Letters as shapes:
On other fronts:
Letters as shapes:
On other fronts:
Who doesn’t like the occasional dingbat & swash?
Side note: I keep trying to tell developers that I think there’s an opportunity to knock together a very simple 3D extrusion/adjustment environment as a Photoshop plug-in, leveraging PS CS3 Extended’s ability to manipulate 3D layers. No one has yet seized the opportunity, but I’ll keep trying.
New alphabets have emerged:
Elsewhere in the world of type…
The frontrunners: Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain. So says the Boston Globe, analyzing the type treatments of the US presidential candidates. Of Obama: “Clean pen strokes evoke a well-pressed Armani suit.” Of McCain: “Everything about this logo says you can buy a car from this man.” [Via reader Tim]
Elsewhere in the world of type:
Having just stumbled across the crazy-handsome I Love Typography, and having just talked about The Elements of Typographic Style being applied to the web, I have to slap my forehead–again–at my inability to get this blog to look consistent across browsers. You might think that after 14 years of development, Web browsers would have made all this a non-issue. You’d be wrong.
I’m specifically irked that I can’t get Firefox to display the titles of posts at anything approximating the correct size. Check out how they look in Firefox vs. in Safari & Internet Explorer. Typically it’s IE that gets taken to the woodshed for its standards-compliance, but in this case Firefox is the odd man out. (Tell me, though, that both Windows browsers’ failure in 2008 to anti-alias the text is just an artifact of my running Vista on a Mac. Please…?)
I’ve been using Cultured Code’s beautiful little Xylescope app to inspect my pages & tweak the CSS values. Safari & IE respond obediently when I tweak the size of h3.title; Firefox, eh, no response. And it’s obviously possible to get Firefox to honor font sizes; the author name on this page, for example, renders the same in Safari & Firefox.
I also failed to understand why the appearance of the comments area would differ between Safari and Firefox (the latter showing the text much larger). Now that I’ve updated to Safari 3, though, I see that it displays the text as Firefox does.
I spent the early part of my career wrestling with browser incompatibilities, so I know this kind of thing shouldn’t surprise me. I guess I just figured that, all these years later, something so simple should be a no-brainer.
Tangentially related: Man Against Weasel.
[Update: Thanks to Mark and Fredrik and their super quick & accurate suggestions, I’ve been able to nix the FF rendering problem. Viva the wisdom of crowds.]
“Trajan Trajan Trajan…”–it’s the Marsha Brady of fonts, at least when it comes to movie titles & posters. Kirby Ferguson rips hack designers a new one in this very funny video. Mark Hamburg quips, “If we want ‘cinematic’ UIs, then we obviously need to revise our typography…”
In other typography news:
Amidst this whole non–stop Flash fest, let’s clear the palette with a little typography:
Amidst this whole non–stop Flash fest, let’s clear the palette with a little typography:
"When I hear ‘The 70’s’, I reach for my gun…"
I picked up a 1974 Car & Driver at a vintage goods store a few years ago, and after thumbing through the pages, I wanted to put my head in an oven. Honestly, I have to thank my parents for letting me miss most of that godforsaken decade, beset as it was by Bookman Swash, brownness, and gas shortages.
Ah, but maybe things weren’t quite that bad. Gene Gable presents a tour of 70’s typography*, showing the ways that evolving technology enabled new type treatments. Check out part 2 for more horrific excellence.
In the vein of type treatments that cry out for a greasy bass line (or maybe an acid rock riff), peep these others I’ve stumbled across:
* Hey, is that the Photoshop family logo? >;-)
Time for another typographic gathering:
Time for another typographic gathering:
“Studies have shown that in nearly 100% of the cases, a given agent of the public will willing participate in high profile acts of vandalism, given the opportunity to do so via mediated tele-robotic technology.”
[Update: In response to Ramón Castañeda’s comment below, Thomas Phinney replies, "Ramón is right. Fraktur typefaces usually have a forked top to the ascenders (h, k, etc.), more curves in the lowercase (less rigidly hexagonal shapes than Textura), and all (not just some) of the caps will have curvy or squiggly shapes replacing vertical lines. This page even shows the NYT logo among the Textura samples, an unexpected bonus). Not that I think this is a big deal, by the way. If the worst typographic errors we have to worry about were people confusing different styles of blackletter, we’d be in pretty good shape. :)"]
The Adobe Design Center shakes the bottle & lets some new content spray:
New Dialog Box:
New Tutorials:
And as always, don’t forget to check out the Adobe links on del.icio.us. Info on how to contribute links is here. [Via]
The Adobe Design Center shakes the bottle & lets some new content spray:
New Dialog Box:
New Tutorials:
And as always, don’t forget to check out the Adobe links on del.icio.us. Info on how to contribute links is here. [Via]
Time for another round up of interesting typographical bits:
In the wake of those great nautical posters, check out this collection of historic fruit crate art. It’s tough to name faves, though I really like Dynamo Apples and these double A’s & arrow. I suppose Gay Johnny would resonate a little differently nowdays, though. [Via]
On an unrelated typographic note, if you’re having trouble identifying a font, you might find this Flickr group useful. [Via] Oh, and see also What The Font. (Me, I just cheat and bug Tom Phinney ("I’ll trade you a Glyphs palette for six correct font ID’s…").)
//na// Savory type bits:
That’s the question on Sam Jackson’s mind in this little (and profane) typographic study. See also a second, apparently independent take on the same idea. [Via] On other typographic notes:
Author & Photoshop TV personality Dave Cross shares a wealth of tips for working with text in Photoshop in a 10-page PDF on CreativePro.com. The chapter (excerpted from Dave’s book) gives succinct answers to a variety of questions (how to fill type with a texture, how to insert a copyright symbol, when to update type layers, etc.) and should be worth printing out for future reference.
For more tips, see my 12 Tips for Photoshop Text, which Russell Brown demos & expands upon in this video. For more type bits, see the Typography category of this blog. And while I’ve got your ear:
