Typography Tuesday: 10 Great Tyopgraphy Sites
Ah, it’s Tuesday and that means it is typography time! This Tuesday I wanted to pass along 10 great sites dedicated to Typography. Not just places to download fonts, but actual typography.
Typophile
The best site for all hard core font and typography nerds. A great resource or all things typograhpic.
Some other great resources from the folks at typophile:
- Their public wiki.
- Typebot. A great twitter feed from the folks at typophile. Lots of great sources of type news daily.
DaFont’s Font Forum
A great community forum for discussing all things typographic and fontish. Okay, I just made that last word up, but still it’s a good site.
WhatTheFont
Can’t figure out what font was used in the latest hip magazine ad or club flyer. This site can help. Also check out their great public forum.
Typetester
A great site that helps you compare fonts for websites on the fly.
Designerplaything
Another great free open source web application that allows experimentation with different font and color combinations on the fly within most modern web browsers.
Ilovetypography
A great blog that, well, loves typography.
Thetypefight
Rock ‘em sock’em typography. Designers Drew Roper and Ryan Paule design individual characters and then duke it out for the typographic title of best font.
Smashing Magazine
Just search for typography on the industry leading design site Smashing Magazine and you will have days and days of great reading a head of you!
15 Great Free Handwritten Fonts
Ah, it’s Tuesday and that means it is typography time! This week, here are 15 fonts that can come in handy when you need that faux-handmade quality. If your penmanship is less than artful or you are running out of time, one of these handwritten script fonts can really come in handy.
As always, please note that even though they are free to download and use, make sure you read the license before use them for commercial purposes. It is important for these great artists to get the compensation they deserve; Typographers can’t live on Bézier curves alone!
Honey Script by Dieter Steffmann
Jellyka Estya Handwriting by Jellyka Nerevan
Journal by Fontourist
Halo Handletter by Mario Arturo
The Only Exception by Kimberly Geswein
Ma Sexy by Margarete Antonio
FP Second Hand by Pia Hed Aspell
Shark in the Water by Kimberly Geswein
Claire Hand by Team Scope
Mawns Handwriting by Måns Grebäck
Never Let Go by Kimberly Geswein
Beautiful Every Time by Kimberly Geswein
Soul Handwriting by fonts-lab.com
James Fajardo by James Paul Fajardo
What Do We Do All Day by Heather T.
“Our Fonts, Our Friends”
If you love typography or the mid-century modern esthetic, you will love: “Our Fonts, Our Friends.” It is a fantastically done, faux retro educational film about fonts from the stock image and font seller Veer. Naturally, it’s an ad, but it’s very clever and very well done. It looks like these videos will be a series and in this episode, the focus is on discusses font styles, choosing a font, and where to find an endless supply of affordable fonts, which just turns out to be Veer!
I find Veer a bit pricey for my taste, but they do have great stuff on their site, so I guess sometimes you get what you pay for. Also for some decent tips and tutorials Veer has a pretty good set of videos on their YouTube Channel.
10 Great Examples of Kinetic Typography
I love Kinetic Typography, I can’t wait to show my experiments, but for the time being I’d share ten of my favorite pieces of kenetic type.
Typolution
Tipografia
The 8 rules of Fight Club – Kinetic Typography
Fight Club – Chemical Burn – Kinetic Typography
I Have a Dream – Motion Typography
Star Wars Kinetic Type
Kinetic Type / Motion Graphics – Seinfeld – The Marine Biologist
V for Vendetta in Kinetic Typography
Full Metal Jacket – Kinetic Typography
Joker – Why So Serious? – The Dark Knight -Typography
This Book Is Just My Type: An A-Z of Type Designers by Neil Macmillan
At it’s heart it is an encyclopedia of some of the most influential type designers from Gutenberg the current crop of digital designers. It is well laid out, thorough and, as you’d expect, has excellent typography. The entries on the various designers have nice informative brief biographies, lists of typefaces and lots of images of the designers fonts being used in books and other ephemera. It’s a perfect way to get face to face with those behind the typeface.
