All in TYPE No. 1
We’ve been hearing a lot about variable fonts, or Variations, where many styles are combined into one font file. The big tech companies are implementing it—Google, Adobe, Microsoft and Apple. And there are of course Variations deniers, pushing back on the change. But it’s time for graphic designers to think what it can do.
Treasure, indeed. With the help of type designer Paul Barnes, we gained access to hidden gems in the basement of St. Bride Library. Here are sharp photographs of some of the most important punches and matrices at the time of the Industrial Revolution. They were saved from extinction by long-time Librarian, James Mosely. Take a look at the business-end of the first slabs and sans serif typefaces.
With a bow to the WPA art program, two poster series celebrate U.S. National Parks.
Vincent Winter, a typographer and photographer in Paris, went to St. Bride Library in London and was bowled over. He shows in text and pictures what its collection is like—an amazing mass of type, books on type, publications and printing materials. Its sweet spot is the British foundries that rapidly changed the design of type in the 19th century. There is not enough room to display all of it, but if you’re nice to the very knowledgeable librarians, you can get a peek.
CATHERINE SCHMIDT takes a trip on Mumbai transit and learns what it takes to make fonts for Indic scripts
Stephen Coles profiles four type designers who represent an amazing wave of talent issuing from the great 21st century schools of type design—including KABK in Holland, Reading University in Britain, ESAD in France, and Cooper Union in the United States.
These newcomers are producing great new typefaces very soon in their career. If you think about it, even the best and most successful type designers of the past (Adrian Frutiger, for example) were hard pressed to release their first font by the time they were 30. But now these schools and several others are sending out accomplished new type designers into a market that seems quite ready to absorb them.
This piece is not so much about education, as about four graduates, and how each is moving into the profession of type design.
The idea of of tapered stems in fonts, so popular in the 1950s, is making a big comeback. Not since Optima have we seen the style so often used—for all kinds of typography.
