Italian designer Alessandro Segalini appeared on the typography forum scene a few months ago and is rivaling Hrant in posting frequency. Today he unleashed the following on Typo-L:

Three Italic fonts die together in a bad book design and go to Typo-Heaven.

When they get there, St. Peter Karow says, "We only have one rule here in Typo-Heaven: Don't step on the Dutch!"

So they enter heaven, and sure enough, there are Dutch all over the place. It is almost impossible not to step on a Dutch, and although they try their best to avoid them, the first Italic accidentally steps on one.

Read the rest at the Typo-L archives. It helps to know some history of digital revivals and pairings, but I'm not an expert and it made me giggle.

Some of you may know Ingo Preuss from typeforum.de. He also runs his own foundry, preussTYPE, and just finished polishing off a brand new revival of Johann Michael Fleischmann's Groote Canon Duits, an ornate baroque blackletter. The detailed specimen PDFs in German and English provide both extensive samples and fascinating details on the type's historical background. The font works even better in combination with Preuss' new Baroque Borders fonts, shown in this PDF specimen.

Preuss' version, Fleischmann Gotisch PT, may well be the most ambitiously complete single blackletter font yet. It supports Western and Central European characters and beyond. It also contains, for the first time, harmoniously designed punctuation and currency symbols, as well as a number of ornaments, ligatures and alternates.

It also features some contextual code to correctly substitute the long s character in about 85% of any given German text set in the font: a major feat within the lookup table limitations of OpenType. There are also both proportional and tabular versions of lining and oldstyle numerals and even a set of Roman numerals. Preuss also added a few custom ligatures to address spacing problems unique to this design, mostly arising from ornate bulbous terminals.

Yet Preuss also took great effort to adhere to Fleischmann's original designs and avoid including certain revisions added through the centuries as other foundries re-implemented the original in advancing industrial type technologies and changing tastes. The result is another flagship example of the latest smart-font technology helping contemporary typography close in on the quality standards that had to be sacrificed to technical compromise in previous decades.

The fonts are available for sale both directly from preussTYPE and at MyFonts.com.

Stephen's totally going to hate this but I felt a huge need to share with you, our friends out there on the Intarweb, the first official Typographica desktop image, as inspired by last night's festivities. Works best tiled.

San Francisco: beautiful weather, beautiful type, beautiful women mostly from Salt Lake City and Vancouver, and lots and lots of Germans. Thursday night, Linotype (as embodied by the generous Bruno) bought many many drinks and awarded a pretty hefty volume of loot in the form of big fat checks (and in some cases just flowers) to a number of tremendously talented designers. Notable winners include our good friend Eduardo Omine for his Beret, crazy Tony and Caio Silva for their beautiful and ingenious Samba and Eduardo Manso for his Bohemia family.

After the certainly complete awards presentation, Herr Spiekermann of the sharp bow-tie regaled us with tales of his misspent youth in "Sex & Drugs & Rock and Roll." The evening was finished off by the Typophile Film Festival, a high point in Typecon thus far that would have been even better had the Linotype open bar been moved into the screening room. Cheshire Dave stole the show as usual with his new short film Etched in Stone, as did the fantastic silent Helvetica film.

More details are available over at Foreword, where Cheshire continues to give a complete run-down of the daily events here at Typecon 2004.

I just moved to Berkeley on Sunday. In the company of my delightful driving pal Stephanie, the trip was bearable, but after a long U-Haul over the desert from Salt Lake City to the Bay, it was hard to feel ready for this week's typography overdose. So I was pleased to see that the first speaker at the pre-conference event would be Jan Middendorp, a man whose knowledge of Dutch typography can fill a hefty book, but whose presentation skills are such that nothing goes over your head -- even when you're road-lagged and concentration juice is low. Middendorp spoke about the "other side of Dutch type design" -- the slightly wacky, nonconformist side. Plenty of tasty visuals. The other lectures were interesting, but didn't grab me like Jan's.

Workshops began the next day. With much charm, Hisako Nakazawa dealt out the basics of Japanese calligraphy, a discipline that is much more difficult than it looks. I would prove this fact by posting scanned examples of my first strokes, but I'd rather spare my pride. Steph and I also got a peek at John Downer's showcard script lettering class, where the man characteristically wowed workshoppers with his ability to swiftly replicate the tradesmen of the early ’90s. Walking by the Advanced FontLab class we witnessed an odd scene: a crowded room of computers, an overhead screen displaying obscure code, and a speakerphone in the center of it all from which the voice of a remote Adam Twardoch* came, tinny and cinematic, issuing OpenType instructions. The students were silent as they strained to hear. Every face seemed glazed over. It was pretty spooky.

That night we assembled again at the elegant Academy of Art auditorium where we were treated to Victor Moscoso, one of the men responsible for the seminal psychedelic posters of the ’60s rock scene. I'm not so hot on the style, but his stories and examples were very entertaining, particularly when he broke from amusing anecdotes to go on a serious tirade of marijuana and LSD advocacy.

