Most free fonts are for headlines, and frankly aren’t to my taste. The League of Moveable Type is trying to remedy that. At their website, they say “you’ll find only the most well-made, free & open-source.” Go here to decide for yourself. Below is an example: Goudy Bookletter 1911
Mary Huang’s computer applicaiton Typeface is a “typographic photobooth”, custom software that generates type design from facial dimensions. It uses a camera as an input device, scanning the user’s face and translating the image into a typeface. There are 2 videos showing how the program works here.
As I continue to look for inspiration for the journal project I’m participating in, I saw this set of pictures of pages from a lettering sketchbook by Linzie Hunter. Here’s one of them, as first seen on the Ampersand blog. See more pages here.
| The Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA) recently released “Coming Together,” a font entirely of ampersands, created to benefit the victims of the recent earthquake in Haiti. The ampersands represent the idea of people coming together to help one another. The font is for sale for $20US from Veer, Ascender Fonts, Fontshop and MyFonts , with all sales going to Doctors Without Borders. This is the fourth project of Font Aid, an initiative started by Swedish designer Claes Källarsson to facilitate the creation of collaborative fonts to raise funds for those affected by natural disasters, war and other tragedies. More info, including the list of various font designers who contributed as well as more pictures of larger ampersands, here.
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The other day, I saw a mention of an artist’s book called “Mappings” by Mary Ann Sampson of the OEOCO Press (One-Eye Opera Company) and, intrigued by the title, set off to see if I could find pictures of it. While I didn’t find that book, I found some lovely broadsides. The one to the left is called “Obstacles & Impediments” and the illustration is of a “word snag” eating letters and words (see a larger version where you can read the poem here).
In this blog post, Ellen Lupton wishes there was a “well-wrought typeface (that) could attract as much attention as a 90-minute film.” Then, using the “best of 2009” font lists on several blogs, she rolls out the red carpet and selects her picks for best actress (Liza Pro, sample at left), best actor, etc. of the font world. I wish she’d included an ampersand in all the examples — I quite like the one for Liza Pro — and most of the choices are headline faces, suitable for titles but not for poetry or book text. Maybe no one is designing those anymore…
