Three Great Typography Tutorials From Veer

If you’ve been read­ing this blog for any length of time you’ll notice I am a big fan of the stock photo/illustration/font site Veer. They have great resources for all design­ers. They also have pro­duced some out­stand­ing videos. For today’s Typog­ra­phy Tues­day I’d like to share 3 great tuto­ri­als they have pro­duced for work­ing with fonts.

Veer Fonts Tuto­ri­als: How to adjust fonts

Veer Fonts Tuto­ri­als: How to install fonts

  Veer Fonts Tuto­ri­als: Open­Type introduction

Typography Tuesday: “Go Wild With OpenType”

For this install­ment of Typog­ra­phy Tues­day I had to share Veer Presents: “Go Wild With Open Type.” This clever ad mixes some of my favorite things, fonts, mid-century mod­ern esthetic and clever pro­duc­tion. Fantastic!

“Go Wild With Open­Type” is the third in a series of retro sci­ence films about fonts, from Veer. In this install­ment, the nar­ra­tor explains Open­Type tech­nol­ogy, the man ben­e­fits of Open­Type fonts, and how to access their spe­cial fea­tures and expanded char­ac­ter sets.

Typography Tuesday: “Ready, Typeset, Go!”

For this install­ment of Typog­ra­phy Tues­day I had to share Veer Presents: “Ready, Type­set, Go!” This clever ad mixes some of my favorite things, fonts, mid-century mod­ern esthetic and clever pro­duc­tion. Fantastic!

 “Ready, Type­set, Go!” is the sec­ond in a series of retro sci­ence films about fonts, from Veer. In this install­ment, the nar­ra­tor explains how sim­ple adjust­ments like font size and tech­ni­cal tricks like kern­ing can make great fonts look even better.

Typography Tuesday “Our Fonts, Our Friends”

For this install­ment of Typog­ra­phy Tues­day I had to share Veer Presents: “Our Fonts, Our Friends.” This clever ad mixes some of my favorite things, fonts, mid-century mod­ern esthetic and clever pro­duc­tion. Fantastic!

“Our Fonts, Our Friends” is the first in a series of retro sci­ence films about fonts, from Veer. In this install­ment, the nar­ra­tor dis­cusses font styles, how to choose your font, and where to find an end­less sup­ply of afford­able fonts.

Know Your Type Designers: William Caslon II

This week’s Typog­ra­phy Tues­day: Know You Type Design­ers: William Caslon I.

William Caslon II

Born 1720
Died: 1778

Most famous for being the son of William Caslon I, he nonethe­less had a big role in con­tin­u­ing the suc­cess of the foundry cre­ated by his father. He took over the busi­ness and began man­ag­ing it in 1766. He kept the foundry as a major player in the Eng­lish type set­ting busi­ness. Upon his death he, left the foundry to his son William Caslon III (1754–1833) who con­tin­ued the fam­ily busi­ness into the 19th Century.

Know Your Type Designers: William Caslon I

This week’s Typog­ra­phy Tues­day: Know You Type Design­ers: William Caslon I.

William Caslon I

Born 1692 in Worces­ter­shire, Eng­land
Died: 1766
Type­faces: Caslon, Pica Roman, Small Pica No. 1, Long Primer No. 2, Great Primer Roman

It’s an old printer’s maxim that “when in doubt use Caslon.” It is impres­sive that for almost 200 years his type­face has been used as the default font for print­ers in the Eng­lish speak­ing world.

Orig­i­nally trained as a gun­smith and engraver, William Caslon I opened his own type foundry in 1722; where he devel­oped Hebrew, Ara­bic and Roman type­faces. The pro­duc­tion of his Roman fonts ended the Eng­lish depen­dence on Dutch made type. Though  not con­sid­ered an inno­va­tor (since his style of fonts were com­mon) his exe­cu­tion and con­sum­mate skill as a crafts­man are unpar­al­leled. His type­faces were also very pop­u­lar in Amer­ica and was used by Mary Kather­ine God­dard for the print­ing of the Amer­i­can Dec­la­ra­tion of Independence.