Much more to say and many blackmail-worthy photos to show. Promise to shift from lazy to semi-productive soon.

* Twardoch was denied entry into the states because we need to protect our country from villainous font technicians.

Other TypeCon reports from Mark Simonson and Cheshire Dave (1 and 2).

Happy Friday. Here's a nice way to wake up [note: not safe for work, small children, or the easily-offended]. TypeCon2004 reports to come shortly.

Thanks Jim.

Another not-especially typographic project I'm working on is just starting to get off the ground, thanks to a very nice masthead from the inimitable Mark van Bronkhorst. Please take a look at Hewn & Hammered and let me know if you'd like to be involved. "Official" unveiling will be in mid-August. And get clickin' on those Google ads!

Katharina Nussbaumer's TypoGenerator uses your supplied text and the Google image-search engine to make David Carson proud.

According to these comments, it appears that some people believe machines can masturbate (or would that be rasterbate?) just as well as graphic designers.

via coolstop by way of metafilter

Canadian computer graphics magazine Graphic Exchange has switched to landscape format and launched a rich-media PDF doppelganger, a world first.

Now subscribers can read the big old print version for high-res, and also download the PDF version that lets one explore VR images, play videos, and follow Web links.

Key to the feasibility of the format is the seamless way the PDF opens up full-screen, without displaying the Acrobat interface, and the way that Quicktime runs "in document" without its own separate window.

In full-screen mode on a large monitor, and without the usual peripheral clutter, the basic layout's four columns of type works surprisingly well.

There are a few custom navigation controls, but it's mostly intuitive, and familiar key commands such as "page down" are functional.

Clicking on web links, however, takes one out of the document and into a standard browser display.

The PDF comes in several flavors, from the "deluxe" stand-alone 92mb option, to a smaller file that streams in video content, to a still smaller version for pre-Acrobat 6 and dial-up speed.

It may seem like we mention Christian Schwartz every other week, but that's only because he makes news that often. (Also, he has a nice soul patch.) This time, the big news is a newspaper. The revised Houston Chronicle marks a milestone in newspaper design as it's probably the first modern paper to use a venetian oldstyle for body copy. The typeface was designed by Schwartz under the direction of the omnipresent publication designer Roger Black. Mr. Schwartz was kind enough to provide us with a PDF [124K] detailing the paper's new typography.

Along with Schwartz and Black, masthead man Jim Parkinson had a hand in the Chronicle's new logo, which is based on something they used in the first half of the 1900s. The star, taken from a monument to Sam Houston, suits Texas to a tee. Unfortunately the resident staff got too excited about it and wear out the symbol by plugging it into every section title. I'm told there's even a "Star" section in which there is no name at the head of the page, just the yellow five-pointer. Crazy Texans.

Today's front page, sporting the complete redesign, looks very nice. Cheers go to Susan Barber (Chronicle AD) and Dan Cunningham (Sports Editor) who headed up the redesign team. Also to Theo Fels of Danilo Black, who spent many weeks in Houston to finish everything up.

Other groups talking about the new Chronicle include Newsdesigner.com (who also show a front page before/after), Hypulp, and VisualEditors.com (registration required, but worth it), where a Chronicle designer defends the big fat star, saying "let's be glad we didn't put a tumbleweed rolling through the flag".

The new Yay Hooray! is really, really good. It is by far the smoovest, most customizable forum system I've seen. A nice plus: each member's profile page offers the simplest way to create a personal blog, ever. The only thing YH needs now is an infusion of smart new participants -- people like you. Therefore, I encourage all Typographica readers who have any interest in discussing general design issues, scrolling through tracts of innovative business cards, or mocking the marketing dept and bad logos to sign on.

While in Los Angeles last week I visited LACMA's wonderful Beyond Geometry: Experiments in Form, 1940s–1970s (through October 13). The wealth of typographically inspired installations is really astounding -- in fact, there are more type-related pieces in this (quite large) show than I've ever seen before in any exhibit of this size. The catalog is beautiful, as well, set throughout in Jon Barnbrook's extensive Priori family.

One installation, a typographic room that I had to remove my shoes for, is something I think you'd all very much like to experience.

The almost-sure-to-be-final program schedule for TypeCon2004 is live. Procrastinators take note: rates increase at midnight Pacific Time. Get in while it's still super cheap. Call for submissions for the TypeGallery show also went out -- if you've designed new type, show it at this annual exhibition, which will travel internationally after the ’con.

If you've forgotten why you need to attend this conference, read this.

"Fudge is a software engine for manipulating TrueType and OpenType fonts in a Flash Actionscript environment."

This is a personal project I have been working on for the past few months. It allows me to write effects in actionscript to manipulate outlines, producing working fonts. I can also write scripts for specific inputs, allowing me to invent physical input devices for making new type designs.

The ubiquitous Gotham by Tobias Frere-Jones found its way unto the 9/11 memorial's stone at the site of the World Trade Center. The New York Times reports on the use of Gotham in the memorial, as set and chosen by Pentagram partner Michael Gericke.