Fonts In Use: Colored body text
In setting body text, deviating from the black-text norm is an easily forgotten option. Here is a plea – in four examples – to offer readers the surprise of color as an extra dimension.
Featured This Week
Design News
That was Fontstand’s 2022 conference!
On September 9th and 10th, Fontstand organized its third conference in The Hague. After years of necessary Covid restrictions, many community members were thrilled to gather together in person again.
Design News
New Releases
Font Reviews
Book Reviews
Fonts In Use
Essays
Knowledge
Foundry Profiles
Quick News
Tune in into a stream of updates on everything typography and design. ↓
Jaini: Glimpsing alternate traditions
A Devanagari typeface whose design references a calligraphic style used in Jain manuscripts.
A matter of taste
Italy’s typographic modernism under fascism: In the 1930s, graphic designers found in fascist propaganda exhibitions and industrial advertising new spaces where an “Italian”-modernist visual language could be developed.
Kuzushiji recognition with AI
Dr. Tarin Clanuwat – a young scholar from Thailand who specialized in Japanese medieval literature – has developed an AI-based character recognition system, which magically transcribes pre-modern Japanese characters into modern Japanese.
Berlin’s typographic legacy
In 2021, four Berlin institutions collaborated to digitize a large part of their printed type specimen collections and make the images freely available online.
Kopius
This serif typeface is full of surprises. It looks lively, is pleasantly readable, and its italics are independent in their design and full of verve.
Nebiolo typefaces in search of an author
An analysis of the archive material that survived after Nebiolo’s shutdown makes it possible to identify more precisely the role played by Studio Artistico’s director Alessandro Butti, Novarese’s predecessor, in creating Nebiolo typefaces. The case of the photo in the type specimen book PC 570.
Quick News
Yesterday a new exhibition entitled Italy and Alliance Graphique Internationale. 25 Graphic Designers of the 20th Century opened at the Magazzino delle Idee Trieste. It looks great, and if you can get to Triest, Italy by 6 January 2023, you can see it.
From 30 September through 30 December 2022, you can travel to the storied Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris for a new exhibition, From Garamont to the Garamond: a typographic journey. There is also a book by Rémi Jimenes to check out, Claude Garamont : typographe de l’humanisme, written in French and published by the Éditions des Cendres.
Join Emily Gravett, the twice Kate-Greenaway-Medal-winning-illustrator, as she chats with her editor Suzanne Carnell, publisher at the children’s book imprint Two Hoots. Emily’s distinctive illustrations and stories are laced with wit and unexpected turns. Best known for now picture book classics like Meerkat Mail and Orange Pear Apple Bear, they’ll talk about Emily’s journey to becoming an illustrator, how they work together, the art of entertaining the reader as well as the young listener, and look at her new book 10 Cats. This 11 October 2022 lecture at St Bride in London is another activity you can attend online or in person.
To coincide with the “A Kingdom of Cardboard” exhibition at the St Bride Foundation, celebrating the BBC’s centenary, Bob Richardson will deliver a lecture on the collection of BBC-related ephemera he has amassed over 35 years since starting work at the BBC in 1977. His collection holds many treasures, including iconic channel idents, an illuminated Police Box panel from Tom Baker’s Tardis from 1980, studio logos used on set for Match of the Day, an early example of the famous Blue Peter badge, designed by Tony Hart in 1963 for a fee of £100 guineas and much more. On 21 September, the lecture will take place in person at St Bride in London and online via Zoom. A ticket must be purchased to attend in either fashion, so act now!