Matt Robinson and Tom Wrigglesworth took “a selection of the most commonly used typefaces (to) compare how economical they are with the amount of ink which they use at the same point size. Large scale renditions of the typefaces were drawn out with ballpoint pens, allowing the remaining ink levels to display the ink efficiency of each typeface.” See them drawing here. (Found here.)
In December my husband & I had dinner with my friend Hayden, who had recently been to Europe, and his wife Tracey. He told us about the chocolate initials he’d brought back for himself and Tracey, explaining that in the Netherlands, Santa Claus (known there as Sinterklaas) celebrated his birthday by handing out chocolate initials. I thought this was the perfect sort of thing for my blog. But when I went to research it online, I found nothing. Tracey couldn’t find anything either. We debated whether Hayden was just pulling our legs to see what we’d be gullible enough to believe (a thing he tries to do regularly).
Then today I found this post (on the blog afterimage) that says
Rather than an orange at the toe of their stockings, St. Nicholas (known as Sinterklaas) brings good Dutch children their first initial, in chocolate form. Pastry and even sausage letters are also still available during Sinterklaas season.
The post points to another blog, called edible georgraphy, and this meandering but interesting post that starts out talking about miniature books and then segues into a discussion of edible letters. The photo above has the caption
Chocolate letter moulds. The letter I is unpopular with manufacturers as all chocolate letters have to weigh the same — those who do produce it often package two Is together. The letter M is the most popular — it is the first initial of moeder (mother) and mama. According to Droste, “Every year we keep track of how the different letters do. For example, two years ago we had too many Gs, so last year we adapted the production accordingly.”
The other day I followed a link to Philip Gallo’s blog and spent a wonderful hour reading the posts. Gallo is a letterpress printer and poet in Minneapolis. That’s his broadside to the left (see the post about it here — it’s about daffodils, printed on daffodil embellished paper, and with a subtle ff in the background). He doesn’t write often, and the posts vary widely, from writing poetry, to typesetting 40 years ago, to a poem called Imagine You Are A Craftsman to hand-setting mouse type. And a few of them are handy letterpress printing tricks:
Someone has started a blog featuring a different ampersand every day — it’s called three-hundred and sixty five. Click on the daily ampersand to find out the font family it’s from (the one to the left is EF Bernhard Gothic).
Rhiannon sent me a link to Scott Teplin’s Alphabet City, a series of 26 houses, each shaped like a letter of the alphabet. The prints are “relief printed from etched magnesium plates on Zerkall vellum text, individually airbrushed with Winsor & Newton and Holbein watercolors, and curated with matching Prismacolor pencils.” As Rhiannon wrote to me, “He uses good materials which is nice to see. Zerkall, gotta love Zerkall.”
Good50x70 is an non-profit initiative with an annual contest to design posters “confronting seven of the critical issues affecting today’s world.” Charities provide the issues and the submitted posters are given to them to use in their media campaigns. The issues include child labor, climate change, HIV/AIDs, and women rights violations. The one to the left is for the child labor section — it’s called “The daily alphabet of many children” and by Juliana Duque.
See all the charities and posters here.