, deco-bordering modern sans like Neutraface, Gotham and Chalet/Comprime have become amazingly successful. And on the other side of things, deco display faces are being created and revived all the time. Mostra was in danger of becoming the godfather of a typographic revival trend but not a relevant player in it: Mostra Nuova corrects that.
It’s still got those arch-modernist elegant-but-odd proportions throughout, so don’t expect it to overtake Neutraface or Gotham in omnipresence. But I’m super-glad that its been added to the modern sans options: I recently made a poster that used Neutraface 2 for its “posterness” but found it came off a little more cold or generic than I wished. Next time I’ll be spec’ing Mostra Nuova.
Myfonts’ Interview with Simonson here. My wishlist for a Mostra Ultra Nuova, preemptively: ahistorical ligatures a la Avant Garde, a more regularized text variant a la Neutraface 2, a layerable 2-color cut a la Bifur, a sketch/irregular form a la the German and Austrian posters of the same period – Lucian Bernhard et al.
July 8th, 2009 by owentroy
July 2nd, 2009 by owentroy I am so excited about Where the Wild Things Are. Heck, I’m excited about the trailer. Spike Jonze, Dave Eggers, hand-drawn type, natural lighting and the Arcade Fire? What’s not to like?
It’s adapted from the classic by Maurice Sendak, which plays, I think, a special part in a lot of our psyches, especially the visual artists among us. To back up this hunch, I offer you some selections from Cory Godbey’s curated collection of Where the Wild Things Are inspired artworks, Terrible Yellow Eyes. He began the project/blog two months ago and has already posted almost 100 incredible pieces. Click each for jumbo-size.
Ana Galvañ
Pascal Campion
Seven more plus a fur-covered book after the jump. 
Continue reading Wild Things
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