Hey, That's a Great Idea » typography

One New Typeface Everyday

the idea collector — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 16:23:10 +0000

Christopher Papasadero of Fwis fame brings you one new typeface every day for the month of January, 2009.

Type.fwis.com is for me to test myself and see if I can design a new typeface every day for 31 days. You will be able to critique me and download an EPS of the file. This will likely end in tears and embarrassment for myself.

I will not convert any of these to real fonts as I have neither the time nor the knowledge.

For the true-blue typography geeks who are ATypI members and are deeply offended by my blunders, I am quite sorry and you should feel free to hurl insults and old issues of Emigre.

Please let me know if you want to use any of these in a project, I would be honored. It is very likely I will give permission in exchange for a copy of the final piece. See the About section for more details, or contact me.

Frustration Free Packaging Certification from Amazon A year ago Amazon announced Frustration Free Packaging; no more...

O’Clock

the idea collector — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 20:48:31 +0000

A beautiful typographic installation by Nadine Grenier, a student at ESAD Strasbourg, displays a quote from Jules Romains, a French poet, every 12 hours. The letters are formed by 500 clocks cleverly arranged and set to form the letters spelling out “le temps passe, et chaque fois qu’il y a du temps passe, il y a quelque chose qui s’efface” which translates roughly to “Time passes, and every time the time passes, there is something that fades.”

Via Today and Tomorrow via Fubiz

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Atoms, Typography, and Trigonometry

the idea collector — Sun, 02 Nov 2008 21:43:10 +0000

Atomic Type

This is one of the many reasons I love typography and typographers. Jonathan Hoefler of Hoefler and Frere-Jones found an article in Science Magazine about a group of researchers who created an “Atomic Pen” that selectively swaps atoms of silicon with tin.

Their technique, documented in today’s issue of Science magazine, makes use of an earlier discovery: that within a certain proximity, individual atoms from the silicon tip of an atomic force microscope will exchange with tin atoms on the surface of a semiconductor. “It’s not possible to write any smaller than this,” said researcher Masayuki Abe, which sounds like a challenge to me: I can already think of one way to make letters that are 8% smaller, using the team’s own technique.

In his next post Hoefler goes into detail, discussing the history of small type, space efficiency, and trigonometry.

Just as the hypotenuse is always the longest side of a right triangle, an angled letter I will always be longer than an upright I of the same height. This can be a nuisance when designing type families, since an especially slanted italic will have ascenders and descenders that feel too long, and shortening them would undercut a fundamental visual relationship with the matching roman. But where there is no matching roman, as in Aldus’s case, these strokes can be retracted at will, offering the additional benefit of shortening the alphabet’s overall height. And it’s this technique that suggests a solution to the atomic alphabet challenge: by reckoning letters on a rotated grid, in which there are upright vertices instead of horizontal ones, it’s easier to make letters that can be both shorter and more tightly fitted. A final benefit of the rotated grid is the ease with which it can render horizontal strokes, which are crucial to the Latin alphabet, and otherwise impossible in a hexagonal matrix. —JH

Click through for the full story complete with scale diagrams of Hoefler’s solution.

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