The end of the book has a nice section for further reading. Perusing the list I was very happy to find that I already had several of the recommended books. Now those books get to share space with this great new edition to my typography and design library.
Included are several short essays on different aspects of typography, they almost alone make the book worth it.
- Jonathan Barnbrook writes on the way digital tools have upset the old order of typography for good and ill and have made typography and type design a realistic vehicle for artistic and self expression.
- Erik van Blokland writes about the change in type foundries from traditional foundries to digital foundries.
- Clive Burton writes about the need for font licensing and the respect for the field of type design.
- John Downer has a great essay about creating new typefaces based on older versions and how that with the lack of historical knowledge of type design has led many designers to use revival fonts and create designs that are wildly anachronistic.
- John Hudson writes and essay on the technology, particularly Open Type technology, behind digital typography and how it is being used to create non roman based alphabets. Espcieally script based languages like Arabic, Thai and so on.
- Jean François Porchez writes on the extent at which type reflects and influcences perceptions of nationality.
- Erik Spiekermann has an essay on corporate typography where he makes the case for buisnesses having unique typography created for their brand.
- Jeremy Tankard has an essay about how to actually draw letters and the initial steps in designing type.
Digital Ephemera
Another Wednesday has rolled around, so here’s my weekly collection of interesting digital ephemera I’ve found poking around the vast Internet wasteland. Think of me as your guide beyond the digital desert…
Art, Design and Retro Items of Note
New Shag Tiki Print
This new print from the great Josh Agle or Shag, mythologizes the great long lost Polynesian Pop Palace, the Kahiki Supper Club.
Useful Illustrator Typography Tips from Smashing Magazine
File under: good to know. | Link
30+ Informative Typography Related Blogs
A nice round up of some good blogs that are just your type. HA! | Link
World’s fair of the 1930’s
A nice look back at some of the World’s Fairs in the 1930′s. Includes some of the lesser known fairs. | Link
Movie Posters Animated into Neon Signs By Mr. Whaite
Now these are just cool! | Link
Great Design Freebie
An Elegant Login Form for Photoshop | Link
Star Wars Retold in Pictograms
The Force is strong with these minimalist masterpieces from someone who goes by the handle kisia. | Link
Film, Video and Motion Graphics
Star Wars Begins by Jamie Benning
Continuing with the Star Wars theme, Filmmaker Jamie Benning has created an amazing unofficial commentary video with footage and interviews about the Star Wars films. Too bad the commentaries on the official discs weren’t one parsec as good as these. For the true Star Wars fan! | Link
Manhattan 4.33pm from Lizzie Oxby on Vimeo.
NY Pinball
A cool short film using New York City as a back drop for a huge pinball game. Now that’s a great use of after effects! | Link
Finally, Something So Bad, It’s Good!
Mr T’s Be Somebody’s Be Somebody or Be Somebody’s Fool
A classic self 80′s kids self help video from none other than the incomparable Mr. T. Link Please note that some of rap lyrics in the video are credited to the Rhyme Syndicate Boss, Ice-T. Also in an iconic twist you’ll get to see The New Edition with Bobby Brown sing about the dangers of drugs and alcohol. A must see for any pop-culturalist!
Funny Graphic Design Videos
Sometimes it seems that graphic designers are a serious lot. After all, it is not the normal person who becomes enraged at the use of papyrus as the subtitle font in Avatar. But to prove that designers and design can be funny I present these following clips dealing with design, adverting and worst of all Comic Sans.
101 Photoshop Tips in 5 minutes by Deke McClelland. Funny, yet helpful.
You Suck at Photoshop: Very crass, but very, very funny! You must watch both seasons of it, well worth it. As a bonus it has some decent tips for Photoshop. Linked below is the first episode, and for poor Danny Boyle, it all goes down hill from here.
John Stossel from 20/20 discussing graphic design, his advice on one particular typeface is illuminating:
Movie Poster Designer: As some one who worked with film posters for several years, this isn’t that far off the mark. From the humor site, Funny or Die.
Font Conference: A classic from the humor site College Humor.
Font Fight: A sequel of sorts of Font Conference. I love it when Helvetica goes after it’s rip off, Arial:
Life of a graphic designer, everything’s better with a little cute kid. From Canadian Designer “yoshbox” of Q Graphique.
Designing the Stop Sign by Committee. I think every designer’s felt this way at one time or another.
How NOT to use PowerPoint. A hilarious, and true video on poor slide preparation. Life After Death PowerPoint from EMT Media on Vimeo.
Life After Death PowerPoint from EMT Media on Vimeo.
OGD: Original Design Gangsta
Focus Testing the Apple “Big Brother Ad” Opening video to the Hatch Award 2007 (an ad agency award), This is an actual focus group testing of the 1984 ad. This is the lowest common denominator ladies & gentlemen.
A Few Good Creative Men: A design related mash up of the classic courtroom scene from A Few Good Men.
Only the Best Ideas Win What happens to all those ideas after the are born… literally born in this case.
Vendor Client Relationships in the Real World Pretty funny take on this sensitive topic.
Last, but not least… What Happens When your Father is a Graphic Designer A classic old video, though why Comic Sans at the beginning? A bit suspect for the premise I’d say.
Design Something Everyday 15/365
I found a great article in Esquire wherein book jacket designer extraordinaire Chip Kidd discusses the thinking and methods that underlie some of his recent work. One typography trick that is particularly useful is how he created the distressed text for his cover of Cormack McCarthy’s The Road:
The font is one of the oldest tricks in the book. You typeset text in a regular font, I think this was Rotis, and then you blow it up really big on a Xerox machine and then you shrink it down really small. The trick is to see just how much you can distress it and keep it readable. It’s gotten harder to do because Xerox machines are so much better, but if you’ve got a wonderfully shitty machine it will look all corroded and gummy and yucky. It takes a bit of playing around, but it’s really not that hard.
With that tip as inspiration I used the same technique to make these little design posters. The typeface is Rockwell Bold and each letter was blown up 1600% on a Toshiba photocopier, before being digitally reduced. The Toshiba was too new to give the type a truly wonderfully gummy yucky look, but it was a good exercise. Even with all of our digital tricks, it is pretty fun to get in there with some old school techniques.
A few laughs for fellow Typophiles
As we know, typography is key in many designs. From the great type treatments used in Chipp Kidd‘s book covers, to the inscriptions on the base of Trajan’s Column and even to the inventive destruction of type by David Carson; type is integral to communication. Modern digital type rests on the shoulders of giants, cuneiform scribes tallying cattle on the muddy plains of Mesopotamia, Phoenician traders with purple dye and scrolls in hand, Guttenberg at his press and modern typographers Max Miedinger, Eduard Hoffmann or House Industries. But this doesn’t mean we can’t have fun with type! I know these have been around for a while, but they are always classics, and what doesn’t say classic like good typography? That and fonts insulting each other.
Font Conference, so this is what happens in font management software when were not looking!
Font Fight! Sock ‘em Helvetica!
Also here’s an extremely quick list of some good type related links, I hope you’ll find they are your type too:
Resources & Forums:
- Typophile.com: love the font, meet fellow tyopolphiles and bitch about Comic Sans.
- MyFonts.com: Look at all the fonts, wonderful stuff, but be prepared to max out the credit card or be lost for hours looking at all the great stuff.
Great Type Foundries:
- House Industries: All I want for Christmas is the Shag font!
- FontDiner.com: Awesome retro fonts, I highly recommend them. Keep an eye out for the type face fontdiner & fontdiner loungy, you’ll see them everywhere.
- Linotype.com: Just the classics please.
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