For more information:

• William Caslon Biography
• William Caslon on Wikipedia
• Caslon Font
• Adobe Caslon Font

Typography Tuesday: Typeface the Movie

I just watched an amaz­ing doc­u­men­tary, Type­face. As an unabashed typophile I must highly rec­om­mend this film. It is the true tale of a The Hamil­ton Wooden Type Museum and it’s role in try­ing to doc­u­ment and try­ing to keep alive the art of hand type­set­ting.  If you are inter­ested in any way in his­tory, print­ing, design or art, do your­self a favor and check it out!

In rural Wis­con­sin, a lone employee waits in a cav­ernous old museum for vis­i­tors to come. A few indi­vid­u­als strag­gle in every few days and then, come Fri­day, the museum fills with life. Machines hum, presses print, artists buzz about. One week­end each month, the quiet of Two Rivers is inter­rupted as car­loads of arti­sans drive in from across the Mid­west. The place comes alive as print­mak­ing work­shops led by, and filled with, some of the nation’s top design tal­ent descend on the sleepy enclave. — from the offi­cial film site.

Type­face Trailer 1

Type­face Trailer 2

For more information:

• Hamil­ton Wooden Type Musuem
• The Offi­cial Type­face Movie Page
• Hamil­ton Wooden Type Museum on Twitter
• Hamil­ton Wooden Type Museum on Flickr
• Hamil­ton Wooden Type Museum on Facebook

Random Design Quote

A ran­dom quotes from famous graphic design­ers on design, cul­ture and art.

As a craft, typog­ra­phy shares a long com­mon bound­ary and many com­mon con­cerns with writ­ing and edit­ing on the one side and with graphic design on the other; yet typog­ra­phy itself belongs to neither.

–Robert Binghurst, The Ele­ments of Typo­graphic Style

Typography Tuesday: 5 Awesome Web Based ASCII Generators

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Ah, it’s Tues­day and that means it is typog­ra­phy time! This I’d like to share five awe­some web based ASCII art gen­er­a­tors. ASCII Art is one of the finest of the geek arts, plus it’s a fun lit­tle trick to add to your HTML code, a sort of Easter Egg like on a DVD. I have found a lot of soft­ware you can down­load to cre­ate ASCII art, but maybe I’m just para­noid about down­load­ing unknown soft­ware to my sys­tem. With that dis­clo­sure, I pre­fer these web based gen­er­a­tors. Some do text, some do images and some do both.

A major tip for gen­er­at­ing images make sure that your images have lots of con­trast, that will aid these tools quite a bit.

• patorjk.com/software/taag/
  My per­sonal favorite for text, an online web appli­ca­tion that allows you to type in large ASCII Art text in real time.
• degraeve.com/img2txt.php
  My favorite for con­verts images to ASCII.
• glassgiant.com/ascii/
  This one con­verts pic­tures to ASCII text art
• network-science.de/ascii/
  Gen­er­ate a ASCII graphic from a word or text.
• ascii-art-generator.org/
  This one is very good at cre­at­ing images, though they are rather large. I cre­ated the self por­trait below with this tool.

10 Fun and Challenging Font and Typography Quizzes

Ah, it’s Tues­day and that means it is typog­ra­phy time! This week ten fright­fully fun font and typog­ra­phy chal­lenges. Think you know your type? Time to find out!

• Cheese or Font?
  Which is it, can you tell?
• Kern Me
  Can you guess what the proper kern­ing should be in this fun and chal­leng­ing kern­ing game.
• Shape of Type
  See if you are a black belt in Bézier curves.
• Guess That Type
  Can you guess this type in less than 3 characters?
• Arial or Hel­vetica?
  Hint, look at the “o“s!
• What font are you?
  A font per­son­al­ity test.
• Name That Font
  Another font iden­ti­fi­ca­tion game.
  
• Men­tal Floss Font Quiz
  Yes, yet another font quiz game, but it’s from the folks at the cool mag­a­zine Men­tal Floss, so at least it’s witty.
• Desk Top Pub­lish­ing Font Ques­tions
  A quiz on some of the ele­ments that make up fonts.
•  Typog­ra­phy Assess­ment
  A fairly sim­ple quiz on ele­ments of typography.