Having a train-obsessed 11yo son who enjoys exclaiming things like, “Hey, that’s Cooper Black!,” this tour of railroad typography is 💯 up our family’s alley. (Tangential, but as it’s already on my clipboard: we’re keeping a running album of our train-related explorations along Route 66, and Henry’s been adding things like an atomic train tour to his YouTube channel.)

From the typesetting video description:

Ever since the first train services, a wide variety of guides have helped passengers understand the railways; supplementing the text with timetables, maps, views, and diagrams. Typographically speaking, the linear nature of railways and the modular nature of trains meant that successful diagrams could be designed economically by using typographic sorts. Various typographic trains and railways from the 1830s to present-day will be evaluated in terms of data visualization, decoration, and the economics of reproduction. Bringing things up to date, techniques for typesetting emoji and CSS trains are explored, and a railway-inspired layout model will be proposed for wider application in the typography of data visualization and ornamentation.

[Via Terri Stone]

<Old Man Nack voice> In my day, it cost $2,500 to buy the Adobe Font Folio—but Kids These Days™ (and the rest of us) get fonts on demand, right through the air. I enjoyed the type & illustrations in this little promo piece:

“The world’s first typeface you can hear and play” sounds (heh) interesting. Per DesignTaxi,

Visualizing the brilliance of Amadeus Mozart, branding agency Happy People Project has created a typeface to front communications for Peter Shaffer’s play, Amadeus, in Turkey. […]

14 numbers and letters were created in line with notes and octaves on the staff, so you could listen to them. In total, though, a massive font family of 574 characters was designed for the project.

Check it out:

While camping at the funky Sierra Circles sculpture garden/pottery studio/winery, this past weekend, we came across an old Linotype machine hanging out in a field—one of 40+ presses that once existed there, before most were sold to China for scrap. Here’s a tiny gallery I captured:

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This reminded my wife to share with me a cool two-minute portrait of America’s last newspaper still printed on the old gear:

Man, who knew just how much cultural identity could be wrapped up in a style of printing?

This excellent 99% Invisible episode covers the origins of blackletter printing (faster & more reliable for medieval scribes), the culture wars (from Luther to Napoleon) in which it battled Roman faces, its association with (and revilement by!) Nazis, and more.

Bonus: stick around for a discussion of revanchist, Trumpian mandates around government architecture, featuring that delightful term of art, CHUD. *chef’s kiss*

I see that for today’s Doodle, Google commissioned a baker…

…to help produce this fun, pretzel-y creation:

It reminds me fondly of when I first joined the company & my son Finn ate his snack into the shape of the logotype. 🥰🥨

[YouTube]

I’m always a sucker for these insights, and for the work of Imaginary Forces in particular:

[YouTube]

Oh, I see you nervously shifting a little, photographers. 🙂 This take-down is as hilarious as you’ve heard:

Bonus: CBS news caught up with the font’s creator to get his reaction:

“I designed the font when I was 23 years old. I was right out of college. I was kind of just struggling with some different life issues, I was studying the Bible, looking for God and this font came to mind, this idea of, thinking about the biblical times and Egypt and the Middle East. I just started scribbling this alphabet while I was at work and it kind of looked pretty cool,” Costello said.

He added, “I had no idea it would be on every computer in the world and used for probably every conceivable design idea. This is a big surprise to me as well.”

[YouTube]

First they add an actual Glyphs panel, now this? Dogs & cats living together, mass hysteria!

In this one-minute video, Adobe Creative Cloud introduces you to ‘Variable Fonts’, an open-type font format that allows for easy weight, width and slant customization—just drag the sliders until you get desired results. 

[YouTube] [Via]

Hard to describe, but just take two minutes & give your Monday a moment of Zen:

[Via]

Fontself looks kinda rad. $49 for Photoshop or Illustrator; $89 for both. (See, I knew there was a reason I fought like a crack-fueled mongoose to enable panel extensibility in Adobe apps. :-))

[YouTube]

Here’s some fun animation from Matt Young conveying interesting info on cross-language differences.

I’ll give it a thumbs-up with my northwest hand…

[Vimeo] [Via]

Imagine WhatTheFont not only identifying fonts in images but then installing them directly into Photoshop. That’d be pretty badass—and is what’s now working in Photoshop. Here’s a demo from Julieanne Kost.

[F]ind similar Typekit fonts, apply alternate on-screen with one click, and font matching to help identify similar typefaces found in images.

[YouTube]

It’s “a design geek’s paradise,” the Verge writes. Check it out:

The new Google Fonts is now in line with the company’s Material Design guidelines. It has both a new logo and a far easier way to test out new fonts, compare them with others, and change preferences on the fly while viewing sample text in a four-font grid. You can filter by categories like Serif and Handwriting, sort through trending and popular fonts, filter by language, and toggle between different degrees of thickness and slant. Each of the more than 800 open source fonts available now also contains bio information on its designer, as well as statistics on its usage and a list of popular fonts to pair it with. Google Fonts will let you either download the font or give you the code to directly embed it into your site.

The view counter to date might make even McDonald’s insecure:

[YouTube]

In this beautifully simple concept & execution, negative words are reconsidered & reshaped into positive ones:

[YouTube] [Via]

Sure beats the bejesus out of clicking through the list & hitting Undo a bunch of times. Check out Julieanne’s concise tour:

[YouTube]

Wow—this app, which lets you interactively vary all manner of type characteristics, looks rather delightful to explore. I wonder A) how many people would take the time to use it, and B) whether the uniformity of its output makes type purists want to throw up. In any event I’m eager to try it out.

[YouTube]

Preach it, Ryan Hamrick.

“Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” — Steve Jobs

Renting fonts? Interesting idea.

We made a Mac app that let you try fonts in your favourite application for free. If you like the fonts, rent them for just a fraction of their regular price. And if you continue to use them, get them for good after a year.

[Vimeo]

Seb Lester is just way better at this than I, and I’m guessing you, will ever be:

[YouTube 1 & 2] [Via Alex Powell]

Heh—check out this fun project from Hyundai:

Stephanie from Houston misses her astronaut father working at the International Space Station. Watch how her special message, written by 11 Hyundai Genesis, was delivered to her father in space. This message was officially acknowledged as “The largest tire track image” by the Guinness World Records.

[YouTube] [Via]

What a gloriously weird Kickstarter project from design professor Curtis Canham:

[Via]

Check out this beautiful showcase created by Chad Mazzola:

There are over 600 typefaces in the Google web fonts directory. Many of them are awful. But there are also high-quality typefaces that deserve a closer look. Below are examples of these typefaces in action. Click the examples to get the typeface from the Google web fonts directory.

[Via Jordi Verdu]

This site features lovely details (e.g. your cursor becoming a stylized fox head, vainly chasing “sour” grapes) while presenting good font pairings:

There are over 640 Google web fonts available for free. Problem is, pairing typefaces isn’t easy. And, many of the fonts in Google’s library don’t work well when applied to typical webpage (desktop) layouts. Part of the 25×52 initiative, this collaborative, ongoing project helps provide typographic inspiration for using Google’s web fonts for web applications.

Lovely work, “created by graphic artist Dex in collaboration with interior designer Anna Burles.”

More than 250 novels were mined in order to make the Literary London Map, taken from the Literary London Art Collection.

Here’s a larger version, and you can order prints of the map here and here. [Via Margot Nack]

Fun animation from Matt Young conveys interesting info on cross-language differences.

I’ll give it a thumbs-up with my northwest hand…

[Vimeo] [Via]

People used to ask about this all the time. Previously little hacks existed, but as of the Photoshop CC release, you can set a default type style for real. Julieanne Kost explains how (jump to just before the 6-minute mark):

Check out Julieanne’s blog for lots of details on exactly how type styles work.

Spend two delightful minutes with Thibault de Fournas’s grad-school ode to typography. Make sure to stay at least until the middle, my fellow ADD sufferers, or you’ll miss the neat nods to tilters from Saul Bass to Kuntzel and Deygas.

[Vimeo] [Via]

Cool news. TechCrunch writes,

Adobe and Google today announced the launch of a new open-source font for Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) languages that covers 65,535 glyphs, making it one — if not the — largest font to cover these languages. The font, which was optimized for both print and screen, is now available for free through Google Fonts and through Adobe’s Typekit, where it is included in the free tier.

My friend Caleb Belohlavek of Adobe writes,

The entire family rounds out at just under half a million total glyphs. Never before has a typeface family of this magnitude, development scope, and value been offered via open source — which makes it a no-cost solution for designers, developers, and everyday users who need a font supporting a broad set of languages…

This is a rather large undertaking for any type foundry, and we couldn’t have done it without Google as a key partner.

Way to go, guys!

Hmm, intriguing. Khoi Vinh writes,

Homeless Fonts works with homeless people from the streets of Barcelona to translate the handwriting they use on their signs into typefaces. The hope is that advertising agencies and corporations will use license the resulting works, with the proceeds going back into programs to help the homeless. The results are often distinctive and quite elegant.

Good stuff to know:

Nice, understated typography for Adobe’s 99u conference:

Each year at the 99U Conference we feature a motion reel of inspirational quotes from our speakers that plays in a loop throughout the conference.

How do you create a reel that you don’t get tired of? We focused on telling a story.

In past years we relied on the use of depth of field and 3D effects moving on changing axes. However, this year we focused on very few elements and simple 2-Dimensional designs that could morph into each other seamlessly, making the objects not only design elements but ‘characters’ of the story. We drew a lot of inspiration from movie title sequences we love and to the master of it all: Saul Bass.

[Vimeo]

Adobe’s Aseem Agrawala (whom you have to thank for tons of great Photoshop features like auto-alignment/blending of layers) & Aaron Hertzmann have been working with university researchers to apply crowdsourcing data to the problem of font selection:

Have you ever been overwhelmed by the huge menu of possibilities when choosing a font? A simple menu of fonts made sense when there were 20 fonts on our computers, but now we have hundreds and even thousands. Online font repositories have over 100,000 fonts. Our interfaces our based on the idea that fonts can be described with attributes, like “friendly” or “legible;” We use crowd-sourcing and machine learning to compute attributes for any font.

[YouTube]

Who actually writes giant letters on your road? Tom Williams caught a couple of craftsmen in the the act early one morning:

[Spoiler alert: I was hoping throughout that these guys were very cleverly disguised graffiti artists out to insert some drolly subversive message into the world, but no such luck.]

[Vimeo] [Via Lex van den Berghe]