Category: Type

This picture is from Anna Garforth’s Climate cops project. She says:

Several of Britains most prestigous and distinguishd buildings were transformed into mossy hot spots to celebrate the launch of the npower Climate Cops Green Fingers competition. The initiative aims to help kids in urban schools develop ‘greener fingers’ and is offering a chance to primary schools to win a growing make over.

The moss says “Kids climbing walls. Help them bloom.”
See more pictures of constructing and installing the moss type here. See more of Garforth’s work and installations, including paper cutting and origami here. (First seen here.

Typography is a visual medium. What happens if you translate a visual medium to an audio-format? Does it bring new perspectives again for visually orientated people? Is it possible at all to transform typography, the subject itself and related areas, to a non-visual medium? What are the consequences?

To find out, visit here and here. First seen here.

This nifty animation by Allesandro Novelli shows letters in various typefaces melting together and reforming. (The Alphabet from n9ve on Vimeo. First seen here.)

It can sometimes feel as if the world is very small. The other day my friend Richard, who I know from one part of my life — bike riding and my jobs as a computer programmer — and who knows my interest in paper and folding, sent me a link to an article about a En Origami, a specialty font. When I went to read it, I discovered the author is my book arts friend Kate Godfrey! In her article, she explains how En Origami was constructed but ultimately she says it’s really only good as a titling font: “En Origami is a feat of typographic engineering, but it is severely limited as a font… A T-shirt for the local origami club might be just the job for En Origami.” There’s a sample below. And Kate has other font reviews here.

What do you call the symbol on the left? And do you ever use it? I’d say “pound” and I type it fairly regularly when doing scripting for websites I work on — most commonly to introduce a comment in the script. But it’s got lots of other names: hash, octothorpe, hex and even more uses (see here on wikipedia).
Why am I thinking about the octothorpe? As I notice more and more twitter feeds on the blogs I read, I wonder why the twitter folks picked # to preface tags. I went off to figure it out, and found a nice typography blog on British newspaper, the Guardian, website. They recently ran a post on the rise of the usage of the octothorpe. Check out all the posts here.