This is an interesting strategy. Jos Buivenga is a type designer producing high quality, fully-featured fonts and releasing them for free through his website. Perhaps realising the seemingly universal attitude that it’s perfectly OK to steal fonts, rather than accepting that they are licensed software products, he allows you to download his fonts with no restriction and just providing an option to donate through Paypal. I don’t know what the solution is to software and digital media piracy, but I’m not sure the honour system is the right way to go about it. I hope Jos Buivenga gets lots of donations, because the quality of his work deserves reward.
I’m particularly liking Fertigo. I think I can make use of that at work (and yes, we will donate):
Been meaning to post this for a little while, I think I found it via Design Observer, these simple t-shirts each bearing a sample of a great typeface. I think they’re a nice idea, but I’m a little disappointed that they don’t have designs that reflect the character of each face more, instead opting for name-of-face-in-a-box. Printing restrictions, I assume.
Still, they’re nice, if too small for me. Go and look.
I can’t quite recall why I’ve not blogged this before. For the life of me I can’t recall where I found it (I’ve had it on my hard drive for a while), but it was made by the “United Designers Network - Berlin”, a search for whom redirects to Spiekermann Partners.
Now and again I look at it and marvel how two entirely different types work so well on the same page. Viewed scaled down (below, in positive and negative) you can see that the whole piece has an even colour, and yet a closeup (right) shows that it’s set in Adobe Caslon and Wittenberg Fraktur (OK, I cribbed the name of the blackletter from the original PDF). I’d never have thought the two faces could have the same colour like that. I love it, it’s a really nice bit of inspiration.
Update: I guess I should have had a closer look through the Spiekermann Partners site! Alessandro Segalini mailed me with the blog entry describing the design motivation of the poster, apparently by Erik Spiekermann himself. Excerpt here:
The poster designed itself: the English text is set in Caslon, the typeface that George Bernard Shaw always specified for his writings; the German copy is set in Fraktur, the typeface used for setting German and other northern languages since Gutenberg. If it hadn’t been for the Nazis misusing these faces for their sinister purposes, we would still be reading Fraktur. It is the typeface of Goethe, Martin Luther, Karl Marx and Hegel. And it is perfectly suited to set our long words and interminable sentences, still evoking Gothic cathedrals and narrow streets with timbered houses. The one used is called Wittenberg Fraktur, after the town where Luther nailed his theses on a church door in 1517.
Incidentally, Spiekermann Partners developed the Deutsche Bahn brand system which I’ll no doubt blog about some time in the future.
One of those old images I’ve had around for a while found here (I think). I saved it because of the interesting script lettering (extracted on the right). It’s bloody hard to read (even if you can read German) and yet it’s really attractive. Maybe for a native Swiss German speaker it’s easier to read?
Update:Steffen wrote to tell me that this is Sütterlin script, and sent the Wikipedia entry on it. Thank you! From Wikipedia:
Sütterlinschrift (Sütterlin script), or Sütterlin for short, is the last widely used form of the old German blackletter handwriting (“Spitzschrift”). In Germany, the old German cursive script developed in the 16th century is also sometimes called Fraktur. ... The beautiful version that Sütterlin developed was taught in German schools from 1935 to 1941.
The full image below (top left) and a few others I rather like from the set.
It’s a bit tempting to create a category called “Stuff you didn’t know needed a name” for this. You know those bits that hold the counters in on type stencils? They’re called Pylons now, apparently.
Actually, I’m surprised they don’t already have a name.
In 1997 the British Library moved to its new building in St Pancras, which I remember reading was designed to roughly resemble a stack of books. Very roughly. It seems that other libraries had a similar idea but decided to be less abstract, much less abstract.
First off, Cardiff Public Library, which has built this (unfortunately) temporary covering for the building until it’s completed. I partly agree with the sentiments here (where I got the images) that the installation should be permanent, but that the books should change. I’m sure book publishers could provide the panels, both advertising the book (should people want to buy it) and the library (if they want to borrow it). It’s interesting how the books are all modern bestsellers, I’ll get to that later.
Then there’s the Kansas City Public Library, where the installation is permanent, on a much larger scale, and is designed to conceal the library’s car park. Here the public were asked to nominate books that they felt represented Kansas City. I’m not sure how Lord of the Rings meets that criteria, and I’m sure the last time I read Romeo and Juliet it wasn’t set in the mid-west, but there’s a hell of a lot I don’t know about Kansas City so I’m sure there’s a perfectly valid set of connections there. Mind you, notice here that all the books are great works, classics, high points of Western literature, which is a bit of a contrast with the Cardiff choices.
Now, I have some entirely unsubstantiated wild guesses about why this might be. I could suggest that the Cardiff Library is taking a deliberately populist stance, trying to make itself appear more relevant to “today’s busy Welshman and woman” and not as some ivory-tower isolated repository of dead knowledge. The British Press does tend to have a schizophrenic view of cultural establishments, either they’re lauding some wonderful new Establishment, preserving and restoring Great British Culture, or slagging off yet another white elephant, a waste of money, ignoring the sensible wishes of the Great British Public who Couldn’t Give A Toss.
The Kansas Library on the other hand, like other American city libraries, is likely to be regarded as an educational institution in its own right and an asset, worthy of city pride. Not forgetting that educational institutions in the US are big business, I would hazard a guess that city residents would have some pride invested in their city having a big library, it shows an educated population, and an educated population must have been able to afford college, so Kansas City must be a prosperous place indeed, well worth investing in. So they pick great works, because they represent learning and achievement better than books you could pick up at the checkout line at Wal-Mart.
Oh, and I’d just like to say that philosophical musings aside, I think both of these are bloody marvellous, and we should see more of this kind of thing.
Yes, it’s been around a while, but I don’t trawl for university logos very often. I came across the Coventry University logo today, and was immediately drawn to the calligraphic strokes forming the phoenix image - they remind me of the intaglio-printed lines on banknotes. I have quite a thing for banknote designs anyway. Interestingly, it seems the University decided that right-facing is future-looking, although the idea of using the phoenix refers quite specifically to the past (not that I disagree with their decision). The Wikipedia entry on the logo has this:
In the summer of 2006 the symbol was flipped on its vertical axis in order to portray the head of the phoenix looking to the right. The reason behind the decision was the desire to portray the university as looking forward rather than back.
Have a look at these great typographic maps of city neighbourhoods from ORK. There’s only Chicago and Brooklyn at the time of writing, but coming soon are Manhattan, San Francisco and Boston. I can’t wait for the Manhattan one.
They remind me a little of this typographic map of London, though I’d be interested to see London represented in the same style as the ORK ones. Well, that and other cities of the world too.
