Below are a few typography-related articles and news from around the world that crossed our radar over the last couple of days. Enjoy!
1. Helvetica Or Garamond: Typography-Inspired Eyewear – Japanese company Type, draws inspiration from ‘Helvetica’ and ‘Garamond’ typeface and creates two lines of respective eyewear. Link here.
2. A Rustic Bespoke Typeface That Is Carved Out Of A Fallen Tree – London-based firm Carter Wong Design recently embarked upon a lovely hand-made project to create a bespoke typeface for organic clothing company Howies. The resulting font is named Castan—instead of creating the typeface digitally, the firm had the letters carved out of a tree before printing them out onto paper and uploading them onto the computer.
3. Top Web Fonts of 2013: Extensis Reports. Link here
4. 26 famous architects designed an alphabet – Archibet is an illustrated alphabet honoring 26 rock star architects, from Alvar Aalto to Zaha Hadid. Archibet is a playful spin on the idea of architectural design as visual communication, as letters are the primary building blocks of meaning. The project beautifully conflates architecture and typography. Link here.
5. Typeface Designer Creates Book That Teaches Toddlers About Typography – ‘The Clothes Letter Wears’ is a picture book that teaches toddlers about the different typefaces through illustrations that shows each font as text playing dress-up. This book also features the “Cabrito”, a custom typeface based on the Bookman Old Style that the designer has made for the project—it has been designed to be especially legible for young eyes. No doubt a great gift idea for designer friends & colleagues with tiny tots to start them of on the right career path 
Link here
We have scratched beneath the surface and uncovered a wealth of the team’s creative influences. Here are some of recent treasures.
“Tableau” photographs have been created since the beginning of photography. However, we find Metz+Racine props cleverly staged and witty. The sets evoke the essence of craft and their constructed scenes remind us of the cubists painters. Their stylized use of colors and pure geometrical forms create elaborate architectural sets with wonderland aesthetics.
We love the assortment of balloons and the Winter Olympic flags that Andrew B Myers created. His top down view on objects staged against simple color backgrounds remind us of the pop colors of the 70s and 80s.
Christine Gustafsson and Nicolas Lydeen have embarked on a unique artistic journey. AGONISTParfums are presented in handcrafted glass created in collaboration with glass artist Asa Jungnelius. Every detail is exclusively developed with regard to nature and raw material. ISIS for instance is bottled in a glass sculpture that had tension inside which made it crack and break during the installation to express the bud bursting in spring. Wait until they discover the individuality of Oud.
As the season for festivals is about to start in Dubai, we were wondering if there is room for a holistic event like the DUMBO festival in New York. DUMBO is only for three days in September. However, its impact is felt for the whole year as the participants who win the hearts of the public get to stay and are offered free space. In its 2nd year of practice they received more than 200,000 visitors and got emerging artists to exhibit side by side with established professionals. This year they are aiming for more. The objective: “the best free contemporary art experience for all ages for years to come”. Now there’s a challenge.
Pascal Zoghbi is one of only a few designers working in the relatively new discipline of contemporary Arabic typography. Having studied extensively in Europe, Zoghbi returned to his hometown of Beirut in Lebanon to found 29letters. His work involves creating new Arabic typefaces, corporate identities and print publications. Understanding the structure of traditional calligraphic styles is important to contemporary Arabic typeface design, and Zoghbi’s objective is to create a balance between the old and the new.
Last but by no means least for this blog The Oh my God Exhibition takes a geometric look at character design. In ancient Greece they had something better than superheroes; they had gods, each with their own powers, weaknesses, backstory and followers. Each one a brand. Presenting them in this contemporary form could induce new interest amongst a young audience.
Every once in a while we come across an interesting tool or initiative specifically designed to help typography lovers spot fonts. A couple of weeks ago we mentioned Fount, a nifty bookmarklet that can immediately identify the web font used on whatever website you’re viewing. Recently we discovered Fontspotting – a free downloadable flashcard game created by an Australian-based creative duo to help designers around the world improve or brush up their typeface recognition skills.
This definitely has the potential to be a great supplementary learning tool both in the work place and certainly in the classroom.This leaves us wondering – wouldn’t it be great to have something similar for Arabic typography?
More details available via DesignTaxi.
This definitely has the potential to be a great supplementary learning tool both in the work place and certainly in the classroom.This leaves us wondering – wouldn’t it be great to have something similar for Arabic typography?
More details available via DesignTaxi.
A couple of weeks ago we discovered an interesting crowdsourcing initiative via one of our bookmarked tumblrs All Things Arabic: a mass callout to catalogue Arabic typography from all around the world in the form of street art, signage, media, fashion, etc.
Followers of our blog & the projects we feature on our website will quickly realize that the spirit of this initiative is quite similar to the theme of our 2013 calendar, which explores both Arabic proverbs & typography (see previous post).
This crowdsourcing initiative is currently being run via Instagram. Below are a few screenshots we’ve taken of some of the submissions from design & type aficionados across the world.
Be inspired & get involved!
‘Typographic Matchmaking in the City’ is a documentary about an urban typographic research project investigating new approaches for bilingual lettering and poetic narrative for public space.
Bringing together designers from different cultural backgrounds to intensely collaborate, over a period of 2 years, on creating coherent products with groundbreaking results, a project such as this demonstrates the important role that design can play in initiating cultural change, assimilation and integration—by simply using our daily basic communication mode: the written word.
The project consisted of 5 teams of 15 Dutch and Arab designers (type designers, graphic designers, architects, and industrial designers) who collaborated on designing new bilingual typefaces conceived for 3-dimensional/architectural design applications. The documentary film gives a visual insight into the design process and the people behind it, and is really one of the bi-products of a project which gave birth to 5 new bilingual font families (Arabic & Latin) that are inspired by and made for the urban public space as well as one book. More details can be found here about the project can be found here.
By Maryam Ahmed, Intern @ Zaman
Using many elements put together to form a whole aesthetic composition produces design. Those elements are represented by many mediums such as photography, illustration, shapes and colours as well as typography. Many of us take type for granted. We see type everywhere ranging from books to billboards and signs on the roads. Every day we are bombarded by huge amounts of products that use type. So what is type? Is it just a bunch of letters thrown together for us to read?
Interestingly, there is a whole science that studies type called Typography. Typography is a study of type arrangement by using various typefaces, font size and spacing to make reading clearer and more interesting. It is also a form of art where type is used to created aesthetical qualities in a piece.
When we think about type, we just imagine the old boring letters put together for reading. However, typography can have many lively characteristics and can represent many personalities. Also, some typefaces clash with each other, some look aesthetically appealing with each other; and some work better than others in terms of form and clarity. It is a whole field that one can explore. But who would actually think that you could actually play “dating” games using typography? Apparently, it exists.
Typography has been an important element in many posters for about one-hundred years now. It is apparent in many historical posters. In the history of typography many methods were explored in terms of using imagery with typography, and using typography as the only visual element in posters. Typography was also pushed to create illustrations out of type, which I find very appealing.
In general, typography has gone into many different directions and has been pushed beyond its normal boundaries in the creative world.
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