JG Ballard

JG Ballard covers by timeline.

India's News Calligraphers Do It on Deadline

The Musalman is possibly the last handwritten newspaper in the world. Four professional calligraphers spend three hours on each page every single day to put out this daily paper.

Source: Wired
Thanks Valdemar!

Design&Typo - The site

Wow... what a great resource. Peter Gabor, from design et typo blog (FR), has put together a nice gallery collection, categorized by author or theme, that is a pleasure to browse. Go take a look at the Design&Typo Site.

Some examples:

PROFILE: Piet Zwart

Piet Zwart (Zaandijk, 28 May 1885 – Wassenaar, 24 September 1977) was a Dutch photographer, typographer, and industrial designer. He started his career as an architect and worked for Jan Wils and Berlage.


As a designer, Zwart was well known because of his work for both the Nederlandse Kabelfabriek Delft (the Dutch Cable Factory in Delft) and the Dutch Postal Telegraph and Telephone, and as a pioneer of modern typography. He did not adhere to traditional typography rules, but used the basic principles of constructivism and "De Stijl" in his commercial work. His work can be recognized by its primary colors, geometrical shapes, repeated word patterns and an early use of photomontage.
He created a total of 275 designs in 10 years for the NKF Company, almost all typographical works. He resigned in 1933 to become an interior, industrial and furniture designer.
Piet Zwart died at the age of 92 in 1977.

More info at Tipografos.net article on Piet Zwart.(Portuguese)

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Flickr Set then AceJet then a new blog by Vernon: newtypography.

Kate Moss - The Brand

With her first line of clothing due to cause riots in Topshop at the beginning of next month, plus other projects in the pipeline, Brand Moss has arrived, her new image sealed by an identity masterminded by Peter Saville, in collaboration with typographer Paul Barnes.

Read the full article at Creative Review.

Eric Gill got it wrong; a re-evaluation of Gill Sans

An article by Ben Archer at Typotheque: a face to face between Eric Gill and Edward Jonhston, with a strong inclination for the last one.

Gill Sans is the Helvetica of England; ubiquitous, utilitarian and yet also quite specific in its ability to point to our notions of time and place. As a graphic designer’s in-joke once put it ‘Q. How do you do British post-war design? A. Set it in Gill Sans and print it in British Racing Green’. As the preferred typeface of British establishments (the Railways, the Church, the BBC and Penguin Books), Gill Sans is part of the British visual heritage just like the Union Jack and the safety pin.

So to pick an argument with something that is akin to a typographic national monument might appear unwise; it is so very much ‘ours’. But it is a flawed masterpiece. How flawed? Well, monumentally flawed, in fact. In 2006, now that Gill Sans is distributed freely with Apple’s OS X and Adobe’s Creative Suite products, it is time to re-examine those flaws. Ever since Gill Sans was incorporated into the Adobe/Linotype library in the early 1990s what used to be Monotype Gill Sans became GillSans. The new compound name and the missing foundry attribution serves to distance today’s users of this type from any awareness that Monotype used to issue Gill Sans in a range of different series with alternate cuts. Readers with experience of metal and phototypesetting may recall this system, but for now, the majority of us only have this ‘bundled’ version of GillSans to go by.


Continue reading the article over at Typotheque.

Source: Tipografias.

Thinking for a living

The Thinking for a Living series is an ever-growing platform dedicated to the concept of open source design education.
Lots of resources...Check out the typography section.

Akzidenz Grotesk

I found this video dedicated to Akzidenz. :)

Akzidenz Grotesk is a realist sans-serif typeface originally released by the H. Berthold AG type foundry in 1896. Contemporary versions of Akzidenz Grotesk descend from an early-1950s project, directed by Günter Gerhard Lange at Berthold, to enlarge the typeface family, adding a larger character set, but retaining all of the idiosyncrasies of the 1896 face. Some new weights, condensed and extended widths were released under the title Standard. While Günter Gerhard Lange sought to academically retain Akzidenz Grotesk's imperfections, Max Miedinger's 1957 Swiss typeface Helvetica, used it as a model but sought to refine the typeface making it more even and unified. Akzidenz Grotesk also influenced Adrian Frutiger's 1958 typeface Univers. Akzidenz Grotesk is the first sans serif typeface to be widely used.

Akzidenz is sometimes at first glance mistaken for the Helvetica or Univers typefaces. The similarities of Helvetica and Akzidenz are apparent, but the subtle differences include the uppercase and lowercase C, and the uppercase G J, R, and Q:

You can find more about Akzidenz Grotesk Roots at Typophile.

Source: lletraorama and Wikipedia.

Double Page - A LiveJournal Community

Very worthy browsing material at LiveJournal community Douple Page, with lots of links to a variety of magazines.

Source: Maquetadores.

Alan Kitching

Talk: Tuesday 13 February 2007 at 7pm; exhibition preview 5.30pm
Exhibition: Wednesday 14 February to Thursday 8 March 2007
Where: At the world's foremost printing and graphic arts library, the St. Bride Library, in London.

Graphic designer, typographer, letterpress printmaker and teacher, Alan Kitching is internationally renowned for his expressive use of letterpress type, process and materials in creating typographic designs for publishing, advertising and his own limited edition prints and ‘Broadside’ publications.

Born in Darlington, County Durham in 1940, Alan left school aged 14 to become an apprentice compositor with a local printer. In 1961 he moved south to pursue a career in design. New directions were inspired by working as typography instructor under Anthony Froshaug in the Experimental Printing Workshop at the School of Art in Watford College of Technology.

Alan subsequently established his own design practice, taught at the Central School of Art, and was invited by Derek Birdsall to join the Omnific Design Partnership. He became visiting lecturer in typography at the Royal College of Art in 1988 and established his workshops there for students of all disciplines.

In 1989 Kitching decided to return to his letterpress roots and launched The Typography Workshop in Clerkenwell London with the first of his A1 ‘Broadside’ sheets – ‘an occasional publication devoted to the typographic arts’. As well as compositions for corporate identities, magazine and book covers and illustrations, Alan’s work has also featured on postage stamps, theatre posters, shop windows, billboards, signage and a 30 x 15ft typographic mural for the Guardian Newspaper’s London office.

Source: St. Bride Library
Continue reading...

Espacios Publicitarios - Ad Space

There´s a very nice gallery at Flickr showing some ads from medical/pharmaceutical magazines "Clínica Rural" and "Glosa" from the 50's, 60's and 70's.


Source: David Airey

Die 100 besten schriften

FontShop presents the results for the 100 Best Fonts, who brought together several top designers and typographers to determine the greatest fonts ever. Either you like it or not, Helvetica is number one.
You can download the PDF here.

Akira Kobayashi

Akira is the spotlight designer of this month FontShop Newsletter:
He began working at a phototype manufacturer in Japan where he had to draw hundreds of complex Japanese characters every week. He was soon turned on to Western alphabets and went on to win awards for his Latin typefaces. As Type Director for Linotype, Kobayashi works with legends of type design — Adrian Frutiger and Hermann Zapf — to update their most important faces: Avenir, Frutiger, Palatino, and Optima.
You can also read what he says on the creation of FF Clifford here.

Towards a non linear typography?

EXP - a non profit research team, has a very interesting blog.
They discuss in this article the Aztec writing system:
When we think to writing and printing as visual forms, we always accept the linguistic and alphabetical model of linearity as the basis for organizing syntactically coherent and effective messages. However, this is perhaps the relic of a misconception about what a graphic notation really is – and what can do –, grounded on the idea of a parallel between verbal syntax (which is necessarily unilinear since it follows the flow of time, although no performed speech act is literally linear nor monodimensional) and visual entaxis (which is the distribution in a synoptic space of inscription of features, characters and groups of notational units as tokens, assumed as identical with syntax while in no way has to coincide with it).
Continue reading...

They were at Lisbon’s ATypI (pics here) and will be talking at the "Trianalle de Milano", starting January 20 until April 25.

Beste Schriften

Interesting countdown at Fontblog for Best Fonts (in German).
Number 10 goes to Univers and Number 9 to Gill Sans.
Keep checking to know more...

The radical architecture of little magazines 196X-197X

If you´re a fan of magazine covers like I am, you´ll love this resource.
Clip/Stamp/Fold is an amazing researh and collect work by a team of Ph.D. candidates at the School of Architecture at Princeton University:
An explosion of architectural little magazines in the 1960s and 1970s instigated a radical transformation in architectural culture with the architecture of the magazines acting as the site of innovation and debate. Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X – 197X takes stock of seventy little magazines from this period, which were published in over a dozen cities. Coined in the early twentieth century to designate progressive literary journals, the term “little magazine” was remobilized during the 1960s to grapple with the contemporary proliferation of independent architectural periodicals. The terms “little” and “magazine” are not taken at face value. In addition to short-lived radical magazines, Clip/Stamp/Fold includes pamphlets and building instruction manuals along with professional magazines that experienced “moments of littleness,” influenced by the graphics and intellectual concerns of their self-published contemporaries.

Update: Also check out Colophon2007 and Magculture

Markus Rathgeb on Otl Aicher

There is a nice interview at MetropolisMag with Markus Rathgeb, author of a monograph on Otl Aicher, graphic designer for the 1972 Munich Olympics.

Via Design Observer.

The most of all Time

The 20 most important type designers of all time? Here is a list... in typophile.

Briar Press Museum

"NOTWITHSTANDING the range of press sizes and shapes you'll observe in these pages, the basic technology of the letterpress changed little during its roughly five hundred year development: its object is the impression of type into paper. After Gutenberg, letterpress invention was but a series of refinements on this one idea. There are many ways to approach the presses in the Museum; browsing is as easy as clicking an image or a name. For serious browsing, we've sorted the presses by Type, based on the central mechanism or form of each press."

Briar Press Museum
This is an excellent historic resource on letterpress and type history.

Jules Vernacular

If you feel like browsing a very nice gallery of pics, here´s the link for you.