At Adobe MAX a couple of weeks ago, the company offered a sneak peek of editable type in Adobe Express being rendered via a generative model:
That sort of approach could pair amazingly with this sort of Midjourney output:
I’m not working on such efforts & am not making an explicit link between the two—but broadly speaking, I find the intersection of such primitives/techniques to be really promising.
As I may have mentioned, my 13yo son Henry—lover of all things vintage & (often) arcane—has recently taken a real interest in typography. We both enjoyed this short love letter to the craft of typesetting & printing:
Check out my teammates’ new explorations, demoed here on Adobe Express:
Can’t wait for generative AI + editable text in Adobe tools! 🤖🔥 pic.twitter.com/2kZi4rYM21
— John Nack (@jnack) October 19, 2022
Per the blog post:
Generative AI incorporated into Adobe Express will help less experienced creators achieve their unique goals. Rather than having to find a pre-made template to start a project with, Express users could generate a template through a prompt, and use Generative AI to add an object to the scene, or create a unique font based on their description. But they still will have full control — they can use all of the Adobe Express tools for editing images, changing colors, and adding fonts to create the flyer, poster, or social media post they imagine.
I am, evidently, the kind of guy at parties who’ll whip out a typographical comedy clip—but hey, this one is worth it! Enjoy, fellow nerds:
The replies led me to discover Emdash.fan, an entire site devoted to providing you, the gentle visitor, with exactly one (1) delicious em dash for your clipboard. Insane & thus amazing. 😌
On a related note:
These Cooper Union courses sound fun:
Each week we’ll cover a different aspect of machine learning. A short lecture covering theories and practices will be followed by demoes using open source web tools and a web-browser tool called Google Colab. The last 3 weeks of class you’ll be given the chance to create your own project using the skills you’ve learned. Topics will include selecting the right model for your use case, gathering and manipulating datasets, and connecting your models to data sources such as audio, text, or numerical data. We’ll also talk a little ethics, because we can’t teach machine learning without a little ethics.
This tool looks rather nifty, though I haven’t yet had a chance to try it via iOS. Here’s a quick demo:
I’ve long loved the weird mechanical purring of those flappy-letter signs one sees (or at least used to see) in train stations & similar venues, but I haven’t felt like throwing down the better part of three grand to own a Vestaboard. Now maker Scott Bezek is working on an open-source project for making such signs at home, combining simple materials and code. In case you’d never peeked inside such a mechanism (and really, why would you have?) and are curious, here’s how they work:
And here, for some reason, are six oddly satisfying minutes of a sign spelling out four-letter words:
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:
This reminded my wife to share with me a cool two-minute portrait of America’s last newspaper still printed on the old gear:
I’ve long, long been a fan of using brush strokes on paths to create interesting glyphs & lettering. I used to contort all kinds of vectors into Illustrator brushes, and as it happens, 11 years ago today I was sharing an interesting tutorial on creating smokey text:
Now Adobe engineers are looking to raise the game—a lot.
Combining users drawn stroke inputs, the choice of brush, and the typographic properties of the text object, Project Typographic Brushes brings paint style brushes and new-type families to life in seconds.
Check out some solid witchcraft in action:
Looks like all kinds of good fun (and a steal at twenty bucks)—all the sort of thing I’d hoped we could enable via Photoshop’s 3D features:
Funny, just a couple of days ago I was reminded of the heartbreaking work of staggering genius I whipped up in Art Text in the wee hours of a morning three years ago:
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]
Happy Sunday. 🔤
[Via]
My old friend Mike Essl curates a fantastic Instagram feed mashing up classic comics typography, and I dare you not to be charmed by his infectious love of the art form:
This audio browser app has a clever idea, though I wonder if it’d benefit from the kind of rendering that a Google project uses to let researchers visualize thousands of bird sounds via AI:
The primary innovation in Sononym is something called “similarity search”, which enable users to find similar-sounding samples in their sample collection based on any source sound. Essentially, a bit like how Google’s reverse image search works, but with audio.
The initial release focuses strictly on the core functionality of the software. That is, to offer similarity search that work with large collections of samples. Technically, our approach is a combination of feature extraction, machine learning and modern web technologies.
Not entirely dissimilar: Font Map helps you see relationships across more than 750 web fonts.
[YouTube]
Old Man Nack would’ve killed for this back in his designer days:
As Design Taxi writes,
“Material Theming” effectively fixes a core gripe of the original “Material Design”: that virtually every Android app looks the “same,” or made by Google, which isn’t ideal for brands.
The tool is currently available on Sketch, and you can use it by downloading the “Material” plugin on the app. Google aims to expand the system regularly, and will roll out new options such as animations, depth controls, and textures, next.
[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.
It makes me sad that after 10 (!!) years of having 3D in Photoshop, I can’t think of a single time I’ve created good-looking text in it, much less anything else 3D of value. Given that PS includes a whole 3D engine, I hope that someday it’ll include easy ways to make attractive text.
In the meantime, amidst sometimes literally cheesy results, Art Text 3 ($29.99) produces some rather impressive pieces. Maybe Adobe could just license & bundle it as a plug-in. Hmm… (No, I don’t know anything you don’t know.)
[Vimeo]
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…
Eric Demeusy & Imaginary Forces have created some terrific titles for the new retro hit Stranger Things:
Want some insight into the inspiration & process? Check this:
How cool this must be for 89-year-old Ed Benguiat, creator of the iconic typeface that bears his name. “We’re back in the driver’s seat together again!” he says in this short Fast Company interview. See also “The Typography of ‘Stranger Things.'”
Oh, and would you like to make your own version? Check out Make It Stranger, with which I busted out this:
[YouTube]
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]
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
Amazingly intricate typesetting in Illustrator:
Willem Rabe’s typographic illustration serves as the interface to the biggest online archive of Russian frontline letters from WWII in the project Living Memory developed by agency Friends Moscow for Google Russia.
A time-lapse look at the making-of:
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]
Earlier this year I wrote about how much my wife & kids were enjoying the beautifully crafted Metamorphabet app. Now you can take it for a spin via your (Flash-enabled) browser and download a copy for Mac & Windows.
[Vimeo]
Seb Lester is just way better at this than I, and I’m guessing you, will ever be:
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.
Hmm—could be interesting:
[YouTube]
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]
“[A] colorful parade of sneering villains, vixens, and an arsenal of menacing guns and knives”; oh hell yeah.
Check out Kurt Volk’s killer (sorry) work below, then dive deeper in an interview on Art of the Title.
[Vimeo]
Seems quite well done. The question, of course, is whether anyone cares/needs this. I’ve seen Notegraphy, Pictual, and other well executed mobile typography apps come & apparently go without causing much of a stir.
[Vimeo]
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…
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.
